Honest operator notes on building, leading & life. 65 and counting.
Won't people walk all over me if I'm gentle? The loudest person in the room often wins the moment. But they rarely win the relationship. Gentleness isn't weakness. It's strength under control. Coercion gets compliance. Gentleness gets commitment.
When a business changes hands, how far down does the outcome reach? I used to think of this as three doors. It is really two doors and a dial. The door is not the decision. Either door can be narrow or wide. Pick whichever door you want but decide where the dial goes before the call comes.
Many businesses buy insurance once. The policy gets written in year one, when the company is small and the risks are simple. Then the business grows. The business changes and the coverage does not. Nobody catches it in a renewal meeting. It surfaces on the one day it matters.
Walked into the office recently and new signs were up. Then I saw the skeleton and decided it didn’t belong in a closet. The signs show what we are building. The skeleton reminds me that everything looks different once you see underneath it. Tell the truth. Own the mistakes.
6am, day two of a member-guest and 78 days without a drink. I've learned I still suck at sober golf. Clarity is the biggest change. Not subtle. 78 days is not a victory lap. It's a data point. And I'd rather leave an accurate record than a flattering one.
There is a particular kind of confidence that only exists at a distance. Here's what it misses: from the outside, the call looks like a choice among options. From the inside, it was the only door that wasn't on fire. Build something. Sign the guaranty. Then tell me what I should have done.
In January, I released a song that I didn't write alone. I worked it out with AI, line by line, from a prompt and a feeling. It took me months to figure out who I was talking to. Turns out it wasn't one person. The machine handed me the shape. I recognized what was inside it. Go be the voice for somebody. Including yourself.
Nineteen years married, and when Ashley left for a week it was the first time it was just Hunter and me. I build companies around the idea that systems matter more than heroics — then discovered the most important system in my life is a person, and I'd been treating her like infrastructure. Reliable. Invisible. Assumed.
"We are processing your refund. You don't need to return the item." For four seconds it felt like generosity — then the only question that matters showed up: who ate that? Every frictionless experience has a cost center. If you can't find it, there's a decent chance you're standing in it.
My feed keeps calling I, Robot a prophecy. Nobody says that about Armageddon — same setup. The risks we discuss are the ones where we still believe we have a hand. The ones nobody brings up are the ones we've quietly decided are out of our hands. Zoom out on your ego. Zoom in on what you gave up on.
People ask why I post so often. Someday my daughter will want to know who her dad actually was, and I don't want her piecing it together from a headline and whatever anyone else remembers. Not the polished version — a record of nothing but wins would be a lie. I'd rather she know me than be impressed by me.
Labor Day isn't a thank-you note — it exists because workers organized around a claim: the people who create the value have a right to a share of it. A century later, that argument has a new instrument. Roughly 25 million American workers now hold an ownership stake. Broad-based ownership isn't a perk. It's the structure we now start with.
A memory feed served up this less-than-flattering pic — a week after I lost a headbutting contest with Edinburgh's cobblestones, during the four weeks we closed the ATIS recap. I showed up to every call looking like this. Nobody flinched. What I carried out wasn't toughness — a shorter list of things to be embarrassed about, and a longer list of people I owe.
Life hit warp speed for me around 35. The years I can replay are the ones with a first in them; the rest blur. But most of what I can still replay isn't a first at all — it's the Sunday dinners I was actually present for. Firsts announce themselves. Moments only slow down if I decide to.
Running commentary on other people doesn't do it for me. Running commentary on me? Please do. I don't participate — but I don't always leave either, and I tell myself that makes me neutral. It doesn't. Sitting there is a vote. If you have the energy to keep score on somebody else, you're not building hard enough.
Walked downtown Houston at 5am reading the skyline like a mystery novel. Then I turned a corner and hit a wall: no pro forma, no consultant, no committee — somebody decided a parking garage should say HOUSTON IS INSPIRED and made it true. Not everything worth building gets underwritten first.
A year ago, Centered Partners had no track record. The safe choice was the incumbent broker, the incumbent vendor. Our first clients weren't betting on a firm — they were betting on people they already knew. Trust before proof is the hardest thing to earn. We intend to keep earning it.
Under the billable hour, the faster and better a firm gets, the less it earns. Per Thomson Reuters and Georgetown, worked rates rose a record 7.3% and profits 13% — on a model 90% of legal spend still runs through, one the report says "may no longer reflect the value delivered." The answer isn't a cheaper law firm. It's rebuilding the trusted advisor itself.
Some people can scroll past, but I never learned how. The suffering on the news has a camera on it; the suffering in my own world does not. The check is not the only currency. The person who needs me most this week is probably not on the news. They are in my phone.
Eleven owners. One Entrepreneurs’ Organization forum. No agenda except honesty. EO calls it going to the 5% — the part you keep behind the door. Nobody gave advice. Nobody tried to fix me. The skeletons only have power while they stay in the closet.
The price of professional services keeps climbing even as the cost to deliver falls. Legal rates rose roughly 7% last year; 90% of legal spend is still billed hourly. Between what you pay and what the work costs sits a gap, widening fast. The question is who keeps it.
Twelve days ago Brad Pitt told Esquire he’d been sober seven years — then went back off the wagon. Seven weeks ago, I quit drinking. I’m not writing from the other side of this. I’m writing from inside it, which is the only honest place I have. It counts. Even week one.
I started my career at NASA. Montana is far, but you can drive there. The moon forces you to invent the vehicle. At its peak Apollo employed 400,000 people; twelve walked on the moon. Pick a destination that requires everyone — then build a structure where everyone shares in reaching it.
Found this going through old photos — top of a new build in Toronto with three of the best elevator consultants I know. What I remember most isn't the buildings. It's who was in the cage with me. That's the thing I keep trying to build. Not the business. The crew.
3am, sitting with the fact that I own 60+ domains, ~30 LLCs, and a dozen websites. Combined revenue: zero. So I re-sorted the list with one question: is there a named human who has committed to this besides me? Options in one pile. Commitments in the other. Be relentless about the second — and stop apologizing for the first.
What worries me isn't people. It's the machine that keeps telling all of us we aren't enough yet. Thinner. Sharper. Younger. Fixed. The pressure was never built to be satisfied — it's built to keep you chasing. You were never the thing that needed fixing. The standard was.
We ran generous equity incentive programs — but they weren’t broad based. A narrow plan rewards the people already in the room. A broad based plan changes who is in the room. Multiple exits later, I understand the difference, and it’s now foundational to how we build.
The photos are always of the ride. Nobody takes a picture of the walk back. We tell founder stories backward — exit first, the hard parts arranged neatly behind it. That is not how it felt. The good years blur. You remember the ones you barely got through.
The entity that’s now Greenleaf Capital Partners was first organized in 2006 under a different name. Different name, same thesis from day one: build the right way, for the long term, with people who care. The name on the door changes. The values underneath it shouldn’t.
I write these with AI — a neurological condition took my typing, and AI gave my output back. The cost of sounding competent has collapsed, even at the top of the ladder. When everyone can produce a sharp answer, the answer stops being the differentiator. What's left is older and simpler: trust, presence, judgment — the one layer no model can reproduce.
A fault line has no god. A wildfire has no flag. Nature erases us without malice — Pompeii, Tanis, the next asteroid. Then I read the rest of the news: wars that won't stop, borders drawn in someone else's blood. That part we choose. Perspective isn't detachment — it's caring about the right things, harder, while we still can.
A UN headline put a number on the other side of the birth lottery: roughly a quarter of a billion people need urgent humanitarian help right now. Same kind of parent, same hopes for their kids — just a different line on a map. Most of my comfort is luck. The least I can do is not waste it being ungrateful.
Watching Jared Isaacman on Face the Nation brought it rushing back — the ISS, the most complicated machine humans have ever built. It didn't have to be international. In 1993, Dan Goldin invited a forty-year rival in, and that choice saved it. If we could do that up there, don't let anyone tell you what we can't do down here.
Twelve months at the table, down to minor redlines — and then it was over. For a while it felt wasted. But that collapse is the only reason we pivoted, and the pivot became a three-way international merger: the proudest deal of my career. The failure didn't cost me the win. It was the door to it.
A documentary on the birth of America, watched from Boston. The founding wasn't clean — the best of us and the worst of us have always lived in the same body. I'm not celebrating a finished country this Fourth. I'm celebrating an unfinished one, and the people on the road who are the whole point.
A photo in my friends' Boston office. Eighteen years ago Seth Burr and Darrin Lang bet on each other and started LABUR — their two last names stitched together, no daylight between them. I've watched founders chase the exit. These two chased the work. Different game.
One of twelve questions in Rabbi Steve Leder's For You When I Am Gone. Your regrets aren't a confession of failure — they're a roadmap of what you learned. Don't wait for a deathbed to answer the hard questions.
Combined enterprise value north of $100 million. I could stop there and let it sound clean. It was not clean. Across all of it, the throughline was never the outcome. It was the people.
What do a Tuscan vintner, the crew of Artemis II, and Marcus Aurelius have in common? They tell the same story. From that far out, you cannot see a single border — just one blue thing holding everyone.
Blame law school. Two cases from first-year Torts never left me. One taught me to price the downside. The other, that I only own the risks I can foresee. Different leaders, different chapters — every one of them taught me the same throughline.
A space stat and a 2002 movie. Both dragged me back to something I wrote last year. There are eight billion of us on one planet. The only things that have ever felt big up close are the people and the moments.
Within the last few days, I've said "Happy Memorial Day" and "enjoy the long weekend." The day very obviously isn't about a three-day weekend. It's about people who didn't come home, and families who've carried that weight ever since.
We sold our company eighteen months ago — after twelve years of building it from nothing. I waited for the moment that was supposed to come after. It didn't. Marcus Aurelius. Brunelleschi. Michelangelo. Every one of them is dead.
Stood in front of him today. The most powerful man in the known world. What survived him is a journal he never meant anyone to read. Performed strength ages badly. Honest reflection compounds.
Kay Cameron was the third person in the office at ATIS. David Estes helped us scale ATIS too. You don't build multiple businesses with the same people unless those people are the reason it worked the first time.
Vertical transportation is one of those quiet industries where safety, compliance, and service legacy compound over decades. What drew me in: the commitment to broad-based equity for the Team.
When Dustin Hejna and I started talking about Friendever, the thing that kept pulling us in wasn't the product roadmap. Turns out the version of "brave" we picked up as kids isn't bravery. It's armor. And armor gets heavy.
Not bad actors. Not lazy ones. People who genuinely meant well and told themselves the right story. A culture of accountability isn't harsh — it's clarifying. We talk about what happened, not what we meant to happen.
One of the most revealing moments in any room is the moment someone leaves it. What gets said in the next sixty seconds tells you everything — not about the person who walked out, but about the people still sitting there.
The private credit conversation has split into two camps and middle-market operators should ignore both of them. Neither framing helps the operators weighing whether to sell, recapitalize, or refinance into the next cycle.
She wasn't falling apart. She was feeling the weight of what she was doing — standing between vulnerable people and the thing that hurt them — and her humanity showed through. Guilty on 17 counts. Proud husband.
A man I know just ended his life. We weren't close. Never met in person. But we wrote chapters in the same book. His was called "Strength Through Surrender." I can't stop thinking about that title. We cannot keep losing people to silence.
This is my NASA badge from the Dan Goldin era. I was 22 years old and had absolutely no business being in that building. Yesterday, four astronauts flew farther from Earth than any human in history. Victor Glover said it simply: seeing Earth from that distance is a reminder of humanity's shared identity.
Make of that what you will. The crucifix belonged to a great friend who gave it to me because he thought I needed to find Jesus. Neither makes me Christian — they make me someone who understands that symbols mean what we need them to mean.
I think about it often. It started in eighth grade when I lost my first grandparent. Bad memory in general — but I can vividly recall the circumstances around that evening and every single loss since.
For decades, professional services solved complexity through specialization. AI is changing that equation — and we built Centered Partners around what comes next.
The real problem in professional services was never a shortage of expertise. It was a shortage of connection between it. Here's what AI actually does — and what it doesn't.
I'm writing a book. My Skeletons Are Better Than Yours. The real point isn't competition — it's that we're all dragging something around and burning enormous energy keeping the closet door shut.
Wars. Elections. AI. Emotional entropy. And yet — my calendar remains full. I am personally struggling with the scale of what's happening out there and the smallness of what we're asked to care about in here.
Writing was once one of my greatest strengths. AI cleared away the friction between having an idea and executing it — and gave me back the most valuable thing any of us have: time.
My wife has been an assistant prosecuting attorney for 18+ years. She handles the cases most attorneys wouldn't want to touch. She carries weight that doesn't clock out.
My dad, brother, and I started ATIS from scratch in late 2012. I will never forget sitting in my basement and filing the articles of organization. A vision. Weekly Sunday morning visits on my parents' porch.
Smart people. Real businesses. Real risk. Being served by advisors too narrow, too transactional, too focused on their own product shelf. That's the gap Centered Partners was built to fill.
Someone in the comments said it perfectly. "That's what Nero said." The answer to the noise isn't paralysis. It's building things worth building — and making sure the people around you are better off for having worked with you.
Austin Grimm is a St. Louis-based musician — former frontman of Roots of a Rebellion. He's also my brother. And somewhere in his journey he wrote a song that stopped me cold.