Advisor · Operator · Builder
Operationally, when the back office needs to catch up with the business. Strategically, when you can't see your way through a hard decision. Personally, when you've been running too long and need to stop.
Where I work
ERP & Payment Infrastructure for B2B Companies
You're leaving money on the table — in your payment terms, your vendor relationships, and your back-office stack. B2BActivate helps mid-market B2B companies find it.
See how it works →StrategicClarity on the Decision You Can't Stop Thinking About
A 400-year-old Quaker practice, now AI-augmented. A small group of trusted people ask only questions — no advice, no opinion — until the answer that was always inside you becomes clear.
Bring your question →Personal10-Day Intensive for Founders Who've Hit the Wall
For the founder who's high-functioning and falling apart. Not therapy. Not rehab. A private, intensive program designed for the pace and privacy needs of founders in crisis.
Learn more →The thread
“The moments that stop founders aren't always the biggest ones — they're the ones where you can't see clearly. I've built things that solve that at three different altitudes: the operations layer, the decision layer, and the personal layer.”
— Aaron C. Smith
A letter
To the founder who's still standing:
You said it would just be a few more months.
That was three years ago.
I know because I said the same thing. I said it to my wife. I said it to myself in the car at 6am before I walked through the door and performed "fine." I said it while missing the birth of my son. I said it before the psych ward. I said it while spending $250,000 on solutions to a problem I hadn't actually looked at yet.
The problem wasn't the business.
The business was what I was hiding behind.
Here's what I know to be true about the person reading this: You are not broken in the way you think you are. You are exhausted by the distance between who you built this for and what you've become in the building of it. You are working harder on the wrong floor of a burning building.
The drinking. The numbness. The thing that used to take the edge off — that is the edge now. Or maybe it's not that. Maybe it's the scroll at midnight. The second glass that became three. The way you answered your kid's question but couldn't remember the question an hour later. The way your wife has stopped asking how you actually are, because she already knows the answer you'll give.
You already know.
Not what's wrong — you've catalogued that. You know what it's costing. You know the math on another year of this. You know the look your kid gives you at the dinner table. That's not ignorance. That's avoidance. And the distance between those two things — that's where everything important is living right now.
I built three things. Not because I had a vision. Because I had a bill.
The first was an operational practice — because I watched founders leak 20% of their revenue through process gaps they couldn't see from inside. The second was a decision practice — because I needed someone to ask me the questions I couldn't ask myself, and the Quakers got there 400 years before I did. The third was a restoration practice — because every tip-of-the-spear leader I've ever met eventually hits a wall, and our system doesn't have a bed until the divorce is filed.
I'm not here to fix you. You aren't broken.
I'm here to build the container I needed — before the collapse, not after it — so someone doesn't have to lose what I lost to finally see what I see.
You have two choices. Keep optimizing the life you're in. Or stop long enough to find out what's actually there.
You already know which one.
With love and partnership,
Aaron