The ADHD Advantage: How a Scattered Brain Built a $150M Company

I didn’t find out I had ADHD until I was 47 years old.

By that point, I had already built a company to $150 million in annual revenue. Lost $35 million when COVID hit. Started over. Built Rock Solid Capital.

The diagnosis didn’t explain my success. It explained why the version of success most people chase had never felt like enough.

The thing no one tells you about ADHD

Everyone gets the label wrong.

ADHD stands for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. That word, deficit, implies you’re paying less attention than you should.

That’s not what happens.

It’s not an attention deficit. It’s an overload of attention. You pay attention to everything, all at once, which means any single thing gets a fraction of your focus.

You’re watching the room while you’re in a conversation
You’re running five business ideas while you’re managing one
You’re solving the problem after next while someone is still explaining the current one

That sounds like a weakness. In a structured corporate environment where you’re supposed to do one thing exactly as directed, it is. In entrepreneurship, where pattern recognition, speed of connection, and comfort with chaos are the actual job, it’s a different story.

I went to conferences once I learned about my diagnosis. Started asking around. At any serious operator event, most of the entrepreneurs I talk to recognize the same traits in themselves. It felt like the baseline, not the exception.

That’s not a bug in the entrepreneur’s wiring. It’s a feature.

What the ADHD brain actually does well

Let me be specific, because “superpowers” is a tired word that doesn’t help anyone.

Pattern recognition. When your attention is scanning everything simultaneously, you notice things other people miss: the early signal, the relationship between two unconnected things, the gap in a market that everyone else walked right past. I built distribution networks by seeing connections that weren’t obvious. That’s not natural intelligence. That’s the ADHD brain running its pattern-match at a higher rate.

Hyper-focus. The same brain that gets distracted by shiny objects can also lock in completely when something genuinely engages it. I can get on a tractor and not come off for two days. Body and mind occupied simultaneously: no room for distraction. In business, when a deal or a problem grabs my full attention, I’m all the way in. That’s not a decision. It’s just how the engine runs.

Comfort with ambiguity. Neurotypical brains want clear processes and predictable outcomes. The ADHD brain has learned to function in noise. When COVID hit, most people with structured companies froze. I pivoted to hand sanitizer production within weeks: 30,000 gallons a day in 30 days. That’s not admirable hustle. That’s an ADHD brain in its natural environment: no playbook, unclear rules, everything moving fast.

Thinking around the problem. There are more ways than one to skin a cat. That phrase is second nature to how I think. If one path is blocked, my mind is already three routes around it before I’ve consciously registered the obstacle.

The honest downside

I built a $150 million company. During most of those years, I wasn’t a good father. I wasn’t a good husband.

Not because I was a bad person. Because my brain was on the business. The relationships, the emotional intelligence, the being-present piece. Those lived in a part of my operating system that wasn’t getting enough bandwidth. The ADHD brain doesn’t naturally prioritize what it can’t measure or optimize.

When the oil company fell apart, that forced something open. Suddenly I wasn’t running the machine 16 hours a day. I had time with my twin boys. And I realized the machine I’d been running wasn’t actually the purpose. They were.

That doesn’t mean ADHD ruined my relationships. It means I didn’t understand my own wiring well enough to compensate for its gaps. That’s not a character flaw. It’s what happens when you spend 47 years not knowing what’s running in the background.

Why real estate works for the ADHD brain

Not every industry rewards the ADHD operating style equally.

Corporate environments box you in. Compliance-heavy fields punish the kind of creative problem-solving that comes naturally. Businesses that require the same thing done the same way every day are a particular kind of misery.

Real estate is different.

No two deals are the same, so pattern recognition matters constantly
The community structure of real estate investing allows you to fill your gaps with other people’s strengths
Deals require quick analysis and decisive action, both things an ADHD brain can sustain
You’re not locked in a single building managing a single asset class for 30 years

What saved me after the $35 million loss was real estate. Not because it’s easy (it isn’t). But because the pace, the problem-solving, and the constant need to read situations and adapt are a terrain the ADHD brain can navigate.

The other thing: real estate investing rewards community. In the oil business, everything was guarded. You didn’t share vendors with competitors. You didn’t let customers know your margins. Everything was compartmentalized. Real estate is collaborative. You can bounce deals off other operators. You can find partners to cover your blind spots. When your brain runs fast and gets bored of detail, having people around who love the detail is the structural solution.

The tool that changed everything: closing open loops

Here’s the most practical thing I’ve learned.

My ADHD brain keeps an active queue. Things that need to be done, things that are half-finished, things that got started and didn’t get closed. These loop continuously. If I don’t have a system to capture and close them, the queue grows and the background anxiety builds.

I call them open loops. And I’ve made closing them a daily discipline.

Every morning: a small notebook, a short list
Every item completed: crossed off
Every item not completed: carried forward until it’s done

That’s it. No app. No complex GTD system. A list. A pen. The satisfaction of crossing something off.

It sounds like basic productivity advice. For an ADHD brain, it’s more than that: it’s the difference between a day that feels out of control and a day that has a spine.

The second tool: delegation. I’m not good at the detail-orientation that running a company’s back end requires. When I had 150 employees, the systems people were the ones who translated my vision into repeatable operations. I learned to identify what I’m good at and build around the gaps: not try to fix them, but structure the work so the gaps don’t become single points of failure.

What getting diagnosed at 47 actually changes

It changes how you interpret the past.

Suddenly the social awkwardness that always felt like a personal failing makes sense. The relationships that went cold because you came across as detached or distracted? You see them differently. The pattern of unfinished projects, the restlessness, the interrupting people because you already know where they’re going: all of it has a name and a framework.

It doesn’t erase anything. But it stops the self-punishment.

I was too hard on myself for most of my career. The internal story was: you know what to do, you know what matters, why can’t you just execute like everyone else? The answer turned out to be: because your brain doesn’t work like everyone else’s. And that’s not a deficit. It’s a different operating system.

Now I extend the same grace to my twin boys. I can see some of my tendencies in them. My goal isn’t to correct those tendencies. It’s to help them understand their own wiring early, something I didn’t have.

The question for entrepreneurs reading this

If you’ve ever been told you don’t focus. If you’ve started more things than you’ve finished. If you know exactly where you want to go but the path from here to there keeps getting interrupted.

You might be running the same operating system.

That’s not a reason to slow down. It’s a reason to get curious about how you work, and build structures that turn those traits into leverage instead of liability.

I’m not advocating for or against medication. I’m not a doctor. What I am is someone who built a significant company before knowing any of this, lost it all, and rebuilt, and who can see clearly now how that brain runs better when it understands itself.

If you’re an entrepreneur with ADHD, what’s the one system or structure that’s made the biggest difference for you?

The rest of that story (the build, the collapse, the rebuild) is on my story page.