What You Can Control as an Entrepreneur When Everything Else Is Falling Apart

A little over 11 years ago I was flat broke and living in my best friend's basement. Separated from my ex-wife. My kids weren't talking to me. I was depressed. And I mean actually depressed, not just stressed or burnt out. I contemplated suicide at one point. I didn't go through with it because I knew it was a selfish decision. But that tells you where I was.

I was living on $900 a month. I'd wrecked my car on black ice so I was driving my dad's old field truck. It had Bondo troweled onto the side, unpainted, trowel marks still visible. Mice had been living under the seat. Every time I got in I had to roll down the windows just to breathe. That was my life when I started Bartlett Roofing.

Eleven years later we're doing $50 million a year. Two years running, including through a down market where a lot of roofing companies lost serious ground. About 200 employees. I started a software company on top of that. I can drive any car I want, go anywhere I want, and the business runs without me. I'm still involved because I want to be. But I could walk away tomorrow and it would keep going.

So when I tell you there's one thing that changed everything, I want you to understand I'm not talking theory. I lived through the lowest possible starting point. And the thing that got me out wasn't a strategy or a system. It was a realization.

The Only Thing You Actually Control

I'm not a dumb guy. I try to control factors, manage outcomes. At my lowest point that instinct was getting me nowhere because I couldn't control any of it. Couldn't control my emotions. I was deeply depressed. Couldn't control what my kids thought of me. Couldn't control what my ex-wife thought of me. Couldn't control the market or the weather or any of it.

That's when it hit me. If I'm not going to quit entirely, the one thing I can control is what I get up and do every single day. My actions. That's the whole list.

If you can't control your mind, your emotions, or the people around you, at least control your body. Get up. Do the work. The actions come before the feelings, not after.

What I figured out is that if I forced myself to do the right things every day, even when I was depressed, even when I didn't want to crawl out of that basement, the actions would eventually produce changes in me that made me feel better. Not the other way around. You don't wait to feel good so you can act. You act, and then over time you feel better. That's how it actually works. Nobody talks about that part.

The System I Built From Nothing

I gave myself a full workday six days a week. Twelve hours a day, six days a week for a long stretch. Partly because the work had to get done and partly because it beat sitting in that basement being miserable. Financial stability would follow if I showed up. That was the deal I made with myself.

I also gave myself one social activity per week. Found meetup.com, joined the Boise Social Club, and started showing up to events because all my old friends were married and I was the divorced guy now. That isolation is real and it matters. If you've got a friend going through a divorce, reach out. It's a brutal time to lose your social circle on top of everything else.

And I controlled my body. Forty-five minutes on a treadmill every morning. Back in the gym every night for weights. I lost weight and the endorphins made a real difference. After a couple of months of doing all this consistently, I was watching an episode of The Big Bang Theory one night and realized I'd gone two whole minutes without thinking about the divorce, the basement, any of it. That should tell you how bad it was. Two minutes felt like a breakthrough. But it was a breakthrough, and it kept building.

Know What Your Time Is Actually Worth

Once the business started moving, the next lesson hit hard. I can't do everything and also grow. I was the only employee when I started Bartlett Roofing. I knocked the doors, set pricing, negotiated with insurance companies, found the crews, managed installs, sourced supplies, paid the bills. All of it. And it didn't take long to see that doing all of it was going to keep the company small forever.

The question I started asking was: where am I actually best? For me the answer was sales. A roofing job is worth about $20,000 and I could close two in a day when I needed to. That's $40,000 in revenue. At a decent margin that's close to $1,000 an hour of my time. So what the heck was I doing handling my own books? I could hire someone for $20 or $25 an hour to do that. I was trading a thousand-dollar hour for a twenty-dollar task and calling it work ethic. That's not hustle. That's self-sabotage.

Figure out the thing you do that generates the highest return per hour. Then start replacing yourself in everything else as fast as you can justify the hire. If you're spending 50 hours a month on data entry you could outsource for $20 an hour, that's $1,000 worth of tasks eating time that could have generated $50,000 in sales. The math doesn't lie.

Hire Faster. Then Replace Yourself Again.

Most founders hold on too long. They're afraid to let go, afraid to trust people. That fear is exactly what keeps most businesses stuck at the same revenue number year after year. I did it too early on. I started as the only person. But I learned fast that the only way out was to hire, train, build systems, and get back to the work only I could do.

Hire faster than you think you need to. Get clear on your time value first. Then define exactly what the role needs to do and fill it with the right person. Early on you also need flexibility, and you need to say so upfront. I used to tell people straight in interviews: your main job is X, but if the toilet needs cleaning because we haven't hired a cleaner yet, I'm going to ask you to do that. Some people walked away. Good. The ones who stayed were the ones who got it.

Build trust over time and give people room to make decisions. I started new hires with a $500 threshold. Anything under that, make the call yourself. Don't ask me. As trust builds, that number grows. I have people on my team now making $100,000 software decisions with little or no input from me. That's what it looks like when you've built the right team the right way.

On the Monster Mindset podcast, I talk about this stuff a lot because it's the real work. Not the highlight reel. The actual decisions that separate companies that grow from companies that stay stuck.

I'm 56 years old. Sixty or seventy pounds lighter than I was at my heaviest. Still working on the physical side. But mentally, and financially, the difference between where I was 11 years ago and where I am now is hard to put into words. Not because I got lucky. Because I got up every day and did the work, even on the days I really didn't want to. That's all it was.