8fit is shutting down on my birthday. I don’t regret how I ran it.

The company I used to run is shutting down on my birthday. June 26. It’s called 8fit.

And it’s breaking my heart.

8fit was the pinnacle of my executive career. Everything I’d learned, every hard year before it, it all came together there. It healed me in a lot of ways, as difficult as it was.

I spent 3 years keeping it alive. It ended anyway. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with that.

What we built there matters. So does what I decided the day I joined it.

The original 8fit was built around weight loss and muscle gain.

It was very white, very thin, and very “fit” in its advertising. After the co-founder CEO was removed, the new CEO rebuilt the brand from the ground up. She made it more inclusive. More honest. Built for the everyday person. 8fit wasn’t for those who were chasing six-pack abs or trying to drop 200 pounds. It was for those who just wanted to feel better in their skin. Who just needed to be met where they were.

The fitness industry, at the time, was still selling transformation. A deadline, a destination, a body you were working toward. Move fast, hurt a little, get there. The rebuilt 8fit was the antidote to all of it.

Our new motto was “Do something good for yourself. A little bit. Every single day.”

Move your body. Fuel it. Rest your mind. That’s enough. It counts.

I believed that when I joined. I still do.

But that belief outlasted the company.

At the time, I was starting over in more ways than I’d planned for.

Coming off the most stressful period of my life, I experienced true, terrifying burnout for the first time. I took 6 weeks of sick leave after a bout of vertigo I couldn’t shake. I was at my least healthy. I was uncomfortable in my body. Less athletic than I’d been in years.

And then I joined a health and fitness app.

It was the exact right thing at exactly the right time. A mission-driven company I was already personally invested in before I’d officially signed. Joining it while rebuilding my own health felt like more than a career move. Like this was the right time even when everything else felt like it was going wrong.

The recently appointed CEO was charming. She was equally as brilliant at selling the vision. Everyone was bought in, including me. It wasn’t until I was inside the machine that I realized how distressed the business actually was. Each month that first year, it got a little worse.

I had spent years saying yes when I meant no. In my marriage, telling myself things were fine when they weren’t. At work, being told which numbers to show the board and which to leave out. Knowing the story we were presenting wasn’t the full one. Telling myself it wasn’t my call.

The thing about small compromises is they don’t feel like compromises at the time. They feel like being practical.

You’re being flexible, right? You’ve got to be a part of the team.

That story is easy to stay in. You’ve probably done it yourself. “Can we pull back to the trend line? This month makes it look worse than it is.” You move the metric. You tell yourself it’s one board meeting. It has a name: being a team player.

I couldn’t do it anymore.

I kept calling it flexibility. But it started eroding away something in me.

8fit had just come through its own reckoning. The founder CEO had been removed. There was a culture of…whoever yelled loudest won. Do as I say. We’re smarter than our customers. Bullying was tolerated. Nobody quite knew what was supposed to replace it.

The culture the founder had built was still in the walls.

The new CEO had been brought in after his removal. A few weeks before I officially joined, this newly appointed CEO and remaining leadership sat down to figure out what we actually stood for – mission, vision, values.

The company was starting over. So was I. But my resolve was the same.

Full honesty. Full transparency. I was done with partial truths.

What I didn’t know yet was whether any of it would actually matter.

A month into my tenure, the company’s database turned up on the dark web.

A breach from two years ago was discovered while half the company was at a month-long offsite in Tenerife, an island off the coast of Spain. Then the dominoes started to fall. Over the next few months, almost all of the leadership team vanished. Including the CEO.

I became interim CEO with two weeks to prepare for a board meeting, and I had a finance person who’d never built a budget.

Nobody knew about any of it. The marriage ending, the starting over. From the outside, apparently, I looked fine. About a month later, the CTO left. The VP of People called me a traitor. She wanted no part in honoring him. I stood up in front of the company and acknowledged what he’d built there anyway. She saw it as choosing a side. I saw it as doing the job. She gave her notice not long after.

The pressure to bend the narrative was constant. Just frame it differently. Just leave that part out. Just wait until after the quarter closes.

It’s a familiar ask. Most operators have given in at least once.

Through all of it, I kept the same commitment. Present full numbers to the board and our employees. Full disclosure on the breach and the other challenges we were facing. When people left, we announced it openly. Whatever was true, we said it.

We told the difficult truth all the way to the sale of the company.

And then we had a choice to make that I’m still not sure we got right.

There were two serious buyers.

One who wanted to keep the 8fit brand standalone, the other who wanted to build an integrated product and fold 8fit into their broader ecosystem. The board chose the latter - a company called Withings. That was 4 years ago. They had hardware alignment, were in the same region, and every rational box got checked.

Had we chosen the other buyer, the brand built for the person who just needed to move their body a little every day would maybe still exist.

I’ll probably always wonder. I still do.

The board made its call and the buyer made theirs. Neither was mine to make.

What was mine was how I showed up. Every step of the way. As honestly and transparently as I could. That didn’t change when the sale happened.

I told the truth. And I sure as hell don’t regret how I ran 8fit.

The date they picked to close it is June 26.

My birthday. Of course it is.

You have to make extremely hard decisions in roles like this. What I know now is that you can make them and still be the version of you who you said you’d be. You don’t have to compromise who you are to get through it. I spent years not knowing that was possible.

8fit is where I got to run a company the way I always believed it should be run.

You bring your whole self to work whether you do it intentionally or not. That’s what this is really about.

Right now I’m working with operators navigating versions of this in real time. Each company is different, but the pressures are surprisingly familiar.

Every week I write about what it actually looks like from inside those rooms. The numbers that don’t go in the deck. The decisions nobody wants to name out loud. The version you won’t find on LinkedIn.

If that’s a conversation you need, subscribe and follow along.