Free Time with Jenny Blake

Are you running a Franken-Brand? A quick, inexpensive logo here. And then someone a few months later tries to write the brand strategy. And then another junior hire adds in graphics and you don’t even know where they came from. Suddenly, you have this brand that is cobbled together, and no one on the team is feeling compelled. Today, returning guest Adam Chaloeicheep and I are picking up where we...

Has your business brand become stale, perhaps to the point of being a liability? After a few years, especially with major pivots, you may run the risk of losing clients and credibility. Sometimes it’s time for a tune-up and fresh tires, and sometimes, it’s time for a whole new brand engine. As today’s returning guest, my good friend and part of the team behind the award-winning Free Time brand, re...

What do you do when a business area becomes energetically draining, or the income isn’t flowing? Today’s guest has many intuitive superpowers, and one of them is “following the data points of truth.” In this episode, Erin Weed and I discuss why you shouldn’t just stick with something that is no longer aligned; the tragic event that launched her journey into entrepreneurship; the moment she knew it...

How can you get paid for who you are, not just what you do? Today’s guest, Terry Rice, is teaching us his Golden Link Strategy for creating a steady stream of potential clients, without giving them (or you) “the ick” through cold outreach misfires. He also shares speaking and marketing tips he pulled from one of his mentors, Daymond John, how he reframes business development activities, why it’s v...

“What am I pretending not to know?” There is tremendous power in asking better questions, whether it comes to ideal day design, creating systems in your business, or teaching someone how to help tame your inboxes. Today’s conversation with Claire Giovino covers all that ground and more. We talk about what qualities make email so vexing for many business owners, how to reduce fear and friction when...

"For the first time in a decade, I feel free again." That’s how one of my earliest blogging friends, longtime community leader David Spinks, was feeling when I caught up with him in-person in the middle of his yearlong sabbatical, after selling his community-based business. David and I discuss best practices for creating and nurturing communities, for engineering serendipity, what it’s like to bui...

“The world doesn’t need another expert.” So says today’s guest, Andrew Davis. Experts rely on hacks, tips, tricks, teaching, preaching, and over-promising. Visionary leaders a) tend not to call themselves that and b) focus on the quest for knowledge itself, with enough humility to admit what they don’t know, or the problems they are exploring even while still in process. In today’s conversation, y...

“You do not need to cannibalize your healing for content.” Today, I’m in conversation with longtime blog-turned-IRL friend Nic Antoinette, diving deeper into her decision to shut down her Patreon community (taking a $30,000/year haircut to do so), then pivoting to a private paid Substack while she navigated her way through decisions about what might follow. We discuss the generosity of being hones...

If you have been in business for any amount of time, then you know the feeling when a launch just isn’t working. The sales are crawling, you start doubting yourself, wondering if you created the right thing in the first place, if you built a big enough audience to sell anything at all. All kinds of additional questions and insecurities follow when sales aren’t flowing: is that the offer that’s off...

“I only write books for problems I can’t otherwise solve,” Nir Eyal says. “I don’t write my books for my readers; I write my books for myself.” Driven by curiosity to fix his own problems, Nir’s books have sold over one million copies. Listen to today’s conversation on how he weathered the criticism storm around his first book, Hooked; the one essential skill to being an entrepreneur; how to turn...

Abundance was my word of 2019. I’d love to tell you I meant abundance in the broadest possible sense, appreciating the bounty already in my life, financial and otherwise. But mostly, my theme was about money. Specifically: to surpass one million dollars in revenue by the end of the year. I was going to build the sexiest small business rocket ship to achieve time-and-money escape velocity with my D...

What is your relationship to rest? How about your caretakers’ relationship to rest while you were young? What examples did they set? What attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors did they hold, and how does that still influence you today? Today I’m talking with Ximena Vengoechea about the five rest profiles, productivity dysmorphia, “tiny transition time,” why paid work (no matter how much you love it) d...

“Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.” —Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things We are not meant to compare ourselves to eight billion people....

You can calm chaos at work, but it starts with a reality check from Charlie Gilkey, delivered with his signature wit and generosity: You might not have a team problem, you have a you problem. It’s time to stop catering to air sandwiches, Crisco watermelons, broken printers, ghost plans, and other corrosive practices, and start implementing Charlie’s finely-tuned, road-tested systems instead. Today...

“As long as we settle for thinking inside the brain, we’ll remain bound by the limits of that organ. But when we reach outside it with intention and skill, our thinking can be transformed. It can become as dynamic as our bodies, as airy as our spaces, as rich as our relationships—as capacious as the whole wide world.” —Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind In this second half of a two-part solo ser...

I’m excited to bring you this crossover episode with Rose Cox, founder of The HSP Business School and host of The Sensitive CEO Show ****podcast. She is one of the people I have been most excited to connect with across the globe the last few years, even though we have yet to meet IRL! In this conversation, we dive into the world of highly sensitive people (HSPs), empaths, and introverts in the bus...

Intuition is always speaking to you in subtle ways. Are you listening? Intuition isn’t a gift that is only bestowed on a special few; everyone can strengthen this muscle—how loudly you hear these signals, and the trust in yourself to take action on the information you’re receiving. In the comments of a recent ‘D🤦🏻‍♀️h post, Claudia asked: I read your words “all-in on myself” and how you consciou...

“Let’s build ESPN.com for strength, and convince everyone they can lift weights.” With this mission in mind, the first six months of building the BarBend platform were a blur for today’s guest. By the end of the first year in 2016, they had had 1.4 million readers. By 2022, they had over 31 million registered users, allowing them to sell the business in 2023. In this conversation, we cover David T...

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” —Maya Angelou Earlier this summer, I arrived late one day to the podcast studio, laying on the floor in lieu of actually recording anything. Should I take that as a sign to reduce my creative output? Not necessarily. Aside from big one-off projects like writing a book, where I pour incredible time and attention to detail into (tha...

When we say trusting ourselves, which self are we talking about? Which parts of ourselves can’t be trusted? That’s what we’re exploring today with returning guest, Ilise Benun. We discuss how confidence is a byproduct of action, what made her so angry that she decided to start her own business 35 years ago, building tolerance for silence and small experiments, and why she puts her phone number in...

This is a free preview of this month's bonus episode for paying Free Time subscribers. Listen to the full episode (plus 100+ in the archives) and join us for live Q&A calls here » *** They say write from the scar, not the wound—but what do you do when you feel called to write or speak from the wound? Do you forge ahead, knowing you will wake up the next day with a raging vulnerability hangover? Or...

“I’m at my wit's end.” That was the conclusion of a text message that broke my heart a little bit. when a friend and fellow business owner showed it to me the other day. Their team member sent it to them, expressing exasperation at the state of unfinished tasks in the business where they were waiting on an answer or action from the owner. Seeing it bummed me out for both of them because it was nei...

“Nobody’s soul is moved by swag.” So says longtime friendtor of the pod, John Ruhlin, founder of strategic gifting company Giftology. Since the day I met John and encountered his work in 2016, I have been inspired by his commitment to elevating the relationship game with generosity, “heart bombs,” and expressing genuine appreciation in the business world and beyond. He does this all while setting...

I used to refer to myself as a hot mess often in the early blogging days circa 2008, until someone scolded me saying it wasn’t a nice way to describe myself, that maybe it wasn’t the best self-image to curate. So I stopped. But I lost something in dropping the “hot” and the “mess” as I now approach middle age (and grandma-status in my soul). Today's post is a crossover from my newest project, Roll...

“A book is not about something. A book is for someone.” That’s the mantra that drives AJ Harper’s work, that includes ghostwriting over one hundred books (and working on many more one-off chapters and projects). In this conversation, she shares the “life of a book” process in her writing partnership with Mike Michalowicz (ten books together and counting!), what most authors get wrong when writing...