I never liked high school. I struggled to stay focused unless it was a topic I was truly passionate about, and it never was. I was one of those kids who got to graduation and had no idea what I wanted to do.

I bounced around for years after that. I tried the trades and realized I didn't like working outside or with my hands. I worked retail. I worked food service. I worked in health and fitness. None of it fit. I was trying to figure out where I belonged and I kept missing.

Eventually I started community college and ended up in the EMT to Paramedic program. I loved it. For the first time, I was studying something that mattered to me, and I was good at it. I thought I had found my path.

Then circumstances pushed me into a part-time job as a door knocker for a small blind company, and that is where my entry into this industry came.

The Door Was Open

I didn't choose this industry. I walked into it because I needed a job, and the door was open.

That's not a unique story. In twenty-five years of running a window covering business, I have met thousands of dealers, installers, salespeople, and operators. Almost none of them grew up wanting to be in this industry. I have never met a person who said I dreamed of selling blinds in junior high. We all got here the same way. We took a job, we were good at it, we stayed.

Some of us came in through sales. Some of us came in through installation. Some of us came in through the office. We worked for somebody who owned a small business, and one day we looked around and realized two things at once. We liked the work. And the person we were working for wasn't doing anything we couldn't do.

That's how most of us became dealers.

The Barrier to Entry Is Low

This is one of the things I love about this industry, and it's also one of the things that quietly hurts everyone in it.

The barrier to entry is low. You don't need a degree. You don't need certifications. You don't need a building. You don't need a million dollars in capital. You can get a business license, open a supplier account, buy a van, and start selling. Plenty of dealers I respect started with less than that.

That's a gift. It's a real path to ownership for people who don't have a trust fund or a connected family or an MBA. It's one of the few industries left where someone with grit and a work ethic can build something of their own without permission.

But it cuts both ways. Because the door is so open, the market fills up fast. Every market in this country has more dealers than the math probably supports. Pricing pressure is constant. Commoditization is constant. Customers know they can get three quotes in a week. The dealer with the lowest overhead wins on price. The dealer who built a real operation has to compete against a guy in a truck who can quote ten percent under because he doesn't carry the same costs.

That's the reality of an industry where the door never shuts.

What Nobody Teaches You

Here's the part I want to dwell on, because it's the part that nearly broke my business and the part I see breaking other dealers' businesses every year.

When you cross the threshold into ownership in this industry, somebody hands you the work. The product knowledge. The install techniques. The sales process. Suppliers will train you on their lines. Manufacturers will fly you to their factories. Other dealers will teach you the tricks that took them ten years to learn. The work side of this business has more education attached to it than you can absorb.

Nobody hands you the business side.

There is no apprenticeship for understanding a P&L. There is no required reading list when you sign up for a supplier account. The industry teaches you how to sell, how to install, and how to take care of a customer. It doesn't teach you how to operate. It doesn't teach you what gross profit actually means or how to read your own financials or what percentage of your revenue should be going to materials. Those things you have to figure out on your own.

I crossed that threshold in 2002. I didn't know what a P&L was. I didn't have a bookkeeper. I had never taken a business or finance class. I had never read a business book. This was before smartphones. I didn't own a computer. The library was the closest thing I had to a research tool, and I didn't know I needed to be researching.

I didn't have a mentor. I didn't know anyone who had built and run the kind of business I was trying to build. I didn't even know anyone who owned a business. The whole world of business ownership was something other people did, and I had no idea how any of it actually worked. I figured everything out the hard way, by breaking it and rebuilding it. Some of the lessons cost me money. Some of them cost me people. Some of them cost me years.

That's most of us.

The hardest part isn't that we got here without a manual. It's that the system we walked into doesn't show us where the manual would even be useful. The friction is everywhere, and most of us spent years thinking it was just us.

The work the manual would have covered →

Why I'm Writing All of This

I'm not the smartest guy in this industry. I'm not the biggest dealer. I'm not the most polished operator.

What I am is somebody who fell into this business the same way most of us did, ran it badly for a long time, learned a lot of expensive lessons, and is finally starting to understand what it actually takes to build something that works. I've spent the last few years dismantling and rebuilding a company I had run for over two decades. The work isn't done. It will probably never be done. But I've learned enough that I don't want to keep it to myself.

I keep meeting dealers at industry events who are exactly like the version of me from twenty years ago. Smart. Hardworking. Good people. Running real businesses. And quietly missing the same pieces I was missing. Not because they're not capable. Because nobody ever showed them where to look.

This is the series I wish someone had handed me when I started. The articles that follow are the things I actually learned, the mistakes I actually made, and the rebuild I'm still in the middle of. Some of them will hit hard. Some of them will sound familiar. All of them are true.

If you've been in this industry long enough to know what good looks like and you're tired of running a business you didn't get the manual for, you're in the right place.