How to Set Work-Life Boundaries When You’re in Sales, Marketing, or Running a Business Podcast By cover art

How to Set Work-Life Boundaries When You’re in Sales, Marketing, or Running a Business

How to Set Work-Life Boundaries When You’re in Sales, Marketing, or Running a Business

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Last updated: March 2026 Why this conversation matters for revenue leaders This is a conversation about something most B2B leaders won’t talk about publicly: the cost of building your career at the expense of everything else. In 2019, I interviewed Carlos Hidalgo on the B2B Lead Roundtable podcast. Carlos had just published The UnAmerican Dream, a book about walking away from the hustle culture that nearly destroyed his family and his health. I related to the story personally. Shortly after building and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended. The entrepreneurship-divorce connection is not a coincidence. It is a pattern, and it comes from treating work as the one system you can control while everything else erodes. Carlos and I talked about why work-life “balance” is a myth, how to set real boundaries instead, and what happens to your productivity when you stop grinding and start governing your time. If you lead a revenue team, run a business, or manage a sales and marketing function, this conversation is worth 20 minutes. The advice is specific and practical. The interview: Carlos Hidalgo on work-life boundaries Some of the hardest working people I know are in sales and marketing. We often read success stories about how hustle and grit drove fantastic success. That said, the relentless pursuit of success can leave behind damaged relationships and personal life carnage in its wake. Take me, for example. Shortly after building up and selling a successful company, my 17-year marriage ended. There’s a reason entrepreneurs have a higher divorce rate. For me. My pursuit of business success left my health and my personal relationships in a severe need of help. I needed to redefine the kind of life I wanted to live, make different choices, and set better boundaries. It wasn’t easy. Now, my health, relationships, and personal and professional happiness are so much better. That’s why I was excited to interviewed Carlos Hidalgo (@cahidalgo), CEO of Digital Exhaust and author of the new book The UnAmerican Dream. In this interview, you’ll hear Carlos’s story about finding personal and professional happiness and establishing work-life boundaries. This is a must-read for sellers, marketers, and entrepreneurs. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your background? Carlos: Yeah. Hey Brian. Always a pleasure to talk to you. I have been in B2B marketing and sales for over 20 years. I think right now it’s about 25 years, which is hard to believe. I’ve been both client-side, and then in 2005, I co-founded an agency. That agency is still running. I left that agency at the end of 2016, beginning of 2017 to start another business. So, could say I’m a bit of an entrepreneur. I love creating things. Now, I work with B2B companies in the whole area of customer experience under the new brand VisumCX, and then just wrote my second book. The first book was on demand generation, so if you ever have insomnia, go for it. You can read that. But this book was the UnAmerican Dream, which is more my story and a whole lot more personal than the first one. Why did you write The UnAmerican Dream? The UnAmerican Dream Brian: Can you tell the story about why you wrote this book, The UnAmerican Dream, and why now? Carlos: Yeah, great question. When I left Annuitas, which was the first company that I had co-founded and started, I put a post on LinkedIn about why I was going. It was more to get back to what I should have been doing in the first place, which was cultivating those meaningful relationships, especially with my children and marriage. I was struck by the number of calls and emails I got from fellow entrepreneurs and fellow business leaders who were saying, “So, how did you do this? What steps did you take because I am at my wit’s end? I’m never seeing my family,” or “My marriage is falling apart,” or insert whatever they were going through. I was shocked. Wow, this is not just me going through this. So, that’s why. But the why now, is the idea of that book came to me over two years ago. But I needed to work on me first. I had to get some things straight in me, and one of those things that I start with the introduction, I believe, saying I first had the idea in 2016. When I told somebody the title, they said, “It sounds like an angry book.” I believe if I had written it then, it would have been an angry book because I had a lot of things that I had to work through and deconstruct some things that I had held to be true which weren’t right. So, I needed to wait. Waiting, I believe, made it a much more authentic book, a much more vulnerable book, but not an angry book in any way. Walking away from the UnAmerican Dream Brian: I’m going to ask the same question you got asked by many people on LinkedIn. How did you walk away from this UnAmerican dream, and what do you mean by that? Carlos: Yeah. Wow. How I did it … From the outside, it probably seemed like, oh, he woke up...
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