Hi Reader,
This is part 2 of an email series where we’re taking you behind the scenes of running our businesses as two co-founders who’ve intentionally built our lives abroad.
Read part 1 here
Last week, we mentioned something at the end of our last email that we want to come back to, and it’s that we are, a little accidentally, running two businesses.
We promised to tell you more. So here it is.
Before Supported CEO existed, we had both owned agencies. Elli owned a Copywriting & Launch Strategy agency, and Ginny owned a Brand Strategy agency. So when the opportunity emerged to build a small boutique Meta ads agency together last year — specifically for summit hosts and digital product business owners — it wasn't a leap. It was familiar territory, and honestly, it was something we knew we could do really well.
What we want to normalize here is this: entrepreneurs build things. Sometimes you set out with one vision and a complementary opportunity shows up that actually makes sense, that uses the skills you already have, serves people you already understand, and fits inside the life you're already living. That's not a lack of focus. That's what it looks like to be a builder.
The real question is never whether to say yes to the thing. It's whether you can hold it without sacrificing everything else.
That's where our own framework comes in.
Every decision we make — on both sides of this business — runs through two questions. How much capacity will this require, and where does that have to come from? And is it actually worth what it costs us?
These are the same questions we work through with every woman inside our coaching program, Built for Both. And we want to be really clear about something: we aren't coaches who talk about this from a distance. We are actively running a boutique agency, building a coaching brand, managing a membership, creating digital products, and doing all of it inside lives we have intentionally built abroad — lives that we are not willing to compromise for the business.
That tension is real. We live it every week.
And that is exactly what makes us good at what we do.
Because here's what we've seen, both in ourselves and in our coaching clients: the women who come to us aren't struggling because they lack ambition or skill. They're struggling because they're holding a lot, often more than one thing, often more than anyone around them fully sees, and they haven't yet found a way to lead themselves through it with intention instead of just survival mode.
That's the work. Not a productivity system. Not a better launch strategy. A real, honest reckoning with what you're holding, what it actually costs, and how to build something sustainable on the other side of that clarity.
We know what that reckoning feels like from the inside. Because we do it too.
During our recent trip together to Milan, a lot of what we worked through on our first two days was about the agency — specifically, how to keep serving our clients at a high level as Meta continues to shift, without letting that work quietly swallow the capacity we need for everything else. We made some decisions we're proud of. We built a process that serves our clients well and protects our capacity as we deliver it.
And then we looked at each other and admitted something harder.
More on that in next week’s email.
Stay Supported,
Elli + Ginny