Dashboard: The Numbers Said Don’t Do It. She Did It Anyway.

This week, we talk to Leisa Peterson, who has spent much of her career thinking about money, risk, and the ways our emotions can interfere with financial decisions. So when Peterson and her family decided to launch The Gear Project, a peer-to-peer marketplace for used outdoor equipment, you might have expected her to proceed with unusual discipline and caution. And she did—right up to the point where the numbers started telling her that maybe they shouldn’t launch at all.As Peterson built out her financial projections, she kept discovering costs she hadn’t anticipated. The margins got thinner. The transaction volume required to make the business work got higher. She was ready to walk away. Her husband, daughter, and son-in-law wanted to keep going. So they did. Now, just weeks after launching, Peterson is deep in the part of entrepreneurship no spreadsheet can fully anticipate: fixing shipping problems, refunding incorrectly collected sales taxes, changing developers, manually approving thousands of listings, and discovering which of the warnings she heard before launch were right—and which weren’t.Along the way, she’s also confronting something more personal: whether a lifetime spent protecting herself from financial risk may have kept her from taking some risks worth taking. This episode is brought to you by Grasshopper Bank.