Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future

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How to Be Spiritual: An Atheist Found God on an Acupuncture Table.

Dr. Amy Albright was an atheist studying the brain, wanting to understand how it works. She was chronically ill and on lots of medications, and she tried acupuncture. The practitioner put the needles in and left the room, and she felt like she was levitating, sinking and hearing voices that were not audible in the room. She knew there ...

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Does your money trauma make your financial decisions? This week's newsletter asks it, and this cut is the answer from a man who had everything money buys and walked away from it. 

Nery Gomez, founder, president and COO of Black Sun Private Equity, had the penthouse office in Beverly Hills and a seat at a $3 billion table, and none of it was his. What he built instead treats money as a source of e...

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Most people look at money as just that. Money for no other purpose than having money. But what if money is energy you can create, move and attract? That is conscious investing as Nery Gomez, founder, president and COO of Black Sun Private Equity, practices it, and it is the opposite of how most private equity has operated for the last twenty years.

I wanted this conversation because private equity is ...

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This is The Architect's Cut of my conversation with Josh Elledge, founder of Up My Influence and PodVerified. 

In our conversation, Josh explains the level of podcast guesting scams that he's seen, and the one that charges you $20K is particularly infuriating.

 He also shares the rule a broadcasting legend taught him early in his career: never lie to your audience. 

If you are using AI pi...

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Media veteran Josh Elledge on the #1 podcast pitching mistake.

Is your AI pitch getting you blacklisted from every podcast? 
If you want to build your authority platform, and frankly, you should, because podcast guesting is a must for you. But so it is for everyone else and that is the problem. 

Internet marketers have found yet another way for mass spamming through AI slop, flooding every...

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From Zero to $60K in 8 Weeks

She'd already given corporate every hour she had. The only way to make more was to stop working for someone else.

That is the math Rachel Castro did after eighteen years in corporate. She had a six-figure job, weekends that disappeared into binge sleeping, and by Sunday night she had stitched herself together enough to face Monday. It was the golden cage: paid enough to nee...

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He loved every minute of the breakdown that made everyone around him want him committed.

Steve Barton loved every minute of his breakdown. That is the part people cannot get past when he tells this story, and it is the part I could not get past either.Steve ran his family's flower business for over thirty years, starting at twenty-two after his father's stroke left him no choice. He built the life eve...

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A solo episode on loss, faith, and what it takes to keep going.

I'm 3,144 items into my insurance list. That's where this episode starts. What cracked me open while I was counting was a photo of the kids stacked in a tower on the living room floor, laughing, my husband Gary looking at them, thinking about adding himself to the pile. A house that doesn't exist anymore. And a question I couldn't shake, ...

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Mike Weisman spent thirty years building other people’s brands.

 As the owner of his own advertising agency, he understood exactly how a performance becomes a product, and he built a career optimizing his clients external image for the world. Then his business disintegrated within six weeks, and he found himself standing alone in his own awards hall, throwing plastic trophies into a trash b...

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Why That Number Isn't What You Should Be Asking?

What does the market bear? What does your competition charge? What do you think you can get away with? These are the three questions most founders ask when they set a price, and Ed Lee has spent the last decade watching them lead people straight into underpricing themselves.

Ed is the author of The Last Mile of Trust and has worked with over two thou...

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How Maeve Ferguson stopped fighting the inner work and built a business that Harvard professors apply to join.

Maeve Ferguson builds diagnostic assessment funnels for the highest end of the thought leadership market. Harvard professors. New York Times bestselling authors. She is data-obsessed, systems-driven, and the last person you would expect to credit her business transformation to weekly identity...

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Alice Kao on daily authorship, childhood trauma, and six climbing gyms.

When Alice Kao was three years old, her mother walked out the door carrying two large suitcases and did not turn around. When she was fourteen, her mother dropped her off alone in America near a school with some cash and left. Alice spent the next thirty years running a story about what that meant , that she was not smart enough, ...

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Tarkan Salar on Living Inside an Unfinished Transformation

Tarkan Salar did not lose his business. He dismantled it. Deliberately, painfully, over eighteen months, canceling contracts, unwinding supplier relationships, letting go of nearly 2,000 employees, absorbing millions in losses, all while his marriage fell apart, his father died, and the people closest to him told him he was making a mistake.

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Hatch Beauty Founder Tracy Holland on the hidden cost of building at all costs. 

Tracy Holland built Hatch Beauty into a $100 million beauty empire in five and a half years. Self-funded.

Three kids under five. EY Entrepreneur of the Year. A manufacturing facility in Durham, North Carolina.

Business with some of the biggest retailers in the world. Every metric of success you could point to and say, ...

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You are using AI. That's the right thing to do. You are enamored with how fast and intelligent it is. But you are getting inconsistent results. And you are worried it's your prompts.

You have been using AI. Getting inconsistent results. Pushing back when it ignores your instructions. Telling it the same thing ten times. And wondering if you are just doing it wrong.
 
You are not doing it wr...

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Nobody builds a business they hate on purpose. You build it because everyone says follow me, do it that way. So you do. 

And after a while you realize it is awful. You hate it. Just like the corporate job you left. And at some point you know you cannot do it anymore. If this is you, this episode of The Business Growth Architect Show: Founders of the Future is exactly where you need to be.
&nbs...

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I had to make some hard decisions about someone who has been advising me for the better part of 20 years. One phone call changed how I feel about this person. I had a visceral reaction. My body knew before my brain caught up. I stopped trusting.

In this episode I sit down with Dr. Michelle and Dr. Dennis Reina, two PhDs who have spent 35 years researching exactly what just happened to me, and what hap...

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Revenge quitting is trending. 

Wiebke Tasch did it before it had a name.
It’s 4pm in Berlin. The tram is packed. Everyone around her is doing exactly what they are supposed to do. She just came from an interview. She got the job. The dream job. The one everyone in Berlin would kill for,  at one of the biggest publishing houses in Germany.

And she can’t breathe.
Something...

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The world is burning. Rock bottom is calling. And for the first time, Beate is giving away every secret she has.

The world is shifting fast,  markets are down, supply chains are breaking, and founders everywhere are hitting walls they never saw coming. We are entering a war state, and whether you feel it yet or not, it will have real consequences for your business. Rock bottom isn't a sign you fa...