"I didn't actually control my own time. Somebody else did."

I spent seven years at a job I thought was going to be my career. I rarely took time off — I was one of those guys who just banked his vacation days instead of using them. One day I finally planned to take my son to an appointment. Something came up and we couldn't go, so I just wanted to spend the day with him instead. I called my boss to take the day. He told me the other supervisor and lead weren't in, so I could do whatever I wanted — but he was leaving. I ended up working that shift instead of being with my family. That was the moment I realized I didn't actually control my own time. Somebody else did. So I put in my two weeks' notice and left.

What came after wasn't a clean plan — it was years of figuring it out. I started a landscaping business and it went well, but come winter I wasn't sure it was really "it," so I tried selling insurance. Two months in, with no paycheck, that idea was over. I picked up work with my brother-in-law's electrical company, took odd remodeling jobs on the side, and pieced things together for about a year and a half.

In 2018, I landed a job I actually loved — five days a week, no weekends, home early most days. I thought I'd found the one. Then another company inside the same building bought us out, and everything changed overnight. I went from hourly to salary and started working every weekend, crazy hours, with no relief in sight. When they started looking for reasons to push me out during a rough season for the business, I beat them to it — I put in my two weeks and left.

Since 2019, I've been building my own thing, on my own terms. That's the pattern I keep coming back to: every time I handed my schedule over to someone else, it eventually cost me the thing I cared about most — time with my family. Every time, that's what pushed me back to building something of my own.

Coaching is something I've wanted to do for years. I kept telling myself I wasn't ready, that I needed to learn more first, that it wasn't the right time. There's always another reason to wait. I finally stopped listening to them.

Along the way, I'd already been doing the work without calling it that. I helped one guy go from a job and a vision to running his own business, with his own truck, trailer, and paying clients, in under two years. That's when I saw I had something real to offer beyond my own hustle.

So that's who I work with now. People who are burnt out and can't name what they want yet. People with an idea they keep circling but haven't tested. People who know something has to change and have no idea what. I've been all three. I'm not going to hand you a plan and send you off with it — we figure out where you're actually going, and we don't stop at figuring it out.