I've thought of myself as an athlete since I was seven or eight years old and completely obsessed with soccer.

The internet wasn't really a thing yet, so getting better meant getting in front of people. I worked with local coaches. I chased down anyone in my town who had once played professionally and found a way to get five minutes of their time. If somebody knew something I didn't, I wanted to practice with them.

When injuries ended the soccer career, I took all of it into golf. Same obsession with movement, same work ethic, same appetite for feedback. I was scratch inside a year.

That didn't happen because I'm gifted. It happened because I never stopped asking.

The head pro at my local facility volunteered his time to give me his insight. The local college coach helped me out. Eventually I started paying for it, working with people like Stan Utley on short game, a handful of swing coaches, and the Callaway Performance Center back when it was the first thing of its kind. I compressed years into months because I was never shy about seeking advice and I was incredibly coachable.

Injuries eventually took golf too, and I became a coach. I worked with golfers at every skill level and eventually landed in a high performance environment, and the players I gravitated toward were always the coachable ones.

Then I burned out trying to build the ultimate learning environment in person, online, and in all the space in between, which is what led to Edufii. (Ya’ll know that story already)

Over the years when raising capital from fancy investors, and long before that when I was just asking people who had built things before me, I prided myself on being coachable.

What took me a lot longer to figure out is that I was often seeking advice from people I had no business seeking advice from. I assumed that because someone held a certain position, they actually knew what they were doing and were therefore worth listening to. That assumption came back to bite me more than once along the way. You can read about a lot of those times in my book.

Being coachable is only half of it. Who you let coach you is the other half.

I'm back in the world of coaching now with a slightly different tweak on it, closer to consulting with founding teams than coaching in the traditional sense. It's been enlightening to be back in a high performance environment with a front row seat on who is going to make it and who isn't.

I've done almost no public marketing of my one-to-one work. Two posts on LinkedIn, maybe. Everything else has come through word of mouth, DMs, and introductions from people who know me.

My DMs have been packed this past year with founders asking for advice, and I appreciate every one of them. But the pattern is usually identical. Hey, what you've built is great, I'm building something, can I get on a call with you? No context, no depth on what they're actually building, just a quick request for time.

Here's what a lot of early stage founders haven't worked out yet simply because they are full steam ahead. My calendar is the most precious thing I have. I've got a family, I work with a number of companies, and I'm building things of my own. I would love to jump on a call with everybody and I can't.

So I built an offer for founders in that $0 to $1M range, and the response has made 3 things clear.

One DM stood out. It came through Instagram of all places, from a founder looking for some advice. I'm happy to trade a few messages there, but that's about the limit of what I can do, so I told him about the offer.

His first reaction was great. Then he realized it wasn't one-to-one, and he pulled back. He didn't want his IP sitting in a room with other people, he didn't want anything group shaped, and he'd rather default to making his own mistakes and learning on his own.

I’m not one to hard sell, but I do love a good reframe. Here’s what I told him.

Roughly 99.9% of professional athletes went pro and stayed pro because they had great coaches around them. Nobody at that level is figuring it out alone, and nobody thinks less of them for it.

Now put it in golf terms.

Imagine Butch Harmon said: pay me a thousand bucks a year and you get me twice a month. It's a group, so you're on the call with other players. You can ask me anything, and I'll answer in between. You get the guides, the drills, and everything I learned building the best player in the world.

I would jump at that. So would you.

Same money, same format, same access to someone who has already done the thing you're trying to do. The only thing that changed was the label on it, and that slight reframe put the whole offer in a completely different spot for him.

If you want to go pro in sport, coaching is obvious. Nobody argues about it. But if you want to go pro in business, the same person who would have paid anything for a swing coach suddenly decides they'll figure the company out on their own.

Think about your inner athlete. Think about how many pitfalls you could avoid, how many fewer mistakes you could make, and how much faster you could reach your goals with the right people around you.

Don't let your ego take you to a spot where you stop looking for advice or help in order to grow your business. Whether that's with me or with somebody else entirely.

If you want to go pro, get some coaching.

It’s been a week since I announced this one. We’ve got enough verbals to move to the next step of the launch. I’ll be sending out links directly to those that reached out next week so they can lock in their spot.

Did you miss the announcement?

If you like what you see, simply reply to this email with “IN” and I’ll follow up.

Keep fighting the good fight. See ya next week 👊

-Spencer