The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Evan Poling is in the middle of his fight right now. No victory lap. No bonus chapter. Two and a half years into building Biz Retire, fifty thousand dollars of his own money gone, working a part time job at a business consultancy to pay the bills while his wife carries the financial weight at home, and the people closest to him still quietly wondering if he should just get a real job. He is not here to tell you it worked out. He is here to tell you what it actually costs to keep going when nothing has moved yet.

But underneath the business story is a prayer he made as a young man that landed differently than he expected. He was sleeping in a house with his grandparents visiting, lying on the living room floor under skylights, and he prayed something he meant without fully understanding the implications. God, break me and remake me. The next morning his ROTC scholarship was gone. An hour later he was fired from his gas station job. Then he went to his girlfriend's house, jerked the wheel on a newly paved road, and fractured his spine. She shattered her heel. Her parents sued. All in the span of about twenty four hours. He finished college with no student loan debt anyway. He met his wife through a different kind of crazy prayer. He found healing from an addiction to pornography he had carried since childhood through a men's group he almost never had the courage to walk into. And he built a resume exposing financial crimes at some of the largest banks in the world before walking away from all of it to bet on himself.

He is an Army National Guard veteran, a former combat medic, a double major in accounting and financial economics, and a man who discovered embezzlement at Raising Cane's that led to fourteen arrests in his first financial analyst role. He understands money better than almost anyone in the room. And he knows now that money is a result, not a goal. The people who chase it as a goal will compromise everything to get it. He watched them do it. He almost became one of them.

This episode is for the man who has been grinding in isolation, carrying something he has never said out loud, and wondering if the prayer he made actually got heard.