What Was Your Biggest Leap?

_{Welcome back to the Weekly Invoice, a growth newsletter for operators, owners and lifelong learners dedicated to solving other peoples problems through product and service. I’ve been working on some playbooks (more to come on that) for future episodes of the Weekly Invoice but for my first newsletter back I thought we’d reconnect. This is my story, and it aligns with so many of your stories that I’ve heard throughout the journey. I’m offering today’s post as an olive branch to each of you; to return the favor and share more about you. (Who knows I may collect them and repost them for the entire audience to grow together in readership). So, welcome back, to the Weekly Invoice. - Grady}

You and are I are probably more similar than you think.

I didn’t start my career with a clean, crisp story or a perfectly linear path. I started as “one of the twins.” Our wins, our losses, our plans were all shared. People knew us as a pair first, as people second. I loved my brother deeply—but somewhere in that shared identity, I realized I didn’t fully know myself yet.​

At some point, you’ve probably felt your own version of that.
Maybe it wasn’t a twin. Maybe it was a role, a company, a family expectation, or a city that defined you before you got a real say in it.

The drive that changed everything

My turning point was both simple and dramatic: I put my whole life into a car and drove to Los Angeles alone. No plan. No safety net. Just a sense that staying where I was meant staying as a version of myself that no longer fit.​

LA was a reset in the purest sense:

• New city.

• No set identity.

• No one who knew my default “role.”

Have you ever had a moment like that—where the environment changed so much that you had to decide who you were again, not just who you’d been?

It doesn’t have to be a cross‑country move. It might have been:

• Leaving a stable job for a chaotic startup.

• Saying no to a promotion that didn’t feel like you.

• Moving into a new industry where you went from “expert” back to “beginner.”

Those moves feel reckless from the outside.
From the inside, they’re often the most honest thing you’ve done in years.

Finding my craft, finding my rooms

In LA, I stumbled into the thing that would shape the rest of my career: marketing. Not just “ads” or “content,” but the deeper question underneath all of it:​

How do brands grow in a way that actually connects with people?

I started in the trenches and slowly worked my way into bigger and bigger rooms—distribution businesses, high‑growth teams, and eventually global boardrooms and C-suites. Along the way, I learned to navigate three very different doors:​

• The back door, where I’d talk with the people closest to the work.

• The side door, where product and operations lived.

• The front door, where the owners and executives were thinking about risk, vision, and outcomes.​

If you look back, you probably have a similar pattern.

At some point, you stopped just “doing the job” and started seeing the whole system:

• You noticed where customers were confused.

• You saw how internal misalignment killed good ideas.

• You realized growth wasn’t a single tactic—it was how the whole organism worked.

Those moments are quiet, but they’re powerful. They mark the shift from “employee” to “operator,” even if your title didn’t change.

When “success” doesn’t feel aligned

For a long time, I measured success the way most of us are taught to: campaigns shipped, revenue up, pipeline full. I did the things ambitious operators are supposed to do—build out sales and marketing motions, launch products, run plays.​

And on paper, a lot of it worked.

But internally, I felt something I later started calling dissonance. The business was growing, but it didn’t feel like it was getting stronger. Wins were spiky and fragile. The work was busy but not necessarily meaningful.​

You might know that feeling:

• You hit your number, but it doesn’t make the next quarter any easier.

• You launch the thing, but it doesn’t actually clarify who you are to your market.

• You’re “successful,” but you wouldn’t call it sustainable.

That dissonance is often a signal—not that you’re failing, but that you’ve outgrown the game you’re playing.

For me, that signal pushed me to ask different questions in every room:

• Are we just pushing messages, or are we actually listening?

• What are our customers teaching us that we’re not building around yet?

• How do we build something that compounds instead of resets every quarter?​

What questions has your own dissonance pushed you to ask?

From growth hacks to distribution

Over time, I realized I wasn’t interested in adding one more campaign to the pile. I wanted to build something more fundamental: distribution—a system of conversations, relationships, and workflows that make growth more reliable and more human.​

Instead of asking, “How do we sell more?” I started asking:

• Who are the people I’m uniquely positioned to serve?

• What are they actually trying to solve?

• What conversations keep coming up over and over again?

That turned into experiments. I built a course called The Ecosystem of Opportunity and gave it to other founders and fractional leaders. I watched how they used it, where they got stuck, what resonated, what didn’t. I executed, analyzed, and iterated—sometimes embarrassingly in public.​

You’ve probably done your own version of this too:

• Turned a messy internal framework into something you shared with others.

• Realized your “side” system was actually the most valuable thing you’d built.

• Let real‑world feedback reshape how you think, even when it bruised your ego.

That loop—launch, learn, iterate—is uncomfortable.
But it’s also where your deepest leverage gets uncovered.

Building Rising Tides and stepping into fractional leadership

In 2024, I formalized what had been happening unofficially for years and founded Rising Tides Marketing. The first client was me. I built a structure to launch my own ideas, stories, and systems into the world, then used that same engine to support the companies I helped lead.​

That’s how I ended up as a fractional CMO / CRO for B2B founders:

• Helping them move from feast‑or‑famine growth to something more predictable.

• Building systems where marketing, sales, and product are all part of one distribution engine.

• Shifting the focus from landing the next customer to building an ecosystem where customers stay, refer, and grow with you.​

If you lead a team or a company, you’ve probably stepped into your own “fractional” role at some point—holding responsibilities that didn’t exist on an org chart because someone needed to own the whole picture.

Those moments matter. They’re often where your true craft emerges:

• Connecting dots no one else sees.

• Advocating for the customer when the room is obsessed with the quarter.

• Quietly designing systems while everyone else chases tactics.

The loneliness underneath the title

There’s a part of this journey that doesn’t get talked about enough: how lonely it can be.

In the manuscript for my book, Build Distribution, I talk about how running a business—and especially leading growth—can feel isolating. You’re carrying competing expectations: customers, team, leadership, family, investors. Everyone wants something slightly different, and you’re the one trying to make it all coherent.​

Even when things go well, it can feel like:

• You can’t fully explain the pressure to people outside your world.

• You’re always “on,” even off the clock.

• You’re the only one who sees certain risks or opportunities clearly.

If any of that resonates, you’re not broken—and you’re not alone.
It’s part of what happens when you move from executing tasks to owning outcomes.

The question is not whether that weight exists. It’s what you build around it:

• Do you create systems that share the load?

• Do you build distribution so you’re not always starting from zero?

• Do you let your customers, team, and partners become true collaborators instead of just endpoints for your output?​

Why I’m telling you this

I’m not sharing this to position myself as a hero of my own story.
I’m sharing it because every major shift in my life and career came down to the same pattern—and it’s likely true for you too:

1. Recognize that the current version of your role or identity no longer fits.

2. Take a leap that feels bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside.

3. Build a new system around the person you became because of that leap.

For me, that looked like:

• Leaving the identity of “one of the twins.”

• Packing my life into a car and driving to LA.

• Saying yes to rooms I didn’t feel fully “ready” for yet.

• Moving from campaigns to distribution.

• Founding Rising Tides and stepping into fractional leadership.​

For you, it might look like:

• Moving from specialist to owner.

• Turning a quiet internal framework into a product, a firm, or a practice.

• Leaving a company that no longer matches who you’ve become.

• Finally aligning your business model with the way you actually work best.

The details are different, but the pattern is the same.

Your leap, your distribution

If there’s one thing I want you to take from my story, it’s this:

You don’t find your full potential inside the version of you that keeps everyone else comfortable. You find it in the leap—where you stand alone for a moment and decide who you are now.​

And once you’ve taken that leap, the work becomes building distribution around that truer version of you:

• The customers who get the best of you.

• The offers that actually reflect your strengths.

• The systems that make your work sustainable and compounding instead of random.

So here’s what I’d love for you to sit with:

• What was your biggest leap?

• Who did you become because of it?

• And what would it look like to build your next phase of growth—your distribution—around that version of you, instead of the older one you’ve already outgrown?

If this resonated, hit reply and tell me about your leap.
That’s where the real distribution starts: not with a funnel, but with a conversation between two people who have both decided not to stay where they started.

-Grady