I Built a $9M Company And Got Nothing
Moneywise
Hampton
4.7 • 701 Ratings
🗓️ 18 November 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stop making million-dollar decisions alone. Hampton gives you a personal board of eight vetted founders in your city who meet monthly to tackle your hardest problems. Find your group: joinhampton.com
Kevin Bartchlett built a $9M compost toilet company from the ground up – and walked away with nothing. No contract, no payout, just a handshake. That blind faith turned into a hard lesson in trust that cost him everything – and now, the reason he’s rebuilding on his own terms.
Here’s what we talk about:
- Building a $9M business from scratch – with zero equity in writing
- The moment he realized his million-dollar payday was gone
- How a $9M sale turned into $0 overnight
- What “sweat equity” really means when it’s only a handshake
- How trusting the wrong partner cost him ownership and peace of mind
- Why he still refuses to be angry about it
- What he’s building next (yep, it involves flying cars)
- The lesson behind it all: if you’re going to bet on yourself, go all in
Cool Links:
- Hampton https://www.joinhampton.com/
- Lower Street https://www.lowerstreet.co/
- Kevin Bartchlett https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-a-bartchlett-262233ba/
Sponsors:
- Get a team of AI agents that run compliance for you at delve.co/moneywise
- Achieve your dream body with dailybodycoach.com/moneywise
- Join 700+ founders hiring A-players in Latin America at hirewithnear.com/moneywise
Chapters:
- (1:58) Building a Compostable Toilet Empire – The Dream of a Big Exit
- (3:22) When Expectations & Reality Collide
- (4:24) Picking Up the Pieces: What Happens After the Deal
- (6:01) The True Cost of Not Getting It in Writing
- (9:41) Why Compostable Toilets?
- (11:21) Meeting His Future Partner & Early Roles
- (14:56) Overinvested, Under-Rewarded: The Ownership Dilemma
- (20:28) Chasing Success, Counting the Cost
- (22:28) The Road to Resignation
- (24:49) Finding Empathy for His Partner
- (27:02) New Ventures: Flying Cars
- (29:12) Reflections – Betting on Yourself
This podcast is a ridiculous concept: high-net-worth people reveal their personal finances. Inspired by real conversations happening in the Hampton community.
Your Host: Harry Morton
- Founder of Lower Street, a podcast production company helping brands launch and grow top-tier podcasts.
- Co-parents a cow named Eliza.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | If you've ever gone through a compliance audit, you know it's rough. |
| 0:03.9 | Screenshots, spreadsheets, constant back and forth with auditors, it's a total time suck. |
| 0:08.6 | That's why I was so impressed when I saw what Delves doing. |
| 0:11.5 | They built the first AI native compliance platform, built for startups and scale-ups that want to use |
| 0:16.3 | AI agents to automate SOC2, ISO, HIPAA, and all the other stuff nobody wants to deal with. |
| 0:22.5 | The agents do the annoying parts for you. They take screenshots automatically, keep an eye on your |
| 0:27.1 | tech stack for security gaps, fill out the security questionnaires, customers send over, |
| 0:31.8 | even spin-up data rooms for prospects and auditors. So you can stop wasting hours chasing screenshots |
| 0:36.9 | and start focusing on building your product. |
| 0:39.5 | Over 1,000 of the fastest growing companies |
| 0:41.5 | are already using Delve to get compliant faster |
| 0:44.1 | and stay that way. |
| 0:45.8 | If you want to finally get this stuff off your plate, |
| 0:48.1 | go to delve.co slash moneywise. |
| 0:50.9 | They're giving Moneywise listeners $1,000 off any compliance framework with the code MoneyWise 1K. |
| 0:56.4 | So that's delve.com slash MoneyWise and use the code MoneyWise 1K. |
| 1:04.8 | I was dumb and I was naive. A million people told me to get things in writing and I'm like, I don't think he's going to screw me over. |
| 1:13.7 | Like, I don't think so. |
| 1:15.4 | Kevin Bartlett spent six years neck deep building the business that he thought was going |
| 1:19.4 | to result in the biggest payoff of his life. |
| 1:21.6 | That business was... |
| 1:24.6 | By that, I don't mean it was bad, by the way. |
... |
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