A Year That Re-Centered Everything 2025

December 26, 2025

Hey oh! Your weekly biz buying newsletter that travels through the frosty air of the internet, down the soot-filled chimney you call an inbox, so when you wake up you get the joy of unwrapping it from the comfort of your living room.

If I’m honest, the most important work of 2025 didn’t happen on a screen, in a notebook, or even in Costa Rica.

It happened at home.

This year we welcomed our fourth child…

Our sweet Jolene. 

And in doing so, life folded in on itself in a way I didn’t expect. We moved back into the same 800 sq ft apartment Meredith and I once lived in when it was just us. The place where we brought home our first two kids… and eventually realized: this isn’t big enough for the life we’re building.

And now here we are, a family of six, back in those same walls.

There’s something humbling about that. Something grounding.

Living small again strips away noise. It forces presence. Cooperation. Patience. You can’t hide in a big house when things are hard. 

You feel eeeeeeverything

the joy, the chaos, the tension, the love…. all of it compressed into shared space.

At the same time, we’ve been looking forward. Dreaming about a home and land that fits how we actually live: homeschooling, outdoor time, space for animals, growing food, kids with dirt under their nails and room to roam. Not a bigger house for the sake of size but a place that supports the values we’re trying to live out.

But the deepest work this year wasn’t logistical.

It was personal.

Becoming the Parent My Child Needed

The last couple of years have tested me as a father in ways I didn’t expect…

especially with one child who has been… challenging.

For a long time, I found myself waiting.

Waiting for him to mature.
Waiting for things to “click.”
Waiting for the hard seasons to pass.

What I didn’t realize at first was that the biggest change that needed to happen wasn’t in him…

It was in me.

I had to confront my own impatience.
My emotional reactivity.
My habit of labeling moments as good or bad instead of seeing them as events — signals pointing to something deeper.

That shift changed everything.

Let me tell you I still ain’t perfect…its a journey. 

When I stopped judging behavior and started getting curious about where it was coming from, I could finally show up the way my child needed…

calmer, steadier, less defensive. I began to see that my role wasn’t to control outcomes, but to regulate myself.

Meredith and I did a lot of reflection this year. A lot of self-work. A lot of hard conversations and small adjustments that don’t look impressive from the outside but compound quietly over time.

And something incredible has happened.

Between his own maturity and the internal work we’ve been doing as parents, we’re making real progress. For the first time in a long while, it feels like we’re coming out of the valley…

not just surviving it.

There’s more ease.

More connection.

More hope.

This… more than any streak, any prototype, any metric…is my biggest accomplishment of the year.

Learning by Doing (Not Just Consuming)

That internal shift changed how I approached everything else this year.

I didn’t read as many books … 

and that wasn’t an accident.

2025 wasn’t about collecting frameworks. It was about doing. Building. Testing. Shipping. Adjusting in real time. I wanted inputs that pushed me to act immediately, not sit with ideas. 

This year I learned enough Spanish to get by…I spent 3690 minutes on Duolingo.

But the real growth happened in Costa Rica, speaking imperfectly, using every Uber ride as a chance to for real life practice, laughing through mistakes. Patience. Humility. Presence.

I went all in on buying a business this year.

In August, I left my job running a healthcare tech sales team to make business acquisition my full-time focus.

and that decision is paying off. 

We’re now closing in on the acquisition of a custom shower door business, set to finalize in January 2026.

Because I created that space, I was able to not only find the right deal, but also build and test several ideas, including launching Rivet:

an automation services company helping Metro Detroit home service businesses stop missing customers and leaking time.

Along the way, I became a super user of tools like V0, Comet Browser, Replit, ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity…moving from idea to prototype in hours, not months. 

Curiosity over ego. Testing over assuming.

I even made my first few social marketing videos using Runway, CapCut, and Canva…pushing past the perfectionism trap and learning by publishing.

And instead of reading, I listened.

What I Listened to Instead of Reading

These weren’t passive inputs. They were an inspiration for action.

This replaced business books for me. Every episode feels like a live brainstorm you can act on the same day. It trained my brain to spot opportunities instead of admiring them in hindsight.

Greg reinforced a simple truth: ideas don’t need to be perfect, they need to be tested. His work pushed me toward speed, community-led thinking, and learning in public.

This grounded me. Real operators. Real numbers. Real businesses. It reshaped how I think about buying vs. building and made me far more interested in boring, cash-flowing companies than flashy ideas.

When things felt scattered, Hormozi brought me back to fundamentals: value, offers, discipline, consistency. More clarity.

And the 5th one on my list was the MLB because my Detroit Tigers stay in playoff contention all year and the motor city grit took us to the playoffs two years in a row!  

Same lesson as parenting. Same lesson as business.

The Throughline

When I zoom out, a single pattern emerges:

  • Learning Spanish required patience and showing up imperfectly

  • Buying businesses required slowing down and getting curious

  • Building with AI required hours of trying and patience.

  • Parenting required letting go of who I wished my child would be

Different arenas. Same lesson.

Growth doesn’t stop at 5 …or 45.
It comes from curiosity. From stepping outside what feels normal or safe.

For me, that meant walking away from a W-2, letting go of reactive parenting, and choosing learning through doing: building, sharing, trying, failing, and adapting in real time.

That’s where the growth came from this year.

2025 reminded me that learning doesn’t just happen in apps or ideas.  It happens in kitchens, tight living rooms, bedtime routines, and moments where you choose presence over frustration.

As we step into the next year…still learning, still building, still searching for land and a home… I feel grounded and confident that what’s ahead is bright and exciting.

Not because everything is easy.

But because I’m finally learning how to see things as they are and show up anyway.