20/04/2026
"I Stepped Away from My Business for Six Months. Here's What I Found."
A lesson in leadership, culture, and building foundations that hold
In early 2025, I was diagnosed with throat cancer.
For six months I stepped away from the business my wife Kim and I had built over 18 years. First part-time. Then completely. No leading from the front. No being the person everything ran through.
We didn't know what I'd come back to.
What we found was a business that hadn't missed a beat.
The team made decisions. Held standards. Kept the culture intact. Without us standing over them. Without us being copied on every email or consulted on every problem.
That wasn't luck. And it wasn't accident.
It was the result of 18 years of deliberately building the right people, the right culture, and the right leadership infrastructure…long before I needed it to hold without me.
And it became the most honest and real proof I've ever had that the work and structure I now do with leaders and organisations…is real and makes a difference.
Pressure doesn't create your culture. It reveals it.
Most leaders understand this intellectually. Few have genuinely tested it.
When pressure rises…a key person leaves, a financial crisis hits, a health emergency pulls the leader out of the room…organisations reveal exactly what has been built underneath the surface. Not what the strategy document says. Not what the values poster on the wall claims. What's actually there.
Through my own experience, and the leaders I've observed, studied and spoken with, the organisations that hold under pressure share one thing in common. They didn't build their culture in response to a crisis…
They built it long before one arrived.
The ones that don't hold, they share something too…
The leader was the ceiling. Every decision flowed through them. The culture was held together by their presence, their energy, their personality…NOT by genuine leadership infrastructure.
When they stepped out, even briefly, things started to drift.
Standards slipped quietly.
Accountability softened.
Decisions got delayed or avoided.
Not because the team wasn't capable. But because the foundation was never truly built.
The hidden cost of leading under unresolved pressure
Here's something most leadership conversations don't address honestly.
Many leaders are themselves operating under significant personal pressure, and have been for years. Unresolved stress. Emotional weight they've never properly dealt with. A pattern of pushing through, staying strong, and keeping up appearances.
I know this because I did it for decades.
For 30 years I carried unresolved trauma that showed up as depression. I was high-functioning on the outside:
A successful chiropractor
A former police detective who had spent five hours inside a siege.
Helping people every day.
But I was exhausted. Not from the work, but from pretending I was fine.
And that exhaustion leaked into everything.
Into how I led.
Into the decisions I made under pressure.
Into the culture I was unconsciously building around me.
What leaders carry personally, they carry into their organisations. The unresolved pressure doesn't stay at the door. It shapes how they respond when things get hard. It determines whether they become steady under fire…or reactive, withdrawn, inconsistent.
This is the gap that a lot of leadership programs miss entirely.
They focus on skills, strategy, and systems. All valuable. But they rarely address the internal operating state of the leader themselves - how they actually think, act, and respond when pressure hits.
That's precisely where performance, culture, and results are decided.
Building the foundation before you need it
After my cancer diagnosis, people asked how I managed it as well as I did.
The honest answer is that the work I'd done on myself over the previous eight years created a foundation that held when everything else was uncertain. A support network. Clear structures. The tools to process pressure rather than absorb it silently, or ignore it all together. The self-awareness to know what I needed and who to turn to.
I didn't have that foundation at 50. I built it in the years after.
And the same principle applies to organisations.
The leaders and businesses that navigate pressure well aren't the ones who respond best in a crisis. They're the ones who built the right foundations before the crisis arrived, who invested in leadership behaviour, team culture, and organisational resilience when things were relatively calm.
The question worth asking right now isn't, "How will we handle pressure when it comes?"
The question to ask is:
“What are we building today that will hold strong when pressure does hit?"
What this looks like in practice
The work I do through ELEVAtum is built around one central question:
How do leaders and organisations actually behave when pressure rises…and what needs to change?
Not in theory. In practice. Under real conditions, with real consequences.
That starts with honest awareness and understanding the gap between how a leader believes they're showing up and how they're actually showing up when things get hard.
From there, we build the infrastructure:
The leadership behaviours, team structures, and cultural foundations that hold without the leader needing to be in the room.
The same two-step principle I talk about in personal development applies here.
Awareness is the first step. Action is the second step, which is always the harder step to take.
Most leaders know something isn't quite right.
Fewer take the step of doing something about it before it becomes a crisis.
The cost of waiting
My cancer wasn't planned. The pressure it created wasn't optional.
What was built before it arrived determined everything that followed.
If you're a leader or business owner reading this, the question I'd invite you to sit with is simple:
If you stepped away from your business or team for six months tomorrow…what would you come back to?
If the honest answer makes you uncomfortable, that's worth paying attention to.
I'm currently speaking with a small number of leaders and organisations who are ready to ask that question seriously, and do something about it.
If that's you, I'd welcome a direct conversation.
No pitch. No pressure. Just an honest discussion about where you are and what the right next step looks like.
If that's you, send me a message. Let's have an honest conversation about where you are and what the right next step looks like.
Remember…Today's Courage Shapes Your Tomorrow.
