This week on Authbition, I sit down with Tom Place, co-owner of Outbound Lighting, for a conversation about bikes, business, career change, customer trust, and what happens when entrepreneurship is rooted in something deeper than growth at all costs.
This episode is a must-listen for aspiring entrepreneurs, small business owners, product designers, career changers, and anyone who has ever had a great job but still felt something was missing.
Tom shares how he went from engineering, LEDs, Cree, and Industry Nine to helping build Outbound Lighting into a rider-focused company known for high-performance bike lights, thoughtful design, and unusually human customer support.
At the center of the conversation is a phrase from an Outbound Lighting Facebook post that caught my attention immediately:
Don’t be a dick.
Simple. Blunt. Funny. Also, maybe, a complete business strategy.
👉 Listen or watch here:
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I recorded the opening for this episode at The Finger Lakes RV Resort, on the east side of Seneca Lake in New York.
That ended up feeling almost too perfect.
The resort is locally owned, bootstrapped, and run by good people doing the real work of small business. While I was recording the opening, one of the owners, Doug, passed by. He was collecting trash, cleaning up campsites, and doing what owners of real businesses actually do.
Doug also happens to be a mountain biker.
I didn’t know him before staying here. I met him at the campground, and we have gone mountain biking together a couple of times since. So there I was, recording an opening for a conversation with the co-owner of Outbound Lighting, while on the grounds of a locally owned bootstrapped business run in part by a mountain biker.
That is the episode.
Small business. Mountain biking. Human connection. People doing real work. Good work.
The conversation opens with the Outbound Lighting marketing post that inspired me to reach out to Tom.
“Don’t be a dick.”
That line made me take a closer look at the company. Then I saw they were small, independent, and not private-equity backed. As someone who has spent a lot of time around entrepreneurship education, that stood out to me.
Too much of entrepreneurship is taught as: raise money, build fast, grow big, flip it, sell it.
Tom and I talk about why that model can miss the point.
Businesses need to make money. Of course they do. Making money is table stakes. But making money is not the reason a business exists. I compare it in the episode to breathing. I need to breathe to live, but I do not live to breathe.
Tom takes that idea and runs with it.
He talks about starting at NC State, working his way toward Cree, getting rejected before finally landing there, and eventually finding himself in a career that looked great from the outside. He loved the work. He was good at it. There was opportunity, upward mobility, and a clear path.
Then bikes and lights started pulling him in another direction.
He eventually took a huge pay cut to pursue an opportunity with Industry Nine. It looked like it might become the dream path: an established bike-industry brand, high-performance products, and a chance to build lights without having to build a whole company from scratch.
Six months later, the project was dead.
Tom says it plainly in the episode: he left a stable corporate job, took a chance, and fell flat on his face.
That moment gives the conversation its deeper career thread. This is not only a show about entrepreneurship. It is also about what happens when the dream job is real, but it still is not the whole dream.
From there, Tom shares how he eventually found Matt, the founder of Outbound Lighting, and how trust became the foundation of their working relationship. Early on, Matt paid Tom three times what they had agreed to because he believed Tom had brought more value than the contract captured.
That kind of moment just doesn’t happen in business.
For Tom, it mattered. It told him something about the person he was choosing to build with.
We did not formally play The Whole Mind Game in this episode, but the whole conversation lives inside a clear tension:
Growth at All Costs <> Sustainable Service
On one side is the familiar startup story: raise money, chase growth, scale fast, grab market share, and aim for an exit.
On the other side is something quieter and harder to measure: build something useful, treat people well, grow at a sustainable pace, support customers, take care of employees, and make decisions you can live with.
Tom does not pretend money is irrelevant. Outbound Lighting has to make money. They have employees, health insurance, production costs, seasonal sales cycles, and real business pressures.
But again and again, he returns to a different center of gravity.
What is the product for?
Who does it serve?
What happens when something breaks?
How do customers feel after interacting with the company?
What kind of business can they stand behind?
One of the strongest moments in the episode comes when Tom talks about the entrepreneurship coaching world being “lousy” with advice about growth, money, investors, and exits. When the product or service itself becomes almost irrelevant, he says, it is a good way to build a hollow brand, a hollow product, and a hollow service.
That might be the sentence every aspiring entrepreneur needs to hear.
The best of both sides is not anti-money, and it is not anti-growth. It is growth in service of something real.
Maybe the synergy is:
Useful Growth
Or maybe:
Service That Sustains
Either way, the warning is clear. A business can grow and still become hollow. A product can sell and still not matter. A company can win the spreadsheet and lose the soul.
This episode matters because Tom gives one of the clearest business lectures I have heard on Authbition — not by preaching, but by telling the truth.
He tells the truth about leaving a stable job. He tells the truth about falling flat on his face. He tells the truth about feature creep, hiring, customer support, Amazon, warranty decisions, and the pressure to make every business decision about money.
He also tells the truth about enoughness.
At one point, Tom says he is never going to have a billion-dollar company because there are not enough people or bikes on Earth for Outbound Lighting to sell a billion dollars’ worth of bike lights every year. Then he says there is a ceiling, and he kind of likes that.
So much of modern entrepreneurship is built around pretending there is no ceiling. No limit. No enough. No natural size for a company, a product, or a life.
Outbound Lighting is asking a different question.
What if the goal is not to become everything?
What if the goal is to become the right thing, for the right people, in the right way?
That is why this episode is about more than bike lights. It is about kind-hearted entrepreneurship, thoughtful career change, durable products, honest work, and the possibility of building something useful without selling your soul.
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Thanks to Tom Place for joining me on Authbition and for sharing so openly about Outbound Lighting, career change, product design, customer trust, small business, and the real responsibility that comes with building something people rely on.
And thanks to everyone following along with Authbition as this show continues to grow into what it’s becoming.