Pat Phelan wrote his book, Leaping Forward, during COVID after what he calls a Jerry Maguire moment at the manuscript. Eighteen years into owning the company now known as Leap, he sits down with Sam Sapp to trace the winding path from a failed stint as a restaurant operator to a national supplier of restaurant furniture and case goods. Along the way he unpacks the line between a hustler and a con artist, why partnerships are tougher than marriages, and the kind of business amnesia that keeps an entrepreneur moving forward.
What You'll Hear
- Why Pat wrote Leaping Forward during COVID and how he wants his daughters to understand what he went through
- The seven or eight jobs Pat worked before buying the company in 2006 and why corporate life felt like Groundhog Day
- How a divorce and his father's sudden death in college shaped the grit that carried him through early business years
- The difference between a hustler and a con artist, and why Pat thinks the follow through is what separates them
- The Kinko's brochure and the cold call to Baltimore that won Pat his first real furniture client in Kansas City
- Why Pat regrets taking on a business partner in the recruiting company even after learning the lesson years earlier
- The financial math Pat framed on his wall: two girls through college, cars in eight years, a different house in five
- How the Chiefs and a Mizzou versus Vanderbilt game illustrate why business plans get punched in the face by week two
Writing Leaping Forward during COVID
Pat Phelan started Leaping Forward a couple of years into the pandemic after what he calls a Jerry Maguire moment with his manuscript. Eighteen years of building the company that is now Leap had given him a stack of stories, and he wanted budding entrepreneurs and people stuck in their own valleys to have access to them.
The second reason was personal. Pat wanted to leave a legacy for his two daughters, who grew up seeing the finished company but not the grind that produced it. He wanted something documented so that long after he is gone, they could open a book and understand what their dad actually went through.
The book is a collection of short stories and learning lessons from the eighteen years he has owned Leap. Leap was not called Leap when he bought it in 2006, and it has pivoted many times since. Today the company supplies restaurant furniture and case goods to corporate growth clients across the country, most of them publicly traded concepts opening at least ten units a year. One chapter in particular centers on connecting the dots, the idea that the failures and detours are what build future success. Pat is frank that if he had known what was coming, he probably never would have started.
From professional golf dreams to seven jobs and a purchase
Pat never really knew what he wanted to be. In high school the dream was professional golf, and that ended fast once he realized he was not good enough to play at the college level. He landed at the University of Missouri as a marketing major, had a good time as a student, and graduated with no clear plan.
The first six or seven years out of college were rough. Pat job-hopped through seven or eight different roles and could not figure out why he was unhappy or where his value actually sat. He describes the feeling as Groundhog Day, the real world showing up every morning and refusing to fit. It drove his wife crazy because he was never content.
When he bought the company in 2006, something clicked. He had spent years inside corporate America with a defined task and no room to build, and he had not realized that was the problem. Ownership, the creative work of building something from scratch, was what he had been made to do. He was not going to be the guy who pulled a paycheck for thirty years and called that a fulfilling life. He just needed the bullshit of getting there to prove it to him.
Grit shaped before the business ever started
Pat did a lot of self-reflection while writing the book, and some of it sent him back to high school. His parents divorced right as he entered ninth grade, and at the same moment his dad was laid off from a job he had held for many years. The family trajectory shifted, and Pat had to grow up fast.
What he watched next mattered. His father, never an entrepreneur before, decided to start his own company in the insurance business and grind. Pat remembers sitting in his dad's apartment folding pamphlets with his brother so they could be mailed to prospective clients. That early exposure to the work behind a small business stuck.
Right out of college Pat lost his dad unexpectedly. It was another moment where life restarted, and where grit was the only real asset he had. Starting high school during a divorce and starting adulthood after a parent's death are the kinds of moments most people carry as baggage. Pat says he just does not look back. He calls it business amnesia, and he thinks any entrepreneur has to have some version of it to survive. The downside is that the good moments fade with the bad ones, but the upside is that yesterday stops weighing on tomorrow.
Hustler versus con artist and the Kinko's brochure
One of the sharpest frames in the conversation is Pat's definition of a hustler. A hustler fakes it a little bit to get started, but has the intent and the follow through to make good on what they sold. A con artist says the same things with no plan, grabs the money, and moves on to the next target. Pat has screwed up deals and lost his own money making them right, and that willingness to eat the loss is the dividing line for him.
He tells the story of his first real break in furniture. He had been grinding as a rep for other manufacturers, running their sales teams around the Midwest, and he knew he had to pivot. A cold call to the Baltimore head office of a group building an entertainment district in Kansas City came back two weeks later as a callback. The caller did most of the talking. Pat said he could help with furniture. The two main guys were flying into Kansas City the next week.
Pat went to Kinko's and built a brochure based on what the caller had described. He pitched. The feedback was that he was too polished and they wanted someone who could be kicked around a little, meaning they wanted an owner-operator, not a rep machine. Pat told them he could be that guy. They gave him two restaurants to bid. He had no idea what he was doing, figured it out on the back end, installed the furniture himself, and earned a relationship that redefined the company.
Pivots, partnerships, and the recruiting bolt-on
Pat is careful about how he describes a pivot. You do not abandon the original business model while you are testing the next one, because the original model is paying the bills. He kept selling back of the house equipment while he tried to build and operate restaurants using other people's money. Those restaurants all failed, in the sense that they never made real money, and he learned how brutal the restaurant world actually is.
The furniture work that emerged from that cold call started generating a pipeline he could not see forming at the time. He got impatient and bolted on a recruiting franchise, started it from the same little office in Liberty where he was selling furnishings, and then watched the furniture pipeline blow up two months later. He had to hire a recruiter to run that side and add employees on the furniture side. For about ten years Leap ran as a two-headed monster.
The recruiting side threw off strong margins and funded the growth of the furniture company. It also came with a business partner, which Pat says he knew better than to take on. He had learned years earlier that partnerships bring baggage and force you to concede constantly. He compares them to marriages, maybe more complicated. The recruiting partnership eventually broke down, in part because Pat was in his early fifties and his partner was in his early thirties and their risk tolerances no longer matched. Pat reconciled with it, kept the Leap brand, and the company is now focused entirely on furnishings and case goods. Being more focused, he says, has made it a better company.
Financial plans, back against the wall, and calling audibles
The hardest part of the journey was not strategy. It was money. Pat and his wife decided before he bought the business that they could live on her salary, but the reality was tighter than either of them expected, and the stress was heavier. He had two daughters under five, panic attacks, and a stretch where he put his own resume out and took job interviews. He had offers that would have paid him a lot more to go back to corporate America.
He did a gut check and stayed. He also wrote the financial picture down on a single page. Two girls through college in ten years. New cars in eight. A different house in five. He printed it, framed it, and within five years he had checked every box. The fear of failing that list, he says, drove the success.
Pat is direct about what it takes. You have to go all in, or be an investor in someone who is going all in. Tiptoeing does not work. You also have to respect the math. He tells aspiring entrepreneurs to plan for two or three years without much income, model what they can actually live on, and check their ego at the door when friends and neighbors are driving new cars they cannot justify.
His other hard-won lesson is about adjustments. He points to a weekend Mizzou football game where the team barely beat Vanderbilt, and to a Chiefs game where the plan was not working. The best teams call audibles. Business is the same. The plan goes out the window inside an hour, and the person who calls the best audibles usually wins. Mike Tyson said everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face, and Pat thinks most people who quit in year five would have had their real success in year seven if they had stayed in the game.
About Pat Phelan
Pat Phelan is the owner of Leap, a Kansas City based company that supplies restaurant furniture and case goods to national hospitality brands, most of them corporate growth clients opening at least ten units a year. He bought the business in 2006, pivoted it multiple times, and ran a recruiting bolt-on alongside it for about a decade. He is also the author of Leaping Forward, a book of short stories and lessons from eighteen years of ownership. Leap