For the Love of Systems: Being Good Humans First with Kristen Lux

Operations coach and business owner Kristen Lux shares her journey from working in restaurants to systems / operations consulting and coaching. She talks about what it’s really like to run a business with her husband, and why entrepreneurship is personal development on steroids. We talk ADHD, boundaries, couples counseling, and why being good at this work starts with being a good human.

Episode Highlights

• How Kristen's childhood and her parents' divorce shaped her and led to years of disassociation and depression as a teen.
• What the restaurant industry taught her about people, prioritization, and operating in constant chaos — and why she still has “server nightmares.”
• Being passed over twice for management in favor of older men, and how that painful experience eventually pushed her out of restaurants and onto something different.
• Moving into commercial real estate and then the solar industry, where she essentially built “a company inside a company” and discovered she was an operations person at heart.
• Feeling like the “junk drawer” at work — the person everything gets handed to — and how that fueled her passion for dignifying operations roles.
• The leap into entrepreneurship and how her husband nudged her into it, even when stability felt safer.
• Why she calls business ownership “personal development on steroids” and what happens when things aren’t working and the mirror points straight back at you.
• Bringing her husband into For the Love of Systems: their complementary strengths, shared clients, proprietary frameworks — and the stress and uncertainty that surfaced a challenging season.
• Habit Story: the assessment that maps behaviors to the stories we tell ourselves, and how retaking it showed her how much she had actually changed.
• Trauma therapy, couples counseling, and the deep inner work that helped them come out the other side with a stronger marriage and clearer roles in the business.
• Her people-first approach: paying a small team well, offering benefits, and designing a digital-first company so she can treat employees like how she wants to be treated.
• Why she loves working with financial advisors - strong values alignment, and believes the future of advice is female — with mentorship as a key lever.
• How systems and tech (and good boundaries) help her manage ADHD and avoid burnout in both life and business.
• Designing a life around walking in nature, being close to trails in Columbia, MO, and defining success as freedom — including the dream of a four-day workweek.
• The sweetest part of all: after a hard season, her marriage is now the thing bringing her the most joy.