Other Owners: The Builders Behind Russell Brunson, Tom Bilyeu, Peter Taunton and Richard Taite

Peter Taunton

Founder, Snap Fitness & Lift Brands — Willmar, MN

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Peter Taunton started work at eight years old, selling popcorn at his father's small-town Minnesota grocery store — not because he wanted to, but because his father believed responsibility, discipline and hard work had to be learned early.

He grew up poor, never finished college, and learned business bagging groceries and watching his father stock shelves and shovel the sidewalk alongside his own staff. His breakthrough was unglamorous: a failing health club losing $200,000 a year, whose owners offered him $16,000 a year with a buyout clause — turn it around and he could own it.

Over the next eight years he made it profitable and bought them out with the profits. Then he kept going, building clubs one by one for twenty years. In 2003 he launched Snap Fitness on a simple idea: an affordable gym, open 24-7, close to home, without the impersonal big-box experience.

Snap Fitness franchises grew to 2,500 locations in 26 countries, and under his Lift Brands umbrella — with 9Round, Farrell's, YogaFit, STEELE Fitness and Fitness On Demand — the group grew to more than 6,000 locations open or in development.

He was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, and even survived an employee embezzling $3.5 million along the way. The overnight success took decades.

"If you haven’t failed, you’re not trying hard enough."

Taunton wrote his book Impossible Hill to pass the lessons on — to help entrepreneurs be better equipped and better prepared mentally, physically and financially, built around the discipline, accountability and patience he says success actually requires.

Forbes asked him to teach an entrepreneurial course on franchise systems, and the kid who learned leadership watching his father bag groceries now teaches other owners the same creed: lead from the front, never ask people to do what you would not do yourself, and keep showing up.

Smart Real Estate Coach Podcast — “Episode 228: The Street Smart Entrepreneur, with Peter Taunton”
Eric Partaker — “How to Succeed in Business: The Story of Peter Taunton”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Paul Orfalea  ·  Phil Miller

Phil Miller

Founder & CEO, Pawville — Wilmington, NC

Official links: Website

Phil Miller was working on cruise ships — hosting port and shopping talks and saving every commission he could — when he met his wife Amanda, a veterinary technician. His first attempt at escape, rental properties in Florida, cost him the savings he had built up at sea, so he went back to the ships and saved again.

Amanda pointed him toward the pet business, and in 2006 the couple bought a struggling pet-supply store in Citrus County, Florida, doing about $100,000 in sales.

Phil saw what the seller had missed: the back half of the 5,000-square-foot building was underused warehouse space, the grooming shop sat empty, and the property was zoned for boarding — so he added boarding and grooming to the retail and opened in 2007.

The Millers moved to Wilmington in 2008 so Phil could earn an MBA at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, opened in Surf City in 2012, and ground slowly: it took fourteen years to reach three locations.

Then the model clicked — eight more locations came in just four years, reaching eleven locations, including two pet hospitals, before private equity arrived and Pawville became the platform brand for PE-backed WagWay in 2024.

"We try to create the best client experience,"

Growth never changed the idea behind the name: Pawville was built to feel like a village — large enough to get everything a pet needs, small enough to know everybody's name.

The company landed on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies two years in a row, built a new headquarters in Scotts Hill by merging two acquired facilities, and kept buying and remodeling local mom-and-pop pet businesses rather than replacing their character. Under WagWay, that personalized, village-style care is now the foundation other pet brands are being built on.

Acquiring Minds — “Scaling a Tiny Acquisition to a PE-Backed Exit”
WilmingtonBiz — “Working like a dog: Pawville owners create HQ in Scotts Hill”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Peter Taunton  ·  Ryan Essenburg

Ryan Essenburg

Co-founder & President, Tommy’s Express Car Wash — Holland, MI

Official links: Website · X

We’re inspired because Ryan Essenburg’s story is for everyone building on a family’s work: honoring the caution that built the foundation while arguing — patiently, for a decade — for the leap that carries it further. Each generation runs a distance, then passes the baton.

“I look at life like a relay race, each generation runs a distance and then passes the baton … And I look at it as my goal to run the race a little further and hand it off to the next generation in a better spot, and hopefully, each generation appreciates the previous journey.”

Essenburg’s grandparents, Jun and Sonny, opened Quality Car Wash in Holland, Michigan, and raised the family on Great Depression lessons: be conservative, be careful, be cautious.

His father Tom was an artist at heart who spent nights tinkering with equipment — and when the family’s equipment manufacturer suddenly went out of business, the family started making the parts themselves, overnight, out of necessity. That scramble became Tommy Car Wash Systems.

Ryan grew up inside both businesses, but his big idea — franchising the wash his grandfather’s generation had kept local — took nearly twelve years of debate with his father before Tom finally said yes.

Tommy’s Express is now one of the fastest-growing franchises in America, ranked #1 in the car wash category of Entrepreneur’s Franchise 500, with more than 280 locations and over 200 more in development — and Ryan still stops to tweak the nozzles himself on site visits.

The company supports Water Mission, which brings safe drinking water to communities in need.

Franchise Times — “Fast and Serious: 40 Smartest Growing Franchises”
Ottawa News Network — “How the Essenburgs Became the Chick-fil-A of the Car Wash Industry”
The WOW Factor, Ep. 106 — Ryan Essenburg show notes

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Phil Miller  ·  Richard Taite

Richard Taite

Founder, Cliffside Malibu; Founder & Executive Chairman, Carrara Treatment Wellness & Spa — Malibu, CA

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

For twenty years, Richard Taite was an addict. He started smoking pot at twelve and snorted cocaine at sixteen, graduated to smoking crack every day, failed out of law school, got fired from job after job, and ended up homeless — bunking in crack motels at $28 a night until the money ran out.

In 1999 a friend wrote him a cashier's check for $850 for a sober-living facility, and after years of struggling, his recovery finally clicked on March 3, 2003.

By thirty-seven he had earned enough buying up medical-bill debt to mortgage the Malibu house he meant to retire in — and instead turned it into the sober-living home he had always wanted to open, leasing himself a one-bedroom apartment down the beach.

It opened in August 2004 with one rule that nearly sank it: he could not say no to anyone, taking men for $2,500 or for nothing while losing tens of thousands a month.

On July 1, 2005, it became Cliffside Malibu, a six-bed treatment center that grew into one of the best-known rehabs in the world — by his account grossing $10 million in 2013 — and in 2018, at eighty beds, he sold it to Discovery Behavioral Health for a sum he described as in the very low nine figures.

"But the past isn’t who I am. Who you are is who you are now."

The sale came with a five-year noncompete. When it expired in 2023, Taite came back — driven, he says, by the fentanyl and opioid crisis — buying the 1 Method treatment center in Los Angeles and opening Carrara Treatment Wellness & Spa in West Hollywood in 2024, with locations following in Beverly Hills and Malibu.

He also hosts the We're Out of Time podcast on addiction and the fentanyl crisis. The man an $850 bed once saved now spends his second career trying to save other families from the same phone call.

Inc. — “Richard Taite: Journey From Addict to Entrepreneur”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Ryan Essenburg  ·  Rick Jackson

Rick Jackson

Founder, Chairman & CEO, Jackson Healthcare — Alpharetta, GA

Official links: Website · X

Rick Jackson grew up in Atlanta's Techwood Homes, the country's first federally funded public housing project. His father walked out when he was a baby, his mother struggled with alcohol, and he has described a childhood marked by poverty and periods of neglect. At thirteen he entered foster care and cycled through five foster homes and an orphanage.

He got to college — Lipscomb University in Nashville — but dropped out when he could no longer afford it. He later took a small-business course at Georgia State University, where an instructor became a longtime mentor. What he did next was pure bootstraps: commission sales work, then, in 1976, buying the small secretarial staffing company where he worked.

He moved into executive recruiting and health care staffing, built and sold a string of health care companies, and in 2000 founded Jackson Healthcare in Alpharetta. It has grown into one of the country's largest health care staffing companies, reporting annual revenue exceeding $3 billion and operating in all fifty states.

The foster kid from Techwood Homes became a billionaire — and never forgot the system that raised him.

"It was very difficult just to survive, but it created a foundation of independence and control that probably has impacted my career, my life, for a long time now."

Jackson's giving runs straight back to foster care. He backed Georgia's 2022 Fostering Success Act, which lets taxpayers direct tax credits to organizations serving young people aging out of foster care, founded a nonprofit to distribute the funds, and serves as board chairman of FaithBridge Foster Care.

Through Giving Films, the nonprofit venture he founded, he co-produced the faith film 90 Minutes in Heaven, with Giving Films' profits supporting charities. His message on billboards across Georgia sums up the arc in four words: foster care to billionaire.

FOX 5 Atlanta — “Georgia governor candidate profile: Rick Jackson”
The Imprint — “Billionaire With Foster Care Backstory Runs for GA Governor”
Wikipedia — “Rick Jackson (businessman)”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Richard Taite  ·  Brian Krusz

Brian Krusz

Founder, Sgt. Clean Car Wash — Strongsville, OH

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

We’re inspired because Brian Krusz started with somebody else’s mess — liens, stigma, no industry experience — and won on how he treated people: real schedules, paid time off, health insurance and 401(k) matches in an industry with a reputation for the opposite. Employees first, veterans always, neighbors as a duty.

“Our first location had 176 liens on the property, so we’ve always been used to adversity”

An Elyria Catholic kid who enlisted in the Marine Corps instead of heading straight to college, Krusz spent eight years packing parachutes and handling aviation ordnance — surviving two explosions, one that cost a fellow Marine his legs — then finished his business degree, sold homes, and worked as an executive banking recruiter.

He knew nothing about car washing when he walked into a trade convention, fell for the industry, and took over a blighted pink-and-aqua wash whose property carried 176 liens. “We weren’t a bankable business,” he says of the early years. Sgt.

Clean now runs 16 Northeast Ohio locations washing over a million cars a year, made the Inc. 5000 list five times, and hires veterans — one fellow ex-Marine started part-time and rose to assistant general manager. The company created a dedicated Community Impact Coordinator, donates to food banks and school foundations, and delivers for Meals on Wheels.

When war displaced Ukrainian families, Krusz raised nearly $27,000 with his Rotary club and personally traveled to Poland to deliver aid. It is his grandfather’s lesson, from the firefighter-businessman who put young Brian to work at fair concession trailers: “When will you pay your community rent?”

Akron Life — “Rinse Cycle: Brian Krusz and Sgt. Clean”
Smart Business Magazine — “How Sgt. Clean Quickly Became a Big Presence in the Northeast Ohio Car Wash Scene”
Elyria Catholic — alumni profile: Brian Krusz, Class of 1998

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Rick Jackson  ·  Russell Brunson

Russell Brunson

Co-founder & Chief Experience Officer, ClickFunnels — Boise, ID

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Instagram · X

Russell Brunson was hooked on selling before he was a teenager.

On the Leap Academy podcast he tells how, at twelve or thirteen, he stayed up past his bedtime, saw an infomercial about making money with tiny classified ads, mowed lawns until he could buy the course, and then ordered every free information kit he could find — sitting after school reading stacks of sales letters.

Wrestling taught him the other half of the lesson. He became a high-school state champion, wrestled at Boise State, and learned to lose a match, study the tape, drill the move that beat him, and win the rematch. Business tested that lesson hard.

In his early twenties, growing his first company too fast, he had about a hundred employees when his nine merchant accounts at a single bank were shut off in one day. Much of his team walked out, he could not process a dollar, and, in his own telling, he owed $200,000 and feared he was going to jail.

He kept showing up anyway. In October 2014 he launched ClickFunnels with his partner Todd Dickerson and a small team, with no venture capital. ClickFunnels says the company passed $100 million in annual sales and 100,000 paying customers by 2019, and surpassed $265 million in annual revenue and 150,000 customers by 2023.

"Just know that if you keep showing up, you keep trying, you'll be directed in the path that you're supposed to go."

Brunson put the comeback into books and rooms full of founders. He is the author of DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets, and ClickFunnels' team page says he has built a following of more than a million entrepreneurs and sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books.

The Two Comma Club, the company's award for entrepreneurs who have made at least $1 million through a funnel, turned his customers' stories into the celebration — proof, in his model, that a small founder with a good story and a working funnel needs neither permission nor a venture check to build something real.

Leap Academy with Ilana Golan via Podscan — “Russell Brunson: From Broke to $100M in Five Years, How I Bounced Back from Rock Bottom”
ClickFunnels — “How ClickFunnels Grew Into a $100-Million Business”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Brian Krusz  ·  Scott Krone

Scott Krone

Founder, Coda Management Group; Co-founder, One Stop Self Storage — Wilmette, IL

Official links: Website · LinkedIn

Scott Krone redesigned his own career the way he once redesigned buildings.

A Chicago native, he began his master's degree in architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1991, in the middle of a recession, and worked as a project manager for Optima, Inc., on multifamily projects including the 400-unit Cormandel in Deerfield, the 40-unit Hedge Row in Winnetka and the 51-unit Optima Center Wilmette.

In 1998 he founded Coda, an award-winning design-build firm working on single-family, multifamily and mixed-use projects; BiggerPockets notes the firm won the international Green GOOD Design Award in 2010 and Best of Houzz in 2014 and 2015. Then the 2008 crash changed his questions.

Studying self-storage, he noticed something odd: he could find plenty of distressed apartment buildings, but he could not find a distressed self-storage facility. Storage, he decided, was multifamily made simpler, with operating and capital costs he puts at about a tenth of multifamily for the same number of units.

From 2013, his firms focused their investment portfolio on self-storage, buying undervalued warehouse space and converting it into climate-controlled facilities. Best Ever lists the platform at more than 47 syndications, with 400,000 square feet and 2,750 storage units under management.

"self-storage is just a more simplistic version of multifamily; it’s an apartment without toilets and sinks."

Krone gave the management side its own home in 2012, when Coda Management Group was launched to manage real-estate assets; Inside Self Storage says the company has more than $70 million invested in self-storage. In 2020 he co-founded One Stop Self Storage, which operates facilities across the Midwest.

He also authored High Performance Homes, a book for homeowners who want to bring green technology into their homes, and he shares his feasibility-study playbook openly on investor podcasts — an architect who stopped only drawing buildings and started teaching owners how to read a market before they risk a dollar.

Best Ever CRE — “JF2148: Self Storage Classified As A National Park With Scott Krone”
BiggerPockets — “[Webinar] Extreme Value Add Self-Storage Investing w/ Scott Krone”
Inside Self Storage — “Scott Krone”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Russell Brunson  ·  Shaun Stimpson

Shaun Stimpson

Founder, North Iron Holdings; CEO, Mitten Fluidpower — Syracuse, NY

Official links: Website

Shaun Stimpson spent about twenty years in wealth management — years working directly with clients, then thirteen in leadership, split between Morgan Stanley and Bank of America's private bank. The turn came over lunch, when a client explained that he had made his money buying companies, again and again.

Stimpson went back to Babson College, where he had earned his MBA, took classes including M&A for entrepreneurs, and spent five years studying acquisition, talking to roughly a hundred people who had searched, failed or bought. Cold calling came naturally: in his first job at Merrill Lynch, he says, he made some 200 calls a day.

As a searcher, he cold-called about 1,200 owners over an 18-month search. He had not even contemplated buying a business until he was 39, and he was in his mid-40s when, in December 2022, he closed on Mitten Fluidpower in Syracuse, New York, through his holding company, North Iron Holdings.

He has since acquired two more industrial distribution businesses, FLN-MAR and Frank Murken Products, and Acquiring Minds puts the three-company portfolio at $38 million in revenue — built in under three years, in a second career most people would have been too settled to start.

"I didn't do it to be a private equity investor. I wanted to be in control of my own destiny."

The Mitten family — a father and two sons — sold to the buyer who answered their real question. Smart Business Dealmakers reports the family cared most about stewardship: would he keep the business in Syracuse, keep the name, keep all the employees, and invest to make it bigger?

Stimpson promised all of it, and he now runs the business as CEO, setting strategy while the leadership team he inherited handles execution. The repeat business backs him up: at Mitten, he says, 81 percent of sales over five years came from customers who bought in all five of those years.

Acquiring Minds — “Started Mid-Career, Grew to $38m in 3 Years”
Smart Business Dealmakers — “Shaun Stimpson On Buying A Business And Becoming An Operator”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Scott Krone  ·  Stephen Scoggins

Stephen Scoggins

Founder, Custom Home Exteriors — Garner, NC

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · Instagram · X

Stephen Scoggins met his first mentor on a framing crew. Steve Myrick — “Old Man Myrick,” as Scoggins affectionately calls him — was his father's employer, a home builder who would pull the young man off the crew and talk to him about life and business. Those talks had to carry a long way.

By nineteen, according to his own site, Scoggins was homeless. What he had was a trade learned on construction sites, a mentor's voice in his head, and a belief he still repeats: that the greatest purpose in life is serving the person you used to be.

He built companies out of what he calls the literal trash piles of construction sites, until one of them — the home-exteriors business he founded, Custom Home Exteriors — reached upwards of nine figures in annual revenue, with hundreds of people across multiple states counting on him to get it right.

The climb nearly cost him himself, he says frankly: the numbers kept rising while something inside him went quiet, running on fumes, adrenaline and, in his words, steady faking. In late 2023, he exited the company he had built from scratch — and walked away with the lesson, not just the money.

"I came up with nothing. A truck, a set of tools, and more pride than sense."

Scoggins now spends his time on the other side of the mentor's conversation. Through Scoggins International and Lion-Lamb Solutions, he teaches founders his Integrated Alignment Method — removing what he calls the five constraints (arrogance, ignorance, impatience, fear and insecurity) and building the five drivers a business needs to run without the owner in every seat.

His podcast, One Part Lion, One Part Lamb, has passed 48 million plays, his site says. The teenager who was given a second chance now offers builders one of his own: a way to scale without losing their peace, their families or their faith.

StephenScoggins.com — “About Stephen Scoggins | Faith-Driven Entrepreneur & Speaker”
Kartra — “Stephen Scoggins Archives”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Shaun Stimpson  ·  Steve Carroll

Steve Carroll

Co-founder & CEO, Kelso Industries — Draper, UT

Official links: Website · LinkedIn · X

Steve Carroll grew up in Sandy, Oregon, a small town outside Portland, on a farm — working with his hands and with tractors, as he tells it, which made construction a natural career path.

He studied construction, worked jobs all through college, and built a career on the general-contracting side, where he saw up close how hard it was to coordinate the mechanical, electrical and plumbing trades on a project, because they were almost always different companies.

He left for corporate America: Walmart moved his family to Bentonville, Arkansas, and a stay he expected to last a year or two lasted seven, and taught him to think in very big numbers.

Then he and his childhood friend Steve Nicholson — the two met at Kelso Elementary School, which is where Kelso got its name — decided to buy the biggest business they could with an SBA loan. The road there was bruising.

An early small deal collapsed at the last hour when his would-be general manager quit, and the first acquisition that did close, a $17 million-revenue business in Phoenix, he ran himself: the Acquiring Minds host describes Carroll drowning in the weeds on 100-hour weeks while moonlighting to keep a W-2 job.

The unlock was acquisition number two — partner with the owners and keep them, instead of buying and replacing.

"Building Kelso from the ground up has been the opportunity of a lifetime, and we are grateful to Peterson Partners for their continued support."

Kelso Industries, founded in 2021 and headquartered in Draper, Utah, is now, in Carroll's own words on Acquiring Minds, at about $1.2 billion in revenue, having acquired and partnered with more than 31 companies.

Peterson Partners puts Kelso at more than 4,000 employees operating across more than 40 states, serving data centers, healthcare, airports and industrial customers, and Peterson has raised a $510 million continuation vehicle, with NorthSands Capital as sole lead investor, to fund the next round of growth.

The farm kid's idea never changed: bring the trades together, keep the local owners in place, and stay with a building for its whole life.

Acquiring Minds — “ETA Unicorn: $1 Billion in Revenue in 5 Years”
Peterson Partners — “Peterson Partners Raises Continuation Vehicle for Kelso Industries; NorthSands Capital Serves as Sole Lead Investor”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Stephen Scoggins  ·  Tom Bilyeu

Tom Bilyeu

Co-founder, Quest Nutrition & Impact Theory — Los Angeles, CA

Official links: Website · Facebook · Instagram · X

Tom Bilyeu's first jobs were not glamorous. YesPress reports that he worked in a door factory at age twelve, scrubbed industrial vats at a paint factory, and worked at a gun range where he nearly lost his leg. What he wanted was film.

YesPress reports he earned a full scholarship to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts, and he spent years learning how to tell stories before he learned how to sell anything. After USC he went into marketing, joining Awareness Technologies in 2003 and rising to chief marketing officer.

Then, in 2010, he, his wife Lisa and partners including Ron Penna and Mike Osborn launched Quest Nutrition from their living room. The work was hands-on in the most literal way: Bilyeu worked the production line in a hairnet, Lisa handled logistics, and they packed protein bars by hand.

Quest grew 57,000 percent in its first three years, ranked second on the Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing companies in 2014, and in 2019 Simply Good Foods acquired Quest Nutrition for $1 billion.

The film-school graduate had built a billion-dollar food company from a living room — learning the business the way he had learned filmmaking, by doing every job in it himself first.

"The level of effort you tolerate from yourself will define your life."

Bilyeu had already stepped back from the day-to-day at Quest in 2016 to build what film school had pointed at all along. That year he co-founded Impact Theory with Lisa, a media company with a mission, in London Real's words, to impact culture at scale by empowering individuals to become their best selves.

Its interviews with entrepreneurs, scientists, athletes and other high achievers have passed, YesPress reports, a billion views of original content, and he has also co-created the graphic-novel series Neon Future, inspired by Steve Aoki. The message never changes: mindset is mechanics, identity can be rebuilt, and endurance beats talent.

London Real — “Tom Bilyeu - Impact Theory”
YesPress — “Tom Bilyeu - Founder, Impact Theory”

More from The Bourgeois Society: The full list  ·  Steve Carroll  ·  Adam Vandermyde