A decade spent on one skill: helping people communicate their value.
It didn't start with a credential or a lucky break. It started with fifty cold calls a day to people who dreaded my name — and the one skill I had to learn to survive them. Everything I build now, across every company, traces back to it.
I learned to sell by calling people who hated hearing from me.
A kid obsessed with details.
I spent my childhood chasing the NBA. At 6'1" and about 150 pounds soaking wet, that was never going to happen — but those years taught me the thing I'd eventually build a career on: the smallest details are what separate the great from the average.
The detour — and a credential I couldn't use.
I went to NC State for pre-med, switched to physical therapy, and graduated with a degree and no idea how to turn it into a career. I'd done everything the plan told me to do. The plan didn't work.
Then I found story.
What actually lit me up in those years wasn't medicine — it was music. I started producing, wrote songs, even opened for a Nappy Roots show, and fell hard for cadence, rhythm, and the craft of making people feel something.
I didn't know it yet — but that, not the degree, was the foundation of everything that came next.
I graduated straight into a dead end.
Four years, a degree, a pile of debt — and then PT school rejected me. The plan I'd built my life around was gone, and I was starting over with no idea what came next.
So I landed in a basement counting pills.
No windows. 4:30 a.m. starts. And the slow, sinking realization that this could be the next forty years of my life if something didn't change.
I fired off applications with no story, no direction, and no idea how to talk about myself in a way that made anyone care.
Then a stranger named Will Barfield called.
A recruiter found my résumé and asked if I'd ever thought about tech sales. I hadn't — but anything beat the basement, so I took the call.
That call opened the door. It wasn't the lesson. The lesson came next.
Fifty cold calls a day taught me the real lesson.
The job: fifty cold calls a day to behavioral-health clinics and correctional facilities. Yes, that means cold-calling jail wardens. No, they were not happy to hear from me. The phone felt like it weighed 250 pounds.
But that grind taught me the single most important skill of my career: attention is currency. Grab it, hold it, turn it into a yes — and you win. That's where storytelling became selling, and selling became storytelling.
Then I climbed — by telling a better story.
I went from those calls to closing deals with Fortune 500 CEOs. I helped build a company acquired for $540M, scaled an AI startup from a few million to $30M in two years, and led North American Solutions at Clari from Series B to a $2.6B valuation — all by refining how we told the story.
I watched the same thing happen over and over: the most qualified person in the room rarely won. The one who could tell their story did. Every single time.
So I built the framework — and wrote the book.
I turned everything I'd learned into a copyrighted framework rooted in the behavioral science of why buyers say yes, trained hundreds of people on it, and drove over $28.6M in sales with it. Then I wrote the book on it: How to Sell with Story.
None of it — not one dollar — came from my degree. It came from the one skill nobody ever taught me.
The producer, not the artist.
I think of myself as the producer, not the artist — the Dr. Dre to someone's Eminem. I don't change who you are; I find what's already great and build the framework that finally makes the world hear it.
That's the thread through everything I build. Narrative Revenue helps founders, consultants, and coaches sell what they already do. Narrative Careers helps capable people get picked. Different rooms — same anchor: communicate your value so clearly you're impossible to ignore.
"I don't start with tactics. I start with the science of how people actually decide to buy — then teach you to sell what you already do, without ever feeling like someone you're not."
Whether it's a founder trying to close bigger deals or someone trying to land their first real shot, the work is the same — and you get me, not a handoff to a junior hire. The person who built this is the person in the room with you.
"The skill that changed my career wasn't a credential. It was learning that attention is currency — and that the story you tell is what makes someone say yes. I built The Narrative Companies so good people don't have to learn that the hard way."
