I founded, built and scaled
12 companies with multiple exits.

At 29, Success Magazine named me one of America's Youngest, Richest Entrepreneurs. It went straight to my head.

By the time I turned 29, I had built two very successful businesses, and I started to believe I could do no wrong.

My ego got so big, it could have had its own ZIP code, and it blew up with my third startup, Stockwell's, the nation's first chain of frozen food stores.

I put together the DREAM TEAM!

My partner was George Naddaff, the founder of Boston Chicken, which was later renamed Boston Market. I also brought in two great companies that also became investors: M&M Meat Shops, a Canadian franchisor with 250 frozen food store locations, and Vie de France Culinary, now called Cuisine Solutions, known for pioneering sous vide in North America.

By the math, the opportunity was incredible. M&M had 250 locations in Canada, so it was easy to assume that the United States could support 2,500+ locations. I was going to be a billionaire!

If only my ego didn't get in the way.

M&M already had a proven formula, but I was sure I knew better.

M&M found success in rural markets. I chose to open in upscale neighborhoods.

M&M kept prices affordable. I decided to go premium.

The failure was devastating. It humbled me and led to a prolonged depression, which I overcame with time, therapy, and the support of my incredible wife, Cindy.

But it also changed who I am.

I would not be the coach I am today without my Stockwell's experience and the lessons from the nine startups that came after.

Success taught me how to build companies. Failure taught me how founders can get in their own way.

My clients don't need a coach who has never made mistakes. They need someone who can see a problem coming and is willing to be direct and tell them before they repeat the ones I made.

I held a grudge against Dan Sullivan for 30 years. And the reason will teach you one of the toughest lessons in business.

If you haven't heard of him, he co-founded Strategic Coach and is known for selling millions of books like "Who Not How", "The Gap and the Gain", and "10x Is Easier Than 2x".

He spoke at a YEO chapter event in San Diego back in 1993. I was really impressed.

Afterward, we happened to share an elevator. I asked him if he offered one-on-one coaching. He said, "That's not what I do." The doors opened, and he walked out. That was the whole conversation.

I saw it as a brush-off and held onto that feeling for thirty years.

Eventually, I realized he wasn't dismissing me. He simply never did one-on-one coaching. He was clear about what he did and what he didn't do, and he wasn't going to change that for someone he just met in an elevator.

That kind of clarity is what helped him build his success.

Being able to say No so clearly is one of the toughest skills in business.

I've said Yes to deals, partners, and product lines that I should have turned down right away. Those decisions ended up costing me years.

Dan gave me the answer back in 1993. It just took me thirty years to finally understand it.

In 2013, I offered the most famous beard in baseball $1 million to shave it on national television.

At the time, I was the founder of 800Razors.com. Brian Wilson had just signed with the Dodgers after Tommy John surgery, and suddenly that beard was back in the headlines. Everyone was talking about whether he'd shave it. I saw the moment and grabbed it.

I made the offer public. His reps at MVP Sports said the beard was "going with him to the grave." He turned us down flat.

But here's the thing. It didn't matter.

The story got picked up by CBS Sports, MLB.com, Bleacher Report, TIME, and TMZ. Big name athletes started reaching out about partnerships. All from an offer that cost us nothing because it got declined.

This is newsjacking. You don't create the story. You insert yourself into a story that's already happening. Wilson's beard was the headline. We just made ourselves part of it.

The lesson? You don't always need to close the deal to win. Sometimes the boldest ask IS the strategy.

Years ago, I was raising capital for what would have been the first frozen food retail chain in the U.S. My partner was George Naddaff, the founder of Boston Chicken (now Boston Market), who had just taken Boston Chicken public in one of the hottest IPOs of the decade.

We were meeting with one of Hollywood's most legendary power brokers, who was also the CEO of a major studio. For privacy, I'll call him "Joe."

Walking through the gates of his estate was surreal. A butler greeted us, led us into this incredible living room, and a few minutes later Joe joined us. He was warm, charismatic, and incredibly engaging. George and Joe hit it off immediately.

Then something happened I'll never forget.

In the middle of our conversation, the butler walked over, clipped the end of Joe's cigar, lit it, and handed it to him. It was one of the strangest displays of wealth and status I had ever seen.

A little later, the butler returned with a telephone. Joe took the call right in front of us.

In an instant, the man who had been so gracious and charming completely changed.

He became impatient, dismissive, and downright rude to the person on the other end of the line.

After the meeting, George and I walked outside. He looked at me and said:

"Stevie… the Joe who answered the phone was the real Joe."

I've never forgotten those words.

People can be incredibly good at managing impressions. They can be polished, charismatic, and say all the right things.

But every so often, the mask slips.

Pay attention to those moments.

As Maya Angelou famously said, "When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time."

It's one of the most valuable lessons I've learned in business—and in life.

In 2012 I founded 800razors. Same thesis as Dollar Shave Club (raised $165M, sold to Unilever for a billion) and Harry's (raised $250M pre-revenue).

My aha moment came in 2011. I got fed up spending $5 on a single razor blade, and started digging. Turns out Gillette and Schick controlled over 90% of the razor market, and no one had launched a new razor in North America in over 40 years. The last was Bic, with the disposable, in the early 70s. The reason was simple: both Gillette and Schick were fiercely litigious, and nobody wanted the fight.

Each of us solved that problem differently. Dollar Shave Club sourced cheap razors out of Korea. Harry's used its war chest to buy an old razor factory in Germany outright.

I had neither a cheap supplier nor hundreds of millions to buy a factory, so I had to do it the hard way and went straight to the source.

Gillette wouldn't do branded or private label deals, period. Schick was more open to it. The problem was that it took close to 18 months to close my deal with Schick for North America exclusive rights to their private label razors.

By then Harry's and Dollar Shave Club had already launched. Dollar Shave Club went on to sell to Unilever for $1 billion, and Harry's landed a $1.37 billion offer from Edgewell (a deal the FTC ultimately blocked, keeping them independent). Either way, both had beaten me to the outcome while my deal was still crawling toward the finish line.

I cracked the hardest part of the business. But by then the window had closed. Harry's and Dollar Shave Club were already spending thousands to acquire customers. The economics didn't work as I didn't have hundreds of millions to spend on customer acquisition.

Here's the thing. I have no regrets.

What I learned is that being right is not the same as being first, and solving the hardest problem is worthless if the timing has passed you by. Capital and timing beat being clever almost every time.

In 1988, I graduated from McGill University in Montreal and moved to the US to launch a home-delivery frozen food business. I stayed in the food industry for the next 15 years, opening the country's first chain of frozen food stores (Stockwell's), followed by a chain of prepared meal stores (The Daily Market).

Then came George Foreman.

At the time, the George Foreman Grill had sold 94 million units, still the best-selling kitchen appliance of all time. I saw the wave coming and I wanted to ride it. So I partnered with George to launch George Foreman Steaks, selling premium meats online and on QVC, piggybacking off the grill's massive momentum.

It should have been a home run.

But in my excitement to close the deal, I gave away too much in royalties. Compound that with the cost of next-day shipping frozen steaks packed in dry ice, and the unit economics quietly collapsed.

Here's what I know now that I didn't fully understand then: my ADHD is my superpower AND my blind spot.

The same brain that spotted the George Foreman opportunity before anyone else, the pattern recognition, the excitement, the go go go, is the same brain that signed a term sheet without doing the math slowly enough.

Impulsive decisions dressed up as bold vision. I've since learned to tell the difference.

That business didn't survive. But the lesson did, and it's shaped every deal I've touched across 12 companies since. If you're a founder with ADHD, I see you.

The fire is real. So is the risk.

Slow down the deals. Speed up everything else.

I was close to cementing a deal to bring a revolutionary sous-vide cooker to Jarden, the $8 billion-plus company that owned Crock-Pot, Rubbermaid, and FoodSaver.

Mellow was the most innovative kitchen appliance I'd seen in years. A sous vide machine you could load in the morning. It kept your food cold all day, then started cooking on a schedule so dinner was perfect the moment you walked in. A patented built-in refrigeration system did exactly that.

It should have been a no brainer. Then a flaw surfaced. In 2018, Wired reviewed the Mellow and scored it 1 out of 10. The problem wasn't the cooking. It was that the machine couldn't pull the food cold enough, fast enough, and hold it there, which left ingredients too long in what food scientists call the danger zone, between 40 and 140 degrees, where bacteria multiply. The review spread. It destroyed the business.

Here's what I took from being that close to it:

They had a brilliant idea. They had engineers good enough to build it. What they didn't have was a single food scientist in the room. So nobody flagged the one thing that turned out to be fatal: food sitting below 140 but not safely under 40 is food growing bacteria. The danger zone wasn't a detail they got wrong. It was a detail they didn't know existed.

In all my businesses, the most expensive lessons came from the same place: thinking I could figure it out myself. The wins came when I stopped doing that. When I brought in someone who had already lived the problem, who'd made the mistake I was about to make and had the scar to show for it. That person sees in five minutes what would have cost you the company to learn the hard way.

Mellow didn't need a better engineer. It needed one person in the room who'd spent their career around food safety and would have asked, on day one, "what happens to the food while it's waiting?" That question was a one-sentence fix. Not having anyone to ask it was fatal.

Build the thing that works. Then bring in the people who know what you don't know you don't know.

In 2008 I was watching The Apprentice when a skincare company fell into my lap.

Carol Alt was on that season. Three-time Sports Illustrated cover model. And somewhere in the back of my head I knew one more thing about her: she was a raw foodist.

Raw foodists believe heat destroys the active nutrients in food. Cook it, and you lose the vitamins and minerals that made it worth eating.

That fact had been sitting in my head doing nothing. Then it collided with a second fact I also already knew: skincare ingredients get processed with heat too.

Two facts I'd had for years. The only new thing was putting them in the same room.

Raw Essentials was the brand I created with Carol Alt, built on raw, unheated active ingredients, fronted by a supermodel who lived the philosophy. I reached out to her manager. Within a month I had an agreement structured, a manufacturer identified, and a pitch in front of Home Shopping Network, where we launched.

It worked. We placed it in Ulta and in mass drugstores across the US and Canada. I sold the company in 2012.

Here's what I've learned after doing this a dozen times: most good ideas aren't invented. They're noticed. The raw food fact and the skincare fact were both public, both obvious, both available to anyone watching that episode. I just happened to hold them at the same time and ask what happens if they touch.

You probably already know the two facts that become your next venture. They're just sitting in separate drawers.

Persistence overcomes resistance.

Maybe that's why I saw what everyone else missed.

In 2015, Phelps was coming off a DUI suspension. Most brands were keeping their distance. I leaned in. He became an investor, partner, and spokesperson for my company 800Razors.com. It was his first partnership after stepping away from the sport.

A year later, he won 5 gold medals in Rio.

Phelps didn't succeed because of discipline alone. He succeeded because he had coaches and systems around him that matched the way his brain works.

That's what I've learned building and exiting 12 companies. And it's what I help CEOs with now. The founders who scale fastest aren't the most organized. They're the ones who stop fighting their wiring and start building an operating system around it.

I launched a CBD-infused drink line with Mike Tyson called DWiiNK.

The name? That's how Mike pronounces "drink." If you've ever heard him talk, you know exactly what I mean. It was the perfect brand touch: authentic, memorable, and only Mike Tyson could own it.

The product was great. The team was great. Mike was all in.

We had four flavors, premium quality, and priced it at $3.99 so anyone could afford it. We weren't trying to be boutique. We wanted mass distribution.

Then the laws got in the way.

State after state, we couldn't get distribution approved. The regulatory patchwork across the US made it nearly impossible to scale. We eventually had to close.

Here's what I took from it: a great product doesn't survive without a viable path to market. Distribution isn't a detail. It's the whole game.

I now bring that lesson into every company I coach. Before you fall in love with your product, fall in love with your go-to-market. Know your lane. Know your blockers.

A few years ago, I launched a dog treat company with Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer himself.

Great product. Great partnership. One problem.

We named it Cesar Millan.

Turns out Mars Petcare, a $30 billion company behind Cesar cat food, had something to say about that. Their legal team reached out faster than our lawyers ever did, with a cease and desist.

Here are the lessons I learned the hard way:

• Fall in love with your idea, not your brand name. Names can be changed. Momentum lost to legal battles cannot.
• Your legal team should be at the table at the beginning, not called in to clean up the mess.
• A great product and a great partner can't save you from a preventable mistake.
• Even the best ideas have blind spots. Build a team around you that catches what you miss.

We ultimately had to walk away from the name, and it cost us dearly.

The best entrepreneurs I know aren't the ones who never make mistakes. They're the ones who make them early, learn fast, and never make the same one twice.

In 1995, I founded the first frozen prepared-meal store chain in the country. My partner was George Naddaff, the man who built Boston Chicken, later renamed Boston Market. At the time, Boston Chicken had just gone public in one of the hottest IPOs in history.

The model was already proven up north. A Canadian chain called M&M Meat Shops had 250 locations. The math was simple. Take a proven concept, bring it south, build a 2,500-unit chain.

Everything was perfect. I raised the money. I had the best partners. We had the playbook from a company that had already cracked it.

And then I did the thing my brain always wants to do. I changed it.

I didn't know I had ADHD back then. I just knew that a finished, working system felt like an itch I had to scratch. Where other people saw "proven, don't touch," I saw a blank canvas. So I took a concept that already worked and rebuilt every single piece of it.

M&M won in rural markets. I opened upscale. M&M kept prices low. I went premium. They had a formula that worked, and I improved it right into the ground.

We opened two locations. Both failed.

For years that one stung more than any other. The setup was perfect, and I was the one who couldn't leave it alone.

Here's the part that finally gave me peace. In 2008, M&M brought their own stores to the US. The proven model, run by the people who built it. They failed too. Apparently, the concept itself didn't travel the way the math promised.

That didn't make my version smart. But it taught me the real lesson.

ADHD is the same wiring that makes me a great visionary and a terrible operator. The drive to reinvent is a gift when you're creating something new, and a wrecking ball when you're handed something that already works. The skill isn't killing that instinct. It's knowing which seat to be in when it shows up.

Today, I know exactly what I am. I'm the visionary, not the operator. I build the vision and let the people wired to execute run the play.

That's the heart of what I now teach through Bloom Growth: getting founders in the right seats. If I'd understood my own wiring back then, and had a framework like this to force the discipline, it would have saved me millions of dollars and ten years of anguish.