Driven To Win

Connect With Chaz Katie Richardson was a young mother making baby gear on her mom's 1962 Bernina sewing machine while her kids napped. A boutique owner asked to sell it and told her she would regret it if she did not use her gifts. Katie felt that future regret so strongly that it pushed her to start a business she knew nothing about. She launched her product in 2010 and within a year it was...

Connect With Chaz At 25, Joe Rivera was a stockbroker in New York making seven figures a year, and it still was not enough. A coworker handed him his first opiate, and his life went dark. He overdosed twice, and the last time it took six doses of Narcan to bring him back. After he got sober, Joe built another multimillion dollar company. Something was still missing, so he built a coaching and spea...

Connect With Chaz Michael Tucker was a part-time restaurant server and youth minister when a friend offered to teach him real estate. He had no money, so he traded marketing work for coaching. He ignored his mentor once and lost $20,000, but he kept going. His marketing work grew that mentor's real estate education company to $750,000 in 10 months with no list and no audience. Michael now run...

Connect With Chaz Brad Lea dropped out of high school at 16 and grew up in a blue collar family that told him to get a real job. He stumbled into sales, started out earning everyone around him, and went on to build many businesses. He says if you are broke, there are only three reasons: your mindset, your skillset or your habits. Brad says if you make $90,000 a year, you can make $200,000, and the...

Connect With Chaz Jason Velie started in real estate at about 30, while he still worked in finance. His first rental went badly. A bad inspection and a contractor who took $16,000 left the house sitting empty for about two years before it broke even. His first flip went much better and proved the model. He kept flipping and used the profits as down payments on apartment buildings. Today he holds a...

Connect With Chaz Beate Chelette built a business and sold it to Bill Gates. Today she calls herself The Growth Architect. She helps owners turn their talent into a business, add the systems that make it run, and build it so someone would want to buy it. She sees a lot of owners do the opposite. They buy course after course and tool after tool, chasing the next marketing promise, without ever buil...

Connect With Chaz Colin Sanburg went to work in a family owned manufacturing company at 21. He ended up running it as CEO for almost 15 years and led a turnaround that took about 10 of them. He later started an industrial distribution company and still owns both. Along the way he noticed something. Most owners take their financial advice from their banker or their CPA. Neither one is focused on ma...

Connect With Chaz Alexander De Ridder builds AI agents for a living. His company, SmythOS, lets teams create agents with drag and drop tools and no code. His picture of the future is a small team of three people running a hundred agents that do the repetitive work. That sounds far away for a lot of owners. Alexander says it is closer than most think, and the companies that stay lean and learn earl...

Connect With Chaz Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal led executive leadership development at Nike and global leadership development at Cigna. In February 2020 she left Nike to start her own company. She had bookings lined up to replace her income. She was a single mom with two young sons. Within weeks the pandemic wiped those bookings out. She ran her business on a 30 day cash runway for 36 months, with no...

Connect With Chaz Clifford Stephan spent 20 years building a compensation consulting firm in Silicon Valley. He was successful, social, and a regular drinker since high school. In his late thirties he started to feel like he was aging faster than he should. He spent real money on sleep, supplements, and diets. None of it fixed the problem. Then he took a full year off alcohol. That one decision ch...

Connect With Chaz Travis King started a real estate side hustle with his wife while he still had a salaried job. The 2008 recession hit his house deals hard, so he switched to land. The deals were smaller and the risk was lower. Some early flips made only about $2,000 each. He kept going. His goal was $10,000 a month in recurring revenue. The side business passed his salary and he walked away from...

Connect With Chaz Phillip Brown has spent about 20 years automating how businesses run. His firm, Blu Pitt, has built systems for Walt Disney, Harley Davidson, and NASA. He also works with small companies that have 5 to 15 people. His view is simple. The average business uses 50 to 100 different software tools every week. About 80 percent of the back office work can be automated. Most owners just...

Connect With Chaz Dre Baldwin did not start playing basketball until he was 14. He played one year of high school ball, mostly from the bench. He walked on at a Division III school, a level that almost never sends anyone to the pros. After college he sold gym memberships and worked at Foot Locker. Then he paid his own way into an exposure camp in the summer of 2005, played well, signed with an age...

Connect With Chaz James Lawrence spent his first 10 years as a CEO doing what a lot of successful people do. He moved fast. He made things happen. And by his own admission, he did not always treat the people around him the way they deserved. That honesty is rare. Most guests walk in with a highlight reel. James walked in with a confession and a blueprint. After spending a year sitting down with ov...

Connect With Chaz In 2018, Ryan Schmitt thought he was having a heart attack. He was cutting every dollar he could find in the business, and he was trying to decide whether to cancel the key man life insurance policy. He kept it. Because he was not sure he was going to make it. The company he had built over a decade had just lost $7 million on one job. They had lost their bonding. He had borrowed...

Connect With Chaz Mike DeHaan was miserable for four and a half years as an engineer. One morning, driving to work in dead silence, he called his wife and said he needed to quit. She asked what he would do instead. He said he did not know. He quit that same day. Within three and a half years, his off-market real estate business had closed 400 deals. One every business day. No passive income strate...

Connect With Chaz 80% of video on social media is watched without sound. If you are not captioning your videos, you are invisible to 8 out of 10 people scrolling past your content right now. That is not a social media tip. That is a revenue problem. Cam Beaudoin spent years as an IBM developer before realizing he was always the one who wanted to present at demo day. He turned that into two busines...

Connect With Chaz At 29, Sean Martin was making 6 figures in medical sales, had the gift of persuasion, and was doing 2 years in federal prison. Not because he couldn't succeed. Because he was afraid he actually could. Sean grew up in the Bronx, the son of a Dominican immigrant who raised him alone. He got the college degree. He got the sales job. He built the income. And still, the programmi...

Connect With Chaz What does financial discipline look like when it grows from desperation instead of discipline? Janine Jennings didn't learn about net worth from a finance professor. She learned it in an ICU, watching her infant daughter fight for her life, while still working hair clients to keep the lights on. When her daughter passed, she had nothing. She restarted with one appointment an...

Connect With Chaz Rick Jordan's IPO deal fell apart eight times in the five days leading up to it going through. Every time there was an impasse in the contracts or the terms, his response was not to choose between two bad options. It was to find the third option that nobody had thought of yet. Every time it almost broke, it came back together. It went through. That is not luck. That is a twe...

Connect With Chaz Dan Rawitch started his career at nineteen years old by getting rejected from twelve interviews before someone finally gave him a shot. He went on to build the fourth largest mortgage credit reporting firm in the nation, trade bonds on Wall Street for Bear Stearns, and develop a trading indicator called Flight Station with an 87.5 percent win rate. Now he runs the University of O...

Connect With Chaz Armando LeDuc lost close to $50,000 a month in retaining business in under five days. Clients were dropping. Bad reviews were coming in. Invoices were not getting paid. He was so confident in what he was doing that he had stopped actually paying attention to what his clients were experiencing. That humbling was the beginning of the client journey framework he now builds for busin...

Connect With Chaz Neb Aynu was the top producer at his corporate bonding firm when he was let go. He had planned to start Kingdom Bonding in five years, at 35. Instead, he started it the same month. He moved in with his sister. He put his apartment on Airbnb. He put his car in a rental program. He walked places in the rain. His budget was under $100 a month. He worked 70 to 80 hours a week. In yea...

Connect With Chaz Rylee Meek gave his life to entrepreneurship at fifteen. He started in network marketing, moved to personal training, discovered dinner seminar marketing at 26, made his first million dollar year selling insulation without knowing what the R value stood for, and has since built a nine-figure sales and client acquisition empire across industries including insurance, regenerative m...

Connect With Chaz Clifton Muckenfuss co-founded a residential construction company in 2010 knowing nothing about construction. By the time he exited in 2021, 60 to 62 percent of his business was repeat and referral. He spent less than 1 percent of top-line revenue on direct response marketing. His Google reviews went from 3 in the first six years to over 100. None of that happened because of a mar...