Three different businesses. Three different industries. Three founders who had been running their businesses for years, doing the work, building something real.

All three had the same problem on day one.

Their marketing systems were locked behind someone else’s accounts.

One had a domain registered under their former website developer’s email. Not the business email. The developer’s. The person who built the site years ago and has since moved on.

Another had their Constant Contact locked down by their marketing vendor. That is right. Their own CRM. The contact list they spent years building. Behind a login that was not theirs.

A third could not access their own Google Analytics. The agency that set it up four years ago never added them as an owner. Just a viewer. Or nothing at all.

We could not move forward until we untangled all of it first.

Here is the part I want to be fair about. In most of these situations, we had decent communication with the vendors involved. We made calls. We sent emails. We got most of it resolved.

Most.

And that is the part I cannot stop thinking about.

Because what if we could not reach them? What if they did not respond? What if they just disappeared?

It happens. A vendor closes up shop. An email goes dead. Someone decides the relationship ended badly and they are not in a hurry to help. Suddenly a business that has been operating for years cannot update their own website, cannot email their own list, cannot see their own data.

None of these founders did anything wrong. Nobody sat them down and said: make sure every account is under your business email. Make sure you have admin access, not just user access. Make sure you know what you own before a relationship ends.

Nobody told them to ask.

That is the thing that stays with me.

Three things I have learned from watching this happen over and over:

1. Vendor lock does not announce itself. It builds quietly while you are focused on running your business. By the time you find it, you are already in a crisis.

2. Good communication is not a system. It is luck. A tool inventory and a vendor offboarding checklist are a system. Those two documents are the difference between a phone call and a nightmare.

3. This is not about trust. You can trust a vendor completely and still insist on owning the accounts. Those are not in conflict. Ownership is not suspicion. It is just good operations.

The fix starts before the work begins.

When you are evaluating a new vendor, before you sign anything, ask one question: do I end up owning everything you build?

The domain. The accounts. The data. The contact list. All of it.

A good vendor will say yes without hesitating. A great vendor will already have a process for making sure it happens. And if someone gets uncomfortable with the question, that is your answer too.

You are not being difficult. You are protecting your business.

What question do you wish you had asked before your last vendor relationship started?

But clarity works like that.

You fix the messaging in one place, and suddenly, everything else wants to catch up too.

Before I ever led GTM execution.
Before I built cross-functional operating systems.
Before I walked into chaotic organizations and made them run with clarity.

I was building systems just to survive.

I just didn’t know that’s what I was doing.

Washington Heights Was a Cocoon

I landed in Miami in 1980. I was six years old.

We moved almost immediately to Washington Heights in New York. It was a cocoon. Spanish everywhere. Classrooms were bilingual. People looked and sounded like my family.

I didn’t know yet that the world outside that neighborhood would feel very different.

Then We Moved to New Jersey

Private Catholic school. Very few faces that looked like mine.

That’s when I started reading rooms.
Adapting.
Managing the narrative around who I was before anyone else could write it for me.

The Escobar jokes started early. They got worse in high school. My maiden name is Gaviria. Same as Pablo.

You can imagine.

“Hey, cocaina girl.”
“Is that your uncle?”
“If it was, you wouldn’t be dreaming of a Mercedes. You’d already have one.”

Ha ha. Very funny.

I laughed too. Every time.

I wasn’t ostracized. I had friends. I assimilated well. That was the point.

But inside, I was doing constant math.

American enough.
Smart enough.
Capable enough that my last name becomes background noise.

How do I walk into rooms that weren’t built for me and make people glad I’m there?

I never defended Colombia.

Not then.

The Unglamorous Work That Made Everything Click

I graduated high school, got into college, and immediately started working two jobs to help pay for it. School at night. Work full-time. Including weekends.

Then an internship turned into something more.

A FinTech company offered me a full-time role. I was nineteen.

They didn’t hire me as a favor. They hired me because I was solving problems no one else wanted.

Filing content so we could database it.
Building small systems in Lotus Notes.
Organizing the corporate library so historical data was actually findable.

We’d call that a knowledge base now! Kinda funny, no?

Back then it was just the unglamorous work that made the company function.

I was Assistant to the Treasurer, which meant I had access across the entire organization. A nineteen-year-old with a front-row seat to how a real company ran.

And for the first time, someone said:

You’re good at this. You solve problems.

I remember sitting with that. Because I had been solving problems my entire life. I just hadn’t recognized it as a skill. I thought it was survival.

Turns out those are sometimes the same thing.

I Didn’t Have a Playbook. So I Built One.

Everything I was doing from the time I walked into that Catholic school was operational thinking.

Reading rooms.
Adapting fast.
Building structure in environments that weren’t designed for me.
Staying useful.
Staying relevant.
Staying one step ahead.

I didn’t have a playbook. So I built one. That’s what operators do.

For years, I was quietly embarrassed about where I came from. Now I understand that where I came from is precisely why I’m good at what I do.

The instincts I developed navigating those years are the same instincts I use today to walk into chaotic organizations, figure out what’s broken, and build the systems that make growth sustainable.

Colombian.
First-generation immigrant.
Operator.
Problem Solver.

Why I Do This

This is why I advocate for women running companies without a roadmap.

Women who didn’t grow up with a CFO dad or a family business to learn from. Women who are figuring it out as they go, the same way I did.

Not because frameworks guarantee success. But because having a map reduces the fear. It shortens the time you spend lost. It gives you structure so instinct isn’t the only thing carrying you forward.

That’s why Ready, Plan, Grow! exists.

We build operating systems.
Financial frameworks.
Execution plans.

Not because they eliminate uncertainty. But because they give you a fighting chance inside it. You don’t need to have grown up with the playbook.

You just need to be willing to build one.

Not outsourcing it.

Not waiting until it’s perfect to talk about it.

Doing it live, with AI, and learning as we go. Using my own frameworks which are working great, particularly since they constantly yell at me for saying too much.

Honestly? It’s humbling.

I know the theory. I teach this stuff. I know what a good customer journey looks like. I know what a clear page needs. I know comparison pages matter. I know the middle of the funnel is where most businesses lose people.

Knowing all of that does not make it easier to do it for yourself.

Here’s what I keep catching myself doing.

1. Writing too much.

2. Explaining things three different ways when one would do.

3. Adding context nobody asked for because I’m afraid the point won’t land.

I talk too much. I know this about myself. And every page I build, I have to go back and cut half of it.

That’s the work nobody shows you. The tedious part. Giving your own copy to ChatGPT and then moving it to Manus because ChatGPT is too nice. Yelling at Claude because it won’t follow the rules I set. AI is helpful. But it doesn’t replace the person who knows when something feels off.

In the end, you’re the human in the loop. And that means being honest enough to say “this isn’t hitting” when you can feel it.

The theory is the easy part. The hard part is being willing to be hard on yourself over and over again until it’s actually clear.

We’re not done yet. We’re still in it. But I wanted to share this because if you’re reworking your own site and it feels slow and frustrating, that’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong.

That’s what doing it right actually feels like.

More updates as we go! You can see the progression at www.readyplangrow.com

It was 2020. I was COO, part of a founding team. We’d grown enough to need help, but not quite enough to comfortably afford it. I had the projections. The math worked. Six months of runway even if revenue stayed flat.

But math doesn’t account for emotional weight.

The Emotional Weight Nobody Tells You About

When you’re solo or early in your role, your decisions mostly affect you. You can take risks. You can pivot. You can eat ramen for a month.

But the moment someone else’s livelihood depends on your choices, everything changes.

Suddenly it’s not just “Can we afford this?” It’s “What happens to them if I’m wrong?”

That first hire meant someone was counting on us to make payroll. Someone had told their family they had this job. Someone’s rent and groceries depended on our startup staying afloat.

Nobody prepared me for that part.

What Actually Happened

I made the hire.

I was transparent from day one: “This is a startup. That means volatility. That means uncertainty. We have runway, but there are no guarantees.”

And for three months, I second-guessed everything anyway. Every slow sales week, I panicked. Every unexpected expense, I calculated runway. Every revenue dip, I wondered if I’d made a terrible mistake.

But here’s what I learned:

The hire freed our team to focus on revenue work. Within two months, we’d brought in enough new business to cover their salary twice over.

The decision forced us to build systems. We couldn’t be in everything anymore, so we had to document processes and actually delegate.

The emotional weight didn’t disappear. It shifted. I learned to carry it differently. To make decisions with data, not just emotion. To be transparent about risk without letting fear paralyze us.

That decision taught me something critical: The emotional weight you’re avoiding doesn’t disappear. It just gets heavier the longer you wait.

I talked about this decision in depth on Craig Swerdloff’s podcast “The Fall: Confessions of Entrepreneurs.” We dig into what it felt like from the inside—including the parts I got wrong.

Three Takeaways

1. Separate emotional weight from actual risk

The decision feels huge because it involves another person. That’s valid.

But feelings and risk aren’t the same thing.

I ran three scenarios before hiring:

• Best case: Revenue grows 20%, hire pays for itself in 60 days

• Likely case: Revenue grows 10%, hire pays for itself in 90 days

• Worst case: Revenue stays flat, we can cover for 6 months

All three were survivable. That’s what mattered.

2. Transparency reduces emotional weight

Being honest about volatility didn’t scare them away. It built trust.

They knew what they were signing up for. They weren’t blindsided by slow months or budget tightening.

Transparency doesn’t remove the weight, but it means you’re not carrying it alone.

3. Make the decision, then commit

The worst thing you can do is keep second-guessing.

I wasted three months of energy wondering if I was right. Energy I could have spent making it work.

Once you decide, put the energy into execution, not regret.

What part of leadership did no one prepare you for?

I’d love to hear what caught you off guard. Hit reply or drop a comment.

Need help with figuring out how projections & scenarios can help steady your mind? Hit me up at Ready, Plan, Grow!

— Marcela

You’re switching constantly.

Business builder.

Problem solver.

Decision maker.

Salesperson.

Support team.

Product lead.

Then suddenly:

Homework helper.

Snack negotiator.

The person who has to find the other soccer cleat in the next four minutes.

All of it. All the time.

The work isn’t the hardest part. The switching is.

Here’s what focus actually looks like when you’re building something real while raising kids (and walking the dog!).

Choosing one priority reduces mental overlap

I used to check Slack during client calls. Draft proposals while my kid did homework at the kitchen table. Refresh email during soccer practice because “I’m just sitting here anyway.”

Mental overlap isn’t multitasking. It’s fragmenting yourself until nothing actually gets your full attention. It leads to mental exhaustion and burnout.

Choosing one role to focus on (sales, delivery, retention, or building product) creates a boundary. You know what your “work work” is.

That makes it easier to put it down at 3pm for pickup. Not perfectly. But better than mentally carrying your entire business through homework, soccer drop-off, and dinner. Your kids notice when you’re only giving them 30% of the attention.

You know that. Then the guilt kicks in.

Deciding what you won’t switch to protects your energy

The stress doesn’t come from doing too much. It comes from switching too often.

Sales to support. Support to billing. Billing to “just fixing one thing” at 2:47pm and now you’re late for pickup because “it’ll only take a minute.”

Not “what can I get done” but “what am I deliberately leaving alone so I can actually finish something that matters.”

Some tasks still get done. They just don’t get your best hours or the hour between soccer drop-off and bedtime when you’re trying to throw together dinner.

Think in numbers to help quiet the guilt

Rough numbers. Numbers that matter. Enough to show what actually moves the business forward versus what just keeps you busy.

For me: 12 hours a week on support emails that didn’t lead to renewals or referrals. They felt urgent. But they were eating time I needed for outbound work that actually grew the business.

When you can see that, the guilt gets quieter. You stop second-guessing yourself when you close your laptop at 2:50pm to leave for pickup.

I still don’t have this figured out. Some weeks I slip back into reactive mode and wake up on Friday wondering what I actually accomplished besides putting out fires and keeping the family on track.

But focus (real focus) doesn’t just change how the business runs. It changes how you show up everywhere else.

Less guilt. Less noise. More trust in your ability to choose what matters and follow through.

That confidence matters at 6pm when you’re sitting in the parking lot at soccer practice and you can actually watch instead of answering emails. Or at 3:15pm when your kid gets in the car and you’re actually listening instead of mentally drafting your next message.

Want the tactical breakdown? I shared the specific 30-day framework I use to actually implement this in my business and with clients at Ready, Plan, Grow!

New habits are good.
New goals are good.
Change is not the problem.

The problem is skipping the reflection.

Most resolutions focus on what we want to add without asking why the old version struggled in the first place.

What didn’t work.
What was unsustainable.
What we learned but never named.

Preparing for my conversation on The Fall: Confessions of Entrepreneurs forced me to sit with one of those chapters.

Not the success story.
The almost story.

The stretch where things nearly worked.
Where optimism outpaced evidence.
Where momentum made it harder to stop than to continue.

That experience didn’t disqualify me.
It trained me.

It’s why I recognize risk sooner now.
Why I help founders slow down before momentum turns into avoidance.
Why I care deeply about clarity, pacing, and decisions that reduce fear.

New habits matter.
But they work best when they’re built on understanding, not denial.

I also want to thank for encouraging me to start writing again and publish on Substack, which I’m loving. Writing is how I integrate the lessons that don’t show up in highlight reels.

So this year, I’m not trying to become someone else.

I’m building on the version of me that already knows.
At 51, I see her clearly.
She learns, adapts, and continues to build.
Not finished, not perfect, but wonderfully grounded in reality.

Because growth doesn’t come from forgetting who you were.
It comes from learning why you needed to change.

By the time you are officially “in charge,” you have already absorbed years of examples about what power looks like, how decisions get made, and how people are treated when things get hard. You don’t walk into leadership as a blank slate. You walk in carrying every parent, teacher, neighbor, boss, and community member who showed you what responsibility looks like.

Some people grow up around leaders who treat authority like distance.
Others grow up around leaders who treat authority like service.

I believe that difference shows up later in how they build teams and companies, whether they realize it or not. This is often what separates the a-holes from the leaders we actually admire.

As I reflect on my own leadership defaults, especially after observing cultures that did not align with what I knew leadership could be, I can see how much of it traces back to the early models I absorbed.

One of those models came from my family’s immigration experience. When we arrived in the United States, a Colombian family took us into their 700-square-foot apartment. Two families, one tiny space. A few months later, they helped us secure an apartment in the same building. The Washington Heights community didn’t just welcome us. It helped us build a life. Haven Avenue gave us jobs, childcare, and safety. That was my first lesson in leadership: people making hard realities workable together.

Another model surfaced when I started working at sixteen. The beauty salon where I worked was run by Ellen, a French immigrant with high standards, strong opinions, and a very clear way of doing things. She pushed me hard and gave me room to modernize a paper-based business with technology she would not have implemented herself. She taught me that a leader can be demanding and deeply invested in other people at the same time.

That salon was a community, the beauticians there were like my family, and it was where I met Ruth (one of their clients). She saw how I worked, solved problems, upgraded systems, and kept things moving. She offered me a full-time job at a Wall Street firm that helped me pay for college. I worked full time starting my sophomore year and went to school at night. That job changed my life.

At nineteen, my family fell into crisis. My mom, my brother, and I ended up alone, under financial strain, and unsure how we would make it. Ruth did not ignore it. She brought together people at work and in her family who could help us. There were no handouts. There was real support. The company she led, founded by her husband, functioned like a family with high expectations and tangible care.

These experiences shaped how I understand leadership today.

For many of us, leadership begins in survival and evolves through community.

I see that mix in so many founders I work with.

You can see this pattern in the ecosystem built by incubators, accelerators, and co-working spaces. They offer programming, but the deeper value is structural. They give founders support and mirrors, especially those who did not grow up with access or privilege.

The best VCs understand this too. They do not just invest. They build portfolio structures around peer groups, shared resources, operator networks, and founder forums. It is not simply added value. It is infrastructure. Founders make better decisions and burn out less when they are not building in isolation.

Harvard’s Study of Adult Development points to the same truth. After tracking people for more than eighty years, the clearest finding is that strong relationships support resilience under stress. Not instead of skill or strategy. Alongside them.

This is a good moment to reflect:

Were you shaped to lead with support, or to carry everything alone?

MIT’s Human Dynamics Lab shows that people think more clearly when they have real feedback loops. Many founders never learned what healthy feedback looks like, so they lead the way they survived. Independently.

Again: most founders don’t break because the work is hard.
They break because they are carrying it alone.

Most founders are not lonely because they lack people. They are lonely because their leadership defaults were shaped in environments where carrying everything alone felt necessary. Or they simply did not have the opportunity to learn from others.

I think about this in my own story. If I had never met Ellen and then Ruth, would I have had the same trajectory?

Maybe eventually.

But it would have taken longer. The timing, exposure, and support I received accelerated everything. Those early models mattered. Not because they guaranteed success. Because they interrupted the instinct to figure everything out alone.

My experience is simple. Founders rarely choose to operate alone.

They learned self-reliance early and carried it into entrepreneurship. Early leadership lessons become reflex.

Community interrupts those reflexes.

Without it, founders keep carrying everything the way they learned when they were young. The right community does more than support founders. It rewrites patterns they never chose in the first place.

This is why founder loneliness is not personal. It is the result of old patterns that made carrying everything alone feel normal.

So here is the question worth sitting with for founders, leaders, and VCs:

Are your instincts around leadership based on what is healthy, or on what you absorbed long before you ever led a team?

If leadership is absorbed long before it is practiced, then community is the structure that lets you update the version you inherited.

I would love to hear from founders who see themselves in this. If this resonates, join the conversation. Let’s unpack it together.

If you are a small business owner who needs a community, I invite you to jump into office hours when you need me. My hour are published weekly, usually Wednesdays and Fridays!

That meant that at six, seven, eight years old, I was the one who spoke to the landlord, the doctor, the teacher, the bank teller. I was the negotiator, the translator, the bridge between my parents and a country they were still trying to understand.

It also meant something else.
I learned early that my voice mattered.
That I could speak into a room and be heard, even if my knees were shaking.
That I could figure things out, even when the stakes felt impossibly high.

And that confidence, born out of necessity, has been the through-line of my entire life.

It’s why failure has never felt insurmountable.
How could it be?
I watched my parents rebuild a life in a foreign country with no money, no English, and nowhere to return to. They overstayed their visa because returning to Colombia in the 1980s was more dangerous than taking their chances in the United States. They worked, they paid taxes, they stayed silent, they prayed things would hold.

And eventually, Ronald Reagan’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act gave them the one thing they needed most:
A lawful path forward, delivered with dignity.

Reagan didn’t get everything right. His plan had flaws and gaps we still feel today. But there was something in the way he framed immigration that feels almost unrecognizable now.

He talked about the law in a way that respected all people.

He believed enforcement should be real, but that humanity should never be lost in the process.

At the signing of IRCA, he said:
“Our objective is to establish a reasonable, orderly, and humane system of immigration. One that serves the national interest and upholds our tradition as a nation of immigrants.”

Reasonable.
Orderly.
Humane.
A nation of immigrants.

That balance, law with dignity, has been echoing in my mind all week.

Because what we witnessed here in Charlotte wasn’t law with dignity.
It wasn’t orderly.
And it certainly wasn’t humane.

On Sunday morning, when our English-speaking church paused to pray for our Hispanic congregation, I cried. Not out of surprise, but because the fear in the room was familiar.

This week, when my cleaning lady, who has legal status, told me she was afraid to leave her house, that same old helplessness hit me in the chest again.

And when I reached out to church leaders outside my protected community, the response was heartbreaking:

“We don’t know what to do. Support the attorneys. Support the organizations trying to find the missing people. We’ll call you if we hear something more.”

I couldn’t just sit still.

So I went to the Mecklenburg County Board of Commissioners meeting that night, where they passed a resolution affirming protections and support for our immigrant community (link here). I needed to feel like I had done something.

That my voice mattered.

Before I walked out the door, I grabbed my American passport.
And I thought, how could this be happening here?

Here’s what I believe. It’s all very complicated. I get that.

We need border processes that are functional and humane.
Clear rules. Real timelines. Predictable outcomes.

We need employer verification systems that actually work.
So workers aren’t exploited and business owners aren’t forced into impossible choices.

We need legal pathways for the labor our economy depends on.
Ask any business owner. This is good for our economy.

We need a plan that reflects the reality of our country, not the political theater of it.

And maybe more than anything:

We need to return to the idea of law with dignity.
Because the moment we normalize fear, profiling, and disappearances, we break something far more fragile than policy.

I stood in that room this week because I wanted to be counted among the people who believe that dignity isn’t negotiable.

And if there’s more I can do, I hope someone will reach out and tell me.

My childhood taught me to use my voice.
My parents taught me resilience.
This week reminded me that silence isn’t an option.

If you want to learn more

There’s a thoughtful piece that revisits Reagan’s 1986 immigration plan, what worked, what didn’t, and why its legacy still shapes today’s debates:

The Nation: “What Democrats Can Learn About Immigration From Ronald Reagan”

Contact me via our website. Let’s have the conversation.

We never talked about money. Looking back, I’m sure there were three reasons for that. One, we didn’t have much. Two, when you don’t have something, the last thing you want to do is talk about it. And three, in our world, that was considered a man’s responsibility.

My dad wasn’t cruel or controlling. It was just how things worked in our house, and I imagine in a lot of Latino homes at that time. Money belonged to the men.

When I began working with founders and small business owners, I noticed something that felt familiar. The same silence. The same hesitation. Especially among women.

At Ureeka, we supported thousands of underrepresented entrepreneurs, many of them Latina business owners. They were talented, passionate, and ready to grow. But when it came time to talk about budgets, pricing, or projections, the energy shifted.

Confidence disappeared.

I heard the same words that used to come out of my own mouth when I first started running startups.
“I’m not a numbers person.”
“Spreadsheets are my enemy.”
“I just go with my gut.”
“I know I should track it, I just don’t have time.”
“I feel stupid asking questions about money.”
“My accountant/partner/co-founder does that, not me.”

It wasn’t incompetence. It was fear. The same fear I’d grown up around, the kind that tells us money is someone else’s job.

At first, I thought maybe I was imagining it. I wondered if it was just my experience, something I was projecting onto the women I coached. Was this anecdotal? Or was it real?

I looked for data, and the pattern was impossible to ignore.

• Research from the TIAA Institute and GFLEC shows that women score 8 to 10 points lower than men on financial literacy tests. Not because they know less, but because they doubt themselves more.
• The GFLEC study on Black and Hispanic Women’s Financial Well-Being found that minority women’s financial literacy scores are 40 to 45 percent lower than those of white men.
• FINRA’s 2023 report confirms that Hispanic women have lower financial confidence and less access to trusted financial education resources.
• Programs like SUMA Wealth and Say Hola Wealth show that culturally relevant, bilingual education increases participation and confidence.

What I saw coaching women was what I saw growing up. A generation later, we are still uncomfortable with money. Still unsure of what to ask, where to start, or who to trust.

This isn’t about blaming our parents or our culture. It’s about breaking the silence that still lingers around money. The truth is, most of us were taught to work hard, save what we can, and hope it’s enough. But hope is not a business plan.

If we want more women, especially those who share backgrounds like mine, to grow, get funded, and build wealth, we have to start by talking about money. Out loud. Without shame. Together.

I’m curious - what was money like in your home growing up? Did your family talk about it, or was it kept behind closed doors? I’d love to hear your experiences, cultural or generational.

Every time I get to help a woman break that cycle, it lifts my spirit. Watching someone pull their head out of the sand and finally see their business clearly is one of my favorite moments. That WOW moment, when fear turns into understanding and pride, never gets old. It’s why I love this work.

I’m on a mission to change how we, particularly as women, approach business and money, and to remove the blockers that quietly limit our growth.

Need help? I’m here for it.

PS: I’m still not a numbers person, but I’ve learned that understanding them is the only way to take control of your business story.