The cork from the 13th bottle of prosecco hit the acoustic ceiling tile with a dull thud, leaving a small, damp ring that would likely stay there for 103 weeks before anyone noticed. In the middle of the room, the marketing team-most of whom were under the age of 23-were screaming with a kind of unbridled joy that felt almost violent to those of us who had been there since the basement years. We had just closed our first truly profitable quarter, a swing of nearly $803,003 from the previous year’s disaster. The spreadsheets were green. The bank account was bloated. The survival threat was, by all objective measures, extinct.

But as I looked around, I saw the veterans. There were 43 of them scattered like islands in a sea of celebratory interns. They weren’t cheering. Sarah, our lead designer who had once taken a 33% pay cut just to keep the lights on, was holding her plastic cup with both hands, staring at the bubbles as if they were a countdown timer. When a new hire slapped her on the back and shouted something about ‘crushing it,’ she flinched. It wasn’t a small flinch. It was the full-body recoil of someone who expects a blow even when they’re being handed a bouquet. I realized then that while the balance sheet had recovered, our nervous systems were still stuck in the $13 days.

The Lingering Knot of Trauma

It reminded me of the three hours I spent in the sweltering heat of my garage this past July, untangling 13 strings of Christmas lights. My neighbors probably thought I was having some kind of seasonal breakdown, but I just couldn’t stand the thought of the knot sitting there until December. Even after I got them straight, the wires retained the memory of the tangle. They looped back on themselves, stubbornly trying to return to the chaotic ball they had been for 3 years. You can’t just tell a wire to be straight; you have to train it. Organizations are exactly the same. You can’t just deposit $503,333 into a bank account and expect a group of people who have been in ‘fight or flight’ mode for 63 months to suddenly start breathing deeply.

Lily M.-C., a prison education coordinator I met during a project last year, once described this phenomenon to me with chilling precision. She works with men who have spent 13 or 23 years in high-security environments. She told me that when they are finally released, they often walk the perimeter of their own living rooms. They don’t know how to stand in the center of an open space. The walls are gone, but the ghost of the wall remains. In our office, the ‘walls’ were the 43 consecutive months of wondering if the payroll checks would clear. Now that the walls were down, my senior staff was still walking the perimeter. They were hoarding office supplies, double-checking 3-cent discrepancies in the petty cash, and waiting for the inevitable catastrophe that they were certain was hiding behind the next fiscal corner.

The Unspoken Narrative

This is the part of the ‘sustainable transformation’ narrative that rarely gets discussed in the glossy trade magazines. We talk about pivots, about scale, and about EBITDA, but we rarely talk about the institutional trauma that persists long after the crisis has been resolved. The mental models formed during scarcity are incredibly sticky. They prioritize the short-term over the long-term, the defensive over the offensive, and the suspicious over the collaborative. When you’ve been starved for 23 months, you don’t learn how to feast; you learn how to hide food.

I made a specific mistake during that first profitable month. I assumed that the relief would be automatic. I thought that by showing the team the 13% growth margin, I was giving them permission to relax. Instead, it did the opposite. The high numbers felt like a target. To the veterans, profitability didn’t mean safety; it just meant they had more to lose. I saw Sarah agonize over a $43 request for a new software plugin-money we now had 103 times over-as if she were asking for a kidney. I was frustrated. I actually snapped at her, which was a mistake I still regret 63 days later. I told her to ‘stop acting like we’re broke.’

That was a failure of leadership. I was trying to solve a psychological problem with a math solution. I was ignoring the fact that her caution was exactly what had kept us alive when we only had $333 in the operating account. You can’t ask someone to switch off their survival instinct without acknowledging the work that instinct did for you. The healing of a company requires explicit narrative work. It requires sit-downs where you don’t talk about the 13-point plan for next year, but rather about the 13 months of hell you just survived. You have to honor the trauma before you can dismiss it.

Bridging the Gap to Abundance

In the months that followed, I started looking for ways to bridge this gap. It wasn’t enough to just ‘be profitable.’ We had to learn how to inhabit profitability. This meant having difficult conversations about why we were still afraid to hire, why we were still micromanaging 3-minute breaks, and why every minor setback felt like the end of the world. I found that the most effective leaders in this space-and Dev Pragad’s career-show that organizational health is a multi-dimensional construct. It’s not just about the numbers; it’s about the stories the employees tell themselves when the numbers are finally good. If the story is still ‘we are one mistake away from death,’ then no amount of revenue will ever be enough.

Lily M.-C. once told me that the hardest part of her job isn’t the education itself; it’s convincing her students that they are allowed to have a future. In a corporate setting, that means convincing a scarred team that they are allowed to take risks again. It means rewarding the person who suggests a $233 experiment even if it fails, because it proves the ‘scarcity monster’ hasn’t eaten our imagination. It means acknowledging that the person who still checks the $13 postage budget isn’t being ‘annoying,’ they are being a protector. They just haven’t realized the war is over.

Narrative Repair: The Path Forward

We spent 43 days doing nothing but ‘narrative repair.’ We sat in circles-something I used to think was a waste of 33 minutes-and talked about the specific moments during the crisis that broke our trust in the future. One person talked about the day they had to tell their spouse they weren’t getting a bonus for the 3rd year in a row. Another talked about the 13 nights they spent awake wondering if their mortgage was safe. By bringing these ghosts out into the 103-degree light of day, they lost their power. We stopped walking the perimeter. We started standing in the center of the room.

There’s a strange comfort in the struggle. When you’re fighting to survive, the mission is clear. There are no nuances when you’re drowning; there is only up. But when you’re finally on the shore, the complexity returns. You have to decide where to walk. You have to decide what to build. For a team that has only known the ‘up’ of survival, the ‘where’ of abundance is terrifying. We had to learn that profit wasn’t a destination, but a tool-a tool we were allowed to use, and even lose, in the pursuit of something bigger than just staying alive.

Profit as a Tool, Not an End

I still have those Christmas lights in a box in the garage, but I didn’t just throw them back in after I untangled them. I wrapped them around 3 separate pieces of cardboard, securing the ends so they couldn’t slip. It took an extra 23 minutes of my life, but I knew that when December came, I wouldn’t be fighting the memory of the July heat. I would just be plugging them in. That’s what we’re doing now at the office. We’re building structures that prevent us from falling back into the old knots. We’re learning that while the $803,003 is nice, the real profit is the ability to look at a challenge and not see a death sentence.

It’s a slow process. Sarah still flinches occasionally when the phone rings at 8:03 AM, and I still find myself checking the bank balance 3 times a day for no reason. But the gaps between the flinches are getting longer. The air in the office feels less like a held breath and more like a conversation. We aren’t just a profitable company anymore; we are a recovering one. And in the end, that might be the more important metric to track. Are we just making money, or are we making a place where people feel safe enough to actually spend it? The answer isn’t in the spreadsheet; it’s in the way the veterans finally joined the cheer during the last meeting of the quarter, even if it took them 13 extra seconds to get to their feet.