I am not writing this from the summit.
I am writing it with the invoice in hand.

Most people who write about business write about the part that worked. I want to write about what it cost to get there, because that is the part nobody hands you in advance.

I started early. At fourteen I was selling watermelons at the side of the road through the summer. At seventeen I had eleven stalls and people working for me, and I learned the thing that has driven every decision since: leverage. Eleven people working, and me with more time and more money than any of them.

In 2003 I opened a stall at the market with women’s clothing. One was not enough, so I opened more. I was the first there to put clothes on mannequins instead of piling them on a table — the other traders laughed until they started doing it too. I was on site at five in the morning. It worked, and it was still a trap: in trading, the day you are not there you lose twice.

Then came real companies, real investors, and the years this book is actually about. There were months when there was no money for wages and the invoices were not paid, and I had to walk into the office and look fine. My people worked three months without being paid and did not leave. I have never fully understood why, and I have never stopped feeling the weight of it.

December 2018, the week before Christmas. Seven days to return $53,000, and about $1,000 in the accounts. That week is where the book opens, and then it goes back six years to explain how a person arrives there.

I am not a coach who read about failure. I am the one who kept the company alive on the days it did not deserve to survive, and who paid for it in ways that do not appear on any balance sheet.