The Wanting Doesn’t Stop When You Hit the Number. Here’s What to Do With That.
I spent time recently at an event for seven and nine-figure female founders.
These are women who have built real things. Who have hit the numbers that most people use as the finish line. And the conversations I kept having were not about what they were launching next or what was performing or where the growth was coming from.
They were about what they actually wanted.
The more vulnerable people were, the more honest they became about having built something that no longer fit where they are now. About being in a season that the business was not designed for. About running something they are proud of and also exhausted by. About the gap between what they said they wanted and what they can feel is missing.
One thing kept surfacing across every conversation: the question of what is enough.
Not in a defeated way. In a real way. In the way that someone who has climbed a long way asks it because she has earned the right to and is brave enough not to pretend she has the answer.
My Husband Asked Me a Question I Did Not Expect
Eric has been open about his struggle with depression. He brought it up recently in a conversation we were having, one of those conversations that happens in the evening when the kids are down and there is enough quiet to hear each other.
He asked me: what do you really want? What does your ideal life look like?
And I sat with it. Because I spend a lot of time asking other people that question and not as much time answering it for myself. And when I thought about it, my honest answer was: we're pretty close. We moved back to Texas, which is where I am from. We built a home I love. My work bought us a million-dollar house. The things I said I wanted, I mostly have.
And I still want more.
I still want better. I still want growth. I still feel pulled toward something I have not built yet. And as I sat with that, the question underneath it became uncomfortable: if I have what I said I wanted and I still want more, what exactly am I chasing? And will there ever be a point where the wanting stops?
I am not sure there should be. Ambition is not a problem to solve. But chasing more without stopping to ask what specifically you want more of, that is where things go sideways. That is where you end up at the top of something and realize it was the wrong mountain.
What People at the Top Are Talking About
The women in that room had all done something rare. They had built real businesses. They had the revenue and the team and the proof that it worked. And most of them were sitting in a version of the same discomfort.
The business had been built for a season they were no longer in. Or for a version of success they had absorbed from someone else. Or at a pace that required them to be everything all the time, and now that pace is not sustainable but everything is so interconnected that changing one thing feels like changing all of it.
Nobody gets to turn parenting off. Even when help is in place, the mental load stays. Nobody gets to fully step back from their business until the business is built to hold without them, and building it to hold without them requires time and energy they do not currently have because they are spending it running the thing.
This is the loop. And most women I know are living inside it.
What I kept hearing in those conversations was not failure. It was maturity. The kind of maturity that comes from actually building something and discovering what it costs and asking whether the cost is one you chose. And the more honest those conversations got, the more I realized that what most of these women wanted was not more. It was different. It was better. It was a version of what they had built that had more room in it.
The Year I Have Had
2026 has been the most reflective, eye-opening, and challenging year I have had in as long as I can remember. A lot was added to my plate. A lot of it was temporary. All of it was heavy.
And in the middle of it, I realized something I had been teaching for years but had not fully confronted in my own business: my businesses have also been founder dependent. I have spent fifteen years helping other women redesign their infrastructure, build teams, create systems, and step back. And I have also let my own business require me in ways I would push back against if a client described them to me.
That realization did not make me feel like a fraud. It made me feel like a human. Because this is the thing about the work: knowing it does not protect you from the pattern. You have to choose, repeatedly, to interrupt it. And I have not always chosen that as consistently as I teach it.
I think about the women I work with who have been in prolonged seasons of running on empty. Who have been carrying the business and the family and the mental load of both for years without pause. Who have told themselves this is just a season so many times the season stopped having an end date. My hard this year has been real. And it has also been a window into what most of my clients have been managing for far longer.
That is not a guilt spiral. It is a clarification of purpose. This is why I do this work. Not because I figured it out cleanly. Because I am in it too.
The Question Worth Answering
What do you really want?
Not what you are working toward. Not what is on your goals document. Not what would impress the people in your industry. What do you want your life to look like?
Most people have not answered that question lately. They have answered a version of it that was shaped by what they saw other people doing, what felt ambitious enough to say out loud, what the next logical milestone was from where they were standing. That is not the same thing.
Answer it now. Close the gap between what you say you want and what you are building toward. Because if you are making decisions based on what you think you should do, what social media says looks like success, what other people will recognize and reward, you are building someone else's business inside your life.
What do you want your life to look like? What do you want to have built when you look back at this season? Not just in revenue terms. In time terms. In presence terms. In who you were when your kids were this age terms.
Filter your next decision through that. Not through what is possible. Not through what other people are doing. Through what you want. And then ask whether what you are about to commit to is moving you toward that or away from it.
The Regret I Think About
I think a lot about our generation of founders and regret.
We are ambitious in a way that previous generations of women were not allowed to be. We built companies. We had the kids. We did both. And we are proud of that, and we should be.
And I wonder how many of us are going to look back and realize that in the years when our kids were small and our bodies were capable and our people were here, we were somewhere else. Not physically. Somewhere else in our heads. Somewhere in the next quarter, the next launch, the next goal.
We are not going to get those years back. There is no rewind. There is also no pause button. The years pass at the same speed whether we are present for them or not.
Build something that lets you be in your life while you are building it. A business that requires you to miss your life in order to run it is not freedom, no matter what it pays.
Where to Go If This Landed
If you are in a season where the business feels heavier than it should, where you are working hard and something still feels off, where you know you need someone to look at the whole picture and tell you what is in the way: the Founders Business Analysis is where to start.
It’s free. You fill out a short form, I review your business, and we meet on a private business review call where I tell you the biggest constraint, where you are leaving money on the table, and what I would stop, simplify, or change. For a lot of women, that call is the first time someone has looked at their business as a whole and told them the truth about what they are dealing with.
And if you are ready to go further, to redesign the infrastructure so the business holds without requiring everything from you, I am booking into 2027 now, including VIP days. Send me a message and we will find the right fit.
You built this. It can work differently. And you do not have to figure out how alone.
