Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Laura Rowe, Founder of The Vital Spirit, located in Portland, OR, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

The Vital Spirit offers intuitive energy healing and spiritual mentorship to empaths and highly sensitive people. Empaths often struggle with fitting into society due to their specific traits. Many experience emotional trauma and need help understanding why they struggle and how to help themselves.

Tell us about yourself

I discovered I was an empath at the age of 33 in a therapy session while I was in the middle of separating from my husband. That period of time I spent in therapy with a counselor trained in various energy healing modalities was life-changing for me. I healed in a way that traditional therapy alone never could accomplish. This inspired me to help others who still struggled despite trying to heal and feel better. Learning what an empath was and how these traits influenced my life and made it harder made me seek healing through energy healing with enormous success. Doing inner work, specifically energy healing and spiritual exploration, expands a person's day-to-day experience. They lose their reactivity and gain resources and responses and a greater understanding of the world and their place in it.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Pioneering a method of healing, education, and mentoring for an area of human experience not yet officially defined and acknowledged by mainstream medicine and psychology. It required lots of education in the community. Although I am certainly not the first to talk about empaths, I am one of the first to develop a mentoring and healing practice specializing in helping empaths thrive. It took time, lots of faith, and hard work. This successful business continues to grow and has contributed to raising awareness about empaths and how to be happy and healthy. I was asked to teach a two-day workshop for the California Institute of Integral Studies in February of 2023 on Tools for Thriving as an Empath, my signature class for empaths.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

You need to be interested and good at the business side of your work or modality. You have to be an expert healer, architect, or widget manufacturer, AND you need to care about and become successful at marketing, accounting, and business operations. It is challenging. You can be the best architect in the land, but if no one has heard of you, you will never become financially successful. This process of figuring out how to be good or passable or able to afford to outsource these areas is the most intense personal healing work you will ever do. All the ways you could hide your shortcomings or trauma reactions will come to the surface, and if you aren't willing to do the work to move past them, it will put you out of business.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

  1. Work out your money issues - whatever beliefs you have about money will surface as your money reality - so make sure it is healed and positive.
  2. Get comfortable with visibility. In order to run and market a successful business, you need to be able to be seen by the world. I am an introvert; this took some work. I needed to find strategies and be open to being visible.
  3. Make your peace with sales and marketing. You will have to do both, not just the work of your business. Find the ways to do them that fit you and honor your ethics. It is possible--you can find ways that don't feel inauthentic.

Is there anything else you'd like to share?

Being a solopreneur is hard work and filled with uncertainty. It is incredibly rewarding, so make sure you are choosing a practice or field that you love and have passion for--sustainable passion. You will need it, and it will pay you back in spades.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://thevitalspirit.net/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thevitalspirit
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thevitalspirit/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurabethrowe/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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