I just added More Than Just Luck into an entrepreneur memoir and business discussion group on Goodreads because I truly admire how you approached the question of what happens when a kid who grew up in violence, poverty, and chaos with an alcoholic father, who stole baby food to feed his children, builds a multi-state security company with nearly 1,500 employees and then watches it almost all collapse from betrayal and partnership splits.
Your book did not just inform me. It changed how I think about the difference between “motivational success stories” and the raw, unfiltered truth about what it really takes to survive. One thing stopped me, and I suspect few people notice it. You stole baby food. Not as a teenager acting out, but as a grown man trying to feed your children.
That is not a career highlight. That is a confession about a man who reached a point of desperation so complete that he broke the law to keep his kids from going hungry. You could have hidden that. You could have polished your origin story into something more palatable. You left it in. Because you know that the hunger—literal, physical hunger—was the engine that drove you. But the deeper, more courageous confession is what happened after you built the empire. You grew a security company from a few hundred employees to nearly 1,500 across ten states . You generated over $40 million in annual revenue . You had partnership splits that cost millions. You faced lawsuits, federal scrutiny from the FTC and IRS, and internal betrayal that nearly ended everything . You even survived attempted hits on your life . The man who once stole baby food to survive watched his business empire nearly crumble from the inside out. And he wrote a book about it—not as a victory lap, but as a warning.
You wrote this book for the entrepreneur who is in the trenches right now. Someone who started with nothing, who grew up in chaos, who has made morally gray decisions in the name of survival. Someone who has been betrayed by partners, scrutinized by regulators, and knocked down more times than they can count. Someone who is exhausted by the relentless grind of building something that could disappear tomorrow. Someone who is starting to believe that maybe the people who say “success is just luck” are right. Because there is a person reading this who grew up in poverty, who had an alcoholic parent, who stole food because they were hungry, who fought their way out of the trailer park and into the corner office. They have been betrayed. They have been knocked down. They are tired. They are starting to believe that the system is rigged against people who started where they started.
They do not know that a man from Willis, Michigan, who built a multi-state empire and survived betrayal, wrote a book called More Than Just Luck. Your book might be the first time they see a serial entrepreneur who built and lost and rebuilt, who says…
“Success isn’t luck. It’s discipline under pressure. Audit your habits. Tighten your circle. Make decisions based on long-term power, not short-term emotion. Most people don’t fail because they can’t win. They fail because they quit when it gets uncomfortable”.
Not as a motivational cliché. As a man who has quit, failed, stolen baby food, nearly died, and kept going anyway.
More Than Just Luck Review by Karim Ahmad
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