Get Scalable

Get Scalable

It was half past midnight when Ryan Deiss got home. He opened the door quietly, the way he had every night for months. The living room light was on, though. His wife was sitting up, awake, and he could tell she had been crying.

Deiss was not a failed entrepreneur at that point. On paper he was the opposite. His company had spent years on the Inc. 500 and Inc. 5000 lists, among the fastest-growing businesses in America. Sales were at an all-time high. More customers, more people, bigger numbers every quarter.

Except the money in the bank kept draining. The balance had been trending down for months. One evening Deiss logged into the company account and could not make sense of what he was looking at. If my business is growing, then why the heck am I making less money?

After that, the rest came fast. He scrambled. He reset the strategy weekly and jumped on every shiny object. The culture turned toxic, his best people quit, and he covered payroll out of his personal savings. He worked twelve-hour days. He missed the soccer games, the dance recitals, the family dinners, and told himself the whole time that it was just a season.

Then came that night, and his wife's sentence: "You can keep doing what you're doing, but you can't pretend like you're doing it for us anymore."

That one landed hardest. Deiss had started the business as a broke college kid trying to scrape together enough for an engagement ring. Then came four kids, and each one handed him a fresh reason to push. And now it turned out the reason had not been true for years.

This is where it stops being just a sad founder story. Deiss did not end up there through laziness, and not through stupidity either. He ended up there precisely because he had done his job very well for years, alone. The more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is. Deiss calls this the Founder's Curse, and the whole book is about how you get out from under it.