7-Figure Mentor

Everybody says you need to be "AI first." Max Dunn says that's how you lose your customers.

Max founded Silicon Publishing 26 years ago. His team built the tools behind the photo books, greeting cards, wedding invites, and book covers you make on Shutterfly, Hallmark, Minted, and Amazon. Some days they put out 30 million pieces.

He has also been hit by almost everything that can go wrong in business. Clients stopped paying. 9/11 wiped out a deal. Steve Jobs killed the tech his whole product ran on. He is still here, and in this episode he explains how.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The "AI Last" rule: why Max puts humans on top, plain automation in the middle, and AI at the bottom, and how to set that up in your own company
• How one press release and one trade show landed Amazon, Google, Hallmark, Nike, and Shutterfly at the same time
• The one-big-client trap that almost broke his company twice, and how to stay out of it
• How a 5-person shop hired the team that built Adobe InDesign the moment Adobe let them go
• What to do when the tech your product runs on gets killed overnight
• Why "it's 90% done" is a red flag when you hire developers
• Why he runs his team like "a jazz band, not an orchestra"

About Max Dunn

Max Dunn is the founder of Silicon Publishing, a 26-year-old software company that automates documents and images for some of the biggest brands on earth. His team includes the people who built Adobe InDesign.

Connect with Max: 

• Website: siliconpublishing.com
• LinkedIn: Max Dunn
• Youtube: Silicon Publishing
• Instagram: Silicon Publishing

Think you're underrated by the VA? You might be right.

Marine veteran Robert Pinero got stuck in his girlfriend's car because his back hurt so bad he couldn't get out. The VA had him at 20%. A second doctor's exam put him at 40%, plus 20% on each leg for a problem nobody had caught.

That's when he realized the system was broken. Now his company, Veterans Educating Veterans (VEV), helps vets get the rating they've earned.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why getting hurt in service is NOT enough to get paid (and what the VA actually needs to see)
• The #1 mistake vets make that can mess up their claim forever
• How to think like a VA rater so your claim leaves zero room for a "no"
• Why "just deal with the pain" costs vets money for the rest of their lives
• What active duty troops should do right now to protect their future claim
• The hidden problem with some VA exams and why a rushed doctor can lower your rating
• How Robert got his brother almost 40% higher in about two months
• Why the VA is getting tougher every year and why waiting could cost you

About Robert Pinero:

Robert is a Marine Corps veteran who served in Iraq and was stationed at Camp Pendleton. He's the founder of Veterans Educating Veterans (VEV), one of the few companies that helps with both service connection AND rating increases. His team covers the medical exam costs up front, and veterans only pay if they win.

Connect With Robert:

• Website: veteranseducatingveterans.com
• Instagram: Robert Pinero
• LinkedIn: Robert Pinero
• Youtube: Robert Pinero
• Tiktok: Robert Pinero

What if the fastest way to fix your income isn't doing more… it's doing less of the wrong thing?

Isabelle Fox started in a brothel at 18, making a few hundred bucks a booking with zero control over her income. Within a few years, she became the highest-charging escort in Australia at $2,000 an hour. Now she runs Escort Academy, where she coaches adult industry workers to build steady, profitable businesses.

In this episode, Isabelle gets real about why most escorts make great money but still feel broke, and the simple shifts that turn a chaotic hustle into a business you can count on.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Why escorts can make $30K to $50K a month with no training, and why that same income vanishes just as fast
• The #1 thing that kills an escort business (and why fixing it does 80% of the work)
• How Isabelle broke through the brothel income ceiling by taking back control of her rates, clients, and schedule
• Why looks and age matter way less than you think, and how one client with one hand earns $40K a month
• The "therapist rule" for building deep trust with clients without crossing the line
• How to redirect a client without saying "no" so they still come back
• The #1 safety habit that calms your nerves and makes every booking better
• Why regular business advice (like Facebook ads) falls flat in the adult industry

About Isabelle Fox:

Isabelle Fox is the founder of Escort Academy, a business coaching company for adult industry workers. After six years as an escort, including time as Australia's highest-charging escort, she now teaches women in the industry how to raise their rates, stabilize their income, and run their work like a real business.

Connect with Isabelle:

• Website: escortacademy.co
• Instagram: Isabelle Fox
• Youtube: Isabelle Fox
• Tiktok: Isabelle Fox

What if you could own a website that local businesses pay you rent for every single month?

Kyle spent 10 years in TV working the Super Bowl halftime show and big award shows. The pay was great when he worked, but he had zero control of his income. Then he tried dropshipping, affiliate marketing, and day trading. None of it stuck.

In 2019 he found a simple idea: build a website, rank it on page one of Google, and rent the phone calls to a local business. Today his company does over $100K a month with about $5K in costs, and he spends more time with his kid than anyone he knows.

He breaks down the whole model, including the exact phone script he uses to land clients.

🎧 In This Episode, You'll Learn

• What a "website landlord" is and how renting leads works
• Where the calls go before you have a client (the answer is so simple, it's funny)
• The soft cold call script that gets business owners to take a free 7-day trial
• How to flip into "boss mode" on the second call and lock in $750 to $1,000 a month
• Why you should test about 5 niches first before you pick one to dominate
• How AI search is actually increasing his call volume, not hurting it
• The #1 reason clients cancel and how a $250 reconnection fee fixes it
• Why this model only costs $20 to $25 per site per month to run
• How long it takes to land your first client (months 3 to 6 for most, months 1 to 2 if you put in 10 to 20 hours a week)
• Why it's not too late if you're older. Kyle started at 32, and he's seen people in their 60s hit $10K a month

About Kyle

Kyle, known as "The Website Landlord," spent 10 years as a TV freelancer before finding the rank and rent model in 2019. He landed his first client by month three and was making $10K a month passively by the end of year one. Today he and his partners run a company doing over $100K a month with more than 100 clients. He's partnered with Rent Local Sites, a program that teaches people how to build and rent lead generating websites.

Connect With Kyle

• Website: rentlocalsites.com
• Youtube: Kyle Goldstein
• TikTok: Kyle Goldstein
• Instagram: Kyle Goldstein

Forrest Jinks started by fixing up a house so he could buy a truck. He had zero construction experience, so he stood outside Home Depot and asked painters questions in the parking lot.

Today he manages $550 million.

In between, he lost a piece of land worth $1.3 million and sold it for $425,000. That crash taught him the rules he still runs his company by twenty years later.

This episode is the playbook.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

• The difference between risk and uncertainty, and why smart investors only take one of them
• Why "I'll get your money back no matter what" is the worst promise you can make to an investor, and what to say instead
• How thousands of multifamily operators got wiped out between 2022 and today, and the exact mistakes that did it
• Why higher risk should never mean a small bump in return (Forrest's rule: double the risk, more than double the reward)
• The one thing to check before you invest in any deal, and it has nothing to do with the property
• Why "insider information" is completely legal in real estate, and how pros use it to beat the market
• Where Forrest sees the biggest opportunity right now, plus the numbers on the 1,200-unit deal he's buying at a fraction of build cost
• How to know if a sponsor is actually good (hint: you only find out when things go wrong)

About Forrest Jinks:

Forrest Jinks is the CEO of Altus Equity, where he oversees roughly $550 million in assets under management. He came up the blue collar way, doing his own construction on his first deal, then scaling through local development before the 2008 crash forced a full rebuild of how he invests.

Today Altus finds real estate opportunities that are too hard or too big for individual investors, packages them, and handles the asset management so investors can go passive without giving up private market upside. Full transparency is the core of how he runs deals. Every investor sees the risk, the mitigation plan, and quarterly reports on what's working and what isn't.

Connect With Forrest:

• Website: altusequity.com
• Youtube: Kyle Goldstein
• Email: [email protected]

Dr. Sterling Carter opened his first physical therapy clinic in 2007 thinking that if he was the most skilled doctor in the room, patients would just show up. They didn't. He spent years bumping his head, working 60 to 80 hours a week, doing the treatments, the scheduling, and the bookkeeping himself.

Then he brought in his twin brother Stephen, an MBA who had never treated a patient in his life. Stephen asked one uncomfortable question about who they were actually marketing to. That question flipped the whole model.

Today the Carter brothers run five clinics, a healthcare staffing company, and an in-home hospice company. All three businesses landed on the Inc. 5000 list in the same year, with over 50% year-over-year growth in mature companies where 6 to 10% is normal.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

• The referral flip: why Sterling moved from spending 80% of his marketing time on consumers to 80% on doctors, and how one primary care physician referring a single patient a day turns into 30 new referrals a month
• Why you can't beat the pharma reps at their own game, and the partnership angle that gets doctors to send you patients without cookies, lunches, or gifts
• The "growing broke" trap: how revenue can climb while net profit stays flat, and what to cut when it happens
• The three things Sterling does now that replaced the 15 things he used to do (hiring and leadership development, high-level business development, and strategy)
• How to build career paths inside your practice so good people stay, including the leadership track, the clinical specialty track, and yes, the entrepreneur track
• The two fears that stop most practice owners cold (thinking you're not expert enough and not having the money) and how to get past both
• The first thing to do today if you want a second location: write everything down, because SOPs are the only way to replicate yourself
• Why mission, values, and culture aren't fluff, they're the only thing that carries the brand once you step out of the day to day

About Dr. Sterling Carter:

Dr. Sterling Carter is a Doctor of Physical Therapy and a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel with 25 years of service, including time as a combat medic. He opened his first practice outside Houston in 2007 and now runs five clinics across the greater Houston area alongside his twin brother Stephen, together known as the Carter Brothers.

Their portfolio includes Sterling Physical Therapy, a healthcare staffing company, and an in-home hospice company. All three made the Inc. 5000 list for fastest-growing privately owned health businesses.

Sterling and Stephen are Forbes authors. Their first book, Double Your Success: Principles to Build a Multi-Million Dollar Business, was an Amazon bestseller. Their second book, The Business of Healing, is the "mini MBA" for practice owners who are already at $1 to $2 million and want to scale to $10, $20, or $40 million.

Connect With Sterling:

• Website: thecarterbrothers.com
• LinkedIn: Carter Brothers
• Youtube: Carter Brothers

In 2023, Lauren Lucas watched her real estate team shrink from 7 agents to 3 when rates nearly doubled overnight.

Most people would have shut it down. She went the other way. She spent 18 months learning AI off YouTube, rebuilt her business around automation, and grew over 30% the next year with less than half her team.

That turned into 150+ keynotes and workshops around the world in 14 months.

In this episode she breaks down exactly what she automated, what she refuses to automate, and the five tools she'd use if she had to start over tomorrow.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• The only two things a business owner should use AI for, and why everything else is noise
• How Lauren turned her 2-hour morning research routine into a 20-second email
• The Instagram keyword automation that booked her 209 consultations last year (187 showed up)
• Why "loop engineering" replaced prompting, and how one AI agent can babysit another so you stop being the one who fixes everything
• The Dave and Busters explanation of Claude usage limits that finally makes tokens make sense
• Which model to use for which job, so you stop burning Opus credits on tasks Sonnet handles fine
• The /compress trick and MD file setup that stops Claude from re-reading your entire chat every single time
• Why dumping 117,000 lines of context into AI makes your output worse, not better
• The 5 tools Lauren would master if she was starting from zero, and why none of them are expensive
• What AI will never replace, straight from someone who automated almost everything else
• The student who replaced her assistant with a Claude dashboard on the $20 plan
• Bonus social play: 100 pain points, 7 seconds of B-roll, and trial reels that only reach strangers

About Lauren Lucas:

Lauren got licensed in real estate in 2017 and built a team that ranked number one in Ohio and top 1% nationwide. After a room with Gary Vaynerchuk in 2023 flipped a switch, she taught herself AI and started teaching it to other agents.

She's now delivered 150+ keynotes and workshops in 14 months, runs three communities, and helps business owners cut the busywork so they can spend time on the two things machines can't do: build relationships and close deals.

Connect with Lauren:

• LinkedIn: Lauren Lucas
• Youtube: Lauren Lucas

Most owners think a bad month means they need better closers.

Josh Long has spent 18 years proving that's almost never the problem.

In this episode he breaks down why he starts every diagnosis at the moment the contract gets signed, why chasing "pain" on sales calls is a low-level move that costs you money, and why $5 million in revenue is the most miserable place a business can sit.

He also shares the exact conversation he had with a $50M CEO where he said "we can't do that either" and completely flipped the deal.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why the close stage is the first place to look when sales are broken, and how it tells you if the real problem is upstream in marketing or downstream in fulfillment
• The "colicky baby" client problem, and why difficult customers are usually created by your own reps instead of born that way
• How to sell like a surgeon so prospects stop dictating terms you can't deliver on
• Why the takeaway close beats the hard close with sophisticated buyers, plus Josh's exact language
• Why pain-based selling stops working as you move up market, and what to sell on instead
• The number one bottleneck in almost every owner's life. It isn't leads, staff, or money
• The Seven-Figure Desert, and why companies bounce from $5M back down to $3M over and over
• The simple qualification tweak that took one client from a 7-8% close rate to 20%
• Where sales call anxiety actually comes from, and why it's a management problem instead of a rep problem
• The two paths every business can take, and how picking the wrong one wrecks every decision after it

About Josh Long:

Josh has been consulting with small businesses for over 18 years. He started under Chet Holmes, author of The Ultimate Sales Machine, and became his marketing director.

He's worked across marketing, systems, and management before landing on what he loves most: fixing broken sales teams. He's the author of Bottleneck Breakthrough, a framework for finding the one restriction choking everything else in your business.

His clients range from small service businesses up to companies in the $20M to $200M range.

Connect with Josh:

• Website: bottleneckbreakthrough.com
• LinkedIn: Josh Long

Jay Cameron spent 45 years believing what he was told about Africa. Then he pulled up Google Earth one night, looked down at Accra, and saw swimming pools and luxury homes. That single moment ended one story and started a whole new business. Today Jay has been to 56 countries, holds three passports, and has taken almost 3,000 people around the world.

In This Episode, You'll Learn:

• Why Jay says he's not a travel agent and what "curated experience" actually means
• The Google Earth moment at 45 years old that flipped his entire worldview
• Why so many people of African descent hit a wall in their family history and how going in person fills the gap
• How Jay earned citizenship in Ghana and Sierra Leone through DNA ancestry, plus the real business perks that came with it
• How he turned the 2020 shutdown into his biggest growth year by treating it like a bear market
• The exact growth path after COVID: 7 people, then 17, then 20, then 24, all in one breakout year
• Why his group trips don't turn into drama, and the code of conduct that filters who comes
• How they handle mobility, dietary needs, and 65+ travelers without watering down the experience
• His straight answer to the skeptic who says it's just an expensive vacation with a story attached
• Who should not book a trip with him, and why he'd rather turn them away

About Jay Cameron:

Jay Cameron has spent over 30 years in media, starting with event promotions and recruiting for Showtime at the Apollo in the early 90s, then radio and live event production. Eight years ago he founded Maximum Impact Travel, which creates and curates travel experiences with a focus on the global African diaspora. He has visited 56 countries, summited Mount Kilimanjaro, holds citizenship in the United States, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, and owns property in Ghana. His largest group to date was 232 travelers, with 160 heading to Kenya later this year.

Connect With Jay:

• Website: maximumimpacttravel.com
• LinkedIn: Jay Cameron
• Youtube: Jay Cameron

George Wiseman spent 30 years sitting on a technology he thought was only good for welding torches and fuel savers.

Then a customer told him it did something else entirely. He didn't believe her. He kept not believing her for nine more years.

By the time he tested it on himself, his wife was gone.

This episode is that story, plus the part almost nobody in the hydrogen space will say out loud: the machines pumping out the biggest numbers are the ones most likely to hurt you.

In This Episode, You'll Learn

• What Brown's gas actually is and how George says it differs from the plain molecular hydrogen everyone is selling right now
• Why "more output" is a red flag, not a feature. George explains the 4.7% combustible limit and walks through a real incident where a user was told to run at 100%, leaned near a candle, and ended up in the hospital
• The checklist George uses to sniff out con men in his own industry: what the guarantee looks like, what the warranty looks like, and the "unopened box only" return policy that should send you running
• How he got the machine's output tested for lye, hexavalent chromium, and other contaminants, and what lye actually is versus what movies made you think it is
• The 30-year blind spot he calls "expert syndrome," and why being the world expert in one use case made him miss a completely different one
• Why he refuses to build a subscription into a $3,000 product, and the rental and service-center model he's trying to build instead
• What he wants a hospital to test if someone handed him the keys tomorrow

About George Wiseman:

George Wiseman is the founder of Eagle Research and the inventor of the AquaCure. He grew up on a remote cattle ranch with no electricity, no plumbing, and no mechanics for miles, which is where he taught himself to build and fix everything himself. He started Eagle Research in 1984 selling fuel savers, tested off the scale on a mechanical IQ test in college, and has been self-employed as an inventor ever since. He's spent the last 10 years focused entirely on Brown's gas.

Connect with George:

• Website: eagle-research.com
• LinkedIn: George Wiseman
• Youtube: George Wiseman