How I stopped being the key man in my own family business: My mom fired me so many times in high school; I'm still shocked she kept rehiring me. That was my first job at Skylink, the aviation parts business my parents started in 1986. Sweeping the warehouse floor. Painting shelves. Getting fired. Getting rehired. I kept doing it through college. Then my dad told me something I didn't get until years later: "You have to work for somebody else to fully understand and know that I'm not the biggest asshole." So I did. I got my personal training license and worked at Gold's Gym and the YMCA. The leadership sucked. And I learned that most people don't, in fact, want to change. That was his lesson, taught the indirect way. Go see how other people lead. Then come back and do it better. I went back, got my MBA, and started at Skylink in sales. I worked my way up to Vice President of Acquisitions and IT, and later took over as CEO. The VP years are where it got hard. The key-man years I had the Skylink name and structure behind me. I was blessed with that. I had key people too, like my mom and Amanda, who handled a lot of the sales and is now our Director of Operations. But the procedures needed updating. The hiring needed to get lined up. And a lot of the core stuff ran through me. Procurement. Marketing. How we went out and got new business. I owned a lot of our key accounts as the main salesperson. So I learned everything. Copywriting. Coding. Design. Sales systems. Supply chain systems. How to write and update procedures. A lot of small business skills most MBAs don't teach you. Some days I worked 7am to 8pm to brute force my way through it. I still took vacations. I was on calls the whole time. What I believed If it all runs through me, it gets done right. If I learn every skill, I can solve every problem. Both sound like hard work and ownership. Both were wrong. Because if I got taken out, the business would crumble. That's not leadership. That's a single point of failure with a nice title. What changed It started with a realization. I lacked some crucial skills. I can't solve future problems I don't know about. And I didn't have a real mentor in my life. So I started small. A couple of hires. A couple of systems and procedure updates. Then I hired a mentor to coach me along the way. That led to more systems. More hires. And eventually I handed a key account to Evelyn, who was more than capable. Evelyn has grown it since. Here's what it looks like now. I take vacations without a ton of calls. The team operates. My workday has an end. I'm not firefighting all day, every day, exhausting myself in one area of my life and neglecting the rest. I spend a massive amount of time with my kids and my family. That was always the priority. Now the business doesn't fight it. My team makes a lot of key decisions without me. The big budget calls still come to me. The day to day runs on its own. And the part that matters most: the business no longer depends on one guy staying healthy. If everything still runs through you Start where I did: 1. Write down everything that runs through you. Every account, every approval, every "just ask me." 2. Find a mentor. You can't solve problems you don't know exist. Someone who's been there can. 3. Fix one system or one procedure. Make the work run the same way without you in the room. 4. Hand off one thing you're good at. Not the thing you hate. The key account. The one that scares you to let go. You won't do it all at once. I didn't. It was a couple of hires, a couple of procedures, and a mentor, then more of the same. Where I'm going I'm building Skylink to $100M a year by 2035. Not for the number. For the impact. We have values that are uncommon in business, with our team and with everyone we work with. At that scale, we change more lives. More opportunities for our people. Better outcomes for our customers. Doing things bigger and better than we've ever done them. Those values come from my faith, from Galatians 5. The fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. That's what we try to deliver to people, so they can feel it and maybe take some of it into their own lives. That's also why I write. I'm a guy who got fired by his mom, learned leadership by watching it done badly, and spent years as the bottleneck in his own business. If you're carrying the weight right now, I'll show you what I learned getting out from under it. Smash that follow button and let's grow together.

My paddleboard pal. The other two are too scared of alligators.

Good people resist the temptation to take the easy way out of a tough situation. Even when doing right is difficult or dangerous, they do it anyway. They keep doing what they know is right, whatever the consequences. So good people are usually also courageous, and sometimes they pay a heavy price for their integrity, but in the end, it's more than worth it. It's right.

Stop apologizing for your bad moods. Go to bed! That's advice for me first. Recently, a bad night's sleep turned into no movement, no sun, and work that felt flat. By the time I noticed, I'd been a little sharp and a little dismissive, at work and at home. I caught it after I said the "thing." Like always. But after is too late. The apology is me owning my shit. But it's cleanup for a mess that started the night before.

Nobody saw a checklist. They saw me, in raw form. One bad night of sleep, and the rest of what makes me feel good fell like dominoes. No movement. No sun. Even the fun work felt flat. What came out of me was a little sharp, a little dismissive, and a lot of negative thinking I had no reason for. At work and at home. Bad sleep doesn't stay in the bedroom. It shows up in your tone with the people who matter most.

A driver hit a power pole and took out our electricity. First thought: "Oh, what a dummy. Why can't they just pay attention?" Then I caught myself getting impatient with something that could be pretty catastrophic for somebody's life, and only a minor inconvenience for ours. No lights, no A/C, no WIFI 😱. We went to my Mom's house for a swim. Best hour of the week. Lesson: Don't treat someone else's pain as your inconvenience. Pray for them. Help them if you can. Then be grateful for what you do have. That's where joy, a fruit of the Spirit, comes from.

The cross comes first, always. If you don't see it, look above one Nation, under God.

Care: what someone does for you when nobody would know if they skipped it. Recently, one of our newer reps landed his first order. I sent him a note saying I was proud of him. The same day, one of our managers sent him nearly the exact same message, and neither of us knew the other had done it. Nobody assigned it. Nobody tracked it. That's care.

Work from home vibes. Crushing my priorities, a beautiful lake view to my right, and the best of all, Ava playing in my office with Arlo. God is great. I am beyond grateful for these blessings.

Most of our playbooks were out of date the day after we wrote them. Not because anyone was lazy. Updating one meant opening the doc, editing it by hand, then remembering to tell everyone who needed to know. Usually that last step never happened. Past me thought "we have a procedure for that" meant the problem was solved. It meant there was a document somewhere that nobody trusted. I was basically running a museum of how we used to do things. Now it works differently. We sketch the draft or suggest the edit. AI updates the playbook. Then it tells the right team what changed and why it matters. The write-up was never the hard part. Keeping it current and getting it to the right people was. If your team doesn't trust your procedures, check how they get updated before you write another one. AI is the perfect partner for this kind of work.

If you carry the weight at work and at home, balance won't save you. You don't get to clock out of either one. Balance splits you in half. Work gets the tired half. Home gets the distracted half. Stop splitting and build one life that wins at both.

Most bad moods aren't mood problems. They're four missing ingredients: movement, sun, important or fun work, and sleep. When all four go missing, my day goes sideways no matter what's on the calendar. The other day I got all four and felt clear, strong, and focused from morning to night. So next time you're in a funk, don't fix your mood. Check the four.

Life choices matter. 🤦‍♂️

Amazing. The man deserves it. One nation, under God.

Work-life balance: a schedule where work and home fight over one guy, and both lose. Integration: the same guy shows up whole in both. One is a calendar trick, the other is a life.

If you haven't watched Max the cockatoo on Instagram, you're missing out. This bird is incredible. I mean, I would lose my mind, but incredible nonetheless. God's creations are beyond words. Please don't disappoint me by saying Max is AI.

Some of my team were spending a big chunk of every week as human copy machines. Data came in. Open it. Manually retype it into our ERP system. Next one. Thousands of times a week. And because of data integrity, we always need a human to review these before entering them into the system (despite the risk of human error). I used to think that was just part of the job. Past me called it "attention to detail." Past me also thought a second monitor counted as a tech strategy. It was really a tax on time. So we built a tool that reads this data, analyzes it based on our industry's criteria, and enters it automatically, still with some human oversight. The people who used to do that work got at least 20% of their week back. Same people. Same talent. Now they spend that time on the work that actually needs a human. Look for the task your best people quietly hate, and that's probably where to start.

Same day, the other week: Closed a big proposal a day early. Onboarded a new developer. Helped put out a customer fire. Ran the kids to school and talked the whole way. BJJ in the garage. Walked the dogs twice. Time with my wife. Played outside. And ICE CREAM!!! Not because I balanced anything. Work-life balance is for people with low responsibility. If you’re carrying a lot, you don’t need balance. You need integration.

I have been doing this for months now. It's the PERFECT focus music. I've also found the lo-fi Christian playlist on Apple to be great as well.

I've struggled for years with this. Someone on my team would ask a question, and I instantly went into problem-solving mode and answered it. Same with a quick question in a chat message. I would just answer it instead of asking them a question back to get them to think. Because it’s faster to do it myself than teach them. Teaching is slow. We want instant gratification or instant solutions, so we do it ourselves. My diagnosis: a severe case of controlitis. The result? People stop thinking before they ask. They expected me to have the answer for them, and when given the answer easily, they don’t learn. If everything still runs through me, I didn’t build a team. I built a daycare. And I would never want to run a daycare. Instead, I started to ask, “What do you think we should do based on this situation?” “Before I give you the answer, give me three possible scenarios that you think are best.” Sometimes they say, “I don’t know.” My rebuttal back to them is, “Well, if you did know, what would you do?” Training and mentorship are not quick wins, but with the law of compounding, months and years have a significant result from daily drips.