Episode 033: He Earned the Freedom. Then Lost Himself in It with Tim Kelly

Episode 036: Chemical Engineer. Camper. Eleven Million in Three and a Half Years with Matthew Hassler

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 grit at a level that most people never reach. He was just demonstrating it entirely for someone else. The moment that cracked it open was not dramatic. It was just the quiet realization, sitting in the middle of all those hours, that the same focus and dedication he was pouring into a company that did not value his time the way he valued it could be aimed at himself instead. He moved to a new company with fewer hours. Got into real estate. Discovered Amazon. Started with five thousand dollars. Then took a leap that would define everything: left the W2, moved into a camper with Logan, and started selling full time while traveling across the country. Year one: seven figures. Year two: three million. Year three: seven million. Eleven million in total revenue in just under three and a half years, built almost entirely from a camper. When Uline was delivering pallets of inventory to their campsite, Logan was dealing with the freight delivery because Matt was at work. The campground was not happy. Logan held it together. The business held together because of systems Matt built from an engineering brain that could not leave inefficiency alone. Today Matthew runs a scaled Amazon wholesale business with a growing international team, gives surprise bonuses that change the lives of employees making two twenty-five an hour in the Philippines, and has just launched Replen Pulse, a SaaS platform born from the exact problem he lived for three years before he built the solution. He is also Karl's coaching client of over a year and one of the kindest, most precise and data-driven builders Karl has had the privilege of watching grow in real time. This is the first time that story has been told publicly. This episode is for the engineer, the operator, the planner, the person who is better at building things for other people than they have ever let themselves be for themselves. In This Episode, You'll Discover: 1. What Matthew's engineering career actually looked like at its peak, one hundred and ten to one hundred and twenty hour weeks, on-call nights, multi-million dollar projects, and the moment he looked at his wife crying on his one day off and understood something had to change 2. How Matthew started with five thousand dollars and his parents loaning him another five at zero percent interest, built to fifteen thousand invested total, found a liquidation outlet in Massachusetts, and went from ten thousand dollar months to one hundred thousand dollar months in a matter of weeks 3. What it looked like to run an Amazon business from a camper, Uline delivering pallets to the campsite, prepping inventory all week from inside the vehicle, and Logan dealing with freight deliveries while Matthew was at work 4. The specific moment of self-doubt three months in when a Black and Decker cease and desist letter landed during a period of two percent net margins, how Matthew felt like a failure telling Logan, and the decision he made to completely pivot to wholesale rather than go back to engineering 5. Why Matthew intentionally burned the boats by moving three thousand miles away and quitting twice so he could not be rehired, and the philosophy behind putting yourself in a position where going back is no longer an option 6. How Matthew built the data-driven purchasing system that eventually became Replen Pulse, the seven data points most software was missing, and how it reduced his ops manager's workload from thirty-three hours a week to thirty minutes on the same volume of SKUs 7. Why Matthew hires admin before sourcers, how a strong admin team keeps margins healthy, reduces mental burden, and creates the ownership and scalability that most Amazon sellers at forty to one hundred thousand a month are missing entirely 8. What it feels like to give a surprise bonus to an employee in the Philippines who was making two twenty-five an hour, and why that impact has become the thing that fires Matthew up more than any revenue milestone Key Takeaways: 1. You Are Demonstrating Grit for Someone. Make Sure It Is for You. Matthew's shift was not about working less. He was signing up for eighty hour weeks either way. The shift was in who was going to benefit from that output. When the effort compounds for you, the results compound differently. The equation does not change. The destination does. 2. Burn the Boats Before You Need the Courage to Do It. Matthew quit twice. Moved three thousand miles away. Made going back impossible before the hard days arrived. That was not recklessness. That was strategy. If the option to retreat exists, the brain will find it. Remove the option and the only direction is forward. 3. Data Removes Emotion From Decisions That Should Not Have Emotion in Them. Matthew's engineering brain applied to purchasing decisions is the single biggest differentiator in his business. When you are buying on gut feeling and hope, you are at the mercy of how you feel that morning. When you are buying on confidence intervals, inbound tracking, and auto-populated lead times, you are running a machine. Build the machine. 4. Hire Admin Before You Hire Sourcers. Most Amazon sellers hire sourcing help first because sourcing is what they enjoy. Matthew did the opposite. Admin holds the margins, handles the discrepancies, catches the losses, and creates the systems that make everything else scale. Your sourcer finds the products. Your admin protects everything you built. 5. Stay in Stock More. Make More Money. It is that simple and that underserved. Thirty plus days of inventory coverage tells Amazon the product is reliable. Amazon rewards reliability with visibility. Visibility drives sales. Every dollar of storage fee you save is margin you keep. Replen Pulse was built on this exact insight. 6. The Cost of Not Having the Software Is Always Bigger Than the Cost of Having It. Matthew quantified it precisely. At best case hourly rates, the time his ops manager was spending on manual buy lists was costing over fourteen hundred dollars a month. That was before accounting for the wrong decisions made on incomplete data. Calculate the cost of not solving the problem before you balk at the cost of solving it. 7. Grit Is the Absence of Motivation and Persevering Anyway. Matthew says this in both directions. Most people think grit is about pushing through the valleys. But the mountain is just as hard. When things are going well and motivation disappears because the goal is achieved, that is when complacency sets in. Grit means you set a new goal and keep going whether the season is hard or easy. 8. You Are the Limit You Set. Matthew's anchor poem from Think and Grow Rich: I bargained with life for a penny and life paid no more. Whatever wages you ask of life, life will pay. Most people set wages that are too low and spend a lifetime being paid exactly what they asked for. Set the goal too high. When you hit it, set it higher. Your limits are self-imposed, not assigned. Timestamps: * [00:00] Karl introduces Matthew Hassler: chemical engineer, former corporate worker, camper builder, eleven million in three and a half years, Replen Pulse founder, Karl's coaching client and friend

Episode 035: Called. Capable. Completely Unaware of Both with Joshua Lee

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 has polio. His dad has a spinal condition. Something happened financially in the nineties and the family never quite recovered. Josh grew up watching people look down on his family. He grew up grateful for what little there was. He grew up learning how to get what he needed in creative ways. He did not grow up knowing he was being forged. Fast forward to his mid-twenties, working as a product manager at a payments tech startup in Redmond, Washington, the kind of company that eventually exits for close to nine hundred billion, and Josh is sitting there knowing something is deeply off. Not because the job is bad. Because every step forward in that career is a step away from who he actually is. He resigned without enough communication with his wife. It was not the right move. It was still the necessary one. What followed was years of private label brands, e-commerce, GE, SaaS, venture capital, consumer products, and eventually the founding of First Light Studios, an Amazon management agency that has personally overseen fifty-seven million dollars in sales for VC-backed startups and household names you have seen on shelves at Walgreens and REI. But the most honest thing Joshua Lee wrote on his intake form was not about any of that. Karl asked what challenges him most when life gets heavy. He left most answers blank. In one box he wrote two words. Leadership weight. This episode is the unpacking of those two words across a marriage under strain, a business building in real time, a faith being tested, and a man in his thirties finally identifying the lies about himself that had been quietly running the show since childhood. This episode is for anyone who has been chasing the right metrics on the wrong path and has not yet had the courage to name it. In This Episode, You'll Discover: 1. What it was like to grow up in Delta Junction Alaska with two physically disabled Korean immigrant parents navigating financial collapse in the nineties, and how that childhood produced both deep gratitude and entrepreneurial instincts Josh is still unpacking today 2. Why Josh resigned from a product manager role at a payments startup on a path to a nine hundred billion dollar exit and what he left blank on every intake question except two words: leadership weight 3. The specific story behind leadership weight, a marriage under pressure at the eight to nine year mark, young kids, not enough time to connect, and a conversation with a stranger who told him he just had to do it and what it took Josh two years to fully understand 4. Why the entrepreneurial journey is lonely in a way nobody warns you about, how Josh lost his groundedness when the wins finally came, and what it costs you relationally when your peers can no longer keep up with how you are thinking 5. What happens when you take your vision to the wrong people, why friends and family cannot validate what God placed specifically in you, and how Josh reframed feedback-seeking from a survival instinct to a precision tool 6. The lies Josh has been identifying from his childhood that were quietly blocking him from becoming the father, husband, and leader he is supposed to be, and the prayer he does with a friend to ask God to reveal the specific lie and break it off 7. How Josh delineates between the voice of God and the voice of the enemy, the familiarity principle, and John ten ten as the filter for any thought that produces fear, shame, guilt, or confusion 8. What the leadership muscle actually is, how it is built through reps not talent, and why sweaty palms and a pounding heart are confirmation you are on the right path and not a signal to retreat Key Takeaways: 1. Your Childhood Does Not Define You. But It Does Form You. Josh is careful about both halves of this. The hardship, the poverty, the disabled parents, the financial collapse, none of that is his ceiling. But he is still actively unraveling how it shaped his beliefs about himself. That unraveling is not weakness. It is the work. 2. The Wrong Path Gets Clearer the Further You Go Down It. Josh was not miserable at that payments startup. He was progressing. But every step forward felt like a step away from what he was actually built for. That sensation is information. Most people dismiss it because the metrics look fine. Josh resigned. The marriage conversation did not go well. It was still the right call. 3. Do Not Take Your Vision to People Who Cannot See It. God placed it in you specifically. Not in your neighbor, not in your parents, not in your friends. They are looking through the lens of who you were, not who you are becoming. Get feedback from people who genuinely know your passions and your capacity. Everyone else is offering an opinion about something that was never theirs to evaluate. 4. Leadership Weight Is a Muscle. Not a Gift. Josh two years ago was falling apart under it. Josh today analyzes setbacks, controls what he can control, discards the negative feelings that are not useful, and keeps moving. That is not personality. It is training. Every rep counts. Every hard decision that does not destroy you is adding to a capacity that did not exist before. 5. Identify the Lie First. Then Work the Skills. You can learn every leadership tactic there is, but if there is a core lie running underneath about your worthiness, your capability, or your right to succeed, the tactics will have a ceiling. Find the lie. Name it. Break it off. Then build on clear ground. 6. Do Not Fear Is the Most Repeated Phrase in the Bible for a Reason. We are skittish. We are fickle. The heart is unreliable as a navigation instrument. That is not a character flaw. It is why training the mind, building daily disciplines, and separating emotion from action matters as much as it does. Show up especially on the days you do not feel like it. That is exactly where the championship is made. 7. The Enemy Never Speaks in a Voice You Would Recognize as Evil. It speaks in your voice. That is what makes it dangerous. The thoughts that tell you that you will never make it, that nobody wants to hear your story, that you are not qualified, those are not neutral. They are active. Learn to identify them, cut them off at the source, and replace them with what is actually true. 8. You Are Called. You Are Capable. The Plan Is Yours Alone. Nobody else is going to champion this for you. Nobody else is going to see it the way you see it. That is not a problem. That is the design. Show up fully committed, even if it is lonely, even if you lose friends, even if it is hard. The path that only you can walk was built exactly that way on purpose. Timestamps: * [00:00] Karl introduces Joshua Lee: Alaskan kid, Korean immigrant family, First Light Studios founder, fifty-seven million in Amazon sales managed, man of faith, father of two * [03:00] Delta Junction Alaska, negative fifty degrees, Korean immigrant parents, physical disabilities, financial collapse in the nineties, and the gratitude that came from having almost nothing * [07:00] Fast forward to the W2 career: good titles, good companies, and the growing certainty that every step forward was a step in the wrong direction * [11:00]...

Episode 034: Stabbed at Nineteen. Sober at Twenty-Six. Still Cracking People Open with Jon Paul Crimi

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 doctor who stitched him up told him his hair would cover it. Jon Paul is completely hairless. He has alopecia. He has no eyebrows. The hair the doctor promised would cover the scar never came. None of that part turned out the way anyone expected. He moved to LA to become an actor and fitness model. His entire identity was built on his looks. Then bald patches started appearing on his head. His eyebrows went patchy. The doctor put him on prednisone, a catabolic steroid that made him fat and bloated while everyone around him at Gold's Gym in Venice was taking anabolics to get jacked. He was pencilling in the patches on his head to go to auditions. Then he bottomed out from drugs and alcohol. Got sober at twenty-six. Made the decision to stop the shots and get off the medication and let the hair go completely. Two months sober, he told a doctor that if that was what God wanted for him, then so be it. He had the courage of someone who had just found his footing and did not yet fully understand how hard the ground was. What followed was sixteen years of sobriety, a Big Brothers mentorship that taught him what it felt like to do something for someone else with nothing expected in return, a career as one of the most sought after celebrity sobriety coaches in the country, trips to pull people out of crack houses in the favelas of Brazil, rock bands on tour, movie sets, private planes at thirty thousand feet with someone trying to open the door. Then Matthew Perry handed him a breathwork session. Then a Tony Robbins VIP invitation led to a night in San Jose and an awakening moment where everything clicked. Then Matthew came to his first sold out breathwork class and told him he had found his gift. JP has now been leading breathwork classes for fourteen years, certified over three thousand facilitators worldwide, led the largest breathwork class in Switzerland for a thousand people, taught at Tony Robbins events, trained Olympians and Oscar and Emmy and Grammy winners, and runs Sunday morning classes online that cost nineteen dollars for your first session. Matthew Perry is gone. The ping pong table JP taught him to play on is being auctioned off. But the breathwork exists because Matthew pointed the way. JP will not let you forget that. This episode is for the guy sitting in the back row of the class with a look on his face that says he cannot believe his wife dragged him here. JP sees that guy. He speaks directly to him. And that guy always cracks open. In This Episode, You'll Discover: 1. What it was like to grow up on the Irish Riviera outside Boston, how getting stabbed at nineteen with forty one stitches almost killed him, and why the doctor's promise that his hair would cover the scar became the most ironic sentence of his life 2. How losing his hair to alopecia while working as a fitness model and actor in LA became the identity crisis that sent him to the bottom, what bottoming out from drugs and alcohol actually looked like, and the two-month sober decision to let the hair go completely 3. How JP built one of the most unlikely careers in sobriety coaching, the Big Brothers mentorship that changed his relationship with purpose, and what it took to become the person celebrities called in the middle of the night when they were in crisis 4. The Stanley Cup game six VIP room encounter with Tony Robbins, Matthew Perry's reaction when JP fanboyed over a motivational speaker in a room full of Hollywood celebrities, and the San Jose seminar that produced an awakening moment where JP decided he was done chasing Hollywood and was going to help people instead 5. How Matthew Perry introduced JP to breathwork, came to his first sold out class and told him it was his gift, and why JP says without Matthew there is no breathwork, and without breathwork he does not know where he ends up 6. The science behind circular conscious connected breathwork, what transient hypofrontality means and why it matters, the difference between parasympathetic and sympathetic breathing and where trauma is actually stored in the body, and why this technique produces results that JP describes as twenty years of therapy without saying a word 7. Why JP stripped the new age out of breathwork to build something that the guy in the back row with his arms crossed will still crack open during, and what he says to that guy during the class that makes even the toughest men cry in the lobby afterwards 8. The mouse study and the fifteen generations of cherry blossom trauma, the John Hopkins study on circular breathwork and veterans with PTSD, and why JP believes this work is especially powerful for the person who has never once walked into a therapist's office and never will Key Takeaways: 1. You Can Be a Work in Progress and a Masterpiece at the Same Time. JP says this without apology. He is not perfect. His wife will tell you. He is also not waiting until he is perfect to help people. The wisdom you carry is not for your enjoyment. It is the fruit on the tree for the people walking by. Give it away before you convince yourself it is not ready. 2. It Is Not a Breakdown. It Is a Breakthrough. The release that happens in breathwork is not weakness. It is the clearing of what your nervous system has been carrying. The reason people with PTSD have level nine reactions to level three situations is because the nervous system has too many tabs open from old events. Breathwork closes the tabs. It does not add new ones. 3. What Comes From the Heart Goes to the Heart. JP is a black belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu who will put someone in an armbar to protect his family and will tell a stranger in a class that they are worth showing up for, and mean both completely. Vulnerability modeled from strength is not the same thing as weakness. It is the only version that lands. 4. The Life You Are Looking for Is in the Work You Have Been Avoiding. JP's directive in the trenches. Whatever you keep walking away from because it is uncomfortable, that is the door. That is where the thing you want actually lives. The breathwork, the hard conversation, the class you think is stupid, the person you are afraid to forgive. Start there. 5. Nothing Changes If Nothing Changes. If you want a different life, do something different. Something specific and new, not just a harder version of what you already do. JP tried breathwork because two people told him to and he thought it was the dumbest thing he had ever heard. He now runs the largest classes in the world. Go do the thing you think is stupid. 6. Grief Is Love With No Place to Go. JP said this quietly about Matthew Perry when he was going through an auction catalog of his friend's belongings and could not stop himself from thinking about the ping pong table. The love does not stop when the person does. It just has nowhere to land. That does not mean it disappears. It means it needs somewhere to go. For JP it went into the breathwork. For you it can go wherever helps someone else. 7. Trauma Is Stored in the Sympathetic Nervous System. That Is Where You Have to Breathe. Box breathing and Wim Hof calm you down through the parasympathetic system. Circular conscious connected breathwork intentionally activates the sympathetic syst...

Episode 033: He Earned the Freedom. Then Lost Himself in It with Tim Kelly

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 co-owner of apartment buildings and mobile home parks he had built alongside other service members. He had engineered enough passive income to make his pension essentially worthless. So at fifteen and a half years, five years before his pension vested, he walked away. What came next was not the dream. Tim had more freedom than he had ever had in his life and less capacity to handle it than he realized. The structure, the accountability, the purpose of being responsible for other people, all of it was gone. He was doing it for the wrong reasons from the start, chasing houses in different parts of the world and lavish vacations and financial markers that fed his ego rather than his purpose. The freedom without the responsibility produced isolation, depression, anxiety, irrational decisions, and a marriage that did not survive. He had the money. He did not have the moral compass. He describes that period plainly: his level of personal responsibility did not align with the freedom he had. The turn came through a group of godly men he had met at his final duty station who gathered weekly for Bible study over Zoom, read God's word together, and poured into each other. He leaned in. He moved to Tampa. He met his now wife, who he describes as a gift from God. He celebrated their one-year anniversary and is building everything again, this time in God's will rather than his own. He still owns and controls nearly two thousand income-producing units across apartment communities, mobile home parks, RV parks, and storage. He is a senior managing partner at Kelly Housing Group, a board member at Active Duty Passive Income, a high performance coach who takes clients to summit mountains, and a man who reads Joshua one nine on his gym wall every single morning. This episode is for anyone who is chasing freedom without asking whether they are ready for it. In This Episode, You'll Discover: 1. How Tim engineered enough passive income to walk away from the Navy five years before his pension vested, what that decision looked like from the inside, and why the freedom he built almost destroyed him 2. The specific ways Tim's moral compass drifted once the structure of military life was gone, what isolation, depression, and anxiety looked like during a season of financial abundance, and what the divorce he did not see coming actually cost him 3. The group of men at his final duty station who met every week for Bible study over Zoom, how that circle of iron sharpens iron rebuilt his spiritual foundation, and why he says that community was what made everything else possible 4. Why Tim says discipline is not restriction or punishment but the structure that gives you access to the life you actually want, and how he breaks that down across the five areas of his life using the GROWS framework 5. The high performer gap audit Tim uses with every client, the three questions around clarity, energy, and courage, and why he finds that even the most financially successful people score low on courage when it comes to conversations with the people they love most 6. Three specific reasons high performers stay stuck, confusing activity with progress, chasing perfection over momentum, and measuring themselves against where they think they should be instead of where they were 7. Why Tim invested thirty thousand dollars across four credit cards into real estate education before he had the money, what that level of financial commitment did to his follow-through, and how he closed his first deal, paid it all back, and never lost those skills 8. The miscarriage he and his wife went through last year, his number one goal of becoming a dad, and the faith that has to carry what his own hands cannot control Key Takeaways: 1. Do Not Just Ask How to Get More Freedom. Ask If You Are Becoming the Kind of Person Who Can Handle It. Tim says this slowly and means every word of it. Financial freedom and time freedom are not the destination. They are a test. If your level of personal responsibility does not match your level of freedom, the freedom will consume you. Build the responsibility first. The freedom follows. 2. Discipline Is Not Restriction. It Is the Structure That Gives You the Life You Want. Discipline with your body gives you freedom of energy and vitality. Discipline with your money gives you freedom of options and wealth accumulation. Discipline with your faith gives you freedom from drift and ego. Discipline with your family gives you freedom to lead and love and build a legacy. Remove the word restriction from this conversation entirely. 3. You Cannot Succeed in Isolation. But You Have to Isolate to Prepare. Tim is specific about the sequence. Before you go find the rooms full of the people who have done what you want to do, do the work alone. Learn the language. Build the foundation. Education without implementation is useless. But implementation without guidance is expensive and dangerous. Know which phase you are in. 4. The Cost of Inaction Is Always More Expensive Than the Cost of Investment. Most people calculate the fee to get in the room. They do not calculate what it costs them to stay out of it. Tim put thirty thousand dollars he did not have across four credit cards for real estate education because the cost of staying in the Navy for another ten years was worse than the cost of figuring it out faster with help. 5. Go Seven Layers Deep on Your Why. If your why does not make you emotional, you have not gone deep enough. Keep asking why until the answer is something that belongs to you. Most people are climbing a ladder that is leaned against the wrong wall because they never stopped to ask why this ladder in the first place. 6. Courage at Work Does Not Automatically Transfer to Courage at Home. Tim coaches CEOs and real estate investors who will negotiate multi-million dollar deals without hesitation and cannot bring themselves to have a hard conversation with their spouse or parent. The courage you build in your professional life is a different muscle from the one you need at home. Both need to be trained. 7. You Either Win or You Learn. Remove the Word Failure. Tim says it plainly and it earns the saying. The most successful people have failed more than anyone else. They just kept going. Every mistake is a lesson, not a label. Soldier on. That is the whole plan. 8. He Is With You Wherever You Go. Tim has Joshua one nine on his gym wall. Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid. Do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go. He gives it to God every morning. The spiritual warfare gets louder the closer you pursue God. That is not a reason to stop. It is confirmation you are going the right direction. Timestamps: * [00:00] Karl introduces Tim Kelly: Navy rescue swimmer, fifteen years of service, passive income investor, Kelly Housing Group, Active Duty Passive Income, high performance coach, Ironman, Kilimanjaro summiter, Tampa resident * [03:00] Growing up outside Chicago, failing out of college, drumming in a band, joining the Navy without a plan, and becoming a rescue swimmer living so others may live * [07:00] Ten yea...

Episode 032: Watch Me. Two Words That Built an Empire with Renee Carbone Fleming

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 talked about it in a healthy way, and by the time Renee was a young woman earning her first real income, money managed her before she could manage it. Bankruptcy at nineteen or twenty years old. No college degree. Just grit, and a growing fire that had nowhere good to go yet. She channeled that fire into corporate sales, built a real career through sheer outwork-everyone determination, fell in love, built a marriage, became a stay-at-home mom by choice, then discovered in the quiet of that season that she had slowly stopped being a person. She was everyone's everything except her own. When the marriage ended after seventeen years, she was over forty, had two daughters aged twelve and nine, and an ex-husband who genuinely did not think she could tie her shoes without him. She wrote two words on post-it notes and stuck them everywhere. On the mirror. On the car. In the office. Watch me. Those two words became a business philosophy, then a book, then a brand. The W is withdraw from explanation. A is act before approval. T is take up space publicly. C is commit without consensus. H is hold a vision when no one else does. That is how she built over thirteen million dollars in retail sales through the organizations she has led. That is how a sparkle queen from a tenement house in the northeast ended up on the Nasdaq billboard in Times Square, on Fox, NBC, CBS, CW, and Telemundo, and named Top Empowerment Coach of the Year in twenty twenty-five by the International Association of Top Professionals. Underneath all of that is a mother navigating estrangement from her youngest daughter for three years and counting, pouring into her oldest the only way she knows how, showing her what it looks like to keep going anyway. This is not a polished story. It is a real one. And it is still being written. This episode is for any woman over forty who has been sitting at her kitchen table wondering if it is too late. It is not. This is what fifty-six looks like when you refuse to accept anyone else's definition of it. In This Episode, You'll Discover: 1. How Renee traced the origins of her money problems to a childhood with no financial modeling, how earning money for the first time without any framework led to bankruptcy at nineteen or twenty, and what she had to unlearn before she could build real wealth 2. What she gave up when she became a stay-at-home mom, why justifying her existence through PTO and volunteering was the clearest sign she had lost herself, and how a dance mom side hustle selling Swarovski crystals accidentally became the beginning of an empire 3. Where Watch Me actually came from, the ex-husband who did not believe in her, the post-it notes everywhere, and how those two words broke down into a five-part business philosophy that she now teaches through her book, brand, and coaching 4. The divorce's real cost, not the assets but the friendships that evaporated, the loneliness of suddenly being one person instead of two in every social circle, and the choice she made between victimhood and reinvention 5. The estrangement from her youngest daughter, three years of silence, no big fight and no clear reason, and how Renee arrived at a place of honoring her daughter's journey without pretending it does not hurt 6. How Renee's miracle morning works in exact practical detail, the Keurig by the bedside, the gratitude before she gets up, the frequency audio, and the voice memo future life script she recorded herself and listens to every single morning before her feet hit the floor 7. Why Renee does not ask for permission or approval before she builds something new, what the Watch Me acronym actually means in practice, and the specific trap of asking the people closest to you whether your vision is a good idea 8. What Renee is building next, the trademark process, the wine brand, the twenty-million-dollar exit goal, the Napa Valley experience, and why she is putting all of it on the table publicly because that is how manifestation actually works Key Takeaways: 1. Watch Me Is Not a Comeback Line. It Is an Operating System. Withdraw from explanation. Act before approval. Take up space publicly. Commit without consensus. Hold a vision when no one else does. Every element of how Renee built her business traces back to those two words on a post-it note. The anger was the seed. The system is what grew from it. 2. Do Not Ask the People Who Cannot See the Vision to Validate It. Your mother does not know how to open a podcast app. Your ex does not believe you can tie your shoes. The people around you are looking through the lens of who you were, not who you are becoming. Do not ask them for permission. Just build. They will have questions when they see it working. 3. The Future Life Script Is the Most Underrated Tool in the Arsenal. Renee recorded herself on her phone's voice memo describing her life in present tense as if she had already achieved everything she wants, every smell, every client, every vacation, every dollar. She listens to it every morning before she gets out of bed. She says on the worst days it is the thing that puts her back together. This is not woo. It is active reprogramming. 4. The Divorce Did Not Take the Assets. It Took the Identity. Renee is clear about what the real cost was. Not the things. The people who disappeared. The loneliness of being one where there used to be two. The story she had to stop telling herself. That grief is real and it is often invisible. Naming it is how you stop pretending it is not there. 5. Grit Is Showing Up In Spite Of. Not because you feel ready. Not because the anxiety is gone. Not because the estrangement has resolved or the finances are clean or the vision is fully formed. Grit is showing up in spite of all of it. Every day you show up when you do not want to is a vote for the future version of yourself. 6. Put the Goal Out Loud. Renee said she is going to sell Badass Queen for twenty million dollars. She said it on a podcast in front of whoever is listening. That is intentional. The more you say it, the more your brain believes it is already in motion. The more your network hears it, the more they are consciously and unconsciously moving you toward it. 7. Multiple Streams of Income Are Not Optional. They Are the Strategy. Renee has network marketing, a personal branding agency, a coaching program, merchandise, clothing, wine, events, and a book. She calls it plan A through G. Every stream lives under the Badass Queen umbrella. None of it is random. It is all part of building an IP business with a real exit value. 8. It Does Not Matter Your Age. It Does Not Matter Your Experience. Fifty-six is a PhD in life. Passion. Hot desire. You can build an extra stream of income at any age, from any starting point, with the right personal brand and enough willingness to be seen. The women who watch the Golden Girls and think that is their future have it wrong. Renee is the proof. Timestamps: * [00:00] Karl introduces Renee Carbone Fleming: founder of Badass Queen, Sparkle Queens brand, host of Unapologetically Badass podcast, author of Watch Me, top empowerment coach, thirteen million in sales, Times S...