The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Most people see the layoff coming before it hits. Bryan Todd saw it too. The IT industry had been shedding jobs by the tens of thousands, Dell, Intel, HP, whole teams gone in a quarter. Bryan had been killing it at his company, maxed out on every performance metric, building products people actually used. None of that mattered. Wednesday morning his manager called, ran through the HR script like a stranger, and Friday was Bryan's last day. He took it personally. He admits he probably should not have, but he did.

What followed was over two hundred resumes, three final-round interviews that all fell apart, and one VP who told Bryan plainly that his experience was the problem. He was too capable. Too seasoned. Too much of a threat to a thirty-year-old hiring manager trying to protect his own seat. By January, Bryan had stopped waiting for a door to open and decided to build one himself. He took a home inspection course in March, launched his LLC on April fifth, and by June and July was doing more inspections in his first year than most newcomers see in two. Then October hit and the market dropped out from under him.

Bryan Todd is a Black Hawk mechanic turned multi-deployment combat veteran turned cybersecurity professional turned home inspector turned entrepreneur. He and Karl served together overseas more than twenty years ago, and this episode is the first time they have actually sat down and talked through what those decades since have looked like. What comes out of it is a conversation about self-awareness, systems thinking, the cost of lashing out at the people closest to you when the business gets hard, why abundance is not just a philosophy but a practical business strategy, and what the word "good" can do when your temperature hits 103 and you are an hour from done on a client's inspection and you want to cut a corner.

This episode is for anyone who has been handed a door closing and is still standing in the hallway trying to figure out what to do next.