I just recorded a podcast with Elizabeth Garvish, founder of Garvish Immigration Law Group, LLC.
Her story reminded me how much leadership is about trusting people we can’t always see and choosing what Elizabeth calls “love.” In practice, that means leading with empathy, trust, and courage, even when leading from afar.
Elizabeth runs a fully distributed team with lawyers and staff across the United States, Spain, Argentina, Colombia, and Honduras.
Her goal is simple yet powerful: to build the happiest law firm in America.
My top three takeaways:
1️⃣ Love as a leadership system
Elizabeth doesn’t lead with rules; she leads with trust. Her team works globally, across time zones and cultures, connected not by oversight but by shared values.
2️⃣ Flexibility as a gift, especially for working mothers
Her firm is built around women, many of them mothers, who can choose how and where they work. She proved that flexibility doesn’t have to reduce performance.
3️⃣ Structure makes freedom possible
Behind the idea of “love” is solid structure: EOS meetings, SOPs in Trainual, and remote systems that make clarity the default. It’s a vivid reminder that this is how culture scales beyond the office.
For me, this conversation reinforced that remote leadership requires a different set of skills, approaches, and practices—and that it absolutely works. When trust, support, and clarity are part of the system, teams don’t just function remotely; they thrive.
Grateful to Elizabeth for sharing her vision of what leading with love looks like in the real world.
Full episode coming soon. 💫
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Leadership That Starts at the Kitchen Table
Marlene Dandler built her company and a community from her kitchen table.
This week, I sat down with Marlene Dandler, founder of Seashore Academy, a fast-growing network of private hybrid schools that started right there — at her kitchen table.
What inspired me most wasn’t just how far she’s come, but how she leads: with clarity, care, and the conviction that great education, and great leadership, both start with human connection.
My three top takeaways:
1️⃣ Hiring for alignment, not background
Marlene explained that her toughest hires were leaders from traditional education, talented people who struggled to embrace Seashore Academy’s flexible hybrid model. What finally worked was finding a leader who shared her excitement for change and innovation.2️⃣ Leadership energy trickles down
She compared leading her company to parenting: when she’s calm, the household, or the business, is calm. Her morning run and prayer aren’t just self-care, they’re her leadership practices.3️⃣ Culture travels through connection
She keeps her on-site and remote teams united through short daily video huddles and by sharing photos from the classrooms, reminding everyone, even those thousands of miles away, of the joy they’re helping create.Conversations like this remind me how much leadership is about intention — who we hire, how we show up, and how we stay connected across distance.
Grateful to Marlene for sharing her story, her heart, and her wisdom.
Full episode coming soon.
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Stop Hiring the Person You Like. Start Hiring for What You Need.
If you don’t know what you really need, you’ll hire the person you like most.
I’ve read hundreds of small business job descriptions, and 95% make the same mistake: they’re more of a wishlist than a job description.
A typical one looks like this:
We want someone who can:
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Manage the calendar
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Write the newsletters
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Run operations
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Handle support
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Think like a strategist
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Execute like a machine
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And work across four time zones
What’s the problem with that?
It mixes six completely different skill sets: administrative, creative, operational, technical, strategic, and customer-facing. That’s not a job. It’s a fantasy.
If someone like that existed, they’d already be running their own business, not applying to work for yours.
Here’s what to do instead:
1️⃣ Write down everything you wish this person would do.
2️⃣ Circle the three most critical things.
3️⃣ Build a role around those, not all seventeen.Once you’ve found that person and developed a good rhythm, go back to your list, see what’s still open, and hire the next person.
Hiring isn’t about finding magic. It’s about making trade-offs and slowly building a team that can cover all the tasks you want to delegate.
Focus beats fantasy. Every time.
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For a long time, I turned a blind eye to this…
I’ve never posted much here, and definitely not personally.Yet I think it’s time I share why I’m doing what I’m doing.I believe it’s relevant to many other business owners around me. For years, I outsourced work to the Philippines.The numbers add up but it never feels quite right when a team member has to work a night shift while I enjoy the light of the day.
I remember one call in particular: It was late afternoon my time and the middle of the night for her.She showed up to our call knowing that her kids would soon wake up, expecting a happy, well rested mom…
And I felt my discomfort.
She was sacrificing the quality of her family life while I was growing my business.Is this what work-life balance and team health are supposed to feel like? We say we care about work-life balance. About being values-driven. About team health. But when our business depends on someone else working shifts we would refuse, I struggle to look myself in the mirror. Aren’t we quietly lying to ourselves?I didn’t like asking that question because for a long time, I didn’t have a better solution.
Until a few years ago, when I flew to Buenos Aires for an EO conference, not expecting much. But something clicked and I realised I might have found a better way:
- US-aligned time zones.
- Cultural chemistry I hadn’t felt elsewhere.
I tested a few placements for my office supply business. It worked better than I expected.
So I built a team.
And now I’ve built a company around it. Staff4Half didn’t start as a business plan. It started as a gut check. I believe there’s a better way to build a company. If you’ve wrestled with this too, I’d love to hear your take.
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Hi, I’m Rosemary. In the past 15 years, I’ve built three businesses in the US, Puerto Rico, and Argentina.
If you believe in leading with trust and building with heart, I invite you to follow me and connect with a community of founders building together.
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