Your Company Is on a Hero's Journey. It Just Doesn't Know What Chapter It's In.

I want to try something with you.

Think about your company the way you’d think about a character in a story. It has a clear origin, trials to overcome, and a version of itself that’s trying to become something it’s meant to be. Maybe you can’t see it right away because you’ve been living inside that story the whole time, but give it a try anyway.

Almost every company follows the same underlying path - the hero’s journey. Not every company finishes it, of course. Some stall at the refusal stage, or simply don’t survive the first crisis. The important bit is that successful companies will eventually go through the whole thing.

Just think about it: why does your company exist? What wasn’t working? Maybe something was broken or missing or frustrating? Was there a specific point where you looked at how something was, thought that it didn’t have to be that way, and decided to make a change? To solve a problem?

That’s the founding wound. The thing that made the company unavoidable. You just had to do something. There was no other option that would let you sleep peacefully at night. And like every good hero, your newly created company didn’t choose its own adventure - it was called into it. By you.

Do you see what I did here? I know that it’s common for founders to feel that they’re on the hero’s journey themselves. Which is totally fair, but I want to reframe it a bit, because I think I can make a decent point about the importance of making all pieces that make your company work coherent.

So let’s start slowly from the very beginning and walk through the whole arc, one stage at a time. You’ll see why it’s important at the very end. All will make sense, I promise.

The story you tell before you’ve earned it (Brand)

Every company starts as a story someone tells themselves before anything real exists.

1. The life before the wound (ordinary world). This is where you’re just a person with a job. Maybe you work for someone for six years, you’re good at it, and nothing is visibly wrong. But once in a while, there’s a recurring headache that you feel. Maybe the industry is handling particular problems clumsily and expensively, and everyone is tolerating it as if it’s normal. You notice it, and it does bother you, but you don’t push it. “It’s fine,” you tell yourself.

The company doesn’t exist yet, but it will. Give it time. :)

2. The thing you can’t unsee (call to adventure). Eventually, something happens that makes the tolerable intolerable for you. Maybe a client complains about the exact problem you’ve been working around for years, and this time, instead of shrugging it off, you think that it doesn’t really have to be this way. That’s your founding wound taking its shape. You now have very strong feelings and opinions about it, and a vision of a company you can clearly see yourself materialising in your mind. This is what made the company unavoidable rather than optional. This is how you called the company on an adventure.

3. The part nobody puts in the pitch deck (refusal of the call). You don’t quit your job right away. You sit on your idea for eight months, telling yourself you’re not ready. That’s because you have no idea how to actually do the thing. Surely there’s someone smarter out there who either already solved it or tried to solve it, and it didn’t work. Well, that’s what you think anyway. You also have a mortgage and really need a predictable paycheck. So you hesitate as if your life depends on it.

If your company’s founding story skips straight from “I noticed a problem” to “so I built a company,” it’s probably missing this part. But not because it didn’t happen - you simply edited it out as soon as you found yourself on the other side. If your company were a person, it would feel that you almost didn’t want it. That it almost wasn’t worth it.

4. One sentence from one person (meeting with the mentor). You finally met someone. Or you read something. Or maybe you heard something casually without expecting it. Whatever that is, it’s the exact thing you need to hear to make up your mind about the company and the brand you want to build. Chances are, it sounds something like this: “You don’t need to know how to do the whole thing. You just need to do the next real piece of it.” Every hero’s journey has this figure, and it’s exactly what inspires you to make a decision. You’re the one who heard the message, but it’s your company that starts showing up more fully. It has to happen. That’s it - you can see it clearly now.

5. The day you can’t take back (crossing the threshold). Now you hand in your notice. This is your first irreversible commitment and the birth of your company. Ordinary world no more - not for you, not for your creation. You’re two pieces of the same puzzle, crossing together the same threshold into adventure, ready for the challenges and transformation that your company is set to accomplish with your help. You act, but the company is the one who’s changed by it.

That’s why founders talk about their companies the way they do. Visionary, expansive, slightly ahead of reality. That’s not delusion (although sometimes it can be), that’s their hero in the early chapters, before the trials start. They’re describing what they can see coming, what they’re building towards. To them, it feels inevitable. The hero has to reach its destination no matter what.

This whole opening act is your brand. Maybe you don’t think about it yet, maybe you think you’ll worry about the brand a little later, but actually, the brand has already started taking shape here. The founding wound becomes the origin story. The vision becomes the promise. The threshold becomes the moment you can’t take it back.

Nobody survives the early days alone (People)

The next stretch is where you discover who your allies are: people.

6. Who actually shows up (tests, allies, and enemies). For the first several months, you’re learning the rules of this new world. You have no idea what you’re doing, and your company feels it. It needs allies to survive the first tests and enemies, whatever they may be, so you hire your first two people. One turns out to be brilliant and stays for years. In fact, this person is so brilliant that your company accepts him as its own. The other isn’t quite a good fit, something doesn’t stick. You can’t explain why exactly, but the person needs to go. On a good note, a competitor turns out to be more useful as pressure than as a threat, and a supplier becomes an ally in ways you didn’t expect, offering flexibility that keeps you alive through the initial stages.

You feel that your company will survive. Unsure how long, but it’ll survive for now because it has allies. Things are a little hard to navigate, but you have a brand promise that helps you make decisions that make the most sense.

The company lives; you pull the strings.

Notice what’s being tested here: the product idea - yes, but more importantly, whether the company can actually work. Who you hire, who you keep, who shows up for you when things are hard, who offers you a helping hand, and who protects you.

What you do when it’s hard (Culture)

Eventually, the stakes rise, and what happens next reveals what the brand can’t fake and people alone can’t carry: culture.

7. The approach to the inmost cave. By year two, the company is stable enough to see the next big decision coming. It requires new leaders to lead functions you, as a founder, don’t even fully understand. This means giving up some control and handing pieces of your company to newcomers you don’t trust yet. You try to delay it, you rethink it, you keep circling back, but ultimately you see that the company won’t survive if you don’t let it.

8. The story cracks open (ordeal, the crisis). You make the hires, hand them the company, and explain what you’re building. A few months later - crisis. A major client leaves, revenue is at rock bottom, and you’re unsure if you can pay the salaries in full. You panic. You think the company won’t pull through this. You do, of course, try to fight, though - you won’t just leave it. The company crumbles, but you keep looking for a way out. You find it, but you also show up and make decisions in ways you’re not proud of.

The company promoted work-life balance, but everyone was burned out. The company was supposed to be fully transparent, but the whole team was kept in the dark throughout the process. The employees were made to believe that their expertise and ideas mattered, but none of that was considered when the company was in the pit.

You don’t recognise yourself or your company, but you both survive the ordeal. Somehow, you both stay standing. Scuffed but alive.

This is culture’s real test. This is what people experience inside when everything is on fire and there are only 4 minutes to make a decision that hurts someone either way. Your company didn’t suddenly become a new entity, with new values; there was simply no space left for the things that mattered when the pressure came.

That’s okay. Things happen. Nothing is lost yet; only learned.

9. Seizing the sword (reward). You finally wake up from the bad dream and realise what has happened. You cannot necessarily fix it - the damage has been done, the allies question their place, and the company is nothing like what it used to be. But you try. You speak with the people who helped you build the thing and you’re open to hearing the truth as is. And the truth is, they hate the culture. They feel lied to, their expertise never mattered when it counted, and the work-life balance was a joke. But that’s okay. You’re rewarded with a level of clarity you never felt before. Now you know where your company actually stands.

What you walk away with isn’t a solution - it’s clarity. A gift you didn’t know you needed. Your company has been presenting two (or more) different stories about what it is, and they didn’t quite match. For you, it was something that survived. For others, it was something they survived instead.

None of this was really about the revenue. A coherent company absorbs a bad quarter and moves on. This one couldn’t, because the brand had been promising what the culture couldn’t deliver, with no systems built to catch it. So one ordinary crisis dragged the brand, the people and the culture down with it, all at once. That's what misalignment costs you.

Clarity doesn’t fix anything on its own (Systems)

10. The slow, unglamorous rebuild (The road back). You’re not inventing new values. The ones you had were the right thing - you simply never built anything underneath to protect them when things got hard. So you go through the approval processes, the way mistakes get handled, and start asking the hard questions.

It’s slow. You try things, and they don’t work right away. Maybe you even hire someone to help you out with this specifically. It’s difficult, and your allies are losing patience. But you stick with it. You power the company with systems that won’t let it crumble again in the same way it did before. You make sure that each value has proper scaffolding underneath to survive the pressure. You address the issues your allies present. You build something new. Well, not quite, actually. You’re rebuilding the better version of it. Something closer to the vision you held in your mind when you started this whole thing.

11. Proof, in an ordinary week (resurrection). The real test is six months later. Revenue dips again, smaller this time, but it still has that crisis feeling. The old instinct rises: go quiet, handle it alone, protect people from the worry. You don't, and it's not really about being a better person. It's that the systems don't give you the choice. The monthly finance update goes out on schedule, same as always, because someone other than you owns it now. Someone's been putting in long hours on an urgent project, and you don't catch it yourself, you're mid-crisis. Your ops lead catches it instead, in the weekly check-in built specifically for this, and sends them home early the next morning. Revenue past a set threshold triggers a team decision meeting automatically, not you deciding alone at midnight.

Small things. But the same allies who once said they felt lied to, who said their expertise never mattered, notice the change.

That’s resurrection. Not where you got better (although maybe you did), but where the company no longer needs you to.

The same company told on purpose

12. Two years on (return with the elixir). Two years on, the company is fixed. Actually, no, better - it’s tested. It knows exactly where it breaks, which value cracks under pressure, and is built on systems that prevent both from happening. People you hire know what they are getting into. Your other founder pals ask you questions about how you did it. The world is trying to peek inside to write case studies and get interviews. They are thirsty for the good and the bad - they want to hear the real story that the hero completed on its hero’s journey.

That’s the promised, earned elixir.

Where does this leave you

Here’s what was actually happening while you were reading a story about a company that nearly fell apart. Every stage you just walked through was one of four things doing the real work.

• Brand went first, because someone has to promise something before it can be tested. Stages 1 through 5: the wound, the hesitation, the mentor, the leap. And I’m not saying this is where it was created, by any means. I’m saying this is where it started taking shape.

• People carried it next because a promise can’t survive alone. Stage 6: the allies who showed up before there was any proof that the bet would pay off. That includes people you hire, suppliers you work with, and partnerships you’re creating.

• Culture got tested later and harder. Stages 7-8 are where it becomes clear what is being said when things are good and what actually happens when things go bad. Reward, stage 9, only happened because you chose to listen after the crisis, not because surviving the crisis produced it automatically. Most companies never take that step and stay misaligned indefinitely.

• Systems came last because clarity is not enough - you have to do something with it. Stages 10 and 11: not new values, just enough scaffolding to create a workplace people think is worth showing up for. Stage 12 is what it looks like once that scaffolding has held for years, not months.

Brand has to drive who you hire, the culture you build, the systems you put in place. People have to actually buy into all three, not just tolerate them. Culture has to match brand, people and systems, not drift from them. Systems have to be built by what brand, people and culture actually need. Get all four pointing the same direction and a crisis is just a crisis: expensive, unpleasant, but survivable. Get even one of them missing or pointing a different way, and the crisis stops being one problem. Brand, culture and people all take the hit directly. Systems just gets exposed for not being there to stop it.

Most founders unconsciously just follow the chapters in the hero's journey and tackle problems that are most urgent and can no longer be ignored. That's natural, but that's not how it should be. And the fix isn't necessarily about making all four dimensions strong at once from day one, because that's not realistic. It's staying one chapter ahead of the one you're actually in. If you're still early, culture and systems aren't urgent yet, but they will be, so don't wait for a crisis to force the question. If you're mid-trial, the ordeal is coming whether you're ready or not, so ask now whether your culture could survive four minutes of real pressure. If you're deep in a crisis right now, the reward isn't automatic, it only comes if you actually stop and listen once it's over. Founders who stay one chapter ahead don't skip stage 8. They just get an ordinary crisis instead of an existential one.

Thanks for reading!

Lina