Essential listening for anyone who has ever wondered what comes after the win.

Abigail Keeso, a Culinary Nutrition Expert graduate, co-founded That Clean Life with her husband in 2014, grew it into a wildly profitable SaaS platform with a 93% profit margin and a team of four, and then sold it. What happened after the sale is the conversation nobody is having.

In this episode, Abigail gets honest about the anticlimactic reality of a business acquisition, the identity earthquake that follows when the thing you built for a decade is no longer yours, and what it actually feels like to wake up on the other side with nowhere to be and nothing to prove.

We talk about building a bootstrapped business from a nursing break room, naivety as a superpower, the moment she looked at her husband and said "it's time," navigating two years of earn-out inside a private equity world she hadn't quite prepared for, and the quiet life she and her family have landed in on 10 acres in the country. There are real questions about purpose, belonging, and who you are when your title disappears.

If you're in a season of transition, sitting with a decision that scares you, or quietly wondering whether success might actually mean slowing all the way down, this one will feel like a deep exhale.

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Covered In This Episode

• What answering customer support emails from a hospital break room in between nursing shifts has to do with knowing, deep in your bones, that something bigger is calling you.
• Why not knowing what you don't know might actually be the only reason any of us ever build something remarkable, and why that same naivety eventually runs out.
• The moment Abigail turned to her husband mid-summer and said, "It's time," and what it meant, he just said okay, no argument, no "let's sleep on it."
• What two years inside a private equity-backed company taught her about the rules of a game she didn't fully understand she had agreed to play.
• Why the day the sale closed was the most anticlimactic moment of her life, and what she was actually doing when it happened.
• The strange grief of checking in on the thing you built the way you'd check in on an ex, and what that says about identity, attachment, and the work of actually letting go.
• The question she spent a year sitting with after the title disappeared: if I'm not the founder, not the boss, not the person everyone needs, who exactly am I?
• What 10 acres, empty calendars, a bag of wool, and kids running across a lawn are quietly teaching her about what it means to finally call something enough.

00:00 Welcome to The Courageous Pivot Podcast
03:25 Introducing Abigail Keeso
07:28 Origin of That Clean Life
17:44 Naivety as a Superpower
27:40 The Decision to Sell
32:58 The Earn-Out They Did Not Plan For
43:28 The Halloween Night House Decision
49:16 Coming to Terms With This Being Enough
54:47 The Point of Winning the Game Is to Stop Playing
59:28 Who Are You Without the Title
01:01:35 The Loneliness of Reinventing Yourself

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Related Episodes

• EP 013: Why Releasing What You Built Could Be Your Greatest Move — The title alone is Abigail's entire story. For anyone sitting on the edge of a decision, they already know they've made.
• EP 018: The Silent Grief of Growth: Letting Go of the Life You Built — Because Abigail doesn't just talk about selling a business. She talks about grieving it. This one goes right there with her.
• EP 037: After The Exit: What No One Talks About with Obé Fitness Co-Founder Ashley Mills — Two women, two exits, the same honest conversation. These two episodes belong in the same breath.

More About Abigail Keeso

• That Clean Life — The nutrition planning platform Abigail and her husband Chris built and eventually sold to Practice Better. It still exists. 
• Abigail's Substack — Where Abigail writes honestly about what life looks like on the other side of an exit, including the moments she catches herself falling back into old patterns and the slow, quiet work of figuring out what comes next. 
  

Abigail Keeso is a Registered Nurse turned tech founder and growth leader. She co-founded That Clean Life, a nutrition planning platform for health and wellness practitioners, later acquired by Practice Better, where she led growth.

After more than a decade of building what many would define as success, Abigail stepped into a more personal pivot, one that challenged her identity, ambition, and definition of growth. Today, she writes and speaks about the emotional reality of exits, the tension between scale and soul, and the courage it takes to choose a different path.

She lives in rural Ontario with her family, where they’ve spent the past year growing their own food and building a life that feels honest, grounded, and fully their own.