Jason Haugen has bought and sold more companies than most people will work for.

He grew up watching his parents run about forty of them — they helped start Costa Vida and owned the Utah franchises, and built a few hundred million dollars of commercial real estate in South Ogden. At 18 he went looking for his own identity in network marketing. By 2018 he and his dad had bought an RV dealership doing $12 million a year and making nothing on it. They made it profitable in twelve months, then ran it to $110 million.

Then interest rates went from 3.25% to 11.5% with $59 million of inventory on the floor. $700,000 a month in interest. A bank that could call and ask for $2.5 million the same day, on the morning his CFO told him there was $100,000 in the account.

Jason's answer to how he handled it goes back to a mountainside when he was 18, watching his father walk down to a brother everyone thought was dead and say four words that became the operating principle for everything after.

He sold in 2024. Then came the part nobody warns you about: the identity was gone, the planes were gone, and most of the circle went with them.

Also in this one: how a joke at a golf retreat turned into acquiring Wedge Golf, why Datos monitors 305 million people without storing a single record, what SOC 2 actually costs, and why he'd rather run a $100K-a-month company well than a million-dollar one badly.