Leah Gervais has built close to $4 million in revenue all while being the stay-at-home-parent of two kids under five in New York City. She is strategic, pragmatic, and genuinely one of the most generous people I know. She showed up in a big way the morning my grandmother died and didn’t ask a single question. That’s the kind of person she is.
In this episode we get into the mechanics of scaling:
* What it actually looks like when you decide to go from $50k months to $65k months.
* Why the first thing you often have to do to scale is spend more money
* How to tell the difference between a business decision that needs data and one that just needs you to trust yourself.
* Leah shares what her top five lead generation sources actually are right now (freebies didn’t make the list — listen before you panic)
* And, why webinars aren’t dead, they’re just slower than they used to be.
We also talk about something that I think will land differently depending on who you are and where you’re coming from: the tension between holding a structural critique of the system you’re building inside of, and actually building inside it anyway.
Leah and I are not identical in how we hold that tension. She is pragmatic in a way I deeply respect and occasionally push back on. I carry more of the systemic weight in how I frame this work, in part because of the specific clients I serve and in part because of my own lived experience as a disabled person who built this business because I needed to, not because it sounded freeing.
We don’t resolve the tension neatly. I don’t think it can be resolved neatly. But I think it’s one of the more honest conversations I’ve had on this podcast about what it actually means to build a values-aligned business inside a system that was not built for most of us.
If you have found yourself stuck between your politics and your pragmatism — or between your grief about the system and your need to build inside it anyway — this one is for you.
Leah Gervais is a business and marketing mentor based in New York City. Find her at leahgervais.com and on Instagram.
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