Congrats, @Marialexandra Garcia

$1200 to $53k a month in just a few years - and a $50k down payment. A few years ago, I was charging $1,200/month for coaching. And honestly? I thought that was a lot of money. I didn’t even fully believe people would pay it… until a client told me I should be charging that. One year ago, I made a decision: I was no longer going to think of my work as “coaching individuals.” (Some of you remember Ben telling me in Austin in May 2024, to stop doing it) I was going to start helping organizations build better leaders, better cultures, and better systems for growth. That shift changed everything. Because I started asking a different question: What is the monetary value of one or more truly great leaders inside an organization? Not theoretically. Actually. What is it worth when leaders stop avoiding difficult conversations? What is it worth when every employee has a real plan? What is it worth when bad news travels vertically instead of horizontally? What is it worth when people stop trying to be right and start trying to get it right? That became the foundation of my work. I created something I call The Friction Triangle. It teaches leaders the difference between being kind and being nice. Nice is comfortable. Kind is clear. Nice helps both people escape the difficult conversation in the name of comfort. Kind tells the truth and builds trust. That became conflict navigation. Then I started diagnosing cultures through a simple question: “How does bad news travel in your organization?” Does it travel horizontally, through gossip, side conversations, and quiet frustration? Or does it travel vertically, to the people who can actually solve the problem? Organizations that want bad news to travel vertically are organizations that are serious about psychological safety. Then I saw another pattern. A lot of leaders have egos that require them to be right. But great cultures are built by leaders who care more about getting it right. That became ownership and accountability.

As I've mentioned on the calls, I've been working on a new book. I'm posting the cover to force myself to start telling the universe what I'm doing. I'm creating illustrations, a landing page and an interactive income analyzer to go along with the book. This is my first attempt at writing a book and creating a sales funnel. I will continue to update my progress.

While I didn't make the top 10 and get an all-expenses-paid trip to the mastermind in LA, I do get to attend. I just have to pay for it myself. Overall, I cannot complain. I'm a little bummed because I have a $360,000 proposal I couldn't count on since I didn't have a signature yet. That would have made me in the top three. Had I not joined that group, I would not have had the cojones to price my last few deals the way that I have. And that includes my cohort. I plan to bring all of the things that I've learned in that group to any of you who would like it.

12 months ago it would’ve taken 2 weeks at least. Same brain. Same frameworks. Same standards. Different stack. Here’s exactly what I used and where each tool earned its spot: Plaud + Fathom — Every discovery call, every client conversation, captured and transcribed automatically. No more scrambling to remember what the CEO said about his succession problem or what the COO admitted about turnover. The raw material was all there, word for word. Wispr Flow — I talk faster than I type, and my best thinking happens out loud. This let me dictate strategy notes, proposal sections, and client insights at the speed I actually think, then clean it up in seconds instead of minutes. Perplexity — Research on the client’s industry, their competitive pressures, and the specific behavioral risks tied to a role at their level. What used to take a day of digging took twenty minutes. Claude — This is where it all came together. I fed it the call transcripts, my ProScan PDP data on the client, the 60-30-10 framework, and my own voice rules. It didn’t write the proposal for me. It built the scaffolding so I could focus on the judgment calls only I can make: which framework fits this exact leadership gap, where the real risk sits, what this CEO actually needs to hear versus what he’s asking for. That’s the part people miss. AI didn’t replace the expertise. It stripped out everything that wasn’t expertise, the formatting, the transcription, the first-draft grunt work, so the six hours I spent were pure high-value thinking. Two weeks of my old process was maybe four hours of real strategy buried under seventy hours of admin. If you’re still doing proposals and other work the old way, you’re not protecting quality. You’re just burning your best hours on your lowest-value work.