Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Eryn Anitavi. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Eryn , thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s kick things off with talking about how you serve the underserved, because in our view this is one of the most important things the small business community does for society – by serving those who the giant corporations ignore, small business helps create a more inclusive and just world for all of us.

At the heart of Sapphire Partners lies a profound purpose:

1 – We exist for the neurodivergent solopreneur on the brink of shutting down their business, drowning in self-doubt and overwhelm. With Sapphire, they can realize their vision and dreams instead of succumbing to failure. Whether this is someone struggling with ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, or one of the other many conditions that create this complex paradox of extreme creative vision mixed with extreme limitations on the day-to-day activities that are required to achieve that vision.

2 – We exist for the leader who has realized an element of success in their business, through sales and/or team expansion, with the realization that they can no longer run things by themselves. Sapphire offers a beacon of hope that they develop the legacy of their dreams.

3 – We exist for the neurodivergent employee or manager, losing hope and nearing burnout. We can help to reignite passion and open new possibilities through our specialized systems that are designed specifically for neurodivergence and clarity of purpose and vision. Turnover is extremely expensive and by simply empowering these incredible minds with the right techniques, we can elevate margins, increase staff happiness, and grow stronger companies.

4 – We exist for the undervalued VA’s and EA’s working long, unappreciated hours. Sapphire represents hope for better working conditions, fair treatment, and opportunities for growth. Whether this is through The Sapphire Academy™, our comprehensive training curriculum specifically created for administrative excellence, through our direct-hire opportunities, or by working with us and our clients, this role is incredibly unique and important.

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Sapphire’s focus on creating neuro-inclusive businesses by focusing on empowerment for the neurodiverse, whether leader or team member, and education for those who lead or manage these folks, every piece of wisdom we share has the potential to change a life. Our commitment to reaching and teaching others drives everything we do.

From public speaking, to creating content on neurodivergent energy management techniques, like our proprietary Clarity Matrix™ system, that reduce burnout, increase productivity, and help find joy and brilliance, to implementing processes around effective delegation to empower our leaders to optimize their teams’ performance, the mission is clear – build for the minority to make it better for the majority and empower PEOPLE to create amazing things and Work in Brilliance™.

Eryn , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m an autistic and creative visionary with a passion for strategy. My entrepreneurial journey began at age 10, and I co-founded my first ‘real’ company at 16. Sapphire Partners, my fifth venture, provides premier executive support and chiefs of staff to visionary leaders, with a focus on neurodivergence.

The inspiration for Sapphire Partners came from a simple question at a networking event back in 2018: “Could you spare five hours a week to help me with my business?” That ‘yes’ changed everything, leading to the creation of a managed service that transforms mundane, day-to-day tasks into fuel for growth, allowing leaders to focus on their brilliance. When ten hours a week of administrative and executive support can mean the difference between burnout and success, this is the most important work that I could possibly do.

I’ve faced all of the same challenges that every small business leader encounters at some point in their leadership journey because leadership is HARD.

-The moment you realize that you can’t go any further until you let go of the notion that you can ‘also work a regular job’.
-When you have to hire your first employee and the fear and WTF goes with it, including hiring your friends cause you don’t know what else to do.
-Two years into Sapphire, I was running payroll for eight people on the team during a rainy September afternoon in Seattle when it hit me that these people relied on me for groceries and rent. This wasn’t a game anymore. It was time to take things seriously or get off the stage. I chose to take things seriously.
-I’ve run out of money several times…and somehow I found more.
-I’ve blown up the company (accidentally!) three times…and somehow, we kept coming back.
-I’ve made incredibly poor hiring decisions and I learned why mentors told me to hire slow and fire fast – this is still a hard thing to figure out cause I really like people and with my own neurodivergent limitations, it’s hard to spot toxic behavior until it’s too late.
-I once had two employees forge time cards, costing me upwards of $10K before I caught it because their clients asked me what was going on and why the service was trash. I checked time cards and saw lots of work being done but in reality, no work was being done. That was horrible.
-I’ve realized too late that I had inadequate processes and structures which resulted in catastrophic failure.
-I’ve learned the difference between abdication as a leader and delegation as a leader – one will kill a team and the other empowers a team. It’s a complicated deal because it’s also hard to spot until you’re too far down and no longer respected enough to pull the power back without significant damage.
-I had an employee who told me beautiful little lies about their experience and skills for two years before I finally wised up – this cost me half a dozen clients (there was always a ‘reasonable’ reason why the account just didn’t work out) and thousands in inflated payroll for demanded raises and experience bonuses. Sometimes trust, naivety, and ignoring red flags are a leader’s biggest failings.
-When I discovered stoicism through the book “The Obstacle is the Way”… it reframed the way that I think about hardship in leadership (and life). It’s now a thing that I try my very best to embrace and intentionally choose the harder path when the result of the hardship will lead to a more significant gain.

I believe that neurodivergent visionaries should be seen, heard, and empowered so they can create the innovative solutions that we all need. Whether this happens on a stage or through virtual workshops, my mission is to speak to as many as possible. No big vision should be abandoned and no visionary should feel that they’re ‘too much’.

What sets Sapphire Partners apart is our specialization in neurodiversity, both for our team and the leaders we support. We offer fixed ‘subscription’ pricing customized to client budgets with hyper-targeted service options that drive impact…fast, making us uniquely positioned to serve small businesses and solopreneurs.

Our innovative blends of AI, automation, and human expertise create a unique methodology in our service approach, including a predictive energy management algorithm that we’re in the process of developing, as well as our proprietary Clarity Matrix™ goal strategy for leadership and personal growth.

I am most interested in promoting and reaching people around my core missions:

-Public Speaking/Workshops – discussing leadership, neurodivergence, team building, and executive support
-Neurodivergence – especially autism and ADHD – and it’s application to small business, teams, and leadership
-The difference between virtual assistance, executive support, chief of staff, and chief of operations (in my opinion of course!).
-Venture capital and angel investors MUST require the leaders in their Seed, Series A, and sometimes Series B investments to hire executive support as a condition of investment – without it, they’re positioning their investments to fail.
-Sapphire’s Clarity Matrix™ is going to be the next EOS system (according to my big vision!)
-Your team is your most important client/customer

In the coming years, within the ‘Sapphire’ brand, I see us expanding our services to support more neurodivergent leaders globally; we aim to grow the Sapphire Academy to train those who want to explore a career in executive support and business administration; I also plan on launching a new endeavor, tentatively Sapphire Technologies, around AI-powered tools, including my own proprietary algorithm in predictive energy management…’spoons’ in neurodivergent terms.

Within Sapphire Partners, our collective dream is to establish the Sapphire Castle in Europe, serving as both an employee benefit and a retreat center for our team and clients. When you can buy a castle for less than an office in downtown Seattle or San Francisco or New York…we’ll take the castle, thank you very much.

Ultimately, the Sapphire brand aspires to revolutionize the way leaders approach business strategy and work-life integration on a global scale, empowering them to create lasting, positive impact in the world.

I’m also very passionate about youth empowerment and I’m working to expand Sapphire’s youth program around teaching and mentoring students in business administration.

I want to be an international speaker on neurodivergency & leadership – including team building and goal strategy. This includes a future TedX talk on subtext in personal and professional relationships, and ultimately progressing into a full Ted talk.

Last but certainly not least, I have a few ‘bookshelf businesses’ that are waiting for the right moment – one of them is poised to revitalize the nation’s dying malls, another is based in virtual reality, another in screenwriting and film production, and another was created by my youngest son to change the way we think about road-trips and traffic jams.

Favorite Quotes:
-Build a life you don’t need a vacation from and Work in your Brilliance™
-You can’t do for your executive what you don’t do for yourself
-Leadership never gets easier, it just gets more public
-Those moments when you think, “I want more for you than you want for yourself”
-When you build for the minority, you make it better for the majority. When you build for the majority, you alienate the minority.
-Sometimes, I feel like I know just enough to be dangerous.
-(On goal strategy) We help you prevent the five year plan that’s still five years away in five years
-With neurodivergence, you don’t get to accept the superpower without also accepting the kryptonite… for yourself or for your team.
-Apologies, to yourself or others, can indicate a broken process or system – ask “Why” to reach the core issue and then solve it.
-(On our service in recruiting executive support) So perfectly matched and managed, your anomaly is our normal.
-Your team is your most important client/customer – you can replace a client/customer…it’s far more difficult to replace a team-member.
-(On bad clients) You can lose money with them and you can lose money without them – pick your battle.
-(On bootstrapped leadership) Congratulations, you have $100K in debt – you now have a real world MBA. What are you going to do with it?
-Ask “How” to get closer to the issue, ask “Why” to gain bigger perspective – ask “Why” enough and you’ll bump into a core value.
-Only dead fish go with the flow
-From failure we learn, from success…not so much.
-(On age vs experience) Sometimes, it’s the miles, not the years.
-I welcome my graying hair because it means that people now take me more seriously – I earned it!
-Work should happen at the speed of life

Some amusing stories that can be expounded upon if desired (tenacity, leadership, being playful):

-I made the movie “The Yes Man” with Jim Carrey my own lifestyle. I split fear into two groups, ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’. Rational is harmful to my health, livelihood, family, mental acuity, or business. Irrational is everything else. And if it wasn’t a rational fear, I said ‘yes’. Without fail, for five straight years. I’ve since chilled out a bit and while I still do this because I’ve grown accustomed to it, I have plenty of exceptions around mood, temperature, weather, and whether or not I’ve done it before.
-I broke my ankle wrestling Vikings and then I went to Paris three weeks later in a wheelchair because I refused to let the injury disrupt my plans.
-I’ve had surgery without anesthesia so that I could drive myself home afterward. My favorite quotes from the medical team while we rolled our way down to the operating room, “Forgive us, we’re all a little awkward right now because our patients aren’t usually awake at this point”, “Oh… yeah… I…uh… guess you can move yourself to the operating table?”, “If, at ANY point, it’s too much… you just tap out and the anesthesiologist will handle it” and when I asked the doctor if I was just being stupid with my request, he just shrugged, “I…have no idea…you wrestle Vikings and I’ve never done this on someone who was awake before…”
-I played roller derby for two years – I was never good enough to make the team but I’m particularly proud of a long distance, endurance skate of 27 miles. I set out to do 40 miles but couldn’t quite get there.
-I spent two years traveling steampunk cosplay conventions, making top hats, selling men’s corsetry, and hosting steampunk concerts.
-My dad is an international speaker and author who retired to Australia; my mom is neuromuscular massage therapist who had a 20 acre organic elderberry farm in Maine (she’s since sold it); my younger brother was an Israeli military veteran who passed away in 2009 from PTSD complications
-I have four children; my oldest son (22) is a film producer, my daughter (20) is a symphonic composer and cellist, my middle son (18) is studying to be a neurosurgeon, and my youngest son (16) is in college, studying game design.
-When I was writing a screenplay on the life of the French painter and naturalist, John Audubon, I became so immersed in the content (special interest!) and in collecting the various journals and historical pieces that I found some obscure detail (I can’t remember now) that one of the modern Audubon historian’s (Richard Rhodes) got incorrect. I contacted him to discuss it and we had a fantastic conversation!
-I’ve been journaling consistently since I was eight years old. I have an entire bookshelf of notebooks, journals, and life stories. I think it would be fun to do an entire TikTok series on it. I also think it could be incredibly useful for autism research as a well documented case of undocumented autism.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

If the information on the previous page isn’t quite enough for plentiful story content, within autism there is a neurological difficulty in reading ‘subtext’ and social cues and the hidden language that so many people use to communicate.

With my late diagnosis just one year ago at age 41, I had to completely relearn how to communicate. Over my 41 years, I picked up habits and cues and social constructs around subtext even though I really had no way of knowing how to use these things properly or in what context.

It took a very special mentor in my world, another autistic leader, to show me just how poorly I was communicating. This was one of the hardest things I think I’ve ever had to relearn because there was nothing to base the new knowledge on or even to know what was good or was not good. Everything that I was working on and building hinged on my ability to communicate with other leaders, with my neurodivergent clients, with my neurodivergent team… if I was not the strongest communicator in the room, then my position as an autistic leader would be compromised along with the success of everything that I was trying to build.

I’m not sure how I ended up doing it but with everything I wrote or said, I would go back over it and analyze it for anything that I might consider ‘hidden meaning’ and get rid of it. One phrase at a time, one sentence at a time, one concept at a time.

I’m still working on this, but I have made significant progress!

Do you have any stories of times when you almost missed payroll or any other near death experiences for your business?

Leaders tend to be publicly hyper focused on the wins and the good things that happen in business. We love to see and read and ‘like’ social media posts on things that make us feel good. We don’t talk often enough about the trials and the hardships though.

One of the quotes that I referenced on the previous page, “leadership doesn’t get easier, it just gets more public!” comes from this realization. Whether it’s a small company or a massive company, the people who lead all face tremendous stress from the decisions that have to be made to the impact that those decisions will have on others in the organization.

I’ve nearly killed Sapphire three times over our six and half years in business. I’m hopeful that the future struggles won’t be quite as intense but knowing that they will come helps to prepare and make decisions that will insulate and support the framework as much as possible.

The first time: “The Fall of Rome”
We were growing so fast! It was exciting, it was adventurous, it was a dream come true! I was hiring fast and building even faster. My ego was feeling pretty darn great. And then, I lost control. Our systems couldn’t handle it and our processes broke down. it took about six months to lose 75% of what I had built. Everyone told me to quit, but that…just wasn’t an option. I recentered my damaged ego and started over with the pieces that I had left.

The second time: “Midnight Tacos”
Spurred on by the Fall of Rome, I started taking on debt. Like so many leaders before me, I ran out of money. I’d tried every bank, I’d maxed out my credit cards, I’d taken out terrible, high interest loans. It was the end of the rope. I went through my closest connections and I decided on a final ditch effort ask for help. I’d never done this before and it was the hardest email I’ve ever written. I pressed send, I drove myself to Taco Bell, ordered a pile of tacos, and cried in my car for several hours. Within 72 hours, aid was delivered. “Get your head out of the fire, you have important work to do. I’ll wire you funds on Monday”. That saved the day and kept me going.

The third time: “The Red Wedding”
A Game of Thrones reference for a rather poignant episode where a lot of big things changed very fast, and in a way that left viewers and characters aghast and in utter shock. I was most certainly all of these things, and I found myself staring into the abyss of, “I don’t care anymore…about any of this.” It wasn’t burnout though, it was abdication. In the months preceding this rapid, internal collapse, I told myself that it was delegation. I was proud of the fact that I could ‘disappear’ for a few weeks and everything would run without me. Except that it didn’t. I was pushing all of the important decisions to other people, decisions that only I should have been making. And when I tried to take it back, it looked as desperate as it felt, which is not the way of a strong, honorable leader. Those who stayed refused my resignation, and they pushed me forward until I could stand tall once again… stronger and more committed than ever.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.choosesapphire.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eryn.anitavi_sapphire.partners/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ChooseSapphire
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eryn-anitavi/
• Twitter: https://x.com/EAnitavi
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@Eryn_Anitavi-Sapphire_Partners/videos
• Other: TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@erynanitavi
  LinkedIn Business: https://www.linkedin.com/company/choose-sapphire-partners/