Quick housekeeping first, then I've got something I've been wanting to build for a long time.

Still Going has a new home. This newsletter now lives on Substack, which means every issue (past and future) lives in one place, you can comment and share, and if somebody forwards this to you, you can join us at the new address:

donedumberthings.com

Yes. That's really the address. I own it, I love it, and if you know me, you know why it fits. More on that in a second, because it's not just a funny URL… it's a foundational piece to something I have been working towards for a while. (I even thought about naming my newsletter "Done Dumber Things"... should I? Hit me back and let me know!)

You don't have to do anything. Your subscription came with me. Hit reply anytime; that still works exactly the same, and I still read every one.

The new series: Done Dumber Things

Here's what I've realized after eight years of building companies: nobody hands you the damn list.

You know the list I mean. Not the "write a business plan, follow your dreams" list. The other one. The list of things that will cost you six figures because nobody told you they existed until you were already bleeding. The list of things that stop your heart and make you question why the hell you started all of this in the first place.

I've paid tuition on that list. Multiple times. So starting with this issue, I'm launching a series where I walk through my experiences; item by item, story by story, scar by scar. I am still going to talk about life and fatherhood and random things on my heart, but some issues will be specific to the Done Dumber Things series. What happened to me, what it cost, what I'd do differently, and eventually, the actual people and businesses I trust and personally use to handle each one. Not affiliates or sponsors. Just the people who actually helped me.

Fair warning: I'm going to be honest about how dumb some of this was. Hence the name.

Let me tell you about my two business divorces (wow I have been divorced alot…smdh)

The first one, years ago with the first business I started: my partner and I stopped seeing eye to eye on the direction of the business. There was no real framework for what happens when partners disagree. So ya know what I did? I basically gave away my half to avoid the conflict.

Read that again. I handed over half a business (that still exists to this day) because having the hard conversation felt more expensive than walking away. It wasn't. It never is. That decision cost me my equity, and worse, it taught me nothing at the time… because I told myself I was "keeping the peace."

The second one hurt more and cost less. Let me explain how that's possible.

In 2021, my original partner at Knowledge Perk and I reached the end of the road together. This was a man I'd shared years of friendship with. Watching that unravel hurt in a way I wasn't prepared for and being completely honest, the process brought out a version of me that was angry, anxious, and checking my email at moments I shouldn't have been. (True story: one of the negotiation emails landed while I was at a Rolling Stones concert. A mentor of mine, in language I'll clean up for print, told me to “put my #&*!@* phone away and deal with it in the morning.” He was right.)

The buyout took over four months. It ended a multiyear friendship. And it was still the best-case version of that story because this time, I had an Operating Agreement.

Your Operating Agreement is divorce papers for your business… written back when everybody still loved each other.

People think an OA is paperwork you sign when you form the LLC and never look at again. Wrong. Mine laid out exactly what happens when a partner wants out: how the offer gets made, how the members consent, how the terms get structured. When everything got emotional (and holy hell did it get emotional and personal) the document didn't care. It just gave us a process to execute and a roadmap to follow.

Without that OA, I'm convinced that fallout would have cost me HUNDREDS of thousands more than it did. With it, the whole thing stayed bounded, unemotional (on paper, anyway), and finished.

That painful buyout became the framework for every partnership since; including my current partnership with Jordan at KP, which is the best one I've ever had. Not because we agree on everything; we don't (and he's usually right). Because the rules were clear before we ever needed them.

The list nobody hands you

Over the coming issues, we're going through all of it. In no particular order:

• The Operating Agreement — your business divorce papers (this story, in full)

• The right accountant setup — bookkeeper vs. CPA vs. CFO, and why you probably need all three doing different jobs at some point in your business journey.

• Real legal representation — finding the attorney who redlines the contract before you're in trouble, not after

• Your IP framework — we once discovered our own trademark was sitting in the wrong entity. Fun conversation.

• Other people's money — investors, and the strings nobody mentions until the check clears. Every dollar comes with opinions, expectations, and a seat at your table. Some are worth every penny. Some cost you more than the money ever helped.

• Buy-sell agreements — and actually funding them — what happens to a partner's equity if they die, quit, or walk away, and where the money comes from

• Key man coverage — what happens to revenue if the person who IS the business can't work

• Personal guarantees — the debt that follows you home, and your family, if you're not covered (this has caused so much stress)

• Disability and income protection — before 65, a long injury or illness is statistically more likely than death. Nobody plans for it. Run your own business and don't have it? You're wrecked.

• Succession and estate planning — what happens to the business, and your family, if you're not there

• Side agreements and handshake deals — if it's not documented, it doesn't exist. Ask me how I know.

• Banking relationships and credit lines — the money you set up before you need it, because when you need it, it's too late (You'd think I would have learned this the first 17 times)

• Separating personal and business finances — the boring one that blows everything else up if you skip it

Some of these I learned the hard way. A couple I got right by dumb luck. All of them I wish someone had put in front of me on day one.

Do this one thing before the next issue

I attached a free tool that walks through 11 of these exact questions: partners, buy-sell, key man, guarantees, succession… and shows you where your gaps are. It takes about 3 minutes.

Full transparency: it's from Ember, my insurance company. That's exactly why the recommendations in this series are going to be worth something; I'm not writing about this stuff as a spectator. This is some of the work I actually do now, largely because of everything above. From the companies I've started out of my own need to fulfill what I was missing, to the work I do with the foundation I Co-Founded, I have a real and authentic desire to help others do more with fewer failures by learning from my own experiences and those of others close to me.

Take the 3-minute Business Risk Audit →

Business Risk Audit

Count how many times you answer "not sure." That number is your homework.

Your turn

What's the thing that blindsided you? The clause you didn't have, the coverage you didn't know existed, the handshake that fell apart? Reply or leave a comment. I read every single one; and your story might become an issue in this series.

Still going. Always will be.

Talk soon,

Ryan

Not Quite There Yet Guy

CEO & Co-Founder, Knowledge Perk | Chair, Gravity Center Foundation | EO Charlotte

Hey y'all,

I know this was supposed to be bi-weekly. But I promised to keep this real and authentic and this one's been sitting on me, so I'm sending it while it's still fresh. (And yes, I got all of your responses from last time. I promise I'm going to write about every single one. I just needed to get this to you first.)

I'm going to tell you something I spent a long time pretending wasn't true.

Somewhere along the way, I got jaded by business.

For years I'd have told you it didn't bother me. That's what we do, right? Thick skin, keep moving, don't let them see it land. But if I'm being honest (the whole point of this newsletter) it bothered me a lot.

When we started Knowledge Perk, we had this huge rush of customers. People showed up, fell in love with the place, made it part of their routine. And over the years since, we've lost some of them. Dozens of core regulars. Hundreds of customers in general.

A lot of that is just business. Attrition is normal. New competition opens up. People move, habits change. I get all of that, and I made peace with it a long time ago.

What I never quite made peace with is the other kind.

The kind nobody warns you about

Some people don't leave over the coffee or the service. They leave because of something they think I said. Or did. Or some slight they perceived that I'm not even aware of.

We've had people decide I was homophobic or transphobic — never mind that some of our very best supervisors have been trans, that we openly and respectfully support people's right to live how they choose, and that two of my closest friends in this world are gay men I love dearly. None of that registers. But we hosted a worship night in our space a couple of times, so clearly I must be a hardcore extremist. People will build an entire version of you out of one data point and walk away from years of history without blinking.

I told myself that one didn't get to me either. Then last week, another customer left. Someone who'd been coming for years. Not over bad service, over a single decision I didn't make the way they wanted. And just like that, gone. Now posting about their new favorite local spot like five or six years of history never happened. Overnight.

And yes… I know it's just coffee. It's not a big deal, right? But time after time after time after time, you can't help but notice. And all those little ones quietly add up into a big hurt.

It's not the first time. And I'll be straight with you: it's frustrating, it's hurtful, and it's a part of running a business that nobody tells you about when you start. It's honestly one more reason I stepped away from social media for a while. Everything gets politicized, dramatized, taken to the furthest extreme when most things just call for a little rationality.

It's everyone's right to take their business wherever they want. But pulling support from a local place over a perceived slight from one person? That one still gets me.

"Too big for your britches"

Here's the other flavor of it.

I've been told lately that I don't do enough for the community. That I've gotten "too big for my britches" by growing the business beyond Rock Hill. As if scaling a company that now supports close to 80 jobs is something I should apologize for. (And for the record; nobody's getting rich off coffee. Trust me.)

Never mind that we do more now than we ever have. I just don't broadcast it through the company, and I post less on my own accounts these days. So the assumption is we must've gone quiet.

The truth: over the last eight years, my companies have given back (very literally) hundreds of thousands of dollars. Coffee donations, support, and time poured into the greater York County area, and Rock Hill specifically.

And it's not just the money. A lot of it is that people don't see me around the way they used to. For years I was at every event, on every board, in the middle of everything happening in Rock Hill. These days I'm rarely there and people have noticed.

But that's intentional. It's part of growth. The honest truth is that Rock Hill can't offer everything I need to keep building anymore, and stepping into bigger rooms is how I keep this thing moving forward. What stings is that instead of cheering that on, some folks would rather hold me back for daring to leave the nest.

Never mind that I still chair a foundation I helped create specifically to fill an entrepreneurial void right here…one that quietly helps dozens of business owners every single year.

And yeah. It stings that none of that seems to matter. That you can pour into a place for years and still get forgotten the second something shinier shows up.

Then it hit me

I was taking all of this way too personally.

I was internalizing something that, at the end of the day, doesn't actually say anything about me. Other people's choices — where they spend their money, who they support — are not a reflection of my character. They're not even a reflection of my company. It just is life.

Some people are rude and shortsighted. Some are selfish. Some will burn you flat regardless of every bit of loyalty that came before. That's real, and pretending otherwise doesn't help anybody.

But there are also incredible people who support you no matter what. People who get how genuinely hard it is to run a small business, and who show up anyway. I ran into a friend recently who, honestly, preached at me a little. She reminded me that what we do still matters. That it's still my job to keep giving to this community and to be honest with other business owners about the fact that I got jaded, that I've been hurt, and that I'm choosing not to live there anymore.

So that's the decision. I'm going to keep giving back quietly. Keep being a good human on purpose. Keep building something I believe will have a real impact, something people are proud to be part of.

Like Steven Bartlett puts it: you can only control your inputs. The outputs aren't your responsibility, and they aren't your business.

That's a tough one for me. I'm still working through it. But I'm starting to believe that other people's actions shouldn't have a thing to do with my intentions. So I'm going to keep moving forward, keep supporting, and keep being as much of an encouragement as I can; including by just being honest about how hard a lot of this actually is.

Your turn

If you run a business or pour yourself into anything where people can walk away without explanation, I want to hear from you.

What's the part of it nobody warned you about? Leave a comment or reply and tell me. I read every single one.

Still… not quite there yet.

Talk soon,

Ryan

Not Quite There Yet Guy

CEO & Co-Founder, Knowledge Perk | Chair, Gravity Center Foundation | EO Charlotte

First things first.

Thank you.

I started this newsletter not really knowing if anyone would care, and the response blew me away. The subscribes, the replies, the messages from people telling me they felt seen by something I wrote… I had no idea. I didn't know how many of you were quietly carrying the same things I write about.

A bunch of you sent recommendations on what to write about next, and I promise I'll get to all of them. But this one's gotta be about today.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there.

I love being a dad. More than anything. It's the best thing I've ever done and the thing I'm most proud of.

And I'm going to be honest with you, because that's the whole point of this thing… it's also the hardest.

Being a single dad on 50/50 custody is hard. Being a full-time entrepreneur on top of that makes it harder. Having a gorgeous, strong-willed 10-year-old daughter? Hard. Having a son on the autism spectrum who just became a teenager?

Whoa.

As Jaxon gets older and the hormones hit, he's been struggling in new ways, which means I've been struggling right alongside him.

Last week he had a meltdown in public. A real one. It was brutal, and it lasted over an hour.

And I'll tell you exactly where my head went, because I think a lot of dads will recognize it. I was embarrassed. Then I felt guilty for being embarrassed. I was frustrated. I was upset. I was anxious. Part of me wanted to yell which wouldn't have helped anybody. Part of me just wanted him to calm down, and if I'm being real, that part was selfish. I didn't want to deal with the scene. I didn't want the eyes.

And then it hit me.

Who cares.

Who cares if strangers think he's "throwing a tantrum." (Was there some of that? Sure. But it's a lot more complicated than that.) Who cares if people don't understand what they're looking at.

My goal used to be to look perfect, to make it seem like I had it all together. As I've matured, that's gone out the window. It's not to perform a perfect family with perfect kids. My goal is to be a dad; the best one I'm capable of being. My job is to help him through the rough patches. To support him when he's struggling and stemming, and to still parent him when he's just being a moody teenager.

Here's the thing about me trying to figure this out. My own dad left when I was young, and the example he set was a bad one. But I got lucky! I had a grandfather and a stepdad who stepped up to the plate when they didn't have to, and showed me what a good man and a present father actually looks like. I carry that with me every single day.

And still… even with those examples burned into me, I get lost sometimes. Times have changed. There's more noise now than there's ever been, more pulling at us from every direction. The men who raised me right didn't have to parent through all of this. So even standing on the shoulders of good men, I find myself unsure of the next move.

Like most dads, I don't always know the right move. But I do know that worrying about what everyone else thinks isn't it. Shut out the noise and do the best you can.

It's the same reason I took the socials off my phone. The same reason I block my calendar. The same reason I shrunk my circle of friends. None of that was about pulling away from the world… it was about getting clear on what actually matters and putting it first.

I still struggle as a dad. Same as I struggle in every other part of my life. But I'm slowly figuring it out, just like everyone else. And it starts the same way every time: by ignoring what the world around you says, and focusing in on what's actually important to you.

In that moment, what was important was simple. Just being the best dad I know how to be to Jaxon and Jasyn.

I'm sharing this for one reason; to be an encouragement to the dads out there carrying their own version of last week. We are never going to have all the answers. But we can support each other. We can be encouraged by other dads still pushing forward for the right reasons.

So let me ask you, and I actually want to hear it:

What's an area you've struggled in as a dad or a major win you've had? Leave a comment or reply and tell me. I read every one.

Happy Father's Day, gentlemen.

We're still figuring it out.

Still… not quite there yet.

— Ryan

Hey y'all,

Welcome to Still Going — the newsletter I probably should have started two years ago.

If you're getting this, you either signed up on your own (thank you), or someone who knows you thought you'd get something out of it (thank you to them too). Either way… you're here. So am I. Let's go.

Why "Still Going"?

Because that's the most honest thing I can say about where I am.

Not "I figured it out." Not "I've arrived." Not "here are my 7 steps to success." Just… still going. Still building. Still failing forward. Still waking up every morning choosing to keep climbing even when the top still feels far away.

That's what this newsletter is. A front-row seat to the real thing. No highlight reel. No performance. Just whatever I'm actually living through, and anything I pick up along the way that might be worth passing on to you.

Some weeks it'll be about entrepreneurship. Some weeks fatherhood. Some weeks raising capital, protecting your business, or navigating something I had absolutely no idea how to handle. Some weeks it'll just be something I saw or felt that I think you need to hear.

Where I've been

You may have noticed I went quiet on social media for a while. Over two months, actually.

No announcement. I just deleted the apps off my phone one day and kept living. And honestly forgot to put them back.

In that time I stood at the Cliffs of Moher in Ireland (and tested every Irish coffee I could get my hands on; in the name of research, obviously). I made multiple trips to California. I watched one of my best friends get engaged. I had some personal milestones that reminded me what being fully present actually feels like. I did spring break with my kids (Carowinds, Crowders Mountain, picnics) and now somehow it's already summer.

The best part? I barely took any pictures. I just lived.

And the freedom from not having social media drama on my phone every single day? Holy smokes. I didn't realize how much noise I had been carrying until I put it down.

I'm back now. But not like before.

I won't be posting just to post. Only when something actually matters. Only when I think it might help someone. That's the standard I'm holding myself to — and this newsletter is part of that.

One thing I learned while I was gone

Presence is a choice you make every single day. And most of us (including me) are choosing badly without even realizing it.

When I was at the Cliffs of Moher, there were probably 200 people standing at the same overlook. Beautiful, dramatic, jaw-dropping scenery. And I'd say at least half of them spent more time looking at their phone screens than looking at the actual cliffs.

I get it. I've done it. But standing there watching it happen from the outside was something else entirely.

The version of a moment you capture is never as good as the version you actually felt. The post you write about the experience is never as alive as the experience itself.

I think about this with my kids too. With the people in my life. With the conversations that matter.

Are you actually there? Or are you there-ish?

I'm choosing actually there. Starting now.

What I need from you

This newsletter only works if it actually helps you. So before I get too far into planning out future issues, I want to know; what do you want?

Leave a comment or reply and tell me. Seriously. I read every one.

A few prompts if you need them:

• What's the hardest part of your entrepreneurial journey right now?

• What business topic do you wish someone would just be honest about?

• What's something you're carrying that you haven't told many people?

• What would make this newsletter worth opening every week?

No wrong answers. I'm genuinely asking.

Coming up in future issues:

• How I actually think about raising capital (and what I wish someone had told me before I raised my first dollar)

• The $120 bet that turned into $900K — and what it really taught me about relationships

• Why I almost quit entrepreneurship three times — and what kept me going

• Fatherhood, business, and the impossible balancing act nobody talks about honestly

• Business protection basics that most entrepreneurs skip until it's too late

Still going. Always will be.

Talk soon,

Ryan

Not Quite There Yet Guy

CEO & Co-Founder, Knowledge Perk | Chair, Gravity Center Foundation | EO Charlotte