I run the shopsand build the tools

I opened Foothills out of my garage and a service truck at 24. I found the customers, fixed the trucks, did the midnight service calls, answered the phone, and cleaned up my own fuck ups.

Then we added locations. That felt like winning for a few years. We were growing fast and hiring faster. Then I figured out I was the only one who really knew what was going on at any of the shops, and I couldn't be at all of them at once.

So I worked more. Eighty hour weeks were the standard. Double shifts in the truck, and staying up until midnight closing out old invoices were a weekly thing. I was running out of hours to throw at it. The problem wasn't how hard I was working, it was that nothing ran well without me in the middle of it.

I fixed that inside Foothills first, and got the business running without me there every day. Then I built ShopView around the way I wished it had worked the whole time. I still run both. I see the real world problems every day, and they end up either in the product or in a video.