Press Pause Under Pressure: Susan L. Combs on Integrity and Leadership

In this episode of Time To Press Pause, Ellen Williams sits down with Susan L. Combs, President of Combs & Company LLC and founder of the nonprofit Pancakes for Roger. 

Susan’s press pause moment didn’t come from long reflection, it arrived suddenly, under pressure, and with real consequences. 

After her nonprofit received an unexpected $20,000 donation, the donor later demanded that a large portion of the funds be redirected to an unvetted project. 

What followed was a high-stakes leadership moment involving legal threats, board deliberation, and the responsibility of stewarding money that wasn’t hers, but belonged to the mission. 

In this conversation, Susan shares how she: 

• Pressed pause during a crisis instead of reacting emotionally
• Brought her board together to evaluate hard options quickly and ethically
• Chose integrity over convenience, even when it hurt financially
• Used the experience to strengthen governance and prevent future risk
• Learned why leadership sometimes means making decisions you won’t celebrate, but can live with

Ellen and Susan also discuss:
 

• Why nonprofits must be run with the same rigor as businesses
• How to handle emotionally charged conversations and legal threats
• Why being able to “sleep at night” is a powerful leadership compass
• The importance of tone-checking responses before reacting
• How moments like these shape better leaders and stronger organizations

This episode is a powerful reminder that pressing pause isn’t always calm or comfortable, sometimes it’s urgent, stressful, and necessary to protect integrity.
 
Learn more about Susan: https://combsandco.com

Learn more about Pancakes for Roger: https://pancakesforroger.org

Learn more about Ellen: https://thesalientstrategist.com
 

Transcript

[00:00] Susan L. Combs: We all want to be able to sleep at night.

[00:05] Voiceover: Welcome to Time to Press Pause. Real-life stories from the C-Suite. I'm your host, Ellen Williams, CEO of The Salient Strategist. I have over three decades of experience with professional and personal transformation, which always starts with pressing pause. Today I'm discussing what happens when an unexpected scenario causes an immediate pause of everything and the teamwork that's needed to create a solution. With my guest, Susan L. Combs. PPACA, ChHC, REBC. President of Combs & Company LLC, an insurance brokerage firm she founded in 2005. She and her team have become the trusted go-to for companies often overlooked by insurance carriers, such as those in entertainment, food, and international spheres entering the U.S. market. Her expertise in health insurance has made her the sought-after guru on the Affordable Care Act, regularly called upon as a witness, advisor, and speaker. In 2022, she published Pancakes for Roger, a mentorship guide for slaying dragons. Part leadership manual, part tribute to her father's legacy, which became the foundation for her next chapter. In 2023, she founded Pancakes for Roger Inc. in honor of her father, who was a Major General. As a not-for-profit corporation, Pancakes for Roger's mission is clear: creating pathways to improve the lives of veterans and their communities. Pancakes for Roger has raised thousands of dollars annually to support the University of Missouri Law School Veterans Clinic, where she also serves on the advisory board. Outside of work, Susan is a CrossFit and Strongman enthusiast, proudly benching over 200 pounds because yes, she really does slay dragons.

[02:19] Ellen Williams: Welcome, Susan, to this episode of Time to Press Pause.

[02:24] Susan L. Combs: Thank you.

[02:26] Ellen Williams: I'm very excited to have you here. You were introduced to me by a dear friend and I am very excited to hear your press pause story.

[02:37] Susan L. Combs: When you asked me about this, the first thing that came to mind is when my father passed seven years ago and I returned home to just be present with him. But then, in this past week, I've had something that happened. I'm like, oh my gosh, that's a big press pause. And that's current. In my daily life, I own an insurance brokerage and consulting firm. I do a lot of expert witnessing on medical malpractice cases all over the country. But then I also have a veterans nonprofit. And the veterans nonprofit is called Pancakes for Roger. We work on supporting veterans in their communities through grant opportunities and different programs that we run as well. In July, we were given a very generous donation of $20,000. We were absolutely thrilled. We've never gotten a donation of that magnitude. So we've interacted with this gentleman, it's been great. We have observed kind of some confusion and things like that, but we just rolled with it. We have recently opened up our grant application. So we took grant applications the month of September, and we're going to allocate these funds by the end of October. So that $20,000 went into our budgeting for allocating the dollars to help these veterans with our grants for our housing improvement fund. And he reached out last week and basically demanded that we make a donation of $14,000 to this project in his state. It's a project that we hadn't vetted, that we knew nothing about. To be honest, that would be basically 30% of the funds we have in our bank. And it's just not a prudent thing for us to do with those dollars. So it was a time that I said, okay, we got to press pause on this and really take a step back and make sure that we're doing things the right way. Because we're a nonprofit, this is not our money. This is the money set aside to help veterans and support them in their communities. I took it to the board. I have an incredible board. We really thought through this and we said, okay, we basically make the donation of $14,000 to this project. We return his full donation of $20,000, which would hurt. Or we can return him personally the $14,000, retain the $6,000 balance because we had expenses that we had already accounted for. We had paid for a press release to announce this donation and support veteran grants, marketing efforts, things like that. And it just didn't feel right that to give everything back because, again, we would be in a deficit with all of our other expenses. He threatened to call his attorney. And at the end of the day, when you make a donation to a nonprofit, there's IRS laws on our side. You make a donation and you can't have a take-back. But we're a new nonprofit. We don't need any bad publicity. And at the end of the day, we felt like we can't give that money to this other project when we don't know anything about it. We felt like we were being blackmailed into it. And I didn't like that feeling. And so we rallied the troops. We came up with those three possibilities. I presented it to the board and I said, let's vote on this because we had to act quickly because, again, he was threatening to call his lawyer. And it was very upsetting because we feel like there might be some personal things going on. We know there's been a lot of doctor's visits and things like that. And I'm always willing to give somebody a benefit of a doubt. But again, we needed to be able to act. So we voted and then we decided that we would give back $14,000 to him and he could do with it whatever he wanted. If he wanted to support that project, go right ahead. And then the $6,000 are going to be used to actually support a veteran grant in his state as well as cover our expenses. The thing that I think I was most proud of is the board didn't vote exactly the same. It wasn't a unanimous decision. There was a lot of conversation back and forth. People were passionate about different options. But we all came together. And we respected that there were differences there. We really rallied and also reminded ourselves that we didn't do anything wrong here. We're doing good. We're trying to support veterans the best way we can. By doing the option three that we ultimately chose, we're able to help more veterans that way. So we presented it to him, had to get the okay. He agreed to it. And so we were happy about that. Two days ago, I overnighted the check and a copy of the agreement, a revised IRS letter for the donation. And we're moving forward. So for us, it was definitely a press pause moment. Now we've updated our website citing the IRS law that basically donations are non-refundable and that they're used to support our programs, our grant funding, and moving our mission forward. So it was one of those things that I'm very glad that it happened when we were less than two years old and it was $20,000, not $200,000. Because the thing is with nonprofits, when things like that happen, a lot of times they've already spent the money before they get it. And so we've always been very conservative and very prudent with our dollars. So I'm very grateful that we do things how we do things. It's going to make us better going forward.

[07:33] Ellen Williams: Wow. I want to call it a fascinating story, but I know it was probably stressful and a little heartbreaking as well. You're talking about a nonprofit that has a different culture than a business, but still nonprofits need to be run the same as businesses. So the fact that you had an unforeseen challenge and needed to drop everything basically and figure out how to address this in a way that would in the end satisfy all parties, but truly maintain the integrity of your organization as well... that's a very interesting pause. Now, from the time that you received his request to the time that you voted to return the money, how long was that pause?

[08:39] Susan L. Combs: This all went down last Friday. There was stress through the weekend and then basically it consumed everything. The check was sent back on Wednesday. 72, 84 hours, I don't even know. But yeah, it was all-consuming. And I have three other companies to run. So it was having to pull back from that and then work later hours to account for that. I'm also in fourth quarter. I do health insurance mostly for a living. We're in open enrollment, gearing up for that. And so it's a lot of extra work on us. And then I was like, come on. And especially since we had just closed the grant application. It was definitely upsetting. It flat out sucked, to be honest. But I know we'll be better for it. I had somebody that said to me that she was not a glass half full or glass half empty. She was a glass refillable. And I kind of like that because I was like, there's going to be things that come up. I have a book that's called Pancakes for Roger: A Mentorship Guide for Slaying Dragons. So I even said to my board, I said, hey, we just slayed our first dragon. And I said, and I think we did remarkably well. So I will say that it gave me the opportunity to kind of lead too, rally the troops because I think sometimes people just, they don't want to have those hard conversations. They want to stick their head in the sand. And you can't do that. I don't want to call it a win-win because we're still out a lot. And it just means that, hey, we're going to have to hustle, get some more donors in and things like that so that we can still do the programs that we're forecasting for this next year.

[10:05] Ellen Williams: Yeah, it's tough to call that a win-win, but it's definitely, you came out on the other side with more knowledge. You said you updated your website, you're prepared for this to not happen again. I want to dial back into is your comment of, it enabled you to take a more leadership role and to have those tough conversations. Let's unpack that a little bit because tough conversations, they're difficult to lead into as well. Not just to have them, but how do you broach them? Now in this case, you had no choice. You had to have this tough conversation. But what was your approach to that?

[10:50] Susan L. Combs: I've been a business owner since I was 26 years old. So I've learned a lot of things along the way. What not to do and what to do. And anytime somebody says lawyer, you cease to talk. And I think a lot of times people keep pushing the envelope there. We had a board member that actually was the one that brought in this relationship and had been communicating with him. And as soon as he said lawyer, I said, you got to stop. I said, because anything we say now further exposes the organization to liability. When we handled the situation, we had to do it very carefully because we had to make sure that we were in fact acting on behalf of the betterment of the organization. The path that we chose was the best path for us. We all want to be able to sleep at night. And I will tell you that I reached out to other friends that have nonprofits and asked them if they ever had this situation. And everybody was like, no, you're crazy. Who would do that? And I said, I know. But I said, you know what? I said, learn from us. And so they're all updating their websites too and updating their donation forms so that there's no gray area on that stuff for them either.

[11:50] Ellen Williams: I love that you shared your experience to the benefit of other nonprofits as well. I also like that your solution really hinged on the ability to sleep well at night. I think integrity is certainly what I bring to the bank because in the end, and as you were saying, your reputation can be tarnished overnight when something like this happens, depending on how you move forward. Yes, you could have stood your ground, but at what ramification? Is it money or is it long-term decision? And I feel the same way. It's integrity is really the only thing I really have. I'm going to do the right thing by me and by you. So in that case, I guess I would call it a win-win because you did the right thing by him and you did the right thing by you. And you learned from it, you shared the experience, and now other organizations are learning from it, and all my podcast listeners are learning from it as well. And that's not exclusively a situation for nonprofits. To your point, the threat of, "I'm calling my attorney," is a threat. And whether you call their bluff or not, it's something to be taken seriously.

[13:10] Susan L. Combs: Yeah. And even in my corporate life, my entire staff will tell you, we're a commission-based business for the most part. And I can't even tell you what we make commission on different carriers and different products because we have always stood by the principle that if you do right by the client, the money will come. And that's just, it's always how I've lived. So I'll go to these insurance conferences and people be like trying to sell us products and saying, oh, you should push this. And then they're like, oh, and it's 18% commission. And I walk away because that's gross. That's not the first thing that comes to mind for us. We're like, we don't care about that. We want to care like what you're going to, how you're going to benefit our client. And then fine, we make money off it, great. One of my board members, when I was talking to him, he's a retired Lieutenant Colonel for the Marines, he said, we're going to bring in double that next year. We're leading with integrity. Maybe some people will hear this and it'll pull on their heartstrings. They're like, oh, maybe we give a hundred dollars to Pancakes for Roger. We'd love that because we're just really excited about our mission and the things that we're doing and the things we have planned in the future for sure.

[14:19] Ellen Williams: That's very exciting. And I commend your mission. I've been involved with various nonprofits for veterans over the course of my career, mostly donating time. I have one last question for you, Susan. I'm really intrigued on how you're going to answer this. What advice would you give leaders as to when they would identify it's time to press pause?

[14:43] Susan L. Combs: Yeah. I got an answer. So okay, my whole thing is everybody has that internal monologue. When something happens, I don't know if people swear on your podcast, but mine's always, "What the F?" I'll keep it clean for you. So everybody has that phrase. So anytime you have that phrase, to me, that is your golden rule of you need to press pause. Because even if you know you're in the right, even if you're going to respond to something, you are going to respond emotionally because you had that initial gut reaction. So I always tell people to have a tone checker. I mean, now with Chat GPT, it's incredible. You don't even need a person anymore. You can just write what you really want to write and then be like, "Yeah, make this nicer and pull out the snark." And it pulls it right out. But I've always had two people in my office that when I'm annoyed by something that happened, I always send the response to them to read through because inevitably you're going to have emotion in it because we're just emotional creatures, right? They give me kind of some advice and some guidance. That's the best advice I can give because when you have that initial reaction, like that, you should just be like, press pause.

[15:46] Ellen Williams: I wasn't really sure how you were going to respond to that because your pause was brought to you, not, "Hey, it's time to press pause." So I love that. And I think that's great advice because inevitably something is going to happen that you have more of an emotional than a professional response to. And certainly we all live through that. I live through that. I give myself 10 minutes. And that's taken many years of only needing 10 minutes. But I know, I'm like, all right, get up, walk away, do the pause. But usually 10 minutes later, if I'm over it, then I knew it was an emotional response. But if I'm not, then I know, okay, this needs to be addressed and maybe it's one of those tough conversations. I appreciate that advice. I think it's right on point. Susan, this was really wonderful. Thank you for sharing such a unique story and sharing it with additional nonprofits so that your lessons spread as well. And the great wisdom on pressing pause.

[16:56] Susan L. Combs: Thanks so much for having me, Ellen. I appreciate it.

[16:59] Voiceover: Thank you for listening to this episode of Time to Press Pause. If you'd like to learn more about Susan, visit combsandco.com. If you'd like to learn more about Pancakes for Roger, visit pancakesforroger.org. If you'd like to learn more about me, visit thesalientstrategist.com. And be sure to sign up for my newsletter to get the most up-to-date information about my upcoming book, Creating Time: The Key to Productivity and Peace, due out in February 2026. 

And please listen again wherever you listen to your podcasts.