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2015 Chicago Marathon. Mile 13. I’m flying—feeling like I could run forever. Heart surgery, back surgery, barely able to stand a decade before, and here I am crushing it. Then I see the sign: NOT ALMOST THERE.
Everything changed. Heavy legs. Cramping. Mental breakdown. I barely finished what started as my best race ever.
That sign broke me, but it also built me. Southside Chicago kid who studied for 15 seconds between building cars on the assembly line. Graduated in 5 years. Built companies. Sold two. 800 employees. Young father at 20 who figured it out as I went.
I’ve spent 50+ episodes of Not Almost There interviewing experts, and now my cohost and I are diving deeper into the conversations that matter most. We dig into what it really takes—in business, branding, health, life. No fluff. Real talk about building something that matters while the clock’s ticking.
Whether you’re running your first mile or your hundredth company, we’re here to help you go the distance.
Because almost there isn’t good enough.
Episodes
Saturday May 02, 2026
Saturday May 02, 2026
Joe's building his second $100M+ company — and this time, the blueprint looks completely different.
As Joe begins his investor journey for Go Brewing, what he's learning is forcing him to rethink how he sees the business from the ground up. In this episode, Joe breaks down why top-down market projections fail with serious investors, how he built a store-level sales model that actually predicts performance, and why the most valuable thing he's selling might not be the beer at all.
Key Takeaways:
- Why savvy investors don’t just buy a share of a growing market.
- How to use Census Data to map hyper-local growth opportunities
- How to leverage the accretive value of your entire business, not just your product or service
- Why Joe's elevator pitch is about “how” not “what”
- The question every founder needs to answer before they can build something worth acquiring
For: Entrepreneurs thinking about their first or second raise, founders trying to understand what investors actually want to see, and anyone building a business that touches physical inventory or CPG.
Topics: Investor strategy, bottom-up financial modeling, capital efficiency, unfair advantage, CPG vs. SaaS risk, building to acquisition, AI in business operations
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