I founded, built and scaled
12 companies with multiple exits.

Remember when people bought Instagram followers to look more important than they were?

It's the exact same move, except now it's AI writing the comments, manufacturing engagement one hollow reply at a time.

"Insightful post!" "Love this perspective!" None of it means anything. A bot read your post, and a bot replied.

And somehow it's being sold as "best practice" by the LinkedIn gurus.

Engagement used to be proof that someone cared enough to respond. Now it's just noise.

Same thing happens in your Monday meeting. Everyone nods, says "sounds good," and goes back to doing exactly what they were doing before. It looks like alignment. Nothing actually moved.

Real beats fake every time. Five genuine comments will always outweigh fifty automated ones.

Just like a team of 5 committed members is better than a full team that isn't committed.

In 1995, I founded the first frozen prepared-meal store chain in the country. My partner was George Naddaff, the man who built Boston Chicken, later renamed Boston Market. At the time, Boston Chicken had just gone public in one of the hottest IPOs in history.

The model was already proven up north. A Canadian chain called M&M Meat Shops had 250 locations. The math was simple. Take a proven concept, bring it south, build a 2,500-unit chain.

Everything was perfect. I raised the money. I had the best partners. We had the playbook from a company that had already cracked it.

And then I did the thing my brain always wants to do. I changed it.

I didn't know I had ADHD back then. I just knew that a finished, working system felt like an itch I had to scratch. Where other people saw "proven, don't touch," I saw a blank canvas. So I took a concept that already worked and rebuilt every single piece of it.

M&M won in rural markets. I opened upscale. M&M kept prices low. I went premium. They had a formula that worked, and I improved it right into the ground.

We opened two locations. Both failed.

For years that one stung more than any other. The setup was perfect, and I was the one who couldn't leave it alone.

Here's the part that finally gave me peace. In 2008, M&M brought their own stores to the US. The proven model, run by the people who built it. They failed too. Apparently, the concept itself didn't travel the way the math promised.

That didn't make my version smart. But it taught me the real lesson.

ADHD is the same wiring that makes me a great visionary and a terrible operator. The drive to reinvent is a gift when you're creating something new, and a wrecking ball when you're handed something that already works. The skill isn't killing that instinct. It's knowing which seat to be in when it shows up.

Today, I know exactly what I am. I'm the visionary, not the operator. I build the vision and let the people wired to execute run the play.

That's the heart of what I now teach through Bloom Growth: getting founders in the right seats. If I'd understood my own wiring back then, and had a framework like this to force the discipline, it would have saved me millions of dollars and ten years of anguish.

In 2012 I founded 800razors. Same thesis as Dollar Shave Club (raised $165M, sold to Unilever for a billion) and Harry's (raised $250M pre-revenue).

My aha moment came in 2011. I got fed up spending $5 on a single razor blade, and started digging. Turns out Gillette and Schick controlled over 90% of the razor market, and no one had launched a new razor in North America in over 40 years. The last was Bic, with the disposable, in the early 70s. The reason was simple: both Gillette and Schick were fiercely litigious, and nobody wanted the fight.

Each of us solved that problem differently. Dollar Shave Club sourced cheap razors out of Korea. Harry's used its war chest to buy an old razor factory in Germany outright.

I had neither a cheap supplier nor hundreds of millions to buy a factory, so I had to do it the hard way and went straight to the source.

Gillette wouldn't do branded or private label deals, period. Schick was more open to it. The problem was that it took close to 18 months to close my deal with Schick for North America exclusive rights to their private label razors.

By then Harry's and Dollar Shave Club had already launched. Dollar Shave Club went on to sell to Unilever for $1 billion, and Harry's landed a $1.37 billion offer from Edgewell (a deal the FTC ultimately blocked, keeping them independent). Either way, both had beaten me to the outcome while my deal was still crawling toward the finish line.

I cracked the hardest part of the business. But by then the window had closed. Harry's and Dollar Shave Club were already spending thousands to acquire customers. The economics didn't work as I didn't have hundreds of millions to spend on customer acquisition.

Here's the thing. I have no regrets.

What I learned is that being right is not the same as being first, and solving the hardest problem is worthless if the timing has passed you by. Capital and timing beat being clever almost every time.

I was close to cementing a deal to bring a revolutionary sous-vide cooker to Jarden, the $8 billion-plus company that owned Crock-Pot, Rubbermaid, and FoodSaver.

Mellow was the most innovative kitchen appliance I'd seen in years. A sous vide machine you could load in the morning. It kept your food cold all day, then started cooking on a schedule so dinner was perfect the moment you walked in. A patented built-in refrigeration system did exactly that.

It should have been a no brainer. Then a flaw surfaced. In 2018, Wired reviewed the Mellow and scored it 1 out of 10. The problem wasn't the cooking. It was that the machine couldn't pull the food cold enough, fast enough, and hold it there, which left ingredients too long in what food scientists call the danger zone, between 40 and 140 degrees, where bacteria multiply. The review spread. It destroyed the business.

Here's what I took from being that close to it:

They had a brilliant idea. They had engineers good enough to build it. What they didn't have was a single food scientist in the room. So nobody flagged the one thing that turned out to be fatal: food sitting below 140 but not safely under 40 is food growing bacteria. The danger zone wasn't a detail they got wrong. It was a detail they didn't know existed.

In all my businesses, the most expensive lessons came from the same place: thinking I could figure it out myself. The wins came when I stopped doing that. When I brought in someone who had already lived the problem, who'd made the mistake I was about to make and had the scar to show for it. That person sees in five minutes what would have cost you the company to learn the hard way.

Mellow didn't need a better engineer. It needed one person in the room who'd spent their career around food safety and would have asked, on day one, "what happens to the food while it's waiting?" That question was a one-sentence fix. Not having anyone to ask it was fatal.

Build the thing that works. Then bring in the people who know what you don't know you don't know.

In 2008 I was watching The Apprentice when a skincare company fell into my lap.

Carol Alt was on that season. Three-time Sports Illustrated cover model. And somewhere in the back of my head I knew one more thing about her: she was a raw foodist.

Raw foodists believe heat destroys the active nutrients in food. Cook it, and you lose the vitamins and minerals that made it worth eating.

That fact had been sitting in my head doing nothing. Then it collided with a second fact I also already knew: skincare ingredients get processed with heat too.

Two facts I'd had for years. The only new thing was putting them in the same room.

Raw Essentials was the brand I created with Carol Alt, built on raw, unheated active ingredients, fronted by a supermodel who lived the philosophy. I reached out to her manager. Within a month I had an agreement structured, a manufacturer identified, and a pitch in front of Home Shopping Network, where we launched.

It worked. We placed it in Ulta and in mass drugstores across the US and Canada. I sold the company in 2012.

Here's what I've learned after doing this a dozen times: most good ideas aren't invented. They're noticed. The raw food fact and the skincare fact were both public, both obvious, both available to anyone watching that episode. I just happened to hold them at the same time and ask what happens if they touch.

You probably already know the two facts that become your next venture. They're just sitting in separate drawers.

Persistence overcomes resistance.