I don’t go on podcasts to relive the origin story. I go to pressure-test the playbook. This one did. Ideas. Execution. Money. Work-life. And why I’m betting the next decade on fast, custom, near-you manufacturing.
We opened with “disruption.” My favorite thing is to birth a new idea. My next favorite is to try and kill it. That’s not bravado. That’s shop discipline. Early Murphy days we tried side hinges, then a piano hinge. Both failed. We chased the failure to the real weak points—top, bottom, fixed shelf—then built a hinge that carries real weight. You hunt the break until it can’t hide, then keep the piece that survives.
What’s Murphy Door? Not a movie prop. Anything you can build into a doorway that makes the room work harder—pantry doors that hold weight, bookcase doors that hang true, utility doors that stay square and quiet. Beauty + utility. If it doesn’t earn its keep, it doesn’t ship.
First break? DIY Network found us off a little builders-show booth. Orders hit a website that barely deserved customers. I owed people better, so I rebuilt a pile of those early doors. Expensive tuition. Worth it. Don’t hide misses—fix the jig, fix the checklist, make it right.
Discipline came up. Everyone has dreams. Very few have the daily reps. I don’t worship vision boards. I set a 10-year end state—personal, professional, financial—then ladder it down to year, quarter, month, week, day. Miss a day and you’ll miss the week. Miss the week and the month is gone. Compounding doesn’t care about your feelings.
Work-life? I don’t do 8/8/8. I front-load life. Seventeen hours a day for a decade so the back half is free and useful. Time compounds like money. Stack the hours while you’re strong and you buy decades later—decades with grandkids, not punching a clock for health insurance. Not romance. Arithmetic.
We traded real-estate plays because the math is clean. My first big commercial buy was $2.9M. I locked pre-leases before close, refi’d, pulled cash tax-free, and let the building pay me while I worked on doors. People call that risky. I see more risk in overpaying for “stabilized” assets with no room to force value. I like zeros I can turn into millions with a lease and a mop.
Hard chapters? I made almost $20M in my early 20s, fumbled, lived in my car for a year, went bankrupt—twice, years apart. I didn’t die. I learned to call people first when the news is bad. Learned cash discipline. Learned to celebrate misses so my crew isn’t scared to try. Protect people by protecting process.
Hiring. I don’t screen for pedigree. I screen for a 10-year picture and the willingness to match effort to outcome. In interviews we sketch personal, professional, and financial targets. If you want 20 acres and a Ferrari on 20 hours a week, we’re not aligned. If you want to outwork everyone in the room, great—let’s talk SLAs, not slogans.
What separates winners? Reps. Define the end. Pick the constraint—machine, skill, supplier, cash. Attack that first. Buy gear to kill bottlenecks, not to feel big. Hire to shorten lead time and improve first-pass yield, not to collect titles. No committees. Just commits.
We hit Pure Brand—the customer-to-customer sales engine I built because big-box “showrooms” eat 40–50% of margin. I’d rather pay real customers to show real prospects. Warm trust beats cold clicks. Keep it volunteer-only. Give them a clean booking link. Track intros, answers, closes. Pay what you promised. Repeat.
Then the future. Murphy is my lab. We ship a fully custom product every six minutes—width, height, depth, color, hardware—all different, all day. That system scales: beds, nightstands, cabinets, tables. By 2027 I want three-day manufacturing lead time and seven-day delivery, built near you in smaller, automated plants. Not four colors on a shelf. Your color. Your size. Your material. Built in the U.S.—on purpose.
Would I sell? I build to be sellable—clean books, empowered teams, written SOPs—so I’m always ready. I take every meeting to learn what buyers see coming. But if I could keep one thing, I’d keep Murphy Door. The mission’s bigger than a wire. Let people design what they actually want and get it fast, from crews in their own time zone. That matters.
Here’s the play: create, then try to kill it. Keep what survives. Set the end and back into today. Front-load life while you’re strong. Invest where you can force outcomes. Celebrate the miss, fix the root, document the win, teach it until it’s boring. Calm beats chaos. Earn your momentum. Then keep earning it.
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