By: Kate Sarmiento
The hard truth about building a business is that it will show a founder who they are, whether they’ve asked to know or not. Dr. Sharon Spano, PhD, is the founder of Spano & Company and a business strategist who does executive coaching with an emphasis on human development. She has spent more than 25 years working with entrepreneurs, executives, and family businesses, and her work rests on the idea that the business is one of the clearest places to see the person running it.
The reveal usually comes disguised as a business problem. Delegation stalls, an investment keeps getting postponed, or a new team never quite earns full trust, and each one tends to get handled as its own separate issue. A better process gets built, a new tool gets bought, or a different person gets hired, and the founder moves on until the problem returns in a different form.
A problem that keeps returning after it has been fixed deserves a second look, because the fix may have been aimed at the wrong target. Dr. Spano’s approach reads recurring problems as clues about the person behind the business, and it asks founders to get curious about what sits underneath them. This one is for the founder who keeps fixing the business and keeps finding the same problem waiting.
The Task You Won’t Hand Off Is Telling On You
Delegation is usually where a founder’s relationship with control becomes visible, since handing something off means letting another person make the call. It is easy to file that under scheduling, and the research on founders suggests it runs deeper.
Interviews with 30 founders and co-founders of Canadian technology startups, all of whom had recently brought in professional managers, found that handing over decision-making was hard and unsettling for many of them, and frightening for some, because holding those decisions was tied to feeling that the company belonged to them (Source: Applied Psychology, 2023). Most of those founders found a way through it. Many put regular meetings and reporting in place so they still knew what was happening in the business, and they gave up control of decisions while still feeling the company was theirs (Source: Applied Psychology, 2023).
That finding has a practical edge. Giving up control and staying attached to the company can happen together, though it took those founders deliberate adjustments to get there.
Money and trust follow the same route. In Dr. Spano’s experience, a founder’s relationship with money tends to surface when it is time to invest or take a risk, and the ability to trust tends to surface once a team is being built. A postponed hire or a delayed investment can be sound strategy, and it can also be an old pattern wearing a strategy costume. Telling the two apart takes honesty about which one is actually happening.
When the Business Wobbles, the Founder Feels It Personally
Control, money, and trust tend to show up in daily decisions. Identity tends to show up when the results come in. In Dr. Spano’s experience, it gets tested when a business struggles, when it succeeds, and when it no longer needs the founder in quite the same way, and each of those moments raises the same question of who a founder is once the company stops confirming it.
A 15-month study in the North of England, built with later-stage entrepreneurs as research partners, found that a founder’s sense of self can become closely tied to the venture. When what an entrepreneur expected from the business in terms of purpose, autonomy, and achievement fails to match what the business actually delivers, the gaps add up to a weaker sense of control, direction, and worth, which feeds anxiety, isolation, shame, and guilt (Source: Journal of Business Venturing Insights, 2023). In the authors’ data, the gaps set off the negative feelings, and the hours worked did not.
That matters because it points to the founder’s expectations as the place to look. A founder who expected the business to deliver a certain kind of freedom or meaning and got something else is carrying a mismatch that no new process will close.
Dr. Spano calls one form of this the Emptiness of Success, where the results are all there, and something still feels missing. She treats it as separate from burnout, since a high achiever can feel empty without being worn out.
Get Curious Before You Hire Another Consultant
Once a pattern is visible, the next move matters. Curiosity sounds soft, and it is more specific than it sounds. It starts with tracking which problems repeat, because a frustration that shows up across different projects, hires, and years carries more information than a one-time mistake.
From there, a founder can ask when the feeling first showed up, what the behavior is protecting, and what handing off the task, spending the money, or trusting the person would say about them if it went badly. Those questions are easier to answer with someone trained to spot the patterns. Founders who take them seriously give themselves a real chance at ending the problem for good.
Ready to Read What Your Business Keeps Telling You?
Some of the patterns a founder carries were there before the business existed, and the business simply gave them a very visible place to show up. Reading them takes honesty and a good map. Dr. Spano’s private Systemic Mapping sessions are built for that purpose, using a systemic approach grounded in a scientific framework to help leaders identify the hidden obstacles that keep them from reaching the next level. Founders who are ready to look at the person behind the business can book a private Systemic Mapping session with Dr. Sharon Spano at Spano & Company.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical, psychological, or mental health advice. Executive coaching and systemic mapping are not substitutes for diagnosis, psychotherapy, or treatment from a licensed healthcare or mental health professional. Individual experiences and outcomes may vary.
