My Story

I grew up in North Haven, Connecticut. Bikes in the street, a Nintendo 64 in a friend's garage, and a brain that was always hunting for the next thing to feel, and the next thing to figure out.

I took things apart because that's how I learn how they work. Early on I couldn't always put them back together. I got better at that.

Christmas and birthdays, people tended to get me Legos. I followed every kit step by step and built exactly what the box told me to build. When it was finished, I didn't care. The finished thing was never where my brain got the hit, it was the building, the figuring it out, the problem to solve. Still is. So I'd take the kit apart and feed the pieces into an ongoing project: a Lego battleship on a folding table in my bedroom. It started small. By the end I needed a six-foot table. I wish I had a photograph of it. Back then we only photographed the moments that felt significant. Little did I know how significant that battleship would turn out to be.

School never got that kind of attention from me. I hated it, not in the softened “I learn differently” way people say now. Homework felt worthless, and I was stubborn about anything I didn't value, so I did the minimum and aimed for invisible: not failing loud enough to become a problem, not succeeding loud enough to get called on. The middle was safest. My GPA was a 1.6. I never took the SATs. Nobody wondered whether I was going to college.

We weren't the wealthiest family in North Haven. The cars were a little older. Those Lego kits on Christmas and birthdays were the exception. Outside of that, if I wanted something, I wasn't handed it. I was handed a path. Opportunities to make a few dollars: work, odd jobs, whatever I could find. Other kids had things I wanted. I had a way to get them.

So I ironed my money. Whatever I managed to earn, I pressed the bills flat with an iron and kept them in a careful stack. Not because I cherished money. I didn't then and I don't now. Because I understood its value. Scarcity will teach you that faster than any lecture. Money was the means. The thing between me and whatever I was trying to get next. The bills were the first thing that got that care. They wouldn't be the last.

I was fourteen when I started selling drugs. It wasn't about the money. I identified a demand, so I found a supply, it kept my own costs low, and I liked how it felt to be the connect. The guy everybody called. Demand, supply, being the one who delivers: the same wiring that runs my company today, pointed at the worst possible market.

I was sixteen the first time I used opiates. I'm not going to dress that up, and I'm not going to make it darker than it was. The truth, the part nobody wants to say out loud, is that it felt like a key turning in a lock. A brain that never once sat still, sat still.

That feeling doesn't come free. It cost me four and a half years.

Opiates. Cocaine. Whatever was available. There's no montage for those years and I'm not going to write one, because addiction isn't cinematic, it's boring. The same day on repeat, each one slightly worse than the last. The bills I used to press flat with an iron went. The trust went. The people went. So did the jobs: an HVAC company fired me, and the Dairy Queen I landed at after that, my last job before detox, fired me too. By twenty, everything I owned fit in a duffel bag again, the same bag that ends this story where it started.

I walked into that detox on New Year's Day and I never walked back out into the old life.

After detox I spent months in sober living, a few different houses, not one neat chapter. What I hadn't figured out yet was who I was without the drugs.

Before them, I didn't really know. Socially anxious. Trying to blend into whatever room I was in, and not very good at it. A brain I didn't have a name for yet, conforming to my surroundings because I didn't know who I should be. Drugs pulled me out of that shell. Suddenly I wasn't as afraid to say what I thought or do what I wanted. An amplified Kevin, maybe a false glimpse, maybe a real one. I still don't fully know. What I know is that when the substances left, that version left with them, and I had to build a person who could stand without them.

I think I was a good person at heart. I also know I hurt a lot of people. I don't regret the decisions that got me here, not the drugs, not the turns. The only thing I regret is the damage. Starting over meant taking what I liked about myself and trying to run it sober: social without a substance, alone without hating the company, rebuilding a life where it wasn't all about me. Nobody expected a thing from me, which meant every expectation I met from then on was one I had set myself.

A few months after rehab, the people around me were digging for the why. Why I'd reached for drugs. Was I depressed? That's when a psychiatrist diagnosed me with ADHD.

Here's the part that doesn't get said enough: after years of flooding your brain with substances, your dopamine system doesn't bounce back on day one. You're left flat. It looks a lot like depression. I'm not a doctor, this is what happened to me.

He explained dopamine dysregulation. Why my brain idled rough and revved clean. Why opiates had felt like a key turning in a lock, because for a brain wired like mine, chemically, they almost were. Then he handed me a prescription.

I never filled it. I still haven't. I had just spent four and a half years learning what happens when I outsource how I feel to a substance, and I wasn't going to open the new life by doing it again with a co-signature. Plenty of people do well on medication, this was a line I drew for myself, not advice for you. But I drew it, and I've held it.

What I did instead was file away everything he told me and start building a system. Not a finished protocol, something that keeps evolving. ADHD doesn't hand you a cure you run forever; it hands you a direction. I'm still moving in it. That work lives at The Brain.

In January 2017 I joined my uncle's calibration business, brand new to the trade, having never calibrated anything in my life. He was an owner-operator out of East Falmouth, Massachusetts, working out of the back of his vehicle. One man, a great business, customers he treated extremely well and who knew it. I spent two years learning beside him, traveling from customer to customer: the instruments, the customers, the trade.

In 2019 I took over, and I brought the company from East Falmouth, Massachusetts, to North Haven, Connecticut. I started the way the work had always started, out of the back of my car , and out of my basement. Then I built the lab myself. In 2023 I moved into the build-out. I grew what he built 5×, past $1 million a year, into Custom Calibration.

I have employees who count on me, which is a sentence I don't write casually, there was a version of me nobody would have trusted with a twenty-dollar bill. I work on the business now, not just in it. How that actually works, the numbers, the decisions, lives at The Business. The software I'm building to run it lives at Building.

I married Rosanna in 2015: all four-foot-eleven of her, talks constantly, best decision I ever made. We have two daughters: one who overthinks everything exactly the way I do, and one who is so stubborn she won't put her shoes on before school and is going to be completely unstoppable because of it.

My days start at 5am. My spice drawer is organized with a precision most people find slightly alarming. I 3D-print custom Tupperware organizers. I wear an Oura ring and check it obsessively. Ketogenic diet, eighteen-hour fasts, those are the levers that actually fit my life. Fifteen to twenty grams of creatine a day, for the brain, not the biceps.

Here's where this goes, stated plainly: I want to build Custom Calibration into something my uncle would be proud of, and something my employees are proud to be part of. My goal is for it to be one of the largest calibration companies in the Northeast, and I check myself that the goal is ambition, not fear of leaving well enough alone. I want to acquire companies. I want to launch new ones. I'm writing two books along the way, the story and the system, and I'm doing all of it out loud, one honest post a week.

I'm 38years old. I have been clean since the first minute of January 1, 2009. I'm enjoying every second of it.