Jared Bruno

08/17/2026

Owning a business has taught me a lot.

Some lessons just cost more than others.

Here are 5 things I’ve had to learn the hard way:

1️⃣ Revenue and profit are two very different things.
You can have orders coming in, employees working, machines running—and still wonder where the hell all the money went.

2️⃣ More employees don’t always mean less work.
I thought building a team meant eventually removing myself from the day-to-day. I’ve learned that payroll only makes sense when every position produces enough value to justify it.

3️⃣ Being busy can hide a lot of problems.
A packed schedule feels like success. But if you’re underpricing jobs, carrying too much overhead, or doing work at crappy margins, being busier can actually make things worse.

4️⃣ Nobody will care about your business as much as you do.
You can hire great people and give them responsibility, but at the end of the day, you’re the one whose name is on the loan, whose money is at risk, and who loses sleep when the numbers don’t work.

5️⃣ Buying yourself a job isn’t the same as building a business.
This one hit the hardest.

If the company can’t eventually operate profitably without me constantly stepping in, then I haven’t built what I set out to build yet.

Still learning. Still fixing things. Still showing up.

Business owners—what’s one lesson you had to learn the hard way?

08/15/2026

One of the biggest ways you can support our small business doesn’t cost you anything — just send good people our way.

If you know a business, school, organization, team, nonprofit, or anyone else that needs custom apparel, introduce them to Big T’s.

And yes… we’ll actually pay you for the referral. 💵

If they become a new customer and place an order, you’ll receive a cash referral reward based on the size of their order.

A simple introduction can go a long way for a local, family-owned business like ours. I appreciate every single person who recommends Big T’s!

👉 gobigts.com/referrals

08/15/2026

☕🇺🇸 The first Coffee & Community is officially in the books.

This morning we opened the doors at Zero Hour USA and Big T’s for the first of what we hope becomes a long-running monthly tradition here in Pflugerville.

We had some coffee, ate some breakfast, and had some genuinely good conversation.

We’re starting small — and that’s okay. Community isn’t built overnight. It’s built by getting people together, making connections, and then doing it again.

So that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Every third Saturday. Same place. Same idea.

No politics. No agenda. No sales pitch.

Just good coffee, great people, and honest conversations.

Thanks to everyone who supported our first one. We’ll see you next month. ☕🇺🇸

08/15/2026

08/11/2026

Third bookkeeper in 12 months.

Same conversation.

“We found some problems with your books.”

Again.

One of the biggest lessons I’m learning while building a business is that hiring someone to handle something doesn’t mean you get to stop paying attention to it.

You can delegate the work.

You can’t delegate the responsibility.

So we clean it up, fix the systems, learn from it, and keep building.

This is the part of entrepreneurship that doesn’t make the highlight reel.

But it’s part of the journey.