It Is Now or Never

At the beginning of 2026 I found myself tired, physically and mentally burnt out, and frustrated with the way my company was developing, both financially and organisationally.

The company, which was started by my parents, has been part of my life for more than twenty years. First as a production worker, and later as foreman, production manager, and operations director. In the end, I took over the company in a generational handover.

When I joined the family business, we were a small company with one factory, built up around my childhood home.

When, at the beginning of 2026, I looked back on the financial year just ended, the situation was that we had grown into an international manufacturing company with several hundred employees and operations in several countries. The result for the year was far from our best.

My story is that I took over the family business and, with a strong commercial and product foundation from my parents, very hard work, skilled employees, and a pronounced entrepreneurial personality, have built a large company, something I am proud of and aware of.

But my story is also about a young man with a trade qualification, who has always been aware that you need people around you who are better than you in the areas where you lack skills or abilities. That is why, very early in my journey with the company, I hired skilled people with good and lengthy educations, and their theoretical competence has been a good match for my more practical approach to business development and problem-solving.

For many years I worked too much and carried too many worries, and was often frustrated that, with such a strong team around me, I still had to be the one who pushed from behind, pulled from the front, cleaned up, and solved the problems we run into from time to time.

Several times I have tried to step back from day-to-day management and hand it over to my skilled, well-educated, and well-paid employees, several of whom have also become co-owners. Most recently a couple of years ago, when we chose to merge our Danish activities, which sat in several different companies and at several different locations, each with its own independent organisation.

Before that, we had been in the process of selling the company to a foreign buyer, with whom we negotiated for more than a year. Shortly before closing, they withdrew, which gave us the chance to stop and decide what we wanted for the future.

The decision was to merge our Danish companies, since that was what we had recommended to the buyer. We started the merger and put together an executive board in which I was not part of day-to-day operational management, but instead had a role in our holding company, working on business development in the broad sense.

For more than a year I watched the executive board, made up of a couple of my co-owners and some skilled and experienced managers, and much of what I saw and experienced gave me worries and frustrations. In all that time I said nothing, out of respect for them and to give them room to work.

But in the end I could no longer accept the large deviations in the financial development and the lack of action to steer the company in the right direction and back onto the strategic course we had agreed when we merged, when I gave a new executive board, without me, responsibility for the company's development and operations.

The result was that some managers were dismissed, and I stepped back into management and did exactly what I have always done. I took leadership and responsibility for everything that wasn't working, and then set about, once again, leading and running the company the only way I know how.

I am an owner-manager, and I am both the company's pioneer and the one who sees the opportunities the others don't. And I am also the company's and my own worst enemy. Because I have only one way of solving problems, and that is hard work, gathering control around myself.

So the situation at the beginning of 2026 was that I was tired, partly because of a long period of heavy work, partly because of frustration with my closest colleagues, who I felt had let me down. I have always been true to my principle of hiring skilled people around me, and yet it is always me who has to solve the problems and create new momentum and development.

As I said, I have only my trade qualification, and I have a feeling that I am humble and must be, in order to give room to the people around me. I am no mathematical genius, but I can do the sums and understand numbers and finance, and so I am also aware that I have created a success.

Through my choices, decisions, hires, and both luck and chance, I have built a large and successful company worth a great deal of money. And now here I stand, feeling limited joy in everything I have created, because it feels as if nothing can happen without my getting involved. And when I do get involved, it becomes overwhelming, both in time and in leadership.

I am an owner-manager, for better and for worse.

And in the middle of my frustration and my search for a way forward, I saw a post on LinkedIn from Mia Wagner. A woman I have followed ever since all of Denmark got to know her as one of the investors on the TV programme Løvens Hule, the Danish Dragons' Den.

Mia was the investor I could identify with. I didn't know why, but where some of the others had big personalities with a need to position themselves and make sure they were seen, heard, and remembered, there was something sincere about Mia and the way she spoke to the often nervous participants.

Mia seemed genuinely interested in the people standing in front of her, and my impression was that she was there for their sake more than her own. I didn't have that same feeling with some of the other investors.

So I followed Mia on LinkedIn, and in the middle of my sense of crisis and frustration, focused more on what wasn't working than on the joy of everything I had created, I saw this post on Mia's LinkedIn profile:

What am I actually doing now? In short, I work with people who carry responsibility.

I have always had a particular talent for seeing what is really going on beneath the strategies, the decisions, the power, the tempo, and the expectations. Now I use that talent in its purest form.

I am a Trusted Executive Advisor. A personal adviser to leaders with strategic responsibility, those who have to deliver … and still remain themselves.

My advice sits in a place where most people lack someone to turn to: between the lawyer's clarity, the accountant's precision, the investor's perspective, and the psychologist's understanding of people. You may know the experience of everything you have done suddenly making sense as a whole. That is how I feel about my advisory work.

I have let go of a great deal in order to refine this field. And I get it back tenfold, because the results are so clear:

Leaders who find the balance between who they are and what they do.

Decisions that become easier.

Systems that can carry the weight without people breaking.

Companies that deliver results.

I take on only a few at a time, and until now only through my network. Right now I have room for two new engagements. If you are a leader, or know one, and you feel a "that … that's me", send me a message.

— Mia

An interesting post, and for me something that made me think: It's now or never, Paul. You may never get the chance to contact her again. That is an invitation to you!

One sentence in particular struck me, and it made me contact Mia to ask whether she had room for me in an engagement.

A good six months later, it is actually a little hard to explain what I thought she could help me with, because I couldn't explain myself what the problem was. But that sentence struck me and gave me the courage to write to Mia.

The sentence that struck me was:

Leaders who find the balance between who they are and what they do.

I had become exactly the man who was identified with what he did, both by others and by myself. Work-Paul and private Paul were the same person, and I dreamt of getting both of them back, but each on his own.

So I wrote this to Mia:

After some hesitation, I have decided to reach out to you. I have read some of your posts on LinkedIn and followed you elsewhere, and something catches my attention, most recently your post last week where you described some of the results of your work. It made me want to get in touch.

I am one of those leaders who, for many years, has tried to find the balance between who I am and what I do. All too often I end up identifying with what I do, because I feel I have to make a difference and solve the things I actually expected others to solve. The result is often that I lead from the front while also feeling I have to push the whole load when things get difficult. I lose myself for long periods, put the company, the customers, and the employees ahead of myself and those closest to me, and that has had major consequences for me through most of my career.

In short, I am the owner-manager of a manufacturing company, which I took over as the second generation. I started somewhat by chance in my parents' company when it was small, and took over first the management and later the ownership. Today we have several hundred employees and production in several countries, and we sell our products in Europe.

Together with skilled employees, I have helped build a healthy company. But for many years I have also felt under pressure, both from my own expectations and from a sense of not always having the right skills in leadership and strategic development. Several times I have tried to step back from day-to-day management and pass the baton on, but several times, most recently last summer, I ended up back in a central management role.

Today I have accepted that I will probably be part of the management until the company is sold. The plan is a sale within three to five years, once the changes we are making, both in operations and in our European market development, are properly rooted. Changes I am good at carrying out, but also a big task that worries me if I do what I usually do when big tasks need solving.

I have promised myself and my family that my life will be more in balance than before. That is why I am contacting you. I saw in your post that you had room for a couple of people. If that is still the case, or if it will be within the foreseeable future, I would very much like to talk with you about the possibility of an advisory engagement.

I have a feeling that what you work with could be really valuable for me.

I have given my private email address in my contact details, as I have a colleague who reads my emails, and I would like to keep this enquiry confidential. If you prefer to reply to my work email, that is fine.

I quickly heard back from Mia, and we arranged our first meeting at her creative studio. There she works with clay, among other things, and she also has a small office where we could sit and talk.

I have now been in a mentoring and advisory engagement with Mia Wagner for five months, and we meet every fortnight.

If Mia finds it hard to explain what her work consists of, which methods she uses, and what her clients get out of it, I can actually understand that, because it is hard to explain.

But the results of Mia's work, or rather the work Mia and I have done together over the past five months, are quite remarkable.

Mia is a quite remarkable person to be with, and as a client of Mia's you benefit from her experience, her knowledge, her incredibly great curiosity and desire to acquire knowledge and learn new things, and not least her professionalism.

At the same time, you are never in doubt about her genuine interest in what we are working on, and in me as a person. She is truly present and puts an enormous amount of energy into her work. And she is also wonderfully human and humorous, and a person who can become both embarrassed and red in the face when you praise her.

And I often do, because Mia has made a huge difference for me, both as a person and professionally.

At our first meeting, Mia told me that she didn't take minutes or work with course material. She engages and puts a great deal of energy into listening, remembering, and relating to me and my situation, and she has no plan from one session to the next.

We talk about what is taking up a lot of space for me, and even though we have now met eight to ten times, Mia has never taken notes or asked me to bring anything in writing.

Mia has chosen a way of working where she is together with the client in the process. She knows the people we talk about from my everyday life, she knows what I feel, and she gives me sparring, challenges, criticism, and praise, and asks me many questions.

It is all anchored in the relationship we have built, and that is what I get from my engagement with Mia. We have built a relationship that starts from me and the challenges I find it hard to solve, and that is truly a big thing for me as a person.

I have always been aware that I must remember to hire others who are cleverer than me, give room to others in my organisation, praise others, and be humble to show them that I recognise them and what they can do.

And now I sit with Mia every fortnight and talk about me and everything I can do, everything I have created, and that it is actually okay that I sometimes think the others are a bunch of arseholes.

It is wonderful to get that attention from a person who is impartial on the one hand and, on the other, so skilled, clever, experienced, and professional that she never lets me shift the problems and their causes onto others.

Not because it may not be justified that others should solve the problems in focus, but because she has taught me, or is at least well on the way to teaching me, that I am actually skilled, intelligent, and a perfectly decent bloke who doesn't need to be humble and take responsibility for everything that isn't right.

She has helped me visit a young version of myself, actually me as a child, and I have found some things in my upbringing that I had repressed.

There was a child who was robbed of some of his childhood, and of some of the joy and playfulness that made him a lovely boy with fire in his belly.

We have set that child free, and he lives in me again.

Mia uses different methods to help me reach conclusions in our conversations that I carry with me into my life and my everyday.

She has reintroduced me to meditation, which I first encountered during a stress management programme but probably never understood or appreciated the way I do now.

We can talk about alternative forms of treatment that Mia knows about, and I find both interest and curiosity in them, which I have never given room to before.

I think it is because Mia and I are there together, right there, in the middle of a conversation that doesn't necessarily end with a result you can underline twice, nor with tasks or new learning I have to go home and practise.

Mia starts from me. She is in what I am in, together with me. And with her abilities and commitment, I find a great deal of new energy and a great deal of self-worth, love, and openness of mind, which I have probably always had, but which has been pushed far away because I have spent my energy focusing on everything I can do nothing about, and all the thoughts about challenges I have held on to instead of letting them go.

And then to use my abilities and my energy on what I am good at, and where I can create the results I dream of.

My biggest challenge in my work with Mia is that I would like to enrich others in my organisation with what Mia has given me.

But if I introduce Mia to my management or my board, I lose what I have with Mia, namely my space and someone who starts from my reality and only mine.

And I don't want to lose that.

I want Mia to myself, for the sparring she gives me, and not to mix it into my professional everyday. Because that is the part I can steer, drive, and control myself, because I have my talks with Mia.

But I would recommend at any time that other leaders become clients of Mia's, if they are truly ready to create change in themselves.

Paul