I’ve always been pretty good at managing stress.

Perhaps it’s my international disposition, or perhaps it’s something I’ve earned after over 20 years on the rollercoaster of entrepreneurial life.

By the spring of 2017, however, the strain of the previous year was pushing me over the brink.

The reckoning came in the spring of 2017. 

I’d just spent the previous 9 months giving just about everything I had - energy, time, sanity, and more - to launch a massive new project in my adventure travel company, Sacred Rides. The project - called our Getaways program - had required, and was still demanding of me, many late nights and early mornings, and large amounts of stamina and resilience.

Impatient with our growth, the previous year I’d set the audacious goal of seeing the company operate in 150 countries within 5 years (by 2021). Our growth had averaged a healthy 45% over the past 4 years and we’d been ranked “World’s #1 Mountain Bike Tour Company” by both National Geographic Adventure and Outside magazines.

Despite the successes and accolades, I felt a profound lack of fulfilment from these achievements.

The Alignment Scorecard is a tool to help entrepreneurs discover aspects of their company and/or life that need more attention, in order to help you live a life of alignment: a feeling of a life well-lived, in harmony with one’s values and ideals.

Last year I wrote a book.

A whole damn book. I surprised even myself.

I started in March, committed myself to writing half an hour every morning, and by early September I had my first draft. I spent the rest of the year doing some initial editing until I was happy with the (semi)-final product.

It was a firsthand account of the gut-wrenching process of taking my company from near-bankruptcy to removing myself from the day-to-day of the company, to finally selling it in February of 2019 - along with all of the systems and tools I used that allowed me to step almost completely out of the business.

[ALIGNED] is a blog series devoted to sharing the tools and systems I used to create a self-managing company that ran almost completely without me (and thrived). Those systems also helped me to significantly increase the value of the company when I sold it in Feb. 2019.

I’ve helped dozens of entrepreneurs implement this system into their businesses, with an average workload reduction of almost 60% (while revenues either stayed constant or grew).