Nicolas Breedlove on the Real Decision Behind the Fraud
Twelve years ago, Nicolas Breedlove was scaling NVB Playgrounds from $20 million to $40 million in revenue. He had distributors in nearly every state, manufacturing operations in three cities, and a team he believed was rowing in the same direction.
Then a distributor called.
“Why is your employee selling in our territory under a different brand?”
That call uncovered a fraud that had been running quietly inside the company. A senior employee had set up fake distributorships, rerouted leads through them, and resold Nicolas’s own product into territories that belonged to long-standing partners. Four other employees knew. Some were writing fake Google reviews to prop up the side operation. The entire department was gone within a week.
Most founders would tell that story as the moment they tightened the controls. Nicolas tells it as the moment he had to decide what kind of company he actually wanted to run — and whether he was willing to become the kind of leader who could build it.
This week on Unstoppable, we get into the decision behind the decision. Not “how do you handle internal fraud?” The harder question: what kind of founder do you become when the threat is inside the room?
The Fraud Was Not the Story
There’s a clean version of this where Nicolas catches the bad actor, fires the team, installs new systems, and the company moves on. Skip it.
The real story is that the fraud was a symptom. It surfaced what was already broken.
Nicolas was operating as a typical founder. Too many hats. Not enough trust in anyone but himself. The systems lacked data. The checks and balances were thin. He had built a culture where one person could quietly own enough surface area to set up fake distributorships and keep them running for months.
In his own words: “We have too much control. We want all the control. And then we get so surprised when things go off track.”
Nothing about that ending was a surprise. The setup made it almost inevitable.
That recognition is the part most founders skip. When something goes wrong inside the company, the easy story is that the wrong person did the wrong thing. The harder story is that the wrong system tolerated the wrong person until the cost became unignorable.
The Decision Was Not “Fire Him.” It Was “Who Do I Want to Be Next?”
Terminating the employee was the obvious move. So were the lawsuits, the recordings, the lawyers telling Nicolas to stay silent while his distributors were asking pointed questions in the meantime.
That wasn’t the decision that mattered.
The decision that mattered came later, after the fallout, the rumor mill, the personal attacks, and the night Nicolas realized four other people had been in on it.
He had two real options.
One: stay safe. Right-size the company down to a footprint he could personally control, eat the lost relationships, and rebuild slowly inside something small enough to manage from the chair he was already sitting in.
Two: keep building. Accept that the version of him who had built the company to $20 million was not the version who could take it to $40 million and beyond. Change the operator. Add the systems. Upgrade the friend group. Trust people again — but build the infrastructure that made that trust load-bearing instead of decorative.
His wife Lacey advocated for option one. She still does, sometimes. Nicolas chose option two.
The point worth pulling out is that option two was not the obvious choice. It looked harder. It required him to become a different person. Stop drinking. Stop running the place by personality. Admit he wasn’t actually the CEO he’d been pretending to be in some of the seats he was sitting in.
That’s the decision the fraud forced him to make. Most founders never face it cleanly. He did.
What Nicolas Knew About Himself That Saved the Company
The most useful thing he said in our conversation was this:
“I am not the CEO 24 hours a day. I am the marketing guy. I am a lot of things, but I am not always the perfect little nice knitted little CEO that people think exists in the world.”
That sentence is doing real work.
It’s the founder admitting, out loud, that he is not equally good at every seat in his own company. He loves marketing. He loves selling. He loves building. He is not the operations guy. He is not the accounting guy. Every time he has tried to be those things, he has gotten the company in trouble.
The post-fraud rebuild wasn’t about Nicolas becoming a better CEO across the board. It was about Nicolas getting honest about which seats he belonged in and hiring people who came from billion-dollar companies to sit in the seats he didn’t.
That clarity sounds obvious in hindsight. It’s not. Most founders confuse “I started this” with “I am the right person to run every function of this.” The first one earns you the chair. The second one quietly capsizes the company.
The Friend Group Was the Problem
This is the part of the conversation worth sitting with for a minute.
When the fraud surfaced, Nicolas’s first instinct was internal. What systems did I miss? What people do I cut? How do I rebuild trust inside the four walls?
The harder realization came externally.
His friend group didn’t include the people who could help him think his way out. He enjoyed the people he was around. He wasn’t growing in a positive direction from them. So he made an uncomfortable upgrade. He joined Mastermind Talks. He started doing Wayfinder trips with entrepreneurs operating at very different scales. He put himself in rooms where he wasn’t the smartest person and forced himself to be coachable.
In his words: “I hated being the smartest person in the room. I was kind of unapproachable. I was a very stubborn guy back then. If I didn’t know it, why would I want to? Not a very smart way of going about things.”
The advisor upgrade was the leverage. Not the new ERP. Not the modified EOS. Not the checks and balances. Those mattered, but they were downstream of the rooms he was now sitting in.
If you are running a company and you haven’t changed your inner circle in five years, that’s a flag. The people you are around either compound your blind spots or correct them. There is no neutral.
Core Values When You Actually Need Them
Nicolas used to think core values were Burger King wall paint. Useless. Decorative.
The fraud changed that view in a way no leadership book could.
What core values actually do, when they are real, is two things. They tell you who fits and who does not. And they hold up under pressure — when a tariff shock, a pandemic, a freight-route disruption, or a key employee betrayal forces the company to bend without breaking.
If your values are decorative, they won’t hold any of that weight. If they’re real, they let you make the brutal calls without losing the company in the process. As Nicolas put it: “Give you a hug or hug you goodbye. There ain’t no in between.”
That’s the operating mode of a founder who has been through a real fire. Not harsh. Clear.
The Self-Check Before You Rebuild
If you are sitting somewhere in this story right now — internal betrayal, a key person who turned, a department you might need to cut — here is the diagnostic worth running.
Did the system tolerate this, or did one bad actor outmaneuver a good system?
If the system tolerated it, the rebuild is not about the person. It’s about the operating model. Replace one human and the same vulnerability will find the next one.
Are you running every seat in this company by personality?
If yes, the company isn’t actually a company yet. It’s an extension of you. That works at $5 million. It breaks at $20 million. It catastrophizes at $40 million.
Who is in the room with you when you make the rebuild calls?
If the answer is your same five friends from a decade ago, get into rooms where you are the least experienced person. The leverage is in who is around you, not in the new framework.
Are you willing to become a different operator?
Nicolas had to give up the drinking, the party life, the unapproachable stubbornness, and most of the seats he thought were his job. The rebuild required a different person to land it. He became that person. Most founders try to rebuild without changing the operator. That’s why most rebuilds fail.
What He Took Forward
Twelve years later, MVP Playgrounds crossed $60 million in revenue, expanded into custom manufacturing, and Nicolas launched playgrounds.com — a SaaS product aimed at the 400,000 annual pediatric playground injuries in the United States.
The throughline is not the recovery. It’s the operator upgrade that made the recovery possible.
You don’t get to keep scaling on the same operating system that broke. The fraud was the forcing function. The rebuild was a leadership change at the top — the leader kept the same name, but became a different person.
That is the work most founders avoid until something inside the building forces it.
Listen to the Full Episode
Nicolas Breedlove is the CEO of MVP Playgrounds, one of the largest commercial playground equipment companies in the United States, and the author of Biography of Play. In our full conversation on Unstoppable, we cover the rumor campaign that followed the fraud, the role his wife Lacey played in the rebuild, why core values went from garbage to load-bearing, and how he runs the company today as the marketing guy who refuses to pretend he’s anything else.
If you’re at this inflection — a company that has outgrown its founder, a betrayal that revealed a deeper crack, a rebuild that is about to demand more from you than you have given before — the question is not whether you can fix it.
The question is who you’re willing to become to make it hold.
Stay unstoppable.
If you’re working through a pivotal decision of your own, The Edge Forums is where founders, executives, and operators sharpen the decisions most at risk of defining them. Apply or ask a question here.
Unstoppable is a decision intelligence podcast for leaders who refuse to settle. Hosted by Jana. New episodes weekly.
