I got laid off in January 2017 with a baby on the way and no plan.

Six months before I got laid off, I was in a bad place. I was one of the top producing account executives at a reverse mortgage company, and the whole thing was falling apart. Turn times were four to five days instead of 24 hours. We laid off half the team. I was drinking too much, blaming everyone around me, and not taking any responsibility for my own situation.

Then sometime around November 2016, I had a random thought: stop listening to the radio on my commute. I bought a cheap Bluetooth adapter off Amazon, plugged it in, and started listening to a podcast called Entrepreneur on Fire. A daily show where John Lee Dumas interviews entrepreneurs.

That podcast rewired my brain. I had always assumed you become a CEO by climbing the corporate ladder. These people just started companies. They were making real money and living the way they wanted to live. I started hearing about ClickFunnels, about Russell Brunson, about this idea that you could build something on the internet and sell it.

January 2017. Layoffs. I got a severance check, some paid time off, maybe $20,000 or $30,000 total. I turned down a job offer. Sent it back in writing. I still have that email somewhere.

I tried contract processing first. Got two clients at a thousand bucks each. Realized pretty quickly that processing mortgage files as an ADHD person was not going to work. But it taught me something important: I could make money outside of the corporate machine.

Then I tried running Facebook ads. A cleaning company that went nowhere. A loan officer who lasted a month. Then another client who lasted two months. For probably the next six to twelve months, the pattern was: get a client, lose a client, get a client, lose a client. I had no idea what I was doing.

By November 2017, I had made maybe eight grand total in ten months. We had burned through all of our savings. I was putting things on credit cards. My old boss had been calling me for months, and I finally said yes and took a job.

That lasted about six months until I got laid off again.

Then I found two courses that actually taught me something. One on Facebook ads from Bobby Stocks. One on sales from Nick Robbins. I also put a $9,800 coaching program on my wife's credit card. Paid it in two installments. I remember crying when I told her. I thought she was going to leave me. She said, "We'll figure it out."

Around the same time, I stumbled into health insurance marketing through a friend of my wife's from high school. That grew fast. $80,000 a month in ad spend. Then open enrollment ended and revenue dropped from $83,000 to $14,000 in six weeks. I panicked. But it forced me to stop chasing whatever was in front of me and actually build something real.

I went all in on mortgage. Built Loans on Demand as a done-for-you lead generation agency for loan officers. Grew it to over 100 clients. Had a massive year in 2020. And then I started hating my life.

I did what the gurus told me to do. Hire people. Delegate everything. Add an operations person. Add a support person. Add a coach. I kept adding people and removing myself from the work I actually enjoyed. I built a business I was miserable running.

The one thing I loved was coaching. I was teaching marketing inside a loan officer community on the side, and those sessions lit me up in a way the agency never did. Watching someone take action on something I taught them, and then seeing them get a result from it. That was the thing.

So we shifted. Shut down the done-for-you work. Built Direct Authority AI as a coaching community. And when AI hit the mortgage industry in 2023, I saw the same problem I had always seen, just amplified: everyone was using the same tools and getting the same generic output.

That is when I built Duplico. Because I got tired of watching loan officers paste prompts into ChatGPT and get back content that sounded like every other loan officer on the internet. Duplico captures how you actually talk and turns that into content that sounds like you.

I am not a loan officer. I never was one. I am a marketer who spent eight years inside the mortgage industry. That is actually what makes my perspective different from every other mortgage coach. Most of them are former loan officers teaching the same playbook: cold call agents, ask for referrals, repeat. I teach direct consumer strategies, organic content marketing, and how to use AI as an amplifier for your real voice instead of a replacement for it.

Today I run Direct Authority AI with 200+ members, host a monthly AI summit with 600+ registrants, speak at conferences like MortgageCon and AIME Fuse, and I am building the tools I wish existed when I started.