Buckle up crew, this is the last newsletter of 2025 as I’m taking the rest of the year to do two things: enjoy the holidays with my wife and get a head start on 2026.

The whole new year new me hype on January 1st isn’t my vibe. Most people that jump on that train are toast within the first 60 days — there’s actually science behind this (I challenge you to not be one of those people), I’m not just talking out of my butt.

I want to leave you with some of my end-of-year reflections, top 3 lessons of 2025, and what I’m looking towards in the new year.

2025 has been a freaking rollercoaster. I was tested on spiritually, emotionally, and mentally.

Spiritually: I got baptized in front of hundreds of people on January 19th, 2025 and surrendered this season to God. I didn’t expect anything, nor did I chase a single thing this year. I took a step back to see what would get revealed to me when it comes to relationships, opportunities, and business. I said no to several things because I could see clearly what was right and wrong. I’ve become a much better steward and a wiser decision maker in the process.

Emotionally: Something I never thought I’d experience in my lifetime was having family members living in a literal war zone in the middle easy and being impacted by it. Not hearing from my dad for weeks wrecked me and served as another spiritual test. It was such a vulnerable moment in time, shoutout to my church fam for the support during this time.

Mentally: After building back-to-back-to-back successful businesses between 2021-2024, going through a rebuild from ground zero was extremely humbling. I went through a brief identity crisis, not gonna lie. Around mid-year there was a bit of a confidence hit that took a while to fix. Around September I managed to turn things around in so many ways which fixed the confidence issue.

Had I not started building that faith-based foundation in January, I believe this year would’ve looked a lot differently. I’m beyond grateful that it played out the exact way that it did.

I’ve been able to let go of my previous identity that was heavily tied to past success and have been able to lean in more on who I am today and where I’m going.

1) Greed is at an All-Time High, Integrity is at an All-Time Low

I come from deep banking roots, have done a ton of business, and spend a lot of time with entrepreneurs and business owners.

With the boom of AI, crypto, creator economy, and modern day media — there has been a huge psychological change on a business and consumer level.

Across several industries, you see businesses increasing prices at such a rapid pace.

In the creator economy you have coaches, consultants, and agencies sucking every dollar they can out of consumers and delivering sub-par results.

I’ve seen endless SaaS companies do two price-hikes in the last 12 months on their basic / lowest plans with the same features but throw in some half-baked “AI” features just to justify the price increase.

Meta, TikTok, etc have absolutely destroyed attention spans and the amount of content that exists on a per-second basis is astronomical, people’s psyches are changing rapidly. The way they make decisions and simply think is more easily influenced than ever before.

For years people have been saying that attention is the new currency and I could truly see what that means this year out of all years prior. People are literally speaking in Hooks for heavens sake…

On the integrity side of things, business culture has really reached a low standard of having any pride of delivering top of class things to the market. I’ve consulted over 30 founders in the last 2 years and have done some consulting for 7 & 8-figure companies. We’ve reached a point where there’s so many business opportunities in this online business era that people will do anything to make money for their self-interest.

In recent years, I’d say 5/10 people I come across operate with low integrity when doing business. I’m being generous here by the way — my more cynical side wants to say 7/10. I’ve gone out of my way to explore different industries, build relationships with people, do business deals and this is what I see within less than 90 days.

One thing about me is I’ve always taken an approach of giving the benefit of the doubt. I still take this approach today, however it takes me less time to see through all the smoke and mirrors.

2) Personal Brands are the vehicle to wealth for Millennials & Gen-Z

There’s a huge group of millennials that haven’t had a great return-on-investment from graduating college. Gen-Z are experiencing it even worse than the millennials did.

Regardless of education, the modern day vehicle to build long-term wealth is having a personal brand that you can leverage for the next 15+ years to set yourself up financially.

If there was ever a debate around this, I think it’s over. The same level of effort and commitment it would take to “climb the career ladder” should be reinvested into building a personal brand. Your future self will thank you.

3) What You Do With Little Will Expose You When You Have More Abundance

My pastor spoke on financial blessings and stewardship earlier in the year and it stuck with me deeply.

How you manage what you have will either expose or reveal you when you have more.

It will expose you if you gain more financially and still manage to struggle.

It will reveal you if you gain more financially and experience many forms of abundance.

You don’t want to be exposed as an incapable steward of resources, you want to be revealed as someone worthy of those resources who makes smart decisions and manages it well in positive ways.

I’m looking forward to leaning even more into my faith to continue on building the foundation I’ve build in 2025. Getting deeper into the Bible and becoming more involved when it comes to serving at a church. I served as a photographer for about 4 months this year, so maybe I’ll do more of that or serve in a different way.

After going cold-turkey in 2025 and not being apart of any founder masterminds or paid communities, I think I found one or two masterminds that have a high probability of finding like-minded founders. As much as I enjoyed being rooted in local community in 2025, I am craving to get back in rooms with people at a certain level from a professional and mindset standpoint.

I’ll be focusing on YouTube big time in 2026. It’s long overdue and aligns with my goal of building a personal brand. This is a 5-10 year journey, I have no short-term expectations. This will be my one big-picture project.

Business wise, I’m sticking to a very reserved capacity when it comes to consulting. Only focused on working with 1-2 founders at a time who are doing between $250k - $1M per year. The two M&A deals I’m getting involved with have long cycles, I’ll probably end up just doing one instead of both. More on this later.

Bucket list travel with my wife is certainly on the books as well as trips to spend more time with family as compared to 2025. The value I’m putting on time with family is significantly higher than it has in the last 3 years.

All that to say, you can make plans and God laughs. As much as I’m looking forward to these things, however He plays it out — I’ll be grateful.

I hope this final newsletter of 2025 leaves you with value.

If you want to connect through socials over the next few weeks, here’s my Instagram: Click Here — would love to chat with you.

See you in 2026 ✌️

Odd picture, I know. Felt like honoring my church brothers who I play soccer with every Friday night.

Would I dare to do any kind of deep work as I warm the bench? Probably unwise.

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