Hi Reader,
You Knew in Week Three. You Always Do.
I had a Learn & Dine event with ten business owners recently, part of a Birthing of Giants cohort I'm leading here in Texas. Everyone at the table already knew their answer. Nobody had said it out loud yet, until I did.
I told the story about my Marketing Manager at woom USA. The one who looked perfect on paper. The one whose profile was almost the exact opposite of mine. It happened right in the middle of the year I went from $12M to $20M.
I fired him in early April 2020. Not April 2019, before anyone had heard of a pandemic. Early April 2020, weeks into the most disruptive quarter most of us had ever run a business through. That's when I finally made the call. Not when I first felt the friction. Not when the comments started ("you have too many ideas for the team," "we need more processes"). Months after I already knew.
He wasn't a peripheral hire either. He controlled hundreds of thousands of dollars in marketing spend, the website, the branding, the messaging carrying the entire growth year. The lesson wasn't just "fire faster." It was that I'd been hiring on gut feeling and a resume, and neither tells you whether someone's wiring fits the pace of your business. That's why I built a real process around it afterward. I wrote the full hiring story separately, with the tools I use now: Link is here
By the time I finished telling it at dinner, three other people were nodding before I got to the end. A controller someone knew was wrong within the first month, still there eight months later. A salesperson crushing his numbers while quietly wrecking the team around him. A business partnership that had been "almost over" for two years.
Every one of them already knew. They were just waiting for the moment it became undeniable, the way I waited for April 2020.
It's not only about who's on your team either. Same pattern with the friend who leaves you drained every time you see them. The relationship you keep out of history instead of how it actually feels now. You can't fire a friend the way you fire an employee, but you can still ask yourself the same question: what is this costing me, and how long have I already known it?
What it actually costs to wait:
- The opportunity cost of who, or what, could have been in that seat instead
- The energy your best people, or your own energy, quietly spends covering the gap, which is often why you don't notice the problem until you're already burned out from carrying it
- The cost to you: every hour spent managing friction instead of leading, or living
Sit with these. Actually write down your answers, don't just read past them.
- When did you first know, really know, not suspect? Name the week, not the year.
- What have you told yourself since then to make the delay feel reasonable? Write the actual sentence you've been using on yourself.
- What are you waiting for that would make this undeniable? Be specific. If you can't name the exact event or number, that's the answer.
- If nothing ever forces your hand, no crisis, no outside pressure, would you still be having this same conversation with yourself a year from now?
- Who in your personal life leaves you with less energy every time you see them, and how long have you already known it, without letting yourself say so?
You don't have to act this week. I didn't, for months. But write the answer down. Naming it is what made April 2020 possible in the first place. Everything after that was just timing.
If one of these landed, hit reply, I read them all.
Mathias Ihlenfeld | Entrepreneur | Coach | Advisor
P.S. If writing it down surfaces more than it resolves, that's normal. I've built a more personal process for this, part reflective exercise, part guided introspection, including a decision-making meditation, that goes deeper than a conversation usually gets you. Not for everyone. If you're sitting with one of these, reach out and we'll talk. And if you want to be in a room full of people doing this kind of work out loud, that dinner was part of a Birthing of Giants cohort I lead. The next one launches October 15.