THE FULL STORY

Many business owners focus on building a Ferrari. They obsess over horsepower — marketing, sales, revenue — but a Ferrari isn't a high-performance machine because of the engine alone. It's the integration of every system working together. Without financial clarity underneath the hood, you can push harder, work longer hours, and still wondering why you're not where you want to be.

I didn't learn that in a classroom. I learned it watching contractors struggle with the same problems year after year, running my own businesses, and figuring out the hard way that the best systems are built around fulfilling the needs of customers, not the other way around.

At Simpson Strong-Tie I started on the road in 1998 as a territory rep calling on engineers, architects, municipalities, walking jobsites and cold calling lumberyards. By 2009 I was running North American sales for a new software and engineering division — six direct reports, 26 developers across the US and UK, enterprise agreements from $15,000 to $120,000, and a book of business spanning a potential of 12,000 lumberyards, 80 manufacturers, and industry partners across seven countries. I built our CRM, the pipeline workflows, the sales plans, the budgets, and the forecasts. I hired and managed. I presented to Fortune 500 C-suites on Tuesday and walked jobsites with foremen and developers on Thursday.

32 years - Construction industry

Sales, market development, and senior territory leadership including Simpson Strong-Tie North American sales manager role.

During those same years my wife (at the time) and I built a Keller Williams real estate team of seven agents with over 50 active listings. Two full careers running at the same time, but that was my normal.

When I left Simpson I joined MiTek and closed $4 million in incremental revenue working with DR Horton, Lennar, Toll Brothers, and a host of other builders. While doing that I was also started from a cold shell building and created a 3,000 square foot production studio. At 40 hours a week alongside MiTek's 40 hours. 200 shoots a year, which produced over 150,000 finished images. Twenty shoots a week. Over 1,000 finished images per shoot delivered in under a week. People always asked how I pulled it off. The answer was never the cameras. It was the process and the systems I built from scratch to make the whole thing run smoothly.

After covid shutdown the studio, I moved to Southern California and built a book of business from zero to 90 active accounts in 12 months at Ganahl Lumber. By my second year I averaged $700,000 in monthly sales with more coming. Southern California is one of the most brutally competitive construction markets in the country. Succeeding there means you can tackle any market. I decided to transition and take a nine-state Western territory at SouthernCarlson for their multifamily division. Adding scopes, looking for revenue between the cracks, developing high level relationships with key decision makers, was exciting for me. I decided it was time to leave the high stress environment of corporate life entirely and launched two businesses simultaneously from scratch in 2026. Back to lots of hours per week, but I love it.

Here is what 32 years in the construction industry and a lifetime of building businesses alongside has taught me. The businesses that scale cleanly know their numbers. The ones that grind themselves into the ground, work hard, but use their bank balance to gauge their success. Growing and scaling is not a talent problem. It's not a hustle problem. It's a priority and clarity problem. When books don’t match how your business runs, it’s a square peg in a round hole.

That's the only challenge ClearBuild Financial exists to solve. Not textbook bookkeeping from someone who learned your industry in a classroom. Financial clarity from someone who has been in the room, on the jobsite, behind the desk, and in the weeds of building real businesses for three decades. Clean books, clear reports, and a straightforward monthly relationship with no surprises. Business needs first, always.