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...

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...

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...

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 $...

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...

Looking back, several of the biggest leaps Cindy and I have ever taken occurred in a very short period of time. As I’ve shared several times before, I’m not detailing the adversities we encountered along the way for sympathy. And I’m certainly not bragging about it; I’m thankful Cindy tolerated me t...

In late July 2014, I received the best performance review in my career. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I deserved it. I had hired nearly 200 external candidates and filled at least a third as many internal positions, secured over $150 thousand dollars in grants to offset some of the training cost...

Regardless of the challenge or adversity, the one seed I’ve nurtured consistently since my early teens has been a strong work ethic. That, coupled with so many other leadership attributes I’ve slowly in the years since, helped me navigate the near-foreclosure experience, the crazy lowball offer that...

Here’s a quick reminder: I’m not sharing any of this for sympathy. Hell, I don’t want it! I’m also not reliving any of this to shine a negative light on anyone. If that were the case, I’d be listing their names and tagging them on social media - and some of them absolutely deserve that and far more....

Living through such an extended period of scarcity and digging our way out of that near-foreclosure experience certainly strengthened our resolve, but it also provided us with seeds we could nurture toward significantly greater opportunities later on. Those seeds served as a foundation for the confi...

Because we chose to take a moral stand and just were not willing to compromise our values, our financial opportunities tied to that multi-level marketing venture never really recovered. But digging in on what I knew was right provided more value than we would have ever gotten there; the seeds that v...