๐งต A 20 Hour Day
My alarm went off at 5:15 am at an annoyingly high pitch; I rolled over to slam snooze to my "alien alarm clock song," as my husband calls it (if you have an iPhone, you might know exactly which sound this is...)
I am not an early riser, but I stumbled out of bed fairly quickly, changed, and ran out the door to catch my flight up to the Bay. I was heading up to facilitate a 3-hour session at The Jazba Collective's Fellowship Kickoff weekend. My role was to guide 30+ South Asian CPG founders into a year of scaling with intention. I was flying in and out the same day. It was always going to be a marathon of a day. I started my day at 5:15 AM, and walked back in at 1:00 AM. Here's how it all went down....
๐ง Inside This Issue
If you're new here, ๐๐ฝ welcome.
This is The Messy Middle, a newsletter about the leadership journey no one tells you about. I'm Arshiya Kherani, an executive and founder coach & speaker, and I write about the things most people skip in professional spaces: identity shifts, the hard work of building something honest in public, and what it actually takes to lead with intention when life is anything but clear.
This week: what a 5-out-of-10 rating taught me about the difference between being an expert vs. being a facilitator.
๐ก Credentials & Feedback = The Perfect Storm
The cohort ranged from pre-revenue to $250k+ in annual revenue. They knew different things. They needed different things. My job was to hold space for their dreams, and build a foundation for them to grow their businesses together over the upcoming year. This is my sweet spot in the founder world, working with early-stage teams to launch, experiment, and iterate from a place of values and dream alignment.
When the feedback came in, most of it made me swoon:
- "She knows her art and is equipped to navigate groups to their potential."
- "The activities helped bring out unique and interesting problems that founders are dealing with and enabled others to give their inputs."
- "I got a good sense of my own journey as well as some future considerations I should watch out for."
And then there was the one that stung.
One founder rated me a 5 out of 10. She noted that I said "uhm" and "like" too much, and that she would have preferred a CPG expert to lead the live problem-solving session.
She's not wrong about the filler words. When I'm deep in facilitation mode โ tracking energy, watching body language, taking content, adjusting timing and activities on the fly, my verbal precision slips. It's something I'm glad to be aware of.
The CPG expert note, though? That one dug into a deep insecurity as a an ex-CPG founder who sun-setted my own brand during Covid.
My husband asked me that night how I felt about the feedback. My first reaction was defensive. I immediately ran through my credentials in my head. I bootstrapped my own consumer brand into six figures. I scaled multiple brands to $5M+ at an agency. I know this world. So what exactly makes someone a CPG expert, anyway?
And then I caught myself. Because that reaction, that instinct to prove my expertise, was precisely the wrong response, and exactly what I teach against.
๐ Receiving Hard Feedback
I took a beat to reframe. I wondered what she was craving that she didn't get from that conversation. And what I landed on was this: perhaps a mismatch in expectations โ what she came hoping for, and what I was actually there to do.
The day was designed to be a kickoff to a year-long fellowship. My session was only 3 hours, and the live problem solving was only about 20 minutes. And as a facilitator, I went in knowing that with a room of 30 brands, 30 dreams, and infinite problems, the precise problems we group-solved that day almost didn't matter.
Instead, what mattered most was how these founders learned to think about and talk about their problems so they can spend the next twelve months calling in the right help and making more strategic decisions. THAT is the transformation I work with executives and founders to achieve.
One founder came in convinced her bottleneck was retail readiness. We started asking questions. Ten minutes in, something shifted for her โ the real problem wasn't that she wasn't ready for retail. It was that she hadn't decided whether retail was the right move at all. She'd been optimizing for a path she hadn't fully chosen yet.
Another founder had pitched to a major retailer but didn't know the terms yet โ and was considering buying into his supply chain in anticipation of the deal. High risk, incomplete information. Somewhere in the conversation, something shifted: he realized he might have more negotiating power than he thought. The retailer wanted to platform small, diverse brands. His supply chain constraints weren't just a liability, they were part of what made him an attractive partner. He came in feeling stuck. He left with a shift in perspective.
Neither of them got an answer that day. They got something I believe is better: a live demonstration on how to ask the right question to a group of people who can support them through it.
So with this reframe, I could finally do what I ask every room I walk into to do, meet feedback with this simple phrase: thank you for the feedback.
And I mean it. I can get better. I can run those live problem-solving sessions tighter. I can work with organizers to better align on what participants expect from workshops. I can catch my "likes" and "uhms." And I will. Keep the feedback coming.
So. Thank you. Even to my 5 out of 10 star rating!
๐ฃ Work With Me
If anything in this issue resonated, the idea that your team might be solving the wrong problem, or that the right question can unlock more than the right answer โ that's exactly what I do for organizations.
Reply to this email or book a call here...let's figure out what's really underneath the problem your team keeps running into.
๐ฅจ Snacks:
๐ง Third Spaces: who gets to have them โ and who designs them? This reel got me thinking.
๐บ What To Watch: Hoppers. cute, funny, and somehow also about environmental harm and co-living. My favorite film I've watched this year.
๐ค Real Community: 250+ registrants from a few LinkedIn posts...that's what Erin Mogel pulled off for her recent webinar on building authentic community. Erin is one of my small business clients, and we've been working together on scaling Elevate Social Impact over the last quarter. If you're in the social impact space, go find her magic on LinkedIn, and learn from one of the best community builders I've ever met!
See you in next week's mess!
Arshiya
PS: Thank you so much for the responses to last week's email. Coming back after a hiatus and hearing from so many of you meant more than I can say!
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