I Lost $35 Million. Here's the Only Lesson That Matters.

I don’t recommend it.

But since it happened, I might as well tell you what it taught me, because the lesson is actually simple. And knowing it ahead of time is worth a lot more than $35 million in tuition.

How it happened

For context: by 2019, my oil distribution company was doing $150 million a year in revenue. One person in an office, to 150 employees, to national distribution: 7-Eleven, Circle K, Loves, Pilot, Kroger, Albertsons, all of it. I’d built private label programs that put products on shelves across the country. And real estate had always been running alongside the business. My dad taught me cash-flowing properties at a young age, and I’d never stopped.

Then COVID hit.

I saw what looked like an opportunity. We knew chemistry. We had facilities. We had distribution relationships across every major convenience channel in the country. When hand sanitizer became impossible to find, I thought: this is what we do.

Within 30 days of making the decision, we were producing 30,000 gallons of hand sanitizer per day. That’s five full tanker trucks of product, every day. We sold to the USPS. We sold to NAPA. Our product, Premier Hand Sanitizer, ended up in front of Congress members during those televised sessions. I saw our bottles on screen and thought, that’s mine.

And then Walmart dropped hand sanitizer to ten cents a bottle. Overnight. Schools closed for a year. Everything we had built in 90 days (the facilities, the inventory, the contracts) became worthless faster than we’d built it.

I had a warehouse full of millions of dollars of plastic bottles imported from China at peak prices. Millions more in packaged inventory. And a market that had evaporated.

The dominoes fell. Decisions that seemed reasonable on the way up looked catastrophic on the way down. When it was over, I had lost $35 million personally.

The thing I got right

Here’s what didn’t fall.

Real estate.

Through every phase of the oil business (the partnership betrayal in the early years, the scaling years, the COVID collapse) I was also buying and selling real estate. Always. And while the business rose and fell, the real estate held.

It was the steadiest thing I owned.

That’s not luck. Real estate operates on different mechanics than most businesses. The asset is physical. It doesn’t go to zero because a competitor undercuts your price. It doesn’t evaporate because a global event changes demand overnight. And when you structure the financing conservatively (buying below value, capping loan-to-value at 70% of value) you have a buffer that most investments simply don’t.

The hand sanitizer business had no buffer. When the market turned, there was no equity cushion, no collateral, nothing to slow the fall. The velocity of the loss matched the velocity of the gain, in reverse.

Real estate doesn’t move that fast. That’s the feature, not the flaw.

What the $35 million actually cost me

I’m going to be honest about something most entrepreneurs won’t say.

The money was the recoverable part.

What actually cost me, what I couldn’t just rebuild with harder work and better systems, was time. Time I didn’t spend being a good father. Time I didn’t spend being present. During the years I was scaling the oil business, I was in constant firefights. Managing, competing, executing, worrying. The business was the primary thing, and everything else was secondary.

My twin boys were growing up, and I was there physically, but often somewhere else mentally.

When the company fell, that changed. I had time. Real time. And I realized that the thing I’d been chasing (the $150 million, the national footprint, the scale) wasn’t the actual purpose.

My twins were the purpose. Building something that lasted, something that compounded, something that could exist after I was gone. That was the purpose.

I don’t recommend losing $35 million to find that out. But I also recognize that sometimes the loss is what clears the noise.

The only lesson that actually matters

Here it is, and it’s not complicated:

Margin for error is everything.

In business, in investing, in life: the people who survive catastrophic events are the ones who built in a buffer. The ones who don’t survive are the ones who ran everything right up to the edge and had no room when conditions changed.

In real estate: the buffer is the 70% cap. You never lend more than 70% of the value of the collateral. That remaining 30% is your margin for error.
In business: the buffer is capital reserves and diversified revenue. I had high revenue and thin margins. When revenue disappeared, there was nothing underneath it.
In life: the buffer is relationships and faith. When the company was gone, the people who stayed were the people who mattered. The faith that had always been there became something I actually leaned on. Those were the only things that didn’t need to be rebuilt from scratch.

The hand sanitizer wasn’t inherently a bad idea. Pivoting to serve real demand is good business. But I ran at full speed into a market with no margin for error. When conditions changed (and in business, conditions always change), there was nothing to absorb the impact.

Real estate has always given me the margin. That’s why I came back to it.

What I built after

Rock Solid Capital is the answer to what I learned.

It’s a hard money lending fund: we provide capital for fix-and-flip real estate projects, secured by trust deeds at a maximum of 70% of value. Investors provide capital; we deploy it into carefully underwritten projects; investors receive a preferred return, paid monthly. The current tiers sit alongside the risk factors in the offering documents at rocksolidcap.com.

The structure was designed by someone who has seen what happens when there’s no cushion. Every decision I made about how to build it reflects that:

Every loan capped at 70% of value: a cushion for when projects don’t go exactly as planned
Diversification across multiple properties, so no single deal dominates the outcome
Investors get paid first, before the fund takes any profit
A defined term, not a 7-year commitment with no exit

The things I didn’t have in the oil business (buffer, diversification, investor-first structure) I built into every layer of how Rock Solid Capital operates.

What this means for you

If you’re an investor evaluating where to put capital, I’m not here to pitch fear. But I am here to say: structure matters more than story.

Any investment that doesn’t answer the question “what happens when something goes wrong?” is asking you to bet on nothing going wrong. Things always go wrong eventually. The question is whether you built in enough margin to survive when they do.

I paid $35 million to understand that. You don’t have to.

What carried me through COVID wasn’t skill or hustle. It was the asset class that was built differently: physical collateral, conservative lending ratios, and the kind of slow, boring compounding that doesn’t make exciting conference presentations but also doesn’t evaporate when the market shifts.

Hype fades. Good structure doesn’t.

What’s the hardest business or financial lesson you’ve learned, and what did it actually change about how you operate?

More on the fund, including the offering documents and their risk disclosures, is at rocksolidcap.com.

For accredited investors only. This is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy securities. Any offering is made only pursuant to Rule 506(c) of Regulation D to verified accredited investors. All investments involve risk, including possible loss of principal.