Beyond A Million

After four years and 250 episodes, I'm stopping the weekly Beyond A Million podcast. I won't say it's gone for good, but I'm putting a bookmark in it for now. I started the podcast to have good conversations and to support Easy Pay Direct: landing clients, giving our leads useful content, and eventually building top of funnel.  Some of that worked well, and some of it I never fully committed to. R...

What happens to entrepreneurs when AI and robots can produce nearly everything we currently get paid to produce? That's the question I wanted to explore with Daniel Faggella and Jesse Elder. A huge part of modern life is organized around making money. We go to school to develop skills, build careers and businesses, compete for resources, and use capital to create more opportunity. But if AI keeps...

Today I'm talking to Daniel Faggella, who built and sold a $2 million ecommerce business so he could go all-in on artificial intelligence years before the rest of the business world caught up. Daniel is now the founder of Emerj, an AI research and media company that works with companies like NVIDIA, Google Cloud, and Salesforce. He also hosts the AI in Business podcast, where he's spent years buil...

Today I'm talking to Austin Armstrong, a longtime digital marketer, founder of Syllaby and AI Marketing World, and someone who has built millions of followers across social media. Austin has spent more than two decades studying how attention works online, and this conversation is largely about how that's changing with AI. We talk about how he approaches content creation today, why Facebook has bec...

I'm sitting on a private jet with Tom Patterson and Chandler Bolt, and the obvious question comes up: when does this kind of spending actually make sense? Once your business starts producing real money, the decisions don't necessarily get easier. Do you keep pouring everything back into the company? Spend more to save time? Pay for experiences and access to better rooms? Or are you just copying th...

Britnie Turner built her real estate career by deliberately going where other investors wouldn't—high-crime neighborhoods, overlooked properties, and land that banks didn't even want to finance.   That approach eventually helped her make tens of millions of dollars. But what interested me was why she was willing to make bets that looked irrational to almost everyone around her.   Britnie went from...

Thanh Pham has spent 15 years studying productivity, and over the last five he's gone deep on implementing AI inside real companies. That means he's seen the difference between AI that actually changes how a business operates and AI that simply helps someone finish a task a little faster. That's the problem we dig into. If you're still using AI to shave a few minutes off work you were already doin...

A lot of founders hit seven figures and assume they've built a business. But if sales slow down, decisions stall, or customers feel the difference whenever they step away, they may still be self-employed. Jeremy Shapiro has built companies across SaaS, ecommerce, technology, and services. He's seen the same pattern repeatedly: The hustle that creates momentum early on eventually becomes the thing...

I bought a lake house in Austin and discovered I was paying city taxes even though the city wasn't providing water, sewer, trash collection, or electricity. Julie Drenner helped me legally remove the property from Austin's tax rolls. But that uncovered another problem: the city could still regulate what I build, how I remodel, and how I use the property through its extraterritorial jurisdiction, o...

Dean Guida started Infragistics at 23 to build UX/UI tools for professional software developers. Thirty-seven years later, the company operates across six countries, its software is used by more than two million developers, and its customers span the entire S&P 500—including Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, Exxon, Intuit, and Bank of America. But AI can now generate functional software in minutes. So wha...

Today I'm talking to Jim Donnelly, a founder who has built and scaled businesses across travel, real estate, wellness, and longevity medicine. He built an online travel community with 300,000+ members that later rolled into Travelocity. He developed luxury real estate that still holds Charlotte's record for price per square foot. He co-founded Restore Hyper Wellness and helped scale it to 225+ loc...

Today I'm talking with Geoff Woods, author of The AI-Driven Leader and founder of AI Leadership, about why so many founders are using AI on the wrong problems. Geoff helped drive Jindal Steel & Power's market cap from $750M to $12B in four years, and one of his points really stuck with me: you don't get beyond a million because you write great emails. But that's exactly how a lot of entrepreneurs...

Today I'm talking to Matt Gallant, co-founder of BioOptimizers, a supplement company generating $10M a month with a larger mission to help people live healthier for longer. Matt started with a simple realization: if he could get great at marketing, he could build a business in almost any category. That belief eventually led him into health, supplements, and BioOptimizers—but not without some hard-...

Today, Cameron Herold (Founder of COO Alliance) is back on the podcast to talk about one of the biggest reasons companies stop scaling: bad hiring. We get into why impressive resumes can be misleading, how to tell if someone has actually done the work, and the hiring mistakes that quietly cost companies years of progress. Cameron also breaks down why most entrepreneurs are never properly trained t...

AI isn't just creating a software boom, it's creating an infrastructure crisis. As demand for AI explodes, the real bottleneck isn't chips or models anymore. It's power, cooling, permitting, and the ability to build data centers fast enough to keep up.  Jason Van Gaal has spent more than a decade solving exactly that problem. After building and exiting multiple data center companies — including on...

Today I'm talking to Bill Tyndall, who helped build Electric AI from an idea into a company approaching a billion-dollar valuation, raised $211M across eight funding rounds, and now serves as CEO of Techvera. Bill has spent his career building companies around automation, IT, cybersecurity, and digital transformation. But his biggest lesson isn't just about AI. It's about capacity. We get into why...

Roger Neel sold his SaaS company at $100M+ ARR, took three hours off, and dove straight into a health tech startup backed by Google Ventures and Dexcom. In this conversation, Roger breaks down the full arc — from founding Mavenlink in the teeth of the 2008 financial crash, to grinding through 13 years of customer base churn, fundraising rounds, and eventually selling to PE. He also shares what he'...

John Lee Dumas has published a podcast episode every single day for 14 years, leading to more than 5,000 episodes of Entrepreneurs on Fire. He records seven interviews in a single day each week, built a multimillion-dollar media business around the show, and put together 12 straight years of $100K+ months in net profit. But when I asked him what he'd do if he were starting a podcast today, he didn...

Today I'm talking to Matt King, CEO of GoBundance, host of The Matt King Show, and Chief of Staff for a family office managing high-level investments and operators. Matt is about to ride a bike 2,000 miles from Mexico to Canada while giving away $1 million to people in overlooked communities across America. We get into how he thinks about balance, why he believes entrepreneurs should stop chasing...

Today, I'm talking with Tom Patterson , founder of Tommy John, the underwear brand that turned a frustrating problem into a 9-figure business. Tom started the company after getting tired of undershirts constantly coming untucked while working in medical sales. What began as a simple fix turned into one of the biggest direct-to-consumer apparel success stories of the last 15 years. In this conversa...

Dan Brisse won back-to-back X Games gold medals as one of the most dangerous urban snowboarders on the planet—jumping off parking garages, rooftops, and rails for a living. But while he was at the peak of his career, he was watching his heroes lose their homes, their wives, and their minds. So he did something different. He started investing. In this episode, Dan breaks down how he went from livin...

I'm sitting down with Jonathan Ronzio, who scaled Trainual from an idea to $30M ARR—while building a company known for its culture and still finding time to climb mountains, run marathons, and live a full life outside of work. What stood out to me in this conversation is how intentional he's been about building systems—not just in the business, but in his life. We talk about why most founders docu...

You don't need to create demand if demand is mandated. That's the insight Will Caldwell used to build and sell his company. Will discovered that inside the mortgage industry, banks are legally required to buy flood certificates on every loan. So, he started Snap — a platform that makes it faster and cheaper for banks to do exactly that. Then he partnered with Intercontinental Exchange, the $95 bil...

Today I'm talking with Chris Taylor, an entrepreneur who turned a consulting engagement with Nissan into a software company serving half the automotive industry—then sold the business for multiple eight figures without ever raising outside capital. In this conversation, Chris shares how a consulting project with Nissan became the foundation of his company, how that journey ultimately led to an acq...

Today I'm talking to Dan Demsky, who turned the frustration of trying to pack light while traveling into an 8-figure e-commerce business. He discovered that merino wool clothing lets you pack far fewer items for a trip. The problem was, most of the brands were focused on outdoor gear—not something everyday travelers would actually wear. So Dan and his buddies built Unbound Merino , a fully remote...