A Midlife Career Change at 51: From the Car Business to a Food Blog

My relationship with my oldest daughter was a zero out of five. Same kitchen you see in every video on this site.

Sam Knickerbocker had me on The Fuel Your Legacy Show to talk about the year everything moved: 26 good years in the car business, a food blog with 1,500 posts on it, two daughters who said yes, and what AI actually does around here. This is the long version, with the parts I would have said better if I had thought of them in time.

The One Thing Our Family Could Agree On

We could not agree on a restaurant, a movie, or what to do with a Saturday. We could agree on cooking shows. Guy’s Grocery Games, Halloween Wars, all of them. When the girls were little we made our own cooking videos at home, so it was already in the house.

When I started looking at businesses to buy, I went through eight or nine of them, a lot of them in health and fitness, with profit and loss statements, bank statements, and tax returns on the table. Everything looks good on the surface until you read the numbers. One of them came with an $18,000 a month rent bill. This Silly Girl’s Kitchen had been under contract to someone else, their financing fell through, and when it came back on the market my partner brought it to me. He was my mentor through the whole search and he held my hand through all of it.

I asked my daughters if they were in. Maddie was 18 and Lizzie was 15. The answer was, Dad, are you kidding me? We get to be on YouTube?

Maddie, What About Me Isn’t Working for You?

Here is the part I had never said out loud. When Maddie was a freshman in high school, our relationship was a solid zero on a scale of one to five. Yelling, screaming, all bad all the time, and this was during COVID, so it was the perfect storm. She did a lot of work on herself. I did a lot of work on myself. And one day I asked her a question I had been afraid of. Maddie, what about me isn’t working for you?

She said, Dad, I’m tired of you saying I’m sorry. That hit like a freight train, because for the first time I understood what she meant. I was apologizing and then repeating the same patterns. It is great to say you are sorry and own it, but unless you change the behavior, it does not matter.

What made her safe enough to say it was that she had watched me change first. Small deposits. What I was saying and what I was doing were finally on the same page, and for the first time it was me focusing on her instead of on me. Today that relationship is a five out of five. It took both of us wanting it and doing the work, separately and together.

I had bought into the idea that a man earns his value by providing for his family. I was very good at showing up physically. I was not there mentally. I was at the game and on my phone. What my family wanted was my presence. Me showing up. Me being there.

26 Good Years in the Car Business, Then a Different Plan

I spent 26 years in automotive, 24 of them at one dealership, and that business was very good to me. When you run a car store you are running five businesses inside one building, and everything I know about running a company came from there. So did most of the people I still call friends. I want to say that plainly, because the next part can sound like a complaint, and it is not one.

Toward the end I had moved to another organization, same job, and I was working 14 to 16 hour days and taking three days off a month. That was the pace I chose. Then my dad had a stroke and the appointments piled up, my oldest was getting ready for college, and I could see a window with my kids that was closing. I prayed. A lot. God, there has to be another way.

The answer showed up at a birthday party. A guy I felt pushed to go talk to, and ended up talking to the whole time I was there, told me to look at businesses that were already cash flowing and that my skill set could run. I had always pictured my daughters working with me in automotive one day. God had a different plan, and I surrendered to it. Miracle after miracle after miracle, as I told Sam.

What AI Actually Does Around Here

AI runs 90 to 95 percent of this business. Not the cooking, not the camera, not the conversations with my daughters. The plumbing.

I came in on January 21st with no idea what alt text was. By April 10th I had a 33 or 34 page audit in my hands with hundreds of recommendations, and I remember sitting there going, how in the good Lord’s name am I going to get all this done. A VA quoted $50 a post. I had 1,500 posts at three to four hours each, so over $70,000 before internal links or schema, and the honest alternative was a year and a half to two years of my own life. Most bloggers I talk to put that audit in a drawer.

I spent a couple hundred hours getting one post exactly right, sending it back to the auditor until it passed. Once it was right, the engine did 35 posts the first month and over 900 the next, 30 a day, and every single one was checked by a person, because it is not set it and forget it. Pictures go missing, things come back wrong, you catch it. The whole audit was finished in three months, and a lot of that was me learning.

The tools that came out of it live at BlogPrep: the audit on autopilot, a PR bot that booked two podcasts within two days of being built, and the social media product. That last one is my favorite. I drop a long form video in a folder, go to church, and come back to the shorts cut and posted.

If you want the audit story with all the numbers, it is in the post about buying this blog, from my Eat Blog Talk episode.

If You Are Where I Was

Three things from that hour that I would hand to any dad who works a lot. Ask the question. What about me isn’t working for you, and then be quiet. Change the behavior, not the apology. And make the time you do have intentional. Sam said it on the show and he is right: being home more is not the same as being there. The cooking videos were our intentional time, and they still are, even with Maddie away at college.

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