By Hanli Prinsloo, Freediver, Speaker, Ocean Conservationist & Entrepreneur
I recorded the first version of this article as a voice note while folding my family’s laundry in Atlanta, six time zones away from my team in Cape Town. I’ll admit I’m tired. That may be the truest place a founder can write from, because it’s often where the work actually happens – in the gaps, while you’re tired.
We seldom hear this version of the story – the one where the founder is folding laundry, or answering emails from an airport, or has multiple tabs open on her phone: a flight change, a funding proposal, a message asking what’s for dinner. The stories that reach us have been sanded smooth, told from the other side of established success. Almost nobody enjoys revisiting the years when things hadn’t quite worked yet – the hard middle, when you don’t yet know where it’s going. But we have to talk about them, otherwise every leader who’s there believes they’re the only one.
Sustainability lives in that same hard middle. Not in the commitments announced at the start or the impact reports published later. It’s built in between, when it costs something and nobody’s watching yet.
Sustainability means two things, and they’re the same thing
We use “sustainable” for two things at once: whether a business can last, and whether the planet can. We treat those as different questions, but they’re the same question asked over different timescales. Both are asking what conditions a thing needs to keep going – whether that’s a coral reef or a company. Keeping the conditions right means paying the real costs as you go: the fair wage, the ethical supplier, the more expensive material that leaves the water clean.
The alternative isn’t cheaper, it just moves the bill onto someone else’s balance sheet: a future quarter, a downstream community, an ocean.
I learnt this in the water, not through business. I fell in love with the ocean through freediving, and everything I’ve built since has been an attempt to get other people to love her too. Our ecosystems, our livelihoods, our wellbeing all run through her – and yet many people have never been given access to her at all. In South Africa, that isn’t an accident of geography, it’s a design with a history behind it. Nobody would seriously argue you can save a coastline while keeping the people who live beside it out; those people are part of the system you’re trying to protect. Conservation and social justice were never two problems for me. The I AM WATER Foundation exists exactly where they meet.
Refusing to separate these kinds of things costs nothing as an instinct. The reality is, it costs a great deal as an operating model. There are many times in business when the two questions about sustainability might pull things apart – the ethical supplier against the affordable one, your team’s wellbeing against the quarter’s performance. That gap doesn’t close by itself. We need to close it, deliberately, again and again. This is the work of real sustainability.
What nobody says out loud
“Find what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” is false. Worse – it’s a trap.
If you care about more than the bottom line, you will likely sacrifice some part of your own financial wellbeing on the altar of purpose. Purpose doesn’t exempt you from the difficulty – it’s where the difficulty comes from. Every decision that costs more because it’s the right one, comes out of somewhere… Often the founder’s pocket or their family’s. Nobody really says that, so the moment it gets hard, we assume the only explanation is that we’re failing.
There’s a particular version of this for women. Most of us accumulate enough experience to step into leadership in our thirties and forties – precisely when many of us are also starting families. The opportunity and the load arrive in the same few years. Nobody told me that’s structural, so I often experienced it as a personal failure to cope. We have a board member who used to say it to me on calls: yes, it’s hard. It was a relief to hear that from someone with experience. Now I’ve learnt to hear it as data. If we can name it, it stops being a private inadequacy and becomes a design problem we can work on.
Deep work doesn’t fit current timelines
In business, we’ve made speed the proxy for quality, which works fine… until the good idea needs to be slow. This speed measure came from the world of venture capital, where a fund’s returns depend on a few companies growing enormous, fast. Early traction became the key evidence of success – and this maths makes sense for funds.
This was never meant to be the yardstick for everyone else, but somehow it became one. This means the founder building a regenerative supply chain, or a conservation model that needs a decade to prove itself, is measured against a timeline never calibrated for their depth of work.
That’s the mismatch. The work isn’t failing – it’s being read on the wrong clock. An organisation that has to prove itself every two years cannot honestly promise anything that takes ten – it won’t survive long enough to find out.
Two things that really matter
I won’t pretend I’ve solved this. I AM WATER is doing well, and we’re still fundraising all the time. This is often the reality of NGOs. But there are two things that go a long way in the question of sustainability:
1. Hire slow and hire for character, not skill set.
Hire slow, and hire for character rather than skill set. People can look extraordinary on paper and still not be the person you need, because values alignment isn’t something a CV can show you. That’s worth waiting for, because the wrong person will cost you time, resources and your culture.
Then the next step is to support the people you do have into leadership roles. Sometimes this is also slow work. But when someone grows into a leadership position from within, what you build with them is shared values, shared commitment and a shared history. This is one of the only things I’ve found that genuinely compounds over time. It’s also the only real insurance you have against your own exhaustion, because an organisation whose values live in one person’s head has a single point of failure, and sooner or later that person is going to burn out.
2. Measure yourself against something outside your own marketing.
Read the advertising for most financial institutions and you’d think they were personally rewilding the planet, when what they’re doing is making millions out of other people’s millions. I don’t mind the vocabulary – people, product, planet; triple bottom line – I mind whether anyone’s checking.
What the ocean taught me about sustainability
The ocean has been a useful auditor for me: she doesn’t work to an external timeline. An ecosystem moves at its own pace, and the evidence of anything you did often only arrives years after you did it. Conservation trains you for that patience, and business school doesn’t. Your job is to stay, keep the conditions right, and hold your nerve in the times when nothing appears to be changing.
That’s true of most things worth building. Building anything genuinely sustainable – a reef, a company, a team – is slower than we’d like it to be, and the founder is the one who has to absorb the difference between how long it takes and how long everyone else is willing to wait to see results. Nothing external gets you through that – not the funding, not the applause, not the plan. The only thing that has ever held me there is knowing why I’m doing it.
So, to the founder still in the hard middle: the years are long because the work is deep, not because you’re behind. If it doesn’t matter, it’s not worth it. And if it matters, it will take longer.
[Hanli Prinsloo](https://www.hanliprinsloo.com/) is the founder of the [I AM WATER Foundation](https://www.iamwaterfoundation.org/) and the [OCEAN FOR ALL Foundation](https://www.iamwaterfoundation.org/oceans-for-all-alliance)
