I watched my father throw my clothes, my books, and the last photo of my mother into the fire like my life meant nothing. Then he looked at me and said, “This is what happens when you disobey me.” I said nothing. Six years later, I called him and whispered, “Check your mailbox.”

The middle years of building a business are the ones nobody tells you about, because they don’t make a good story. They are the years of steady incremental progress that is almost indistinguishable from standing still. You finish a project and start the next one. You make a mistake and correct it and try not to make the same one again. You watch your credit score move in single-digit increments over months of careful behavior. You do the work.

There were setbacks. A commercial client who disputed the final invoice on a large job and delayed payment for four months while I paid my crew out of savings. A structural assessment I got wrong on a property with a water-table issue that wasn’t visible in the pre-purchase inspection and required expensive remediation I hadn’t budgeted for. A year where the pace of new work slowed enough that I had to have a genuinely difficult conversation with Derek about what I could afford to pay him for the next six months and what I needed him to trust me on.

Derek trusted me. The work picked up. We got through it.