The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Episode Summary Matthew Stafford built the kind of resume that makes other entrepreneurs stop scrolling. Three decades of building companies. Thousands of store owners mentored. Hundreds of brands scaled past seven and eight figures. Stages around the world. The biggest e-commerce optimization event in North America. By every external metric, he had won. And in a room doing emotional intelligence...

Episode Summary Here is what the trophy room says about George W. Tinsley, Sr. Three national championships. Pro athlete. Number one KFC franchise in the nation for thirty-five straight years. Number one TGI Fridays in the country for nine consecutive years. Airports, Starbucks, Wendy's, P.F. Chang's. A fifty-four year marriage. A son now running the empire. A book. Speaking stages. Hall of Fame n...

Episode Summary Eric Lowe grew up in Mount Washington, Kentucky, five people in a nine hundred square foot house with three bedrooms and one bathroom. His oldest brother went to the Air Force. His middle brother went to the Army. Eric got out on a football scholarship to a small NAIA school and decided that law was going to be the ticket that changed everything for his family. He was going to be t...

Episode Summary Rich Potter looks, from the outside, like a guy who simply wins. Corporate sales executive who built a half million dollar desk into fourteen million in five years. Photo booth entrepreneur who put his equipment on Garth Brooks's stadium tour semi truck and did events for Larry Fitzgerald and NASCAR. Amazon wholesale seller who hit a million dollars by year two. Gym franchise owner...

Episode Summary Hadley Nightingale bought a farm at nineteen years old, right before the Global Financial Crisis hit, with a mortgage the bank handed him the way mortgages got handed out in those days, if you could fog a mirror, you qualified. He had no business experience and made decisions that put him underwater fast. The fallout sent him to the Australian outback, driving road trains nearly tw...

Episode Summary Steven Dolan won by every external scoreboard there is. He started at twenty-eight thousand dollars a year as the lowest level salesperson at a waterproofing subcontracting firm in Southern California, knowing nothing about waterproofing or construction. Within three or four years they hit ten million in sales. By year six, fourteen million. He had partnership and equity within a y...

Episode Summary Benas Leonavicius tried the safe path twice. Both times he hated it. He landed an SEO manager role straight out of university in Lithuania, hired into a marketing agency with no managerial experience, full of drive, full of ideas about how to make things better for clients. Two months later he was fired. He had not even passed probation. He felt the work he was delivering was the b...

Episode Summary Austin Reed was a full-time musician in Bali in early 2020, living paycheck to paycheck, composing, recording, doing whatever creative work came his way, when the world shut down and his Brazilian friend Mateos texted him from another country to say he had just been robbed at gunpoint. Laptop gone. Rent money gone. Everything gone. Austin did not offer sympathy. He sent two hundred...

Episode Summary Kanika Vasudeva had sixteen years of corporate excellence behind her. Engineer by training. MBA by discipline. Projects at BHP, PwC, ING Bank with price tags in the tens of millions. By every external marker, she had built exactly what success was supposed to look like. And she was calling her friends in her mid-thirties asking them quietly whether they were okay, whether this was...

Episode Summary Matthew Hassler was a chemical engineer working one hundred and ten hour weeks on multi-million dollar industrial projects, on call at midnight, watching his weight climb to two thirty-five, watching his wife Logan cry on the one day off he had in a nine-day stretch because she needed more of him and he was spending that one day off working on a house flip. He was demonstrating gri...

Episode Summary Joshua Lee grew up in Delta Junction, Alaska, a town of a couple hundred people north of Fairbanks where winter hits negative fifty degrees and his Korean immigrant parents were navigating physical disabilities, financial hardship, and the kind of survival-mode existence that most people only read about. His dad moved there as a thirteen year old who did not speak English. His mom...

Episode Summary Jon Paul Crimi grew up on the Irish Riviera outside Boston, a place where city mentality lived inside suburban houses and you learned early that your bike might get stolen and somebody might beat you up and that was just Wednesday. At nineteen he was at a party, grabbed the wrong guy during a fight, and took a knife to the head. Forty one stitches. Almost died from blood loss. The...

Episode Summary Tim Kelly grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, failed out of college, played drums in a band, and figured the Navy might be a good move until something better came along. Fifteen years later, he was a rescue swimmer living the mantra so others may live, a certified command financial specialist teaching hundreds of sailors and Marines how to build wealth while still in uniform, and a...

Episode Summary Renee Carbone Fleming grew up on the second floor of a tenement house, sharing a pullout sofa in the living room with her sister, in a home where the expected trajectory was secretarial school, a pension, a social security check, and a slow death. Her biological father committed suicide when she was six or seven. Her mother remarried. The family scraped. Nobody had money, so nobody...

Episode Summary Allie Grack was born to a mother who was not ready, adopted into a volatile and abusive marriage that was already near its end, and by age eight had been through emergency placements at a runaway home for teenagers, a twenty-four hour psychiatric hold for adults, and the foster care system. The foster mother who took her in, a woman named Bev, sat an eight-year-old Allie down on th...

Episode Summary Merit Kahn walked into her first stand up comedy class in 2014 with one goal: to be funnier in her keynotes. She had no intention of becoming a professional comedian. She was already a keynote speaker, a sales trainer, a certified emotional intelligence expert, a former Gerber baby model, and the youngest general sales manager of a Personal Achievement Radio station in Chicago, a s...

Episode Summary Marc Schmidt was born with Opitz GBB Syndrome, a rare condition that arrives as a package deal. Cleft lip and palate. Surgical intervention required at birth. A speech pattern that has drawn stares and dismissive comments since he was four years old. Daily physical management that most people in his life do not know about and that he has learned to carry without making it a headlin...

Episode Summary Most people spend their careers chasing the seat at the table. Chris Farr had it. Vice President of Technology at a credit union in southwest Georgia, twenty years building his expertise from the ground floor up through the era of mainframes and dumb terminals, through the rollout of online banking when half the membership still preferred the phone teller, through compliance framew...

Episode Summary Ryan Otwell grew up a preacher's kid in a middle-class home, raised in the church, moving from house to house as his dad's work demanded, and building the kind of faith that was borrowed from the people around him rather than owned for himself. That distinction would cost him a decade. When infidelity, attempted suicide, and months of family chaos unraveled everything at home just...

Episode Summary Josh Crumback had one semester of college, a dream of playing football that ended with a back injury junior year, and the kind of work ethic that sends a teenager riding his bike to the school gym every summer morning to lift weights before anyone else shows up. When he dropped out of college he did not spiral. He went to work for his great uncle in office furniture, stayed five ye...

Episode Summary Murray Smith did not plan any of it. He finished high school, got accepted into chemical engineering, lasted two months, went home and told his mum he was done, and ended up in the Victoria Police because he thought he might like helping people until he figured out what he actually wanted to do. Fifteen years later he was still there, and everything that happened in between is the...

Episode Summary Carly Pepin grew up in LA knowing something was off but not having a name for it. She was reactive at work, rough around the edges when challenged, and excellent at showing up for teams she believed in and a disaster when asked to do things that violated what she stood for. She was the kind of employee who screamed in an office and quit on the spot when her boss asked her to create...

Episode Summary Khang Dang sold blueberry blow pops for a quarter in fourth grade, got shut down by his math teacher, and kept going. He spent his college years arbitraging eBay inventory while his peers chased grades. He climbed the corporate ladder as a database administrator, jumped eleven jobs in twelve interviews across eight years, hit six figures by year four, and still hated every corporat...

Episode Summary David Forster grew up on a cattle farm in northeast Kansas, the son of a man who worked nights at a railway mailroom, put himself through school, became a mainframe programmer, and still ran a fifty-head cattle operation on the side because that was just what you did. David absorbed all of it. The work ethic, the no-excuses mindset, and the quiet limiting beliefs about money and bu...

Episode Summary Barby Ingle was at the top of her game. Coaching at Washington State University in the athletic department, cheering at every sport from basketball to cross country, taking the dance team to the national top five, running her own cheer and dance training company on the side, named top five choreographer in the country. She was a human doing, building and creating at full speed. The...