What made you want to do the work you do? Please share the full story.
Honestly I have always been wired to build things. Even at a young age I was working on tractors, cars, computers. If something was in front of me I wanted to figure out how it worked and make it better. I am not someone who can sit still and watch an opportunity pass by.
Telecom was a space that was ripe for disruption. The big carriers were not innovating, customers were being underserved, and the technology existed to do it better. That combination was too hard to walk away from.
What keeps me going is watching something I built from nothing actually work. Seeing a customer get exactly what they need, watching the team grow, and knowing we are building something that is going to be around for a long time. That is what gets me out of bed every morning.
Tell us 3 surprisingly easy and 3 surprisingly difficult things about your business.
Three surprisingly easy things:
Selling the product is easier than people think because we actually believe in what we offer. When you are not pretending it shows and people respond to that.
Finding problems to solve is easy. In telecom there is never a shortage of things that need to be fixed or improved. The work is always there.
Building culture on a small team is easier than people expect. When everyone knows the mission and trusts each other, good culture happens naturally.
Three difficult things:
Patience with the pace of growth. You always want things to move faster than they do. That tension never fully goes away.
Personnel decisions are the hardest thing I do. Letting someone go or making a change on the team is never easy regardless of how necessary it is.
Staying focused when everything feels urgent. In a small company everything can feel like a fire and learning to prioritize what actually matters is something I work on every single day.
What are the 3 things you like best about your work and why?
Three things I like best about my work.
First is building. There is nothing better than taking an idea from a conversation and watching it become something real that people actually use. That feeling never gets old.
Second is the team. Watching people grow into their roles and seeing them take ownership of something they built is genuinely one of the most rewarding parts of running a company.
Third is the customers. When someone calls in and tells you that Voiply has made their life easier or their business run smoother that is why you do it. That is the whole point.
What are your greatest 3 skills and how have they helped you succeed?
The three skills that have carried me the furthest are hard work, listening, and patience.
Hard work is self explanatory. Nothing gets built without it. I have never been afraid to roll up my sleeves and that work ethic started young and never left me.
Listening is one that a lot of entrepreneurs underestimate. The most valuable information I have ever gotten came from just shutting up and listening. To customers, to my team, to people who have been where I am trying to go. It changes everything.
Patience is the one that took me the longest to develop. I am an avid hunter and that sport teaches you something that carries into every part of life. You can be fully prepared and doing everything right but you still have to wait for the right moment. And when the opportunity shows up you have to be ready to strike. Business is no different.
Tell us about a time you were dead wrong about something.
I was dead wrong about how long we could stay on open source platforms.
For years I told myself that this platform could scale. We could make it work, we could patch it, we could build around its limitations. I kept pushing that belief longer than I should have because switching platforms is painful and expensive and honestly a little scary when you have thousands of customers depending on you.
But the platform was not scaling with us and our customers were feeling it before we were ready to admit it. That is the worst place to be as a business. When your customers experience your mistakes before you do, you have waited too long.
Making the decision to move was hard. Executing it was harder.
How do you get yourself out of a funk? Please share the details.
Honestly I get outside. That is always my first move.
When things are piling up and my head is full I stop trying to think my way out of it at a desk. I get up, I get outside, whether that is the farm, a walk, or just some fresh air and I let my brain decompress. Nine times out of ten I come back with a clearer head and a better answer than if I had just kept staring at the screen.
The other thing I do is talk to people I trust. My partner, my family, someone close to me. Sometimes you just need to say what is on your mind out loud to realize it is not as big as it felt inside your head. The people around you are your greatest resource when things feel heavy.
What is a habit you try to stick to and how has it helped you?
Getting outside. That is my honest answer. I spend a lot of time on the farm with my family and there is something about working with your hands and stepping away from a screen that just resets you. Some of my best ideas have come to me when I was not even thinking about the business.
I think a lot of people in this industry confuse being busy with being productive. I do not buy that. The best version of me shows up when I am balanced. The farm teaches you patience. You cannot rush certain things and that mindset carries back into how I run the business.
How do you celebrate your victories?
As for celebrating victories it always comes back to family. The people around that table are the whole reason I am building anything in the first place.
What is your favorite book and why?
Two books that have stuck with me are Atomic Habits by James Clear and Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell.
Atomic Habits changed how I think about building systems inside a business. The idea that small consistent improvements compound into massive results over time is something I apply every single day at Voiply. It is not about making one giant leap. It is about getting one percent better every day and letting that build on itself.
Buy Back Your Time hit different as an entrepreneur. Dan Martell makes a point that your job as a founder is not to do all the work. Your job is to buy back your time so you can focus on what only you can do. That mindset pushed me to double down on automation and delegation and it completely changed how I run the business.
Both books are worth your time.
What advice would you give to your younger self and why?
Honestly when I think about it I am not sure I would change much. The early struggles with platforms, the growing pains, the hard lessons, all of that led us to where we are today. If we had not gone through what we went through we probably never would have found the right fit. So I have a lot of respect for that journey even when it was painful.
Who has been your biggest mentor in life (personal or professional) and how have they helped you?
My dad without question.
He was a farmer, never finished high school, and spent 20 years of his life working in the coal mines. By every traditional measure he did not have the advantages most people would point to as a recipe for success. But he is still the smartest person I know and I mean that.
What always blew me away was the depth of knowledge he carried. Cars, electric, plumbing, HVAC, you name it. Anything around the house, anything mechanical, anything that needed figuring out, he figured it out. No YouTube, no internet, no calling someone else. Just an old manual, a little patience, and the will to find the answer.
That is the lesson that has stayed with me the most. You can always figure it out if you want to badly enough. Every challenge he ever faced he came out the other side of it. Watching that as a kid wired something into me that no school could have taught.
He showed me what it looks like to show up every single day regardless of how hard the work is. No excuses, no shortcuts, just get it done. That work ethic is in my DNA because of him.
Everything I have built started with what he put in me. I will not forget that.
Just for fun, what is your favorite food?
Steak. A good steak with the people you love. Hard to beat.