That was the start of a six-year war with the bank. Hit a $240k payroll every other Thursday. Drive to the cabin in Wisconsin on the weekend. Pound Captain Morgan. Do it all over again.
We pulled it out. By the time I was 25, I had fired 55 people. By the time I was 27, we had taken the business from a $940k loss to healthy seven-figure EBITDA and sold it for eight figures.
Eight-figure wire hit. I went home and bawled my eyes out.
Sixty days later I was sitting in a cube at the buyer's office, two seats down from a kid named Mitch who was fresh out of college. I had gone from running a $20M company to executing somebody else's spreadsheet. No desk. No phone. No team. No idea what I was supposed to do next.
That morning is what built iBD.
Because here is what I figured out, slowly, over the next eleven years. We did not fail. We sold a working business for a real number. By every external measure it was a win. But internally I was wrecked, because nobody had ever taught me what I was supposed to be doing as the owner. Not the operator. The owner.
Nobody had walked me through what the business was actually worth, or how it would feel to wake up the morning after the wire. Nobody had asked me what I wanted out of my time, or my cash flow, or my wealth. Nobody had separated my W-2 income from my distributions from my equity. Nobody had explained that an owner has a different job than a CEO, and that I was trying to do both.
I spent the next decade trying to build the playbook that should have already existed.
500+ podcast episodes interviewing the smartest owners, operators, and experts I could find. A wealth management seat. A consulting firm. A fractional CFO services business. Three thousand owners through Vistage and EO workshops. Vistage Top Speaker Award.
The pattern that showed up across every conversation was always the same:
