My Story

I grew up in the mountains of North Carolina. My dad worked in factories; my mom was a secretary. Magic showed up when I was five and it never left my life.

That's not a metaphor. I mean I started doing tricks at five, had my first paid gig at thirteen, and ate fire at eighteen. It was never about entertainment. It was more about understanding how people work: what they see, what they miss, and (most interesting) why.

Most capable people I meet are running on a system they never chose on purpose. All their habits, assumptions, and mental models were inherited from earlier versions of their situation.

The gap almost never comes from lack of talent or execution. It comes from an assumption that was never written down, never agreed to, and never questioned. Nobody stated it out loud in the first place. It's just an idea. It looks real, but has nothing to do with reality.

Fifteen thousand shows taught me to read the room, find the gap between what people believe and what's actually happening, and close it.

The first time I walked into a boardroom, I recognized the room. Different chairs, same problem. The skills that worked on stage worked in there too, and in that context, they were worth considerably more.

Nobody thought to look for them outside a theater.

I spent a decade doing it the hard way: 1,400+ sales consultations, rebuilding the entire sales process at Thrive Agency from discovery call to close, and keynoting for BP and United Airlines.

I now work with founders and executive teams as an upstream advisor. My job is to find the assumption nobody stopped to question (the one driving every downstream problem) before anyone spends another quarter executing against it.

State Farm rated me the #1 professional skills teacher for 3 consecutive years in Chicago. Pure Storage (a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader in enterprise storage, serving 64% of Fortune 500 companies) saw millions in additional revenue from repositioned communication. At 1871 Chicago, the founders I worked with landed $1M+ in funding.

The results are consistent because the problem is consistent. Trying harder to fix the wrong thing is a losing strategy. Find the real problem first, then fix that.

I've written five books on psychology, communication, and persuasion (with more on the way), and share the underlying frameworks on my YouTube channel.

I still perform. I run a monthly mentalism show in Asheville (20+ shows and counting), and I keep doing it for the feedback loop, not the career.

There's no substitute for a room full of people telling you, in real time, whether you're right. The stage keeps the diagnostic muscle honest in a way that no boardroom can.

If the gap between what you're capable of and what you're getting feels like a strategy problem you haven't been able to name, the triage call is 15 minutes and it's free.