September 2026

In the near future, a robot may be fixing your car‘s flat tire.

A San Francisco-based startup named PitPro Automation recently installed a tire-changing robot in a Calgary tire shop. The device features two cube-shaped robots that move along a track and use sensors and robotic arms to locate and store lug nuts. In all, the machine can complete a full tire-changing job in 15 minutes.

Will this put a lot of tire changers out of work? The founder, Jeremy Conrad, told TechCrunch the bigger problem is that shops can’t find workers in the first place. Calling the work of changing tires “backbreaking,” he said the jobs have become so unpopular, “one shop manager was telling me they had to get special permission to pay more because a Panda Express opened across the street and it took about half their employees.”

PitPro is looking to put more of its technology in chain stores, since their layouts are more standardized and they can help the company with mass deployment. The company also has an eye on the Canadian market, where changing tires as winter comes and goes is a common practice.

In the near future, a robot may be fixing your car‘s flat tire.

A San Francisco-based startup named PitPro Automation recently installed a tire-changing robot in a Calgary tire shop. The device features two cube-shaped robots that move along a track and use sensors and robotic arms to locate and store lug nuts. In all, the machine can complete a full tire-changing job in 15 minutes.

Will this put a lot of tire changers out of work? The founder, Jeremy Conrad, told TechCrunch the bigger problem is that shops can’t find workers in the first place. Calling the work of changing tires “backbreaking,” he said the jobs have become so unpopular, “one shop manager was telling me they had to get special permission to pay more because a Panda Express opened across the street and it took about half their employees.”

PitPro is looking to put more of its technology in chain stores, since their layouts are more standardized and they can help the company with mass deployment. The company also has an eye on the Canadian market, where changing tires as winter comes and goes is a common practice.

As a CEO or business manager, ensuring customer satisfaction is a top priority. Without happy customers, achieving long-term revenue growth is nearly impossible. Consistently delivering positive customer experiences fosters trust, earns referrals and builds your reputation — all of which drive profits and create a competitive advantage.

There are many strategies to improve customer experience, from consumer feedback to tracking customer experience metrics. But don’t overlook one of the most effective ways to impact customer outcomes: improving the workplace environment. Here are a few surprising ways your workplace culture and environment affect the customer experience.

The link between employee engagement and customer outcomes

If you want happy customers, focus on your employees’ happiness first. In my experience leading teams, I’ve found a positive employee experience is the foundation of any successful customer interaction. When employees feel valued, they’ll naturally want their customers to feel the same way. Engaged workers consistently deliver exceptional service, creating positive interactions with customers throughout the entire sales cycle. 

But how do you keep your employees happy to facilitate positive customer outcomes? It often begins with small, genuine actions that help staff feel appreciated. For example, I’ve seen great success by offering more flexible break times or creating dedicated quiet zones for staff to recharge. To support a healthy work environment, many leaders are also investing in better amenities. Providing access to high-quality office drinking water systems like FloWater keeps the team hydrated and energized. Similarly, ergonomic sit-to-stand desks allow employees to customize their workspace for better comfort and focus.

Beyond the physical office, consider implementing an employee recognition program with incentives for exceptional work. When you prioritize worker engagement, positive customer experiences usually follow. 

How a positive workplace environment attracts customers

I have often found that a company’s internal energy is impossible to hide. Have you ever bought from a business that felt standoffish — as if your experience didn’t matter? If so, you probably decided to spend a few extra dollars at a more customer-centric competitor. A positive workplace environment makes customers feel engaged, satisfied, and supported. It also attracts repeat business in three key ways: 

1. Make a good first impression

In business, first impressions are everything. Much like a bad first date can ruin a relationship’s potential, a poor first impression can stop a customer from ever returning. In my years of managing teams, I’ve noticed that a positive, professional workplace environment is the strongest safeguard against this.

Employees who work in an uplifting, motivating environment have more confidence in their ability to serve others. They are more willing to go the extra mile to ensure customer needs are met. When employees take pride in their workplace, they tend to do their part to ensure the environment is clean, inviting, and comfortable for visitors. 

2. Build trust and loyalty

Building consumer trust is vital for growth. However, I have a rule: You must earn the trust of your employees before you can expect it from your customers. When you acknowledge and provide for your employees’ needs, the team operates with security and ease. This positive energy naturally rubs off on customers during every interaction. Simply put, well-cared-for employees are better empowered to serve.

Engaged, proactive employees signal that your organization is competent and trustworthy. Customers pick up on that energy and respond with long-term loyalty. When customers trust you, they will choose you over competitors and act as brand ambassadors to their friends and family.

3. Provide consistency and predictability

To ensure good customer experiences, you must create an environment of consistency and predictability. That’s easier to do if you have loyal staff members who can solve customer concerns and deliver a positive experience. The quality of your workplace environment directly determines whether employees choose to stay or leave. 

A positive culture leads to happier employees, which reduces turnover rates. In addition to saving money on recruitment, a low turnover rate directly improves customer outcomes. I’ve found the longer you retain your workers, the more experienced your team becomes at anticipating customer needs. 

Elements of a positive workplace environment

Organizations that invest in workplace culture and environment often have an easier time earning and retaining customers. The most successful workplaces share these five elements: 

• Employee civility
• Honest and respectful management
• Open communication across all levels
• Meaningful growth opportunities
• Empathetic leadership

To drive positive customer outcomes, prioritize these elements. Doing so doesn’t just earn customer loyalty; it creates a happy and resilient team that scales with your success. 

Improve your workplace to deliver superior customer outcomes

A positive work culture benefits more than just your internal team; it directly benefits the customers you serve. Today’s consumers seek out businesses that project authenticity, trust, and optimism. Treating your employees well is the most effective way to build a welcoming and supportive environment for your customers.

As a CEO or business manager, ensuring customer satisfaction is a top priority. Without happy customers, achieving long-term revenue growth is nearly impossible. Consistently delivering positive customer experiences fosters trust, earns referrals and builds your reputation — all of which drive profits and create a competitive advantage.

There are many strategies to improve customer experience, from consumer feedback to tracking customer experience metrics. But don’t overlook one of the most effective ways to impact customer outcomes: improving the workplace environment. Here are a few surprising ways your workplace culture and environment affect the customer experience.

The link between employee engagement and customer outcomes

If you want happy customers, focus on your employees’ happiness first. In my experience leading teams, I’ve found a positive employee experience is the foundation of any successful customer interaction. When employees feel valued, they’ll naturally want their customers to feel the same way. Engaged workers consistently deliver exceptional service, creating positive interactions with customers throughout the entire sales cycle. 

Entrepreneurs love the idea of diversification. After building one successful company, the temptation is to chase the next opportunity that comes along. A friend pitches a restaurant concept. Someone mentions a real estate deal. A franchise becomes available. Before long, the entrepreneur owns several businesses in completely unrelated industries. It looks like growth. More often, it’s fragmentation.

Over the years, I’ve learned that expansion works best when each new business strengthens the others. Instead of building a collection of unrelated companies, we focused on building an ecosystem. Every new venture had to support the businesses we already owned while creating more value for customers, employees and stakeholders.

That approach helped us build companies across physical therapy, healthcare staffing, hospice care, consulting and technology. More importantly, it allowed each business to generate opportunities for the others instead of competing for our time and attention.

Many entrepreneurs believe diversification reduces risk. In my experience, random diversification increases complexity and weakens focus. Strategic ecosystems do the opposite. They improve efficiency, strengthen margins and create momentum that compounds over time.

The difference between growth and distraction

Several years ago, I noticed a pattern among business owners who came to me for advice about expansion. Many were chasing opportunities simply because they looked profitable.

One entrepreneur owned a successful service company and wanted to buy a restaurant. Another ran a thriving healthcare practice and was exploring a retail concept. Neither opportunity had any connection to the existing business. When I asked how the new venture would support their current operation, the answer was usually the same: “It won’t. I just think it could make money.” Revenue alone doesn’t make something strategic.

A new business should strengthen your existing platform. It should create operational advantages, shared resources, stronger customer relationships or new market opportunities. If it does none of those things, you’re adding complexity without creating leverage.

How we built a healthcare ecosystem

Our ecosystem grew as we identified related needs within the same market. It started with physical therapy. As our practice grew, healthcare organizations kept contacting us looking for qualified therapists. At the same time, therapists were reaching out looking for work.

That gap led us to launch our company. Rather than starting a completely separate company, we built an extension of what we already understood. The staffing business deepened our industry relationships, expanded our reach and created value across the organization. More recently, technology has become another extension of that ecosystem. Our digital tools and automation support multiple business units instead of serving a single company. Each addition strengthened the whole system.

How vertical integration compounds profitability

Ecosystems work in part because they reduce dependence on outside providers.

Many entrepreneurs focus only on increasing revenue. Fewer focus on controlling the critical parts of their value chain.

When a healthcare company relies entirely on outside staffing agencies, for example, it pays a premium every time it needs talent. When staffing becomes part of the ecosystem, those resources can be coordinated more efficiently, and the organization gains another revenue stream The same principle applies in almost every industry. A manufacturer can add distribution. A software company can launch implementation services. A consulting firm can create training programs.

Each move captures more value while improving control over quality and execution.

Four questions to ask before you expand

Before pursuing any new opportunity, I encourage entrepreneurs to ask four questions.

1. Does this business serve the same customer?
Expansion is easier when customers already trust your brand. If the new venture solves another problem for the same audience, you gain efficiency in marketing, sales and relationship building.

2. Does it strengthen an existing capability?
The best opportunities build on strengths you already have. Your expertise, infrastructure, talent or relationships should give you an advantage from day one.

3. Will it create opportunities for your other businesses?
Every new venture should generate value beyond its own revenue. Look for ways it can create referrals, operational support or strategic advantages for the broader organization.

4. Can it run without draining your attention?
Many ideas look attractive until they start consuming leadership bandwidth. If an opportunity requires an entirely new skill set, industry knowledge base or management structure, it may create more distraction than value.

A simple framework for planning your ecosystem

Entrepreneurs often overcomplicate expansion decisions. I prefer a straightforward approach.

Start with your core business and identify the main problem you solve. Next, map the challenges your customers face before, during and after they work with you. Then ask where additional services, products or capabilities could improve their outcomes. Finally, prioritize the opportunities that create shared resources, operational efficiencies or stronger customer relationships.

The goal is a connected system that delivers more value with each addition.

Build a network, not a collection

The biggest lesson I’ve learned about expansion is that success comes from building the right businesses, not more of them.

Random diversification creates the appearance of growth while quietly draining focus and energy. Ecosystem thinking creates alignment. Every company strengthens the others. Every new capability expands the organization’s reach. Every strategic addition serves a larger mission.

Every entrepreneur will face opportunities that promise quick growth. The real challenge is deciding which ones belong in the ecosystem you’re building.

Entrepreneurs love the idea of diversification. After building one successful company, the temptation is to chase the next opportunity that comes along. A friend pitches a restaurant concept. Someone mentions a real estate deal. A franchise becomes available. Before long, the entrepreneur owns several businesses in completely unrelated industries. It looks like growth. More often, it’s fragmentation.

Over the years, I’ve learned that expansion works best when each new business strengthens the others. Instead of building a collection of unrelated companies, we focused on building an ecosystem. Every new venture had to support the businesses we already owned while creating more value for customers, employees and stakeholders.

That approach helped us build companies across physical therapy, healthcare staffing, hospice care, consulting and technology. More importantly, it allowed each business to generate opportunities for the others instead of competing for our time and attention.

Many leaders see high standards purely as a tool for achievement, whether that means gaining a competitive edge or outperforming the market. For years, I saw them that way too, judging my organizations mostly by execution and output. But working in multiple executive roles has taught me something deeper: High standards are fundamentally a form of protection. They shield a leader’s career, team and company from the slow, compounding damage of mediocrity.

When you set high standards, low-quality inputs, whether in hiring, partnerships or daily habits, get filtered out before they can cause problems. Over several years, that protection is worth far more to a business than any single quarterly win. High standards aren’t about demanding perfection. They’re about building a strong filter that protects the health of the whole organization.

Why high standards make organizations more efficient

To run a complex organization well, treat your standards as a filter everything must pass through. Every partnership you pursue, investment you make, client you take on and behavior you tolerate should meet them. When standards are loose or low, the filter breaks down. Misaligned goals, unhealthy team dynamics and unnecessary complexity start to spread through the culture. The result is a business weighed down by obligations it shouldn’t have taken on, constant internal friction and decisions it comes to regret.

Strong standards change how an organization spends its energy. People who don’t meet your professional or behavioral bar don’t get hired. Opportunities that don’t fit get declined. Situations that slow the company down get addressed. This isn’t about arrogance. It’s about protecting your team’s time and focus. By keeping the noise out, leaders create room for focused, intentional work instead of constant firefighting.

Build the culture first, and the results will follow

McLaren Racing offers a clear example of standards coming first. When Zak Brown joined the team in 2016, McLaren had drifted far from its championship history. Results on the track were poor, performance benchmarks had slipped and the team’s culture was fragmented.

Brown did make changes at the top, bringing in new drivers and eventually replacing a handful of senior leaders. But the rest of the team, roughly a thousand people, stayed the same. What changed was how they worked together. McLaren set clear expectations for how engineering teams communicated across departments, how problems were raised and solved without finger-pointing and which lapses were no longer acceptable.

Those standards were designed to protect the team from the habits that had held it back: blame-shifting, excuse-making and settling for “good enough.” The culture came first, and the results followed. McLaren went on to win back-to-back Constructors’ Championships in 2024 and 2025, along with Lando Norris’s first Drivers’ title.

How high standards protect your profits and brand

When standards slip, the damage rarely shows up on the P&L right away. Instead, it works like a hidden tax, gradually slowing the company down and making its work less clear and less consistent.

Low standards let small compromises slide: a late deliverable here, an unresolved conflict there, a small cut in product quality to hit a deadline. Each one looks minor on its own. Together, they wear down a company’s competitive edge and weaken its brand.

Consistently high standards across every department have the opposite effect. When employees know excellence is the baseline, they hold each other accountable, which reduces the need for constant management oversight. Managers spend less time fixing avoidable mistakes and more time on strategy and innovation. Sales teams can focus on better-fit, higher-margin clients because the brand isn’t built on competing on price alone.

In short, high standards can improve your bottom line by cutting the hidden costs of rework, lost customers and repairing a damaged culture.

How to raise your organization’s standards

To put these ideas into practice, build the following steps into how you run your business:

• Treat standards as protection, not vanity. Stop measuring standards only by how impressive they look. See them as your first line of defense against mediocrity.
• Audit how you choose. Review how you select employees, projects, vendors and partners, and identify where loose standards are quietly slowing you down.
• Set standards before you spend. Establish clear expectations for behavior, operations and communication before investing in new growth initiatives. Your culture needs to be strong enough to support your strategy.
• Keep raising the bar. Treat standards as a baseline that rises as the company grows, not a static handbook. Check regularly to make sure small compromises haven’t crept back in.

When leaders get disciplined about what they let into their organizations, they stop reacting to problems created by low-quality inputs and start protecting what matters most. With the right standards in place and consistently enforced, results depend less on luck and more on the strength of the organization built to produce them.

Many leaders see high standards purely as a tool for achievement, whether that means gaining a competitive edge or outperforming the market. For years, I saw them that way too, judging my organizations mostly by execution and output. But working in multiple executive roles has taught me something deeper: High standards are fundamentally a form of protection. They shield a leader’s career, team and company from the slow, compounding damage of mediocrity.

When you set high standards, low-quality inputs, whether in hiring, partnerships or daily habits, get filtered out before they can cause problems. Over several years, that protection is worth far more to a business than any single quarterly win. High standards aren’t about demanding perfection. They’re about building a strong filter that protects the health of the whole organization.

Why high standards make organizations more efficient

To run a complex organization well, treat your standards as a filter everything must pass through. Every partnership you pursue, investment you make, client you take on and behavior you tolerate should meet them. When standards are loose or low, the filter breaks down. Misaligned goals, unhealthy team dynamics and unnecessary complexity start to spread through the culture. The result is a business weighed down by obligations it shouldn’t have taken on, constant internal friction and decisions it comes to regret.

A basic water filter pitcher typically costs around $20 to $40. Rorra, a startup water filtration company known for its stainless-steel countertop system, is asking $249 for its new version.

That’s a lot of money for a water pitcher. So what makes founders Brian Keller and Charlie Carlisle think people will pay a premium for it?

Part of their pitch is that this isn’t your typical plastic pitcher. Rorra’s version is made from borosilicate glass and stainless steel, and uses the same proprietary technology as the company’s larger countertop system. 

Keller and Carlisle recently joined the One Day with Jon Bier podcast to talk about the new product and what they’re doing differently the second time around as founders.

Going all in before they had a product

Keller and Carlisle had one advantage when they started Rorra. They’d done this before. The two previously worked together at Love Your Melon, the apparel brand known for donating hats to children battling cancer, so they had already been through the process of building and exiting a company.

But Rorra required a different kind of sacrifice. They didn’t have a finished product. They didn’t have sales. What they had was enough early research to convince themselves there was a business worth pursuing.

Then came nearly two years of working full-time without making a sale.

There were plenty of moments when the plan looked shaky. One early prototype of Rorra’s countertop filtration system was roughly one-and-a-half times the size of the final product. Carlisle described it as a giant “Stanley Cup-looking thing.”

A bigger problem came when they thought they were nearing launch. Their engineering firm told them the product needed another three or four months of work.

Keller said they had to “remodel the whole business” and make sure they had enough cash to get to launch.

Rorra eventually launched its countertop filtration system, followed by a filtered showerhead. Keller said the company did eight figures in sales in its first year and expects sales to grow two to three times this year.

That growth has given them room to expand beyond the products that built the business. Their latest invention is the $249 pitcher.

Why pay $249 for a water pitcher?

The pitcher is Rorra’s attempt to take the filtration technology from its larger countertop system and put it into a more portable form. But Keller and Carlisle didn’t want to make another cheap, plastic pitcher. 

“Go back to the 1950s refrigerators,” Carlisle said on the podcast. “They used to last for 40, 50 years. How do we get back to that really wonderful, durable, and oftentimes self-serviceable culture?”

The difference is in the materials used. The 13-cup Rorra version is made from borosilicate glass and stainless steel, with no plastic touching the filtered water. Rorra says its filter reduces PFAS, lead, microplastics, and dozens of other contaminants. It also lasts for up to 200 gallons.

Using AI

But durability doesn’t necessarily make consumers want to spend $249 on a pitcher. Keller and Carlisle still had to figure out how to sell it.

That’s where Keller tried something unusual. While working on the launch strategy, he fed the plan into AI. But rather than ask whether it was a good plan, he told the AI it had already bombed.

Keller said he built the launch plan himself, fed it into AI, and told it: “This was the plan. It completely failed. Tell me where we went wrong.”

The exercise identified some potential problems. Keller said AI warned that Rorra wasn’t a big enough brand to sustain the lengthy pre-launch period he had envisioned and suggested the company was trying to communicate too many selling points at once.

So they changed the plan, shortening the pre-launch period and narrowing the message.

The strategy appears to have worked. Rorra says the first batch of pitchers sold out, with a second batch scheduled to ship in October.

Beyond the pitcher

The pitcher may be Rorra’s newest product, but Keller and Carlisle are already thinking beyond what sits on the kitchen counter. They see an opportunity to build a water filtration brand that follows customers outside the home.

“Right now, when you go to fill your water bottle up at an airport or the gym, that brand is not the same brand that you can buy for your house and vice versa,” Carlisle said.

Rorra plans to keep developing consumer products, but Carlisle said the bigger opportunity could be creating a “fully integrated, filtered water platform that transcends environments.”

Rorra is also entering a new stage as a company. Keller and Carlisle have relocated the business to Austin, where they plan to build out their team and work together in person after running the company remotely for its first three years.

Keller believes this stage can be particularly dangerous for a fast-growing company.

“Businesses go to die between 20 to 50 million,” he said. To get beyond that point, he said, founders need to keep innovating while hiring the right people and maintaining the speed that got them there in the first place.

For now, Keller and Carlisle have a more immediate test in front of them: finding out how many people really are willing to spend $249 on a water pitcher.

A basic water filter pitcher typically costs around $20 to $40. Rorra, a startup water filtration company known for its stainless-steel countertop system, is asking $249 for its new version.

That’s a lot of money for a water pitcher. So what makes founders Brian Keller and Charlie Carlisle think people will pay a premium for it?

Part of their pitch is that this isn’t your typical plastic pitcher. Rorra’s version is made from borosilicate glass and stainless steel, and uses the same proprietary technology as the company’s larger countertop system. 

Entrepreneurs are often told that success comes from taking risks. The advice sounds inspiring, but the best leaders rarely take blind risks. They make informed decisions with measured risk.

Over the years, my brother Sterling and I have expanded healthcare companies, entered new markets, launched new service lines and managed through disruptions ranging from Hurricane Harvey to the pandemic. Along the way, I’ve learned that successful risk-taking is less about courage and more about structure.

Every major decision carries uncertainty. The challenge is determining which risks deserve pursuit and which deserve patience. Whenever I face a significant decision — an expansion, a partnership, a new investment, a strategic pivot — I rely on a simple three-part framework to evaluate the opportunity and the downside before moving forward.

Why most leaders struggle with risk

Many entrepreneurs fall into one of two categories. The first group moves too quickly. They become excited by an opportunity and focus almost entirely on the upside. Revenue projections look promising, the market appears attractive, the idea feels exciting. The second group becomes trapped by analysis. They spend months gathering information, building projections and waiting for certainty before acting.

Certainty rarely exists in business. But the alternative to waiting for it isn’t operating without knowledge. Effective leaders balance optimism with preparation: They pursue opportunities while planning for the setbacks that could occur along the way. That balance is the foundation of the framework below.

Part one: Evaluate the opportunity

The first question I ask is simple: What happens if this works?

Too many business owners evaluate risk without fully defining the reward. Before considering obstacles, I want to understand the opportunity itself. Does this decision move the company closer to its long-term vision? Will it create meaningful growth or strengthen existing capabilities?

When my brother and I evaluate expansion opportunities, we begin by asking whether the opportunity aligns with our broader mission. We are careful to avoid growth that creates complexity without advancing our long-term goals. A good opportunity should create leverage, not just more revenue.

One exercise I recommend is writing down the three best outcomes that could result from a decision. It forces you to think strategically rather than emotionally. If the upside is limited, the risk may never be worth taking.

Part two: Analyze the downside

The second part of the framework is about protection. I ask myself: What is the worst realistic outcome?

Notice I said realistic. I evaluate what could reasonably go wrong and whether the organization can absorb the impact.

During the pandemic, many business owners faced challenges they had never anticipated. Those with strong financial reserves, adaptable operations and contingency plans had far more options than those operating without safeguards. That experience reinforced one of my strongest business beliefs: Resilience is a competitive advantage.

Before taking a major risk, I work through four questions:

• How much capital could we lose?
• What operational challenges could emerge?
• How would this affect our team?
• Could we recover if the decision failed?

If the downside threatens the survival of the organization, I either restructure the opportunity or walk away. Protecting the downside keeps you in the game long enough to benefit from future opportunities.

Part three: Assess adaptability

The final component is flexibility. I always ask: Can we adjust if conditions change?

One lesson from periods of uncertainty is that adaptability often matters more than the original plan. During the pandemic, healthcare providers had to rethink how care was delivered. Those who adapted quickly recovered far faster than those waiting for conditions to return to normal. Whenever possible, I look for ways to reduce commitment while increasing learning. Can we test the concept before making a larger investment? Can we launch a pilot? Can we enter a market gradually instead of all at once?

The ability to pivot creates options, and options reduce risk.

Knowing when to pivot versus persevere

One of the hardest leadership decisions is whether to keep pushing or change direction. Many entrepreneurs quit too early. Others stay committed long after the evidence suggests a different path.

The key is separating temporary difficulty from structural problems. Temporary setbacks require persistence. Structural problems require adaptation. Persistence should always be tied to evidence: When data shows progress, continue. When evidence consistently points elsewhere, adapt.

Treat failure as information

Failure carries value if you are willing to study it. Too many people view unsuccessful outcomes as personal defeats. I prefer to view them as feedback. Every setback contains information about assumptions, execution, timing or strategy.

Some of our most valuable lessons came from situations that did not unfold as planned. Those experiences helped us build stronger systems, make better decisions and avoid bigger mistakes later.

After every major decision, successful or not, I conduct a simple review:

• What assumptions proved correct?
• What assumptions proved wrong?
• What would we do differently next time?
• What did we learn?

Leaders who consistently extract lessons from experience improve their decision-making over time.

Before your next major decision, evaluate the opportunity, analyze the downside and assess your ability to adapt. That simple framework has guided Sterling and me through expansions, market disruptions, partnerships and the hardest leadership calls of our careers.

Entrepreneurs are often told that success comes from taking risks. The advice sounds inspiring, but the best leaders rarely take blind risks. They make informed decisions with measured risk.

Over the years, my brother Sterling and I have expanded healthcare companies, entered new markets, launched new service lines and managed through disruptions ranging from Hurricane Harvey to the pandemic. Along the way, I’ve learned that successful risk-taking is less about courage and more about structure.

Every major decision carries uncertainty. The challenge is determining which risks deserve pursuit and which deserve patience. Whenever I face a significant decision — an expansion, a partnership, a new investment, a strategic pivot — I rely on a simple three-part framework to evaluate the opportunity and the downside before moving forward.

For many leaders, isolation has little to do with being alone. You can sit in meetings all day, work on busy teams and have a full calendar and still be isolated. The isolation I mean is being the only one, or one of very few, in the room: the only woman at the leadership table, the only person of color in the meeting, the only one whose background and lived experience look nothing like everyone else’s. It means having no one nearby who shares your vantage point, no one to quietly ask, “Did that feel off to you too?”

That kind of isolation shows up quietly in the decisions leaders make every day. You volunteer for one more project because you want to prove your value. You spend an entire weekend preparing for a meeting that probably required half the time. You replay conversations in your head, wondering whether you should have spoken sooner, waited longer or chosen different words.

Over time, those decisions become habits. Eventually, the habits become your leadership style. I know because I lived it.

Early in my career, I worked in a finance division with more than 200 people. Only two of us were Black women. Every weekend, I prepared for Monday’s meetings as though I were studying for a final exam. I anticipated every question, rehearsed every answer and reviewed every detail. At the time, I thought I was becoming a better leader. Every extra hour of preparation felt like an investment in my future, and every carefully rehearsed answer felt like proof that I belonged.

Looking back, I see something different. I was becoming an excellent survivor. Survival teaches you how to anticipate risk, manage perception and avoid mistakes. Leadership demands something different. It asks you to think strategically, build relationships and create opportunities for other people to succeed. Those are very different skills, and many leaders spend years developing their survival skills before they work on becoming better leaders.

Through my research with hundreds of Black women leaders and my own experience, I have seen these same patterns emerge again and again. The good news is that once you recognize them, you can begin replacing survival strategies with leadership strategies.

Isolation changes the way you see yourself

One of the first things isolation steals is perspective. When no one else in the room shares your background or lived experience, there’s no one to help you make sense of what just happened, so every setback feels personal. A rejected idea becomes evidence that you should have prepared more. Tough feedback becomes proof that you still have something to prove. Eventually, every challenge starts with the same assumption: What did I do wrong?

One question changed the way I evaluate difficult situations, and I still come back to it today. Is it me, or is it the room?

Sometimes important decisions happen in spaces where you have very little access. Sometimes the barrier has very little to do with capability. Learning to recognize that distinction helps leaders spend their energy solving problems they can actually influence instead of carrying responsibility for issues that belong to the organization.

The next time you hit a setback, pause before assuming you need another certification, another late night or another weekend of preparation. Ask whether you’re trying to solve a personal challenge or a structural one.

Isolation can make hard work feel like the only strategy

Many accomplished leaders respond to uncertainty by working harder. I certainly did.

The challenge is what that habit does to you when you are the only one. Hard work becomes a place to hide. If I just prepare enough, produce enough, carry enough, maybe my difference stops being the first thing people notice. It does not work. The work grows. The isolation stays. And now you are tired on top of it.

Effort was never the thing standing between me and where I wanted to go. Being the only one already takes more out of you than the job does. More hours do not fix that. They just wear you down further. And a worn-down leader is not leading. She is surviving in a nicer title.

One of the clearest findings in my 2025 research is that the leaders who lasted were not the ones grinding hardest. Work-life alignment predicted perceived success more than anything else I measured. More than promotion. More than pay. Endurance never moved people. Sustainability did.

Every few months, audit your calendar. Which activities move your career forward? Which ones simply prove that you’re dependable? Those answers often reveal where your leadership energy should go next.

Isolation can shrink your circle

When you feel different from everyone around you, it’s easy to hold people at a distance, and relationships can become transactional. Many leaders approach networking by collecting contacts because they believe a bigger network automatically creates more opportunities.

I prefer something I call “friend raising.” Friend raising starts with genuine relationships long before opportunity enters the conversation. Sponsors speak your name because they know your judgment and your work. Those relationships grow through trust rather than convenience.

That shift also changes the way you approach relationships. Instead of asking, “Who should I meet?” start asking, “Who already knows my work well enough to advocate for me?” Those people are often much closer than you think. A trusted colleague or someone you’ve collaborated with across departments can become a stronger champion than someone you meet once at a conference.

Relationships grow through consistency. A monthly coffee or a thoughtful check-in builds the kind of trust that lasts far beyond a networking event.

Build a leadership life bigger than one organization

One of the strongest findings from my research surprised me. Leaders who sustained success rarely depended on a single community. They built several. In the 2025 data, community connection predicted success too. The women with strong community ties reported higher self-esteem and deeper fulfillment, even the ones who were not advancing fast. The circles were not a comfort. They were a strategy. One circle understood their day-to-day work. Another included peers across their industry. A third had very little to do with work at all. Those relationships provided the perspective and the sense of shared experience that being the only one inside an organization cannot.

One of the biggest mistakes leaders make is expecting one organization to meet every professional and personal need. That’s an impossible expectation for any workplace. The same is true for founders and business owners, who often have no true peers inside their own companies.

A broader community gives you perspective when work feels discouraging. Industry peers remind you that your challenges are rarely unique. Friends outside your profession remind you that your identity extends beyond your title. Internal colleagues help you navigate today’s decisions, while outside relationships help you think about tomorrow’s possibilities.

This week, identify one relationship you could strengthen in each of those three circles. Small investments today often become the support system that carries you through tomorrow’s challenges.

Lead from choice, not survival

Being the only one in the room changes you. It sharpens your awareness, strengthens your resilience and teaches you how to read people quickly. Those strengths deserve to stay. The survival habits deserve a closer look. Every leader eventually reaches a point where the habits that once protected them begin limiting them. The goal is to decide which habits still serve your leadership and which ones belong to an earlier season of your career.

The best leaders eventually stop asking, “How do I survive this room?” They begin asking, “How do I lead well wherever I am?” That shift changes far more than confidence. It changes the kind of leader you become.

For many leaders, isolation has little to do with being alone. You can sit in meetings all day, work on busy teams and have a full calendar and still be isolated. The isolation I mean is being the only one, or one of very few, in the room: the only woman at the leadership table, the only person of color in the meeting, the only one whose background and lived experience look nothing like everyone else’s. It means having no one nearby who shares your vantage point, no one to quietly ask, “Did that feel off to you too?”

That kind of isolation shows up quietly in the decisions leaders make every day. You volunteer for one more project because you want to prove your value. You spend an entire weekend preparing for a meeting that probably required half the time. You replay conversations in your head, wondering whether you should have spoken sooner, waited longer or chosen different words.

Over time, those decisions become habits. Eventually, the habits become your leadership style. I know because I lived it.

A founder I work with hired a marketing agency eight months into his startup. Solid agency, good reputation, reasonable contract. Six months later, he had a beautiful brand deck, a content calendar running like clockwork and a social presence that had grown by a few thousand followers. He also had no new customers he could trace back to any of it.

When I asked what success had looked like in the original scope of work, he went quiet. “I guess we never actually defined it,” he said.

That conversation comes up more often than I’d like. Not because agencies are dishonest or founders are naive, but because the agency-client relationship for an early-stage startup is structurally set up to produce the wrong outcomes if you don’t actively design it otherwise. Agencies are very good at delivering what they can measure, and what’s easy to measure and what actually moves your business forward are often two different things.

What founders get wrong before the contract is signed

The most expensive mistake happens before the agency does a single hour of work. Most founders go into a retainer conversation thinking about outputs: how many posts per week, how many emails per month, what the deliverables look like. Agencies are happy to have that conversation because deliverables are easy to define and easy to demonstrate at the end of the month.

What almost never gets discussed is what the business actually needs to look different in six months for this engagement to have been worth it. Revenue from a specific channel, a pipeline that didn’t exist before, customer acquisition cost coming down measurably. These are harder to commit to, so most agencies won’t volunteer them as success criteria unless you make them.

Before you sign anything, you should be able to answer two questions clearly. First, what does this agency believe is true about your market or your customer that your current strategy isn’t acting on? If they can’t answer that with specificity, you’re buying execution without a point of view, which is rarely what an early-stage startup needs.

Second, how will we both know in 90 days whether this is working? If the answer involves impressions, follower counts or share of voice, that’s a signal worth paying attention to.

Why vanity metrics survive so long in agency relationships

Founders often sense something is off well before they act on it. The reports look active, the team seems engaged, there’s always something to show on a call. The problem is that activity and progress are easy to conflate when you don’t have clear baseline data and a specific number you’re trying to move.

Agencies don’t push vanity metrics because they’re trying to obscure poor performance. Most of the time they push them because those are the metrics they can reliably influence within a retainer. Follower growth, engagement rate and content volume are things an agency can control. Whether any of that converts to pipeline depends on your product, your sales motion and your pricing, all of which extend well beyond their scope. So they report what they can defend, and founders accept it because the alternative is an uncomfortable conversation.

The way to break this cycle is to agree on a shared “signal metric” before work begins. Something that sits between a vanity metric and a revenue outcome, specific enough to be meaningful but close enough to the agency’s work to be fair. For a B2B startup, it might be demo requests from organic channels. For a consumer brand, it might be repeat purchase rate among customers acquired through content. Whatever it is, get it in writing before month one.

The red flags founders ignore because they’re excited

Most founders can spot a bad agency in retrospect. The harder skill is spotting the signs during the pitch, when everything feels promising and the deck looks polished.

An agency that can’t point to a client whose business measurably grew because of their work is a red flag, not a gap they’ll fill with your company. Ask for two or three examples where a client saw a specific business outcome they can trace back to the agency’s work, something with a number attached and a clear line of causation, not just “we grew their social presence.”

Watch for agencies that build strategy entirely from your brief without pressure-testing your assumptions. Good agencies push back. They ask whether your positioning actually resonates with the buyer you think you’re targeting, whether your conversion path makes sense given your price point and whether the channel you want to invest in is where your customer actually makes decisions. If the strategy process feels like they’re mostly agreeing with you and adding production value, be skeptical.

And pay attention to who is in the room during the pitch versus who will actually be doing the work. The senior team that closes the deal and the junior team that runs the account are often very different groups of people.

What a productive retainer actually looks like

The founders I’ve seen get real value from agency relationships share a few habits. They treat the first 30 days as a diagnostic, not an execution sprint. They push the agency to pressure-test assumptions about the audience, the message and the channel before any significant production begins. This slows things down initially and sometimes creates friction, but it almost always produces better outcomes than moving fast on a strategy nobody has genuinely stress-tested.

They also maintain a clear internal owner of the agency relationship with enough context to evaluate the work critically, not just approve deliverables. When the person managing the agency doesn’t understand the commercial goals deeply enough to push back on a content calendar, the relationship drifts toward activity for its own sake very quickly.

Your first marketing retainer is a significant bet. The agencies that will serve you best are the ones willing to be held accountable to a number that actually matters to your business. If they’re reluctant to have that conversation, that tells you something important before you’ve spent a dollar.

A founder I work with hired a marketing agency eight months into his startup. Solid agency, good reputation, reasonable contract. Six months later, he had a beautiful brand deck, a content calendar running like clockwork and a social presence that had grown by a few thousand followers. He also had no new customers he could trace back to any of it.

When I asked what success had looked like in the original scope of work, he went quiet. “I guess we never actually defined it,” he said.

That conversation comes up more often than I’d like. Not because agencies are dishonest or founders are naive, but because the agency-client relationship for an early-stage startup is structurally set up to produce the wrong outcomes if you don’t actively design it otherwise. Agencies are very good at delivering what they can measure, and what’s easy to measure and what actually moves your business forward are often two different things.

OpenAI’s robotics push comes with salaries of up to $500,000.

According to a recent report from Business Insider, OpenAI is going big on robotics — and backing its focus with sizable salaries. At the time of writing, the startup had 27 robotics jobs open on its careers page, up from 11 openings in May. 

The roles included hardware, data collection, software and prototyping. They come with base salaries ranging from $177,000 to $500,000, plus equity and bonuses. For example, one role as a robotics software engineer in San Francisco pays $255,000 to $325,000 in base pay and offers additional undisclosed equity and performance-related bonuses. The role requires at least five years of professional software engineering experience developing systems in robotics. 

OpenAI offers generous benefits as well, including a 401(k) retirement plan with employer match, paid parental leave of up to 24 weeks and daily meals in the office. 

Inside the job postings

The highest-compensated role is a machine learning engineering position focused on the systems that handle robotics data at scale. The job involves building the underlying infrastructure to process, store and move training data across large networks of computers. It carries a listed base salary of up to $500,000. 

Cornell mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Guy Hoffman told Business Insider that the robotics job postings indicate that OpenAI is creating a “custom robot design team.”

The startup is recruiting engineers to develop robot hardware, including the motors and mechanical systems that power movement. 

The openings also include a lab technician who would build, test and refine robotic systems, as well as an in-house lawyer assigned specifically to the robotics group. 

One job asks the candidate to manage OpenAI’s data collection facilities. Unlike language models, which can learn from the massive trove of text and images online, robots need real-world examples of people, objects and machines interacting in physical environments. That data is harder to find, so robotics companies must frequently capture it themselves or purchase it from specialized providers.

OpenAI’s robotics aspirations

The language in the job listings frames robotics as a major long-term bet for OpenAI. One posting described the team’s mission as advancing general-purpose robots and working towards human-like intelligence across multiple types of robotic machines. 

Another job lays out an even broader aspiration: A future in which “everyone” has a personal robot “doing anything they need.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has become increasingly direct about the company’s plans to move from software into physical machines. 

In an interview on the podcast Sources earlier this month, Altman said that OpenAI will “definitely do a humanoid” and “other form factors as well,” or other robot designs suited to different jobs. 

Altman pointed to data centers as a likely early use case, suggesting that purpose-built robots could help operate and maintain the enormous computing infrastructure powering AI. Longer term, he described a consumer vision in which people own personal robots capable of handling a wide range of everyday tasks.

OpenAI’s robotics push comes with salaries of up to $500,000.

According to a recent report from Business Insider, OpenAI is going big on robotics — and backing its focus with sizable salaries. At the time of writing, the startup had 27 robotics jobs open on its careers page, up from 11 openings in May. 

The roles included hardware, data collection, software and prototyping. They come with base salaries ranging from $177,000 to $500,000, plus equity and bonuses. For example, one role as a robotics software engineer in San Francisco pays $255,000 to $325,000 in base pay and offers additional undisclosed equity and performance-related bonuses. The role requires at least five years of professional software engineering experience developing systems in robotics. 

When new creative employees join Oatly, the onboarding starts with a single instruction: “Unlearn everything you know about marketing.”

According to Oatly creative director Michael Lee, that’s the only way to build a truly distinctive brand voice: You must operate without the guidelines that bind most other companies — including how decisions are made, how teams are structured, and how the brand voice is even defined.

For example, most big companies have a “brand book.” It’s a style guide that defines how the brand looks and speaks, so that every touchpoint is consistent. But Oatly does not have one.

“We’ve always kind of refused to do kind of brand books,” Lee says. “Whenever we work with a partner, they’re always asking us about our brand book. And we don’t have one because as soon as you do one, you feel like you have to stick to it, and we’d rather have the freedom to just do something completely different if we felt like it.”

For a company that’s grown into a global provocateur beloved for its packaging and relentlessly human tone, that freedom matters enormously. Here’s what Lee’s approach reveals about what it actually takes to build a brand with real perspective — and why it gets harder, not easier, the bigger you get.

The Oatly origins

Oatly launched in Sweden in 1994, originally positioned as oat-based alternative to dairy. Its branding was quiet and boring.

Things began to change in 2012, when Toni Petersson became its new CEO. John Schoolcraft him joined him as chief creative officer, then eliminated the entire marketing department and rebuilt it with creatives at the center of the business. Their goal: Transform Oatly into a brand with personality and international appeal.

Schoolcraft’s new model was unusual. Oatly’s creative team (which named itself the Department of Mind Control) would operate largely on its own. It would write its own briefs, set its own strategy, and execute its own work.

Schoolcraft departed in 2025, but that structure still remains.

“No one really can veto what we’re doing,” says Lee, who joined as creative director in 2017, the same year Oatly entered the U.S. market. “It’s not like we’re presenting to any marketing director or sales guys.”

This is a genuinely rare setup, but Lee believes it’s a vital one. If you want a distinct brand voice, he says, you can’t just hire creative people and hope for the best. You must remove the layers of approval that instinctively sand down anything provocative, and empower creatives to truly own and operate their work.

But with great creative power comes great creative responsibility.

“When things go well, great. But you also have to take it in the chin when things don’t go well,” Lee says. “Then you must have the wherewithal and courage to continue being at that edge.”

Oatly’s creative director, Michael Lee.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Oatly

A Brand Voice is a Feeling

That unusual corporate structure has produced an unusually voice-driven product. Oatly is full of creatively distinct decisions, and speaks in a funny, often provocative way that helped turn the brand into something beloved and distinct.

Here are a few of those unusual choices:

• On the front of its carton, the name Oatly appears like this: OAT-LY. Why the hyphen? Just because it looked cool.

• The side of its oat milk carton is full of dense, self-referential, constantly changing text. One version began: “Before we wrote this sentence, there was a lot of empty space on the side of this package and we didn’t know what to do with it…”

• Its marketing often follows suit. One billboard said: “Why do giant oat-milk ads have to ruin cool neighborhoods?” Another said: “Maybe a social media celebrity will take a photo of this poster and you will see it on Instagram and like it way more than you do right now.”

• Oatly once described oat milk as “like milk but made for humans.” That prompted a lawsuit from Sweden’s dairy lobby, which Oatly then (ahem) milked for a lot of public press and sympathy.

But despite Oatly’s distinctive voice, Lee says he can’t exactly explain what’s “on brand” for this brand. Nor does he want to.

“There is an Oatly idea, and there is… that is not an Oatly idea,” he says. “How do you know? I don’t know. It’s just you develop a feeling. You develop this sense for what feels Oatly and what doesn’t feel Oatly, and it’s hard to wrap words around it.”

This might sound frustrating for anyone seeking a repeatable process. But Lee’s point is that a real brand voice resists being reduced to a checklist. It must become a fluid, ever-evolving thing.

“A lot of what I’ve spoken about — a company acting human and doing human things — is easy to say, and it sounds kind of normal,” Lee says. “But the reality within corporations and businesses it is extremely difficult. Because as everyone knows, when you go into a company, suddenly it’s company speak. You talk like you wouldn’t talk at home.”

As a result, he says, brand leaders often become police officers: Their jobs are to create guidelines that feel safe and prevent bad ideas. But Lee thinks a creative leader should do the opposite, by building enough shared instinct for everyone to recognize a good idea. That way, they can collectively reject ideas that are safe but don’t feel true to brand.

Courage Gets Harder As You Scale

Startup founders often lament: If only I had the marketing budget of the big guys…

But Lee says startup founders should take advantage of their size. When you’re small, it’s easier to take large risks. “It is much harder to be disruptive and courageous with your brand at the $100 million level than it is at the $10 million level,” he says. “That, I think, is the most difficult challenge — to maintain that edge and continue to be disruptive.”

At scale, every campaign faces more scrutiny, more internal stakeholders, and more pressure to protect what’s already been built. This is when most brands quietly sand off their edges, he says. They trade their original voice for something safer.

So how do you preserve that creative integrity? Lee says it all goes back to fundamentals: How are you structured? And is the company truly built to support creatives? Commitment must come “not from just the creative director, but the entire company, from the top all the way down,” he says.

That’s one more reason he’s grateful for the structure at Oatly.

When there’s no brand book, the creative team must constantly shape and refine the brand itself. When there’s no layers of approval, the creative team feels a deep obligation to get it right. And when a new team member is told to “forget everything you know about marketing,” they can start to define a new way for themselves.

When new creative employees join Oatly, the onboarding starts with a single instruction: “Unlearn everything you know about marketing.”

According to Oatly creative director Michael Lee, that’s the only way to build a truly distinctive brand voice: You must operate without the guidelines that bind most other companies — including how decisions are made, how teams are structured, and how the brand voice is even defined.

For example, most big companies have a “brand book.” It’s a style guide that defines how the brand looks and speaks, so that every touchpoint is consistent. But Oatly does not have one.