Welcome
Welcome to Issue #3 of The Trailblazer's Journal. October's four guests on Ingleside Reviews: Innovators Unveiled built businesses in landscaping, SEO, fulfillment, and erosion control, and every one of them hit the same wall: the moment the business needed more than they could carry alone. This issue is about how each of them learned to let go so the business could grow.
We're also opening two new doors this month. From the Vault revisits our Season 1 guests one episode at a time, starting with our very first, and Legends Unveiled premieres Tuesday, November 10.
What's inside this month's Journal:
THE TRAILBLAZER'S JOURNEY
HIGHLIGHTS AND KEY INSIGHTS
TRAILBLAZER TIP OF THE MONTH
SUCCESS STORIES
FROM THE VAULT
ON THE CHANNEL
THE INNOVATORS UNVEILED BUSINESS 15
THE TRAILBLAZER'S JOURNEY
S2E14 | Chris McManus, GC Landscaping Inc.
Chris McManus: How a $25 Mowing Job Became a Landscaping and Pool Company
Chris McManus started mowing lawns at 18 with a borrowed mower so he could keep racing motocross on weekends. He ran the business from his childhood bedroom closet, cycled through 20 hires a year, and spent late nights in his office wondering how he'd make payroll. Today, at 29, he leads a team of about 25 in western North Carolina and added pool construction by acquiring a retiring competitor. His hardest lesson: delegating without follow-up is just forgetting, so every task he hands off now comes with check-ins and quality control.
S2E15 | Benas Leonavicius, Avium
Benas Leonavicius on Rejection, Freelancing, and Becoming a Business Owner
Benas Leonavicius planned on a career at Google or Apple. Then a marketing agency let him go two months into his first SEO manager role, and he gave freelancing a full-time shot. His first year on his own out-earned the salary he lost. He has since launched Avium, an agency that helps speakers, authors, and founders get found online, and 80 to 90 percent of his clients arrive by referral. His advice for freelancers stuck in the feast-and-famine cycle: build retainer offers that serve three to five clients at once, so you have time left to grow.
S2E16 | Dave Gulas, EZDC 3PL
How Dave Gulas Built a 3PL for Emerging E-Commerce Brands
After more than 20 years in medical and pharmaceutical sales, Dave Gulas was suddenly out of work when his company was foreclosed on. A friend had just bought a warehouse with no plan for it, and together they turned it into EZDC 3PL, a fulfillment partner for growing e-commerce brands. When customers proved harder to find than he expected, Dave launched the Beyond Fulfillment Podcast with a laptop and free tools in under 30 days. Early on he said yes to clients who weren't a good fit, so now his operations experts weigh in before any new account comes aboard.
S2E17 | Phillip Lanier, Core Business Essentials
From Homeless to a Private Equity Exit: Phillip Lanier's Rags-to-Riches Story
The sale of Phillip Lanier's company arrived as an email with one word: closed. There was no confetti, just a pizza night with his wife, Tracy. In the months after, the money felt heavy, and a counselor helped him see that growing up without gifts had left him unsure how to receive one. His advice for founders still building: "Be willing to not be the smartest person in the room. Because if you are, all roads lead to you and you're gonna be worn out."
HIGHLIGHTS AND KEY INSIGHTS
Founder Takeaway of the Month
"Don't be afraid to start messy. You don't have to have all the answers, but you're never going to figure things out if you don't get moving."
Dave Gulas, EZDC 3PL
Dave went from idea to his first published podcast episode in under 30 days, without owning a microphone. Chris McManus ran his first office out of his childhood bedroom closet, and Phillip Lanier fell into business while trying to keep food on the table. None of them waited until they felt ready.
TRAILBLAZER TIP OF THE MONTH
Know your breakeven number before you add a truck (from Chris McManus, S2E14)
Chris kept adding crews to keep up with demand without ever raising his hourly rate.
Every new truck payment, hire, insurance increase, and fuel bill pushed his overhead higher, until the rate that made money with two crews only broke even with four.
Add up your monthly overhead and find the number you have to bring in just to keep the lights on.
Run that number again before your next hire or big purchase, and adjust your pricing if it moved.
Forecast at least once a week. Chris tracks his breakeven rate religiously now.
SUCCESS STORIES
From a Tent to a Private Equity Exit: Phillip Lanier
Phillip Lanier was raised by a 16-year-old mom in Fort Mill, South Carolina. As a young man he lived in a motel, then a tent, heating instant noodles over a handful of charcoal briquettes. A $12-an-hour job digging test trenches for a civil engineering firm put him around engineers for the first time, and he watched them make calm, logical decisions he had never seen modeled before.
When the 2003 recession cut his hours to 15 a week, a construction superintendent he had befriended offered him cleanup work across 40 homes. After eight or nine months of showing up consistently, that superintendent handed him environmental compliance work, and an erosion control company was born.
Phillip and his wife, Tracy, kept their salary flat for 12 or 13 years while revenue climbed into multiple seven figures. Their first expansion, to Charleston, lost a lot of money within a year. They studied what went wrong, went back two years later, and grew into five markets across the Carolinas. That footprint brought a private equity buyer to Phillip's parking lot, and he sold the company in 2022.
Today he shares what he learned through his book, No College, No Problem, his coaching business, Core Business Essentials, and Your Money Essentials, a personal finance class built for people who come from where he came from.
FROM THE VAULT
Season 1, Episode 1 | Arias WebsterBerry, WebsterBerry Marketing
Where Ingleside Reviews: Innovators Unveiled began
Arias WebsterBerry was our very first guest. He launched his first business at age 10, walking neighborhood dogs for $5 each with his cousin, until his mom shut it down that same afternoon. He went on to promote a concert of around 17,000 people at the LA Sports Arena, which earned him a commendation from the Los Angeles City Council. Then the recession hit. Arias moved into his grandmother's house in Dallas, went through a stretch of homelessness, and took a job at a digital marketing company. The training he got there became the foundation of his own agency.
His advice to new founders came from his mom: "You have to do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do." Keep your day job while your business learns to feed itself. Arias is also the author of Content Cannon, a playbook for creating a month of content in a single day. And when A.D. admitted he recorded that first episode from a closet, Arias said his agency started in one too, with a motto worth keeping: "Done is better than perfect."
Next month from the Vault: Season 1, Episode 2.
A.D. Edwards
ON THE CHANNEL
Premieres Tuesday, November 10: Legends Unveiled
You know the brands. Now meet the founders behind them. Legends Unveiled breaks down the world's most famous entrepreneurs in about 10 minutes: the green flags worth copying and the red flags to avoid. We kick off Tuesday, November 10 with Ray Kroc and the story of how McDonald's really grew, and new episodes drop every Tuesday and Thursday on our YouTube channel.
Hear from today's founders. Learn from timeless legends.
THE INNOVATORS UNVEILED BUSINESS 15
One trusted business per category, featured across the Innovators Unveiled community.
Each category has one seat. The business that holds it becomes the exclusive partner in that category, with visibility across the podcast, YouTube, BraveHeartsTV, this newsletter, and social media. If your business serves other businesses, from attorneys and accountants to marketers and HR pros, a founding seat could be yours.
Founding partner spots are limited. Learn more →
Questions? Email [email protected]