In the late 1990s, Freer Hall was building websites.
That sentence doesn't quite mean what it means today.
The commercial web was still young. Companies were trying to figure out what they could do with it, and people who knew how to build interactive websites and web applications were relatively hard to find.
Freer had started a company called Tec-Con, doing business online as Heywebdude.
For a while, business was very good.
There were employees. Customers around the country. Websites that could sell for $10,000. Increasingly sophisticated web applications. Eventually, a growing amount of work connected to federal programs.
Freer was also regularly turning down well-paying job offers.
Opportunity seemed to be everywhere.
And after years of working something like 70 hours a week, Freer had reached a place he liked.
He wasn't particularly interested in building the biggest web company in town.
He'd discovered something else.
He liked having a business that created a good life.
A comfortable home. Vacations. New cars. Musical instruments. Some toys.
Enough.
Life was pretty good.
And when life stays pretty good for a while, it's surprisingly easy to begin believing that pretty good is simply how life works.
September 11, 2001
Tec-Con's employees worked from home.
That meant Freer sometimes drove around delivering their paychecks.
On the morning of September 11, he had delivered one and was at another employee's house doing the same.
They were standing in the kitchen watching television when the second plane hit the World Trade Center.
Freer was supposed to leave from there and drive into downtown Columbus for a meeting at the federal building about upcoming work.
The phone rang.
Don't come.
The building was being evacuated.
At that moment, nobody was thinking about Tec-Con.
There were much bigger things happening.
But in the days and weeks that followed, another much smaller consequence began to emerge.
Federal projects were being put on hold.
Nobody knew what was happening yet.
Nobody knew what came next.
And the work stopped.
The storm was bigger than one day.
September 11 is the moment Freer remembers.
But the economy surrounding Tec-Con had already begun changing.
The dot-com boom was collapsing.
The country had entered a recession.
Technology companies were under pressure.
Then September 11 added an entirely different kind of uncertainty.
None of those things were within Freer's control.
And initially, he wasn't particularly worried.
In fact, he'd probably describe his younger self as a little cocky about it.
Work had been everywhere for years.
If the federal projects didn't come back immediately, something else would.
If the business didn't generate enough work, there were always those lucrative jobs he'd spent years turning down.
Besides, Freer was exhausted.
He had been working relentlessly since the mid-1990s.
Maybe this wasn't a catastrophe.
Maybe it was an opportunity to take a break.
“How much do I have in savings?”
Freer called his accountant.
He asked how much money he had put away.
The answer, as he remembers it, was essentially:
A bunch.
So Freer did something he hadn't been particularly good at doing.
He stopped.
For roughly three months, he spent time with his family. He rested. He regrouped.
There was another reason that family time felt particularly relevant.
Freer and his wife, Kristen, had three children and had just purchased their first home.
They had closed on it only a week or so before September 11.
The previous owners needed several weeks before moving out, so Freer's family hadn't even moved into their new home when his income essentially stopped.
Still, they kept moving forward.
The assumption was that the pause was temporary.
The world would settle down.
And Freer would go back to work.
The jobs never came back.
After about three months...
Freer started looking again.
Within a couple of weeks, he realized something was seriously wrong.
The opportunities he'd grown accustomed to weren't there.
The federal projects hadn't returned.
Small side jobs helped, but they weren't enough.
Months became a year.
Savings disappeared.
The family came frighteningly close to losing the home they'd just purchased.
Kristen took two jobs to help keep food on the table.
Eventually, Freer took a position with a consulting company for roughly half of what he'd previously been earning.
There were plenty of explanations available.
And most of them were true.
“This wasn't your fault.”
Both of Freer's fathers owned businesses.
Both had lived through difficult economies themselves.
And both gave Freer essentially the same message:
This wasn't your fault.
That mattered.
These were two of the people whose opinions Freer cared about most. Knowing that they didn't see what had happened as his failure gave him some peace.
And Freer agreed with them.
He hadn't caused a recession.
He hadn't caused the technology market to collapse.
He certainly hadn't caused September 11.
But there was another sentence he couldn't shake.
I should have planned better.
Those two thoughts didn't seem contradictory to him.
They still don't.
He knew storms existed.
Freer had lived through the economic turmoil of the 1970s.
He remembered the difficult economy and unemployment of the 1980s.
He had watched both of his fathers operate businesses through changing economic conditions.
He had watched friends and family struggle.
Freer knew economies changed.
He knew good times didn't last forever.
He just hadn't been living as though he knew it.
There were new cars.
Vacations.
Musical instruments.
A new house.
Other things that were enjoyable because the money was there and there was every reason to believe more money would follow.
Success hadn't made Freer unaware that storms existed.
It had made the next storm feel very far away.
How did I get here?
Freer had been asking himself some version of that question since high school.
When something went wrong, his instinct was to work backward.
Not simply:
What happened?
But:
How did I get here?
What decisions came before this one?
Which of them seemed perfectly reasonable at the time?
What assumptions had quietly become facts simply because they'd been true for a while?
And which parts genuinely had nothing to do with him?
Looking backward at Tec-Con didn't make the external circumstances disappear.
It simply revealed that there were things Freer could have done differently.
More reserves.
Less spending.
Less confidence that tomorrow's opportunities would resemble yesterday's.
A life and business better prepared for the possibility that income might suddenly stop.
None of those things could have prevented the storm.
They might have changed what happened when it arrived.
Responsibility isn't the same thing as blame.
That's a distinction Freer has carried forward.
Blame asks:Whose fault was this?
Responsibility asks:What part of this was mine?
Sometimes the answer to the first question really is:
Not mine.
And the answer to the second can still be:
Some of it.
That isn't an invitation to blame ourselves for every terrible thing that happens.
There are storms we don't create.
There are circumstances we cannot anticipate.
There are things other people do that we cannot control.
There is luck.
There is loss.
There is simply life.
But once all of that has been acknowledged, there can still be value in looking at the piece we could influence.
Because that's the piece that can change next time.
The boat looks different now.
Freer would like to say he learned the lesson once and never needed to learn any part of it again.
Life has been somewhat less tidy than that.
But Tec-Con changed something.
Today, Freer and Kristen live pretty frugally.
Their home and property are owned outright.
There is still debt Freer would rather not have. Savings is still something he thinks they could do better.
There isn't a financial-perfection story hiding here.
The objective is simpler than that.
Build a life in which losing a job doesn't have to mean losing the life around it.
The boat doesn't need to be unsinkable.
It just needs to be built with a little more respect for the possibility of weather.
The storm was real.
Freer couldn't control it.
His fathers were right.
It wasn't his fault.
And Freer was right too.
He could have built a better boat.
Both things can be true.
A question to carry forward
When something goes wrong, how much time do we spend asking who caused the storm—and how much time examining the boat?