Why we opted out
I'm 46. Last month I walked away from eight years as Chief Operating Officer of a private equity-backed company. Five hundred million in revenue. Thirteen brands. Three hundred seventy-five stores. The decade before that I was COO of a privately held multi-brand operator where I had ownership and helped build the platform.
While I worked those roles, I spent twenty years building businesses on the side. Car dealerships. Consulting. Excavation. Equity in growth-stage companies I now advise. The parallel life isn't a recent idea. It's how I've worked since I was 26.
At forty I started to feel worse than my dad did at seventy. Sixty-hour weeks, dinners that ran too late, decisions about other people's livelihoods made in spreadsheets. Mainstream medicine wasn't helping. Time wasn't going to.
In 2020 our family started removing things. Soda. Then the television. Then the over-the-counter drugs. Then the subscriptions, the perfume, the celebrity follows. Then we started adding the alternative.
By the time I finally left the COO role this past month, the new life was already running. Today I run a civil contracting business and a consulting practice. I advise three tech companies. We're building an offsite homestead while keeping the suburban house. The kids are homeschooled and walking barefoot. I drink water from a copper jug instead of Pepsi. I feel better at forty-six than I did at thirty-two.
None of this was planned. It happened one decision at a time. What I'm doing on this channel is writing down every decision, ranking them by difficulty, and telling you what I'd do differently.