Biz Hero Is One. We Have Some Thoughts.

Biz Hero turns one this September 2026, which feels both completely impossible and approximately correct. A year ago, Kent and I were sitting with a business that was mostly an idea, a growing collection of spreadsheets and documents, and years of experience doing this work in our own and other people’s organizations. We knew we wanted to help founders and organizations build stronger, more sustainable things. We knew we were good at walking into complicated situations, asking questions, and finding opportunities other people had gotten too close to see. We had some early ideas about what Biz Hero would sell and how we would deliver it.

Naturally, some of those ideas survived contact with reality better than others.

Our first few months were a bit of a blur. We said yes to a lot, and we got very deep inside a handful of organizations very quickly. We were assessing programs, restructuring teams, building marketing strategies, untangling operations, writing grants, coaching executives, looking for revenue opportunities, and creating some truly heroic spreadsheets. We worked with tiny organizations and multimillion-dollar companies, nonprofits and for-profits, new founders and experienced executives. Meanwhile, we were also trying to figure out how to build Biz Hero itself.

There was something mildly ridiculous about spending all day helping other people make smart strategic decisions and then sitting down together at night going, “Okay, but what the hell should we do?”

And I think that may be one of the most important things our first year taught us.

It’s really hard to see the thing you’re standing inside.

We started noticing pretty early that people rarely needed exactly what they initially thought they needed. That didn’t mean they were wrong or that their ideas were bad. Usually, they were seeing something real. But the first problem someone could name wasn’t necessarily the most important problem to solve.

One nonprofit came to us wanting help with grants. That made perfect sense: they needed revenue, and grants are one way nonprofits generate it. We could have happily helped them build a grant strategy and called it a day. Instead, as we learned more about the organization, we started wondering why they weren’t selling some of the expertise they already had. Grants stayed in the picture, but we shifted a significant amount of attention toward fee-for-service work. Within a few months, that had generated nearly $30,000 in contracts while the much slower grant process continued in the background.

With another company, a question about staffing eventually became a much bigger question about what the function itself needed to accomplish. That work helped uncover more than $77,000 in annual personnel savings. Another founder had spent months making her offer better and better. There were plenty of things she could still improve, but at some point the answer was simply: stop building for a minute and go sell it. She landed her first $3,000 in revenue and real customers with real data.

None of those organizations started with a bad idea. Grants made sense. Staffing made sense. Improving the offer made sense. They just weren’t necessarily the most important thing to do next.

That pattern showed up so many times that it eventually became the foundation for our Mission Critical Method™. We started looking at organizations through five lenses.

Anchor, Build, Connect, Discover, and Elevate.

We actually pulled apart five of the situations that helped shape this thinking in a free guide for our first birthday. What’s Actually Keeping Your Business From Growing? looks at what each organization thought it needed, what we found when we looked closer, and what happened next.

→ GET THE FREE 1-YEAR CASE STUDY

We’ve built Biz Hero the same way. Over the past year, we’ve tried things, watched what happened, listened closely to the people we were building for, and adjusted as we learned more. Some ideas grew into something bigger. Some got smaller. And some worked perfectly well—we just realized we wanted to take them somewhere else.

About six months into Biz Hero, Kent and I hosted our first event in downtown Asheville, The Solutions lab. We spent months developing it as a four-hour experience for founders, nonprofit leaders, creatives, service providers, and other people building things. People showed up. Our local news came out. The room had great energy. The conversations were thoughtful. By any reasonable measure, the event worked.

But the most interesting feedback wasn't that people wanted another event. They wanted more time.

So we changed it. The four-hour Lab became a three-month experiment with a small group of founders, which wraps up this month. Will that become the permanent version of Solutions Lab? I genuinely don't know. We learned things from the four-hour version, we've learned things from the three-month version, and whatever we do with it next will come from what we've seen actually happen. Mot from feeling obligated to keep an idea exactly as we originally imagined it.

Early in this journey, Kent and I started what we call Feral Fridays. Getting out of the office when we can, usually into the woods, and giving ourselves some space to think beyond whatever was demanding our attention that week.

On one of those Fridays last year, we were hiking Grandfather Mountain. Somewhere near the top, I looked out and realized we were watching birds fly below us.

I remember that moment because we were still so early in figuring out what Biz Hero could become. We had ideas, obviously. Lots of them. But there was also something useful about physically getting high enough above everything to see farther than we could from inside the day-to-day.

I think about that hike sometimes when we're making decisions about Biz Hero now. You need time down in the work to understand it. But every once in a while, you need to get high enough above it to see where you're actually going.

A year in, we can see Biz Hero more clearly than we could when we started. That doesn’t mean we know exactly where every trail leads. And I don’t think we need to.

I don't want us to become a company that keeps doing something because it worked once, or because we put it on the website, or because changing our minds would mean admitting we didn't perfectly predict the future. I want us to build a company that can pay attention.

That's also the way I think about strategy more broadly. A good strategy isn't a promise to your past self. It's your best understanding of what matters given the evidence you have now. 

Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is double down. Sometimes it’s to stop. Sometimes it’s to give something more time.

Sometimes it’s admit that the perfectly good idea you were excited about six months ago is no longer the most important thing.

A year later, there are some things we know.

There are numbers from this year that I'm enormously proud of. In our first year, Biz Hero has worked with more than 50 founders, leaders, and teams across 20+ industries. We've spent more than 200 hours coaching executives, and the organizations we've worked alongside represent more than $12 million in combined revenue. Biz Hero crossed six figures in revenue in our first seven months, and we've also given away more than $40,000 worth of our work through pro bono services and community support.

Those numbers matter. We're building a business, after all, and part of our mission from the beginning has been proving that meaningful work and financial sustainability do not have to be opposing forces.

But my favorite moments from this year aren't particularly easy to put into a metric.

There's this thing that happens sometimes when we're working with someone. They've been talking through a problem, usually one they've been carrying around for a while, and there are six directions they could go with it. We ask questions. They explain more. We poke at something that doesn't quite make sense. And eventually their whole expression changes.

“Oh. THAT'S what I need to do.”

I freaking love that moment.

Not because we swooped in with the answer, but because you can almost watch some of the noise disappear. The organization still has problems. There is still work to do. But the person isn't trying to solve all of it at once anymore. They can see the next move.

A year into Biz Hero, I think that's much closer to describing what we're building than any list of services ever could.

We help people figure out what matters, and then we help them do something about it.

Sometimes that's a Strategic Growth Assessment. Sometimes we're consulting alongside a team for months. Sometimes it's executive coaching, a workshop, an article, or one really useful question at the right moment. The shape can change. The purpose underneath it has become much clearer.

So, year two.

There are things about year two we're planning carefully, things we're experimenting with, and probably a few things we're currently convinced are brilliant that we'll laugh about when I write this again next September.

Good.

If our first year taught us anything, it's that building something well requires enough conviction to make a move and enough curiosity to reconsider it.

So that's what we're going to keep doing.

To everyone who trusted a very new company with something important this year: thank you. To everyone who hired us, referred someone to us, came to an event, read something we wrote, challenged an idea, answered one of my approximately 4,000 questions, or let us get our hands into some complicated corner of your organization: thank you for helping us build this thing.

And to Kent, who somehow agreed that starting another business with me sounded like a reasonable thing to do: happy birthday to us. We freaking did it.

Now, let's see what year two has to say.

Keep building boldly.

Johanna + Kent Co-Founders, Biz Hero

And if you're somewhere in the middle of figuring out your next move, [our free first-year case study is a pretty good place to start.]