Built Not Born with Dr. A

I paid marketing agencies tens of thousands of dollars, and the first thing they asked me was what I wanted them to do. That one question taught me something about outsourcing. I couldn’t tell good work from bad, because I didn’t understand what I was paying for. So I went and learned marketing, CRM, and systems myself. Then, with AI as a force multiplier, I built my own CRM, LMS, and other tools...

Before I open email, there's already a report waiting for me: a content intelligence report across every brand I run, plus a social snapshot of how ParaReady, Florida Civics Prep, Built To Pass, and PrincipalReady each did the day before. Two years ago, that kind of visibility meant hiring a team. Now it's just how my mornings start. In this episode I walk through what that actually looks like day...

Every week, same four girls in the back row of my undergrad class at UCF. Cliff notes, flashcards, quizzing each other before I even started teaching, and after every exam, the same reaction: "none of the questions looked like anything we studied." They'd done everything right. I'd lived that exact frustration myself years earlier as a bad test taker who had to train himself from scratch. Watching...

Twenty-three years old, ninth grade world history, assistant varsity baseball coach, and evaluations that were genuinely strong all year. End of that year, I got cut anyway, along with 34 other first-year teachers at the same school, no reason required under Florida's first-three-years rule. Months later I'm on break at my Disney server job and a reporter from the Orlando Sentinel calls me. Turns...

A few months ago I sat down and wrote out my entire brain. Not a bio, not a LinkedIn summary — my story, my frameworks, my beliefs, even the five things about me that can't get stripped away no matter how big any of this gets. I call it my brain clone. In this episode I walk through why I built it, how every AI tool I use now pulls from that same source instead of me re-explaining myself in every...

For five and a half years I was the entire production engine of a company I no longer owned. Sixteen and seventeen hour days, one salesperson, constant turnover in the executive suite above me, and I told myself all of it was normal. Then came a five-minute Teams call. In this episode I go back and name the warning signs I talked myself out of seeing, why building alone made me both more valuable...

ParaReady started with a conversation I heard over and over at conferences, and a phone call I kept putting off making until I finally did. Now, a year later, I just moved the entire platform onto my own LMS, powered by the Built To Pass method and a personalized AI coach for every paraprofessional. This is the origin story and the rebuild in one.

There's a full subscription platform live right now at buildsmarterclaude.com . Next.js, Supabase, Stripe, Vimeo, all deployed on Vercel. I'm not a developer. I built it with Claude Code, one conversation at a time, the same way I've taught myself everything else in this business. Here's what that actually looked like.

In 2000 I took a job waiting tables at Disney just to survive grad school. It ended up giving me my wife, six years of the hardest grind of my life, and the work ethic that built The Learning Liaisons. This is the part of the grind story nobody talks about — that it also builds a life.

When I was building Built To Pass, I realized I needed to stop being the bottleneck for my own content. That's when I cloned my voice. My mom didn't catch it. My wife — who hears me every single day — was freaked out. But voice cloning is only half of it. The real work is building a brain clone. And that's not a ChatGPT thing.

"It was a Thursday in May. A Teams call. Five minutes. Maybe less. I had built a company from nothing, helped tens of thousands of educators and professionals pass their exams, and in five minutes — it was over. What I didn't expect was what came next. Not the sting. The clarity."

I didn't do a traditional sale. The deal was a small dollar amount up front, a waterfall revenue share model, and a commitment to help me scale what I had built. I was grateful for the opportunity — and I walked in as a first-time seller who didn't fully understand the difference between a letter of intent and a closing document. Here's what I learned the hard way.

I built The Learning Liaisons to almost $400K in annual revenue and couldn't get past it. Not because the product was bad — educators were passing. The problem was a commission structure I built out of necessity that became a ceiling I couldn't break through. This is what I learned from that mistake — and why a lot of exits aren't grand strategy.

I'm not going to tell you my SAT score. Not because I'm embarrassed — mostly because the number isn't the point. I was a B-track kid with real learning disabilities. The score I got back was rough. And for years, I let it tell me something about what I was capable of. At some point I stopped trying to memorize my way past it and started studying the test itself. How the questions were written. Wha...

In 2012, I quit teaching and told myself I was going to build a company. No business degree. No MBA. No team. No budget. This is what that actually looked like — including the structural mistake that quietly killed my ability to scale.

From second through fifth grade, they pulled me out of class and put me in a tiny room. Maybe seven feet by eight feet. One teacher. One other student. Me. Nobody explained it to me at eight years old. Just extra help. And leaving class for extra help meant walking out while everyone watched. You tell yourself a story when that happens. That the other kids don't need this. That the room is proof o...

Nobody handed me a roadmap. I built The Learning Liaisons from scratch in 2015 with no business degree, no investors, and no guarantee it would work. By 2021 it was acquired. In this first episode, I talk about what it actually takes to start something from nothing — and why being "built not born" isn't a tagline. It's the only way I know how to operate.