Every Business Is Unique

This little exploration stems from When Your Business Is Working. But You Don’t Feel Steady…

We're looking at how the same feeling of something being a bit 'off' can stem from many different things. This is why I recommend slowing down instead of rushing into "fix-it" mode.

Let's dive in!

Say your business is two years old. You’re not in the red, you know what you offer and how to deliver, your team and customers are happy, etc. Yet you are feeling quite unsteady despite things looking fine on paper.

There are so many different things that might be going on. Some of what I’ve seen:

One client came to me feeling unsure how to prioritize anything

She was working full time on building her early stage business. Things were growing steadily, but she kept saying, “I don’t know how to structure my days. I feel like I’m spinning my wheels, even when I’m getting things done.”

There wasn’t an obvious crisis. But she didn’t feel settled, and nothing she tried seemed to fix it.

We mapped out the work together and realized she was actually ahead of schedule. She wasn’t behind, she was untethered. That surfaced a deeper truth: she’d been operating from a constant sense of urgency, and without it, she didn’t know what to trust.

Naming this changed everything. She started seeing that the slower times were not a failure or a sign of danger. They were part of the business’s natural rhythm, one that was just beginning to unfold because of all her hard work. 

That shift let her stop reaching for urgency as a motivator, and instead use clarity as her guide.

Another client was feeling vague pressure and low-grade unease after hiring

He’d just brought on his first full-time employees. On paper, things were going fine. But day to day, he felt distracted, tense, and like he had less space to think.

He wasn’t in over his head, but something was off and he didn’t know what it was.

We looked at the structure and surfaced what hadn’t been named: the business now had fixed financial responsibilities that didn’t exist when it was just him and independent contractors when needed. While nothing was wrong, the weight of leadership had quietly increased.

Creating space for long-term forecasting and planning helped him settle. The answer was not to work harder. It was to notice the new terrain and adjust how he held it.

A third client came back to me years after we first worked together

They said something like, “You came to mind. Things are going well but I’m not as excited as I used to be. And I just can’t tell if that’s my new normal or if something’s actually off.”

The business had grown steadily and sustainably since we last worked together. Revenue was consistently climbing. Capacity was there to match. Employees were happy. Customers too. The business was stable. But the founder felt emotionally absent from it all.

In our work, they came to see something they hadn’t fully known yet: the early-stage building and momentum is what lights them up most. Now that the business was in maintenance mode, their role had changed… and so had their sense of meaning.

We started succession planning. Not as an urgent move, but as a way to give the founder a longer horizon to move toward. That re-energized their work immediately. The clarity wasn’t about their exit, it was about realigning their energy with the work that aligns internally and figuring out what they might want to create next.

Why this matters

None of these clients came in with a “problem to solve” per se. They each had a deep feeling that something was off, but they didn’t know where it was coming from.

They were too close to the system to see what had shifted. This is normal. And it’s exactly where orientation work begins.