Run the crews.

Before I ever heard the term “deal flow,” I ran pipe. Eight years in Northern Canada’s oilfields as a pipefitter and welder — gas plants, pipelines, steel that has to hold pressure in weather that wants to kill it.

By the end I was running crews of a hundred to a hundred and fifty men. People think welding was my education. It wasn’t. Logistics was. Materials, schedules, inspections, payroll, and a hundred-plus guys who need to know exactly what they’re building today and why. That’s an operating company. Nobody calls it that on a pipe rack.

Watch it crash.

The oilfield is feast or famine. You’re either eating well or you’re not eating at all — and which one isn’t up to you. It’s up to a commodity chart.

“I worked in the oilfield for eight years, running crews of a hundred, hundred and fifty guys — building gas plants, pipelines… I had a daughter on the way around 2015, and the oilfield crashed. I had to figure out a new way of being more stable and controlling my income.”

— Me, on the I AM CEO Podcast (ep. IAM1103, Aug 2021)

That sentence is the hinge of my whole life. 2015: oil collapses, the work disappears, and my daughter is on the way. A man with a torch and a mortgage doesn’t get to wait out a cycle. I needed income that answered to me.

Buy the books before the businesses.

My first acquisition wasn’t a company. It was a library card’s worth of other people’s experience. The 10X Rule came first, then everything else in Grant Cardone’s world. Then I paid for coaches — real money I didn’t really have — because tuition is cheaper than a decade of trial and error.

I taught myself lead generation, marketing, branding, and web development the same way I learned to weld: badly at first, then less badly, then well enough that people paid me. Trade school all over again, except this time I was the apprentice and the foreman.

Build for the people you knew.

I didn’t chase glamorous clients. I built an agency for contractors and real-estate pros — the people I’d worked beside for a decade. I knew what a job site actually runs on, what a slow month feels like, and what they’d pay to never chase another lead. Speaking customer wasn’t a marketing skill I learned; it was a first language.

Trade hours for assets.

The agency worked, but trading hours for invoices is still trading hours. What kept catching my eye was the asset underneath: the websites, the SaaS tools, the e-commerce stores. They could be bought — the way a tired gas plant gets bought, rebuilt, and run profitably.

So that became the business: buy the asset, rebuild the operations, sell the upside. I wrote Unlimited Sellers Guide to document how I find businesses to buy at will, co-created the Buying Beast sourcing method with Andrew Baldwin out of Alberta, and co-founded Prime Acquisitions Group — an AI-and-technology-first M&A team. As of June 2026 the firm reports 16+ closed deals across a $1M–$48M range,* with eleven transactions documented on our public tape.

Roll with the punches.

“Nothing changes — your challenges just change. You’ll still have hard times while you’re doing good… That’s why it’s called being an entrepreneur. You just know how to roll with the punches.”

— Me again, same episode

People hear “oilfield welder turned dealmaker” and assume the crash was the bad chapter. It wasn’t. It was the forge. The oilfield taught me that nothing stays up forever; 2015 taught me to own the thing that pays you. Everything since — the agency, the book, the firm — is just that lesson, compounding.

The full story, with the timeline and the receipts, lives on my About page. And if you’re holding a digital business and wondering what it’s worth to someone like me — my DMs are open.

* Deal figures self-reported by Prime Acquisitions Group (primeacquisitionsgroup.com), June 2026. Largest documented transaction: $24M; 11 deals on the public transaction tape.