Episode notes
Johanna Voss is a fractional COO and operations strategist with 15+ years of building businesses from the inside out. She works with female founders who've already made something great and are ready to stop running it like a one-woman show. She helps them turn big visions into the systems, teams and operations that let a business run without the founder approving every last thing. Her own start was an accident: a nutrition coach in Barcelona who realised at around 40 that the work she never talked about was out-earning everything else.
This is about the truth at the centre of every successful small business and how if you’re the founder holding it all together it’s why your business can't get bigger. Johanna walks through the real work of moving from founder to CEO (which happens, as she puts it, in the space between your two ears), the difference between being busy and actually building and the hourly-rate maths that exposes how much "I'll just do it myself" is really costing you. Along the way, we also discuss why your systems live trapped in your own head, how to hand them off and a client story that turned a honeymoon-week implosion into the best thing that ever happened to her business.
It's a clear-eyed look at the part of scaling no one really wants to talk about: that growth asks you to let go of the version of yourself that got you here.
Key Timestamps
[01:49] What a fractional COO actually does
[03:04] Breadcrumbs from the universe
[10:49] Cut out the noise and get quiet
[15:59] Execution as a leadership function
[17:25] Working in the business vs on it
[21:21] The bridge between founder and team
[34:33] The honeymoon implosion that became a blessing
[44:20] Put yourself first
Memorable Quotes
"You built a business, it works, and it works because you're the glue holding all of it together. And you're also the reason that it can't get any bigger." — Johanna Voss
Take the Archetype + Growth-Readiness Super Quiz to discover your Business Growth Archetype in eight minutes or less and walk away with a radar view of your company, an immediate action plan, and the insight to grow smarter and faster: https://disha-wuqmsieb.scoreapp.com/
Connect with Johanna Voss
Website: https://www.johannavoss.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johannavoss/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johannavoss/
Substack: https://johannavoss.substack.com/
Connect with us:
Website: https://thetrailblazehers.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thetrailblazehers/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-trailblazehers
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheTrailblazeHers
Produced by Evolved Podcasting: https://www.evolvedpodcasting.com