Why You Didn’t See the Business Betrayal Coming
“What else was going on in your life when the betrayal happened?”
That's the question I now ask every business owner I interview, and one owner’s answer has stayed with me. Colleen* had spent the year of her betrayal caring for a child in a serious mental health crisis, a crisis that needed her attention for hours of every day, and by the time she noticed what her business partner was doing, the damage was already done.
Entrepreneurs who were betrayed almost always blame themselves for not seeing it coming.
They walk back through the details looking for the moment they should have caught it, and they tell me they should have known better. What they don’t usually mention, unless I ask, is what was happening in the rest of their life at the time.
Once I started asking, the answers followed a pattern. They were caring for a parent through a long illness. They had received a serious diagnosis of their own. They were raising a child in crisis, or getting divorced, or grieving a death, or moving, or handling a financial emergency that had nothing to do with the business. They had been working past sustainable hours for years.
“I got a call from my employees when I was literally in the hospital, having just given birth,” Laura*, a business owner, told me. “She’s going around talking really poorly about you.”
Business betrayal in small partnerships is barely studied, and the research that does exist mostly covers venture-backed startups, so this pattern doesn’t have a published name (yet).
But in my interviews with betrayed business owners, more than half were already dealing with at least one major life crisis when the betrayal happened. That’s consistent enough that I no longer think of it as coincidence.
The reason you didn’t see it coming is that you were already operating at the top of your capacity. Your attention was going where it had to go, to the sick parent, the struggling child, the medical diagnosis, and you didn’t have spare attention for a problem you didn’t know existed.
As for the betrayers: some were opportunists who knew exactly what they were doing, some sensed an opening without consciously planning anything, and some were under their own pressure and made a bad move out of self-protection.
None of those explanations make the betrayal something you caused by being distracted. They’re the reasons the betrayer made the choice they made, not the reasons you failed to prevent it.
So you don’t need to figure out what you should have done differently, because with the attention you had left, there was nothing else you could have done.
Walking back through the details for the moment you should have caught it keeps the blame on you instead of the person who betrayed you, and it won’t help you sleep, hire, or sign the next agreement.
I run one-day intensives for business owners after business betrayal. You can read about how the intensive works, or reach out to me directly with your questions.
*Names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of the people interviewed for this series.