I quit my job and founded a company!
From small town Montana kid to Cloud Architect, to now founder and entrepreneur. I have resigned my position and started my own business Integritas Cloud Solutions. This journey has been wild!
I come from nothing. I’ve eaten rice and beans for 2 years as a kid living in a rural village in Central America. I’ve eaten leftover rich kid’s sandwiches thrown in the trash because there was never quite enough food for me and 6 siblings. I’ve roofed in 100 degree heat during the summers and other manual labor in high school to pay for basketball shoes and gas to drive to games in blizzards. I joined the military at 23 because I was tired of sitting around and wanted an education I couldn’t afford. I’ve stayed up until the wee hours of the morning for semesters on end studying for my technology degree after working night shifts at a grocery store to support my wife and 2 young boys. I’ve rebuilt an 80 year old 2 bedroom house while working a full time job and being a husband and father to 4 kids so we could make some profit to flip and afford a better house due to the insane housing market.
I’ve been given opportunities, but nothing was ever handed to me. I’ve made poor decisions, but never lazy ones. I’ve been so low mentally I couldn’t see the path, but I kept crawling nonetheless. I’ve missed the boat on career changes, investments, real estate…the list is very long. I have bounced around from dead-end job to dead-end job throughout the years, dragging my family with me, searching for something. But I’m still here, and it’s because my wonderful wife of 19 years and 4 kids have stuck by me, and for them I have, and will, never give up!
This next step feels surreal to fulfill something I have dreamed about doing for so long. The possibilities endless, the unknown exhilarating, the risk and reward commensurate. I now get to show my kids a different path, how to build businesses, how to think out of the box, how to fight for something. But most importantly, I get to spend more time with my family. Which, at the end of the day, win or lose, is the only thing that matters!
I leave you with one of the greatest things ever written:
*“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” ~ Teddy Roosevelt