Million Dollar Grit

I recorded this one from my car — a little hat tip to Russell Brunson, who taught me that "in the car" beats "not at all" — because I had something I couldn't wait to break down: the launch my client Jessie Gene just ran on Instagram, and what it actually teaches the rest of us. I met Jessie back in the ClickFunnels Two Comma Club days when I was a head coach and she was running a binge and disordered eating recovery program, and even then she had this rare combination of high standards and magnetic transparency. Fast-forward through her walking away from a 150,000-follower account to start completely over — beating the sunk cost fallacy that traps most people — building a new account to 400,000 followers in five months, and launching her YAP Challenge to hundreds of sales a day on FG Funnels. Here's the thing I want you to take away: a big following does not equal big money, and her conversion rate wasn't even special — six or seven percent, same as everybody else. The difference was that her content drove over 35,000 people to that sales page. So the real lesson is a multiplication problem. It's not marketing plus traffic, it's marketing chops times traffic — and if either number is zero, your launch is zero. This episode is for the marketer who has a great offer and great copy but only a hundred people looking, and for the content creator with the audience but not the marketing skills to monetize it. You need both. Most people have exactly one.

This is a candid conversation with friend, client, and business partner Aryeh Sheinbein. I have two real-time negotiations on my desk right now (a post-divorce mortgage refinance the bank told me had only one path, and a $10K non-refundable sheep deposit I'd already mentally written off), and partly because Aryeh is one of those rare people whose default assumption is that almost every "this is the price" is actually an opening position. What started as a casual conversation turned into a working framework — the two negotiation muscles most people never build, and the one filter that tells you which one to use. We get into Aryeh's $20 baseball-card arbitrage at age 12, his 60-day-late home builder, the Walmart end-cap standoff over a $30 pricing error, the Amex deal he settled for fifty cents on the dollar, and his co-investor who keeps asking for discounts — each one demonstrating a different rule. The flip in the episode comes near the end: I assumed "non-refundable" meant the conversation was closed. Aryeh's reframe was that when the other side breaks their part of the deal first, the deposit clause loses some of its teeth — and there's almost always room to open the conversation. By the end of the recording I'd talked myself into emailing the sheep seller. If you're someone for whom negotiation doesn't naturally dawn — if you read "non-refundable" or "this is our price" and just accept it — this episode is going to reframe what you've been leaving on the table.

This episode started with a client of mine watching me sell out four in-person workshops in three days and asking — completely seriously — how the heck I take action so fast. Her honest answer was that she'd need six to eight business months to put together something similar. So I broke down what's actually happening, and it's not what most people think. Fast execution isn't about being braver, more energetic, or wired differently. It's a two-part skill: action (doing the next thing in front of you) and ignoring (refusing to entertain the other 17 problems at the same time).

I just got back from three days in New Haven at the 17th Digital Insiders mastermind — 40 entrepreneurs in one room, and somehow these events keep getting better than the last one. In this episode I walk you through the keynote from Michael Roderick on aspirational vs. excellence buyers, the member shares from Emily Green on $15 paid workshops, Amber Housley on the 34 webinars it took before hers converted, Aryeh Sheinbein on a deeply personal credit card story, and Brittany Long on delivering a full done-for-you funnel in 60 minutes using Claude. From there I get into my halftime report on what's still working in 2026, the Three Overs framework I taught on day two, and the Get It Done day where we built AI-powered daily sales rituals — and watched the most skeptical person in the room close a $1,200 sale within 60 minutes of building hers. By the end of three days, three themes kept showing up: discomfort is the price of growth, AI is infrastructure not a project, and being in a room with the right people compounds everything else. If you've ever wondered what a real mastermind is actually supposed to do for your business — or you want to hear how I'm bringing some of this work to my farm this summer with two-day workshops called AI and Sheep — this is the episode for you.

This episode started with a client question — "what's a tripwire?" — that turned into a full breakdown of every low-ticket funnel term the marketing world uses (and misuses). I walk through the difference between a tripwire, which is a low-ticket offer sitting on the thank-you page of your free opt-in, and an LTO, or low-ticket offer, which is that same product when you run traffic directly to it as the first page of a funnel. These aren't the same thing — and confusing them is why so many people declare their offer is broken when it's actually performing completely normally. A 1% conversion rate on a tripwire? Standard. The same offer converting at 3% as a direct-to-ad LTO? Also normal — because Facebook is training itself to find buyers instead of email-givers, and that's a different person. I also cover why you cannot run an LTO without an order bump and at least one OTO, what makes a one-time offer actually a one-time offer (hint: it doesn't have a credit card form), and what Kathy and I call a Paid Lead Maker — the structure that, when built right, can break even or turn a small profit on your ad spend. If you've ever stared at your funnel numbers wondering what went wrong, this episode might completely reframe what you're looking at.

In this episode, I'm introducing a term I've been using a lot lately — hub tools — and why the distinction between a hub tool and just another piece of software matters more than ever in the age of AI. I spent two years building a knowledge base inside ChatGPT, only to realize I couldn't easily extract any of it. That was the wake-up call. So I'm walking you through the five questions I now ask before I bet on any tool: how long it's been the category king, how easily it integrates into everything, how private and flexible it is, how much time and energy it actually saves me, and how easy it is for my clients and customers to adapt to. I share the six hub tools I've officially settled on (FG Funnels, Google, Obsidian, Zoom, Slack, and Voxer), why Claude is not on that list even though I use it every single day, and how this framework is helping me resist the urge to try every shiny new thing that lands in my feed. If you've been feeling the tool overwhelm — this one's for you.

I am still riding the dopamine and adrenaline high from discovering what I'm calling the most powerful second brain system I've ever built — and this week on Million Dollar Grit I'm breaking down the whole thing. If you've been using ChatGPT or Claude to build context and memory for your AI work, you need to hear this. I spent two years building a second brain in ChatGPT and last week I stumbled on a viral article from a developer named Karpathy that sent me down a two-day rabbit hole untangling code speak into something any normal non-technical person can actually build. The result is a private, secure, off-the-cloud second brain that lives on your own device, works with any AI tool that comes along, and gets smarter every single time you use it — without you having to organize a single thing. I walk you through the exact system: what Obsidian is, how the three-folder structure works, what a wiki actually is and why the AI builds it for itself not for you, and why this completely solves the persistent memory and context problem that every AI user is running into. If you want to stop re-explaining yourself to AI, stop losing your best thinking, and stop having your data held hostage by a company you don't fully trust — this episode is for you.

I want to talk about something that gets really blurry when money feels tight. The difference between actual urgency and straight-up anxiety. Because they feel the same in your body, but they lead to completely different decisions in your business. In this episode, I walk through five simple ways to tell the difference so you don’t blow up something that’s actually working just because you’re feeling pressure.

I also share a personal example of how this shows up for me in real life (and it’s kind of ridiculous when you see it clearly). If you’ve ever felt the urge to pivot, cut things, or make a big move just to feel in control again, this one will hit. This is about slowing down just enough to make the right move, not just the fast one.

In this episode, I'm breaking down the line that every customer travels — from having zero clue who you are, all the way to becoming a buyer — and why most business owners are missing critical pieces of it without even realizing it. I walk through the difference between marketing and sales (they are not the same thing), why your reels aren't supposed to close sales, what I call "Big Daddy Funnels" and why they're the closest thing to a shortcut I've ever found, and how to do a quick audit of your own business to find exactly where your line is broken. If you've ever felt like you're doing all the things and still not seeing results, this episode is probably going to tell you why.

Let’s talk about the question every business owner eventually asks: if I had to sign five clients by the end of the month… what would I actually do?

This episode came from a Voxer message a client sent me this morning. She wanted to know how to move quickly when revenue suddenly feels urgent. I walk through the exact strategy I’d use, starting with activating past clients and warm leads, and working outward through your network, email list, conversations, workshops, and visibility engines.

The big idea is simple. Signing clients fast is infinitely easier when you’ve been consistently producing content and keeping people in your orbit. When you do that, you’re never really starting from zero. You’re just activating the people who are already nearby.