People would probably describe me as someone with a diverse set of interests, and that is fair. I started off in Kansas, went to high school in Missouri, college in Boston, then moved to Chile for my master's and PhD. I started my first company there when I was 27, a travel business, and it really took off and grew to four different cities. Along the way I ended up hosting a TV show in South America too. I moved back to the US in 2019, and now I work in long-term care: as a fractional CMO, a consultant, a board member at a couple of institutions, and the host of a podcast called LTC Heroes.

The through line is that I spent the first 39 years of my life in the B2C world, selling things directly to a person without a bunch of decision-makers involved. Bicycle tours, walking tours, a TV show. Then I jumped into healthcare software, which meant selling enterprise software priced somewhere between $50,000 and $150,000 a year to five different decision-makers at once. That was a completely different game, and I had to re-skill very fast. So much of who I am professionally is a person who keeps walking into new industries and figuring out how to get good at them quickly.

Once I knew where I stood in the healthcare space, I reached out to the founder and said I wanted to become a mentor, because I wanted to pay back everything I had been given. My phase as a student was only about two and a half to three months, and then I moved over. These days I play both roles. I still book a couple of calls a month as a mentee, and I do six to ten a month as a mentor.

Honestly, I knew right away that I would be a good mentor, maybe even a great one. Before any of this, I had probably 100 to 150 international interns come through my travel company in South America, entry-level liberal arts students learning Spanish, and I taught them to become very good marketers within three to five months by engaging them, empowering them, setting up SOPs, and building systems. So I knew I could do the mentor side. I just needed that same kind of help for myself when I first landed in healthcare, and once I had it, giving it back felt natural.

I attribute it to my parents. They taught me from a very young age, and I have this same conversation with my own son about once a month, that the person you are with needs to feel they are the most important person in the room. There is almost never a good reason to say I know, I know. If someone tells you something smart, you do not need to say yeah, I did that already. You say, wow, that is interesting. That person needs to feel they are teaching you and that you are genuinely learning from them.

So as long as I am not pretending to be the expert in the room just because I happen to be holding the microphone, the format works. People at conventions tell me LTC Heroes feels more authentic and more human than other shows. If I were interviewing a nursing home operator, instead of talking about the 50 facilities they just acquired, we would end up talking about how long-term care shaped them personally, or the guitar in the background that a senior gave them years ago. I think that approach is replicable by almost anyone, in almost any industry. It is much less about expertise than people assume.

I have a strong opinion on this. If I were starting over, or if my son came to me at 22 and said he did not know what to do, I would tell him to find a founder running a team of somewhere between two and 15 people that is already making money, so you are not worried about getting paid at the end of the month. Then reach out and say something like, I will work on the cheap, half my tasks can be following SOPs and doing the mundane work, but I want to be mentored and coached up, and when you make your next big hire, I want to apply for it.

The idea is to move from a $500-a-month intern to being the sales manager or the project manager at their next hire. Young founders at that size are go-getters, and they do not really care about your resume. So I would also say, do not stress about going to an expensive college, just go to the cheapest one and finish it. Learn to write, learn to think, read philosophy and sociology, get mentored by your teachers. Then go find a founder who already has a product that works and ask to be their intern. Ask to sit in their strategic planning meeting, learn their email copy, work a few hours under their ads person. I think nine out of ten smart founders will take that person under their wing.