...and I’ve been revising ever since.

When I launched Scout Lease, I knew what I wanted it to feel like—but not always how to build it. I found someone on Fiverr to help with the first website. Paid $1,200 for a decent-looking homepage, a thrown-together “Meet the Team,” and a bunch of backend features I didn’t know how to connect. It was built in WordPress using Elementor, and looked just good enough… after I went in and personally fixed as much as I could, manually.

No blog. No CRM integration. Just a form that maybe worked—if I remembered to check it. I’d manually plug leads into HubSpot and hope nothing slipped through the cracks.

And the thing is—I had big plans. I got the gear. I had a vision for content, systems, social, outreach, a whole ecosystem. But I was overconfident in how much I could actually execute while also keeping the business alive, helping renters, and figuring out the backend of an entirely new company. I underestimated the time it takes not just to do something well—but to do it sustainably.

So I stayed up late. I manually tracked leads. I tried to fix what I could. There were nights I’d be in the WordPress dashboard reformatting buttons and spacing, line by line, just to make it usable. And at the time, I was proud of it—not because it was what I envisioned, but because I was holding the whole thing together while actually helping people find apartments and keeping the business alive.

That site wasn’t built right—but it still launched.
Not because it was ready.
Because I needed to start.

The rest of the year felt similar: figure it out as you go. There were days I felt on top of things, and others where I wondered if any of this was working. I learned how to build systems, delegate better, track what mattered, and let go of what didn’t. Sometimes I made progress. Other times I just patched holes.

But that’s what running a business is—it's not just building once, it’s rebuilding constantly. Rewriting how you do things because you finally understand them differently. Getting clearer on what you want by living through what you don’t.

A year in, I finally rebuilt the website myself—this time on my own terms, with a little more skill and a much better understanding of what Scout Lease is actually here to do. But the new site isn’t the point. It’s just the latest revision. There will be more.

That first site? A rough draft.
This new one? Better—but not final.
The company? Still learning, still improving, still figuring it out.

Because most of this—the systems, the service, the vision, the team, even the writing of this piece—won’t ever really be done. Let's see if I can get it live by this Friday.