I started running because I needed something that was mine.
When you run a business — particularly a services business where your calendar is filled with other people’s priorities — there are very few hours in the day that belong entirely to you. Client calls. Team syncs. Strategy sessions. Slack messages. The to-do list regenerates like a hydra. Cut one task and two more appear.
Running was the one thing on my calendar that nobody else benefited from. No client got a deliverable. No team member got unblocked. No revenue was generated. It was an hour of pure, unproductive selfishness, and it turned out to be the most productive thing I did all week.
The First Three Kilometers Are a Lie
Every runner knows this: the first stretch is terrible. Your body objects. Your breathing is off. Your legs feel heavy. Your mind generates an impressive catalog of reasons to stop. You’re tired. You didn’t sleep well. You have emails to answer. Your knee feels weird. The weather is wrong.
If you stop here, running is a miserable activity and you’ll never understand what the fuss is about.
But if you push through — if you override the early-kilometer complaints and keep moving — something shifts around the twenty-minute mark. The breathing evens out. The legs find their rhythm. The mental chatter quiets. You enter a state that isn’t quite meditation but isn’t quite effort either. It’s a sustainable, almost pleasant discomfort.
Building a company works exactly the same way. The first phase is awful. Everything is harder than you expected. The revenue isn’t there. The systems don’t work. The clients are demanding things you haven’t figured out how to deliver yet. Your mind generates a catalog of reasons to quit — get a real job, join someone else’s company, do literally anything that doesn’t involve this much uncertainty.
If you stop here, entrepreneurship is a miserable activity and you’ll never understand what the fuss is about.
But if you push through — and I want to be clear that pushing through is neither guaranteed nor always advisable — there’s a phase where things click. The processes start working. The clients start referring. The team starts operating without you in every decision. You find a sustainable rhythm that isn’t easy but isn’t agony either. It’s the business equivalent of finding your pace.
Pace Is Everything
The most important concept in distance running is pace. Not speed — pace. Speed is how fast you’re going right now. Pace is how fast you can go sustainably for the entire distance. Amateurs start too fast. They feel good in the first kilometer, so they push it. By kilometer six they’re walking. By kilometer ten they’re done.
Experienced runners start slower than they want to. They bank energy. They know that the race isn’t decided in the first third — it’s decided in the last third, when everyone else is fading and they still have something in reserve.
I’ve watched this dynamic play out in the agency world with uncomfortable precision. The agencies that launch with a bang — big office, aggressive hiring, expensive brand, flashy website — often burn out within two years. They started at a pace they couldn’t sustain. The overhead was too high. The client acquisition couldn’t keep up with the cost structure. They were sprinting a marathon.
When Bruno and I built PipelineRoad, we were deliberately slow at first. No office. Small team. Modest overhead. We could have grown faster if we’d taken on debt or given away equity. Instead, we grew at a pace our revenue could support, which meant some months felt agonizingly slow. But we never hit a wall where the economics forced a crisis. The pace was sustainable, and sustainable pace is what gets you to the finish line.
The Long Run
In distance training, there’s a weekly session called the long run. It’s the run where you go farther than any of your other runs that week — not faster, just farther. The purpose isn’t speed. It’s teaching your body and mind that you can sustain effort for an extended period. That you can be uncomfortable and keep going. That distance is not your enemy.
The business equivalent is the long project. The one that takes six months instead of six weeks. The content strategy that won’t show results for a year. The market positioning work that requires patience before it generates pipeline. The relationship with a client that takes a year to deepen into a real partnership.
Short-term thinkers avoid the long run. They optimize for quick wins, immediate results, visible progress. There’s a place for that — you need short wins to keep morale up and cash flowing. But the long run is where the real adaptation happens. It’s where you build the capacity for sustained effort, which is the single most important trait for any company that intends to exist in five years.
Running Alone
I run alone. Not always by choice — finding a running partner whose pace and schedule match yours is harder than it sounds — but increasingly by preference. Running alone means there’s no one to distract you from the discomfort, no conversation to dilute the effort, no external pacing to override your own judgment.
This is uncomfortable, and the discomfort is the point. Running alone teaches you to be your own regulator. To notice when you’re pushing too hard and ease off. To notice when you’re sandbagging and push harder. To trust your own read on your own capacity without external validation.
Leadership is, in many ways, running alone. You have a team around you, and their input is invaluable. But the final decisions — the pace, the direction, the moments where you push and the moments where you hold back — are yours. No one else feels what you feel. No one else has your exact read on the situation. You have to trust your own internal signals, and trusting those signals is a skill that develops with practice.
The Finish Is Not the Point
Here’s the thing about distance running that non-runners misunderstand: the finish line is not the point. The point is the person you become in the process of training for it. The discipline. The self-knowledge. The ability to override the voice that says stop. The relationship with discomfort.
The same is true of building a company. The exit, the revenue milestone, the client count — these are finish lines, and they matter. But they’re not the point. The point is what the process of building requires you to become. More patient. More resilient. More honest about what you’re good at and what you’re not. More comfortable with sustained effort in the absence of immediate reward.
I don’t run to win races. I run because the practice of running makes me better at everything else. And “everything else,” at this point in my life, mostly means building PipelineRoad into something worth being proud of.
The miles compound. So does the work.