From the Dirt

I hadn't always been there.

I spent four years in the Marine Corps. When I came out, I took a desk job in human resources as a compensation analyst — a real job, with a salary and benefits and a path. The kind of job your father would tell you to hold onto. I had a wife. We'd just had our second child, a daughter, days old.

Then things at work went south. The way they do, in places like that, in moments like that. I'm not going to relitigate it here. I quit.

I want you to notice something about that moment, because it's the moment everything turns. Most men in that position, with a brand-new baby and a paycheck on the line, would have eaten whatever they had to eat to keep the job. I didn't. I have always been built that way. I will suffer loss before I'll suffer a bad name. That's been a sentence I've lived inside for forty years, and it's cost me a lot of money. I'd do it again every time.

So I quit the desk job. And right about then, a friend of mine offered me eleven-fifty an hour to come learn construction.

I took the job. I'd never swung a hammer for money. I didn't know a floor joist from a foot stool. But I was willing to learn, and eleven-fifty was a paycheck, and a paycheck was what I needed.

Less than a month in, he laid me off.

Right before Thanksgiving. The same friend who'd hired me. He was a good man — still is — and the work just dried up, the way it does in this business when you're small and the season turns. But on the wrong side of that math was me, my wife, and two kids under five, and a freezer that needed filling.

If you've ever been laid off right before a holiday, you know the particular flavor of that feeling. It's not just I don't have a job. It's the people who depend on me are about to find out I don't have a job. It's the longest walk in the world from the truck to the kitchen door, and you make it anyway.

The friend who'd laid me off had an idea. He always had an idea. Let's build vine trees and sell them, he said.

If you don't know what a vine tree is: you go out in the woods, you find the kind of vines that grow up into the canopy and choke a tree out, and you pull them down. You bend them into the shape of an upside-down cone. You wrap them with white Christmas lights. People buy them for their porches.

That was the plan. Two grown men with a layoff and a baby each, going to make Christmas porch decorations out of the woods.

I'm telling you: we did it. We pulled vines out of trees all winter. We built dozens of those things. We set up at a flea market and sold almost none of them. I learned an early business lesson at that flea market — that the people you're trying to sell to are usually not the people who'd actually buy. The right buyer was somewhere else.

There was a reseller at that flea market who lowballed us. I told him no thanks and watched him walk away. Then, somewhere between the door and the parking lot, I changed my mind. Not because I'd softened on the price — I just realized I'd rather sell at half than not sell at all this week. I chased him down. I caught him before he got to his truck. I sold him the lot at half what we'd been asking.

That reseller turned out to supply a chain of local stores. He told me, if you can keep making them at half price, I'll buy every one you can produce. And he did. All winter. Cash on the spot.

That was the first time I really understood that a real business has a real customer, and not a flea market full of strangers. I was twenty-seven years old and I had just learned my first business lesson, two pulled vines and a wad of small bills at a time.

By the end of that winter I'd seen my friend pull cash out of self-employment in a way I'd never seen anyone make money before. Not bigger numbers — easier numbers. Cash for the work, on the day, no two-week-pay-period bureaucracy. I looked at him and thought, this isn't that hard. I can do this.

I told my wife I was going to run my own ad in January. I asked my brother if I could borrow his hammer.

I want to be clear about something here, because I think it matters. I was not brave. I was desperate, which is a different thing entirely. Brave is what you call it when you have a choice. Desperate is when you've run out of choices. The reason I started my company is the same reason a lot of men start their company. I needed to feed my kids and I'd run out of better ideas.

That first ad ran the third week of January. I had a phone, a borrowed tool bag, that hammer, the speed square, the five-dollar tape, and an Excel spreadsheet I'd started keeping in the corner of my mind. The spreadsheet wasn't a real thing yet. It was just a habit of asking, what does this cost me, separate from what I'm charging? That question would eventually become everything. But at the time, it was just a nag in my head.

The phone rang. I went and did the work. I came home. I had no idea what I was doing.

I want to be honest about this part because there's no point in writing any of this down if you can't.

The first stretch was rough. I priced everything wrong. I priced it wrong out of two reasons, both of them mine. I priced it wrong out of goodwill, because I felt bad asking for what I needed when the customer in front of me clearly needed the work done. And I priced it wrong out of ignorance, because I didn't actually know what my work cost me to perform. I was guessing. Most of the trade is guessing, when you start, and you don't even know that you're guessing.

I went to work in the cold. I went to work in the heat. I went to work in the rain and in the snow. I worked through injuries. I worked through illness. I worked through nights I shouldn't have worked through and through paydays that didn't come the way I'd told my wife they would.

I reminded myself every morning, before I walked out the door, that I wasn't doing it for me. I was doing it for three people. My wife, and my two kids.

I wrote something during those years that I came across again last spring. I didn't think it was going to make it into anything, but I think it might be the most honest thing I've ever written down:

I was struggling bad for money. Fundamentally, I am a very honest person. I will suffer loss so I don't earn a bad name. More than once learning this craft, I lost. I have lost a lot — that's not to say I haven't had wins, I've had many wins and some were big — but I was losing hard at this moment. I remember waking up and realizing I sucked at business. I just wanted enough, you know what I mean. Just enough to get by and give my wife and kids a little extra. So I bit down hard on the mouth piece and charged in head on. Punching, kicking, biting. Praying for the bell, and wishing I had a cornerman, but I didn't.

I read that back to myself now and I can still feel that morning. Praying for the bell. Wishing I had a cornerman.

I didn't have one. There was no one in my corner. My wife loved me, and she was in the kitchen, but she couldn't be in the corner because she didn't know the fight either. There was no veteran in the trade who took me aside. There was no business mentor who looked at my numbers and said son, here's where you're bleeding. I was alone in the ring and I had no idea what round I was in or what the score was.

Most of what I'm building now is for the man who's in that round. Because there are an awful lot of him out there, and he doesn't have a cornerman either.

A few years into being out on my own, I broke my leg.

It wasn't on the job. I was training Brazilian jiu-jitsu — which is a thing I picked up in my thirties because some part of me has always needed to fight someone, even if it's a friend on a mat. I took a bad fall in training. I broke my leg badly enough that I couldn't go climb a ladder the next morning.

If you're a one-man shop and you can't climb a ladder, you don't have a shop. So I limped down to the Carpenters' union hall and asked to be put on a list. I figured I'd take whatever they'd give me until my leg healed up, then go back out on my own.

That was eight years ago, the first time I limped into Local 472. Eight years.

I went into the union as a scaffold builder. Nobody starts at the top in the trade and I didn't want to. I wanted to be the guy who showed up and did what was asked, and I wanted to be paid fair for it. Local 472 did both.

In a couple of years I was a journeyman carpenter. In a couple more I was a foreman — first on scaffold, then on carpentry. By the end of my time there, I was running over twenty men. I was ordering material. I was hitting production. I was enforcing safety and policy. I was making the kinds of decisions that real businesses make, every day, on real money, but I wasn't the owner of the money. I was the foreman of it.

I tell people now: the union taught me the parts of business that being out on my own couldn't. When you're alone with a hammer, you can't learn how to schedule six men onto three rooms. You can't learn how to push a crew without breaking them. You can't learn what it feels like to be the person responsible for everyone else's day, and then have to face the boss when it goes wrong.

The union finished my education. The dirt years taught me how to work. The union years taught me how to run.

Here's the part of the story most contractors won't say out loud.

For about eight years, I cycled. I went self-employed for a while. I learned what I could. I refined my system. I priced wrong, then less wrong, then close to right. When I couldn't keep it together, I went back into the union for a season and moneyed up. Then I'd take another run at being on my own.

I'm not proud of it and I'm not ashamed of it. It was what I had to do. Every cycle, the system got a little better. Every cycle, I came back with a little more capital and a little more clarity. The man who went out on his own the fifth time was a very different operator than the one who went out the first time.

If you're sitting somewhere right now thinking about whether you have to choose between a job and your own business, hear me on this: the answer is sometimes both, in alternation. That's what I did. There is no shame in going back to a paycheck while you figure your business out. There is shame in pretending you've figured it out when you haven't.

My last year in the local, I cleared just under one hundred and eighty thousand dollars. That's good money in the trade. That's a number a lot of men spend their whole careers trying to reach.

I walked away from it to build this.

I need to back up, because somewhere in those losing years — sometime in that first stretch when I was alone and bleeding — I sat down at my kitchen table and I built the thing that ended up saving me. Not me alone — the version of me twenty-five years later, the one writing this, has him to thank too.

I couldn't afford accounting software. I couldn't afford an accountant. I couldn't afford the books that were actually any good — and the ones I could afford were full of fluff, words taking up space because the publisher needed a word count. I picked up one book after another and put each one down the same way: this is not for a man in my situation.

So I built it myself, in Excel, one painful row at a time.

I called it BASE.

The thing I'd been missing — the thing nobody had taught me — was the distinction between what the job costs and what my life costs. They're not the same thing. Every contractor knows what the job costs, more or less, because the job is in front of him. But almost nobody, in our trade, knows what their life costs. Not the way you have to know it if you're going to run a business that funds the life.

BASE was the answer to that question. What is the floor under my life — separate from what I do for a living — that my business has to clear, before any of this is worth doing?

I built it stripped down. I cut everything. I lived on ramen and gas money. I bought the cheap brand of every single thing I bought. I came from the dirt and I knew how to live in the dirt, but I also knew my kids weren't going to grow up that way if I could help it. The first version of BASE was bare survival. It was awful to live on. It worked.

It worked, because for the first time I knew what number my business had to hit before I was even breathing. Below that number, I was drowning. At that number, I was still. Above that number — and this was the part I'd never been told — above that number was where a life happened.

BASE alone is a survival number. It will keep you breathing. It will not give you a life.

A few years in, when I'd hit BASE enough times in a row to believe I could plan past it, I added the second half of the system. I called it BALL, for Basic Amount Living Large.

BALL is the increment. Every year I hit my milestones, I bumped my number up by three to five percent. Not a doubling. Not a windfall. A raise, the way a real job gives you a raise — disciplined, predictable, a function of having actually done the work to deserve it.

Four BALLs is a home run. That's the language I use now — four balls and you've crossed home plate. By the time you've taken four annual increases on top of your BASE, you've built a business that runs at about seventy-five percent of its own efficiency. You can step away. You can take a week. You can take a month if you've done it right. The thing has its own gravity.

Most contractors in this country are pitching from the mound their whole career and never round first base. I want to teach the trade how to round the bases.

There is a moment in my business life that, when I tell it, sounds like a joke. It isn't a joke. It is the most accurate picture of who I am that I know how to draw.

I needed a strategic plan. I didn't have a strategic planner. I had a Rand McNally Road Atlas and a compass — the kind you draw circles with, not the kind that finds north.

I cut Kentucky out of the atlas. Kentucky is split across two pages, so I cut out both pages and taped them together on my kitchen table. Then I drew three circles.

The smallest circle covered my hometown. Ashland, Kentucky, and across one river, Ironton, Ohio, and across another, Huntington, West Virginia. The Tri-State. That was my home market.

The middle circle had its center over Lexington, two hours away. A two-hour radius. That was where I wanted to expand to next, because Lexington is a real city with real money and a real construction economy.

The outer circle — the ambition circle — included Knoxville, Columbus, Cincinnati. The mid-tier cities I could reach from a Lexington headquarters if I ever built one.

That was the business plan. Three pencil circles on two taped-together pages of a Rand McNally Atlas, sitting on my kitchen table next to a cooling cup of coffee, on a night when my kids were asleep and my wife had gone to bed.

I'm telling you this story because everything that came afterward — the six-hundred-point market study I eventually paid for, the zip-code scoring tool I eventually built, the tier system that classifies every market in the United States — all of it grew out of those three pencil circles. The atlas pages grew up. The pencil grew up. I grew up. But the move was the same move I've made my entire life: I didn't wait for a system. I built one.

That, more than any single thing I've done, is what I want to teach. Not how to wait for the system to find you. How to build the system you needed yesterday.

The year I cleared one-eighty in the union was a good year. My wife and my kids had a real life by then. The house was paid down. We'd come a long way from the vine-tree winter. By every external measure, the responsible thing to do was to keep showing up to the local hall every Monday morning for the next twelve years until I could retire on a union pension.

I quit instead.

I quit because I had spent the last eight years — the cycle years, the back-and-forth years — quietly assembling something. Every time I went out on my own, I learned more about how to teach what I'd learned. Every time I went back to the union, I bought myself another six months of teaching prep. By the end of that cycle I had a curriculum in pieces, scattered across notebooks and folders and the corner of my brain.

I knew what I was supposed to build. I'd known for a while. I just couldn't build it on the side of a foreman's schedule. It needed all of me.

So I left the local. I told my wife. I told my kids. I sat down at the kitchen table where I'd taped together the atlas, and I started building the thing I wished somebody had handed twenty-seven-year-old me on that cold January morning.

I'm doing it from Russell, Kentucky. By my own market scoring system, this is a Tier 4-D area — the lowest opportunity zone there is. I started from here on purpose, because the work is the work and the location is just where I happen to be. If the system works here, it'll work anywhere. And if it doesn't work here, it doesn't work, and I'd rather find that out at home.

Zero Capital Startup is the part I wish somebody had handed me first.

Not the part about scaling. Not the part about hiring. The part about the driveway — the cold morning with a borrowed hammer and no money and a family inside the house, when the only thing you actually own is the skill in your hands.

Because here's what nobody told me: I did it in the wrong order. I bought before I earned. I priced before I knew my cost. I chased the truck and the tools and the look of a real company long before the company was real, and every one of those moves cost me years I didn't have to lose.

The order matters more than the effort. That's the whole thing. Start earning with what you already own, learn what your work actually costs you, split every dollar that comes in before you touch it, and let the business buy its own truck when the business — not your hope, not your credit card — can prove it's time.

That's what's in here. Four stages, in order, and you don't skip one. Start Smart. Solid Planning. Strong Systems. Strategic Scaling. You start at the start.

It's free. That's on purpose. I was broke when I needed it, and a man who is broke should not have to pay to find out how to stop being broke.

I want to be very specific about who this is for.

The person I'm building for is at the top of their wage. They're a journeyman or a foreman or a service tech who has hit the ceiling on what one set of hands can earn per hour. They have a family, or they want one. They have a mortgage, or they want one. They look at the people who own the company they work for and they don't think that guy is smarter than me. They think that guy made a decision I haven't made yet.

That person is who this is for.

We'll teach them to know their BASE before they make the decision. We'll teach them how to price a job so they don't bleed out on it. We'll teach them how to split the money, how to budget for taxes, how to plan for slow seasons, how to know when the truck is finally safe to buy. We'll teach them everything I had to learn alone in the ring, with no cornerman, on cold mornings.

And if they work through it and decide they don't want to go out on their own after all — that's a real answer too, and an honest one. Knowing your number and deciding not to jump is a thousand times better than jumping without it. The trade has many honorable paths. I won't pretend self-employment is the only one.

But for the man or the woman who does want to go — I'll walk them through it the way I wish someone had walked me. On purpose. In order. With the tools and the system to make it stick.

The purpose is older than the system, older than BASE, older than the union, older than the vine-tree winter. The purpose is what walked me out the door every morning when I was twenty-seven and didn't know what I was doing.

Three people. My wife and my two kids.

I built a life for three people, and then a few more, by doing the work that nobody had taught me the right way. I bled to learn what I learned. I lost more than I made for years to learn what I learned. The reason I'm spending the back half of my life doing this is because there is no reason — no reason at all — that the next generation should have to bleed the way I bled to learn what I learned.

The trade is too important for that. The country runs on people who build the country, and we have spent fifty years telling the smartest of them that the only respectable path is to go to a four-year college and come out with a hundred thousand dollars in debt to do work that doesn't move anything in the physical world. Meanwhile the houses still need to be built. The lights still need to be wired. The pipes still need to be hung. And we have left the men and women who do this work alone, with no system, no mentorship, no operating manual, no cornerman.

That's the purpose. Hand them what I didn't have. Let the next twenty-seven-year-old with a borrowed hammer and a five-dollar tape measure walk out with a fighting chance.

If I can do that, I have done enough.

And enough, by the way, is the most important word I will ever teach. The whole American conversation about success is broken on this point. Enough is not failure. Enough is not settling. Enough is the goal when you have understood that a life of enough is a life that takes care of the people you love and lets you sleep at night. The chase after more than enough is what breaks most contractors in this country, financially and spiritually. I will spend the rest of my career teaching the trade to build enough, and then enough plus a little extra — that's BALL — and to do it on purpose, with a plan.

I started this story with a cold January morning and a borrowed hammer. I'll end it the same way.

If I could go back to that man — twenty-seven years old, standing in the driveway with a wife and two kids inside the house and a five-dollar tape measure in his pocket — I'd hand him three things.

First, I'd hand him this story, and I'd tell him read it slow. It is going to be all right.

Second, I'd hand him the BASE spreadsheet. The finished one. The one that took twenty years to perfect. I'd tell him to fill it out before he ran the ad and not to take the first call until he knew his number.

Third — and this is the one I think about most — I'd hand him me. I'd tell him I am your cornerman. I have been where you are about to go. Every round, I am going to be here. I will pour the water. I will tell you what you can't see. I will tell you when to swing and when to clinch. And when the bell rings between rounds, you sit down and you look up and you see my face, and you remember you are not alone in this fight.

That is what I never had. That is what I'm building.

This is the cornerman, multiplied. It is the man I needed, made into a system, made into something I can hand to you.

I came from the dirt. My kids haven't known that life. And if I do this right, no kid in the trades has to know that life again.

That's the work. That's the rest of my time on this earth.

I'll see you in the ring.