You might be surprised to know I love bourbon. Over the years, I've discovered that I enjoy the taste of bourbon much more than wine, and my body is much happier with it too.

My husband Jan knows what I like, so when he recently signed us up for a bourbon tasting course at a local distillery, I was thrilled. What we experienced at Mystic Farm and Distillery was delightful—but even better, it provided a story I had to share with you about a completely different kind of business success. One where you can grow and scale not despite staying true to your authentic identity, but because of it.

This matters because most growth-stage leaders face what feels like an impossible choice: Your calendar is packed, your team is maxed out, yet somehow you're still the bottleneck for every important decision. You know you need to scale, but every approach feels like it would kill what makes your business special in the first place. You're caught in the founder's dilemma: grow and lose your soul, or stay small and limit your impact.

But what if you didn’t have to choose?

The Distillery That Rewrote the Rules

Mike Sinclair and Jonathan Blitz faced this exact founders dilemma. By 2015, their hobby-turned-bourbon-business had grown enough to purchase 22 acres in Durham and build North Carolina's first grain-to-glass distillery since Prohibition. Mike, a former computer programmer, and Jonathan, a practicing lawyer, weren't trying to compete with industrial giants or copy traditional scaling approaches.

Instead, they'd found their unique tribe: people who wanted something special, different, where they could know the makers and be part of a community. Their volunteers don't get paid to help with packaging—they get fed, receive a t-shirt and a free bottle of bourbon, and most importantly, they get to hang out and be part of the Mystic experience.

This wasn't just their business model—it was their authentic identity in action. Everything they did expressed who they were: experimenters, community builders, craftspeople who valued relationships and quality.

Then disaster struck that threatened everything they'd built—and taught them how authentic identity could become the foundation for a new kind of scalable success.

When Everything Goes Wrong, Everything Could Go Right

They'd invested in barrels from a new cooperage, filled them with their precious bourbon, and watched in horror as the barrels leaked—profusely. Months of work, thousands of dollars, and their reputation hung in the balance. For a tiny operation, this wasn't just a setback; it was potentially the end.

Here's where traditional business advice would tell them to cut their losses, implement better quality controls, and find more "reliable" suppliers. Instead, Mike and Jonathan did something that would define their approach to a new kind of scaling: they worked with what they had.

With Jonathan's legal background, they weren't afraid to take legal action and fight for resolution. But while the lawsuit played out, they faced a crucial choice. They could panic and abandon their experimental nature, or they could lean deeper into who they were as discoverers and innovators.

They chose to experiment.

And the bourbon that aged in those leaking barrels developed into something extraordinary. The additional oxygen exposure created unique flavors that their normal process couldn't replicate. When they entered that "failed" bourbon in the 2023 San Francisco World Spirits Competition, it won Best 5-Year Small Batch Bourbon.

Their "Broken Oak" bourbon—born from disaster—became their signature premium product.

The Breakthrough: Systematizing Serendipity

But here's where their story becomes a masterclass in this new kind of authentic scaling: they didn't just celebrate the accident and move on. With their systematic thinking, they figured out how to recreate the conditions intentionally. Now they drill precise holes in barrels to recreate that "broken" effect, turning their crisis into their signature approach.

This is the secret to scaling without losing your soul. They didn't abandon their experimental nature or try to become more "professional." They systematized their authenticity, scaled their uniqueness, and turned what others might see as quality control failure into one of their greatest strengths.

Meanwhile, Mike's wife Katie serves as their master taster—an ability you’re born with. Unlike large distilleries that blend thousands of barrels for consistency, Mystic’s gifted taster works with what they have, with input from their community, to create beautiful results that are intentionally unique. As Mike puts it, you can take two horrible-tasting barrels, combine them, and create something amazing—but you have to taste, experiment, and discover what works.

Their approach isn't about avoiding broken barrels—it's about learning to drill the holes yourself, systematically and intentionally, while staying true to the experimental spirit that makes you unique.

Beyond Traditional Success: The Identity Expansion Path

Most scaling businesses get trapped by pursuing traditional success—the kind that demands choosing between founder control or corporate bureaucracy. Research shows that when companies hit the £1-5 million mark (according to Ballards LLP, a UK source), founders often become the constraint to growth because every key decision still runs through one person.

The typical "solution"? Bring in "professional managers" to replace the passionate founders. The result? The entrepreneurial spirit—the very authentic identity that made the company successful—morphs into bureaucracy, and companies often fail to grow or fail altogether.

Mike and Jonathan could have fallen into this trap. Instead, they discovered something powerful: there's a completely different kind of success available when you scale by becoming more of who you are, not less.

The New Success: Authentic, Unique, Scalable

When COVID hit, Mike and Jonathan didn't panic about pivoting away from their core business. They used their distillation expertise to produce hand sanitizer for over 200 healthcare facilities. It wasn't a desperate pivot—it was their experimental, community-focused identity expressing itself in new circumstances.

Now they're planning to send bourbon to space for a year of aging, creating "Mystic Galactic" at $75,000 per bottle. It sounds crazy until you realize it's perfectly aligned with who they are: boundary-pushing experimenters who've never stopped being guided by curiosity and quality.

This is what the new kind of success looks like. It's authentic, unique, and niche—and it can still grow and scale precisely because it's authentic, unique, and niche. Your brand identity isn't what you put on your website—it's the deeper truth about who you are that shows up in your leadership, your culture, your strategy, and every decision you make.

The businesses that achieve this new kind of scalable success do it by expanding their authentic identity rather than abandoning it for someone else's template.

Permission to Drill Your Own Holes

For technically-minded leaders, Mike and Jonathan's story offers a profound lesson: your analytical skills and experimental spirit aren't opposing forces—they're your unique expression waiting to be scaled.

You don't have to choose between systematization and creativity. You can systematize discovery without killing innovation. You can create controlled chaos that leads to breakthrough rather than breakdown.

The key is recognizing that this new kind of growth requires identity expansion, not identity abandonment. Instead of copying traditional scaling approaches, profoundly successful companies get better at experimenting in ways that express their authentic identity—and attract exactly the right people who want what only they can offer.

When drama strikes your business—and it will—ask yourself: "What if this isn't a problem to be fixed, but an opportunity to express more of who we truly are?" What if your constraints contain your greatest opportunity to create something uniquely valuable?

The secret to scaling without losing your soul isn't avoiding the broken barrels. It's learning to drill the holes yourself, systematically and intentionally, while staying true to the experimental spirit that makes you irreplaceable in your unique niche.

Unleash Your Strategic Throughline

If you're a growth-stage leader feeling stretched to the breaking point while your strategic work waits until "after hours," then you're experiencing a disconnect between who you truly are and how you're currently operating.

The challenge isn't to just do more—that’s the old story of success. The challenge is learning to operate from your authentic Strategic Throughline: the energetic alignment between who you authentically are and the value you create. So the hard work you do scales you, your business, and your impact for customers. 

Like Mike and Jonathan turning their barrel crisis into Broken Oak bourbon, the solution often lies not in fighting what's happening, but in learning to show up as your authentic self without resistance to the drama—internal or external.

It's like discovering you're authentically a bourbon person, not a wine person—something I learned firsthand after years of trying to appreciate wine because it seemed more 'appropriate.' You feel better and function better when you stay true to what you love and what your body likes, instead of wasting time and energy trying to be somebody you’re not. 

Ready to discover your own Strategic Throughline?

Within a single workweek, we can personally help you reclaim the time and energy needed to reconnect with who you truly are and amplify the value you’re creating—so can be like Mystic. So you can become wildly productive as a leader without burning out.

My Unleash Your Strategic Throughline program helps you transform the very challenges that are draining your energy into sources of sustainable leadership power.

Learn more about Unleash Your Strategic Throughline at https://www.iamx.one and how you can turn your greatest challenges into your signature advantages.

Learn more about Mystic and their sustainable business practices and events here: https://www.whatismystic.com/

What broken barrels are you trying to 'fix' instead of learning to leverage? What crisis in your business could become your signature advantage? Your authentic leadership—and your new kind of scalable success—might depend on the answer.

‍