I'm the Biggest Loser in the Room. That's the Point.

Key Takeaways

• I built an oil and chemical company from nothing, and by 2020 I was running roughly $150 million a year in revenue.
• COVID hit, and I pivoted the whole operation into hand sanitizer. It worked — until greed kept us in the trade too long, and it collapsed on top of a hundred truckloads of unsold inventory.
• I walked into investor rooms afterward and called myself the biggest loser in the room. I meant it as a credential, not a confession.
• Losing the company is what pulled me out of a pace and a version of myself I wouldn’t have walked away from on my own.
• The name of what I built next — Rock Solid — isn’t a marketing name. It’s the philosophy: build on the rock, not on the sand.

I walk into rooms full of investors and I say it straight out: I’m the biggest loser in the room. But I’ll tell you — I’m also the biggest winner.

That’s not a line I say for effect. It’s the fastest way to tell you the truth about how I got here.

The pivot that worked, until it didn’t

In 2020 I was running an oil and chemical manufacturing company I’d built from a single room to over $150 million a year in revenue. When COVID hit, the opportunity in front of everyone was obvious: hand sanitizer. So we pivoted the whole operation.

It worked. For a while, I thought I was the hand sanitizer king of the world.

Here’s the part I don’t sanitize when I tell this story: what happened next was on me. I got greedy. I decided we were going to make hand sanitizer forever, long after the market had already started to turn. Instead of cutting the trade and surviving, we kept pushing.

I ended up with a hundred truckloads of hand sanitizer sitting in my buildings. And then it all melted down.

What it actually feels like

I lost the company. I lost almost everything I’d spent years building. If you’ve never been through something like that, the closest comparison I can give you is grief — watching dominoes fall one at a time, and there’s nothing you can do about any of them.

Why I still call it the best thing that happened to me

Here’s the reframe, and I mean it every time I say it: if I hadn’t lost that company, I’d still be on the same pace I was on before. The local version of me running around, chasing the next deal, not really connecting with my kids.

Losing it is what changed me. It’s what reshaped me as a person — from a workaholic who wasn’t paying attention to his family, into someone who was.

I think about it as walking through the valley. You go through the hard stretch, you come out the other side, and eventually you’re back on the peak. That’s not a metaphor I picked up somewhere — it’s just been true for me, more than once, and I keep coming back to it because it keeps being true.

Why I named it Rock Solid

The name isn’t an accident, and it isn’t just a strong-sounding word. It’s a philosophy I state plainly: I like to build on the rock, not on the sand. My biblical reference, and it’s deliberate. After watching a business built on a pandemic trade evaporate in ninety days, “not building on sand” stopped being an abstraction for me. It became the standard.

That’s the story. Losing it wasn’t the end of the story — it’s the reason the next chapter looks the way it does.