"I didn't need a better plan. I needed to stop preparing and start asking."

For seven years I worked in corporate finance. On paper everything was fine. In April 2024 I started training people on the side, and in January 2025 I left and built my own practice.

My problem was never ideas. I had a method, a website, a funnel and systems. What I kept doing was preparing. Whenever it got busy, I went back to the foundation and told myself it wasn't sharp enough yet to go out with. That felt like care. It was avoidance.

Dave asked me two questions in a single conversation. The first: if a post of yours goes viral tomorrow and five hundred people message you, what happens then? The second: what is your structure from a message to a sales call? I had no answer to either.

What he showed me was not a new strategy. It was the rung that was missing in my own conversations. I always asked people what they were struggling with. I never asked what it was costing them, and what it would keep costing them six months from now. That is the question that turns a nice conversation into a decision.

I rewrote my sales conversation that same week, and I built the structure from a message to a call. Instead of two messages a day, I sent sixty in a week. Twenty-one of them wrote back.

The thing I had been calling quality turned out to be something I could only learn by sending. Every useful thing I now know about what works, I learned after I stopped preparing.