Deksia

I became CEO of Deksia on January 1st. Five months in, here's what I wish someone had told me.

1. The weight isn't just financial. It's personal.

I knew I'd be responsible for the health of the business. I didn't fully anticipate that I'd also be lying awake thinking about 15 people's mortgages. Their grocery bills. Their families. There's a quiet heaviness to that. It makes every decision feel bigger, and honestly, it should.

2. Nobody knows what you do. Including you, at first.

Fair enough. I didn't know what a CEO's day actually looked like a year ago either. Turns out it's a lot of spreadsheets, sales calls, and constantly figuring out on the fly who owns what. Big chess board. You learn the pieces as you go.

3. Culture doesn't shift just because leadership does.

You can't announce your way into trust. People need time to figure out who you are and what it actually feels like to work under new leadership. That adjustment is slow, and it's supposed to be. My job right now is to keep showing up and let trust build at its own pace.

4. Confidence and certainty aren't the same thing.

You won't always have the full picture. You make calls anyway. But the bigger shift for me has been accepting that problems aren't interruptions to the job — they are the job. You're not trying to build a company where nothing goes wrong. You're building one where things that go wrong get navigated well. Nobody really teaches you that part.

5. The loneliness catches you off guard.

You're leading the team, which means you can't always process the hard stuff with the team. Finding peers who actually get it has been one of the most useful things I've done since January.

I'm still showing up and learning every day, and I'm always grateful for a team that makes it worth it.

-Erin Boone