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.

Rachelle Morris’s mother pulled her off the reduced-lunch program the summer before sixth grade. Her father brought home a box of Wrigley’s gum from a trade show. She sold it at school, made seven dollars, and paid for her own lunch from then on.

She ran that operation out of her backpack and locker through middle school and high school. Everyone knew where to get their gum.

Second of seven kids in Houston, money tight, and she describes the specific moment of looking around at classmates’ families and deciding she wanted to figure out money the way they seemed to have. Lifeguard at fifteen. Call center at sixteen, doing outbound political polling, getting a seventy-year-old woman in Austin to stay on the phone for forty-five minutes — chasing the gift cards for top performer. She says she didn’t know then that she’d spend the rest of her life calling strangers to make things happen.

She was the first woman on her mother’s side to get a college degree. Information Systems at BYU, where she learned she wasn’t the person who could code for six hours straight — and learned instead to be the person everyone wanted in their group, because she could take what the team built and explain why it mattered.

Then Goldman Sachs, right before the financial crisis, starting in mutual fund operations and talking her way into the Dallas private wealth office. Twelve years. Then a call from JP Morgan in 2018 asking her to move to Utah and open their office. She says she thought that was the entrepreneurial leap. Looking back, it wasn’t.

The actual leap came from a panel. Asked about women founders receiving only around 2% of venture capital nationally, she reframed the question — the gap she saw wasn’t in who gets funded but in who sits on investment committees. Six months later she got a cold call from Darren Hill at RevRoad asking why investors weren’t committing to his fund. She gave him the honest answer. He paused, then asked her to come run it. Her response: I’m not a VC. His: not yet.

She’s now a partner at Stalwart Ventures, fourteen investments in, hundreds evaluated. Thirty percent of the fund’s limited partners are women, which happened because they dropped the minimum to $100,000 regardless of net worth — she’d found that most of these women had never been pitched by a VC firm before.

There’s a lot in here for anyone early in a career. Her warning to high achievers that she’s more concerned about their mental health three years after graduation than she is right now, because results are a different game than grades and people you thought were less sharp will navigate it better. Her advice on walking into a room where you know nobody, and why “I’m new” has a short shelf life. And the 401(k) advice from her Goldman bosses in Dallas that she credits for the financial freedom to take risk now.

Plus a plain-language explanation of what venture capital actually is, why founders should be interviewing VCs rather than the other way around, and what a fund owes the investors who hand over money for a decade.

Chris Bond started as the janitor in his family's scrap metal yard, scrubbing floors on his hands and knees and polishing bathroom faucets until he could see his reflection. Twenty-two years later he was a partner and VP of Sales in a company doing several hundred million a year across ten facilities in three states. Then he sold his stake and left.

What changed was COVID. The job had been ten to twelve hour days, five and sometimes six days a week, with travel on top. Being home showed him what he'd been trading away. His words: he was sacrificing the most important asset he had. Everyone thought he was crazy to walk away from that kind of comfort, and he says there were moments he agreed with them.

His conclusion was that it wasn't actually a choice. He could still make a lot of money, still make an impact, and be there for his kids.

This one covers the full arc. Growing up in a blue-collar scrap yard and working alongside men two and three times his age doing hard physical labor for the same money a sixteen-year-old was making — which taught him respect for that work and a clear sense that he wanted something different in twenty years. Taking a sales job at 23 because he was nervous, and deciding that nervousness was a yes. Going from one location to ten, and being the one sent into every newly acquired yard to win over employees who'd just been bought and were bracing for what came next.

That last job produced what he names as his superpower: building trust with people fast, authentically. The second one is the reason he coaches — he can see potential in someone who can't see it themselves, and hold the mirror up until they do.

He's clear-eyed about why coaching works. Most of his clients already have it together. They started a business for freedom or passion and somewhere along the way it became a headache with employees to manage and a scaling problem. His job is helping them remember why they started. And he reframes accountability as something done with love, not someone busting your chops.

Also in this one: why the top is lonely and what to do about it, the line from his friend Brian that the things that are most private are the most universal, where mortgage rates actually sit right now, and his answer for what he credits his success to — optimism and mindset, trained deliberately, no matter what happens.