I didn’t grow up wanting to sell insurance.

I grew up in a small rural community where we didn’t get our first traffic light until I was in graduate school — and it blinked after 6 PM. I’m not making that up.

I went to RPI (the oldest engineering school in the English-speaking world, where they call the sports teams “The Engineers”) and studied physics. I was a Teaching Assistant, a Research Assistant, and spent my evenings training for my black belt in Tae Kwon Do. I thought I’d end up in a lab somewhere.

Then my Godfather died without proper legal documents or good financial advice. The family lost the farm. That was my lightning bolt.

I called the local Northwestern Mutual agency and said, “I’m coming to work for you.” Arrogance has always been something I’ve struggled with.

I got my license in the summer of 1995 while finishing grad school, running the local college bar, working weekends at a store, and training for the Olympics in Tae Kwon Do. I was 23, running on coffee and stubbornness.

Within six months, I was running the college internship program. Within a few years, I was making MDRT, writing 100+ lives a year, and I’d earned my CLU, ChFC, and passed the CFP exam — all before 30. I recruited over a hundred people into this profession. I spoke at NAIFA events across the country. I loved every minute of it.

But here’s the thing nobody tells you about building something great: life doesn’t care about your plan.

When things fell apart, I didn’t have to start from scratch. I had a system. The same one I’d been building and testing for 25 years. A system that didn’t care whether the market was up or down, whether the economy was booming or in crisis, whether I was at the top of my game or climbing back from rock bottom. It just worked.

That system is what became The Intro Machine.

Every chapter, every script, every strategy in the training library came from real conversations with real clients. Over 7,500 of them. I didn’t write this in a library. I built it in the field, one introduction at a time.

Now I teach it. Because if there’s one thing 25 years in financial services taught me, it’s that we have a culture of sharing ideas — and there are more people who need our help than any of us could serve in ten lifetimes.