I'm Annie P. Ruggles, founder of The Non-Sleazy Sales Academy, coming at you from Chicago, right in the middle of the US.

I've been a copywriter my entire adult life, and most of my day-to-day lives inside what I call the coaching industrial complex. Good work, but siloed. That's not where my background is, and I wanted to branch back out. So really my whole thing is sales and marketing that doesn't make you feel gross: knowing what your brand is, being obsessed with the problem you solve, and selling like a lovely member of a community instead of a robot.

I am pro AI, let me be clear. I love it as an amplifier, a clarifier, an organizer. I have it double-check that I'm not missing follow-ups, check my presentations for open loops I forgot to close, make me a sexy spreadsheet. What I hate is AI as a creator, because you're better than that.

Here's the thing people forget: it's often wrong. Ask it two plus two and sometimes it'll say five and defend five, then walk it back. It makes claims it can't back up. And in copywriting specifically, it flattens you. People put their entire intellectual property in and say make this better, and in most cases it doesn't make it better, it makes it blander. We don't have time for bland.

The part it can't do is the human part. Your clients need you, not the digital version of you. You wouldn't send a robot on a first date, and marketing is you trying to seduce someone. So if you don't have that skill set yet, that's exactly what a place like GrowthMentor is for. Ask a human.

The people who come to me are usually drowning in shoulds that other people put on them, and a lot of my job is helping them validate or invalidate those. Omnipresence is a big one, being on every platform every day. Another is treating AI as the thing that'll finally streamline their marketing, when they don't yet have good processes or a brand or an obsession with the problem they solve. AI can't fix a foundation that isn't there.

And cold email, I have strong, strong opinions. Personalization at scale is a mythical unicorn, it doesn't exist. The psychology of personalization is that it's actually personal. Most mass cold email is just lying, and the second I feel duped, I have a negative impression of your brand. I'd rather you reach out to five people with real personalization than 2,000 with lies. And then people forget to follow up, which is where the money actually happens. I call it being pretty, popular, and poor: visible, known, and broke because you never asked effectively or followed up.

Mostly what I do on the platform is give people permission to do less, with better intention.

Don't apply if you're here to scale a side hustle or perform expertise. People can tell.

Apply if you genuinely like helping in small doses, if a stranger's hard problem is interesting to you, and if you can give someone the real thing instead of the polished version of the real thing. The mentees I love are the ones who show up to be honest and a little vulnerable, because that's where the actual work happens. I'll push hard for your business and for you as a founder, and I won't apologize for it. If that energy sounds fun rather than scary, you'll fit right in.