Scale or Fail

Foreword

When you first meet Allison, you get the sense that she has done impossible things. This feeling is not easily articulated. It is an unspoken energy that surrounds her. It is an invisible, powerful force that comes through in such a gentle way that you want to take on the hardship of scaling. She has a way with it, and she teaches you not only how to scale, but also how to scale over and over again.

You see, she takes that invisible force and gives it to you. At first she makes you feel that it is easy to do – that it is possible for you to overcome all the pain, all the fear, all the uncertainty. You even forget that scaling is daunting. This is how it felt when I first met her in 2011. I was just starting out with my Life Reentry work and she grabbed my hand and said, “Christina, this will be hard, but you can do this.” I remember thinking: I know what hard is, this can’t be harder than loss. After all, I had lost my husband and had gone through some impossible things. But she was right, it was close.

Scaling is brutal. It is not for the faint of heart. It is as painful and as impossible as the hardest things in life. It requires something, a very important something: resilience to pain. You have an opponent every day when you wake up. Your opponent is called struggle. You have to fight with struggle every day and, in the end, you must win.

Somehow, Allison has won tens of thousands of these battles with her gentle fierceness. She built 10 businesses and has held ...