This week’s newsletter is a response to another newsletter I saw—
Tony Robbins wrote this week that 2025 is all about knowing what season your business is in.
He equates growing a business to the phases of growing up. Including the prime of life and then decline and death.
As if you are your business. But you are not your business. You are the parent of your business.
I notice this all the time with my clients.
If they are in start up mode, they are just trying to get the kid fed and get enough sleep.
As their business grows and matures, their leadership has to grow and mature as well, or else, as one of my clients put it, “the business is running you rather than the other way around.”
There is a stage, (the pre-tween years?) where everything you do and say is revered.
And then suddenly you have to be very clear about the guidance you provide.
You can gently nudge but more and more your leaders have ideas of their own. (And some of them are better than yours!)
As the business gets more and more successful, you actually need to have less and less involvement. “Helicopter parenting” can frustrate your team and even backfire.
At some point, if you have done your job well, your business no longer needs you. (If you’ve really done well, it, or the proceeds from its sale, might even support you in your old age!)
Many parents get their identity from parenting and from their kids. And when the kids move out, they struggle. I’m going through a version of this right now with my youngest in Japan for a year. It’s been really hard figuring out who I am with no kids in the house.
The same can be true for founders.
What about you? What happens when the business starts to succeed without you? Or when you become a “business empty nester?”
Here’s the original Tony Robbins post—