Chapter One: The Exit

I always thought my exit strategy would be something simple—an IPO, a big acquisition, maybe even a quiet buyout where I could slip away and enjoy the spoils of years spent grinding in the government technology sector. That was the plan. That was supposed to be my legacy.

Instead, my exit strategy turned out to be something far less conventional. I left behind boardrooms for barns, contracts for cattle, and software solutions for soil. Instead of shaking hands in Washington D.C. or Silicon Valley, I found myself knee-deep in mud on a patch of land in southern Nevada, wondering what the hell I had just done.

It wasn’t some epiphany that led me here. It wasn’t a lifelong dream of running a farm or getting back to nature. It was grief—raw and unfiltered. When my father died, it wasn’t just a personal loss. It was a full-scale dismantling of everything I thought I understood about success, purpose, and what mattered in the long run.

He had spent his life working, helping others, and taking care of the people he loved. He taught me everything about persistence and discipline, about making something from nothing. And yet, in the end, it wasn’t the crimes he stopped or the hours he put in at work that defined him. It was his connection to the earth, to his roots, to something real.

At his funeral, I had conversations I never expected to have. People told me stories about him I had never heard. Not about his career or the money he made, but about the way he showed up for others. The way he never hesitated to help someone who needed it. The way he never forgot where he came from.

And then, suddenly, I was staring down at my own life, wondering if I could say the same.

I had spent years building a company, turning an idea into a multi-million dollar machine. I had government contracts, employees, and more stress than I could handle. I had spent so much time trying to win at the game of business that I had never stopped to ask if I even wanted to play it anymore.

So I made a decision.

I walked away.

I didn’t sell my company for a headline-worthy number. I didn’t try to pivot into another venture. I took the money I had, bought a farm, and decided to start over.

This is that story.

Not a story of overnight enlightenment. Not some romanticized tale of leaving the corporate world for a “simpler” life. This is a story of struggle, of failure, of learning everything the hard way. It’s about breaking apart everything I thought I knew and rebuilding it from the ground up—literally.

The day I signed the paperwork for Rancho del Chivo, I stood in the middle of an empty field, the Nevada sun beating down on me, and thought:

What the hell have I done?

That was my real exit strategy.

And this is how it began.