About

First question: is this guy even worth listening to?

For a lot of people, the honest answer is no.

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I'm not famous. There's no podcast you've heard of. Nearly all of my work is under NDA and my clients would prefer you never found out their names. I'm not going to sell you a course — I don't have one.

If what you want is a guru, there are better options, and I mean that sincerely.

Here's the case for listening anyway.

Twenty years ago I was broke, homeless and depressed. Then I picked up a book.

It was called Awaken the Giant Within, and it turned out to be the catalyst for the next twenty years of my life.

I read two thousand more. I've been to something like three hundred seminars — a hundred of Tony's alone, as a paying attendee, long before I ever worked for him. Every author that book mentioned, I went and bought their whole catalogue. Then I went looking for the people who wrote those.

Napoleon Hill said there's a secret hidden between the lines of Think and Grow Rich. He never states it outright. Years later, a lot of people decided the answer was the law of attraction.

They were wrong. It's obsession.

I have no talent. I became the most skilled guy in the room anyway.

That's not modesty. It's just who I am.

I'm bad at everything when I start. Genuinely bad. I was the least talented martial artist in the room.

I became the most skilled one.

And I won anyway — not because I was the strongest or the fastest, but because I outworked everybody. Somebody did ten push-ups, I did eleven. Somebody trained once that day, I trained twice.

The whole time I was working the other problem underneath it: how do I win in spite of what I don't have? What's the way through that doesn't require me to be the most talented person in the room?

Twenty years later I know there are two halves to that, and they don't work apart.

Somewhere in there I became the Obsessed Strategist. It's not just a slogan, it's my superpower, and it's the only method I've ever had.

It's also why I'm relentless about details. Details don't mean a lot. They mean everything.

I didn't come up with any of this. I went and found the people who did.

When I opened my karate school I was a hundred thousand dollars in debt just to open the doors, and the overhead ran about twenty thousand a month once you counted rent, staff and the interest.

My dad told me to be patient. I was not patient.

So when I saw an ad for a phone call with Jay Abraham, I took it seriously. Five thousand dollars. For a call. I didn't have five thousand dollars, so I put it on my dad's business credit card and told him about it afterwards.

Before the call, Jay sent over a four-hundred-question form. By the time I'd finished filling it in, I already knew what was wrong with my business.

Then we got on the phone and he asked me exactly one question. What did you learn?

I told him. He said, “Great. Do that.” And then: “Do you want to pay me ten thousand a month to learn from me?”

I did. Eighty-five thousand dollars over the following year in one of his small masterminds, at a point in my life when I had nothing. It is still the best money I have ever spent, and it is where I actually learned marketing.

That became the pattern for everything. Find the best living person at the thing you want to be good at. Get in the room. Shake the hand. Say thank you. Learn everything you can. I've never been the pushy guy at these things — I'm usually the one at the back — but do that for twenty years and you end up knowing people.

Marketing

John Carlton · Dan Kennedy · Frank Kern · John Reese · Jeff Walker · Eben Pagan · Andy Jenkins · Joe Polish · Dean Jackson · Ryan Deiss · Perry Belcher · Russell Brunson

The other half

Tony Robbins · Jim Rohn · Zig Ziglar · Bob Proctor · Brian Tracy · Denis Waitley · Stephen Covey · Les Brown

Some of them remember me. Some of them don't. I owe all of them.

Which is exactly the job I do for businesses.

Twenty years of it now. Almost a decade as Tony Robbins' top speaker and trainer — the loop from that Barnes & Noble closing in a way I still find funny.

I left that role in 2023 and went back to fixing companies. Add the couple of dozen since then and it's over three hundred businesses I've personally consulted — a million a year up to four hundred million a year.

Combined? I've made them hundreds of millions of dollars.

Same job every time. Get obsessive about the details, then go find the one domino that makes everything else fall — because the business is almost never broken. One part of it is.

Push that one, and the rest goes over on its own. That's the trick. There isn't another one. Here's how it works →

I still speak. It has to be worth leaving the cats.

Twenty years on stages, most of them somebody else's. I don't chase this work and I've never kept a speaker reel — if you want me in your room, email me and tell me who's going to be in it: [email protected]. Ask for a bio and a photo and I'll send them straight over.

Fair warning: there are two cats at home who are extremely accustomed to me being there. The number has to make sense.