I nearly shut down Gallantway completely in 2022

In 2022 a member of my team missed his flight to an important client trip because he slept in.

He got the next one. And showed up to the client lunch in a hoodie.

I was sitting there in a suit with the rest of our team looking the part. I smiled, said nothing, and ordered another water.

That was the moment I knew something had to change. Not because of him. Because of me. Because I was so hollowed out I couldn't even summon the energy to be angry. I just sat there thinking: I cannot do this for another ten years.

This was Gallantway in 2022. Not failing. Working. And I was miserable.

We had survived COVID, but I was waking up dreading opening my inbox. No creation, no feeling of momentum despite some great work from our team. Just output and no light at the end of the tunnel. The business had become my entire identity and it had hollowed me out. Multiple rounds of burnout will do that. Ask most agency founders and they may likely tell you the same.

The cruel irony is that by 2022 I'd finally begun to piece together a genuinely good team. This was after what felt like an extended international tour of bad hires - people who were creative in their approach to showing up, enthusiastic about leaving early, and in a couple of memorable cases, creative about which clients were actually theirs.

The good ones had arrived. But I was already gone.

My partner Maria was the one who named it. She told me I needed to end it. I ignored it and thought I could just grind through it. I tried. But she was right.

So I wound it back. Kept a few clients. Gave myself space to ask a question I'd never actually asked:

What is this business for?

Not in a revenue sense. In a life sense.

The answer I landed on changed how I build everything now.

The business exists to serve the life we are building - not the other way around. We think about the life we want first. The business is designed around that. Not hoped to land there eventually. Our definition of wealth now fundamentally includes health, as an asset. More on this later.

This sounds simple. But it isn't the default.

Most founder culture runs the opposite sequence. Build hard, sacrifice now, the life follows (hopefully). I believed that. I lived it. And what it produced was a version of success I didn't want to wake up to. One I definitely did not want to work in. And one I couldn't do sustainably for another ten plus years.

I'm not saying there isn't sacrifice, or hard work, or grind. There absolutely should be.

But sustainability isn't just a business model question. It's a body question too.

The thing I've come to understand - slowly, through burnout and a few near-quit moments - is that how you build and create is inseparable from your health. Not just mentally. Physically. The chronic stress, the identity collapse into work, the absence of genuine recovery - it compounds negatively the same way good habits compound positively.

I'm building differently now. Deliberately. With longevity as a design principle - for the business, myself and our family.

It's slower in some ways. It's more sustainable in every way that matters.

If you're in the consumed phase right now - I'm not judging it. I lived it.

But I'd ask you the question nobody asked me:

What is the business actually for?