Transcription
I've been in business for 10 years, and here are 10 lessons that I've learned in this last year that helped me have my best year yet. Hopefully, by the end of this video, you can too.
The first business lesson is that missed opportunities are not problems. We were going to do a book launch for Alex in the very beginning of 2025, and over this last year, we've just had a tremendous amount of opportunity in all divisions of the business. So, we're ready to do this launch from a product standpoint, but from a team bandwidth standpoint, there is none.
When I looked at the cost, I realized that following through with doing that launch would mean that two other things that are going very well and growing very fast would suffer because they would use the same resources. Those resources were planned to handle this. I came to him and said, "I think it's best that we push it." Could we do it? Yes, but at what cost? Not one that I'm willing to pay. We have a lot of people that are tapped out at this point. I would be tone-deaf to put more work on people's plates.
So, I said, "This isn't a problem; it's a missed opportunity." It's actually a missed opportunity that, if we capitalize on, makes our real problems worse. Sometimes things don't go according to plan; sometimes things go better than according to plan. When that happens, sometimes it upsets other plans that you have. The reason for that is that the real problems in my business are things on the back end.
If you capitalize on all the opportunities, you just stoke the fire of the problem that exists and make it worse. I said, "I never want to make the same mistake twice." That's one thing that I've kept myself to in my business career. I recognized that I felt very similar to when I had Gym Launch and Prestige Labs. During that conversation, I essentially ended up folding, and what happened was what I was afraid of: it diluted our resources, it diluted my attention, and it was the business that I was the least proud of building because it wasn't done well.
The frame that I always put myself under is: under what conditions does it make sense to capitalize on this opportunity? It's not about time; it's about conditions. If I can get these 30 people hired, then under those conditions, it makes sense to do a book launch. If those conditions don't exist, then this book launch will actually make our problems worse.
Most companies die from the inside out: bad internal decisions, bad internal hiring and firing, bad internal culture. The little is what kills a company. Most companies die by indigestion, not starvation. If you only have one opportunity, then all your attention is going to go to that opportunity.
Let's just point to something minute that you would think wouldn't make a lot of money: toothpaste. Everybody uses toothpaste. Think about the billions of dollars that have been made off of toothpaste. People might say, "Oh, but we're missing out; we should have toothbrushes and we should have floss." Yes, but you could also make a billion dollars off toothpaste. If you're only focused on toothpaste, you're probably going to put a lot more effort there, and you're probably going to get there a lot faster.
A lot of people have this imaginary rush that causes them to capitalize on opportunities that they're not ready for. When you try to force things, you try to force conditions rather than allow conditions to happen. It makes it a lot harder to do.
So, if you're an entrepreneur and you're looking at this year, I want you to ask yourself: what's the cost of capitalizing on that opportunity? Have I solved my biggest problem before tackling my biggest opportunity? If we solve the problem in our business, the opportunity presents itself.
Now, here's the last thing I'll say: one habit that I have is to never let myself get into regret. A missed opportunity is worse than failing. Missed opportunity regret is truly useless, and what you're doing is stealing attention from capitalizing on the next opportunity. So, if you do say no to an opportunity, do it without regret.
The next business lesson is that there is no one solution. About a year ago, we started our Workshop Division, and it started with an absolute boom. We had been doing this for about six or seven months, and then for a period of about two weeks, I noticed that there weren't as many people referring others to the workshop. I was like, "Why would our word of mouth go down? I don't understand; why would it get worse, not better?"
I remember sitting there thinking, and I realized that people habituate to things. When they habituate, they start to slip up. So, I sat in for the next three workshops. The greeters that were supposed to greet people when they walked in were not on time. In fact, we didn't have as many as we had in the past. Lunchtime, some people were taking meetings with portfolio companies, so they just decided not to show up for lunch. We had fewer people socializing at lunch.
One thing that I have emphasized is that it's really important to say hello and goodbye to people. People actually were not saying a kind farewell. It wasn't any one thing; it was a hundred little things. As I observed this, I realized we had to go full bore into this to make sure this is a great experience. If it's a bad experience, I'd rather not do it.
When people have a problem they're trying to solve, when something goes wrong, when a metric isn't where we want it to be—sales are dipping, revenue is dipping, people are complaining, customers aren't staying—whatever it is, we search for some magic answer when it's actually just a hundred golden BBs. I explained this concept to my team: this is 100 golden BBs; it's not one silver bullet.
Here's all the things that I believe have led to people not telling as many people about this. So, what we did is we made sure the greeters were there on time and that there were more greeters. We made sure everyone was at lunch, we made sure everyone was at the breaks, and we made sure people said hello and goodbye. People called others by name. What happened? We went back to the same stats we had prior within one workshop.
It wasn't any one thing; it was like I think my list was about 11 things that we did. Everyone had a different reason as to why something worked or didn't work. You know what that taught me? Every business is built on a thousand details.
In the beginning, we feel like we find silver bullets because we don't know how many bullets are left to make something really work. Once you really get into business, you realize it is all about the details. It is everything. It's not just marketing and sales; it's marketing and sales and customer service and IT and operations and HR.
The second thing it taught me is that attention to detail is the currency of success in business. Something I tell my team is, "We don't teach excellence; we demonstrate it." What I mean by that is what you say to them doesn't matter; how you say it to them matters. When someone comes in for a workshop, are they going to listen to me talk on stage about business if my team can't even say hi at the door? I think not.
What I learned from this last year is the amount of details that go into maintaining excellence. If you're looking at your business and thinking, "I think I need to change who I serve; I think I need to change my product; I think I need to completely redo my price," more often than not, it's not a strategy question; it's an execution problem.
As you grow, execution only gets harder because what is execution? It's not just you doing stuff; it's your ability to get tens or hundreds of other people to do stuff for you. So, if you're trying to figure out what to do with your business this year and things aren't working, I beg of you: try to fix 11 details before you try to fix one big strategy.
The next business lesson is that most people won't buy in until they see it work. This actually goes with the last lesson I just talked about. We started up this workshops division, and when I had the idea for doing this, I was very certain it would work. I understand what skills are required, and I've also put on probably 50 workshops in my career, just in a different business. So, I'm thinking this is a no-brainer.
But my team was like, "This doesn't make sense; how are we going to do this?" I spent so much time trying to get everybody to like my idea and trying to tell them that they think it's a good idea before hitting go. What I realized is that only a few people will believe it before they see it. More people will believe it after you really try to convince them, but most people will not believe in something and won't buy into something until they see it work.
I recognize that this is the case, and what I actually don't want is for everyone to agree with me. I don't expect everyone to agree with me. I don't expect everyone to say it's going to work. Instead, what you want is for people to act as though the idea has a fighting chance so that you can find out if it actually does.
Most people doubt something will work until it becomes so obvious that it is impossible to ignore. I was reminded this last year of the fact that that buy-in is impossible to get from 100% of your team. People come to me a lot and say, "I want my team to buy in." What you actually want is you don't need them to believe it will work; you need them to act as though it could possibly work.
If people act as though it will never work, then they will not execute 10 out of 10, and then you don't even know if the idea will work or not. You don't need them to believe like you believe that it's going to happen, and you shouldn't expect that. Only a few people are going to be like that on your team, but that shouldn't stop you from taking action.
This was a really great lesson for me because I had a lot of people on my team coming to me, concerned, saying, "I don't understand; I don't think this is going to work." I said, "I don't need you to believe it, but I do need you to execute as if it has a fighting chance." That was what I told everyone on my team. Ironically, after they saw it work, then everybody was very supportive of it.
They laughed at Galileo until they looked through his telescope. People will laugh at you; they will mock you; they will tell you your idea won't work. The people closest to you will do this. That's normal. Honestly, if everybody tells you that your idea is going to work, then you're probably being lied to, and they're probably scared of you.
I will never punish somebody or fire somebody for having a different opinion. What I won't accept is if somebody doesn't give it a 10 out of 10 shot by not executing. There are many times where someone that reports to me wants to do something a certain way, and I'm like, "I don't think that's going to work that way," but I support them as if I think it could. Sometimes I'm proven wrong; sometimes I'm proven right. Either way, I don't believe it until I see it.
The next business lesson is that you want to bet on the jockey, not on the horse. No matter how fast the horse is, sometimes we see a business opportunity that's just so obvious, it's so easy that I'm like, "There's no way this is not going to work." You know what that did? It sort of blinded me to the fact that I kind of took the founders at face value. I didn't dig very hard to test how much of a founder fit they were to see that they shared values.
All these little things that I saw in the beginning but didn't push on became big with those founders. Lack of discipline, lack of self-management actually led to them not being able to grow their business, even though the business opportunity was a clear winning shot.
A great leader, a great CEO can make an average idea succeed, and a poor leader can make even the best idea fail. If you're looking at hiring people, I think this is another area where I've just seen that in the past, I've bet on the horse, not the jockey. What do I mean by that? I actually consider the horse—what I'm hiring people to be—their experience, rather than if they're a fit for the team.
I've hired people who have been all-stars at Microsoft and Google, and I brought them in for them just to fall flat because they weren't a culture fit, were not a values match, but they had this insanely cool experience. So, I bet on the experience rather than the person.
If in your business right now you're looking at how do I want to set myself up for success in the coming year, no matter what, I know it is hard because you can't measure what you have to gain; you only measure what you have to lose in these situations. If you're in that situation and you're like, "Well, I would lose all this experience this person is going to bring," but you don't know what you have to gain by saying no to this. Nothing is better than the wrong thing.
I'm going to bet on the jockey. I'm done betting on horses. If I can't find a jockey that I like, no jockey is better than the wrong jockey.
The next business lesson I learned is that when incentives are designed poorly, they can sabotage even the best of businesses and teams. One thing that happened for me in this last year is that I think I was behind the eight ball with a couple of departments in terms of getting incentives in place quickly. Because of that, when people don't know how to make more money in their role, they want another role.
What it incentivizes, if you don't have what I call a technical track for performance—meaning you don't know how to pay an individual contributor more for doing better work—then they say, "Well, I would like to be a manager." Most people don't inherently want to be a manager or leader; most people just want to make more money or they want to feel like they're improving.
If people are given a clear path to improve in the role that they have, most people opt for actually just staying in that role, making more money, getting a better title, improving there. But because I got behind the eight ball, what I realized is that in a couple of the departments, what they're incentivized to do is to try and stop doing the work that they are doing as quickly as possible and start managing people as quickly as possible.
You create this environment where people feel like the only way they can grow in your company is if they move up into management. Then you also incentivize people to stop doing the work that they might be best in the world at. What it does is it creates this very contorted culture where people will essentially sacrifice what they want for what they see is rewarded.
In two departments in my company, because people were incentivized to move up in their management roles—from being a director to a senior director—they were just trying to get more people under them so they could move up faster. That's because I failed to show people how they could make more money staying where they were.
What it does, if you don't do that, is it incentivizes bloating in a company. It is in that person's best interest to create a big team because they know if they get these people under them, they get to move up into this position that they've expressed they really want. But they don't see a way to do that to move up into that position unless these things occur.
Something that's really difficult is to incentivize people immediately in the beginning of a business. I just put people on salary for the most part. I don't have many incentives. As the business matures within 18 months or 24 months, I have clear metrics that I know I want to hit, and I know the averages for them. Then I'm going to say, "Okay, I want to tie people to these."
Having metrics that incentivize the behavior that you want is key. Incentives are based on having baseline metrics. You cannot incentivize people to do better until you know what average is. So, one, you have to know what you want out of a person or a department. Two, you have to know what average looks like and what below average and above average are.
When a business is a year or two years old, I have a very hard time setting incentives that are very specific because metrics tend to change so quickly. What was a good close percentage when you're at month three is probably pretty poor at month eight because you gain so much efficiency so quickly. It's like you grow out of a compensation plan very quickly.
So how do you stop this? You can stop it by showing people how to make more money without moving up and incentivizing performance, not just on moving up in a company. What that looks like is you have two tracks in a company: you can have a management track and you can have technical tracks. Most tracks in a company should be technical tracks, meaning people can learn how to make more money in their current role.
Only a few people get put on a management track because it doesn't make sense for a company to have 17 people going on a management track. You don't need 17 managers. More management is not always better; no management is actually not better either.
What I learned is that I need to pay more attention as the company grows to making sure I get these things into place faster. That reminds me of this quote by Charlie Munger, which says, "Show me the incentives, and I will show you the outcome." If you want the outcome of your business to be one where you have really strong leaders and you've got really strong individual contributors, you need to have a technical track and a management track.
The next business lesson that I learned this year is that you have to prioritize solving personal constraints before business constraints. About four months ago, I had three departments that I thought needed change, and there was one that made the most sense to tackle. But I was speaking with one of my friends, and he asked me this question, which prompted me to remember this: "Which one is the one keeping you up at night?"
I said, "Well, it's this department." He asked, "Why?" I said, "This person is taking six to seven hours of my week every week because of their emotional needs, their coaching needs, and their dependence on me. Because of that, underneath that, now the department has these issues, and this person is relying on me to help solve those issues."
He said, "Leila, you won't have the power or attention to solve the real constraint unless you solve your personal constraint." It was just such a good reminder for me because I am really good at putting others and the business ahead of myself. I look at myself as a steward of the business; I need to do what's best for it because if I do what's best for the business, I protect everybody else.
Sometimes it doesn't look good; sometimes it's not something people are going to like, but I know that the goal is that the business does two things: survives and succeeds. If it does those two things, then I protect my team.
Over time, I've gotten more skill and more capacity, and my ability to take on more has gone up. What I recognized this last year is that that's not always a good thing. What I was saying was, "What is the number one problem in the business? I need to focus on solving that one."
Yes, there are these things that are bugging the hell out of me, but I'm not going to solve them because this logically makes the most sense to do to grow the business. However, if my attention—which is arguably the most costly attention in the business—is only able to be used 60% to solve this problem because 40% is taken by this thing that is really personally frustrating me, then I can't even solve the problem in front of me to the best of my ability because my attention is being sucked.
What it does is it gives you more power to solve the business problem once you've solved the problem that you have a personal issue with. I'm sharing that with you because if you're going into this next year and saying, "What do I need to solve first?" sometimes you have to handle your personal issues.
It doesn't even need to be personal; it can be the thing that takes the most attention from you. For me, this was quite personal because it took so much of my discretionary time. That's because I care for the people in my company; I care for the departments. If somebody is needing my attention, needing my help all the time, and there are things going on that maybe aren't aligned with the culture I want to build, that takes my attention.
These things are happening in the back of my head, yet I have a problem in front of me that's completely unrelated. For you, that could be a business problem; it could be a personal problem. Think about whatever that problem is that's stealing from you your power to actually tackle the number one thing in your business.
The reason why I think business is such a great vehicle for personal growth is that if you really want to grow the business, you have to tackle the things that constrain you before the business. You know what it really reminds me of? This quote: "The bottleneck is at the top of the bottle." You have to free yourself first, and the business will follow.
The next business lesson is that momentum makes everything better. When I first started in business, I just fell into it. We had been working really hard for two years launching gyms, and then suddenly we got product-market fit, and things took off. There was no planning on a whiteboard, no six-year plan—there was nothing.
Over my business career, what I learned is that the ideal is to create a flywheel. A flywheel is a system where all the parts make the whole better, and a flywheel creates momentum in a business. If you improve this piece of the business, it makes this piece better as well.
For a long time, I really wanted to have that in my business, and I didn't have it. I tried to create it in Gym Launch, and it just didn't really work as well as I wanted to. When I started Acquisition.com, my main goal was: how do we create a flywheel in this company so that we have momentum?
If I have different divisions of a company but they don't make each other better, then you get less return on your effort. We have our brand. What our brand does is it allows us to get proprietary deal flow, meaning we get access to deals that nobody else gets. Most of the people that come to us and want to partner with us are not looking to sell to another PE firm; they're looking to sell to us. If they cannot sell to us, they don't want to sell.
That's proprietary deal flow. Then, getting those companies, we share the stories of those companies, we share the wins of those companies, and we share all the lessons that we learn through growing those companies, which creates more deal flow for us.
Then that deal flow—we say, "Okay, well, we can't take all of these into the portfolio because that's not our model and they don't qualify." So instead, what we're going to do is put them into the incubation program, which is our workshops division. The workshops division creates content; it also creates deal flow.
What that looks like is workshops create deal flow for portfolios, workshops create content for the brand, and the brand creates deal flow for the portfolio. The brand creates deal flow for workshops. You see, it's a self-fulfilling machine. What happens is that if you design your business this way, then it is inevitable that you succeed.
An example of this would be fitness. Think about compound movements. Why is it that we want to prioritize squats, bench, and deadlifts? Why are those the core foundation of working out? Because these create more momentum. They don't just isolate one body part; they actually make all the body parts better.
If somebody's trying to grow muscle, they're going to do compound movements. They're going to do a lot of volume on those compound movements because they know that when you do squats, you're not just growing your quads; you're also growing your glutes, hamstrings, and calves. Same with deadlifts.
So what that means is that now if I grow my brand, I also grow my portfolio, my workshops division, and my ventures division. I don't just grow one thing. This year has proven to me that if you create that flywheel, everything gets easier.
Now, what does this mean for your business? As you say, "Hey, maybe I want to add a new product; maybe I want to add a new division," ask yourself: how does that product or how does that division grow the others? This forces us to be strategic and creates a flywheel effect.
Jim Collins said this: "A flywheel is a self-reinforcing loop. Once it's in motion, it is unstoppable momentum." If you want to build momentum in your business, if you want to create a flywheel, think about how you can be strategic when you add a division or a product so that it makes everything better, not just one thing.
The next business lesson is that executives are rarely let go for performance. I had to part ways this year with a couple of executives in the company, and I asked myself, "Why did this not work?" It wasn't that these people were not performing, and it wasn't that they were even misaligned with the values. It was that, for the most part, they were misaligned with the vision or the founders.
They were misaligned with where we were going because values, in my opinion, are how you get there. Performance is going to say how fast we're going to get there, but where are we going? If somebody on your team wants to end up somewhere that you don't want to, it's really hard to work together because they're just opposing your vision.
Misaligned leaders break companies; aligned leaders build legacies. I had a few people that were very close to me, that I loved working with, that were very high performers, that were really competent, but they weren't aligned. They were trying to influence me to go to their vision rather than the one that I've had for five years since I started the company.
What that does is the lack of unity at the top creates chaos at the bottom, and their departments bear the brunt of that, as do other people in the company. When you're on leadership calls, when you're on executive calls, people can tell that there's misalignment.
What I learned is that misaligned leadership is like having a car with its tires all pointed in different directions. What happens? It goes nowhere. If all the leaders at the top are not aligned, the car will not move. Sometimes that person never had the same vision to begin with, or that person thought they could change my vision, or that person developed a different vision along the way.
It's kind of like if you're in a relationship with somebody, and you're both like, "We want to have a family and a white picket fence and kids," and then two years in, they're like, "Hey, I actually want to live in the city, and I don't think I want kids." You're like, "Wait, what do you mean? We're going to have this house; that's what we've been talking about."
You can want that, and I can want this, but we can't really be married. Ultimately, misalignment is why it doesn't work with people who are very competent and also culture fits. It's like a marriage with one person wanting the house with the white picket fence and one person wanting to live in the city.
As you go into the new year, ask yourself: is my leadership team creating alignment, or are they creating disunity? Do I have leaders or high performers on my team that are culturally aligned but don't want to go the same place I want to go? There's nothing wrong with that, but it can't work in the company.
The next business lesson I learned is that businesses grow faster than most people can grow. In one situation, I had a person who was killing it. That role got promoted because the company was growing, and then that person, who was killing it, became actually like the biggest bottleneck in the company, with millions of dollars at stake because of this person's incompetence.
What I was really lucky for is that I did not over-tile that person too much. I was able to bring somebody in above them, and that person was able to take that person who had been a star and then turned into the biggest struggling person and make them a star again. They filled in the gap.
Oftentimes, when you over-promote somebody or the business over-promotes somebody, it's like seven to ten skills that they're lacking, and that could take a year or two years for them to acquire. If the business doesn't have time to wait, then you need to make sure that you bring somebody in to bridge the gap in the interim.
There's a principle that really extrapolates this out; it's called the Peter Principle. It states that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to the level of their incompetence, meaning they're promoted based on their ability to do their current job well, not on the potential to do the next job well.
For example, say I have somebody who's a controller in my company, and then you say, "You know what? You're such a good controller; I'm going to promote you to CFO." But the skills to be a CFO are not the skills to be a controller. You can take somebody who is a great controller and then make a terrible CFO.
What happens is that individuals rise to a position where they're no longer competent, and that creates a ceiling of incompetence. The business can no longer grow because of the incompetence of the person that you have put in that role. You've essentially taken someone who's like a superstar and turned them into the biggest struggling person in the organization.
A business is only as strong as its weakest link. If you have six leaders in the organization, but two of them are at their level of incompetence—meaning they're not competent for the role they're in—those weakest links are the strength of the organization.
You start to create this dynamic where it's not just you that feels it or the other leaders, but it's other people that are their peers that start to say, "What's going on? Why aren't they doing a good job? Why this? Why that?"
What happened to me this year is that I didn't actually promote anybody, but my business promoted them because it grew so fast. If a company quadruples or quintuples in a year, then the person who was the operations manager at the beginning of the year is not competent to be it at the end of the year.
That's why I'm such a fan of under-titling because then you can bring somebody in above eventually if the business grows too fast, and you don't have to worry about demoting people or letting people go. If your business right now you're looking at, and you're like, "We're growing really fast," I want you to understand that there are two things that could be occurring: either one, you promoted people based on the skill that they have in their current role, not the skill that they would have to do the next role, or your business grew so fast that your business promoted the people for you, and they're no longer competent in that role.
In that case, you have decisions to make. If you promoted them, then you can try to offer them a step back down in position in some way as a benefit. On the other instance, if the business promotes somebody in their world, then I think you have a better shot at bringing somebody in a level above them to help bridge the gap.
The likelihood is that if the business has grown really fast and they're outgrown for their role, you probably do need somebody above them as well. Over-promotion turns talent into a liability, and a bad fit in a good role is actually worse than no fit at all.
So ask yourself this: is the growth of my business outpacing my team's ability to grow as leaders? If so, what can I do to prevent over-promoting people past the point of their ability? The leadership team is the most important team to pay attention to because leaders multiply themselves. If you have an incompetent leader, you will get an incompetent team.
The last business lesson is that business is personal. What I watched over this last year is one of the founders of one of my companies. Essentially, their personal life was in chaos, and they kept telling me that it was not going to affect the business. I didn't believe them because everything that was happening on the personal side started to seep into the business side.
This person formed a lot of bad habits; they were hanging out with a lot of people who weren't good influences. What happened is that we had a business that was growing year-over-year for four years, and then it cut in half because this person's attention was going towards all this drama.
You cannot compartmentalize chaos. If your personal life is in shambles, your business will soon be in shambles as well. This is a lesson that I've learned for myself, and I feel really fortunate because I had a mentor in the beginning who said, "Your personal life is your business life."
If you want to be regimented, if you want to be happy in your business life, be all of those things in your personal life. I've always tried to live my life in a way where, in order to succeed and achieve my goals in business, I have to actually also achieve those things personally in order to show up in a way that doesn't create chaos in my business.
Your attention is like a jar of marbles. If you're drinking, you've got five marbles here. If you've got an issue with your mom, it's five marbles here. If you have a bad marriage, it's ten marbles here. Everyone looks, and they only have five marbles, and then they try to grow their business with those five marbles. Then they say, "Why can't I grow my business?"
He says, "Well, you got to pick up your marbles from all the places that are stealing them. Get them back." The first thing I did before I started my first business was I said, "Where am I leaving marbles?" There were some things that Alex and I hadn't hashed out or agreed upon before we moved in together, and so we had to have those conversations.
What I did is I picked up all these marbles from all these places and put them back in my jar. Some people say, "How did your business grow so fast?" I had more marbles than you. I picked them all up. I'm constantly saying, "What other areas of my life are stealing my marbles?"
It's not that you have to say no to everything else in life; it's that you have to say, "How do I get my marbles back so that they actually give me more marbles rather than take more marbles?" If you have a great body and physique, you probably feel better when you show up at work. If you have a great marriage, then you probably feel better when you're going into your business because you feel supported.
The point is that you cannot compartmentalize chaos. If your personal life is a mess, it's stealing from your attention to do business. If your personal life is in order, that will give you the attention to go into business and just be a savage.
The greatest threat to your business is not your competition; it's your unresolved conflict with yourself and other people. Your personal chaos will always bleed into professional clarity. You will not be clear in your business if you have personal chaos surrounding you.
So the question that you want to ask is: are the things going on in my personal life affecting my ability to lead and grow my business? If they are, that should be your number one priority right now. Go figure that out.
A great rule that Alex and I have always had is that we always have to feel really good about our relationship; otherwise, we can't show up and go to war together every day to grow this business. We would take an hour, two hours, whatever it took before we showed up for everybody else because we knew that unresolved personal conflict leads into business.