Featured essay
Stop Being the System
Every snowstorm, dispatch ran through me. Then I redesigned it so it didn't have to. What changed when the founder stopped being the bottleneck, and what it did to how much work each crew could finish.
Story
Read the full storyI took four months away from the company I built. It needed me five times. That's the number I'm proudest of.On building something that runs without you
I started flight training at 12 and college at 15. By 18 I was running a Walmart front end. I learned operations by doing every job in the building, not by studying them.
Since then I've turned around a retail store, built the fleet behind a FedEx Ground contractor's Midwest expansion, and founded a property services company that grew to 137 people across three states before I sold off the northern branches to focus on one market.
Somewhere along the way I learned that a business should buy back your time, not consume it. I write about that as much as I write about operations.