The work
Twenty-five years, and it has looked like a lot of different things.
I started in sales and spent six years running a territory before anyone asked me to build anything. That part matters, because it means I learned the business from inside the job rather than from above it.
Then I was asked to build something that did not exist. I built a business education division and a school for owners inside one of the largest distributors in the industry, along with the four textbooks that became its curriculum. More than three hundred owners came through that program. I finished an MBA at the University of Iowa along the way.
After that the work got more personal. I bought businesses, sold them, ran them, and guaranteed the debt myself. I have been on both sides of more than a hundred transactions. I have also been the person responsible for payroll, for people, for capital, and for the consequences of decisions that turned out to be wrong.
That experience included failure.
Growth outran the systems that were supposed to hold it. The company came apart. It ran through receivership and, eventually, personal bankruptcy. That season took my assumptions about success apart and made me rebuild both my work and my sense of who I was.
The work I remember most is quieter than any of that. Owners who got their evenings back. Families who came through a sale better than they expected. Businesses that survived the year that should have ended them.
