When Terry Tateossian was 37, she stood in her kitchen reaching for her nightly pint of ice cream and collapsed with chest pains.
She ended up in the ER. Twice.
Both times, it was a panic attack. Both times, they sent her home with a Xanax. And both times, she swept it under the rug and went back to work.
At the time, Terry was running a digital agency with over 40 employees and 25 contractors. She had two kids. She was winning by every external measure.
And her body was paying for all of it.
This episode of FoundHer Rising is one of those conversations that doesn’t let you look away. Not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s familiar.
The Cost of the Business You Thought You Wanted
Terry didn’t walk into entrepreneurship recklessly. She was methodical, technical, and relentless. Computer engineering background. Early e-commerce. SEO before most people knew what that meant. She built something that worked, and it worked at scale. But there’s a difference between a business that works and a business that works for you.
“All of my energy was going toward something that was draining me,” Terry said. “It required everything from me.”
At 210 pounds and 48% body fat, with pre-diabetic markers, ovarian cysts, and crushing anxiety, her body made the decision her mind wouldn’t.
The wake-up call wasn’t a revelation. It was a reckoning.
The Pendulum Problem Nobody Talks About
After her second panic attack, Terry finally changed course. She restructured her mornings. Got a Peloton. Overhauled her nutrition and eventually hired a coach (a professional bodybuilder) because she does nothing halfway.
She lost 80 pounds.
But what she said next is the part that applies directly to your business.
“When we start a fitness journey, we go all in and burn out within weeks. Same with nutrition. Same thing in business. If you’re working yourself to exhaustion, eventually you will burn out. We can’t seem to stay in that sustainable, neutral zone.”
The middle path moves slower. It also actually gets you there.
Christine named it precisely. The pendulum swings from fully hands-in to fully hands-off, and neither extreme is sustainable. In business, in health, in leadership, the work is learning to live in the middle.
That’s not a personality trait. It’s a skill.
Why She Walked Away from the 40-Person Company
Terry didn’t just change her habits. She changed her business.
She is, by her own description, a one-woman show. Not because she can’t build a team, but because what drains her most is managing one. The constant redirect. The bypassing of managers. The responsibility she felt over every deliverable. None of that is a flaw.
It’s just not the problem she wants to solve.
“Every business has problems,” Christine said. “What matters is whether those are problems you want to have.”
Most business owners don’t ask that question until they’re already burned out.
Terry walked away from the agency. Not quickly, and not without grief. “Learning to keep your hands off of it was very difficult,” she said. But she did it. And what she built next looked nothing like what she’d left behind.
What She Built Instead
Five years ago, people started asking Terry for help. Neighbors. Friends. Family. She had lost 80 pounds and reversed every health marker that had once been pointing toward catastrophe.
She got certified. She built quietly. And then she started seeing the results.
“Everything before was transactional. This was fulfillment. The non-monetary payment I received was so rich.”
Today, Terry runs a virtual coaching practice for women and hosts five-day immersive retreats in the Smoky Mountains through Thor Retreats. She also co-created a recipe book with her daughter featuring the meals served at those retreats and the ones that drove her own 80-pound transformation.
Purpose didn’t come from a vision board. “I didn’t find it,” Terry said. “It found me. I hit rock bottom. It came to me.”
The Team Lesson That Changed Everything
Terry has a team of eight now, and this time, it’s different.
The difference isn’t the size. It’s the clarity.
“I have very clear roles and very clear boundaries,” she said. In the past, she people-pleased her way into misalignment. She found ways to give people what they wanted, even when the business didn’t have it. Even when she didn’t have it.
In the first year of her new company, a team member asked for triple what the P&L could support. This time, she said no. She was transparent, clear, and firm.
Christine framed it in a way that lands: “These decisions aren’t about right or wrong, good or bad. They’re about fit. And when we operate from guilt instead of clarity, we make choices that are out of alignment with where we want the business to grow.”
That’s the shift. Not from being kind to being hard. From being unclear to being honest.
What This Means for You
If you’re in a business that works but feels heavy, Terry’s story isn’t a cautionary tale. It’s a map. You don’t have to burn your business to the ground. You don’t have to earn a crisis to earn permission to change. But you do have to ask yourself the honest question:
Is the business I’m building one that I actually want to run?
Not the one that looks right on paper. Not the one that proves something. The one that sustains you.
Terry found hers. It found her, actually.
Yours is out there, too.
If today’s episode resonated with you, apply to be a guest on FoundHer Rising.
Full Transcript
Christine Hakkola: Welcome to FoundHer Rising, the podcast for women founders in wellness, coaching, and consulting who are ready to build businesses that create freedom, impact, and income. I’m your host, Christine Hakkola, business coach, former psychotherapist, and mentor to women scaling service-based businesses. Today I’m joined by Terry Tateossian, serial entrepreneur, wellness expert, and founder of House of Rose and Thor Retreats. She helps women transform their health and their relationship with food after losing over 80 pounds in her 40s and overcoming emotional eating. Terry, welcome to the show.
Terry Tateossian: Thank you, Christine, for having me. It’s a pleasure.
Christine Hakkola: I’m so excited to have you here. You have such a wealth of experience and such an interesting background. I’m so excited for you to share your journey and all your lessons learned with our listeners. Let’s dive in. You’ve built and exited multiple companies and experienced a lot of success. But as I briefly mentioned in the intro, your health journey in your 40s became a real turning point for you. Tell us about that and what led you to build the version of your business you have now.
Terry Tateossian: Such a great question. I started my entrepreneurial journey in my mid-20s. Back then, there was no Facebook, no Instagram. I went to school for computer engineering and worked as an applications engineer in the corporate world for a long time. Just as the dot-com bubble was bursting, my original idea with my partner was to create something very similar to what Facebook eventually became. From there, things evolved and I discovered e-commerce. I started developing e-commerce stores, discovered search engine optimization, and learned how to rank sites. Over time, I had about eight or nine different companies. Eventually, it all turned into a digital agency because clients and brands were just starting to ask, “How do I rank on Google? How do I do all these things?” The agency grew to over 40 employees and about 20 to 25 consultants. It was a large organism.
Christine Hakkola: A lot on your plate, I imagine.
Terry Tateossian: Yes. I’m a Type A. I’m very dedicated to the work I do. I want it to have integrity and be the best it can be. That’s very hard to manage when you’re Type A and handling all of those moving parts. I gave the business everything I had. In the middle of all that growth, travel, and client work, I had my daughter at 30 and my son at 35. I’ve heard people say you can’t have a career and a family at the same time. I always said no, I’m going to prove them wrong. And I did. But it cost me something very precious. It cost me my health.
Christine Hakkola: A bill always comes due, no matter what.
Terry Tateossian: Nothing’s free. By the time I was 37, about 13 years ago, I was 210 pounds. For reference, I’m five foot three. My body scans showed 48% body fat. I was starting to have pre-diabetic markers, ovarian cysts, and crushing anxiety. I started abusing alcohol daily. And one night, I was pulling my nightly pint of ice cream out of the freezer and I started having chest pains. I ended up in the ER. They told me I wasn’t having a heart attack, that it was a panic attack, gave me a Xanax, and sent me home.
Christine Hakkola: Wow.
Terry Tateossian: And then I had to figure out how to explain to everyone at the company where I’d been. It was so embarrassing. You’re supposed to be leading these people, and meanwhile you’re putting yourself in the ER because you can’t manage your own health. When you’re in the middle of it, as most entrepreneurs know, you’re just busting through. You’re getting up and getting it done. There’s no time to reflect. So when they said it was a panic attack, I swept it under the rug. And then it happened again a few months later. This time I was convinced it was a heart attack. Nope. Another massive panic attack.
Christine Hakkola: Your body wasn’t letting you get away with not listening.
Terry Tateossian: No. They sent me home with Xanax again. But someone in the ER told me I should really think about losing some weight. That’s when everything started shifting. I realized the 80 pounds I was carrying is going to manifest onto my body. My body was going to take the brunt of that negligence.
Christine Hakkola: A real wake-up call. So what did you do next?
Terry Tateossian: Type A. I did it all. I changed my schedule so that 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. was mine. I wouldn’t get into the office until about 10:30. I figured out my food and established a routine. I got a Peloton. It was right next to my bed. There was no way to avoid it. I cried a lot. It was very difficult. But I lost 30 pounds. Then I got paranoid about gaining it back, so I asked for help. I hired a coach. She was a bodybuilder and professional fitness model, top of her field. I figured I’d never get accepted because I was such a newbie. But she took me on. I didn’t know what a dumbbell was. I didn’t know what a macro was. There were a lot of growing pains. But it took a few years, and the transformation was so significant, so astronomical, inside and out, that I realized this is a passion of mine. I need to get into this field.
Christine Hakkola: If something in this episode feels uncomfortably familiar, that’s not an accident. A lot of the women who listen to this show are at that in-between stage. The business works, but it’s heavy. You’re the bottleneck. You’re stretched. You know something needs to shift, but you’re not sure what the right next move is. That’s exactly why I offer free connection calls with my team. It’s not a pitch. It’s a real conversation about where you are, what’s actually in the way, and whether I’m the right person to help you scale without burning out or compromising your values. If you want clarity instead of more guessing, book one. The link is in the show notes.
Christine Hakkola: I want to dive more into the turning point with respect to how you saw your business. Up until your health crisis, you had this idea of what success was, and you did it. You did the thing many of our listeners are striving for. And for you, it wasn’t worth it. You made a choice to change. Your personal journey brought you to a point where you became aware that not only did you not want to build what you had built before, your passion was actually something different. Am I getting that right?
Terry Tateossian: Yes. I was completely misaligned in what I was doing. All of my energy was going toward something that was draining me. It required everything from me.
Christine Hakkola: When you look back at the business you built, was it the industry, or was it the way you built the company?
Terry Tateossian: I realized I’m a one-woman show. When you’re helping employees do their jobs after you’ve landed the client, done the presentations, set the strategy, overseen everything, I felt incredibly responsible for all of it. Delegating and then having things not go the way I envisioned was really taxing. You can’t throw your hands up and say, “I don’t know, go ask someone else.” It’s your business.
Christine Hakkola: It’s such a common problem in service-based businesses. And I’d go so far as to say it’s inevitable. When we’re good at what we do and the deliverable relies on us, choosing to grow by hiring people to execute the process creates an inherent challenge. What makes it work or not is whether it’s a problem you want to solve. Some people love managing and training people. But I hear from business owners all the time, and it sounds like you’re in that group, where hiring, training, and managing is just not desirable. And if it’s not, how do you build a sustainable business?
Terry Tateossian: My answer would be to hire a manager who does those things. But what kept happening is, even when you have someone responsible for managing, because you’re so involved, people jump over that person and come directly to you. You’re stuck wondering whether to redirect them or just handle it yourself. And it keeps happening over and over until you start asking yourself, “What am I doing here?”
Christine Hakkola: And whether it’s hiring or outsourcing, I see this across all my clients. Our immediate thinking is often, “What am I doing wrong?” Most of the time, it’s simply a skill that hasn’t been learned yet. We get into service-based businesses because we’re good at the service, not because we know how to build a business. That’s a whole other skill set. And the problem you faced, not only how to hire, manage, and train someone to do the work you’re no longer doing, but when you add a manager, the next level is how do you train your team to go to the manager and not bypass them? It’s a learnable skill set. And it’s also completely valid that it burned you out. At the end of the day, you decided this is not the business model for me.
Terry Tateossian: Exactly. So I made the decision to build a completely different type of business. More aligned with who I am, with my values, with the kind of problems I actually want to have. Because every business has problems, regardless of size or structure.
Christine Hakkola: Tell us what you built instead. What do you have now that is more aligned with how you want to show up and serve?
Terry Tateossian: Over the next few years, I got myself in order. I lost the weight. I actually joke that I reversed aging. If you look at pictures of me at 37 on my Instagram, I was in bad shape in every sense of the word. My face looked different. I was bloated, inflamed, visibly stressed. Once I detached from that energy, stopped drinking alcohol, started taking care of myself emotionally, and incorporated movement throughout my day, I started feeling better. I looked back and said, “I don’t ever want to go back there.” So I walked away from that particular business.
Christine Hakkola: Even though it was the aligned decision, I imagine it was incredibly difficult.
Terry Tateossian: Very difficult. Learning to keep your hands off of it. I had to tell myself everything is going to be fine. Just walk away. The complete opposite of everything I had done before.
Christine Hakkola: You see that same pattern with your clients now, right?
Terry Tateossian: Yes. A lot of times when people start a fitness or wellness journey, they go all in and burn out within weeks. Same with nutrition. Same thing in business. If you’re super hands-on and working yourself to the point of exhaustion, eventually you will burn out. I see this pattern over and over. We can’t seem to stay in that sustainable, neutral zone. The result might be slower than what our mind says it should be, but it’s still moving forward. We just don’t know how to trust that pace.
Christine Hakkola: I love that analogy. The middle path is where we experience the most alignment and the most sustainability. That pendulum swings from fully hands-in to full hands-off, and there’s a middle path for that too. But it needs to be a problem you want to solve. So, you went from a 40 to 50 person scaled company to what you described as a one-woman show. What does that look like today, Terry?
Terry Tateossian: I can’t take full credit. I do have a team of about eight people. About five years ago, completely organically, friends, family, and neighbors started asking me for help with their health and wellness. My neighbor, who I’ve known for about 18 years, was one of my first clients. She’s now starring in Bollywood music videos and films. Her name is Tina Goyal. And this just kept happening organically. I got the certifications, got the education, did it right. And when I started seeing the results and the impact this work was having on actual human beings, it was the most rewarding thing I had ever experienced. Everything before was transactional. This was fulfillment. The non-monetary payment I received was so rich. It gave me sustenance on a level I didn’t know I needed.
Christine Hakkola: It sounds like even though your previous business was meaningful, the impact wasn’t the one you were here to make.
Terry Tateossian: A hundred percent. Once I got a taste of that, I realized everything I had done up to that point was just to get here. Just to know the difference between what it’s supposed to feel like and what it’s not. People ask me how I found my purpose. I always say I didn’t find it. It found me. I hit rock bottom. It came to me. So now I do coaching for women who are looking to expand their lives, improve their health, really find themselves again. Get strong mentally, physically, and emotionally. I do that virtually. And I also run five-day, fully immersive retreats in the Smoky Mountains. You take that work home and can continue with me by your side or on your own.
Christine Hakkola: I love the work you’re doing. I want to pull on the thread of team, because that was one of the hardest parts of your old business. But you didn’t walk away from team entirely. You have eight people. What are the lessons you learned about hiring and managing, and what do you do differently now that makes it more sustainable?
Terry Tateossian: I have very clear roles and very clear boundaries. If someone wants more than what I have to give, I understand, but we have to part ways. In the past, I would try to appease them. I would find a way to get them what they wanted without considering what the business actually had to give. In the first year of this new company, someone wanted essentially triple what the business could pay. Looking at the P&L, it wasn’t there. I was very upfront. This is a startup. I’m not even taking a salary myself. Most people don’t understand that when they come to work with an entrepreneur, that entrepreneur is watching every dollar, putting everything into the business, looking for ways to put things together out of thin air. So I had to say no, part ways, and hold that boundary.
Christine Hakkola: Such an important lesson. And I’d suggest that mindset shift has less to do with the size of the team and more to do with being clear about the business you’ve built, the roles that need to be filled, and who the right people are. When we can step out of guilt-based decision-making and look at these situations through the lens of fit and alignment rather than right or wrong, good or bad, that’s when we stop people-pleasing and start building sustainably.
Terry Tateossian: That is a very hard lesson to learn. I learned it the hard way.
Christine Hakkola: I’m sure a lot of folks can relate. One more question. You’re stepping into digital products next. What excites you about that chapter and how do you see it supporting the business model you’ve built?
Terry Tateossian: One of the most requested things at our retreats is the recipes for the food. It’s been requested for four years. My daughter and I have finally put together a recipe book that includes all the meals we provide at Thor Retreats, along with the recipes that helped me lose 80 pounds. It’s going live next week. You can find it at HouseofRose.com.
Christine Hakkola: Amazing. Besides the recipes, where’s the best place for folks to connect with you and learn more about your coaching and retreats?
Terry Tateossian: You can email me at [email protected], find me on Instagram at howgoodcanitget, or visit thehouseofrose.com.
Christine Hakkola: Fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing your experience and your wisdom. And thank you, listener, for tuning in to another episode of FoundHer Rising. If today’s episode resonated with you, follow the show, share it with another founder, and leave a quick review. It helps more women find these conversations. You can connect with me on LinkedIn or learn more at HakkolaHorizons.com. Until next time, keep rising and keep building the business that gives you freedom to live, lead, and create on your terms.
