We Got Smaller on Purpose. Here's What Grew.

Dear SUCCESS family,

LinkedIn started pinging me this week with congratulations on one year as Managing Director of SUCCESS. I almost scrolled past it. Then I sat with it for a minute and thought it might be worth writing down what actually happened in that year, including the parts that weren’t fun.

Some background for anyone who came in late: eXp World Holdings, now AGNT, Inc., bought SUCCESS back in 2020. For most of the five years after that, I was hands off. Good people from the eXp ecosystem took on various roles to expand the brand, and I let them run. By 2025, we had made a number of investments, and outside of the magazine, most of them had not paid off. Not failed exactly. Just not paid off. At some point, the honest read on that situation is that somebody who can make decisions has to get close to it, and that somebody was me.

So I got involved. The work in front of us was to trim back some of the projects and put the energy into fewer, better ones. Green shoots instead of a wide field of things that were technically alive.

I want to be straight about what that felt like inside the building because I think we do each other a disservice when we describe this kind of year as a clean strategic pivot. Cutting back in order to grow later is never easy on a team. There were protests from some of the staff. People who cared about what they were building and had every right to be upset that it was being stopped. Some people opted out and took severance. About a dozen of us stayed on, and we pivoted.

Here is the accounting, plainly.

When I started there were roughly 35 people on the payroll in some fashion, from W2 employees to significant 1099 contractors doing real work for the company. Payroll was over $4 million a year. Today we are around 13 people and payroll is around $1.4 million a year. Revenue a year ago was, to put it generously, close to nonexistent.

That’s the hard half. Here’s the other half, which is the reason I’m writing this at all.

Our biggest green shoot this year is SUCCESS® Certified Coaching™. It has become a real new revenue stream, built on an identity-first method rather than another generic coaching curriculum, and it’s the first thing in a long while where the money and the mission point in the same direction. It works because it’s what SUCCESS has actually been about for 129 years, packaged in a way somebody can carry into their own practice.

Part of why it works is who’s teaching it. We attracted Matthew Ferry, a master coach who has spent decades on this material and did not need us, and alongside him Kristen Ferry, a true operator. If you have ever tried to build something with brilliant teachers and no operator, you know which of those two is harder to find. We got both.

Beyond coaching, we replatformed SUCCESS.com and JimRohn.com, both of which needed it. We launched SUCCESS Events. We ran a series of labs projects, some of which have graduated out of the lab and are now built into other platforms, which is exactly what a lab is supposed to produce. And we got the team up to speed on vibe software development and thinking agentically, which sounds like a technology note and isn’t. It’s the difference between a 13-person company that can only do 13 people’s worth of work and one that can’t be measured that way anymore. That shift is why the second list is longer than the first.

The last thing on the list matters most to me. Through all of it, the magazine team executed flawlessly. Our core product did not miss a beat. Not a late issue, not a soft one, not a quarter where you could feel the turbulence in the pages. Anyone who has been through a restructuring knows how rare that is. Usually the flagship is the first thing to wobble. Ours didn’t, and that is entirely on the people who make it.

What I’d take from the year, if I’m honest, is that the cutting was the easy part to decide and the hard part to live through, and the building was the reverse. Anyone can look at a P&L and see which lines have to go. Sitting across from people who believed in what they were doing while you tell them it’s over is a different thing, and I don’t think it should ever get comfortable. The people who stayed didn’t stay because it was pleasant. They stayed because they thought there was something on the other side worth getting to.

Twelve months later I think they were right. We’re smaller, we’re solvent, we have a product line people are paying for, and we have more capability per person than we had with three times the headcount. Think of this as base camp—the work starts now.

Year two is where we find out what this smaller, sharper version of SUCCESS can actually build. I’ll keep writing it down as it happens, the misses along with the rest, the way I have all year.

More soon.

Keep building what matters.

–Glenn