Worst Day on the Job: When Pedalheads founder and CEO Claudia Sjoberg lost a key location

The hardest days on the job for me have almost always been about people, not numbers or logistics. I invest deeply in the relationships we build with our staff, and over time many of those relationships grow into real friendships. When something goes wrong on the people side, it lands differently than anything else. Those are the days that stay with you long after the work is done.

It was early in Pedalheads’ history, when the business was still small and heavily dependent on just a couple of key locations. I received a call from a partner site letting me know they would no longer be renting their pool to us for the summer.

At the time, this particular location was central to our business. We were running close to 20 classes there. It was not just another site; it was a pillar. When we lost access to that pool, we were left with just one location, and it could serve only about 20 percent of those customers. Simply put, we did not have the space.

We had invested years into building what felt like a genuine partnership. We brought families, energy, and programming to the facility, and they provided access to a pool. It felt mutually beneficial and stable, the kind of arrangement you assume will continue because it makes sense for everyone involved.

Not long after that initial call, I learned the real reason behind the decision. The partner planned to run their own summer program. Not just swimming lessons, but a broader summer offering, one that we had effectively trailblazed for them. They took many of our families with them, and almost overnight, something we had built carefully and thoughtfully was gone.

I remember sitting with the weight of what had just happened, trying to make sense of it. The uncertainty came fast. Staff had to be given fewer hours, or no hours at all. Parents and kids had to be disappointed in ways that stayed with me. Every decision felt personal, because it was. These were people who had trusted us, relied on us, and built their summer plans around us.

That was one of the first times I truly felt the weight of leadership. There was no one else to absorb the stress or uncertainty. I had to carry it quietly while showing up calm and steady for the team. Inside, though, I was scared. I questioned whether we had built something resilient enough to survive a loss like this.

The hardest part was resisting the urge to react out of fear. Fear pushed me toward short term thinking. It narrowed my perspective and made every problem feel urgent and overwhelming. I was forced to ask a question that felt uncomfortable but necessary: if this disappears, what am I left with? The honest answer was: not enough.

That realization stayed with me. When we lost that pool, it reshaped how I thought about the business and my role in protecting it. I learned quickly and painfully the importance of diversification and self reliance. Pools are hard to come by, and relying too heavily on rented facilities left us vulnerable.

At the same time, I knew that building our own pools was not something we could act on right away. While the idea took root in my mind then, it would be more than 20 years before we were actually able to make that happen. In the immediate aftermath, we had to do something significant, and quickly, to stabilize the business and reduce our dependence on any single location.

One of those steps was investing more seriously in biking programs. We needed parts of the business that were not dependent on pool availability, programs that could balance one another when something unexpected happened and that could scale across regions. Over time, that decision proved critical. Today, we are proudly operating bike programs across multiple regions in North America.

Much later, once the business had grown and could support the investment, we finally acted on that original lesson by building our own pools. We built our first in 2021 at Park Royal in West Vancouver, and our second last year at Fremont Village in Coquitlam. It was a major investment and came with real risk, but it gave us control over something foundational to the business.

Interestingly, the partner site eventually realized how difficult it was to run a swim program on their own and stopped. We hung in there. But by then, the lesson had already taken hold.

That day permanently changed how I think about growth. Not growth for its own sake, but growth designed around durability. Around asking what happens if something goes away, before it actually does.

In business, everyone is ultimately responsible for looking after themselves. As a founder, that responsibility extends to the people who place their trust in me. I cannot rely on assumptions or good intentions alone. I have to build with the expectation that things will change.

That call was one of the worst days on the job. But it forced a level of honesty and clarity that shaped everything that came after. And it reminded me that resilience is not about avoiding setbacks, it is about building something strong enough to endure them.