A winding road to here.
What I've got is real experience, and a belief that being a good business owner has everything to do with your willingness to work, your ability to adapt, and whether you're honest and kind.
My first job was in 2001, at fifteen, working at a local water park — running the slide, concessions, admissions, whatever needed doing. From 2005 to 2007 I worked lot attendant jobs around East Lansing.
Then in 2007, I became a 911 dispatcher, and did that work until 2015. It shaped me more than almost anything else I've done. Dispatching means showing up for people on the worst day of their lives, over and over, and learning to lead with a calm, steady voice when everything around them is chaos. People still tell me how soothing my voice is, how safe they feel the moment we start talking. I used to spend my workdays seeing the worst of humanity. Now, I get to see the best of it — grief and love, instead of anger.
While I was dispatching, I also spent six years, from 2009 to 2015, as a competitive bass fisherman — I had my own website, sponsors, and traveled for tournaments. I gave it everything I had, but my eyesight was already making it clear that path had a ceiling.
After leaving dispatching, I ran a small handyman business, which taught me more than I expected about hands-on problem-solving — and also taught me when to recognize a venture isn't sustainable. I built a tiny house on wheels, start to finish, and sold it. After that, I became a stay-at-home dad for a while. Then I built White Cane Taxidermy into a successful business, which eventually led me toward pet cremation research—and that's where I discovered aquamation. It clicked instantly, because my own dog Bryce loved water more than anything else in the world.
That's how Nature's Way Pet Aquamation was born. You can see the business I built at natureswaypetaquamation.com.
Looking back, every chapter built on the one before it. There's also been a thread running through every one of those chapters that doesn't show up in any job title: I've been losing my vision for most of my adult life. It's meant learning new ways to do old things, again and again, and it's taught me more about adaptability and patience than any one job could have on its own. None of it was planned as a straight line, and that's exactly why Pet Business Architects exists. Your skills travel with you, even when the venture changes.
Today I live in the Lansing area with my fiancée AJ, my nine-year-old daughter Arya, my eight-year-old son Michael, our dog Chase, and our cat Luna.