Ep. 85 - Why Founders Burn Out Even When the Business Is Winning w/Annie Wright, LMFT

Founder burnout doesn't always look like failure. Sometimes it looks like a profitable, multi-state, multi-million dollar business that is quietly costing you your health, your marriage, and your identity.

In this episode, licensed psychotherapist and relational trauma specialist Annie Wright, LMFT, joins Makhosi for a raw conversation about entrepreneur mental health, exiting a business at its peak, and the founder identity reckoning that so many successful women founders experience but rarely discuss.

Annie built Evergreen Counseling, a large trauma-informed therapy center, from the ground up while navigating postpartum, unresolved trauma, and the survival patterns that shaped every hiring decision and cultural norm inside the company. She spent a year and a half grappling with the decision to sell; not because the business was failing, but because the cost of staying was no longer worth the financial security it provided.

Together, Annie and Makhosi examine what it means to walk away from a profitable business, the ambiguous grief of letting go of an identity built on achievement, and why the most dangerous moment for a founder is not crisis: it's success that leaves no room for anything else.

**Key topics:**

0:00 — Introduction

1:10 — Who Annie Wright is and what she built

2:10 — Building a therapy center postpartum: "Who does that? Someone with unprocessed trauma."

5:26 — The founder's identity as the architecture of the business

7:00 — Letting go of something that is still affirming you

10:11 — Makhosi's story: choosing presence over med school

12:29 — Grief on both sides of the working-mother coin