We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Elinor Fish a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Elinor, so great to have you with us today. There are so many topics we want to ask you about, but perhaps the one we can start with is burnout. How have you overcome or avoided burnout?
For almost 15 years I owned and operated a travel company specializing in women-only group travel. Since I was a runner myself, all of the trips were centered around mindful running for optimal health and wellbeing. The company was truly a reflection of my personal values and travel style.
But as the company grew from offering domestic to international trips, our customer base expanded and our team grew, I started to feel more overwhelmed at times. As much as I loved the work I was doing, it was also really exhausting to always be solving problems and searing for solutions.
During that period of rapid growth and a lot of travel, I leaned into my personal spiritual practice. For many years, running on trails in forests and mountains was my meditation and helped me deal with stress and recharge my energy. And as I got older, I relied less on running and embraced other physical practices, such as yoga and breathwork instead.
Ultimately, I also learned to appreciate burnout as a signal that what I was doing wasn’t serving me anymore, and I sold my company in 2024. It was the right time for me to close that chapter of my life and let someone take up the reins of the company I had created so I could focus more of my energy on my own healing and wellness.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
As a long distance runner all through my teens and twenties, I pursued achievement through racing and pursuing bigger and harder challenges. Whether it was running for days through the Alps or for 100 miles in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, a lot of my identity was wrapped up in reaching the next milestone and seeing how far I could push myself.
When I went all-in in creating my own travel company in 2010, I transferred a lot of that energy into a business that deeply aligned with my values and served the kind of women runners I wanted to spend time with. The results were spectacular, and as the company grew over the years to offer dozens of trips in 13 countries around the world, I couldn’t have been more proud.
However, so much of my identify was wrapped up in the business and it was really hard to separate myself from it at times. I overworked and ignored my body’s early signs of burnout. I didn’t have a clear vision for how to get myself out of the weeds of my company’s daily operations.
Not only was being at the center of everything impacting my wellbeing, it was holding my company back from reaching its full potential.
That insight prompted me to start preparing my company for sale, which ended up being a two-year process of adjusting the brand positioning, empowering the team, optimizing our pricing structures, implementing new hiring and reporting processes and much more.
So by the time I posted the company for sale in 2024, I found the ideal buyer almost immediately, and we closed the deal in just 30 days!
I share this story because the work I do now is really about helping other female founders avoid the burnout that can prevent them from growing their businesses into something really valuable that they can actually sell.
I know how challenging it can be to go from being a solopreneur or very small operator to an enterprise that is transferrable to a new owner, but that’s the kind of challenge that gets me fired up. Women entrepreneurs in particular sacrifice a lot of themselves, personally and economically to launch a business, and my goal is for them to ultimately get the highest possible return on that investment.
And the best way to do that is to build a strong set of systems, and an empowered team to operate those systems. When those systems no longer depend on the founder to run well, then that founder has created an asset that she can then sell for a lot of money.
That money is well deserved and should be enough to fund the lifestyle the founder has always dreamed of. It should be enough to make up for the sacrifices and investments she made along the way. That’s why I call my flagship program the Empowered Exit Strategy. It charts a clear path to kind of payoff.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
The three important skills or areas I would highlight are:
1. Intuition: your intuition is more valuable than you might think. It’s just as important as your credentials, degrees and lived experiences. When your analytical mind is paralyzed and it feels too hard to make the next choice or take the next step, lean into what your intuition tells you feels right for you.
2. Take a break: I often found it much easier to be a leader to my team and stay engaged with my company when I regularly stepped away from the daily operations. For me, that meant unplugging altogether, removing work emails from my phone and spending weekends in nature where I could recharge and rest.
3. Financial acumen: For too long I shied away from developing my financial acumen because I felt I wasn’t smart enough. But once I started investing more time and energy in understanding my company’s financials, I was surprised to discover how much I actually enjoyed it, and how it empowering it was to see the full financial picture. It was a lot easier to make strategic decisions when I had that kind of clarity.
Tell us what your ideal client would be like?
These days, I work with small business owners, mostly women, who are ready to work on their business instead of in their businesses. They’ve done the really hard work of starting the business, growing their audience and developing a successful product. But now they’re to scale in a way that feel sustainable and manageable, while also freeing up more of their time.
These entrepreneurs are no less ambitious than when they started their companies, but they’re ready for a better work-life balance. They don’t want to spend all their managing the team and putting out fires. They want to have the freedom to step away for a week or a month and trust that the business will run smoothly without them.
And they want the clarity if understanding what their company is worth today, and how much it could be worth in the future. They have an idea of how much cash they want to have the bank, and are ready to have a plan that will help them achieve that goal.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.openairconsulting.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/elinor.fish7/
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/elinorfish
- Linkedin: https://linkedin.com/in/elinorfish
Image Credits
Michele Cardamone Photography
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