Read the opening of Pink Slip Comeback

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You know the moment.

Maybe it was a meeting you weren't invited to. A meeting that would have had your name on the calendar six months ago, and now it doesn't. You find out afterward, casually, the way you find out things that are meant to sting a little.

Maybe it was a birthday. Not a dramatic one. Just a quiet Tuesday when you did the math and realized that the years you've spent building, contributing, showing up, haven't added up to anything you actually own. You've been depositing into someone else's account this whole time.

Or maybe it was a Sunday morning. Coffee going cold. Numbers on a page that don't lie. The gap between where you are and where you thought you'd be by now sitting there in plain sight, impossible to explain away.

That moment is different for everyone. But the feeling is the same. Something inside you goes quiet and then very loud. And a question surfaces that you've been pushing back down for longer than you want to admit:

Is this it?

This book is for that moment. And for what you decide to do about it.

---

Fifty-seven percent of Americans would rather start a business than work for someone else.

You're probably one of them.

Maybe you already got the pink slip. Maybe you can feel it coming. The quiet shift in how people talk to you, the meetings you're no longer invited to, the growing sense that the company you gave your best years to is quietly moving on without you.

Or maybe nothing dramatic has happened yet. You're still showing up. Still performing. Still telling yourself it's fine. But somewhere underneath all that fine, you know the truth: the deal you made with yourself to work hard, stay loyal, and build something hasn't paid out the way you expected. You didn't build a career. You built someone else's.

You may be doing well by every measure that shows up on a resume. But if you have nothing to show for it on a balance sheet, you are equity poor. And that is the quiet crisis nobody talks about.

This book is for the moment after you realize that. Whether that moment came with a pink slip, a performance review, a birthday that made you do the math, or a quiet Sunday morning when the numbers just didn't add up, this is for what comes next.

This is a comeback story. Mine first. Then yours.

---

Five months before my body made the decision for me, my best friend David planted a seed.

David called me from Basalt, Colorado, six miles down the valley from Snowmass. He'd just left a sales job he hated in Pensacola and moved out west to figure things out. No plan. Just a decision that staying was worse than leaving.

We talked a few times over those months. He told me about the mountains, the freedom, the strange relief of not knowing exactly what came next. And I told him about the cubicle, the grey padded walls, the thumbtacks, the wrong job in a tall shiny glass building I'd been so excited to walk into after grad school.

At the end of one of those calls, I heard myself say it out loud for the first time:

"Man, I wish I could move out there."

David didn't pause. Didn't think about it. Just said:

That was it. Two words. And they stayed with me, quietly at first then louder, for the next three months as I kept showing up to that cubicle, kept doing work that had nothing to do with who I was, kept telling myself that leaving wasn't practical.

Then came the ulcer.

I was 24 years old, healthy, and I got my one and only ulcer.

Not a stress headache. Not a rough patch. An actual ulcer, the kind that wakes you up at 3am and reminds you, in case you forgot, that your body keeps score even when your mind won't.

The hip publishing firm. The tall glass building. The penthouse office suite. The grey cubicle in the back corner with padded walls for thumbtacks. Within 14 months, 95% of that job was the wrong job for me. And somewhere in my gut, literally, I knew it.

The ulcer didn't break me. It clarified me. I knew this was wrong. A young healthy guy is not supposed to get an ulcer from a desk job. That was my body telling me what my mind kept avoiding.

David's two words came rushing back. Why not? And this time I didn't have a good answer. The only thing keeping me in that cubicle was the habit of staying. The comfort of the known. The low-grade fear that leaving meant failing. And if I'm being honest, leaving meant leaving my home state for the first time too.

When the "why not" finally became my "why," I left within a month.

Jenny, now my wife, encouraged me even at the risk of losing me. Her advice before I left for Basalt: "Figure out what you love to do and be intentional finding that."

That was the most important business advice I ever received. It just didn't look like business advice at the time.

I came back from Colorado about four months later without a clear path. Honestly, I felt like I was wasting the graduate degree I'd just worked hard to earn, doing odd jobs to barely cover rent for a tiny room in somebody else's home. I was out of my comfort zone, away from my hometown, away from my family, away from Jenny. So I turned around and went back to New Orleans.

I stumbled for a while. Then I landed my first job by accident thanks to a referral, test marketing new micro beers for GMR Marketing, our client was Miller Beer Corporation. Fell in love with it. The microbrew we test marketed, Southpaw Light, made it to market. Oddly enough, that led to my first trade association role marketing southern pine lumber, and for the first time I felt steady.

One thing led to another and I eventually found myself appointed by the governor to lead the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board, a role that would define the next long chapter of my life in ways I never could have anticipated.

We guided Louisiana's seafood industry through two of the most devastating crises it had ever faced. Hurricane Katrina. Then the BP oil spill. Our fishing communities were teetering on the edge, some of them six and seven generations deep, genuinely at risk of disappearing. Working alongside thousands of business owners, we helped restore billions of dollars in lost sales and protect the coastal communities that provide a third of all domestic seafood the lower 48 states rely on.

In February of 2010, the New Orleans Saints won the Super Bowl. When Drew Brees held up that trophy, the whole city exhaled. That was our comeback moment. The city and our seafood communities were finally back.

Three months later, Deepwater Horizon exploded Tuesday, April 20. Eleven lives were tragically lost. By the following Wednesday I was driving to work, turned on WWL radio, and heard the fishermen going absolutely ballistic about an oil sheen they could see as far as the eye could see. And we started all over again.

Those years also gave me something I did not fully appreciate until much later. Two mentors walked alongside me almost every day through all of it. Harlon Pierce was my chairman when Katrina hit and stayed through the BP oil spill. Mike Voisin chaired the Louisiana Oyster Task Force. The three of us became what I can only describe as a three-legged stool. We instinctively knew how to work together, how to bring an industry together, how to collaborate across the Gulf Coast and all the way to Washington to get through those years of recovery. I learned more about leadership, resilience, and what it means to build something that lasts from those two men than from anything else in my career. It is one of the reasons I believe so deeply in mentorship as part of the franchise process today.

What most people do not know is that I had actually started building something on the side during those years. CloseTheDeal.com started as a job board to help people find sales and marketing jobs. My entrepreneurial spirit was alive even then. I was investing time and money into something of my own while still leading the seafood board.

Then Deepwater Horizon happened.

One hundred hour weeks for months. The industry was fighting for survival. The communities I served needed everything I had. I knew what I had to do. I shut down CloseTheDeal.com and stayed for three more years to see the job through. It took until 2013 to turn the industry around.

I do not regret that decision for a single day. But I would be lying if I said it did not cost me something. I had started building something of my own and I walked away from it. When I finally left in 2013, I had zero equity and a dream I had already put on hold once.

After nearly 13 years in the association world, I left. This time I was determined to build something of my own.

That's where the story gets sobering.

I tried a couple of things. Burned through a good chunk of savings. Trusted a business partner who turned out not to be honest. And when those things didn't work the way I'd planned, I did what a lot of people do when life doesn't go according to plan.

I went back to what I knew.

One more executive director association role. Safe, familiar, respected work. The kind of position that looks like progress from the outside but feels like retreat from the inside.

About six weeks in, I drove two hours back from my first board meeting, Jenny still back in New Orleans, and I called her from the road. I said, whatever you do, don't give up your job. I knew in my gut this wasn't going to last.

Then COVID hit.

Suddenly I was fighting again for an industry in crisis, this time the logging industry in North Carolina, one of the first industries declared essential because loggers harvest the wood fiber that goes into everything. And I mean everything. Remember the great toilet paper shortage of 2020? Those were my guys in the woods keeping the country running.

So I stayed longer than I planned. And honestly, at the time, it was a blessing. But eventually the world opened back up and I ran out of reasons to wait. It was finally time.

When I finally made the break for good, through consulting work with associations and then into franchise advising, I looked back at the full picture for the first time.

What most people do not know is that I had actually started building something on the side during those years. My entrepreneurial spirit was alive even then.

And zero equity. Not a dollar of ownership in anything I had spent my career building.

I want to be clear about something. The seafood board work was some of the most meaningful work of my life. I am genuinely proud of every year I gave to it and the communities we served. The zero equity realization was never about that work. It was about a pattern I had allowed to define my entire career. Giving everything. Building nothing of my own.

That's the moment that changes you. Not because it's catastrophic, but because it's clarifying. You look up and ask yourself a question you should have asked years earlier:

Where does all this effort actually go?

For most career professionals, the honest answer is: into someone else's asset. Someone else's valuation. Someone else's exit. Not yours.

I'm not bitter about it. That was my choice and I own it completely. But if I could go back and hand my younger self one piece of advice, not career advice, not financial advice, just the plain truth, it would be this:

Comfort is not your friend.

The moments I retreated into roles that felt safe, the decisions I delayed because change felt risky, the ownership I never pursued because "now isn't the right time," that was fear dressed up as wisdom. And fear kept me from building something of my own for longer than it should have.

The question isn't whether you're ready to be perfect at this. The question is whether you're ready to move.

I'm telling you all of this, the grey cubicle cell, the ulcer, the stumbles, the retreats back to safety, the zero equity, because I've watched the same story play out hundreds of times. Different industries. Different titles. Same moment.

Smart people. Accomplished people. People who have built real skills over many years.

And almost all of them had a version of the same realization:

This isn't it.

Most waited. Most stayed comfortable. Most let "why not" haunt them for years.

So let me ask you directly, the same way my best friend David asked me:

Whatever it is you've been considering, building something, calling your own shots, turning the skills you've spent years developing into an asset you actually own, what's the real reason you haven't moved yet?

So what's really stopping you, because it's probably not what you're telling yourself.

---

I want to ask you something before we go any further.

What is the most dangerous thing most people will ever do?

Take a second. There's no wrong answer.

People say all kinds of things. Drive too fast. Trust the wrong person. Ignore their health. Sky dive. All fair. All real.

But here's my answer, and it comes from experience, both my own and from watching people make and avoid the biggest decisions of their lives:

The most dangerous thing most people will ever do is believe a lie.

I became a student of the lie because I had to. I got burned by dishonest people in business more than once. A partner who wasn't straight with me. Situations where the story I was being told didn't match the reality I was living. Those experiences taught me to pay close attention to what people say, and more importantly, to what they tell themselves.

Scripture calls the devil the father of lies, and describes his job description plainly: to kill, steal, and destroy. You don't have to take that on faith to recognize the pattern in your own life. Because that's exactly what a lie does when you believe it long enough. It kills momentum. It steals time. It destroys the future you could have built.

So let me walk you through the progression.

That last one is what this chapter is about.

Because the lie that keeps most people from building something of their own doesn't come from a dishonest business partner or a misleading job offer. It comes from inside. It's the story you've been telling yourself, probably for years, about why now isn't the right time, why you're not quite ready, why it makes sense to wait just a little longer.

That lie sounds nothing like a lie. It sounds like wisdom.

Nobody walks around saying "I'm too afraid to build something of my own."

That's not how it works.

What they say instead sounds completely reasonable. It sounds like patience. It sounds like someone being smart and strategic about a big decision.

It sounds like this: