Authenticity in Business: You Don’t Have to Become Someone Else to Succeed

Yesterday, I joined Elisa Boogaerts on the Authentically Elisa podcast for a panel conversation with three other coaches. We came from very different areas of work: business systems, conflict transformation, photography and data management, and digital accessibility.

Yet much of our conversation kept returning to one idea: authenticity.

What does it actually mean to be authentic when you’re also trying to build a business?

The Business I Want to Help People Build

When Elisa asked us to introduce ourselves and talk about who we love working with, my answer came back to something I see all the time through Wonder EA.

I work with solopreneurs and small business founders who are brilliant at what they do, but somewhere along the way, they’ve become the person doing everything in the business.

They’re serving clients, answering emails, making decisions, fixing problems, creating content, managing operations and carrying dozens of tiny details in their heads.

Often, the business is working.

But the way they are working isn’t.

My background is in people, systems and operations, so I help founders look behind the scenes of their businesses.

* Where are they carrying too much?

* What’s sitting in their head that needs to become a process?

* What are they still doing simply because they’ve always done it?

* Where would the right support make a difference?

I call my approach The Ease Equation: Systems + Support = Sustainable Success.

I especially love working with founders who don’t necessarily want to build the biggest business possible. They want a successful business, yes. But they also want a business that leaves room for family, health, creativity, relationships and everything else that makes up a life.

That distinction matters to me.

What I’m Building Next

There are a few things I’m excited about right now.

Through Wonder EA, I’m continuing my work with founders around building businesses that don’t depend on them holding everything together. I’m also doing more speaking and workshops around the Ease Equation, mental load, systems and sustainable growth.

And on the publishing side, I’m working on Voices Across Borders: Becoming Here, an anthology bringing together immigrant women’s stories of leaving, landing, belonging and becoming.

At first glance, consulting, speaking and publishing might seem like very different parts of my work.

For me, they’re connected.

A lot of what I care about comes back to the same question:

How do we create enough support and structure for people to become who they’re trying to become, without losing themselves in the process?

That question applies to the founder overwhelmed by her business.

It applies to the woman rebuilding her identity after moving countries.

And it applies to many of us trying to grow into something new while still holding on to what matters.

So, What Does Authenticity Actually Mean?

This was probably my favourite question from the panel.

For me, authenticity is when the person people meet online, the person they work with, and the person I am when nobody is watching are essentially the same person.

That doesn’t mean sharing everything.

I think we sometimes confuse authenticity with visibility or vulnerability. You can be a private person and still run a deeply authentic business.

For me, it means I don’t have to perform a version of myself because I think that’s what a business owner, consultant or speaker is supposed to look like.

I’m naturally a calm person.

For a long time, especially in business, I wondered whether I needed to be louder, more aggressive or more polished to be taken seriously.

I don’t believe that anymore.

I can be calm and still be ambitious.

I can care deeply about people and still make difficult business decisions.

I can want my business to grow without wanting growth at any cost.

And perhaps that’s one of the freedoms that comes with building a business that genuinely reflects you. You stop spending quite so much energy trying to look like the person you think everyone expects you to be.

Four Coaches. Four Very Different Ways of Helping People.

One of the things I enjoyed about this panel was hearing how differently authenticity showed up in each person’s work.

Robin McTague is a conflict transformation specialist who works with small teams and entrepreneurs. Her work goes beyond managing disagreements after they happen. She focuses on understanding and addressing the root causes of recurring conflict, so people can spend less energy being drained by unresolved issues and more energy on the work and relationships that matter.

Robin also shared that she’ll be speaking at the Global Business Blueprint Summit on August 19, exploring the emotional side of conflict in business.

Andrew Darlow brings together photography, coaching and data management. During our conversation, he raised something many entrepreneurs probably don’t think about often enough: protecting the digital work we create.

Photos, documents, contacts, content and even our LinkedIn information can represent years of work. His reminder about backing up our data was practical, but it also made me think about how much of our businesses now exists entirely in digital spaces.

Andrew will be presenting at the Secrets to Being a High Performing Entrepreneur Experience on August 18, alongside his pet story parties.

Danielle Stephens works in digital accessibility, helping entrepreneurs understand why accessibility needs to be part of how we communicate and build online.

With AI changing how quickly businesses can create websites, content and digital experiences, accessibility can’t simply be an afterthought. Danielle spoke about its connection to customer relationships and referrals, and about making sure more people can actually access what businesses create.

She is also developing a course on digital accessibility and working on a GPT tool designed to help people with accessibility questions.

Authenticity Doesn’t Look the Same on Everyone

That was one of my biggest observations from this conversation.

The four of us don’t do the same work.

We don’t have the same personalities.

We don’t approach business in exactly the same way.

And that’s rather the point.

Authenticity isn’t a business strategy where everyone follows the same five steps.

For Robin, it can mean being willing to address the uncomfortable conflict underneath the surface.

For Andrew, it can show up in protecting the creative work and information that matters to us.

For Danielle, it includes making sure the spaces we’re creating don’t unintentionally exclude people.

For me, it means building businesses where success doesn’t require the founder to sacrifice themselves to keep everything running.

Different work. Different perspectives. A common thread.

One Question I Keep Coming Back To

At the end of the panel, we were asked to share some final words of wisdom.

Mine came back to a question I think many founders need to ask themselves more often.

We spend a lot of time asking: What more do I need to do?

Maybe a better question is: What am I carrying that I was never meant to carry alone?

You don’t have to prove that you’re capable by doing everything yourself.

Build the systems.

Ask for support.

Make room for your life alongside your ambition.

Success should support the person building it, too.

Watch the full Authentically Elisa panel conversation in the video accompanying this article to hear Robin, Andrew, Danielle and me share our perspectives in our own words.