Let It Hold You

This week felt sort of heavy, so I posted in our community Facebook group that I was in a funk.

That was pretty much the whole post, just an honest admission that I couldn’t seem to shake whatever had settled over me. What happened next surprised me. There was a flood of friends, familiar faces, and fellow community members checking in. People commented on the thread, but then the private messages started too. Texts. DMs. Personal check-ins.

Nobody hesitated. 

Wow.

If that’s not community, I really don’t know what is.

It’s easy to put something in a mission statement about believing people do better connected than they do alone. I’ve said some version of that for years through JHD, and it has become an even bigger part of what we’re trying to build through The Nexus.

It’s another thing to accidentally, and very publicly, test it and watch it come to the rescue. So, yes. I told myself: the thing you built is working.

And apparently, this was going to be a week about testing that in more ways than one.

I also learned that a key member of our JHD team would be leaving for another opportunity.

Team transitions used to mean crisis.

Immediately, my brain would start running through everything that could go wrong. Who takes this over? What gets dropped? What am I going to have to pick back up? How quickly can I fill the gap?

If I’m being completely fair to younger Jason, that reaction made sense. JHD depended heavily on me being involved in almost everything. When something shifted, I shifted with it. Usually by taking on more. This time was different, and I didn’t scramble.

I just trusted it.

Part of that was because, strangely enough, the day before I got the news, a former team member had reached out asking whether there might be an opportunity to come back and help part-time. Now, I don’t know if that’s coincidence, timing, the universe, or some combination of all of the above.

I’ve gotten less concerned with figuring that part out.

I just noticed it.

A few days later, I sat down with a fractional CFO to take a closer look at JHD. And by closer, I mean the numbers. The real numbers.

Margins. Expenses. Gaps. Places where things were working well and places where, if I’m honest, I had probably been relying on instinct more than information. After 25 years in business, you’d think sitting down to look at financials would feel completely routine.

It does not.

There’s still a part of me that feels like I’m about to be called into the principal’s office.

But the interesting thing was, I didn’t walk into that conversation wanting somebody to tell me everything was fine. I wanted help finding the gaps. That felt important.

Because there’s a difference between wanting control and wanting clarity.

Control says, “I’ll handle it.”

Clarity says, “Help me see what I’m missing.”

For a good portion of my career, I was much better at the first one.

Then came the server outage. Another moment that would have looked very different for me several years ago.

Over the weekend, several client websites went down. That sentence alone used to be enough to ruin whatever I was doing.

I would’ve been on the phone. On the computer. Checking everything repeatedly. Probably convincing myself that nobody could possibly care about solving the problem as much as I did.

Except this time, by the time I found out about it, the team had already handled it.

The sites were back. Problem solved.

I had missed my own crisis.

And I have to admit, that was a pretty nice feeling.

Not because I don’t care.

I care a lot.

But somewhere along the way, JHD stopped being something that could only function if I was holding every piece of it together myself. That’s taken years.

Years of building a team. Years of creating processes. Years of getting things wrong, fixing them, trying something else, hiring people, saying goodbye to people, trusting people, and occasionally learning the hard way where we needed a better system.

I think that’s what this whole week was showing me.

The community showed up when I was having a hard week. The team could handle a problem without me. A transition didn’t automatically become an emergency. Someone with expertise could sit beside me and help me see the business more clearly.

None of those things required me to grip harder. Actually, they required the opposite.

They required me to let some of the things I’ve spent years building do what they were built to do. 

Hold some weight.

I think when you start a business, especially when it begins with you, there’s this natural belief that being responsible means carrying everything. For a while, maybe it does.

But if you build something for long enough, the hope is that eventually it becomes bigger than your own ability to carry it.

Strong enough that when you’re in a funk, people notice. Strong enough that when somebody leaves, everything doesn’t collapse. Strong enough that when a server goes down on a weekend, you don’t have to be the person awake fixing it.

It’s one of the stranger things about building anything that lasts.

You spend years trying to make it strong enough to stand on its own, and then when it finally starts doing that, you have to learn to stop holding onto it so tightly.

This week, I got a little practice.

I think I needed it.

Sometimes the thing you’ve spent years holding up is finally strong enough to hold you too.