“Almost” is a strategy, not a stall

A founder I collaborated with spent four months seemingly on the verge of discontinuing a product line that had failed for over a year. The data was clear. She didn't lack information. Week after week, she juggled one more customer inquiry, one more pricing experiment, and one more quarterly review to confirm her decision. The phrase "almost there" often comes up in founder discussions.

People usually interpret it as sluggishness. More often than not, it serves a different purpose: safeguarding the founder from a loss they might not be prepared to face yet. The financial impact is rarely included in the presentation. Research on founder mental health, conducted by psychiatrist Michael Freeman, highlights the significant psychological burden.

His study compared 242 entrepreneurs to a control group and found that entrepreneurs reported significantly higher rates of depression (30% vs 15%), ADHD (29% vs 5%), and bipolar disorder (11% vs 1%), with 49% of entrepreneurs experiencing at least one lifetime mental health condition, compared to 32% in the control group. Major unresolved decisions, such as pivots, shutdowns, and co-founder conflicts, lie at the heart of this pressure.

Almost no one allocates time to the decision-making process itself. A deck can easily accommodate "done" and "not yet," but there's no space for the three months a founder spends circling around a decision they already know. Also Read: Founders are buying gold, not Lamborghinis, after the exit "Almost" actually serves a protective function.

While a decision remains undetermined, all potential outcomes remain viable. The pivot might yet succeed, the co-founder relationship might reconcile without a tough conversation, and the product might find its market with just one more adjustment. There is no tested evidence, so nothing is proven incorrect. Deciding eliminates most of these possibilities at once.

Only one future becomes reality: the one that has now truly materialized. This is a genuine loss, not merely a difficult choice, and studies have shown for decades that people tend to value a loss more heavily than an equal gain. Remaining in "almost" postpones that loss, albeit at a high cost. What actually causes this behavior I don't ask clients about the obstacles they face.

Such a question merely provides them with a list of justifications to defend. A more effective approach is to ask them to describe what the decision looks like once it's been made, until it starts to feel authentic: what does the morning after you've actually made the call feel like? Not the logic behind it. The emotional experience.

When that visualization comes easily and genuinely excites the person, it often does more than analysis ever could. The vision starts driving instead of the fear pulling, and "almost" becomes unnecessary. People begin seeing the path rather than the reasons not to take it. If the picture remains unclear or fails to resonate no matter how hard someone tries to visualize it, it suggests that the vision is not fully their own yet, or there may be something beneath it that hasn't been explicitly named.

In either case, the work is to strengthen the vision, not to list what's holding them back. Also Read: Male founders are losing confidence. Women are doubling down on AI The real catalyst for change Rarely a sudden surge of courage. The shift typically occurs when a vision becomes vivid and compelling enough that staying put starts to seem like the more expensive choice, not because the founder has run out of excuses, but because the pull towards the decided future ultimately outweighs whatever the undecided state still provides.

The founder mentioned at the beginning of this piece didn't acquire new information. Instead, she allowed herself to genuinely envision running a company without that product line in detail, and recognized how much more energy and focus that alternative company had compared to the one she had been preserving by avoiding a decision.

This is likely the better place to begin for founders trapped in "almost." Not by identifying what's in the way, but by clearly and honestly picturing the alternative path.