Patrick O'Cain's first restaurant, Gan Shan Station in Asheville, was doing well. By every measure anyone could see from the outside, it was a success. Then, as he told me on my podcast, What Holds, he "got a little bit itchy." He loves opening restaurants, the whole process of it, being there and walking through the construction. When the chance came to open a second, Gan Shan West, he took it.
"The energy that it took to run both restaurants far surpassed the energy that I had," he said, "and so I was running over a hundred percent for years and then ultimately burned out."
The stretch when everything is working
Many founders know that itch. The first thing works, so the next one seems obvious: a second location, a new product line, a bigger round, a larger team. Everyone around you is saying what a good job you're doing, and the numbers back them up. It's easy to tell yourself the strain is just the cost of success, and that you'll get to the relationships and the health and the rest of it eventually.
Some founders in that stretch are having fun. Most of the ones I talk with aren't. The success isn't fun, and they thought it would be, but they persist in pushing anyway.
Red flags that look like a carnival
There's a meme I still think is hysterical. A client sits across from a therapist, who asks, "Didn't you see the red flags?" The client says, "Yes! But I thought it was a carnival!"
I had my own small version of this last spring. After all these decades, I decided to learn piano, and I practiced a couple of hours a day from the first week. I was having so much fun and getting better so fast that the pain building in my wrist never registered as a problem. A few weeks in, the tendons were so inflamed that I had to stop, and six months later I still can't play. My wrist had been telling me for weeks, but I didn't listen. It absolutely looked like a carnival to me, and I went all in.
Founders do the same thing on a much larger scale, and growth makes it harder to notice, because so much of what they hear is good news. They may work more, step in more, or get angry faster, and each of those is easy to explain away as the company grows.
Listening early
Things left unattended long enough become real injuries, and real injuries take far longer to heal than they would have if you had listened early. If I had stopped when my wrist first hurt, I'd be past my first recital by now, the one I had planned for eight friends and my dog, Lucy. Instead, I'll have to start all the way over once it heals. For a founder, the equivalent might be a year spent recovering from burnout, or a relationship that doesn't come back from the strain.
Looking back, Patrick told me that with the right structure in place, he might have seen that it wasn't the time to open Gan Shan West. He didn't mean never, just not yet. It took him "a certain degree of self-awareness, vulnerability," he said, to admit that he could keep doing something and that it was wearing on him anyway. He has since sold both restaurants, and today he helps other owners build that structure while things are still going well.
If you're in the most successful stretch you've ever had and it doesn't feel the way you thought it would, that deserves your attention now, before it turns into an injury. You can probably keep going. Before you add the next thing, it may be worth asking what this is costing you, and whether now is the time.
Listen to my conversation with Patrick O'Cain: When the Business You Built Starts to Cost Too Much
I work privately with a small number of founders each year. If something here sounds familiar, you can write to me personally.