At the height of my career, I was overseeing maintenance and reliability across North America. 42 plants, real results, a title that looked like success from the outside.

I was also 320 pounds. Disconnected from my wife. Checked out as a father. Running from a past I'd never dealt with.

The job didn't cause that. I let it happen, because it was the one place I already knew how to win, and everything else felt harder.

What turned it around wasn't a system I built alone. It was my Catholic faith, a marriage that almost didn't survive, and men who loved me enough to tell me the truth instead of what I wanted to hear. I lost 80 pounds. I rebuilt my marriage. I became present for my kids, all eight of them.

Thirty-two years in operations taught me how to find what's broken in a system and fix it. Forged Knight exists because I learned the hard way that a man is a system too, and you can't optimize one part of it while the rest quietly fails.