The Book
Where Toughness, Kindness, and Humility Collide
A leadership memoir about thirty years of learning that the fight and the service were never opposites - they were the whole point. Not a playbook. Not a framework. A pile of scar-tissued stories, hard-won perspective, and proof that almost anything is possible when you stop choosing between fierce and kind.
In progress
Fight to Serve
Lead fiercely. Stay humble.
Win together.
What this book is
A revelation, not a redemption
Not a story about going from wrong to right. About holding two opposing forces - the competitor and the servant - long enough to discover they make each other stronger.
Real stories, not theory
Every chapter opens with a note from an employee, a family member, or a friend - voices that exist because of decisions made. They're not decoration. They're the reason the story exists.
Fresh eyes on tired cliches
"Hope is not a strategy." "Nice guys finish last." "It's just business." Flipped over - not to be clever, but because the unexamined version stops working the moment you stop noticing it.
From the prologue
The book opens on Cinco de Mayo 2017 - the ESOP announcement. It's the moment that forced a thirty-year career into focus. Everything before it led there. Everything after it was shaped by it.
"Terrified, I looked out at a hundred employees - their families, my family, and close friends mixed among them - swallowed hard, and said: 'If you work at NCC, you are now an owner of NCC.'
Twelve years earlier Danielle and I had made the decision to buy this conveyor company when it was a million dollars underwater. In 2017, after a decade of sleepless triage and relentless growth, it was worth roughly $15 million - and I had just handed 42 percent of it to the people staring back at me, wondering what the hell had just happened."
- Fight to Serve, Prologue
The structure
Part one
The Edge
CB West football. Early career. The Mauger Letters. Raw Kevin - competitive to a fault, hustle without relationships, winning at all costs and barely noticing what it cost.
Part two
The Collision
The buyout. Servant leadership. Danielle - the person who moved Kevin from a math-driven worldview to a people-driven one. The discovery that both were needed to complete the equation.
Part three
Learning to Hold Both
EOS implementation. Culture building. The blue dot. The development of judgment - knowing which force a given moment requires, and having the discipline to choose.
Part four
The Revelation
The ESOP. The sale. The retirement fishing rags. Strategy led somewhere strategy couldn't have predicted.
Part five
What I Now Know
Ten principles earned, not borrowed. Universal truths framed as discoveries - the bets Kevin would make again, and the stories that prove why.
Who it's for
The emerging leader
Wondering whether you have to choose between fierce and kind. You don't. But nobody tells you that early enough - or shows you what holding both actually looks like.
The owner in the middle of it
Running a company, carrying the weight, wondering if there's a better way. This book doesn't have all the answers. But it has the honest ones.
Anyone who's ever led people
And discovered that the hardest part isn't strategy - it's showing up the right way, for the right people, at the right moment. Consistently.
When it's ready, you'll hear about it here first. In the meantime - the ideas are on The Bets page, and the story that produced them is on The Story page.