Robbie Bent, CEO of Othership, spent three years doing finance, construction, operations and marketing alone, which left him chronically stressed and unable to sleep. He hired a COO and controller to reclaim his time, then built a recovery routine: weekly therapy, monthly retreats, massages, float sessions, and a morning nanny to protect his sleep.
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The healthy person has 100 priorities. The sick person has one. Get healthy. Far too often I see CEOs killing themselves trying to build their company. Work is all-consuming. In order to keep up, you sacrifice your health, your family, and other relationships. For what? Most startups fail. I deeply believe that happy, healthy humans build bigger, better companies. In this video, Robbie Bent, co-founder and CEO of Othership, gets real and shares the toll that his companies have taken on him. Othership is helping heal people, and he needed some of that healing himself. Let's listen to Robbie.
This brings up for me boundaries, which is a thing I wanted to ask you about. You know, like, you run— presumably you work during the day. Your business prime time is actually in the evening. It's also the weekends. You know, you're very often there. Uh, you do have a wife, you do have a son. As you know, you and I have talked about in the past, it would be tragically ironic to be killing yourself in the process of trying to make everyone else healthy. So like boundaries are important. You know, how do you actually navigate all of that? Do you have— okay, now I have like, are there rigid separations? Are you able to create different contexts and switch off, or is everything just sort of blended?
It's really hard. And so I think I've gotten better, but I'm still struggling. And like earlier this year, I'd been going for 3 years straight. I was running finance, construction, operations, marketing as a single person. And so since then we hired, you know, as a CEO, can you hire firstly to take things off your plate? And so we hired former director of construction from SoulCycle. We've hired professional COO, we've hired a controller. So my bandwidth has increased. Like if you're just stuck in the details all day, you can never get anywhere. You're just doing the same thing over and over. So that was a major— we could, we should have hired even sooner probably. So that was a major change, but there was points like, you know, in March where, okay, we're struggling with Yorkville, which is our second space to launch. New York is a complete disaster. We're going to lose these leases. Oh my God, we've signed a lease and we don't even think we can build what we need from a code perspective. I might have just committed like a million dollar security deposit and like lose it. And, you know, I'm kind of crying each day and I'm like getting complaints about the experience and kind of just so, you know, I was also just drinking coffee in the morning and then not eating until 5 PM. And I'm like so upset that I'm just like, you know, honestly, fuck the customers. Fuck this, even though I love it so much. And so what I would do then is go to— so, like, just one is if you're in that state, it's just not— you can't be like a real human being, you know? And so I would come home from work and I would just be— I'd work from home, but I would be just thinking, and my wife's like, where are you? And I'm like, not even there. So hiring really helped. Some other things that— but also, like, look, when you're starting, like, you might not even have the money to do that. So it's just kind of hard for a period of time. So I look at it as like, what am I willing to sacrifice for how long? And it's worth it to me, to be honest. Like, if I look back on it, like, yeah, absolutely. Okay. That's what it's going to take to build something great and like create something in Canada and go to the US. Like, that is what it takes. Like, you have to have fanaticism about every little detail and you just have to care at that level. So it was worth it. Now the role has shifted from like, okay, I'm not an individual contributor anymore and it's actually detrimental to the company. For me to do that. And so now my role is mostly emotional. So it's like raising money, vision, ensuring all the employees are the right people. And that takes— it doesn't take like I'm losing my temper on calls with people and they're afraid of me, which, you know, candidly, yeah, I'm just trying to be transparent as possible so people know. But like, yeah, I would lose my temper and people are like, whoa, this guy's fucking intense. And I would like, yeah, yeah, sometimes then regret it after, you know, So, so the boundaries I have now though, I take one week per year, which I, which I'd always done. It's not enough, but it's a good starting point to have my phone off. And so whether that is a Vipassana retreat or just in nature, it's like, or a psychedelic medicine retreat, whatever it is, it's one week with no phone. I'm trying to do little bite-sized things twice a year where it's like a weekend again with no phone. Healthy eating. I've taken now— it stopped because we just opened the new space, but I was taking one morning a week to do a massage at MyoDetox and then a float and to just start my day again. No phone, no caffeine to kind of layer in. And then I've started doing for the past year therapy biweekly, a 2-hour session of like IFS parts work, kind of just like feeling emotions in the body and like kind of talking through the way we are like, hey, there's a competitor launching in New York. I'm afraid. What does that feel like? Not like just try to ignore it and be pissed, but like, okay, I'm angry. Why am I angry? Because I'm afraid they might do it better than us. Okay, what is that? And like, you know, okay, let's, let's feel that feeling. It's okay to be afraid, you know? And so before I used to just try to the hard feelings, like push them away. And so what I've learned this year is to just feel them deeply and they usually subside a bit. And so that therapy I've been doing has been extremely helpful. And then on the dad side, I was also feeling guilty of like, oh, I'm, I'm not really helping, you know, I'm tired in the morning, I don't want to get up early. And there was a discussion with my therapist, recommended to just have a discussion with my wife and was like, hey, what do you need for support? And she's like, I need you to get up 4 mornings a week. And I was like, okay, well, I don't want to. And so I ended up hiring a nanny, a morning nanny. And you know, at first we were like, oh, we want to spend more time with our son, but it turned out to be more worthwhile to have someone come 6 AM to 9 AM, 4 days a week so we could sleep. And yeah, especially because you're kind of on in the evenings, right? Exactly. So it's just, it's, you know, getting sleep was super important. And so something I thought before was like, just be resourced. You know, so I have two equity advisors for business advice. I have my therapist, I have a health coach. So another thing, like, I wasn't eating in the morning, so I did all my blood work with this health coach, and now it's mandatory that I have a shake even if I'm like all riled up, ready to go with like, you know, banana, avocado, protein powder, a bunch of stuff. So at least I'm getting my nutrients first thing. And I thought like, oh, I'm intermittent fasting, like, who cares? I won't eat all day. And like, there's no nutrients there and like you don't have the energy and then I would be way too stimulated. So, right. Morning shake, nanny for support, therapy, time off intermittently. We're going to take our first vacation in a couple of years in Costa Rica in February. And I just feel now having— being like present and emotionally aware is sort of what the CEO role is. And so I've been more aggressive about not being as in go like day to day for specific roles.
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