Traveling with your biz bestie– The Miami edition.
Meg and I went to one of her very favorite places last week– The 1 Hotel in Miami Beach. I think traveling with a business bestie is a super fun thing to do. It’s both an exercise in being a better friend and a better co-creator.
In the last 6 months, I’ve been to Montauk, Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami– for work. The women I’ve been traveling with (and for) are Charity, Meg and Gigi– all women founders of purpose-based businesses. They’ve got unique visions and missions that I become intimately familiar with. My goal is to think like them– but just in the capacity as their creative director. I care as much about their missions as they do. I care as much about them as I do about their business success.
Certainly, I’m also particularly interested in traveling for work. But there’s also something really really fun about partnering with a business bestie– especially for someone like me who is a solopreneur. It’s so fun to co-create.
And that’s what Meg and I did in Miami.
I don’t work with a ton of clients each year, because I want to spend time creating with another woman who I can support in a deeper way. It’s fun to be away with a business bestie and it also has the capacity to teach you how to be in these relationships in a deeper, better way. When you’re traveling together, you don’t always have the option to turn off the computer or not talk things through. I guess you do, but when you’re there together you’re just also two different humans communicating in your own ways and finding ways to connect beyond that.
It tends to move beyond business, and you get to connect over stories of your past. Your dreams. You get to know each other’s coffee preferences. What time you like to have dinner and if you can in-fact get through tough discussions (spoiler alert– you can).
I was invited to be a part of Meg’s trip to South Beach to help her capture her favorite place– and to have some adventures together as women who are achieving big things simultaneously. I got a chance to learn how to be better at all of this.
Here’s a look at what we did.
We spent time mocking up her new program– The Table. It’s a really cool coaching group that will be meeting back here in Miami. I always say that I’m the queen of the flat-lay. It’s not such a unique title any longer but when instagram just began I was the one handling all of the flat lay styling for Cleveland Flea. And I got really good at it. This time, we had such a beautiful array of built-in textures and foods and lighting that it was so easy and so fun.
We did one more arduous planned shoot on the beach on our last day. I ended up getting all of our supplies at Trader Joe’s and spent most of our last day capturing flowers in the sand, a beautiful beach picnic, and fruit rolling around in the surf. It doesn’t sound hard– and it’s not hard– but it DOES take a good deal of focus, planning and in-the-moment execution while hungry and bossy seagulls are surrounding you.
Lots of impromptu styling of flowers in cocktails.
Fruit and flowers floating in the surf.
Lots of portraits with the most gorgeous backdrop.
Lots of reading Pema Chodron in the pool.
What you don’t see–
We also took a bubble bath together because we got kicked out of the hot tub. But I don’t have any pics of that or also the night I had an emotional breakdown because instead of dinner at Soho House we had to eat in a basement restaurant that actually felt like a giant cruise ship called Burger and Pizza and the burger and pizza were terrible. And it was still $150 for dinner because, well, Miami.
The difficult conversations. The flight home we missed because we forgot about rush hour. The carsickness because the Uber driver didn’t believe us that the heat was blasting on us. The drunk guy who kept bumping into me in line at the airport. The fact that we almost missed our SECOND flight because I was buying snacks and the crew wanted to leave early.
This is just to say that there is so much life to be lived, so much adventure to be had, so many weird and wild and hard and easy situations you’ll find yourself in.
Traveling is fun. Traveling with a business bestie is fun, too.
A 3-hour deep dive can be broken up into 2 parts– Coaching + Consulting.
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I typically break them up into Coaching– “tell me what’s going on and what’s wrong and why you think it’s that way” and Consulting– “now let’s decide what we’re going to do about it.”
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