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Entrepreneurship

From Lit to Lost

lost

A little while back I asked you a question. Are you lit?

I did not tell you what to do about it. I wanted you sitting with it, because most entrepreneurs go years without anyone asking it directly. Today I want to give you the rest of it.

Your Most Valuable Asset

In any business where entrepreneurship is still the central challenge, human energy is the most valuable asset you have. Not your systems. Not your funnel. Not your product roadmap. If you are running low on that asset, it is your biggest strategic challenge, regardless of what your other metrics say.

There is a simple way to tell whether you have earned the right to shift your attention to the mechanical side of the business, or whether you are still squarely in the entrepreneurship phase. It comes down to whether you have found a real concern nobody else is solving well, built something that actually solves it, and figured out how to get people to hear it and use it. If you can say yes to all of that, your attention belongs on business practices now. If you cannot, the bottleneck is the same one. Are you lit.

Lost, Then Found

If you are not lit, you are most likely lost. Not lost in a vague sense. Lost in a specific, diagnosable way, without a coherent answer to who you are, where you are going, and how you are going to get there.

But here is the part most people miss. You can resolve all of that, get completely clear on who you are and where you are going, and still not be lit. You can know the whole plan and simply not want to go there. That is a different problem, and it is more common than you would think. A lot of organizations mistake it for the goal. Competent, coherent, and hollow.

I have been calling the fixed state oriented, because it is the accurate word. But what it actually feels like from the inside is found. Relief. The sense of having arrived somewhere real after a period of wandering.

Vision Is Only Part of It

Mood does not come from one place. It comes from three sources working together, and vision is only one of them. You can have a beautifully clear vision and still not feel lit, because the other two are off.

Being lost or unlit is not a soft concern to get to eventually, after the operational and strategic stuff is handled. It is the primary strategic problem. Every decision you make while lost or unlit is suspect, no matter how sound it looks on paper, because it is being generated by someone without a coherent or resonant center.

Where the Work Actually Happens

So how do you get there. Any real vision work is an antidote to some degree, but the tool I trust most, and the one I return to again and again with clients, is the Vision/Traction Organizer® (V/TO®), a powerful map to help you chart a brilliant future for your business that you love. What makes it different is that it is built for congruence with the self. Not just a plausible plan on paper. One that actually fits who you structurally are.

Here is the piece almost everyone misses. People fill out their V/TO once and never return to it. Used correctly, refined and revisited over time, it is the antidote to being lost and the path to becoming lit. And it cannot happen alone. A document reviewed in solitude just confirms whatever you already believe. Conversation is what actually tests whether the plan still resonates.

Get Oriented. Get Lit.

The paper goes further into the other two things quietly shaping your mood, the old pattern most entrepreneurs never named, and what actually changes on the outside once you get lit.

Read it when you have twenty quiet minutes. It is the work underneath the work.

Article By Kevin Suboski

Entrepreneurial Leadership Coach & Founder of Livingston Entrepreneurial Academy

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Business, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Leadership

The Entrepreneur’s Dream: A reminder of what you set out to build, and why it is still within reach.

dream

Does this resonate for you? I would love to hear from you. I know writing it stirred something up in me.

There was a moment, before any of this got hard, when you saw it clearly. You knew what you wanted to build and you knew why it mattered. You could feel the life it would make possible, for the people you wanted to serve and for you. That picture had weight. It was the reason you were willing to leave something safe and start something of your own.

Then you started, and it turned out to be harder than anyone warned you. Somewhere in the long middle of running the business, the picture got quieter. When I sit with solopreneurs now and ask them about their ten year future, almost every single one tells me the same thing. They say, I just want to get to a place where I feel secure. It is the sound of someone who started with an enormous dream and slowly, honorably, under real pressure, began to set it down.

I want to ask you to pick it back up. In twenty years of working with entrepreneurs I have learned that the dream is more shared than you think, and far more reachable than it feels from inside the grind. So here is what I have come to believe the entrepreneur’s dream actually is. Not the party lifestyle version. The real one.

To make a difference in the world

Under everything else, entrepreneurs are empathetic people who cannot comfortably watch a concern go unmet. You look at the world and you see people trying to take care of something that matters to them, and not being served well, and it bothers you in a way you cannot put down. You obsess about it. You invent a better way.

People assume it is about the money. More often you left because you were being asked to deliver something to the people you served that you knew was not good enough, and you could not make it right inside the structure you were given. Making a difference is the deepest driver, and it is the part of the dream that is most worth protecting.

With people you adore

We do not have endless compassion for everyone. None of us do. We each have a particular kind of person we genuinely adore, whose concerns land on us as if they were our own. When you are working with that person, helping them feels less like labor and more like the point of the whole thing.

One of the compromises that pulls a business off course is the moment you start saying yes to anyone, because you need the revenue. The dream you started with was never to serve everyone. It was to serve a certain kind of person who fits you so well that helping them is its own reward.

Doing the work you love

There is a hidden ambition almost every entrepreneur carries and almost none of them say out loud. They want a business that runs without them. It sounds like laziness. It is the opposite. It is the expression of a deeper desire to spend your days inside the work you were actually built for.

Entrepreneurs tend to be visionaries, strategists, culture builders, relationship people. The repetitive, grinding maintenance work is what slowly kills us. The dream is to get the business to a place where you spend your time in your gift, surrounded by people who are brilliant at and love the very work you do not.

Earning real money, by the value you create

Yes, entrepreneurs want money, real money. The problem was never that money is on this list. The problem is where the world insists on putting it. Everything around you pushes money to the front and treats it as the first and ultimate reason to build anything at all. Notice that here it comes in at number four, not number one. That placement is the whole argument.

There is a caveat that matters just as much. We want to make money, and we are not willing to do anything to make it. There are offers we will not sell, people we will not become, and value we will not fake, no matter what it would pay. The quiet irony is that holding that line is also how the money actually comes. We want the money. We want to have earned it. And we are not willing to sell ourselves out to get it.

Living a full life

The last piece is the one people sacrifice first and regret most. So many entrepreneurs end up working eighty to a hundred hours a week, letting their closest relationships fray, putting every other passion on a shelf they tell themselves they will get back to. That is not the dream. That is the dream deferred so long it starts to look like the cost of doing business.

The business that expresses your entrepreneurial dream is running well enough that you are not chained to it. A full life is not the reward you get after the dream. It is part of the dream itself.

Here is to the dream

You are not alone in carrying this picture, and the compromises you have made along the way are temporary, not permanent. They were the honest cost of getting through a hard stretch, not a verdict on what you are capable of.

The first step is the simplest and the hardest. It is to let yourself believe again that the dream is reachable, and to decide that you are going to find the way.

There is a way. I promise you that.

Article By Kevin Suboski

Entrepreneurial Leadership Coach & Founder of Livingston Entrepreneurial Academy

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Why Brilliant Businesses Work

understand

There is a particular kind of entrepreneur I find most interesting.

Not the one who is struggling to survive, though I have enormous respect for that fight. Not the one who has achieved a comfortable level of success and is content to stay there.

The one I mean is the entrepreneur who wants to build something exceptional. Something people talk about. A business that leads its industry rather than follows it. A business with the kind of margins and reputation that reflect genuine mastery, not just adequate execution.

I have spent a long time studying what separates those businesses from the rest. What I have found is not what most people expect. It is not strategy in the conventional sense. It is not systems, though systems matter. It is not hustle, mindset, or even talent, though all of those play a role.

What separates the genuinely exceptional business is the depth of development of the person leading it and the quality of their understanding of what a business actually is.

The Three Domains Every Entrepreneur Must Develop

If you want to build a brilliant business, you need to develop across three distinct domains: entrepreneurship, leadership, and business. Most people conflate these domains, which is part of why brilliance is so rare.

Entrepreneurship is the innermost domain. It is about the person. Your capacity to read the world accurately, think strategically, navigate your own mood as a navigational instrument rather than a weather event, and create offers that are genuinely worth making.

Leadership is the middle domain. It is about your capacity to transmit vision and build genuine commitment in others rather than mere compliance. You cannot scale a vision you cannot transmit, and you cannot transmit it without genuine human leadership capacity.

Business is the third domain. Here is the thing most people get wrong: you do not need to be masterful at business to build a brilliant business. You need to be competent. You need a system that creates structure, accountability, and rhythm. The ceiling is rarely raised by better mechanics. More often, it is raised by deeper entrepreneurial and leadership development.

The Most Useful Definition of a Business I’ve Ever Found

One of the most influential ideas I have encountered came from my teacher Toby Hecht, who used to say that a business is a network of commitments among human beings.

The longer I work with organizations, the more convinced I become that this is the most precise and useful description of what a business actually is.

Not a machine. Not an organizational chart. Not a collection of tasks.

A network of commitments among human beings.

Work gets done because people make requests of one another and respond to those requests. Promises are made and either fulfilled or broken. Coordination happens through conversation. Performance is not primarily a function of effort, intelligence, or even talent. It is a function of the quality of commitments being made and how reliably they are fulfilled over time.

Most businesses are taught and managed as though they are machines. Inputs. Outputs. Processes. Metrics. That framing has utility, but it also hides something important. The machine is made of people, and people operate through commitment, not mechanism.

Once you see this, you cannot unsee it.

The Hidden Reason Business Systems Work

I implement EOS with many of my clients, and most explanations for its success point to accountability, discipline, clarity, and cadence. Those explanations are accurate, but they describe what happens rather than why it happens.

A good business system works because it operationalizes the commitment structure of an organization. It makes commitments visible. It creates rhythm around whether promises are being kept. It surfaces breakdowns before they become crises. It helps people coordinate more effectively, often before they fully understand what the system is actually doing.

Most companies can implement a system before they understand it. At some point, however, the difference between companies that achieve genuine excellence and those that plateau at solid performance comes down to whether the people leading the business understand what is happening beneath the surface.

When they do, they stop using the system mechanically and begin using it with precision. And precision is where mastery lives.

Why Systems Alone Are Never Enough

A brilliant business begins with a developed entrepreneur. Not brilliant in the sense of innate genius, but brilliant in the sense of being developed across the capacities that actually determine the quality of what gets built.

The ability to read the world clearly. The ability to navigate mood skillfully. The ability to design intentionally rather than reactively. The ability to create offers worth making. The ability to cherish the people you serve.

That last distinction matters more than most people realize.

Cherishing is not sentiment. It is not niceness. It is holding another person’s concerns as though they were your own.

When entrepreneurs cherish their customers, the offers they create are fundamentally different from those created from a transactional orientation. When they cherish their teams, they generate a different quality of commitment. When they cherish the work itself, they build organizations people genuinely want to be part of.

Becoming the Entrepreneur Your Business Needs

Get your business system in place and run it well. It will give you structure, accountability, rhythm, and visibility.

But do not stop there.

Understand what the system is actually doing. Develop your ability to read the world clearly. Learn to navigate mood as an instrument rather than experience it as weather. Design with intention. Cherish the people around you.

The system gets you in the game. What you bring to it determines how far you go.

If these ideas resonate with you, I invite you to download the full white paper. In it, I unpack the six components of EOS through the lens of human commitment, explore why some companies get dramatically more from the same system than others, and examine the entrepreneurial capacities that sit beneath every truly exceptional business.

The question is not whether you have the right system.

The question is whether you are becoming the entrepreneur that system is waiting for.

This article is adapted from my white paper, Why Brilliant Businesses Work. Download the full paper below to explore these ideas in greater depth.

Article By Kevin Suboski

Entrepreneurial Leadership Coach & Founder of Livingston Entrepreneurial Academy

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Building the Premium Company: How Human-Centered Leadership Creates Entrepreneurial Organization

human centered

Most companies compete by trying to be slightly better than their competitors. They improve efficiency, they manage costs and work harder to execute. 

But the companies that truly dominate their markets operate differently.

They become the premium offer.

Customers prefer them, employees want to work there and competitors struggle to match the experience they create.

Over time these companies often achieve industry-leading margins and build reputations that endure for decades.

When you look closely, something interesting appears.

The advantage is rarely just the product.

It is the organization itself.

These companies maintain an entrepreneurial spirit even as they grow. They continue to innovate. They constantly evolve their offer to take better and better care of their customers.

And most importantly, they build organizations where people bring their intelligence, creativity, and care fully into the work.

This is not an accident.

It is the result of how leadership is practiced throughout the company.

The Hidden Constraint in Growing Companies

Most organizations begin with entrepreneurial energy.

The founder is deeply committed. Early employees care about the mission. Decisions are fast and creative.

But as the company grows, the leadership challenge changes.

Managers are promoted for their technical competence, but have never been taught how to lead people. Communication becomes more complex, alignment becomes harder and energy begins to dissipate.

Gradually the company drifts toward a model of leadership based on control, pressure, and optimization.

I call this the Zombie Operating System™ of business.

It is the default model most organizations inherit, and it produces predictable outcomes: disengagement, burnout, and the slow erosion of the culture that originally made the company special.

The alternative is what I call the Human Operating System™.

This approach recognizes a simple truth: healthy, inspired, committed people perform better.

When people feel genuinely cared for, connected to meaningful work, and trusted to contribute their intelligence, organizations become far more powerful.

This is the foundation of Human-Centered Leadership.

The Art of Entrepreneurial Leadership

For over twenty years, I have been working with entrepreneurs and leadership teams through a framework called The Art of Entrepreneurial Leadership (AEL).

Originally developed for founders, AEL focuses on how entrepreneurs mobilize people without relying on positional authority.

Entrepreneurs lead primarily through:

    • vision
    • care
    • trust
    • shared commitment

These same capabilities are exactly what allow companies to grow without losing their entrepreneurial spirit.

When leadership throughout the company operates from this orientation, something remarkable happens.

People care about the work.

They take ownership of outcomes.

They collaborate more effectively.

And the organization continuously evolves its offer to better serve customers.

Over time this produces exactly what most CEOs want:

A company that becomes the premium offer in its marketplace.

Scaling Human-Centered Leadership

Building this kind of organization requires more than a single training program.

It requires a structured approach to developing leadership throughout the company.

The process typically includes three elements.

Foundational Leadership Education

Leaders across the organization learn the fundamental distinctions of Human-Centered Leadership.

These ideas create a shared language for leadership and establish the principles that guide how the company operates.

Leadership Practice Inside the Company

Leaders regularly engage in structured conversations about how the principles apply to real challenges.

This moves leadership from theory into daily practice and ensures that the culture evolves intentionally rather than drifting.

Ongoing Reinforcement

Leadership cultures require reinforcement as the company grows.

Through periodic retreats and advanced workshops, organizations deepen their understanding of Human-Centered Leadership and address the real challenges that emerge over time.

The Result

Companies that commit to this work often discover that leadership becomes one of their greatest competitive advantages.

Employees become more engaged. Customers feel the difference. Innovation increases.

The organization becomes known not only for what it sells, but for the experience it creates.

This is the foundation for becoming the premium offer in your market, achieving industry-leading margins, and building a company that can endure for generations.

Building a premium company begins with how leadership is practiced throughout the organization.

If you’re interested in building a company where people bring their intelligence, creativity, and care fully into the work, this approach may be worth exploring.

I work with founders and leadership teams who want to scale their organizations without losing the entrepreneurial spirit that made them successful in the first place.

If you’d like to explore whether Human-Centered Leadership could strengthen your organization, you can schedule a conversation with me. I’d love to hear about what you’re building.

Article By Kevin Suboski

Entrepreneurial Leadership Coach & Founder of Livingston Entrepreneurial Academy

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Entrepreneurship

Reading the World: What Entrepreneurs Need to See Right Now

article 1

There’s something in the air right now that’s hard to ignore.

If you’re building something, how you interpret this moment will shape what you do next.

People feel it in different ways. Some feel frustrated, anxious, or like the system just doesn’t work anymore. More often than not, I hear a version of the same thought: “Something is wrong… and I don’t think it’s going to get better.”

I’ve been spending some time sitting with that. Not trying to argue with it. Not trying to fix it. Just trying to understand what might actually be going on underneath it.

Here’s a what I’m starting to see.

What’s Actually Breaking Down

Most people think what we’re experiencing is primarily economic or political. That it’s about inflation, inequality, elections, policy, or “late-stage capitalism.”

I don’t think that’s wrong, but I don’t think it tells the whole story.

What I’m seeing is that we’re in the middle of something deeper.

We’re losing a shared way of understanding the world.

There used to be a set of assumptions most people operated inside of. Work hard and you can get ahead. Institutions are generally trustworthy, and the system, while imperfect, basically works.

That shared understanding made coordination possible. It allowed people to make decisions, take risks, and move forward with some level of confidence.

What I’m noticing now is that this shared understanding is beginning to crumble.

Different Realities, Not Just Different Opinions

Some people still believe the system works, that opportunity is there, that things are fundamentally okay if you play the game well.

Others are looking at the exact same world and seeing something very different. They see a system that is rigged, institutions that don’t take care of people, and a future that feels increasingly uncertain.

And here’s the important part:

These are not just different opinions.

They are different realities.

When that happens, coordination becomes difficult. Conversations feel impossible, trust erodes, and everything starts to feel more unstable than it actually is.

The Stories We Start to Tell

As human beings, we are wired to look for threats. We imagine worst-case scenarios and then treat them as if they are inevitable.

So when the shared understanding starts to break down, our biology kicks in. We start to tell ourselves stories about where this is going.

“This is the beginning of the end.”

“This is how it all falls apart.”

“This is permanent.”

Those stories feel true, but they are not always accurate.

A Different Way to Look at This Moment

There’s a model I’ve been revisiting lately, from The Fourth Turning Is Here, that suggests societies move through recurring phases. Periods of stability, questioning, unraveling, and crisis where things are reorganized.

I’m not interested in treating that as a rigid prediction. But it offers a useful orientation.

If you look at what’s happening right now through that lens, it’s not hard to see that we may be in one of those crisis phases. A period where existing structures are no longer holding the way they used to, and something new is forming.

That can be uncomfortable and disruptive, but it is not the same as everything falling apart permanently.

The Role of the Entrepreneur

If you’re an entrepreneur, this moment matters.

While many people respond by pulling back or assuming the worst, entrepreneurs have a different role.

Actually, they have two.

The first is practical.

If you can see that we are in a period of breakdown and reorganization, you can position your business accordingly. Pay attention to where things are not working, where people are frustrated, and where systems are failing to take care of them, and create offers that meet those needs.

There is real economic opportunity in moments like this for those who can see clearly.

The second role is even more important.

Entrepreneurs are one of the few groups that can respond to breakdowns by creating something new that actually works.

When large institutions lose trust, most people don’t have the ability to change them. They can vote, they can complain, or they can withdraw.

Entrepreneurs can build.

They can restore trust in small, meaningful domains. They can create products, services, and experiences that take care of people in ways the larger system currently is not.

In that sense, entrepreneurship is not just an economic activity.

It is a social function.

And in periods like this, it becomes essential.

Where Opportunity Actually Lives

There’s a subtle shift available here.

If you start to see what’s happening not as “everything is broken,” but as “there are breakdowns in how things are working,” you begin to see possibility again.

Breakdowns are where entrepreneurship lives.

It means recognizing the difference between what is actually happening, what we are telling ourselves about it, and how we choose to respond.

Because the stories we adopt in moments like this shape the actions we take. And those actions shape the results we get.

A Question to Sit With

For now, I’ll leave you with a question:

Where, in your world, are things not working the way they should… and what would it look like to take care of that?

Article By Kevin Suboski

Entrepreneurial Leadership Coach & Founder of Livingston Entrepreneurial Academy

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