My Greatest Lesson of 2025

In my philosophy of business (and yours too, I suspect), success is measured not just by what you get but also by what you become. Because of this there is no finish line to this race. Not “oh good, I made it. This is enough. Now I can relax.” I’m not wired that way. There is only, “It’s done. Good. Now what’s next?” 

To those of us wired this way, few things are as maddening as hitting a plateau. 

In early 2025 I hit such a plateau. In response I doubled down on what had gotten me this far - hustling to build brand recognition, putting in extra hours to do 110% of what was contracted, investing deeply in 1:1 client relationships. All good things, but I still wasn’t getting the results my goals demanded. 

Sometimes what got you here won’t take you there. 

After burning myself out with all that, I stepped back from the business to rest. That is, I made structural changes that enabled me to scale back from 70 hours a week to 50, and shifted my focus to other important areas of my life, including moving, renovating our new home, and beginning wedding planning. 

I was amazed when within a few months of cutting my work week by 30%, the business side of things took off with a steady stream of new clients knocking at the door. 

How is this happening? I asked myself. 

For the answer, let me digress into a story that initially seems unrelated but is absolutely essential. 

I had the good fortune of attending a college with a world class extracurricular martial arts program. And the unrealistic time management skills to think that signing up for every class was a good idea. 20hrs a week of martial arts on top of a part time job and full time class load is not something I would recommend. But I’m glad I did it, because when it comes to skills I regularly use in life, I ultimately learned just as much (or more) on the mat as in my coursework.  

When you’re a teenager training martial arts with your buddies, there is a temptation to think “Look at me! I’m a badass!” I’d be lying if I said I was immune to it. When our instructor saw us muscling or rushing through a movement sequence in our hurry to be cool and tough, he would walk over and softly say “slow is smooth, smooth is fast.” He was right. In fact, I can’t think of a single thing I learned from him that proved to be wrong. 

Obediently we would slow it down, down to a slow dance, letting the sequence seep into our muscle memory. Once that was done, it was easy to be fast. 

Coming back to business, to reduce my workload I had to redesign numerous workflows so that things could happen without me, or at least with less of me. I had to slow things down, parse out processes, refine best practices, make some new hires, and distill replicable scalable standard operating procedures to guide them. Turns out I’d been a major bottleneck, holding everyone back in the name of quality control (an important goal but inefficiently executed). 

With me pushing less and flowing more, delivered more value and our revenues grew proportionally. All this happened not by pushing harder, but by being smoother. For me as the leader, this was a marvel to watch until my martial arts instructor’s voice echoed in my head:

“slow is smooth, smooth is fast”.

Then it all made sense.