What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

There is a quote I keep coming back to that has become one of the more important reminders in how I think about building HUMN. What got you here won't get you there. It sounds simple and it is one of the harder things to actually live by when you are someone who built everything you have through individual effort, self-reliance, and an almost stubborn refusal to ask for help (I needed to call myself out on that one).

I Was Built to Do It Myself

For most of my professional life, doing it myself was the right answer. At CDW, I built my portfolio from scratch through volume, consistency, and showing up every day with no guarantee of what the scoreboard would look like at the end of it. When I moved to Denver I rebuilt my community from nothing. When I became an endurance athlete I trained alone in the early mornings before the rest of the day started. The pattern across all of it was the same. Identify the goal, put your head down, and outwork the problem until it is solved. That approach served me well for a long time and it is also exactly the approach that would have broken HUMN if I had not been willing to let go of it.

The Moment It Had to Change

My lead investor said something to me early on that I didn’t fully understand until I sat with it for a while. He told me to focus on putting systems in place that prevent me from being the only person who could do the work. Not just delegating tasks but building an infrastructure where things move without requiring me to be the one moving them. That was a completely new concept for me. My entire identity as a professional had been built around being the person who could figure anything out independently. Being told that the goal was to make myself less central to the operation felt counterintuitive at first. Then I started to understand what he was actually saying.

A company that can only function when its founder is in the room is not a company. It is a job and I did not leave a 14-year career to build myself another job. I left to build something that could grow beyond what any single person could carry on their own. That reframe changed how I thought about my role entirely.

What Delegation Actually Feels Like

I want to be honest about the fact that letting go is uncomfortable in a way that is hard to articulate until you experience it. When you are someone who has operated at a high level independently for a long time, handing something off carries a quiet anxiety underneath it. Not because you do not trust the person you are handing it to but because the work has always been the thing you could control when everything else felt uncertain. Releasing that control requires a different kind of confidence, one that is less about your own capability and more about your belief in the people around you.

My best friend Sam put it plainly. You are just one person with 24 hours. He’s right. There is a ceiling on what any single person can produce regardless of how early they wake up or how many hours they put in. I wake up at 4am, run, work, strength train, work, and go to sleep six days a week averaging around 65 hours. That is close to the ceiling of what one person can sustainably do. The only way to build beyond that ceiling is to bring in people who are exceptional at the things you are not and trust them to carry those things the way you would carry your own.

The Team Is the Strategy

What I have come to understand is that the people around HUMN right now are not just support. They are the strategy. The investors who believed early, the advisors who bring expertise I do not have, the fractional executives who have operated at levels I am still working toward, the future employees who will bring this vision to life on the floor every day. None of them are accessories to the build. They are the build. When I think back to the places in my career that I loved most, whether it was selling windows and siding, working electronics at Target, or partnering with technology executives at CDW, the common thread across all of them was never the work itself. It was the people I was doing it with. I am building that same thing now inside HUMN, except this time I get to choose every person in the room.

Where We Are Now

Year two looks nothing like year one and it is supposed to. The conversations are more complex, the relationships run deeper, the stakes are higher, and the team is real. I am surrounded by people who are smarter than me in the areas that matter most and I consider that one of the best things I have built so far. The version of me that started this by making 3,000 outbounds alone in a room needed to operate that way to get here and getting here required becoming someone different. Someone who leads the vision, builds the culture, and trusts the people around them to carry the rest. What got me here was necessary. What gets us there is something bigger than me.