In 2025, ROMTech had a problem most startups would envy: far more demand than it could immediately fulfill.

The Connecticut-based company makes the PortableConnect, a connected rehabilitation device that lets patients recovering from orthopedic surgery complete therapy at home while clinicians monitor their progress remotely. As orders accelerated, CEO Peter Arn made a decision that runs counter to most growth-stage playbooks:  he made revenue wait.

The company kept growing, but deliberately moderated its expansion while strengthening the operational infrastructure and clinical oversight required for larger scale. It meant leaving some short-term revenue on the table. It also meant giving the service model time to catch up with demand— and as those systems strengthened, patient volume hit record levels, with more than 57,000 patients served in 2025 and 34% year-over-year growth.  

“Sustainable growth in healthcare has to prioritize quality, safety and patient outcomes,” Arn says. “In this industry, growing faster than your ability to deliver isn’t ambition. It’s risk.”

The Home-Care Shift

ROMTech’s bet sits inside a much larger trend. Hospital-at-home programs, remote patient monitoring and virtual physical therapy have all expanded as health systems look to cut costs and patients push for convenience. Rehabilitation is a natural candidate: it’s frequent, repetitive and traditionally requires patients — many of them fresh out of joint-replacement surgery — to travel to a clinic multiple times a week.

The catch is that home-based care only works if clinicians can still see what’s happening. That’s the gap ROMTech is trying to close. The PortableConnect combines an adaptive therapy device with software that captures objective performance data — range of motion, session compliance, progress over time — and feeds it back to the care team.

To date, the company says more than 190,000 patients have used the platform.

Turning Demand Into Scalable Care

Healthcare is famously difficult to change, and for defensible reasons: the cost of getting it wrong is measured in patient outcomes, not churn rates. Arn’s experience building ROMTech reflects that reality. The company’s biggest obstacle wasn’t demand.  Physicians understood the model almost immediately, and health systems were receptive.  The harder work was building the operating discipline required to turn a new care model into a scalable national service while the company was already growing at high speed..

His answer has been to lead with evidence and real-world execution rather than novelty. “Innovation only matters if it solves meaningful problems,” he says. “Healthcare entrepreneurs should spend more time understanding patients and clinicians than chasing the newest technology.”

It’s advice that cuts against the grain in a moment when AI features and flashy demos dominate healthtech pitches. Arn’s version of product development is less flashy and more disciplined: listen, listen, listen; validate with data; improve based on real-world use; repeat.

That disciplined approach has started to earn outside validation. ROMTech was named to The Healthcare Technology Report’s list of top healthcare technology companies for 2026, won a 2026 MedTech Breakthrough Award for best home healthcare solution, and appeared on Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies list in 2025 and the LexisNexis Top 100 Global Innovators ranking for its intellectual property.

What Comes Next

The more interesting question is how far the model travels. ROMTech is piloting applications beyond orthopedics — cardiology, oncology, metabolic care and post-acute recovery — betting that the same combination of guided movement, remote monitoring and engagement applies wherever recovery depends on patients doing the work at home.

The company’s accumulating rehabilitation data may prove to be the more durable asset. Ultra-dense, real-world recovery data at that scale is rare, and it has opened the door to more personalized protocols and AI-driven prediction, optimization, and mitigation.

The next test is how broadly ROMTech can extend its nationwide platform.  The company is focused on expanding into new diagnoses, provider relationships, and patient populations while maintaining the service consistency, clinical quality, and operating discipline required at scale.

“Building a healthcare technology company requires patience, persistence and the willingness to overcome setbacks,” Arn says. “Success isn’t measured simply by growth. It’s measured by the number of lives you improve.”

In 2025, ROMTech had a problem most startups would envy: far more demand than it could immediately fulfill.

The Connecticut-based company makes the PortableConnect, a connected rehabilitation device that lets patients recovering from orthopedic surgery complete therapy at home while clinicians monitor their progress remotely. As orders accelerated, CEO Peter Arn made a decision that runs counter to most growth-stage playbooks:  he made revenue wait.

The company kept growing, but deliberately moderated its expansion while strengthening the operational infrastructure and clinical oversight required for larger scale. It meant leaving some short-term revenue on the table. It also meant giving the service model time to catch up with demand— and as those systems strengthened, patient volume hit record levels, with more than 57,000 patients served in 2025 and 34% year-over-year growth.  

Moonlighting, or working more than one role, is a contested topic in the tech industry. I recently spoke at a human resources retreat and broached it with leaders in the field. Some thought it was ethically okay or even necessary in the current economy. Others thought it was never acceptable, regardless of the circumstances.

Landing a single tech job is becoming increasingly competitive in the current labor market. If you’re lucky enough to land not just one, but multiple roles, how do you do so ethically? I’m a career coach specializing in the tech industry. I’ve helped clients navigate this exact dilemma. Let’s explore the steps to take to ensure you’re working and living in alignment with your values.

1. Review your employment contract

Regardless of your views on moonlighting, reviewing your employment contract is a smart place to start when considering holding more than one role in the tech industry. Many employees sign a heap of documents when joining a company, only to never reference them again. If you’re thinking about moonlighting, you’ll want to review the promises you made.

Moonlighting policies vary dramatically across companies and are often tied to seniority. It’s common for tech firms to require you to sign an agreement stating you won’t simultaneously work for a competitor. It’s less common at junior levels for them to restrict outside employment entirely. That said, at the executive level, it’s possible that any external employment will require company or board approval or be outright barred.

2. Define your goals

Get clear on why you want to work multiple jobs. While increased income is a common reason for moonlighting, and certainly a valid one, it’s not always why people pursue simultaneous employment. Sometimes, they’re looking to gain experience or skills that aren’t available in their current role.

Before pursuing a second position, consider whether you’ve exhausted the opportunities at your current employer. I’ve spoken with countless clients who wanted new exposure and assumed it had to come from outside their company since it was beyond their job description. They eventually spoke with their manager and realized they could get what they needed right where they were. They sold their employer short by assuming they would be denied.

I don’t want you to make the same mistake they did. Clarify your goals first. The exposure you’re looking for might already be within reach.

3. Be intentional about logistics

It’s common for employees to occasionally use their company-issued laptop, phone or Wi-Fi for non-work-related tasks. While that’s already a grey area, the potential for a mix-up can escalate quickly if you use company resources for a second or third job. Think twice before using company-provided technology for anything outside your primary role.

Companies are increasingly using AI and other monitoring tools to track employee activity. The last thing you want is to lose your current job because of a careless oversight. Keep each job digitally and technologically separate.

One of my clients currently holds down four full-time roles. Rather than risk a mix-up, he places four laptops side-by-side to ensure complete separation. He has received praise across all four roles for exceeding performance expectations.

4. Know your limits before you overextend

Taking on multiple roles isn’t just a logistical challenge. It’s also a values question. If you accept a second or third job knowing you don’t have the capacity to perform well in all of them, you’ve already made an unethical choice, regardless of how you choose to frame it.

Before you say yes to another offer, ask yourself: How am I actually performing in my current role? Do I have breathing room in my schedule, or am I stretched thin? What will happen to my mental health if I add more?

My client with four laptops isn’t just an impressive story. He’s also someone who reflected deeply on his capacity before he committed. That self-awareness is what separates successful moonlighting from futile moonlighting.

5. Decide how to handle transparency with your manager

Before making any decisions about transparency, review whether disclosure is required by your employment contract or company policy. If disclosure isn’t required, think critically about the relationship you have with your manager and how they’ve responded to other sensitive topics in the past. While voluntary transparency can build trust and goodwill, it also opens a conversation you can’t undo.

Whatever you decide, don’t let your performance slip at your primary job. That’s the clearest signal to your manager that something is off. It’s also the most likely reason a conversation you didn’t want will occur anyway.

Final thoughts

Moonlighting isn’t inherently ethical or unethical, and there is no universal answer here. The ethics come down to how you do it. You must protect yourself, protect your integrity and protect your reputation. You’ve got this!

Moonlighting, or working more than one role, is a contested topic in the tech industry. I recently spoke at a human resources retreat and broached it with leaders in the field. Some thought it was ethically okay or even necessary in the current economy. Others thought it was never acceptable, regardless of the circumstances.

Landing a single tech job is becoming increasingly competitive in the current labor market. If you’re lucky enough to land not just one, but multiple roles, how do you do so ethically? I’m a career coach specializing in the tech industry. I’ve helped clients navigate this exact dilemma. Let’s explore the steps to take to ensure you’re working and living in alignment with your values.

1. Review your employment contract

Regardless of your views on moonlighting, reviewing your employment contract is a smart place to start when considering holding more than one role in the tech industry. Many employees sign a heap of documents when joining a company, only to never reference them again. If you’re thinking about moonlighting, you’ll want to review the promises you made.

AI is everywhere, and if you have spent any time evaluating tools for your business, you already know the gap between pitch and payoff is wide. Most tools promise to change everything; very few actually free up your calendar.

The real win is the hours you reclaim when repetitive tasks stop living on your to-do list and start running themselves. Here are 15 tools delivering on that promise right now.

1. ChatGPT (OpenAI)

ChatGPT has become the workhorse for founders who used to spend half a morning drafting one email.

Use it for writing, brainstorming, competitive research and communication templates. What used to take three hours of manual content work now takes 20 minutes.

2. Notion AI

Notion AI earns its keep inside teams that live in documentation. It summarizes meeting notes, auto-fills templates and surfaces relevant pages before you finish typing.

For fast-scaling teams, faster knowledge management means fewer Slack threads asking “where’s that doc?”

3. Zapier

Zapier is the glue between your apps, running quietly in the background, handling tasks you’d otherwise do manually a dozen times a day.

It connects your CRM to your email platform, auto-logs form submissions and triggers alerts when deals close, eliminating manual data entry and the mental overhead of constant task switching.

4. Make (formerly Integromat)

Make is the pick when workflows get complex. Where Zapier handles straightforward if-this-then-that logic, Make handles multi-step, conditional processes that would otherwise require a developer. For operations-heavy businesses, it’s a serious force multiplier.

Marketing and content creation

5. Jasper AI

Jasper AI is built for marketing teams who need volume without sacrificing brand voice. That includes campaign emails, landing page copy, ad variants and product descriptions.

It learns your tone and speeds up execution significantly. Here’s how to build a content strategy that actually generates leads if you want to pair it with the right framework.

6. Copy.ai

Copy.ai handles short-form ad copy and social content at a pace human writers simply can’t match.

If you are running A/B tests across multiple platforms, generating dozens of copy variants in minutes is a real competitive edge. See how AI is transforming content creation for businesses of every size.

Sales and CRM optimization

7. HubSpot AI

HubSpot AI has quietly made its CRM far smarter. It personalizes email sequences, recommends follow-up timing and summarizes deal activity, so your sales team spends time selling instead of updating records.

8. Clay

Clay is a secret weapon for outbound teams. It enriches lead data from dozens of sources and writes hyper-personalized outreach at scale. What used to require a full-time researcher now runs as an automated overnight workflow.

Customer support and lead capture

9. Intercom AI

Intercom AI handles the support query volume that used to bury small teams. It resolves FAQs instantly and escalates the right tickets to humans, meaning your staff handles exceptions, not repetition, and response times drop noticeably.

10. Drift

Drift works at the front of your funnel, engaging website visitors and qualifying leads before a human ever gets involved.

According to the MIT Lead Response Management Study, responding to leads within the first hour makes you seven times more likely to qualify them, and Drift makes that speed possible around the clock.

11. AI-powered intake and call handling

Missed calls are missed revenue, and most businesses have more of both than they realize. Speed-to-lead has become a measurable competitive advantage, especially for service businesses where the first response wins the client.

These tools are helping businesses eliminate missed opportunities by ensuring every call and inquiry is captured, qualified and responded to instantly, including at 6 p.m. on a Friday when no one is at their desk.

See how AI is reshaping customer service for businesses for service-based businesses looking to close the response-time gap.

12. Pecan AI

Pecan AI brings predictive analytics to teams without a data science department. It identifies churn risk, forecasts revenue and surfaces patterns your spreadsheet will never catch.

According to Sloan Management Review, companies using AI-driven decision tools report faster and more confident strategic moves.

13. Obviously AI

Obviously AI takes this further by letting non-technical teams build predictive models through a clean interface: no Python, no engineering tickets, just better decisions faster.

14. Fireflies.ai

Fireflies.ai records, transcribes and summarizes every meeting automatically. Instead of writing notes while trying to listen, you’re fully present, and the recap with action items lands in your inbox before you’ve closed your laptop.

• Searchable transcripts across all recorded meetings
• Action item extraction built in
• Works with Zoom, Google Meet and Teams

15. Otter.ai

Otter.ai delivers real-time transcription accurate enough to be genuinely useful on live client calls and interviews. It reduces miscommunication, improves documentation and keeps teams aligned without anyone replaying a long recording. Explore how AI meeting tools are improving team workflows across distributed teams.

The businesses getting the most from AI right now aren’t the ones with the biggest tech budgets; they are the ones who picked tools that slot cleanly into existing workflows and committed to using them. Pick two or three from this list, run them for 30 days, and let the results tell you where to go next.

AI is everywhere, and if you have spent any time evaluating tools for your business, you already know the gap between pitch and payoff is wide. Most tools promise to change everything; very few actually free up your calendar.

The real win is the hours you reclaim when repetitive tasks stop living on your to-do list and start running themselves. Here are 15 tools delivering on that promise right now.

1. ChatGPT (OpenAI)

ChatGPT has become the workhorse for founders who used to spend half a morning drafting one email.

Roughly nine out of every 10 startups fail. Almost everything we read about entrepreneurship is written for that reality: how to survive the early days, how to find product-market fit, how to avoid running out of cash. Far less gets written about the one in 10 that actually makes it, and what happens to the founder once it does.

I was sitting across from a founder over coffee, at a moment when everything in his business suggested lift-off. From the outside, it looked like success had already arrived. He leaned in and said that his company had raised $1 billion in funding. Coffee turned into drinks, and he told me something that few entrepreneurs have the guts to say: “I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m not a big company CEO.”

There was no performance in it. No false modesty. Just a clear admission that the job he had signed up for had already changed into something else.

That moment captures something most people miss about startups. Everyone wants to get in early, to be part of the story before it becomes obvious. The assumption is that success makes everything easier. In reality, success introduces a completely different set of challenges, many of which are harder than the early-stage chaos people romanticize. Here’s what to actually expect if your startup ends up in that fortunate minority, and how to prepare for it before it catches you off guard.

Success changes the game

In the early days, a startup feels simple, even when the work is intense. Small teams move quickly, decisions happen in real time and everyone has visibility into what matters. There is very little distance between effort and impact.

As the company begins to scale, that clarity starts to fade. More people join, priorities expand and coordination becomes a requirement instead of an afterthought. Decisions that once took minutes begin to require alignment. Communication becomes more deliberate. Execution becomes more complex.

The shift is subtle at first, then it accelerates. What felt fluid begins to feel heavy, and the organization has to adjust whether it is ready or not.

Don’t wait for that shift to force your hand. As soon as headcount or customer volume doubles, name one person accountable for each major decision area (product, hiring, customer commitments) instead of letting everything continue to route through you by default.

The founder’s role evolves quickly

That conversation over coffee reflects a pattern I have seen many times. Founders are often exceptional at starting businesses. They see opportunities others miss, take risks others avoid and push forward without perfect information.

Scaling a company demands a different kind of leadership. The founder now has to build an organization, develop people and create systems that allow others to operate effectively. The scope of the role expands almost overnight, and there is no training ground for it.

Many founders figure it out as they go. The strongest ones recognize their gaps early and bring in people who can help fill them. They stay open to learning and surround themselves with individuals who challenge their thinking. Others struggle with the transition because the instincts that helped them succeed early begin to work against them as complexity increases.

Run this gap check quarterly, not after a crisis forces it: list the three skills your role most requires right now, and rate yourself honestly on each. Anywhere you score low, bring in an advisor, a coach or a senior hire before the gap becomes visible to your board or your team.

Culture gets tested under growth

Culture in a small startup is almost effortless. A handful of people, a shared goal, constant interaction. Alignment happens naturally because everyone is close to the work.

Growth puts that under pressure. New hires bring different experiences and expectations. Communication becomes less direct. Informal ways of working start to break down, even if they once felt like strengths.

The organization has to decide what to preserve and what to evolve. Holding on too tightly to the early culture can create confusion, while overcorrecting can strip away what made the company compelling in the first place.

There is no perfect formula, but there is a starting point: write down the three to five behaviors that made your early culture work before you scale past 20 people. Treat those as non-negotiable and be explicit that everything else is allowed to change.

Speed requires more discipline

Speed is often celebrated as a defining advantage of startups, and early on, it truly is. Teams move quickly because there are fewer constraints and fewer consequences tied to each decision.

As the company grows, the impact of each decision increases. Customers rely on the product. Revenue depends on execution. A mistake that once would have been a small setback can now have meaningful consequences. The organization still needs to move quickly, but it also needs to think more carefully. That balance can be difficult for teams that are used to acting first and refining later.

Another shift that catches people off guard is how the work evolves. In the early stage, everything feels urgent and visible. Contributions are obvious, and progress is easy to see. As the company scales, roles become more defined. Work becomes more specialized. The focus shifts from building something new every day to executing consistently across a larger operation. For some people, that transition is energizing. For others, it feels like a loss of what made the experience exciting in the first place.

Set a simple threshold: any decision above a defined cost or customer-impact level gets a five-minute gut-check with one other leader before it ships.

Expectations rise along the way

In the beginning, there is a sense of freedom that comes from having very little to lose. The focus is on building, testing and learning. Success changes that equation. Investors expect performance. Employees expect stability and growth. Customers expect reliability.

The weight of those expectations builds over time, and it changes how decisions are made. The margin for error becomes smaller, and the consequences of getting things wrong become more visible. What once felt like a possibility begins to feel like a responsibility.

Get ahead of this by over-communicating on a fixed cadence, not just when something goes wrong — a short monthly update to investors and a short weekly update to your team.

Growth is not for everyone

The hard truth is that people like the McDonald brothers can create something great, but without the Ray Krocs of the world, you would have never eaten one of their hamburgers outside of San Bernardino.

Early-stage environments reward flexibility, improvisation and a willingness to operate without structure. Growth introduces a need for consistency, process and coordination. Some individuals adapt and grow with the company. Others find that their strengths are better suited to an earlier stage. These transitions are a natural part of scaling, even if they can be uncomfortable.

Ask yourself honestly, once a year, whether the skills that got the company here are still the skills it needs next. If not, choose your own transition rather than waiting for a board to make that decision for you.

A more honest expectation

Being part of a successful startup can be an incredible experience, but it helps to understand what comes with it. The pace remains fast, but the decisions carry more weight. The culture evolves under pressure. Leadership roles expand quickly, often faster than people expect. Individual responsibilities shift as the organization grows.

Success amplifies everything that is already there, both the strengths and the weaknesses.

We love to hear about the early days when a spark of genius in a garage creates a business. Far less attention is given to what happens when the company begins to work. The challenge does not end when the business finds traction. In many ways, that is when the real work begins.

That founder I met up with for coffee? He stayed in the role beyond his abilities, and the situation got messy for him before he was ultimately replaced as CEO. He didn’t mean to do anything wrong. He’s a good guy. But he was right: He was not the person to run a billion-dollar company. He was making more money than he had in his whole career, and he was miserable until the music stopped.

Getting a company off the ground takes vision and drive. Learning how to lead it through growth takes something deeper: a willingness to adapt, to learn and to evolve as quickly as the business itself. If you want to be in the 10% that makes it, start running the checks above now, while they’re still easy, instead of waiting until growth forces the issue for you.

Roughly nine out of every 10 startups fail. Almost everything we read about entrepreneurship is written for that reality: how to survive the early days, how to find product-market fit, how to avoid running out of cash. Far less gets written about the one in 10 that actually makes it, and what happens to the founder once it does.

I was sitting across from a founder over coffee, at a moment when everything in his business suggested lift-off. From the outside, it looked like success had already arrived. He leaned in and said that his company had raised $1 billion in funding. Coffee turned into drinks, and he told me something that few entrepreneurs have the guts to say: “I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m not a big company CEO.”

There was no performance in it. No false modesty. Just a clear admission that the job he had signed up for had already changed into something else.

Melisse Shaban has spent two decades watching science, biotech and consumer behavior slowly converge, and believes the beauty industry is finally ready for a new question: not how young can skin look tomorrow, but how well can it function for decades?

That question sits at the center of Aramore, the performance skincare brand Shaban leads as CEO. Built around NAD+ precursor science, Aramore is positioned as a topical delivery system designed to support cellular skin health rather than chase the traditional language of anti-aging. For Shaban, that distinction matters.

“It’s a topical delivery system, so it falls under the category of skincare,” Shaban said, “but really, what we’re doing is delivering NAD+ precursors for overall cellular health and longevity, to help consumers live better in their skin every day for the long term.”

Consumers who once thought about wellness in terms of diet, exercise and supplements now increasingly recognize cellular health as part of the conversation. NAD+, or nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, is found in living cells and is involved in cellular energy and function. In beauty, the challenge has been turning that science into a story people can understand and daily products they can actually use.

“NAD+ is not new to the medical or research community,” Shaban said. “Every living cell requires it; it’s what powers cellular renewal and maturity and turnover. The fact that these scientists were able to build a pathway to deliver a molecule down to the cellular level and have the body progressively make its own NAD+ was fascinating to me, and represented a real shift in how we think about aging and cellular performance.”

That shift is also a business bet. The skincare market is crowded with brands promising glow, firmness, barrier repair, brightening and smoother texture. Aramore is trying to stand apart by arguing that the more interesting opportunity is not simply treating the surface, but helping the skin behave better over time.

“It’s not an easy story to tell, but we actually age from the inside out, not the outside in,” Shaban said. “If we can keep our cells performing at their peak, those signs of aging decrease. I believe that’s a powerful motivator worth building a brand around.”

Photo credit: Aramore

The language of longevity has become unavoidable in wellness, but Shaban is careful not to treat it as a softer rebrand of anti-aging.

“I think the biggest misconception is that longevity is the new anti-aging, and it’s not,” she said.

“Anti-aging as an aspiration is honestly a little silly, because if you’re not aging, you’re dead,” Shaban explained. “The concept of longevity is really about how you age; how your age management takes you through the decades so you’re getting the best out of yourself for as long as possible. I’m in my 60s, I go to the gym four times a week, I eat well, I feel as strong as I’ve ever felt. That’s about effort, discipline, the right expectations from the right science, and staying curious about what’s available to you.”

That philosophy arrives at a moment when consumers are more willing to connect beauty with long-term health.

“I see a tremendous shift in the women’s health space,” Shaban said. “People are understanding that NAD+ starts depleting in your late twenties, hormones shift in your mid to late thirties, and as hormones deplete, your skin, hair, and body all change. Hormone replacement therapy is top of mind. Diet has changed dramatically, especially among women; we understand now that protein is critical to muscle health, muscle health is critical to bone health, and bone health is critical to longevity. There’s a real, transformative attention being paid to how we age and how we manage that process.”

Aramore’s challenge is turning a dense scientific premise into a brand consumers can trust.

“Credibility comes from fact, and facts aren’t claims,” she said. “A lot of brands make claims and imply things about their products that have no real backing. True scientific credibility comes from clinical differentiation—skin biopsies, cell biopsies, in vitro and in vivo studies.”

The company’s differentiation is its topical delivery system. She describes NR as the gold standard precursor in the NAD+ space, but says it cannot be delivered to the skin and ingesting it will not get it there either. NMN, another popular precursor, she said, does not reach the cellular level in isolation.

“Our NAD+ complex was developed by a team of incredibly impressive minds in science from Harvard & MIT, and it’s clinically defensible and demonstrates more NAD+ production in the basal layer of the skin cells,” Shaban said.

That is the kind of claim that requires education, not just advertising. Shaban believes consumers are more capable of understanding the science than many brands assume, provided it is framed in human terms.

“On the education side, I think people actually understand the concept once you frame it simply,” she said. “Once you can see the signs of aging, it’s much harder to reverse them. Prevention is the real opportunity here, and I think NAD+ is going to do for cellular skin health what sun care has done for aging: shift our understanding of what’s actually worth protecting against.”

Shaban estimates that when the brand started, less than 20% of consumers understood NAD+, while today that awareness may be closer to 30% to 35% as it relates to skin. The company has also picked up visible momentum: Aramore was recently named to BeautyMatter’s prestigious NEXT50 List, as well as Glossy’s Best Breakthrough Wellness Startup this past December, and Shaban said the brand has begun selling at Bloomingdale’s and on Ulta.com.

“I’ve watched Aramore go from an outlier business to something more mainstream, and I’ve seen consumers develop real curiosity about NAD+ and want to understand its benefits,” she said.

For Shaban, the brand’s growth also reflects fatigue with overcomplicated routines. The beauty industry has trained consumers to add product after product, but she believes the future may belong to fewer, more functional steps.

“You can use an NAD+ precursor, a retinol, a moisturizer, and a sunscreen, and that’s really all your skin needs,” Shaban said. “At minimum, our NAD+ Cell Energizing Treatment is something every person over 25 should be using to get their skin cells performing at their peak.”

Shaban sees NAD+ as part of a wider future for cellular performance, with potential relevance across skin, scalp, hair, oral care and the visible effects of major body changes, including weight loss associated with GLP-1 use.

“Our product increases the thickness of the skin barrier by over 10%, which is extraordinary,” she said. “A healthy barrier keeps the good in and the bad out, and that’s critical to both skin span and health span.”

Shaban’s vision for Aramore is not to chase whatever ingredient becomes fashionable next, but to simply follow the biology.

“I’d like to see Aramore on the forefront — in form, in function, and in formats — of finding ways to deliver cellular performance and cellular health to all living things,” she said. “That’s the vision. Follow where the science takes us and keep building toward that.”

Melisse Shaban has spent two decades watching science, biotech and consumer behavior slowly converge, and believes the beauty industry is finally ready for a new question: not how young can skin look tomorrow, but how well can it function for decades?

That question sits at the center of Aramore, the performance skincare brand Shaban leads as CEO. Built around NAD+ precursor science, Aramore is positioned as a topical delivery system designed to support cellular skin health rather than chase the traditional language of anti-aging. For Shaban, that distinction matters.

“It’s a topical delivery system, so it falls under the category of skincare,” Shaban said, “but really, what we’re doing is delivering NAD+ precursors for overall cellular health and longevity, to help consumers live better in their skin every day for the long term.”

When Darrick Ramsey first held the single dollar bill he’d been given, anxiety hit him hard. “I was very nervous, like I was anxious,” he recalls in an interview with Entrepreneur. 

Alexis Jordan had a similar reaction: “For me, I was very nervous,” she says. 

In February 2024, a documentary film team tasked these two students, along with about two dozen of their then-high school classmates, with an unusual challenge: Turn $1 into $100 in a week using all of the resources at their disposal. They started the challenge terrified of failing, then used their businesses, networks and hard work to turn $1 into far more than $100 in a week. A documentary film released last month called Learn to Earn: A Student’s Journey From $1 to $100 chronicled their experiences.

Both Ramsey and Jordan initially grappled not just with the math, but with the reality of trying to build something in “this economy,” as Jordan put it, where “what can you get for $1?” is a genuine question. The time frame added pressure: They had roughly a week, layered on top of school, sports and other commitments, to turn $1 into $100. “We had other stuff to do, so it was very time-consuming,” Jordan says. 

How Jordan flipped $1: services and Kool-Aid pickles

Once the shock of the $1 challenge wore off, Jordan went directly to the community she knew best. “My strategy was, where do people give the most money?” she says. “So for me, I was raised in a church; my church is like a big family. So I said, let me go to my number one supporters.” With that single dollar and her existing relationships, she offered labor and creativity instead of products she couldn’t afford to buy.

“Usually what I did was I cleaned their yards, I cleaned the church,” she says, describing how she exchanged services for donations and payments.

Then she layered on a homemade snack that became an unexpected hit: Kool-Aid pickles.

“It’s weird,” she says. “But a lot of people bought them. Everybody bought them, like everybody was going crazy over them.”

She explained the process simply: “You get the pickle jar, you pour out the pickle juice and then you just mix Kool-Aid packets and sugar with it, and then pour it back and let it ferment in the refrigerator for like a day or two, and then after that you put them in a Ziploc bag and you just sell them.”

With cleaning work for local small businesses and a snack that turned heads, she surpassed the $100 target.

Where she is now

More than two years later, Jordan, 19, runs a business called Blended Threads LLC, which centers on childhood diabetes, a condition she was diagnosed with in fourth grade.

She wrote a children’s book, Why Did Diabetes Pick Me, chronicling her struggles and how she overcame them. She is now working on a second book, this time a chapter book. She’s also a keynote speaker, turning her lived experience with juvenile diabetes into education and advocacy. 

“I wanted to broadcast and bring awareness to it, because you rarely hear anybody talk about childhood diabetes or juvenile diabetes,” she says, adding that people in her community were “shocked” to learn more and “glad” she published the book.

For Ramsey, the turning point came when he realized that the $1 was less important than the relationships he already had. He was part of the CEO program at his high school, and the program had taken students to tour businesses in the community. 

“We had a journal, and I wrote down each business owner, their name and their contact,” he says. When the $1-to-$100 challenge arrived, he asked himself: Why can’t I just reach back out to these guys to see if they can help me?

He recorded a simple one-minute video for those contacts: “I tried to keep it real short and simple, explaining, hey, my name is Darrick Ramsey. I talked to you in the CEO program before. I’m just wondering if you had any advice or if I can pressure wash your car or detail it for you,” he says. 

He had bought the power washer before the challenge with money from an hourly job.

The response was overwhelming. “I kind of overbooked myself with all the people that we had met and all the people they know,” he says. “I really got to see the community coming together. It was just great.”

He focused first on pressure washing and later added car detailing as demand grew. “It got to the point where I had to pressure wash in the cold, had to pressure wash in the rain; we had the car detail in the freezing cold, like cars were icing over as we were washing them,” he says, describing one of the busiest weeks of his life. By the end of the challenge, he’d far exceeded the target, earning $2,065. 

Where he is now

Ramsey, 20, was born in Decatur, Alabama, and moved between Chicago, Atlanta and Alabama before settling back in Decatur. He struggled “academically, financially” in school, which shaped his purpose now: “I feel like one of my life’s purposes has been trying to help the youth with what they do best, and keep excelling,” he says. He is a physical education teacher and mentor who “goes all over Decatur city schools” to connect with kids, pulling them aside to talk through “behavior issues and really just stuff I was struggling with.”

His business, PeerPressure, was born out of personal grief and bad influences in middle and early high school. After a close friend died the summer before ninth grade, he says, “I was peer-pressured into doing a lot of things that I really felt like I wouldn’t have done if I wasn’t around those bad friends.” 

In his sophomore year, with the help of teachers, he turned that story into a brand. PeerPressure now offers pressure washing, mobile car detailing, house washing and automotive light work, built over “about four years” and expanded through work with “many business owners within our community and outside of our community,” he says. 

His biggest challenge was internal

Ramsey says that he was his own “biggest enemy” solely because he didn’t really believe in community or family at the time. Academic and financial struggles left him feeling isolated and under pressure, which “created a lot of self-doubt” during that week.

Reaching out to people changed that perception. “They started showing me that I wasn’t alone,” he says. “Then I started to see a bigger vision.”

The lesson has stayed with him. He endured years of “long nights, a lot of crying, a lot of work.” Those years helped him define his purpose: “If I can change somebody’s life through teaching and mentoring, then I feel like I’ve fulfilled my purpose,” he says. 

This article is part of our ongoing Young Entrepreneur® series highlighting the stories, challenges and triumphs of being a young business owner.

When Darrick Ramsey first held the single dollar bill he’d been given, anxiety hit him hard. “I was very nervous, like I was anxious,” he recalls in an interview with Entrepreneur. 

Alexis Jordan had a similar reaction: “For me, I was very nervous,” she says. 

In February 2024, a documentary film team tasked these two students, along with about two dozen of their then-high school classmates, with an unusual challenge: Turn $1 into $100 in a week using all of the resources at their disposal. They started the challenge terrified of failing, then used their businesses, networks and hard work to turn $1 into far more than $100 in a week. A documentary film released last month called Learn to Earn: A Student’s Journey From $1 to $100 chronicled their experiences.

Most entrepreneurs never fail. They simply stop too early. They build a business that provides a living, then spend years operating it without ever scaling it into a true asset. They create income but not enterprise value.

Looking back on my own career, I can divide entrepreneurship into three distinct phases: Build. Scale. Dominate.

Understanding the difference changed everything.

Build

Building a viable business is a worthy goal, and many people attempt it. Some succeed.

This is the stage where entrepreneurs learn how to sell. Just as Calculus 1 eliminates many aspiring engineers, sales eliminates many aspiring entrepreneurs. It is the first great test of business ownership.

In the build phase, revenue is king. We do whatever it takes to get revenue through the door and then figure out how to turn it into profit. The focus is almost entirely on the profit and loss statement because no business can survive if it consistently loses money.

Early in my investment advisory career, I was fortunate to receive some support while learning the sales process. I worked for a large brokerage firm in downtown Washington, D.C., where I partnered with a senior advisor. He handed me a list of smaller client accounts and told me, “It’s up to you to turn chicken sh!t into chicken salad.”

For the next several years, I learned how to persuade, retain and serve clients — mostly over the phone.

I never became one of the elite producers in the office, but I became good enough to go independent. Suddenly, I had what many entrepreneurs dream about: a business with no boss.

I also discovered what many entrepreneurs eventually learn: A business without a boss still has problems.

Some clients followed me when I left. Many did not. What had started as a process of learning a new profession became a marketing challenge. Looking back, I did not yet understand the power of positioning, niche specialization or an irresistible offer. I had built a practice, but I had reached a plateau.

At the same time, I was wrestling with the realities of self-employment. Revenue growth was difficult, taxes were higher than expected, and progress felt slow. This became the grinding phase of my career. I tried many things. Most failed.

Scale

Building creates income. Scaling creates assets.

Scaling is the transition from operator to owner. It transforms a job with no boss into a business with value beyond the owner’s daily efforts. It also changes how you think. Instead of focusing exclusively on the income statement, you begin building both business and personal balance sheets.

Of the two problems I faced — marketing and taxes — it was taxes that I solved first.

Through the teachings of Sandy Botkin, CPA and attorney, I immersed myself in the world of small business tax strategy. I learned about entity structures, retirement plans, expensing opportunities and other tools available to business owners. Over time, I became proficient enough to improve my own financial position and eventually help others do the same.

Ironically, what began as an effort to improve my investment advisory business led me somewhere unexpected.

I had been encouraged to build referral relationships with tax professionals. The idea was simple: Exchange referrals and grow together. While that strategy produced limited results, it exposed me to an entirely different opportunity.

I earned my IRS Enrolled Agent credential and launched a tax practice. What I thought would become a marketing solution became a scaling opportunity.

As I discussed in a previous article, I used debt to accelerate that growth. I acquired two tax practices from retiring owners. Unlike the investment advisory business, where acquisitions can be difficult and heavily regulated, opportunities in the tax profession were abundant.

I wasn’t really buying businesses. I was buying cash flow. The client relationships, recurring revenue and enterprise value came with it.

The acquisitions worked well and allowed me to scale far more rapidly than organic growth alone would have permitted.

The next scaling opportunity came through real estate.

After leasing office space, I explored purchasing the building I occupied. When that opportunity did not materialize, I purchased a commercial condominium in a new development. Once again, I used debt — but this time to acquire a different asset.

Instead of buying cash flow, I bought real estate.

Banks love lending against real estate. My tax business became the best tenant I will ever have. The arrangement created tax advantages, increased control over my workspace and added another asset to the balance sheet.

For the first time in my entrepreneurial journey, I was no longer focused solely on generating revenue. I was building assets that could appreciate, produce income and create long-term wealth.

I had finally moved beyond building. I was scaling.

Dominate

The final phase is domination.

Dominate does not mean eliminating competitors. It means becoming the obvious choice for a specific market.

It is characterized by:

• A clearly defined niche market with strong demand
• Exceptional product or service delivery
• A reputation that generates referrals and trust
• Systems and processes that support growth
• Some form of moat that makes client attrition less likely

The dominate phase began when we discovered a niche within the Snap-on franchise community.

Like many successful niches, it was not something I intentionally set out to find. It emerged through experience. As our client base grew, I noticed that Snap-on dealers shared a unique set of challenges. Their bookkeeping is more complex than that of many small businesses due to inventory management, route operations, financing arrangements and the industry’s unique reporting requirements. Generic accounting knowledge was often insufficient.

The niche also presented a marketing challenge. Most Snap-on franchisees spend their days serving customers, managing inventory and operating their routes. They are rarely sitting at a desk consuming business content or scrolling social media. Reaching them required a different approach.

Equally important, I found that I genuinely enjoyed working with them. Having grown up in a blue-collar environment, I understood many of their values and experiences. We spoke a similar language. Trust developed naturally.

Over time, specialization created momentum. As our expertise deepened, referrals increased. Marketing became easier. Prospective clients were no longer looking for a tax preparer. They were looking for someone who understood their business.

That is what domination looks like.

It is not about eliminating competitors. It is about becoming the obvious choice for a specific group of people with a specific problem. When that happens, the grind of constantly chasing prospects begins to fade. Reputation starts doing much of the heavy lifting.

The business gains a moat. Clients stay longer. Referrals become more frequent. Enterprise value grows.

Most entrepreneurs focus on building. Some learn how to scale. Very few reach the point where their market actively seeks them out.

That is the power of domination.

Many entrepreneurs spend their entire careers in the build phase. They learn how to generate revenue but never learn how to create enterprise value.

The opportunity is not simply to build a business. The opportunity is to build it, scale it and ultimately become the dominant solution for a specific market.

Revenue creates income. Scale creates wealth. Dominance creates options.

Most entrepreneurs never fail. They simply stop too early. They build a business that provides a living, then spend years operating it without ever scaling it into a true asset. They create income but not enterprise value.

Looking back on my own career, I can divide entrepreneurship into three distinct phases: Build. Scale. Dominate.

Understanding the difference changed everything.

There’s a line you hear in a lot of leadership talks: “People don’t leave companies, they leave managers.”

In a hybrid company, however, this can play out a little differently. People leave managers who stop being able to read them. The instincts that work in an office don’t always translate well across a dozen screens and different time zones, and plenty of good managers might not even notice until it’s too late.

When I started building BriteCo, I assumed the hard part of leading a distributed team would be the logistics. However, the actual challenge was relearning how to connect with people. It’s emotional work, and the screen backgrounds and mute-button etiquette we tend to fixate on barely scratch the surface. Most of us were never trained for the kind of leadership that hybrid work actually demands.

The hallway moved, so I had to move with it

One of the most underrated things about an office is its hallway. Someone walks past your door with a half-formed question, you talk for 20 minutes and a problem you’d both been circling for a week is suddenly solved. We’ve experienced that at BriteCo more times than I can count.

However, this type of spontaneous interaction just doesn’t happen on its own when half the team is remote. So, we stopped waiting for it to happen naturally and started manufacturing it. We keep a few Slack channels dedicated solely to unfinished ideas with no set agenda. We also schedule virtual coffee breaks on the calendar with no connection to any project. Our in-office days are now reserved for messy, collaborative work, with focused work taking place wherever a person actually concentrates best.

These practices give creative energy somewhere to land, even if they never fully recreate the hallway.

Most of my cues don’t survive a screen

It’s genuinely hard to read a room over video. The signals I used to rely on — a shift in posture or the atmosphere going flat when an idea lands wrong — are often muted or absent on a call.

To tackle this issue, I’ve become more direct. I ask people how they’re actually doing, then I stay quiet and wait for the real answer instead of the default “good, busy” response. I also ask what frustrated them this week. I used to treat these questions as optional, but they serve a valuable purpose. For a leader who can’t rely on physical presence, they help you collect the information that the hallway used to hand you for free.

I run a jewelry insurance company, so I spend my days thinking about objects that carry enormous emotional weight for the people who own them. An engagement ring is never just a ring. That sensitivity to what something means to a person has to extend inward to the team; otherwise, it’s just a talking point in a brand presentation.

Trust does the work the office used to do

For a long time, many managers relied on a lazy shortcut: if I can see you at your desk, you must be working. The reality is that some people do coast when no one is watching. However, plenty of others do their best work at home with no commute, fewer distractions and a closed door. Desk visibility never told you which employee was which, so you never found out.

Trust-based leadership replaces that shortcut, but it demands more from you on both a psychological and professional level. You have to know each person on your team well enough to understand what conditions allow them to do their best work. The warning signs also need to be caught earlier, because the casual observations that once revealed them are gone. That also means having difficult conversations sooner, before problems have time to grow.

At BriteCo, culture is created deliberately rather than inherited. We run off-site and all-hands gatherings, and we stay rooted in Evanston, where our relationship with Northwestern University has helped build a strong talent pipeline that keeps us tied to the place we’re from. We prioritize clear and frequent communication across our online channels, too, so that our remote workers never feel disconnected or isolated from their colleagues who do come into our offices. Our local roots and hybrid model work in tandem, enabling us to offer flexible working to our team. 

The managers who succeed in this new hybrid work environment are the ones who can sense how someone is doing through a screen and build trust without needing to see them in person. Better software and stricter return-to-office policies won’t get you there; it’s a skill that needs practice and a framework we’re always working to improve. Over time, I’ve found that getting better at reading people I can’t see has made me more attuned to those sitting right across the table from me.

There’s a line you hear in a lot of leadership talks: “People don’t leave companies, they leave managers.”

In a hybrid company, however, this can play out a little differently. People leave managers who stop being able to read them. The instincts that work in an office don’t always translate well across a dozen screens and different time zones, and plenty of good managers might not even notice until it’s too late.

When I started building BriteCo, I assumed the hard part of leading a distributed team would be the logistics. However, the actual challenge was relearning how to connect with people. It’s emotional work, and the screen backgrounds and mute-button etiquette we tend to fixate on barely scratch the surface. Most of us were never trained for the kind of leadership that hybrid work actually demands.

You did everything right. You invested in AI early, ran pilots, got board approval and committed real budget to an AI-first strategy. So why is the ROI still so hard to prove?

In the past few years, one problem has come up in nearly every executive conversation I’ve had: AI technical debt. Not the definition your engineering team uses internally, but the business cost behind it. Shortcuts taken to get AI tools running faster, integrations bolted onto systems never designed for them and pilots that shined in demos but needed constant fixes in production all compound into a cost that’s now eating into every AI dollar you spend.

IBM’s Institute for Business Value puts a number on it: enterprises that ignore technical debt see AI project ROI drop by 18% to 29%. That’s the money spent maintaining, patching and working around problems that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. And 81% of the executives IBM surveyed said technical debt is already constraining their AI success.

Why AI debt compounds faster than any tech debt before it

Technical debt has been around since the first developer took a shortcut to meet a deadline. But AI debt plays by different rules, and I’ve watched it catch leaders off guard in new ways.

Traditional tech debt sits still: old codebases, outdated servers, systems that haven’t been touched in years. AI debt moves. The prediction model that worked well in January starts producing unreliable results by June because real-world conditions shifted and no one scheduled a retraining cycle. The integration your team built between your CRM and your AI analytics tool breaks every time either system updates. Each fix looks minor on its own, but twelve months of minor fixes add up to a budget line nobody planned for.

Then there’s the vendor problem. Gartner predicts more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, citing escalating costs and unclear business value. One reason: the market is saturated with what Gartner calls “agent washing,” vendors rebranding chatbots as AI agents. Of the thousands of agentic AI vendors, Gartner estimates only about 130 offer genuine capabilities. If you’ve been buying based on demos and pitch decks, it’s worth asking your team whether what you purchased really qualifies.

Four signs your AI investment has a debt problem

Here are four patterns I see repeatedly when talking to executives who invested early in AI but can’t explain the returns.

1. Your AI tools work in demo but underperform in production. This is the most common complaint I hear. The pilot looked impressive in the boardroom. Six months later, your team is spending more time maintaining the system than using it. If your AI line items are growing but the business outcomes aren’t, that gap is the tax.

2. You’re paying for multiple AI tools that do overlapping things. Marketing bought one platform. Operations bought another. Finance is trialing a third. None of these purchases was coordinated. Now you have five tools that don’t communicate with each other, a monthly bill that keeps climbing and no single person who can map out what they all do. This kind of uncoordinated tool purchasing is one of the fastest-growing hidden costs I see.

3. Your data team spends more time cleaning than analyzing. Every AI system runs on data, and if your data infrastructure wasn’t ready before you layered AI on top, every project is building on a weak base. I’ve seen companies spend six months on an AI initiative only to realize the real problem was the quality of the data feeding it. My advice: ask about data readiness before you sign the AI contract, not after.

4. You can’t explain your AI ROI to your board. This one matters most because no technology team can fix it for you. If the value feels vague, the governance probably doesn’t exist. Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise report found that only one in five companies has a mature model for governing autonomous AI agents. No governance means no measurement, which leaves you in front of the board with a number you can’t defend.

Three moves worth making before your next AI investment

If any of those signs sound familiar, here’s what I’d recommend.

Audit before you add. Before signing your next AI contract, ask one question: can our current infrastructure support this without creating new debt? If the answer is vague, that tells you everything you need to know. The biggest mistake I see is treating AI as a technology purchase. PwC’s 2026 AI predictions research reinforces that technology delivers only about 20% of an AI initiative’s value. The other 80% comes from redesigning how the work gets done, and CTOs can’t do that alone.

Cut the projects that aren’t delivering. Ask for a list of every AI proof-of-concept currently running, what each one costs per month and what measurable business outcome it produces. If that third column is mostly blank, those are the ones to cut. Shut them down and redirect those resources toward the two or three initiatives with a realistic path to production value.

Modernize before you layer. This is the advice that sounds least exciting but produces the biggest returns. At Accedia, the projects where AI actually delivered on its promise had one thing in common: the client invested time in fixing their infrastructure before introducing AI. In a recent case, we spent eight weeks retiring outdated data components and restructuring their systems. When we introduced AI after that, deployment reached production 30% faster than their previous attempts, because it was built on a foundation that could support it.

Where the real returns are

The next time someone asks you to justify your AI spend, don’t reach for another dashboard or vendor pitch. Look at what’s underneath. The only way to see real AI returns over the next 18 months is to fix what’s broken before investing in what comes next.

You did everything right. You invested in AI early, ran pilots, got board approval and committed real budget to an AI-first strategy. So why is the ROI still so hard to prove?

In the past few years, one problem has come up in nearly every executive conversation I’ve had: AI technical debt. Not the definition your engineering team uses internally, but the business cost behind it. Shortcuts taken to get AI tools running faster, integrations bolted onto systems never designed for them and pilots that shined in demos but needed constant fixes in production all compound into a cost that’s now eating into every AI dollar you spend.

IBM’s Institute for Business Value puts a number on it: enterprises that ignore technical debt see AI project ROI drop by 18% to 29%. That’s the money spent maintaining, patching and working around problems that shouldn’t have existed in the first place. And 81% of the executives IBM surveyed said technical debt is already constraining their AI success.

Across two decades, I’ve held twelve corporate roles of increasing responsibility and scope. Some came with positional power and authority. Some did not. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter when it came to my ability to make an impact and advance my career.

The reality is you’re not always going to be the boss with decision rights, but you can always be a leader. In fact, the higher I climbed, the more often I found myself leading cross-functional initiatives that required buy-in from other teams and approval from senior stakeholders.

What I learned along the way is that influence, not authority, is what drives real progress. You don’t need permission to become an excellent leader, just the right mindset and relationships.

Leadership is about relationships, not rank

No matter your title, cultivating influence in an organization starts by building strong relationships in order to solve problems. This way, you will naturally gain allies who are willing to follow your lead. Not because they have to. But because they want to.

I’ve found that the most powerful influence you can earn stems from self-awareness. For example, knowing when to give up short-term decision rights to build a better long-term relationship. Trust me, your willingness to be flexible will be remembered in future interactions.

On the topic of decision-making, the biggest mistake I see people make when “acting like a leader” is to attempt to hold on to all decision rights simply because they are the most senior person on a project, not because they have the most knowledge. Don’t fall into this trap.

A self-aware leader knows who in the room is the most knowledgeable on a topic, and then will allow them to own related decisions. This not only results in better project outcomes but builds trust.

Here are a few more tips for becoming more self-aware as a leader to drive influence:

• Admit if you are not prepared to make an informed decision and ask for clarification.
• Invite others into the decision-making process if you lack experience or knowledge.
• Seek out context and potential cross-functional impact before making a decision.

The best way to build credibility with peers and senior leaders

Instead of trying to prove yourself at the start of a large project, commit to learning. The first 30 days should be spent understanding the landscape. Meet with stakeholders. Ask questions to understand their priorities, concerns and how this project will impact their team.

Most importantly, determine who has final decision rights to avoid confusion and setbacks. By the end of these conversations, I try to have clarity in three areas:

• How the project impacts each department.
• Who has decision rights.
• Where alignment and misalignment exist.

What to do when roles are unclear on a cross-functional project

Cross-functional projects are rarely neat and organized at the beginning. Often, responsibilities overlap, and ownership over decisions rights isn’t yet defined.

In these situations, leadership is about creating clarity. Here’s how to gain momentum:

• Schedule a cross-functional workshop to build a shared timeline for completion with key milestones. There should be at least one representative from each team present.
• Require workshop participants to share back information with respective teams to get feedback and bring it back to your workshop group if anything was missed initially.
• Present the project’s finalized roadmap highlighting all key milestones to leadership to determine decision rights for each one, alignment of resources, and finalize a timeline.

Influencing outcomes through collaboration: a case study

I was once responsible for launching an entirely new brand, tasked first with developing a product description and instructions on how to use it. All this information had to come together on the packaging, a process that required close collaboration with highly specialized teams focused on medical, legal and regulatory requirements — none of which reported to me.

Even in the earliest stage of the project, I knew every packaging decision would ultimately shape how I could market, educate and talk to consumers about the brand later down the road. Yet, I had no formal authority over the teams making the calls, so here’s what I did:

First, I tackled an often overlooked (yet simple to solve) hurdle that can stunt collaboration: proximity. These specialized teams physically worked on the other side of the building, so I made the decision that, for half of the week, I would physically go and sit with them. Even if I was working on something unrelated to our project, I was intentional about being present and available.

As the weeks progressed, this choice led to team members casually calling me into hallway conversations about our packaging simply based on proximity. It also allowed me to listen and learn from those teams on how they work and what was driving their decisions.

By inserting myself in their world, I also had the opportunity to chime in to explain our marketing strategies and give broader context regarding consumers. Ultimately, this allowed us to jointly build a packaging recommendation that met all medical, legal and regulatory requirements while still giving the marketing team plenty of room to promote the brand effectively.

The bottom line on influence vs. authority

No, your title does not dictate how much influence you can have within an organization. But it should impact how you go about earning it. Cultivating influence always comes back to self-awareness, whether that means deferring to someone with less authority but more expertise to build trust or leading with curiosity, not control, as a newcomer to a project.

When people see you taking time to understand their perspective and create alignment, trust begins to form naturally and they will be more willing to support your recommendations.

Across two decades, I’ve held twelve corporate roles of increasing responsibility and scope. Some came with positional power and authority. Some did not. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter when it came to my ability to make an impact and advance my career.

The reality is you’re not always going to be the boss with decision rights, but you can always be a leader. In fact, the higher I climbed, the more often I found myself leading cross-functional initiatives that required buy-in from other teams and approval from senior stakeholders.

What I learned along the way is that influence, not authority, is what drives real progress. You don’t need permission to become an excellent leader, just the right mindset and relationships.