Behind the Search

My grandfather started with a cleaned-out chicken coop in rural Southern Illinois.

No investors. No MBA. Just a welder, a wife, and a bet that he could build something that mattered. So he built two steel companies. Over sixty years in continuous operation. More than 300 people employed.

He changed the trajectory of a town — not because he had a plan to scale, but because he kept showing up and the work was good. My grandmother was beside him the whole way.

My father's side came from a different world — corporate sales and marketing leadership across big American companies. I grew up at the intersection: one family that built things with their hands and another that built the commercial systems to sell them.

That's the model I grew up watching. Not business as theory. Business as responsibility.

I didn't start in manufacturing. I started behind a camera. I built a production company out of college and landed Fortune 500 clients.

Through that business, I helped many small businesses, but I kept noticing the same thing: the businesses that hired us for better marketing assets didn't need better marketing. They needed better systems.

So I followed the problem. That's how Davidson Ventures became a revenue consultancy — and how I ended up inside specialty manufacturers. Redesigning go-to-market strategy for a modular masonry manufacturer. Building e-commerce and dealer systems for a 120-year-old refractory company. Implementing CRM and sales process where none existed.

Seven years of the same lesson repeated in different buildings: the product is never the problem. The infrastructure is.

I kept building these systems and handing them back. Watching businesses I'd spent months inside grow on the infrastructure I built — under someone else's name, on someone else's timeline.

It was good work. I'm proud of it. But at some point you stop wanting to build the engine for other people and start wanting to drive it yourself.

I enrolled in the MBA program at Washington University in St. Louis. I was awarded the Koch Center Fellowship for Family Enterprise — a program built to prepare the next generation of small business owners. I secured SBA financing with a nationally ranked lender. I built an advisory network of operators running multi-generational industrial companies.

I wasn't preparing to think about ownership.

I was doing it.