I thought I was my company.It nearly did me in.
I've been building things my whole life. I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, in Czechoslovakia, where I watched an entire economy of capable people produce the bare minimum on purpose, because the system paid them to. That lesson never left: people act the way their context tells them to act. Change the context and the people change. It's the spine of how I coach today.
I started my first company before I was legally old enough to hold the business license.
Sold it around 2000. Moved to the US in 2003, then to Canada, where a company made me head of engineering and production with precisely zero formal education in either. I was lucky enough to be surrounded by people much smarter than me, and over time I became VP. When that company sold, I went back to two old colleagues who'd started a software company called Keboola and pitched them on a Canadian operation, which I then ran as its CEO.
That's where the wound is. I had tied my whole identity to my work, so when a later role started going badly, it didn't feel like a bad quarter. It felt like a verdict on me as a person. I was escaping into work, absent for big parts of my daughters' early years, and somewhere underneath convinced I just wasn't good enough. There was no villain and no slammed door. Just therapy, time, and a couple of years of small realizations until the penny dropped: I am not my company.
As a CEO I had a coach, Damian Byrne, and the difference between running a company without him and with him is the reason this practice exists. The fog of uncertainty thinned. I moved from being a 'thing maker' to a 'company builder.' So when a friend from my CEO peer group asked me to coach him, I said I'd never done it. His answer: "That's good, that means you're cheap. I'll be your guinea pig." That was seven years ago. He's still a client and a dear friend.
I never decided to become a coach. The people I was already helping told me who I was.
The organization is human, not a machine.
It has memory and desires, reflected in its people. So I don't show up with one framework and run every company through the same steps. I'm certified in several (Metronomics Coach, TLO Practitioner, Six Types of Working Genius Facilitator), intimately familiar with others (EOS, Scaling Up, etc. etc.) and I treat all of them as tools. The human is the point.
And the company should serve your life, not the other way around. Toward two weeks away without collapse. Toward a business worth selling or passing on. Toward remembering why you started.
The People Who Grew Me
I've been with my wife Janet for about a quarter of a century. She's an artist, and her illustrations are on every card in The CEO Game deck. She is also a clinical counselor - and helps me tremendously in my understanding of the psychology of what I do. We have two daughters, both deep into one form of art or another, and we live near Vancouver on a property we're slowly turning into a retreat center. My weekends go to woodworking, which I half-learned from my late uncle, a master furniture maker, and half-learned from trial and error. And more errors. I have a mild case of severe obsession with ramen.
