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I built a $45M business in 4 years and was still paying myself $40,000.

No fancy car
No f*cking watch
No f*cking bling bling..

Because I knew what I was doing it for and I believed fully in what I was doing.

As a 22-year-old kid, I worked for my parents’ business for 12 years .. every day, every Saturday .. I came, I did my thing, I changed the course of my parents’ financial life the way they changed and created the course of my life ..

And I knew that was right from the get because that was my mission

And then I was ready to leave and do my own thing at 34. So when people are impatient at 26, I laugh.

Patience, my friends.

Too many of you are way too worried about short-term goals when your mouth is saying you want big-time goals.

The bigger the ambition, the slower you need to go.

Skills can be taught.
But drive cannot be bought.

I've seen companies pass on hungry candidates because they didn't check every box. Then hire the "perfect resume" who coasted from day one.

Experience looks good on paper.
But experience without drive is just someone who's been doing the same thing for years without getting better.

Give me the person who asks questions. Who takes feedback and actually applies it. Who treats the opportunity like it matters.

I can teach them the rest.

What you can train:
↳ Software
↳ Processes
↳ Industry knowledge
↳ Technical skills

What you can't:
↳ Curiosity
↳ Work ethic
↳ Coachability
↳ Showing up like it matters

The best hires aren't the ones who already know everything. They're the ones who learn fast and care enough to figure it out.

To employers: take a chance on potential. You might find your best employee.

To job seekers: if you don't have experience, lead with drive. The right company will notice.

📌 Save this as a reminder
♻️ Repost if you agree

Everyone loves the product.

But no one signs the contract.

Building a robotics company can make you feel
crazy in a very specific way.

Because the signals are never clean.

The product works.
The demo lands.
The buyer engages.
The meetings keep happening.

And still, revenue doesn't move fast enough.
So you end up living inside mixed signals.

Enough interest to stay hopeful.
Not enough traction to relax.

That messes with a founder.

Because now every conversation
starts carrying extra weight.

A good meeting feels too important.
A slow reply feels too personal.
A delayed next step feels ominous.

You start reading into everything.
Who sounded excited.
Who brought in procurement.
Who went quiet after the pilot.
Who said “timing” when they probably meant “risk.”

That is exhausting.

You're trying to keep belief steady
while the market keeps blinking.

And robotics makes that worse.

Because buyers are rarely judging the machine alone.
They're judging the disruption around it.

What happens to the workflow.
What happens to the team.
What happens if the rollout gets messy.
What happens if they champion this and it backfires.

That's the subtext.
And subtext slows deals down.

So the outside view looks decent.
There's activity.
There's interest.
There are conversations.

But inside the company, it feels different.
It feels like strain.

Sales is pushing for movement.
Marketing is trying to create pull.
Product is still improving.
Leadership is trying not to show stress.

All while the founder is thinking:
How can something this strong
still feel this hard to sell?

That question starts eating at people.
Because when adoption moves slowly,
the product starts getting blamed
for problems that belong somewhere else.

Weak positioning.
Too much buyer friction.
A path to yes that feels too risky.
A story the customer still cannot repeat.

That is where companies get stuck.
They keep feeding the machine.

More outreach.
More demos.
More features.
More meetings.

And they call it momentum.
A lot of the time, it's just expensive limbo.
That's why commercialization matters.

Buyers need to understand it fast.
Explain it internally.
Trust the rollout.
Feel safe enough to move.

Until that happens, great technology can stay trapped
in endless “very interested” conversations.

That's the work we do at NeuroForge.

P.S. One of the hardest parts of building
a robotics company is watching strong interest
fail to become real urgency.

Try the commercialization audit -->
https://lnkd.in/gvZNBKq9

--------------------------------------------------------------

⚙️ Follow Shannon for brain-based commercialization insights
♻️ Share this with a founder who is tired of mixed signals

Onboarding is what makes someone stay.

Business owners who skip onboarding think it's optional.
The ones winning know it's not.

Onboarding meant typing client info into many places.

Forms.
Contracts.
Signatures. 
Dashboards.
Trackers.

A new client would say yes…

Then I'd spend an hour on setup.
An hour on signatures.
An hour copying their info across tools.

I'm tired of AI tools that almost work.
I want tools that just work.

That's why I'm running this through Anvil.

Here's exactly what Anvil's Document AI does.

I upload an empty PDF. That's it.

Their AI reads the doc and:

⇢ Finds every field and checkbox
⇢ Understands what each field is for
⇢ Assigns the right labels automatically
⇢ Builds a categorized, multi-page web form
⇢ Finds signature fields and assigns signers

The client fills out the web form in 2 minutes.

I get clean, structured data I can re-use anywhere.

CRM. 
Payment tool. 
Signature flow. 
Dashboard. 
Tasks.

One empty PDF kicks off the entire onboarding stack.

No re-typing.
No tab-switching.
No copy-paste mistakes.

Good process equals happy client.

This is what AI is doing for me right now.
Giving me back the hour I lost on every new client.

What does your onboarding look like right now? 💬👇

👊

---

♻️ Repost to help a founder fix their onboarding.

✚ Follow Cory Blumenfeld

I'm on a mission to inspire 1M everyday people to start their own business and find their voice.

#AnvilPartner

Anthropic just launched Claude for Small Business, and it basically turns Claude into an AI employee for companies too small to hire one 😳

Here's what it can do already:

→ Manage invoices, payments, and finances
→ Create campaigns, designs, and content
→ Organize sales and customers automatically
→ Read, summarize, and draft documents
→ Manage emails, calendars, and files
→ Execute tasks across multiple apps

All from Claude.

The product plugs into tools SMBs already use: QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and more.

Then Claude can run multi-step workflows across them.

The coolest part?

Claude for Small Business can understand the context of the business and execute work across the stack.

Anthropic has already shipped:

↳ 15 agentic workflows
↳ 15 repeatable skills
↳ Finance, sales, marketing, docs, and admin automations
↳ No engineers required
↳ Human approval before anything gets sent, paid, or posted

It’s clear now that Anthropic doesn’t want Claude to be another tab inside the business.

It wants Claude to become the OS for every small business.

The place where invoices get chased.
Campaigns get created.
Customers get organized.
Contracts get reviewed.
Files get summarized.
Tasks get finished.

So you won’t be opening 10 different apps. You will be just asking Claude 🤖

ClaudeOS is eating the world.

P.S. also check out how I built an AI operating system to run a startup with Claude 🤖: https://lnkd.in/dv7-ZRVc

Big things are just small things put together.

You look at a finished wall and see a massive structure -
but it started as a single brick, carried by hand, and set with care.

Great careers, healthy teams, and successful agencies work the same way.
They don't appear overnight in a moment of luck.
They are built in the quiet, repetitive hours that nobody else sees.

But our culture has a way of making us feel like we’re falling behind.
Social media whispers, "You need to be there already."
Ambition says, "This small step doesn't matter."
And slowly, we lose heart because we’re looking at the mountain instead of our feet.

The truth is simple:

Consistency is more powerful than intensity.

The gap between a dream and a reality
is often just the patience to keep going - slowly, steadily, and truthfully.

Every small task you finish is a victory.
Every difficult client call you handle well is a foundation.
Every day you show up when you're tired is a win.

So lay the next brick.
Focus on today.
Trust the process.

Give your work the time it needs to grow into something strong.
Because the goal isn't to reach the end as fast as possible.
The goal is to build a life you can actually stand on.

Image credit: WisdomStoics on Twitter/X

I underwrote a $4,364,000 Shake Shack in Missouri.

Here’s the breakdown of my thoughts on the deal:

1. The Shake Shack has 12 years remaining on the lease.
2. The average income within a 1-mile radius is $281,000.
3. The Shake Shack’s lease is an absolute NNN lease.
4. The tenant is not an investment grade tenant.
5. The Shake Shack’s NOI is $240,000.
6. The Shake Shack’s cap rate is 5.5%.
7. The Shake Shack was built in 2023.

3 things stuck out to me about the deal,

1. The average income in the 1-mile radius is high. 
• The median income for an American is $66,456.
• $281,000 per year is an incredibly high amount. 
• Shake Shack, despite its “fine casual” brand, 
• is still fast food. 
• That demographic is least likely to be a regular.  
• & competition is brutal in high income areas. 
• But there are pros to being in that area too. 
• Namely, their spending power. 
• & their resistance to reactionary issues.

2. The cap rate is low for our cash flow requirements. 
• Cash flow is an integral part of our investment thesis. 
• Low cap rates hinder our ability to provide cash flow.

3. The tenant is not an investment grade tenant. 
• This is an automatic no go for us.

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the Shake Shack!
Comment below!

Brutal truth: Your customer experience will never
exceed your employee experience.

Most leaders get it backward.

They obsess over customer satisfaction while
their teams burn out in the background.

26 years in business have taught me one thing
more than anything else:

Your customers will never be happier than your people.

Think about it.

Who's answering that support call at 8pm?
Who's staying late to fix that urgent problem?
Who's going above and beyond for your clients?

Your team.

And when they feel

> Undervalued
> Underpaid
> Unheard

That energy shows up in every customer interaction.

I learned this the hard way at a previous company.

We lost 3 top performers in one month.

Customer complaints doubled.
Response times tripled.
Revenue took a hit.

So we flipped our priorities:

✓ Team wellbeing before quarterly targets
✓ Investment in people before new tech
✓ Flexibility before rigid policies
✓ Recognition before criticism

The results proved the approach.

Customer satisfaction hit record highs.
Employee turnover dropped 90%.
Profits followed naturally.

Look... your employees are your first customers.

When you take care of them,
they take care of everything else.

Start there. Always start there.

♻️ Repost to help others build a positive culture.
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