About Clay
I have already been handed somebody'slife's work.
It was my mother's. That is a harder test than any deal I will ever do with a stranger, and it is the only credential on this page that should matter to you.
1996
A thousand square feet in a town of eighteen hundred people.
My mom started Stitchin' Heaven in Quitman, Texas. Everybody thought she was crazy. It grew, but every dollar went back into inventory, which is the story of almost every small business up to about two million in revenue.
In 2016 I asked if I could come help. I want to be honest about why: I had just come off a bad few years and I mostly needed something steady to do. She put me on the phones. A four-line phone, thirty employees, and my whole job was walking over to somebody's desk to tell them line four was for them.
So I spent five thousand dollars on a phone system and eliminated my own job. Then I went and fixed the block of the month department, which had ten people and no manager. Then I told her the business needed a building.
What happened next
Twenty years of somebody else's work, and I did not break it.
- 2018
We built the building.
An SBA loan, seventeen thousand square feet, on land the city's economic development program was giving away with tax abatements. It was supposed to be a five year plan.
- 2020
Then the retreat center.
Twelve bedrooms and six cottages, next door. The events and community side turned into the best part of the business.
- 2016 to now
About $2M to about $12M.
I credit EOS for a lot of it. But the specific thing worth saying here is what did not change: the name, the town, and the people who were there before I showed up.
- Meanwhile
Thunder Laser, almost by accident.
We needed to cut fabric for the cruises, so I bought lasers. I ended up the factory's US distributor. Because Stitchin' Heaven was my actual job, Thunder Laser had to run without me from day one. That constraint taught me more than any book did.
Why I am doing this
The best businesses I know are owned by people who are ready to stop.
There is a wave of owners in their sixties right now with good, boring, profitable companies and nobody to hand them to. The kids do not want it. The employees cannot buy it. So a lot of these places just close, and thirty years of somebody's work becomes a sign in a window.
I think that is a waste, and I think I am unusually well suited to fix a small number of them. I am not trying to build a fund or roll up an industry. I want one or two more good businesses that I can keep running the way they were meant to run.
If you built one of those, I would like to talk to you.
No pressure, no listing
Start wherever you are comfortable starting.
Most people start with the number, because it costs nothing and answers the question they have actually been sitting on.