Built. Lost.
Rebuilt.

The uniform

I joined the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves at nineteen and spent six years as a Military Police officer while I worked through school. The Corps didn’t teach me about money. It taught me the thing money answers to: you don’t rise to the occasion, you fall to the level of your training.

The other education started earlier. My dad taught me cash-flowing real estate before I was ten. I was installing ceiling fans in apartment units while other kids watched cartoons. Property was never exotic to me. It was Saturday morning.

The climb

Business degree, then a sales job at a products company. I stayed until I ran the sales organization, then left to build my own: RPP Products, an automotive oil and chemical manufacturer in Southern California.

One person in an office became 150 employees and national distribution: 7-Eleven, Circle K, Love’s, Pilot, Kroger, Albertsons. Private-label programs on shelves across the country. By 2019 we were doing $150 million a year in revenue, over $500 million in lifetime sales. In 2018 they gave me the Spirit of the Entrepreneur award: “Best of the Best.”

Real estate kept running quietly alongside all of it. That detail matters later.

The pivot

COVID hit and I saw what looked like the opportunity of a lifetime. We knew chemistry. We had facilities and relationships in every major convenience channel in America. When hand sanitizer became impossible to find, we retooled in 30 days.

Thirty thousand gallons a day: five full tanker trucks, every day. We sold to the USPS and NAPA. We opened a 180,000-square-foot facility in my hometown of Butler, Pennsylvania, and donated thousands of gallons to shelters, food banks, and first responders. I watched members of Congress on live TV with our bottles on the desk in front of them, and thought: that’s mine.

The collapse

Then Walmart dropped sanitizer to ten cents a bottle. Overnight. Schools stayed closed. Everything we had built in 90 days (the facilities, the contracts, the warehouse full of bottles imported at peak prices) became worthless faster than we had built it.

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

Here’s what I want you to notice: the operating business, the one with tight margins and no buffer, is the one that died. The boring real estate, the assets everyone told me were too slow, held.

What survived

Three things made it through: my family, my faith, and the discipline. That was the whole inheritance from a $150 million company. And it turned out to be enough.

I went back to the thing that held. Real estate lending, structured the way a man who has watched a foundation give way would structure it: real collateral, equity cushion on every loan, investors paid first. I named it Rock Solid because I know exactly what it feels like when the ground isn’t.

Along the way I co-authored Success Strategies with Jack Canfield, started the Rock Solid Conversations podcast, and got honest in public about the ADHD brain that runs all of this: the same pattern recognition that got me into trouble at full speed is the thing that spots a bad deal in minutes when it’s pointed at underwriting.

The standing orders

Rock Solid Capital lends on residential renovation projects across the country, secured by real property. I host the podcast, I write the field reports, and once a month I send the Briefing.

The $35 million bought six rules. I publish them for free, because the most expensive education in America shouldn’t have to be repeated by the people I can reach first.