When the pandemic hit in March 2020, everything changed. Both my wife Julia and I lost our income from the 360 Innovation Lab as the business collapsed. Within weeks, our professional world — which had been full and stable — was completely upended.
I sat in my home office in Graz, staring at a blank calendar and feeling the specific panic that comes from watching your income evaporate in real time. This was not a strategic career moment. This was fear.
And yet, within twelve months of that day, I’d co-founded Vulpine Creations (which would go on to become a twelve-product company shipped to 50+ countries and eventually sold), and I’d begun writing what would become a four-book business methodology. The two most significant projects of my career emerged directly from the space created by the pandemic.
I’m not going to romanticize this. The pandemic was devastating for millions of people. Businesses closed permanently. People died. The suffering was real and ongoing. My experience — an opportunity emerging from forced disruption — was a privilege, not a universal story.
But within the specific context of my career, the pandemic taught me something I wouldn’t have learned any other way: the things I was busy with before weren’t the things I should have been building. The busyness itself was preventing me from seeing that.
What the Empty Calendar Revealed
When every commitment evaporated, I was left with something I hadn’t had in years: unstructured time. No meetings. No travel. No client projects to prepare. Just empty days stretching ahead.
The first two weeks were genuinely terrifying. I filled them with anxiety, financial planning, and obsessive news consumption. By week three, something shifted. The anxiety didn’t disappear, but it reduced enough for something else to emerge: creative energy.
With nothing on my calendar, I started thinking about what I actually wanted to work on — not what was scheduled, not what clients needed, not what paid the bills this month. What I genuinely wanted to build.
Two things became clear almost immediately:
First, I’d been wanting to create physical products for years but had never had the bandwidth. The consulting schedule was always full, and product development requires focused, uninterrupted time that consulting didn’t allow.
Second, I’d been accumulating frameworks and methodologies through years of consulting but had never organized them into a coherent body of work. The knowledge was scattered across client decks, workshop materials, and notes.
The pandemic gave me permission — forced permission — to pursue both. Not gradually. Immediately. Because there was nothing else to do.
This is the lesson I’ve taken forward: building in obscurity isn’t just something that happens before you get noticed. It’s something you should deliberately create, even during busy periods, because the creative space it provides is where your best work happens.
Building Vulpine in the Void
The Vulpine Creations story started with a conversation. Adam Wilber — an American magic inventor I’d connected with through a keynote event — proposed that we build a magic product company together. The timing made sense: every magician in the world was stuck at home with nothing new to practice. The demand for quality magic products was about to surge.
He was right. Live performances had stopped completely, but magicians’ desire to learn and practice hadn’t diminished — it had intensified. The market was hungry, and nobody was feeding it because the entire magic industry was in pandemic-shock.
We had a prototype for our first product within three weeks. Not because we worked around the clock — because we had nothing else competing for our time. The consultant in me would have taken three months to plan, research, and strategize. The pandemic-founder in me built a prototype in three weeks because planning was a luxury and the market window was open now.
That first product sold out in a week. Not because it was our best product (it wasn’t — products four through twelve were significantly better). Because the timing was perfect and we shipped fast instead of waiting for perfection.
Every product after the first was an iteration. We learned from customer feedback, improved our manufacturing processes, refined our marketing, and built each product on the foundations of the previous one. By the end of 2020, we’d shipped four products. By 2024, we’d shipped twelve and exited by selling the product rights and inventory to respected magic companies.
None of this would have happened without the pandemic clearing my calendar. I would have been too busy with consulting to notice the opportunity. I would have been too committed to existing revenue to take the risk. The forced disruption removed both barriers simultaneously.
The Writing Project That Became a Methodology
While Vulpine was developing, I started a parallel project: organizing my consulting frameworks into written form. What began as “let me document these while I have time” evolved into what eventually became the Subtract to Ship methodology and a four-book series.
The writing process revealed something unexpected: I had more original thinking than I’d realized. Frameworks I’d used casually with clients — the Subtraction Audit, the Revenue Engine, the Owner Dependency Score — were genuinely novel when I examined them against existing business literature. They weren’t in any textbook because they’d emerged from my specific combination of experience: engineering, innovation consulting, product development, and accelerator work.
The pandemic gave me the reflective space to recognize this. In my pre-pandemic busyness, these frameworks were just “tools I use.” With time to think, they became “a methodology worth sharing.”
The books didn’t publish until much later, but the foundational thinking — the organization, the refinement, the articulation — happened during those pandemic months. And it happened because I had nothing else to do. The forced pause created the reflective capacity that busyness had been preventing.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Busyness
Here’s the uncomfortable truth the pandemic taught me: much of my pre-pandemic busyness was avoidance. Not deliberate avoidance — structural avoidance. By keeping my calendar full, I was unconsciously preventing myself from doing the harder, more important, more vulnerable work of building something new.
Consulting was safe. I knew how to do it. I was good at it. It paid well. It kept me busy. And its busyness provided an excellent excuse for not building products (“I don’t have time”), not writing books (“I’ll get to it eventually”), and not taking creative risks (“I’m too committed to existing clients”).
The pandemic stripped away the excuse. And without the excuse, I had to confront what I actually wanted to build — which was scarier and more fulfilling than anything I’d been doing.
I’m not suggesting you need a global crisis to create space. I’m suggesting you need to deliberately create empty space in your schedule — even a few hours per week — for the creative and strategic work that busyness prevents. My Sunday CEO Review now includes a standing question: “Am I too busy to think? If yes, what needs to come off the calendar?”
What I Carry Forward
The pandemic period reshaped my relationship with time, risk, and creative ambition. Here’s what I’ve carried forward:
Busyness is not productivity. A full calendar feels productive. It often isn’t. The most valuable things I’ve built came from empty space, not busy schedules.
Crisis creates opportunity — but only if you’re paying attention. The magic product market opportunity existed because I was in the magic community and noticed the shift. The writing opportunity existed because I had years of frameworks stored in notes and decks. Opportunity doesn’t come from nowhere. It comes from preparation meeting changed conditions.
Speed beats perfection in changing conditions. When the environment is shifting rapidly, moving quickly with an imperfect offering beats moving slowly with a perfect one. Our first Vulpine product wasn’t our best. It was our most timely.
You probably have more creative capacity than you think. You just can’t see it because it’s buried under operational demands. The capacity is there, waiting for space.
The things you should be building might be different from the things you are building. The pandemic forced me to rebuild from scratch, and what I built was better aligned with my actual skills and ambitions than what I’d been doing before. Sometimes you need a hard reset to see the misalignment.
I would never wish for another pandemic. But I would — and do — deliberately create the conditions that the pandemic accidentally provided: empty space, reflective time, permission to build new things, and the courage to let go of what was comfortable. Those conditions produced the best work of my career.
Key takeaways:
- Deliberately create empty space in your schedule for creative and strategic work — busyness is often structural avoidance of the harder, more important projects.
- Crisis creates opportunity only if you’re paying attention and prepared — the preparation (skills, relationships, knowledge) happens before the crisis.
- When conditions change rapidly, speed beats perfection — ship fast with an imperfect offering and iterate rather than waiting for stability.
- You probably have more creative capacity than you realize — it’s buried under operational demands and becomes visible when those demands are removed.
- Ask regularly: “Are the things I’m building the things I should be building?” — forced disruptions reveal misalignment that busyness hides.
