What I’ve Learned Building Three Companies — and Why the Frontline Is Still Being Ignored

Recently, Adam Mendler of the pod Thirty Minute Mentors connected with me for his leadership blog.  He wanted to go deep on how I grew my business, how I think about building businesses, and a few tips for founders.

Here’s a few things that came out of it, because they’re ideas I think about every day at weavix.

Every business I’ve built started with the same question

When I was a sophomore in high school, a flood hit our town and messed up everything with crude oil.  It was a next to impossible cleanup job for our town. I used a heat source and figured it out. By my senior year (after many twists and turns) I had 250 employees and $5 million in revenue.

It was a lesson I’ve followed ever since: find what nobody around you is solving, go all the way to the bottom of it, and get it done with a team.

PK Companies — the original industrial services business my brothers and I built a long time ago — started the same way. Every new line of business came from watching our customers struggle with something nobody was solving well. Inspection. Safety staffing. Data capture. We didn’t jump randomly. We followed the problem.

In many ways, weavix came from that same instinct. 

Two billion frontline workers. An entire industry — two-way radios, a $23 billion 2-way  radio market that serves maybe 10% of them. The other 90% had nothing built just for them. That asymmetry bothered me.

The biggest opportunities aren’t where everyone is already looking

When I was doing fireproofing work inside PK, the standard approach was encasing steel in concrete. It worked, but it was maintenance-heavy. I found a spray-on fireproofing product used offshore and asked why it wasn’t being used onshore. Today it’s the standard practice worldwide.

The gap between what exists and what’s actually possible — it’s where I’ve found every real opportunity.

AI is doing this right now to physical-world operations, and most people haven’t caught up to it yet. Real-time translation across 40 languages. Geofencing that routes the right person to a problem in seconds. Pattern recognition across billions of tasks. We’re doing all of this today at weavix, and we’re still early.

The frontline workforce is the backbone of the global economy — and technology keeps treating them as an afterthought

Every product on every shelf. Every building that gets built. Every operation that runs. It all happens because of people working with their hands.

For too long, the tech industry has built for the office and ignored everyone else. The companies that fix that — that give frontline workers tools that make their jobs easier, safer, and more valued — will have an advantage that compounds for years.

That’s what we’re building. And it’s why I’m not slowing down.

Here are Four Tips I Tell Every Entrepreneur

• Look where others aren’t looking. Ask yourself who nobody is building for, because that’s where the white space is.

• Be all-in before you ask anyone else to believe. I put a significant amount of capital into weavix myself. That wasn’t just about money. If you’re going to ask someone to get behind your vision, you have to already be living it.

• Lead with simplicity, not complexity. Technical founders know too much and go too deep. We assume complexity is what makes us valuable. It isn’t. The more clearly you can explain a complicated problem in one or two sentences, the more people you can actually bring together.

• Find what people are good at before they know it themselves. The best investment I’ve made in every company isn’t capital — it’s time spent figuring out what someone is capable of that they haven’t discovered yet. Entry-level workers who don’t even know what they’re capable of will outperform seasoned professionals if you take the time to find their talents and give them room to use them. Most people who seem disengaged aren’t permanently disengaged. They’re just waiting for someone to notice them.