From Mowing Yards at 12 to a Million Square Feet: The Unfiltered Version

I started mowing yards at twelve to buy clothes and stuff. Kids made fun of me in the rich area I grew up in.

I sold that business at 17 for $60,000. All I gave them was the contractors I had acquired. No equipment. No physical assets.

I bought a house at 18 for $10,000. It was horrible and not something anyone should live in. I did. Took me a year of building fences and decks to pay my bills and save enough to fix it up. I also bought a brand new Ford Ranger. That was dumb.

I sold that house at 19 for $80,000. I have no idea how much cash and labor I actually put into it beyond the purchase price.

At 20 I had two kids and a wife trying to get through nursing school. I stepped up. Started moving into houses and fixing them to sell, buying cars at auction to flip, running a full time handyman business, and driving a wrecker at night to transport cars.

Over the next 23 years I met investors who hired me to fix things I did not know how to fix until I figured out how to fix them. I moved into, fixed, and flipped two dozen houses. Hundreds of cars and motorcycles. And divorced my wife. We are still friends. It is fine.

At some point I decided to become a GC. I did that for most of the time I was flipping houses and cars. It let me stop driving the wrecker. It did not cut my hours.

As a GC I rehabbed, remodeled, and built thousands of structures and homes. I developed over a million square feet of retail space and hundreds of thousands of square feet of office space.

A few years back I bought a house I planned to flip and then sold my GC business and went back to being a handyman. My passive income more than covered my bills and I was bored. For about a year I knocked out every favor friends and family had been asking me to get to for the previous several years.

Now I still flip houses, build out developments, flip cars and motorcycles, and partner with investors who have all the energy of someone who has not been doing this their whole life. I do it exactly how I want to do it.

I did not realize how rewarding it would all be. I was just trying not to be broke and feed my five kids. Yes, five. Get cable. It is cheaper.

I did not write this so you would be inspired by me or my story. I wrote it so you could understand that every single week for 25 years someone tried to pull me away from what I was doing or tell me how I could be doing it differently, better, or easier.

Ignoring the naysayers and my own doubts was harder than any house I ever had to finish or any inspector I ever had to correct.

The balance between confidence that you will do right and the willingness to admit when you were wrong has to happen entirely inside your own head. Not everyone can manage that. But if you can, never let anyone change your mind about your goals.

Not even yourself on a bad day.