I’ve been doing operations since 2014. Twelve years of learning, solving, and figuring things out, and I still don’t think anyone ever has it all figured out.

What’s changed in those twelve years isn’t the work. It’s the noise around the work.

We now live in an era where everything is searchable and everything has an answer. Right or wrong. That’s a wonderful thing. It’s also a deceptive one.

Somewhere along the way a belief took hold, in the press, in boardrooms, in the ads that follow us around all day, that artificial intelligence can do better than the humans who built it. And in many narrow ways, it does. From that belief came a bigger one: that we can get real relationships, real problem solving, real progression out of a machine.

That can’t simply be the truth.

Computers have transformed how we live and work. But they cannot be the best thing to happen to civilization at the cost of human replacement. We still haven’t finished mapping the human mind, and we’re already funding its replacement at scale.

So let me bring this back to the people I serve every day.

They are founders. Builders. Thinkers. People who care deeply about the foundations that hold other people up. They have created businesses out of nothing, served millions, and still have the ambition to serve more.

So what do we do with the world of AI as we know it now? Who do we become in the face of a tool built to replace us?

We become irreplaceable.

We start companies of our own, extremely profitable or not. We lean into the things this country does best when it’s at its best: collaboration, community, and capital. We support each other until that support turns into something that stands on its own. We like, share, comment, and applaud the friends and family who use their free will to start something in the face of fear. We give our $2 or our $20,000 and we hold each other to the promises we made.

That’s the part no model can run for us.

Where there is a problem, I have been a solution

A friend wanted to host a challenge. I set up an encouragement tracker.

A friend was laid off. I made sure she wasn’t scammed, and I sent her the getting started guide.

A friend wanted to take control of her finances. I sent her the cost of business calculator.

A friend was diving into entrepreneurship while carrying a family. I sent her the peaceful budget tracker.

A small company wanted a new way to run their business. I built and ran a new CRM and onboarded over 250 individual profiles.

People ask me how to handle all the things that are required, and I develop and share the resources I use to handle life and business.

None of that came out of a prompt.

Every one of those started with a person telling me something true about their life, and me having already lived enough to know what would actually hold. That’s not information retrieval. That’s experience and wisdom, and it’s what makes room for a person.

A tool can give you a template. It cannot know that the friend who just got laid off is going to get three predatory offers in her inbox this week and needs to be warned before she needs to be organized. It cannot know that a woman building a business while carrying a family doesn’t need an aggressive budget, she needs a peaceful one.

Where there is a problem, I have been a solution. That is the whole job, and it is a human one.

What that looks like from the other side

A friend of mine built a business past $70,000 in revenue. Then life came. Trials came. Something had to give, and the business is what gave.

She’s building it again right now, from zero.

She isn’t doing it alone, and that’s the only reason I’m telling you about her. Not because she’s a ticket anybody’s trying to ride. Because she’s a Black woman who serves, and serves well, and she is driving other women into better versions of themselves.

Here’s what I want you to take from her:

She trusts what she can’t do to the people around her. And she trusts herself enough to ask for help.

Most of us are good at one half of that. The asking is usually the hard half. But nobody gets to be the solution for you if you never say the problem out loud.

The number that keeps me up

Only about 2% of women-owned businesses in the United States ever cross $1 million in annual revenue. Men-owned businesses are roughly three and a half times more likely to get there.

For Black women, the picture is harder still. The average Black woman-owned business brought in about $47,300 in 2023, compared to $192,600 for women-owned businesses overall. Black entrepreneurs receive less than 2% of venture capital dollars each year. Black women receive less than 1%.

And yet: there are more than two million Black women-owned businesses in this country. Between 2019 and 2024 their revenue grew by more than 80% and their employment grew by 44%. Closing the revenue gap with the average men-owned business could add $1.7 trillion to the economy.

Our communities have been traditionally underfunded, under-resourced, and under-mentored. And we persevere anyway.

The perseverance was never the problem. What’s missing isn’t grit. It’s the infrastructure, and the people who solve for you while you build.

What The NC Co is for

We support founders who believe in humans and who leverage AI, in that order. Founders who serve real needs and who put the right people in the right positions to move the mission forward.

This company is rooted in 1 Timothy 4:12. Don’t let others look down on you because you’re young, but show them and be the example for the believers in truth, love, faith, purity, speech, and in everyday life.

That verse has never been about performance. It’s an instruction to go first. To live it out where people can see it, so they know the path exists and can walk it themselves.

So my mission has always been to be the example for the believers. And now it’s also to propel the people around me into that 2%.

Let’s make it 3.

Not because we all want to be financially successful. We do, and there’s nothing wrong with saying so. But because moving that number was never going to be a solo project. It takes working together and staying together long enough to actually get there.

Find the thing you can’t do and say it out loud to somebody who can. Then go be the solution for somebody else. Don’t let anyone replace you. Become irreplaceable and own your own business.

You lead it. We’re all the support.

Here for the long run. xo, Niché

If this is your year to build the infrastructure behind the vision, let’s talk. Connect Here!