I built a business I hated. Here's how I didn't see it coming.

A heads up before we start: this one is longer than usual and more personal than practical. If you're here for the frameworks, Thursday's your issue — and it's a good one. If you want the story behind all of it, stay with me.

I was sitting in my naturopath's office, head still swimming, eyes still struggling to focus on anything without it drifting to the right.

She looked at me across her desk and asked, simply: "Why now?"

I looked at her confused. "What do you mean, why now? It's a viral ear infection."

"Kasey." She held my gaze. "This is stress. Why now? What's going on?"

And without thinking — without even a beat of hesitation — I burst into tears and said:

"I hate my job."

And then I immediately thought: what the hell am I even talking about?

I'm an entrepreneur. I built this. I made every decision that led to this exact moment. How do you hate a job you created for yourself?

That question is what this newsletter is about.

It had started a few weeks earlier, walking out of a coffee meeting with a prospect. I felt off — woozy, not quite myself, like something was slightly wrong with the air. I couldn't put my finger on it.

The next morning I woke up and the ceiling was moving. Not metaphorically. I focused on the light fixture above my bed and watched it drift to the right and circle back. My head was pounding.

Urgent care sent me for a CT scan to rule out a brain tumor. It wasn't a brain tumor — it was a viral ear infection, probably stress-triggered. They gave me valium and told me to rest.

I laughed. I went to the office.

Which tells you everything you need to know about where I was.

To understand the naturopath moment, you need a little backstory.

A couple of years earlier, I'd been approached by two brothers I'd met through my co-working space — and had become genuinely close with. The older one was one of my dearest friends at the time. I loved these guys. They ran an outsourced sales agency. I ran a marketing agency. We served the same market. They wanted to combine forces, build something bigger, and they wanted me to be the CEO.

I got excited fast. Within about six months of launching the new company together, I'd grown us from roughly $30K to nearly $98K in monthly recurring revenue. We were hiring. Things looked genuinely good.

And then they didn't.

The younger brother started making expensive unilateral decisions — giving his entire team raises without discussion — while blocking investments in my team, despite the fact that my department was the only profitable one and was floating everything else. I pushed back.

And almost overnight, I could feel the ground shifting underneath me.

The two of them came to me together and told me they wanted me to step back from the CEO role and make all decisions by committee. I agreed at first — I didn't want to blow up what we'd built.

I genuinely asked myself: maybe I'm the problem. Maybe I'm difficult. Maybe I don't deserve to lead this.

(I want you to hold that sentence. We'll come back to it.)

We had another conversation. I proposed instead that my team split back off as its own entity — we'd keep our clients, stay strategic partners, remain friends. Everyone agreed. We hugged it out.

Less than 24 hours later, they locked me out of my email and every company system. And started calling my clients to tell them I'd been a figurehead — that the younger brother had actually been running strategy all along.

I won't go into all the details, partly for legal reasons and mostly because it still makes my blood pressure spike to think about it. What I will tell you is this.

I spent the following month battling constant panic attacks, fighting to protect my team and keep my clients, preparing for potential litigation, and still delivering on major projects.

It was worse than my divorce. And my divorce was NOT easy.

Here's the part I don't always tell.

I survived it. I rebuilt. Over the better part of a year, I grew my business again — new clients, growing team, new projects. By early the following year, we'd hit $50K in monthly recurring revenue.

And at no point during any of that did I stop and ask myself: is this what I want?

I just ran. Hard and fast, because stopping felt like letting them win. Because I was so committed to proving — to them, to the industry, to myself — that I could build something without them, that the question of what I was building never came up.

Here's what I'd actually built by the time my eyes stopped focusing properly:

I had gotten completely away from everything that had made me fall in love with the work in the first place — big picture strategy, working directly with founders, the kind of creative problem-solving that makes you forget to eat lunch.

I had built a business designed to prove something. And it looked nothing like me.

That evening, after the naturopath appointment, I sat in bed with my journal.

And I finally let myself ask the question I'd been outrunning for the better part of a year:

What if I did something else? What would I do?

Not "how do I fix this business." Not "how do I grow faster." Just — what would I actually do, if I let myself choose?

I wasn't sure yet if it was even possible. But something shifted in the asking. A weight fell from my shoulders, the tension in my body softened, and my heart began to open up again.

The question itself felt like a door.

Here's the thing about what happened to me that I've thought about a lot since:

The betrayal didn't create the pattern. It just made it so much harder to find my way back out of it.

Long before those brothers ever came to me with a proposal, I was already the last person to see what I was actually good at. Years earlier, an international negotiator named Mickey Bergman invited me to lead workshops for entrepreneurs in Beirut — a UN-backed accelerator program, founders doing genuinely world-changing work. My first instinct was to say no. I was convinced I had nothing to offer them. I was sure they'd be disappointed.

They weren't. The feedback was overwhelming. One of the founders messaged me five years later to tell me how much it had meant.

Mickey saw it. The founders saw it. My first client Suzanne saw it so immediately she offered to hire me before I'd even decided to start a business.

I was the last to know.

The betrayal didn't install that pattern — it just weaponized it. It gave the voice that said maybe I'm the problem, maybe I don't deserve this a whole lot of new ammunition. And then I ran so hard to prove that voice wrong that I never stopped to ask whether the direction I was running had anything to do with who I was — or who I wanted to be.

That, if you read Thursday's newsletter, is the framework corporate installs. Or in my case, that a devastating partnership installed. It doesn't matter where it came from. What matters is whether you can see it running.

If you're building right now — whether you just left corporate last month or you've been at this for years — I want you to sit with this:

Are you building something designed for who you actually are? Or are you building something designed to prove a point to people who may not even be paying attention anymore?

What would you build if you stopped trying to win something and started asking what's actually true about you?

I'm not saying the answer comes easily. It didn't for me. It took a viral ear infection, a naturopath who wouldn't let me off the hook, and a journal entry I almost didn't write.

But the question is worth asking. Even if you're not ready to answer it yet.

In love and growth,

Kasey

P.S. This is Part 2 of a series I've been building for a while — the story of how I got from there to here, and what I learned along the way. If you want to read Part 1 — the Cuba trip, the Beirut workshops, and the single phone call that started all of this — it's here.

If you want to know what came next after the naturopath moment — how I actually rebuilt, what Essentialist CEO is really about, and why I'm more certain than ever that this is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing — that's Part 3. And I haven't written it yet. But I will.