“I’ll figure it out.”
This simple, four-word phrase is one that most of us entrepreneurs adopt automatically, if not proudly. It's the instinct that got us into business in the first place.
It's also, as I was reminded in a recent conversation, the thing that can take us down.
I sat down with Nenuca Syquia for the Growing with Purpose podcast not long ago. Nenuca is the founder of Better Organizations by Design (BOxD), a consultancy that helps mid-market companies navigate rapid growth, strategy pivots, and mergers that actually have to land.
She launched it in January 2020, weeks before the world shut down. Her parents – lifelong entrepreneurs themselves – thought she was crazy for leaving a job she loved at Cisco. And because her network was in the world of enterprise while her heart was in the mid-market, she built her client base from scratch: cold outreach, one message at a time, in a year when nobody was meeting anyone. Five and a half years later, BOxD is around 35 people strong.
But the part of her story that stuck with me wasn't the launch. It was 2021.
By her own account, 2021 was the darkest stretch of Nenuca's business life. She had convinced good people to leave good jobs and join her. She had clients counting on the firm. And the weight of not letting either side down pushed her into pure fear mode. There were days, she told me, when she couldn't pick herself up off the floor.
Here's what fear did to her leadership: she started controlling everything.
Nitpicking the work of people who had been doing this for decades. BOxD runs a deliberately flat organisation full of experienced operators, and those operators noticed. One of them gave her feedback tough enough to serve as a wake-up call: she was losing followership. Not because the business was failing, but because she was leading from fear.
What broke the cycle was a simple act of kindness. Dina, a project manager at the time, stepped forward and said: "Nenuca, let me help you with more things." Dina is now her chief of staff. And that weight lifted gave Nenuca the space to notice more. Like how she noticed Gliza, her admin, had an exceptional mind for systems and data, and asked if she wanted to run with it. Gliza did, and had ideas Nenuca never knew were sitting there.
The shift, Nenuca says, sounds simple but changed everything. All it took was moving from "I’ll figure this out" to "we’ll figure this out."
That shift matters because of something Nenuca has watched happen to her own clients. In many companies, the founder is the nucleus. Everything orbits them. It feels like dedication, and it works right up until it doesn't. A company built around one person is a company at risk of falling apart the day that person steps away, or whenever the business requires more than that person has to offer.
So Nenuca is deliberately building in the opposite direction. Her stated goal is to make herself as dispensable as possible. Not by cloning herself into mini nuclei across the team, but by building a team and a way of operating that works regardless of who is in the room.
It's how she managed to write a book in record time: her team blocks her calendar and protects her focus. The founder gets space because the business no longer needs her in every meeting.
And the bar she sets for the culture? "I want us to be so great that you would pay to work here." She says it with a laugh. She means it completely.
Two things worth taking away this week.
First, the reframe. When something hard lands on your desk, notice your first instinct. Is it "I" or "we"? Nenuca's self-reliance was a strength her parents raised her on, and taken to the extreme it left her flat on the floor. Any strength overused becomes a weakness.
Second, borrow Dina's question, in reverse. Ask one person on your team: "What could you take off my plate?" Then actually listen. Nenuca discovered a chief of staff and a systems thinker who were already on her payroll. What talents may be sitting uncovered among your roster?
One more thing. Nenuca's book, written with Small Giants Press, is coming this autumn. It's a parable about the false solutions companies reach for when change gets hard, the reorgs and shiny technology purchases that never fix the real problem. If you’d like to help her promote the book by getting an advanced copy, you can click here.
Cheers,
Jean