the price
out of the darkness
Inc. 500 CEOs share some of their most emotionally trying moments—and their advice for getting through tough times.
Cindy Tysinger GSATi (No. 170 on the Inc. 500) When cash got tight, Tysinger’s son invested $250,000 in her company. “That was the hardest thing ever, going to my son to borrow money,” she says. “Humbling yourself to that point is difficult. I just want to take care of everybody, you know?” Around that time, anxiety made it hard to sleep and blunted her appetite. She lost 30 pounds. Her family tried to make her take breaks by unplugging the home internet connection. What she’s learned: Get outside. “I love to walk,” she says. “Even if I was thinking about things I needed to do, I was in fresh air, nature.” Toby Thomas EnSite Solutions (No. 188) Thomas started his company with two partners who, he claims, did not do their share of the workload. Six months later, he bought them out. “That was a very scary point,” he recalls. “When you go into a business with partners, you’re spreading the risk out. But when you suddenly don’t have that support system, it’s like you’re in a black hole.” What he’s learned: Find a CEO support group. Thomas is a member of Entrepreneurs’ Organization, a global nonprofit founders’ network. “It’s very Skull and Bones,” he says. “People completely open up. You have to sign a constitution that says you can’t even tell your wife about what you talk about.” Grier Allen BoomTown (No. 433) A publicly traded company bought Allen’s main competitor and rebranded its entire business around that company’s technology. Allen tried to stay calm and focus on the market segment where BoomTown was strongest, a strategy that later paid off. But the stress was getting to him and shortening his temper. What he’s learned: Jog it off. “Running releases a lot of stress,” he says. “It clears my mind and lets me detach from the digital world for a little while. If I don’t get out and run at least twice or three times a week, I just start feeling crazy.” Yisroel Bruce Krinsky Renegade Furniture Group (No. 127) Krinsky’s first venture, at 21, was importing dried-fruit energy bars from South Africa. He got the product into 200 stores, but there were no repeat orders, and the company flopped. “It was heartbreaking,” he says. “Every time I went to check on the product with a big smile on my face, it was all still sitting on the shelf. I was really upset, and I felt kind of like a loser.” What he’s learned: Play the long game. “If you can think of any problem you have today, picture your reaction in seven years,” he suggests. “Will it be affecting you then?” Andrew Laffoon Mixbook (No. 177) Mixbook nearly ran out of cash three times before getting venture capital funding. “We were pitching VCs day in and day out,” Laffoon recalls. “We got a lot of soft nos. I was sick to my stomach for weeks.” What he’s learned: Remember that you’re not the business. “If your identity is all wrapped up in this company you’ve built,” says Laffoon, “when someone rejects it, they’re rejecting you.”
you a great deal,” says Feld. “They are very successful people, very visible, very charismatic—yet they’ve struggled with this silently. There’s a sense that they can’t talk about it, that it’s a weakness or a shame or something. They feel like they’re hiding, which makes the whole thing worse.” If you run a business, that probably all sounds familiar. It’s a stressful job that can create emotional turbulence. For starters, there’s the high risk of failure. Three out of four venture-backed start-ups fail, according to research by Shikhar Ghosh, a Harvard Business School lecturer. Ghosh also found that more than 95 per cent of start-ups fall short of their initial projections. Entrepreneurs often juggle many roles and face countless setbacks—lost customers, disputes with partners, increased competition, staffing problems—all while struggling to make payroll. “There are traumatic events all the way along the line,” says psychiatrist and former entrepreneur Michael A. Freeman, who is researching mental health and entrepreneurship. Complicating matters, new entrepreneurs often make themselves less resilient by neglecting their health. They eat too much or too little. They don’t get enough sleep. They fail to exercise. “You can get into a start-up mode, where you push yourself and abuse your body,” Freeman says. “That can trigger mood vulnerability.” So it should come as little surprise that entrepreneurs experience more anxiety than employees. In the latest Gallup-Healthways WellBeing Index, 34 per cent of entrepreneurs—4 percentage points more than other workers—reported they were worried. And 45 percent of entrepreneurs said they were stressed, 3 percentage points more than other workers. But it may be more than a stressful job that pushes some founders over the edge. According to researchers, many entrepreneurs share innate character traits that make them more vulnerable to mood swings. “People who are on the energetic, motivated, and creative side are both more likely to be entrepreneurial and more likely to have strong emotional states,” says Freeman. Those states may include depression, despair, hopelessness, worthlessness, loss of motivation, and suicidal thinking. Call it the downside of being up. The same passionate dispositions that drive founders heedlessly toward success can sometimes consume them. Business owners are “vulnerable to the dark side of obsession,” suggest researchers from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. They conducted interviews with founders for a study about entrepreneurial passion. The researchers found that many subjects displayed signs of clinical obsession, including strong feelings of distress and anxiety, which have “the potential to lead to impaired functioning,” they wrote in a paper published in the Entrepreneurship Research Journal in April. Reinforcing that message is John Gartner, a practicing psychologist who teaches at Johns Hopkins University Medical School. In his book The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America, Gartner argues that an often-overlooked temperament—hypomania—may be responsible for some entrepreneurs’ strengths as well as their flaws. A milder version of mania, hypomania often occurs in the relatives of manic-depressives september/october 2013 | INC. | 3 1