Sparkle and the Fade: The Rise and Fall of Bean's Power Clean
A lesson in "Buy, Don't Build."
There’s a certain romance to building something from nothing.
The late nights, the early mornings, the adrenaline of the first customer.
It’s intoxicating.
That’s exactly how it felt when we launched Bean’s Power Clean — a dream that Jenelle and I built around our kitchen table, fueled by a desire to create something real, something tangible, something we could touch.
In the beginning, it worked.
We grew faster than we expected.
We built a brand we were proud of, delivered work that spoke for itself, and served customers who genuinely appreciated us.
The community in Raleigh welcomed us warmly, and for a while, the future felt wide open.
But there’s a lesson that experience has a cruel way of teaching you:
Just because you can build it doesn’t mean you should.
I should have listened to Codie Sanchez.
"Buy. Don’t build."
It’s advice that sounded too transactional back then — too clinical for someone who wanted to create something from scratch.
I get it now.
Building from scratch is emotional.
It’s slow.
It’s expensive.
And it drains time, attention, and energy — three things you don’t realize are finite until you run out.
One of the most painful lessons was around people.
Jenelle and I have been spoiled in our professional lives.
We’ve been surrounded by high performers — people who showed up early, stayed late, shared our vision for excellence, and poured themselves into the mission.
We took it for granted that this was normal.
It’s not.
At Bean’s, it was a constant battle just to find people who would show up on time and work as hard as we did.
Hiring, training, and dealing with no-shows became a daily grind that slowly sapped the joy from the work itself.
And then, the stakes got real.
We had an employee get hurt on the job.
Even months later, that individual is still dealing with the fallout — a painful reminder that when you run a business like this, you're carrying more than financial risk.
You're carrying human risk.
The exposure wasn’t limited to employees, either.
Commercial work introduced a new set of liabilities —
Lifts that could crash into buildings.
Subcontractors whose reliability changed with the weather.
Disorganized construction sites where a single mistake could cost thousands.
Every job carried real risk, and every invoice carried personal liability.
One bad day could threaten everything we had worked for.
And then, life changed forever.
Ford arrived.
And as much as we thought we understood the shift that was coming, the reality was far more intense — physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
It became very clear, very quickly, that if we kept pouring daily energy into Bean’s Power Clean, Ford wouldn’t get the attention he deserved.
There was no contest.
When you’re holding your newborn son — and fielding calls about liability waivers, lift damages, and missed shifts — your priorities reorder themselves immediately.
In the end, it wasn’t a business failure.
It was a conscious choice to put our family first.
We realized the cost of keeping Bean’s alive was simply too high.
And it’s important for me to be clear:
While I was proudly involved behind the scenes, Bean’s Power Clean was primarily Jenelle’s business.
I continued leading and delivering at Scaled Agile throughout this journey, fully committed to my work there.
Jenelle deserves full credit for building, running, and ultimately making the tough decision about the business she created.
Along the way, we met some truly amazing people — customers who became friends, mentors who offered advice, neighbors who cheered us on.
Those relationships are something we’ll always treasure.
This journey wasn’t just about hard lessons. It was also about community, connection, and growth.
Looking back, Bean’s Power Clean was a beautiful distraction.
An expensive but invaluable lesson in opportunity cost.
Had we acquired an existing business — with customers, cash flow, and operational maturity already in place — we would have started five steps ahead instead of twenty steps behind.
Instead, we spent time building when we should have been compounding.
The sparkle was real.
But so was the fade.
Ultimately, we made the decision to shut down Bean’s not because it was failing,
but because the future we’re building — for Ford, for our family, and for ourselves — demanded a better foundation.
Looking back, we’re proud.
Proud of what we built.
Proud of the way we served.
Proud of the work ethic and care we poured into every job.
But we’re even more proud of the lesson we learned:
In business — and in life — building isn’t always the flex.
Buying the right thing and making it better is often the real power move.
Next time, we’ll listen to Codie.