The Observer's Notebook

Your business may not need a rebuild. It needs a different read. One of the most expensive things a founder can do is solve the wrong problem well. The work gets done. The execution is clean. The business still feels wrong. Here is why — and what actually changes it. Late in the 2025–26 regular season, the Vegas Golden Knights changed coaches with eight games left. Eight. That is not a generous amount of time to reconsider the direction of a professional hockey team. That is changing the person driving while the car is already merging onto the freeway. There was no time to replace the roster, reset the strategy, or methodically repair every weakness before the playoffs. The team had to work with what was already there. The same players. The same talent. The same limitations. The same season. What changed was the perspective directing it. John Tortorella came in with enough experience to look at the team without being attached to every explanation for why things had been done a certain ...

  The Founder Who Mistook Control for Standards A founder says: I just have really high standards. And the diagnostic question I always want to ask is this: can anything happen without you? Because if every email needs your eye, every proposal needs your edits, every client issue needs your intervention, and every deliverable needs your fingerprints on it — we may not be looking at high standards. We may be looking at control. And that distinction matters a great deal to the business trying to grow underneath it. Why the Pattern Is Hard to See From the Inside This founder is not careless. That is what makes the pattern harder to catch. She is doing the opposite. She is everywhere. She reviews everything. She catches everything. She answers everything. She rewrites everything. She steps in whenever something is not quite right, which is often, which means she is constantly stepping in. She also accidentally made herself the printer, the therapist, the approval department, and the em...

  When Your Brand Is More Mature Than You Are Sometimes the brand gets there before you do. The website looks grown. The visuals look grown. The copy sounds grown. The offer finally has a spine. And then someone asks the price and suddenly the founder is 17 again, trying to be impressive and unthreatening at the same time. That is the pattern. Your brand matured. But some part of you is still making decisions from an older room. And until that gap closes, the business sends mixed signals the market cannot ignore. What "The Brand Outgrew the Founder" Actually Means This phrase gets used as a compliment when it should be a diagnosis. It is not about having a beautiful brand. A lot of founders have beautiful brands. The problem is when the brand is presenting one version of the business and the founder is still operating from a different, older, more apologetic one. The brand says established. The founder is still asking permission. The brand says premium. The invoice says pleas...

Business Coaching vs. Strategic Advisory: Why the Category You Buy Determines the Help You Get A founder comes to me and says: I think I need help with my marketing. Maybe. But before I answer that, I want to know what we are actually calling marketing. Because sometimes that sentence means the offer is unclear. Sometimes it means the audience is too broad. Sometimes it means the pricing does not match the promise. Sometimes it means the founder has outgrown the business model and keeps trying to promote it harder. If I answer the marketing question before I diagnose the business problem, I can give a very good answer that still costs her. That is the difference between business coaching and strategic advisory. And it is a distinction that matters more than most founders realize before they have bought the wrong one. What Business Coaching Is Actually For Business coaching, at its core, helps a founder move forward from the question she brings. You come in with a goal. The coach helps...