Where it started
My parents dropped out of the picture in my later childhood years. My grandmother stepped in and adopted my siblings and me. She had already raised one family, and she chose to raise another.
As a kid I also started Taekwondo. I trained for close to eight years and earned a conditional second-degree black belt as a teenager. The dojang gave me structure when I needed it, and it gave me a code to live by.
Mentality creates reality. I’ve said it so often that it became my slogan. I learned it on a mat, and I’ve tested it in every business I’ve built since 2011.
The code I carry
Taekwondo hands every student five tenets: Courtesy, Integrity, Perseverance, Self-Control, and Indomitable Spirit. It also hands you ten commandments:
- Be loyal to your country.
- Be a good son or daughter to your parents.
- Be faithful to your spouse.
- Be on good terms with your brothers and sisters.
- Be loyal to your friends.
- Be respectful to your elders.
- Respect and trust your teachers.
- Never take life unjustly.
- Never retreat in battle.
- Always finish what you started.
I’ve done my best to build my life around them. A few show up in my work every week. Integrity means I tell a client the truth about their systems, even when the truth is inconvenient for both of us. The tenth commandment is the reason I keep businesses running past the five-year mark. And when a project goes sideways, I stay in the room and fix it. That’s my version of never retreating.
Run lean and wear the hats
I’ve started a lot of projects. Several of my businesses have lasted more than five years, and in most of them I carried the bulk of the work: sales, delivery, support, and the back office.
Small businesses and startups can’t hire a department for every problem. You keep overhead low, you learn the job in front of you, and you spend money where it produces a result. Wearing every hat taught me where each dollar and each hour goes, and I still run my companies that way.
Stand in the middle
I come at business from the tech side, and I plant myself between the engineers and the business people. I speak both languages.
An executive tells me the number they need to hit. I turn it into a plan an engineer can build. An engineer tells me why a deadline will slip, and I turn that into a choice the executive can make. Projects stall in that handoff, so I put myself in it and own the outcome.
Learn fast and protect people
I’ve focused on cybersecurity since 2016. I study how attackers get in so I can help families and companies keep them out.
That work trained me to adapt. I can learn a new tech platform in under a week, and I’ve done it dozens of times across CRMs, ERPs, automation tools, phone systems, and cloud services. Hand me a system on Monday and I’ll be building in it by Friday.
Find your who
For years I asked how to get something done, then did it myself. Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy gave me a better question in Who Not How: who can do this? It took me a while to act on it.
In Rocket Fuel, Gino Wickman and Mark C. Winters describe two seats every company needs filled, the Visionary and the Integrator. I’m a Visionary with deep tech skills. I’ve now found a business partner who sits in the Integrator seat and covers sales, HR, and part of operations. I handle the tech our current project depends on, and each of us spends the day on work we’re good at.
Reasonable capitalism
I believe in capitalism with a conscience. Build something, earn well, and spread it around. Pay your people fairly, help the next founder get started, and put money back into your community instead of hoarding it.
I want my businesses to lift the people around them, and I want to help others build their own. That’s the life I think is worth living.
My grandmother, eight years on the mat, and fifteen years of building companies all taught me the same thing. Mentality creates reality. Decide who you’re going to be, then go do the work.
