What if work helped you build a better life, not just pay for one?

Think about the kind of person who invests in themselves. They take a course to grow. They show up to yoga on Saturday morning. They pick up a new hobby just because it makes them feel more alive. They’re the kind of person actively building a great life.

Then Monday comes, and they walk into a job where none of that seems to apply. Management that doesn’t really listen. Systems that keep failing in the same predictable ways. They do their best to cover for what other people miss, which mostly means they get paid the same to do more work. They care about their work and somehow end up punished for it. And when something breaks, everyone seems certain it’s somebody else’s fault. All the growth and intentionality people apply to their own lives gets left at the door, and what’s left is something they just learn to tolerate.

Monday through Friday gets spent waiting for the weekend, counting down to the next vacation. It’s as if work puts life on hold: get through work so you can actually live once you’re off the clock.

We don’t think it has to be that way.

Imagine work that actually challenges you, that expands your skills every week. You get better at communication, teamwork, organization, technical skill, and managing your own emotions. You work with people you genuinely enjoy. Your hobbies and your quirks are welcome, not something to hide. The work isn’t easy. It pushes you to be better. And at the end of the day, you feel real pride in what you accomplished.

You’re trusted to get what needs to get done, done. A doctor’s appointment comes up, or a trades person is coming by. You let the team know you’ll be unavailable during that window, and you make sure your work is handled so nothing gets dropped. You feel a sense of freedom in your life. You get to design your life around your work, instead of the other way around.

We know more about good management than we ever have. Companies have retreats about trust, autonomy, communication and psychological safety. We have more productivity tools, automation and AI than any generation before us.

And somehow, work still feels harder than it should.

A lot of businesses respond by adding more. Another tool. Another process. Another meeting. Another layer of management to make sure the process gets followed. Before long, people spend as much energy managing the work as actually doing it.

We think a lot of what looks like a technology, productivity, or process problem is actually a people problem underneath.

It’s exhausting to work with people you can’t depend on to do what they said they’d do. It’s exhausting to use technology that’s supposed to make work easier but creates more places to check, update, and manage. And it’s exhausting to work somewhere that accepts all of that as simply the cost of doing business.

We don’t think it has to be.

We want to build a company where capable people, good systems, and useful technology work together to make work lighter. Not by expecting less from people, but by removing the unnecessary work around the work to create space. 

That space matters. We want people to have room to stop and watch the birds in their backyard without needing to turn it into a side hustle. We want a life outside of work that gets to just be a life, not another project to optimize.

A lot of what gets in the way of that is what we call the compliance tax, the time and energy companies waste making sure basic things happen because nobody built a system or a culture where they’d happen on their own. Reduce that tax and there’s room to pay people more without asking them to work more hours to earn it.

We’re building towards work that makes you feel valued instead of overlooked, where you’re learning and growing as a person nearly every day, where Sunday night doesn’t come with dread. We don’t think work and life have to be two separate things you’re constantly trading off, one endured to earn the other. We think they can be two things that genuinely support each other. There will be hard days on both sides. We just don’t think hard should be the default setting of either.

Getting there means redefining how work and management actually operate, and that has to come from both directions: from us as a company, and from the people who work here. It’s a higher level of responsibility than showing up somewhere that just tells you what to do.

If that’s the kind of responsibility you want, keep reading. This is written for you.

Work has changed

For a long time, the model was simple: managers thought, and employees did. A manager decided what needed to happen, broke it into tasks, and checked whether those tasks got done. Being a good employee mostly meant being dependable at execution.

Then work got more complex, and better companies started giving capable people more room. Instead of assigning tasks, managers defined outcomes and let people figure out the how.

That was progress. But we think there’s a further step, and it’s the one we’re building BTN around: a company where people develop the judgment to figure out what needs to happen in the first place. That means being comfortable with ambiguity, creating clarity where none exists, anticipating what’s coming, making good decisions, executing on them, and then checking whether they actually worked. It’s anticipation, execution and validation. 

It’s the difference between becoming more efficient at doing and becoming more capable of thinking. And it changes what we believe management is actually for.

Management should make you more capable

We don’t think the primary job of a manager should be making sure you work. A great manager should help you become capable of things you couldn’t do before. Over time, you should need them less for answers and more for the perspective, context and challenge that expands your thinking.
 
That hasn’t always been how management has worked at BTN. We’ve experienced three very different versions of management. 

The first is micromanagement: controlling someone who’s already capable and reliable. Dictating how the work gets done, requiring more visibility than the situation calls for, inserting yourself into decisions that don’t need you. We don’t want that, and we don’t think it’s a mystery why people leave jobs where it happens as the norm.

The second is compliance management. This is what happens when management time gets spent making sure the basics of a role are being met: did the client get a response, was the task updated, did you do what you said you’d do, did you flag it when a deadline was going to slip. When someone else has to keep noticing, asking, reminding, checking, and following up just so the basics happen, management has become a compliance function. Sometimes that’s necessary. We don’t think it’s where management creates the most value.

The third is what we’re practicing: Expansion Management. It helps you become capable of work you couldn’t do before. A good leader should be able to reflect something back to you that you couldn’t see yourself yet, challenge an assumption, hand you context you didn’t have, teach you how they think, and eventually help you build judgment that used to belong to them alone.

One team member was working through a complex migration, moving over 2,000 subscriptions from one system to another, and understandably felt overwhelmed by the size of it. We broke it down together into buckets: some customers had upward of 20 subscriptions, some had two to five, and some had just one. Each group needed a different approach, so we tackled them one at a time, which made the whole thing manageable. The next time this team member faced something similar, they broke it into buckets themselves, without being asked. That’s the kind of growth we’re talking about.

We want to minimize supervision so we can maximize development. The more capable a team member becomes, the more value they create for our clients. The more value they create, the more revenue the company brings in. The more revenue we bring in, the more freedom and pay there is to go around.

Why this matters to me

Here’s the part that’s personal. I don’t want my job as CEO to be making sure adults do the things they’ve already agreed to do. I want to build a company where getting better at your job gives you more freedom and space, not just more work. I want caring about your work to pay off. As you become more capable and dependable, that should create more freedom, abundance and space in your life, not just make you the person everyone gives more work to. I want to get better at my own work so I have more room for a life outside of it, and I want that to be true for everyone here, not just me. I want to work with smart people who make me better, and who I can help become better in return.

That’s really the point of everything below. Judgment, ownership, less compliance overhead, all of it exists so people spend less time being managed and less time managing others, and more time doing meaningful work in the hours they’ve actually chosen to give it. If this company works the way we want it to, it should show up not just in what people accomplish at work, but in what their life looks like outside of it.

One of our team members leads a lot of cognitively heavy client calls each week. They’re also someone I trust deeply: if something needs to be handled, I know it will be. Instead of rewarding that reliability with more work, I encouraged them to stop taking calls on Fridays and make it a lighter day.

That’s what I want capability to create here. Being great at your job shouldn’t just earn you more work. It should earn you more trust, more freedom, and ultimately more opportunity and pay.

Is this you?

There is really one kind of person we want to work with, at two different stages of development.

The first already operates this way. You notice what everyone else misses. You think ahead. People trust you with hard things. You’ve probably felt the frustration of competence earning you more work instead of more autonomy, opportunity, or pay. 

The second isn’t there yet, but wants to be. You don’t want to spend your career waiting to be told what to do. You want honest feedback. You want to understand how capable people think, not just what they decide. You want responsibility before you feel fully ready for it, and someone willing to point out what you’re not seeing. 

What matters isn’t arriving fully formed. It’s wanting to become more capable and being willing to take responsibility for that development.

BTN won’t be the right fit for everyone, and we’d rather say that plainly than let people figure it out the hard way. This may not be the place for you if success means completing the tasks you’re assigned and little more. It may not be the place for you if you need a manager to set your priorities, catch your missed commitments, or tell you when something needs attention. It may not be the place for you if feedback feels like an attack rather than useful information, or if what you want most from work is predictability and clearly bounded execution. None of that makes those preferences wrong. There are good companies built around that model. We’re just building something different.

And the responsibility runs both directions. We shouldn’t expect self-leadership while handing people chaos and calling it autonomy. We owe our people context, reasonable clarity, systems that actually work, real feedback, and the psychological safety to say “I don’t know,” “I made a mistake,” “I need help,” or “I disagree.” We owe them leaders who ask whether the system contributed to a failure before assuming the person did. When we fall short of that, we need to own it too.

And in return, we need team members who take responsibility for the things within their control: creating clarity when they don’t have it, communicating when something changes, following through on what they commit to, asking for help when they need it, and learning when something doesn’t work.

Autonomy has a price: responsibility

Autonomy sounds appealing on its own. Trust me, don’t micromanage me, let me decide how I work. We believe in all of that. But autonomy without responsibility doesn’t hold up.

If nobody’s checking whether you did something, you have to check. If nobody’s reminding you of a commitment, you have to remember it. If something’s going wrong and nobody’s noticed yet, you have to surface it. If instructions are unclear, you have to recognize that and help create the clarity. If you finish something, you have to care enough to find out whether it actually worked.

Self-leadership doesn’t mean never needing help. It means taking responsibility for recognizing when you need it, and actually going and getting it.

Autonomy is earned through reliability and expanded through judgment.

We haven’t always gotten this right

This philosophy comes partly from where we’ve struggled. There have been times we gave people autonomy before we’d taught them how to use it. Times when expectations that felt obvious to us weren’t explicit enough. Times we could have given better context, clearer systems, earlier feedback. And times when expectations were clear and simply weren’t met.

When that happened, we sometimes reached for more oversight: more checking, more follow up, more process to catch what was being missed. From the team’s side, that could reasonably feel like micromanagement. From ours, it felt like being pulled back into supervision we didn’t want to be doing. Both of those things were probably true at the same time.

We’ve learned this the hard way. At one point, team members were telling me they had too much work. I was frustrated because I could see places where time wasn’t being used effectively, like spending three hours stuck on a support ticket without solving it. What I missed was that while I expected people to manage their time well, we hadn’t actually taught them how.

So we built productive time limits, work budgets, and clear rules for when to stop and ask for help. The expectation didn’t disappear; we got better at teaching people how to meet it. That’s the balance we’re after: BTN is responsible for creating the conditions for people to succeed. Team members are responsible for using them.

That tension is a big part of why we’ve had to get clear about what we’re actually building. The answer isn’t to manage less. It’s to create the conditions where less management is needed, which means better systems and clearer expectations from BTN, and more ownership and self-management from everyone working here. We’re responsible for our half. We expect the same from our team.

The Compliance Tax

Every organization pays for the work that creates value. It also pays for the work required to make sure that work happens. When someone doesn’t close a loop, someone else has to notice. When someone doesn’t flag a missed deadline, someone else has to discover it. When someone doesn’t check their own work, someone else has to catch the problem.

One missed responsibility can create a whole second layer of work: notice, ask, remind, check, follow up, correct. We call that the Compliance Tax, and it doesn’t just cost money. It eats the attention of your most capable people. An hour spent chasing an update is an hour not spent teaching someone, fixing a system, or solving a hard problem for a client.

Compliance management isn’t automatically a team member problem. Sometimes expectations weren’t clear. Sometimes someone hasn’t been taught the skill yet. Sometimes they know what’s expected and simply aren’t following through. And sometimes a manager is checking things that don’t need to be checked. The goal isn’t more oversight. It’s understanding why the oversight is needed in the first place, and fixing that.

I have three one-on-ones on Mondays. During a recent holiday week, I asked everyone with a Monday one-on-one to send me a written update by end of day Friday instead, in place of the call.

One team member let me know she was headed out for the weekend and asked if she could send hers over the weekend instead, since it was already evening on her end. I told her Tuesday morning was fine. She’s consistently on top of her work, and if she ever does drop something, she catches it herself before it becomes my problem. She’s shown that kind of self leadership for years, so I don’t need to compliance manage her.

Another sent hers well before the deadline: clear bullet points, outstanding items clearly flagged, exactly what she needed help with. When she didn’t hear back from me right away, she followed up again on her own.

Not everyone responds that way, and not always about this specific thing. Sometimes nothing comes back at all, and I have to go find out for myself where things stand.

If I can’t trust someone to follow through on something I asked for directly, it’s hard to trust that they’re following process when I’m not watching…

Process is what lets us hold a standard of work and deliver it consistently. When it doesn’t get followed, it creates fires: urgent things that land on my desk and become my problem to solve. Time spent putting those out is time not spent on the work that actually grows the company. That’s the real cost of noncompliance.

We don’t want an organization that needs bigger layers of management to make sure everyone’s doing their job. We want systems that provide visibility, people who manage themselves, and leaders who spend their time making people and systems better.

Why this matters economically

Middle management is expensive. If a big share of payroll goes toward supervising the rest of payroll, there’s less left for the people actually creating value. We’d rather build it differently: invest more in capable people, let technology and systems handle coordination, and let people develop the judgment to operate with real autonomy.

We also don’t think the reward for being highly capable should just be more work. Too many high performers live that exact story. They become the person everyone can rely on, so unfinished work keeps finding its way to them. They solve more problems, cover for weaker performers, become the glue holding things together, and eventually realize that being excellent has mostly earned them a bigger pile of responsibility. Too often, high performers become organizational over-functioners: carrying work that should have been owned elsewhere at a cost to themselves.

We’re creating a different cycle: capability leads to contribution, contribution creates value, and value should come back around as opportunity and compensation. We haven’t perfected that. We’re saying plainly that it’s the direction we’re building toward.

The future employee isn’t just an executor

AI makes this philosophy more important, not less. Execution is getting cheaper. A first draft, a piece of code, a research summary, a documented process, an analysis, these increasingly take less human time than they used to. This page is proof of that. It would have taken weeks, maybe months, to think through and write without AI doing a lot of the heavy lifting on execution.

That doesn’t make capable people less valuable. We think it makes them more valuable, because someone still has to decide what actually matters, notice what’s missing, check whether the information is even correct, figure out what should happen next, and validate whether it worked. The scarce skill is judgment, not output.

So we’re not building a team of people who wait well for instructions. We’re building people who can anticipate, execute, and validate. People who think, notice, and create clarity, and who use tools, systems, and AI to expand what they’re capable of, not to replace their thinking with it.

We see this in how we work with clients too. We meet with them weekly and record every call, then send a follow up summarizing what was covered. A team member suggested we let AI generate the first draft of that summary from the recording, with the lead simply reviewing it before it goes out. It’s freed up real time for the team to spend on the actual work instead of the admin of writing up the call, and the quality hasn’t dropped at all.

The company we are becoming

We want BTN to be a place where you can build a real career without needing to become a people manager just to grow. Where capable individual contributors earn more because they create more value. Where managers are teachers and context providers more than supervisors. Where systems replace unnecessary process, problems can be raised without blame but can’t be endlessly explained away, and mistakes are expected as long as we learn from them.

We’re not fully there yet. Building this has exposed real weaknesses in our systems, our hiring, and our own leadership, and it’s shown us how different wanting autonomy is from being ready to take responsibility for it. We’re learning from both.

But we know where we’re going. We want fewer people whose job is making sure other people work, and more people doing work that matters. We want the time and money that usually goes into layers of supervision to go into making people more capable instead. And we want the people who become genuinely excellent to share in the value that creates, at work and in the life it makes room for outside of it.

If that sounds like the kind of place you want to build a career, we’d like to meet you.

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