[#009] My First Billion: Strategically Absent

By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be out of the country with my family for Christmas.

No meetings.
No content days.
No dashboards.

About five or six years ago, we started a tradition of bringing in Christmas in a different country each year.

This year, we’re in Panama.

I remember the first time we did this.
Being away felt like something I needed to justify.

Now, it doesn’t.

The team knows I’m out.
Clients are still enrolled and served.
Payroll still runs.
Nothing escalates to me.
And I don’t come back to a pile of fires to put out.

A few years ago, being “out of office” would’ve felt irresponsible.

Not because the work wasn’t important, but because too much of it still depended on me.

Stepping away would’ve created friction, delays, or quiet anxiety about what might break.

Now, it feels like confirmation.

Not that everything is perfect, but that the systems are strong enough to carry weight without constant supervision.

I’ve learned that absence is a lagging indicator.

If things fall apart when you step away, the problem isn’t distance.
It’s dependency.

Real scale isn’t measured by how much you can handle.

It’s measured by what keeps moving when you’re not there to push it.

Stepping away has a way of revealing hidden truths:

Where decisions are bottlenecked.
Where clarity is missing.
Where trust hasn’t fully transferred.

And it reveals something else.

Peace is a better KPI than productivity.

Not because ambition disappears, but because it finally has structure.

When systems do the work they were designed to do, urgency quiets down.
The noise fades. And what’s left is signal.

The goal was never to work from anywhere.
It was to build something that works without me.

Marquel