Too Close to See: When Founder Identity Becomes the Blind Spot

Audio Too Close To See. What Do You Do When the Company You Built Becomes You?

Video What Do You Do When the Company You Built Becomes You?

Chapter-by-Chapter Summary

Following are the sections we covered in this conversation with their summaries, along with the time location in the video and audio to follow along. The timestamps in orange correspond to the chapters in the YouTube version of the podcast episode. This video will display to the lower right as you scroll down. 

03:29 What Would Make Your Best People Quit the Profession? 

He saw it clearly because he was not yet inside it

The company did not start with a market. It started with a leaving.

John's wife Andrea finished her doctorate in counseling psychology, and within two years about a third of her cohort had left the field. Not left a job. Left the profession they had spent a decade training for.

He found that shocking, and then he found it interesting, which is the order that matters.

Andrea was working a day and a half a week in a private practice and full time at a nonprofit, and earning the same from each. The private practice paid well and had no culture and no benefits. The nonprofit had both and paid less. She was being asked to choose between purpose and a living wage.

"You don't typically expect to have to choose, do I want to have purpose or benefits," John
said.

They started the company to refuse the choice. That is the outsider's view, used before there was anything to be inside of.

11:58 Is Work Part of Your Life… or Part of You? 

Founder identity forms early, and it forms on purpose

I asked whether there was a moment when it hit him that this was harder than it had looked.

"It's hard the entire time," he said. Then he said something I have not been able to put down.

"If you don't want work to be a big part of your identity, if you're not ready to go work 80
hours so you don't have to work 40, like don't start a business."

Read that as advice and it is unremarkable. Founders say versions of it constantly.

Read it as a description and it is something else. He is not saying the work will be hard. He is saying the work will take up part of who you are, and that if you are not prepared to hand that over, do not begin.

He is describing the blind spot forming. And he says it forty-five minutes before he finds out what it did.

20:23 Would You Tell a Candidate What You're Bad At?

Naming your blind spots out loud is a hiring strategy

They spent years getting their interview down to four questions.

Four, plus a short case study the candidate wrote beforehand. The compression was not about efficiency. It freed up forty-five minutes at the other end for John and Andrea to explain who they were.

Including what they were bad at.

Their family benefits were poor. They had chosen strong individual benefits instead,
deliberately, because their people were young clinicians early in their careers. So they said
so, out loud, to candidates who had not asked.

"The last thing we want to do is surprise them with that after they've accepted a job offer and quit their other job."

"I think the best way to gain trust is admit your faults," he said. "Be honest about where
you're weak."

Most companies find out their weaknesses in exit interviews.

22:39 What Happens If You Give the Answer Away? 

An outside perspective can be built when it cannot be bought

Here is the part that sounds like a mistake.

They told their competitors what had failed. Not vaguely. Specifically, repeatedly, and to the open irritation of their own leadership team.

Then, having spent two years building a telehealth training program with the largest hospital system in the state, they watched COVID arrive, put the program online, and gave it to every competitor they had.

"We didn't ask for anything."

You are allowed to think this is naive. I did, for about a minute.

But watch what it buys. A competitor you have been honest with will tell you what is actually going wrong inside their business. And once several of them are doing that, you are no longer looking at your industry from inside your own company. You are looking at it from inside all of them.

Generosity is the honest description of what he was doing. It is also how an outside
perspective gets built when you cannot buy one.

28:16 Do You Sell When It's Right… or When You're Done? 

The blind spot was never about the company

The decision to sell did not come from a valuation.

He got sick. Fourteen nights in hospital across one year, nine months of antibiotics, surgery,
part of his colon removed. He worked every day of it. He came out of surgery and started
emailing.

"The only reason that continued to progress was I wouldn't rest. And that's because I had too much work."

Read that slowly. The illness progressed because he would not rest. He would not rest because of the work. Nobody made him. There was no board.

He turned to Andrea and said he thought they should go to market.

"I've lost a hundred pounds since we sold Care," he told me. "I'm much healthier. I look my kids in the eyes now."

He said it as an aside, on the way to something else.

33:09 Would You Let a Buyer Audit You Five Years Early? 

He rented the investor's view years before he needed it

This is where the acquisition calls sit in the conversation, and it is worth saying what he was
actually doing.

He was not preparing an exit. He says so plainly. He was importing the third perspective, the investor's view, into a company he had no intention of selling.

"I could learn a lot about what drives value in the industry and how they would behave if they had control of my business."

Most founders meet the investor's view once, at the end, when it is being used on them rather than by them. He met it two dozen times, for free, while it could still change what he built.

And then he declined every one of them.

38:13 Which of Your People Actually Moves the Needle? 

Most founders cannot see which group carries the company

In most service businesses one group carries the whole thing, and most companies work out which one by accident, years in.

CARE did not. From the beginning John and Andrea decided it was the therapists, and then did something uncomfortable with that decision.

"We had to focus on the therapist at the cost of every other employee. And by doing that, our whole business did better."

Read the first half of that sentence alone and it sounds unfair. It is unfair. It is also, on
his account, exactly why everyone else ended up better off, because the clinicians generated the surplus that paid for all of it.

The number underneath it. Average clinician tenure in his industry was eighteen months. He got his to thirty-six.

He is writing a book about this. It is called The Nuance Effect.

55:08 Who Tells You What You Don't Want to Hear? 

A founder's blind spot needs another person to see it

I asked him for one piece of advice for someone who has built something good and cannot get outside it.

"Hire a coach with gray hair."

That was the answer, and it arrived before I had finished the question.

"Hire someone who's been there. You want them to be honest, probably too honest. You want someone that will tell you things you don't want to hear."

I mentioned that ChatGPT will not do this.

"No," he said. "ChatGPT's so nice to me."

It is a joke and it is also the point. What he is describing is not information. Information is
abundant now and most of it is agreeable. What is scarce is a person with standing to tell you something about yourself you would rather not hear, who will still be there next month.

56:21 Who Are You Once It's Sold?

Founder identity outlives the company it attached to

He had just signed the documents. Most of his team did not know yet.

That evening he went to an event his company was sponsoring, a thousand people from the recovery community, and somewhere in that room he found an empty booth, sat down in it, and wept.

"I don't really cry a lot," he told me. "But I just like wept."

What matters is what he said next. He was not crying about the sale.

"I wasn't feeling emotional about the transaction. I was just feeling like empty."

He sat there and asked himself why. The answer, when it came, was one sentence.

"My entire personality was this business."

I told him that on this podcast we sometimes call this founder codependency.
The business becomes dependent on you, and you become dependent on the business. I had published a solo episode on it two weeks before we spoke.

He answered in five words.

"It's kryptonite and a superpower."

Stay on that, because it is the most useful thing anyone has said to me about this on this show.

The fusion is not a defect.

It is the thing that made him formidable. Nobody grows a company seventy percent a year for a decade while maintaining a healthy detachment from it. The identification is the fuel.

And it is also the reason none of the first four perspectives could show him what he was looking at.

Back to you

You are probably not selling your company this year. That is not what this is about.

Here is the argument, in order.

• You cannot see your own company from outside, because past a certain point there is no outside.
• The company is somewhere your identity has moved into, and you cannot get behind your own eyes.
• That is the founder's blind spot, and it is a position rather than an oversight.

The fusion causing it is not a flaw. It is what made you capable of building the thing.

Kryptonite and a superpower.

So the outside view is not something you find. It is something you construct, on purpose,
while you are still inside. John built his out of competitors he had been honest with, acquirers he had no intention of selling to, and eventually a coach with gray hair. None of it was accidental and none of it was comfortable.

And the reason to build it now rather than later is that the moment you will most need it is the moment you will be least able to construct it.

One more thing before the questions.

Three things make a business philosopher, by the definition this show has used since the first episode. You do your own thinking and trust it above the room. You think seriously about the human condition. And you turn both into results in the cold, hard realities of the marketplace.

John does all three, which is rarer than it sounds. He held a position his whole industry did not hold and said so from the rooftops. He started a company because a profession was losing its people, not because a market was underserved. And he grew it seventy percent a year for ten years, bootstrapped, to an exit.

So here is the small thing, and it is small on purpose.

This week, find one person with no stake in your company and no reason to flatter you, and ask them what they notice about it. Not what they would do. What they notice.

You are not after advice. You are after a position you cannot occupy yourself.

Three Perspectives. Then Four. Then Five.

Going into this conversation I framed it around three perspectives. I said them in the opening of the episode, before John and I had spoken a word to each other.

To build a high-performing, self-sustaining organization that outlives its founders, leaders need to cultivate three perspectives. The insider's view, which drives performance. The outsider's view, which exposes its blind spots. And the investor's view, which asks a harder question. Can this organization endure without you?

Three. That was the plan.

About eleven minutes in, a fourth one turned up while we were talking. I did not bring it with me, and I said so at the time, mid-sentence.

There is actually even perspective before. There's a perspective before we start a business, right? So we're actually adding a fourth perspective.

A moment later, still working it out on the recording: There's a perspective going into, which we're just kind of stumbling into right now. That is a perspective which is kind of rosy and nice and clean. This is what I'm going to do. That's the spark, that's the inspiration.

The founder who has not started yet.

Four.

And then, thinking about it afterwards, I came to a fifth. I think it may be the most important of them, and I think it is the bedrock the other four stand on.

Here is the part I want to leave with you. John arrives at the fifth perspective in this conversation, near the end. He does not name it. I do not think he was looking for it. But it is there on the recording, and once you have heard it you cannot unhear it.

Can you spot it? What would you call it?

Tell me in the Comments. I will write about this properly before long.