I had $O.

Someone emailed me last year to ask if I was hiring.

I laughed out loud. At the time I had $0 in my business. Not a slow month. Zero. I was not hiring. I was barely keeping the faith.

From the outside it looked like things were going well. I was showing up consistently in the right places and connecting with the right people. I'm an optimistic person by nature. So what people saw was someone who had it together. Someone building momentum. Someone on their way.

What was actually happening was a different story.

The Rooting Season

2025 was my “rooting” year.

I jumped into entrepreneurship without a parachute. No side hustle warming up on the side. No contingency plan. No soft landing. I was all in. That was a choice I made with full awareness and zero regret. But it also meant that when things got hard, there was no fallback plan. Just a girl on a mission and the work in front of me.

I started this journey with a heavy dose of confidence. Maybe too confident in retrospect. I had spent 25 years leading global teams and managing multimillion dollar P&Ls. I had seen businesses run from the inside. I had a knack for making something phenomenal from anything.  I was a phenomenal chef.

What I didn't realize was that I needed to be a hunter and chef to grow my business. Hunting was new to me. You could tell.

Deals were falling through. Weeks would go by without a single prospecting call. There were stretches where I was doing all the right things on the outside and nothing was converting on the inside. The pipeline was not moving the way I had expected. And I had expected it to move because I had always been exceptional at what I did. That was the part that was hard to sit with. This was not a competence problem. I knew I was good. But being good at the craft and being good at building the business around the craft are two completely different things. I was learning that the hard way.

The doubt would creep on the low days and the same questions would pop up. Do you really know what you're doing? Are you cut out for this?

The Twelve Month Rule

I’ve always been multi-passionate person. I can go deep on something and six months later be ready for the next thing. Starting energizes me. Building energizes me. The maintenance phase, the business as usual phase, that is where I tend to get restless. I know this about myself.

So when I started Catapaultt, I made a rule. Give it twelve months. Not because I had data that said twelve months was the right number. I picked it somewhat arbitrarily, if I'm honest. It felt like enough time to truly vet the idea. Enough time to see what was real and what was just starting energy. Enough time to not quit when it got hard and call it a strategic pivot.

This idea had been on my list since 2015. A decade. I had waited for 10 years. Twelve months was my commitment to myself to thoroughly vet it out.  

Twelve months was also the commitment to not find a way out. Not look for a job ( and there were offers). Not talk myself into a graceful exit. Not let the multi-passionate part of me convince the rest of me that something shinier was waiting.

What kept me sane was not the strategy. It was my walks in the woods and my workouts. Both of them non-negotiable. Music and moving my body is how I clear my mind. It has always been that way. On the mornings when the doubt was loudest I walked anyway. That time was mine regardless of what the numbers in the bank said. It was the one thing I could control when everything else felt uncertain.

So I stuck to the plan. Even when nothing was showing. Even when the outside looked different from the inside. You have to run the play, reset, recalibrate and run the play again.  I was in the first phase. I just had to keep reminding myself of that.

Both Seasons Matter

Everyone wants to bloom. Shine. Be seen. Land the client. Close the deal. Post the win.

However, nobody talks about what comes before that.

Root work is real work. It is not sexy. It does not get applause. There is no LinkedIn post that goes viral because you spent three hours refining your pitch and heard nothing back. There is no celebration for the week you stayed consistent when nothing was converting. But that is where the strong foundation forms. Underground. Invisible. Quietly doing the work that the blooming season will need.

The rooting season does not look like progress from the outside. It looks like silence. It can feel slow and humbling and occasionally terrifying, especially when you are someone who was used to getting results. When your whole identity is tied to being excellent at what you do, a season where excellence is not immediately visible is a particular kind of hard.

But don't confuse stillness with stagnation. Don't be ashamed of the slow days. They are building something.

I had to become a hunter in my rooting year. That required unlearning things I had spent decades getting good at. It required humility I was not expecting to need. It required sitting with uncertainty long enough to let it teach me something instead of just making me uncomfortable. I could not have learned any of it in a boardroom. I could not have learned it anywhere but there, in that season, doing this work.

The year that looked like nothing from the outside was the year that built everything I am standing on now.

Both seasons matter. You need to know which one you're in so you have the right mindset, the right patience, and the right moves. Rooting requires a different kind of discipline than blooming. It requires you to measure yourself against your own commitment instead of someone else's accomplishment. It requires you to trust that the foundation is forming even when you cannot see it yet.

Are you rooting or blooming right now?

Hit reply with 🌱 or 🌸 and tell me about it.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh