Meet fellow member Maartin Strydom, a Soft Skills Facilitator and Life Coach with 24 years of experience at Buscor (Pty) Ltd. He’s passionate about helping people develop essential soft skills and achieve personal growth. Maartin studied at the University of Pretoria, earning degrees in Environmental Science and Psychology. Throughout his career, he’s worked on projects like studying desertification and psychology, which have shaped his approach to training. As Maartin nears retirement, he’s gearing up to start a blog and is excited to tick off items on his bucket list. There’s no slowing him down! Connect with Maartin on LinkedIn to learn more about his journey.

Alex saysThat you should pickFree or if your goal is to make money then chargeAnd he saysIt could He says it could gain you a lot of leads if you make a free one butIt could be the wrong leads if you want to make money and my goal is to make money so many people have told me they have free groups but if my goal is to serve my avatar then should I have a free school group or not check out my school and just let me know I'm not asking you to buyBecause I only wantIcpBut if you are a successful school ownerThen I would like to know your opinion? It means a lot thank you so much for sharing!!

If you're already doing $30K+ MRR, you probably know this. But if you’re earlier — this will save you money, time, and stress. A while back, I talked about how I wasted 60 days building something nobody used. The lesson was simple: Find the real complaints → Test the idea quickly → Show it to 10–15 people → Kill fast if it’s not resonating → Build only after validation That saved me months. But here’s where it got interesting for business owners: When I started applying this same thinking to operations, everything changed. I began asking businesses questions like: What’s the bottleneck actually costing you? Is this a “nice to have,” or is it literally losing you revenue? If we fix it, what’s the measurable ROI? Suddenly, the real leaks showed up: - A data-entry loop costing $16K/year - A sales process slowing deals by days - Workflow chaos wasting 10–16 hours/wk across the team Most business owners think their problem is “we need a tool.” But it’s rarely the tool. It’s the system behind it. That’s what pushed us (me and my partner) into the AI Transformation Partner model: - Audit sales/ops/admin - Determine bottlenecks and automation opportunities - Map the path - Implement hands-on (not strategy decks) We didn’t start here. We started small — building for ourselves, messing up, learning fast. And those failures became the framework we now use with clients. - Interview frontline → not just execs - Validate ideas → kill non-ROI tasks fast - Only build what moves revenue, time, or retention That’s how you avoid $20K–$50K “solutions” that sit unused. Here’s the truth: The companies winning with AI aren’t the ones using the fanciest tools. They’re the ones fixing the right problems. And that clarity comes from a simple discipline: Validate first. Kill fast. Build only what earns its keep. What’s one project your business spent too long on — that should’ve been validated (or killed) earlier?

I just launched my new Skool: Money Makers Mastermind—$49/month—for action-takers who want to grow impact, income, and influence. I’d love your brutally honest feedback: - Does this offer make sense? - HOW COULD I MAKE IT INSANELY valuable for this price? - How can I get people involved--so they feel part of it? - Anything I can improve to make it IRRESISTIBLE for serious entrepreneurs? I want to make this as helpful, actionable, and high-value as possible, so please give me the honest truth—I can take it! 💪 Thanks, BELIEVE NATION!!! Can’t wait to hear your thoughts! Liberty!

I spent two months building a fancy AI workflow. Clean. Automated. Beautiful. When I launched it? 13 people said “nice.” 0 actually used it. Why? Because I made the classic mistake: I assumed a problem existed just because I felt it. I never validated it. The real lesson? Projects don’t fail because the solution is bad. They fail because the problem isn’t painful. Now I use a simple 5-step filter before building anything: 1️⃣ Go where people complain Reddit, X, Skool, LinkedIn DMs. Look for pain in their own words. Not assumptions — complaints. 2️⃣ Build a hypothesis, not a product Loom demo. Simple mockup. Tiny prototype. 2–3 days max. 3️⃣ Show it to 10–15 people Ask only: “Does this solve your problem?” Half the time, they’ll realize a problem exists only after you point it out. 4️⃣ Watch reactions, not words “Can you show me more?” = gold. “That’s cool” = corpse. 5️⃣ Decide fast 7+ interested? Build it. 3 or fewer? Kill it in 48 hours. (Metrics aren’t sacred — just signals.) Since applying this, I started killing ideas in Week 1. Ruthlessly. And the ones I did build? They actually worked: Lead scoring tool: 40+ users in 2 weeks Company summarizer: first client in Week 1 Not because they’re technically superior. But because they solve problems people already feel in their workflow. Is there any project you regret spending too long on? Someone here will learn from it. (P.S. If anyone wants a quick peek at the dead system I built months ago, check a screenshot.)