UpTrajectory Review

Inc. Magazine's Elizabeth Gore sits down with Jes Wolfe, the CEO of Rebel Girls, the children's media company built on the blockbuster Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls franchise. The interview centers on how Wolfe has navigated leadership through grief and personal adversity while steering a mission-driven brand. The only line provided to us ahead of publication is Wolfe's own summary of her operating philosophy: when the plan falls apart, keep putting one foot forward. That single sentence tells us the conversation goes well past standard founder-story territory and into the harder question of how you keep showing up for employees, customers, and investors when your personal life is in crisis.

For a small-business owner or operator, this is not a celebrity profile to skim. Wolfe runs a company that, like most small businesses, is tightly identified with its mission and its leader. When grief or serious adversity hits the person at the top, there is no HR department to absorb it, no bench of executives to quietly take over, and no communications team to manage the narrative. Employees are watching your face in the morning meeting. Customers are watching whether the product ships. The bank is watching whether the numbers hold. Wolfe's experience is a case study in the specific loneliness of leading a small, values-driven company through a period when you are personally not okay.

What is genuinely new here is the candor. Plenty of CEOs talk about resilience after the fact, once the crisis has passed and the story has a tidy arc. Wolfe appears to be speaking from inside the experience, not from the other side of it. That matters because the business media's standard resilience narrative often amounts to performative stoicism, which leaves operators feeling like they are failing if they are not bouncing back on a quarterly schedule. We are skeptical of any framework that treats grief as a productivity obstacle to be optimized away, and Wolfe's one-foot-forward framing suggests she is not selling that. It reads more like permission to move slowly and still move.

The second-order effects of this kind of leadership story are worth sitting with. When a visible CEO admits to struggling, it changes what employees at similar companies feel entitled to ask for. It can normalize conversations about bereavement leave, mental health, and flexible expectations that small businesses often handle ad hoc or not at all. It also carries risk: customers and partners may read vulnerability as instability, and competitors may exploit the perception. For the operator reading this, the practical question is not whether to share your struggles publicly but whether your business has any structure, even an informal one, that keeps it functioning when you cannot be at full capacity for weeks or months.

Watch for whether Wolfe names any concrete mechanisms, a deputy, a chief of staff, a decision-making framework, that allowed her to keep the company moving. That is the part most profiles skip and the part operators can actually steal. In the meantime, the actionable takeaway is uncomfortable but useful: write down the three decisions only you can make at your company, identify who makes them if you are unreachable for thirty days, and tell that person. One foot forward is good advice. It works better when someone else knows the route.

This interview is worth reading in full when it publishes, not because Wolfe has discovered a secret but because she is describing a situation most operators will face and few business publications cover honestly. The gap between how leadership is taught and how it is actually lived is wide, and conversations like this narrow it slightly. If you have been carrying something while running your business, this one is likely to feel less like advice and more like recognition.

“When the plan falls apart, keep putting one foot forward.” — Inc. Magazine

Takeaway: Identify the three decisions only you can make and name who makes them if you are unreachable for thirty days.