After 14 years running her marketing agency, Shari was burning out. She was wearing every hat, managing 20 things at once, and letting her team and clients control her time. She worried about payroll, about client satisfaction, about finishing projects — and dealt with it by working late nights and weekends. She was so busy doing the work that she'd never focused on the numbers, the growth, or the goals. In her own words, she was just an employee in her own company. She'd come close to throwing in the towel. But when a new division of the company started gaining traction, she saw the potential and knew she couldn't get there alone. She wanted to surround herself with people who were in the same boat — or had been — and figure out what needed to change. Through The Alliance Mastermind, Shari's transformation came fast. Within three months, she documented SOPs for nearly all of her processes, projects, and systems. She named team leads and put them in charge of specific project types. She made key hires to take on work that only she had been doing. And she tackled the most urgent structural risk in the company: capturing the tribal knowledge of a retiring employee who had been there since the beginning — when Shari was the only other person — and had run half the business ever since. The biggest shift was in how Shari leads her team. She started telling them directly: make the decision. Even if it's not the one I would make, I'll share how I'd do it differently, but I want you to own it and run with it. As she puts it, that's the only way this company stops depending on her 100% of the time. It was a shock to some team members who'd never been told "I don't need to make this decision." But slowly, people started stepping up — and she watched them prove they knew what they were doing all along. The company noticed the change. Her team started seeing things shift. The whole business felt different. And because Shari was finally spending time on business development instead of buried in delivery, the floodgates opened — new opportunities started flowing in at a rate she hadn't experienced before. Shari credits the Mastermind community as a key part of the experience. After 14 years of feeling like she was doing it alone at the top, she finally had a group of agency owners she could lean on, bounce ideas off, and who understood her challenges. As she describes it: she doesn't have one mentor — she has a whole group, and sometimes she mentors them and sometimes they mentor her.