Beginning in November 2017, Cindy and I had both stepped away from full-time employment. Less than 18 months prior, our combined salaries were nearly triple what we had earned as recently as 2012. When Cindy stepped away from her position and into the world of self-employment, it was based on a sign...
I’m forever grateful for the opportunity I had to maintain the part-time position with that small company through 2018 and 2019. The 15-20 hours I spent with them each week helped build systems many smaller businesses never establish, but it also provided us with a bit of stability while we built mo...
Think back to each piece of what I’ve shared here: the strain when reading the non-compete language buried in a lengthy contract, the institutional conflict that followed and our refusal to compromise our values, leading to the courage, cooperation, influence, and systems we’ve built from the seeds ...
If you’ve spent much time with me at all, and you have even a basic understanding of the DISC Model of Human Behavior, you likely already know just how Driven I am; extremely face-paced and very task-focused. That said, getting results and winning are what fuel me. I would have enjoyed few things mo...
Time provides us with distance from adversities, adversities that often seem monumental in the moment. Those same adversities, when viewed through a lens of time, end up being relatively insignificant in our bigger picture. That’s absolutely the case when I look back on that 2017 event. Our entire c...
A few times to this point, I’ve referenced our 2017 experience in hosting that event an hour away as a “battle.” While it certainly seemed like one at the time, it was really just another adversity we had to work through - and a relatively minor one at that. It was by no means the most significant i...
I received a call one evening a few years back from a friend named Rick, just a day or so after he watched me turn red-faced but choose to walk away rather than throwing someone out of a second story window. Early in that conversation, Rick said “I’ll bet you’re the kind of guy who would sacrifice $...
Had we signed the contract to partner with that institution in hosting our 2017 event, I have no doubt that attendance (and revenue) would have been significantly higher - that day. Living through each adversity prior to that provided a tremendous foundation for us to stand on in that moment, though...
Attendance at the event we hosted an hour north of us was just under half of what we had locally. Considering it was just two weeks after our local event, in an area where we had few existing relationships, and considering all the nonsense with the institution (whose campus was just a few miles away...
I’m forever grateful for the opportunities I’ve had throughout my life in a capitalistic society. Healthy competition between companies in the private sector forces everyone to work tirelessly toward building their best possible product or service. When all things are even close to being equal, qual...
As I closed Leveraging Leadership Growth, I stressed the importance of constantly working to grow and strengthen every professional relationship possible. When Cindy and I left our roles in large organizations, we both had extensive networks internally but found ourselves starting from scratch exter...
Cindy and I made some of the boldest leaps of our lives in 2016 and 2017, leaps that would have never happened without a complete willingness to accept full responsibility for our definite decisions. Even then, stepping away from both our full time jobs required every bit of unwavering courage we ha...
