TO: Everyone who does the work while someone else gets the credit FROM: Sean
RE: Corporate politics, a trip to headquarters, and the one thing keeping me from leaving tomorrow
I spent last week at corporate headquarters.
Not because I wanted to. Because I had to.
Not for a meeting. Not for a presentation. But to do something that no one who's genuinely good at their job should ever have to do —
Remind people that I exist.
How it happens
There's someone at my company. Smart. Polished. Very good at being in the right room at the right time.
He became the conduit between my division and corporate headquarters. The translator. The middleman. And somewhere along the way, without anyone making a deliberate decision about it, my results started getting associated with his presence.
I'd deliver. He'd be in the room. People would congratulate him.
I'm not saying it was malicious. That's almost what makes it worse. It didn't require a conspiracy — just a system that rewards visibility over results. That rewards the person telling the story over the person living it.
And I am not a storyteller. Not about myself anyway.
I never have been. I was raised to let the work speak. To keep my head down, deliver, and trust that the right people would notice.
That worked at a previous company — eventually. I spent years waiting for a promotion I'd already earned before I finally walked into my VP's office and said I can do this job. Give me the chance. We made a deal. I delivered. He kept his word.
But that moment cost me years.
And I'm done paying that tax.
The headquarters trip
So I went to headquarters. I had conversations — with the VP of commercial sales, the VP of Aero and Defense, the director of supply chain, marketing, HR.
Casual conversations. Natural. No agenda on the surface.
But underneath every one of them was the same quiet mission: to be seen. To separate my name from his. To make sure that when people in that building think about what's happening in Camarillo — the results, the growth, the wins — they think of me.
I think it worked.
I'll never know for sure. That's the other thing about corporate politics — the scoreboard is invisible. You do the work, you have the conversations, you play the game you hate playing, and then you wait to see if it mattered.
I'm 57. I don't have time to keep waiting.
The broken system
Here's what I want you to understand — because I think a lot of you live this too.
Corporate environments don't naturally reward the best performers. They reward the most visible ones. The loudest ones. The ones who've mastered the art of being in the right room and saying the right things to the right people.
The quiet ones — the ones who just do the work — get left behind.
I've watched it my entire career. I've been on both sides of it. And it never stops being maddening.
When you own your own business there is no middleman. There is no him. The results are yours — completely, directly, undeniably yours. Nobody stands between you and the credit for what you build.
That thought alone gets me through days like last week.
The thing keeping me here
Here's where I have to be honest with you.
The financial piece is real — I'm not going to pretend that walking away from an executive salary is easy. But money isn't actually what keeps me from handing in my notice tomorrow.
It's the people.
I have a team here that I genuinely care about. Good people. People who show up, work hard, and trust that someone in leadership has their back. If I leave — if I walk out that door — I don't know who fills that seat. And I do know what a corporate assassin looks like when they're sent in to cut costs and clean house.
I'm not ready to do that to them.
So I stay. I navigate. I play the game I hate well enough to protect the people who deserve protecting.
But I'm building the exit. Every week. Every Thursday.
Because the most important thing I can do for those people — and for myself — is prove that there's another way.
That's what this newsletter is.
Let's get out of here.
— Sean
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