Stacie Grissom and Sean Wilson lived in New York City for almost a decade, and then the covid-19 pandemic hit.

In early 2020, Grissom was pregnant with their first child and working in marketing at BarkBox, while Wilson was working as an orthopedic surgeon in NYC hospitals.

Seeing the state of the city during that time made Grissom realize she was ready to move back to Franklin, Indiana, their hometown, which is about 30 miles from downtown Indianapolis.

“We had a reevaluation that it’s the people who matter the most, so we wanted to move back to our hometown to be by our families,” Grissom tells CNBC Make It.

“We got our chosen family in New York, and it’s the best city in the world, but we had to go where our family was.”

A couple of months after their son was born, Grissom contacted a realtor friend in Franklin and told him to start looking at “weird old houses.”

“I told him the quirkier, the better, and to send us a fixer-upper,” Grissom says. “His dad saw a school for sale and immediately said, ‘Send it to Stacie.’”

Since Grissom and Wilson were still in New York City at the time, they asked her parents to check out the property instead.

Grissom says the building was a school for local children between 1914 and 1934. After the schoolhouse closed, it was used as a barn.

Since Grissom’s dad had experience running a commercial real estate business, she knew he would give her an honest and expert opinion on the school’s state.

After getting her parents’ approval, Grissom and Wilson made an offer on the schoolhouse without ever seeing it in person themselves — and it was accepted within 24 hours.

“We wouldn’t have bought it if my parents hadn’t agreed because we knew with this kind of project we were going to need the entire village,” she says.

A week after Grissom and Wilson closed on the former schoolhouse, they saw it in person for the first time.

“I think back then I was a lot more naive than I am today, but I was so excited to see it and its potential,” Grissom says. “You could see that there could be giant windows, tall ceilings, and open spaces for a big family to come together around the holidays.”

“It’s like a Midwestern castle in the middle of some cornfields of Indiana. It’s a beautiful little brick building that is home now,” she adds.

After the couple closed on the former schoolhouse, the real work began. By the fall of 2021, the couple got the school down to its bare bones, but a renovation they thought would take two years ended up taking three.

The couple was still living in New York City at the time.

“Things were a little slow to get going but then the new roof started going in February 2022 and things started to move but it ended up taking us three years because we were basically building a new house inside an old shell of a building,” Grissom says.

Grissom declined to comment on how much the couple spent on the renovation but says they are still getting through it and not completely done yet.

While cleaning out the property, the couple and their contractors found random things, including a board that would hold old chalkboards with the words “Chicken coop” written on it.

“It was really cool to see because this is such a beautiful little school built by farmers for the kids in this rural area. The community was really proud of the school,” Grissom says.

Though the couple had to almost start from scratch with the schoolhouse, they were able to keep the floors in one classroom, all of the brick, the original doors and a water fountain that they are trying to restore.

“The time it took was definitely a big challenge and having to renovate from afar was tough. I don’t think we were naïve going into it, but now I know we’re not renovating anything again after this,” Grissom says. “We did it, and we’re glad we’ve gone through, but no more old buildings for a while.”

Despite how hard the renovation was for the couple, Grissom says her favorite part was getting to work alongside her dad.

“It’s been really cool to go through my dad’s renovation boot camp, from how to work with other contractors to how to do the work ourselves. We learned a lot of trade-like things over the three years,” she adds.

To pay homage to the former school, the couple used the same colors that were originally painted on the walls back when the school was still open. Grissom also made two mosaics for the entrances with the name of the school and its date of creation.

Of the décor, Grissom says they’re “trying to get as much school furniture as we can put back into the school.”

Grissom admits that nothing about the renovation has been easy, but a highlight of the experience has been being able to focus full-time on being a content creator and sharing the schoolhouse journey on social media.

“It has been fun to document this process and find this old home renovation community online. I never thought my house could be a job,” she says. “It’s nice to be able to make an income from some of the storytelling while also getting advice and having a community of people who like restoring old stuff.”

Amid ongoing renovations, the couple and their now two kids moved into the home in September of this year.

“Moving into the schoolhouse was easier than moving into any New York City apartment we ever had,” Grissom says. “It was nice to wake up and see the sunrise over the cornfields. It will be a tornado in here for a while, but it was really crazy to finally set up a place that we’ve been thinking about for three years and pouring all of our money, energy, sweat, and tears into.”

The schoolhouse now has four bedrooms and two and a half baths, all on the 4,000-square-foot upper level. The couple still has a lower 4,000-square-foot sub-basement that they are trying to figure out what to do with.

The best part of finally moving into the schoolhouse and being back in their hometown, Grissom says is that her kids will grow up around their families.

“After living through the pandemic and all of the stress and anxiety, we all had a confrontation with our mortality at a much earlier age than most generations do and that totally shifted stuff in my brain. It’s beautiful to see my parents are healthy, our kids are happy and just appreciate the small things,” she adds.

Since moving in a few weeks ago, Grissom says that while she realizes it was a long road to move in, she would go through it again.

“I never want to lose the naivete of whatever made us say that we wanted to buy a school and it was going to be our house,” she says.

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When Todd Graves and Craig Silvey came up with the idea for a restaurant in southern Louisiana that only sold chicken fingers, they probably didn’t expect to get the lowest grade in a startup-pitching assignment for Silvey’s LSU undergraduate business class — or to get rejected for bank loans when they tried to make it a reality.

Yet the concept, which eventually became Raising Cane’s Chicken Fingers, propelled Graves to his debut Tuesday on the Forbes 400, a ranking of America’s richest people. He’s reportedly the country’s 107th-richest person, with an estimated net worth of $9.5 billion, largely driven by his ownership stake in Raising Cane’s.

“If people tell you something can’t be done, it makes you strive so much more to do it,” Graves, now 52 and the company’s co-CEO, told students at Nicholls State University in 2009.

To raise enough money to open the fast-food chain’s first location in 1996, Graves moved to California from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to work 90-hour weeks in an oil refinery — and, later, fish for salmon in Alaska — according to the company’s website.

He spent between $40,000 and $50,000 of his own money, plus roughly $100,000 from friends, family and a Small Business Administration loan, to get his restaurant off the ground, he told the “Trading Secrets” podcast in May

Today, Raising Cane’s — named after Graves’ yellow lab Raising Cane — has more than 800 locations internationally and brought in $3.7 billion in net sales last year, a company spokesperson tells CNBC Make It. Graves owns more than 90 percent of the company, and has no plans to take it public or sell his stake to private investors, he said.

“I want my kids in the business to be able to carry our values on after their mom and I are gone,” said Graves. “They can turn this into a worldwide business and continue to grow.”

When Graves and Silvey — who left the business in 1999 — opened their first location in Baton Rouge, Graves had zero business management skills, he said. He worked seven days per week at the restaurant, from opening at 8 a.m. to closing at 3:30 am the next morning, he added.

As the company grew, Graves figured out how to recruit employees and develop leaders on the fly, he said: “I was building a plane while I was flying it.”

Most entrepreneurs finance their businesses with a mix of debt and equity. Graves relied almost exclusively on loans when starting out, he told the “How I Built This” podcast in 2022. He’d offer private investors a 15% interest rate on a loan, which he’d then use to secure additional funding from community banks that treated the debt as equity, he said.

In retrospect, the approach was “stupid,” and nearly cost him the business when Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana in 2005 — shutting down 21 of his 28 storefronts in the Baton Rouge area — but it allowed him to maintain his ownership stake while growing his company, he said.

“Debt to equity, you should have proper balances in your business, and that helps you get through tough times like a major hurricane — but I levered everything,” said Graves, who credited his business’ survival to reopening as much as he could quickly after Katrina passed. “Luckily I lived through that, but that’s when I really learned to balance risk.”

The company — which turned 28 this year and is on its third real-life yellow lab mascot, Raising Cane III — had its first billion-dollar quarter in sales earlier this year and is on track to finish 2024 with nearly $5 billion in sales, says the Raising Cane’s spokesperson.

Contrary to the company’s hard-charging early expansion, Graves now preaches the value of not rushing into opportunities or growing too quickly at his brand’s expense, he told “Trading Secrets.”

“The vision of Raising Cane’s is to someday have locations all over the world, and be the brand for crave-able chicken finger meals, great crew, cool culture and active community involvement,” Graves said. “You have to stay disciplined, because if you are successful, opportunities are crazy, and you can grow it towards something not special at all.”

His outlook echoes advice from other successful entrepreneurs. Kind Snacks founder Daniel Lubetzky and Vuori CEO Joe Kudla advocate for taking a step back to self-reflect before big decisions, and Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck says he takes his time to analyze any potential opportunity.

“Sometimes, you can take big risks. Sometimes, you need to be very safe and methodical about how to back out of situation,” Beck told Make It last year. “Control the things you can control and acknowledge the things you can’t control.”

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Love can be measured in many ways. For Mark Cuban, it was all about a simple 100% USDA beef patty slider.

When Cuban married his wife, Tiffany Stewart, he’d been a billionaire for roughly three years. He had one question for her before they tied the knot, he told the “Club Shay Shay” podcast last week: Would she go to White Castle with him?

“We’re going to White Castle, and if you really love me, you’ll eat a White Castle burger,” said Cuban, 66. “And she did.”

The couple met in 1997, seven years after Cuban sold his software startup MicroSolutions to CompuServe for $6 million. He became a billionaire in 1999, selling his second company Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in an all-stock deal.

But Cuban wasn’t always rich: He grew up in Pittsburgh in a working-class family, where his dad made a maximum of $40,000 a year upholstering cars. His mom worked “odd jobs” to make ends meet, he said. He attended Indiana University, where White Castles were “everywhere,” he added.

Sharing that piece of his early life with Stewart probably built trust between the couple, says Robert Wickham, a relationships expert and associate professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University.

Asking your partner if they’ll go to White Castle with you isn’t a one-way ticket to true love — anyone could agree to eat a burger — but their relationship likely benefited from Stewart’s reaction, Wickham says.

″[Cuban is] thinking, ‘OK, this person is in it for me. She wants to know me more,’” Wickham tells CNBC Make It. “She’s in it for the right reasons.”

Twenty-two years and three children later, Cuban and Stewart are still married.

In the early stages of a romantic relationship, partners look for signs of authenticity to gauge each other’s trustworthiness says Wickham. It’s a precursor to a more satisfying, intimate relationship, his research shows.

“Openness in a relationship, right from the get-go, tends to facilitate the authentic development of intimacy, trust and all the good things that are a part of fulfilling relationships,” Wickham says.

If you frame a question like Cuban’s as a test, you might not get very far: “Testing” your partner isn’t exactly the epitome of openness or vulnerability.

But if you share an unexpected or important part of your life with someone you care about, and they reciprocate, you might be on the right track. The more open and vulnerable you are with your partner, the more you can foster a positive cycle of trust and intimacy, says Wickham.

“It feeds into this virtuous cycle where there’s nothing hidden, there’s nothing covert about your motives or about what’s going on, everything’s on the table,” he says.

The advice extends beyond romantic relationships: Building trust by being yourself can lead to more successful friendships and business relationships, says Wickham. If your manager trusts you, they might give you important tasks more freely, for example.

“Much of what goes on is built on trust and relationships,” Wickham says. “Authenticity is generally a good thing.”

Disclosure: CNBC owns the exclusive off-network cable rights to “Shark Tank,” which features Mark Cuban as a panelist.

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When Jyoti Bansal made “the hardest decision” of his career — selling his software startup AppDynamics for billions — he did it with his employees in mind.

In 2017, AppDynamics was days away from going public when communications tech giant Cisco swooped in and offered to buy the business for $3.7 billion. As the startup’s founder and chairman, Bansal would’ve become wealthy either way — but only one of his two options guaranteed the same for many of his staffers, he says.

Upon Bansal’s acceptance of the offer, roughly 400 AppDynamics employees saw their shares of the company rise in value to at least $1 million, a spokesperson for Bansal says. “We had dozens of employees with $5 million-plus outcomes. These are life-changing outcomes,” Bansal tells CNBC Make It.

The decision to sell ultimately came down to a handful of factors, like the fit of AppDynamic’s software products within Cisco and how a sale would affect the startup’s nearly 1,200 employees, both culturally and financially, Bansal says.

He also compared his own post-IPO projections to Cisco’s valuation of the startup, to weigh which option was smarter monetarily. Reaching a $3.7 billion market capitalization would’ve taken “three [to] four years of great execution,” he estimates, adding: “That means three [to] four years of risk that we … reduced for all of the employees there. [That’s] a significant impact.”

After the sale, Bansal actually regretted his choice, he told Make It on Monday: He believed that he could’ve kept growing AppDynamics, and felt aimless without a startup to run. Today, he’s the CEO and co-founder of two other software startups, Traceable and Harness, the latter of which was most recently valued at $3.7 billion in 2022.

Still, selling was the right decision based on the information he had at the time, he says. The deal was financially significant for him too, he adds: Bansal owned more than 14% of the company, according to an SEC filing.

“As the founder, it was much more than life-changing money for me, personally,” Bansal says. “I would be in a good place. So that was a factor for me, but not the biggest factor. The biggest for me was our employees.”

Startup founders don’t always take their employees into serious consideration when debating whether or not to sell their companies, so it’s notable when they do. When cloud cybersecurity firm Zscaler got acquired by VeriSign for $70 million in 1998, the startup’s founder and CEO Jay Chaudhry didn’t realize just how impactful the sale was for his employees until he left a company-wide party celebrating the windfall, he told Make It in July.

At least 70 of the company’s 80 employees became millionaires on paper when VeriSign’s stock soared two years later, Chaudhry said.

“People were going crazy in the company, because they had never thought of so much money,” said Chaudhry. “A lot of them were buying new houses. They were buying new cars. I know one guy, he took six months off, rented a [mobile home] and went around the country. They could do what they wanted to do.”

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What if there were something you could do to help your child succeed in life, but you weren’t doing it yet? 

I’m talking about helping your child become mentally stronger, which is easy to overlook with everything else that demands your parental attention. But it’s more essential than ever, given that kids face so many triggers for self-doubt, fear, and anxiety, and so many barriers to resilience, focus, and positivity.

I’ve been studying mental strength for three decades. That work recently culminated in my book “The Mentally Strong Leader.” And I’ve applied my findings both to help adults and to help parents assist their kids. 

I’ve seen firsthand the impact that teaching mental strength can have: My own daughter, who learned to handle the challenging environments of middle and high school with resilience and confidence, was able to successfully transition into college and the “real world.”

You, too, can help your kids become confident, resilient, positive-minded problem-solvers. It starts by nurturing their mental strength in these six ways.

If you have kids, you’ve likely endured a barrage of “Why?” questions: “Why, Mommy?” “Why do we have to do that, Daddy?” “But why?” 

Take that inquisitive spirit and put it to good use. Teach kids to be good problem solvers by using the Five Whys analytical approach pioneered by Japanese inventor and industrialist Sakichi Toyoda, whose son established the automaker Toyota. 

Foster kids’ instinct to keep asking, “Why?” until they get to the root of a problem. Often, the root cause emerges around the fifth repetition of the question.

Say they aren’t getting their allowance this week, for example, which is a problem for them. Help them get analytical as follows, maybe even making a game out of it:

• Why aren’t you getting your allowance? Because you didn’t wash the dishes like you said you would.
• Why didn’t you wash the dishes? Because you played video games instead.
• Why were you playing video games when you knew you shouldn’t be? Because you didn’t put them away. They were in front of the TV, ready to go.
• Why didn’t you put them away when I told you to? Because you weren’t listening.
• Why weren’t you listening? Because that’s a bad habit you need to work on.

The point is, problem-solving starts by digging into why an issue occurred, so you can address the root cause. Help your child build this habit when they’re analyzing any problem, and you help them become mentally stronger. 

Kids seek their parents’ approval. It’s natural. But approval-seeking becomes unhealthy when it turns into a constant search for external validation. You can begin to migrate away from your authentic self. 

Help your children measure their performance against their own expectations rather than seeking a stamp of approval from other people.  

Instead of determining if they lived up to someone else’s standards, encourage them to consider: “Did I accomplish what I set out to do?” and “Am I becoming a better version of myself?” 

You probably already know that it’s smart to put limits on how much time your kids spend on social media — and how much time you spend on there, too. That doesn’t make it easy.

As you talk with your kids about the social media they do encounter, remind them not to compare their bloopers to everyone else’s highlight reels. Help them understand that influencers often post carefully tailored impressions that don’t reflect real life, and that they shouldn’t hold themselves to the impossible standards they come across. 

Encourage them to view social media as largely entertainment, rather than a measuring stick. This can help prevent or at least soften feelings of inadequacy that might otherwise arise. 

When kids focus too much on the outcome of their efforts, it can lead to perfectionism. Instead, teach them to fall in love with the process. 

Especially when they’re encountering setbacks in their efforts, ask them:

• “Are you learning along the way here?” 
• “Are you having fun?” 
• “Are you growing and improving?” 

That’s the real victory, and by asking these questions, you help them focus on the positives of the journey.  

By no means am I saying they shouldn’t strive for a great outcome. But becoming overzealous about results can eat away at kids’ mental strength because so many factors besides effort can influence the outcome.  

It’s important to help keep children from falling into a victim mentality, which can make them feel and act as if they’re powerless. Here’s one key question to ask them in such times: “Do you just want things to change, or do you want to change them?”

The former is passive and can induce prolonged periods of wallowing in the sense that “it’s not fair.” The latter is proactive and helps turn your kids into change-leaders. That can build up their mental strength. 

A great source of anxiety for kids can come from worrying about things they can’t change. 

You can conduct “Control Checks” with them. Ask them to write down all the things they’re worried about. Then ask them to circle only what they can control and discuss with them how they could do something about those items. 

Mental strength has a lot to do with putting your energy where it serves you best. This exercise works to narrow down a kid’s universe of worry and helps them put energy toward taking action that will improve their circumstance, which can further ease their worry. 

Scott Mautz is a popular speaker, trainer, and LinkedIn Learning instructor. He’s a former senior executive of Procter & Gamble, where he ran several of the company’s largest multi-billion-dollar businesses. He is the author of ”The Mentally Strong Leader: Build the Habits to Productively Regulate Your Emotions, Thoughts, and Behaviors.” Follow him on LinkedIn.

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