A founder hit $4.4 million in monthly revenue and had a mental breakdown. She realized success had trapped her in safe moves when real growth demands risky ones. Staying uncomfortable enough to learn gets harder the more you have to lose.
Business was doing $4.4 million a month. I looked at my husband and told him I wanted to end it. Probably the one time in my entire business career I had like a real mental breakdown. My husband looked at his phone, he was like, holy crap, we just had the biggest month to date. We just did $4.4 million. Instead of feeling excitement or happiness or anything like that, I just remember my stomach dropped and I felt this feeling of dread because I knew I wanted to end it. So this is what I realized that I was doing. And because of this, I wanted to quit everything is that I needed to shift from productively procrastinating to productively failing. It takes more than that leap in the beginning when you start a business, you have to continue to make those leaps, which are productive mistakes, while you have the business. And that is something that once you reach a certain level of success is very hard to do because it threatens everything that you have built. But there's also no way to grow unless you do it.
