By: Natalie Johnson
Nobody talks about this part. Not on stage. Not in interviews. Not in the books that founders write after they’ve already made it. But behind almost every business owner who has built something real, there’s a trail of people who took advantage of the access they were given.
Robert Indries will tell you about it, though. He’s been open about the fact that trust has been the single most expensive thing in his career. Not a bad investment. Not a market downturn. Not a deal that fell through. People.
“I want to give everyone a chance. And a second chance. And a third chance,” he said. “I WANT to believe everyone CAN be good. And that everyone WILL do good. But reality has proven that there are many people who can’t wait to steal, to lie, to double-cross, to do harm.”
For any CEO reading that and feeling it in their chest, you already know the specifics don’t matter. The details change, but the story is always the same. You bring someone in. You give them a seat at the table. You share your vision with them because you think they’re bought in. And then one day, you find out they were using that access for themselves the entire time. Sometimes it’s a business partner. Sometimes it’s someone on your leadership team. Sometimes it’s the person you would have bet your company on.
Robert has lost years because of it. Relationships. Real capital. And the hardest part isn’t the financial hit. The financial hit you can recover from. The hardest part is what it does to the way you operate after. Do you close off? Do you stop giving people the benefit of the doubt? Do you build walls around everything and run your company from behind them?
That’s the real cost. Not what you lost. It’s who you become after you lose it.
A lot of founders go one of two directions after getting burned. They either become paranoid and run their businesses as if everyone is a threat, or they overcorrect and keep trusting blindly because they don’t want to become the person who doesn’t trust anyone. Both of those paths have a price tag.
Robert chose a third option, which is harder than either of the other two. He kept going. Not with blind trust and not with closed fists, but with a clear understanding that some people will take from you and that building something meaningful is still worth doing anyway. He talks about prayer and a genuine commitment to staying a good person as the things that kept him grounded through it. That’s not something you hear from many business figures, but it’s honest. And honesty is exactly what this conversation needs.
What makes Robert’s perspective worth listening to is that he’s speaking from real experience. He’s been involved in scaling numerous businesses, working across a variety of sectors, and achieving multiple personal exits. The man has been in rooms with more business partners, investors, operators, and decision-makers than most CEOs will meet in a lifetime. And through all of that exposure, the lesson that hit hardest wasn’t about margins or market timing. It was about people.
The business world celebrates growth. It celebrates exits, revenue milestones, and expansion into new markets. What it doesn’t appreciate enough is the emotional toll of building something while constantly having to figure out who actually has your back and who is just waiting for the right moment to take what they can.
If you’re a CEO and you’ve been burned by someone you trusted, you already know this isn’t a strategy problem. It’s a human problem. And there’s no playbook for it. There’s no framework that tells you exactly when to trust and when to walk away. There’s just experience. And experience usually comes at a cost.
Robert paid that price more than once. The fact that he’s still building, still trusting selectively, and still leading with the belief that doing good work matters more than protecting yourself from every possible betrayal is the part of the story that doesn’t make it into most CEO profiles.
But it should.
