A book for founders who are still personally holding the business as it grows.

This is not a business book in the usual sense.
And it is not a memoir.

The Work That Holds You is a book about what happens before things settle. Before leadership feels shared instead of personal. Before the work fits neatly into roles, systems, or plans.

It’s written for founders who are still carrying the weight of the business themselves, even as it grows, and who are starting to sense that the way they are holding it cannot be the long-term answer.

The Work That Holds You

Most books about leadership and growth begin once things are already working.

This one starts earlier.

It starts in the phase where responsibility has expanded faster than support. Where decisions still come back to you. Where progress is real, but so is the strain of carrying it.

I wrote this book because I kept seeing the same pattern, across companies and stages. Founders assumed something was wrong when the work started to feel heavier, when in reality they were entering a phase that rarely gets named.

Advice tends to skip past this moment.
This book does not.

It slows down long enough to give language to what is actually happening, before offering any guidance on what to do next.

Why this book exists

Who this book is for

This book is for founders who:

Are building real companies and feeling the weight of that responsibility
Are still personally holding decisions, direction, and pressure
Sense that effort alone will not carry them forward indefinitely
Want work that can support them, not quietly wear them down

This book may not be for you if:

You are looking for tactics, templates, or quick answers
You already have a fully distributed leadership structure in place
You want reassurance more than reflection

The right readers tend to recognize themselves within the first few pages.

How the book works

The book unfolds in two distinct movements.

The first part focuses on naming the experience of carrying the work. It explores what leadership feels like before it stabilizes, and why so many founders struggle to make sense of this phase.

This is not a warm-up. It is orientation.

The second part turns toward what comes next. It looks at how work gets structured, how responsibility can shift, and how decisions can be held by systems instead of people alone.

The order matters.
Rushing past the first part weakens the second.

This is a book meant to be read steadily, not skimmed.

I’ve spent more than 20 years working inside growing companies, often at moments where expectations were high and the margin for error was small.

Over time, I noticed that the hardest part of growth was rarely strategy or skill. It was the quiet accumulation of responsibility before the work had anywhere else to go.

I wrote The Work That Holds You because I couldn’t find a book that spoke honestly to that experience without minimizing it or rushing to fix it.

This book is the one I wish existed earlier in my own work.

Why I wrote it

The ideas in this book reflect how I think and how I work

As a fractional CMO and strategic advisor, I help founders build marketing and growth systems that can carry weight without relying on constant personal effort.

I also host CMOs Without Borders, a podcast where I speak with experienced leaders about what this work actually looks like inside real companies.

The book, my client work, and those conversations all come from the same place. A belief that work should be built to support the people doing it.

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