Vlad Sopov Featured on the Cover of Safety Harbor Living, November 2026

The following feature, written by Vlad Sopov, appeared in the November 2026 issue of Safety Harbor Living.

When you arrive somewhere with nothing, you learn quickly that nobody owes you a leadership title or a seat at the table.

I never planned on being a writer. If you’d told me 20 years ago that I’d end up with a finalist’s medal from a national book award program sitting on my desk, I would have laughed. My path here wasn’t a straight line. It was closer to a series of decisions that only make sense looking backward.

I moved to the United States in 2010 from Moldova, a small country in Eastern Europe most people have never heard of. I came with very little English language skill, and even less certainty about what came next. The transition wasn’t easy. I had to rebuild almost everything from scratch: communication, career, a sense of where I belonged. There were plenty of hard days early on, moments where I felt like I was starting from zero, while everyone around me already knew the rules of the game.

But there were unexpected joys too. Small wins meant a lot. Landing my first real job in web development felt enormous. Understanding a joke in English for the first time felt like a milestone. Over time, those small wins added up into a feeling of belonging, an actual career, and eventually a life I’m proud of.

That immigrant experience shaped almost everything about how I think, including the topics I wrote about in my book. You either take ownership of what’s in front of you, or you don’t move forward at all. That idea became the backbone of my work.

My debut book, Take the Wheel: How to Influence Anyone and Be the Leader People Want to Follow, is built around two concepts I think get confused all the time: ownership and influence. Ownership means taking responsibility for outcomes even when it’s not officially your job. Influence means earning people’s trust so they choose to follow you, rather than backing you because they have to. I wanted readers to walk away understanding that real leadership has very little to do with title and everything to do with those two ingredients.

Writing the book wasn’t a linear, predictable process either. Most of the work happened in small pockets of time around a full-time career in marketing technology. I’d write early in the morning or late at night, whenever I could find the space. Inspiration came mostly from real situations I’d lived through in my career, moments where I either got leadership right or badly wrong, and had to learn something from it.

This community played a bigger role in the book’s journey than people might expect. My neighbors and friends across the street, Rob and Suzanne Dauberman, were a genuine source of support while I was writing, the kind of encouragement that keeps you going on the days you want to quit. And in a twist I still find a little funny, after the book came out, I was offered the VP position on our HOA board. Having a book about leadership essentially tested in your own neighborhood, and possessing the ownership and influence to pass it, is not something I expected.

Safety Harbor has been home for 16 years now, and it’s shaped my life in ways that go beyond just being a nice place to live. It’s offered community, real friendships, and now, apparently, a small taste of local leadership. My wife Nadia and I have been married for 14 years, and through the marketing of my book, our cat Carbon has become something of a local celebrity. She’s a regular character in my professional LinkedIn posts, helping me build a following of thousands online who tune in to follow her antics as much as anything else I have to say.

If I could offer one piece of advice to anyone chasing a dream while their life is also transforming around them, it’s this: don’t wait for the perfect moment, because it’s not coming. I wrote this book while working full-time, during a period that included real uncertainty in my career. The opening was never going to be convenient. Start anyway, in the pockets of time you actually have.

And if there’s something I want people to know about my journey that might not be apparent from the outside, it’s that none of my success came with a grand plan. It resulted from consistently choosing to take ownership of whatever was in front of me, one decision at a time, starting way back when I had nothing but a plane ticket and very little mastery of English. Everything since has just been the compounding results of this habit.

Take the Wheel was named a Finalist in the 2026 Next Generation Indie Book Awards, Business category, and is available on Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle.

→ Learn more about Take the Wheel

Featured in Safety Harbor Living, November 2026, published by Best Version Media. Photography by LeShayne Maddex.