[9/11/26] AGOGE Sales Training

[9/11/26] AGOGE Sales Training

Greg DeSilva stole the show with a standout live Shin-Fu roleplay, earning his Black Belt and the first-ever Golden Ticket for his skill, consistency, and commitment to helping others improve.

Webinar Summary

This AGOGE focused on strengthening the sales process through better tracking, relationship-building, personalized proposal delivery, and consistent Shin-Fu roleplay. The coaches challenged members to look beyond price when they lose jobs and instead evaluate how they’re communicating, presenting proposals, and building trust. The call also featured a live Shin-Fu roleplay with Greg DeSilva, who was awarded Black Belt status with the first-ever “Golden Ticket.”

Key Takeaways

  • Track your wins and losses to identify what is actually affecting your close rate.
  • Don’t assume price is the reason you’re losing larger projects.
  • Avoid simply emailing estimates—use in-person meetings, Zoom, or personalized proposal videos when possible.
  • Focus on building relationships instead of becoming another contractor who simply sends a quote.
  • Reconnect with past customers and existing relationships as a source of new opportunities.
  • Shin-Fu should feel like a genuine conversation, not a memorized script.
  • Consistent roleplay builds confidence, listening skills, tonality, and stronger questioning.
  • Greg DeSilva earned his Black Belt, recognizing both his Shin-Fu skills and his commitment to helping other members improve.

[8/26/26] The Fight Way | LEADERSHIP: How to Run a SWOT Session with the Team

[8/26/26] The Fight Way | LEADERSHIP: How to Run a SWOT Session with the Team

In this call, Micah Miller details a step-by-step framework for leading interactive, team-wide SWOT analysis sessions to confront operational reality, align company culture, and systematically resolve bottlenecks using a rolling “Top 5” action plan.

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Time Audit & Delegation Matrix Worksheet

Deep Dive

Micah Miller outlines how business leaders can run annual SWOT analysis meetings by bringing the entire team together for structured sticky-note brainstorming and AI-assisted theme grouping. Once the team identifies core strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, they vote on the most critical themes and develop targeted action steps. Rather than attempting to tackle every issue at once, the company commits to a strict, rolling “Top 5” list to ensure solutions are thoroughly implemented and tested before moving on.

Key Action Items & Takeaways

  • Inclusive Team Participation: Host annual SWOT sessions that include all layers of the company—including field labor and key vendors—to eliminate blind spots and build genuine team buy-in.

  • Timed Sticky-Note Brainstorming: Kick off with a brief “State of the Union” overview, followed by three 15-minute rounds where team members write S, W, O, or T notes and discuss their insights without leadership pushback.

  • AI-Assisted Theme Grouping: Input all raw notes into a spreadsheet and use AI tools like Claude to consolidate individual feedback into distinct, overarching organizational themes.

  • Democratic Theme Voting: Have the team vote on which themes represent the most urgent priorities to build alignment around key strengths to protect and weaknesses to fix.

  • The “Top 5” Execution Strategy: Limit active projects to a focused list of five key action items, relentlessly addressing the top priority before retiring it or cycling new initiatives up.

  • Operational Automation: Address complex recurring weaknesses—such as inventory tracking—by leveraging tech integrations and specialized AI agents to streamline day-to-day workflow.

  • Constructive Problem Ownership: When staff bring up grievances, avoid defensiveness by pairing them with leadership to co-design and take responsibility for practical solutions.

  • Uncompromising Culture Standards: Use team alignment calls to maintain operational clarity, protect company culture, and enforce clear organizational hierarchy.

[7/29/26] The Fight Way GUEST Speaker: Wealth Beyond the Business​​​​​​​

 [7/29/26] The Fight Way GUEST Speaker: Wealth Beyond the Business​​​​​​​

Certified Financial Planner Alan Dawkins joined the call as a guest speaker to discuss how contractors can build retirement wealth independent of relying solely on a future business sale. He provided actionable guidance on selecting business retirement plans, leveraging S-Corp tax benefits, setting up buy-sell agreements and insurance, and completing essential estate planning documents

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Time Audit & Delegation Matrix Worksheet

Deep Dive

Certified Financial Planner Alan Dawkins joined the call as a guest speaker to discuss strategies for contractors to build real retirement wealth beyond total reliance on selling their business. He outlined various business retirement account options—such as SEP IRAs, Simple IRAs, and Solo 401(k)s—and highlighted tax-efficient corporate structures like S-Corp elections to reduce self-employment taxes. Dawkins also emphasized essential protection measures including disability insurance, key man coverage, buy-sell agreements, and fundamental estate planning documents like wills, powers of attorney, and trusts. The session concluded with an open Q&A addressing specific member questions regarding term versus permanent life insurance, S-Corp election timing, and balancing pre-tax versus Roth retirement contributions.

    • Alan Dawkins detailed why contractors should diversify retirement savings rather than relying strictly on an eventual business sale.

    • He reviewed popular employer retirement options, including Simple IRAs, SEP IRAs, and Solo 401(k) plans.

    • Transitioning to an S-Corp election around $80,000–$100,000 in net income can significantly lower self-employment tax burdens.

    • Key man insurance and funded buy-sell agreements are vital to protect a business if an owner or essential employee passes away.

    • Dawkins advised acquiring convertible term life insurance to lock in health ratings for future permanent policy conversions.

    • Attendees were offered free access to software for drafting core estate documents like wills, trusts, and powers of attorney.

    • The group discussed balancing pre-tax and Roth retirement contributions to effectively manage personal tax brackets over time.

[7/10/26] AGOGE Sales Training

[7/10/26] AGOGE Sales Training | Wes Stanfill takes on Derek

In a high-stakes roleplay gauntlet, member Wes Stanfill successfully earned his Black Belt by navigating a chaotic and erratic customer profile engineered by Derek Johnson.

The Deep Dive

This special session operated as a live Black Belt test where Wes had to handle extreme conversational tangents, eccentric psychological jests, and blunt skepticism regarding website portfolio credibility. While Wes struggled early in the loop to pin down a firm emotional motive or establish a structured project scope, he successfully anchored a $180,000 budget and walked away with a signed $1,500 design agreement. The coaching panel heavily critiqued his tendency to follow a scattered client too far into “the weeds” rather than deploying sharp, regulatory timeouts. However, recognizing his baseline adherence to the Shin-Fu steps and disarming Southern charm, Derek officially passed Wes through the gauntlet to secure his 200th point and award him his Black Belt.

The Essential Details

  • Black Belt Graduation: Wes Stanfill successfully conquered the ultimate corporate gauntlet, capturing his 200th point and official Black Belt rank by getting Derek to move forward into a formal consultation.

  • The Scattered Client Curveball: Derek played an erratic, eccentric lakeside property owner who dropped jokes about missing his psychiatric medication, rambled about Cracker Barrel fires, and dismissed website portfolio photos as “enhanced AI filters and corporate bullshit”.

  • Relational Price Anchoring: Wes leveraged a live digital walkthrough to frame an existing flagstone patio project at $180,000, successfully mapping out a premium baseline budget and securing a 30% deposit check for an upcoming Monday site visit.

  • The Menu Guide Analogy: Micah Miller critiqued Wes’s passive approach to an unfocused client, explaining that a master salesperson must act like a premium waiter, stepping beside the buyer to dynamically pitch creative “what-if” design concepts rather than waiting for them to choose blindly.

  • Scripting Next-Step Authority: Micah coached the room to memorize a flawless, authoritative script for delivering upfront fees, telling Wes to eliminate all verbal fillers (“ums” and “errs”) to naturally exude executive confidence.

  • The Weapon of Website Autonomy: Coach Tim noted that a Black Belt organization should have pricing models clearly integrated online, helping unqualified tire-kickers self-select out of the pipeline before a consult call even takes place.

  • Brutally Kind Timeouts: In his final analysis, Derek strictly warned the room to stop coddling rambling prospects, urging contractors to use direct timeouts because over-talking is a direct form of stealing valuable time away from families.

[7/1/26] The Fight Way NUMBERS: Winning the Margin War: How Pre-Priced Packages Kill Scope Creep

[7/1/26] The Fight Way NUMBERS: Winning the Margin War: How Pre-Priced Packages Kill Scope Creep

Micah  breaks down how to weaponize granular, pre-priced project packages and interactive digital calculators to eliminate ambiguous pricing ranges, automatically screen out tire kickers, and secure unshakeable buyer trust. 

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Time Audit & Delegation Matrix Worksheet

The Deep Dive

As contractors wrap up an exceptionally high-demand second quarter, the primary operational bottleneck is wasting valuable time drafting manual, speculative proposals for unvetted leads. Micah layout how calculating precise material inputs and fixed labor allocations for fictitious “ideal projects” allows business owners to list unambiguous pricing structures directly on their public sites. The workshop then pivots heavily into next-generation technology, illustrating how front-end plugins like UCalc and custom text-based AI networks built across Claude and Gemini can effortlessly audit financial metrics, streamline logistics, and flag hidden margin deficits in real time.

The Essential Details

  • Eliminating Pricing Ambiguity: Micah strongly argues against publishing wide, ambiguous digital estimation brackets (e.g., $25,000 to $50,000), advocating instead for itemized, upfront package lines that show customers exactly what features their budget buys.

  • Pre-Priced Modular Add-Ons: To account for unpredictable site elements—such as restricted backyard access, excessive soil hauling, or concrete slab excavation—contractors must establish fixed modular upgrade fees to disarm field friction.

  • The Power of the Front-End Calculator: Utilizing flexible WordPress plugins like UCalc, business owners can construct interactive pricing trees directly on their websites to force self-selection and instantly flush low-budget leads out of the pipeline.

  • Capitalizing on Competitor Collapse: Documenting a massive market surge, member Michael Frazier shared how he absorbed two failing roofing and restoration competitors with zero acquisition costs, instantly capturing premium insurance “chub jobs” through Servpro.

  • Building a Multi-Agent AI Ecosystem: Micah charts out his customized internal AI agent, “Nash,” which functions as a virtual accountant and inventory director by processing heavy logical math via Anthropic’s Claude while utilizing Gemini Flash for cheap, rapid data parsing.

  • Automating Workflows with Claude Co-Work: Contractors were instructed to leverage Anthropic’s newly deployed “Co-Work” automated system, enabling teams to query business databases and log field updates remotely via standard text, Slack, or WhatsApp.

  • Deploying a “Margin Hawk” Guardrail: To protect long-term corporate cash flow, Micah deploys a specialized automated AI sub-agent nicknamed “Margin Hawk” to continuously analyze active weekly billing cycles and automatically text warnings when project spending slips into a deficit.

[6/24/26] The Fight Way LEADERSHIP: The Delegation Matrix

[6/24/26] The Fight Way LEADERSHIP: The Delegation Matrix

Micah breaks down the operational blueprint for reclaiming your schedule by auditing daily tasks, calculating an accurate financial buyback rate, and leveraging automation and delegation to eliminate energy-sucking administrative friction.

Click to Download

Time Audit & Delegation Matrix Worksheet

Webinar Summary

This interactive workshop-style call focuses heavily on tracking executive time to clearly separate immediate tactical chores from future-forward strategic growth. Directly challenging the standard industry myth that scaling requires abandoning field operations, Micah emphasizes that entrepreneurs should deliberately build highly profitable business frameworks that allow them to keep their tool belts on if it brings them genuine joy. Utilizing core principles from the book Buy Back Your Time, members are shown how to audit their daily calendars in highly granular increments to organically convert lower-value tasks into definitive job descriptions for future hires. The overall tone balances aggressive operational accountability with deep peer-to-peer empathy, directly encouraging business owners to lean tightly into the collective community to navigate intense professional and personal hardships.

The Essential Details

  • Calendar and Event Adjustments: Due to the upcoming holiday weekend, next Friday’s Agoge session has been officially moved to Tuesday, while the Freedom Forge Colorado team event is now exactly one month away.

  • Denouncing the Tool Belt Mandate: Micah flatly rejects the rigid theory that true corporate growth requires abandoning field execution, validating that staying on the tools is perfectly acceptable if it preserves your operational energy and fulfillment.

  • The ROI of Strategy: Dedicating deliberate time blocks to future-forward strategic work (such as process mapping) builds an upfront time investment that fundamentally buys back massive, compounding blocks of freedom down the road.

  • The Buyback Math Blueprint: To pinpoint your operational hourly worth, divide your targeted take-home pay and full business-covered benefits by 2,000 working hours to reveal your true executive baseline.

  • Procrastination as Internal Wisdom: Putting off specific backend duties is a healthy biological indicator that a chore actively drains your spirit ; these recurring bottlenecks should be immediately contracted out or completely handed off.

  • Building Instant Job Descriptions: Business owners can seamlessly isolate all low-quadrant tasks—such as tracking permits, running job site materials, or managing social page comments—to compile a precise weekly payroll budget and a flawless job description for a new administrative or field support employee.

  • The Granular Tesla Lesson: Demonstrating the direct power of tracking time in precise 15-minute windows , Micah notes that a previous audit exposing a heavy driving pattern prompted him to instantly buy a $51,000 self-driving Tesla to transform dead travel hours into open workspace.

  • Juggling Personal and Team Hardships: Highlighting intense real-world friction, member Matt Day outlined his struggle balancing his father’s critical late-stage cancer battle with a sudden helper resignation , confirming that severe operational pinches must force leaders to lean on subcontractors and write clear, unshakeable onboarding policies