Hitting The Ceiling

Who does your company need you to become before your current capacity becomes its next ceiling? You can land Target, grow into an eight-figure company, and still discover that success has not made the business safe. After six bootstrapped years, you can find yourself approaching a Friday payroll deadline needing $1 million, while the pressure of leading with your husband, raising six children, and carrying too much of the company is already catching up with you.  In this episode, you'll hear how Cherie tightened her grip on cash, loosened her grip on the work only she thought she could do, and started redefining what the company actually needs from her as CEO. What you’ll learn in this episode:  (01:52) How six years of bootstrapping still led Saalt to a Friday when payroll depended on outside funding.  (05:29) How building companies with her husband shaped Cherie's refusal to walk away when Saalt got difficult.  (07:47) Why selling in a stigmatized category created both a business obstacle and an opening for Saalt.  (11:40) How Cherie and Jon learned to share leadership when their old visionary and integrator roles stopped fitting cleanly.  (13:36) What changed when Cherie admitted that being CEO and a mother of six had pushed her into burnout.  (16:54) How landing Target turned what should have been Cherie's biggest win into the moment she wondered how she could keep going.  (22:51) How Cherie's next ceiling became figuring out her highest and best use after finally letting go of major parts of the business. Learn more about Cherie Hoeger and Saalt: https://saalt.com/ Want to gain traction in your own company? As written about in the best-selling book, "Traction" by Gino Wickman, the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) helps entrepreneurial leadership teams clarify their vision, gain traction, and work together more effectively. Learn more at www.eosworldwide.com Want a little more clarity in your week? Sign up for Mark O'Donnell's Clarity Break Thoughts newsletter: www.eosworldwide.com/claritybreakthoughts Follow the show on your favorite platform: www.eosworldwide.com/htc This episode was produced by Story On Media: https://www.storyon.co/

How do you walk back into a celebratory dinner after learning you may be replaced? You can know exactly how mergers go wrong, build a company into a nine-figure brand, and still discover that your own speed has become part of the problem. Erica Good merged two companies in 2021, watched the culture fracture for 18 months, then sat in a snowy Park City town hall while the board told her and her co-founder it wanted new management, forcing her to finish the day, attend a celebratory dinner, and call her husband crying on the drive home.  In this episode, you'll hear how Erica stopped treating leadership like a star player role, rebuilt Momentous around a faster but more deliberate culture, and later had to admit she repeated an old mistake when a second office split the team all over again. What you’ll learn in this episode:  (01:57) Why Momentous outgrew its original one product model and chose a merger instead of building a new portfolio from scratch. (03:33) What Erica knew about merger culture from McKinsey and why she ignored the rule inside her own company. (07:45) How 18 months of cultural friction finally came to a head at a snowy company town hall in Park City. (08:36) What happened when the board told Erica and her co-founder it wanted a new management team. (10:37) How Erica kept running the company while interviewing potential CEOs who could replace her. (13:05) Why Erica had to stop operating like a star player and start leading like a head coach. (22:38) How opening an LA office recreated the same cultural split Momentous had already suffered through once. (31:39) Why Erica now treats high energy chaos as a warning sign instead of proof that the company is moving fast. Learn more about Erica Good and Momentous: https://www.livemomentous.com/ Want to gain traction in your own company? As written about in the best-selling book, "Traction" by Gino Wickman, the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) helps entrepreneurial leadership teams clarify their vision, gain traction, and work together more effectively. Learn more at www.eosworldwide.com Want a little more clarity in your week? Sign up for Mark O'Donnell's Clarity Break Thoughts newsletter: www.eosworldwide.com/claritybreakthoughts Follow the show on your favorite platform: www.eosworldwide.com/htc This episode was produced by Story On Media: https://www.storyon.co/

How long would you stay in a good job after your family started asking why you could not show up? You can spend 22 years helping quadruple a company, earn a good salary, carry eight different hats, and still wake up to the fact that there is nowhere left for you to go. Rob Taylor reached that point while late nights followed him home, his wife noticed the cost, his sons kept growing up, and eventually even a free Thursday afternoon on a bike trail could make him feel guilty for not answering email.  In this episode, you'll hear how Rob spent nearly a year getting decades of knowledge out of his head, left the career that had defined him, cut loose work that felt like "selling my soul," and started learning how to let success take up less room in his life.  What you’ll learn in this episode:  (01:46) Why calling himself a workaholic forces Rob to confront habits he has carried for almost three decades.  (02:33) What four grandchildren changed about Rob's definition of where his time belongs.  (03:59) How a Thursday afternoon bike ride exposed the guilt Rob still feels when he is not working.  (05:42) When Rob realized a 22 year career had become a ceiling instead of a destination.  (06:54) How hearing family members ask why he could not show up made the cost of work impossible to ignore.  (08:21) Why Rob spent almost a year with a technical writer pulling decades of knowledge out of his head before leaving.  (16:09) What Rob noticed when paid work he was excellent at started feeling empty instead of useful.  (16:54) How admitting he felt like he was "selling my soul" finally gave Rob permission to burn the boat. To learn more about becoming an EOS Implementer, visit https://www.eosworldwide.com/become-an-implementer Want to gain traction in your own company? As written about in the best-selling book, "Traction" by Gino Wickman, the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) helps entrepreneurial leadership teams clarify their vision, gain traction, and work together more effectively. Learn more at www.eosworldwide.com Want a little more clarity in your week? Sign up for Mark O'Donnell's Clarity Break Thoughts newsletter: www.eosworldwide.com/claritybreakthoughts Follow the show on your favorite platform: www.eosworldwide.com/htc This episode was produced by Story On Media: https://www.storyon.co/

What happens when the identity you built your future around disappears overnight? Rick Gardner was supposed to ride bulls for a living. Then an injury took that future away, a roofing business taught him that fast growth can look a lot like talent when luck is doing most of the work, and years later the same need to figure everything out followed him into engineering, startups, and leadership.  In this episode, you’ll hear how Rick went from trying to be the smartest person in the room to realizing that his job was not to have every answer, but to build people who did not need him to. What you’ll learn in this episode:  (01:25) How Rick went from wondering whether he was smart enough for engineering to earning straight A’s while still waiting for someone to prove he did not belong. (04:06) What happens when the only future you ever planned for disappears before you have thought about what comes next. (05:49) Why a little early success can convince you that you are better than you are before failure gives you a more accurate answer. (07:06) How one Colorado hailstorm turned Rick’s truck-and-hammer roofing business into rapid growth that was never going to last. (09:33) Why Rick once believed the boss had to know more than everyone else in the room, and how that idea followed him into leadership. (12:16) What brilliant engineers taught Rick about the danger of building an impressive solution before figuring out whether anyone actually wants it. (14:31) How one mentor changed Rick’s definition of leadership by telling him that the team, not the work, was now his product. (23:48) Why admitting that you are in over your head can be harder than working longer, learning more, or trying to solve the problem alone. To learn more about becoming an EOS Implementer, visit https://www.eosworldwide.com/become-an-implementer Want to gain traction in your own company? As written about in the best-selling book, "Traction" by Gino Wickman, the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) helps entrepreneurial leadership teams clarify their vision, gain traction, and work together more effectively. Learn more at www.eosworldwide.com Want a little more clarity in your week? Sign up for Mark O'Donnell's Clarity Break Thoughts newsletter: www.eosworldwide.com/claritybreakthoughts Follow the show on your favorite platform: www.eosworldwide.com/htc This episode was produced by Story On Media: https://www.storyon.co/

How do you stop carrying everything when being the reliable one has become part of your identity? Clay Harris learned early not to wait for someone else to fix things. His father was mostly absent, his mother was raising him on her own, and one of the adults who believed in him most was a high school teacher who would simply point to a banner at the front of the classroom that read, “Look inside yourself.” That lesson followed Clay into adulthood, through entrepreneurship, leadership, and every moment when people were looking to him for answers, but over time the instinct to rely on himself became harder to separate from the pressure to carry everything himself. In this episode, you’ll hear how Clay learned to live with uncertainty, loosen his grip on control, and pass a different lesson to his daughters: be yourself, act before you feel ready, and do it scared. What you’ll learn in this episode:  (02:15) What “ride the dragon” taught Clay about accepting that life will never stay fully under control. (03:38) Why certainty is often a fantasy and how Clay learned to focus on the next right move instead. (05:08) How Clay realized that the instincts he trusted for years were becoming less useful as he moved farther from the ground. (07:27) Why hard decisions about people become even heavier when empathy, loyalty, and responsibility are all pulling in different directions. (17:34) How Clay learned to lead through uncertainty without pretending he knew exactly what would happen next. (19:16) Who gave Clay the confidence he did not yet have in himself and why the words “look inside yourself” stayed with him. (20:40) Why growing up without his father made self-reliance feel less like a personality trait and more like a necessity. (23:04) What Clay now wants his daughters to understand about authenticity, fear, and doing the thing before they feel ready. To learn more about becoming an EOS Implementer, visit https://www.eosworldwide.com/become-an-implementer Want to gain traction in your own company? As written about in the best-selling book, "Traction" by Gino Wickman, the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) helps entrepreneurial leadership teams clarify their vision, gain traction, and work together more effectively. Learn more at www.eosworldwide.com Want a little more clarity in your week? Sign up for Mark O'Donnell's Clarity Break Thoughts newsletter: www.eosworldwide.com/claritybreakthoughts Follow the show on your favorite platform: www.eosworldwide.com/htc This episode was produced by Story On Media: https://www.storyon.co/