Imagine this…

You’re a 400-meter hurdler at your first Olympics. Getting to this moment has taken a lifetime of everything: training, sacrifice, support, practice, dedication, more training.

You’re at the starting line next to eight other competitors. Each one of them has gone through exactly what you have to get here — to a moment that will take less than 47 seconds to be over.

You look at the runners in the lanes to your right, then to your left. Your mind starts wandering into other people’s lanes. It starts reaching for anything and everything except what matters most.

What was their training like?

Is their warm-up routine better than mine?

Did they get the better lane?

Then, the gun goes off. And you’re already chasing.

You came here to go further, faster. But now you’re running like a fugitive instead.

Your focus needed to be in one place: on the first hurdle and the finish line. In your lane.

This happens to business builders all the time. It’s not an analogy about competition or falling behind. It’s about stolen attention — the kind that cunningly pulls us off purpose before we even realize we’ve left.

I’ve been saying “running’s for fugitives” for years without fully excavating what it means. This is the excavation.

“I Meant It — At The Time”

It’s no secret that I’ve had two business partnership divorces in my entrepreneurship career that started in 2008. Like any divorce, they were professionally and emotionally costly and painful. Although it could be a source of shame, after asking around, I found that break-ups are a pretty common cost of doing business.

That doesn’t solve the frustration, but it eases the embarrassment.

I remember the beginning of the end of my last one: a group fitness business.

My partner and I had spent hours one afternoon debating how we were going to price a seasonal special we typically ran. They had, for years, kept the price insanely low — which meant that clients delayed purchasing classes for the special to arrive. This created two problems. First, feast-or-famine cash flow cycles. Second, those same cycles were depressed, because they were based on discounted pricing.

Rough way to run a business.

My partner wanted to keep the seasonal special at the familiar low rate, because the community loved it. I wanted to nudge it up, because the business deserved and needed it. After hours of hard debate, we agreed raising the price was the responsible thing to do.

Or so I thought… until the next day.

There it was in my inbox: our annual email announcing our seasonal special… with the original irritatingly low pricing.

When I confronted my partner about what we had agreed, they responded: “I meant it — at the time. Plus, I was afraid we’d upset our clients, that they might not like us, and we could use the cashflow.”

There are a lot of hidden stories in that response. People pleasing, needing to be liked, self-value and -worth conversations, fear of losing clients. Had they agreed with me the day before as a way of escaping the conflict, I wondered.

Taken on its own, this was a pretty small disagreement. But those stories became part of snowballing cycles of conflict avoidance, approval seeking, personality navigation, and risky revenue practices that kept us playing small. They create pure friction and tension that drag on any business. Much of it was internally — and unknowingly — self-manufactured.

That friction is a living, breathing example of lots of motion and little momentum.

My partner wasn’t being intentionally malicious, and they definitely were not incompetent. They just operated on some pretty consistent patterns that weren’t right for the way I comfortably operate. Each of us brought our own blind spots, insecurities, and hidden stories to a situation that was ever harder to communicate in.

With the right awareness, that’s a kind of chaos that can be avoided and mitigated. You don’t even need a partner to experience this sort of challenge. I speak with many solo founders and entrepreneurs who are moving along hectically with similar patterns.

In the end, our break-up opened something up for me. It came at a time of a big geographic move and a shift in my business. It also turned into an opportunity to more fully understand the patterns, stories, and behaviors I was carrying.

Maybe This Sounds Like You

You’re a solo founder or an entrepreneur with a small team. Forging your own path is hard. You feel every risk and carry lots of weight while building something that truly matters. You’ve tied your identity, your pride, to this thing you’re creating — the kind of work that measurably improves the lives of the clients you serve.

Much of what you’re creating is built around your personality, your perspective, your passionate energy, your process. Even if you have a team around you, it’s your point of view that fuels the engine. You and your business are at a pivotal moment — one where you’re evolving up, forward, or maybe even out.

Most days, it feels like you and what you’re creating are one and the same. It’s impossible to distinguish where you end and your business begins. There’s little daylight between them.

When you started this endeavor, putting more and more of you into it made sense. You had to do, be, and lead all the things to get this off the ground. Over time, it gets hard to maintain that level of YOU consistently and sustainably.

We find ourselves saying things like:

“I can’t make another decision this week.”

“I don’t even know if I’m good at this.”

“Other people know better. What if I get found out?”

“I can’t seek growth help… until I’ve reached a different level.”

“It’s scary to stand up for my own needs.”

“I keep waiting for permission to change — to stop shrinking myself.”

“I have to be the one to do this. I have to figure it out first.”

“I know I should stop doing [fill in the blank], but it’s just faster if I do it.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing. I need systems.”

“I feel like I’m swimming upstream.”

“Sometimes, I just feel like firing myself from my own business.”

A Dog That Chases Two Rabbits

Every one of these is the byproduct of over-extending, over-committing, over-thinking, over-functioning. All of them legitimately started from some necessity — or belief about necessity. All of them with their own kind of “Hoof it. The fuzz!” fugitive energy.

The entrepreneur who tells themselves “I need to take every client that comes my way right now” is a classic example. Although they might have well-articulated rationalizations for that view, both the chase and the actual work often end up overwhelming and exhausting.

Focus and energy are limited resources. Spread across too many priorities, those resources deplete quickly. A dog that tries chasing two rabbits catches none. And yet, that’s what business owners do all the time.

This isn’t leading to a conversation about work-life balance or self-care. I’m not that guy.

What really keeps most founders from going further faster when they’re building something that matters?

Confusion. Systemic, core-level confusion. About what they actually want, why they’re doing it, what they’re allowed to ask for, where they’re pointed. And instead of staying in it long enough to hear what it’s telling them, they run. Urgently. Desperately. That’s the fugitive run. That’s the whole thing.

Confusion in a founder’s business is both internal and navigational.

Internal confusion lives in unclear values, motives, intentions, expectations, roles, beliefs, and hidden stories. That’s the internal structure that holds us up — or doesn’t. Maybe it was clear at one point, but the founder has lost sight of it.

Navigational confusion is about orientation — unclear purpose, vision, direction, priorities, permission structure, self-understanding. It explains where we’re pointed and why we’re pointed there.

Confusion is both the cause and the natural consequence of an unclear core. A well-trained core means a stable base. If a trained core makes us feel stable and grounded, an unclear one does the opposite. Confusion and the running from it become a repeating cycle. The natural response is to start running — in any direction — fleeing out of low-level desperation in search of clarity.

Confusion creates misdirected urgency.

Confusion Is Just A Place

For solo and small entrepreneurs, there’s very little difference between what is personal and what is business. The two are an inextricably interconnected system. Confusion in one part creates tension in another.

Remember my pricing example that became the beginning of the end of a partnership? My partner’s fear of upsetting clients drove a decision to keep the seasonal discount insanely low. We were selling low-cost brand and customer loyalty. Once you start selling it cheaply, it’s very hard to stop. That decision created feast-or-famine cash flow cycles. Those cycles kept the business playing small. And playing small kept us in a constant state of chasing: urgent, reactive, exhausting.

Trace it backward: the action (discount pricing) came from a decision (keep it low), which came from a strategy (keep people happy), which came from a belief (they won’t like us if we charge more), which came from a core confusion about what the business was actually worth and what we were allowed to ask for.

A yogi friend of mine likes to say “Confusion is just a place.” She means it’s not a permanent condition. It’s not even necessarily a problem.

The problem happens when we start running, because we’ve decided that uncertainty feels dangerous. Confusion that starts in one place moves through every layer of the business — from the story running underneath all the way to the price on the email.

By changing nothing, we choose our own friction.

The Compass

The solution, for a fugitive in perpetual motion, isn’t running harder, doing more, better tactics, or a new system. It’s slowing down, going back to the source, and asking better questions to clear the underlying confusion.

That’s my job. A long time ago, I trained and worked as an historian. The job of the historian isn’t simply to list the who, what, and when of events. The job is about inquiry. It’s about asking the different kinds of questions in ways that pierce prevailing understanding and provoke different perspectives.

I’ve got a friend who’s building a professional advising firm. We’ll leave the details vague to protect her anonymity, but she’s badass at what she does. In the early days of her business, she said she wanted to build “the number one woman-owned professional advising firm in the country.”

I’m all for ambitious aspirations that make us stretch. But as we dug into this, some things didn’t add up. Together, we investigated her actual motives and intentions and concluded that what she actually wanted was something different: a smaller firm that allowed her to serve clients in her industry-defying and unique way. One that also gave her financial freedom, time for the kids, and the ability to sometimes do yoga in the middle of the day.

Reacting to stereotypical expectations within her industry, my friend convinced herself that her goal had to be huge to be valid. She was working on borrowed beliefs and trying to run a race not of her own choosing. Building a business that fits is every bit as courageously aspirational as building “the number one woman-owned professional advising firm in the country.”

This is why finding the core confusion matters. Had we built strategy, infrastructure, and actions around her originally stated goal, she would have been directionally incorrect — working toward a thing she didn’t actually want.

The other day she texted me: “My to-do list for today is over. Is it supposed to be like that?”

Her business is becoming exactly what she wanted it to be…

Because she found her more precise compass.

Because she now has a vision with a clearer strategy that makes sense.

Because she takes focused action.

Because she’s directionally correct.

And, because she is continually building a better infrastructure that supports and serves her needs.

Stable Footing

When I coached competitive athletes, we could design a fabulous training plan — the kind that would get them legitimately strong and fast. But plans don’t execute themselves. If my athlete stayed up late with kids through summer vacation, they’d snooze-button their way through the morning training block we’d set aside. The plan was right. The infrastructure around it wasn’t.

The same is true for founders.

The best strategy in the world crumbles without personal infrastructure to support it. Infrastructure is what holds the plan up when motivation fades, when the week goes sideways, when the old patterns come reaching for the steering wheel.

Infrastructure looks different for every founder, which is why one-size-fits-all advice falls apart. For some, it's clearing the schedule so the most important work gets the best hours. For some, it's finally bringing in an operations person so the founder can stop being the hub that every spoke runs through. For some, it's building an emotional and social support structure around them.

Infrastructure creates stable footing. Stable footing creates trust — trust in yourself, trust in the people around you, trust in the direction you’ve chosen. And trust is what finally allows the exhale.

Which brings us back to the beginning. “Running’s for fugitives” was only ever the first half. The second half — “remember to exhale” — is where the work actually lives.

The fugitive run is what happens when we operate from confusion, urgency, low self-trust and stolen attention. The exhale is what happens when we slow down, clear the core, find the compass, and build the infrastructure to hold it all up. One is the diagnosis. The other is the first step out.

Everyone reading this is already working hard. That’s a given. You’re building something that matters. But sanity and evolution happen in the exhale.

So if any of this has landed — if you recognized yourself in the race you didn’t choose, lots of motion but little momentum, or an infrastructure that’s not working — I’d like to hear which part.

I’ve got space to start riding alongside two new founders next month. If you’re curious about how that might work for you, respond here to chat.

Running’s for fugitives. Remember to exhale.

— Bryan