A Story About Business That You Know Isn’t True (But Want To Believe It Anyways)
It’s Summer 2025.
I’m making dinner in the kitchen, gossiping with one of my internet friends who’s visiting from the west coast of Canada. We’re trading information and we know each other well enough to not be delicate about it.
Whose live event was a total gong show? Who took a job and gave a thin explanation that we know is only half the story? Whose business do we long to trade for our own?
The onions are barely beginning to caramelize when she drops this nugget:
“OMG! Do you follow Candy Carruthurs?!,” she says. “My friend paid $20,000 to join The Portal, and the member’s area is a hot mess of 3-hour call replays and unreadable PDFs.”*
I could not get my phone out fast enough 🏃
Red flag city, my friend!
Candy revealed everything I needed to know in two posts.
The first, a video where she shares that she‘s banking multiple 7-figures a month with a team of two people. (Hello, customer service nightmare! No surprise the member’s area stinks like hot garbage!) The second post proclaimed boldly, “My job is to be the vibe.”
And Candy was doing an incredible job being the vibe — wearing the most beautiful size 2 dresses, often while pregnant, riding in private jets with her handsome husband, insert your girlboss clichés. When one of her customers died of cancer, Candy turned the news into a sales email. (“You. Only. Live. Once.”)
So last week, when the internet exploded with disgruntled sponsors from Candy’s event, I was not surprised. #candygate was always only a matter of time.
But it got me thinking about the red flags we ignore, and why.
I mean, are you allowed to be mad when your mentor – a person who built an entire brand around being unapologetic – refuses to apologize to you?
This same girlboss disaster story will continue to happen over and over, and customers will continue to ignore the red flags, as long as we believe Candy’s fundamental message:
That life and business are an eternal hockey-stick curve of growth in money, followers and happiness, and all it takes are vibes.
And as humans navigating a polycrisis, swiping between genocide and ecological disaster and children being kidnapped by ICE, can you blame people for wanting Candy’s version of the world to be true?
Oh, let it be so!
As someone with significantly more business experience than Candy and her many dopplegangers, and also as a person recently initiated into an apprenticeship with grief, I would offer this:
Business is not an endless, upward-trending endeavour, and neither is life.
It is a roller coaster ride of heart-busting joys and crushing disappointments. Part of being human – and being an entrepreneur – is going for long walks in the dark, sometimes for much longer than you’d like.
Life handed Candy a golden opportunity to sit with the painful reality of having disappointed her customers, to stand still in that grief for long enough to see the way forward. Grief may sound like too big a word, but in my experience, acknowledging my responsibility for disappointed customers is some of the hardest work I’ve ever done in business.
Few people are willing to go to that dark place.
If you want to feel fully alive and aligned in your work, this is a necessary step. Lying to yourself is mentally expensive — when you stop asking your brain to suppress the truth in favour of a false narrative, you free up a lot of bandwidth.
(A parallel crisis is happening in the grief tending world, which also has influencers, and the abuses of power that go along with that. Someone quoted Clarissa Pinkola Estes, who said, “A woman who carries a secret is an exhausted woman.” It made me think of Candy. She must be so tired.)
…but it’s really hard to see the false narratives that our brains are working so hard to justify. That’s why people hire coaches and therapists and join masterminds.
Maybe it’s why you signed up to this newsletter.
So that, when the next Candy Carruthers pops up in your feed, waving her sequinned handbag and bombing you with Stripe screenshots, you’ll actually know what you’re looking at.
A fairy tale about business about as real as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Hope this helped 😉
~ Tarzan
Tarzan Kay Consent-Based Business Educator
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*Candy’s real name is not important. There are too many Candy’s on the internet to go around rattling off their names. What matters is learning to spot red flags, not keeping a list of “the bad people.”
P.S.
At Song & Story, I’ve made some space for an optional ritual around business grief. I’ve found business events that don’t have this, events that nudge participants to be uplifted and excited for four straight days, are a major missed opportunity (not to mention incredibly tiring).
Onboarding call happens Thursday, FYI. So tomorrow’s your last day to sign up.
