Most entrepreneurs think some debt is inevitable. Mike Barrett built one of Oregon’s fastest-growing companies — 3 employees to nearly 400 — and never took a dime of it. Here’s exactly how, and why it matters more than revenue ever will.

In 1971, a gunman held a recording engineer hostage at Sound City Studios in Los Angeles. The cop who talked him down — without firing a single shot — was Mike Barrett’s father. What followed over the next 36 years was one of the most unlikely friendships ever told.

A video conversation with Dawn Tiura, CEO of the Sourcing Interest Group, where Mike Barrett cuts through the noise on nearshoring — the real benefits, the common mistakes, and how Unosquare grew from a spare bedroom to 1,200 people without taking a dime of debt.

Mike Barrett publishes the first formally written book on IT outsourcing to Latin America, covering nearshoring trends, safety, IP protection, and cost comparisons with India.

As CEO of a multinational operating across the U.S., Mexico, and Northern Ireland — with engineers from Cuba, Russia, Ireland, and Colombia — Mike learned that trust doesn’t translate automatically. It has to be built differently in every culture.

Unosquare announces the opening of a Belfast engineering centre, creating 100 software engineering roles backed by £650k from Invest NI.

How Mike Barrett went from fired, broke, and $30,000 in debt in 2009 to building a 1,200-person global company — and handing it to a next generation that earned every inch of it.