There is probably no better metaphor for entrepreneurship than a Jeep rolling through the front of your business.
It is about 7:30 at night when I learn there is a Jeep parked in the reception area at Gevity. Not outside reception. Not near reception. In it.
The owner had gone into the sauna and apparently the parking brake had not been fully engaged. At some point, the Jeep began rolling across the parking lot, reached the front of the building and introduced itself to our window.
We spend a lot of time at Gevity talking about adding years to your life. I did not realize we also needed to worry about the life expectancy of the front windows.
In the first few seconds, my mind did what a founder’s mind has been trained to do. It ran toward every possible disaster at once. Was anyone hurt? How bad was the damage? Was the building secure? Would we have to close? What would insurance cover? Was the member okay? How exactly does a Jeep end up inside a wellness club while its owner is sitting in a sauna?
You can plan for cash flow, staffing, construction delays, member experience and the thousand other things required to keep a business moving. Somewhere in the operating plan, however, you eventually encounter something that was never on the list.
This was ours.
While I was at home worrying about everything that could be happening, our team was already handling what was happening. They checked on everyone, understood the situation and dealt with the reality in front of them. Nobody was injured. The damage looked worse than it was. A window could be replaced.
My imagination had built a catastrophe before I had even gathered the facts.
Founders often mistake this kind of worrying for responsibility. We tell ourselves that running every worst-case scenario is part of caring deeply. Sometimes it is useful. Anticipating problems is part of the job. But there is a point where preparation quietly becomes panic, and panic has never made a problem smaller.
The strange part about building something you care about is that everything begins to feel personal. A cracked window is not simply a cracked window. It is the front of the place you spent years imagining, financing and fighting to open. It is the business carrying your name, your reputation and the livelihoods of people who trusted you enough to help build it.
Of course your mind runs.
But caring about the business does not mean emotionally matching the size of every problem. Leadership is often the less dramatic work of slowing down, understanding what actually happened and dealing with that before inventing the next five disasters.
The person whose Jeep rolled into the building was understandably shaken. My first concern was making sure everyone was safe and that she did not spend the night punishing herself over an accident. The glass, paperwork and repairs could be dealt with later. There was no value in turning an already stressful situation into something heavier than it needed to be.
That moment also showed me something about the company we are building.
If every unexpected problem requires the founder’s panic in order to be solved, then you have not built a team. You have built a dependency. The people at Gevity did not need me to dramatically enter the scene and save the day. They needed trust, clear thinking and the freedom to handle what was directly in front of them.
That is not always easy for a founder to accept. We like being needed more than we admit. But one of the clearest signs that a business is growing up is when the room does not fall apart simply because you are not standing in it.
By the end of the night, everyone was safe. The building was still standing. Gevity would open again. The Jeep would eventually return to a more traditional parking spot.
The incident became another strange entry in the growing collection of things entrepreneurship has taught me. You can make plans, build systems and think through every reasonable risk. Something will still happen that was never on the list.
The problems are inevitable.
The panic is optional.
