I'm an MBA who owns a plumbing company. Apparently that makes me a meme. Since MBA's, trade based companies, and ETA seem to be a hot topic at the moment, I thought I'd add some first hand insight. 18 brief insights below. My evening is free, so can do AMA tonight for a bit. Please, keep it civil and constructive. We're all here to learn and encourage. Don't be that guy unconstructively bashing other people just to feel better about yourself or just shooting off careless words. Here's some first hand info in no particular order: 1. I co-own a plumbing franchise com with my best friend of 20 years; like a brother to me. His family, a second family to me. 2. He runs the day to day. He does not have an MBA. I could not run this business without him. He managed SMB sign manufacturing companies for most of of his prior career. 3. My role is CFO; i also operate kind of like a board chair, providing perspective. He believes he couldn't run the business without me. See my linkedin for background. I work just a few hours a week on the business. Mostly collaborative phone calls early in the AM or late PM; and big spending decisions; forecasting, cash flow, etc. 4. I think the secret to us working together successfully is trust built on 20 years of real friendship, being able to leave our ego's out of everything b/c we have nothing to prove to each other, and having complimentary skill sets. 5. Our trucks are wrapped, so i guess that makes us fancy. We want to employ great plumbers who don't want the hassle of running all of the "business stuff", and we want to employ top performers and pay them above market average. 6. I previously owned a company with my wife. I couldn't have run that company without her. We're still married. Huge accomplishment. 7. Prior to starting my MBA, I made less than 6 figures. After getting more than halfway through my MBA, I got a new job and now make double what I made in my previous job. 8. My current job requires an MBA 9. MBA at University of Arkansas Walton School; Great program. 10. None of my classmates are struggling to find jobs. Most make 6 figures and are some of the most wonderful people I've ever met. Some will be leading the Fortune 1 in the coming years. 11. Cost of MBA: $50,000. I paid less b/c of tuition discount for being a Univ. employee for awhile. 12. Plumbers don't "make" $200 an hour. "Make" implies take home pay. $200/hr is what is charged to the client. 13. Most plumbing companies with 3 employees now charge $250-$350 per hour for labor. 14. An experienced journeyman plumber will make $75k to $175K/yr with base salary commission bonus benefits. I would say the highest recurring number if all were surveyed would be in the $100k ballpark when including all forms of compensation. 15. MBA's, generally, teach from a corporate perspective. This makes it hard for most MBA's to run SMB's. 16. I believe we will dramatic changes in curriculum over the next 5-10 years. Univ of AR is top 3 schools in SEC for Entrepreneurship 17. Most MBA Entrepreneurship programs are solely aimed at Angel/VC to Exit models unfortunately. This will change. 18. In the last 2 years of what I've learned about business: 40% has been from SMBX/Twitter; 40% has been from MBA; 20% has been self study and online courses. Hope this is helpful. If you'd like to connect, feel free to reach out. Networks of good people are powerful things and I'm always looking to grow mine.

Saving LA - Phase III

In small business, the gap between $2M and $10M in annual revenue usually comes down to one thing: Leadership. The most common leadership failures I see in small biz? 👇 1. Avoiding hard decisions and hard conversations. The cost of conflict avoidance compounds. 2. No direct line to the top. Frontline employees have no safe, open channel to the CEO or exec team—so the truth never reaches the people who can act on it. 3. Keeping long-time employees in seats they no longer have the skill to fill effectively. Loyalty is real, but when the business outpaces someone’s skill or leadership ability and nothing changes, everyone pays for it. Just because someone can build at $3mm doesn’t mean they can at $5mm and $10mm. Different ballgame. 4. Tolerating toxic players. Big egos, gossip, slander, chronic fault-finding in public (never in private), outright sabotage—one of these unchecked sets the standard for the whole team. 5. Correcting in public, praising in private. It should be the reverse. Praise publicly, correct privately. Get this backwards and you erode trust and breed resentment. The hard part isn’t knowing these. It’s having the courage to fix them.

In life, I’m finding it wiser to be strong for when others fall rather than to influence them left or right.

There's a grassroots movement to buy Spirit Airlines. They have real momentum but are making a classic acquisition mistake. Here's what I'd tell them as their CFO: $1.75B buys the airline. It doesn't keep the lights on. At 3:00 AM on May 2nd, Spirit shut off the lights. 44 million passengers. 17,000 jobs. Gone overnight — killed by jet fuel that nearly doubled after U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran. A YouTuber named Hunter Peterson launched letsbuyspirit.com within hours. Crowdfund a cooperative acquisition. One vote per member. The people's airline. It's now at $437M in pledges from 500,000 people. I'm rooting for them. But nobody is saying this yet. The capital stack a real CFO would build: 𝟏. 𝗔𝘀𝘀𝗲𝘁 𝗔𝗰𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: $400–600M 76% of Spirit's fleet was leased. You're buying slots, owned planes, facilities — at distressed prices. 𝟐. 𝗙𝗔𝗔 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁 𝟭𝟮𝟭 𝗥𝗲-𝗖𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: $15–25M The operating certificate was voided. Spirit 2.0 starts from scratch. 3–12 months. Zero revenue. 𝟑. 𝗙𝗹𝗲𝗲𝘁 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝗽𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝘀: $150–250M Lessors don't hand planes to unproven cooperatives. 𝟒. 𝗧𝗲𝗰𝗵𝗻𝗼𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘆: $10–20M Reservations. Ticketing. Operations. None of this transfers with the brand. 𝟓. 𝗣𝗿𝗲-𝗥𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲 𝗕𝘂𝗿𝗻: $400–600M This is the number nobody is talking about. 12–18 months paying staff and maintaining planes before a single ticket is sold. JetBlue launched in 2000 with $130M total — in normal fuel conditions. Spirit 2.0 launches into $4.51/gallon fuel. 𝟔. 𝗗𝗢𝗧 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘀: $100–150M Mandatory. Not optional. 𝟕. 𝗙𝘂𝗲𝗹 𝗛𝗲𝗱𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗴 & 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹: $225–350M Spirit burned $100M in surprise fuel costs in 60 days. 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗻𝘂𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿: $2.3B–$2.5B $1.75B gets you the keys. Not first flight. Not the first winter. The movement is real. The target needs to be real too. If anyone connected to this campaign is reading: the path exists. It just costs more than you think.

Some conservative Christians really will obsess over the moral failings of a barely influential gay pastor as evidence of theological rot while completely ignoring or downplaying the fact that the most important and influential Southern Baptist in decades raped young men.

What do telescopes have to do with business? Galileo’s telescope let Venetian admirals see enemy fleets from 8 miles away — invisible to anyone without one. At Waterloo, Wellington’s 30x magnification telescope let him pick out individual soldiers amid the chaos of battle. Commanders without it were essentially blind. A sniper with iron sights is effective to maybe 300 yards. With a scope — 12 to 25x magnification — they’re accurate at 600, 1000 yards, or beyond. Same shooter. Completely different capability. Most owner-operators are running their business the same way. Only able to see as far as the naked eye can see. A fractional CFO does what those telescopes and scopes did: it extends your horizon of awareness. Instead of guessing month-to-month, you’re seeing 6 to 12 months ahead. You spot cash flow problems before they become crises. You see growth opportunities others miss. You make decisions with actual foresight instead of hope. That’s the difference between catastrophe and victory.

New essay on @BenSasse and the question I can't stop asking myself. How can a dying man without the ability to grow skin on his face radiate a joy, levity, and peace that the rest of us are starving for?

You’re going to hear an increasing chorus of service providers whining and complaining about clients using AI to ask them tough questions. Let me be blunt: There was a time that many self-declared experts were just bullshit artists in disguise. That time is over.

Warning:

Iran was trying to use the North Korean model to get a nuke: create sufficient conventional deterrence so you won’t be challenged in acquiring one (it’s called the Seoul Hostage Problem). This has been explained over and over since day one. Everyone claiming shifting goalposts or no imminent threat has been lying. The reason North Korea was allowed to get nukes is because Seoul (and its 10 million inhabitants) is within artillery and rocket range of North Korea. During the 1994 nuclear crisis, the Clinton administration seriously considered airstrikes on North Korea’s Yongbyon reactor but backed off precisely because of the artillery threat to Seoul. Iran was trying to accomplish the same by stockpiling missiles and drones which would have had the same deterrent effect. The proof is what Iran has been doing in the past month: attacking all its neighbors in order to pressure the US to stop attacking it Beyond this, they were building medium-range ballistic missiles that could reach Paris and London, meaning all of Europe could be held hostage as they built a nuclear bomb. The reason Iran has not built a nuclear weapon until now is not because it couldn’t, but because it knew it would be attacked and denied this capability. So by allowing them to continue developing this conventional deterrence, you would be allowing Iran to get a nuclear weapon. And unlike North Korea, Iran is led by an eschatological death cult Reagan saw nuclear mutually assured destruction (MAD) as both morally bankrupt (because of the innocent-body-count problem) and dangerously fragile because it assumed flawless rationality between adversaries…this means it only takes one irrational actor to destroy the world. Working backwards from the conclusion that Iran’s Islamist regime must never have a nuclear weapon, it was necessary for the US to attack Iran to deny it the conventional capacity to hold the entire eastern hemisphere hostage. Every European leader knows this and behind the scenes praises the US for this action. But they are cowards, held hostage by their own internal Muslim populations, and so adopt these ridiculous public positions. This was never about Israel. And if your argument is that Iran should be allowed to get a nuclear weapon then you are a fool and a traitor to western civilization…you’re a useful idiot

Trying to be hypercurious about AI. In doing so, I created customer software. 2 for 2 on things I never thought I'd ever be doing my life, right behind plumbing.

I've spent the last few weeks going all-in on AI. Analysis. Presentations. Research. Financial models. Client reports. Here's what I've actually learned: 1. It's not going to replace me. 2. But those who adopt it will be 2x better than those who don't. 3. I do better work, faster. 4. My expertise is the guardrail. My experience is the QC. That last one is what most people miss. Everyone talks about speed. Fewer people talk about what determines the *quality* of AI output — and the answer is the human behind it. AI didn't make me a better CFO. It removed the friction so my judgment could operate at higher volume.