The other night I spoke at a career for a young adult night, and I had to answer a question I don’t usually stop to think about: how did I actually get here? The honest answer is: not in a straight line. I graduated high school with my CNA and figured out fast that healthcare wasn’t for me. I tried college for elementary education, then HR management, and realized the classroom wasn’t where I learned best. And then I realized something else: I’d been building skills the whole time, every time I stepped into something new. Admin work taught me organization and how to keep a calendar from falling apart. Sales taught me to talk to anyone and handle a “no.” Volunteer service taught me how to lead people who didn’t have to follow me. Running shifts taught me to manage a team under pressure. And retail taught me how to keep showing up and getting it done. None of it was wasted. It was all training for a job I didn’t know existed yet. Then someone in my network opened a door. I started at ActionCOACH Kansas City in February 2025 as Community Coordinator and Executive Assistant, and a year later I was promoted to Manager of Outcomes. The first stretch was hard. I was suddenly wearing every hat except owner and coach: marketing, systems, operations, networking, client experience, events, supporting Joe. All at once. The overwhelm was real. What got me through was treating the job like a curriculum. I leaned on the same frameworks we teach our clients, then went looking for whatever skill I was missing next. CRM automations, pipeline reporting, training a VA, building systems so I could hand pieces off and lead instead of doing it all myself. I even taught myself to connect our software to AI with zero coding background. That’s my favorite part of this job: I’m never bored, because there’s always something new to learn. And every new skill makes me more valuable to the team than I was the week before. Here’s the advice I gave those students, and it applies to every business owner here too:

We have crossed a huge milestone since starting this Skool community! I am genuinely thankful to everyone here who contributes to make it a better experience for everyone! As a thank you gift, the first 150 should now have lifetime access to our standard plan. Thank you thank you!! Also a bonus that you may have not thought of. Right now you’ll get 40% commission for anyone you refer (if you use your affiliate link). If you’re part of the first 150, then that’s positive financial ROI straight into your pockets. For those who are new and making their investment for it, only 2-3 people successfully referred and it pays for itself. Not even including the main ROI being what’s learned, taught, and implemented through the connections. Now we enter into the next phase, let me know with a dm your thoughts on how to improve and provide more value as we go. All ideas are welcome. @Joe Quero and I along with our team members are making plans this Friday to discuss this as well!

If you've been around us a while, you know September is our hard one for GrowthCLUB attendance. Every year. Historically our September GrowthCLUB runs about 26% below our other GrowthCLUBs in attendance — school just started, everyone's traveling, somebody's kid has a tournament. I have years of notes that just say "out of town." "Family stuff." "Maybe December." This year we nearly tripled it — and then had to close registration, because we ran out of seats. It wasn't luck and it wasn't one magic ad. It was new coaches on the team. Showing up at BNI and every networking table we could get to, long before any of it turned into a registration. Doing what we said we'd do, following up when we said we would, and letting other people talk about us instead of talking about ourselves. None of that felt exciting while we were doing it. Most weeks it felt like admin, and I genuinely wondered if it was landing. It was landing. Shout out to Dan — he came on as my VA and took the least glamorous job we have, calling people all day and hearing "not this time" more than anyone should. A full September room doesn't happen without that. And to Joe — thank you for building something worth filling a room for, and for never letting us settle for good enough. "We don't have enough chairs" is the best problem I've had all year. To everyone who grabbed a seat — thank you. To everyone who didn't: December. Get on it early this time. What's the good problem you're hoping to have by the end of this year?

Part 2 of my last Marketing Post👀 We put all ten of our marketing strategies on a whiteboard Monday. It was humbling. Ten of them. We ran out of marker about eight in, which felt a little on the nose. Then came the actual question: what is each one giving back? And here's the part that's on me. For most of that list, if you'd asked me, I would've said something extremely confident like "oh yeah, that one's been great for us" — with absolutely nothing behind it. My tracking method was vibes. Very sophisticated. Highly recommend if you enjoy being wrong later.🫣 Some of these are slow burns by design. Nobody watches one of our videos and calls that afternoon — they meet Joe somewhere, then go look us up to see if we're the real deal. That's a different job than lead generation, and it matters. But "it's a slow burn" can't be the excuse I use forever for not measuring something. So we're building a funnel behind every single strategy. All ten. Because we've grown to the point where "I think that lead came from Google?" isn't an answer anymore. If I can't measure it, I'm either pouring money into something that's already dead or starving something that's quietly working — and I won't find out which until it's expensive. Not the fun part of marketing. But I'd rather know than keep guessing confidently. So — if I asked where your last five clients actually came from, could you name it? Or would you be running on vibes like I was?

NOT BECAUSE IT WAS BAD! Because what used to work... just stopped working. And halfway through the year, that meant a major update, not a tweak. Joe(owner), Dan(my VA), and I have spent the last few months testing and measuring — the unglamorous kind of work where you're staring at numbers instead of doing the fun creative stuff. What used to move the needle wasn't moving it anymore. And some of what we almost skipped was actually where the results were hiding. So now we're rebuilding — not from scratch, but from evidence. Which honestly feels better. Less "hope this still works," more "we know this works now, let's do more of it." Here's the part I keep coming back to: it's tempting to just keep running the plan that used to work, because admitting it stopped feels like losing ground. It's not. It's the difference between building something that resets every few weeks and something that actually stacks year over year. Anyone else mid-year-realize-what-used-to-work-doesn't-anymore right now? Tell me I'm not alone.