From a faded green Maverick to finally having enough

My first car was a 1973 Ford Maverick, faded green in color, and I noticed other people drove nicer cars.

We were lower middle class. My dad was a dairy farmer who gave up farming to become a small businessman. There were eight of us kids, and we were the employees. I lost him when I was fourteen years old, just when I needed him the most.

Two things drove my life after that. The first was the fear of poverty, because we were in it. I came to learn later that it was relative, but I never had money, and I wanted to acquire some.

The second thing was an irrational belief. My dad's clock ran out at fifty-five, so I was sure mine would too. I'd better live fast. I'd better learn this. I'd better go, because there's only so much time in a life.

That last part is still true. But why would I think that because Dad died at fifty-five, I would? I'm sixty-eight now. I'm past my expiration date, and it's still going.

If you ask me how long I lived in scarcity, the honest answer is sixty-six or sixty-seven years. Nearly all of it.

EOS® is my second career. I was a CPA for twenty-five years, and I've been an EOS® Implementer for almost fifteen. I wish I'd started sooner, but I couldn't have done this work without all the other garbage I went through first.

I came in as a fractional CFO with fifteen clients, and I thought, this will be easy. I'll convert all fifteen and be the fastest one ever. I converted five of them, and then I had to learn to win others.

I still topped about $101,000 in my first year, which was the record at the time. I didn't even know I was doing it. They told me later.

Two years in, I hit the wall. Everything we all talk about started playing in my head: I'm not good enough, I just don't know what I'm doing. What was I doing next to people who had actually run a real business? I ran a CPA firm. A lot of people say that's not a real business, but let me tell you, I messed it up like one. That's where my nickname, Hurricane Ken, came from, but that's a story for another day.

The imposter syndrome had been there from the start. I looked around and thought, I don't belong here, these people are smarter than me. So I did the thing I now tell my own new clients not to do. I stayed quiet.

Right when I was doubting myself the most, Jonathan Smith, Chris White and others were forming a group they called the Honey Badgers. They helped me, and slowly I came to realize that maybe I did belong.

Losing my dad early had made me something of a loner. I was in a fraternity, but I wasn't really into it. The Honey Badgers were one of the first real clubs I'd ever been in. Mike Paton once told us, "You cool kids, stop talking," and we all just went, yay, we're cool kids. For the first time in my life, I was one of the cool kids, and I remember thinking, man, I have made it.

Chris White put his arm around me in those years and talked to me like nobody ever had, pushing me to find the energy for the hard, uncomfortable stuff of business development. The EOS® tribe is the best tribe I've ever been in. I'm thick-skulled, and I absorb things slowly. But it worked.

The person who gets me out the door, though, is my wife, Pam. I met her in high school fifty years ago, and we've only been married thirty-nine.

I'm a slow-developing guy. I dated that pretty girl for eleven years, and she stuck around.

Pam has a way of saying things bluntly to me that I sometimes don't get. On proposal days, though, it's simple. I tell her, sweetheart, I'm making a proposal today. She smiles at me and says, "Go show them what you got, babe."

If I don't get that from her, I don't go to a 90 Minute Meeting™.

About eight years in, suddenly I was successful. In our community, we listen to experience, and nobody asked me anything until my numbers went up. Then people wanted to know what I'd done. I honestly didn't know.

Right around COVID, I sat down to answer them, and I wrote a letter to myself from the future. Ken, you've just graduated from boot camp. This is you from eight years in the future.

I told that younger Ken it would be an emotional journey. I told him he belonged here, at least for now. And I told him that comparison is the thief of joy. If I had quit looking at my numbers next to everybody else's, I probably would have gotten a hundred extra nights of sleep a year.

That letter was advice to myself. It took me a while to take it.

I'm from Alabama, and I'm proud to say Forrest Gump is probably one of my first cousins, because I'm about as fast as he is at learning things. I still make mistakes every week and every month. But three or four times in, I stop making the same one.

The shift from scarcity to abundance didn't come from words. Part of it was a reawakening in faith. Part of it was long life experience, and finally taking advice I'd given myself. And part of it, which I wish weren't part of it, is that I have enough.

I'm not wealthy. But for the first time in my life, if I stopped today, I'd be able to make it. That has been a worry my whole life. I've always thought, gosh, what am I doing right now? I need to be doing something to generate something positive.

Abundance is an amazing feeling. That's all I can tell you.

I'm starting the last third of my EOS® career. I think I can do another five years, maybe ten, as long as I'm relevant. The EOS Life® turned out to be real, and I'm above a nine on every one of the points. I wish it for every Implementer and every client. I'm careful how I tell clients about it, though, because they don't believe it's real.

These days I work about sixty-five days a year, down from 130 at my busiest. I have the energy to prepare for each client and to remember, standing in the room, that this is their day. I've got clients in their 20s and 30s who think I'm one of the coolest old guys they've ever met, and clients in their 60s and 70s I can put my arm around and say, yeah, I went through that.

I still have the fear sometimes of speaking up. It just doesn't run my life anymore.

Dad's clock stopped at fifty-five. Mine is still going, and I've stopped racing it.