May 28, 2026 · 16 min read

My Journey Into AI

I did not find AI because it was trendy. I found it because I kept running into the same wall: I could see the system, but I could not build it fast enough by myself.

• AI
• entrepreneurship
• ESSAY
• personal-brand

I did not find AI because it was trendy.

I found it because I kept running into the same wall.

I could see the system.

I could see the offer.

I could see the machine behind the business.

But for years, I could not build what was in my head fast enough by myself.

That is the real story.

Not "I saw ChatGPT and decided to become an AI guy."

That is not what happened.

AI became interesting to me because I have always been obsessed with how things work. People. Machines. Sales systems. Compensation structures. Churches. Families. Money. The hidden mechanics behind why one person gets stuck and another person compounds.

So when AI showed up, it did not feel like a new trend.

It felt like somebody handed me tools for a world I had already been trying to build.

I Came In Fighting

From the beginning, it was not guaranteed I was going to make it here.

My mom had basically been given a 50/50 chance that I would not survive the pregnancy. A 50/50 chance I would be miscarried.

So when I say I came in fighting, I do not mean that as a cute origin-story line.

I mean literally.

Before I had language, before I had ambition, before I had any idea what my life would become, there was already this sense that I had to fight to be here.

And once I got here, that energy did not exactly go away.

I was hyper. Rebellious. Curious. The kid who could not just accept an answer because an adult said it with authority.

If somebody told me not to challenge something, that usually made me want to challenge it more.

Not because I wanted to be difficult.

Because I needed to understand.

I needed to know why something was true. I needed to know how the parts fit together. I needed to know whether the person saying it actually understood what they were saying, or whether they were just repeating something they inherited.

That pattern has followed me my whole life.

I also think that is part of why mood and perspective became so important to me. In the grand scheme of things, in the line of eternity, one of the only things I can actually control is how I choose to respond. How I manage my emotions. How I decide to feel about what is happening.

I was always the kid asking how things worked.

How does a key turn a car on?

How does a plane lift that much weight off the ground?

How does a computer work?

How does photography work?

How do radio waves work?

How does the brain work?

I loved shows like How It's Made because they pulled the curtain back. They showed the system. The machine. The process behind the thing everybody else just used without thinking about it.

That is how my brain has always worked.

I do not just want the outcome.

I want to understand the mechanism.

The Reset Pattern

My dad is a pastor, so we moved around a lot growing up.

That meant friendships reset.

Environments reset.

Identity reset.

I was kind of the weird kid in class. I did not really sit with the popular crowd, but I could make friends. I have had amazing friendships throughout my life. But I never really got to settle into one place long enough for it to feel permanent.

So I learned how to adapt quickly.

I learned how to read rooms.

I learned how to figure out what mattered in a new environment fast.

I also learned how to let go.

That part is more complicated.

When you are constantly moving, you get good at starting over, but you can also start to feel like everything is temporary. People. Places. Seasons. Versions of yourself.

That has been painful, but it also became one of the most useful skills I have.

Because entrepreneurship is basically a long series of identity resets.

You build something.

It breaks.

You learn what was wrong.

Then you have to become the next version of yourself before the next version of the business can exist.

I did not know that language when I was younger, but I was already living the pattern.

The Entrepreneurial Thread

The older I got, the more I started learning about my own family background.

My great-grandfather and grandfather were entrepreneurs. They owned land. They were in insurance.

That hit me because I eventually found myself in the insurance and financial services world too.

At the time, I did not see it as some grand lineage. I was just trying to figure out what the hell I was doing with my life.

But looking back, there were similarities.

The desire to own something.

The instinct to build.

The frustration with being boxed into somebody else's system.

The obsession with independence.

A lot started to click.

I started to understand that maybe I was not random. Maybe some of the wiring had been there the whole time.

Before Business, I Learned To Speak

One of the first real skills I developed was communication.

When I was around 16, I wrote and preached my first sermon in my father's pulpit.

After that, I went on to write and preach around 15 different sermons with different themes. I was involved in church, small groups, young men's groups, and leadership development.

My first mentor was Dr. Derek Lewis Noble.

He taught me how to write. How to speak from stage. How to create concepts. How to think in frameworks. That became one of the first real operating systems I ever learned: take something invisible, turn it into language, and make it useful to another person.

At the time, I did not understand how valuable that would become.

But now I can see it clearly.

Before I ever built sales teams, offers, AI systems, or software, I was learning how to take something in my head and make another human feel it.

That matters.

Because business is not just numbers.

It is language.

It is belief.

It is the ability to make the invisible obvious.

Financial Services Was My First Real Business School

My first business mentor was Andrew Nelson.

I met him through a friend named Evan while I was living in Waverly, Tennessee, where my dad was preaching at the time.

I was going to the gym a lot while I was in school, and Evan knew me as an outgoing, ambitious, driven person with entrepreneurial tendencies. He knew I had grown up speaking, preaching, leading groups, and trying to figure out what I was supposed to build.

So he introduced me to Andrew.

Andrew was working with World Financial Group, which is basically an insurance MLM inside the financial services world.

That was my first real entry into entrepreneurship.

I did that for about three years.

And for a while, I was all in.

I was learning sales. I was learning recruiting. I was learning financial products. I was learning how compensation worked. I was learning how people made money in an industry that most customers barely understand.

Then I started seeing the structure underneath it.

And the more I understood the structure, the more disgusted I got.

The thing that pushed me over the edge was learning how agents were being compensated compared to the contracts above them.

Companies like World Financial Group and Transamerica could get paid around 200% of annualized premium on certain business, while the agents doing the work could be getting paid around 25%.

The way I understood it, they could write off the first year as a loss because those were long-term contracts, or at least they were supposed to be. The money was in getting the contracts in the door and keeping the policies alive over time.

There was a recruiting model layered on top, so people could make overrides on the people they brought in. But once I understood that I could potentially get contracted through a different IMO or FMO and get paid dramatically more for doing the same business, it changed everything.

Not just for me.

For the people I could recruit too.

I realized I could bring people into a model where they were paid way better than they would be in the old one. In some cases, almost three times higher compensation than what they would have made inside WFG.

So I left.

And it was a bloodbath.

But I left.

One moment made the whole thing real for me.

During that transition, I wrote a policy for someone connected to my family. It was an IUL with around a $10,000 annual premium.

I calculated what I would have made inside WFG versus what I made under the independent model.

Inside WFG, it would have been around $3,000.

Under the independent model, it was around $7,500.

That was my first real high-ticket commission.

I was probably 22.

And once I got that check, something shifted.

Not because of the money alone.

Because I saw the spread.

I saw what happens when you understand the machine instead of just operating inside it.

That lesson never left me.

I Wanted Something More Legit

After that, I wanted to get deeper into the industry.

I wanted something that felt more legitimate, more established, more serious.

So I connected with Parker Molitor and Chad Molitor at RAI Advisors, a local wealth management firm in Murfreesboro.

They became another set of business mentors for me, but in a completely different capacity.

I learned a lot about the financial industry.

I learned about wealth management.

I learned about the more professional side of the business.

And I also learned something I did not want to admit at first:

I did not love the work.

I did not love being stuck in an office.

I did not love dealing with people's financial anxiety all day.

I did not love the same routine every day.

Then I failed the Series 7 exam for the third time.

That forced a quarter-life crisis.

I was engaged at the time, looking at the reality of needing to support a family. I would have to wait six months to retake the exam. I needed income. I needed a path.

And I was struggling with lead generation in insurance.

Studying for the exams had taken a lot of my focus. I had licenses, but I was not producing like I needed to. I did not have a consistent system for leads. It was mostly cold prospecting, and I was not doing enough outbound volume to make it work.

I knew I needed something different.

There was also a humbling in-between season there. I had a job at UPS and worked at my mother's school for a period of time while I was figuring things out. I was still trying to sell insurance, still trying to make the traditional path work, and still realizing I did not know enough about marketing or scalable lead generation to make it move the way I wanted it to move.

The High-Ticket Coaching Door

One day, while I was watering the flowers at the wealth management office, I got hit with an ad for HighTicketCoaching.com.

It was for a challenge around creating and launching your first online offer.

That grabbed me immediately.

Because that was the thing I had been missing.

Up to that point, I had mostly been selling other companies' financial products and services.

They were not mine.

I could sell them, but I could not truly innovate inside them.

That bothered me.

I went to MTSU and graduated in 2020 with a degree in business administration and entrepreneurship. Innovation and entrepreneurship were not just buzzwords to me. I actually cared about building things.

But in financial services, I felt boxed in.

So I joined the challenge.

Eventually, I paid $10,000 on a credit card to become a student.

I did not have that money.

I probably should not have spent it.

But I am glad I did, because I took a bet on myself.

I created different iterations of a financial offer. I made the money back theoretically with a few sales, but I could tell the offer was not going to be the long-term vehicle. It was too close to credit stacking. It did not feel like the thing I wanted to build my name on.

Still, the door had opened.

I got introduced to people in the high-ticket coaching world.

Taylor Welch was in Nashville running Traffic and Funnels at the time.

I went through a sales process for one of Taylor's products, got connected through his brother Payton, and eventually got around that ecosystem.

Through that world, I eventually connected with Armin Schaffey, the founder of High Ticket Coaching.

There are pieces of that timeline I honestly do not remember perfectly. I was in and around different programs, calls, sales processes, jobs, and opportunities. I put money down on programs I probably should not have been buying at the time, but I was trying to get out of the old model and into something I could actually build.

But the important part is this:

I found the online offer world.

And I realized I could take my sales background, my speaking background, my curiosity, and my obsession with systems and point it at something bigger than insurance.

Appointment Setter To Sales Manager

I started working for Armin as an appointment setter.

At the time, Kayla Hodges was my sales manager.

This was right before I got married. Armin even flew from Miami to Tennessee to come to my wedding.

Then, while I was on my honeymoon, he promoted me to sales manager.

That season changed me.

I managed a seven-figure sales team.

I helped build a recruiting department for the company, for ourselves, for appointment setters, for sales reps, and for clients.

I sold packages ranging from $5,000 to $30,000.

I closed multiple six figures in revenue.

And for the first time, I was selling an offer I actually believed in.

That matters more than people think.

When you believe in the offer, your sales process is different.

You are not trying to manipulate someone into a decision.

You are trying to help them see the bridge between who they are now and who they could become if they actually execute.

That was the good part.

Eventually, that company came to an end.

The hard part was that I was still inside someone else's company.

Someone else's offer.

Someone else's container.

I had more room than I had in financial services, but I still could not fully build the thing in my head.

That tension kept coming back.

The Reset I Did Not Ask For

Somewhere in that whole season, my marriage ended.

It was brutal.

It was abrupt.

I lost a lot.

The dog.

The house.

Thankfully, I kept the car.

The exact timing of that season is blurry in my head because so much of it stacked on top of itself. But I remember the impact clearly. Armin saw that process up close. He saw the version of me that was trying to perform, lead, sell, and rebuild while my actual life was coming apart.

I do not want to turn that part of the story into a drama piece, but I also cannot skip it because it was one of the resets that shaped me.

There are certain moments where life removes the illusion that your current identity is stable.

Divorce did that.

Business failure did that.

Debt did that.

Losing things I thought were secure did that.

By the time I was 27, I had been through more failure than I expected to have on my scorecard.

I had almost gone to jail twice when I was 17.

I had been married and divorced young.

I had been defrauded for a little over $50,000 by someone impersonating a government official.

I had a failed business partnership and lost over $50,000 from that.

I found myself with a failed partnership, over $100,000 in debt, a repossessed vehicle, and back living with my parents.

At that point, I had almost nothing to do except build, play golf, hang out with my parents, and hang out with my dog.

That sounds like rock bottom because in a lot of ways it was.

But it was also the cave.

And caves are where a lot of people either disappear or rebuild.

AI Felt Like A Playground

When AI got released, it felt like a playground for me.

Not because I wanted to write prompts all day.

Because I could finally build things I thought I would never be able to build.

Custom software.

Sales systems.

Marketing systems.

Lead generation systems.

Revenue infrastructure.

Agentic orchestration.

All the stuff that used to require a team, a massive budget, or years of technical ability suddenly became more accessible.

That does not mean it became easy.

It just meant the distance between idea and execution collapsed.

And for someone like me, that was dangerous in the best way.

I had spent years learning sales, offers, compensation, recruiting, leadership, speaking, and the psychology of entrepreneurs.

AI gave me a new layer.

It gave me a way to turn those patterns into infrastructure.

That is where LEVRG AI came from.

I partnered with one of the closers I had hired, and we built LEVRG AI, pronounced Leverage AI.

That became the AI agency I ran for about two years before eventually shutting it down around late May or June.

The core idea was simple:

Businesses did not just need another tool.

They needed systems that could actually interact with their leads, support their sales process, and create leverage inside the business.

One of the first major versions of that was a voice and chat AI combo.

That was the beginning of what I now think about as the AI Sales Team.

Not a chatbot.

Not a gimmick.

Not "AI because AI is cool."

A real operational layer tied to lead channels, sales conversations, follow-up, and revenue.

That was the first time the pieces really started to come together.

Financial services taught me to study the compensation machine.

High-ticket coaching taught me offers, sales teams, and transformation.

Failure taught me what happens when the operator is the bottleneck.

AI gave me the tools to start building the cockpit.

The Lesson Underneath All Of It

Looking back, the thread is obvious.

I have never been satisfied just operating inside someone else's machine.

I want to understand it.

Then I want to rebuild it.

Then I want to make it better.

That is what pushed me out of WFG.

That is what pulled me into high-ticket coaching.

That is what made me restless even when I was succeeding inside someone else's offer.

And that is what made AI click for me.

Most people look at AI and ask, "What can this tool do?"

I look at AI and ask, "What kind of business infrastructure can this unlock?"

That is a very different question.

Because the opportunity is not just automation.

The opportunity is architecture.

It is the ability for a founder to finally get the systems out of their head and into something that can operate.

That is the part I care about.

Not replacing people.

Not chasing every new model.

Not pretending a prompt is a business.

I care about helping founders build the cockpit that lets them actually fly the plane.

Why This Is Only Part One

This post is the origin story.

It is the foundation.

It is how I got from financial services, to high-ticket coaching, to building my first voice and chat AI infrastructure in 2023.

And if there is one thing I have learned, it is that the trail matters.

People see the current version and assume it appeared clean.

It never does.

It is always messier than that.

It is failed exams.

Bad offers.

Repossessed cars.

Credit cards you probably should not have swiped.

Mentors.

Divorce.

Debt.

Sales calls.

Late nights.

Support calls.

Systems that break.

Systems that finally work.

And eventually, if you stay with it long enough, a pattern emerges.

Mine was this:

I was never just trying to build an AI agency.

I was trying to build the infrastructure I wish I had when I was the bottleneck.

That is the journey into AI.

And this is where the story starts.