Written by Jessica Murray

It’s been a busy Q2 over here at Empower. Lots of events, travel, meetings, and, most exciting of all, a wave of new partners with whom we’ve hit the ground running. I’ve had the opportunity to operate through the lens of an entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and service provider, giving me a front-row seat to a range of topics currently circling the thoughts of all these stakeholders.

While the conversations vary, I’ve observed commonalities in what’s on the minds of many emerging business leaders—whether they're solopreneurs, brick-and-mortar small business owners or technology startup founders.

THREE MONTHS OF INTEL DISTILLED TO FIVE THEMES

Here’s a rundown of what I’ve discussed most over the past three months: the patterns, business challenges and Empower’s quick take on shifting the trajectory.

Theme #1: Founder bottlenecks & too many hats

Pattern: Earlier-stage founders and business owners juggle approvals, firefighting and general business operations out of necessity, then crave a partner who can own several of those lanes so they can go back to actually steering the ship.
Challenge: Momentum stalls, milestones get missed, overwhelm sets in, teams feel scattered and the weight of day-to-day activity inhibits the leader from driving strategy forward.
Empower’s quick take: Be ruthless and brutally honest about your time. Write down how you should spend it, then track your actual activity for the next week. Analyze the gap and build a delegation plan.

Theme #2: Aligning the team from strategy to execution

Pattern: In today’s market, teams sprint, but the connection between strategy and execution often snaps. Tactical busywork gets prioritized over needle-movers.
Challenge: People log hours, but core metrics stay flat and progress zigs when it should zag. Leaders discover the gap late and burn budget on rework.
Empower’s quick take: Confirm everyone on your team understands the strategy. Once that’s locked, set focused objectives that tie directly to it, then have each person craft goals that ladder up. When the through-line is visible, progress follows.

Theme #3: Process inefficiencies & lack of documented workflows

Pattern: “Ways of working” are ill-defined; critical knowledge lives in someone’s brain. Then, the unexpected hits.
Challenge: Inconsistent quality, a single vacation can halt delivery or a surprise resignation leaves the business exposed.
Empower’s quick take: Start recording key repeatable tasks and workflows (videos, voice notes, digital writing, ChatGPT) and then drop these artifacts in a centralized repository. Ask each team member to capture one process per week for a month; refine later.

Theme #4: The customer experience upgrade

Pattern: Businesses are under pressure in 2025, leading leaders to hunt for differentiation through service quality and personalization at scale.
Challenge: Gaps create friction, a sub-optimal interaction and potentially churn.
Empower’s quick take: Map your full customer journey. Instead of trying to change everything at once, pick one sticky moment that also presents a meaningful opportunity. Fix it, measure the impact, iterate, then move on to the next.

Theme #5: Human-AI Collaboration

Pattern: Pretty much everyone is assessing how to build better, faster, stronger with AI (and, as you know, I believe this is the right approach). It’s a hearty helping of curiosity mixed with caution, hype and fear.
Challenge: Teams either under-utilize AI and stay manual or over-rotate the other direction and miss ROI.
Empower’s quick take: Return to first principles. Clarify the outcome, map the workflow, label each step Human / AI / Human + AI, then assess which mix best delivers the goal.

Where Empower fits

These topics aren’t coming up once. I hear them over and over again.

The good news? They’re all the challenges I envisioned solving for entrepreneurs when I launched Empower.

If you’re reading this and something hits home, let’s unpack it together. Grab 30 minutes on my calendar and we’ll talk it through.

FIELD NOTES FROM Q2: FIVE PATTERNS I’VE HEARD FROM ALL CORNERS THIS QUARTER