I ran an agency of 70+ people, and things were going really well. That was the problem. The success masked what was underneath: everything ran on memory, inside everyone’s heads. I didn’t realize it until it broke.
Then the pandemic hit. Team members started missing work. Health issues, lockdowns, limited resources. And every absence took knowledge with it, because none of it lived anywhere else. The agency collapsed. The office, the team, the routines, all of it gone within months.
Clients were unhappy, and rebuilding felt impossible, because there was no central system holding the processes together, and the people who knew them were gone. That’s when I saw exactly how I’d lost. The people scattered, and there was nothing underneath holding the shape, because I’d never built the underneath.
I learned it the hard way, and I rebuilt differently. Structure first, memory never. Now I install that difference into other founders’ businesses, so they get the lesson without losing everything to learn it.


