By June Ramli
Perth, Aug 4: Not long ago, Don Robertson and his wife, Matilda Murray, were celebrating the remarkable success of their activewear brand, Stax, after earning a place on the Australian Financial Review Rich List. Today, the company has entered administration, with a buyer being sought—a dramatic turn that has once again highlighted the unpredictable realities of entrepreneurship.
Having previously met the couple, the team at DailyStraits.com watched their journey with admiration, making the company’s downfall all the more sobering. While stories of soaring valuations and business success often dominate the headlines, far less attention is given to the psychological toll that comes with building a company, facing burnout, navigating failure, or making difficult career decisions.
Prompted by the conversation surrounding Stax’s collapse, DailyStraits.com spoke exclusively with psychologist Zahra Ciardi to explore the emotional realities behind work and business.
In this exclusive email interview, she explains why founders often tie their identity to their companies, how isolation quietly erodes judgment and motivation, and what both entrepreneurs and employees can do when they feel trapped, burnt out or uncertain about their next step.
We’ve seen founders build something that makes the AFR Rich List one year, then watch it go into administration and end up searching for a buyer not long after — Stax is a recent example. Psychologically, what happens to a founder’s sense of identity when a business that defined their success collapses that fast?
When a venture collapses rapidly, a founder loses the central structure around which their identity has been organised. This fusion of self and business is common among those who have transformed a private idea into a public entity. Cardon and colleagues’ research on entrepreneurial passion found that founders often describe their ventures using the same language parents use for their children. This instinct is understandable given that building a business involves conceiving an idea privately, shaping it daily over years, and ultimately staking one’s public reputation on its success.
The speed of collapse in cases like Stax intensifies the psychological impact. A gradual decline allows the nervous system to adapt incrementally, processing the loss over time. In contrast, a rapid collapse bypasses this adjustment, resulting in acute shock. The aftermath often resembles acute grief or trauma, including intrusive rumination, shame, diminished decision-making confidence, and disrupted sleep and appetite. To outsiders, these reactions may appear disproportionate to the financial loss. However, for the founder, the experience is one of grieving a version of themselves that existed through the business, a process with its own internal logic.
Public visibility intensifies this dynamic. Founders must build their ventures in public, making external perceptions a constant and immediate influence rather than something processed privately. While some feedback can genuinely improve the business, the entanglement of self and venture means that criticism often feels like a judgment of personal worth, regardless of the founder’s intentions.
Recovery from such a collapse often depends on self-complexity, or whether the founder’s identity includes other significant roles beyond the business, such as being a parent, friend, or athlete. Founders with these additional pillars experience the loss as losing a limb, while those whose entire identity is tied to the business experience it as losing the entire organism.
Solo founders often lose the “why” somewhere between the spreadsheet and the burnout. What are the early psychological signs that a founder has fallen out of love with their own business — before it hits crisis point?
Losing the “why” is rarely a single moment of realisation. Instead, it is the culmination of a process, and recognising this process enables early detection before a crisis occurs. Maslach’s burnout research shows that exhaustion and cynicism develop sequentially: exhaustion arises first, and cynicism follows as a defensive response when exhaustion remains unaddressed. Cynicism serves as the mind’s way of protecting itself from a purpose it can no longer sustain. It does not feel like abandoning the “why”; rather, it feels as though the “why” has become inaccessible.
This is often overlooked by founders and those around them, as they tend to focus on visible signs of exhaustion such as fatigue, disrupted sleep, and a worn-down appearance. Exhaustion may temporarily improve with a short break, creating the illusion of recovery even when the underlying issues persist. If these issues remain unresolved, exhaustion returns, and over time, cynicism develops. The erosion of the “why” becomes evident in daily behaviour: language shifts from “we’re building” to “I’m managing,” challenges that once sparked curiosity now cause irritability, and the founder may articulate what the business does but struggle to explain why it matters to them.
Cynicism is a more diagnostic indicator, not due to its early appearance, but because of what it signifies. When a founder discusses their business cynically, it typically reflects months of unaddressed exhaustion. The sense of purpose has not disappeared; rather, it has been gradually eroded by depletion, with cynicism serving as visible evidence of this shift.
Is “falling back in love with the business” even the right goal, or does it risk masking a founder ignoring signals they should actually walk away or restructure?
Viewing “falling back in love with the business” as a standalone goal is problematic, and research on founders’ delayed exit decisions clarifies why. Barry Staw’s escalation of commitment research demonstrates that individuals often invest more resources in failing ventures when they feel personally responsible for the original decision, driven by self-justification rather than objective evaluation. Founders are structurally the least objective evaluators of whether to recommit, as their identity and track record are closely tied to the outcome. Entrepreneurial exit research supports this: DeTienne’s studies show that founders consistently under-plan and delay exits compared to what the data would suggest, precisely because their identity is so intertwined with the venture’s continuation.
This framing carries significant risk. Reconnecting with purpose is a valuable goal when the business remains fundamentally sound and the issue is the founder’s exhaustion or cynicism. However, the same instinct to seek one’s “why” can serve as a sophisticated form of avoidance, delaying decisions that market data or financial realities have already dictated. Reconnecting with purpose feels proactive, while closing or restructuring a business feels like admitting a mistake. Staw’s research highlights that the psychological drive to persist increases with personal responsibility for the original decision.
A more constructive question for founders is not whether they still love the business, but whether their fatigue stems from a manageable role within a viable business, or from a business that lacks a sustainable future and is being mischaracterised as a motivation issue because that narrative is easier to accept.
What’s a realistic, non-toxic-positivity way for an isolated founder to reconnect with purpose — something more substantial than “remember your why”?
“Remember your why” is ineffective because it demands a feeling as if it were an instruction, yet motivation does not respond to directives. It asks founders to summon inspiration while already depleted, akin to asking someone to drive faster with no fuel left.
A more effective approach is informed by job crafting research by Wrzesniewski and Dutton, which shows that individuals who actively reshape their work across three dimensions (tasks, relationships, and mental framing) report greater meaning in their work. Crucially, job crafting is behavioural rather than reflective. It involves changing how time is spent, with whom, and which aspects of the role can be delegated or eliminated, rather than simply thinking differently about the business.
For isolated founders, this involves three specific strategies rather than relying on motivation alone. Task crafting requires auditing time allocation and intentionally reducing hours spent on purely obligatory tasks by delegating or eliminating them. Relational crafting directly addresses isolation by establishing at least one ongoing relationship, such as with an advisor, peer founder, or mentor, where business matters are discussed regularly. Cognitive crafting, which most closely resembles “remembering why,” is effective because it is concrete: it involves linking tasks to specific individuals served, client outcomes, or problems solved, rather than relying on the original founding narrative.
These strategies do not require the founder to feel inspired initially. Instead, they involve altering the structure of the role, with a sense of meaning typically emerging as a result of these structural changes.
How does isolation itself (no co-founder, no team peer) distort a founder’s relationship with their own work over time?
Cardon and Arwine’s recent research on entrepreneurial loneliness, published in Personnel Psychology, highlights a key distinction: solo founders may not lack social contact, but they often lack decisional peers, individuals at the same level with similar stakes who can provide input before critical decisions. A founder may have a busy schedule and supportive family, yet remain structurally isolated where it matters most: in decision-making.
This lack of decisional peers distorts a founder’s work over time. Decisions made in isolation are processed and stored without external reference points. In a team, others’ reactions provide automatic calibration, indicating whether a decision is reasonable or questionable. Alone, there is no such feedback, so minor misjudgments accumulate, causing the founder’s sense of what is normal, urgent, or critical to drift without awareness.
Research also identifies a significant downstream effect: increased entrepreneurial loneliness is associated with reduced passion and a higher likelihood of leaving the venture. Isolation not only makes daily work more challenging but also gradually erodes attachment to the business. This process is structural rather than sentimental; without others to reflect the work, both judgment and motivation deteriorate in ways that are often invisible to the founder.
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part exclusive email interview with psychologist Zahra Ciardi. Tomorrow, DailyStraits.com will publish the second instalment, exploring the psychology behind wanting to leave a job without a financial safety net or another role lined up.
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