I recently went one-on-one with Jeremy Barker, founder and CEO of Murphy Door.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Jeremy: I always knew I wanted to be a firefighter. I started training in high school, and I loved the job, but my first paychecks worked out to about six dollars an hour, and I could not build a life on that. At 19, I designed a metal brace that made portable sheds faster to build, set up a booth at the Utah State Fair, and walked away ten days later with $60,000. I had just started college. I figured I had already done the thing college was supposed to help me do, so I dropped out.
Home Depot picked up the sheds, and the business took off. I was a kid with a lot of money and zero financial education. I bought the truck, I partied, and I paid one bill with money that belonged to another. By 23, I was bankrupt and living in a used truck, hauling RVs around the country and making just enough to stay broke. I spent about six months seriously depressed. Then I spent about six months doing an honest inventory of every bad decision. Not to beat myself up, but to see exactly where I went right when I should have gone left.
I rebuilt with a home construction company, and it did well until 2008. When the banks stopped lending, it was gone. That second bankruptcy taught me something different: you can do a lot right and still get wiped out if you have no cushion. I went back to the firehouse in 2010 for a steady paycheck. A while later, I built a hidden door for a theater room I wanted for my kids, realized nothing like it was on the market, and designed my own hinge. That became the company. I kept working shifts and did not take a paycheck from the business until it was running at $5 million a year. Every failure before that is the reason it worked this time.
Adam: In your experience, what are the key steps to growing and scaling your business?
Jeremy: The first one is cash. Leave the money in the business for as long as you possibly can. I think of a young company like a baby with a bottle. If you keep taking sips to cover your mortgage and your truck payment, the baby does not grow. I lived on a firefighter’s wage for more than four years while the company grew, and that is the only reason we could afford to scale. Most struggling businesses I look at do not have a product problem. They have a cash problem. Second, price your product properly and do not be afraid of margin. Both of my bankruptcies taught me that revenue is not the same thing as health. You can sell a lot and still starve.
Third, get it in front of customers before you think it is ready. Build fast, break faster, then refine. We took our first hidden doors to a big trade show and pitched them for panic rooms. A woman at the booth pointed out that not many people need a panic room door. What people do need is storage. She was right. We changed direction, and that one conversation is behind most of what came after.
Fourth, design your operations so growth does not eat you. We build to order, one piece at a time, and buy material after the customer has ordered. That keeps cash moving in the right direction. And plan capacity early. The equipment we run can take six to twelve months to arrive, so if you wait until you need it, you are already a year late.
Adam: What are your best tips on the topics of sales, marketing, and branding?
Jeremy: Listen before you talk. The best mentor a company can have is its customer. Ours told us what the product actually was, and they were more accurate than I was. Show, do not explain. We started posting on Facebook in 2012, back when you did not have to pay for anybody to see it. A bookcase swings open and there is a room behind it. You do not need a paragraph of copy for that. If your product can do something on camera that makes a person stop scrolling, put your effort there and not into clever slogans.
Be consistent for longer than feels reasonable. People call it going viral, but there were years of posting before anything took off. Hire people who are better at it than you are. I am a builder. When we brought in people who had spent their careers in media and social, the reach changed completely.
On sales, get trained. Sales is a skill, not a personality. I have learned from people who are far better at it than I am, and it paid for itself many times over. And your brand is not your logo. It is whether the thing shows up the way you said it would, and what a real customer tells a neighbor afterward. The most persuasive voice you will ever have is somebody who already bought from you.
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Jeremy: Honesty, starting with honesty about yourself. I would rather work with someone who can tell me plainly what they can and cannot do than someone with a perfect resume who bluffs. Transparency. Every employee in our company gets a financial report every day. They can see what came in, what went out, and where it went. It builds trust, and it shows them the money is going back into the company and not into my pocket. People make better decisions when they can see the scoreboard.
Calm. In the fire service, the person in charge on a bad call sets the temperature for everyone else. If the leader panics, the crew panics. Business is the same. Your team is reading your face long before they read your email. Humility about roles. I see a company as a wheel, and every person is a spoke. No spoke is longer or thicker or more important, including mine. If one is out of balance, the wheel does not roll straight.
And accountability. I learned the hard way. I am the guy who has to fall off the cliff to believe it hurts. But when I fall, I own it, I study it, and I do not fall off that same cliff again.
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Jeremy: Find mentors, and then do the uncomfortable part, which is actually following their advice. Most successful people want to help. What they do not want is to give the same advice three times to somebody who nods and changes nothing. I have had mentors for operations, for people, for systems, and for sales, and each of them saw something I could not. Do a regular inventory of yourself. The months I spent in that truck going through my own decisions did more for me as a leader than any success I have had. If your habits got you where you are and you do not like where you are, stop doing what you have been doing and try something different.
Change how you treat failure. I want to see as many failures as possible, as early as possible. Not because we are aiming for them, but because once a problem is on the table, we can fix it and never have to talk about it again. If your people hide mistakes from you, that is a leadership problem, not a people problem. Last, keep a few relationships where you are not the boss. Everyone comes to the leader for answers. You need people you can go to, people who will tell you the truth and who do not want anything from you.
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Jeremy: First, protect the cash. Wait as long as you can before you pay yourself out of the business. When the owner has to live on the net margin, the company loses its ability to grow. The same goes for a city budget or a department inside a big corporation. If every dollar is already spoken for, you cannot move when the opportunity shows up.
Second, stop waiting for perfect. Waiting until something is flawless is a death sentence. Get a working version into the real world, let people use it, and fix it based on what actually happens instead of what you imagined in a conference room. Third, make your calendar match your values. For years I said my family and my company mattered most, while most of my hours went somewhere else. If someone looked only at how you spend your week, could they guess what you care about? If the answer is no, the calendar is the one telling the truth.
Adam: What is your best advice on building, leading, and managing teams?
Jeremy: I do not look at education when I hire. I look at experience, at how a person carries themselves, and at whether they will be straight with me about what they can and cannot do. A lot of our team comes out of firefighting and law enforcement. Those are people who already know how to follow a process, stay level under pressure, and look out for the person next to them. I can teach someone to build a door. I cannot teach them to show up.
Then I give them the information. Open books, every day. You cannot ask people to act like owners and then hide the numbers from them. I treat every role as essential, because it is. The person packaging hardware can make or break a customer’s experience just as easily as I can from my chair.
And I try to bring some of the firehouse into the building. The best team I was ever part of was a fire crew. We respected each other, and we looked after each other. It was a true brotherhood, men and women alike. If you can build even part of that at work, people will go a long way for each other.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Jeremy: It came from my fire chief in 2016. He sat me down and said that my body was at the station because the job requires it, but my mind was obviously on my company and my family. He told me to arrange my time so it reflected what I valued most. It was hard to hear because he was right.
I went home that day, and only the dog came to greet me. When my wife saw I was frustrated, she told me that if I wanted to be treated like a dad, I needed to start showing up like one. Two people who cared about me told me the same thing on the same day. I resigned from the department the next day. I will be honest, I still have not mastered it. I still work very long days. But when I am with my wife and kids now, I unplug on purpose, and I measure myself against that advice all the time.
Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?
Jeremy: People ask what I would tell my 19-year-old self, the kid with $60,000 in his pocket who was about to lose all of it. The answer is nothing. I would not want him to miss the lessons he needed to learn. If you are in the hole right now, broke or embarrassed or starting over, that is not the end of your story. Take your inventory, forgive yourself, find someone who has been where you want to go, and get back to work.
And hold on to the people who knew you before any of it. I have a few old friends I meet for coffee at a rundown diner. We do not talk about money or business. We talk about our kids and tell the same old stories. Success can get lonely if you let it. Do not let it.
