Sacred Business Stories

Shannon Algeo had already done the hard part. He’d published his research, written his thesis, and turned years of study into a direction for his book our relationship with technology. Then a friend told him he had to try Claude as a writing partner, so he opened it and fed it his question and his plan. It handed back chapter titles. Mini chapter descriptions. Catchy ones. And reading through them...

Claude Silver was running a major Unilever account at VaynerMedia. Sixty people on her team, cupcakes and bubbly water at the meeting every other Wednesday, and a calendar full of decisions about whether a logo should be purple, brown, or black. By every outside measure she was doing well. She worked for Gary Vaynerchuk , at a company she loved and called home. But one day, she had to walk into hi...

In 2007, Steve Kamb spent his days getting rejected. He had a sales job renting construction equipment, and he was bad at it. He would drive to a job site, get told no, sit in his car and read the next chapter of a book, then drive to the next site and get told no again. He needed the job. He also could not make himself care about it. What he wanted was to stop spending his life on work that wasn’...

In 2007, Elizabeth Purvis sat on her bed in Brooklyn with her husband, two black cats, and a deck of Carolyn Myss archetype cards, hunting for something to call her new business. The card that came out said goddess. She had just quit her last job, a six-figure systems engineering role, and was making about $1,000 a month helping her tarot friends price and package their services. She was also ten...

On July 1st of last year, Dr Sam Illingworth published the first post of Slow AI from his desk in Edinburgh and put a line in it that said he would never charge for the work. He was a tenured full professor with a PhD in atmospheric physics, a decade of public engagement behind him, a science & poetry blog that had peaked at a quarter-million views a year, and a past life as an award-winning playw...

This week we talked with Matt Brown , and here’s the thing… we allowed ourselves to go a bit off-script. Matt runs a boutique email performance agency. He helps entrepreneurs make sure their emails actually land in inboxes instead of spam. It sounds dry. But oh so important. Most first-time creators don’t think about deliverability until they have a problem. They build an audience, they send email...

So, Billy Broas was on Sacred Business Stories with us this week. For context, Billy is the guy who supported the creation our messaging foundation for Sacred Business Flow back when we were too close to it to see it ourselves. Author of Simple Marketing for Smart People. Creator of the Five Lightbulbs framework, which we still apply almost daily. He just launched a new Substack called Fractal Fai...

So here’s what happened. We sat down with Leo Babauta last week. About twenty-five minutes came through in the replay. The first fifteen didn’t. Substack swallowed the opening. Honestly, I was pretty gutted, and I sat with the recording for a few days wondering whether to share the replay at all. Then I caught myself. This was a conversation about beginning before you’re ready and shipping the imp...

We had Mia Kiraki 🎭 on Sacred Business Stories this week. She writes a Substack called Robots Ate My Homework. Half Armenian, half Romanian. Film studies in London, two master’s degrees, a decade in B2B content marketing, a content agency built with her husband, and now one of the most interesting voices on AI on Substack. Her tagline says it. AI with brains, taste, and an unreasonable amount of...

The snowboarding accident landed Brian Clark in surgery for a subdural hematoma. He had a wife, a three-year-old daughter, and a new baby son who’d just arrived. What he wanted was simple. He didn’t want to keep spending his life on work he hated. The hard part was that his real estate brokerage had just become the first business he’d ever built that made more money than his big-law job would have...

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA started medical school with three kids under five, a husband commuting 100 miles each way, and no real plan for how she’d absorb the sheer volume of information being thrown at her. So she drew cartoons. Not as a hobby. As a survival strategy. It worked well enough that her classmates started asking for copies, and she ended up publishing six textbooks before she graduated....

She Had 100,000 Followers. Then She Disappeared for 18 Months. Here’s What She Came Back With. Sacred Business Stories | Weekly Substack Live Recap | Guest: Morena Cardoso , Somatic Therapist, Writer & Founder of Danza Medicina Morena Cardoso has spent the last decade leading immersive movement laboratories across 15 countries under the banner of Danza Medicina, working with the female body, ances...

You’ve been sitting on something . Maybe for months, maybe longer. Not because you don’t have anything to say, but because the silence around what you’ve already written, or thought about writing, or almost published, has started to feel like a verdict. What if it isn’t? You read it back, you hear nothing from the outside world, and you decide to wait a little longer until it’s better, until you’r...

The man who helped copywriters earn $25 million in contracts couldn’t pull the trigger on his own Substack channel. That’s the confession Kevin Rogers made on Sacred Business Stories this week. And if you’ve ever found yourself knowing exactly what you should do next while watching yourself not do it, this conversation was for meant for you. Kevin built CopyChief into a powerhouse community over 1...

This is part of our Sacred Business Stories series — weekly conversations with people who are building businesses that align with their deepest truth, not just their training. In this episode, we sat down with Jane Riccobono , a midwife and founder of Wisebody , who is building a healthcare practice for women who know they deserve better and are ready to trust their bodies again — without abandoni...

Bob Burg ’s The Go-Giver has sold over 1.5 million copies in 30+ languages. The premise fits on a napkin: shift your focus from getting to giving, and you’ll make more money. Not because of karma or magical thinking, but because when people feel genuinely served, they buy. They refer. They become what Bob calls your “personal walking ambassadors.” We brought Bob on Sacred Business Stories for this...

You don’t need tens of thousands of subscribers to build a real business. You need 300 people who’ve actually talked to you. Jo Barnes has spent 15 years testing this idea across multiple six-figure launches, an e-commerce exit, and 45 countries traveled with a laptop. Her take: 30,000 passive followers who occasionally skim your content are worth less than 300 people who actually know your name....

We loved our first conversation with Dr. Kelly Flanagan so much that we wanted to bring him back for something different. This isn’t a regular episode of our show. It’s an Author’s Spotlight to support the launch of his new book, The Road Less Triggered , and to share his work with as many people as we can. Kelly is a clinical psychologist, author, and coach who’s been featured on The Five Love La...

Ruben Hassid spent his childhood computer time writing blog posts about video game optimization instead of playing the game. His brother thought he was nuts. Twenty years later, that pattern, test things repeatedly, figure out what worked, teach it simply, built a 700K LinkedIn following and 230K+ on Substack. This week he shared what happened. Turns out his ChatGPT success in December 2022 came a...

What happens when a 15-year corporate veteran at Apple and Estee Lauder gets stranded in a foreign country during a pandemic with two young daughters, her husband and dog stuck on the other side of the world? She plants a lemon tree. This week on Sacred Business Stories , we sat down with Veronica Llorca-Smith , a Substack Bestseller, Penguin author, and international speaker who turned rejection...

Paollà Yáelli spent 17 years abroad, built a career with the U.S. government, and studied everything from Kabbalah to tantra to somatic work. Then she moved back to Brazil and had to start from scratch. Nobody knew who she was. And the first time she walked into a yoga studio to teach, people complained about her behind her back. This conversation cuts through the polished version of the entrepren...

Letícia Tórgo spent 20 years building a career in communications, television, and theater production across three countries. She had contracts, credentials, recognition. By any standard measure, she’d made it. Then she hit 40. And something stopped working. What happened next is the kind of story that makes perfect sense in retrospect and no sense whatsoever in the moment. She signed up for two as...

You Can’t Download Your Way Into a Business A pattern I see often and lived through myself goes something like this: You get a strong idea. It feels important, maybe even urgent. You build the outline, the offer, maybe even the landing page. For a moment, the whole thing feels inevitable. Then, as soon as it’s time to move it into the world, everything stalls. The enthusiasm fades. A new idea arri...

Jari Roomer spent years building a successful productivity business on Medium. He was earning real money, had thousands of readers, and by most metrics was winning the game. Then something unexpected happened: he started self-sabotaging. His subconscious had figured out what his conscious mind refused to accept. The topic wasn’t aligned with who he was becoming. The business that looked perfect on...

Some people teach what they know. Others live what they teach. Marc Angelo Coppola spent years in the first camp before making the jump to the second. He was Phil’s first coach, back when Marc was running events and masterminds for entrepreneurs chasing freedom. But something shifted. The man who once taught others how to build businesses decided to stop talking and start building. Not another cou...