The Four Years I Don't Talk About

I used to own a $160 million logistics business. Six offices across the US. Over thirty agents around the world. A hundred and fifty people on payroll. From the outside, it looked like everything was working.

From the inside, I was drowning. And I couldn't tell anyone.

The late nineties hit us hard. What started as a rough quarter became a rough year. Then two. Then four. Four years of waking up at 3 AM with my heart pounding, staring at the ceiling, calculating how many more months we had before the walls closed in.

Four years of flying to crisis meetings in cities where I used to feel like a conqueror. Four years of conference calls that started with hope and ended with me in empty hotel rooms, wondering how I'd become the problem I couldn't solve.

I spent those years running. Country to country, office to office, chasing fires that kept starting faster than I could put them out. Frankfurt on Tuesday, Chicago on Thursday, back home by Saturday to stare at spreadsheets that told stories I was too scared to believe.

The worst part wasn't the failing numbers. It was becoming someone I didn't recognize.

You can't tell your team you're terrified. You can't admit to your board that the strategy you sold them with such confidence is crumbling in your hands. You can't explain to your family why you're gone again, why you can barely look them in the eye when you are home, why the person they loved is slowly disappearing.

The performance becomes everything. The confident voice in investor calls while your stomach churns. The steady presence in staff meetings while your mind screams. The reassuring answers to everyone else's panic while your own grows so loud you can barely think.

Somewhere in year three, I caught my reflection in an airport window and didn't recognize the man staring back. The light was gone. The joy was gone. The person who'd built something from nothing had become a ghost managing the slow-motion destruction of everything he'd created.

I used to love what I did. By year four, I hated who I'd become.

I sold the business in January 2000. Not because I wanted to. Because I finally accepted that I'd rather save what was left of me than lose everything—including myself—trying to save what was already gone.

The morning I signed those papers, I sat in my car in the parking lot and cried. Not just for the business. For the four years I'd lost. For the man I used to be. For all the nights I'd lain awake carrying weight that was killing me, piece by piece.

And I made a promise: no other founder should have to spend four years in that particular kind of hell. No one should have to carry that weight alone, in silence, until it nearly destroys them.

That's why this work exists.

Not because I studied crisis management. Because I lived through the kind that almost broke me. Not because I read about founder isolation. Because I know what it feels like when the thing you built starts eating you alive and there's nowhere safe to say it out loud.

I spent four years learning what breaks founders. I've spent the last twenty-four learning how to fix it before it gets that far.

The founders who find me are usually three or four moves away from where I was. Still functioning. Still leading. Still performing strength they don't feel. But starting to see that man in the airport window—and it terrifies them.

They don't need someone to tell them how hard it is. They're drowning in how hard it is.

They need someone who's been to the bottom and knows the way back up. Someone who can step into their nightmare and help them wake up before they lose themselves completely.

That's what this is. That's why I'm here. That's what I do.

Because no founder should have to lose their soul to save their business. There's another way through the darkness. I know because I found it.

But only after I almost didn't.