Dear Founder,
First of all, can we just acknowledge what you’ve done?
Because I imagine you’ve spent a good portion of your life being the person who figures things out.
The person with the vision.
The person who takes the risk.
The person who looks at something that doesn’t exist yet and thinks, Well, why the hell not?
And then somehow, through a combination of courage, intelligence, stubbornness, and probably a few sleepless nights, you go and make it real.
You have a big heart. A sharp mind. A vision for something you believe should exist in this world.
You have values you care deeply about.
And you’ve taken those values and built something out of absolutely nothing.
Something that employs people. Supports families. Changes lives. Makes a difference.
I hope you actually let yourself feel that for a moment.
That’s no small thing.
And I imagine you became very, very good at holding things together.
At being the one who knows what to do.
At being the one who makes the call.
At being the one who sees the problem before anyone else does, who catches the ball when it drops, who carries the vision when everybody else is still trying to understand it.
And thank God for that part of you.
Seriously.
That part of you probably helped build the entire damn thing.
But this is something you need to know.
What got you here, won’t get you to your next level.
the very qualities that got you here aren’t the ones that will take you where you want to go next
You’ve reached the bottleneck
What if your extraordinary ability to hold everything together has become the very thing keeping your organization from learning how to hold itself?
What if being the person who can solve every problem has quietly turned you into the person who has to solve every problem?
What if the company you’ve built to make an impact on the world is still depending on you to be its entire nervous system?
And how exhausting is that?
How often are you making decisions you wish someone else could make?
How many conversations are you having for the fifth, tenth, or fiftieth time?
How often do you have this very clear sense that something needs to change, but you can’t quite put your finger on what it is, so you try another strategy, another hire, another system, another round of throwing spaghetti at the wall?
And when was the last time you felt genuinely held by the thing you’ve spent so much of your life building?
I ask because I don’t think the answer is always another strategy.
Sometimes it is, of course.
Sometimes you need clearer roles, better systems, more accountability, and people who actually do what they say they’re going to do.
Wonderful. Let’s do that.
But sometimes the problem is living somewhere a little less obvious.
- In your relationship with responsibility.
- In the way you’ve learned to trust—or not trust—other people.
- In your relationship with power, money, conflict, and control.
- In the unspoken agreements between the people on your team.
- In the roles everyone has quietly agreed to play, without ever actually agreeing to them.
- In the ways you’ve learned to survive that have served you beautifully for years, but may no longer be serving the person—or the leader—you’re becoming.
You see, I don’t look at an organization as a machine.
I look at it as a living system.
A system with a history. Relationships. Loyalties. Fears. Longings. Brilliant people. Frustrating people. People who care deeply and people who are terrified of disappointing one another.
A system that, just like a family, can develop patterns that everybody participates in and nobody quite knows how to change.
That’s fascinating and a little fucked up
So, when we start to see the system clearly, we can begin to change things that once felt impossible to change. We put a cloak over the ghost. We outline the dynamics that are driving the whole system.
- The same conversation doesn’t have to happen for the sixteenth time.
- Someone else can carry a responsibility that has been yours for years.
- The team begins to function like a team, rather than a group of people orbiting around one extraordinarily capable and increasingly exhausted human being.
And suddenly, there’s room for something else.
For creativity.
For possibility.
For actual leadership.
For you to remember why you started this whole thing in the first place.
That’s the work I want to do with you.
I want to help you see the things you haven’t been able to see from inside your own creation.
I want to understand the person behind the founder. The relationships and histories and beliefs that have shaped how you lead.
I want to understand your team. Your organization. The things that are working beautifully and the things everybody knows aren’t working but somehow nobody is talking about.
And I want us to get really curious about what’s possible when those patterns begin to change.
Because I don’t believe you built this company just to become its most exhausted employee.
I don’t believe your capacity for impact should require the sacrifice of your own life.
And I certainly don’t believe the only way to grow something extraordinary is to become even better at carrying everything yourself.
I believe there’s another way.
One where your people grow alongside you.
Where responsibility is shared.
Where your company becomes more capable, more alive, and more aligned with the values that made you start it.
And where you get to have a life that feels as extraordinary as the thing you’re building.
More freedom. More joy. More time to think, to create, to love, to be a human being.
Imagine that.
A company that doesn’t just need you.
A company that actually takes care of you, too.
That’s what I’m interested in creating.
Not just a more successful business.
But a more beautiful relationship between you, your people, and the thing you’ve brought into this world.
You’ve already proven that you can build something out of nothing.
I’m curious what becomes possible when you no longer have to build it all alone.
Ricki