2017 · The eclipse
In 2017 I was an executive recruiter, burning out on sales calls. During the solar eclipse I walked outside, looked up, and something broke open.
I went back in and told my boss the sun had just told me to quit and become an inspirational speaker. True story. No plan, no savings, just a gift I refused to die with.
The hamster wheel
A coaching business emerged, and I loved the work. But every sale depended on me posting that day and praying the algorithm was generous, and the grind was flattening my voice.
So I made a vow: solve marketing, permanently, for purpose-driven founders. I spent eight years engineering conversion.
New Year’s Day, 2025
On the couch with my wife, my phone dinged. Two thousand dollars. A total stranger. A Facebook ad.
That funnel went on to do over two hundred thousand dollars at a six-to-one return on ad spend, and it paid for our dream wedding. The mystery was solved. Not by working harder. By finally seeing the whole engine.
The night the engine paid for
That same funnel paid for our wedding. Three days in Florida, eighty of our closest people, a dear friend on the decks, and a tunnel of sparklers at the end of the night. Kelly and I still talk about it as one of the most magical moments of our lives.
And afterwards everyone asked the same question: how did you pull this off? I told them the truth. I built a funnel and ran ads, and it worked. So my friends started asking me to build theirs.
The problem I could not unsee
I said yes before I did the math. That one funnel had taken me four hundred hours to stitch together, and I came to it with ten years of marketing behind me and an electrical engineering degree. To rebuild it for someone else with a team was forty thousand dollars.
So the expertise existed, and the build was still too slow and too expensive for most of the people who needed it. That is the chasm. People love what you do, and the sheer complexity of building the machine that carries it to more of them stops you from ever crossing.
I think entrepreneurial complexity is the single biggest tax on human genius on the planet. Founders are the ones building a better world. Founders are the ones who hire everybody. If we are not liberated into our full potential, everyone in the economy pays for it.
Eighteen months, three million lines of code
So I asked a different question. What if the system could build the revenue engine out of a conversation with the founder? Eighteen months and three million lines of code later, the Growth Mastery System was born: an AI Chief Revenue Officer that learns your business, guides the decisions, and builds the connected assets that actually bring in clients.
From software to a venture growth firm
Then the work kept outgrowing the software. Solving marketing turned out to be the first step of the journey, not the journey. Founders also needed the operations, the data, the finance seat, and a path to an outcome they could one day harvest, whether that means stepping back to the board or selling the company outright.
So GrowthMastery became a venture growth firm. The software is still at the center. Around it now sits a bench of senior operators and an AI executive team, walking founders the whole way, from the first irresistible offer to a company that runs without them.
What I believe
Every human being carries a gift, and the number one fear we all share is dying with that magic still inside us. Entrepreneurial complexity is the single greatest barrier standing between brilliant people and the lives their gifts could change. You are the battery. The lives you are meant to change are the lightbulb. The engine is just the circuit, and my life’s work is completing it. That is the mission: to liberate founders to create a better world for all, by simplifying entrepreneurship to creative expression.