I grew up on the poor side of Chickasha, Oklahoma. Lower middle class. My mom was a bank teller. My dad worked the oil fields. Neither one went to college. We did not have a lot, but they both worked hard, did the best they could, and taught me two things that turned out to matter more than anything I could have learned in a classroom. People skills and work ethic.A ton of books were not exactly lying around the house. We were not what I would call a big reading family.
There was no roadmap for what came next. No family connections to open doors. No trust fund. No safety net. I started working early and figured things out as I went, which is a polite way of saying I made a lot of mistakes and kept showing up anyway.I worked my way up from the bottom. Store-level management to multi-site operations to executive leadership. Over 35 years, I built companies from zero to multi-million dollar operations. Led teams of more than 200 people. Managed P&Ls up to $80 million. Founded Riderflex, a nationally ranked executive recruiting firm that has placed thousands of professionals across the country. Launched Robo Reliance, a nationwide robotics field service company built to support an industry that does not have the infrastructure it needs yet.Now I spend most of my time helping organizations figure out how to implement AI strategy and lead through the messiest part of this technology shift. Not the theoretical version. The real version, where you have to bring actual people along and make it work inside an existing operation.
Along the way, I wrote four books. If you had told the kid in Chickasha that he would publish anything, he would have laughed at you.Two of them are about business. The Riderflex Guide: Inspiring and Hiring, and The Riderflex Guide 2.0: Mastering Job Interviews. These came directly from decades of recruiting and hiring. Everything I learned about what separates the people who get the job from the people who do not.Two of them are personal. Stormwalker's Grit: A Memoir of Struggle and Strength, and Zero to Something: A Novel Inspired by True Events. These came from the parts of the journey that were not on a resume. The hard stretches. The moments that shaped how I think about work, resilience, and what it actually takes to build something from nothing.I put all four on YouTube as free audiobooks. Every chapter. Full recordings. Zero cost.
Because I remember what it felt like to not have access to things. Books, mentors, guidance, any of it. If one of these helps somebody get through a tough interview, start a business, or just feel less alone in the fight, I am not putting a paywall on that.That is not a business strategy. It is just how I was raised. You help people when you can.If any of these sound like something you or someone you know could use, the full audiobook recordings are available free on my YouTube channel.