I Knew The Business Was The Lifeline.
How I rebuilt the empire from the ashes of the marriage
The week my marriage ended, I was in due diligence on the sale of the business.
The timing could not have been worse. We were deep in the process. Every document mattered. Every call mattered. Every answer mattered. And no one on the other end of any of those calls knew what was happening in my personal life. They just knew I was prepared.
I took diligence calls from the floor of my closet because it was the only quiet place in the house. I answered investor questions from the seat of a loaner truck between meetings, laptop on the passenger side, hand on the wheel, body still in motion because if I stopped I would feel it. I wrote about the day after the decision last week. This essay is about the week the business required everything from me at the exact moment my personal life had nothing left to give.
Nobody warns you about the operator chapter of divorce. Everything becomes incredibly simple. There were only two priorities. My son. And the business that supported us. Everything else became optional. If a decision did not protect one of those two things, it did not get my energy. I stopped negotiating with guilt and started allocating my capacity like the scarce resource it was. That was the decision tree. Two filters. Run every choice through them. No exceptions.
The team rebuild happened on its own. The season made the decisions for me. I could not carry people who only took energy. I could not manage other people’s drama while managing my own survival. The people who stayed were not necessarily the loudest supporters. They were the steady ones. The people who showed up with solutions instead of opinions. The ones who made life lighter instead of asking me to carry them too. I did not have to do a performance review. The fire did the sorting.
The number that grounded me when the personal was falling apart was not revenue. It was not valuation. It was not the diligence checklist. It was one standing weekly appointment with Julie. My therapist. My yoga teacher. My grounding place. Every week she reminded me that I was not just responsible for closing deals. I was responsible for coming home to myself. She helped me regulate my nervous system before I ever had the language for what my nervous system was carrying. Looking back, those sessions were just as important as every board meeting I attended.
5 AM became the ritual that kept the empire alive. I was not sleeping anyway, so I stopped fighting the mornings. While the rest of the world was quiet, I trained. The workouts were not about fitness. They were survival. Movement became the only place my brain stopped negotiating with itself. Every workout reminded me that even when my personal life felt out of control, I could still keep one promise to myself. That discipline carried me into every meeting that followed.
The boundary between personal grief and professional show-up taught me that professionalism is not pretending your life is not falling apart. It is refusing to let your pain become someone else’s burden. I never lied about where I was. But I also did not ask my team to carry what belonged to me. I built spaces where I could fall apart so that when I walked into work, I could lead with clarity instead of chaos. That boundary protected both my business and my healing. Most operator advice tells you to leave the personal at the door. I am telling you the opposite. Bring the truth of where you are. Just do not hand the bill to the team.
If you are a founder reading this from inside the same fire, the line I wish someone had given me at the start of mine is this: this is a season, not your identity. Do not make permanent decisions based on temporary pain. Protect your health. Protect your children. Protect the business if it is worth protecting. Everything else can wait. And one day you will look back and realize you were not falling apart. You were becoming the operator your next chapter required.
MOMumentally,
Erika