I've sat in the seat.

I started in the warehouse and drove the delivery truck at Allen & Petersen Cooking and Appliance Center in Anchorage, Alaska. I learned receiving, shipping, inventory and the day-to-day work it takes to keep product moving. As my responsibilities grew, I went from doing the work to helping build and lead the operations behind it.

I helped build and manage our service department, even though I was not the technician fixing appliances. I worked across purchasing, including negotiating with manufacturers and vendors, sales, marketing, delivery, warehousing and customer service. Over the years, I bought and sold hundreds of millions of dollars of product.

Eventually, my job was not just to understand each part of the business. It was to make sure all of those parts worked together. We had to buy the right products at the right cost. Inventory had to be available when customers needed it. Sales had to produce profitable business. Delivery and service had to keep the promises we made. Marketing had to bring people in. And the numbers ultimately had to work.

That is where I learned to see a business as a whole, not as a collection of departments.

At the same time, I was working full time and going to college. I earned my bachelor's degree in business, with an emphasis in marketing, and later went back to school for my MBA. The classroom gave me the theory. Allen & Petersen gave me the place to live it, test it and understand what it meant when real customers, employees, inventory, cash and payroll were involved.

And all of that was happening while my wonderful wife and I were raising a growing family. We built our family through adoption and eventually became parents to seven children. Home taught me just as much about responsibility, priorities, patience and what really matters.

As my family grew, so did my responsibilities at work. I led teams, made payroll, managed cash flow, dealt with facilities and real estate, helped acquire and build businesses, and eventually became CEO and a partner.

Along the way, I dealt with the same things many owners face: people, cash flow, inventory, facilities, customers, growth and the constant pressure to keep everything moving.

I built businesses. Then life changed.

While at Allen & Petersen, I became a partner and helped acquire the real estate that housed the business. With two partners, I also acquired a commercial laundry equipment, chemical and service company in Alaska. With another partner, I started a custom appliance trim-kit business, built a manufacturing relationship in Canada and helped create the websites and processes needed to serve customers across the United States.

In 2018, a family emergency changed the plan. I sold my interests in the businesses to my partners and moved to Utah. I left behind businesses I had spent years helping build, along with the roles, routines and identity that came with them. It was a major reset.

Then I got to see business from a much wider view.

Within days of arriving in the Lower 48, I was approached by Nationwide Marketing Group, West, where I had served on the Board of Directors, about becoming Vice President of Membership for the West. I went from operating my own businesses to leading a team of 11 consultants serving approximately 1,100 independent retailers across the western United States.

That experience gave me something I could never have gotten from running one company. I got to see hundreds of businesses up close. Different owners. Different markets. Different strengths. And many of the same problems. Unclear accountability. Numbers people could not act on. Processes that lived in someone's head. Issues that kept coming back. Good ideas that never quite made it into the way the business actually operated.

Knowing what to do is not the hard part.

While at Allen & Petersen, I had come across Traction and the principles of the Entrepreneurial Operating System. I self-implemented those principles in my own companies. Later, at Nationwide, I helped more than 20 retailers learn about and put Traction into practice.

That reinforced something I had already learned the hard way. Most owners do not need another book, another binder or another list of things they should be doing. The hard part is turning what you know into what the business actually does. It means getting clear on where you are going, giving people real ownership, measuring what matters, getting to the root of issues, building processes people can follow and creating a cadence that keeps everyone moving.

That's why I do this.

It's lonely to run a business. The decisions are yours. The payroll is yours. The cash flow problems are yours. And even with good people around you, it can feel like no one really understands what is sitting on your shoulders.

I do. I have been there.

Barbachano & Associates exists to work alongside owners and leadership teams as they organize the business, improve what is not working and build the structure to take on what comes next. I am not here to hand you an impressive report and leave you to figure it out. I help you and your people do the work, put the systems in place and follow through until the changes become part of how the business runs.