The whole story, the way it actually happened.

October 1, 2017

Michelle and I were at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas with the people we call our framily, a dozen friends who grew up together on the same streets in Yorba Linda. It was our second year there. When the gunfire started, I told my wife I loved her and that we would get out. I was not sure it was true. We ran, we hid on the floor of a casino, and we spent the night piecing together who was safe. We did not get everyone out. Someone we loved did not survive.

I was thirty-nine, in the best shape of my life, with a healthy family and a good job. Eighteen months later I sat in my office and asked myself what in the hell I was doing with my life. That question did not come from nowhere. It came from that night, and from a lot of nights before it.

1984

"Daddy still loves Mommy, but it's better for us to not be together." I was six. That was about the only explanation I got for why my dad left, and it was all I could have understood anyway. What I did understand was what was missing. My mom carried everything for me and my brother, and I started walking away from the religion I was raised in, because if God was against divorce, why did He allow ours?

A boy who loses his father at six learns to grow up fast and to trust no one with the weight. I did both. It took me until 2011 to reconcile with my dad. Today I consider him one of my best friends.

The wounds I caused

Some of the deepest wounds in my story are not ones that happened to me. They are ones I made. For years I worked long hours and told myself I was giving my family a better life. In reality I was funding the partying and the gambling that let me fit in with people who had more than I did. It cost my family tens of thousands of dollars. It cost my marriage almost everything. My words and my absence pushed Michelle away, and I nearly lost the two things I said I was working for.

I know what it is like to carry a wound. I also know what it is like to be one.

2006

I became a Christian in 2006. It did not fix me overnight and it did not make the wreckage disappear. What it did was give me a Father who does not leave, and a standard for the kind of husband and dad I was supposed to be. Everything I have built since sits on that. Faith is underneath the work, not painted on top of it.

November 2011, $500

I walked away from a sales job because of how the owners were doing business, turned down the safe offer that came next, and told Michelle I felt led to start my own thing. She was a full-time stay-at-home mom. We had five hundred dollars in checking and no savings. She had every reason to tell me to get a real job. Instead she said, "If you believe you can do it, I believe you can too, and I trust you."

Those words were all I needed. I started coaching and consulting with a laptop, a talent for sales, and a conviction that people could become who they were created to be. I have been helping owners and sales teams build pipeline ever since, and I have never had to compromise on how I sell to do it.

April 2019

I was about to lose my largest client, a monthly five-figure contract. I had just lost a big opportunity and I was walking a friend through the collapse of his marriage. The morning of the call, I went dark. I got through one coaching session, barely, and then I sat in the corner of my office and curled into a ball. My body shut down. I called Michelle and begged her to pray for me.

By God's grace I made it through the day. The client call turned out to be about reworking the engagement, not ending it. But the attack was not really about the client. It was every old wound opening at once. In the weeks after, I built the framework that runs through everything I do now: acknowledge the hurt, realize what it did to you, unlock what it built in you. I wrote it all down in Wounds, and I have kept working it out on the Unlocking Greatness podcast for more than four hundred episodes.

What I do with it now

Two rooms, one story. In the first room I build sales systems for owner-led businesses through the Sales Operating System, in insurance and in the trades, so the owner stops being the pipeline and starts running one. In the second I lead Men of Greatness, a brotherhood for men who are winning on paper and drifting underneath. I also speak to rooms of owners, producers and men, when the room is right.

You were created to become something more than the life you settled for. I know that because I spent years settled for less than what I was made for, and I know the way back out.