The Honest Record of Building Four Things at Once
Dispatch No. 1
Between February and July of this year I built a metals company, finished the working draft of a memoir, stood up an author platform, and turned a corner of my office into a broadcast studio. I did it from my desk in Nyack, between Addison’s orthodontist runs, interviews and everything else a house full of people that lean on me requires.
I want to tell you what that actually took. Not the version that fits on a stage. The real one, with the dollar amounts and the failures left in.
But first, the four things, because each one deserves its own introduction.
The company. Treska Metals is a sourcing business built on the oldest idea in commerce: I know who has material, I know who needs it, and I connect them. No warehouse. No inventory. No taking title to a single pound of steel. Just seventeen years in metals, thirty in sales, and a fee that gets earned before anyone shakes hands. I am the third generation of my family in this industry. My father spent more than fifty years in it and founded two steel companies of his own. When I put my name on this one, I was not starting a business. I was continuing a sentence he started before I was born.
The book. FORGED is the memoir I spent years telling myself I would write someday. This year, someday ran out of road. Fifty one thousand words went to a professional editor, came back restructured into a five act arc, and became a real manuscript with a real path to a real shelf. The book is about the pattern that shaped my life: build it, lose it, build it again. Which means the book and the company are not two projects. They are the same story told in two languages.
The platform. A website, this newsletter, two Instagram accounts, and a professional media presence, all built from nothing, because a book without a way to reach readers is a diary with a very expensive price tag. Every piece of it, the design, the photography direction, the voice you are reading right now, was decided on purpose. Nothing was outsourced to a template.
The studio. The microphone, the backdrop, and the wired earbuds live in a corner of my office, which might be the most honest room in the house. A laserjet and an inkjet. File folders holding a bazillion years of the metals industry on paper, shoulder to shoulder with the folders that run the household. My vision board. Office supplies. A microwave, and a mini fridge stocked with nothing but Celsius. A bug zapper. My crazy art on the walls. Lego kits for when my brain needs somewhere to go that is not work. And a bookshelf that holds my father's ashes and a small memorial to him, so the man who gave me this industry is in the room for every recording I make. The broadcast equipment cost under three hundred fifty dollars. The room cost a lifetime.
Four builds. Five months. One desk.
What it looked like at three in the morning
Now the part the highlight reel always cuts.
I have lived with insomnia for years. I know its moods the way you know a narcissistic ex. But these five months were something else entirely, because the problem was no longer falling asleep. The problem was that I could not turn my brain off, and I have never once in my life been able to walk away from something unfinished. That is not discipline. It is wiring. If a thing is open, it is open in my head, all of it, all night, every filing and follow-up and unanswered email circling like planes over an airport that never clears them to land.
So I worked. I worked until my eyes did not just burn but physically ached, a soreness behind them I could press on with my fingers. I would wake in the dark with a sentence or a fix or a name I had forgotten to write down, and rather than lose it, I would slip into the guest room and voice text notes to myself so I would not wake the house. There are weeks of this year documented in three in the morning voice memos, half whispered, half brilliant, half nonsense.
At the worst of it I was running three machines at once. The desktop carrying the business, the laptop carrying the book, the phone carrying everything else, all of them lit up in front of one woman trying to be a whole company. And underneath all four builds ran a fifth thing I have not mentioned yet: a full job search. Interviews, applications, preparation, follow-ups. The volume outgrew my memory, so I did what I have always done when life gets bigger than my head. I built a system. File folders for every company, every job description, every conversation, so that no opportunity would die of my own disorganization.
I am not telling you this so you will admire it. I am telling you because it is true, and because the fog I am trying to burn off with this series includes the fog around what building actually feels like in the body. It is not a montage. It is bloodshot. Some of it I am proud of. Some of it was simply the price, and I paid it because the alternative, another year of someday, cost more.
Why I am writing this down
Because of the fog.
When people ask how you built something, the answer they usually get is a highlight reel. Somebody standing on a stage saying believe in yourself, as if belief ever configured a DNS record. Somebody posting a launch photo with no mention of the three failed attempts the night before. Somebody selling a course about freedom who will not tell you what their software costs.
I have spent my career in an industry where the numbers are the conversation. Price per pound. Weight per bundle. Lead time in weeks. You cannot fog your way through a metals negotiation, because the other side of the table has a calculator too. I have come to believe the building world deserves the same honesty the buying world demands.
So over the next several dispatches, I am going to open the books on all of it:
What I spent, line by line, and what the total will be by the time FORGED launches. The real number, not a vague gesture at investment.
What I built first and why the order mattered more than the money. There is a reason the trademark came before the website, and it is the most important thing I will write in this whole series.
The one Monday in June when a company that existed only in my head got a domain, an email address, a phone number, and a front door before dinner.
What broke. The emails that vanished into spam folders. The website that failed to launch twice before it launched once. The outreach machine I built with my own hands and then shut off on purpose. The six figure deal I walked away from to protect my name.
The tools, described honestly, including the two most important ones that cost nothing at all.
And the costs that never show up on a ledger. The 4:30 in the morning starts. The particular loneliness of building something before anyone believes it exists.
Who this is for
Maybe you are sitting where I was sitting in February. Between titles, through no fault of your work, staring at a skill set the world keeps insisting must be attached to someone else's letterhead. Maybe you have a manuscript in a drawer or a business in your head, and every article you have read about starting has left you either terrified of the cost or suspicious of how easy everyone makes it look.
This series is for you. Not as inspiration. As information. Belief is free and you already have it or you would not still be reading. What you need is the part nobody hands over: the receipts, the sequence, and the honest account of what it feels like sitting up in bed at midnight when the filing system finally makes sense.
I did not build four things because I am extraordinary. I built them because I finally understood that waiting for the right time is just fear wearing a calendar, and because I have been taken down to the studs enough times to know exactly what I wanted the next foundation made of.
Mine. All of it, mine.
That is the record. It starts next dispatch, with the first and best decision I made all year: protecting the asset before I promoted it.
Julie
