Turning 29

Not sure if this is the right medium for this but so what: I didn’t have a plan for what 29 was supposed to look like. But here’s where I’m at. When I was finishing college, the plan was dental school. Then I landed at a dental education / consulting company, stayed four years, learned a lot, took on a few side projects, and at some point realized I wanted to build something of my own. So I bought Novel Ice Cream. Not because ice cream was my lifelong passion, but because I saw something in it - a brand with real bones that I thought I could make into something bigger. I didn’t have a specific vision for what my life would look like at 29. I just knew I wanted to build. What I didn’t plan for was everything in between. Somewhere during my first role and into some of the new projects I pursued, I made a quiet decision. I stopped pursuing hobbies. Stopped playing sports. Stopped doing most of the things that made me feel like myself. I told myself I was focused. What I was really doing was narrowing. I only cared about two things: learning skills and making money. For a while that felt like discipline. Looking back it was just imbalance with a good story attached to it. The cost I didn't see coming was people. I put work above everything, including friendships and relationships that actually mattered. There are seasons where that's necessary. I stayed in that season way too long. At some point I looked up and the people weren't there anymore. Not because of any falling out - just because I'd made myself unavailable long enough that the distance became permanent. You can tell yourself you're building something. Sometimes you are. Sometimes you're just avoiding the parts of life that require you to show up differently. Buying Novel felt like the move that would fix all of that. And in a lot of ways it has been the best decision I’ve made. But it came with a cost I underestimated. Growing a business takes more capital than you think, and I was also making decisions alongside it that weren’t helping. I got into another concept without stabilizing my current one. I took on real estate rehab projects that didn’t work out. I said yes to one-off things that pulled my attention and my money in directions that didn’t compound into anything. The clearest example of this: I opened Remix Coffee while going through a full management changeover at Novel. I was managing too much at once, and I wasn’t able to give proper attention to what was already working. The honest version is that I didn’t focus until recently. Unfocused time and capital is expensive. The lesson underneath all of it isn’t just “don’t do too much”. The real lesson is that you need to be focused on the tasks and projects that actually move the needle. Get support where you can. You don’t need to do it all, but you do need to do a lot - which means the things you choose to do have to be the right ones. I didn’t earn the right to expand before I’d stabilized what I had. That’s the part I’d want someone earlier in their operator journey to actually internalize. Growth doesn’t need to happen at all costs. What’s strange about this stretch is that even as the financial picture has been harder than I expected, other parts of me have been coming back online. I played tennis in high school and walked away from it for years. I came back to it last year and it’s something I really enjoy. When I’m on the court I’m not thinking about payroll or lease assignments or what’s coming due. I’m watching the ball and reading the player across the net. That’s it. You can’t be somewhere else when the ball is coming at you. It sounds simple but after years of being somewhere else mentally almost all the time, simple is what I need. The same thing is happening with design. I’ve always been able to recognize good design even when I couldn’t produce it myself. Cars, architecture, the way a space is laid out, the way something looks on a page - I know it when I see it. That instinct never went away, I just stopped paying attention to it. I love cars in a way that’s hard to explain, and I won’t try to. I can’t afford the ones I want right now and that bothers me. Not because I need a car to feel like someone, but because it represents a standard I’m working toward. A vintage Porsche isn’t just transportation. It’s design, history, and craft collapsed into one object. Not being able to have it yet is a useful reminder of where I’m headed and how much further I have to go. There’s a version of my story I tell publicly and a version I actually live. The public version is cleaner. It’s about growth and new locations and building something real in Phoenix. That’s all true. What I leave out are the bad calls, the private lessons, the stretches where I wasn’t sure what I was doing. For a long time I was displaying perfection - making it look like everything was roses when in reality it was hard and messy 90% of the time. Most operators do this. We perform confidence because confidence is part of the product. But there’s a cost to that. You start believing your own highlight reel. Or worse, you feel alone in the hard parts because you’ve made it look like the hard parts don’t exist. What I’ve come to understand is that real confidence doesn’t come from projecting it. It comes from lived experience. From the reps, the mistakes, the things you paid for with real money and real time. Hypotheticals don’t build it. I finally understand what it takes to make an F&B concept work, but it took me a while to embrace the work that actually moves the needle - operations, team, consistency, and the willingness to look at what isn’t working and fix it without ego. I’m trying to close the gap between the public and private version. Not by oversharing, but by being more honest about the fact that building something real is messy and slow and occasionally embarrassing. That’s not a warning. It’s just accurate. I didn’t expect this version of 29. I expected to be further along financially. I expected more consistency. I expected to have figured out more by now. But expectations can work against you. What I have instead is a business I believe in, a clearer sense of what I actually care about, and a lot of lessons paid for. More than anything, I have direction. Focusing on Novel and building the right team around it is what gives me clarity for the foreseeable future. Novel has real potential, and I don’t want to get caught chasing shiny objects when I have something great right in front of me that can be nurtured and grown steadily. That’s the work. That’s where I’m putting my energy. I’m not where I want to be. I’m also not lost. That’s probably the most honest thing I can say about 29.