The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Josh Crumback had one semester of college, a dream of playing football that ended with a back injury junior year, and the kind of work ethic that sends a teenager riding his bike to the school gym every summer morning to lift weights before anyone else shows up. When he dropped out of college he did not spiral. He went to work for his great uncle in office furniture, stayed five years longer than the six months he planned, and spent the next decade climbing the corporate logistics ladder at Blue Jay Solutions and Transcore until the day he decided to stop climbing someone else's ladder and build his own.

He started Encore Business Group in 2015 while still employed, bootstrapped every dollar from his own salary, refinanced his paid-off Jeep to keep the lights on, and spent two years building something that did not yet exist while showing up to a day job every morning. In 2017 he started dating the woman who would become his wife. In 2018, married and hopeful, he quit his corporate job to go all in. And that same summer, while he was learning the books and getting his hands into every part of the business, he discovered that his co-founder and best friend, the man who was best man at his wedding and for whom he was best man, had been using company funds for personal expenses and outside ventures.

The ultimatum was simple. One of them was leaving. His partner left and took their biggest profit-generating customer with him. Josh had no income, a brand new marriage, a business that had to start over, and a baby on the way. He got on his knees and prayed. He did not hear a voice. What he heard was nothing, and he took the absence of a signal to quit as a sign to push forward. He found a new partner in Dom, his high school quarterback who had his business head screwed on right, rebuilt the customer base, pivoted entirely to e-commerce when Covid hit and the market exploded, and in 2021 brought on Ryan Walsh, his cousin and business partner from Episode 14, when Dom exited after doubling his investment.

Today Encore Business Group has nineteen employees, ISO 9001 certification, a new larger facility, their biggest client in company history signed after a two-year pipeline, and more momentum than at any point in nine years of existence. Josh is quiet about it, the way people who have genuinely been through it tend to be. But this conversation is not quiet. This episode is for every founder who has been betrayed by someone they never thought they would have to protect themselves from.