Sarah Hawley has always been ahead of the curve.
She started her first private wealth management company in her late 20s. Through this, she identified a gap in the market, and launched Australia’s first millennial-focused financial advisory firm. In 2014 she launched Grow My Team, a remote work consultancy firm.
Her newest venture, Growmotely, takes that idea to the next step, and exists to support the evolution of conscious work and culture.
It’s this idea of conscious work and culture—of being present—is what drives Sarah.
Well, now it does. Because as Sarah found out, you can make as many future plans as you want. You can strategise. You can put things in place for the future. But if you’re not focusing on the here-and-now, eventually it catches up with you.
It was 2016. Sarah was living in Colorado, in an eight-bedroom mansion, in one of the best ski resorts in North America. She was financially independent, she had the husband, the business; she had everything.
But inside, despite growing all these amazing ventures, she just didn’t feel right.
“All the years of striving, improving, and ticking external boxes that I thought would ultimately make me happy… something had to give at some point.”
And it did. Business got in the way of life.
Sarah realised she was going down a dark path. She needed to do the hard thing, and just stop. Stop everything, and focus on herself. Focus on being present.
But leaving a marriage, stepping away from a business, and stepping away from what we think of as ourselves—it’s a herculean task.
As business owners we spend so much time, and expend so much mental and physical energy keeping busy. We find it difficult to untangle our personal success from our business success.
“It will become a real strength—if not a superpower—if you can separate your self from your business,” Sarah says.
And when you think about it, this ability to separate the personal identity from the professional identity is essentially an in-built exit planning tool, of sorts. It takes the personal feelings out of business, and allows you to be truly grounded in the running of your business. It’s about accepting that we can’t control everything, but what we can control, we’re able to really drive home.
It’s like life, really. If we don’t take the time to identify what’s actually important to us, then we’re setting ourselves on a dangerous path.
And now, coming out the other side of a global pandemic, with a flourishing tech startup and a new family on the way, Sarah is more present than ever.
Ultimately, money has never been her goal—she just didn’t realise it. She was searching for clarity. Freedom.
And in finding that clarity, in really pushing herself to be present in everything she does, this has allowed Sarah to really be there in her new business.“What I’m working on with Growmotely is something that I’m super excited about, and I see the world shifting and changing right now. And I see a real opportunity for this… [a] total shift in the way that we’re all connecting globally.”
The ability to be truly present in the next step of her journey? There’s a superpower in that.
To hear the full conversation, listen to episode 7 of It’s Never About Money.
