I’m Sorry I Waited Seven Years to Write My First Book

You can spend 18 years building experience the market never sees.

I know because I did.

I was 29 years old when my business crossed seven figures for the first time, and it felt like I had summited a mountain I had been climbing for years. I had spent most of my twenties focused on growing the business, making money, and trying to prove that I could build something successful.

Then something slowly started to shift.

Prospects stopped returning calls and emails while cheaper competitors started winning deals on price. For years, the market knew what my company did, but it didn’t understand how our thinking made us different from everyone else doing the same thing.

Looking back, I can see part of the problem was one I had helped create. I had been so focused on making money that we had slowly become order takers for clients. We were good at what we did, but what we did was becoming increasingly replaceable.

The market knew the services we sold. What it didn’t know was my story, the experiences that had shaped how I thought, or the perspective behind the work.

Publishing eventually changed that for me.

But not right away.

From the outside, it looked like I had an amazing life as the business grew. I was hiring people, winning industry awards, and getting plenty of the external validation I craved back then.

Then there was the travel.

My wife and I welcomed the start of 2009 by celebrating New Year’s in Paris. Then nine months later, we were in Bora Bora for our babymoon before we welcomed our first son in 2010. The following year we took him to Italy, where I turned 30 and celebrated by drinking 30-year-old Macallan. Then our first daughter joined us in 2012, and we took them both to Costa Rica.

Still, I was not truly happy or fulfilled.

And these were not my finest years.

I had gotten good at putting on a mask to protect my ego and make everything look fine from the outside, even when it wasn’t. The business was pushing toward $2 million in revenue, but the truth was we had slowly become commoditized, and I was carrying more stress than I knew how to handle.

That stress found its way home as I wasn’t a very present father in the early years of our first two kids as I struggled to be where my feet were. Even when I was physically with my family, part of me was usually somewhere else, thinking about the business, the next goal, or what I needed to fix.

Behind the scenes, things were getting pretty rough as my wife grew tired of the entrepreneurial rollercoaster she hadn't signed up to ride. On October 4, 2012, my wife had enough and gave me an ultimatum: choose the business or the family.

I wanted both, and I knew I needed help.

A few weeks later, I hired David C. Baker, who sat down with me in my office. He asked me a question that would eventually change my life.

“When are you going to write your book?”

I laughed.

“Me? Write a book? What do I know? Who’s going to read it?”

David replied, “You’ve been doing what you’ve been doing for a decade. You know more than you think you know.”

David saw something in me that I couldn’t see in myself.

The problem was that it would take me another seven years to do anything about it.

In January 2019, during a conversation with Gray MacKenzie on his podcast, I finally made a public commitment to write my first book. I shouldn’t have waited that long because writing forced me to do something I had never really done before: take years of experience, stories, lessons, ideas, and perspective that mostly lived in my head and give them structure.

That changed more than I expected.

My first book became a bestseller. It helped my podcast grow into the top 3% globally and led to higher paid keynote speaking opportunities. Within 18 months of publishing, the book generated more than seven figures in new revenue while my reputation started traveling farther than my direct relationships.

People who had never met me could learn my story and understand what I believed, while getting to know my perspective, philosophy, and how I thought about the problems we were solving.

Looking back now, I can see the authority I built didn’t really start with publishing.

It started with my experience.

What you live shapes how you see the world. And when you take the time to look back at those experiences and understand what they actually taught you, patterns begin to emerge.

Those patterns influence your thinking, which shapes your beliefs, principles, and perspectives. Over time, those ideas can be developed into a compelling philosophy and clear framework that makes your thinking easier for other people to understand.

Publishing then gives that thinking a way to travel beyond you.

That distinction has become increasingly important to me because what you do can now be copied, automated, and commoditized more easily than ever before. Competitors can study your services. Technology can replicate more of the work. AI can create more content in a few minutes than most of us could have created in a month just a few years ago.

But no competitor, institution, or AI can copy what only you have lived and learned.

Your experience is what makes you different from everyone else who does what you do.

I keep meeting founders with 10, 20, even 30 years of experience and lessons that still mostly live in their heads. They’ve built companies, solved hard problems, made mistakes, learned things the hard way, and developed perspectives that could help other people.

They just haven’t taken the time to develop any of it.

That’s a big part of why I’m building Built Authority.

We help founders tell their story, share their philosophy, and build their authority through publishing so the market can begin to know and trust them for how they think, not simply what they do.

You’ve already lived the source material, and you have everything you need to begin.

There are two questions you must now answer:

I’ve been thinking a lot about that second question lately.

A couple of years ago, I published my second book, Banking on Change, to help leaders navigate change in the Age of AI. What I didn’t expect was how much writing that book would end up changing my own life and business.

Turns out, I wasn’t simply writing about change.

I was living through it myself.

The ideas I was writing about forced me to wrestle with much bigger questions about the work I was doing, who I was becoming, and what I wanted the next chapter of my life to look like.

Eventually, some of those questions would lead me to step away from the business I had spent more than two decades building and begin creating something new.

That’s another reason I’m giving Banking on Change away now.

The same ideas that helped me navigate my own season of change can now help other founders navigate the change required for them to become who they’re being called to become next.

If you’re an entrepreneur sitting on years of experience and lessons that mostly still live in your head, hit reply, tell me what you’ve been thinking about, and I’ll send you a copy of Banking on Change.

I’m genuinely curious.

It’s your story. Live it well.

Memento mori,