Without a Plan: A Memoir of Unbound Action and Failing My Way to Success

By Jeremy Delk

"There was a pattern emerging in my life that dictated that the second I got bored, I'd make a move. Luckily, I was never short of ideas."

Without a Plan

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
• Release date: Nov 8, 2022
• ISBN: 9781544532738

Jeremy Delk

Jeremy Delk is a serial entrepreneur with a passion for disrupting industries. Born and raised in a small-town, blue-collar household, he jumped into entrepreneurial ventures with the naivety of a child and the tenacity of a tycoon. Since 2001, Jeremy's businesses have earned hundreds of millions in revenue, created hundreds of high-paying American jobs, and earned one of Inc. 500's fastest-growing company distinctions. Now focused on investing in and advising entrepreneurs, Jeremy shares the good, bad, and ugly of entrepreneurship. While great times don't last forever, neither do the truly bad ones.

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copyright

© 2022

jeremy delk

All rights reserved.

without a plan

A Memoir of Unbound Action and Failing My Way to Success

isbn

978-1-5445-3272-1 Hardcover

978-1-5445-3271-4 Paperback

978-1-5445-3273-8 Ebook

978-1-5445-3384-1 Audiobook

Contents

Contents

Disclaimer

Introduction

1. The Early Years

2. What Could Go Wrong?

3. When You’re the Youngest

4. Branching Out

5. Going Home Again

6. When You’re Forced to Be an Expert

7. Life’s about the Journey

8. Escaping the Pain

9. Transformation

10. What Love Looks Like

Conclusion

About the Author

Acknowledgments

Disclaimer

This book is a memoir. It reflects my present recollections of experiences over time. The conversations found here come from my memories and are not written to represent word-for-word transcripts. The feeling and meaning of what was said, the essence of it, is completely accurate. To maintain their anonymity, in some instances, I have changed the names of individuals. In others, I have compressed several into one. Likewise, many events have been similarly compressed.

To my wife, Maggie, and children, Graham and Ava, for being my constant reminder of what is truly important in this journey called life.

Introduction

An entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down.

—Reid Hoffman

The dawning realization that someone may be driving you out into the middle of a desert in order to end your life without witnesses can be quite sobering. When faced with such a situation, there are a couple of different ways you can handle it. One: you can beg and plead with the driver, maybe even offer a bribe to spare your life. Two: reflect on everything that put you where you are, realize you’d do most of it the same way all over again, and start singing, with gusto, I Did It My Way.

I chose door number two.

Never, in my wildest dreams as a kid in Kentucky, did I ever think I’d wind up where I did in that desert, nor here now, about to tell you my life story. I just grew up knowing I wanted to see more, do more, and be more. And when I arrived there, or accomplished whatever I was doing, the urge would hit again: go do more, see more. So, I went. And I remain in that constant pursuit to be more.

That’s what living without a plan is all about.

Let me be clear, this book isn’t an endorsement for living out a fantasy life. It’s not about sitting around and dreaming big, believing if you think good thoughts, then life will be all lollipops and gumdrops. It is all about just going after what you want—without any kind of SMART goal-setting strategies or methodical steps to get from point A to point B.

Instead, as you read through my life’s personal and business stories, one of the lessons I hope you take away is to skip the planning and just get started. That’s what I did. I never had anything completely figured out before I dove in, which perhaps is what my superpower is. I never had it all figured out; I set a direction on the horizon and just started moving toward it.

You can’t have it figured out.

None of us knows for sure what’s in our future. Therefore, it’s impossible to make an informed decision about exactly how you will get there—anywhere. You just don’t know. I believe the best you can do is make an educated guess, set your aim for that generalized direction, and take action until you discover a course correction or different action is needed.

I would even argue that putting a plan into place can be detrimental. A plan takes you to a specific place. Sure, you may get where you thought you wanted to go, but…how do you know that’s the best place for you? What if you could go beyond it? What if you could go someplace entirely different but entirely better?

Instead of sticking to a plan, I choose to be more open-minded about where I’m going. I see something I think I want and head in that direction. Sometimes I get there; other times I experience a failure of some sort, which is always a gift. Those failures provide the guidance I need to head in a different direction. Because of that loose and sometimes wandering strategy, I’ve found massive success. I’ve traveled the world. I’ve had some amazing adventures. Who knows? If I’d had a plan back in high school, I likely would have just ended up on Wall Street.

I have nothing against being on Wall Street. It’s just likely I would never have wound up in the desert singing Sinatra if I had stayed there.

Before I get started with my story, though, I do have to throw out a word or two of caution. First, yes, I’m a small-town kid from Kentucky. But I lived in New York City for a long time—long enough that I talk like a New Yorker. And I’ve worked with way too many Aussies whose language is just as colorful. In other words, you’re about to read some words you may not be expecting in a business advice book. Words like fuck, cunt, and other lively expressions. I’m writing that way on purpose: because that’s how I talk, how I express myself. I want you to know who my true, authentic self is—and that self swears like a motherfucker.

I think being authentic is the key to meaningful relationships. Whether that’s a love relationship, friendship, partnership, or some other kind of business relationship, authenticity is the cornerstone that will make it real and strong, something you can trust. I live an authentic life because I know that the people around me who will accept me for who I am, are the people I want to be around.

Aside from the swear words, and maybe balancing them out, you will also find yourself reading some things that might seem mundane or even boring. At some point, I’ll even be presenting some pretty high-tech information and discussing regulatory bodies. Please, humor me. Stick with it and get through that content because there’s another lesson there. The businesses I’ve built are very real. Every single business you’ll read about in the following pages is still in operation. Each one survives me, whether I sold them via a complete exit or I still own a piece of them as a passive investment. Over the past twenty years, I’ve been able to build multiple businesses, employed hundreds of people, and achieved hundreds of millions in revenue—all the while continually learning new industries, new technology, new everything. I dove in and learned that mundane and somewhat boring stuff along the way instead of making a plan before I started.

In other words, my success is a testament that you don’t need to figure it out before you start. You just need to get started. Now, let’s fucking GO!

Chapter 1

The Early Years

I was fucking terrified.

It was early spring, 1985. I was almost five years old.

I clung to my dad. One tiny hand gripped his jacket, the other reached for the front handlebar like a lifeline, which it probably was. We were going so fast, the wind ripped tears out of my eyes. They streamed down my face as we bumped hard off the rugged terrain.

Dad popped wheelies. We flew across a vacant lot without any helmets on. There was nothing to protect us as he raced over the field, so I did the only thing I could: hold on. If a stranger saw us, surely, they’d think a crazy biker kidnapped someone’s little kid.

But no. It was just me and my dad.

My dad was the alpha-wolf pack leader in my world. My dad kicked your dad’s ass! I idolized him. I’d do anything with him. And even though I was scared as hell as he raced that dirt bike around the empty lot beside his engine shop in Louisville, Kentucky, there was no place I’d rather be at that moment in time than right there, with him.

Everybody looked up to him. After his dad, Harold, left, he became the man of the house for his mother, Mamaw Barbara, and he was the father figure for his four sisters: Brenda, Lori, Kathy, and Polly. He was just ten years old at the time but grew up quickly. He never took shit from anyone. But to hear my mom and aunts talk about him, he was a big teddy bear, a protector with a heart of gold.

Mom and Dad met just after he was medically disqualified from the army because he had pectus excavatum, a condition called birdcage or sunken chest. This is where the sternum goes inward to form a depression in the chest, which in his case, compressed his lungs.

Birdcage be damned. When Mom, fifteen at the time, saw him walk into her Lexington, Kentucky, high school football stadium wearing a camo jacket with his dark hair and beard, she was smitten. Dad, at seventeen, was struck as well. They fell fast and hard in love.

Their young love was all they could see. They were so intoxicated with each other; they did what any reasonable fifteen- and seventeen-year-old would do just a few months later. They ran away together—all the way down the road to Louisville, a full seventy miles away. Mom skipped school that day, and as night began to fall, as a rule-following daddy’s girl, she got scared and called home.

She was a wreck, trying to get words out through tears and heavy breathing. Meanwhile, Mamaw Georgia was so irate, that she wasn’t helping the situation any. She handed the phone to Papaw Smitty.

The smooth, soothing voice of her dad asking, hello darlin’, what’s the matter? caused an even bigger reaction from my mom.

Daddy…Daddy, I love him, and we want to get married.

Okay, sweetie. Put Steve on the phone.

My dad, probably a bit reluctantly, took the phone and raised the headset to his ear to hear: Steve, go on and bring her home tonight, and I will make everything okay.

That he did. Not long after that night, Dad saved up and bought her a tiny diamond ring, and Papaw Smitty kept his promise. My mom finished her freshman year at Bryan Station High School, and then Papaw Smitty signed off on the marriage. They married in 1974; Mom was still fifteen, and Dad seventeen.

***

Papaw Smitty was a hustler. His full name was Harrison Smith, but everybody who ever met him called him Smitty. Good-looking, well-dressed, usually holding a guitar and a bottle of Seagram’s is how I remember him the most. He never made it in music, and I don’t know if he could actually play guitar or sing that well, but he never let that stop him. His go-to Hello Darlin’ George Jones line was always a lever he could pull.

Papaw Smitty was left on my great granddad’s front porch by his mom, whom he never got to know, at age one. Armed with just a third-grade education, he started working in the coal mines in Harlan County, in eastern Kentucky’s impoverished hollers, when he was old enough. At sixteen, he lied about his age and enlisted in the army.

Despite the odds, he survived the coal mines of Appalachia, and the army, while nearly losing two toes to frostbite when he was stationed in Greenland. He came home and moved to Detroit, where he got a job in the Cadillac factory. There he fell in love with Caddies, which he’d drive for the rest of his life, and learned everything a man could learn about car engines.

He owned a buy-here-pay-here kind of car lot in Lexington, on the north end of New Circle Road, but had an entrepreneurial spirit that led him all over the southeast. He’d open car lots or find some small town somewhere, lease out a space on a high-traffic road, throw in a couple thousand dollars to outfit it with machines and tools, call the place The Engine Room, and then place an ad in the local paper announcing he did engine rebuilds and other mechanical work. Just like in the movies—he’d build it, and the people came. Business would only grow from there. And about six to nine months later, he’d sell it for $25K or so and move on down the road to someplace else. Rinse and repeat.

Shortly after my parents married, he divorced Mamaw Georgia and hit the road heading to Florida with my parents riding along with him. My dad fell quickly under Smitty’s wing.

My parents spent their first five years running across the country, married, in love, moving from town to town, shop to lot. I was born in Clearwater, Florida, when my mom was twenty-one. Being true patrons of the seventies, my parents drank and smoked plenty of pot. My mom will tell you she only drank a few beers with me but cut pot out completely, and that was the reason for her gaining fifty pounds with me.

I had these febrile seizures when I was a baby that would probably scare any young mom to death. Consequently, mine tended to be on the overprotective side when it came to me my entire life, beginning with staying home with me while my dad hustled engine repair work for Papaw Smitty.

My earliest memories are from when I was about three-and-a-half years old, and we had moved from Nashville to Knoxville. We had a little house across the street from Papaw Smitty there. Dad did all the engine work at Papaw’s car lot. Mom would visit him, taking me with her, and I would have the lay of the land. Papaw Smitty would let me check out all the cars. One time he’d taken a limousine in on trade and had one of his guys drive us around in it. I was fascinated because it was like a living room in a car, and the windows would go down with the push of a button. In retrospect, I see now how those early days on the lot are likely where my car obsession later in life would come from.

Otherwise, my life was relatively normal when I was a toddler and later. I was always around people who loved me; I felt safe and protected in my world. About a year later, my sense of safety continued when we moved to Louisville. My mom stayed at home with me. Dad went to work every day after branching out and starting his first and very own Engine Room. (Yeah, the one beside the vacant lot where he decided to take me dirt bike riding.)

We lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood down the road from my aunts, so I had plenty of cousins nearby. Everybody got along. Everybody looked after everyone. Life was stable, safe. I never had a fucking clue what it meant to be scared or insecure. There was a constant sense of togetherness, of family, and of certainty.

Is That Any Way to Raise a Kid?

My kid brother, Josh, was born shortly after the move to Louisville. I quickly found being home with Mom and my crying baby brother wasn’t much fun, so I spent as much time at the shop with my dad as I could.

What do you do here, Dad? I once asked him when he took me there.

I make money, son, was the reply.

I looked around at all the parts, the tools, the greasy nuts and bolts, and couldn’t quite figure out how the fuck he was going to make money out of that. I had seen enough money to be sure it was soft and made of paper. That confirmed for me that Dad was a genius. He could do anything, including make paper money out of all that metal, grit, grime, and oil.

Dad eventually went into business with another relative and opened a new Engine Room alongside LeGrande’s Auto Body. The new place was much bigger; it had four bays as opposed to the two in the first one. There were so many more things to play with via the excess fenders, frames, and beat-up hoods from the body shop. The best part was completely new for me, and the beginning of an obsession for both Dad and me. Up front, in a separate building that had the road frontage, was The Bike Shop. David Newman, the owner, was a good friend of Dad’s. You could buy, sell, or repair any bike there…as long as it was a Harley. The area became part of my dad’s kingdom, and I, the prince, had free rein to do as my little self pleased.

The bike shop was the place for all the bikers to hang out. Every one of them looked up to my dad, who they called Jethro, for some reason. I had my own embossed Lil Jethro belt to match. He was a natural leader; the badass who commanded respect just from his presence. So those tough-ass bikers, some of them outlaws, many of them with guns and knives tucked close to their bodies at all times, became my guardian angels of sorts. I roamed freely under their guidance, with don’t hurt yourself as the only parameter around my behavior, likely knowing they would have my dad to deal with if anything happened to me.

No one would fucking let a kid live like that today! I ran around the place, doing whatever I pleased while gazing at posters on the wall of half-naked, big-titted women posing on motorcycles. I got to play with and on whatever I wanted—including the pet boa-constrictor that belonged to one of the men who worked at the shop and lived upstairs. It was supposed to stay out of my hands, but my mom reluctantly let me collect the