Hey, I’m Carmen Renè.

Entrepreneur. Certified Business Continuity Professional. Business Analyst. And the person behind Dear Entrepreneur.

I know what it’s like to build a business when you don’t have a corporate-sized team behind you.

You’re the person making the decisions, figuring out the tools, creating the content, answering the emails, keeping up with customers, trying something that swore it was going to make your life easier and somewhere in there, you’re supposed to actually run the business.

I know because I’ve built businesses too.

I’m the founder of Authentic Empowerment Studios, and over the years I’ve built, tested, changed, scrapped, restarted, sold products, created digital offers, built communities, written a book, launched a podcast, tried platforms I loved, tried some I absolutely did not, and learned a LOT about what running a business actually requires.

But there’s another side to what I bring to Dear Entrepreneur.

My corporate work taught me to look at business differently.

I’m a Certified Business Continuity Professional (CBCP) with professional experience in business analysis, business continuity, disaster recovery, incident response, process improvement, technology, risk, and figuring out how work actually gets done.

In corporate environments, there are entire teams thinking about questions like:

What happens if this system goes down?

Who needs access to this information?

What does this process depend on?

How quickly does this need to be restored?

Who knows how to do this if that person isn’t available?

Then I’d look at entrepreneurship and think…

Wait a minute. Who’s having these conversations with the small business owner?

Because when you’re running a small business, you may not have an IT department, risk department, operations team, backup person, or somebody whose whole job is to think about what happens when something goes wrong.

Sometimes you are all of those departments.

And that's exactly why these conversations matter.

That’s where Dear Entrepreneur comes in.

I created Dear Entrepreneur to have the business conversations I wish more entrepreneurs were having.

Not just:

How do I start?

But:

How am I going to run this?

What do I need to put in place now?

What happens when something doesn’t go according to plan?

Am I creating a business that works for me or one that requires me to hold every single piece together?

Here, I take things that can sound unnecessarily complicated in the corporate world and bring them down to real-life entrepreneur language.

Corporate America might call something a single point of failure.

Over Here It’s…

Dear Entrepreneur, if you’re the only person who knows the password, that’s a problem.

Same lesson.

Much easier conversation.

What I believe about business.

I’m not interested in glamorizing entrepreneurship.

I’m also not interested in making business unnecessarily complicated.

I believe you should understand the business you’re building.

Know where your important information is.

Know how the work gets done.

Use technology because it helps, and not because somebody told you that you need 37 apps.

Document the things somebody else may eventually need to know.

Think about what could interrupt your business before you’re standing in the middle of the interruption trying to figure it out.

And yes, use AI, automation, systems and all the tools available to make running your business easier but understand what they’re actually doing for you.

Because starting the business is only part of it.

We’re building one that can WORK, too.

Around here, we’re learning how to:

BUILD IT.
Get the business out of your head and into the world.

RUN IT.
Create better processes, systems and ways of working.

PROTECT IT.
Prepare for the very real things that can interrupt business.

GROW IT.
Make smarter decisions as the business changes and you’re no longer doing everything the way you did on Day One.

No glamorization.

No corporate jargon.

Just useful business conversations, tools, resources and a different way of looking at the business you’re building.

Welcome to Dear Entrepreneur.

— Carmen Renè

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