03 Sep Antifragility in Action: When Your Business Actually Works Without You
If you’ve been following our journey at Reconciled Solutions, you know 2025 has been our “antifragile awakening” year. We’ve been laser-focused on building a business that doesn’t collapse like a house of cards when I step away. One with resilience and systems robust enough to thrive, regardless of who is steering the ship.
I got to put our antifragile transformation to the ultimate test in early August when I disappeared for 15 days to Italy and Croatia. My daughter, Liesl Noll, was cast as the lead in the opera version of Little Women, and wild horses couldn’t have kept me from being there.
Now, anyone who knows me knows I’m no stranger to extended trips. I love to travel like most entrepreneurs love their first cup of coffee. But this time felt different. All the actions we’ve taken in an effort to build a business that was both antifragile and would run like clockwork clicked into place like a perfectly orchestrated symphony. Not only did they stay in place during my absence, but they continued to work when I returned and hopped back into things without missing a beat.
Here’s what’s different this time around, and what’s making Reconciled Solutions more and more antifragile.
The Dan Martell Method (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Delegation)
Since October 2024, I’ve been religiously following Dan Martell’s Buy Back Your Time framework. My assistant Joy Celocia and I have become disciples of the 2x/week sync meeting gospel, following the book’s agenda like it’s our business bible:
- Offload (because holding onto everything is so last year)
- Calendar review (where we decide what actually deserves my attention)
- Past meetings (learning from our wins and “learning opportunities”)
- My action items (the stuff only I can do)
- Feedback loop on projects (keeping everything moving forward)
- Emails (the necessary evil)
- Questions for Angie (because great assistants always have the best insights)
We’ve mastered the art of meeting triage: knowing which type of meeting takes priority and which gets the gentle push when something more critical emerges. We follow Dan’s buy back loop, auditing incoming work to identify tasks that either drain my soul or fail to move the business needle. Those tasks? We transfer them to team members who can handle them with both competence and enthusiasm.
The result? For the first time in my entrepreneurial life, I didn’t spend the week before vacation working until the wee hours, frantically trying to tie up loose ends. Historically, I’d arrive at my destination physically exhausted and mentally fried—what a way to start a relaxing getaway, right? This time, I maintained civilized working hours right up until departure (not one day on the clock past 6pm)! That meant I could actually focus on trip logistics (coordinating nine people across international borders requires its own kind of project management skills).
More importantly, I arrived in Italy mentally present and emotionally available. Liesl was tackling some of the most challenging music of her young career with only 12 rehearsals under her belt. She was understandably nervous and needed her mom, not a distracted CEO checking emails. I got to be fully there in those nerve-wracking hours before her performance, offering reassurance and celebrating her talent without my mind wandering to work issues and deadlines like I have so many times in the past.
The Business Kept Humming (And Other Pleasant Surprises)
While I was soaking up Italian sunshine and Croatian coastlines, Reconciled Solutions continued its rhythmic dance of daily operations without interruption. Payroll processed seamlessly, bills were paid on schedule, Profit First allocations transferred like clockwork, and our first-of-the-month invoicing went out without a hitch. We closed three new sales, upgraded an existing client, released our monthly newsletter (looking beautiful, I might add), and my team even successfully thwarted a hacker attempting to breach our infrastructure. Talk about antifragile in action!
And here’s the kicker: I wasn’t even the only one out of office. Our fabulous Kitty Conroy was celebrating her son’s wedding–because the moments that make life worth living don’t pause for work deadlines. Yet business progressed beautifully while we both focused on what truly mattered.
The Frictionless Return (Or: How Not to Dread Monday Morning)
Coming back to work has never felt so smooth. Joy had been managing my email inbox with the precision of a museum curator, leaving only items requiring my specific attention. Gone were the industry newsletters, the back-and-forth threads, and the archaeological dig through weeks of accumulated digital debris. She’d identified the most recent version of every ongoing conversation, creating a clear path forward.
Two business days. That’s all it took to get completely caught up. By day three, I was back to focusing on company objectives and plotting our next antifragile improvements. My heart remains full of Italian opera music as I write this. I can still hear Liesl singing on that Italian stage while the steady rhythm of an antifragile business hums in my soul.
The Antifragile Lesson
Building a business that operates beautifully in your absence isn’t just about systems and processes, though those matter enormously. It’s about creating a culture where talented people feel empowered to make decisions, solve problems, and keep moving forward. It’s about trusting your team enough to actually step away. It also means trusting yourself enough to build something bigger than your individual contributions.
As I reflect on this experience, I’m reminded that antifragility isn’t just a business buzzword—it’s freedom. Freedom to be fully present for life’s most precious moments, whether that’s watching your daughter shine on an Italian stage or simply knowing that your Monday morning won’t be dominated by crisis management.
The music of a well-orchestrated business is indeed a beautiful thing to hear.
