Beating Imposter Syndrome

By revisiting the worst week of my career

It was 8pm on December 12, 2016. After three hours of tense back and forth discussion, we had just decided to fold our company. Just four days later, December 16th, was greeNEWit’s last day in business.

I’ve thought a lot about this moment in the time that’s passed since. The failure of greeNEWit after nine years in business is what motivated me to start my own company, BE Lean. I’ve been driven by the desire to prevent other businesses from ending with the same fate. To help others achieve what greeNEWit never could - a sustainable business model. 

And while greeNEWit’s failure inspired me to start my company, it’s also held me back. If I’m brutally honest, since the moment I started BE Lean, I haven’t been able to shake the imposter syndrome whispering in my ear, “If you couldn’t make greeNEWit succeed, what makes you think you can help others succeed?”

I know I’m not the only person to suffer from imposter syndrome. Countless times, I’ve spoken with friends and colleagues, helping them to quiet the voices inside their head telling them that they aren’t good enough. Helping them to see that those voices don’t speak truth. They’re founded on a filtered and distorted narrative.

And I’ve fallen into the same trap.

This realization hit me recently as I was thinking about the story of greeNEWit’s failure. Day by day, hour by hour, I recalled what it was like during what I remembered as the worst week of my professional career. And after putting the story down on paper, I realized that the internal narrative I’ve held onto for the past four years wasn’t the complete truth. It was filtered and distorted by the stigma of failure.

Looking back with fresh eyes, a more complete narrative arose. That week wasn’t the worst of my career. In fact, more than any other week in the eight years I spent with greeNEWit, that week epitomized all that greeNEWit was and had achieved - lasting impact, an extraordinary culture, and the values, lessons, and experiences that have carried on with me and every person on our team.

I want to tell you about that week. A week that I can only describe as an extraordinary way to go out of business.

The Beginning of the End

Six months prior to that Monday evening in December, our industry had received the sudden news that one of the primary programs we participated in ran out of funding and would freeze immediately. It was a program that provided rebates to commercial and multifamily buildings for installing energy efficient upgrades to their lighting systems. Practically overnight, our clients pulled out of scheduled projects and our entire sales pipeline dried up.

It took six months to build back our pipeline while our already cash-strapped business accumulated more and more debt. We made every payroll, but fell further behind with our bills. It finally caught up with us on December 7th when one of our primary subcontractors pulled the plug on us. Without them, there wasn’t any way to remain operational in a significant way. The writing was on the wall.

Our co-founders Josh and Jason worked tirelessly over the next few days to try to pull a Hail Mary. They heaved several balls into the air. Every one hit the ground. We were left with no choice. If we continued to limp through the rest of our busy season and failed, we risked taking down our entire supply chain and laying off our team members at the beginning of the slow season when the demand for workers was at its lowest.

So we made the agonizing decision to close our doors.

Tuesday, December 13th

The next day, we met with the rest of our management team to break the news. We had been through a lot together over the past nine years. These people were, and still are family to me. 

Josh shared with them exactly what had happened, how we came to the decision, and what we needed to accomplish over the next four days. We were making an emergency landing and needed to land the plane with as minimal disruption as possible to our clients, partners, and staff.

As I looked across the conference room table, there was shock painted on every face. But there was also conviction. We had been through trying times before. And while this would be our biggest challenge, we knew we had one last job to do.

The plan was to pass all of the jobs we had scheduled for clients to our partners and competitors in the industry. We didn’t want to cancel a single appointment. Calls started going out immediately to make that happen.

We also began preparing to inform our vendors, and most importantly, the rest of our team. We knew it would be deeply challenging and wanted to provide as much information to them as possible. Could they expect a final paycheck? What options would they have with finding other employment or receiving unemployment benefits? What would happen with their healthcare and retirement plans. By the end of the day, I had answers.

Wednesday, December 14th

Driving into work that Wednesday morning was by far the hardest day of my career. I fought back tears the entire drive knowing what would happen at 9am.

We called an all hands meeting with the entire team. I stood at the side of the room as everyone gathered together in our open office space. Josh stood at the front, and Jason beside him. The two founders broke the news openly and honestly, explaining with full transparency why this was happening and what the next few days would look like.

Silence blanketed the room.

As everyone took in the gravity of the moment, the silence was broken by a voice.

Gabe Bustos was one of greeNEWit’s earliest team members. He started as an intern and rose the ranks to ultimately lead greeNEWit’s education and social impact program called OUR Schools. He stood up above the silence. His voice slightly trembling, Gabe turned to Josh and Jason and thanked them.

Despite the realization that he’d soon be without a job and the company he’d spent nearly eight years building would be closing its doors, Gabe found the courage and character to thank our owners for what they had done for us. Slowly, one by one, other team members began doing the same. Sharing stories and sentiments from their time at greeNEWit. What the company had meant to them, how they had grown as professionals, and how their experiences had impacted their lives.

It was one of the most astounding and moving things I have ever witnessed.

Throughout the rest of the day, as we started informing our clients of the news, the responses we got were a continuation of that morning’s events. Each client we told the news to took it as hard as our employees had. The messages we received were deeply touching and personal. It felt as if they were losing an integral part of their own team.

But perhaps the most surprising reaction came later that evening. At 5pm we were scheduled to host a quarterly meeting for our industry’s trade group, Efficiency First. One by one, each of our competitors walked through our office and into the conference room, totally unaware of the decision that had been made in that very room two days prior. When Josh broke the news to them about what was going on, they were devastated.

Our competitors were devastated by our failure.

The feeling in the room, as Josh later described to me, was “if greeNEWit can’t make it, how will we?”

There had always been an inside joke within greeNEWit that when you join the team, you drink the Kool-Aid. We operated differently than the other contractors in our industry. We were young, innovative, and purpose-driven.

I had always assumed that our culture stayed within the walls of our office. Yes, our clients experienced our professionalism, our quality, and our enthusiasm. But the magic that we had, I thought it was our secret sauce.

But I had been wrong. Without knowing it, we had become a role model in our industry. We were the benchmark that others looked up to. The standard by which others were measured. Our culture, values, and purpose were not confined to our team. They had spread and made an impact on others.

Thursday, December 15th

The next day, I had scheduled one on one meetings with every single employee in the company. I walked everybody individually through their benefit options. I gave everyone the opportunity to ask questions. And I gave everybody an exit interview and coaching to best prepare them to find employment elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Josh had scheduled meetings with the heads of every competitor he had broken the news to on Wednesday night. They all knew the talent that was available on our team, and Josh personally made sure that as many of our employees as possible would find immediate re-employment in the industry.

Friday, December 16th

On Friday morning, everyone received an official termination letter. We began packing up the office. Savoring every moment knowing they would be our last together as a team.

By the end of the day, some of our team members already had job offers with other companies. Others had interviews scheduled.

All of our clients were seamlessly passed off to our partners. We didn’t have to cancel or reschedule a single appointment.

Every filing cabinet was emptied. Our equipment was packed up in boxes. Our inventory was consolidated and organized in our storage units.

We had just wound down our business in four days and brought the plane down for a smooth landing. Someone on the team joked, “We’re so good at being efficient that we even went out of business efficiently.”

Monday, December 19th

On the following Monday morning, I returned to the office with Jason and Josh. There were some pieces of furniture that needed to be disassembled and a few final things that needed to be wrapped up before the legal proceedings would kick in.

We weren’t the only ones to arrive. Having just been laid off, half a dozen of our team members also showed up to chip in and help each other with writing resumes and figuring out next steps. It was yet another testament to the character and culture of our team.

At the time, I had recognized that winding down the business as smoothly as we did was out of the ordinary. But it was what I had come to expect from our team. It didn’t feel extraordinary. My thoughts in the weeks that followed weren’t about what we accomplished, they were consumed by what went wrong.

Why did we fail? Could it have been prevented? What could I have done differently as a leader?

Those questions have been lingering in the back of my head for years, feeding the version of the story that my imposter syndrome has wanted me to believe.

Of course there are reasons why greeNEWit ultimately failed. I could point to the fact that we were too reliant on a single stream of revenue early on. That our successes covered for our lack of focus and discipline. And when our biggest service line started to shrink, our bloated operating expenses devoured what was left of our profits.

We eventually tried to diversify into new service lines, but by then every penny of profit went to servicing debt. We had no working capital. The program freeze that killed our pipeline wasn’t what caused the failure. It was simply the straw that broke the camel's back.

But if those observations alone were true, greeNEWit would have never gotten past our first years in business. We would have never attracted the talent we did. We would have never gained the reputation we had or the accolations we were awarded.

The story of why greeNEWit failed that looped over and over in my head was an incomplete story. It was filtered by the obsession over failure.

The other side of that story goes something like this:

While we lacked discipline and focus in our early years, our willingness to take risks and experiment with new ideas is what got the company off the ground. We pivoted our entire business model twice before finally finding an opportunity that took us from the brink of bankruptcy to grossing $5.5 Million in just one year.

While others in our industry found the same opportunity, we vastly outpaced our competitors by investing in efficiency and automation. Our ability to streamline as we scaled allowed us to do double the amount of business than the rest of our industry.

As we started introducing new service offerings, we committed to rigorously testing and measuring each one. We uncovered service lines and sales channels that were losing money. We identified the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in our operating processes. And using data, we made better decisions and prioritized our work with laser focus.

Thinking back, there were two or three times before that Monday night in December that greeNEWit should have failed. But we didn’t.

We were resilient. We transformed our company from an undisciplined startup to an organization that was admired by our peers. And we did it by committing to efficiency, measurement, and a culture of continuous improvement.

These are cornerstones of what I love helping other businesses achieve. And you know what? I’m damn good at it, and my imposter syndrome isn’t going to tell me otherwise any longer.