She ran that operation out of her backpack and locker through middle school and high school. Everyone knew where to get their gum.

Second of seven kids in Houston, money tight, and she describes the specific moment of looking around at classmates’ families and deciding she wanted to figure out money the way they seemed to have. Lifeguard at fifteen. Call center at sixteen, doing outbound political polling, getting a seventy-year-old woman in Austin to stay on the phone for forty-five minutes — chasing the gift cards for top performer. She says she didn’t know then that she’d spend the rest of her life calling strangers to make things happen.

She was the first woman on her mother’s side to get a college degree. Information Systems at BYU, where she learned she wasn’t the person who could code for six hours straight — and learned instead to be the person everyone wanted in their group, because she could take what the team built and explain why it mattered.

Then Goldman Sachs, right before the financial crisis, starting in mutual fund operations and talking her way into the Dallas private wealth office. Twelve years. Then a call from JP Morgan in 2018 asking her to move to Utah and open their office. She says she thought that was the entrepreneurial leap. Looking back, it wasn’t.

The actual leap came from a panel. Asked about women founders receiving only around 2% of venture capital nationally, she reframed the question — the gap she saw wasn’t in who gets funded but in who sits on investment committees. Six months later she got a cold call from Darren Hill at RevRoad asking why investors weren’t committing to his fund. She gave him the honest answer. He paused, then asked her to come run it. Her response: I’m not a VC. His: not yet.

She’s now a partner at Stalwart Ventures, fourteen investments in, hundreds evaluated. Thirty percent of the fund’s limited partners are women, which happened because they dropped the minimum to $100,000 regardless of net worth — she’d found that most of these women had never been pitched by a VC firm before.

There’s a lot in here for anyone early in a career. Her warning to high achievers that she’s more concerned about their mental health three years after graduation than she is right now, because results are a different game than grades and people you thought were less sharp will navigate it better. Her advice on walking into a room where you know nobody, and why “I’m new” has a short shelf life. And the 401(k) advice from her Goldman bosses in Dallas that she credits for the financial freedom to take risk now.

Plus a plain-language explanation of what venture capital actually is, why founders should be interviewing VCs rather than the other way around, and what a fund owes the investors who hand over money for a decade.

What changed was COVID. The job had been ten to twelve hour days, five and sometimes six days a week, with travel on top. Being home showed him what he'd been trading away. His words: he was sacrificing the most important asset he had. Everyone thought he was crazy to walk away from that kind of comfort, and he says there were moments he agreed with them.

His conclusion was that it wasn't actually a choice. He could still make a lot of money, still make an impact, and be there for his kids.

This one covers the full arc. Growing up in a blue-collar scrap yard and working alongside men two and three times his age doing hard physical labor for the same money a sixteen-year-old was making — which taught him respect for that work and a clear sense that he wanted something different in twenty years. Taking a sales job at 23 because he was nervous, and deciding that nervousness was a yes. Going from one location to ten, and being the one sent into every newly acquired yard to win over employees who'd just been bought and were bracing for what came next.

That last job produced what he names as his superpower: building trust with people fast, authentically. The second one is the reason he coaches — he can see potential in someone who can't see it themselves, and hold the mirror up until they do.

He's clear-eyed about why coaching works. Most of his clients already have it together. They started a business for freedom or passion and somewhere along the way it became a headache with employees to manage and a scaling problem. His job is helping them remember why they started. And he reframes accountability as something done with love, not someone busting your chops.

Also in this one: why the top is lonely and what to do about it, the line from his friend Brian that the things that are most private are the most universal, where mortgage rates actually sit right now, and his answer for what he credits his success to — optimism and mindset, trained deliberately, no matter what happens.

Instead he'd already built something else in his head. He calls it spiritually designing — deciding what a thing could be before you look at what it is, then chasing that. That restoration became the catalyst for a whole neighborhood turning over.

Tom was born in downtown Ogden and went to Ogden High. His father, an East LA transplant teaching at Weber High, thought his students were sheltered and started taking them on summer trips through Europe — and was among the first Americans allowed to bring a group into China. Somewhere in there he did the math on hotel bills and started buying property in London instead. He was an Anglophile with family portraits of the royals on the wall.

Tom served an LDS mission in Scotland, which gave him UK residency, which meant he could invest in London without being treated as a foreigner. He spent 25 years doing it. The portfolio crossed $100 million, built one property a year to start.

He also sat on Ogden's Historic Landmarks Commission for fifteen years, and he has a useful answer for investors scared off by historic designation: it depends entirely on the attitude you bring. Strip the character out and you'll be scrutinized. Work with what's there and the commission becomes wind at your back.

These days his focus is Plot AV, six years old, doing AV integration and home networks. His diagnosis: technology in our homes has become noisy. Not audibly — we just spend too much time troubleshooting things that should already work. His argument is that Wi-Fi is now closer to heat and electricity than to a gadget, and that we'd never build a house without plumbing but routinely ignore what he calls the nervous system of the home until it's too late. Three goals, and only three: invisible, reliable, intuitive.

Also in this one: why his oldest properties date to the 1890s, the block where he and his father restored five houses alongside Ogden City, and the Rick Rubin idea that if you don't make the thing, it goes and finds someone else to make it.

He was studying broadcast and film at the time and couldn't see where the degree was going. Video was just starting to move onto the internet — this is back when Zappos was putting shoe videos on product pages — so he asked the guy whether his knife site had any video on it. It didn't. Ben started making YouTube videos about knives instead.

What happened next is what he calls two degrees of learning. You learn YouTube, then realize YouTube is a piece of marketing, so you learn marketing. Then you wonder what's beyond that. Own the marketing department, then finance and accounting, then ops — and eventually you're looking at a business you own outright.

He and his wife started Knafs in 2018 as a side hustle, ran it that way for four years while having kids, and took it full time in 2022. Today it's ten employees, roughly half direct-to-consumer, most product launches happening on Kickstarter, and seventy dealers worldwide with the biggest in the Netherlands. He's not a knife maker, and he'll correct you if you call him one. He's a marketing guy and a storyteller who happens to own a CNC shop with three mills.

The name came from a hashtag nobody had claimed — "knifes" the way it sounds in the American South. Five letters, twelve dollars, 2018. That doesn't happen anymore.

Ben's answer for what he credits his success to is two words: failures and networking. His superpower, by his own account, is connecting ideas — knowing a guy in Boise who knows how to do one thing and a guy with the right machine, and seeing how they fit together. It's the same skill that builds a newscast rundown, which is what he studied.

Also in this one: why there's a glut of pocket knives and what actually makes one matter, five guys from North Carolina who called ahead for a short tour and stayed two hours, live-selling on Whatnot where he signs knives on camera, the roll of toilet paper that sold for a hundred and eight dollars, why he puts space cats on his products when the rest of the industry goes tactical, and the rising-tide mentality he brings to introductions: invite me to your pool when you're all billionaires.

Kevin Ward was voted Realtor of the Year for the number one Century 21 office in the world. He was having an affair at the time. Within a year he was sleeping in that office.

He spent fifteen years as a Christian pastor in small-town Texas before moving to Dallas Fort Worth — a town of twelve thousand to a metro of five million, knowing nobody. He learned real estate the hard way, did 108 transactions in a single year before mega teams existed, and buried himself in the work to avoid a marriage he'd never admitted was broken.

Then it burned down. And he did it again. And again. Three divorces.

After the third, he journaled over two thousand pages in about fifteen months and arrived somewhere most people never get to: it's gotta be me. There's a commonality, and the commonality is him. That admission is what everything he teaches now is built on.

Out of it came the seven domains — faith, feelings, focus, fitness, fun, finances, family — and his argument that feelings is the most powerful one and the one nobody talks about, because your emotions drive more of your behavior and decisions than anything else does. It only takes one domain in trouble to take the rest down with it. His analogy: you can't win at pickleball with a great serve alone.

Also in this one: Vortex Kings, his men's mastermind, and why he believes you're the king of your own life. The daily guided journaling practice that isn't about writing down feelings at all. The book that reframed how he understood being a husband. Two bestselling books for real estate agents built on getting yes without the BS. And the superpower he'll tell you plainly: he gives a shit, and he'd rather have his heart broken and let it heal than stop caring.

Carpe victoriam. Seize the victory. It's the phrase on his hat and the battle cry of his coaching, and it exists because championships are planned events. Nobody hands them to you.

He didn't stay because he was made of something rare. He stayed because nobody offered him a way out — and he says so plainly. If someone had put an insurance job in front of him in 2008, he'd have taken it.

Mike is a Minnesota kid who moved to Hawaii after college, met a girl from Sandy on the beach, and followed her to Utah twenty-five years and four daughters ago. At 22 he bought a condo two blocks from the water, then bought a trashed one nearby for reasons he still can't explain, and spent his evenings fixing it up with paint from Home Depot. When he sold it he made a year's salary in one go. This was 1999, before house flipping was a thing anyone had named.

Utah in the early 2000s had no tech industry and no job he wanted, so he opened a Curves franchise in Sugar House, was projected a hundred members in week one, signed eleven, and had to go get a job to pay for the business he'd just started. That job was mortgages — an industry he knew nothing about and was setting company records in within six months. Spec houses followed. Things got bigger. He decided he was a genius. Then 2007 arrived.

What came after the crash is the shape of the whole conversation. Two months of his parents covering his mortgage, then a month of his mother-in-law covering it, which he describes without any softening. Years later, a short sale finally cleared and he pulled the repayment out of the bank in cash, because he knew his father wouldn't accept it any other way. Then a $200,000 raise turned into a $2 million line of credit, and for five straight years he was at the courthouse auction every single day — roughly 300 houses.

He's equally direct about what happened next: a million dollars lost on his first big Park City deal, another million on his first development. Today he's building ski-in ski-out at Powder Mountain and has just taken on High Star Ranch, and he's honest that the reason he can do it is a single narrow skill. He values real estate better than the people bidding against him. That's the whole superpower, and he can point to exactly what it's been worth.

Running underneath all of it is a question he keeps circling: how much of this was him, and how much was timing. He'll tell you the only common denominator across successful people isn't intelligence or hustle — it's the ones who don't quit — and then immediately admit he was one phone call from being someone who did.

It's also a conversation about four daughters. A farmer, a nurse, a self-declared golf mom, and a fifteen-year-old just signed by an LA agency. About a wife who told him at nineteen exactly what she wanted to do with her life. And about the low-grade dread every parent of grown kids carries — that one day someone new walks in and the thing you built at home changes shape.

At 8:30 one morning Brett Chell was the CEO of a company he'd spent thirteen years and $53 million building. By 9 he'd been told not to go back to his house, not to speak to a single employee, phone off, computer off. They towed his Escalade. His visa was attached to the job. He walked out of downtown Houston with a backpack.

Brett dropped out of high school and spent eight years on oil rigs. What he also saw was a problem nobody was solving: operators running hundred-million-dollar sites from headquarters half a country away, getting their data emailed to them piecemeal by a dozen service companies who had no interest in talking to each other. He figured software couldn't be that hard. Thirteen years and $53 million later, he had his answer. The company he built is still running, doing $50–60 million a year with 250 employees. He was removed from it right as it hit escape velocity.

What followed was sixty days of Domino's and Netflix with his phone off, then a year of trying to work out who he was without a company name to lead with. His lawyer told him he'd win the fight for his equity — two years, half a million in fees, roughly $20 million in warrants on the table. He let all of it go, because taking it wasn't who he wanted to be on the other side.

Then he sat at a kitchen table and wrote down what he actually loved. Supercars. Art. Being around his friends. Marketing. He flew to Salt Lake, drove the city in a grid for two weeks writing down addresses of interesting buildings, walked into the first one, and met the man redeveloping the entire neighborhood. The warehouse he ended up with had gravel floors, smashed windows, rain coming through the roof, and people living inside it. He took it because it was the only one he could afford.

That's Bricks: a business club, a car club, and a media house in one building, built on the observation that most coworking spaces sell community and deliver a room full of strangers who never speak. His fix is curation plus actual services — pooled media production, distribution, and a network members can use.

This is a conversation about what happens when the thing you built stops being yours, and what you're left with. Brett is unusually honest about the role ego played in staying too long, about how much of his earlier success he now attributes to timing rather than talent, and about the difference between the CEO a small company needs and the one a large company needs — a distinction he understood about himself and ignored.

His line for anyone whose identity has quietly merged with their work: "I ask people, who are you? Not what you do."

"I don't want to teach my kids peaks over people." That decision cost her the entire climb: the money, the training, the window, all of it back to zero, on a mountain she says kills a quarter of the people who attempt it. She went back and finished it.

Jenn Drummond holds two world records and had never slept in a tent before any of this started. She's a mom of seven who moved to Utah at 35 with seven kids under the age of eight and two thousand miles between her and everyone she knew. What set the whole thing in motion was a car accident she says she shouldn't have survived — and the realization that came with it, that she'd been building a life on external validation instead of internal.

In this episode she and the guys get into what she's learned from mountains that transfers directly to building a business: why you climb a big peak multiple times before you ever summit it, why every step back down feels like failure and isn't, and why winning means coming home alive — which is also the question to ask before you launch anything. She explains the "grump dump," a journal where she writes down every failure and leaves blank lines underneath, then goes back months later to ask whether it was a failure or a pivot.

Plus: landing on a Denali glacier with five people, 650 pounds of gear, and no porters allowed. Getting stranded in Russia when a missile closed the airfield and no American card would work. And the "somedays" list she's building a company around — because her grandma died, her dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and a friend got cancer with a mountain still on his list.

He grew up watching his parents run about forty of them — they helped start Costa Vida and owned the Utah franchises, and built a few hundred million dollars of commercial real estate in South Ogden. At 18 he went looking for his own identity in network marketing. By 2018 he and his dad had bought an RV dealership doing $12 million a year and making nothing on it. They made it profitable in twelve months, then ran it to $110 million.

Then interest rates went from 3.25% to 11.5% with $59 million of inventory on the floor. $700,000 a month in interest. A bank that could call and ask for $2.5 million the same day, on the morning his CFO told him there was $100,000 in the account.

Jason's answer to how he handled it goes back to a mountainside when he was 18, watching his father walk down to a brother everyone thought was dead and say four words that became the operating principle for everything after.

He sold in 2024. Then came the part nobody warns you about: the identity was gone, the planes were gone, and most of the circle went with them.

Also in this one: how a joke at a golf retreat turned into acquiring Wedge Golf, why Datos monitors 305 million people without storing a single record, what SOC 2 actually costs, and why he'd rather run a $100K-a-month company well than a million-dollar one badly.

Josh gets into why he won't use the word "lost" — in sports or in business — and the story behind the hardest call he's had to make at ERC and the surprising aftermath.

Zach walks through two and a half years running S2 Pickleball from four hours away, what a great manager can and can't do for you, and the community that grew out of a business — including a couple who met there and got married.

Then the part most business podcasts skip: a 14-year-old calling her award-winning year "kind of mid," a dislocated knee days before tryouts, a private school rejection with no explanation, and a Kyrie Irving free throw that changed how one of our families talks about hard weeks.

Books and shows mentioned:
Wings of Fire · Project Hail Mary · The Comfort Crisis · The Human Connection (Cody Bateman) · Bluefishing · The Logo (Jerry West) · Soul Power · Suits

Chapters:
00:00 — Cold open: how air conditioning built Phoenix
00:33 — Why there's no guest this week, and the new Mountain Green studio
05:00 — Passion business vs. necessity business: two and a half years into S2
07:20 — What changes when the owner isn't in the building
09:40 — Going from 1099 contractors to W-2 employees
10:30 — The community that didn't exist before
11:00 — 80 people had to go. All 80 volunteered.
12:30 — The Facebook group the former employees started
13:45 — Books, part one: Wings of Fire, Project Hail Mary, The Comfort Crisis
16:30 — Why we're all too comfortable
18:50 — The sixth-grade bike ride from Mountain Green to Morgan and back
21:15 — The Human Connection, and the follow-up habit it started
23:30 — Bluefishing and asking better questions
25:00 — What we're watching: The Logo and Soul Power
26:00 — "This year was kind of mid"
27:30 — A dislocated knee at the worst possible time
29:30 — Kyrie Irving, a torn ACL, and two words at the line
31:30 — Two state championships and a summer selling door to door
33:30 — The private school rejection nobody explained
34:30 — Charity: doing more than writing a check
37:30 — Why we're not taking June off this year

Jeremy Barker's story is one of the wildest we've had on the pod:

→ Created the metal frames used in Tuff Sheds — as a teenager

→ Was doing $20M/year top line by age 21 supplying Home Depot

→ Partied like a 21-year-old with $20M. Went bankrupt.

→ 2008 crash hit. Went bankrupt AGAIN.

→ Became a firefighter at Roy City. $762 every 2 weeks. House payment was $2,311.

→ Lived a full year in the extra-cab of his Dodge Dooley

→ Borrowed $24K from his neighbor John Porter to start Murphy Door

→ First door sold for $3,000 on a red-and-black website with green-screened fake photos

Today: one door every 6 minutes, $60M+/year

In this one we get into failure as a system, the Britney Spears analogy for why untested success breaks people, and the line I can't stop thinking about — "There's no firmer ground than the bottom."

#murphydoor #entrepreneurstory #foundermindset #podcast #resilience #flatbillinvestor #thejoshz

Then her husband started talking about franchising a bar. She ignored him — for five years.

Until one walk around a lake in Daybreak, Utah changed everything.

In this episode, Jill shares the full story of how The Lake Break was born: the 48-hour scramble to secure a sublease from Hoppers Grill, navigating an SBA loan with daily contractor chaos, training bartenders without a liquor license in hand, and soft-opening the week before Christmas — because a $17,000/month lease waits for no one.

She breaks down what it really takes to build something from scratch when you have the vision but not the industry experience — and how a background in real estate, design, and house-flipping became her secret weapon.

Topics covered:

— Going from fashion design school to real estate at 21

— How one walk around a lake became a business plan

— Securing a sublease in 48 hours with no due diligence

— Navigating SBA loans and contractor reimbursements in real time

— Getting a liquor license the day before soft opening

— Building a team you actually trust

— What makes The Lake Break different from every other restaurant in the South Valley

📍 The Lake Break | Daybreak, Utah

Connect with Jill Jones: Instagram: @thelakebreak_daybreak @jillypink5858

Connect with Josh Zieglowsky: Instagram: @thejoshz

Connect with Zach Spencer: Instagram: @zach_espencer

Subscribe, leave a review, and invest in your future. This is the Flat Bill Investors Podcast.

Russ Warner has been a chameleon his entire career. From running a mortgage company with 38 branches, to assembling longboards in his living room while hiding parts from his wife, to waking up one day to find a TikTok had pushed his product to 50 million people overnight — Russ has never waited for perfect conditions to move.

In this episode, Josh and Zach sits down with Russ to break down the real story behind Ghost Boards — a one-of-a-kind plexiglass longboard company that went from 3 sales a month on a Shopify store built in two hours, to national wholesale accounts and inbound licensing interest. They also get into the mindset behind never taking no personally, the "yes, and" approach that's defined Russ's career, and what most entrepreneurs get wrong when things scale faster than they're ready for.

If you've ever talked yourself out of starting because the timing wasn't right — this one's for you.

In this episode:

• How Russ asked the same neighbor the same question every month for 6 years — and what finally changed
• The TikTok moment that flipped Ghost Boards from hobby to business overnight
• What it actually looks like to scale without a plan — and the expensive lessons that come with it
• The superpower Russ credits for every pivot he's made
• Why Russ believes "no today doesn't mean no tomorrow"

Connect with Russ Warner: linktr.ee/ghostboards

Connect with Josh Zieglowsky: Instagram: @thejoshz

Connect with Zach Spencer: Instagram: @zach_espencer