Sometimes it takes a change in perspective to see something that was there all along.

Today, August 25, 2026, marks one year since I filed the paperwork with the North Dakota Secretary of State to form Vogel Consulting LLC. The filing was approved on August 28, 2025, and I officially launched the business on October 1, 2025.

At the time, I was thinking about starting a business. I was thinking about clients, projects, technology, invoices, cash flow and all the other things that come with building something of my own.

I was not thinking about my health.

A year later, I find myself looking back at that decision from a very different perspective.

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A Number That Caught My Attention

Back in 2022, my cholesterol was high. For two years, I took medication to bring it into the normal range. Several side effects made it impractical for me to continue, so I talked with my Family Medicine Doctor in 2024, stopped the medication, and continued to monitor things.

In 2025, my cholesterol was right back where it had been before.

The plan was simply to continue monitoring it.

Then this year I received a message from my doctor:

“Your blood sugar (hemoglobin A1C), cholesterol, hemoglobin, kidney function, liver function and thyroid are all good.”

My cholesterol was down 22 mg/dL in one year.

That caught my attention because I am not sure what I intentionally did to lower it.

I did not set out on a highly structured cholesterol-lowering program. I did not spend the year obsessing over the number. There is not one major change I can point to and say, “That is what did it.”

But there was one major change in my life during that same period.

I started my own business.

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The Stress I Did Not Realize I Had

Before starting Vogel Consulting LLC, I never really thought of my work as particularly stressful. It was simply work.

There were deadlines, customers, employees, projects, problems to solve and systems that needed to work. When something did not work, I dealt with it and moved on to the next thing.

At least, that was how I saw it.

After starting my own business, I began to recognize something I had not noticed before. The constant “fight or flight” feeling that had become part of my normal workday was gone.

That surprised me.

Running a business certainly has its own stresses. I have had difficult projects, urgent problems, and some very long nights. There have been times when I needed to research an issue, find an answer and solve a problem while knowing that a client was waiting.

But it feels different when I am responsible for the work and responsible for how I respond to it.

I have control over how I approach the problem, how I communicate with the client and how I work toward the solution.

That change in perspective has been significant.

I help organizations fix what slows them down, without selling new software or systems. For me, that means being focused on the problem the client needs solved rather than creating another layer of complexity.

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What Does It Mean to Be an Expert?

That change in perspective has also affected how I think about consulting.

One question I have wrestled with is what happens when a customer’s system is down and the outage is costing the company significantly more than the work required to correct it.

Do you stop working because you have reached a certain number of hours?

What about the time required to research an issue?

Should I bill the client for the time I spend figuring something out?

My answer has become straightforward.

When I am the expert, my obligation is to be the expert when I am with the client.

That means doing the research. It means finding the answer. It means solving the problem.

I am not suggesting that every problem requires an all-nighter. But there have been times when that is what it took to get the job done.

Interestingly, those long nights have not felt as stressful to me as the daily 8-to-5 grind I experienced before.

Work has not necessarily become easier.

My perspective on the work has changed.

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Running a Tight Ship

That same perspective has carried over into how I run the business.

During the decade before starting Vogel Consulting LLC, I spent a lot of time worrying about whether a client would pay an invoice.

I did not ask enough questions. There were things on invoices that should have been discussed differently. I simply accepted a level of uncertainty that I did not need to accept.

Owning the business changed that.

I want to know what is happening. I want invoices to be clear. I want bills to be paid. I want problems dealt with rather than allowed to sit in the background.

I want to run a tight ship.

That does not mean everything is perfect. It means I pay attention to what is happening and deal with it.

Recently, that became particularly clear when I was looking at my business reporting.

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Then I Looked at the Numbers

I was told that there was nothing outstanding in Accounts Receivable or Accounts Payable.

Both were $0.

My first reaction was to ask:

“My A/R and A/P are not showing up because I keep up with my bills and invoices. My business does not have anything outstanding. Is that a problem?”

And down the rabbit hole we went.

The answer was no.

Having nothing outstanding in A/R and A/P is not a problem. In fact, it can be a sign that invoices are being collected and bills are being paid promptly.

Of course, there are accounting details that matter. Timing matters. Transactions need to be recorded correctly. The financial statements need to accurately represent what is happening in the business.

But the reason my A/R and A/P were both $0 was not because something was missing.

It was because there was nothing outstanding.

That was an interesting reminder that sometimes we can look at a number and assume something is wrong simply because we are expecting to see something there.

The number was not telling me that the business had a problem.

It was telling me something about how the business was being managed.

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Perspective Changes What We See

That is what keeps bringing me back to the idea of perspective.

The same thing can look completely different depending on where you are standing.

I spent years thinking my work stress was simply normal. It took leaving that environment for me to recognize how it had felt.

I looked at my business reporting and wondered whether having nothing in A/R and A/P was a problem. It turned out that the absence of a number was the information I needed.

And then, today, something happened that brought the idea of perspective outside of my own experience.

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Seconds That Matter

A few seconds before writing this section, I learned about the passing of Dolly Parton.

I did not know Dolly Parton. I only knew of Dolly Parton.

I knew the name, the music, the movies, and the public persona. But it was only in recent years that I began to understand more about her character and the way she used her success and influence to help other people.

My perspective changed as I learned more about the person behind the name.

Hearing about her passing today made me think about that again.

It also immediately connected with something I wrote about last week in my post, Seconds That Matter.

Sometimes it takes only seconds to change our perspective.

We can hear news that changes how we see a person.

We can receive a health result that makes us reconsider our habits.

We can start a business that changes how we understand the work we were doing before.

We can look at a financial report and realize that what we thought was a problem is evidence that something is working as it should.

The circumstances may not have changed.

What changed was what we could see.

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Looking Back One Year Later

I cannot tell you that starting Vogel Consulting LLC caused my cholesterol to drop 22 mg/dL. I do not know that.

What I can say is that the past year has changed my perspective.

I see work differently.

I see responsibility differently.

I see stress differently.

I see my business differently.

And I am paying closer attention to the signals than I did before.

That may be the connection between personal health and business health.

Neither is simply about having good numbers.

The numbers are indicators. They give us something to pay attention to and, sometimes, a reason to ask better questions.

A year ago today, I filed the paperwork to create Vogel Consulting LLC. I thought I was starting a business.

I did not realize that the next year would also change the way I looked at some of the things I had simply accepted as normal.

Sometimes you do not need to change everything.

Sometimes you just need to change your perspective.

And sometimes, as I wrote last week, it only takes a few seconds to matter.