Published in Entrepreneur: What I Learned Writing Two Essays for the Entrepreneur Leadership Network
Updated: 10 hours ago
I've now published two essays with Entrepreneur as a contributor to their Leadership Network. Entrepreneur describes the Network on my author page with a simple line: "Want to write for Entrepreneur too? Apply to join Entrepreneur Leadership network." That's it. No mystique. It's a channel for operators to write about what they're actually doing, not theorize about it.
I want to walk through what I wrote and why, because writing both essays taught me things about my own business that I didn't fully see until I had to put them in a paragraph someone else would read.
Essay one: the place that broke me became the foundation
The first essay, "How I Turned a Life of Pain Into Purpose and Built a Multi-state Business," is the harder one to have written. In it I talk about growing up in South LA, losing my mother during the pandemic early in my company's journey, and what happened when I stopped hiding that grief from my team.
I wrote: "The place that broke you can become the foundation that builds others — if you stop hiding it." That sentence took longer to write than the rest of the essay combined, because it's easy to say and much harder to actually practice as a CEO. Being honest about that loss with my staff didn't make me look weaker. It made room for them to show up as people instead of just employees, and the numbers backed it up: productivity went up, turnover went down.
The essay ends with a line I still think about: "Healing is a business model. When you build from truth, you build something that lasts." I didn't fully believe that when I started the company. I believe it now.
Essay two: an investor called me impatient, and he wasn't wrong
The second essay came out of an uncomfortable conversation. A seasoned investor told me I seemed impatient. My first reaction was defensive — I wasn't chasing trends, I was expanding into new counties and programs deliberately. But sitting with the comment longer, I realized something: "Impatience is often not a mindset problem at all. It's a structural signal."
The comment that stung the most turned out to be the most useful thing anyone told me that year.
In a business built on Medicaid-aligned contracts across two states, relying too heavily on any single payer, contract, or jurisdiction is real exposure. The fix wasn't slowing down. It was restructuring into a holding company model so risk could be contained across separate operating entities, with centralized oversight for compliance, finance, and HR. That change let leadership move from constant reaction to actual governance. As I put it in the piece, "Stability isn't the opposite of ambition. It's what allows ambition to compound."
Read it here: An Investor Called Me Impatient — Here's How It Became the Wake-Up Call My Business Desperately Needed
What writing both taught me that running the company didn't
Running Mysti's day to day, I don't often stop to name the pattern underneath a decision. Writing forces that. The first essay forced me to admit that authenticity, not authority, is what actually built loyalty on my team. The second forced me to admit that my own presence everywhere in the business was becoming the bottleneck, not the asset I thought it was.
Both essays came from the same source: a willingness to be specific about what actually happened, instead of writing something generically inspirational. That's the only kind of writing worth doing for a platform like this.
Why this matters beyond the byline
I didn't write these essays to build a media portfolio. I wrote them because other founders in regulated, people-centered industries are dealing with the exact same tension — between staying close to a mission and building a structure sturdy enough to carry it. If either essay saves someone a year of learning the hard way, it did its job.
You can see both pieces and my full author bio on my Entrepreneur page: Giovanne Schachere, Entrepreneur author page
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