🚀How I Became An Entrepreneur

Hey, there’s a myth I want to bust today.

20 years ago I was 27 years old, completely lost and desperate.

I was in a job I hated, with a girlfriend I thought might kill me, living in a place where I didn't belong. I came this close to getting caught in an FBI sting.

If you're struggling and looking for inspiration, read on.

2003. I was living in Alabama as a construction engineer on a massive tunnel and water treatment project. At 27 I was supervising a crew of 19 men and had a $18M budget. I was making big bucks, working my ass off, shooting up the ladder. "The dream" for a young construction engineer.

And I was miserable.

I had no control over my time. I was constantly being called into work in the middle of night to fix problems that no one else could. The pressure was immense. We had to fight with everyone, including mother nature, to get anything done. And we were always two weeks behind.

Piled on top of this was the fact that my bosses were corrupt. This was a county-funded project (with backing from the EPA) and the top bosses were total grifters. They would take entire crews away to dig a bass pond at their hunting cabin, work on their beach house, or just do honey-dos for their wives.

That was the cheap stuff though, they were rigging the entire bid process and getting rich from the $150M project. And they were paying the county commissioners massive kickbacks. (You can read the whole sordid tale here) I was offered kickbacks for awarding subcontracts too.

One day a plumbing company owner pulled up in a new Chevy Silverado pulling a shiny bass boat. He told me it was all mine, all I had to do was award him a contract worth about $3M. I told him to GTFO.

Couple that with the fact I had decided to shack up with my direct supervisor (who was the about the only guy who was not on the take and I loved dearly) daughter. Turns out she was a founding member of Crazytown. I'll withhold the details here but let's just say the cops were involved on a monthly basis.

Anyway, I knew I had to get out of dodge, NOW. So one night, I quit my job, dumped his daughter, rented a Uhaul and hit the road in about a 10-hour span.

Shortly thereafter the FBI showed up and most of my bosses went to jail.

To my knowledge it's still the largest municipal public corruption case in US history. Those good ol boys stole so much money they bankrupted the county.

I hightailed it back to Colorado with no clue what to do with myself. An old college friend invited me to stay with him, so I moved in. I weighed my options, and quickly realized I was pretty much unemployable.

I hated corporate America. The politics, the backbiting, the ladder climbing. I was too smart for all these hacks - or so I thought.

Couple that with the fact that all my old supervisors were either A) under investigation by the feds or B) pissed off at me for dumping my job AND his daughter on short notice - I didn't really have much in the way of job references - you know what I mean?

But my new roommate had just bought a business. It was completely outside his area of expertise but he was loving it. He was a tech guy but had bought a lube/oil/filter shop using SBA money.

I had ZERO entrepreneurial instincts growing up. I could barely sell my quota of candy for the school fundraiser. But going back to BigCo and playing the game sounded like fresh hell.

I looked at my roommate, his lifestyle and thought I could do the same thing. I found a small excavation company for sale and got hooked up with the same bank. I put in $50k and bought the thing and was off and running just a month and a half later.

Now there have been a million ups and downs, painful lessons, got rich, went broke, got rich again, might go broke again, but I have had a blast and wouldn't trade a minute of it for anything.

Entrepreneurship has given me EVERYTHING I wanted and more. Freedom, wealth, satisfaction, the whole nine.

So if you're struggling with what to do, hate your job, but have the skills to make a business go on your own, I HIGHLY recommend it. Sure it's not easy, but nothing worth doing ever is. Nothing can match the experience of captaining your own ship.

I'm living proof you don't have to be a "born entrepreneur" to make it.

So, what’s your story?

Kriss Berg