Everyone sees the most visible part of a founder’s journey: the outcome. But the truth is that few understand the mindset, pressure, and discipline behind it.
This podcast explores the deeper system behind business and life. The beliefs, habits, and decisions that shape growth long before the numbers appear.
Through thoughtful conversations, Jarome McKenzie sits down with founders, operators, and thinkers who have built meaningful things. Together they explore the moments that shaped them, the pressure that forged their discipline, and the mindset behind their success.
Jarome approaches each episode as both a builder and a student. He learns alongside the audience while weaving each guest’s insights into the frameworks he uses with founders and leaders.
The result is an honest exploration of business, leadership, and intentional living. A look at how great builders think, make decisions, and design lives that matter.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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Most founders' stories focus on the business, but what about the internal system that shapes the founder? In this special solo episode, Jarome McKenzie pulls back the curtain on his own unconventional path, from a spontaneous move from New Zealand to the US with no plan, to the messy, unscripted moments that defined his life and business. This isn't just a story; it's a living case study on how conviction, movement, and a deep sense of ownership are the true drivers behind building something meaningful. Jarome reveals the core philosophy behind "No Trade Secrets": the person is the playbook, and the most pivotal moments often arrive without a map.
✨ Why This Matters for You
This episode is a masterclass in the mindset required to build a life on your own terms. You will learn to:
Internalize the principle that "the call comes before the clarity," empowering you to take action on your convictions without waiting for perfect certainty.
Recognize how seemingly ordinary moments and "un-strategic" decisions are often the catalysts for the most significant, life-altering opportunities.
Understand the profound difference between contributing to someone else's vision and taking full, unadulterated ownership of your own path—failures and all.
📝 Key Takeaways
The Call Comes Before the Clarity: Many transformative journeys begin with an internal pull or a feeling, not a detailed plan. Waiting for a complete map can lead to inaction, while trusting your conviction is the necessary first step toward meaningful progress.
Life Unfolds Through Movement: The optimal path is often revealed by taking action, not by over-analyzing. Each step, even a detour like getting cut from a team or ending up in an unplanned city, provides the information and opportunities needed to discover the next move.
Ownership is About Responsibility, Not Comfort: True entrepreneurship isn't about an easier life; it's about choosing to be directly responsible for your outcomes. This desire for total accountability is a more powerful motivator than the pursuit of comfort or a predictable corporate ladder.
The Person is the Playbook: Sustainable success isn't just about business tactics; it's a reflection of the founder's internal system. Traits like intentionality, resilience, and unwavering conviction are the invisible architecture behind any great company or life.
🚀 Put It Into Action
Identify one area in your life or business where you feel a strong internal "pull" but are waiting for more clarity. This week, take one small, concrete step in that direction without needing to know the full outcome. The goal is simply to initiate movement.
Reflect on your "Plan B." Ask yourself if its existence is subtly undermining your commitment to your "Plan A." Consider what would change in your focus and intensity if you mentally removed that safety net, as Jarome was challenged to do.
Schedule a 30-minute personal debrief. Instead of analyzing business metrics, map out the key "unscripted" moments or decisions (like Jarome's dog or borrowed vacuum) that have shaped your journey. Acknowledge how these messy, non-linear events built the person you are today.
🔗 Stay Connected
Subscribe to the No Trade Secrets podcast so you never miss an episode.
Share this episode with a fellow founder who is building with intention.
SPEAKER_02
Hey and welcome back to another No Trade Secrets debrief session. Now, this episode's going to be a little different. Usually I unpack lessons from conversations that I've had with other founders and operators, or I reflect on something that I'm learning currently in business leadership or in life. But today I want to step back and tell a little more of my own story. Who I am, where I come from, how I ended up here, and why I created the No Trade Secrets podcast in the first place. Because if this podcast is about deeper systems behind business and life, then it probably makes sense for you to understand the system that shaped me. Not just the business, not just Arrowhead, not just the podcast, but the real journey behind it. So I was born and raised in Auckland, New Zealand. And growing up, I always knew two things. One, I always knew that I wanted to be a father. And two, I always knew that I wanted to be in charge of my own life, and which essentially means that I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Even if at the time as a teenager I didn't exactly know what it meant. Part of that probably came from my dad. He was self-employed my entire life. And so for me, the idea of creating your own path and being your own boss is not and never has been some abstract concept. It was something I saw every day. So it was always normal for me that you could be something that you built, not just something you found. And I think I also had a natural resistance to just accepting things because that's how they've always been done. I've always been someone who asks why. Why are things done this way? Why is this the rule? Why is this the limit? Which then could sometimes be followed by testing the limit. And at the time I didn't understand how much that mindset would shape my life. But looking back, it's one of the through lines. I've always really kind of been pulled towards ownership. And so after high school, I took a gap year. And during that gap year, I was figuring out what I was gonna do next. I I I thought that, okay, I want to go to university, but I don't know what I want to study. I don't know what I want to do for my career. So I was working primarily for that gap year as a house painter in New Zealand. Just trying to figure out what was next. And also playing a lot of uh fast-pitch softball, which is uh the bigger diamond sport in New Zealand over baseball for uh for whatever reason. I think it has something to do with the US Navy during World War II playing that on the aircraft carriers with the New Zealand Navy uh sailors. Um but it was one morning, January 17th, 2017. I remember I woke up with this feeling, and I wrote this all down in a book that I had. And it wasn't some detailed plan, it wasn't some big strategy, and it definitely wasn't logical. But it was this deep internal pull that was that there was something for me in the United States, which I had never been to the US before. And so I didn't have everything figured out, but I I felt like I was just supposed to to go, supposed to be there. And I think this is one of the first big lessons of my story, is that sometimes the call comes before the clarity. Sometimes you can feel pulled somewhere or to do something before you can put into words or explain why. And if you're a very logical person, that can be super uncomfortable because you want the full plan mapped out in front of you before you take the first step. You want certainty, you want evidence. But a lot of meaningful decisions start with no signal, no plan, just a feeling. And so I started looking at how I could go to college uh in the US, since that was already what I thought, you know, part of my plan. And I quickly learned that college in the US is expensive, really expensive, and I didn't come from a family with an abundance of money, and so that was really not in the picture. And as I continued my Google search, I realized that there's a pathway through athletic scholarships, and so I picked baseball. I didn't play baseball, I but I I assumed that if I was good at fast pitch softball, which I'd represented Auckland and New Zealand in fast pitch softball all through my teenage years, and traveled all around the world to uh to Europe and Canada to play competitively at different tournaments. So I thought I I could pick up baseball.
SPEAKER_00
They're how hard can it be?
SPEAKER_02
They're pretty similar, and thinking back I can now see how wrong I was about how easily you can transition uh sports. But but anyway, baseball became the vessel and the vehicle that got me moving, and so I came over to the US and played summer baseball in Fort Collins, Colorado, for the Fort Collins Foxes, and those were my first real baseball games ever because I arrived in Colorado that summer and I had woke up only five months earlier and decided I was gonna do this. And so I was there for uh the summer, and I then after a week or so, I believe, I got a scholarship to go and play for junior college in West Burlington, Iowa. And I was there for a semester, and it was brutal. This is a very competitive program, and I was still trying to learn the fundamentals that a lot of these American kids learnt when they were children, and then I got hurt, and I got cut, and at that point it could have been easy to say that maybe this was a mistake or maybe I should go home. And trust me when I say part of me wanted to quit, but I knew I was never going to, so instead I kept moving. I drove down to Kansas City, stayed on another New Zealand guy who I was introduced to in Facebook Messenger, who had never met, stayed on his couch, tried out for a university here in Kansas City, and ended up spending the rest of my college years here in KC. And that is a huge part of my story because Kansas City was never in the plan. This just became the pathway after the path I was on was cut off. And I never thought when I was back in New Zealand that I was targeting Missouri as my dream destination. But sometimes life unfolds through movement by taking the step that's in front of you. And when you do that, the next step appears. And one day you look up and you realize that the thing that felt super random was actually shaping your entire life. And that is what happened to me, because Kansas City became home. Where the real life part of that story comes in is my now wife entered into my life in a way that wasn't exactly glamorous. So I lived in an apartment with a roommate, and we had a dog, and that is another decision that I made that looking back on in hindsight, from a logical perspective, getting a dog on a student visa was probably not the smartest decision to make at the time. But getting this dog may very well be the difference between meeting my wife or not. So, because we had this a dog, I had a dog, in this apartment, and this dog shed bad, and we didn't own a vacuum cleaner, and so that apartment had not been vacuumed in the three years that we lived there. And so one day I decided I was going to go upstairs, knock on the apartment of the two girls that lived up there, because I assumed they're girls, they have a vacuum cleaner. And I'm gonna ask them, hey, can I borrow your vacuum cleaner? And so they said yes, and then I returned it smelling like three years of dog hair. And I later find out that my wife's best friend and roommate told her that he is never fucking borrowing that vacuum cleaner ever again. And so I went back a week later and asked, can I borrow it again? And they did. And one of those girls upstairs is now my wife. And the part I love about this the most is that it's not polished or perfectly scripted, it's just life. It's messy, it's funny, it's unexpected, and kind of disgusting too, if you smelt that vacuum after I was done with it. And it's a constant reminder that some of the most important parts of your life can come from the most ordinary moments. You never know what small interaction or seemingly insignificant decision is going to change your entire life. And so from there I was studying accounting because someone told me that accounting is always a good degree, can't go wrong with it. And naturally, I went after college into accounting and finance consulting. I started out for a large public accounting firm in their consulting division, and pretty quickly, and I'm meaning like first week, I realized that the corporate ladder was not going to be my path. And that's not a knock on people who do it. There are people who thrive in that structure, but I just could feel that something in me did not fit in that environment. I wanted more ownership, more control, more responsibility, and more direct connection between what I put in and what came out. And I later worked then in a startup environment doing the same kind of work, and I enjoyed that more, but even then there was still this internal tension that I was helping build something, but it was not mine, and I felt a limit on how much ownership or fulfillment I could have doing it that way. I was contributing, but I was not fully responsible for the outcome. And I think that phrase kind of matters because I wanted to be directly responsible for the outcome of my life, and I had been thus far with my journey to even get here. And that is one of the biggest reasons that I became an entrepreneur. It's not because entrepreneurship is easier, because it is not, not because it's more comfortable, because it definitely is not, but it's because I wanted the weight and the freedom of ownership. And at the same time, as I'm going through these two jobs, I discover a love for different books. The first book that I read that really changed my perspective was a pretty cliche one to say, but it is what it is for me. It was Rich Dad, Poor Dad, a great book by Robert Kiyosaki. If you have not read it. Or if you are an aspiring entrepreneur. Definitely a must-read book. And each of those books led me to another, and another, and another. And the stories in those books shifted a lot in me and shaped a lot of the way I thought and about what I thought was actually possible. And so in March of 2024, I founded Ourhead Strategy Group. And when I did, I did not have that all figured out. I did not have some perfect master plan. I did not have a huge book of clients waiting for me. I just had conviction. And how I took this leap was actually talking to a really good friend of mine. Where my thinking was, okay, I'm going to I think I'm gonna get some clients on the side, and once I can replace my current income, then I'll quit my job and go all in on this. And the amount of time that would go into earning the same or more than I earn now will free me up to then figure out what I want to do with my life. Because at that time I also didn't think that I wanted to do or be in the accounting and finance world forever. And that friend said to me, So you want to start an accounting firm? And I said, No. I just want to replace my income so I can buy time and space to figure out what I want to do. I don't want to do that my entire life. And he said, So you want to start an accounting firm? And I said, No. I I don't want to do that my entire life. He said, why would you have to do anything your entire life? And as simple as that sounds, that statement really hit a nerve with me and opened my eyes, and I was like, oh my gosh, you're right. I don't have to do anything forever. And so he also said to me in that conversation that if you don't have a plan B, then you will make your plan A work. And so that's when I committed to not doing this on the side and building something up and then quitting. But going out and saying, okay, if and when I can find one client that is willing to pay me to do this for them. When I can find one who says yes, I will quit my job that day. And so, a month or so later, and keep in mind too, I had zero network, basically, because I didn't place any importance of building a network in my spare time to feed someone else's company. It's just not how my brain worked. And so I had essentially zero network, so I'm having to reach out to anyone and everyone I knew in the US, which also I have been had been in the US for only a number of years at that point, not my entire life. I didn't have family here. And so I found someone with a business local who then agreed that they wanted to hire me, hire Arrowhead.
SPEAKER_00
And so then I put my notice in at the company I was working for so that I could have a clean break and then start serving this client.
SPEAKER_02
And so I also didn't have any savings, any buffer or or safety net, apart from I cashed out my 401k, what little I had in there, because I didn't contribute consistently because I knew that this was that was not gonna be my retirement plan. And I cashed that out and kept that sitting as in the brokerage account as my safety net if I need to, because this first client that I had wasn't enough to wasn't enough revenue to pay for our month's grocery bills, let alone our mortgage. And so that money sitting there bought would buy me about seven months. And so I drained what money I had in my savings account, which was I believe a little over fifteen hundred dollars, and uh put that into starting arrowhead, and I left the remaining six hundred dollars that I actually had in my savings account, in my savings account, and that that was all I had left. And I actually uh I actually still keep that savings account with just that six hundred dollars in it as a reminder to me. Um, and it's helped you know it's it's been a nice reminder at different times over this journey over the last few years. So but none of this could have been possible without having a wife who completely believed in me, especially at times when I was struggling to believe in myself. That is the difference between making this jump or not, because if I didn't have her support to do this and take a huge risk and a huge jump into the unknown, then I wouldn't have been able to live with myself and make that decision. And so founded out ahead and had that one client, and then all of a sudden my main role is in sales, and I've never sold anything apart from in high school my first, you know, quote unquote business was selling uh cans of ice cold coke, Coca-Cola, not cocaine, Coca-Cola at at at school during the summer. But those sold themselves. Um so I've never really had to sell anything. I've never been in a sales role and And I also would get really anxious and nervous on some of these different calls or meetings, talking to people, especially large groups. Especially when it comes to selling myself, which is what I had to do, which feels so unnatural. And so I went in and I said, I'm going to not treat sales like sales because sales is gross and I don't like it. I'm just gonna treat this as relationship building. And that built the foundation of how we do everything at Arrowhead. And since March of 2024, Arrowhead has been what I've been building. And none of that, if you had have told me back in 2017, if if if you had have laid that out in front of me and said this will be your path, I would have asked what drugs you were on, because that sounds crazy. Oh, you're gonna go, you're gonna get cut, you're gonna sleep on a stranger's couch, then you're gonna be in hindsight a dumbass and get a dog on a student visa, and then you're gonna what? And then I borrow a vacuum and then I marry her, and we move around from Missouri to North Carolina to Florida and then back to Missouri. And so through Arrowhead, I was then led to no trade secrets, because through building Arrowhead, I started to have hundreds of conversations with founders. Different industries, different backgrounds, different levels of success, different goals, and over time I started seeing patterns. The people who were growing were not always the smartest people in the room. They were not always the most talented. They were not always the ones with the most resources, but they often had similar traits. They were intentional. They owned their decisions, they were willing to face reality. They could stare at a challenge in the face and attack it head on. They managed pressure. They learned from failure. And so, you know, would see failure as the biggest blessing and opportunity to grow. They built real relationships. They had unwavering conviction in themselves, and they align their actions with their values in their life. And I just started to realize that most people only see the outcome. They see the company or the revenue or the growth or the recognition, the lifestyle, the exit, but they they don't see the internal system that created it, or the adversity that the person faced, or the pressure, or the doubt, the discipline, the long nights, the hours, the trade-offs, the hard conversations, the identity shifts, the lonely periods, the moments where someone just had to keep going before there was proof. And so that's what I wanted this podcast to explore. Not polished advice, not people pretending that they have always had it all figured out and there's some genius, but real conversations that I've been having for years about what it actually takes to build something meaningful, a meaningful business, a meaningful life, a meaningful family, and the different seasons that people go through. And so no trade secrets is the conversation for that. And underneath the realization that for a lot of us founders, the business and the person are so deeply intertwined, which is why the way you build your company is connected to the way you build your life, and so building a fulfilling life filled with purpose will directly impact how you build your company. And so that's the short version, you know, of my story. Just a kid from Auckland, New Zealand, who came to America, tried some new stuff, fell in love, and took a bet on myself. And I'm still at the beginning of my journey. And so I'm not sitting here acting like I'm someone who has arrived because I don't think there is an arrival. I will never pretend to have all the answers. I'm building too, I'm learning too, I'm still figuring it out too. But if there's one theme that's carried through my life this far and to this point, it's that you do not need the full map to move. You just need enough conviction and belief to take the next step. There are no trade secrets, there are people willing to follow their pull, their own journey, and keep becoming, you know, becoming the person that you are capable of in building the life that you say and know that you want. And everyone's journey is going to be different, and it's pointless to compare your journey to someone else's because they're just not going to look the same. Because you have different things that are important to you, and your path just will be different. So just trust the journey, take the next step in front of you, and more importantly, just bet on yourself and take the first step.
