Do You Miss the Suck?
Why Veteran Entrepreneurs Get Stuck in Chaos
There’s something strangely comforting about the grind.
The 5 a.m. wake-ups. The hurry-up-and-wait. The controlled chaos of getting it done – together.
A lot of us don’t talk about it, but after the uniform comes off, we find ourselves reaching back toward the suck. Not because it was easy. But because it made sense.
Veteran entrepreneurs know how to grind. It’s wired into us. But too many founders confuse that grind with forward progress. They build businesses that keep them buried in operations, fighting fires all day, and wondering why it never seems to get easier.
Building a business? Is different. It’s ambiguous. Messy. Lonely.
And when the mission feels unclear, many of us turn back to the only thing we’ve trusted: the grind.
But look, if you’re still at the center of every decision, you don’t have a business. You have a bottleneck.
Case Study: From Firefighting to Frameworks
Let me tell you about a client – an Army Ranger who built a logistics company from the ground up.
Disciplined. Sharp. Mission-focused. But constantly overwhelmed.
He was working 90-hour weeks. Running every meeting. Solving every problem. He thought he was being a strong leader. But no one can sustain firefighting in a leadership costume.
He didn’t trust his team to make calls. Not because they weren’t capable, but because he had never handed them a framework.
He was simply addicted to being in the center of the chaos.
We helped him step back, reassign decision authority, and implement a simple 2-page ops system. Within six weeks:
His team handled 80% of issues without him.
He reclaimed 15 hours/week.
And for the first time, he started building forward instead of cleaning up backward.
By diagnosing the problems, he was able to identify the daily disruptions that he – personally – did not need to handle. He needed to build a system with clear command lanes.
Structure of three key functions:
Operations Lead ➝ promoted from former warehouse foreman
Customer Service/Admin Department
Vendor and Procurement Coordinator
Trouble with late shipments, routing errors, or delivery timeline fell under Ops. An SOP was created for audits and checklists, which now diverted 90% of CEO’s texts to the right seat, right person.
Result: 80% fewer disruptions and reroutes
Customer complaints going unresolved or escalated too fast fell under Customer Service. The SOP guided the team with a tiered approach for appropriate resolutions.
Result: Faster resolution, fewer executive distractions
Recurring vendor questions did not need to reach the founder’s email with a standard onboarding sheet with standard FAQs and protocols.
Result: No more recurring "What do I say to this vendor?" texts
The biggest breakthrough? Realizing he wasn’t the only one who could solve these problems – he just hadn’t given anyone else a system to do it.
The Mission in Clarity, Not Chaos
Veterans are great under pressure. But that doesn’t mean you should live there.
If you feel like you’re working harder than ever but still stuck:
Audit your chaos. Where are you the bottleneck?
Build one system. Start small – one recurring issue, one SOP.
Empower someone else. The trust fall isn’t easy – but neither was Ranger School.
Soldiers are trained to embrace the suck. Because surviving the suck got you here.
But escaping it? That’s how you scale.
