David is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu brown belt at Supremacy BJJ in Largo, Florida. He's also a seasoned marketer who has accumulated a lot of knowledge on marketing strategy and tactics while running a business focused on developing martial arts curriculum for academy owners. David recently parlayed that expertise into another business venture, one that helps owner-operated home service businesses improve their branding and online presence. We discuss David's early career experience in multi-level marketing, potential future impacts of AI on the marketing industry, what it takes to be a good business partner, and the value of integrity.

Russell is a serial entrepreneur and investor. He's built multiple multi-million dollar businesses and has been an early stage investor in companies that got sold or acquired for hundreds of millions of dollars. His latest commercial adventure is The GildedBox Company. It's an on-demand business gifting concierge service that curates, manufactures, and delivers premium personalized gifts meant to elevate high-value relationships. Russell also operates CustomUSB, where I started my career as employee number four. We discuss what we learned along the way, how to properly gift, the illusion of work-life balance, and other topics on business operations and life.

I recently sat down with Erin Young from SlideUX to discuss the ins and outs of user experience. I met Erin in 2017, when my company was having a mismatch between the products we were offering and how our customers understood them. Erin's employee-owned, family-run firm specializes in user experience (UX), usability analytics, and digital product design strategy. Everyone talks about UX, but few truly understand what it entails. We explored the topics of usability thinking, potential future impacts of AI on the UX industry, and what it's like to work with family.

When it comes to buying and selling, most people have a problem with the abstract. For the last 20 years I was involved in producing and selling custom-made products. These were things that started out as raw materials, had to be articulated and curated from a landscape of potential options, and then produced and delivered to spec. Strange as it was, many people I dealt with, on both sides of the equation, customers and fellow sales people, had a real hard time with it.

I spent the last ten years growing a $10MM packaging manufacturing company, which I sold in October 2024. It didn’t actually manufacture anything in a traditional sense of producing finished goods from raw materials using some type of equipment or skilled labor…but it did deliver exceptional value, remove the risks, and make it easy to buy low-cost, made-in-China, premium custom packaging. For 13 years prior to starting my company, I did the same thing for licensed toys and promotional consumer electronics. The products were different, but the formula was the same.

In October of 2013, while working a full-time job, I soft launched the Paper Tube Co. out of my garage. Over the next decade, through tens of thousands of hours of wins, losses, trials, adjustments, frustrations, breakthroughs, and hard work, my team and I grew the company to a 26,000 sq ft, 25-person market leader in premium, sustainable, niche packaging. We had two patents, Fortune 1000 clients, and employees on two continents.