What this episode is about:
Why almost quitting over a bad job taught me how to spot system failures early—and why that lesson still runs my business today.


When we first started out, I took every printing job I could.

Big jobs.
Small jobs.
Anything that brought money in.

One day, a small restaurant on Kauai — Verde — ordered 24 green staff shirts.

Not a big order.
Not a big payday.

But I wanted to do it right.

To save money, I outsourced the printing to a guy in California who did side jobs after hours.

That decision haunted me.

First shipment: wrong ink color. Beige instead of green.
Second shipment: crooked print.
Third shipment: still wrong.

I laid the shirts out on my kitchen table and just stared at them.

I wasn’t making money.
I was embarrassed.
And I didn’t want to make the call to the client again.

I remember thinking:

“I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore.”

I told my dad I wanted to quit.

He looked at me and said:

“You don’t have a business problem.
You have a supply chain problem.”

That hit me hard.

This wasn’t about printing shirts.

It was about control.

I switched to a trusted local printer.

Someone I could see.
Someone I could talk to.
Someone I could hold accountable.

The quality issue disappeared.
The stress disappeared.
And the business continued.

But the real lesson came later.

At the time, I thought this was a one-off mistake.

It wasn’t.

Years later, I realized this wasn’t about shirts.

It was about signage.
It was about vendors.
It was about media execution.
It was about partnerships.

It was about learning how to spot system failures early.

That experience trained me to ask better questions:

Is this a people problem or a process problem?
Do we actually control quality here?
Where are we outsourcing accountability?

Now, when something breaks in the business, I don’t panic.

I zoom out.
I look for the pattern.

Most of the time, the issue isn’t the work.
It’s the system supporting the work.

This isn’t a story about a bad job.

It’s a mental model I still use today:

Don’t quit the mission because a system failed.
Fix the system.

That mindset has saved me time, money, relationships, and stress.

THE TAKEAWAY

If something feels broken in your business, pause before quitting.

Ask yourself:

Is this really a failure of the idea,
or just a failure of the system behind it?

Because those are very different problems.

🤙

If you’ve read this far, you might enjoy my music too.
Check it out at https://ctzns.co