Letter to Me
Around your 16th year your interest grows in theatre and broadcast technology. Think radio stations, lighting, sound and automation. Failing pre-algebra twice, you are feeling academically doomed by your 2.nothing GPA. Your counselor tells your parents you are not college material (fuck you [or, thank you?] Mr. DelFavro). Jim, your one engaged mentor in the school district, gets very sick and goes in to the hospital for a long stay. Your high school vice principal approaches you and offers you your mentor's job, with his pay, to stay in high school as work-study if you promise high marks. You finish your last two years of high school getting paid to get all A's.
In your 17th year you graduate high school. Starting at a 4-year R1 university you again struggle academically. You soon transfer to a 2-year community college and gain study habits that accelerate your academic aptitude. You work in IT part-time yet you find the fair paying work boring and lonely. You need fellowship and an adventure but don't know what either is yet.
Around your 18th year you join the volunteer fire department and take advantage of free college to gain certifications as a firefighter, medical responder, hazmat technician and police dispatcher. Because of the volunteering a nearby police department picks you up for midnight clerk and teaches you how to answer 911, shoot guns, deal with the public, dress in uniform and get fit. Your height didn't change but you stand a foot taller thanks to Lt. Roger StJean.
In your 19th year, a year in to volunteering for the fire department, you volunteer for extra duty and get certified as a fire marshal to inspect buildings around the city. One of those buildings houses America's favorite beer company. After inspecting the Budweiser office and helping them with an IT outage they make you a job offer. You suddenly have the title manager at Anheuser-Busch and make 400% more than you did at the police department. Thanks Dave, Bill, Larry and Chief Tice.
Around 21 the beer company awards you contractor of the year with a beautiful gold watch. They look in to promoting you and find you never finished college. You are not eligible for your current job, let alone a promotion. You make a deal with the regional president to work as a contractor as long as you finish your bachelors full-time while doing both. You resign on the day it's legal for you to drink their product.
About 23 you have continued on with school and earned a masters degree. You have an IT business that, thanks to door-to-door selling (begging), has allowed you to purchase your first home and a new car. The fire department has promoted you to sergeant and you are getting paid as an adjunct professor teaching college classes in firefighting and IT while growing your fledgling firm.
Through your 20's and early 30's you build several IT businesses with friends, learn about private equity and investing, get married, buy and airplane and learn how to fly it, fly jets for the wealthy set on the weekends, get divorced and learn how to be a single dad, and stick with the fire department earning a lieutenant's gold badge before retiring after 14 years.
Around 35 you get married a second time with your own kids as your best man and maid of honor. You're gifted with another child and he passes away after less than two weeks. You are emotionally destroyed and feeling aimless in the worst way. You sell your share of the business under extreme duress. With a 3 year non-compete you need to find your purpose somewhere new.
The care your son received at Michigan Medicine inspires you to volunteer around campus. You insert yourself in grand rounds at the medical school and graduate seminars at the business school. You dress in a suit as if you belong, and they eventually ask who you are. Instead of pushing you away they suggest you apply for a PhD and formally join the community. You laugh it off, as surely even a name like Ross or Bezos wouldn't get you in to one of the top 5 medical and business schools in the nation. #GoBlue
As a flier you take the GRE and write the application essays. You score 99th percentile on language and reasoning -- surprise -- that feels good. Application submitted, you have no hope or expectation of acceptance, and are not sure how you'd pay for the school while not working in IT and supporting a family. One day you open the mailbox and find an offer for a full-ride PhD scholarship with a paid research position in the medical school. You accept the offer within hours of opening the mailbox. Coincidentally it's the same week that your mother retires as United States Postal Service worker, turned teacher, turned mid career PhD student and eventual assistant dean at Wayne State University School of Medicine.
In your later 30's you're the eldest and least academic of the students in your PhD program. You go to campus 7 days a week to stress, cry and plead for help wanting to quit every day. A year in you learn that every doctoral candidate is in the same boat and everyone's here to help, especially a professor at the University of Michigan - Stephen M. Ross School of Business. He constructs a plan for you to be a linkage from the medical school to the business school and apprentice under him as his substitute teacher and mentee for capstone seminars in venture capital. It turns out he created the university's investment banking program, is world renowned, and trained the heads of many global financial firms.
You've earned the required core knowledge in the PhD program, passed the dreaded qualifying exam, and you've conducted successful medical research in the surgery department. That research results in Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan funds being funneled back to the medical school to reward your work reducing post-surgical emergency department return visits across the state. Your surgeon project partner and surgical department mentor asks how soon you can write your dissertation to finish the doctorate to join their faculty and become a University of Michigan tenure track professor.
There's just one problem, and he clocks in at 6'5" and 200lbs. Jeffrey Vlasic, a Doogie Houser caliber emergency physician under 30 who is already tenure track and also somehow ace-ing your full-time PhD program, sits you down for a bourbon fueled intervention and offers to throw away his medical career to open a business with you. Grandson of a CEO who led billion dollar businesses, Jeff had proven his own path in medicine but feels called to take our hearts and knowledge to serve founders, families and those trying to make healthcare better.
To the astonishment of professors, parents, friends and colleagues: you resign. You take an early buyout from your non-compete for a reduced payout, and Jeff and you open a fully functional business with no clients. Office, website, insurance, wine lounge, best technology...it's all cobbled together on a budget of $10,000 each. You have to look big and strong to compete with the likes of Huron, PWC, and Deloitte. You suit-up daily and return to the door-to-door selling days of your youth by begging for referrals at industry events. One of those industry contacts walks in to your office around the time your $20,000 is about to run out. She is an out of the box hospital president for Henry Ford Health and becomes your firm' first client. A tiny to her $30,000 engagement results in well over $10,000,000 in follow on work for health systems and healthcare entrepreneurs across the region. You've made a name in finance and healthcare. Thanks for the trust, Lynn Torossian, FACHE, ACC.
A bit before COVID takes hold you and Jeff recognize that those best served by your growing team are founders and families in the precision manufacturing, healthcare, technology and business services verticals. They don't have as much free cashflow on hand to pay today, however they move quickly than institutions and you can now afford to work contingently for them. This success fee based risk brings more exiting work, better potential income, and the right to hand pick the clients you work for. The investment banking knowledge and network gained by apprenticing David Brophy back in the PhD becomes your core offering. And your team is damn good at it.
Nearing 50 you want nothing but to do more of the same. To care for your +1 family, to serve your team, clients and community, and to do all of this for as long as you keep breathing. Your community brings opportunities to invest in clients and other awesome entrepreneurs, and to serve non-profits on your own terms through your generous network. The immense responsibility and good fortune you feel drive you to grow in your faith, stay physically unstoppable and love with a full heart.
And you'll know there's more good to come.