The Grit Factor Podcast w/ Karl Jacobi

Bart Merrell grew up on a pig farm in New Mexico with a father who had his hands in a dairy in Idaho, a mushroom warehouse in Utah, a produce warehouse in Arizona, and the Pork Producers Association, all simultaneously. Nobody sat Bart down and taught him the birds and bees of business. His father showed him by example that you could do many things at one time and that opportunities were everywhere if you trained yourself to see them. That programming never left.

His first big dream was the FBI. He studied accounting on an FBI agent friend's advice, hated every minute of it, scraped through a degree, then discovered that corrective eye surgery he had gotten to improve his vision had quietly disqualified him from federal service before he ever applied. Devastated. No plan. A college town in Utah. A friend who jokingly asked if he wanted to go to Japan to help set up a bungee tower. Bart said yes without knowing what he was agreeing to. Three months later he was pushing little Japanese people off an eight-story tower for a living and loving every second of it.

What followed was a life built entirely on saying yes to things he did not know how to do, figuring it out, and then asking the same question he asks about everything: how can I monetize this? Bungee towers led to sky coasters led to freefall rides led to building a custom coaster in Japan. A Japanese big rig driver friend led to twenty-nine years of importing camping trailers and Ford diesel trucks into Japan, still running today. Nine hundred and eleven wiped out several hundred thousand dollars, so he bought a truck he could not afford, drove to Indiana, and came home with a contract pulling trailers nationwide. His wife's cancer scare in Japan eight nights of not knowing the results taught him he needed multiple income streams before life needed them. An eight thousand dollar dog training course to handle a ninety-pound Rottweiler turned into almost a hundred thousand dollars in his first year of dog training. Being told his ankle bone was gone and amputation was the only option led within six months to a retainer contract with his prosthetist counseling incoming patients.

Today Bart runs Side Hustle Samurai and has written Monetize Your Mindset, a book born from watching a woman at a drug rehab Toastmasters session realize that her abusive childhood was not normal. It hit Bart that if you did not grow up watching someone like his dad see opportunity everywhere, you simply did not have that wiring. His entire mission now is to give people the wiring they were not handed. From zero to cash flow in six months, 90 days as the goal, 180 as the promise, using the skills, the story, and even the worst thing that ever happened to you.

This episode is for anyone sitting on something valuable and calling it nothing.