What Building a $25 Million Company Taught Me About Patience
I spent a decade building a plastics manufacturing company from $500,000 in annual revenue to $25 million. That sounds like a clean story now. At the time, it was anything but. Looking back from where I sit today, the most important lessons from that stretch of my career have almost nothing to do with manufacturing, and everything to do with how I was wrong about what growth actually requires.
When I started that company, I had already been through something valuable. I'd joined a small plastics operation in Canada, worked my way into an executive role, and helped guide it to acquisition by Menasha Corporation while holding onto an ownership stake. That experience gave me real confidence. Maybe too much confidence. I believed that because I'd seen one company succeed, I understood the formula. I thought I could move fast, execute hard, and scale the thing in half the time it actually took.
I was wrong about the timeline. I was also wrong about where the hard work would actually come from. In those early years, I was focused almost entirely on operations and revenue. Hit the numbers, grow the client base, keep the machines running. That mindset got us from $500,000 to a few million. But around the middle of that decade, growth started stalling in ways I hadn't anticipated. It wasn't a product problem or a market problem. It was a people and structure problem. I hadn't built the organization to carry the weight I was putting on it.
That was the shift. I had to stop thinking like a founder chasing a number and start thinking like someone building something that could last without me holding it together by hand. That meant bringing in the right people, creating real accountability, and accepting that some decisions would take longer than I wanted them to. For someone who came close to a career in professional hockey, a sport built on speed and reaction, slowing down felt unnatural. But it was exactly what the company needed.
Here's what I didn't understand at 30 that I understand clearly now: urgency and patience are not opposites. The best version of urgency I know is building something correctly the first time so you don't spend years correcting it later. When I finally internalized that, the last stretch of that decade went differently. We grew in a way that held. And when the time came to sell the business, it was a clean, valuable transaction rather than a distressed one.
That lesson has followed me through everything since. When I structured a partnership with a technology firm to develop a sustainable materials line, I didn't rush the design of the deal. When I founded and managed an investment fund focused on acquiring long-term lease assets and bringing them to Wall Street through credit enhancement and packaging, the entire model depended on doing the structural work right before going to market. Shortcuts in that world don't just slow you down. They end the conversation entirely.
What I think about now, particularly as I work on a 47-acre workforce housing development near Sedona, is how directly this lesson applies to community-scale projects. The temptation in development is always to move toward the finish line. But workforce housing in Northern Arizona isn't a transaction. It's a long-term commitment to the teachers, healthcare workers, and tradespeople who keep these communities running. That kind of project demands exactly the same patience I had to learn the hard way during a decade of building something from scratch in the plastics industry.
I'm not the same person I was when I started that manufacturing company. The discipline I developed there, and the humility that came from being wrong about how fast things should move, shaped how I approach every project since. I hope sharing that perspective is useful to anyone building something today, whatever the industry. The timeline you set at the start is usually optimistic. The work of getting the foundation right is where everything else begins.