I’m Just Making Deposits

I.

She is sitting on the edge of the bathtub at four in the morning with a laptop, and the striking thing is that it does not strike her as odd.

This is New York, her mid-thirties. The apartment is a studio, so the bathroom is where you go if you want a surface and a door.

“It was every day. On the weekdays I’d get up before work and work, then work all day, then go home and work at night.”

She was not dating. She did not really have friends. She is precise about that, “I mean, but not really,” the way people are when they have already audited the claim.

Then a man she had recently started seeing, who is British and therefore has opinions about all of this, opens the bathroom door at four in the morning to use the bathroom.

“He looked at me like I was a maniac. He looked at me as if I was f**cking crazy.”

She closed the laptop.

“It wasn’t weird to me,” she says of the tub, and then, of the moment he opened the door: “It hit me.”

What hit her was the arithmetic underneath the hours.

“My priorities are completely out of whack.”

And the part that turns this into a story: nobody had told her.

“Nobody told me, per se, because so many other people were operating that way. Everybody that I knew.”

She stopped working before dawn. She started leaving the office at a normal hour. And then the finding that everyone who does this discovers and nobody believes in advance:

“The reality is I still did fine. And I actually freed myself up.”

She married him. They moved to Colorado, knowing nobody, and stayed nine and a half years.

II.

What she runs now is called SLG Impact, and she will tell you the naming process was not sophisticated.

“I was going through all these different cheesy names and I was trying to have fun with it. And then I was like, wait a minute. If I just stand back, what am I actually trying to do?”

So: her initials, and the word for the thing she wants.

“I want to make an impact in the way that I truly can. Not trying to be anybody else. I’m not trying to compete with anybody else.”

The work is Growth, Experience, Partnerships, & Leadership, which she groups under a heading that keeps a decision-maker in the room.

“I talk about it a lot as revenue growth, because at the end of the day a decision maker is not going to do something because it’s a nice to have. You don’t do leadership work to align your staff for no reason.”

Her reasoning for why leadership is revenue work is the cleanest statement of it anyone has given in this series.

“If you lead the people well, then the work takes care of itself. If you can work on yourself to be a great leader first, then you’re leading by example. Then you build trust with people. It’s much easier to bring them along with you.”

The delivery model is the interesting part, and it came from reading the market.

“I don’t operate like a traditional agency. I’m not trying to sell you the farm. I’m listening to what you are and aren’t saying: you’re at this stage of your business. You don’t need a full-time person. You don’t need a big agency. It’s just this.”

“So, then I bring in subject matter experts as needed and we form a SWAT team for them.”

Why that works right now is a genuinely sharp observation about the last five years.

“During so much instability over the last five or six years, you’re seeing a lot of really great talent that’s on the sidelines wanting to get in the game, but the job market’s been so hard. You’re seeing a lot of people inside businesses with smaller budgets. You’re also seeing less experienced people in those seats at brands.”

She is plain about having spotted it.

“I didn’t create this as a gimmick. I’m literally reading what’s going on in the marketplace and going, let’s solve for this in a way that’s practical.”

The newer arm has a name that describes its posture exactly: SLG Impact’s Sidecar Strategy, fractional leadership and work streams that ride alongside a company.

III.

Before all of it there were thirteen years in professional sports, and before that she played basketball at the University of Michigan, a detail she raises only to say she did it wrong.

“I’m really good friends with my former teammates. I wasn’t actually even friends with them then, because I was so focused on: I need to do really well in school and play basketball.”

“I never went to one party in college. Not one.”

Then she moved to the agency side, into leadership, and into what she describes without hedging as the worst experience of her working life.

The mechanism was a title instead of a raise, and then another title.

“It’s that combination of: I’m going to give you this title, I’m going to make you head of this, you’re going to lead this thing. And then, okay great, I’m going to give you the raise. But then you don’t get the raise for a while. But then that’s dangled out in front of you.”

She had been honest at the offer stage, on principle.

“Even when I went in there I was very fair. I was like, this is what I’m making. And I believed that was the way to go, be honest.”

“He undercut me out of the gate.”

The correction came with a promise attached.

“But you’ll make it up on commissions. And I believed it, and then he never did it. And then I’d follow up with him, and then he would dodge me, not have the conversation with me, or tell me that I was wrong for asking.”

Then she closed a deal she had built with one other colleague, one large enough to carry the company through the year and well beyond, and had to keep him away from it to do so, or the clients would have walked.

She waited until it was signed before raising the question of what she should be paid for it.

“He tells me I’m immature and unprofessional for asking for any compensation off of it.”

There is one detail from that era that says more than the rest of it combined. On a public holiday, at the laundromat, she got a message: meet me at the airport this afternoon, we’re pitching a new client, you’ll be perfect for it.

“I was new there, and there was no one at that time being like, no, you can say no, it’s okay. So I ran home, get myself there, go there, and I’m completely unprepared. I don’t have any idea what’s happening.”

She tells that story as an example of a leadership failure with a technical definition.

“If you’re a good leader and you create the conditions for people to be set up for success, you don’t put somebody in that situation.”

“Here’s the thing. I hold myself accountable. I kept myself in that, rather than quitting. I allowed it to go on.”

IV.

The body kept a record, and the record is specific.

“My health was an absolute mess from the burnout.”

“My stomach. I had headaches. I had all this stuff. It was really bad.”

And then the symptom that is hard to read twice.

“That was the first place where my throat would close up when I had to go into meetings with him.”

She built a workaround, because that is what she does.

“I literally had to learn to basically do a backbend before I would go in and meet with him, to be able to get myself to speak.”

A woman doing a backbend outside a conference room so that her voice will work. She names what it actually was.

“You’re literally choking off your voice.”

She stayed anyway, for a reason she can now say out loud and could not then.

“The opportunities that he would get the agency in front of, or the people that I got to be in front of as clients, it was confusing for me. I was like, of course I’m going to stay because of all these things.”

In the end, what became unbearable was the gap between what she was telling her team and what she was doing.

“I would be telling people that work for me, do not stay here. This is not the place to stay long term.”

“I kind of had a hard time looking at myself in the mirror.”

“I have a friend who says the universe will push you off a rock if you aren’t willing to do it for yourself.”

“It is an absolute blessing that I got laid off from that place.”

V.

The layoff came in 2020, and it came during a period when there was no version of landing softly.

“It wasn’t like I was going to get another senior level job during that time. It was an extended period where everybody was getting laid off repeatedly.”

She had already been coaching on the side, so a company technically existed. What did not exist was revenue.

“I was just like, I have to find a way to make money. So I just started going out to people: here’s what I could do for you. Do you have anything that you want me to work on?”

She flags her own tone before anyone else can.

“I know that sounds very desperate. But I did it with people I trusted.”

What that period taught her is the thing most founders spend years failing to learn.

“There was no second guessing. There was no time to perfect anything. It was like, I’m just putting s*** out there.”

The sports and agency years turned out to be the right training after all, for reasons that had nothing to do with marketing.

“I was used to pitching people. I was used to coming up with ideas. I was used to networking. And because of my athletic background, I was used to being able to figure out how to work well within a team.”

Then, honestly: it was hard to make money. So she took another full-time agency job. Then the tech downturn arrived and she was laid off a second time, in 2023.

It is at that second place that the story turns, and it turns on an email.

A man at the top of the company tried the maneuver she had spent a career absorbing. She sat and listened. Then she got on a plane, and somewhere over the country she wrote it down.

“What you just did is absolutely unacceptable, unprofessional, and I will not tolerate it. And if you want to discuss this, then you can schedule a meeting with HR.”

She sent it to the head of the company.

“And I was so proud of myself. But it was the first time that I really was like, no f***ing way. You’re not doing that to me. I’m not going to stand for it.”

Her own read on why it mattered is about her.

“Once you figure out how to react differently, or how to act differently, I’m just not falling for it.”

VI.

Now to the operating philosophy, which has a name she gives it herself and which will sound like one thing and turn out to be another.

“I also kind of adopt this philosophy of being long-term greedy.”

The greed is real. The timeframe is the trick.

“It’s not a transactional thing. I’m very relationship-based. I don’t sell services to people. I’m more like, tell me what’s going on, because you’re going to tell me things and I’m going to connect dots.”

What she does in those conversations is a specific and repeatable act, and she describes it precisely.

“I’m going to put a mirror up to what you’re saying. You’re going to be like, gosh, did I say that? And I’m like, yes, you said this to me. I’m just telling you what you said.”

Then the part that costs money in the shorter run. If the work is not for her, she sends it somewhere else. If it is, she has often already done some of it, including a lot of the discovery for it, as part of relationship building.

She describes a client she has been closing for over a year.

“I wasn’t chasing him. I was adding value along the way in ways that would pay off. I introduced him to an investor. I helped him with his deck for the investor. All this stuff. I didn’t charge him for it.”

“I was like, I’m just making deposits.”

A couple of weeks before this interview, he told her they were ready to hire her, and they did.

She extends the same logic to work she could keep for herself, and she is clear-eyed about the math.

“Strategically it makes more sense for me to bring in one or two people who are really great in their zones of excellence too, and we make the work that much better together.”

“Because I’d rather get a third of something than a zero.”

And then the admission that makes the philosophy credible.

“Last year I took a hit on revenue because I prefer to work with people. I’m going to bring in this person, and I probably did it overly. I didn’t actually really need every person I brought in it. But I just felt better, and I think that work is better.”

VII.

Ask her where the engine came from and she goes back a long way, briefly, and without asking for anything.

Her parents each married and divorced three times. She moved a great deal. It was, mostly, her and her sister.

“I learned at an early age that no one was coming to save me, and that the only way I was getting through was by sheer will.”

She names the cost without dramatizing it.

“I had a hard time trusting in people, and friendships and relationships, because there were so many people in and out of my life.”

And then she does the thing that makes her worth listening to on this, which is to refuse to make it special.

“While my specific experiences were unique to me, each person has a version of their own experiences that shape them.”

“You could be in your own way if you come from an intact family, nothing’s wrong, very well off, and you start expecting that all the time.”

Which is why the phrase she uses most in an hour is about herself.

“I was in my own way for so much of my life.”

The last five years supplied more than their share of reasons to stop. Her father was diagnosed with cancer and was gone within three months. A year later her mother was ill too. A health crisis of her own, her immune system damaged after COVID, eventually forced her and her husband out of the Colorado climate and back to Michigan.

Her response to the pile-up is closer to arithmetic.

“What I can’t do is cry in a corner. Nobody’s doing anything for me. So I have to keep pushing myself forward. I have to keep unearthing opportunity, seeing potential in s***** times.”

Underneath all of it is a sentence she offers early and almost apologetically.

“I have this obsessive desire to literally maximize the impact I’m making on this planet during this short life that I have.”

She hears how it sounds. “I know it sounds really weird,” she says, and then explains.

“It’s just like, we truly only get this much time on Earth. I don’t want to live it working in a place where I hate my job every day.”

VIII.

She turned fifty shortly before this interview and reports being unable to account for it.

“I have no idea how that happened.”

Asked what she would change, she picks a register that is funnier and sadder than regret.

“Okay, dear soul, if reincarnation is a thing, please do this better next time.”

What she would do differently is specific.

“I wasted a lot of time from my early twenties to my mid-thirties seeking approval from others, thinking that I was going to climb the corporate ladder and there’s a sense of fairness, it will just happen for me.”

For the birthday, her husband organized a surprise. Her former teammates came. One friend flew in from Chicago.

Her reaction is the most revealing thing in the interview.

“I was just overwhelmed in an interesting way. I just kept thinking, I can’t believe all these people are here for me. They actually like me enough. I matter that much to them.”

She has a standing suspicion about this.

“I still always kind of feel like people kind of tolerate me.”

A woman who closed a deal big enough to carry a company, who has had a coach every two weeks for ten years, who assembles teams of experts for a living, quietly assuming she is being put up with.

What the surprise party did was slower, and better.

“It’s stuck with me. It’s left me feeling elevated to some degree. Lighter.”

And the thing she says she has only recently understood:

“I grew up not having to need anyone. I’ve had a hyper independence about me.”

“I didn’t realize how much I needed certain parts of that.”

IX.

Asked to finish the sentence about freedom, she reached for one word, joy, and then defined it entirely by subtraction: three things it frees her from.

Anxiety. Being alone. Being unseen.

Read backwards, that is an exact inventory of the twenty-five years this piece has just covered. The bathtub at four in the morning. The childhood where nobody was coming. The meetings where her throat closed and she had to bend backwards in a corridor to get a sentence out.

She was already winning when it hurt most. She had the titles, the deals, the seat at the pitch. The winning was the problem: it was what kept her in the room.

What she built instead is a company whose entire method is the opposite of the thing that hurt her.

She assembles teams and shares the work. She sends business away when it isn’t hers. She does the discovery first, as part of relationship building, and invoices later. She takes a third over nothing, on purpose, and takes the revenue hit on the chin when she has brought in one person too many because the work is better with two brains in it.

Every one of those is a decision a manipulative boss could not have made, because every one of them requires believing there will be a next time.

That is what long-term greedy actually is: a bet on the future, placed by someone who spent a long time unable to make one.

She is still working on the part where she believes people like her. She said so, twice, unprompted, to an interviewer she had met an hour earlier.

They flew in from Chicago, Shauna.

Sources: Mackey, Frieder, Brees & Martinko, “Abusive Supervision: A Meta-Analysis,” Journal of Management 43(6), 2017 · Fischer, Tian, Lee & Hughes, Leadership Quarterly 32(6), 2021 · Balia et al., Stress and Health, 2026 · Danhof-Pont, van Veen & Zitman, Journal of Psychosomatic Research 70(6), 2011 · John, Bouillon-Minois et al., Frontiers in Psychiatry, 2024 · Bergeron, Shipp, Rosen & Furst, Journal of Management 39(4), 2013 · Azoulay, Jones, Kim & Miranda, American Economic Review: Insights 2(1), 2020.