Fighting Solves Everything

Joe Buckner and I have known one another a long time. Even though we are from the same town, we grew up in different worlds. But it never stops us from having breakfast together.

1990s Fort Collins was a sleepy place. Our town had so little going on that if you searched for significant things that happened here before 1990, you wouldn’t find much. Back then, everyone knew everyone. We had three high schools, but most of the kids in town knew a lot of the other kids at the other schools. There were cross-town sports rivalries in football and basketball, but no one really ever won state championships because we couldn’t compete with the big Denver schools. The Fort Collins versus Rocky Mountain High basketball games were the best events in our town for sports. CSU was stuck in their patterns of 1-11 losing seasons year after year. So when our local high schools met up, it was an early version of Friday Night Lights.

In those sleepy days of our city, we used to joke that it was the “vanilla valley.” We could count the number of African American kids in our town on one hand. There was Donny McDonald, with whom I had played JAA football, who taught me how to catch a football the “right way.” And there was Joe Buckner. He was the star athlete in any sport he tried. He went to the odd-man-out high school called Poudre. But everyone knew that if Joe was on the field, Poudre had a shot at winning the game.

Joe and I grew up in different worlds. My family was in the real estate business, and my grandfather had made a name for himself. We had real estate signs everywhere, and we never wanted for much. Joe, on the other hand, lived very differently. He knew what it meant to live in a world of want. He and I could not have had different upbringings. After high school, Joe went on to play sports, and I left to play music in Canada. When we finally made our way back to our hometown, our paths crossed again. He was working in sales, but anytime I sat down with him, I could feel the desire in his heart to make himself into something better and more. He wanted to be an entrepreneur. His life had taken a hard turn in those years in between the football field and our first coffees. He had found out that selling furniture was far less profitable than selling drugs, and he found himself on the wrong side of the law.

He lived in his car for a season and struggled to get back on his feet after a stint in prison. When we started having regular breakfasts together, it was fascinating to learn of his journey and what had happened to him while I was off travelling the world playing music.

Our first breakfast together was hours long. We sat and heard the hearts of one another and realized that, despite our incredibly different lives, we both wanted to make and create great things in business. He was just starting his Beautifully Savage Boxing club, and I was deep in the throes of our manufacturing business, where we made barnwood wall decor. We sat and listened to one another about how each of us had difficulties making payroll and paying rent. We learned quickly that we fought hard for the same things every morning. Both of us saw each customer as critical to our success. We were, after all, from the generation that had been taught that our reputations were the backbone of our business, so doing the right thing was always the only option.

Somewhere, a few years ago, Lululemon heard about Joe’s story and decided to tell it. They brought a film crew out to do a documentary about his journey into the entrepreneurial space. It is incredibly compelling. As many of his friends sat in the room where the documentary was premiered, we were astonished at the story. Something special had happened to Joe in his darkest time. He learned to fight for what matters. Joe loves to say that “fighting solves everything.” He believes it.

Don’t skip past that video. It is profoundly beautiful and shows the real dedication Joe has to overcoming anything in his way.

Joe and I are likely not on the same page politically. But I don’t care, and he doesn’t seem to care either. We don’t talk much about it at our breakfasts. More than anything, we love to sit together and catch up about how we are doing as “business guys.” We open up about what life after kids looks like, or how now, both at 50, we don’t have the same gas in the tank for it that we once did. Joe continues to reinvent himself to try to grow his businesses, and I admire him deeply for that. In an exhausted moment at breakfast this month, both of us admitted that we were tired. We both said how much we might just want to work for someone else and let them worry each night about where the rents were coming from, or how this month’s unexpected expenses were going to be paid for. The small business landscape in America is not for the faint of heart. It takes an almost ignorant devotion to the idea to survive. If you asked Joe if he would have started his business knowing what he knows now, I bet he would emphatically tell you “NO!” But once you get started, a small business never has the luxury of hindsight. Mistakes and lost revenue are just as much a part of the game as the great compliments from a customer that keep you going.

Joe is a good man. He’s a close friend and someone that I know I can tell anything to. We don’t need to be on the same page about life, or economics, or presidential politics to be friends. We get to live in our town together, having watched it grow up from sleepy nothingness to a place filled with people and entrepreneurial giants. This is the town of New Belgium Beer and Otter Box. Joe and I got to watch them both come of age in our lifetimes. That is wonderful, and demoralizing at the same time if you don’t get the same recognition they do. But Joe and I found our way into friendship in the midst of those late-night, lonesome thoughts. I love what he does. I love who he is. We both need each other on this crazy ride, and for the fact that he will still go to breakfast with me and talk about the deep things, I am forever thankful.

Beautifully Savage Boxing - Click to find out more about what Joe is doing and his plans for the future of the gym.