Taking a Leap of Faith, Together

You can’t build a life you love by following a path you hate.

I can’t tell you how many times she would come home from work completely irate—whether it was because of a negative interaction with a coworker, a sudden shift in policy, or a poor leadership decision. But the most frustrating part for me was not being able to understand why I felt so frustrated myself.

It took months of couples therapy for us to realize the truth: it hurt me to see Donna being treated so inhumanely. She was giving 110% to her company, to her patients, to the system and yet it felt like she was constantly being let down.

The pandemic only made everything worse. It didn’t just create new problems; it exposed and amplified the broken processes, the systemic flaws, the bad leadership, and the misaligned financial incentives that were already there.

We fought. A lot. And from my perspective, many of those arguments started after one of us had a terrible day at work. It got to the point where, on particularly bad days, we’d look at each other and ask, “Seriously. What would happen if I quit tonight? Could we financially swing it?”

That question became an informal metric — how many times we’d ask it in a month. At its peak, it happened four times. That was when I realized that, although we had built a beautiful life and were incredibly fortunate in many ways, it wasn’t sustainable. And at the end of the day, it wasn’t something I was proud of. It wasn’t a future I wanted for our kids.

We spent countless sleepless nights talking about our future—especially about what we didn’t want it to look like. And during those talks, I kept asking Donna to take a leap of faith with me: to go into business together.

That leap meant taking on a lot of risks. Were we good business people? How can we build a business together when we can’t even cook together? What would this mean for our marriage? For our finances? For our kids? Could we even compete in a system we didn’t build—one that seemed rigged, especially with no formal business experience?

We still wrestle with these questions, but what became clear was this: continuing with “business as usual” was not an option.

So this is really just a long way of saying:

To my beautiful wife—thank you.

Thank you for trusting me.

Thank you for joining this journey with me.

And I promise you: if we keep our values front and center, we will make a massive difference in our little corner of the healthcare system.