BTS #4: What To Expect (From Me) In 2025

⚡️ Today’s level up ⚡️

Today’s edition shares The Purposeful Performance Masterclass and dives deeper into the evolution of this newsletter into a productized service to help you achieve your goals next year.

Let’s go!

All good things should get better

Hard to believe, but I’ve been writing this newsletter for over three years. I’d like to think I’ve come a long way since the first edition. Curious what you think about that though?

But it’s time to say goodbye.

There are just s̶i̶x̶ five editions left of Be Focused. Live Great. I have poured my heart and soul into making it a valuable tool designed to upgrade your thinking, help you operate more effectively, and sell more strategically.

Over the course of 150 editions, I’ve learned a lot (and I hope you have too). Here are my main personal takeaways:

• Writing in a long-form format is my preferred way to communicate ideas and share knowledge

• Moving to a weekly format has forced me to get better at this craft

• Effective writing starts with immersive reading and thinking

• Writing opens the mind of the reader and the author

During this three-year journey, I’ve endeavored to deliver more than “just a newsletter,” but I realize we are entering a time of newsletter fatigue. In fact, I ran a couple of polls on LinkedIn earlier this quarter, and I learned that more than 69% subscribe to less than five newsletters (out of 202 votes) and over 75% stated that they actually read less than a quarter of the newsletters they subscribe to (out of 465 votes).

That leaves a lot of competing noise and unread newsletters flooding your inbox. I think it’s time for me to do better, and I want to invite you on this ride with me.

The road that has led us here

My long-term vision when I retired from corporate sales on March 4th, 2022 was to enable more revenue generators to do the same by repurposing their sales career as an accelerator to owning their calendars and filling it up with projects that bring them joy.

A perfect example of this is one of my first mentees, Melissa Gaglione, who recently announced her departure from the corporate world to launch her new company ASYNC.
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Melissa is the epitome of a Purposeful Performer who accelerated her path to owning her calendar using her background in investigative journalism and teaching to become an effective seller, sales leader, influencer, and now business operator.

My short/medium-term plan to support this vision was to get better at delivering content that made a difference. I had built a net worth north of $5M, most of it in my last four years as a strategic corporate seller, which gave me a Total Term Score of 30.6 years, which estimates the number of years you could live on your current assets if they did not grow (ignoring inflation, taxes, and fees). It includes cash, investments, business equity, and real estate equity.

As you can see, Lisi and I live well on a fairly modest annual expenditure. We benefit from living in a no state income tax location, own our homes, and have expenses for just two. For reference, most financial experts and those eager to join the FIRE (Financially Independent Retired Early) community suggest a Total Term Score of 25 years before ditching the corporate world.

Although Lisi and I have become RVers over the last few years (something I never thought I would do), my goal was to never “close up shop,” remove myself from work, and live out the rest of life together on our earnings. As Eric Siu reminded me recently, a life of pure leisure is hell.

But neither was going full force into maniacally building out a coaching empire or a software company. I’ve seen this relentless approach literally put friends in the hospital, and luckily (can I call it luck?), I already know the dangers of what constantly grinding can do earlier in my career.​

Instead, I was interested in building a calm company. Something I could pursue for life that invigorated me while positively impacting others. So I got to work on my craft, doubling down on writing, as one of my respected teachers, Cal Newport did. I took cues from others who have built simple, sustainable, and sensational businesses (and lives) like Jason Fried and Derek Sivers. I started working with a coach, Justin Welsh, to turn attention into a community and knowledge into income.

The intent was to treat this time period as a chance to transfer something I knew that others were curious about (earning 7-figures in SaaS) and run a bunch of experiments. The goal was never to make as much money as possible, but instead, lower the barrier to learning these strategies and create a profitable small business so that I could reinvest that income and those learnings into designing the next stage of the journey.

The time has come to take the next step, and I invite you to join me.

2025 is the year of Empowerment

Here’s a powerful idea from Derek Sivers, which is “Ideas are just a multiplier of execution.”

The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. This doesn’t just apply to building your own business, it can be applied to your strategic sales process–as this is essentially you building a business within a business, an area I see a lot of room for improvement in the industry.

Of course I think my ideas are brilliant (don’t we all), but the market is the true arbiter of that. After gaining over 10,000 email subscribers and nearly 5,000 practitioners of 7 Steps to 7 Figures, more than 400 Make More Hustle Less Club members, and over 100 paid coaching clients, impact has been delivered and lessons have been gained.

It’s time for good, if not, great execution.

To do this, my focus for 2025 is to package up the learnings from these sessions into a 52-edition weekly productized service called The Purposeful Performer, as my core offering. It won’t be a newsletter, as newsletters I’ve found, even as in-depth as I attempted to go, are just random thoughts that jump from week-to-week. This will be a coherent, systematic learning journey that builds each week.

This allows us to adapt to real-time conditions in the market or learnings on the frontlines, rather than static information that can get stale–one of the limitations of digital courses.

The theme for 2025 is Empowerment. Each quarter will have a specific focus, or "block:"

• Q1: Create a high-performance operating rhythm

• Q2: Design a world-class buying experience

• Q3: Manage your pipeline like an innovative startup

• Q4: Take full ownership of your personal brand

There will be a simple, implementable strategy delivered every Wednesday morning in your inbox and the journey will be designed to hold you accountable and feel like a fun game to play. It’s intended to keep you on pace, and we’ll be using simple tools that allow you to build, use, and benefit from them as you progress.

The marketing tagline for The Purposeful Performer is “Learn how to shave a decade from your corporate sales career in less than 25 minutes a week.” This may evolve, but for now it signals the intent of the long-term vision–use your sales career as a vehicle to fully owning your calendar.

This is a lot to absorb, so next week, I will dive deeper into the specifics of the weekly cadence, additional structure/tiers to complement this core offering (like 1:1 coaching), and who will be the best candidates for 2025.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with the full Masterclass presentation I gave in Austin at the Sales Success Summit in October, which will give you a little preview of what to expect.

The Purposeful Performance Masterclass

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See you next week!