1607: How have you put your entrepreneurial GHOSTS to rest!? (COLLAB EPISODE!)
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RSS Feed In this special Collab Week episode of Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, 10 founders come together to answer one deeply personal question:
Tell us about a decision or mistake that haunted you, and how you finally put that ghost to rest.
The ghosts in this episode include a strategy deck that walked out the door, funding turned down at the finish line, a six-figure funnel kept running out of attachment, and friendships that made hard calls even harder. It’s a wide-ranging, refreshingly honest episode, and it’s a reminder that the mistake itself rarely haunts us for long. What haunts us is a lesson we haven’t put into practice yet.
For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur still replaying a decision they wish they could take back, this episode is proof that you’re not alone. Every founder carries a few ghosts, and the ones who grow are the ones who turn those ghosts into guardrails, boundaries, and better instincts.
✨ What You’ll Take Away
In this episode, you’ll take away:
- How the “first big check” can cost you far more than it pays
- Why how you treat the people building your business deserves as much attention as any strategy decision
- How to walk away from a growth path that’s out of alignment, even with funding on the table
- Why years of industry expertise don’t automatically make you good at pricing your own work
- How to stay generous without letting people build on you instead of with you
- Why turning off the marketing isn’t the same as killing your first business
- Why every founder’s ghost can become the foundation for how they lead next
🎙️ Meet the Collab Week Contributors
Renée Holder — Janus Management Group
Renée Holder is the Founder, President, and Principal Consultant of Janus Management Group, a New York-based firm specializing in organizational change management strategy, training, and transformation support. A certified change management professional with more than 20 years of experience, Renée helps organizations and their people navigate technology, HR, and ERP transformations, including large-scale systems like SAP, with confidence and success.
Connect with Renée:
https://www.janusmanagementgroup.com/
William McCumber — Rowan Elder Productions & Applied Erudition
William McCumber is the founder of two ed-tech companies, Rowan Elder Productions and Applied Erudition. Rowan Elder is an async faculty development program that upskills professors to build studio-quality online lectures that feel more like YouTube than a lecturer reading slides at the front of the room. Applied Erudition is a platform that measures real capability rather than seat time.
Connect with William:
Sara Reece — Workmind
Sara Reece is the CEO and Co-Founder of Workmind, where she helps organizations use practical, operations-first automation to eliminate friction and grow without increasing headcount at the same pace. For the last seven years, she has designed and implemented automation with organizations ranging from nonprofits and small businesses to franchise systems and Fortune 500 enterprises. Her unconventional career spans journalism, television broadcasting, environmental research, and technology, and she is the author of The Practical Path to Operational Automation.
Connect with Sara:
Drew Mehta — ThinkFraction
After more than 20 years in corporate, Drew Mehta founded ThinkFraction to help owner-operated businesses integrate AI into their everyday workflows and processes in a practical, hype-free way. He helps owner-operators grow revenue, lower costs, and improve quality by fixing leaks in their back-end workflows. ThinkFraction pairs advisory with hands-on implementation and education, and Drew teaches clients how AI fits into their business while learning the entrepreneurial ropes himself.
Connect with Drew:
Janice Kephart — ZipID
Janice Kephart is a lawyer, identity expert, and the founder of ZipID. She drafted the federal identity theft criminal statute for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, served on the 9/11 Commission, helped architect both REAL ID and the nation’s biometric border entry-exit system, and later developed biometric workflows at MorphoTrak (now Idemia). ZipID brings real biometric identity verification to the Form I-9 process so employers can meet federal requirements with confidence, and Janice is now building ZipID’s ID Fraud Forensic Dashboard for banks, credit unions, casinos, and any business that needs to know an ID is legitimate.
Connect with Janice:
Anne Gillaspie — Fix & Form
Anne Gillaspie is a global keynote speaker, truth disruptor, and creator of SHARE YOUR FEAR™, a movement that makes fear less scary and truth easier to tell. A 12-year entrepreneur, she is the CEO and founder of Denver-based Fix & Form Branding Firm, host of the top-ranked OnlyFounders podcast, and a brand therapist to founders and executives. Through storytelling, unexpected dance, and radically human experiences, Anne challenges audiences to stop performing and start telling the truth about who they are.
Connect with Anne:
Heather Waisanen — Coastal Maverick
Heather Waisanen is the founder of Coastal Maverick, a woman-owned boutique out-of-home advertising agency in Jacksonville, Florida, that helps brands nationwide with advertising strategy, media planning and buying, negotiation, and campaign execution. With more than a decade of experience across the client, agency, and media owner sides of the industry, she launched Coastal Maverick after being laid off from her role as a senior media planner. Now in her fourth year of entrepreneurship, Heather was recognized as a JAX Chamber Small Business Leader of the Year and is a member of the inaugural 2026 Visionaries 200 class.
Connect with Heather:
https://www.coastalmaverick.com/
Kacy Webster — Profit Quiver
Kacy Webster is a Business Transformation Strategist and Certified AI Consultant with 30+ years of executive leadership across higher education, workforce development, and enterprise transformation. Through Profit Quiver and The PrecisionX System, she partners with mid-market manufacturers, B2B leadership teams, colleges, and workforce organizations to adopt AI in a way their people can actually trust. Her framework, the 12 Domains of Human-First AI Adoption, gives leaders a structured path to transformation that starts with culture, alignment, and readiness before technology.
Connect with Kacy:
Erik Berglund — The Language of Leadership & Loominary
Erik Berglund is the founder of The Language of Leadership and Loominary, and host of the I Have Some Questions podcast. His companies help people practice difficult conversations before they have to have them in real life. The Language of Leadership offers a framework for leadership communication, and Loominary builds custom skill simulation systems that give businesses a way to reinforce those skills across their teams.
Connect with Erik:
https://www.languageofleadership.io/
Jane Alexander — Emma Advisor
Jane Alexander is the founder and CEO of Emma Advisor, an AI platform that helps students and families navigate the path from high school to college with more clarity, strategy, and confidence. Her own path was unconventional: she was homeschooled in rural Idaho, started at community college, transferred to a private university, completed graduate work at Harvard, and spent more than a decade advising leaders at over 200 colleges and universities. She built Emma Advisor so that opportunity doesn’t depend on social capital, connections, or the ability to hire expensive consultants.
Connect with Jane:
