I was homeschooled. I attribute more of how I think as an operator to that than to anything I've done in business since. My schedule was mine. Nobody tried to fit me into a box. I didn't grow up learning how to think inside one.
I got my first computer at 15 and spent a lot of my teenage freedom on it: tinkering, building websites, a little hacking. Then I joined the Navy and worked in IT and radio communications. That's where I cut my teeth on technology at scale, and where I learned most of what I know about working as a team and leading people. I was already disciplined when I got there. The Navy sharpened it.
I opened my first CrossFit gym in 2007 in Memphis. I didn't know what I was doing. In 2012, I co-founded a second gym in Collierville, where I held a minority stake and operated more as an advisor than as an owner-operator. I sold both gyms in 2015.
In 2012, I also co-founded Barbell Shrugged and took the CEO seat. We built a fitness media company, a podcast, an audience, and a brand that got big enough to mean something in the CrossFit world. It sold. The sale wasn't for much. I wouldn't brag about the numbers if I had to share them. But it was my first real exit, and the lessons I took from it shaped everything I've done since.
Here's the main one. I didn't own the thing I built. I was the operator of it. The business couldn't run without me. Which meant I didn't own it. I was it.
When it came time to sell, I sold what I could. Building something that runs without you is a different skill than building something that runs because of you. It took me a long time to learn the difference.
I've learned how to exit companies now.
While Barbell Shrugged was running, I started Barbell Business with my co-founders. Separate brand, focused on the business side of fitness, aimed at CrossFit gym owners. I ran a mastermind. I built a SaaS product for gym owners in 2015 (originally Barbell Logic; the name is used by someone else for something unrelated now). I consulted gym owners, then supplement companies, then anyone in the broader health and fitness space who wanted the help. That work started in 2013. It hasn't stopped.
The consulting expanded outward. I stopped working exclusively in fitness and started working with operator-founders more broadly. People who'd built something real and needed someone to help them see what the business actually needed next.
Not everything worked.
I founded The Strong Coach in 2018. I closed it in 2022, but not because I stopped believing in coaching. I closed it because the way people had started selling into the coaching market had gotten out of control. The market had saturated. Empty promises everywhere. Marketing tactics that didn't respect the buyer. Marketing honestly got harder. My business started to suffer. Eventually I made the call to shut it down and pivot into a different kind of consulting, because the style of selling the industry had normalized wasn't something I was going to keep doing.
In 2018 I also co-founded Training Camp for the Soul, an emotional development program. I exited in 2021. That exit was better than Barbell Shrugged's. Not perfect. Just better. The difference was that I'd learned to build something that could leave my hands cleanly.
Around that same time, I helped transform a company called Procabulary (a mindset course and 1-on-1 coaching practice) into Enlifted, a certification program around language and cognitive training. I exited in 2020. That work ended up being the pattern I do now with operator-founders: take what someone's built, help them turn it into what it can become.
Since 2013 I've also been doing personal development work. Nervous-system work. Psycho-emotional work. The interior work most operators leave on the table, not because they don't need it, but because it doesn't feel productive until they realize it is. I learned to work on myself first. That's what lets me work with leaders on a level beyond strategy.
In 2022 and 2023, I was a creative real estate investor. I did the actual work: acquisitions, structures, negotiation, deals. That experience is feeding a project I'm building now — an AI-first operations layer for creative real estate investors. Same move I'd tell any operator-founder to make: get inside the work, find where the architecture ceiling is, and build the AI-native layer that compounds the human expertise already in the business.
I've been an advisor to Life-Aid Beverage Company since 2015, and to Hiro Science, Psychedelic Guide Network, Universal Awareness Fellowship, and Sacred Hunting in the years since. A lot of my consulting now lives in two places: businesses in the psychedelic and consciousness space, and operator-founders navigating the AI-era rebuild. Same underlying work, different contexts.
That's the work now. I write. I host the Full Stack Founders podcast with Ted Phaeton. I run Bledsoe & Co., the consulting practice that diagnoses what an AI-era operator-founder business actually needs and builds it with them. And I work one-on-one with founders through Personal Counsel on the strategic and personal work of becoming the owner of what you built, not the operator of it.
I got here by building, breaking, rebuilding. The hardest lessons came from the things that didn't work. The small exit. The closed company. The pivot I had to make when the market I was in had drifted somewhere I wasn't going to follow. The wins paid me. The losses shaped me.
If you're at a version of that road I've already walked, welcome. Subscribe to the writing below, or pick a door in Work With Me.