You Don't Need Another Course. You Need a Plan.

In 2016 I felt a pull to teach. I'd already paid the dumb tax on enough mistakes that I figured maybe I could help other people avoid some of them. So we quietly launched a program called Diffactory Direct out of our office in Lee's Summit, Missouri. People would drive across town and sit in our conference room. No Zoom. No Skool. No Circle. Just humans in chairs, coffee, and ten modules on marketing that we'd put together ourselves.

I dug up some of those old recordings not long ago. They're hilarious. We built everything from scratch: the back-end, the delivery system, the follow-up. Duct tape and hope. We were basically trying to build an education platform before education platforms existed.

But here's the thing I noticed, looking back on it. The content wasn't what made it work. The room did. People showed up because they wanted to be around other people who were trying to figure out the same things they were. The learning was almost secondary to the connection.

That memory has been rattling around in my head as I've watched the explosion of online courses, masterminds, memberships, and guru-led programs over the past decade. There are thousands of them now. Some are great. Most are not. And the pattern I keep seeing among the business owners I work with is this: they've consumed a lot of content, joined a lot of programs, collected a lot of strategies. And they're still stuck.

The information isn't the problem. The implementation is.

Most programs turn entrepreneurs into information junkies. There's a dopamine hit from learning something new, from feeling like you're making progress by absorbing someone's framework or attending a hot seat call where you get three minutes of generic advice. But consumption isn't progress. Progress is doing the work. And doing the work, the hard, unsexy work of building systems and developing your team and making your business less dependent on you, requires something that courses don't provide: protected time, real accountability, and someone who knows you well enough to call you on your own patterns.

I'm not saying education is useless. I'm saying the bottleneck for most founders isn't knowledge. It's execution. They know they should document their processes. They know they should train their team to make decisions. They know they should stop being the answer to every question. They've known this for years. They just haven't done it, because every day they wake up and the business demands their attention again, and the strategic work gets pushed to next week.

This is the burnout trap, and I've lived in it myself. The numb hustle. The forced smiles. The Sunday dread that starts on Friday night. You're not just tired. You're fried. Disconnected. And the worst part is that the thing causing the burnout, the business, is also the thing you can't walk away from, because it doesn't work without you.

The conventional advice for burnout is self-care. Take a break. Practice mindfulness. Set boundaries. And look, those things aren't wrong. But they're treating symptoms. The root cause of founder burnout isn't that you work too hard. It's that your business is structured so that you have to work that hard. Fix the structure, and the burnout starts to resolve itself.

That's what I mean when I say you need a plan, not a course. A course gives you information. A plan gives you a sequence of moves, specific to your business, that changes the fundamental architecture of how the thing operates. It addresses the real problem: you're stuck in the middle of everything, and until you're not, nothing changes.

I also think most founders need people around them who understand the weight. Building a business is lonely. Your friends don't get it. Your family tries, but they can't fully understand what it's like to carry payroll, chase revenue, manage people, and make a hundred decisions a day, all while wondering if you're doing any of it right.

When we ran those sessions in the conference room back in 2017, the most valuable moments weren't when I was teaching. They were when one owner looked at another and said "I thought it was just me." There's something powerful about being in a room with people who carry the same weight and are honest about it.

That's why, when we rebuilt what Diffactory does, we didn't build another course. We built a place where founders do the actual work, together, with real support and real accountability. Not a content library. Not a guru dispensing wisdom from a stage. A working environment where people show up, face their real problems, and make progress on the stuff that actually matters.

Is it less scalable than selling a $497 course to ten thousand people? Yes. Does it actually work? Also yes.

I think the business education industry has the same problem as a lot of the businesses it serves. It's optimized for volume, not outcomes. Sell the course, move on, sell the next one. The customer feels good for a week, then goes back to the same patterns. Nobody's accountable. Nobody's checking in. The guru's already moved on to the next launch.

I wanted to build something different. Something closer to what that conference room in Lee's Summit felt like in 2017, but with better tools, more structure, and a real focus on execution. Not information. Progress.

If you're a founder who's consumed a shelf of business books, been through multiple programs, and still feels stuck in the grind, the issue probably isn't that you need more input. It's that you need to do the work you've been putting off, in a context where someone won't let you keep putting it off.

That's not a course. That's a commitment. And it's the only thing I've seen that actually moves the needle.