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  "path": "/utah/2026/05/24/meet-the-resilient-utah-ceo-of-the-year-behind-the-hidden-door/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-05-25T01:30:00.000Z",
  "site": "https://www.deseret.com",
  "textContent": "Of all the successful executives named a 2026 CEO of the Year by Utah Business Magazine, Jeremy Barker stands alone as the only one who once spent a year living in his truck and who took out bankruptcy. Twice.\n\n“I have to learn the hard way. Instead of listening to someone warn me it’s going to hurt, I’m the guy that has to fall off the cliff and go, oh!, that hurt!,” says the founder of Murphy Door, the “hidden door” company that is projected to generate nearly $60 million in revenue this year — and that’s before adding in revenue from the 11 other companies, ranging from warehouses, to developments, to hotels, to ladders, Jeremy also owns and supervises.\n\nInnovation and making money have never been difficult for Jeremy. That’s the easy part.\n\nLearning how to manage and be responsible with success? That took some time.\n\nWhich sends us back 32 years ago, when he was 19 years old and he made $60,000. In 10 days.\n\nAs a forerunner to his patents on the Murphy Door hinges that make his doors unique, in 1994, fresh out of high school, Jeremy invented a metal frame brace that revolutionized construction on portable garden sheds.\n\nHe opened a booth selling his sheds — he called his business Frontier Sheds — at that year’s Utah State Fair. Ten days later, he walked away with $60,000 jammed in his pocket\n\nHe had just started his freshman year at the University of Utah. “Wait, I’m going to school to make $60,000,” he remembers thinking, “I already did that.”\n\nSo he dropped out of school.\n\nThings got even better when Home Depot contracted to buy his sheds. At 20 years old, Jeremy was sitting on top of the wave.\n\nThen he watched it all unravel. Or more exactly he _didn’t_ watch it all unravel.\n\n“First thing you know, you buy a truck, because you’ve got all this money,” says Jeremy. “Then you party too hard, you don’t pay your debts on time, you play the rob Peter to pay Paul game. I just had too much money that I didn’t know how to manage.”\n\nBy 23 he was bankrupt and living in his truck — and not the new top of the line Dodge Ram he’d bought when things were good, but in a used dually he paid $7,000 for so he could haul RVs around the country, making “just enough to stay broke.”\n\n“I did six months of extreme depression,” says Jeremy, “and then six months of becoming your own best friend, forgiving yourself, and rehashing all of what happened. Not to abuse yourself, but to do an inventory on all the bad decisions that you made and where you should have gone left instead of right.”\n\nPicking up the pieces, he established a successful house-building business, only to have the market crash of 2008 wipe him out again. Banks stopped lending, construction came to a standstill, “so I didn’t feel the remorse I did with the first bankruptcy,” he says.\n\nBut he was still broke and back to square one.\n\nHe retreated to something he knew well, along with the added benefit of a steady paycheck: firefighting and EMS work. He’d passed his paramedic tests in high school. For $762 every two weeks, he went to work for the Roy City fire department.\n\nStill, the innovator and entrepreneur lurked within. Motivated by a desire to build something cool for his children, he constructed a hidden door for a theater room in his house. The door’s revolutionary hinge system paved the way to starting up his own business.\n\nIn 2011 he patented the Murphy Door hinge; in 2012 he started selling doors. At first the company made a door a week, then two doors a week, then four doors. The trajectory was trending steadily in the right direction.\n\nBut this time, when the money started coming in, Jeremy didn’t touch it. He plowed it all back into the business.\n\nHe resolved he wouldn’t quit his firefighting/EMS job until Murphy Door cleared $5 million in annual revenue.\n\n“I’m a firm believer, you should never steal milk out of your baby’s bottle,” he says, “If you want the baby to survive and thrive, you can’t take any of the milk. It’s a pretty basic thought process. If the baby’s got a full bottle of milk, and it’s going to grow from that, and then you say, hey, I need half to pay my house payment, or half for my car, and by the way, I might need 75% next week, then the baby is going to just either die or have stunted growth, which means you can’t scale.”\n\nMurphy Door made about $39,000 in revenue its first year, then $150,000, then $1.2 million, then $2.5 million, then $5 million. Jeremy stayed true to his word. It took five years before he left Roy Fire and went to work for Murphy Door full time.\n\nToday, the company makes a door every six minutes. They ship hundreds of doors every week throughout the country and the world.\n\nIn addition to Jeremy’s recent Utah Business CEO of the Year honor, he was named a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award, while Murphy Door has been on Fortune’s list of Fastest Growing Companies four years in a row and has been named one of Fortune’s Most Innovative Companies.\n\nAll kinds of people are coming to Jeremy for advice these days, including the Trump administration, who last spring invited him to Florida to discuss tariffs with other U.S. CEOs. Daymond John, of “Shark Tank” renown, is among Jeremy’s collaborators on Murphy Door.\n\n“I freakin’ love my job,” says Jeremy, who employs 135 people in his various businesses.\n\nLooking back, if he could return in a time machine to his 19-year-old self who was about to make $60,000 selling storage sheds, only to then watch it all disintegrate into bankruptcy, what would he tell him?\n\n“You know what, I wouldn’t tell him anything,” he says. “I wouldn’t want him to miss out on the lessons he needed to learn.”",
  "title": "Meet the resilient Utah ‘CEO of the Year’ behind the hidden door"
}