10 Years Building a Company Emotional Journey, Scaling, and Success Story

11 Jun 2024 · 1 min

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In this first-person narrative, the speaker reflects on a decade of building and scaling a company. They describe an emotional roller‑coaster typical of entrepreneurship, noting that over time they began to lose personal joy and focus for the day‑to‑day work. As the business grew, the speaker shifted from working in the business to primarily working on the business, creating the possibility of stepping away. A pivotal realization emerged when a talented young leader, now second‑in‑command, was identified as the natural successor; the speaker recognized that unless they stepped aside, the leader might leave, making her the planned future leader of the company.

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So I built a company over the course of 10 years and it was a really exciting, emotionally up and down journey, just like every entrepreneur's story, I'm sure. And I got to the point where I was sensing a couple of things were happening. The first was I was starting to lose my joy and focus for the work itself. The second was we had built and scaled enough that I was no longer really in the business too much. I was mostly working on the business. And so, I had something that I could step away from. And thirdly, I had an amazing young leader coming up who had come up through the ranks and was now kind of second in charge. And I had this very strong realization that if I didn't get out of her way, she would leave. And I realized she was my plan.