Charlie Epstein (actor, entertainer, financial advisor) gives a testimonial about a two-day accelerator session run by Mike Koenigs and team that helped him synthesize 45 years of ideas into a platform called "the fortress" focused on supporting military personnel and veterans. He recounts previously creating a one-man show with the team's help pre-COVID, describes tangible deliverables from the session (platform, website, pitch deck, marketing funnel, logo, cards), and endorses the program as transformative for entrepreneurs seeking to build a distinct brand and platform.
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In two days, we have created a amazing platform that's going to impact hundreds of thousands of lives of active military and vets that is just going to have an enormous impact on their security, their financial well being, their family's well being, their children's well being, their friends well being. I mean, it's just an exponential. Charlie Epstein. I am an actor, entertainer and financial advisor. I am based in the booming metropolis of East Lake Longmeadow, Massachusetts out of Springfield, mass. We also have a home in Connecticut on the Connecticut shore and a wonderful apartment in midtown Manhattan across from Lincoln center and Central Park West. For 45 years, I have had ruminating in my head all these ideas and thoughts about creating what we have called now as the fortress, which was something initially I wanted to do for the quote unquote civilian population. But since I've been called forth to help eradicate veteran suicide, I can't think of a better place to have developed this. So we came in here for two days. This time around I had ideas and information. I had given you information. I had sort of an outline in my head, but it's like being shot out of a cannon. So the first time we did this pre Covid, I had this idea. I wanted to go back to stand up comedy. That's all I had. Mike said, you know Charlie, you should hire your own comedy team to help you write this idea that you have in your head. And I said, that's great. I've been out of the acting entertainment world for 19 years. And he said, if you hire me, I'll get that group of comedians and we'll help create that. And y' all can go to yieldedgeons live to see the result. We literally wrote a one man show in two days. Now took another year to get it on its feet, to perform it live, to iterate it. But those two days were absolutely magical. And I tell people, how big of a check would you be willing to write to have the dream of your life come true, to create the platform of your life that will differentiate and create a distinct brand of one of who you are in the marketplace. And cut through all the noise and let me tell you something. We are overwhelmed by the response from that journey and the creation of my one man show. It's what's led me back here because members of the military have beaten a path to my doorstep to say, we want to make you, Charlie, and yield of dreams the go to financial advisor for the entire military. What that wasn't in my head. All I wanted to do was do a show and entertain some people out of that. I'm now presented with this, well, how do I package these ideas and make it real for the military? So this time around, I had some information, I had some curated thoughts, I had some curated material, but still, I couldn't put it together in a coherent way. I needed Mike and his team again to help me synthesize all this data and information and package it up and make it real, and then we'll make it repeatable. And that's what these two days were all about. Another amazing experience. I'm just going to tell you, write the check. The magic happens when you write the check. You got to just trust in the process. And you do not have to have anything, right? All you need is that big idea. And I know you as an entrepreneur have nothing but big ideas. The problem is you have too many big ideas. You don't know which one to develop, and you don't know how to develop it, and you don't have the talent and the team to do that. And you're just saying, well, someday, one day, I'm going to write that book, or I'm going to create that show, or I'm going to create that platform, I'm going to create that funnel. I'm going to fill in the blank. This is the place to do it. There is no place better. You'll get more than a 10x return. That's it, baby. So if you could build the platform of your dreams, what would you need? Because that's what you're really looking for. You're looking for a place where your voice breaks through the noise. I'm a professional actor. I'm a trained actor, and every actor has their own voice. If I say Brad Pitt, what do you see? If I say Johnny Depp. Depp, what do you see? If I say Angelina Jolie, what do you hear? I mean, every one of those actors has worked to be their own brand of one, their own distinct voice. That's what Mike and his team do with this accelerator program is they find your voice and then they build a platform that your voice can be amplified across wherever you are in the world. In terms of whether you're in the longevity world, financial world, real estate world, whatever your lane is, they're going to amplify that. People are going to beat a pathway to your doorstep. So you're going to walk away with a platform and a website, you're going to walk away with a pitch deck. In my case, you're going to walk away with repurposing and repackaging some of the things that worked really well through our Yielded Dreams program. You're going to walk away if you do it with a whole marketing system and a funnel. Maybe you're going to create a book, maybe you're going to create a scorecard. You're going to have so much material that you're going to be able to use in a distinct way and deploy and find those people that are looking for your solutions faster, easier, bigger, and brighter. What more could you ask for in two or three days? I got a platform, I got a logo, I got a new deck, I got killer cards, the whole fortress design. I've got everything I've been thinking about for literally 45 years in the financial world packaged up. This is truly something that people are going to identify with and want.
