Eighteen years. Thirty thousand sales. And the most valuable thing I walked away with wasn't in any of the shipping boxes.
A farmer called needing a couple of cows pregnancy-checked and one lame one looked at. I drove out in my old Ford Ranger, did the work, and came home $75 richer — along with the first idea for a business of my own.
I thought I was buying growth on wheels. What I really bought was an expensive lesson in cash flow, overconfidence, operational complexity, and knowing when to walk away from a good idea that was not mine to build.
A mission statement is aspirational. A budget is a confession — it tells you, line by line, what leadership chose to protect, what got pushed off another year, and what people were quietly expected to absorb.