I built a business I loved, and somewhere along the way it demoted me.
The night I became the intern in my own company
It was almost midnight. I was on my hands and knees on the floor at home, collating workbooks for a Fortune 500 company, with a 6:00 a.m. flight to catch so I could go deliver the workshop. I was the founder of my company and the expert they paid a premium to bring in, and there I was doing the lowest-paid job in my own business, for free, at midnight, because there was no one else to do it.
That was the night it hit me. The better I got at speaking, the more business I won. And the more business I won, the more of the business landed on me. The industry has a name for it. They call it the Solopreneur's Paradox: the skill that earns your fee is the same skill that pulls you off the stage and onto the floor.
If you have ever sent a proposal three days late because you did not have a spare three hours, rebuilt a workbook at one in the morning, or watched a warm lead go cold in your inbox, you already know the trap. It is not a talent problem. It is a staffing problem.
And until now, the only fix was money you did not want to spend on a team you could not quite justify.