The Ecommerce Influence Podcast · Austin Brawner

388: (NEW) It Was The Best of Times, It Was the Worst of Times

October 11, 2023·27 min·2 clips

Austin describes sitting on a bouncy ball in a dark room watching Yellowstone on an iPhone while his business was collapsing.

Austin starts with the gap. After 10 months away, he comes back saying the silence was not planned, and that the last year changed him at home and at work. The title earns its keep. He calls it the best of times and the worst of times because business, family, and the house all started crowding each other at once. The tone is candid, a little raw, and not trying to sound neat. He moves from the spark of recording again into the mess that pulled him away. A newborn changed the math. Late in the year, while trying to be present for his wife and son, he had business decisions piling up too. Then the house became its own problem. They expected a late February move-in, but as January became February, the project was nowhere near finished. That pressure shrank his world. They were living in a smaller house they owned as a rental property, meant to be temporary, while the house project took over month after month. The team decision hits hardest. He laid people off to stop the business bleeding, then realized their work had landed back on him before he was ready. He does not dress that up. The image he leaves is plain: a dark room, his son asleep in his arms, Yellowstone on an iPhone, and a parent realizing the hard choices were already here. January forced the reckoning. Once he wrote down his commitments, it was obvious he could not keep every promise. Still, the return feels open. He wants the podcast to hold learnings, wins, relationships, guests, and the personal business reflections that come from being squeezed that hard.

As heard by us

A candid founder return about business strain, layoffs, fatherhood, and a delayed house build forcing a hard capacity reset.

Austin Brawner returns after 10 months with a candid founder update that is more personal reset than ecommerce playbook. He frames the lost stretch as a collision of business pressure, new fatherhood, a house build that kept slipping, and the hard choice to lay off his team to…

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Why you'd press play

You want a candid founder reset after 10 months off the mic.

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