Mike Cardona

Helping busy solo entrepreneurs save 30+ hours per month | Automate the tasks you hate, so you can spend more time doing what you love | Automation Alchemist 🧪

Are you working around the clock to keep your business afloat? From marketing to writing, accounting to customer service, you're juggling it all. It's exhausting.

You're not alone. This is a common struggle for solo-entrepreneurs and digital creators. The demands of your business often sideline the need for strategic focus and direction, leading to a vicious cycle of low-value tasks.

Don't blame yourself. When you're in the thick of running a business, finding time for growth planning can feel like a luxury. But what if it didn't have to be?

Imagine having:

• Simple but powerful automations.
• Streamlined workflows and systems.
• Time dedicated to strategic growth planning.

This is the promise of Hidden Levers. As a fellow solopreneur, I've walked in your shoes. Nine years ago, I was where you are now.

Today, I'm on a mission to help creative solopreneurs like you:

• Grow a profitable business without burning out.
• Do the work you love and enjoy.
• Achieve time-freedom.

Every Tuesday, I share actionable frameworks, resources, and tips that leverage AI/Tech tools so you can reclaim your time and do the work you enjoy—all in five minutes or less.

Ready to redefine your solopreneur journey? Click here: https://bit.ly/3PhJ8Vi

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Follow me as well for content on:

• AI
• Zapier
• Airtable
• Systems
• No-Code
• Automation
• Solopreneurship

Operations | Automation Alchemist | Writer

Empowering creative solopreneurs to save time and money by optimizing and streamlining their operations for maximum efficiency.

Sarah Bierenbaum

Customer Success Executive | SaaS Startup Leader | Human-Centered Systems Optimizer

You know your sh*t. So why is this situation so freaking hard right now?

I'm Sarah, founder of Nimble Penguin, an executive coach and advisor for leaders who need to cut through the mess and get back to clarity.

I've spent 20+ years leading humans through chaos: as a theater stage manager (where literally anything can go wrong and the show still goes on), a tech startup executive (scaling teams when nothing is stable), and now as a coach who sees patterns others miss and helps you think clearly when the stakes are high.

I work with executives and senior leaders navigating acquisitions, reorgs, new roles, and the moments where your usual playbook stops working.

Together, we tackle the messy stuff that keeps you up at night:

✔ People problems that feel unsolvable: that peer blocking your progress, the talented-but-destructive direct report, the new boss you can't read

✔ High-stakes decisions without obvious answers: whether to fire someone you've invested in, how hard to push back on a strategy you think is wrong, what to do about the reorganization you didn't design

✔ Moments when you start second-guessing yourself: "Am I missing something?" "Is this the hill to die on?" "Am I about to make things better or blow them up?"

You don't need someone to fix what's broken. You need a thought partner who helps you make confident, deliberate decisions—so you can lead at your highest level without burning out or compromising who you are.

Let's chat. Visit www.nimblepenguin.com to book a free clarity call, or send me a DM.

Strategic Advisor

Playspaces' mission is to foster the next generation of creative thinkers. We are a passionate team of storytellers, engineers, designers, scientists, and educators who have joined forces to incubate technology, content, and products to help children think creatively.

I found this photo a few years ago and immediately went looking for a frame.

It's my parents, bundled up in the front seat of a car, turning around to look at me. Smiling.

I took it during an ice storm that knocked out the power in our small Virginia town. I was home from college, already at the age where I was seeing my folks less, and my brother had bailed to stay with a friend who had power. Which, honestly, fair. 🥶

Day three. No heat. No electricity. Just three people in a cold house watching our breath fog up.

Then one of us (probably my mom) realized: who has heat right now?

Movie theaters.

We drove 20 minutes to the nearest one, bought popcorn, and watched Shakespeare in Love in a blissfully warm, dark room. (Yes, you can now do the math on how old I am. Enjoy.)

I don't know what made me grab the camera before we left. This was well before we carried fancy camera phones in our pockets and documented everything. But somehow I knew I wanted to keep that moment.

We were doing something completely ordinary, going to the movies. But it felt like the best thing in the world, escaping the cold and sharing a rare moment alone with my folks.

That photo is now framed on my wall.

I think about this a lot when things get hard — professionally, personally, whatever. I can hunker down in the cold and be miserable. Or I can ask myself who has heat right now, and go find it.

What's a moment when something hard made an ordinary thing feel extraordinary? Drop it in the comments. ❤️

Tackle what’s next without losing yourself | CS/CX leaders facing a high-stakes moment - let’s make sure you nail it | Ex-stage manager + startup exec | Your thought partner for new roles, reorgs, tricky relationships

The most valuable people in my network aren't necessarily the ones who agree with me.

Kristi Faltorusso posted about our friendship earlier this week - a relationship that started when she didn't hire me. (Yes, really. Read her post. 😉)

Her post made me pause and ask myself, what has made me value this friendship? What makes me continue to make the effort, connect, make time?

What I value most about our relationship is that we do not agree on everything.

We approach problems differently. We see the world through different lenses. And when we sit down together, like we did at Chief last week, I know I'm going to leave with my thinking either sharpened or completely flipped.

That's rare. And I don't take it for granted.

It's easy to default to building networks full of people who get me, agree with me, and cheer me on. But the people who actually move the needle are the ones who ask, "but have you thought about it this way?"

Kristi has never once just told me what I wanted to hear. Eight years in, she still pokes holes in my ideas. I do the same for her.

Who in your life has made you better specifically because you don't see eye to eye?

Alysa Liu didn't win gold because she took a break.

Yes, the break played a key role.

But she won gold because she worked her a$$ off for years and got really f*cking good at skating. Top of the world.

And then she said to herself: I'm really f*cking good at this. Shouldn't I be finding more joy in my work?

So she stepped away. Gave her mind and body a different hill to climb.

And when she was ready? She came back to the ice with a fresh perspective, still carrying every single year of hard work and dedication she'd put in before.

She figured out how to work her a$$ off *and* find joy in the work. And we all watched that joy carry her straight to the gold podium.

I've worked with a lot of badass leaders who are asking themselves the exact same question: "I'm really f*cking good at this. Shouldn't I be finding more joy in my work?"

The answer is always yes. It took me a long time (and a lot of not joy) to figure out how to get there. Now I find joy in helping other leaders do the same.

What's one thing that's brought you joy in your work lately — big or small?

New Haven pizza is the best pizza. 
Thin. Crispy. Brick-oven fired. Perfect ratio of toppings to crust.

Yes, I live in NYC. Lived here for 20+ years. Hasn't changed my mind. Fight me.

It's Friday. Defend your inferior pizza in the comments.

P.S. My husband and daughter are not on team New Haven. I am outnumbered at home. Send backup.

P.P.S. BAR pizza has my heart. Pepe's and Sally's are close seconds. IYKYK.

me trying to write my to-do list... 
my cat: it's Saturday b*tch, chill out 😻

guess I'm stuck here now...

International Women's Day feels like a lot of bullsh*t, this year more than ever.

I want to talk about what actually matters: I am on a mission to create the world my hilarious, sassy, and powerful daughter deserves to live in. That world requires a lot more successful businesses run by women and people from historically marginalized communities.

So instead of a generic post about women being powerful (blah blah), I want to shout out an incredible woman founder who is kicking a$$ and taking names.

Nikisha Bailey founded Win Win Coffee, a coffee company that's about way more than just getting a caffeine fix. She and her co-founder are sourcing all of their coffee from the African diaspora. They’re making thoughtful choices about where they source the coffee, and paying close attention to whose hands the money goes into. The name says it all: everybody wins, or it's not right.

And guess what? I tried four of her coffees at a Chief tasting on Friday. 
(And y’all know I basically never drink coffee.) 
I LOVED all four. No milk, no sugar. 😲 I know, right?

Nikisha also has an amazing story about how she went from the music industry to building Win Win, but I'll let her tell it.

Go buy her coffee. 👇
https://winwin.coffee/

Drop a woman-owned business in the comments that deserves more love.


P.S. In case you can't tell from my happy and slightly "wild-eyed" look in this photo from the tasting event, I'm a bit of a caffeine lightweight 😂

The day reading a novel made me confused *and* hungry...

I was reading "The Impossible Fortune" when a character casually mentioned she was going to pop into a coffee shop to grab a flapjack... what?! She’s walking down the street eating a single dry pancake?!

I had to stop and google it. 
Turns out British flapjacks are oat bars. 
Ohhhhhhh! Brain unbroken.

What's a word that broke your brain when you learned what it meant in another culture or country?

I spent months trying to get my head of product to do what I wanted him to do.
I could see the problem. I had the solution. So I told him what to do. 
He didn't listen. 😂

I had a session last week with a client who was facing the same thing - exhausted, overwhelmed, working twice as hard as she should've been.

When we slowed down and looked at it together, we figured out why: she was handing people instructions instead of asking them to problem solve with her.

Telling people what to do rarely works: their only motivation for doing the thing is to make you happy or follow instructions. Oh, and P.S. now you own all the outcomes, yours and theirs.

When I stopped telling my head of product what to do and started asking him questions, he not only listened - we solved the problem together.

He didn't choose the exact path I would have… which was the whole point. He was the expert on his job, I was the expert on mine. And we were finally pulling our expertise together.

What's one thing you wish you'd figured out earlier in your career about working with other teams?

I used to think difficult work relationships just needed time to fix themselves. Oops. 😬

You know the one. The person who was critical to my success, but somehow we were never on the same page.

A peer who kept blocking my work. A direct report who was quietly tanking team energy. A new boss whose style I just... could not read.

And every day I didn't deal with it, the friction built. Projects slowed down. My stress went up. The relationship got weirder and harder to untangle.

What I learned the hard way: the thing keeping me stuck wasn't always the other person. Sometimes it was the dynamic we'd both created, sometimes external pressure, sometimes even the story I'd written in my own head.

So if a tricky work relationship has you stuck right now, hit me up. This is literally what I do.

How long is too long to let a work relationship stay awkward before you do something about it? Asking for a friend. 😉

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Mike Cardona

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