A letter from Dad
There is a chapter every business biography leaves out, and it is the one that matters most.
Before there was Kerr University, before Logistics Consulting, before a single book carried my name on its spine, there were three children who carried it first, simply by being mine. Whatever this website says I built, they were built first, and they remain the truest thing I have ever had a hand in.
I won't use this page to explain a divorce, or to litigate a history that isn't mine alone to tell. What I will say plainly, without excuse: life didn't go the way any of us planned, and somewhere in that unraveling, a distance grew between us that I haven't yet found my way across. That is simply true, and I own my part in it.
What is also true, and what I hope reaches them if these words ever do, is that not one day has passed without thinking of them, without being proud of them, without loving them exactly as much as I did the day each of them was born. If anything, more.
If you have ever loved someone from a distance you did not choose, you already know the particular weight I am describing. There is no shortcut through it. There is only staying, quietly, for as long as it takes.
Dylan, your first job was working for me, at DFS Consulting, the same initials I carried out of my own childhood, off my uncle's trucks. I was four years old when I started riding those trucks. You were seventeen when you came to work for me. It felt like the story folding back on itself in a way I still haven't found the right words for, except to say I was proud beyond measure.
Alexis, your creativity has always run ahead of what anyone around you could keep pace with, a mind that sees around corners the rest of us walk straight into. I still think about a Florida highway in the summer of 2016, the year before you turned sixteen, the two of us laughing at a hundred and forty miles an hour in a brand new Chevy Corvette we had no business driving that fast. That was you entirely: fearless, delighted, fully alive in the moment. I have spent your whole life being amazed by how your mind works, and I still am.
Christiaan, your strength has always been the quiet, load-bearing kind rather than the loud kind, and it's the sort I admire most in anyone, at any age. I saw it in you even as an infant. You would watch me, giggling, and then try to recreate whatever I had just done, my faces, my movements, handed straight back to me, like you already understood something about connection that most of us spend a lifetime learning. I never saw another baby do that, before or since. It told me everything about who you would become.
I've built six businesses and written thirteen books trying, in different ways, to answer the same question: what do I have that's worth handing to someone else? Somewhere around 2008 or 2009, I told people I wanted to make a difference in the world. I meant it the way people usually mean that kind of thing, as a hope more than a plan. I did not know yet what shape it would take, or what it would cost.
I know now. The years I could not reach the three of you did not slow that plan down. They sharpened it. Every year that door stayed closed, I pushed further into someone else's: a student, a client, a company, mentoring and coaching and handing off whatever I had learned the hard way, so somebody else's road might be a little shorter than mine was. One student at a time. One client at a time. One company at a time, across more countries than I ever expected to work in. None of it replaces the three of you. Nothing does. But it is what I built out of years I could not spend the way I wanted to, and every venture, every chapter, every lesson learned the hard way and taught the easier way, was built with you somewhere in the reasoning, even in the years we weren't speaking.
I have loved English literature my whole life, Shakespeare most of all, the tragedies and the comedies both, because he understood that a life rarely holds only one or the other. Mine hasn't. If I have learned anything worth handing you along with everything else, it is that the world will knock you down in ways that are genuinely unfair, and none of that excuses you from standing back up anyway. Standing up does not erase what knocked you down. It never does. But it is the only part of the story you ever really get to write yourself.
I'm not asking for anything on this page. I'm not owed a reply, and this isn't meant to be one. I only want it said, publicly and permanently, in case it ever finds its way to any of you: my door hasn't closed. It won't close. Whatever separates us now has never touched what I feel for you, and it never will.
If there's a legacy in any of this, the businesses, the books, the years of work, I hope it's this: that you knew, without question, that you were loved completely, every single day, by a father who never stopped hoping you were happy, whole, and exactly who you were meant to become.
This page isn't going anywhere. I intend to keep it standing for as long as I possibly can, so it's here whenever you're ready to find it, whether that's tomorrow or a long way down the road.
Everything else on this website is a résumé. This page is the truth.
Dad
