I Helped Build a Business From $150K to Over $1.1 Million With My Father. Now He Can't Remember How We Did It.

Why the Most Successful Entrepreneurs Treat Their Business Systems and Their Health the Same Way, and What Happens When You Don’t.

By Jason Griffasi | JG LLC | jasongriffasi.com

My father spent forty years placing concrete. Flatwork. Foundations. The kind of work that breaks your body down one pour at a time. By the time he transitioned into polished concrete floors and countertops, he was older, worn down, and learning a trade that was still so new the guy who originally trained him gave him bad instructions on how to grind and polish.

But my dad is a craftsman. Always has been. His countertop work was stunning. The floor polishing had a steep learning curve, but the talent was there. What was missing was the business infrastructure to match it, and the revenue showed it.

That’s where I came in.

After building the website and putting solid marketing in place, I dove into the operations side of the company with everything I had. I built systems to determine how long each step of the polishing process should take our employees based on the specific look the client was going for. I created structure where there was none. 

I turned craftsmanship into a repeatable, scalable operation.

And it worked. I thought building the business was the hardest thing I’d ever do. I was wrong.

The Systems That Built the Machine

Together, my father and I grew that polished concrete company from $150,000 in annual revenue to over $1.1 million, consistently achieving year-after-year growth. By the time I eventually sold my stake, I’d spent twelve years learning what it actually takes to scale a business from the inside out.

The growth wasn’t luck. It was systems. Every process in that company got documented, timed, and optimized. When a client wanted a high-gloss finish versus a matte look, our team knew exactly how many steps were involved, how long each one should take, and what equipment to use. That operational clarity is what allowed us to take on more work without sacrificing quality. It’s what turned a small family operation into a company doing seven figures.

The industry itself was still young back then. There wasn’t a centralized place for contractors to learn best practices, compare techniques, or shorten the learning curve my dad and I had to grind through on our own. So we built one. We co-founded an international concrete polishing conference and online university, which we ran for seven years before selling it. Our goal was to give the rest of the industry what we wished we'd had. A faster path to competence. 

Over nineteen years, I’ve started, run, and grown businesses across multiple industries. I’ve coached and consulted with entrepreneurs in wellness, construction, online coaching/virtual assisting, education, and professional services. I helped transform a 500 acre nudist resort into a wellness & glamping world. Yes, you read that correctly. I’ve done it all. Most recently, I helped build and grow a full-service wellness brand from the ground up. Across every one of those experiences, the pattern is the same: the business that wins is the one with systems that streamline the workflow and day-to-day operations. 

That lesson would eventually apply to a lot more than business.

The Illusion

While I was building all of this, I thought I was fine. Healthy, even. I went to the gym regularly. I worked a physically demanding construction job. I was on my feet for ten, twelve, sometimes eighteen hours a day.

Growing up, I’d been a skinny kid. All I wanted was to put on muscle and look like I belonged on a job site. So I ate. Everything. As many calories as I could get my hands on, as often as possible. At one point, I was 220 pounds.

I looked bigger. I looked strong. And I assumed that was the same thing as healthy.

It wasn’t. I had no understanding that food quality mattered as much as quantity. I didn’t know that the processed, GMO-laden food I was eating every day was making me bloated, inflamed, and running on a fraction of my potential. I was operating on the same assumption most entrepreneurs operate on: if I’m working hard and showing up, I must be doing enough.

That assumption carried me for almost a decade. I was in the gym multiple times a week. I was hauling equipment on job sites in the heat and the cold. 

You can look functional and feel functional while your foundation is quietly deteriorating.

By any visible metric, I was an active, capable guy. On the surface, everything looked like it was working.

But underneath, I was running a body the same way a lot of entrepreneurs run their businesses. On effort alone, with no real system to sustain it. I had no protocol. No understanding of what was happening inside my body. I treated food like fuel quantity and exercise like a checkbox. That’s the trap.

The Crack

In 2017, my first marriage ended. Divorce has a way of making you look at every part of your life with fresh eyes. And for the first time, I actually stopped and questioned what I’d been doing to my body.

During that period, I picked up The Bulletproof Diet by Dave Asprey. That book reframed everything I thought I knew about nutrition. It wasn’t just about calories in versus calories out. The quality of what you eat determines what your body actually does with it. Where your food comes from, how it's produced, and what's been done to it before it reaches your plate matters even more than how much of it you consume.

I started a ketogenic diet. Once I cleaned up what I was eating, my body naturally dropped from its bloated state down to 165 pounds. Fifty-five pounds of inflammation, water retention, and accumulated damage from years of eating food that was working against me. Gone. I didn’t starve myself or run extra miles, but I finally fixed the input.

That’s when I dove deep into gut health. I began researching the gut microbiome and its connection to brain function, mood, and cognitive performance. Not necessarily academically. Personally. I’d seen firsthand how mental health challenges can derail someone’s life, and I started connecting dots between gut health and the brain that made the standard “just eat clean and exercise” advice seem dangerously incomplete.

For the first time in my life, I was paying attention. And what I found terrified me because it meant I’d been ignoring the most important system I’d ever be responsible for.

The Invoice

2018 was the year my body stopped asking and started demanding.

By that point, I’d been on strict keto for 1.5 years. I was still working construction. Eighteen-hour days on job sites. Divorce stress was compounding everything. I was reading, researching, learning. But I was also grinding harder than my body could sustain. 

Then a rash appeared on my legs. It spread to my arms. Then my torso. Eventually, it covered my entire body.

The doctors initially diagnosed it as staph. They flagged a potentially serious skin and internal issue. For a stretch, I didn’t know what was happening to me. I was covered in a rash, getting conflicting information from doctors, and still showing up to work because the business didn’t stop just because my body was falling apart. I eventually pushed for deeper testing and got my gut analyzed. Turns out, it was a mess. Looking back now, I know that was a result of unchecked severe stress. 

The rash wasn’t caused by one thing. It was caused by everything. The chronic overwork. The emotional stress of a divorce. The nutritional deficiencies that come from staying on strict keto for too long without adjusting. Something I've since learned is a common underestimated problem. My body had been absorbing damage from every direction, and it finally sent me an invoice I couldn’t ignore.

That period cracked me open in ways I didn't expect. I'd spent years thinking the gym and protein shakes were enough. They're a good foundation, but they're just scratching the surface. I'd been reading Dave Asprey and Ben Greenfield since 2016, and now I was seeing firsthand that it all went even deeper. I learned how blue light exposure at night disrupts sleep, and how early morning light exposure can help regulate circadian rhythm. I learned that gut health affects brain function. 

Health isn't one fix. It's an interconnected system.

I learned that light exposure affects sleep. That sleep affects decision-making. And that decision-making affects your business.

The parallel hit me like a freight train: this was systems thinking. The same discipline I'd applied to scale a concrete company was exactly how the human body works. Every step connects to the next, and a breakdown in one process cascades through everything downstream. I’d spent a decade building systems for businesses while not knowing enough about the most critical system of all.

The Rebuild

Once I better understood that my body runs on systems the same way a business does, I treated the rebuild the same way I’d treat an operational overhaul for a client. Assess what’s broken. Identify the root cause. Implement solutions in order of impact. Measure results. Adjust.

I repaired my gut health first, because everything else downstream depends on it. The gut microbiome directly influences our entire body including cognitive function, emotional regulation, and immune response. When your gut is compromised, your brain runs on a deficit. For an entrepreneur making high-stakes decisions every day, that’s an operational bottleneck most people don’t even know exists.

I'd been cycling creatine for muscle, but I had no idea it was also supporting my brain. Research has shown that creatine supports brain function, particularly under conditions of sleep deprivation and high stress. If you’re an entrepreneur running on five hours of sleep and wondering why your thinking feels foggy by 2 PM, this is the kind of thing worth paying attention to. I also bought a sleep mask, black-out curtains, and would set the temp of my apartment to 65 degrees °F before going to bed. 

I also started focusing on a detox protocol. From metals to parasites, I needed to move the toxic build-up out of my body. I started moving my lymphatic system with dry brushing, adding in regular sauna sessions, a rebounder, and also binders to my routine. I could do an entire series of blogs on parasites and how they not only eat up vital nutrients, but they can also control your cravings, emotions, and even your brain. 

Regulating my nervous system was a huge piece to handling my stress. I added daily practices such as breathwork & meditation. I want to point out both of these practices have a wide range of variations, many brought support, but also some serious struggles, which I’ll get into on future blogs.  I also purchased a Muse & Mendi, which I’ll talk more about later as well.

I was able to accomplish a lot with supplements and movement. Since then, I have invested in more equipment, which I’ll talk much more about in future blogs, such as PEMF (Pulsed Electromagnetic Field therapy),  IHHT (Intermittent Hypoxia-Hyperoxia Training), and Vestibular Training. Each one addresses a different system in the body, the same way you’d use different tools in a tech stack to address different operational functions. PEMF supports cellular recovery. IHHT trains your body’s oxygen utilization at the cellular level. These tools give me the infrastructure to perform at the level my business and my family need me to.

I restructured my mornings around sleep optimization and movement to support both my fitness and cognitive fuel goals. The way I move in the first hour of my day directly impacts the quality of my thinking for the next twelve. I started treating my daily routine with the same rigor I’d give a client’s operational workflow: what happens first, what depends on what, where are the bottlenecks, and what gets cut when time is short.

None of this is medical advice. I want to be clear about that. This is what I did, based on my own research and personal experience, after my body forced me to pay attention. But I’ll say this with conviction: the entrepreneurs I know who take their health seriously outperform the ones who don’t. Not by a small margin. By a significant one. Because they’re making decisions with a clear mind, sustained energy, and a body that’s working for them instead of against them.

My wife, Jessie, is a nurse. Having her perspective in my life has reinforced what I was learning on my own. 

The body gives you signals long before it gives you a crisis. Most entrepreneurs are too busy to hear the signals. I was one of them.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

My father built businesses his entire life. He placed concrete for forty years. He co-built the polished concrete company that I helped grow past $1.1 million in annual revenue. He co-founded a conference that served an entire industry. He worked harder and longer than anyone I've ever known. He was named one of the five most influential people in the concrete industry by Concrete Construction magazine in 2013.

He never prioritized his health. 

Today, my dad is experiencing cognitive decline. The man who built everything with his hands and his work ethic is losing the ability to enjoy what he spent a lifetime creating. I'm still right beside him every day but it looks different now. 

And it is, without question, the most difficult thing I’ve ever faced.

There’s a specific kind of grief that comes from watching a parent lose themselves while they’re still here. He can’t fully engage with the life he earned. The retirement he worked toward doesn’t look like what he planned. And we have a long road back. Anything is possible, and I believe he still can. For now, all I can do is be present, help where I can, and make sure the lesson isn’t lost on me or on anyone willing to listen.

This isn’t a hypothetical scenario I use to make a point in a presentation. This is my actual life. This is what I, and my family, wake up to.

And he’s not the only one. Someone close to me has been battling serious mental health challenges for years. My family has had to provide financial and emotional support since 2020, working constantly to help this person find stability. The weight of watching people you love struggle with conditions that might have been mitigated, or at least addressed earlier, if health had been treated with the same discipline as work, is something that never fully leaves you.

This is why I built JG LLC around a single thesis: sustainable business success requires two foundations built simultaneously. Airtight business systems and intentional personal wellness. You cannot neglect one and expect the other to carry you.

Build Your Business Around A Balanced Life is not just a tagline. It’s the conclusion I reached after watching what happens when a man gives everything to his business and nothing to his body. 

It’s what I learned when my own body sent me an invoice I almost couldn’t pay. And it’s the standard I hold myself and my clients to, because I’ve seen the alternative up close, and I refuse to let anyone I work with sleepwalk into it.

The Proof It Works for Others

When Saba came to me, she was making $700 a month as a virtual assistant. She had the expertise. She had the passion. She was new to the space so she didn’t fully have the operational structure to turn any of it into consistent growth. She was overwhelmed, marketing inconsistently, and saying no to opportunities because she had no systems underneath her to handle the load.

We implemented task management systems so she could see exactly what needed to happen each day, each week. Once the operational chaos was under control, she had the space to realize she had a knack for coaching. She then hired a virtual assistant to handle the basics, freeing her to focus on what only she could do. Teach and consult.

Within a year, Saba scaled from $700 a month to over $100,000 in revenue, and went from VA to building her own agency.

The tools weren’t revolutionary. Task management. Time blocking. Delegation. The same principles I used to systematize a concrete company and the same discipline I applied to rebuilding my health. The pattern is always the same: identify the bottleneck, build a system to eliminate it, and free the person at the center to operate at their highest level.

Most entrepreneurs I work with are the bottleneck in their own business. Everything runs through them. Their marketing is inconsistent because they’re doing everything manually. Their revenue has plateaued because they can’t scale what lives inside one person’s head. And they're exhausted. Physically, mentally, creatively. Because they never built the infrastructure to sustain what they started. 

They’re also, almost without exception, neglecting their health in ways they won’t recognize until something forces them to. Stress is more than mental. It can be physiological and all encompassing. It’s affecting their sleep, their gut, their clarity, and their ability to show up as the leader their business needs them to be. The business problem and the health problem are the same problem wearing different clothes.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the norm. The go-go-go “American Dream”. That was me. That was my Dad. That was Saba. And maybe that’s you.

What Working With a Business Coach for Entrepreneurs Looks Like

As a business coach for entrepreneurs, I work with clients two ways, both designed to solve the two problems that hold most businesses back: broken operations and inconsistent marketing.

As a Fractional COO, I step into your business on a retainer basis and build the operational infrastructure you need to scale. Systems, processes, project management, team structure, strategy. This is hands-on, embedded work, typically around twenty hours a month, where I function as a senior operational partner without the cost of a full-time hire.

Through my 1-to-Many Content System™, I turn one interview with you into a full month of premium content. Twelve pieces per month: social media clips across every major platform, a long-form YouTube video, a blog post built for SEO, an email, and a website page. You show up for one conversation, and your content runs on autopilot. For entrepreneurs who know they should be creating content but never have the time, this system eliminates the bottleneck entirely.

For those who aren’t ready for a monthly engagement, I also offer a 'Transform Your Business in 90 Minutes' session. A focused, one-on-one deep dive that delivers a personalized audit and action plan you can implement immediately.

Whatever entry point makes sense for where you are, the mission is the same: build a business that grows without grinding you into the ground.

The Invitation

If anything in this story resonated, if you recognized yourself in the overwhelm, the inconsistent marketing, the creeping sense that something about how you're running your business is unsustainable, I'd like to talk.

Book a discovery call at jasongriffasi.com. Connect with me on Instagram @jasongriffasi or find me on LinkedIn.

Nineteen years of building businesses taught me that systems are everything. Watching my father taught me that health is everything. The intersection of those two lessons is why JG LLC exists.

Build Your Business Around A Balanced Life™. I’ll show you how.

Disclosure: All recommendations are based on my personal use and experience. This content is not medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your health routine.