I started in the restoration industry at 16 years old—just a kid with an obsession for doing things right. Water damage, fire cleanup, mold remediation… it all fascinated me. My dedication, attention to detail, and, honestly, a bit of OCD made me one of the top-performing technicians in Austin. That might sound like a bold claim, but anyone who has worked long hours learning the trade, mastering the tools, and showing up for customers when they need you most understands that pride.
When you pour everything into your craft—learning the dos and don’ts, honing your technique, staying up late to finish the job right—it becomes part of your identity. And for me, restoration was all I knew. I wasn’t just good at it; I was great at it. I felt confident, competent, and in control.
About seven years into owning All Nation Restoration, I made the decision to scale the business. Up until that point, we were a small, scrappy team. But I wanted to build something bigger—a company that could grow beyond me.
That’s when reality hit me like a burst pipe at 2 a.m.: I didn’t know the first thing about business. I knew restoration. I knew how to dry out a soaked house, clean up smoke damage, and put things back together. But hiring, scaling, managing people, tracking numbers, building systems? That was foreign territory.
I tried to do both. I kept showing up on jobs, putting on the gear, doing what I knew best—while also trying to run and grow the company. It was a disaster. I hit a wall of total exhaustion and frustration. More than once, I thought about throwing in the towel and going back to the simplicity of being self-employed.
The hard truth finally set in: You can’t do both well. You can’t be the technician and the CEO at the same time. At some point, you have to choose.
And that meant I had to walk away from the one thing that had always made me feel safe and confident—my identity as a technician. My knowledge of remediation had been my security blanket. Letting go of it wasn’t just a career shift; it was deeply personal. It meant giving up the thing I was best at to become a beginner again.
Of course, I still passed on what I knew. I trained others, taught the dos and don’ts, and shared the knowledge I had accumulated over years of hard work. But I stopped being the person on the job. I stopped being “the expert” and became a student of leadership, systems, finance, growth, and team-building.
People think that scaling a company is a chest-pounding moment—like a gorilla on a mountaintop. But in my experience, every major milestone came with a kind of loss. Every time the business grew, I had to let go of a part of myself. Pride had to take a back seat. Comfort had to be traded for discomfort. Certainty had to be replaced with learning curves.
And here’s the kicker: If you want to keep growing, you’ll always be a student. There’s no final mountaintop. There’s no arrival. Only the next phase of humility, the next lesson, the next identity shift.
If you’re standing at the crossroads—if you’re trying to grow your business while clinging to the role you’ve always known—listen to me: You can’t do both. Not forever. You have to choose.
Either you keep doing the trade and stay in the comfort of mastery, or you embrace the wild, humbling, character-shaping journey of becoming a real business owner.
And if you choose the latter, do it with open arms. Trade your expert badge for an apprentice mindset. It’ll be hard. You’ll grieve parts of yourself. But you’ll grow.
Stay strong. Stay focused. And most importantly—stay in business.
