People ask me this in two versions. The honest version is quiet, usually late in a dinner, from somebody who has just made real money for the first time and is trying to figure out what happens next. The rude version is from people who assume the number is a lie or that I should have stopped by now. Both people deserve an answer. This is the one I would give if you sat down across from me and asked.
The short answer is that money was never the reason I started, so hitting a number was never going to be the reason I stopped. The long answer is more useful, so I am going to give you that one instead.
What the number actually is
The number people cite is a portfolio, not a bank account. Murphy Door has delivered over two hundred thousand doors from Ogden, Lexington, and Rigby, and it is the largest thing in the portfolio. Murphy Ladder is running. Purebrand is running. Pinnacle Flaming Gorge is running. Barker Capital Group is running. Barker Properties owns real estate that appreciates whether or not I show up.
None of that money is liquid. Most of it is inventory, real estate, working capital, and equity in companies I still operate. When people say a hundred million, what they actually mean is that the businesses I have built, if you added them up on a piece of paper and squinted, come to a nine-figure enterprise value. That is not a bank balance. That is a spreadsheet. If I stopped working tomorrow, most of that spreadsheet would start decaying inside a quarter.
That is the first honest answer to the question. The number is real, and it is also not the kind of number that lets a person stop. The businesses need an operator. If the operator leaves, the businesses become something else, and the number becomes something else with them.
I already tried stopping
The second honest answer is that I have already tested this. Twice. The first time was after a good Murphy Door year, when I told my wife I was going to spend six months doing nothing but reading and being at home. I made it four weeks. By the end of week four I was miserable, my sleep was worse than when I was working eighteen-hour days, and I was picking fights with people I loved because I had no place to put the energy I was used to spending on problems.
The second time was after Founder Fallout was finished but not yet out. I told myself I would take a summer. I made it about eleven days before I was building the wireframes for what became jeremybarker.com and drafting the outline for Ashes to Empires. Some people are wired to rest when they get quiet. I am wired to build when I get quiet. That is not a virtue. It is a fact about me, and pretending otherwise made me a worse husband and father, not a better one.
What actually keeps me at it
The real reason I keep working is not the money and not the identity, both of which are the easy answers people expect. It is that I have four books to write, three of which are not written yet, and I want to finish all of them before I am seventy. Ashes to Empires is next. Before You Blow It is after that. Don't Quit Your Day Job Yet is after that. If I stopped working, I might finish the books, but I would lose the credibility that makes people read them. Founder Fallout works because I am still bleeding while I write it. If I write from a beach, the book gets thinner every page.
I also have a podcast, 90 Proof Wisdom, that only works if I am actively in the arena. The guests I want to book are people who are building right now, and they will sit with me because I am building right now too. When you are not in the fight, you can still ask good questions. You cannot ask the best questions. There is a difference between an interviewer and a peer, and I want to stay a peer.
Beyond the books and the podcast, there is a boring version of the answer that matters more than either. Two hundred thousand doors is a starting line, not a finish line. There are more doors to build, more houses to put them in, and more homeowners who do not yet know a Murphy Door exists. Somebody has to do the work of getting them there. If I stop doing that work, somebody else has to, and I would rather they do it because they are excited about it than because I quit on it.
The thing rich founders will not admit
There is a thing that happens to founders after their first real win, and almost nobody talks about it honestly. You realize that most of the people who told you money would fix things were wrong. Money fixes a specific list of problems and it fixes them completely. Housing, food, kids' education, most kinds of debt, medical bills, dental. The list is real. It matters. If you have not had money and you are reading this, do not let anybody tell you money does not solve real problems. It does.
But the list is shorter than you think. Once housing is safe and the kids are in school and the tax bill is paid, money stops fixing things. Marriage does not get better because of money. Depression does not lift because of money. The relationship with your father does not repair itself because you cleared his mortgage. Your best friend does not become interested in you again because you own a lake house. The list of things money fixes ends abruptly, and past the end of it, you still have to do the work of being a person.
That is the part rich founders do not want to admit, because admitting it makes the striving look pointless to the people watching. It is not pointless. Money is worth striving for because the list of things it fixes is a real list and it is a list that includes suffering. But past that list, the work is the same work everybody else does, and it is harder because you no longer have the excuse of being busy trying to survive.
I still work because I know the list ends and I know what is on the other side. On the other side is the work of writing four books and running the podcast and building the companies, and that work is what makes me feel like a person and not like a hobbyist. If I stopped, the money would still be there. So would the questions I did not want to answer. I would rather answer them by continuing to build.
What I would tell a founder trying to reach the same point
If you are on the way to your first real number and you are asking why the founders on the other side keep working, here is the useful version. Do not build a life you have to escape from. Build a life you would keep doing if the money went to zero tomorrow. If you cannot answer what you would do on Monday morning if the exit paid you enough to never work again, that is your first assignment. Answer that question before you sell, not after.
Most founders answer it wrong. They say they would travel, or read, or spend time with the kids. Fine. Two months of that will not feel like meaning. Meaning comes from work that is aimed at something. It does not have to be the same work you are doing now. It might be the opposite. But it has to be work.
If you cannot picture what you would build after the exit, the exit is going to be worse than you think. I have watched three friends sell for real money and then spend two years pretending to be happy before quietly starting something new. All three of them told me later they wished they had known before the sale that the money would not do what they hoped. I am telling you now, so you do not have to learn it the same way.
The one-line version
I still work because the number was never the point. The work was the point. The number was a byproduct of the work being aimed at something. If you take the number and remove the work, you do not get freedom. You get a slow-motion identity crisis dressed up in a lake house.
That is the honest answer. If you want the longer version of the same idea, the book Founder Fallout is closer to that answer than a blog post can be. It is out now. Direct on this site for twenty-four dollars and ninety-nine cents. Also on Amazon in paperback and Kindle.
If you want to argue with any of this in person, the podcast is open for the right kind of guest. [Apply to be a guest.](/be-a-guest)