‘I was an older woman starting at the bottom of a new career’
Shulamit Ber Levtov on launching a new career later in life and starting a business without personal wealth or investors to back you up
Work undoubtedly impacts your mental health, as something that occupies around half of your waking life. There’s plenty of attention and (at least a veneer of) support for the psychological effects of workplaces, companies and corporate cultures. But we often forget to give the same consideration to the self-employed.
It’s easy to imagine entrepreneurship as the escape hatch from all the ways corporate employment stresses you out. In a lot of ways, it is. But working for yourself comes with its own host of stressors and challenges that impact your mental health, too. And — speaking from experience! — on top of the basic stressors of running a business, you also feel like a failure if you’re not basking in the freedom, autonomy and creativity of living the life you’ve chosen. There’s a lot of baggage to carry in self-employment.
Shulamit Ber Levtov, “The Entrepreneur’s Therapist,” recognized this lack of attention to entrepreneurs’ mental health as she struck out on her own and decided to turn her experience as a counselor and social worker into a practice dedicated to supporting women in entrepreneurship.
I invited Shula to talk about how she started her business and the challenges she’s faced — her journey to entrepreneurship out of necessity later in her career struck a nerve!
Name: Shulamit Ber Levtov
Business: The Entrepreneurs’ Therapist
About the business:
I provide mental health support for women business owners, because running a business is hard.
Business details
Based in: Jasper, Ontario, Canada (near Ottawa)
Year started: supporting women with their personal growth: 2000, as a therapist: 2012
Profit structure: Traditional for-profit
Legal structure: Sole proprietorship
Who works in this business? Me, plus I have a few contractors: web designer, web maintenance, accountant, bookkeeper, VA
Income contribution: My full-time job
How much money does the business earn per year? $98,000 CAD gross. Profit on paper is about $50,000 CAD. I get paid around $40,000 CAD. It’s important to point out this is sustainable for me because I purposely have a very simple lifestyle with very low cost of living, and that my basic health care is paid for by my taxes.
Hours worked per week: 24–32 hours
Is your business profitable? Yes
Your experience doing this work
Have you run any other businesses in the past?
Yes. I’ve co-owned a Steadicam. I was a PR and media consultant and a freelance translator.
Why did you start this business?
I was injured at work and needed to do my own occupational rehab so I could change careers, because I could no longer do my job. I was an older woman starting at the bottom of a new career and wanted to be sure I had a job that enabled me to work until I died.
What surprised you most about starting a business?
How stressful it was.
What are some of the challenges you faced starting your business (and how did you overcome them)?
The entrepreneurial community’s total lack of understanding or even valuing a therapy practice and/or consulting as an actual business. The lack (at the time) of business coaching for therapists and therapy practices. The lack of bank financing for new businesses. Lack of affordable commercial space. The need to ensure a consistent and stable income without having personal wealth or investors to rely on. Fears of indebtedness and fears of being unable to pay back the debt. Total alone-ness in taking big risks like that.
I wasn’t able to surmount most of those barriers when I was running the first iteration of my therapy businesses, which was a group practice. That’s why I do the work I do now as The Entrepreneurs’ Therapist, so no one has to go through what I did as a woman business owner.
What’s the most rewarding thing about the work you do?
Being a witness to the transformations that take place both in businesses of my clients and in their peace of mind. The deeply intimate moments of change that occur with therapeutic processes can feel as intimate as physically intimate moments but on an entirely energetic level (and not sexual at all), but just as emotionally moving and connected.
These experiences connect me with a sense of meaning, and a sense that there are greater forces at work in the world that are helping us all meet our needs.
I’m so grateful to be able to do such meaningful work and have it support my financial sustainability. It challenges the notion that meaningful work and sustainability stand in opposition to one another.
In what ways do you take care of people in your business?
I carry my relationship and communication skills as well as my skills for having difficult conversations into all facets of my business and life. My presence is the most valuable thing I have to offer, so I bring it to all my interactions. In order to be sustainable in that, I have a fierce self-care practice.
One of my ongoing concerns is money conversations and empowering clients in our money relationship. I’ve recently moved to a fee range for everyone instead of a fixed fee or a sliding scale, and I invite clients to choose their own fee. In an extension of this, I also invited clients to choose the amount of their annual fee increase. I wrote a blog post about it here.
Learn more about this business
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