The Right Room Can Change Your Entire Business
- 6 days ago
- 6 min read
Written by Laura McCann, Founder & CEO of Auratherapy
Laura McCann is the Founder & CEO of Auratherapy, a luxury wellness brand helping people reclaim their breath and remember they are vibrational beings. A 30-year CPG + tech founder, she’s building a modern movement at the intersection of scent, energy, and self-mastery, turning daily rituals into transformation.
For years, I searched for the right kind of coaching, mentorship, and founder ecosystem. I tried accelerators, founder groups, executive coaching, advisors, industry programs. Some were helpful. Some offered community. Some offered tactical insights. But deep down, I still felt like I was translating myself.
As a founder, I often struggled to fit inside traditional frameworks because my business itself didn’t fit neatly into a category.
Are you the kind of founder who struggles to be coached conventionally, needs advisors who can understand nuance, convergence, and unconventional business models, feels like most mentorship programs oversimplify your vision, and finds yourself intellectually ahead of the systems designed to support entrepreneurs?
If so, you’re not alone. Some founders don’t need motivation. They need environments sophisticated enough to recognize what they’re actually building.
For years, I thought the problem was me. What I eventually realized was not every founder needs the same room, and not every program is designed for founders building entirely new playbooks.
A decade of reinvention
I’ve been refining my business for over 10 years. I started as an aromatherapy manufacturer selling wholesale products. Then COVID hit, and like many founders, I found myself staring at a version of the business that suddenly no longer worked. Revenue slowed, uncertainty took over, and I had to make a decision: evolve or disappear.
So I opened a retail store. At the time, it felt like survival. Looking back, it became the unlock. Inside that store, something unexpected happened. I added aura readings and chakra consultations as part of the customer experience. What started as a wellness offering quickly became the razor to my blade. The experience became the relationship. Customers stopped asking, “What’s in it?” They started asking, “What do I need?”
That single shift changed how I saw the entire business. The products were no longer the center of the ecosystem. Personalization was. Over time, I realized we weren’t simply selling products anymore. We were building an operationalized wellness experience centered around emotional insight, rituals, community, retention, and behavioral patterns.
That realization forced another evolution. I started over with a clean slate, rebranded the company, and reimagined the vision.
Today, Auratherapy includes two retail stores, a wholesale business, certifications, wellness events, experiential services, and Aura Sanctuary, a 7,500-square-foot hybrid space in Asheville designed as a factory, innovation lab, training center, and wellness community hub.
Just when I thought I had finally arrived, the market shifted again. AI changed everything. Consumer behavior changed. Retail changed. Brand building changed. The speed of innovation changed.
I realized the business needed another reinvention. Not because it was failing, but because I could feel another level trying to emerge.
The part most founders don’t talk about
What people don’t see during reinvention is the psychological load founders carry while trying to evolve a business in real time.
You’re still running payroll, managing teams, handling operations, watching expenses multiply, trying not to lose momentum, trying not to lose yourself.
All while carrying a future version of the business in your head that nobody else can fully see yet. That’s the exhausting part.
You’re simultaneously operating the evergreen business that pays today’s bills and while trying to invent the disruptive business of tomorrow.
At one point, I realized I was trying to build Version 3.0 of my company while still operating Versions 1.0 and 2.0 at the exact same time.
And perhaps the hardest part: the future version of the business still looked abstract to everyone around me.
Teams naturally crave stability. Operations reward predictability. Most people inside organizations don’t love radical change because change creates uncertainty.
As founders, we underestimate how much internal selling transformation requires. You’re constantly explaining the vision, reframing the opportunity, defending the changes, repeating the strategy, and trying to get buy-in while still keeping the business operational.
Sometimes daily. That creates enormous emotional tension. Externally, people may think you’re successful. But internally, you’re carrying fear, financial pressure, cognitive overload, strategic uncertainty, and the weight of holding the future alone.
The stores became the laboratory
What finally clicked for me was understanding that my business itself had become the testing ground.
The stores became laboratories. The community became feedback loops. The events became research. The aura readings became onboarding systems. The CRM became behavioral insight.
I stopped thinking like a product founder. I started thinking like a systems architect. That’s when the vision became clearer: we weren’t building a wellness brand. We were building infrastructure around personalized emotional wellness.
But despite seeing pieces of it, I still couldn’t fully articulate the larger opportunity. I knew there was something there. I just couldn’t get clear enough to operationalize it.
This time, I did something different
Instead of trying to figure it all out alone, I built a multi-disciplinary ecosystem around the business. A branding strategist helped uncover the narrative thread connecting everything we were building.
A sales coach helped operationalize the wholesale vision, refine positioning, and build a stronger pipeline. Then I entered the Fixer accelerator, a founder advisory program specifically designed for beauty and wellness entrepreneurs navigating growth, positioning, and operational complexity.
What made the experience different wasn’t just strategy. It was sophistication. For the first time, I felt like I had entered a room capable of understanding not just the products, but the architecture behind the business itself.
Perhaps most importantly, the people in the room saw it too. Not customers. Not spectators. Not people reacting to surface-level metrics.
But sophisticated operators, mentors, coaches, and founders who understood convergence, disruption, category creation, and reinvention.
For the first time, I had people on the bench saying, “Wait… this is big.” “Go further.” “You’re onto something,” and “That’s the real opportunity.”
That kind of validation changes a founder psychologically. Because sometimes the thing you need most isn’t another tactic. It’s intelligent reinforcement strong enough to help you keep going before the rest of the world catches up.
The AI exercise that quietly changed everything
One of the most unexpectedly powerful parts of the Fixer accelerator wasn’t financial modeling or growth planning. It was an AI-driven founder archetype assessment.
At first, I almost dismissed it. As founders, we’re conditioned to focus on metrics, execution, and growth. We rarely stop to ask deeper questions about how we naturally build, lead, and innovate. But the process forced me to step outside the chaos of daily operations and look at myself more objectively as a founder. The result surprised me.
My archetype came back as “The Outsider,” a founder driven by disruption, fresh perspective, and challenging existing systems.
Even more impactful was realizing my natural archetype and aspirational archetype were the same. The assessment literally said: “Your instincts already match the path you want to build toward.”
That hit me harder than I expected. Because after years of operational pressure, financial stress, pivots, survival mode, and carrying the cognitive overload of reinvention, I had slowly started disconnecting from the very thing that made me a founder in the first place.
The assessment reminded me that I’m not wired to maintain existing systems. I’m wired to rethink them, to challenge categories, to build differently, to create new frameworks where others see saturation.
Suddenly, so many tensions I had been carrying made sense. That wasn’t distraction. That was my founder DNA. Honestly, there was something deeply emotional about having a room full of sophisticated operators not only understand that, but validate it. That level of recognition gave me something I didn’t realize I had lost: trust in my own instincts again.
The rise of the convergence CEO
The modern founder can no longer think in silos. Everything now affects everything else.
Your brand affects your sales. Your events affect your CRM. Your AI strategy affects your operational speed. Your community affects your positioning. Your founder story affects your ability to attract talent, partnerships, and capital.
Today’s CEOs are simultaneously navigating technology, storytelling, systems, emotional intelligence, operations, AI, customer psychology, and strategic reinvention.
That requires a completely different leadership model than the one most of us were taught. The founders who will shape the next decade won’t necessarily be the most conventional.
They’ll be the founders most willing to evolve, synthesize, seek perspective, leverage technology, trust their instincts, and continually place themselves in rooms that expand what they believe is possible.
As I come out of this latest evolution of my business, I realize something important: the next version of my company didn’t emerge because I finally found all the answers. It emerged because I stopped trying to carry the future alone. Sometimes the right rooms don’t just change your business. They change your relationship to yourself as a founder.
Read more from Laura McCann
Laura McCann, Founder & CEO of Auratherapy
Laura McCann, a former child star, France-raised creative, NY fashion alum, and tech entrepreneur, now leads Auratherapy as Founder & CEO. With 30 years as a founder across CPG and tech, she’s bringing luxury and innovation to functional fragrance through breathable, essential oil-based Aroma Perfumes and water-based aura sprays. Auratherapy pairs this with data-driven aura and chakra diagnostics that translate energy into personalized rituals. Her mission is to help people reclaim their breath, remember they are vibrational beings, and transform through the practice of adoring yourself.
