The hardest part of accountability is admitting when you were the one who waited too long.
Accountability is easy to believe in when someone else needs to be accountable.
It gets harder when the person who needs to own the mistake is you.
I’ve made a lot of mistakes in business. Some are small. Some are expensive. The hardest ones are not the dramatic ones. They are the ones where you knew something was wrong before you were ready to admit it. The facts were there. The signs were there. You kept hoping next month would be better.
I’ve been there.
A number of years ago, Sanctuary was growing fast. We had outside recognition. We were making lists. Things felt like they were opening up.
We hired ahead of the curve. We moved into a bigger office. We kept paying ourselves well. We used debt to support growth.
Then growth slowed.
Major clients left. Sales did not replace them fast enough. The numbers started tightening.
I saw it.
I was the one closest to the books. I was watching the numbers. I could see things were getting tighter. But I kept telling myself we were one good month from turning the corner.
Next month would be better. Then the next. Then the next.
though, where hope stops being courage and starts being avoidance. I crossed that line by probably three to six months.
I thought I was protecting Chris and the team from stress. If I could just work harder, sell more, and hold the line a little longer, I could fix it before it became everyone else’s problem.
That was the failure.
Not the market. Not the client losses. Not even the over-hiring, though that was part of it. The failure was waiting too long to be honest. First and foremost, to myself.
By the time I could no longer avoid the facts, our options had narrowed. We booked a loss for the first and only time in our history. We had to refinance debt to keep going. Chris and I cut our pay. We reduced expenses. We let people go.
Before any of that, I had to have the conversation I should have had months earlier.
Chris and I have known each other for about 50 years. He has excellent emotional intelligence, and we can read each other pretty well.
So when he said, “I’m not pleased,” I knew he was angry and scared. That was Chris’s way of saying he was furious. Rightfully so.
His trust was not just shaken. It was broken.
He had fair questions. “I thought you said we were fine. We just hired people, now we need to let them go? Why didn’t you tell me sooner? If we make these changes, are they going to be enough?”
He has told me before that he really only gets worried when I am worried. So when I finally came to him and said, in effect, “I am worried,” it landed with full weight. The problem was that I should have said it earlier, when there was still room to maneuver.
If I had, he could have been part of the solution. Instead, I had spent months telling him, “It’ll be fine. We will get through it.” Then I asked him to absorb a much harder version of reality in a single conversation.
That was not respect or transparency. It was one person trying to hold the fear alone until the fear got too big to hide.
To Chris’s credit, once the reality was on the table, he moved quickly to what had to happen next. He is good in black-and-white conversations when a hard line needs to be drawn. Once we knew where we stood, he was fully supportive of the decisions ahead.
I still had to rebuild trust. Saying “I was wrong” does not make anything better on its own. It opens the door. You still have to walk through it.
After Chris, we talked to a few key people. Then we had to talk to the people we were letting go. Then we talked to the whole company.
There is no clean way to do that.
It is one thing to look at payroll on a spreadsheet. It is another thing to sit across from someone and know they are going home to tell their spouse. To rethink vacations. To rethink spending. To tuck their kids in that night with a different future than they had that morning.
That morning, they had a job. By the afternoon, they did not. It still haunts me.
We provided generous severance. We reached out to peer companies about opportunities. We made introductions. Most of those people found work before their severance ended, which I am grateful for.
A ‘soft’ landing is still brutal however you cut it. It does not erase the responsibility.
One thing that experience clarified was the difference between a family and a team.
We had described ourselves as a family. Most companies do. Usually what we mean is that we care about each other, which we do. But families do not lay each other off.
A company is a team. A good team can still care deeply about its people. A team also has standards, roles, and a responsibility to protect the whole group. Trying to preserve the feeling of family had actually put the team at greater risk.
Today, one of our values is “Be Selfless.” It is not just your work. It is our work. What each of us does affects the stability of the whole company.
That applies to owners too.
The biggest lesson from that time took me a while to see clearly.
By trying to protect people from the fear, I had kept them from helping with the solution.
I thought carrying the weight alone was part of leadership. I thought if I could keep the fear contained, everyone else could stay focused. I was wrong.
Chris had skin in the game. The team had skin in the game. Their families, careers, and futures were tied to the decisions we were making. They had every right to the facts earlier than I gave them. And when we finally did share the truth, they did not collapse. They brought ideas. They made sacrifices. They helped us stabilize.
I had underestimated them.
That season changed how we run the business.
We built clearer scorecards and tied business rules to them. When we can hire. When we need to slow expenses. What signals tell us we are drifting toward serious decisions.
We implemented Simple Numbers and EOS as operating tools, not buzzwords, so we could see reality earlier.
We added financial guardrails. One example: no single client should represent more than 7% of our revenue. If a client grows beyond that, we welcome it. But the revenue above the threshold is treated differently. It goes toward strengthening reserves, not toward expanding permanent expenses.
We monitor client health more closely. We project attrition instead of assuming every client stays forever. We try to make decisions on facts, before fear narrows our options.
None of this makes us perfect. It makes us more honest, sooner.
I used to think of accountability mostly as something I expected from other people. Did they own the task? Did they admit the mistake? Did they learn from it? I still believe in those questions.
But leaders cannot ask for that from above, as if we are exempt from the same standard. If I expect our team to raise their hand when something is wrong, I have to be willing to do the same with mine.
Otherwise accountability becomes a one-way street, which feels less like respect and more like control.
That is why I see accountability differently now. It is not just a management expectation. It is an act of respect.
It is the willingness to tell the people around you the truth while there is still time to do something useful with it.
That is the part I missed for too long.
I am still learning it.