How Ego Destroys a Business: "Maybe Me."

Key Takeaways

Ego destroys a business by convincing the founder he has the answers. Asked on air whether I’d ever seen someone damage a business protecting their ego, my honest answer was “Maybe me.”
Dishonesty in business usually starts as over-optimism: you fully believe the picture you’re painting, and then it falls out of your control. The fix is updates and clarity, before anyone has to ask.
My $150 million company was missing three things: people in the right seats, a management system, and a founder who wasn’t the bottleneck.
A deal that’s too good to be true without a really clear explanation usually is. Check the concept, check the founder, and check whether you can touch the asset.
Return every business message within 24 hours. Silence on money matters reads worse than bad news. I talked through all of it with host Hannah Kesler on Money Mornings, and you can listen to the full conversation below.

Ego destroys a business by convincing you that you already have the answers, so the people you hired to tell you the truth stop getting through. I know because I did it. I’m Eric Zwigart. I built an oil and chemical company to over $150 million in annual revenue, then watched it melt down after I ignored my own advisors. In my conversation with Hannah Kesler on Money Mornings, she asked whether I’d ever seen someone damage a business protecting their ego. My answer was two words: “Maybe me.” Here’s the rest of what I told her, and the conversation itself, right here:

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Eric Zwigart in conversation on a podcast set

How quickly should you respond to a business email?

Within 24 hours. Not solved in 24 hours, answered in 24 hours. As I put it to Hannah: “Once somebody gets to you, try to do at least a 24-hour return.”

That’s been my standard for a long time, and it isn’t easy. I’ve had the same phone number for 30 years. “I think there’s like 10,000 plus contacts in my phone. It’s like overloaded.” The way you hold a 24-hour rule at that volume is a system, not willpower: an assistant on the inbox, “access through email and your admin and everybody tied in, that you really want to try to get back to somebody within a 24-hour time frame.”

And when life genuinely takes you off the grid? Say so, in advance, automatically: “Put an auto reminder on your email that says: I have a situation and I’m going to be out of pocket for a while, but you’ll hear from me when I can get back on the grid. And that pretty much clears you to go deal with what you need to deal with.”

Why does this matter so much? Because when money is involved, silence gets read as a signal. “It sounds insensitive, but it’s not: you start to get a little worried, because that’s a money matter.” Nobody panics because you took a day to reply. People panic when they don’t know if a reply is coming.

We recorded this episode at dawn West Coast time. I was in Dallas at the Ritz-Carlton at TPC Las Colinas for a quarterly CEO conference. Halfway through, my connection dropped. “I lost you, Hannah… Let me log right back in.” I was back inside a minute. The rule applies to podcast hosts too.

How do you stop being the bottleneck in your own business?

Three things I didn’t do the first time: put people in seats that match who they actually are, run a real management system, and stop letting every decision flow through you.

On people, I hired for the role and not the person. “I thought I’d put people in positions that they matched, but I didn’t pay attention as much to analysis of what people really fit to in their personality and character types.” Right résumé, wrong seat.

On systems: “I never used a management system in that big company, and it also helped melt down. So you’re missing KPIs, you’re missing proper structures and SOPs. As a CEO or a founder, you want to be able to go to one place, a dashboard, and know what’s going on. So that was missing in those companies. So that’s not missing in Rock Solid.” Since then I’ve run EOS, another system called Empire, and I now work with a consultant named Carl Gould.

And on the bottleneck itself, here’s the part most founders won’t say out loud: “I thought I had surrounded myself with people that know those things, but the truth was, no: everything flowed to me and everything was on me. And to this day, I still have a lot of that happening.”

To this day. I’m not writing this as the guy who fixed it. I’m writing it as the guy still working on it, with better systems than I had at $150 million a year. And one more confession from the episode, because it belongs here: “My forte is in sales and being with people, and being a visionary. But yet I’m way into management… I don’t like management. I don’t like managing people, and probably my people don’t like me managing them. But straight up.”

How does ego affect decision-making in business?

Ego tells you that you’re the exception: that the warnings from the people around you apply to somebody else. Hannah asked me whether I’d ever seen someone damage their business protecting their ego, and the truest answer available was: “Maybe me.”

During COVID, my oil and chemical company pivoted to hand sanitizer. In 30 days we went from zero to 30,000 gallons a day. I’ve told the full story of how that pivot melted down in I Lost $35 Million. Here’s the Only Lesson That Matters.. What I haven’t told there is the ego side of the decision.

Here’s what I was thinking at the peak: “I thought, hey, we’re the next hand sanitizer king of the world. This is like printing money.”

And here’s what the people around me were saying: dump it, while the profit was still in the bank. Instead, I put the profits back in. “I went all in, thinking this is a long-term thing. And no, it was a short-term thing. Should have gotten in and out and listened to some of my advisors and folks around me. Which I didn’t do.”

That’s the whole mechanism, and I gave Hannah the thesis straight: “So that’s the ego thinking: I have the answers. But you need to listen to your people, and you need to listen to the people that you put around you.”

“If you don’t, then you’ve got to take the heat yourself and put it on your shoulders. And losing a $150 million company and $35 million personally is a lot to put on your shoulders. But you get through it.”

Looking back, “there’s a hero’s journey in there somewhere. And God does those things: sometimes he’ll take you off one track and put you on another.”

Why do entrepreneurs lie?

Most of them don’t set out to. In my experience, looking dishonest in business usually starts with optimism, and I told Hannah exactly how the trap works.

“Business isn’t always black and white. So sometimes there’s a little bit of gray. So you want to paint a good picture to certain folks, because you think it’s part of the evolution of a product, of a service, and you want to be able to fix it in the time frame that you think you can.” Or more bluntly: “Sometimes you’re trying to buy yourself a little time to fix whatever glitch is happening.”

Then the trap springs: “The problem is, you can get too overly optimistic. And when you do that, it then can backfire and turns into looking like you aren’t honest.”

I lived this. “When I was telling them about what I wanted to do, it was absolutely 100% the truth. Now, what happens is sometimes that falls out of your control.” Nobody in the room lied. The picture I painted was real to me. Circumstances changed it, and the gap between the picture and the outcome had my name on it.

The remedy I gave Hannah is the one I’d give anyone: “You got to be honest with your clients and your investors. And if there’s an issue, you got to go to them: updates and clarity.” Bad news delivered early, by you, is a very different thing from bad news discovered late, by them.

I’ve written separately about the tactic this grew into (walking into a hard meeting and saying the objection out loud before anyone else can) in my 8 Mile strategy for handling objections. This is the principle underneath that tactic.

How can you tell a deal is too good to be true?

Here’s my rule from the episode: “Most of the time, when you see things that are too good to be true without a really clear explanation, it’s usually too good to be true.” The qualifier is the useful part. Extraordinary results do exist, but there’s always a clear, checkable reason for them. When the explanation goes fuzzy, that’s the flag.

Beyond that, I gave Hannah the checks I actually run.

The concept test. “Look at the concept and look at what is in theory: does it make logical sense? Does this product make sense? Does it have a market? Does it have a future-proof type of thing? Does it have the right founder?”

The founder test. “Do they have a customer base? Do they have a product?… Do they have a business background? Can they handle this? Some people don’t, and that’s when you can get in trouble, because they don’t know the pitfalls.”

The exposure check. Know what you’re actually signing up for. In some passive deals, “you’re going to have a cash call and have to put money into that, because you’re an owner.” Owner means owner on the way down, not just on the way up.

The tangible test. “I like asset-based things… it’s a tangible piece of property: you can see it, you can touch it, you feel it. That’s what scares me about some of those things that you can’t touch and feel and see,” crypto included, “which I don’t know as much, by the way.” My dad taught my brother and me to stay with what we could stand on, and I never left it.

And underneath all of it, honesty about the nature of the game: “You got to kind of know that there is a risk to investing. There’s a risk to buying property, because you can lose.”

For the record, something else I said to Hannah applies to this whole section: “I’m not a financial analyst or a professional that can give professional advice: whatever we talk about today is my opinion.”

Why is vision important in business?

Because without a destination, effort just becomes motion. The image I used on the episode: “If you don’t put yourself in a touch-feel-see type of scenario down the road, you’re really just sailing around in the water, sailing without a destination.”

I’m not preaching here either. “That’s what I did with a big $150 million company. I didn’t always have a destination. We did goals, but we didn’t see ourselves in those goals.” There’s a difference between writing a number on a whiteboard and being able to describe the life on the other side of it.

A mindset coach I work with walked me through an exercise that closed that gap: put yourself three years out, and make it sensory. “What does it look like in those three years? Where are you? What does it smell like? What are the sounds around you? We did an exercise (it took about 10, 15 minutes) and it was amazing. It’s direction. Personal direction and business direction.” The same practice “helps you clear your mind and be still and make decisions from a still place.” I’ve written about that side of it in how I stay calm under pressure.

Hannah asked for my one piece of advice for going far in business, and this was it: “Plot your course by the direction. And if you keep your mind on that destination, chances are you’re going to get there.”

The full conversation, Business Truths No One Talks About, on Money Mornings with Hannah Kesler, runs about an hour and goes further than any page can. More of my story is on the story page.

FAQ

Where can I hear the full episode?

The full conversation is “Business Truths No One Talks About with Eric Zwigart” on Money Mornings, hosted by Hannah Kesler, aired February 27, 2026, about an hour long.

What is Money Mornings?

Money Mornings is a weekly live money-and-business show hosted by Hannah Kesler, streamed Thursday mornings at 9 a.m. Eastern. Each episode covers money and business topics with a guest. This one was mine.

What happened to Eric Zwigart’s oil company?

I built an oil and chemical company to over $150 million in annual revenue, pivoted it into hand sanitizer during COVID, and watched that market evaporate. I lost $35 million personally. The full story, including what it taught me, is in I Lost $35 Million. Here’s the Only Lesson That Matters.

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