Kimberly Spencer sold out of her company and married the man she loved. Years later, the entrepreneur and bestselling author argues her real breakthrough was never strategy. It was identity.
On paper, Kimberly Spencer had arrived. She had exited an e-commerce company after her business partner bought her out, cashed the largest check she’d ever received (to that point), and married the man of her dreams. By every external measure, the story was supposed to end with the word “success.” Instead, it began with a quieter, more uncomfortable question: why did she still feel like she was failing?
That question is the engine behind Crown Yourself®, the business leadership and identity brand Spencer founded in 2015. The idea arrived a year earlier, on her 2014 honeymoon, what she calls “a divine download,” a vision for helping leaders stop waiting for permission and step into who they were meant to become. The vision came fast. Acting on it did not. “I was scared to press record. I was scared to make a mistake,” she says. The fear wasn’t coming from nowhere. In the three months leading up to the buyout of her e-commerce company, Kimberly had endured a grueling negotiation process in which attorneys repeatedly challenged her value. Her age, her skill set, her credibility, even her lack of a college degree were brought into question as leverage to convince her to lower her asking price.
She held her ground. The deal closed. But the psychological impact lingered.
“On paper, I won,” she says. “But after months of having my worth dissected and debated, I started questioning myself. Every time I wanted to put myself out there, there was a voice asking, ‘Who do you think you are?’”
The gap between the woman in the vision and the woman holding it is the real subject of her work. From the outside, the early years of Crown Yourself® looked polished: the photoshoots, the branding moments, the live workshops, the purpose-driven launch. Behind it, Spencer was wrestling with what she describes as “an identity crisis in a bedazzled Instagram dress.” She was building a business around sovereignty while still hunting for outside validation, teaching confidence while privately interrogating herself.
“Every business ceiling is ultimately an identity ceiling wearing a strategy costume.”
The Lie of Arrival
Crown Yourself® did not make meaningful money for nearly eighteen months. Spencer poured resources into coaching, certifications, events, and the slow machinery of building something real. The slowness was its own teacher. Most entrepreneurs, she argues, misdiagnose the problem. They assume the obstacle is strategy, marketing, or execution. In her experience, and across thousands of conversations with other leaders, the harder task is becoming the person capable of sustaining the life and business they say they want. “Build it, yes,” she says. “Sustain it, harder. You know the saying: heavy is the head that wears the crown.”
What carried her through the lean stretch was not certainty. It was conviction. She became, by her own account, obsessed with the wiring underneath performance: the link between identity, subconscious beliefs, nervous-system regulation, and business growth. She studied NLP, leadership development, and high performers. More to the point, she turned the work on herself.
The Turning Point
The breakthrough was a reframe. Spencer stopped asking how do I make this work? and started asking who do I need to become to lead this vision? Everything moved from there. As the vision expanded, so did her sense of self, and the question simply repeated at each new altitude. The lesson she now teaches clients is blunt: what got you here is often exactly what keeps you from your next level.
That philosophy now anchors a portfolio. Across eighteen years and four businesses (a brick-and-mortar Pilates studio, the e-commerce company she exited, the coaching brand Crown Yourself®, and the visibility agency Communication Queens™), Spencer has built a single thesis into a practice: sovereignty precedes strategy, and you reach it only by taking, in her words, “100% radical ownership of being the creator of your life.”
“Sovereignty precedes strategy. The quality of your business reflects the quality of your relationship with yourself.”
What She Wants Leaders to Hear
Spencer’s central message is permission, or rather, the refusal to wait for it. “You do not need permission to become who you were created to be,” she says. Most leaders, in her telling, stall out waiting for a milestone, a credential, a title, or someone else’s approval before they fully step into their potential. Her counter is that leadership begins the moment you decide to trust yourself.
She is equally direct about the cost of the alternative. Success without alignment feels exhausting. Achievement without presence feels overwhelming. Growth without identity work eventually becomes unsustainable. The fix is not another tactic; it is a change in operating state: moving from fear, proving, and perfectionism toward clarity, ownership, and trust. “When you stop operating from fear,” she says, “you don’t just build a better business. You build a better life.”
Career Highlights
- International TEDx speaker on possibility, decision-making, and leading through fear and change.
- Four-time award-winning, bestselling author of Make Every Podcast Want You, winner of the 2025 BIBA Award for Best “How-To” Book.
- Co-winner of the 2026 Women Podcasters Award for Best Coaching Podcast (Communication Queens).
- Host of the top-2% podcast Crown Yourself®, on conscious leadership and human potential.
- Featured twice on a Times Square billboard following her book launches.
- Eighteen years of entrepreneurship across four companies, including one successful exit.
The Vision Ahead
Spencer wants Crown Yourself® to become the global authority on what she calls sovereign leadership, a model rooted not in titles or external metrics but in identity, ownership, and personal responsibility. Over the next few years she sees the books, podcasts, and programs reaching a million people, and the community growing into a gathering place for founders, authors, executives, and creatives who want to lead with ambition and humanity at once.
The personal aspiration is quieter and, she would argue, the point of all of it: to keep proving that success and presence can coexist, a life where her marriage, her family, her businesses, and her mission reinforce one another instead of competing. “My dream is simple,” she says. “To help people remember that the authority they’ve been seeking has been within them all along.”
It is a fitting line from a woman whose brand is a verb. The crown, in Spencer’s framing, is not handed down by a revenue milestone or an outside authority. It is placed, by choice, on your own head. “This world will be wildly different,” she says, “when more conscious-minded, good-hearted leaders trust themselves, or, as we say, crown themselves.”
