The Hidden Cost of $100M Launches: Power, Urgency, and Extraction

Last Saturday my inbox wouldn’t stop buzzing: We’re live now! Don’t miss it! Still going! Eight hours of livestream, a $6,000 bundle, and a timer pulsing in the corner of the screen.

I never registered, and still the launch arrived uninvited, bleeding into my Saturday.

Authority by Spectacle

I turned to my husband, Brent, who was sitting on the couch (like me, a longtime veteran of the online business space who has seen many folks sparkle and shine across the decades) and said, “I don’t know why, but this Hormozi launch isn’t sitting right with me.” He shrugged and said, “Sounds like old-school internet stuff.”

He wasn’t wrong. The tactics are decades old. I’ve run them, I’ve bought from them, I’ve worked behind the scenes of them. What’s new isn’t the style. It’s the saturation, the scale, and the sheer authority granted to anyone who can command a room that large for that long. 

And in trying to explain it, my body got restless… that itchy feeling on the inside when something isn’t right, but you can’t quite put your finger on it. I’ve built backstage on launches like these—and I’ve seen the bloodletting they demand. The question underneath wasn’t about one man’s book or one man’s launch. It was about the kind of authority we normalize, the kind of power we celebrate, and the costs we’re not naming out loud.

Spectacle has a way of moving through culture whether you opt in or not. It can galvanize, it can inspire, it can teach… and it can also distort. It makes us believe that holding attention is authority. That noise equals credibility. That scale is proof of worth.

And I didn’t arrive at these questions alone. Last week I was live with my friend and mentor, Trudi, turning over the same restlessness — tracing where authority begins to distort, and who pays the cost when it does. That conversation helped me sharpen what I’m naming here: spectacle isn’t neutral. It moves power, and it leaves a price. 

When Urgency Becomes the Operating System

Here’s what I know from years behind the curtain: urgency on the outside almost always mirrors urgency on the inside. The countdown clock pulsing in your feed is also pulsing through a team running on adrenaline. Heroics have their place, but when sprinting becomes the default operating system, collapse isn’t far behind.

Not Power Shared, But Power Performed

From where I was sitting, it didn’t feel like a workshop. It felt more like a filibuster.

I thought of Cory Booker on the Senate floor—dehydrated, holding the mic for hours. Some called it principled. Others saw a stunt for future political positioning. Either way, the point wasn’t dialogue. It was endurance. In a filibuster, holding the floor is the strategy. And that’s how a lot of marketing (and business) can feel. 

Whether or not that’s the intention behind it… that’s the restlessness, tightness and feeling in the body of power.

Not power shared, but power over.

And I’ve been in those kinds of rooms before—cameras mandated on, warnings not to step away. It disconnects people from their own agency, from listening to their bodies. Authority becomes measured not by what’s built, but by how long you can keep someone captive.

Spectacle vs. Substance

And two things can be true at once, which makes this a juicy paradox: it was impressive, and it was troubling. Both are true.

Because spectacle can teach. It can galvanize. It can even pull me in (here I am, writing about it, thinking about it, in some ways promoting it). In marketing, there really is no such thing as bad press.

But when performance itself becomes the credential, the less obvious work of practice… the unshowy work of depth, of integrity… slips out of view.

So I’m left asking: when credibility comes from scale instead of substance, are we actually inspired by it? Or just pressured to replicate it?

What Is Money For?

This isn’t a critique of the $100M model branding. This isn’t about hating money. 

Money matters. It pays for the increasingly inflated cost of groceries, for therapy and basic healthcare, the payroll that has to clear your operating account whether you’re tired or not. It builds the cushion that lets you step away from constant hustle. Without it, leaders burn out. Without it, the structures we’re holding crumble under the weight of our absence.

Money is morally neutral, but the systems around it aren’t.

Every business extracts something — time, attention, energy. The real question is: do you replenish what you take? And are you leading towards regeneration, or are you leading away from it?

Because here’s what I saw bubble through my feed in the wake of that launch: people saying, “I need to step up my game. I’m falling behind.” That’s what happens when spectacle defines success. Money stops being fuel and starts being proof. 

Money liberates, and money distorts. And in a culture where urgency is the water we swim in, distortion seems to spread faster than liberation. Blood in the water.

And so the question isn’t “is money good or bad?” It’s: what is money for in your business? Is it fuel? Or is it pressure?

What if value wasn’t measured by how much you could squeeze from a launch, but by how much space your launch created for you, for your team, and for your body to keep breathing?

Because the hidden cost of stories like this isn’t just the weekend revenue high. It’s the systems built to make that revenue possible.

Sprint Mode vs. Season Mode

Urgency outside looks like a pulsing countdown timer.
Urgency inside looks like missed deadlines, team sprints, heroic effort stacked on heroic effort.

And yes, sometimes some brand of heroics are necessary. Startups sprint. Emergencies demand it. But when heroics become the default operating system, they stop being courageous and become corrosive.

Which brings me to the question I keep circling: do you want your business to run on sprint mode, or on season mode?

Sprint mode burns hot and fast. The other makes room for rhythms: push and pause, sprints and recovery, growth that bends and adjusts when external variables inevitably shift.

Collapse Is a Design Choice

Infinite growth is the cultural air we breathe, and it’s something that some folks teach and aspire to. I’ve worked in rooms where anyone who questioned that model was called a wet blanket. I carry that memory in my body, and I want to name it clearly: if infinite growth isn’t what you aspire to, that’s not failure. 

The $100M launch was only one expression of it. And when we accept it uncritically, as the only path, we begin to think collapse is inevitable—we might choke on it and drown—when really, collapse is a design choice. 

Borrowed funnels are easy. Lived practice is harder. It’s one thing to polish the playbook; it’s another to name what’s faltering underneath it. Real leadership is the latter.

The Kind of Leadership I Want to Practice

Years from now, no one will remember one weekend’s numbers. What they’ll remember is how you built. Whether your team could still breathe. Whether you told the truth about what it was costing you.

And sometimes the most radical move isn’t to perform another version of success. It’s to admit what isn’t working and build from there.

Honesty can be performed and spectacle can sometimes reveal truth. It’s not about choosing “truth or performance.” The question is whether the story you’re telling lines up with the life underneath.

That’s the leadership I want to practice. Not the kind that holds people captive, but the kind that makes space to step out, listen to your body, and return when you’re ready.

Another Way Forward

Hormozi’s launch is one model: scale, spectacle, extraction.

Our work is another: rhythm, alignment, truth, sustainability.

Money matters. But how we make it matters just as much.

So ask yourself: What definition of wealth are you building toward, and how do you want to enact the practice of making it?

Because Hormozi’s launch shows one truth: that money and spectacle can move culture.

Our work is to ask: at what cost, and toward what end?

Collapse is a choice. So is sustainability and the practice of building wealth that regenerates, not erodes.

Work in Practice

That’s why I’ve spent this past year in practice — with myself, with clients, with this very newsletter — asking the same question I’m leaving you with now: what is money for in your business?

For me, the answer has become Work in Practice: a strategy studio for leaders who want to scale without selling themselves out. In a world where work has become both a tool for survival and a site of harm, we need another way forward. One where urgency isn’t the operating system, where exhaustion isn’t the price of entry, where the structures we build actually hold the people inside them.

That’s the work I want to be known for.

xo,
Brittany

P.S. If you’re ready to stop sprinting and start building in season mode:

• Start By Listening → My private podcast series, COO-fessions, names the ruptures and repairs that never make it into glossy case studies. It’s where I tell the truth about the costs.

• Step Into a Session → A Studio Session is two hours of deep pattern recognition, where we reset the point of friction before urgency becomes your operating system.

• Rebuild the System → For leaders who know the whole structure needs re-setting, the Studio Sequence and Re:Alignment Studio are where we design for sustainability instead of collapse. Apply for a 30 minute Studio Inquiry if you’re interested in going deeper with me.

Collapse is optional. So is sustainability. The work is deciding which one you want your business to practice.

Here are a few case studies from leaders who chose sustainability over collapse.