Back to Holstee, for a sprint

In January 2025 begin to phase out my day to day involvement in Holstee. I was lucky to have a team in place that I could hand off my key responsibilities too. The timing coincided our 15 year anniversary and the forthcoming arrival of our third daughter and a feeling of building burn out. In 15 years I have never really taken an extended break and my body and mind needed it.

My plan was to make space to explore what type of change I might want to make professionally. I happily got to spend with our new our new baby and tried my best to lean into the uncertainty. I didn’t realize how tightly I held my identity as a founder/ leader until I let go. It was both a feeling of relief and groundlessness in the same breath.

Emma was born in March 2026 and nothing quite narrows your vision like a baby. Having time to spend with her and see how her two older sisters mature and step into motherly roles was an absolute.

Though within a month I itching get back to thinking about what’s next.

I felt this incredible to desire to take on a role in a very different industry. So I enterained discussions with friends in fields from Nuclear energy (big believer in sodium cooled gen IV SMR reactors) to home services where I took on a consulting project for a few months and quickly immersed myself into the garage door installation business. Meanwhile the world of AI entered it’s cambrian era with new tools large steps forward each month. Like many I was amazed and couldn’t help but get immersed. I could see how a small ‘legacy’ business could automate so much of the daily clerical tasks, allowing a lean team to punch far above their weight. A great place to see how effectively I could experiment and put this into practice was right under my nose, Holstee.

I’m in as a contributor (apparently this is now a thing), with weekly sprints are cleanly scoped out and driving a much larger impact than I ever thought possible. I have to say the feeling of taking a manual repetitive task, like monthly kpi ledger, which we’ve tracked by hand for 10+ years in a gdoc and having it programmatically populate each month is work that I find incredibly satisfying.

I have a juicy list of fix’s like this within Holstee that I plan to knock out one at a time. As of right now, I see this as a temporary role with an uncertain enddate.

I do know that I don’t feel called to be the leader, or face of Holstee. I do want to learn all the way I can help holstee become a better business, as highly a focused operator within the business.