There's not enough love in business.

It’s overwhelming how much love is missing from business.

Contracts. Lawyers. Employment agreements. Financial statements. Marketing funnels. Bank loans. Credit cards. Customer service. Press releases. The customer is always right. Because I paid you money you must deal with my lack of emotional growth, patience and the fact that I wasn’t loved enough as a child.

Will we ever talk about it?

Will we ever speak the truth about business? It is just a canvas for humans to exercise their humanness- or lack thereof.

Sure, business is formulas and pie charts and graphs and meticulously-coded spreadsheets.

But do you know what else it is?

It is loving people fiercely who reject you.

It is baring your soul for someone to say, with such entitled ease, “You probably don’t know what you’re doing and you’re going to be out of business soon.”

It’s staring at bank account and wondering how you’re going to make it to next month, while pretending it’s all fine.

It’s putting your heart and soul into a product, service, blog post or podcast only to have it miss the mark because you forgot to push record.

It’s waking up each morning knowing you have to pull and entire cart of boulders up a mountain while people watch you struggle, snacking on crusty bread and sipping cold coca-colas out of glass bottles- waiting for you to stumble, always ready to remind you that YOU CHOOSE THIS AND YOU PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE NEVER STARTED.

it’s going to bed at night willing tomorrow to be better than today. And sometimes, thankfully, it is.

It is soul-crushing moments of watching others steal your hard-earned design and sell a million tee shirts with it.

So, why the hell do we pretend it is not so? Why do we pretend that just because we are turning passion and heart into something that (fingers crossed so tightly behind our backs will both provide value to someone who needs it and sustenance to us) that it is ok to treat us like we are not people?

I don’t know who took love out of business (I’m mostly speaking small business here, but maybe big biz can learn something, too) but it’s doing none of us any favors.

This will undoubtedly lead some to political conclusions (rightly so) and others might shake their heads, annoyed again that I’m bringing up how we should treat each other with kindness, but being a silent participant in the current system of thought is killing me slowly- and I know I’m not the only one.

I look around our planet, our city, our neighborhoods. And I see a lack of love. Of empathy. Of belonging.

So, this is why we’ve decided to hold a day of Creative Conversation.

It is a day of love. To bolster us to do our very best.

To gain courage to be loving to ourselves. To others. To the world.

And to, yes, also learn how to be brave enough to enter the rapids of entrepreneurship, which I can assure you with 100% certainty, are not smooth but that as long as we have each other there is nothing we cannot do.