From Micro Machines to 18 Countries: What 25 Years of Entrepreneurship Actually Looks Like
People hear the highlights and think the path was a straight line. Inc. 5000 at number 326. TEDx talk with over 230,000 views. Over 500 staff. Clients across 85 industries. Speaking at the United Nations. Sharing stages with John Maxwell and Deepak Chopra.
It sounds like a success story. And it is. But it’s not the kind they teach in business school. It’s the kind that includes bankruptcy, exploding products, a job offer that evaporated two weeks before it started, and a third grader with a rental empire built on toy cars.
This is what 25 years of entrepreneurship actually looks like. The whole thing. Not the highlight reel.
The Micro Machines Empire (Age 8)
I was in third grade when I started my first business. And I use the word “business” intentionally, because that’s exactly what it was.
I had accumulated a massive collection of Micro Machines…those tiny toy cars that were everywhere in the late ’80s. Over 600 of them. And I realized that other kids wanted to play with them but didn’t have their own collections.
So I started a rental operation. Kids could rent Micro Machines from me during recess. I made paper credit cards for my best customers. I typed up newsletters about new inventory. I gave myself the title “VP of Sales and Marketing” because even at eight years old, I understood that titles matter when you’re trying to look legitimate.
Was it a real business? By any adult standard, no. But the instincts were all there. I saw demand. I had supply. I created a system. I even had a customer retention strategy with those paper credit cards.
I didn’t know the word “entrepreneur” yet. But I already was one.
When Everything Fell Apart the First Time
Entrepreneurship ran in my family. My parents had their own business, and for a while, life was good. Then economic shifts crushed the family business, and we went through bankruptcy.
I’m not going to go deep into the details because that’s my family’s story as much as it’s mine. But I’ll tell you what it taught me: nothing is guaranteed. No matter how solid things look, the floor can disappear. And when it does, you find out what you’re actually made of.
That experience wired something into me permanently. A refusal to be complacent. A deep respect for cash flow. And an understanding that resilience isn’t something you read about in a leadership book…it’s something you build by surviving things you didn’t think you could survive.
Twenty Years Old and Holding Everything Together
By the time I was 20, I was working two jobs, caring for my two younger sisters, and finishing my degree at Wharton. Finance and marketing, magna cum laude.
I don’t say that to brag. I say it because people sometimes look at the Wharton credential and assume I had a smooth path. The opposite is true. I was grinding through that degree while carrying family responsibilities that most 20-year-olds can’t imagine. I finished early because I had to. There wasn’t time or money for a leisurely college experience.
That period taught me more about discipline, prioritization, and grit than any class I ever sat in. And it taught me something else: you can handle more than you think you can. Not because you’re superhuman, but because when the alternative is letting people down who depend on you…you just figure it out.
The Job That Vanished
Coming out of Wharton, I accepted a position in investment banking. The career path was set. The salary was set. The future was set.
Then the firm collapsed. Two weeks before my start date.
No job. No backup plan. And a severance check for $2,000 that felt more like an insult than a lifeline.
I remember staring at that check and thinking: I can either spend the next three months applying to other firms and hoping someone takes a chance on me…or I can take this $2,000 and bet on myself.
I bet on myself.
The Company That Made the Front Page
With that $2,000, I launched a company that helped low-income families access free prescription medications. The pharmaceutical companies had these programs…patient assistance programs…that provided medications at no cost to people who qualified. But almost nobody knew about them. The paperwork was confusing. The process was opaque. Families who desperately needed help couldn’t navigate the system.
So I built a business that did it for them.
It worked. We helped thousands of families get medications they couldn’t afford. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put us on the front page. And for the first time, I experienced what it felt like to build something that mattered…not just something that made money, but something that genuinely changed people’s lives.
That feeling never left. It’s the same feeling that drives everything I build today.
Going Global (and Nearly Going Under)
After the prescription company, I built a nutritional-products company. Then a beauty-industry brand. Then a global teeth-whitening business that expanded to 18 countries.
Eighteen countries. Distribution networks on multiple continents. It was the biggest thing I’d ever built. And it was exhilarating…right up until the moment it almost killed me.
A manufacturing failure caused our products to literally explode during shipping. The gel would expand and burst the packaging. Returns poured in. Distributors across 18 countries were furious. Revenue cratered. And I was personally trying to manage the crisis across every time zone, every distributor relationship, every angry customer email.
I was working 18-hour days and falling further behind. Not because the problem was unsolvable, but because I was trying to solve it alone. I had no infrastructure. No delegation system. No one I trusted to handle the pieces I couldn’t get to. I was the single point of failure in a global operation, and the single point was failing.
The Book That Changed Everything
During the darkest part of that crisis, someone handed me “The 4-Hour Workweek.” I almost didn’t read it. The title sounded like nonsense to someone working 18-hour days.
But the core concept…that you can hire skilled people overseas to handle work you shouldn’t be doing yourself…hit me like a bolt of lightning. Not because it was revolutionary in theory. But because I was living proof of what happens when you DON’T do it.
I hired my first virtual assistant. Then a second. Then a third. And slowly, painfully, I learned to let go of tasks that were drowning me. To trust other people with pieces of my business. To build systems instead of doing everything through brute force.
That experience…the near-death of a business, the discovery of offshore talent, and the rebuilding that followed…is the origin story of Outsource Access.
Building Outsource Access
I didn’t start OA because I thought outsourcing was a good market opportunity. I started it because offshore staffing literally saved my business, and I knew it could save others.
The early years were messy. I made every mistake in the book…and then some I invented myself. Treating VAs as cheap labor instead of strategic assets. Skipping onboarding. Hiring generalists. Not building systems. I’ve written about all of those mistakes elsewhere, and I don’t need to rehash them here.
What matters is what came out the other side. A company with over 500 team members, headquartered in Atlanta and Cagayan de Oro in the Philippines. Serving businesses across 85 industries. A dedicated team leader, operations manager, and account manager for every single client. Custom playbooks. No long-term contracts because we believe our work should speak for itself every single month.
Inc. 5000 number 326 in 2023. Inc. Best in Business in 2021. Real Leaders Magazine recognition in 2023 and 2024. A TEDx talk that’s been watched over 230,000 times. Speaking at the United Nations headquarters on sustainable development goals with 200 fellow entrepreneurs.
None of that was planned. All of it was earned through a combination of conviction, mistakes, and the stubborn refusal to quit even when quitting seemed like the smart move.
What I Actually Learned
Twenty-five years of building things has taught me a handful of lessons that I come back to constantly.
The skills that get you started will hold you back if you don’t evolve. Doing everything yourself works until it doesn’t. The sooner you learn to delegate, the sooner you can scale.
Failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s the prerequisite. Every system I’m proud of at OA exists because something broke first. The playbook came from clients who churned. The management structure came from VAs who were set up to fail. The industry verticals came from generalists who couldn’t go deep enough.
The people matter more than the plan. I’ve had brilliant strategies fail because the wrong people were executing them. And I’ve had mediocre strategies succeed because the right people found a way to make them work. Invest in people first. Always.
Resilience is a skill, not a trait. I wasn’t born tough. I was shaped by bankruptcy, exploding products, vanishing job offers, and 18-hour days that felt like they’d never end. Anyone can build resilience. You just have to survive enough hard things to realize you’re capable of surviving hard things.
Purpose makes everything sustainable. I could make money doing a lot of things. What keeps me going…what gets me up at 5 AM and keeps me energized after 25 years…is the mission. Helping people realize their full potential. Showing business owners that they don’t have to do it all alone. Creating economic opportunity that crosses borders and changes lives on both sides.
The Story Isn’t Over
I’m in the middle of writing a book. I run four companies. I coach my daughter’s softball team and my son’s baseball team. I’m working on an AI-powered education platform. I’m speaking in countries I’ve never been to before.
And I still feel like I’m just getting started.
That’s not hustle culture talking. That’s a kid who rented Micro Machines in third grade, survived bankruptcy, finished Wharton while raising his sisters, turned $2,000 into a front-page company, built and almost lost a global business, and came out the other side with 500 people who depend on him and a mission he’ll never get tired of.
The path was never a straight line. It was messy and chaotic and sometimes terrifying. But it was mine. And I wouldn’t trade a single part of it.
Your Next Step
This story…all of it…is the foundation of my upcoming book, Automate and Delegate: The Modern Leader’s Guide to Scaling and Living in Your Passion Pockets, launching May 30, 2026. It’s not a textbook. It’s 25 years of building, failing, rebuilding, and figuring out how to scale without sacrificing the things that matter most.
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