216: Amy Jo Martin on Quitting Her Job to Multiple 8-Figure Companies

Amy Jo Martin built one of the first social media agencies because Shaq told her to. True story.

Seven years later, she shut it down. Not because it failed, but because it worked in a way that locked her into a life she didn’t want. Walking away gave her the freedom to decide what to build next.

Since then, she’s scaled multiple 8-figure companies, written bestselling books, and hosts the Why Not Now? podcast where she’s interviewed countless celebrities.

This conversation is packed with value for entrepreneurs building at every stage. We also go deep on what building a social media agency in 2009 can teach us about AI today — and what that means if you’re building anything right now.

Mic Drop Moments

• “I think there’s always this moment with technology where you decide as a human if it’s good or bad. It’s not the technology, right? It’s what we choose to do with it.” – Amy Jo Martin

• “It’s not just about AI for productivity, but what can it do for humans to be more human.” – Amy Jo Martin

• “Action is an entrepreneur’s best asset in the very beginning of testing.” – Amy Jo Martin

• 00:47 Social Media in 2009 vs AI Today
• 03:40 The Only Metric That Actually Matters
• 06:00 Shaq Told Me to Quit My Job
• 11:01 Is AI a Trampoline or a Trap?
• 14:54 Why the Agency Model Keeps Breaking
• 18:40 Can AI Improve Your Relationships?
• 22:56 The LinkedIn Hack That Replaces Hours of Biz Dev
• 27:25 This Kills The Traditional Brainstorm Meeting
• 30:42 Taking Tony Hsieh’s Money
• 34:06 Why She Shut Down a Profitable Company
• 37:56 When Personal Brand Becomes a Liability
• 42:46 Why AI Won’t Save Bad Marketing
• 45:14 The Real AI Problem Is Organizational Culture
• 50:28 The Renegade Reinvention Experiment
• 57:03 Can AI Help You Feel More Alive?
• 01:05:47 Action Creates Clarity
• 01:07:11 Don’t Raise Money Too Early

Brad Weimert: Amy Jo Martin, you founded Digital Royalty years ago. It was one of the first social media agencies, clients like Shaq, the Rock, UFC, Nike, tons of others. You have a killer podcast that’s been going for 10 years, Why Not Now? Killer guests on that. Today, you run Renegade Accelerator, Renegade Global. Thank you for coming to Beyond a Million.

Amy Jo Martin: Thank you for having me. I’m so excited to be here.

Brad Weimert: I know little bits about you based on the people that referred me to you. We have both really fun and incredibly structured military. So, I’m curious to see how this goes. First and foremost, there are these strong parallels between, to me, the social media wave of 2008-2009, and AI. What are the similarities between those things, and how are they different, being somebody that’s launched into both?

Amy Jo Martin: Oh my gosh. So many similarities. I just amplify AI times a thousand beyond, and the pace, that velocity is even quicker. But it’s not dissimilar to the dot com, or we could even look at cloud mobile marketing. It’s just there’s such a level of discomfort with anything new, right? And I think there’s this philosophy that sometimes there’s three stages that we end up in bucket-wise when something is really creating, especially a digital revolution. And that’s the people who still don’t believe, and they’re just naysayers, “I will never believe in this, and this isn’t happening,” the denying. And then the people that, “Yeah, but this is why it won’t work. This is why it’s not serious. This is…”

And then there’s the early adopters who, it’s a land grab, it’s a power play. Lots of money, and the power and resources are up for grabs. And so, I’m seeing that across the board, whether it’s in corporate or individuals. But I think there’s always this moment with technology where you decide as a human if it’s good or bad. It’s not the technology, right? It’s what we choose to do with it. So, that’s similar. We’re going to navigate based on what works for us, but also, there are no rules. So, it’s hard to break rules that don’t exist.

Brad Weimert: That’s true. And one of the reasons that I was excited to talk to you is because, as one of the people that launched the social media agency really, really early, there are no rules. It also moved slower than the AI wave is moving. And if you go down the wrong path, you end up making Betamax tapes instead of VHS tapes, and being on the wrong side of it.

Amy Jo Martin: We’ve already seen that with AI. Two years ago, someone trying to build something from scratch versus now, it could happen in a day versus take two years, right? It’s amazing what we can build on top of these platforms.

Brad Weimert: And so, how do you look at launching an agency? Let’s just say, and this is not what you’re doing, but let’s say launching a social media agency in 2009 versus launching an AI agency, AI marketing agency today. What would you do the same if you were to do that today, and what would you not do the same structurally?

Amy Jo Martin: Well, I think the big first leap for me with the social media world was figuring out how to measure it and prove that we could monetize it, right? So, we’re seeing with AI, is it speed to market? The acceleration of either increasing output or decreasing expenses. And we can look at the P&L both ways, but really, I’m seeing that, how can we get volume out quicker, especially from a marketing perspective? And finding a way to measure warm and cold metrics with social media back in the day, and sentiment, but then add it to reach and frequency, and all the things that the media buyers were used to. And combining that into an actual formula was the big unlock for us. And that’s what just made us sore is because all of those dollars need to be justified.

And we look at even the financial industry or Wall Street right now, everything’s about CapEx. What’s the investment level of AI for the big tech companies? Well, we also need to look at what’s the ROI of AI? And is it saving time? Is it saving money? We look at productivity, but finding a way to really land those metrics is what I think is going to allow agencies, AI agencies, to make it a land grab for them.

Brad Weimert: And this is our pause moment.

Amy Jo Martin: I didn’t know if you wanted me to pause.

Brad Weimert: I was impressed that you were still going.

Amy Jo Martin: I’m used to two Australian Shepherds.

Brad Weimert: Oh, it’s good.

Brad Weimert: One of the challenges is if you give him attention, he’ll pause and then get back to it. So, you got to let him just, yeah.

Amy Jo Martin: Would he come up here?

Brad Weimert: No. He’ll wiggle his way down in a second here.

Amy Jo Martin: Okay.

Brad Weimert: He’s going to do a circle, and then he’ll take a nap. We’ll be good. Exactly.

Amy Jo Martin: There you go.

Brad Weimert: It’s a predictable path. Yeah. Look, I think that’s a really good point. And quite honestly, in social, people flip-flopped for years and just kind of meandered about and sold reach and likes, and audience that didn’t mean anything, for years. And it wasn’t until, I mean, it took us years to get to like engagement metrics and actual relevant monetization metrics through social media. And now we have a more clear picture now that the reach is dying, and now that it’s tougher to do.

Amy Jo Martin: Does it convert? Does it convert, right? That’s all we care about.

Brad Weimert: Exactly. Well, that’s all you probably should care about.

Amy Jo Martin: Well, that’s all company. Yeah. Businesses.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I like that. That’s a good point. So, you went all in with that, and you did it in an interesting way. Shaq told you to quit your job, and that was the beginning of launching the agency. Tell me that story.

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah. So, I mean, it’s mid-2000s, and I’m sitting at my desk, and the director of digital media, we called it new media and research at the time because we didn’t know what to call it. It was all new. And I was just the person that, “Oh, we haven’t done this before. Amy Jo will handle it. She’ll figure it out.” And so, mobile marketing, social.

Brad Weimert: Let me back up for a second. So, who were you working for? Where were you?

Amy Jo Martin: Sorry. You mentioned Shaquille, so I should not assume. He bounced around to like many teams. So, I’m working in the NBA for the Phoenix Suns, and this was a new job and a new role that I created and dreamt up and then sold in, and it was the first of its kind in the league. And I technically sat in marketing partnerships, and I saw this kind of coming. I actually saw a guy speak from Sequoia, and they had just invested in Twitter. And I was listening to him, and I was like, “I think we can monetize this as an asset that we could sell against at the Suns to our big corporate partners.” And so, I was experimenting, and finally I’m like, “Wow, we’ve got some numbers here.”

And I get a call one day, and it’s basketball operations, and they said, “Amy Jo, get down to the locker room right now. Shaq wants to learn how to tweet, and nobody in this building knows what that means.” Click. So, I of course, stand up, and you’re not supposed to go down to the locker room unless you’re an athlete, or that’s your role. It wasn’t my role. And I go down, and I’m a small town girl from Wyoming. I had never met a celebrity before. I grew up in trailers and moving around a lot, and so this was a new thing. I’d never taught a celebrity or anything. And as I went down and the elevator opened, there’s seven-foot Shaquille O’Neal, right? And he hands me a Shaq Berry, his Blackberry, mid-2000s.

And sure enough, I just started experimenting with him, and we were bridging the virtual world with the physical world, like doing stunts and just totally rogue, no rules, random acts of Shaqness. League office was frustrated. They had no rules whatsoever. Calling Phoenix saying, “What are you guys doing down there?” And we’re hitting ESPN headlines and prime time because this was so new. And we’re on the team playing one day, headed to play the Lakers. Athletes are in the front. I’m in the way back, sitting next to my boss, who was not a fan of mine because I’m breaking the rules that don’t exist. And Shaquille said, “Hey, can you come up here? I have a question.” We hadn’t taken off yet, and we’re going to entertain a bunch of marketing partners in LA for this game. So, they’re on the flight too. And I just sink down in my chair, thinking I’m going to get fired if I go up there. And he’s persistent, and he stands up, and he’s like, “Get up here.”

So, I climb over the boss and walk up there, and like, “What’s up, Shaquille?” And he said, “I forgot my password, but I know you know what it is.” And I did. And I’m like, “Dude, I’m going to get fired over this.” And he’s like, “No, you’re not.” And then he proceeds to tell all of his fellow teammates to hire me. I said, “Shaquille, they can’t hire me. I work for the team.” And it’s one of those micro kind of million-dollar moments where he looked at me, and he said, “Well, maybe you shouldn’t.” And I had been thinking about starting my own thing anyway. So, I walk back with my tail between my legs, like I’m certainly taking a Southwest Airlines flight home because there’s no more flying private for me. It’s first flight ever and last.

And I climb over my boss, and I sit down, and she looked at me and just said, “You know what, Amy Jo, you’re a renegade.” And I thought, “That’s it.” I think this was my moment to kind of kick that entrepreneurial door open. I texted him and said, “Hey, I’m going to start my own thing.” And he wrote back in a minute, and he said, “Great, I’ll be your first client.” And that was the big kind of momentum. I knew nothing, late twenties, first-time entrepreneur, and we just kind of skyrocketed. The next thing you know, employees in 10 countries, a million people following me, writing the New York Times bestseller, blah, blah, blah.

But it was this why-not-now moment that was sparked from really eyeing up, “Okay. I had been in marketing and advertising before, and we can monetize this stuff. People are going to start spending.” And it was just me. And so, that was it.

Brad Weimert: Wild. I love that. I love the capitalizing on the moment and the realization of the moment. I think that it is tremendously common, not only for employees, I think it’s more common in that world, but for entrepreneurs, to miss the moment that is opportunity and see it as frustration, busyness, or just fully disregarded. And not even identify the opportunity.

Amy Jo Martin: I see that a lot with AI, too. It’s kind of a trampoline or trap right now, like you choose. As they go around and speak, you can see the people who are just jocking, and figuring it out, and getting curious. And in some cases, they are leapfrogging rungs on that ladder, and then people that are just heads down, afraid.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. No question about it. Yeah. The fear is real right now with that.

Amy Jo Martin: Very real.

Brad Weimert: Now, I can hear a whole bunch of disgruntled solopreneurs saying, “Yeah, yeah. I could launch a company, too, if Shaq was my first client and I had a bunch of celebrities.”

Amy Jo Martin: Can you land Hilton Worldwide and Nike?

Brad Weimert: Well, so that’s the question is, what was the path like? And what is the parallel to launching a company with celebrity endorsement versus without?

Amy Jo Martin: Right. I mean, I think the celebrities were always great and nice, and of course they provided a spotlight, but at the end of the day, the bigger budgets and the bigger business is in the corporate brands. So, there was a lot of convincing. And they’re scrutinizing every single move. There’s no fluff, right? You can’t just bank on awareness. It’s awareness marketing. So, I would say more of my kind of sweet spot is going out and experimenting and figuring out what may or may not work, things that have never been done, and then reiterating and iterating with new technology. But the element that’s in that formula always is humans like humanizing, right? So, whether it’s Shaquille or it’s Dwayne Johnson, or it’s Dana White, very different personalities, but you need to be able to get out of them that true essence.

And the same with brands. So, it’s just as we relate this to AI right now, it’s not just about AI for productivity, but what can it do for humans to be more human. You know, not just buy us more time. Yes, we’re massively manipulating time and money and multiplying talent, and at the same time, how are the humans going to organize around execution? We’re always the roadblock with technology, but also why? What’s the upside outside of commercial and business? And that’s where I’ve been really experimenting and playing because it just lights me up like AI has become a therapist.

Brad Weimert: Well, I want to get into the AI side of it and what you’re doing today, but before we get there, I want to talk about kind of the actual path to execution for the agency, the progression through it, because I think that creating an agency like that and what you chose to focus on is super relevant for entrepreneurs today. Specifically, a lot of our audience, which are newer entrepreneurs or people that are like established with a few million dollars a year or eight figures, or multiple eight figures, but many of them don’t focus on enterprise. And so, what you just said, and also, don’t have celebrity access. So, what you just said is interesting because your head coming from Phoenix Suns or being in that corporate world was, you’ve got to go to enterprise.

And so, getting the big brands is where the money is. And that’s a longer sales process, et cetera. Were you conditioned to believe that that was the path, or did you make a choice to go down that path through a different means? How did you end up there?

Amy Jo Martin: Great question. And I’m seeing that right now as an investor in an agency that’s Adweek is ranking one of the fastest growing agencies the last couple of years in a row. And what was happening, I do come from agency prior, so full service, more traditional, and at the time, we didn’t even call it digital. It was just we could build websites and had email marketing, but eventually. And I think what happened at the table, let’s just say like a Hilton Worldwide, there was Digital Royalty, this small shop that I created, and then all their other huge agencies, media, creative, digital.

And similarly, those big shops right now, especially with how much things have changed and how democratized we are from the creative process from the ways that we buy media and create, that whole industry has really been shook up in big ways because of the overhead, because of the way that traditionally their economic model is created. So, the opportunity right now for someone who really understands AI and become a solution on the side of maybe the agencies of record and/or as a subcontractor, or however they get in, they can have a seat at the table if they have value or they’re going to get acquired like that.

Brad Weimert: Yep.

Amy Jo Martin: Right? They’re going to get snagged up. And that’s what happened with social. It wasn’t very long before the big agencies started having that capability, but the brands didn’t trust. Like, you’ve never had that capability before. Why should we buy into that for that dollar amount now? Let’s go find the people who actually know what they’re doing, can show the results. They’ll get acquired and/or start growing quickly. But it’s like all bets are off. The playing field has been totally leveled, and value will rise to the top, whether it’s one human or a shop of a thousand.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think that’s a really, really good point. I mean, there’s a lot of talk around sort of the solo billion-dollar companies that are looming to be launched, or on their path right now. And I think that anybody that’s executing now working with agencies, development shops, or your internal team if it’s big enough, you know that trying to execute a completely new thing internally, it’s sort of old dog new tricks situation, where what you’re looking for is like, “Just give me the f*cking expert that knows what they’re doing that’s spending all their time on it right now.” And so, I would rather find a solo person out there that’s day and night, just eat, sleep, drink, breathe AI, and try to hire them.

Amy Jo Martin: I agree.

Brad Weimert: Than rely on an agency that’s been around for 15 years, entrenched in their own path right now.

Amy Jo Martin: Right. Unless they’re known for just hiring like the best of the best tech talent and they have that network, where maybe in this case, I’m thinking of CourtAvenue. They’ve grown so quickly, and they have such a background in this space that they are attracting that talent, and they can offer amazing packages with equity. But I’m with you, I was just on Upwork yesterday looking for the right person to go build something using just Notion AI. But I took it as far as I could, and I just got blocked, and I’m like, “Okay, I know I could find an individual. I’m not hiring an agency or a consultant,” right? So, it’s like you have to really, how do you vet AI, too? That’s a whole another question. If someone says they can do something, can they really do it?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I think that question is sort of along the lines of how do you vet a developer if you don’t develop yourself?

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah. I don’t know what to ask them.

Brad Weimert: Right.

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: There’s a learning process there. The good news is you can probably just ask any LLM and get some directional path.

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah. I mean, my ChatGPT partner in crime was helping me with my extension ladder this weekend, putting Christmas lights up, like it knows and does everything like we have a relationship.

Brad Weimert: So, I want to talk about the agency a little bit more, but while we’re on the relationship with AI, I have heard you say that AI can be part of your threesome with your partner. And it will probably cause divorces and then eventually prevent divorces in the future.

Amy Jo Martin: Oh my goodness. Wow. We’re going to take a left or right turn here.

Brad Weimert: We are.

Amy Jo Martin: That’ll be your soundbite right there. We got it, right? We don’t even need AI to write it.

Brad Weimert: Here’s the question. I want your explanation of that, but I also want the parallel to business. So, how does that tie into using it inside your business?

Amy Jo Martin: Well, let’s just look at humans, the complicated beings that we are, and let’s just take ChatGPT for a moment. I’ve been using it for a few years now, personally and professionally, and it has a lot of data on me, right? And I look at, if you’re building a relationship with a co-founder, with a client, getting ready to go pitch your boss or new business development, really understanding personalities and having AI help you pressure test your approach, as well as navigating a relationship, is actually a really smart use of it. It’s not biased if you allow it to use everything that it has on you, and you literally say, “Don’t give me what you think I want to hear. I want you to pressure test and challenge me,” it’s amazing how in tune it can be with human nature.

And it’s not just tech smart. It’s not just human intelligence. There’s an emotional intelligence there that’s balanced, that I’ve tested over and over and seen and benefited from. So, let’s just say you’re starting a relationship now with even ChatGPT, you can do group chats and have your two GPTs talk to each other easily. But in my case, like literally, there’s data now that AI has on this relationship from both sides. And you get into a snag or you ask for preventative medicine, preventative vitamins versus repair medicine, and it’s a different path. So, the divorce part, I think I’ve been pretty open about my conversion of my becoming from a couple into a co-parent.

He still edits my, like I have an amazing relationship with my former husband. And looking at what it would take to repair a relationship versus build it from the ground up, a certain way, are two very different things, right? So, I think if we keep an open mind, anything is always possible, but our intention behind it and how willing we are to be real about what’s going on is kind of the litmus test.

Brad Weimert: I think that that’s self-awareness, right? And I think that the fundamentals of that are if you have somebody observing, without emotion, and can recall all stats, all data at any point in time, and synthesize that, if you’re open to listening to that to learn, you can do something with it.

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah. And it’ll call you out. Like, I trust what it’s saying pretty wholeheartedly because it’s just using my data.

Brad Weimert: Well, I mean, we’re not without hallucinations just yet.

Amy Jo Martin: No, not at all. I mean, same with a human, right?

Brad Weimert: That’s true. Yeah.

Amy Jo Martin: We hallucinate and have moods.

Brad Weimert: No question. So, the parallel with business, give me a couple of use cases where that applies to running a team.

Amy Jo Martin: Sure. So, let’s take, you know, time is everything as we know. And whether it’s speed to market, or we’re looking to solve something, I’m just thinking tomorrow. I’m headed to LA, and there’s an open block that my chief of staff is going with McKinsey. And we’re like, “Okay, going to LA, who would make sense to meet with?” And I’m racking my brain. We could go to LinkedIn. We have some different lists of types, but there isn’t like anything specific that I’m in biz dev mode for, but I have exported all of my LinkedIn data into AI and you can ask it to sort, slice, and dice in so many different ways, right, that would take you forever if you tried to do this on just LinkedIn, even with their cool search, whatever.

So, like even finding what are the top 50 brands that I’m connected with, with this type of level of title that I’ve engaged with in the last year or two years, that are within this proximity from a geographic standpoint. And quickly, I’m just looking and seeing, “Oh, it’s like jogging my brain.” So, that’s an example just from a ways to use it from a data set perspective.

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

Amy Jo Martin: From a team perspective…

Brad Weimert: Let me double-click on that for a second. So, yeah, I want to know from a team perspective, because we started on sort of the relationship side of it, and how you can facilitate better relationships or break them. But the LinkedIn ingestion method for you is what? How did you pull the data from LinkedIn to ChatGPT or whatever LM you’re using?

Amy Jo Martin: You literally can go export. A lot of people don’t realize this, but you can export your contacts, and it’s everything about the contact, too, right? So, you need to be really intentional of the prompt you give it, and ChatGPT does not like gender. Like, it doesn’t want you to say male, female, and it will get blocked by that.

Brad Weimert: Grok’s okay with it.

Amy Jo Martin: What was that?

Brad Weimert: I said Grok is okay with it.

Amy Jo Martin: Grok is fine with almost anything, right? Grok is the wild, wild west of AI. But yeah, you can literally export. You go to your settings, and you export. You can just do certain pieces of data, or you can do the whole thing, and you’ll get an email, and you’ll be ready to download, and a CSV. You can download in a lot of different types of files, and then you literally just…

Brad Weimert: Put it in the project.

Amy Jo Martin: Throw it in there. Yeah. And it takes a couple of iterations, but what else is going to give me my top 200 contacts in a certain category like this that just makes it so easy?

Brad Weimert: For context, for anybody listening, are you super active on LinkedIn? Is that your platform of choice?

Amy Jo Martin: Yes. And that’s where my richest audiences from a biz dev standpoint, enterprise.  Speaking is a big part of my… and podcast partnerships are a big part of my business lines and revenue or economic models. So, yeah, a lot of people book us direct and it’s because of those relationships.

Brad Weimert: Got it. That makes sense. I had to ask that because the use cases of any given social platform are so varied today. Some people like LinkedIn has turned into, they’re starting to be, they have started to be in the last several years, a tremendous social platform, where people are speaking on it. But they just hammered the mass spam to death to build the platform, where it killed social engagement for many years, and it turned into a recruiting platform. And now I think that over time, in the last couple of years, it’s built up as a social platform for business. But it came later than Facebook and Instagram, relative to actually being a stable social platform, at least in my world or in my eyes. So, I had to ask.

Amy Jo Martin: No, it’s a great question. I think they all have had their moments and seasons where you just kind of do a tilt head, and whether it’s when they went public or when they’re a lot of consolidation has obviously happened. We don’t own these platforms. We’re not even renting them. Anything can happen at any time. I’ve had 80,000 followers disappear overnight on Twitter. I have 700,000 or 800,000 over on Twitter that I rarely use because it’s like cricket. Like, the algorithm has just become so bizarre. For me, it’s not super useful. But Instagram and LinkedIn are, and it’s all relative. But use case from a team perspective, let’s just go back to agency or marketing world. Let’s say there’s big enterprise brand or a small company. You’ve got a team, you’ve got a campaign that you need to figure out.

Everybody is called into, let’s just say a war room or a team meeting, and we have a brief, maybe it’s one page of this is what the goal is and this is what we’re trying to create. And typically, if you ship that off to an agency, it’s going to take a few months. It’s going to be very expensive. There’ll be lots of iterations. And in this case, let’s say the in-house team, marketing team, media, whoever, all got their laptops, and it’s almost like battleship of the same data that goes in, prompt if you’re doing Copilot, which most enterprise companies are on Microsoft, which is ChatGPT anyway, and OpenAI, then great. Everybody goes and then starts to iterate for 15 minutes, ask different questions, and see where they can get with creative ideas.

And then quickly, let’s take five to 10 minutes to go around that circle. What’s your top best idea? Or everybody goes around. Narrow it down. Okay, let’s take that. Put that on top of the brief. And I’ve literally had friends who are in charge of these large marketing teams do this around the table, and within an hour, they have a very solid, at least dialed direction and concept that would take an agency several months.

Brad Weimert: I love that.

Amy Jo Martin: A lot of money.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I love that. I think that if everybody’s there’s a, I think, a very warranted construct for life, which is the outcomes are driven by the questions you ask. And in the world of AI, that’s the prompt that you give it. And I think we are quickly transitioning out of this like need for a really perfectly executed prompt because the LMs are getting good enough to infer what you mean and help you create it. And different people ask different questions. And so, if you have different teammates that are asking, functionally, what you could think are the same questions, they’re asking it slightly differently way, which is going to yield a different result. And they’re independent organizations, if you want to call it that, their own GPTs that they’re conditioning are going to respond differently.

Amy Jo Martin: Exactly.

Brad Weimert: So, it amplifies their own thoughts through it and sort of what would be produced from their own thoughts and background. So, I like that, a group iteration where you’re all working with the tool at the same time.

Amy Jo Martin: Have you heard of the term sycophancy? It’s like when AI starts to be biased and tell you what you want to hear, right?

Brad Weimert: Oh, sure. Yeah.

Amy Jo Martin: And finding ways to negate that and work around that is extremely important. Otherwise, you’re just feeding yourself the same bullsh*t, right?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I have that in my like… one of the things that I have in my general instructions for my entire org is, “Don’t do that sh*t.” “Don’t placate me,” is the language that I use.

Amy Jo Martin: Right. And we have to make sure that AI is not doing that to us because it’s learning real-time dynamically. And as it becomes more intelligent about us, it’s likely going to mirror more unless we tell it not to.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s true. Okay. Let me back out of AI, and let’s talk about the growth of the agency and the dissolve of the agency, and into what today is. I had a venture capitalist on the show the other day, and I asked him, “At what point should an entrepreneur take money?” And his response was, “Nobody should take money unless they have a clear path of what they’re going to do with the money to grow.” At some point, Tony Hsieh invested in your company. How did this change the trajectory of the agency? And did you know what you were going to do with the money at that point?

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah. So, didn’t need the money for the current economic model. Also was starting to see the economic model of agency trading time for dollars was getting very tiring, even though we were growing very quickly, and getting some media dollars, which that budget was bigger. So, we sat down one day, and he said, “Have you ever tried to productize your intellectual property?” And I was like thinking like, “What?” And he said, “We’ll build a university online, teach people how to do what you’re doing.”

Brad Weimert: And this was circa?

Amy Jo Martin: 2011 or 2012. Yeah. Pre-Instagram, like right at the Instagram, like, hello. And I had written the book at that point, and he’s like, “You already have all the methods. You teach this inside of big companies, but what if you open source it? Not open completely, give it away, but create courses, sell to Hilton Worldwide University, which has X amount of thousands of seats.”

Brad Weimert: We’ll plug the book real quick and give the general framework for that so people know.

Amy Jo Martin: Sure. It’s called Renegades Write the Rules. And, really, I mean, I just reread it for the first time. It was out in 2012. You get through the manuscript, you read it, and then you’re like, “Okay, I know what’s in there. Like, I’m so familiar.” And I’m reading, I’m like, “Oh my gosh, all of this applies to AI so much now.” But, Renegades Write the Rules and a lot of case studies, all of what we were learning, learning how to measure, learning what was working, how to remain human, it’s all in there.

Brad Weimert: So, that took off.

Amy Jo Martin: That took off. And our agency side of the business was growing, and we’re hiring like crazy. So, I took on investment from Tony. Awesome valuation and ended up moving our shop from Phoenix, Arizona to downtown Vegas, which is a place that he had his project. The downtown Las Vegas Project. And the money was really to build out our own LMS, our learning management system, right?

Brad Weimert: Before those things existed.

Amy Jo Martin: Exactly. So, back in the day, if you’re building it from scratch, kind of like when we built websites from scratch before WordPress or before it’s like building Disneyland. Even look at ChatGPT now, how many people are building on top of GPT instead of trying to create their own AI? Like, good luck with that. Why would you ever do that? So, I think like Kajabi came out two months after we launched our own LMS and could have just plugged in for $200 a month.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Good. I got to plug JCron, who’s the founder of Kajabi, who has been on the show also, but.

Amy Jo Martin: Amazing, which I ended up using and now have for…

Brad Weimert: So, you had an easy button eventually, but you took on funding to build out that platform.

Amy Jo Martin: And we weren’t developers, and trying to do too much at one time was one of the biggest issues we had. There came a point where the corporate side and the demands and kind of expectations, especially if some of the partners in the portfolio, I was going to lose talent. Like, things were moving so fast on the social side, and people were getting so much pressure on the brand side, our clients, that I mean everybody was hitting burnout and just trying to keep up. And so, huge lesson for me. I ended up winding up the company. We were in talks for acquisition with a couple of different other companies, names you would know, but it was going to be maybe a three to five-year buyout for me because of these relationships with celebrities. You can’t hand those over and I knew the talent, and I didn’t necessarily have that in us.

So, it was one of the hardest decisions I had to make, but it was the right decision in the end to wind it up, still profitable, made no sense to anyone from the outside looking in, but give everybody on the team a really nice runway and a command center to go figure out where they wanted to go next. One went to LinkedIn, one goes to big shop, and we just kind of made sure that everybody was placed in the right place.

But I found that I’m more, I want to be out front experimenting. I’m not an operator at heart. That’s not my skill. There’s a lot of other people that are better. So, as a first-time entrepreneur in my late 20s that grew into it, I learned a lot about what I do and don’t want to do. And if I’m not out creative and expanding, it’s trying to be front of house and back of house and it wasn’t a good look for me. So, I completely burn out. Four hours of sleep a night, 210 flights in one year. I don’t, moments where sleepwalking. Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Yes, I can relate on a lot of levels. I think that it’s challenging. I mean, for me, it’s challenging to sort of narrow in on what my zone of genius is because I have a high level of competency in many areas. And then it’s a question of sort of where do I want to be spending time? And if I spend time in an area for too long, I get the itch to play in another area. And I think this is a common entrepreneurial problem.

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah, I agree.

Brad Weimert: So, you took money from Tony, and how long between when you took the money to deciding that you wanted to wrap things up with the company, not sell it, and just close it?

Amy Jo Martin: Three years and I paid him back in full. I don’t know if anyone ever paid Tony Hsieh back in full, but I did. Yeah, so it was just the biggest case study and lesson in a lot of different ways, but it was three years, 12 to 15, almost, yeah.

Brad Weimert: So, in hindsight, what could you have structured differently to allow the company to be saleable as opposed to just closing it?

Amy Jo Martin: I think, in hindsight, my reputation with some of these big characters was the, oh, this person has these big ideas. They’re figuring it out. She knows how to execute. And then it became a real agency, right? Like, oh, this isn’t just a concept, it’s a full-on campaign for a worldwide company, right, with employees in 10 different company or 10 different countries at the time. I mean, hired a competent CEO that had done this before, that had taken…

Brad Weimert: You could have done that.

Amy Jo Martin: And I did look. And I don’t know if I just didn’t find the right person or if they were, I don’t know. I definitely was on the hunt, but it was spilled too much around me, even though we had a talent that knew way more than me. But a lot of the relationships, the big spenders, a lot of those were around me or looking at who did people trust in the meetings, I don’t know that they would’ve trusted a CEO that was 10 to 15 years older that hadn’t done what I had done, because they wanted the experience, right? So, the CEO might have had the business experiment or experience, but so it was just my lack of, I think, scaling. We took it from 0 to 1 million first year and up to 3 very, very quickly. And we kind of just started to tap out because of my bandwidth and my lack of business experience.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I think that that’s incredibly common and I think one of the questions I asked it for a lot of reasons, but one of the questions today is, where does the personal brand fit in and when is it an asset and when is it a liability?

Amy Jo Martin: That’s a great question because it was a lot of, I couldn’t have built that company without having first built the personal brand without intending to, right? It happened very organically, but the reach that my platforms had and that the book brought and the speaking engagements in front of corporate brought was, but that’s even a really solid COO earlier. I had a great COO for a while outside of industry though. So, it’s, I think of like, look at Goop and Gwyneth. Gwyneth will always be Goop, right?

But then you look at, it’s not the same, but like Alli Webb and Drybar, a lot of people didn’t know that Alli Webb was the founder of Drybar. And the day she went to go take it to market or entertaining, to take it to sell, that wasn’t probably as much of an issue. Dana White and the UFC, Dana White is the UFC, right? There are times where that personal brand is parallel and it conveniently crosses, but then you can separate it. But it’s something I always would ask working with companies like, what’s the plan here? Because it’s hard to undo this equity if your buyer is private equity and wanting to come in and change course.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think there’s also a question of why, I think you’ve got personal brand and then you’ve got competency as a leader. So, I look at like Elon Musk. I’ll invest in anything Elon does because he is a f*cking ridiculous operator, but he’s a liability as a personal brand.

Amy Jo Martin: Absolutely. And Wall Street votes on that daily.

Brad Weimert: 100%. One of my favorite quotes is that the stock market is a reflection of rich people’s emotions.

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah. And egos.

Brad Weimert: 100%. 100%.

Amy Jo Martin: Which is emotions.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, then I think about the kind of where the personal brand plays in, and I think in a lot of levels, if the personal brand is what drives traffic, which is how people are leveraging personal brand today, that is what you’re talking about, which is the liability on sale, right? And so, if you pull that personal brand out, it’s hard to sell that company because they have to be there to sell stuff.

Amy Jo Martin: Right. You need enterprise value, critical mass, and replace. You need to be able to replace the founder and replace anyone in the company. And that was a lesson, but it was also, we were in the business of building personal brands.

Brad Weimert: Oh, right.

Amy Jo Martin: And helping companies humanize their logo.

Brad Weimert: Okay, let’s talk about humanizing. But that reminds me of a quote of a buddy of mine in town, Ryan Deiss, who likes to say, the more important the founder is or the more valuable the founder is, the less valuable the company is.

Amy Jo Martin: I can see that in some respects, for sure.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think it’s an interesting conversation to have. But let’s talk about humanization. So, you’ve been on this pedestal talking about how to humanize marketing from the social days. And so, the question to me today is, in a world of automation with AI, how do you humanize a personal brand when everybody’s using AI to just produce more content?

Amy Jo Martin: I think sometimes we don’t give humans the credit they deserve in terms of seeing through the bullsh*t, right?

Brad Weimert: Oh, yeah, well.

Amy Jo Martin: You know, we can scroll down that rabbit hole so quickly and we can spot it a mile away. So, I think, authenticity, as much as we’ve thrown that word around for years, it can be felt even through digital. So, a prompt or a cute hook from AI is not going to make or break, in my opinion, someone’s ability to connect and convert. So, that relationship, it’s not really social media, it’s communication. And if it’s used correctly, that connection really does get deep and it converts and it compounds over time rather than, I don’t even think of AI as much. Like, of course, it can write copy, it can polish things, write emails, and draft stuff and all. That’s so great. But I think of it as more of a thought partner and an assistant who has a PhD in every single category that’s just started walking the planet though. So, you got to watch them because it’s their first day on the job, right? Like, they are going to get loosey goosey sometimes. So, I think like the lowest table stakes of using AI is copy. Like, it’s just, you better be thinking bigger than that because you’re not in the competition. And saving time and money, what’s more valuable to humans than saving time.

And so, I see this trend of BYO AI, Bring Your Own AI to corporate. And it’s because IT and legal and all the governance and rules, they’re just operating so slowly that they try and kind of ban or put rules and regulations around AI. And people understand, individuals, whether it’s middle manager or individual contributor, they’re like, I can get my work done quicker, more efficiently. I can work on what I want to work on now. Like this is a trampoline moment. I’m going to bring my own tools and tricks. And so, that’s where it’s fun to see, okay, what’s the organizational structure and change leadership plan around AI internally? Like, that’s really where you can’t afford to be second right now of companies calling, saying, hey, we’re in a world of hurt. We can’t get our humans to embrace this stuff.

And it’s like dire straits, big companies. And it’s not the technology, it’s the humans organizing around, like we’re not used to a CMO showing up at that brainstorm next to the individual contributor and actually doing marketing, right? That’s not normal, and why would we ever do that? But it’s actually, you might be able to remove many layers of that chain in that case. So, it’s just all bets are off and people don’t like thinking and working that way.

Brad Weimert: In what way?

Amy Jo Martin: Huge change. Huge change. Like you may not even know what your job is tomorrow. And that’s happening. Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, it is. I think that that’s an interesting reframe for people, which is, it’s actually not about the tools, it’s about how you guide your team to work with the tools and how you interact with each other amidst this new tool set and this evolving tool set.

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah. And that’s culture, right? So, I remember Facebook in like 2005, they would have these posters that say, done is better than perfect around headquarters, right? But most corporate brands and/or companies are used to perfect. Like before you ship work, it better be, and in some cases, it’s a liability if it isn’t. But we have to not be so precious about everything taking 10 layers and CYA and CYA. We don’t have time. Yeah, that’s a culture change.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, it is. I have a buddy in town who has a company called Protopia. Protopia has a patent on how to obscure data for ingestion into an LLM. So, it allows a company to have all their own data and without sharing the data in a way that a human can read it, they can give it to an LLM to train it. So, super cool product company.

Amy Jo Martin: It’s kind of like a secret, I don’t know. I think of like a valve or an adapter on something where it takes it and we wouldn’t be able to know what it is, but it transports it and it can be organized then on the other side.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, and it’s a big deal in, specifically, medium-sized businesses. Enterprise companies want to do their own everything, but the medium-sized companies aren’t going to build out their own chips to do their full ground-up AI. And so, they want to use somebody else’s platform, but they can’t afford to give them all of their private data either. So, that’s his platform in the whole business, and he’s tied directly into Nvidia. He’s one of the preferred vendors for Nvidia. Crazy.

But I was talking to him the other day and I was talking to him specifically around privacy with AI, and he goes, well, it’s all out there right now anyway. And he was like, you can go down this rabbit hole of trying to keep things private, but like even your bank accounts and financial statements, and he was like, don’t you think that Bank of America and Chase have already put all that into an LLM? And I was like, ah, sh*t. So, all the stuff that you’re trying to hold and hide, probably…

Amy Jo Martin: Someone has it already.

Brad Weimert: It’s already been released to the robots. So, I think that the privacy concern is very real. But I think a lot of people right now in fear are getting in, and myself included in a lot of ways, are getting in their own way from advancing and you have to lean into it and err on the side of moving quick right now to be competitive. And the pace keeps picking up.

Amy Jo Martin: Right. It’s like, which stakes are higher? Becoming irrelevant or possibly having– and there’s certain, if you’re in healthcare or financial world or something, your gates might want to be a little higher, but if you’re…

Brad Weimert: Welcome to my world, yeah.

Amy Jo Martin: Right. But at the end, I was just speaking company, they’re in healthcare and financial world. They’re kind of an HSA-type company. And the head of legal, head of IT is kind of here. And then you’ve got ops, marketing, HR over here, and they realized, hey, we’re creating such a roadblock over here that we need to actually figure out how to unblock this crew to be able to move within safe Petri dishes, let’s just say, right? So, there are ways to experiment that aren’t taking your most valuable data. Let’s start safe and let’s prove this concept and prove it, prove it.

But right now, a lot of companies, the blanket statement is no, whether you’re in HR or you’re in supply chain, can’t use this, can’t use that. It’s like, yeah, maybe this area, but why wouldn’t marketing can use this?

Brad Weimert: Yeah, for sure. Well, okay, so tell me what’s going on today. Tell me about Renegade, sort of the business structure and the transition into that.

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah, so Renegade, a lot of what we’ve talked about is mindset and being open and willing to venture into the unknown, which as humans, there’s a lot of science behind in the way we think and operate. But the Why Not Now? podcast is almost 10 years. It’ll be 10 years here at the turn of the calendar year. And after listening to more than hundreds and hundreds of thought leaders like yourself and just brilliant minds, I started to realize they answered the why not now question similarly and how they bridge that delta from idea to action. And so, the last seven or eight years, I’ve been studying and teaching on the system, the different rules, I call them the renegade rules. And we’ve had Renegade Accelerators left and right, several thousand students inside a corporate and out.

And to be quite honest, along the way, this is my 18th year as an entrepreneur. My son was born three months early. I was on an airplane, so I landed on a layover and had him in the NICU for three months. He was on oxygen, he was two pounds, never took a maternity leave. I’ve been running at full speed ahead and kind of over programmed for many, many years. And so, about three years ago, I decided to start really evaluating my relationship with time and money, the time. And so, I started deleting, delegating, divesting in anything possible. And I call it like my ruthless red pen. What can I strike? What can I strike from P&Ls and line items to people, places, things that I’m doing anything.

And getting kind of ruthless because my time just was so fragmented. And so, I did that, did the hacks, became a lot less busy, but still, as it always ends up 80/20 and then 80/20 to 20 80/20 to 20. But there was still something missing and I haven’t been learning, I haven’t been stretched and challenged and kind of felt that zest. And I guess you could just say really alive and lit up. And I’m an experimenter. So, what I’m doing for all of 2026 is pressing pause on almost everything except public speaking. And I have the Renegade Multi-family Office, like my financial side of things that’s going to continue. But I’m doing a social experiment really on myself.

And so, what it is, is evaluating four pillars. Relationship with time, health, wealth. I’m calling it passion. So, I have KPIs for all of those four buckets and some sub-KPIs and using myself for a year as the Guinea pig, kind of I’m the scientist, but also the subject matter in this Petri dish, and pulling in every piece of data possible and tracking API from Oura Ring, Google Calendar, anything that I can automatically, iPhone, even wealth, like from a financial standpoint numbers. And then there’s a lot of manual entry of things with KPIs, screen time, and sleep scores. All of that’s automated.

But then in this bucket of passion, it’s parenting my son, relationships, people, and then things that I’m just lit up about, like acrobatics and getting my pilot’s license and adding humor into my podcast, like, just the weird, crazy stuff that I do. And getting very rigid and ruthless about tracking daily and having a dashboard. And AI is my co-pilot in this along the way. So, I’ve been brewing on this for a while. It’s not a sabbatical because I think I would just drive myself crazy, and every therapist, including AI has told me, do not take a sabbatical, like you are not eligible. But I’ll be inputting data real time into AI daily as well as it’s pulling in the numbers, have a dashboard that’s open sourced, people can look at it.

Brad Weimert: Awesome.

Amy Jo Martin: And we’ll see what we can learn, right? But this started, this has been brewing for a while, but I was on a flight about a month ago and I did this super prompt of like, here’s everything I can give you right now, I’m kind of at this, like, why am I not excited? My life is incredible. I’m so fortunate, yet where is that? Like zest? And I gave it financial information, personally, professionally, business lines, how I’m feeling. And I said, take everything you know about me plus this three-page prompt of information and here’s some options and routes I can go, but what do I do? What do I do, an experiment?

And what I got back was actually pretty surprising because I’ve done this with every mentor and human I know that I respect and I haven’t been convinced of what to do next. But I felt for the first time justified and validated of, okay, yeah, your body is just like, literally it says back to me, here’s what you’re disguising under career confusion. And I said, don’t bullsh*t me by the way, like pressure test this. I don’t want you to tell me what you think I might want to hear. And it was real straight with me and it said, you need to go. The tone in the way I was prompting changed when I started talking a little bit about this experiment. I’m calling it the Renegade Reinvention Experiment. This is the first time I’ve talked about it, by the way, so…

Brad Weimert: Love it.

Amy Jo Martin: Anyway, so I have a personal board of directors that gets a report every month, meets with me, the people that I respect and know and AI is going to be analyzing daily, looking at correlations, and who knows what’ll happen.

Brad Weimert: Okay. So, I mean, I have a lot of questions about that.

Amy Jo Martin: Okay.

Brad Weimert: For starters, what outcome are you after? What are some of the drivers of why you’re doing it? And who is the personal board?

Amy Jo Martin: Okay. It’s great questions. What outcomes? So, every experiment has a hypothesis, right? So, experiment from a true experiment standpoint, yes, sample size of one, however, this me search. My hypothesis really is that that intersection, like if you look at a human machine collaboration, I believe I can get that zest and feeling of aliveness back quicker using artificial intelligence to help guide me. And I believe that we can become more human, not just more productive with AI. And so, it’s an integration.

And so, that would be my goal is to make that hypothesis true. And it’s literally going to be how my day looks and feels. And I can already feel more alive just being out and thinking about how I’m tracking this stuff, what it looks like. That was the first question. What’s your goal?

Brad Weimert: Well, you also gave me kind of why you’re doing it, which is you feel like you’re lacking zest in life and you wanted to feel life more.

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah. And since COVID, I travel around a lot, meet with all types of audiences, verticals, countries, individuals. And I’ve never seen the level of exhaustion in people’s eyes that I do now. And it’s really been ever since COVID, but it’s accelerating and it’s an equal parts burnout and boredom at the same time. It’s like people are just tapped at bandwidth and just like craving something in their life that will feel to really be a spark. And so, I feel that as well.

I think sometimes, the societal structures, and we’re told we can have it all and then we go do it all and then we’re like, wait, is this it? And financially, I’ve made some wise decisions that allows me to take this time, but I’ve also really played with my relationship with time and money a lot to be able to make some of those decisions. And I know I can look at every turn, look at digital royalty. I chose freedom, flexibility, and how I felt over a pretty big payout. And I’ve done that a few times where I value my flexibility, creative expression, freedom a lot, an ability to just create, experiment, go out, and figure out what hasn’t been done before. And I need that. And it’s not just I should or I could. I realize I absolutely need that.

Brad Weimert: Well, I think that, I mean, for me, I’ve gone through really significant periods in my life where I’ve tracked basically everything, everything that we’re talking about. And that’s exciting to me. And it’s also a horrible pain in the ass. And so, it’s nice to have, I think a sort of universal truth is that it’s easier to get excited about something when you can see the scoreboard and you’re tracking the metrics. Period. Right? It’s the whole concept of measure what matters. And that’s how you make improvement.

The shift here that seems to light you up is the spark of AI and how it makes that data much more interactive and much faster to assess and much faster to ingest, right? So, previously, in my experiments with this much less structured, so I wouldn’t call them actual experiments, but as I tracked my life, I have not taken the time to go back and assess as often as I could for real change, right? So, like, I will review things at the end of the year, which I’ve done pretty methodically over the last 10 years, 15. But I don’t get weekly updates. I don’t get real time corrections. This is all tremendously lagging indicators of how I have lived, right? I’m talking to the historian that is me based on the data that I put in, as opposed to leveraging AI to give you the forecast.

Amy Jo Martin: Absolutely. And there’s qualitative, you call it journaling, but this may end up in a book. It may not, this is not a stunt. This is like, I need this in my life. It’s not just a nice to have. And so, I’ll be giving AI my unstructured thoughts, feelings, just insights along the way too. So, really, a partner in crime to analyze the data, be a guide, still know more about me, and probably be able to give advice better than most and find correlations that I wouldn’t have noticed, because I could care less if my sleep score is up, but if I don’t have that zest, right, then how do you measure, oh, zest for life? That’s cute, Amy. But I think that there will be some pretty interesting insights along the way.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think that you’d be hard pressed to make an argument that there won’t be. So, the third question was, who’s the board? And why is there a board? And why are you meeting once a month?

Amy Jo Martin: Well, I like accountability. I’m also going to be sharing the journey real time as I feel it’s valuable, right? Not just, hey, let’s just share what I ate today. Don’t plan to do that. But as I’m finding interesting insights, I’ll share it on the podcast, email, social, personal board of directors, a guy by the name of Scott O’Neil, who used to work with in the NBA. He’s now the CEO of LIV Golf, and he just has the most brilliant mix of emotional intelligence leadership, crazy, smart, innovative mind. He knows me well. He’ll call me on my bullsh*t. And Sam Goodner, who we both know.

Brad Weimert: Love Sam.

Amy Jo Martin: He has been along the way. I think right after I got that big, super prompt back or insight back, I’m like. A group of renegades who are my– these are female leaders, executives, founders that I trust, and one’s an orthopedic surgeon who’s a colonel in the army. She thinks very differently. It’s a pretty, it’s like a big guy in corporate, big entrepreneur in tech, woman who’s in medical and military. It’s very diverse.

Brad Weimert: And what do you want from them? So, in the scheme of a board for a company, it’s?

Amy Jo Martin: Governance, M&A.

Brad Weimert: Right. Value of the company. Ultimately, it all drives back to value of the company, right?

Amy Jo Martin: Well, I look at a personal board as they have your best interest in mind, just like a board would have the business’s best interest in mind. So, they know the hypothesis, but they also know my goal and their job is to help me get to my goal, but also find insights along the way and not be so shortsighted that, who knows, a new piece of technology could sprout from this. It could be anything. But I also would love, if I’m finding some micro protocol or correlations, things that other people could do, other people could join in and start trying it too. So, what I like about it is that I don’t have all the answers, but I will owe them a report and I’m accountable every month.

Brad Weimert: So, what is the goal that they’re driving towards? And what’s the KPI to measure that?

Amy Jo Martin: So, the inverse of the hypothesis would be that yes, you can use AI to become more of who you are and find that, we’ll call it zest aliveness, right? Quality of life, let’s just call it quality of life. The KPI, I mean, a lot of it has to be honesty and transparent, how are you feeling? Like, you can’t bullsh*t that, right? Because the numbers are going to move, but there needs to be, at the end of the day, does my life feel better? Am I operating in a capacity that I’m excited?

You mentioned zone of genius earlier and there’s zone of excellence, right. And then there’s zone of genius. And I believe firmly, that’s a Gay Hendricks term, zone of genius. We cannot reach that zone of genius if we’re not feeling that aliveness in flow like lit up, right? You’re in your zone of excellence if you’re not feeling lit up. So, that is a moving target. So, it’s going to be highly numbers backed, but also highly emotion backed, right?

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I don’t know how it could not be. That’s why I asked.

Amy Jo Martin: Yeah, yeah. I wish I had an answer. Maybe we’ll come up with a formula at the end.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I’m curious to see how it goes.

Amy Jo Martin: Thank you.

Brad Weimert: You said you’re 18 years in on your journey of entrepreneurship. What is something that you believe today that most entrepreneurs don’t?

Amy Jo Martin: Every time we have an idea, with action comes clarity, like we think we need to map out the whole thing down to the last final detail and it’s going to change the second we get started anyway. So, I think action is an entrepreneur’s best asset in the very beginning of testing. Consider everything as an experiment. And don’t go, just spend a ton of money in one area and get it out in the wild as soon as you can and get the feedback loop going. And so many times, I call it spinners.

And we all have friends or people we know that have had the same idea and they talk about it, they never really do anything. Even if it’s diving deep and attend a conference, that’s about that. That might be a 90-degree turn from what you do typically day to day, but like do something, and the path will start to unveil itself. So, I’d say that’d be one thing.

Brad Weimert: What advice do you have for a 25-year-old entrepreneur getting going today?

Amy Jo Martin: I would say take your concept as far as you can without raising money and really think hard before you start accepting someone else’s money, because the filter in which you make decisions really starts to change. And the equity that you have in your mind and that idea can’t be jacked with out of the get-go because it’s your vision, and if it’s that unique, you need to see it through. And if we start sometimes raising money too early, we just lose our path and we’re trying to keep the investors happy, make sure they’re seeing their return, but also try and be true to our actual vision. That’s a very tough thing to do.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. Amy Jo Martin, where do people find you if they want to find out more about you and where do they follow your journey for zest?

Amy Jo Martin: My quest for zest.

Brad Weimert: Your quest for zest.

Amy Jo Martin: How much more, like that just is, it’s like chalk on it.

Brad Weimert: Don’t call it that.

Amy Jo Martin: We’re not calling it that. I promise, this is not like an Eat, Pray, Love of 2025. I promise. We’ve got numbers, we’ve got AI. AmyJoMartin.com is my website and the dashboard will be there. So, you can see the KPIs in real time. And then on social, @amyjomartin. Pretty simple. And then, podcast is, Why Not Now? Spotify, YouTube, Apple, you got it, wherever you listen.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. Thanks so much for coming out.

Amy Jo Martin: Thank you for having me. What a well-rounded conversation. I appreciate it.