Why I Left New York
A few years ago I was working in private equity in New York. It was a good job, the kind you're supposed to want. The work was real, the people were sharp, and I learned more in that stretch than I probably give it credit for. But most weeks looked the same: early flights, late nights, a calendar that belonged to someone else's deadlines more than my own life. I'd call home from an airport gate and realize I couldn't remember the last time I'd been somewhere long enough to actually settle in.
None of that is a complaint. It's just what the job was. But somewhere in there I started noticing the gap between what my life looked like on paper and what it actually felt like day to day. Those aren't always the same thing, and for me they'd drifted pretty far apart.
What Called Me Home
I grew up in the Midwest, and I think you don't fully understand what that means to you until you leave it for a while. It's not just geography. Nobody here cares about your title. They care whether you make it to the cookout, and whether you call back when you said you would. I missed that. I missed being close enough to family that showing up for the small things was possible again, not just the big ones you fly in for.
Coming home wasn't a grand plan with a five-year model behind it. It was closer to a decision I kept confirming every time I visited and didn't want to leave. Eventually I stopped ignoring that.
Building Something With My Brother
Connor and I grew up close, and starting Salt Creek Advisory together has been one of the better decisions either of us has made. There's something different about building a firm with someone who already knows you, who you don't have to explain yourself to, and who has just as much riding on getting it right as you do. We built this firm around the idea that owners deserve to work directly with the people actually doing the work. That idea is a lot easier to believe in when the person next to you is your brother.
It also means something to be back in the Midwest doing this. The owners we work with built their businesses here, raised families here, coached Little League here. Being from the same place they are means we already know what these towns care about before anyone has to explain it, and that shapes how we listen.
Working With Family Isn't Always Easy
I want to be honest about something, because it's easy to romanticize a family business and skip the parts that are actually hard. Connor and I don't agree on everything. We've had disagreements about the business that turned into disagreements that followed us to a family dinner, which is its own particular kind of uncomfortable. When you work with a sibling, there's no clean line between the professional relationship and the personal one, and some weeks that line matters more than others.
What's kept it working, more than anything, is that we both actually want the same thing: to build something we're proud of and to still like each other at the end of it. That doesn't make the hard weeks disappear. It just makes them worth having.
The best part of coming home wasn't leaving a career behind. It was getting to build the next one next to the people I'd have chosen anyway.
This Fourth of July
Today we'll do what a lot of families in the Midwest are doing: grill something, sit outside longer than we planned to, and probably argue about fireworks. It's not a complicated day, and that's exactly what I like about it. A few years ago I would have been working through it, or catching a flight home a day late. This year I'm already here.
That's most of what this note is really about. Not a firm update, not a market view. Just a reminder to myself, on a summer day with family around, of why we built Salt Creek Advisory the way we did: to spend our working lives close to the people and the place we actually care about, and to help other owners protect the same thing for their own families. Happy Fourth of July.
Jack