Dan Buckway was gassed walking across the sand in Oceanside. That trip was his family’s ten-year anniversary. He’s since lost 122 pounds — and taken the family business from $400,000 in sales to $7 million.

He’s the third generation. His grandfather Dallas was an Ogden entrepreneur who did everything from land deals to the old Ogden City Mall with the water slides inside it, and started Cozy Carpets along the way. What Dan took from him wasn’t the flooring. It was walking into rooms where everyone said “hey, Dallas!” and thinking that would be a good way to be known.

The path there wasn’t direct. He worked for his dad out of high school from 2008 to 2011, which meant learning the business during a stretch where they went a month, maybe two, without seeing a customer. Then he went to work on a repossession team, drilling locks and changing them on houses that weren’t his. His last one was evicting a family two days after Christmas. He watched them walk down the street, leaving their cars and everything they owned behind, Christmas included.

After that came RC Willey, five years on the sales floor, and the moment that decided everything: customers reading his name tag and asking where the Buckway store was. He’d pitch RC Willey on building a commercial division. They told him there was no money in it. He wrote an email to his dad and two of his brothers instead, got sweat equity and some backing, and opened 2,200 square feet in 2017. He outgrew it in six months. He now owns the building RC Willey used to rent — and got to introduce himself to their general manager as the new landlord.

The operating principle he credits most is the rule of 30: thirty percent commercial, thirty contractor, thirty residential, and the last ten whatever’s hustling. A friend in the industry gave him that, and his point is that it means never scrambling for clientele in two sectors when the third slows. Retail is down right now. Commercial is up. His line: if you’re not shifting, you’re dying.

The health story runs alongside all of it and lands in the same place. Giving up soda in 2023 and never going back. Fifty pounds, then twenty more, then thirty back on during a stretch of travel. Then collapsing in his own backyard on the way to check the chickens, two bulging discs, and a surgeon asking when he wanted to operate. He said no at 36 and did core work and weight loss instead.

Asked for his superpower, he doesn’t say sales or operations. He says he’s a good friend, and that he doesn’t expect much back. It’s the thing he took from his grandfather, who used to pull over and pick up strangers with Dan in the back seat. It’s also, not incidentally, how the business got built — he didn’t golf when he started, and now a round in Virginia ends with texts from fifteen guys in Pennsylvania.

Also in this one: what it costs to work with family and what it takes to be talking again, why a stocking company turned out to be the perfect thing to own during a supply chain collapse, and a twelve-year-old already handing out branded hats to his friends at school.