The odds were not in my favor. I didn’t care. I didn’t know enough to.

On October 1st, 2022, I moved out of my marriage and into a rental. I had asked myself one question that changed everything: What if this is my only life? Is this really how I want to spend it?

I chose myself. And something about that choice cracked something open.

Three months later I had my last drink. I didn’t plan to quit. I hadn’t even admitted to myself that I was an alcoholic. I had tried to cut back before but never intended to stop permanently. What happened instead was something I’m not ready to fully explain yet. A moment of clarity. A spiritual experience that made drinking simply incompatible with who I was becoming. That story deserves its own space and I’ll give it one. What matters here is that I didn’t stop drinking because I wanted to. I quit drinking because something shifted in me at a level I didn’t completely understand.

What I also didn’t know, because why would I, is that every major recovery program has a foundational rule for early sobriety: no major life decisions. No new job. No new relationship. The reason is simple. Early sobriety is fragile. The brain is rewiring. The emotions are raw. Major stress in early sobriety is one of the most common triggers for relapse. The odds of staying sober through the first year are not in anyone’s favor.

I started a company in mine.

My last drink was New Year’s Day 2023. Less than two months later, on February 21st, 2023, I filed the paperwork to form my HVAC company. I was in what recovery circles call the pink cloud phase, that blissful early window where everything feels possible and you feel invincible. I was on top of the world. Absolutely certain I could do anything. I had no idea what was actually coming. And honestly? If I had known, I never would have been bold enough to start. The confidence that launched my company was borrowed from a woman who didn’t yet know what she was walking into. I am so grateful she didn’t know. I am so grateful she jumped anyway.

What came next was not a pink cloud.

I wasn’t just new to being a business owner. I was new to the HVAC Industry with just over a year of management experience, and not even in the service department. I wasn’t prepared for the fact that HVAC is a seasonal industry. The hardest stretches have been the winters. Phoenix is paradise in December. Perfect weather, beautiful sunny days, the reason 100,000 people a year move here. It is also the reason HVAC companies go quiet. Nobody needs their air conditioner or their heater when it’s 72 degrees. I didn’t have a contingency plan to stay afloat in the winter. I didn’t know I needed one. Every single winter since we opened, the phones slow down, the money dries up, and I have had to figure out how to keep us alive. I sold my personal vehicle to pay a vendor our first winter. I have run the company on personal credit cards and high interest loans. Every winter has been a different kind of desperate.

And every winter, I chose to heal instead of drink. Those were genuinely the only two options available to me. I had to keep becoming someone else. Someone strong enough to navigate this storm.

I went to some very dark places. The kind of dark that makes you question everything. The kind of dark that, for someone in early recovery, is genuinely dangerous. Every tool I had, the meditation, the healing work, the spiritual practice, got tested in ways I hadn’t anticipated. And every single time I reached the edge, I chose not to drink. I chose to heal instead. I chose to keep going. To keep rising back up.

Often what pulled me back was my team.

I would think about what it would mean for them to have to work somewhere else. Some company that wouldn’t see them. Somewhere that would pressure them into becoming something they weren’t, (a salesperson). One of those people is Morgan, one of our technicians. Morgan finds genuine joy in helping people, not in selling to them, not in hitting a number, but in actually solving a problem for someone who needed help.

He said something to me once when I asked why he liked working here:

“I like that I can treat my customers as fellow children of God and not opportunities for making money.”

I kept going so that sentence could exist.

Recovery teaches you that healing and integrity are the same work. You cannot be rigorously honest with yourself and dishonest with the people around you. It doesn’t work that way. The moment I let my company start cutting corners or misleading customers, I would have started lying to myself. I know exactly where that road leads. I had already been down it.

So I kept going. Through the dark winters and the maxed out credit cards and the moments I wanted to walk away. I healed. I made mistakes. I learned. And the company grew. Not as fast as I needed it to sometimes. But in a way I could be proud of.

Always in a way I could be proud of.

Everyone who knows anything about addiction recovery will tell you the odds are brutal. Everyone who knows anything about new businesses will tell you the same. Most people who attempt either don’t make it through the first year. I was attempting both at the same time, in one of the most competitive HVAC markets in the country, as a first time business owner with no roadmap and no safety net.

We are in year four.

I don’t say that to brag. I say it because I need you to understand something: we are not here by accident. We are not here because it was easy or because we got lucky or because someone handed us anything. We are here because integrity turned out to be the only foundation I could build on in my sobriety and in my business. The two were never separate. They were always the same fight.

That is why we are still standing.

That is why we keep rising.

And the mission grows.

I spent years in operations streamlining, organizing, making other people’s companies run better. I was good at it. So when a group of private equity investors brought me on to help acquire and grow an HVAC company, I thought I understood what I was walking into. I didn’t.

They purchased a small service company. The previous owner had passed away suddenly. He was in his thirties and left behind five trucks, a commercial space, and almost no repeat customers. I didn’t fully understand yet what that meant. I was figuring out how to get the phones and internet turned on. What I did know was that the people around me, the technicians I had hired, the team I was building, were tired of being treated like they didn’t matter. We had all come from toxic work environments. Bosses who didn’t listen. Leadership that didn’t lead. We weren’t just trying to start a company. We were trying to build something we actually wanted to show up to.

That was the real reason my company was born. Not the industry. Not the customers. Us. We wanted better for ourselves and for the people who would eventually work alongside us. The mission to serve customers with integrity came later, and it came hard.

Because here’s what I learned once I started trying to figure out how to actually grow my own company: almost every piece of advice I received pointed me toward strategies that didn’t feel right. Commission-only pay structures that incentivized technicians to sell people things they didn’t need. High-pressure tactics disguised as customer service. Sales scripts built on fear. I kept asking myself, would I want this done to me? The answer was always no. Every contractor, every business coach, every industry group told me that doing things the way I wanted wasn’t profitable. That I’d have to play the sales game.

I refused. I still refuse.

What I didn’t fully understand then but do now is that private equity has quietly taken over the home service industry, and their goal isn’t to fix your air conditioner. It’s to extract as much money from you as possible before flipping the company to the next buyer. The advice I was getting made perfect sense once I understood who was giving it and why.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Back to February 2023.

We had started quietly talking about getting out. Maybe buying the company from the investors if we could pull the money together. Maybe starting something from scratch. We were tired of watching the capital drain while the phones barely rang, tired of being told what to do by people who had never once turned a wrench or looked a customer in the eye.

Someone we trusted found out.

He secretly recorded our conversations.

Then he handed them over.

On February 20th, 2023, the investors called us into a meeting and fired us.

…

On February 21st, 2023, I legally formed my own HVAC company.

I named it. I designed the logo the one that strangers stop to compliment when they see it on our trucks and business cards. I took on the debt. I made the sacrifices. I pulled off more than a few miracles to get this company to where it is today. There is a version of this story I haven’t told yet, one that involves losing my marriage, facing alcohol addiction, and understanding in the most visceral way possible that running an honest company is not just a business philosophy for me. It is how I stay well. It is how I stay me. That story is coming.

Looking back, I realize that I wasn’t just building a company. I was rebuilding myself. My company exists because a group of people wanted to be treated with dignity and decided to create a place that offered that. We are proof that you can do things the right way. Every person who told me it wasn’t possible is still out there playing the game.

I’m here to change it.

Welcome to my Substack. I’m glad you found it.