Building the Brewery Ep. 2
Learning How to Work (And Where Not To)
We left off last episode with an evergreen piece of advice: Life is tough, wear a cup. I graduated high school in East Jordan, Michigan, with the cup in hand, as it were. The problem with being eighteen, however, is that you have absolutely no idea where to put it. You haven’t yet faced the kind of pitch that requires protection.
When you’re young, almost every single injury you sustain is entirely self-inflicted. You spend your twenties running headfirst into walls of your own making, slowly realizing that the universe doesn’t care about your potential or plans.
But before the walls start hitting back, you get to live in the blissful ignorance of being a big fish in a very small pond.
The Big Fish Illusion
Growing up in a town of 2,000 people in Northern Michigan was an incredible gift. I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything. It was the kind of place where you could roam free and feel like you owned the world.
But small-town life has a side effect: it insulates you. It wraps you in a warm, comfortable blanket of false security. It tricks you into believing you are incredibly special and unique.
In high school, I was the classic overachiever who didn’t actually have to try. I carried a 3.7-ish GPA. I made varsity in four different sports. I coasted through math and science because my brain just happened to process those concepts easily. The only thing I ever truly poured my soul into—the only thing that forced me to dig deep and actually work—was basketball.
Everything else? Kind of a breeze. I had zero concept of what real, bone-crushing hard work felt like. If you have a decent baseline aptitude in a small town, you are treated like you are something.
Naturally, because I was good at math and science, I decided I was going to be an engineer. Not just any engineer—a civil engineer. I wanted to build massive steel and concrete structures, bridges specifically.
I applied to a handful of state schools, got accepted, and settled on Michigan State as one of a handful that actually had a Civil program. I paid my housing deposit and was ready to go to East Lansing. My life was mapped out on a clean, predictable grid.
And then, the butterfly effect flapped its wings.
Thirty-Second Decision
You look back at your life and realize there are tiny, seemingly insignificant moments that completely rewrite your entire biography.
I remember this one vividly. It was fifth-hour study hall during the spring of my senior year. I was sitting there, likely doing anything but studying, when my two buddies, Andy and Brad, walked in.
They had just decided they were going to Grand Valley State University (GVSU) in Allendale. They knew I was headed to State, but they also knew I had been accepted to Grand Valley as a backup. They pitched me a classic, half-baked, eighteen-year-old plan:
“Hey, why don’t you come to Grand Valley with us? We can all live together freshman year, you can get your general education classes out of the way, and then you can just transfer to Michigan State next year.”
I thought about it for approximately thirty seconds.
“Yeah, okay. Sounds like a plan.”
That was it. No pros and cons list. No deep parental consultation. Just thirty seconds of teenage logic. I swapped a massive Big Ten university for GVSU on a whim.
I would never make it to Michigan State. That thirty-second decision changed the trajectory of my life forever.
The Cold Shower of Reality
The transition from a high school class of less than a hundred kids to a university with tens of thousands of students is a bucket of ice water to the face.
I walked into GVSU’s engineering department expecting to coast the same way I had in East Jordan. Instead, I ran directly into a brick wall.
It turned out that every single podunk town in the state had sent their smartest math and science kid to the exact same building. And the schools bigger than my whole hometown? They had sent twenty of them per high school.
Worse yet, these kids had taken advanced AP Calculus and Chemistry classes that my high school didn’t even offer. They weren’t just smarter than me; they had a multi-year head start. While I wasn’t flunking out, it was painfully obvious that the students who were going to excel in this program were lightyears ahead of me.
By the end of my freshman year, I knew two things: I was going to change my major, and I had absolutely no clue what the hell I was going to do next.
I knew myself well enough to know that if I took a gap year or a “semester off” to find myself, I would never go back. So, I forced myself to keep taking classes.
Growing up in Northern Michigan, I spent a lot of time outdoors. I hunted, I fished, mountain-biked, skied, and snowmobiled. I figured, why not try Natural Resources Management (NRM)? It was still science, but a lot of the classes were labs held outside. It felt comfortable.
What I didn’t realize at the time was that NRM was widely known among GVSU students as standing for “No Real Money” or “Not a Real Major.” The State of Michigan was on a hiring freeze, and the job prospects were bleak.
I was officially a rudderless ship. And then, the storm hit.
The Dumpster Fire Year
Your sophomore year of college is supposed to be when you start finding your groove. For me, it was a complete, unmitigated disaster.
The perfect storm of personal “crises” hit all at once. My best friend and roommate, Andy, left the country to study abroad in London. Brad dropped out. At the exact same time, my long-term girlfriend and I split up.
Suddenly, the guardrails were gone. I was fully on my own, feeling completely disconnected from my life, my goals, and my identity.
I became a walking dumpster fire with glimpses of being a functioning student.
I missed way too many classes. I dropped a bunch of courses, lowering my credit load to a joke. I was drinking like a fish at random times that one should not be drinking, and waking up with a headache and a hollow feeling in my chest.
If I had brought that protective cup with me from high school, I had officially thrown it out the window. I was actively committing one self-inflicted wound after another, spiraling into the worst version of myself.
I survived that year mostly on luck and a part-time job I managed to land at The Meadows, the GVSU campus golf course.
I didn’t take the job because of some grand career ambition. I took it because I needed money, and I liked working with my hands outdoors. There is a quiet, therapeutic beauty to physical labor. You start the day with a chaotic, overgrown stretch of turf, and by the afternoon, you can look back and see a perfectly manicured green. You can physically see your accomplishment.
Getting up at 5:30 AM to mow greens after drinking Milwaukee’s Best until 2:00 AM is a special kind of hell, but when you are twenty-one, your body is still made of rubber. You can pull it off.
Pivot and Grind
That summer, I went back home and got a job at the Charlevoix Country Club, digging deeper into the mechanics of the golf industry. By the time I returned to GVSU for my junior year, a spark had finally lit in my brain.
I sat down with my boss at The Meadows and asked her what it took to actually make a career out of this. She pointed me toward Penn State University, which had recently launched one of the very early online programs in Turfgrass Management.
This was the early Wild West of online education. There were no sleek web portals or digital quizzes. I had to have my exams physically proctored by a GVSU professor who would vouch that I wasn’t cheating.
I decided to run both tracks simultaneously. I spent my last year and a half at GVSU finishing my degree while grinding through the Penn State turf program. At one point, I was carrying an insane load of twenty-five credits between the two universities, all while working as many hours as The Meadows would give me.
It was an absolute, relentless grind. My schedule was a chaotic mess of dawn-patrol turf maintenance, lectures, studying, and proctored exams. But this relentless schedule was exactly what I needed.
And for the first time in my life, I realized something vital about my own psychology:
I loved the pain of the grind. I reveled in the exhaustion. I liked being the guy who worked harder than everyone else. I liked knowing that while other kids were sleeping in until noon, I was up at 5:00 AM, earning my keep.
In December of 2002, I graduated from Grand Valley. Later in 2003, I wrapped up my Penn State credentials. I had moved on to a job at Kent Country Club, a high-end private club in Grand Rapids, and started hunting for assistant superintendent jobs.
It didn’t take long to land a gig at Cedar Chase Golf Club in Cedar Springs—my first stint with people under me at the ripe old age of twenty-three.
The 100-Hour Club
The head superintendent at Cedar Chase was a guy named Alistair Lynch. Alistair is only five years older than me, and today, in another weird twist of fate, he is my insurance agent.
Alistair had cut his teeth in the industry under a legendary, old-school superintendent affectionately known as “Wild Bill”—which should tell you about the “work hard, play harder” mentality of many in the industry. Bill taught us the simple reality of the turf industry: if you aren’t living the job, you aren’t trying hard enough. Alistair had survived years of 100-hour work weeks under Bill, and he was determined to pass that work ethic down to me now that he was the head guy.
The golf industry is a beautiful, brutal, cult-like space. If you want to succeed, you don’t just do the job—you live it 24/7, at least six months out of the year here in the north.
I became a card-carrying member of the 100-hour club. I would arrive at the course at 5:00 AM, work a grueling twelve-hour shift, and then stick around to play in the course league two nights a week. There were weeks on end where I did not see my apartment in the daylight.
We lived that work hard, play hard life and we took it literally. We would sweat through our shirts all day, and if we didn’t golf after, we were at a bar or salmon fishing on Lake Lake Michigan until far too late, slept a couple hours, and did it again the next morning.
But a fire that burns that hot eventually runs out of fuel.
By the mid-2000s, the golf industry was beginning to contract. The real estate bubble was swelling, and the massive build-out of new courses was grinding to a halt. Head superintendent jobs—the brass ring we were all chasing—were becoming incredibly rare. The ladder was running out of rungs.
So, when a stable job opened up managing athletic turf for West Ottawa Schools in Holland, Michigan, I jumped at the chance.
Stuck in the Mud
On paper, the West Ottawa gig was perfect. It was stable public school funding, great benefits, and a clear path to the top. The guy who hired me told me flat out that he was planning to retire in a few years and wanted me to be his successor.
Then, reality intervened.
A couple of messy divorces and a mountain of private school tuitions later, my boss’s retirement plans evaporated into thin air. He wasn’t going anywhere. And frankly, he was threatened by having the guy he handpicked to take his job still on his staff.
I found myself trapped in a stagnant, fairly bureaucratic, and deeply toxic work environment. The promises of advancement were gone, replaced by institutional inertia and workplace politics.
I stayed there for eight years.
Looking back, I ask myself how the hell I let myself tolerate that toxicity for nearly a decade. The truth is, I hadn’t built up the internal confidence yet to make another massive leap. I was comfortable, even if I was miserable.
But there was another reason I stayed: West Ottawa was the perfect platform for my true passion at the time, which was coaching high school basketball. More on that later.
School district budgets across Michigan began to crater. When public institutions face budget cuts, they don’t look at talent, dedication, or credentials. They don’t care that I had a dual background and a relentless work ethic.
They use a blunt, brainless instrument: seniority.
As the least senior full-timer on the turf staff, my position was summarily cut. Just like that, I was going to be out of a job.
The Government Ceiling
I was in my early thirties, about to be out of work, and trying to figure out my next move.
My wife was an environmental health sanitarian. She had worked her way up through several Michigan county health departments and was currently working for the FDA. One of her former colleagues had recently taken over a leadership role at the Ottawa County Health Department, and they had an opening.
I had the science background, I had the work ethic, and I needed a job. So, I pivoted once again, entering the world of government environmental health.
If you give me a work task, I am going to execute it as fast and as thoroughly as humanly possible. That’s just how my brain is wired. I treated my county caseload the same way I had treated the greens at Cedar Chase or the varsity basketball schedule.
I put my head down and worked. The number of files I got through was my scoreboard. I was so effective that I ended up winning the David H. McMullen Young Sanitarian of the Year Award, identifying me as the top new public health professional in the entire State of Michigan.
But government agencies are not designed for hard-charging self-starters.
Because I wanted to stay on top of my cases and keep things moving, I was frequently putting in unpaid hours, meeting at job sites after hours as favors to the installers who loved the service.
In the private sector, working extra hours to ensure exceptional results gets you a promotion or a bonus.
In the government sector? It results in a staff meeting about working outside of 9 to 5.
To be fair, it wasn’t just me. Most of my department was working extra hours to keep up with the load. We all got scolded and told to work our 40, and if people have to wait six weeks, it is what it is.
I sat there, frustrated, and the realization hit me like a physical blow.
The system didn’t want my work ethic. It didn’t want my drive. It wanted compliance, mediocrity, and predictability.
I had spent my entire twenties learning how to work, how to grind, and how to survive. I had built a tolerance for massive workloads and high-stress environments. And now, I was being told that my greatest asset was a liability.
This was part of my realization that I didn’t want to work under others’ speed limits. It was time to build my own road.