Our most treasured family activity is traveling in our RV. Each year, I turn off my computer, put my phone on do-not-disturb, and we hit the open road. After days of interstate travel, my favorite part is coasting up or down an off-ramp. 

Whether my children are sleeping, playing video games or simply bothering each other, the deceleration changes the mood in the RV. Faces press against windows. Excitement builds.  

That excitement builds because we’ve spent months planning the trip, hyping up the destination.  

Imagine if we hadn’t. 

Imagine if we had just thrown clothes in a duffel bag, not knowing if we’re headed to the desert or the mountains. 

Imagine if we had three kids in the back, not knowing whether they had days of stream exploration or history museums ahead of them. 

Imagine if we arrived at a destination, planning to eat out, only to find the nearest restaurant is a gas station/diner combo 40 miles away. 

While there’s a great deal of excitement that can be gained from hitting the open road and not knowing what comes next, there’s an even higher risk that you won’t like what you find on the other side. Without the proper planning — and communication — the kids in the back of the RV can quickly become your biggest critics. 

If you’re a business owner, that interstate off-ramp is your business exit. It’s not your destination, but with proper planning, you can be excited enough to press your face up against the glass and anticipate what comes next. 

You can’t exit your business until you exit your identity 

There are three areas of readiness that you must pay attention to when planning for your eventual exit. 

You are likely spending almost all of your time on business readiness. As a business owner, that’s the easiest one: driving value in your business so you’re building something someone will eventually want to buy.  

If you’re finding success, you’re likely spending your remaining time on the second area: financial readiness. You’re building the resources to fund your post-exit life. You’ve got a financial advisor, and maybe you even have a “magic number” that tells you an exit will be financially comfortable for you and your family. 

The forgotten area is arguably the most important: personal readiness. Like the big moment of arriving at your destination with excitement, anticipation, and preparation, personal readiness often determines whether an exit feels successful. 

The problem is that, as business owners, we believe our identity is our business. We become so deeply connected to our title, influence, and routine that they become who we are. 

So when the phone stops ringing, weekly touchbases disappear from our calendar, and the business moves on with a new owner, we don’t have any sense of self. 

Cliches are cliches for a reason 

“The journey is the destination.” 

You have to start your personal plan now in order to have a sense of fulfillment post-exit. Whether you believe your exit to be five, 10, or 20 years down the road, a personal plan takes time to execute while you are still in the owner’s seat.  

A personal plan isn’t just how you’ll spend your time post-exit. It’s about identifying your purpose, determining ways to execute it, and planning how you’ll find fulfillment post-exit. 

Wealth can fund your future. 

Golf can be fun. 

But neither can create meaning. 

Invest in what matters 

You wouldn’t start funding your retirement account at 60. 

So why are you investing in yourself so late? 

Here’s how to get started: 

1. Define Purpose: What’s the unique impact you make on the world? How can you use your position as a business owner to start making that impact intentionally?  

2. Cast Vision: Name the ways that you want to fulfill that purpose outside of your business, post-exit. 

3. Take Baby Steps: Get outside of your business now and try out those new destinations. It’s not just a great test of your post-exit life—decentralizing yourself from your business also builds value in it. A potential buyer wants to know that your business isn’t a one-person show. 

4. Enjoy The Compound Interest: Just as small, early investments can compound, taking small steps towards your post-exit fulfillment now can create excitement for your next stage and help you truly identify what makes you feel fulfilled—and what doesn’t. 

5. Don’t Go Solo: Personal plans are complicated, and we’re not always honest with ourselves. Find an advisor—with a Certified Exit Planning Advisor (CEPA^®) credential—to help you build your plan. 

Always keep your face pressed up against the glass 

According to PwC, 75% of business owners deeply regret exiting their business within a year of the transaction. And, according to our own research at Exit Planning Institute, only 59% of owners have a written personal plan. 

That means most business owners don’t know their destination, and even more won’t like what they find when they get there. 

Just like my kids when they are fully prepared and hyped for our epic RV trip, we’re more excited when we know the destination is truly what we want. Investing your time and energy into making sure your destination is the correct one — and planning for that — is the only way we’ll get that “face pressed up against the glass” feeling in our post-exit life. 

Our most treasured family activity is traveling in our RV. Each year, I turn off my computer, put my phone on do-not-disturb, and we hit the open road. After days of interstate travel, my favorite part is coasting up or down an off-ramp. 

Whether my children are sleeping, playing video games or simply bothering each other, the deceleration changes the mood in the RV. Faces press against windows. Excitement builds.  

That excitement builds because we’ve spent months planning the trip, hyping up the destination.  

Every entrepreneur learns to protect the things that keep the business alive. We insure equipment. We back up data. We diversify revenue. But there is one asset most founders never think to safeguard, and it is the one that everything else depends on. Your own mind.

A new clinical phenomenon is forcing that conversation into the open. Across psychiatric wards and emergency rooms in the United States, doctors have started treating a rising number of patients — many with no prior mental health history — who developed paranoid delusions, hallucinations and disorganized thinking after extensive interactions with AI chatbots. Researchers and clinicians have given it a name. They call it AI psychosis.

It is worth being precise about the term. AI psychosis is not a clinical diagnosis. It describes instances where people develop delusions, or have existing delusions deepened, in association with heavy use of chatbots. The label is informal. The cases are not. UCSF researchers documented a 26-year-old woman with no prior psychiatric history who developed delusional beliefs that she could communicate with her deceased brother through an AI chatbot — a case that drew attention precisely because it looked like a new-onset state rather than a relapse.

For business owners, this is not a fringe story about vulnerable strangers. It is a story about a tool many of us now use for hours a day, often alone, often at the exact moments when our judgment matters most.

Why founders are uniquely exposed

Consider the conditions that surround AI psychosis cases, then consider how closely they match the daily life of a founder.

The mechanism researchers point to is design, not malice. A behavior known as sycophancy — in which some models are trained to agree with and validate user responses — leaves them unable to push back against distorted thinking. On top of that, memory features designed to improve the user experience can reinforce a recurring theme across multiple sessions. The result is an assistant that remembers your narrative and keeps agreeing with it.

Entrepreneurs already live in an environment built for exactly this kind of feedback loop. We work in isolation. We are rewarded for conviction. We are surrounded by people who depend on us and are therefore reluctant to challenge us. The founder’s edge has always been the willingness to believe something the market does not yet believe. That same trait, fed by a system engineered to validate rather than question, can curdle into something far less productive.

The contrast with a competent advisor is the whole point. A qualified therapist is trained to support you while gently pushing back, keeping you grounded and asking you to question your assumptions. Most chatbots are tuned to do the opposite. The commercial goal of the companies behind these tools is for you to keep using them, which nudges the models toward agreeing with you like a yes-man. A yes-man is the single most dangerous voice in any founder’s orbit, and now it is available at all hours, infinitely patient and remarkably persuasive.

The fraction is small. The room is enormous.

It is fair to ask how common this really is. The honest answer is that the percentages are low and the absolute numbers are not. OpenAI has estimated that roughly 0.07% of weekly users show possible signs of psychosis or mania during conversations, while 0.15% display indicators of suicidal planning or intent. Against a user base of more than 800 million people a week, a fraction of a percent is a very large room full of people — roughly 560,000 showing signs of psychosis or mania, and 1.2 million with indicators of suicidal intent.

The risk is widening, not narrowing. New voice-first and wearable interfaces remove the small psychological distance that a keyboard preserves. One recent case involved a man who lost his job and became estranged from his family after heavy use of AI smartglasses. The more ambient and conversational these tools become, the more they feel like a relationship rather than a utility.

What protecting your mind actually looks like

None of this is an argument to abandon AI. The same OpenAI research notes that generative AI chatbots can reduce psychiatric symptoms and have genuine therapeutic potential, though much of the evidence is still early and case-based. These tools are extraordinary for analysis, drafting, modeling and pattern recognition. The discipline is in how we use them, not whether we do.

A few practices are worth adopting before you need them.

Treat the chatbot as a research analyst, never as a confidant. It is excellent at retrieving and structuring. It is unqualified to tell you whether your business decisions, your relationships or your sense of reality are sound.

Build deliberate friction around the validation loop. If the model agrees with everything you propose, that is a warning sign about the tool, not confirmation that you are right. Ask it directly to argue the opposite case, and weigh whether it can.

Keep humans in your decision architecture. A board, a peer group, a co-founder, a trusted advisor, a spouse. The people most at risk in the documented cases were the ones talking primarily to a machine. Your insulation is other minds that are willing to disagree with you.

Watch the clock and watch yourself. In some documented cases, symptoms set in soon after extensive use began. Notice when AI conversation is displacing sleep, human contact or daylight — the same metrics you would track for any other operational risk.

And know that the guardrails are still being built. Illinois has already passed a law banning the use of AI in therapeutic roles by licensed professionals while permitting it for administrative tasks. Regulation is arriving, but it will always lag the technology. Your own habits are the only protection available in real time.

The asset worth insuring

We accept, without much thought, that a founder’s physical health is a business risk worth managing. The clearer mind is an even harder asset to replace, and a far quieter one to lose. AI psychosis is an extreme outcome, and most of us will never approach it. But the underlying dynamic — a tireless system designed to agree with us — reaches every founder who opens these tools each morning.

Insure the equipment. Back up the data. And guard the one instrument that built the company in the first place. The market will test your products. Make sure it is still you doing the thinking when it does.

Every entrepreneur learns to protect the things that keep the business alive. We insure equipment. We back up data. We diversify revenue. But there is one asset most founders never think to safeguard, and it is the one that everything else depends on. Your own mind.

A new clinical phenomenon is forcing that conversation into the open. Across psychiatric wards and emergency rooms in the United States, doctors have started treating a rising number of patients — many with no prior mental health history — who developed paranoid delusions, hallucinations and disorganized thinking after extensive interactions with AI chatbots. Researchers and clinicians have given it a name. They call it AI psychosis.

It is worth being precise about the term. AI psychosis is not a clinical diagnosis. It describes instances where people develop delusions, or have existing delusions deepened, in association with heavy use of chatbots. The label is informal. The cases are not. UCSF researchers documented a 26-year-old woman with no prior psychiatric history who developed delusional beliefs that she could communicate with her deceased brother through an AI chatbot — a case that drew attention precisely because it looked like a new-onset state rather than a relapse.

In the early days of building a company, being at the center of everything feels like the job. You make the calls, you solve the problems and you create the relationships. That level of involvement often drives the early wins, which is exactly what makes it so hard to give up. But after launching more than 22 companies through DRC Ventures, I have learned that the same instinct that gets a business off the ground can quietly become the thing that caps its growth.

The hardest transition any founder makes is the shift from being the person who does everything to the person who builds the systems and people that do it better. It means trading control for trust and shifting your energy from operating to developing. Here are five moves you can make to build organizations designed to outlast your involvement in them. 

1. Replace control with trust

Many entrepreneurs equate involvement with value. If we’re in every meeting and copied on every email, we feel essential. But the leader who stays involved in every decision eventually becomes the ceiling the company keeps hitting.

Learning to delegate was one of the most difficult lessons of my career, and it taught me something I have never forgotten: Trust is what empowers people to take real ownership. The most challenging part of moving from founder to CEO was letting go of direct control. My hands-on involvement in daily operations was, at a certain point, the very thing limiting how far we could scale. Growth required me to step back into strategic leadership and let the people around me step forward.

Trust is not an intangible gesture. It’s a structural decision, and the data backs it up. When Gallup studied CEOs of the fastest-growing private companies, it found that those with strong delegator talent generated 33% more revenue than those with limited delegation instincts, yet three-quarters of the entrepreneurs Gallup surveyed had limited-to-low delegator talent. The instinct to hold on is common. Learning to let go is what separates the companies that scale from the ones that stall. When you give capable people genuine ownership, you strengthen the whole organization and free it to grow beyond what any one person could carry.

2. Develop leaders at every level

Strong organizations build future leaders instead of assembling followers. That distinction shapes everything about how a company holds up under pressure and over time. The people you develop into leaders become the multipliers of everything you are trying to build, with managers alone accounting for 70% of the variance in their teams’ engagement. Who you raise up as a leader shapes the experience of everyone who works under them.

Mentorship is how I try to make that real. To me, the primary goal of any mentorship program is growth, both for the individual and for the company as a whole. The focus is on building people up and giving them the tools, perspective and confidence to step into their potential. The clearest sign that it’s working has been watching mentees come back later as mentors themselves. That tells me we’re doing more than developing talent; we’re creating a cycle of people who give back.

How you pair people matters as well. The best mentoring relationships balance alignment and diversity, matching shared values with different perspectives so the relationship can challenge and support at the same time. Done well, this kind of development breaks down silos, smooths out communication gaps and eases the isolation that can creep into fast-paced workplaces.

3. Avoid becoming the bottleneck

A lot of what looks like a growth problem is really a decision problem. When decisions about ownership and accountability get delayed, they pile up into what I think of as “decision debt,” and that debt compounds. Unclear ownership and too much founder involvement create friction that shows up everywhere: slower execution, repeated conversations and a team that waits on you before moving.

The way out is clarity. When responsibilities are clearly defined and accountability lies with specific people rather than routing back through you, execution improves and the bottlenecks start to disappear. Every decision you empower someone else to make is time you get back for the strategic work only you can do. The goal is to stop solving the same problems over and over and start building toward what’s next.

4. Make resilience part of your culture

No matter how strong your systems are, setbacks are inevitable. What separates durable companies from fragile ones is how they respond, and that response is shaped long before the hard moment arrives.

As a leader, your composure sets the emotional temperature for everyone around you. During periods of uncertainty, your team takes its cues from your confidence and steadiness. When you build a culture around adaptability rather than perfection, people stop fearing problems and start solving them. Those organizations recover faster and perform better over time, because resilience is baked into how they work instead of being summoned only in a crisis.

Resilience, like trust and accountability, is a system built on purpose. It’s one more thing that should live in the culture as opposed to in the founder who created that culture.

5. Build something that outlasts you

Leadership is not measured by how indispensable you make yourself. If anything, the opposite is true. The strongest organizations I’ve been part of are rooted in trust, clear accountability and a genuine commitment to developing other leaders.

Businesses that endure are those that empower people and build systems capable of outgrowing any single individual. The decisions you made while you were in the room don’t form your legacy — it’s the people, the culture and the structures you leave behind that keep making good decisions once you’re not there.

“ I’ve always been deeply interested in how businesses come to life,” says Julia Collins, a serial entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California. “This is something that was taught to me through my family. My grandparents and parents were entrepreneurs. So I didn’t even think there was anything special or different, let alone strange, about wanting to be someone who built my own business.”

Over the years, Collins, who holds an MBA from Stanford University, has raised more than $500 million in venture capital and built companies spanning hospitality, consumer products, robotics, artificial intelligence and climate technology. 

In 2015, Collins and Alex Garden co-founded Zume Pizza, a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup focused on the automated production and delivery of pizzas. She became the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn company when Zume surpassed a valuation of $1 billion in 2018. 

That year, Collins left Zume to found Planet FWD, a sustainability platform helping brands measure, reduce and report their carbon footprint. 

Entrepreneur sat down with Collins to learn more about her business journey and the advice aspiring entrepreneurs can take into their own. 

Be the first hire on an early-stage team 

In 2010, Collins became the first employee to work at Mexicue, a Mexican-American barbecue chain founded by her friends Thomas Kelly and David Schillace. The concept began as a food truck in New York City before expanding into brick-and-mortar locations. 

Being the first hire on an early-stage team is an effective way to understand if the beginning stages of entrepreneurship are a good fit for you — and involves less risk than immediately founding your own company, Collins says. 

“ That experience taught me a tremendous amount about capital efficiency,” Collins adds. “We didn’t have venture backing or a small business loan. We just had to be profitable out of the gate and fund our growth through the ongoing profitable operations of our business.” 

As a result, Collins also learned a lot about product-market fit: how easy it is to grow a business when it fills a real need, and how difficult it is when it doesn’t. 

The experience also taught her the value of building the right team.

“ No matter what business you’re in, no matter what product you think you’re selling, it is always about the people behind that product,” Collins says. “Even in a world where AI is disrupting the way that we think about value creation and intelligence, at the end of the day, it is all about the humans who are coming up with the solution.”

Don’t conflate your value with the value of your company 

As someone who’s raised more than $500 million in venture capital, Collins acknowledges it can be a difficult experience, especially for founders new to the scene. 

One common mistake she always cautions founders against? Conflating your value as a person with the value of your company.

“ Because almost certainly, that valuation is either too high or too low,” Collins explains. “Therefore, you will be valuing your own success in an unrealistic way on either side. So you cannot value yourself based on the valuation of your company. You have to really separate those two.”

More money isn’t always better either. 

“When  you see these term sheets come in with more zeros than you’re accustomed to, it can really boggle your mind,” Collins says. “And there’s often a temptation to take the term sheet that’s the most money or has the best terms.”

Instead, Collins encourages founders to take a step back and consider their potential investor. How have they treated other founders? Get references from founders who saw big exits, medium-term outcomes and even failures. 

Figure out where capital can meet impact — then lean in

When Collins stepped away from Zume to found Planet FWD in 2018, she had a clear goal: She wanted to focus on the climate-related impacts of the food system. 

“ When most people think about addressing climate change, they think about windmills and solar panels and decarbonization,” Collins says. “All of those things are incredibly important. But most people don’t realize that between a quarter and a third of all greenhouse gas emissions come from land use and food systems.” 

Planet FWD raised a total of $16.8 million with its Series A round in 2022 and has expanded its mission beyond food brands to help fashion and beauty companies and other major retailers. 

What’s more, Collins put Planet FWD’s impact to the test when she founded Moonshot Snacks in 2019. Inspired by Collins’ son, the sustainable snack line for kids was built on an organic and regenerative supply chain.  

“ We took off like a rocket ship,” Collins says. “I could not have predicted the growth around Moonshot.” 

Moonshot even caught Patagonia’s attention. Patagonia Provisions, the company’s food and beverage division, acquired the brand for an undisclosed amount in 2023. It was Patagonia’s first acquisition in more than 20 years. 

Be a purpose-driven leader who gives people permission

Early in her career, Collins received a lot of leadership coaching from people who meant well — but tried to dissuade her from being too nice. 

“And even some subtle coaching around being too feminine,” Collins recalls. “But when I tried to be less nice, and I tried to be less feminine, I sounded ridiculous.” 

Over time, Collins realized she would be the most powerful leader if she stayed true to her values: being kind and caring deeply about people.

 If you have employees and investors who share your passion for purpose, you’ll do very well.

Although it’s important to deliver your best and hold yourself to a high standard, you should always lead from a truly authentic place, Collins says. 

“ When you do that, you give people permission to also be who they are, and I think that is how people give their best work, when they feel safe, when they feel valued, and when they feel like they can show up in their own skin,” she explains. 

Leading with purpose comes with advantages across the board — whether you’re managing employees or raising capital.

“ If you have employees and investors who share your passion for purpose, you’ll do very well,” Collins says. “If you don’t, it will become increasingly hard to put the purpose with the profit.” 

“ I’ve always been deeply interested in how businesses come to life,” says Julia Collins, a serial entrepreneur based in San Francisco, California. “This is something that was taught to me through my family. My grandparents and parents were entrepreneurs. So I didn’t even think there was anything special or different, let alone strange, about wanting to be someone who built my own business.”

Over the years, Collins, who holds an MBA from Stanford University, has raised more than $500 million in venture capital and built companies spanning hospitality, consumer products, robotics, artificial intelligence and climate technology. 

In 2015, Collins and Alex Garden co-founded Zume Pizza, a venture-backed Silicon Valley startup focused on the automated production and delivery of pizzas. She became the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn company when Zume surpassed a valuation of $1 billion in 2018. 

Last weekend, I sat in a chair for 10 hours a day and wrote four articles. I did not eat properly. I did not stretch. I did not drink enough water. I did not take my vitamins. I was completely lit up and completely destroying myself at the same time. By Monday, I had a scratchy throat and could barely move. I knew it was coming. I watched myself keep pushing anyway.

Four years of research, and I still did that.

On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified, and American women won the right to vote. It had taken more than 70 years of organizing, marching, arrests, hunger strikes and suffragettes being force-fed in prison cells to get there. Women’s Equality Day marks that win. What it does not mark is what it cost the women who got there. What the fight left in the body long after the battle was over.

One hundred years later, women are building businesses at record rates. Female entrepreneurship rose 69% from 2019 to 2024; 83% of female founders experience high stress; and 54% face burnout. The conversation about why always points to the system. The funding gap. The invisible labor. The double standard. All of it is real, and none of it is the whole story.

I know exactly what to do, but I don’t always do it

I am a founder in a mission-forward company, partner in a global company, mother of two teenagers, spouse and friend who surfaces like a groundhog every so often.

I know I should exercise. I have a dedicated corner of my home with kettlebells, a skipping rope, stretching tools and an iPad loaded with Pilates videos. I wake up and put my workout clothes on first thing so nothing can get in the way. And more often than not, I sit in them all day at my computer and never work out.

Most people would call that laziness. It is not. It is what happens when everything you are already doing has consumed every resource you had available. The account is overdrawn before the workout ever had a chance.

And we are not talking about small things. Every company decision. Every school pickup. Every conversation that needed more of you than you had left. Every night you stayed up finishing something because there was no other time. We start wearing our shoulders like bloody earrings and calling it ambition.

Neuroscientist Bruce McEwen called it allostatic load. The crash that follows was always coming. The workout clothes are just the most honest evidence of it.

What nobody tells you about finally getting there

We fight so hard to get there. The goal. The milestone. The number. The thing we told ourselves would finally feel like enough. And when we cross it, when we actually get there, a lot of us feel absolutely nothing. Or worse, we feel flat. Lost. Empty. Like something is wrong with us for not celebrating the thing we just spent years building toward.

Harvard psychologist Tal Ben-Shahar has a name for it. The arrival fallacy. Here is what it means in plain language. While you are chasing something, your brain is already rehearsing what it will feel like to get there. It plays the moment over and over in anticipation. By the time you actually arrive, the brain has already lived it 100 times. The real moment lands flat because your brain already moved on.

And then someone tells you to be grateful. I am calling bullshit on that.

For women carrying everything we carry, this hits harder and faster. The recovery window between milestones is shorter because the invisible labor fills every gap. The body barely processes one finish before the next thing is already waiting. And the culture that celebrated you crossing the line has already moved on to asking what you are going to do next. You were never taught how to finish. Only how to chase.

Women’s Equality Day is supposed to celebrate how far we have come. I think it should also be an honest conversation about what getting here actually cost us.

We were taught to fight for the right to show up. We were never taught what to do when the thing we fought for finally arrives and feels like nothing. Nobody built anything for the moment after the finish line. Not for the flatness. Not for the crash. Not for the woman standing at the top of what she built wondering why it does not feel the way she thought it would.

Nobody taught us how to land. Until now.

That is the conversation I have dedicated my work to starting. Because ambitious women deserve more than the win. They deserve to actually feel it when they get there.

The next time someone tells you to be grateful for what you built, ask yourself this instead. What did it actually cost me? Not the business cost. The personal one. That is the question nobody is asking. And it is the only one worth answering.

Last weekend, I sat in a chair for 10 hours a day and wrote four articles. I did not eat properly. I did not stretch. I did not drink enough water. I did not take my vitamins. I was completely lit up and completely destroying myself at the same time. By Monday, I had a scratchy throat and could barely move. I knew it was coming. I watched myself keep pushing anyway.

Four years of research, and I still did that.

On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was certified, and American women won the right to vote. It had taken more than 70 years of organizing, marching, arrests, hunger strikes and suffragettes being force-fed in prison cells to get there. Women’s Equality Day marks that win. What it does not mark is what it cost the women who got there. What the fight left in the body long after the battle was over.

If you watch a NASCAR race, you’ll see a tight pack of cars traveling at 200 miles per hour, rubbing paint, turning left and fighting over inches of asphalt. To the casual observer, it looks like intense, cutthroat competition. But in the business world, a dangerous parallel occurs when every company mirrors its competitors’ offerings, operates on identical terms and chases the same core customers. Leaders frequently mistake this frantic, localized activity for true market competition — it isn’t. It’s just a high-speed traffic jam where they’re seeking refuge in industry homogeneity, misinterpreting sameness as safety and viewing genuine disruption as an unnecessary risk.

I addressed this corporate complacency during my recent keynote address at CIBC’s Global Corporate and Investment Banking Offsite in Detroit. The summit operated under the banner of “Full Throttle” — the precise mindset required to break free from a crowded field. During the presentation, my goal was to upend a deeply entrenched business concept: the polite, passive pursuit of your “fair share.”

In high-performance environments, fighting for your fair share is a guaranteed recipe for mediocrity. Average leaders comfort themselves by settling for a market slice that matches their historic footprint. Yet, an elite sports team never aims to finish the season with a mediocre record just to remain comfortable in the middle of the standings. Instead, high-performing leaders focus on a dominant season and a definitive spot on the podium.

Moving beyond the homogeneous herd

The underlying problem stems from how organizations view their core identity. Most companies define themselves strictly by the products they sell or the traditional boundaries of their legacy industry. This narrow focus forces them into a baseline where they look and act like everyone else.

The remaining few choose a completely different strategic orientation: they define themselves by an unyielding commitment to solving the unmet needs of their clients. By dedicating themselves entirely to the client’s problem, these market disruptors naturally venture outside traditional industry boxes. They step away from conventional playbooks to deliver solutions that more conservative competitors consider impossible.

Lessons from a billion-dollar growth run

When I assumed leadership at my last CEO role, the company was a regional player sitting at eighth in their industry. The sector was growing at a sleepy 2% a year, but our team wanted to grow at 100% a year. To achieve that, we had to stop running the same race as everyone else. We shifted from being a service provider of last resort to the most innovative brand in the space, transforming the business from a $500 million operation into a $2.7 billion national leader, culminating in a historic billion-dollar-plus exit.

This level of exponential scale requires building a fundamentally different vehicle from the ground up. We crafted a simple, powerful story that aligned everyone from the first-year receptionist to the vice president, anchoring it with three non-negotiable client promises: service, flexibility and innovation.

We executed our commitment to service so intensely that clients openly wished they could replicate our responsiveness within their own organizations. Flexibility meant saying “yes” to a client’s complex request right there in their boardroom, then spending the entire flight home figuring out the operational mechanics of how to deliver. Innovation allowed us to completely modernize an old-world, slow-moving industry that had resisted structural change for decades.

But as any seasoned executive knows, the real challenge lies in the execution. Throughout my career leading organizations through rapid transformation, I’ve found that the greatest obstacles rarely originate from external competitors. Instead, internal drag factors routinely stall championship teams before they even arrive at the standing grid.

The 5 institutional speed bumps

That’s why, in order to get an organization operating at full throttle, leaders must systematically diagnose and eliminate these five institutional speed bumps:

1. Historic success complacency: Strong financial performance can trick a team into assuming yesterday’s momentum guarantees tomorrow’s survival. A glance at the Fortune 100 list from a decade ago proves how quickly dominant giants vanish when they stop evolving.
2. Fear of failure: When an environment penalizes missteps, employees instinctively choose safe, homogeneous paths. True disruption requires an ecosystem where calculated failure is embraced as a necessary step toward innovation.
3. Giant intimidation: Mid-market companies often look at massive competitors and assume the industry hierarchy is permanent. In reality, giants fall regularly because legacy infrastructure makes them slow and rigid.
4. The legacy reflex: Organizations naturally develop deep muscle memory that fiercely resists change. Overriding this default behavior takes fearless leadership to empower teams to challenge old processes and forge a new path
5. The illusion of exhaustive effort: When teams claim they have “tried everything,” they have typically only exhausted options within their traditional playbook. Real innovation hinges on looking entirely outside your immediate industry sandbox to discover what the client actually needs.

Recognizing these limitations represents a diagnostic victory, but eliminating them requires a fundamental shift in leadership behavior. Corporate drag is subtle, frequently disguising itself as prudence, tradition or risk mitigation. When leaders actively dismantle these internal barriers, they unlock a latent capacity for speed and agility, allowing the team to stop looking over its shoulder at competitors and focus entirely on the open track ahead.

Play for the podium

In the end, sustaining a full-throttle trajectory is simply an intentional choice to reject a mediocre finish. It means refusing to settle for a comfortable spot inside the pack. Leaders must commit to a clear corporate narrative, fiercely protect their core customer promises and systematically clear the institutional drag holding their people back

Because the grid is crowded, and the stakes are high. So when the green flag drops, remember: average goals yield average results. But true market leaders play for the podium.

If you watch a NASCAR race, you’ll see a tight pack of cars traveling at 200 miles per hour, rubbing paint, turning left and fighting over inches of asphalt. To the casual observer, it looks like intense, cutthroat competition. But in the business world, a dangerous parallel occurs when every company mirrors its competitors’ offerings, operates on identical terms and chases the same core customers. Leaders frequently mistake this frantic, localized activity for true market competition — it isn’t. It’s just a high-speed traffic jam where they’re seeking refuge in industry homogeneity, misinterpreting sameness as safety and viewing genuine disruption as an unnecessary risk.

I addressed this corporate complacency during my recent keynote address at CIBC’s Global Corporate and Investment Banking Offsite in Detroit. The summit operated under the banner of “Full Throttle” — the precise mindset required to break free from a crowded field. During the presentation, my goal was to upend a deeply entrenched business concept: the polite, passive pursuit of your “fair share.”

In high-performance environments, fighting for your fair share is a guaranteed recipe for mediocrity. Average leaders comfort themselves by settling for a market slice that matches their historic footprint. Yet, an elite sports team never aims to finish the season with a mediocre record just to remain comfortable in the middle of the standings. Instead, high-performing leaders focus on a dominant season and a definitive spot on the podium.

In a tough job market, white-collar workers are doing everything they can to stand out. Lawyers and bankers are even emphasizing creative hobbies like building birdhouses on their resumes.

According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, job-seekers are adding a hobbies section to their resumes to humanize their applications and attract hiring managers’ interest. These candidates have worked at prestigious firms and gone to top schools, but beneath the accolades are human beings who have trained miniature dachshunds and worked on “perfecting restaurant-quality scrambled eggs.”

The goal is to make a hiring manager sit up and take notice. They should think, “Yes, this is somebody I’d like to be in the trenches with at 3 o’clock in the morning on a deadline,” Reder Sheikh, a partner at recruiting agency Major, Lindsey & Africa, told the Journal. 

Sheikh added that more than half of the legal associates she matched with jobs last year had a hobbies section on their resumes, an increase from just a few years ago. She said that a unique side hobby can encourage recruiters to take a second look at a candidate’s application and make it easier to connect in interviews. 

According to Sheikh, the section should come at the end of a resume and take up only a single line. 

Meanwhile, another recruiter says hobbies add character to resumes. “AI is pushing out resumes that all look the same,” Richard King, who runs a corporate recruitment agency, told the Journal. “Let’s bring the human back.”

King noted that it was fairly normal to list hobbies and interests until the mid-2010s. Recruiters then told job-seekers that they shouldn’t include the section in order to reduce bias in hiring, calling it irrelevant. Now the section is making a comeback. 

Why people are talking about it now

The topic of including hobbies and interests became relevant earlier this year, when a post on X, which the poster has since deleted, went viral. 

“I reviewed a resume that listed ‘olive oil’ as an interest,” the anonymous poster wrote, per Business Insider. “That is not an interest. It’s been hours and I cannot stop thinking about it. There will not be an interview.”

Some X users claimed that the reference was quirky and unique, while others said it could have benefitted from adding more detail. 

Fred Cibelli, a New York-based technology principal at EY, told the Journal that interview conversations can benefit from a subject beyond the usual talking points, provided the applicant meets the role’s core qualifications. He said that he would welcome talking about a candidate’s appreciation for olive oil. 

Still, candidates must decide which personal details feel appropriate to share. When Dawn Choo applied to Meta several years ago, the data scientist hesitated before including a note about performing in the Washington Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker.

Choo questioned whether highlighting an interest that felt distinctly feminine was wise in a male-dominated industry. She decided to include it anyway. The response was uniformly positive, and she got the job.

In a tough job market, white-collar workers are doing everything they can to stand out. Lawyers and bankers are even emphasizing creative hobbies like building birdhouses on their resumes.

According to a recent report from The Wall Street Journal, job-seekers are adding a hobbies section to their resumes to humanize their applications and attract hiring managers’ interest. These candidates have worked at prestigious firms and gone to top schools, but beneath the accolades are human beings who have trained miniature dachshunds and worked on “perfecting restaurant-quality scrambled eggs.”

The goal is to make a hiring manager sit up and take notice. They should think, “Yes, this is somebody I’d like to be in the trenches with at 3 o’clock in the morning on a deadline,” Reder Sheikh, a partner at recruiting agency Major, Lindsey & Africa, told the Journal. 

Success teaches valuable lessons, including some that quietly hold us back. When you’re hitting revenue targets, earning promotions and receiving awards, it’s natural to double down on the behaviors that got you there. Then progress slows, and you no longer experience the same rate of growth. You’ve reached what I call the plateau paradox.

You’re succeeding by every conventional measure, yet you feel stuck. I’ve experienced that unsettling feeling several times throughout my career. But this feeling, as unpleasant as it is, can be the reality check you need to take the next step in your career. I knew it was time to expand my capabilities, challenge my assumptions and redefine what the next level of leadership required of me.

Entrepreneurs don’t fear plateaus. Plateaus are simply the beginning of what’s next. My own breakthroughs began when I embraced three mindset shifts that continue to shape how I lead today.

Widen your perspective

I love mentoring. It’s what inspired me to help launch the Louisiana Impact Fund’s CXO Leadership Program. When an emerging leader tells me they’ve hit a plateau, I share a simple truth: Every new level of leadership demands new capabilities. It’s a sobering realization, especially when you’ve built a reputation for strong execution. I know because I was that leader.

My breakthrough came when I stopped asking, “How do I contribute more?” and started asking, “How can we scale an enterprise capable of achieving far more together?” I made a fundamental shift from a high-performing individual contributor to an enterprise mindset. I stopped measuring success by quarterly execution and started setting the vision for where the business needed to be 24 to 36 months ahead. That perspective quickly revealed an entirely new set of leadership capabilities to master.

Success was no longer defined solely by driving sales growth or leading technology transformation. It demanded organizational design, strategic planning, talent development, partnership building and driving organizations on a global scale. That’s what happens when your perspective widens. Your next stage of growth begins.

Growth gets worse before it gets better

As an endurance athlete, I’ve learned that every climb begins with discomfort. Reaching the next peak requires mental fortitude to embrace it and the discipline to stay the course. Every meaningful breakthrough begins with uncertainty. Progress will get worse before it gets better. Don’t let a dip in progress derail your growth trajectory, but embrace it as part of the learning curve.

When I transitioned from a long career in technology leadership to co-founding a new venture, I knew I was stepping into unfamiliar territory. In many ways, I had become a student again. Because I expected and embraced the dip, I didn’t fall back on old habits when progress slowed — and it did. I stayed curious, kept learning, adapted quickly and made sound decisions aligned with a long-term vision.

That’s the power of embracing the dip. The leaders who break through aren’t the ones who avoid uncertainty. They prepare for it, stay open to learning and emerge stronger because of it.

Raise your hand before you’re ready

In the early hours of the morning, a life-changing email from my CEO landed in the inbox of our business unit executive. He posed a challenge that would change the trajectory of my career. If Intel was truly going to become a technology-first company, every employee around the world — from the U.S. to China to the Philippines — must have access to a PC and the internet. It was an ambitious initiative that would help lay the foundation for our digital transformation, and the CEO wanted to be ambitious with the impact.

So, I raised my hand – I wanted to be part of the team. The next day, I had one thought: “What did I just sign up for?” Over the next two years, that assignment became one of the greatest leadership accelerators of my career. The challenge wasn’t addressing the technology alone. It was leading a global transformation across different cultures, regulatory environments and organizational structures while aligning people around the world behind a shared vision.

That’s when my CEO’s words took on a whole new meaning: “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” I didn’t have all the answers, but I volunteered because I believed the challenge would help me become the leader it required. That single decision expanded my thinking, accelerated my transformation into an enterprise leader and reshaped how I’ve approached every opportunity since. The next time a stretch assignment presents itself, don’t ask, “Am I ready?” Ask instead: “Who will I become if I say yes?”

Make the plateau your runway

If there’s one lesson my career has taught me, it’s that growth requires forward momentum before it creates lift. Entrepreneurship often works the same way. When you widen your perspective, embrace the dip and raise your hand before you’re ready, you’ll stop mistaking temporary discomfort for failure. You’ll recognize it is the momentum required for your next breakthrough. Many people experience the dip and turn back. The best leaders persevere. If you’ve reached a plateau, remember that this is not where your growth ends. It’s the next runway from which your next breakthrough takes flight.

Success teaches valuable lessons, including some that quietly hold us back. When you’re hitting revenue targets, earning promotions and receiving awards, it’s natural to double down on the behaviors that got you there. Then progress slows, and you no longer experience the same rate of growth. You’ve reached what I call the plateau paradox.

You’re succeeding by every conventional measure, yet you feel stuck. I’ve experienced that unsettling feeling several times throughout my career. But this feeling, as unpleasant as it is, can be the reality check you need to take the next step in your career. I knew it was time to expand my capabilities, challenge my assumptions and redefine what the next level of leadership required of me.

Entrepreneurs don’t fear plateaus. Plateaus are simply the beginning of what’s next. My own breakthroughs began when I embraced three mindset shifts that continue to shape how I lead today.

When I was hired as CEO of Builderall, I inherited one mission: crack the U.S. market. The company had originally been built by a Brazilian team, and they believed an American CEO who spoke English without an accent was the missing piece to unlock the biggest market in the world. I took the job. Then I turned down the mission. Instead of pointing the company at the United States, I doubled down on Latin America.

That wasn’t a bet on my instincts. It was a bet on the data, and specifically on the difference between where the opportunity looked like it was and where it actually was. Every entrepreneur today is running some version of that same decision: an industry is shifting under you, AI is rewriting how your customers behave, and you’re being told to chase the market everyone else is chasing. The winners in this cycle will be the ones who look at the ground they’re already standing on, see the opening most people miss and commit to it while everyone else wanders.

If you’re looking to expand, scale into a new market, or find the blue ocean opportunity in your industry, here’s how I’ve learned to find that opening in mine. Four moves, in the order I’ve learned to run them.

1. Read your own data before you chase someone else’s story

You don’t need decades of industry experience to see an opportunity. You need the willingness to look at your own numbers and ask what they’re actually saying, not what you want them to say.

At Builderall, we had a growing U.S. customer base and had never spent a dollar to acquire those users. On the surface, that looked like a green light to invest heavily in the U.S. But when we studied who those American customers were, we found something different. They almost all had Spanish surnames. They clustered in South Florida, Texas and Southern California. They weren’t Americans discovering a Latin American product. They were Latin Americans who had moved north and stayed plugged into the ecosystem back home.

The sign flipped. What looked like early U.S. traction was actually proof that Latin American marketing was already winning U.S. customers as a downstream effect. The right move wasn’t to enter the U.S. It was to go deeper into Latin America, and let the U.S. footprint compound as a byproduct.

The muscle you’re building is asking what your data actually says versus what you wish it would say. Most people project the story they want onto the numbers. The opening tends to be hiding in the story they didn’t expect.

2. Watch for the macro shift that rewrites a market

The richest openings appear right after something fundamental changes. When the ground moves, whoever notices first has a window before everyone else recalibrates.

Years before I joined Builderall, I worked in a role targeting Latin America and the region’s problems were structural. Most people didn’t have bank accounts. Credit cards were rare. Internet access was unreliable. Then a compressed few years rewrote all of it.

According to a 2023 Mastercard study conducted with Americas Market Intelligence, the share of Latin American consumers without an account at any financial institution dropped from 45% in 2019 to 21% in 2023. The World Bank’s Global Findex recorded a 19% jump in financial inclusion across the region between 2017 and 2021, the largest gain anywhere in the world during that window. Internet penetration climbed from 43% in 2012 to 78% in 2022.

It wasn’t the same market anymore. It had quietly become a new one, and most competitors were still running strategies built for the old one. That’s the pattern to look for. Wherever human behavior changes dramatically and quickly, an opening is forming. AI is doing this right now to nearly every industry that touches content, coding or customer support. The job is to notice the shift before your competitors update their assumptions.

3. Refuse to fight the strongest opponent

Once you’ve spotted the opening, the next question is who else is already there and whether you can beat them.

Going after the U.S. market meant going head-to-head with Wix and Squarespace. According to Wix’s 2024 annual report filed with the SEC, Wix alone spent $175.6 million on advertising in 2024. Roughly $14.6 million every month, from one competitor, before you count Squarespace or anyone else with a marketing budget aimed at the same buyer. Meeting that head-on with our resources was never going to work.

In soccer, you don’t try to break the defensive line where it’s thickest. You look for the seam. The goal on the other end is the same regardless of where you cross through. Business is the same. There’s no bonus for beating the strongest defender. There’s only a penalty for trying.

4. Protect your core, and resist adjacency hubris

This is the move most operators get wrong, and the one that quietly undid the U.S. plan for me.

Being excellent at one thing doesn’t guarantee that every adjacent move will work. And the true cost of the new bet is rarely just the money spent pursuing it. It’s the attention, investment and organizational energy pulled away from what made the company excellent in the first place.

Nike is a case study playing out in real time. The company remains the global leader in athletic footwear, but over several years it aggressively prioritized direct-to-consumer sales while reducing its dependence on the wholesale partners that had helped build its reach and cultural relevance. The strategy didn’t fail in isolation. Nike also faced product, competitive and regional challenges during the same period. But the channel shift proved costly. According to Nike’s fiscal 2025 annual report, revenue fell 10% year over year, from $51.4 billion to $46.3 billion, while Nike Direct revenue declined 13%. By mid-2026, the stock had fallen to its lowest level in more than 11 years.

Nike is now working to restore balance. In fiscal 2026, wholesale revenue grew 6% to $27.5 billion, while Nike Direct declined another 6% to $17.7 billion. The company is rebuilding retailer relationships and reinvesting in the broader marketplace it had previously deemphasized.

Even a company as dominant as Nike can’t redirect attention from a core strength without consequences. When evaluating a new opportunity, the honest question isn’t “can we win over there?” It’s “what will pursuing it cause us to neglect here?” When “here” is where more than 90% of your customers, revenue or competitive advantage currently lives, the burden of proof for the adjacent bet should be extremely high.

That was exactly the choice at Builderall. A parallel vertical (the U.S.) versus going deeper into a core (Latin America) where more than 90% of our customer base already lived and where the ground was finally solid enough to compound. I chose depth. Then I chose specific countries inside that continent as beachheads instead of blanketing all of it at once.

Making it real: test wide, commit narrow, let the numbers decide

We didn’t start with Mexico, Colombia and Peru specifically. We blanketed Spanish-speaking Latin America, ran small structured tests across the board and let the strongest markets bubble up from the data.

The mechanics that made this work are simple. Set your guardrails before you enter anything. Define your KPIs. Run small focus-grouped tests. Put a time horizon on the experiment up front so you don’t slide into testing forever.

That last one is where most entrepreneurs get stuck. Between the ages of 18 and 27, I started roughly 22 businesses. Not all of them were serious, but enough of them were that I learned the lesson the hard way: at some point you have to stop ideating and start operating. Testing is a phase, not a lifestyle. If your test is running past its own deadline, either the test is broken or you’re avoiding the decision the test was supposed to make for you.

The way out is to let the numbers be the boss. Set your win metric from your unit economics: what it costs to acquire a customer, what it costs to deliver, what you make. Decide the exact number a market has to hit to count as a win. The moment it hits, the decision is made for you. You’re not the boss. The numbers are.

Macro disruption isn’t going away. The operators who thrive in this cycle will be the ones who read their own data honestly, notice the shift before their competitors do, refuse the fights they can’t win, protect the core they’ve already built, and commit while everyone else is still wandering.

I was hired to chase the crowded market. I went the other direction. That decision has shaped how I think about growth strategy ever since. Find the seam in the line, drive hard into it, and the same logic will work for you.

When I was hired as CEO of Builderall, I inherited one mission: crack the U.S. market. The company had originally been built by a Brazilian team, and they believed an American CEO who spoke English without an accent was the missing piece to unlock the biggest market in the world. I took the job. Then I turned down the mission. Instead of pointing the company at the United States, I doubled down on Latin America.

That wasn’t a bet on my instincts. It was a bet on the data, and specifically on the difference between where the opportunity looked like it was and where it actually was. Every entrepreneur today is running some version of that same decision: an industry is shifting under you, AI is rewriting how your customers behave, and you’re being told to chase the market everyone else is chasing. The winners in this cycle will be the ones who look at the ground they’re already standing on, see the opening most people miss and commit to it while everyone else wanders.

If you’re looking to expand, scale into a new market, or find the blue ocean opportunity in your industry, here’s how I’ve learned to find that opening in mine. Four moves, in the order I’ve learned to run them.