Reinvention Isn’t Just Possible, It’s Powerful

“My dad is a lifeguard.”

This is my six-year-old daughter Justice’s new favorite answer when asked what her dad does. She found out I was a lifeguard in high school and early college, and apparently that’s the coolest job I’ve ever had.

She’s latched onto this identity. Not the rock star thing. Not the marketing work or real estate or serial entrepreneur stuff. Dad is a lifeguard.

It’s sweet, and it got me thinking about identity and work. I’ve worn so many hats over the years. Lifeguarding is the only “real job” where I worked for other people. And it was a great one. You get tan. You meet girls – pretty solid gig for a teenager.

But I’ve been so many things. Musician. Restaurant owner. Real estate developer. Marketing agency founder. Podcast host. Luxury vacation rentals. Each chapter brings its challenges, failures, and unexpected lessons. But when people ask me what I do for a living, I panic.

What do I say?

Career ADHD? Serial entrepreneur? Professional hat collector?

“I’m a lifeguard” is simple. No follow-up questions needed.

The truth is, I’m someone who follows my curiosity. I start things. I dive into what interests me even when it doesn’t make sense on paper. I’ve has some of the most incredible adventures. And some spectacular failures.

I’m constantly asked, “Did you know you wanted to be an entrepreneur?” “How did you have the courage to pursue music?” “How did you make such big pivots?”

Here’s the honest answer: there was never a grand plan.

I have been guided by principles that have shaped my decisions and led to their outcomes. I’ve learned that it all comes down to what you believe about reality. About identity. About who’s really in control.

For me, this has crystallized into three principles that have been instrumental in my life:

• First, knowing your true identity frees you from the pressure of work defining your worth.
• Second, life is short, so pursue what makes you curious rather than what’s conventionally safe.
• And third, mistakes are not setbacks. They’re free education and springboards for growth.

I learned these principles the hard way – through making mistakes and figuring things out as I went. And while they led me to different careers, they all started with one very clear (and admittedly ridiculous) dream.

I wanted to be a rock star.

When I was fifteen, my brother Geoff and I started a band called Green River Ordinance.

Of course, this goes against almost every piece of conventional wisdom you hear growing up. Go to college, get a degree, get a safe job. But I’d lie in my bed at night, staring at posters on my wall of my rock heroes – U2, The Beatles, Pearl Jam. And I’d think, “Why not me? What makes them so different?”

The band was my first real lesson in choosing curious over safe. Even at fifteen, something inside me said, “You get one chance at this life. When you find something that lights you up, something you could see yourself doing forever, why shouldn’t you pursue it?”

I went to TCU and became a philosophy major, but the band was still the dream. With only 18 hours left to graduate, I made the call.

I dropped out, and Green River Ordinance went on tour.

In those early days, we were poor. I mean poor. The poorest I’ve ever been, but we were living the dream. I also got married while on the road. Once again, everyone said I was crazy. The band still hadn’t officially taken off. I had nothing. It didn’t make logical sense. But I said, “I do,” and Melissa did, too.

Hamburger Helper and love became our specialty, and I learned something crucial. You can survive without money. Money doesn’t make you happy. Some of my richest memories come from that broke season.

Capitol Records called, and we spent the next eight years on the road with Green River Ordinance. We had Number One songs and Top 10 albums. We were living the dream we’d chased since we were teenagers.

But we also made a lot of mistakes. We didn’t manage our money well. We had to fire our booking agent, manager, lawyer, and accountant because of mismanagement of funds. We wound up leaving Capitol Records.

I was back at that precipice of “What do I do now?” I had to dig deep into what I really believed about taking risks and failure. And that brought me back to something that happened in college.

I was sitting in an existential philosophy class, listening to my professor talk about Sartre and Camus. Their argument was simple: Life has no predetermined meaning, so you can create your own meaning and live however you want. Ultimate freedom through meaninglessness. But I thought, “Well, that sounds kind of depressing.” My faith perspective gave me way more freedom.

I hold tight to the belief that God loves me, that He’s powerful, and that there’s nothing I can do to shake that. I can’t lose his love or my future.

So I raised my hand and asked, “What sounds like better freedom? Knowing that life is meaningless, so you’re free to live however you want, or knowing you have a lottery ticket in your pocket for a billion dollars; you can’t lose, and you can live however you want?”

The room got quiet.

For me, the faith story isn’t just better, it’s my guaranteed winning ticket. Whenever I face tough decisions, I ask, “What would I do if I were holding a winning lottery ticket in my pocket?”

The answer is always resoundingly clear: chase what you are curious about, there’s no need to play it safe. When you know the end is good, you can take swings that other people won’t. When your identity is rooted in something bigger than your career, failure isn’t that scary.

I took over as the band’s manager and booking agent. We wanted to release our music, and we needed to figure out how to do it. That was the moment I became a businessman.

We released “Dancing Shoes,” a song our label had hated because it was “too country.” It wound up becoming our biggest song to date. Our independent album sold substantially more than our major label album.

The lottery ticket had come through again.

In 2011, I found myself in China. My wife, Melissa, took college students there every year, and we were sitting in this incredible coffee shop. The atmosphere and the community feel were unlike anything we had back home.

Someone said, “Man, I wish there was something like this in Fort Worth.”

Conversations continued back home. We’d stay up dreaming about what this hypothetical place could be. Eventually, dreaming turned into property searches.

We found an empty, ugly building on Magnolia Avenue. Back then, development hadn’t pushed nearly as far down Magnolia as it has now. People thought we were crazy. “Too close to Hemphill,” they said. “That building is way too rough.” We could see what others couldn’t. However, none of us had any coffee shop experience. No restaurant experience. No bar experience. But we had big dreams and a bigger vision.

BREWED opened in 2012. We designed something beautiful and interesting – warm, inviting, unlike anything Fort Worth had seen. I did the marketing like I’d done with the band, through stories, not sales pitches.

BREWED was a huge success and a complete disaster at the same time. We had no idea what we were doing. The service was horrible. Our menu was confusing and overly ambitious. But that third principle kicked in: mistakes aren’t setbacks. They’re education.

Every service disaster taught us something about operations. Every confused customer helped us simplify our menu. Every overwhelmed staff member showed us what systems we needed to build. We learned. We adapted. We got better. Eventually, we expanded to multiple locations.

As BREWED grew, we faced a gut-wrenching decision about Green River Ordinance. By 2016, three of us had kids, and touring suddenly felt unsustainable. We were coming off our best year with two Number One songs. But we’d never had that massive nationwide hit. We had success, but not the dream.

Stopping was the right decision. But emotionally, it was devastating. Walking away from Green River Ordinance – the dream I’d chased since I was fifteen – felt like losing part of myself.

Meanwhile, BREWED had grown. I loved being part of it. But 6th Avenue Homes was rapidly expanding, and I wanted to start a marketing company. I couldn’t do it all.

The decision to stop the band and to leave BREWED taught me that failure isn’t the opposite of success – it’s part of success. But I learned something equally important. Sometimes success means knowing when to walk away.

By 2014, my best friend and I had fallen into the same pattern – buy a fixer-upper, renovate it ourselves, live in it for a couple of years, sell, repeat.

Fort Worth’s oldest neighborhood, Fairmount, had a mix of neglected historic homes. Artists and young professionals were starting to breathe new life into the area. One day, a listing popped up on Hawthorne Avenue. Listed at $90,000, it was an absolute steal. There was just one problem: we had maybe $5000 between us. I was still a musician. He was a cop. And it was a foreclosure; foreclosures are cash-only.

When the agent asked if we had the cash, we stretched the truth.

We signed the paperwork, paid our $5,000 (nonrefundable), and panicked.

I found a local investor who agreed to lend us the money. We did all the work ourselves – late nights, weekends, learning on the fly. Ninety days later, we’d transformed that little house and sold it to a young family. We made some money and became completely hooked. Over the next few years, we bought, sold, or renovated over 120 properties in the Near Southside.

Something unexpected happened. I’d been posting our renovation projects on Instagram – not as marketing, just because I was excited about what we were doing. People started following our work. Then they started calling.

“Can you help us buy a house like this?” “We love what you’re doing. Can you help us find something?” We kept saying, “We’re not a real estate company. We just flip houses.”

But the market was telling us something different. There was a whole group of people who didn’t want cookie-cutter houses. They wanted something with character. The traditional real estate industry wasn’t serving them.

Neither of us had real estate licenses. But we created a one-stop shop to help people buy, sell, design, and renovate homes. We gave clients whiskey at closings. We threw house concerts instead of open houses. When families closed on their homes, we’d go and pray over the houses with them.

The company that started with a $5,000 stretched truth now has 70 employees and multiple locations.

By 2020, 6th Avenue Homes was thriving. I’d sold out of BREWED the year before to focus on the real estate company. Between all my businesses, I’d hired and fired more marketing companies than I could count. Each company could create a logo, build a website, and run some ads, but they always missed the point.

Social media was instrumental to our success. It’s what built the following for the band, packed BREWED with customers, and turned house flipping into a real estate company. But every time I tried to hand social media marketing off, it would fall flat.

The problem was simple: nobody took the time to understand our story.

I know that story is what sells. Pretty graphics matter; they make you feel something. But graphics don’t sell things. Stories do. Meanwhile, these agencies kept offering piecemeal solutions. “You need SEO.” “You need better ads.” “Here’s the magic bullet.”

But small businesses don’t need one thing. They need a comprehensive marketing plan. We started joking, “We should just start our own agency.”

Then COVID hit, and the world shut down. Everyone asked the same question: “How do we survive this?”

I had a choice. Play it safe, keep my head down, and wait for things to return to normal. Or follow what made me curious.

Every small business owner I knew was desperate for precisely what we’d been joking about building. They needed someone who understood their story, who could help them connect with customers when everything felt uncertain. So, in the middle of a global pandemic, I launched 6th Avenue Storytelling.

All those “mistakes” I had made before were my real education. The three principles that had guided every major decision were working again: my identity wasn’t tied to any single career, curiosity was trumping safety, and every failed agency hire had taught me something valuable.

We built something called The Storytelling Pathway, which is everything I’ve learned about marketing, organized it into a plan that works.

The marketing world is full of silver bullets—SEO, ads, branding, websites, funnels. Everyone’s selling a solution. But small businesses don’t need one thing. They need a tool belt. Over the past four years, we’ve helped hundreds of small businesses tell their stories and grow. I also launched a podcast called Stories with Soul – something I’d dreamed of doing for years but never tried.

Musician became restaurant owner became real estate developer became marketing consultant.

You don’t have to stay in one lane forever. Reinvention isn’t just possible. It’s powerful.

The question shouldn’t be, “What do I want to be when I grow up?” The question is, “What makes me curious right now?”

Whether you’re 22, panicking about picking the perfect career, or 45 and wondering if it’s too late to change course, you don’t need a master plan. You need the courage to take the next right step. You don’t need to have it all figured out. You need to know who you are when everything falls apart.

You’re already holding the winning lottery ticket.

I believe the God who created you loves you and has a plan for you. That means you can’t lose in any way that truly matters.

Chase what makes you curious. Bet on yourself. Treat mistakes as education, not verdicts. Your work doesn’t define you, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. Do something that lights you up. Build things that make the world a little better.

And if all else fails, tell people you’re a lifeguard.