My mom called me in November of 2023 and asked me if I was losing clients.

I laughed because I had never been busier.

I want to tell you why that's funny and what it taught me about the relationship between speaking

up and what you actually believe and the business that lands at your door because of it.

In the fall of 2023, I started to use my platform to speak out about

the anti-Semitism that I was facing as a Jewish-American woman. I'm not going to relegate the whole

moment on this episode. I actually wrote a whole piece on substack today that goes into it in detail

and I'll link it in the show notes. But here's the short version. My mom thought that I was

losing business because I was posting about being Jewish. But what actually happened is that in the

three months after I started speaking up, close to 50 women joined my brand new marketing

made simple mentorship program. And I wasn't even talking about it on social media. They

weren't joining in spite of the speaking up.

They were joining because of it.

So many of them had found me because I had shared my truth.

I want you to sit with that for a second because if you've been told somewhere along the way

that the smart move as a business owner is to stay quiet or stay neutral or to keep your point

of view soft so that you didn't lose anyone. What I'm about to say for basically the rest of the

month on this podcast and on social media and in our substack is going to probably land a little

sideways. Silence doesn't protect you. It postpones the cost of being unclear about what you stand for. And the cost, my friends, is real. The cost is the right people not being able to find you because your story is allowed enough or specific enough or honest enough for them to recognize themselves.

Welcome to Dear Founder. I'm Lindsay Pinchuk, founder, acquired entrepreneur, and part of the

less than 1% of female founders who have led a company through acquisition. I built my first

business from just $500 to seven figures without a marketing budget, simply using community, smart publicity,

...