He Took an 80% Pay Cut to Fix a Broken System: Chris Hamilton on Why Health Insurance Is Costing You More Than Your Mortgage

He Took an 80% Pay Cut to Fix a Broken System: Chris Hamilton on Why Health Insurance Is Costing You More Than Your Mortgage

On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Chris Hamilton, a former corporate finance professional turned health insurance consultant who walked away from a comfortable six-figure career to fight for something he actually believed in. Chris is the founder of a consulting practice that helps companies manage the rising cost of health insurance, protect their employees, and build better plans outside the traditional system. He's been doing it for ten years, and what started as one client has grown into one of the fastest-moving segments of the health insurance marketplace. Chris grew up as a multi-sport athlete in a small town outside of Southwest Houston, and he'll tell you that background shaped everything. Competition, adversity, getting knocked down and getting back up. Those aren't just sports lessons. They're the same things that carried him through a decade of building something that most people in his industry didn't think was worth the extra work. The story that really sets the tone for this conversation happened early in his career. He was thirty days into the job, had just renewed his first client, and his friends were congratulating him on already getting a raise because the premium went up and his commission went with it. Then a single mom of three walked up to him with tears in her eyes. One of her kids needed a procedure and she couldn't afford the deductible. Chris walked straight into the owner's office after that meeting and told him how he was getting paid. Then he changed it. That moment is where everything started. Ty and Chris get into the real mechanics of why health insurance is broken, why it functions more like an oligopoly than a competitive market, and why the people who created the problem are not the ones who are going to fix it. Chris uses a car insurance analogy that makes the whole thing click: imagine if your auto policy covered oil changes and tire rotations for a $25 copay. That's essentially what's happened with health insurance, and it's a big reason costs keep climbing. They also talk about what it actually takes to build a team worth having. Chris is clear that the best hire he's ever made didn't have the most impressive resume. What he looks for is someone who's a little fired up about how broken the system is. Someone who sees the smoke and wants to be part of putting out the fire. You can teach the technical stuff. You can't teach the want-to. Chris opens up about the sacrifice most people never see: taking an 80% pay cut, giving up the club membership and the perks, and betting on himself in a space where almost nobody was doing what he was trying to do. He's honest that it wasn't glamorous and that people who see him now assume it just happened. It didn't. Two people shaped who he became. His dad, an engineer and a man of his word, gave him his foundation. A C-level mentor he met in finance gave him the real business education that no MBA program ever did. He credits both of them with building the floor he's been standing on ever since. His advice for anyone trying to level up is straightforward: stay a student, surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, and find a peer group. Not just people inside your industry, but people outside it too. Sometimes the best answer to a problem comes from someone who has zero context and no assumptions about how things are supposed to work. The only legacy Chris cares about is what his kids think of him. That's it. Everything else is noise.   🔗 Connect with Chris: fixhealthinsurance.com 🔗 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chamilton 🎙️ Follow along: @thetybradyway   As always, we'd love to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

6,000 Episodes, Zero Days Off: How JB Glossinger Built a Daily Coaching Empire by Showing Up When Nobody Was Watching

On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with JB Glossinger, the man behind Morning Coach, one of the longest-running daily coaching podcasts on the planet. JB has published five books with Hay House, spoken to crowds of 5,000 people, beaten Oprah and Ellen in the podcast charts, and has shown up every single day for 21 years to deliver 15 minutes of coaching to help people start their mornings right. He's done over 6,000 episodes. And he started in a world where nobody even knew what a podcast was. But the origin story is what makes this one worth your time. JB grew up in Indiana with a blue-collar mom who raised him alone until he was ten, while his father, a famous pro football player, didn't pay child support. In third grade, he got held back, labeled special needs, and pulled out of class to work on his speech while the other kids stayed behind and learned. He never talked about that publicly until recently. Now it's the first word in his new book, Get It Done Now. He wanted people to know that none of what he's built came from a golden spoon or a Harvard degree. He had to find a different way. That different way started with a letter so bad that the CEO of an aerospace company called his sales manager over just to read it out loud and ask if JB had even gone to college. They hired him anyway. He spent the next decade in aerospace, moved through sales into running companies, and eventually burned out so badly working 67-hour weeks that he ended up in the emergency room. That's when he walked away and built something on his own terms. Ty and JB get into the concept of Zone Two, which JB borrowed from endurance running and applied to business and life. The idea is simple: most people are sprinting all the time, running at a four or five, burning out and crashing. The people who actually build something lasting are the ones doing the boring, consistent work every single day at a sustainable pace. JB qualified for the Boston Marathon not by training harder, but by running 40 miles a week at a controlled heart rate. He built a business not by going viral, but by showing up 6,000 times. They talk about what separates coaches who make it from the 90% who don't. JB's answer is direct: most people skip the one-on-one work and go straight to trying to build an internet business. That's backwards. You have to understand what problems people actually have before you can build anything worth selling. He also makes the case that the people who pay you the least are almost always the hardest to work with, and that having a barrier to entry isn't about being exclusive. It's about attracting people who actually value what you do. One of the most memorable parts of this conversation is JB's story about the Israeli special forces trainer he found in an old warehouse in 2005 when things weren't going well. The guy tested him with a question JB still won't repeat on air, then told him to show up at five in the morning. JB trained with him for 16 years. Three-day workouts, no sleep, no food, swimming through black water in the middle of the night. He says it changed everything about how he thinks about being pushed. The key, he says, is finding someone who will take you to the edge but won't break you. That's what a real coach does. JB's legacy has nothing to do with personal development rankings or podcast charts. He wants a statue next to St. Francis at an animal shelter. He and his wife are giving everything they can to saving animals, and that's the real reason he's still building. He's also building a place in Palomino, Colombia, in the middle of the jungle, because when it's time to go, he wants to go out having actually lived. His closing message is the simplest one: don't give up. Find one person who believes in your crazy ideas. Borrow their belief when yours runs out. And then go build something.   🔗 Connect with JB: MorningCoach.com 🎙️ Follow along: @thetybradyway with @MorningCoach   As always, we'd love to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

11 Months of No Before the Tide Turned: Natalia Zacharin on What It Actually Takes to Build a Business From Nothing

On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Natalia Zacharin, founder of Zacharin Consulting, a multimillion dollar accounting firm she built from scratch starting at age 50 with no accounting degree, no clients, and no real plan. What she had was a need, a willingness to figure it out, and enough stubbornness to keep going when most people would have quit. Natalia's story doesn't start with a passion or a calling. It starts with a divorce in 2012, a stretch of poverty, years of grinding through jobs that were slowly disappearing, and a conversation in a cafe in Annapolis, Maryland where someone she was dating said, almost offhandedly, why don't you just start your own business? She thought he was joking. He wasn't. She took a short course on starting a business, followed the steps, got her first client, and then went to work figuring out how to actually do bookkeeping. That's the whole origin story. No dramatic leap of faith, just a fork in the road and a decision to go left. What followed was anything but easy. She worked full time while learning a brand new skill set from YouTube videos and books. Her first year in business she made $38,000 in gross sales. She spent the first three years fighting imposter syndrome almost weekly, asking herself why she was doing something she never wanted to do in the first place. The answer was always the same: it was working, clients were coming, and she had nothing to fall back on. So she kept going. Ty and Natalia get into the three beliefs she had to break to get where she is today. The first was the negative self-talk that told her she was too old to start over. Every time that voice showed up, she learned to stop it in its tracks and ask whether it was actually being helpful. The second was the envy she felt scrolling through social media watching other people live the life she wanted. She flipped that story and started telling herself she already had that life, even when she didn't. Before long, she started actually having it. The third was the deepest one: growing up as a first-generation American with the belief that a woman's security came from a husband. She had no safety net, no partner to lean on, and no fallback. In hindsight, she says that was exactly what she needed, because it left her no option but to keep moving forward. One of the most honest moments in this conversation is when Natalia talks about the 11 months she spent reaching out to people every single day and hearing no over and over again. She describes it as feeling like she was sinking further into an abyss with no sign of when things would turn around. She kept going anyway. That's the whole answer. She kept going. They also get into how she built the business beyond bookkeeping. She did all the sales calls herself for years, and she kept hearing the same thing from business owners: I don't understand what these numbers mean. That pattern became fractional CFO services, which is now the core of what Zacharin Consulting does. She helps business owners stop looking at where they are and start seeing where they're headed, projecting six to twelve months out so they can make decisions before problems become crises. The tax and payroll services came later, both born out of frustration with industry gaps she kept watching hurt her clients. Natalia's non-negotiables are worth noting: exercise with a personal trainer because she knows she won't show up for herself alone, sleep after years of running on fumes, hobbies and time with her kid on weekends, and getting her hair done, which is blocked on her calendar and visible to her entire team. She's not apologetic about any of it. You can't lead sixteen people if you're running on empty. Her definition of success has shifted completely. It started as survival. Then it became about the quality of service she was delivering. Now it's about her team having real careers and real opportunities, her clients getting everything they deserve, and giving back to causes she cares about. The business is no longer just about her, and she's clear that's exactly how it should be. Her closing message is simple: it's harder than you think it's going to be, and it's worth it. Find a room where you're the smallest business in it. And leave your ego at the door, because the goal is to keep hiring people who are better than you.   🔗 Connect with Natalia: ZacharinConsulting.com 🎙️ Follow along: @thetybradyway with @GrowYourBottomLine   As always, we'd love to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

The Matchmaker of Business Ownership: How Jeff Shafritz Has Helped Hundreds of People Find the Right Franchise and Build Real Wealth

On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Jeff Shafritz, a franchise consultant who has spent his entire career in franchising and has been helping people find the right business opportunity for over 20 years. Jeff started out selling season tickets for the Georgetown Hoyas, stumbled into franchise development at Athlete's Foot in Atlanta, worked his way up to Director of Franchise Development of the Americas, and then had the rug pulled out from under him on September 11th, 2001, thirteen days after his first son was born. He was in a new city with nothing lined up. That's when franchise consulting started, and he hasn't looked back since. What makes Jeff different from most people in his space is that he doesn't think of himself as a salesperson. He thinks of himself as a matchmaker, closer to a buyer's real estate agent than a traditional sales rep. His job is to figure out whether franchising is even the right path for someone, and if it is, to find the specific opportunity that fits their goals, their skillset, their investment range, and the kind of life they actually want to live. He gets paid by the franchisor, not the candidate, and because franchising is regulated by the FTC, the fee is the same no matter how someone finds their franchise. Working with Jeff costs nothing extra and gets you someone in your corner who has no incentive to push you toward the wrong fit. Ty and Jeff get into what actually separates elite performers from average ones in this business. Jeff's answer is simple: consistency and not chasing the deal. The people who burn out or wash out are the ones focused on closing something, anything, just to get paid. Jeff's whole model is built on doing right by the person in front of him, even when that means telling someone they shouldn't buy a business at all. He had that exact conversation recently with someone who had the money but not the motivation. He told them to walk away. That kind of honesty is what's built his referral base over two decades. One of the most honest moments in this conversation is when Jeff admits that even he was terrified when he finally bought his own fitness franchise. He had spent his entire career helping other people through that anxiety, and then when it was his turn to sign, he froze. His wife had to sit him down and remind him that this was literally his area of expertise. It's a good reminder that fear doesn't care how much you know. It shows up anyway, and the goal isn't to eliminate it. It's to do the work, make the informed decision, and move forward anyway. They also get into a conversation that a lot of parents need to hear: the real cost comparison between sending a kid to college who doesn't know what they want versus putting that same money into a low-overhead franchise. Jeff has worked with families spending $120,000 to $250,000 on a four-year degree for a kid who isn't sure what they want to study. For that same investment, someone could open a business, build real equity, and walk away four years later with something worth selling. He's not anti-college. He's pro-options, and he makes the case clearly. The story that sticks from this conversation is a client Jeff worked with during the 2008 recession. The guy had lost a significant amount of money in real estate, had very little left, and refused to go work for someone else. Jeff helped him find an in-home senior care franchise. Within a few years, that business was generating serious cash flow and eventually sold for multiple millions of dollars. Jeff calls it a resurrection story, and it's the kind of outcome that keeps him doing what he does. His message to anyone sitting on the fence about business ownership is straightforward: you don't have to figure this out alone, and you don't have to pay for the help. The conversation is free. The only question is whether you're ready to have it.   🔗 Connect with Jeff: FranchiseGuideGroup.com 🔗 Listener-specific page: podcast.franchiseguidance.com/ty 🎙️ Follow along: @thetybradyway with @JeffShafritz_FranGuidance   As always, we'd love to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway

The Man Who's Been a Franchisee, a Franchisor, and a Supplier: Scott Jones on What He's Learned From Every Side of the Table

On this episode of The Ty Brady Way, Ty sits down with Scott Jones, a 30-plus year veteran of the franchise world who has sat on every side of the table. He's been a multi-unit franchisee across multiple brands, a franchisor, and a co-founder of a support services company that now serves about 80,000 franchised locations worldwide. If there's a three-sided fence in franchising, Scott's been on all three sides of it, and that perspective is exactly what makes this conversation worth your time. Scott's entrepreneurial roots go back to his childhood dinner table. His dad was a corporate executive with an oil company who hit an inflection point when the company got acquired and relocation to Chicago was the only way to keep his job. He said no, walked away, and started building businesses. Scott watched all of it up close. He never had a job until he graduated college, was always creating something on his own, and didn't stay in the corporate world long before following the same path his dad had blazed. That early front-row seat to what entrepreneurship actually looks like, the good days and the hard ones, shaped everything that came after. One of the most honest moments in this conversation is when Scott shares his real take on the franchise industry. Out of more than 4,000 unique franchise brands, he believes about half are absolute train wrecks based on unit economics alone. They don't have the support systems, the processes, or a game plan that gives someone a real shot at success. Another 40% are okay to good. That leaves roughly 10% that are truly exceptional. He knows that's not a popular thing to say in his industry. He says it anyway because it's the truth, and because his whole job is built on helping people find that 10%. Ty and Scott get into the biggest mistake people make when looking at franchises: falling in love with the widget. I like this sandwich, so this must be a great business. Scott reframes the whole conversation by asking a different question: how are you going to measure any opportunity? The moment he asks that, nobody talks about sandwiches anymore. They start talking about quality of life, financial goals, what they want their life to look like in one year, three years, ten years. A business is a vehicle. The question is whether it's the right vehicle for where you're actually trying to go, and whether you're the right person to drive it. The early mistake Scott owns is one a lot of founders share: he had to control everything and couldn't let go. It took a good mentor and some hard experience to recognize that his job wasn't to do all the tasks himself. It was to build people, develop systems, and create a culture where exceptional is expected and rewarded. He makes a point worth sitting with: average employees can hide in a large corporate environment. In a small business, they hurt you. The goal is to build a culture where people who think and work at a high level actually thrive, and where people who haven't operated that way before get the chance to discover they can. The story that closes this episode is one Scott spoke about the day before recording. Two engineers, both in corporate jobs, came to him five years ago with a dream of eventually working their way out. The plan was to start a franchise, keep both jobs, and maybe in two years he'd be able to leave. They found a boutique fitness franchise in Alabama. He left his job in five or six months. Eight or nine months later they added a second business. A year ago they added a third. Their net worth has increased about tenfold over five years. She still works her corporate job by choice. They're now looking at buying the buildings their businesses operate in rather than leasing them. That's the outcome Scott is working toward every time he picks up the phone. His closing message is simple and direct: don't settle. Too many people are stuck in a life they don't love because it's the thing they know. There are better ways. The only thing standing between where you are and where you want to be is the willingness to step outside what's familiar and find out what's actually possible.   🔗 Connect with Scott: FranchiseGuideGroup.com 🎙️ Follow along: @thetybradyway   As always, we'd love to hear from you! Email us at thetybradyway@gmail.com Or DM us on Instagram @thetybradyway