What the Forbes Women Summit Reminded Us About Running a Better Business
Rooms full of sharp, ambitious people have a way of holding
up a mirror.
The Forbes Women Summit was that kind of room. Not because every session delivered a revelation, but because the right conversations, at the right time, with the right people, have a way of pressing on things you already know but have been quietly avoiding. We came back with three things we're changing. Not because we've been doing it all wrong. Because there's a version of how we work that's more honest, more useful, and sharper than the one we've been running.
Getting honest about how we're using AI
We help businesses think through where it fits, how to use it well, and how to build strategies around it without losing what makes them worth working with in the first place. Then Annie Liao got up and talked about how Build Club approaches it internally, and it landed differently than we expected. Because there's a gap between knowing something and living it. We've been giving clients the right advice. We haven't always been following it ourselves.
Not because we're resistant to it. Because the day-to-day business of running an agency is relentless, and the things that feel like extras, even when they're not, are the first to slip. The shift we're making isn't about doing more for its own sake. It's about being selective and deliberate: where can AI remove the low-value work so we can spend more time on the work that actually needs us? The thinking, the strategy, the relationships, the craft. The stuff that doesn't scale well because it isn't supposed to. We're holding ourselves to the same standard we hold our clients to. That feels overdue.
Turning empathy inward
Empathy came up in almost every session at the Summit. Which makes sense, it's everywhere in marketing right now, and rightly so. But the way it kept surfacing wasn't just about how you communicate with customers. It was about how you run the room you're already in. Empathy for our clients has always been central to how we work. It's in how we have hard conversations, how we push back when we need to, how we show up when something goes sideways. That part we're proud of.
But applying that same care to how we operate as a team? We've been less consistent there. The business of delivering good work can squeeze out the slower, more intentional work of checking in on the people doing it. What we took from the Summit isn't a new policy or a restructure. It's a reminder to slow down enough to ask better questions internally. To notice when someone's carrying something they shouldn't be carrying alone. To lead the team the way we'd want to be led. It's easy to build a client experience you're proud of and forget to build a workplace that matches it. We're working on closing that gap.
Building a team of problem solvers, not problem spotters
This one cut through cleanly. The people in that room who were doing the most interesting work weren't waiting for everything to settle before they moved. They weren't pointing at the hard thing and naming all the reasons it was complicated. They were already in it. There's a difference between a team that surfaces problems well and a team that solves them. Both matter. But if you stop at identification, you create a culture of analysis without momentum. People become good at knowing what's wrong and less good at actually fixing it.
At Soqual, we want to be the second kind of team. The kind that stays in the room until something shifts. That doesn't treat discomfort as a signal to step back, but as a sign you're in the right conversation. We're not there yet, all the time. But we're being more deliberate about it, in how we run meetings, how we make decisions, and what we celebrate when something is genuinely hard and someone just gets in and does it.
What now?
The Summit didn't give us a new strategy. It gave us an honest look at a few things we'd been doing by half measure.
Sometimes that's exactly what you need.
If any of this resonates with where you're at, in your business, your team, or how you're thinking about the year ahead, we'd love to talk.
