August 2026

When something isn’t working on your team, it’s natural to look outward first.

We examine performance, processes, communication and accountability. We ask why people aren’t meeting expectations or why the same problems keep showing up. Sometimes those things are the issue. But over the years, I’ve learned that recurring leadership challenges often have a common denominator: me.

Before I make assumptions about my team, I try to run what I call an emotional pattern audit. These five questions help me identify blind spots before those blind spots become barriers.

1. What problem keeps showing up repeatedly?

One of my favorite tools for self-awareness is the Enneagram because it highlights how you behave when you’re thriving versus when you’re stressed. The greatest strength a leader can have is knowing their own weaknesses.

When I notice the same frustration appearing over and over again, I stop focusing on the individual situation and start looking for the pattern. If the same challenge keeps showing up with different people or under different circumstances, there’s usually something deeper worth examining. Patterns often reveal issues that a single event cannot.

2. What role might I be playing in that pattern?

This is often the hardest question to answer honestly. For years, I thought I had a delegation problem. I couldn’t understand why everything seemed to come back to me. Then I realized I wasn’t struggling with delegation at all. I was struggling with my own understanding of my role.

I explained this recently using family photos. When my children were little, I was always the one holding the camera. I was organizing everyone and managing the moment instead of simply being in it. In business, I was doing the same thing. Instead of focusing on my responsibilities as the owner, I kept stepping into responsibilities that belonged to other people. I was unintentionally preventing ownership.

3. Am I expecting my team to be as invested as I am?

One of the hardest lessons I learned was accepting that my team will never care about the business the way I do. That’s not because they aren’t committed. In fact, they work for me because they’re committed to educating children and care about it deeply. However, that investment has a different lens than that of an owner. They’re simply not going to care about the same things I care about to the same degree that I care as the owner.

For a long time, I found myself frustrated when people didn’t show the same level of passion or urgency that I felt. Eventually, I realized I was expecting people to experience the business through my lens instead of theirs. Once I adjusted that expectation, I became a better leader because I stopped measuring commitment by whether someone thought exactly like me.

Sometimes, the feedback we’re least willing to hear is that we need to adjust our expectations, not our people.

4. Who has permission to tell me when I’m off course?

Every leader needs someone who can see what they can’t. For me, that’s often my husband. I’m a visionary by nature, which means I’m usually thinking years ahead. While that’s one of my greatest strengths, it can also become a blind spot.

Whenever I get too focused on the future, my husband jokes that I’m Icarus flying too close to the sun. What he’s really telling me is that while I’m looking at the horizon, there are things happening right in front of me that need my attention. I have similar people at work, too, people who can prod me back onto the right path.

The best leaders don’t surround themselves with people who always agree with them. They surround themselves with people who are willing to tell them the truth.

5. Am I acting from intention or habit?

Once you’ve identified a pattern, the next question is whether it’s something that can actually change. There are things about me that I can improve. I can communicate more clearly. I can create better systems. I can be more intentional in how I lead. There are also things that are simply part of who I am. I’m always going to be a visionary. I’m always going to care deeply about people.

Growth doesn’t happen when we try to become someone else, but when we learn to refine the habits that hold us back while leaning into the strengths that make us effective.

Turning awareness into action

Identifying a pattern is only the beginning. The next step is deciding whether it’s something you can change and then creating a simple plan to address it. One mistake I see leaders make is trying to fix everything at once. If you discover that you’re avoiding difficult conversations, struggling with delegation or creating confusion through unclear communication, don’t create a ten-step improvement plan. Pick one area and focus on making consistent progress.

I like to identify no more than three action items. For example, if clarity is the issue, I might commit to ending every meeting with clearly defined ownership and next steps. If delegation is the issue, I might choose one responsibility to fully hand off instead of continuing to check in on it. If emotional awareness is the issue, I might ask a trusted colleague to tell me when they notice I’m operating from stress instead of intention.

Just as importantly, check back in with the people affected by the change. Ask whether they’re seeing improvement and whether there’s anything you’re still missing. Leadership growth isn’t about making assumptions. It’s about creating feedback loops that help you improve over time.

The leaders who grow the fastest aren’t the ones who never have blind spots. They’re the ones willing to identify them, work on them, and measure their progress honestly.

When something isn’t working on your team, it’s natural to look outward first.

We examine performance, processes, communication and accountability. We ask why people aren’t meeting expectations or why the same problems keep showing up. Sometimes those things are the issue. But over the years, I’ve learned that recurring leadership challenges often have a common denominator: me.

Before I make assumptions about my team, I try to run what I call an emotional pattern audit. These five questions help me identify blind spots before those blind spots become barriers.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Every owner enjoys seeing a profitable year. It validates years of hard work, reassures stakeholders and creates confidence that the business is moving in the right direction. Yet one of the biggest surprises I see in private markets is how often profitable companies struggle to attract premium valuations.

The assumption is understandable. If profits are growing, surely the business must be worth more. Unfortunately, buyers, lenders and institutional investors rarely see it that way.

Profit explains what happened last year. Value reflects what someone believes can happen after ownership changes. That difference is where many businesses unintentionally leave money on the table.

Profit is an accounting outcome. Value is an underwriting decision.

A company’s income statement may show healthy margins, consistent EBITDA and year-over-year growth. Those numbers matter, but they are only the beginning of the conversation.

Acquirers spend far more time asking a different question: “How confident are we that these earnings will continue after closing?” That single question changes the entire discussion.

A business earning $15 million of EBITDA may receive dramatically different offers depending on how buyers assess the quality of those earnings. The headline number is identical. The perceived risk is not.

Value is ultimately a judgment about future cash flows, not a reward for historical profitability.

Buyers don’t purchase yesterday’s earnings

Owners naturally focus on what they have achieved. Buyers focus on what they are inheriting. That distinction sounds subtle until a transaction begins.

During diligence, profitability is dissected from every angle. Revenue concentration, customer retention, supplier relationships, pricing power, recurring demand, working capital needs, management depth, reporting quality and capital expenditure requirements all become part of the underwriting process.

Suddenly, the conversation shifts away from “How profitable is the company?” toward “How dependable are these profits?”

Those are very different questions.

It’s a little like buying a rental property. The current rent matters, but so does the condition of the building, the quality of the tenants and whether the income is likely to continue after the keys change hands. Businesses are no different.

What creates enterprise value beyond profit?

Several characteristics consistently separate companies that merely report profits from those that command premium valuations.

Cash conversion:

Accounting profits are important, but lenders and investors ultimately finance cash generation.

If EBITDA consistently turns into operating cash flow, confidence increases. If cash is perpetually tied up in receivables, inventory or unexpected capital expenditures, profitability becomes less convincing. Healthy cash conversion demonstrates operational discipline rather than accounting success.

Earnings durability:

One exceptional year rarely defines enterprise value. Institutional buyers want confidence that earnings can withstand changing market conditions.

They examine customer contracts, retention rates, pricing flexibility, backlog, recurring revenue and competitive positioning.

The real asset is not last year’s earnings. It is the likelihood of earning them again.

Management depth:

One uncomfortable truth appears repeatedly in privately held businesses: The more indispensable the owner becomes, the less transferable the business often is.

If every major customer relationship, hiring decision, pricing negotiation and strategic choice depends on one individual, buyers inherit dependency rather than infrastructure.

Ironically, the owner who built the business can unintentionally become its biggest valuation discount.

Financial visibility:

Sophisticated buyers dislike surprises more than imperfect performance. Reliable monthly reporting, realistic forecasting, clear KPIs and disciplined financial controls reduce uncertainty. Uncertainty almost always carries a financial cost.

One investment banker once joked that every missing report eventually finds its way into a lower purchase price. While perhaps an exaggeration, the principle is difficult to argue with.

The hidden cost of looking better than you are

Many businesses spend significant effort making profitability appear stronger. Adjustments are reasonable when they reflect genuine one-time events. But there is a fine line between explaining earnings and stretching them.

Every seller believes the add-backs are perfectly reasonable. Buyers have an impressive ability to become forensic accountants the moment those adjustments appear.

The issue is not whether adjustments exist. The issue is whether they improve credibility or reduce it. Trust is difficult to rebuild once buyers begin questioning the financial story.

A better question for owners

Owners often ask: “How can I increase my valuation?”

I think a better question is: “What would make a sophisticated buyer more confident in the sustainability of my earnings?”

That shift changes management priorities.

Instead of chasing short-term accounting improvements, businesses begin strengthening the characteristics that institutional capital actually rewards.

That may include reducing customer concentration, strengthening reporting systems, building management depth, improving working capital discipline or documenting repeatable operating processes.

These initiatives rarely create overnight profits. They often create something more valuable: confidence.

A practical framework

Before assuming profitability will translate into value, management teams should ask themselves five questions:

1. Would earnings remain stable if the owner stepped away for six months?
2. Does EBITDA consistently convert into operating cash flow?
3. Are customers diversified enough that losing one account would not materially change the business?
4. Can management explain the monthly financial performance without relying on informal knowledge?
5. Would an outside investor understand how the business creates sustainable cash flow within a few weeks of diligence?

If several answers are uncertain, the business may be profitable without yet being fully institutionalized. That distinction matters.

Profitability earns attention. Business quality earns confidence. Confidence earns premium valuations.

The companies that attract the strongest buyers are not always the ones reporting the highest earnings. More often, they are the ones whose earnings appear understandable, repeatable, transferable and capable of surviving well beyond the current ownership team.

Profit tells the story of the past. Value reflects how believable the future looks. For owners considering growth, outside capital or an eventual exit, that difference is more than semantics. It is often measured in the price the market is ultimately willing to pay.

Every owner enjoys seeing a profitable year. It validates years of hard work, reassures stakeholders and creates confidence that the business is moving in the right direction. Yet one of the biggest surprises I see in private markets is how often profitable companies struggle to attract premium valuations.

The assumption is understandable. If profits are growing, surely the business must be worth more. Unfortunately, buyers, lenders and institutional investors rarely see it that way.

Profit explains what happened last year. Value reflects what someone believes can happen after ownership changes. That difference is where many businesses unintentionally leave money on the table.

In 2013, St. Louis, Missouri-based sisters Jane Molina and Joy Williams were in a busy season of life, running their family’s long-time heating and cooling business and raising five young children between them. 

Despite having no shortage of to-dos on her list, as Molina breastfed her third son, a new project took shape. She noticed that sometimes he would latch not for milk, but for comfort, and searched for a pacifier that could fulfill that need and give her back some time.

But she couldn’t find a product that mimicked real breast tissue and encouraged a wide latch, rather than the typical tight, pursed one. What if she created it herself? 

Molina voiced her idea to Williams, whose marketing background would be a serious asset. At first,  Williams questioned the practicality of starting another business. The family HVAC company continued to struggle in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis; it was tough to cover all of the bills. 

“ We basically were walking around with holes in our shoes, eating bologna sandwiches and drinking Coca-Cola, paying payroll and then having $150 in our bank account at the end of a week,” Williams says. 

Starting a new business to soothe babies: Ninni Co.

However, Molina felt called to bring the ultra-soft silicone pacifier to life, and before long, Williams was on board. Their pacifier brand Ninni Co., named to honor their grandmother, who breastfed 10 children and referred to the act as “the ninni,” was born. 

But it would be a long road before the product hit the market. 

For about seven years, the sisters worked on Ninni Co. on the side, drawing on financial support from family, including their mother. They tapped into their retirement funds and personal savings to develop a prototype, which cost less than $1,000, and work with an attorney to secure a patent.

Selling the HVAC business to fund Ninni Co.

By 2019, Molina and Williams were ready to go all-in; they decided to sell the HVAC company and open up additional funds for Ninni Co. 

The sisters sold the business for $500,000, to be paid in three installments, and owed $120,000 to vendors. “ People hear, ‘Oh, you sold a business and used that money,’ but it’s not all glitz and glamour or some exorbitant amount,” Williams notes. 

Next, the co-founders joined incubator programs, including BioSTL and the CET’s (Center for Emerging Technologies) flagship program for entrepreneurs, Square One, and received $10,000 through the Level Next program. They used the money for consumer testing the prototype and secured a manufacturer, the same one they use today, in upstate New York. 

Then the sisters were told it would cost $50,000 to $75,000 to create their product mold. The co-founders needed more cash. 

Meeting for coffee leads to a much-needed loan

Fortunately, a chance encounter at a networking event with a man who worked at Carrollton Bank helped them secure it. 

“I used to carry the prototype in a little box, something I got from Marshalls or Ross,” Molina says. She presented that box to the man over coffee, and he immediately understood the product — because his wife was currently breastfeeding. 

He agreed to structure a loan, and the journey to market continued.

Pre-launch, the sisters also received a $70,000 angel investment for a 20% stake in the company from two older men in their church. “ It was a large chunk that we unloaded right at the beginning,” Molina says, “but of course we were valued at zero. So where Joy and I were at, $70,000 might as well have been $250,000.”

Launching the product on Shopify in 2021

By March 2021, the sisters couldn’t wait to test the waters any longer; they launched with a modest supply. They went live on Shopify and priced the pacifiers at $12.99. They didn’t have professional photography, so they used stock images and spread the word on social media. 

On day one, they sold about 100 pacifiers, thanks to support from family and friends, but the number dwindled, sometimes to zero sales in a day. Molina and Williams fulfilled orders in their mother’s basement for about six months, with her help.  

Then, in April 2021, a viral TikTok video changed everything. 

A friend of Williams’ who happened to be an influencer loved using the product for her son, so she created an Instagram reel about it. Then Williams reposted the same video to TikTok.

Since the beginning, the sisters had turned on Shopify alerts on their phones, the “dings” tracking each sale in real time — and that night, they wouldn’t stop going off.

The next morning, the sisters realized Ninni Co. had gone viral, but they only had about 35 pacifiers in stock, with an additional 250 ready at the factory.

Williams put on her marketing hat and leaned into the demand, posting on Instagram and Facebook about upcoming drops and colors. The strategy lent the brand an exclusivity — and it paid off in a major way. 

Going viral brings a serious revenue boost

In 2023, Ninni Co. saw about $2.2 million in annual revenue. The following year, revenue hit $2.9 million, then $5.3 million in 2025, up 83% year over year.

In 2026, Ninni Co. is on track to reach $6.5 million in revenue. The brand sells more than 1,000 pacifiers every day.

Within four years, Molina and Williams bought back 95% of the company from their angel investors. Currently, the co-founders have eight employees and still manage the company’s fulfillment themselves. 

Learning a lesson through Amazon selling

What’s more, the sisters haven’t lost sight of Ninni Co.’s original mission.

As a U.S.-manufactured brand with sourcing focused in the U.S. and Sweden, profit margins are slimmer than on products made in some places overseas, and they’ve had to be selective with their distribution channels.

For example, Ninni Co. stopped selling on Amazon after four months because “it was one of the most stressful, hardest times of our company,” Molina says. 

The platform diverted substantial traffic from the company’s website, and Amazon held money from the sales for two to three weeks, then took up to 50% in the end. Additionally, Ninni Co. had invested in a team to manage the channel. 

“ It wasn’t right for our business model,” Williams adds. “Not every platform is made for every single business or product. Everyone is unique, and you have to honor that.”

Other advantages come with being the customer’s primary contact too, the co-founders note. 

Not only do the sisters get a firsthand look at valuable feedback, but they’ve also built strong communities on Instagram and Facebook  — and it’s part of why it’s been so easy to say “no” to the many people who have expressed an interest in buying them out over the years.

“We wanted to build this business as the two moms behind the dream,” Williams says. “We really feel like we’re living the American dream, and we love what we do every day.”

In 2013, St. Louis, Missouri-based sisters Jane Molina and Joy Williams were in a busy season of life, running their family’s long-time heating and cooling business and raising five young children between them. 

Despite having no shortage of to-dos on her list, as Molina breastfed her third son, a new project took shape. She noticed that sometimes he would latch not for milk, but for comfort, and searched for a pacifier that could fulfill that need and give her back some time.

But she couldn’t find a product that mimicked real breast tissue and encouraged a wide latch, rather than the typical tight, pursed one. What if she created it herself? 

Many entrepreneurs are drawn to exciting sectors such as AI, crypto or whatever is trending, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s glamour in telling people at a dinner party that you’re building the future.

The businesses I’d bet on, though, are the ones nobody wants to talk about: the boring, mundane industries that people tune out as soon as they come up. These are the markets where the most defensible, high-margin businesses get built, and most entrepreneurs walk right past them chasing something flashier.

I know this because I picked one of the least glamorous industries imaginable: insurance (specifically, jewelry insurance). Nobody dreams about working in this sector, but that’s exactly why it worked for me.

Boring usually means overlooked

A boring industry is typically overlooked and underserved. These are old, entrenched, legacy markets where customers might interact with the product once a year, if that. People are frustrated with the status quo, but they’ve accepted it because what’s the alternative? The technology is bad, and the service is worse, but everyone puts up with it because that’s how it’s always been.

This frustration is the opening. When customers are annoyed but resigned, you’ve found a market with an unsolved problem. Insurance is a perfect example because it’s complex and widely avoided. It’s also as far from glamorous as a business gets, and that’s precisely why so few entrepreneurs bother to look at it.

Established businesses get complacent

The reason why these industries stay boring is simple: Established players get comfortable. When no one pays attention to a market, the players in it stop innovating and lose sight of what a good product even looks like, relying on the fact that customers don’t have a better option. Complacency is a strong sign that a market is ready for someone new.

Before BriteCo, I witnessed this firsthand. I’m a third-generation jeweler and a Gemological Institute of America gemologist, so I spent years watching customers try to insure rings and watches they’d just bought. The application process was miserable, requiring customers to fax documents, then wait days or weeks for a coverage decision. Making a claim was a manual, over-the-phone process with no technology to handle it. NPS scores were dismal, and nobody in the industry seemed to care. This was the accepted standard because people had no real alternative.

Distribution is hard to replicate

We’ve now built much better software. Customers can get a quote and coverage in minutes instead of waiting weeks, and making a claim doesn’t require navigating frustrating phone menus. But fixing the software was the easy part.

Jewelry insurance has a timing problem. Customers often purchase jewelry and then don’t think about insuring it until months later, if ever. There are perhaps two moments when insurance even crosses their mind: standing at the jeweler’s counter with the purchase receipt in hand, sitting at home at 11 p.m., and finally typing “jewelry insurance” into Google.

At BriteCo, we addressed both moments. We sold to jewelers for years before offering direct options to consumers because store owners are unlikely to refer their best customers to a brand nobody has heard of. We then built the direct-to-customer side to be there when they finally decide to search for insurance on their own.

This is the advantage of a boring niche. A national carrier can’t justify investing in a business case this small, while established specialists have no reason to change when the current processes are simply accepted as they are. Find a problem, figure out when customers are most likely to care about it, and go solve it.

Profitability is often overlooked

I want to challenge a common assumption about building companies. Growth gets all the attention. Entrepreneurs talk endlessly about scaling but not enough about profitability, and that’s backward. The entire point of a business is to be profitable; if you’re not, you’re out of business.

Boring industries are often the most profitable. These niche, overlooked markets have customers with valid problems and real money at stake. Solving a mundane but important problem is far more valuable than building another AI demo with little practical use.

This is the model we run at BriteCo. We found an underserved niche market, built a better product, and now we dominate the sector and cross-sell to a growing base of policyholders. It’s profitable.

If you’re deciding where to build, resist the pull toward whatever’s trending. Instead, look at the industries people complain about but continue to tolerate because they’ve stopped expecting better. Find the market where the established players have lost momentum and processes still rely on paperwork and patience. If you modernize the technology and reach customers earlier than established businesses bother to, the boring, neglected industry becomes an area your competitors can’t replicate.

After you find success, go do it again for the next one.

Many entrepreneurs are drawn to exciting sectors such as AI, crypto or whatever is trending, and it’s easy to understand why. There’s glamour in telling people at a dinner party that you’re building the future.

The businesses I’d bet on, though, are the ones nobody wants to talk about: the boring, mundane industries that people tune out as soon as they come up. These are the markets where the most defensible, high-margin businesses get built, and most entrepreneurs walk right past them chasing something flashier.

I know this because I picked one of the least glamorous industries imaginable: insurance (specifically, jewelry insurance). Nobody dreams about working in this sector, but that’s exactly why it worked for me.

Cracker Barrel’s Julie Masino didn’t step down for making changes. Masino stepped down, in effect, because of how she found out what to change.

Masino came in, modernized a beloved brand, customers revolted, President Trump weighed in, she reversed course, and now she’s gone anyway even after steering a real turnaround. The moral is simple: don’t touch what customers love. Change is dangerous. Keep the status quo.

That moral is wrong, and it’s about to cost many companies a lot of money.

I’ve spent two decades watching executives use “we did the research” as a substitute for actually understanding their customers. Masino pointed to customer research when she rolled out the new look, and the backlash happened anyway. But the takeaway of “change bad, nostalgia good” misses the actual failure. The failure wasn’t the decision to evolve a stale brand, but mistaking data for understanding.

Those are not the same thing. I wrote an entire book on the difference, because I kept watching smart leaders get burned by it.

Customers will answer your question, but they won’t tell you the truth

In 1999, Sony ran a focus group for a yellow Sport Walkman. Participants loved it. “So sporty,” they said. Sony thanked them and let each person take a free unit home: black or yellow, their choice. Every single person took the black one.

That’s how people work. What someone says in a survey and what they do at the moment of truth are two different data sets, generated by two different parts of the brain. Neuroscience research on decision-making suggests roughly 80 to 90% of it runs on emotion, not logic. Ask a customer what they think of a new logo, and you’ll get a rational-sounding answer. But the reaction that actually drives their behavior — loyalty, defection, an angry post shared four thousand times — is running on something else entirely: identity, nostalgia, a sense that something theirs was taken without asking.

Cracker Barrel’s customers weren’t reacting to a font. They were reacting to a feeling that nobody bothered to ask them how they’d feel. That’s a translation failure, not a strategy failure. And it’s the same failure that’s sunk a hundred rebrands nobody remembers, because the companies were smaller and the backlash never made a headline. The mechanism is identical. Cracker Barrel just had the misfortune of doing it in public, at scale, with a political spotlight attached.

“We did customer research” is not a finding, it’s an alibi

Most customer research is built to produce certainty, not insight. You ask a clean question, you get a clean answer, you write a report, and you move forward feeling protected. If it goes wrong later, you can point back to the “data.” But clean answers to shallow questions don’t predict behavior — they just make leadership comfortable pulling the trigger.

The real work is qualitative, messy, and uncomfortable. It’s understanding not just what customers say but the emotional terrain underneath it, what they’re afraid of losing, what identity they’ve attached to your brand, what unstated expectation you’re about to violate. That kind of understanding doesn’t come from a survey question with five tidy response options. It comes from digging past the first answer to the second and third questions nobody thought to ask.

Most organizations stop at the first answer because the first answer is fast, quantifiable and defensible in a board meeting. The second and third questions are slower, harder to summarize in a slide, and occasionally tell leadership something it doesn’t want to hear. That’s exactly why they get skipped. And that’s exactly why the surprises keep happening.

Jo-Ellen Pozner, the Santa Clara management professor who’s been vocal about the Cracker Barrel case, is right that the environment matters. A shaky economy makes any brand’s core audience more protective, not less. But protective customers aren’t asking companies to freeze. They’re asking to be brought along. Those are opposite instructions, and only one of them requires you to actually understand your customer instead of just surveying them.

The lesson boards need, and the one they’re about to learn instead

Leaders need to take a hard look at whether “customer research” in your organization means real translation of customer psychology, or just a compliance step before a decision that’s already been made. But that’s not going to happen. Boards will instead flag every future rebrand, logo tweak, or product evolution as too risky and strategic drift will calcify for another year because nobody wants to be the next Cracker Barrel headline. But change was never the threat. A shallow understanding dressed up as due diligence was.

The irony is that freezing is its own decision, and it carries its own research failure. A board that won’t touch the brand because it’s afraid of the emotional terrain still hasn’t mapped that terrain. It’s just betting that nothing changes in the meantime. That’s not caution. That’s the same alibi, worn a different way.

So don’t ask your team, “Did customers like it?” Ask them what your customers were actually afraid of, and whether anyone bothered to find out before the launch. If nobody can answer that with more than a survey score, you don’t have customer research. You have an alibi for when things go south.

Cracker Barrel’s Julie Masino didn’t step down for making changes. Masino stepped down, in effect, because of how she found out what to change.

Masino came in, modernized a beloved brand, customers revolted, President Trump weighed in, she reversed course, and now she’s gone anyway even after steering a real turnaround. The moral is simple: don’t touch what customers love. Change is dangerous. Keep the status quo.

That moral is wrong, and it’s about to cost many companies a lot of money.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Wall Street analysts listening in to Bank of America’s quarterly results last month may have been scrambling for a dictionary. 

The confusion was intentional. The CEO of the second-largest U.S. bank, Brian Moynihan, deliberately sprinkles obscure, archaic words into his prepared statements on these calls, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. 

Moynihan regularly uses words like “gainsay,” “concomitant” and “fantods” as part of a secret game he plays on analyst calls, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. The game is so secretive that only a few employees within Bank of America are in on it. 

These employees note that someone chooses random words at the last minute for Moynihan to use in his prepared statements. For example, Moynihan has used “gainsay,” or labeling something as untrue or invalid, more than once. In one earnings call, he said adviser productivity was strong, along with accompanying or “concomitant” growth in fee-based assets. In another call, he said he didn’t “get fantods,” or wasn’t nervous. 

“There is no question, Brian loves a good challenge and always makes us think,” a Bank of America spokesperson told the Journal. “Or what might be called ludically noetic.” According to Merriam-Webster, “ludic” means playful while “noetic” means relating to or based on the intellect.

How he does it

Typically, Moynihan adds at least one advanced word per earnings call, although at times he includes multiple archaic words in one sentence. Bank of America staff members listening in on the calls try to pinpoint the word that Moynihan added, and sometimes it is easy to find.

For example, Moynihan added “perspicacious,” meaning “smart, sharp and quick to notice or understand things that are hidden,” to a sentence during an analyst call in 2022. “A perspicacious analyst might wonder whether talk of inflation, recession and other factors would fructify in a slower spending growth,” he said at the time.

Moynihan’s penchant for advanced vocabulary can sometimes lead to confusion. During a July call with analysts, Moynihan labeled the Iran war as “anfractuous,” which means winding, complex or tortuous. 

The unusual vocabulary created a transcription mess. FactSet recorded the word as “infructuous,” meaning unproductive, while Bloomberg’s transcription service captured it as “intractable,” or difficult to manage. 

S&P Global Market Intelligence transcribed the remark as: “the Iran war is in [fractures].”

One listener, Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo, labeled Moynihan’s vocabulary an “intellectual flex” and said he preferred to keep things simple. Mayo said Moynihan was the “anti-Jamie Dimon.” When the JPMorgan Chase CEO speaks, “everybody understands,” he added. 

Moynihan’s journey

According to the Journal, Moynihan studied history at Brown University, where he also co-captained the rugby team. He graduated in 1981, then got his JD from the University of Notre Dame Law School in 1984. Members of his team describe him as intelligent, having a photographic memory and constantly working, per the Journal.  

He joined Bank of America in 2004 following the company’s merger with FleetBoston Financial and stepped into the top job in 2010.

Bank of America had a market capitalization of $443 billion at the time of writing. 

Wall Street analysts listening in to Bank of America’s quarterly results last month may have been scrambling for a dictionary. 

The confusion was intentional. The CEO of the second-largest U.S. bank, Brian Moynihan, deliberately sprinkles obscure, archaic words into his prepared statements on these calls, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. 

Moynihan regularly uses words like “gainsay,” “concomitant” and “fantods” as part of a secret game he plays on analyst calls, people familiar with the matter told the Journal. The game is so secretive that only a few employees within Bank of America are in on it.