About
I'm Samantha Guthrie. Entrepreneur. Investor. Coach. Wife of almost 29 years to my business partner, Mike. And the woman who spent two decades building a company that made it onto every "success" benchmark I could find, while quietly calling her own job the soul crusher behind closed doors.
I grew up in San Francisco, started working at 13, and cycled through more jobs than I care to count: real estate, mortgage, title operations, marketing, healthcare administration. At the time, I thought I was just figuring it out. Looking back, I was collecting something. Every industry taught me how people operated, how systems failed, what real leadership looked like and what it didn't. I was building a toolkit I didn't know I'd need yet.
ready...Set...go...
Then I found Mike. I didn't just find a husband. I found my person. The one I wanted to build a whole life with. We got married and hit the ground running. Both working. Both excited. Both feeling like, for the first time, the pieces were actually starting to come together.
Then we got fired. Same day. Same company. Both of us.
We had called out a billing practice we knew wasn't right. And that was enough. Out we went.
No jobs. No plan. Just each other and $2,000 between us.
Most people would have called that rock bottom.
We called it the starting line.
it might not be much, but progress is progress!
We put everything on a credit card, bought one ATM machine, and landed our first placement at Rob Schneider's sister's nightclub in San Francisco. We had no roadmap, no industry experience, and nothing guaranteeing it would work. But hey... progress is progress!
Success & Sacrifice
I was the woman in a room full of men in an industry nobody had heard of, figuring it out in real time, earning every inch of credibility the hard way. That grind? It built me. And that turned 1 ATM to over 8,000 prolific ATMs scattered within the United States.
Behind closed doors... I called my job the "Soul Crusher". The business was getting better and better, while I was losing myself and my marriage little by little. I was asking, "Is this the cost of success?"
rediscovery
I refused to feel that way any longer. I challenged everything I had accepted as normal. The exhaustion. The identity wrapped around output. The quiet belief that success and happiness were a trade-off, that you picked one and made peace with the other.
Mike and I embarked on a season of rediscovery. Masterminds. New rooms. People who had built companies like us and were also genuinely living... something shifted. I started seeing, up close, that success and happiness can actually coexist. That my value was never just in what I produced. That I was worth something simply because I existed, not because of what I closed, built, or delivered.
after breaking the ceiling... it's time to scale
Through the help of my mentors, armed with strategies, new skills, and a confidence I hadn't felt in years, we were finally ready to scale. We had a clear direction.
Scaling a company requires you to do less of the wrong things. I learned to let go of control. Let go of every hat. Every soul-crushing task that had my name on it. I had to be willing to go back to basics, relentless documenting, redefining our mission and vision, hiring people smarter than us in the areas where we were weak. Outsourcing without guilt. Not only did Mike and I get our life back, the company got better. So much better that when it came time to sell, we walked in with real leverage.
The Long Way Up
The exit was inevitable. We had the systems. We had a clear value proposition. The team was so efficient, so dialed in, that we became one of the top ATM distributors in the country. From $2,000 on a credit card to an eight-figure exit.
Did we stop? Hmm. Nope.
Today, Mike and I own Pacific Capital LLC, where we have co-directed over $110 million in private capital across 25+ real estate syndications. We also co-founded Wealth Mission Group, a private credit fund offering first-lien real estate debt strategies to accredited investors. Both ventures are funding our lifestyle our and investors' passively.
You can be excellent at running a business and completely wrong about what's driving you.
Excellence will take you far. Clarity will take you somewhere worth going.
- Samantha Guthrie
