In 1986, my husband and I started a construction company with no blueprint for what an “owner” was supposed to do. He was in the field. I was doing the books — a job I learned from nothing, because I didn’t have a college degree and nobody was going to teach me. I taught myself accounting the way you teach yourself anything when the alternative is the business failing: badly at first, then well enough, then out of necessity, expertly.
I remember running payroll in the early morning hours before I went to the hospital to deliver one of our children. That’s not a metaphor for hard work. That’s a literal Tuesday. The business didn’t pause for labor. Neither did I.
That’s how PM Construction started: two people, no operating system, boots on the ground in the truest sense. And for a long time, that’s how it stayed — except the boots got heavier every year, and the ground got less stable.
There’s a time and a place to do things the hard way. In year one, with no capital and no playbook, hard was the only option — and it built something real. The mistake wasn’t doing it hard. The mistake was not knowing when hard was supposed to end.
The Operator Trap
Here’s what nobody tells you about building a company from the studs up: the version of you that starts it is not automatically equipped to scale it. You get good at surviving. You get fast at solving whatever’s on fire. And if you’re not careful, that becomes the whole job — forever.
For us, the breaking point wasn’t a bad quarter. It was almost losing our marriage. The company had become all-consuming, and it was running us over instead of the other way around. We were succeeding on paper and drowning everywhere else. That’s the operator trap in its purest form: the business grows, but the owners don’t — they just get more depleted at a higher revenue number.
Nobody warns you that this is the actual cost of “boots on the ground” leadership carried on too long. It’s not sustainable, and it’s not free. It’s paid for in the parts of your life that don’t show up on a P&L.
The Turn
The shift came when we brought in a consultant — years before Gino Wickman had fully formed what would become EOS, but built on the same instinct: businesses don’t scale on hustle, they scale on structure. That engagement forced us to build something we didn’t have language for yet — what I’d now call an Accountability Chart. Right people, right seats, clearly defined. Systems instead of two exhausted founders holding the whole thing together by memory and adrenaline.
That structure is what made the next decision possible.
Stepping Back
I stepped back from operations and accounting because I was honest with myself about something most owners never say out loud: I was no longer the right person for that seat. Not because I’d failed at it — I’d built it from nothing — but because the company had outgrown what I could give it in that role.
We brought on a partner to run operations. Under his leadership, we scaled to $15M in revenue. And then we hit the next wall — the one every growing company hits — where the skill set that got you to $15M isn’t the skill set that gets you past it. We needed someone stronger in the finance seat than what we had. We got one. That’s how you scale past the founders’ ceiling: you keep asking who this company needs next, not who’s comfortable staying.
We eventually scaled PM Construction to $40M across multiple states, and sold it. I did a version of this transition again years later with a fly-fishing resort in Montana — same core lesson, different terrain. That story deserves its own telling. This one is about the first time I learned it, the hard way, in real time, with no framework and no guide.
What It Cost Me to Figure It Out
Here’s the honest accounting. It cost years. It cost a stretch where our marriage was genuinely at risk. It cost health, sleep, and time with our kids that I don’t get back — including, apparently, the morning of one of their births. And it cost opportunity: every year we operated without structure was a year we weren’t compounding growth, we were just surviving it.
If I’d had EOS — the actual language for what we were instinctively trying to build — I wouldn’t have needed a decade to figure out that the Accountability Chart isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the thing that lets an owner stop being the operator. I wouldn’t have needed a near-miss with my marriage to learn that “all-consuming” isn’t a badge of honor, it’s a warning sign that the business has no operating system.
Why I Do This Work Now
I implement EOS with business owners today so they don’t have to learn this the way I did. Most of the owners I work with are stuck exactly where I was — growth has stalled, they’re exhausted, and they don’t have a strategy to fix it, just instinct and grit that used to be enough and isn’t anymore.
The goal isn’t to get them out of the business. It’s to build them a way out — a structure strong enough that stepping back isn’t a risk, it’s the plan. That’s the difference between an operator and an owner. I didn’t learn it from a textbook. I learned it running payroll on the way to a hospital delivery room, and then spending the next decade building the system that would have made that unnecessary.
If your company has stalled and you don’t know exactly why — that’s not a strategy problem. It’s a structure problem. Let’s talk about what’s actually missing.