A lot of business owners say they want to “build a brand.” What they usually mean is visibility. More reach.More impressions.More awareness. But visibility isn’t brand equity.And attention doesn’t compound if trust isn’t underneath it. What most businesses are actually missing isn’t better marketing—it’s a foundation strong enough to support
It doesn’t happen often—but every once in a while, life gives you just enough distance from yourself to see clearly. For me, it showed up last week on a family vacation. Not during the fun parts.Not during the noise. It showed up early in the morning at the hotel gym,
Life will hand you enough real problems.Drama is the optional one. Most people don’t invite drama—they tolerate it. Slowly. Politely. Repeatedly. Until confirmed chaos becomes part of their operating system. Businesses lose momentum. Relationships rot. Focus fractures. And somehow, the blame always lands somewhere else. Looking back, last year wasn’t
Someone asked me recently if I had a vision board. It caught me off guard—not because I don’t have vision, but because I’ve never needed a cork board full of future wants to orient my life or my business. That question forced me to pause and ask something more important:
SUMMARY In this episode we interview Rob Johnson, Founder of Ultimate Defense Technologies (https://www.ultimatedefense.com/) and previous founder of Sparrow One and Ariel Med, to learn the traits and skills necessary to create multiple million dollar businesses. INSIGHTS What are Rob’s thoughts on the most important trait when starting a businessWhat
Legacy Was the Wrong Word In 2023, I was asked to speak on legacy at a nonprofit annual review event. I was excited. Honored. Ready. Legacy had become a theme in my life—something I believed deeply in. I thought of it as the ultimate measure of a person: how they
Knowing When to Fold Is a Skill Every industry has a lifecycle. If you stay in business long enough, you don’t just witness cycles—you feel them. The early momentum. The gold rush. The crowd. The compression. The slow realization that what once worked… doesn’t anymore. I’ve been in the business
Every day there’s another conversation about scalable business models. More revenue. More users. More reach. More speed. Growth is treated like virtue. Scale like inevitability. What’s missing from most of those conversations is the one thing that actually determines whether a business survives what it’s chasing: Sustainability. Because growth without
There’s a moment that happens as you get older—usually quietly—when all the scattered lessons you’ve picked up stop living as individual ideas and start snapping together. Not as answers.As patterns. Last night, that happened for me over a vodka tonic and an unexpectedly good conversation. It wasn’t loud or dramatic.
Today was one of those days. The kind where you wake up already behind.The kind where every conversation feels slightly off.The kind where nothing technically explodes—but nothing goes right either. Lack of sleep did me in. And once you start a day tired, the margin for error disappears fast. We