A couple of years ago I did something a few people thought was a bit mad. I shut down my public and client-facing Facebook groups.
At the time they were the place to be. They were free and easy to join, and during lockdowns they were a genuine lifeline – a place to connect when the world felt very disconnected.
But I’d started asking myself an uncomfortable question. Why was I building my community inside someone else’s empire?
And it isn’t only Facebook. So many of the women who come to me tell me about their following before anything else – their LinkedIn network, their Instagram audience, their Substack subscribers. Real people, real relationships, years of work.
But how much of it do you actually own?
When you build your business on someone else’s platform, you’re building on leased land. You don’t control who sees your posts – the algorithm does. You don’t set the rules, and they can change overnight. On most platforms you can’t take your followers with you if you leave. And if your account is hacked or shut down tomorrow, would you know how to reach your people?
This isn’t about abandoning social media. I’m on LinkedIn every day, and it’s brilliant for being discovered. But there’s a big difference between using a platform to grow your business and letting it become the foundation of your business.
So over the last couple of years I’ve been quietly buying back my land.
I moved my community onto a platform I own. I’ve invested in this email list, because it’s the most direct relationship I have with you – no algorithm deciding whether you see this. And this year I built ElevateOS™, so my clients can access my thinking whenever they need it, in a space designed around their business rather than someone else’s.
None of it was glamorous. Most of it was admin. But every decision came back to one thing: owning the relationships that make my business work.
Why does this matter more now than ever?
Technology is moving faster than any of us can keep up with. AI is changing how people search, what they see and who gets found – and the rules of that game are being written by a handful of very large companies whose priorities aren’t yours. The platforms decide what your audience sees. They hold the data about who engages with you. And they can change the terms whenever it suits them.
You can’t control any of that. What you can control is how much of your business depends on it.
So I’ll ask you the same question I asked myself.
How much of your business is built on land you actually own?
If your main platform disappeared tomorrow, could you still reach your audience? If referrals dried up, could you start new conversations? Do you have a direct line to the people who matter most to your business?
You don’t need to rebuild everything overnight. But you do need to start choosing, deliberately, where your business lives – before someone else makes that choice for you.
Because building a business on your own terms means owning more than your offers and your income. It means owning the foundations too.
Janine x