There is no person in this life that I have worked with that has taught me more about business than Glenn Davenport. He is an amazing individual.

Glenn Davenport didn't go to college. He started at the ground level of Morrison Restaurants. They asked him to move (often) and he moved. His journey took him to Saudi Arabia. The personal sacrifices he made to advance his career were significant.

They spun off Morrison Restaurants into Morrison Restaurants, Ruby Tuesday, and Morrison Management Specialists which was essentially their healthcare arm before healthcare was healthcare. When they did, he became CEO of Morrison Management Specialists.

Even becoming CEO was not particularly easily handed to him by most standards. He had to take great personal risk when taking that position. But he did it well. He took them public, ran them as a public company, and then re-privatized them. Few get to do one of those things, let alone all three.

He also sat on the board of other publicly traded companies including Cracker Barrel and Team Health.

But more than all that Glenn Davenport is a great man. A great father. A great grandfather. A great boss. A great friend.

It is the greatest privilege of my professional career at this point to have gotten to spend 14 years with him (and continue to get to spend time with him).

I learned how to run a company from him. Learned how to read a P&L. Learned about the importance of EBITDA. That's just the start. While Glenn may not have taught me a lot about technology, everything else there is to running a business, he taught me.

Early on before Glenn became who was in my life, his CFO at that time was a guest on the talk radio show I was producing. We were doing a show on adoption. His CFO was adopted. He eventually tracked down his parents. This narrative fed into the nature of that episode.

I don't remember a lot about that show. But I remember walking into the radio station on October 22, 2006 like it was yesterday. Allen Hunt asked the CFO something along the lines of, "why do you like working with Glenn?" And his CFO said, "when I first started working with Glenn I remember him saying 'we don't confuse effort and results.' And I knew that was a man I could go work for as that is how I saw business as well."

A book could be filled with the amount of core values Glenn Davenport taught me over the years. I had to stop at eight, and I had to pick one for him, and I was just drawn back to that foundational moment before all this really got started.

We are not going to be people who judge performance based on effort, as tempting as that is. Likewise, if something gets results with less effort, that's a cause worth striving for.

Thank you, Glenn Davenport. We will strive to be like you.