The Human Timeshare: Leading Two Businesses 700 Miles Apart

The conversation with the President started well.

"Amit, I need you to integrate this acquisition."

"Great," I said. "I'll lead it from Toronto."

He smiled the way people smile when they're about to say something you won't like.

"I need you in Providence. Five days a week."

"And the Canadian business?"

"You're doing both."

I had just become the human equivalent of a corporate timeshare.

The Weekly Choreography

What followed was two years of a split life navigated with military precision, and which cost more than I fully understood while it was happening.

Providence weekdays meant 6 AM plant walks, twelve-hour integration days, and hotel rooms that started to feel uncomfortably familiar.

Toronto weekends meant frantic catch-up on the Canadian business, school recaps compressed into Saturday mornings, and a persistent background guilt I had learned to manage rather than resolve.

My four-year-old's most frequent question on Sunday afternoons became: "But you just helped them yesterday."

""Being everywhere at once meant I was never truly anywhere.""

What the Account Left Out

The "flawless integration" I sometimes referenced in professional settings was powered by something I didn't always acknowledge: my wife's unpaid labour as a solo parent.

Every week I was in Providence was a week she held everything else together.

The corporate win was real. It was also subsidised by her.

That accounting should be in every success story I tell about that period, and it usually isn't. I'm putting it here.

The trait that makes certain leaders invaluable, the willingness to take on the hard thing, also makes them exploitable.

Every yes to the impossible is a no to something else. Usually something that doesn't make it onto a performance review. Usually something that matters more.

True leadership isn't measured in miles logged. It's measured in moments truly present.

I learned the difference between physical presence and genuine presence in ways I couldn't have learned any other way.

The most powerful leaders I know have learned to be fully, genuinely present in the role they're in, not dispersed across all of them simultaneously.

Where are you physically present but not truly there, and who is co-signing your professional success without appearing in the credits?

Service, Empathy, and Integrity are three of the twenty traits in Half & Half.

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