The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Rich Potter looks, from the outside, like a guy who simply wins. Corporate sales executive who built a half million dollar desk into fourteen million in five years. Photo booth entrepreneur who put his equipment on Garth Brooks's stadium tour semi truck and did events for Larry Fitzgerald and NASCAR. Amazon wholesale seller who hit a million dollars by year two. Gym franchise owner. Franchise broker who has helped hundreds of people start businesses. Every chapter looks like another win stacked on the last one.

What that highlight reel skips is 2019, the year Rich bought a Snap Fitness franchise as a turnaround project, discovered within two to three months that the corporate support was nonexistent and the previous owner had not disclosed key problems, and started waking up in the middle of the night with panic attacks he had never experienced before. He had built three successful businesses by that point. He was the guy who figured things out. And here was a gym slowly convincing him he was about to lose everything he had built, triggering a catastrophizing spiral that did not match who he actually was.

He sold the gym within a year, just months before Covid hit and would have closed it anyway. The buyers who took it over were not so lucky. Rich calls it luck. But the anxiety that gym triggered did not disappear when the business did. It became something he still manages today, six years later, not every day, but enough that procrastination and slow business stretches can still trigger it. What changed everything was not eliminating the anxiety. It was redirecting his focus outward, toward coaching other Amazon sellers through Jim Cochrum's community, toward deepening friendships during Covid isolation that turned his neighbor's back patio into a three a.m. hangout spot, and eventually toward franchise brokering, where his entire job is helping other people find the right business for their life instead of chasing the next shiny opportunity for himself.

This episode is for anyone holding themselves together with one hand while building with the other, and wondering if that counts as strength.