Why Founders Burn Out—and How to Reclaim Control with Zaheer Merali

Auto-generated transcript. Speaker names, spelling, and punctuation may be slightly off.

Mark Evans: It's Mark Evans, and you're listening to Marketing Spark. If you're a founder or entrepreneur, you've probably been there working long hours, juggling too many priorities, stuck in your head, and wondering if all the hustle was really worth it. Today's guest, Tahira Morale, knows that feeling all too well. Not only has he lived it, but he spent the past decade helping founders break free from the cycle of overthinking, overworking, and misalignment. Now, Zahira isn't your typical executive coach. Before stepping into this space, he spent more than twenty years in the trenches, advising CEOs, investing in startups, launching ventures of his own, and navigating the ups and downs of leadership, marriage, divorce, fatherhood, and personal growth. In other words, he gets it. What makes Zahir stand out is his focus on what he calls the inner game, helping high performance helping high performers master their thoughts, emotions, and limiting beliefs to show up with clarity, purpose, and presence. His message is simple, but powerful. We don't need more strategies, hacks, or to do lists. We need to understand ourselves more deeply. In this episode, we'll dig into how founders can find alignment, reclaim their time, and build businesses and lives they actually enjoy. It's a conversation about clarity, not just productivity. It's about doing less, but achieving more and showing up as the kind of leader you actually wanna be. Zahir, welcome to Marketing Spark.

Zaheer Merali: Thank you very much for having me on.

Mark Evans: You help founders eliminate overthinking, overworking, and misalignment. Why do you think these challenges are common among ambitious entrepreneurs and executives?

Zaheer Merali: It's because we're sold a story and we buy into it. We buy into a story that says success or peace or happiness, whatever we're in search of, is at the end of something, at the end of a journey. You'll get it when. I remember feeling this myself and talking myself out of doing things that I really wanted to do in order to get this success mark, and finding so many different pressures, so many contradictory pressures. It wasn't just success as a business owner, it was success as a father, success as a partner. You start to realize we're wearing so many different hats, and the message in every one of those roles seems to be to excel, you need to do more. You need to add more capabilities, add more skills, fix your weaknesses. And I feel that traps us in this never ending cycle of needing to add more. That kind of tension creates the kind of loop that I talk about, the overthinking, the overworking, the misalignment. Once you get into that loop, it's a spiral down.

Mark Evans: I find the more is better mantra or philosophy permeates itself, especially through the tech world. You hear entrepreneurs who proudly say that they work eighty, ninety, a hundred hour weeks as if it's a badge of honor, as if it's something that everybody should aspire to, As someone who values work life balance, I can't imagine what that would be like. My question is why some people, many entrepreneurs, celebrate this work ethic, the idea that to work hard, you need to work along.

Zaheer Merali: Let's get those ones out the way. It's the stories we see in the media, the way things are celebrated, the unicorn status, everything, and everything boils back down to you just gotta hustle harder. You've gotta send 10,000 more emails and intros. Those are the kind of immediate tactical things that people gravitate to, 5AM wake ups. But it's a signal of a deeper sense of unrest. A deeper lack of meaning and lack of clarity with a goal and an ambition and a purpose in your life. That you're chasing so many different things and chasing to the nth degree because it's only in the external validation of all that effort that you find that peace. If you look at it, that's what we're all doing. I came at this from a consulting standpoint. The tech side is the third round. Consulting was the first and used to wear those hundred hour work weeks on the sleeve like that and think I could just do it with four hours of sleep. I crashed and burned in that time frame. I did it for a long time, but eventually crashed and burned because I was trying to start a young family at the same time. And I did it in banking as well. And now tech has come around and I can see the same pattern. What I started to notice is that we get trapped for a while in that pursuit because we're paying attention to all the noise that we're seeing, and we're not really deeply connected to a sense of purpose within. Our resonance, not just a mission that you can put in words and slap it up on a set of neon lights behind you on the podcast, but the real resonance with a mission that's gonna shape and change like a river moves down to the sea. We're missing that kind of story. So absent a story, we take on whatever's outside there. And so many of us are looking for that in our work in the fulfillment because the metrics that we measure are the ones that seem to matter, and that's dollars or share price or hours worked.

Mark Evans: Going back to the work long is the formula for being successful. Entrepreneurship is hard, and a lot of people think that the key to success is brute force. I will simply work longer and harder than other entrepreneurs and that will get me to where I wanna go. But one of the realities of entrepreneurship is success is elusive and failure is often the reality for many entrepreneurs. It's not for a lack of trying or how smart they are or whether their idea is any good. There's lots of variables that come together that make you successful or not. You said that we struggle to apply what we know and we lack the courage to change and we give up too soon. And I think that's something that a lot of entrepreneurs do when they sense that success is not as easy as they want it to be It's not coming as fast as they would hope. How do you come to realize that these were the root causes that were holding people back? The ability or the willingness to give up too soon and to recognize that there are other ways to be successful.

Zaheer Merali: I lived it. I went through it. A long career in consulting banking is successful, but lots of small failures and stuff along the way, things that we would call failures. And as a big part of this, just what we take on this notion of entrepreneurship is hard. Not saying it's not, but relative to what. It's not an absolute hard. Then second, we don't realize that this is part of a journey. It's part of the learning of set of skills. If I put you back to when you were walking, you would say, hey, look, walking's pretty hard. Hardest thing I've ever done. But we still managed to power through it. But then we use words like power through it, and we were learning how to walk. It wasn't a power through it message. It was just say we get up and try again, and then we learn each time to do it better. But the biggest thing I think is that we mistake the playing field as the same playing field. What I mean by that is you could take a patch of grass and you can put two posts at the end of it and it looks like a football field. But you can change countries and put two golf things at the end of it and it's a soccer field, or you put a thing in the middle and it's a cricket pitch and everything else, and you've gotta start figuring out which playing field you're on, which one matters to you, what goalpost you have, what game you're doing. Because if you don't, you that's when you start to burn out because you're playing cricket and a soccer pitch, and people don't get what game you're playing, and you're burning out because you're trying to send a message of this. That's totally different. And having gone through that myself, founders going through, I remember one investing in one where the target market we were looking at were people who were preparing for end of life. We were trying to do something really helpful for them, just to organize all their affairs. Noble mission, everyone deals with it, all the things that you would normally check off on a list for the target market, but no one wants to talk about it. No one wants to have that conversation, and it's so hard to market to that demographic or that group of people. We did that for so long, and so many people gave up. 10 different competitors from the last eight years raised tens of millions of dollars, and all of them gave up. We've continued to do is pivot from end of life knowing that this was a mission, this was a purpose, this had something to do with it, but move to a different demographic. In continuing this path, we find something different at the other end of the spectrum down at the university end. When their students are growing up and not feeling like they're ready to adult in a world that's a lot more complex than maybe what their parents grew up in. More digital, so many more relationships, so many more connections. They're looking for something different, and what we built for one end of the market ended up working for the other because we persevered for eight years, keep running through this process to go, who does this really work for, and who's ready to have this conversation? That would be the kind of persistence I would say. We didn't raise crazy amounts of money. It's been family, friends, little angels, but we've kept at it, and it's because the founder had this mission and couldn't give it up. We're still at it, but it's an example of when there's something important and you're guided by something more important than a success metric that says total return to shareholders or whatever.

Mark Evans: The point that you're raising here is the ability to change and veer from one path to another. In tech, we call it a pivot. But one of the challenges for entrepreneurs is they drink the Kool Aid so long that it's hard for them to see another path forward. They get stuck in a bubble where this is the way it's gonna be. This is the business we're gonna build. This is how we're gonna do it. When things don't go according to plan, they don't know what to do. The idea of a pivot is almost an admission of failure. Yes. Their idea that they rallied around and they raised money around and hired employees isn't working. Often, they fail and they disappear because they can't change. In terms of the mental approach to entrepreneurship, what have you learned in terms of helping entrepreneurs embrace change? Recognize that change is a positive, that getting off the beaten track and doing something different is okay. And in fact, that might be the better path overall, but there are barriers to that. There are obstacles. How do you work with entrepreneurs to overcome those barriers? The part of it

Zaheer Merali: is naming the obstacles. The biggest part is actually pausing. It's counterintuitive. Right? Because we get trapped in this thing of just I'm just gonna do more. And I've heard the stories about work harder. Everybody else says do this. So we pick up selective sound bites. Alaston say particularly that, he said, do this when you've got clarity in your mission, then go pound the pavement, but it's not when you've scattered. But we take little sound bites, we hear them, and then that's what we take on. Part of it's slowing down to listen and see what you're actually missing in the environment. It's the reverse of this effect that we see, Batter Meinhof, other kinds of effects where when you have selected something in your mind, I wanna buy a Jeep, and suddenly you start to see Jeeps everywhere, or you see a certain brand everywhere. That's an effect working that way. We do the same thing with problems. When we see something's not working, we're more finely attuned to those pieces. We miss the opportunities where someone goes, I would actually use it this way, but what I meant was, I built it for this market. And so if it's not about that market, I suddenly got the blinders on, and I missed that opportunity to have that conversation that would open that door. And so a lot of it is just having them slow down. And we go back to first principles in terms of their business. What was the one mission critical problem they were trying to solve and for which customer? And what in that has changed? Did they go talk to other customers and try to solve that mission critical problem for a different kind of customer because that was easier? That was in their network. That was a warm intro from a VC or whatever, or is there something with the product? We're not solving an actual mission critical problem. We've got great customers and great access, but we're missing that piece of it. Slowing down is the first piece that we do. From that, it's a series of really simple techniques that I find that clarify the space because what ends up happening is you take on so many of everybody else's opinions and thoughts that you're missing your kind of signal inside. We use breath work and we use techniques like that to clear the space. We start brainstorming sessions or we start product ideation sessions with a little bit of a technique like that creates a space and some clarity. From that, their natural creativity springs. It's like when they were back in the throes of coming up with the idea, when nothing else mattered. They had that heads down focus on the idea, but they were expensive in their thinking because they were creative at that point, and not now hemmed in by all the pressure and the failure that we've taken on, because we do. We take on words like pressure and failure, and they kick off a cascade of thoughts and emotions that put us down in the dumps and not look at it as signal. We keep looking at things like burnout and failure and other things, and we attach a label to them that drives us to look at them as something to run away from, not something to look at as a piece of signal and a lesson that's either pulling you towards something or pulling you away from something.

Mark Evans: On a related note, a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly successful entrepreneurs who have the luxury of pontificating will declare and I'm talking about people like Gary Vaynerchuk, who will declare that we should follow your passion. And that is the mantra for entrepreneurial success. If you're focused on the things that you're passionate about, then your chances of success are that much better as opposed to being pragmatic and solving a problem that other people haven't addressed yet. I always find that to be trite or a quaint way to look at entrepreneurship because, again, entrepreneurship is hard and you're ideally solving problems that people will pay for you to solve. What is your take on follow your passion when you have entrepreneurs? You may have clients for that matter who love that idea, who believe wholeheartedly in them that idea, even though from a business perspective, it may not be applicable or may be a recipe for not being successful at all.

Zaheer Merali: I come in just slightly differently. It's more of an uncover your passion. It sounds like a simple language flip, but it means the world a difference. Because follow your passion, for a lot of us, means go look out in the world and find something to go and do, and make that your passion. Go acquire something more. Go and acquire another interest that will now pay, and let's put the Ikigai Venn diagrams together. We keep missing the point that what we're here to do and what we're driven by is something far deeper and more profound than what we've learned from school. I wanna rest that because I think this is where we tend to get trapped a lot in as we've taken on so many of society's expectations around jobs, entrepreneurship, and what you should be doing. Passion is about uncovering that spark in you that you can't wait to unleash. And we miss that as we grow up because we conform to a standard based on education, competition, the reward mechanisms, everything else, messaging that we see that says entrepreneurship should look like this and this. These are the success metrics x, and zed. We track people in these cycles of passion needs to look a certain way, and you need be paid for it. I look at it the other way, and I've helped founders not change what they're doing, it's change the relationship to what they do. This is the really important part. Most people don't end up leaving everything they've done and sitting on a couch somewhere, veg dating because now they're looking for their passion. They found their passion is just sitting around doing nothing. No one's passion is sitting around doing nothing. Their passion and the reason they're sitting around doing nothing is because they're unmotivated by the cacophony of noise and thoughts that are holding them down in that. What I try and do with people is to uncover what's up inside of you, but is buried under the weight of conditioned expectations that you should live in this town, work in this job, be with this person, do this kind of work because your family's always done it, your family's been dying to do it. You've picked up so much from everybody else that you have completely masked what's inside of you, that you actually have an interest and passions. You have a creative piece in you that's trying to express itself through a business or a piece of art or whatever that is. My job is to help you reconnect with that piece of truth because you started down that path, and then you've ended up in a really dark spot. I work with people that have hit rock bottom. It's really hard. I can't figure my way out of this to here. I'm at my wits end. I'm either folding this company. We're getting divorced or whatever it is. I meet people at the cliff top. People who have achieved everything, have got so much money, have got so much freedom, and still feel so trapped that they would give it all away in an instant if they could get rid of this feeling that this was not worth it. And so those are two things because they join in the same spot, which is a lack of of meaning and purpose in your life. Those two points bring that to a head for people. And so that's where I find that this language we've taken on around entrepreneurship traps us in these cycles. It's about pulling that off and uncovering your passion. Your passion might be writing and helping people to understand new things. Your passion might be service and volunteerism. I try to help people find that, and you can be an entrepreneur doing that. Entrepreneurship being the freedom to decide what you get to do, the freedom to work with whoever you want to do that with, the freedom to spend your time the way you wanna spend your time. That's how I look at entrepreneurship. When I look at it on those dimensions, there's nothing about it has to be in a certain industry certain revenue target or whatever else. Did I spend time doing the thing I love to do today? And did I do enough of it? And if I don't, then tomorrow's another day to do more of it.

Mark Evans: The reality for a lot of entrepreneurs who aspire to success is how much venture capital they raise, how many invitations did I get to appear on stage, how much media coverage did I get. Those things are important to many people, but at the end of the day, they're tick marks. I wanna go back to something that you say often is align your inner compass. What does that mean? How would a founder who's feeling stuck or burnt out begin that process? A lot of entrepreneurs find themselves spinning their wheels. They don't know how to follow a different path. It's almost like Groundhog Day. Every day is the same. They get up, manage people, hire people, fire people. They try to grow sales, but they can't get out of that cycle. How do you take a step back as an entrepreneur and, as you say, align your inner compass?

Zaheer Merali: Let's say we've done enough introspection to quiet down enough to actually hear something come through. The really quick kind of piece is, what would you do every day if there was no applause? What would you do every day if you couldn't tell anyone about it and you couldn't get any praise for it or any recognition or whatever? I find that's a really good way of linking back to the core things that matter most to you that you would do, that you enjoy doing, you would spend time on. And then find a way to pull that forward into a vocation that pays you if that's what you need to do. A lot of people that I work with don't necessarily need to be paid that much anymore. They've changed. Some of them have made so much money they don't need it. Some of them have decided that through this work, their metrics of success and material consumption have changed dramatically. A lot of us have gone through that, I think, through the pandemic through a more radical focus maybe on what's essential to us. People change those things, so you start to change the nature of work through that. But I find that's the easiest way. What would you do if there was no applause for it? It's a really good way of connecting back with that sense of knowing inside. That inner compass being a wordless feeling of what's right and good and true for you. Most of us can't hear it anymore because we've spent so much time in the noise and in our phones and addicted to the dopamine, so it's already quieting that to understand that.

Mark Evans: It's hard. You think about the digital world in which we live, every social post is we're consumed by how many likes or comments or reposts or things that validate the success of what we're doing. I think it's hard for an entrepreneur to step back from the brink and say, if I wasn't getting that recognition pursuing the likes and the comments, What would success look like to me? What would make me happy?

Zaheer Merali: I think that's part of it. We look back at another metric. What would success look like? I'm throwing you back to what would you do with your hours? I draw people back to you have a thousand minutes of awake time in a day. How will you spend those? You have eight hours of sleep that you're spending. How are you spending those times? How are you spending those hours? What would you do with no applause for a thousand minutes? How would you fill that day? I think for most people, how we spend our time is the downstream impact of how everyone else wants us to spend our time because they've put in calendar invites and emails and everything else into our calendar day. That's how we drive our task list. I pull founders back to, hey, look, stop reacting to the noise in the field here. Start leading from your sense of presence and purpose about what you're here to do. The noise masks what's underneath for us, and what's underneath for us is pretty effortless power to do as much creative work as we want. We've got the tools around us that make that even easier. A psychic, an intern that can do just about anything you can do, but quicker, faster, better. So for most solo founders now, it's about having them realize that they can delegate a lot of their busy work, mind work to something else.

Mark Evans: Many founders chase growth and impact, and that could be financial impact or societal impact or but at the expense of happiness and freedom. Why do we often treat these goals as if they're in conflict? You can have one or the other. This whole idea of work life balance where you've got a successful, and we can define success, professional life where you're happy and satisfied and you're doing what you wanna do. At the same time, you can have a very healthy and happy personal life where you've got a great relationship with your partner, you've got lots of friends and family, you enjoy spending time with your children, you can pursue your nonprofessional hobbies or interests. You can have it all. But often, we fall into this where you can have one or the other. You can't have both. Why are those goals in conflict? And how do we eat our cake and have it too?

Zaheer Merali: Where do think we get that from? You can one but not the other. You mentioned it, but where do you think that comes from?

Mark Evans: Some of it may come from expectations of what success looks like from the outside looking in, and we may find ourselves becoming addicted to what other people define as success as opposed to establishing our own parameters for what makes us happy and what makes us successful. I think that's one of the problems with entrepreneurship is that it's like you join a cult. You give up a lot in the process as part of that cult. It's the rules of the agents, which means you need to work eighty hours a day. You need to be 100% focused on this activity so that you can achieve these societal goals. You can't have one and the other. It's impossible. I go back to my original question about long work hours is that you can't be successful entrepreneur unless you dive in a 100%. You you completely give yourself into it and surrender to it. Otherwise, you won't be successful. And then that obviously means that you're abandoning the things that you love, your family, your friends, your hobbies and interests. I'm biased because I I don't like to work for long hours.

Zaheer Merali: I hear you because I've lived in this life three times thinking, if I just change the environment, it'll be fine. It had nothing to do with the environment. It was always about the beliefs Zaheer had picked up in his life that now framed how he looked at the world. They were the goggles he put on. There's white snow outside, he's got these orange goggles on or blue goggles on, and that's how he sees the world. It wasn't until I realized that I had these goggles on that I got to take them off and go, hang on a second. Part of that piece that you talk about, the entrepreneurship piece, is like forming a club. It's a pleak. Everybody behaves this way. But it's not as insidious as that. Not as overtly, at least. It's like a sport. You can play baseball. You can be the top success in baseball as long as you don't play hockey at the same time because you can't play pro hockey. We create these clubs around the thing that we believe. The second part is it's somewhere in the future. So I've gotta do x and then I'll get y. These things fundamentally set up as false choice. It's a false choice that you have to pick something now, act a certain way in order to get the reward at some point in the future. The reward is already here right now except for the lack of insight and patience and ability to see that it's actually here right now. What we're doing is dragging ourselves in every moment to make a plan to do something to acquire that same thing that we're looking for right now at some point in the future, and that's what traps us. We say I'll do x, y, and zed until I'll get it there, but this is the trade off. I won't be able to have time with my family. Where did this goal come from? Who says that's the only way to do it? What are you actually searching for? If what you're searching for in your work is to feel fulfilled and to have the peace of mind that you gave everything today to the best of your ability, you can sleep well at night, that your family is well taken care of, then there's lots of ways to get at that, but not all of those require a billion dollars or a unicorn valuation or 80 hours, a hundred hours of work. But the story that says I'm an entrepreneur and I get to put that on my profile and I wear that label on my jacket, then, yeah, if the label is what you're after, you're gonna get stuck in there. That's what I realized. I was after the labels that said I was a consultant and a banker and a VC guy and a startup guy. These are the labels I was chasing, and the labels had a definition underneath them. The realization that was that was every part of that identity. As a father, as a husband, the things I'd failed at, the distance parenting, all these things were labels. They were labels about what I didn't wanna do as a kid reacting to my upbringing. You will take on things that, hey, look, won't do that when I have kids. I'll do something different. I wanted to do something different, and in the course of life happening, it was really different. Distance parenting was the last thing on my mind when I was thinking about how I was gonna pay. It forced me to look at things in a different way to go, okay, can I still be at peace though now because this is my circumstance? Is there a way of looking at the world that is available to everyone, not just by circumstance, not because you're rich or poor or you grew up in this country or that? Is there some way of looking at the world, some way of perceiving it that allows everyone to look at their circumstances and realize that they're actually okay and they have their peace of mind in this moment? And realization around those labels and identities kick started some kind of process in me to unwind what had happened for God knows how many years of believing this story and making it such a habit to believe it, and that I can drop it right now and say entrepreneurship for me, it's a word that we use to describe a complex set of feelings that all work together. We've agreed all kind of work together. But the underlying intent of it is to give someone the freedom and the passion to pursue the thing that they want to serve in the world to make it a slightly better place than what they found it. If that's what I'm looking for, all the other mechanisms like blockers do because it's someone's definition of how to get there, someone's official about. I'm just gonna look at what the core of it is. The core of it is the clarity to see that ball playing out, the trust that what's happening right now is happening the way it is, and the capacity to step back and just respond to each moment as it happens, as you're building your company, as you're building your business. With a little more grace and presence, we had a workshop this week. She was supposed to be there for two days, couldn't make the two days, loved day one. Day two was blew up. Customer called in. An issue they hadn't found, an issue that the team hadn't noticed had now hit the customer. They're an enterprise risk management piece of software. And it's really important that when the customer's raising it as a halo, guess a heads up that we found this thing. It's totally okay. But the founder already jumped up the wall in terms of their mind thinking that this is the end of the world. Everyone's gonna find out, and this is gonna be the end of their company. And you can see the energy kind of flow between those things, but she's able to catch herself and stop and slow down. And now respond to that customer with a, hey, all that's good. They've now got a tighter relationship because they now trust each other to respond in the moment with what was needed, not a series of cascading blames, which is what tends to happen, or hey, look, what does this say in our contract about this issue, and so which is what I've seen over and over again in every one of the roles I had. It's leading from that kind of presence, which makes all of those noisy hours you have to work, etcetera, start to dissolve. They disappear, and the hours become more creative and productive, more free of the mental chatter about the shoulds and shouldn'ts, which is really what that would have been about. We should have caught this earlier. We should have said something like this, and I wish I'd done this earlier, otherwise my company is not imploding.

Mark Evans: You said that coaching has transformed your life. What does your life look like now, and how does it feel different than the one you left behind?

Zaheer Merali: Externally, it can largely the same and also the different. I'm from an RV. We've moved out of Toronto. We made some pretty radical changes to our life because entrepreneurship gives me more freedom. Being chained to to a VC backed startup and the hours and the demands of meeting every investor and everything else wouldn't allow me to do that, but changed certain pieces. It changed the conditions of my life. But a lot of the work I'm doing is the same. Like, I'm still running a company. I'm doing coaching. I've got a documentary coming out. I'm doing podcasts. And so I'm finding that maybe against other dimensions, I'm probably doing more work, more creative work than I've ever done before. Less pushing of paper, interesting, deep work. That really fills me up inside. I've got bags of energy to do anything I want, and I've got time outside in nature to to spend it. But the bigger thing is inside, I don't have any kind of noise inside that says, I should be here or I should be there at a certain stage in my life or in my career or a certain metric or certain amount of success. My startup has been slow to grow. It's been hard. I've been finding resistance in interesting places, but whenever I see someone light up after using it, it still pulls me forward, and so I know that North Star is there. For me, I find that coaching is a way of expressing this learning. It's a way of bringing more people into a different way of being, a different way of relating to this. It's not just founders. I'm connecting with people from all walks of life that are finding resonance in something that is about slowing down, about finding a bit of stillness, and about creating from peace rather than busyness. I just started writing a kids book the other day, and it's the kind of book I wish I could have read to my kids. And it's the kind of thing that, hey, look, I'd love to share with them now. They're all far beyond the ages of needing a kids book, but it's written for our inner child inside. And so I'm creating and doing all these things that I would have been spent doing, I don't know, strategy reports for a bank, or creative innovation around a credit card product, or how to get more dollars out of The US healthcare system. Those are the things I used to do, and they're all great. They taught me a lot of great skills. I build these really interesting skills over these careers, but it's the pattern recognition that has served me around us because I can see the same pattern in me and the same pattern in founders, and seeing the pattern is what sets you free.

Mark Evans: Where can people learn more about you you and what you do?

Zaheer Merali: On my website, on LinkedIn, Zaheer Morale. I do a priority workshop that's open to everyone. There's no charge for it. It's small format, but the idea is to help people find this little place of stillness in them and lead from there because it would the world of difference. I've lived a really busy life, an executive founder life, and found something really different when I jumped out and tested the waters.

Mark Evans: Thanks, Suneera, for the great conversation, and thanks to everyone for listening to this episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, subscribe by Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave a review if you like what you heard. Marketing Spark dives into the real stories, hard earned lessons, and strategies of b to b SaaS entrepreneurs and marketing leaders making a difference. I'd love to hear from you if you have unique strategic or tactical perspective or an interesting journey to share. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or visit marketingspark.co to get in touch.