Coach's Corner Audio

About Coach's Corner Audio

Renegade Breakthroughs is the weekly wake-up call for entrepreneurs who refuse to wait for permission. Host Robert Imbriale — coach, founder, straight-shooter — turns hard-won lessons on mindset, trust, and decision-making into moves you can use in the next 24 hours. No fluff, no ‘someday,’ just breakthroughs.

Publisher

Robert Imbriale

Category

business · business · education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

3 Jul 2021

Latest episode

16 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

67 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   16 Oct 2026

   How to Stand Out in the Age of AI: 4 Things No Machine Can Copy

   (https://robertimbriale.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Ep-17a.png) How to Stand Out in the Age of AI: 4 Things No Machine Can Copy AI can write a hundred blog posts before your coffee gets cold! So here’s the question that kept coming up on Episode 17 of Renegade Breakthroughs. If anybody can crank out content for free, how does a business owner stand out in the age of AI? My guest had a great answer. Aurora Winter is an MBA, a former TV writer and producer, the founder of Same Page Publishing, and the author of ten books, including Turn Words into Wealth: 7 Ways to Make 7 Figures as a Thought Leader. We go back a long way, because I spoke at her seminar in San Diego around 2006 and she came into my Carlsbad studio for an interview years later. Reconnecting with her was a treat! Why Aurora Rewrote Her Book Because of AI Aurora first wrote Turn Words into Wealth around 2021, and in March 2026 she rewrote nearly the whole thing. AI changed the game for every expert, coach and consultant out there, and she wanted to answer one question head on. How do you become the expert AI quotes instead of the one it replaces? Her answer starts with a simple observation. AI has made fast basically free, and when speed costs nothing, the thing that goes up in value is your brand! So she says now is the time to build your brand by design instead of by default. That means doing the identity work most people skip. Who are you, what do you care about, and what happened in your life that made you a deeper, more compassionate person? The 4 S’s: How to Stand Out in the Age of AI Aurora built her framework around four words that all start with S, and each one is something AI simply can’t fake. 1. Your Stories AI can produce generic stories all day long, but it can’t produce YOUR stories, because nobody else has them! Aurora’s advice is to gather your stories, get them concise, and collect the stories of the people whose lives you’ve changed, whether they’re clients, patients or family. And don’t only tell the wins. Aurora said our scars are part of the gift, like the night you’re awake at 3 a.m. because you can’t make payroll tomorrow, and the breakthrough that came after it. That’s the story people remember! 2. Your Smile People thrive around other people, and the more we get buried in digital content, the more we’re going to crave real human contact. So have the coffee, go to the lunch, and show up at the conference. I told Aurora about a recent trip to the supermarket and then Costco where I got everything done and never spoke to a single person. That’s the world we’re living in now. Want to stand out? Be the smiling face in the room! Zoom is nice, but it doesn’t replace being with someone in person. Who’s up for another Zoom call today? Not me! 3. Your Style Back when most people grew up in a village of 150 people, nobody wanted to be the tall poppy. Today you’re in a marketplace of 8 billion people, so you WANT to stick out. Lean into your quirks, your passions, your purpose, even your hobbies. Remember, you don’t need 8 billion fans. Aurora pointed out that about a thousand people who believe in what you’re doing can add up to a profitable business and a handsome living. 4. Socrates We still remember Socrates 2,000 years after his death because he asked powerful questions. AI hands us answers, and that comes with a hidden cost, because it can make us passive. Aurora coaches the other way. She asks a client a powerful question, then she stops talking and gives them a moment to think, and that moment of discovery builds a new connection in their brain at any age. I love this one, because it’s exactly how I work with people. Ask the question, then zip it! Listening is my super-power, and you hear a lot more when you’re not the one doing the talking. How a Short Book Becomes Your Best Salesperson Aurora shared a story every coach and consultant should hear. She was known as the founder of the Grief Coach Academy, and she wanted to find out whether people would hire her for help with their books, messaging and marketing. You can’t get two more different audiences! So she recorded a one-hour interview about marketing and turned it into a short book called Marketing Fast Track. She offered it free to her list for the cost of shipping and handling, added a few videos, and invited readers to book a call where she offered help with whatever problem they had. The result was $250,000 in 90 days! That money didn’t come from royalties, which don’t pile up that fast for most authors. It came from the next step. Alex Hormozi plays the same game on a much bigger scale, giving the book away and building the business on the back end. Aurora’s tip for the rest of us is to sign your book and hand it out at the Chamber of Commerce, because nobody throws away an autographed book! I’ve seen this work again and again. An e-book is fine, but a real book in the mail feels like a gift, and people don’t mind paying the shipping. In fact, a book is how I got into marketing in the first place. Dr. Jeffrey Lant’s Cash Copy said a one-page sales letter could make you $25,000, so I wrote one and made the $25,000. It took me a year, but I did it! Aurora also says to start marketing your book the day you start writing it. And if you’re retired and think you have nothing to share, think again, because a lifetime of wisdom is a terrible thing to let disappear. Don’t Miss the AI Wave I’ve been through this before. I had a computer in my hands in 1980 and got online in 1984, and I watched people panic over personal computers taking their jobs, over typing a credit card number online, and over e-commerce killing the retail stores. Same fear, again and again! AI is the fourth wave I’ve seen, and the pattern hasn’t changed. Think about a surfer. When the wave starts coming, you paddle so you’re moving when it reaches you, because if you miss it you’re left out in the cold. So dip your big toe in. Pull out your phone, ask AI a question, and watch the fear go away. Aurora compared this moment to the printing press and the Renaissance. One of her clients used AI to build a business over a three-day weekend for about $400, after being quoted $108,000 to build it the old way. He landed a $15,000 client the next week and passed $1 million within months! You can test an idea in a weekend now, and if it doesn’t fly, no harm, no foul. Here’s how I use it. I’ve kept one running conversation going since April as a sounding board, and I’ve rebuilt my website five or six times trying different things. I also gave it about 480,000 words I’ve written over the years, and it told me I have three distinct writing styles, one for sales letters, one for book chapters and one for landing pages. Try it yourself. Put your business idea into Claude or Grok and ask it to show you your blind spots. Key Takeaways AI made fast content free, so your brand is now worth more than ever.Stand out with Aurora’s 4 S’s: your Stories, your Smile, your Style, and the curiosity of Socrates.Tell your scars along with your wins. That’s where people connect.A short book can work as a silent salesperson. Aurora’s free book brought in $250,000 in 90 days.Every tech revolution brought the same fear. Paddle now so you catch the AI wave.There’s a lot more in the full conversation, including what happened when Aurora asked Claude to name itself. Listen to Episode 17 at RobertImbriale.com/listen (https://www.RobertImbriale.com/listen). To learn more about Aurora, her books and her free quiz on whether you’re ready to launch as a thought leader, visit AuroraWinter.com. (https://www.AuroraWinter.com.) If AI still feels overwhelming, grab my free guide, Win With AI Without the Overwhelm, on the home page at RobertImbriale.com. And if you know your business could be doing more but you’re too close to see what’s holding it back, let’s find it together. Book your Power Session at renegade.club/powersession (https://www.renegade.club/powersession) and let’s get to work! Be Outstanding! Robert Imbriale Your Renegade Coach Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! (https://www.renegade.club/110) This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now (https://www.renegade.club/110) Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet Robert (https://robertimbriale.com/meet-robert/)Resources (https://robertimbriale.com/meet-robert/)Coaching with Robert (https://robertimbriale.com/media/)

2. 

   9 Oct 2026

   AI Business Ideas for Beginners: 4 Proven Rules, Zero Fear

   (https://robertimbriale.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Ep-16a.jpg) AI Business Ideas for Beginners: 4 Proven Rules, Zero Fear Every week I get emails and calls from people who are scared. They’ve watched the big tech companies lay off programmers by the thousands, and they’re asking me the same question again and again. “Rob, what am I going to do?” So I decided to answer it in a very specific way, not with a generic “you’ll find something else.” If AI took my job tomorrow, I already know what I’d do, and in this post I’m going to share the AI business ideas for beginners that I would start with, the four rules I’d use to choose one, and the 30-day plan I’d follow. Now, I’ve worked for myself since 1995, so treat this as a thought experiment, but I’m not immune either! I’ve used Photoshop since around version 2.0 and InDesign back when it was still PageMaker. Today I can hand Grok a photo and a title, and in three minutes I get a video poster that would have taken me an hour in Photoshop. A lot of skills I spent years building are going by the wayside, and I feel it too. I’ve Seen This Movie Before In my adult life I’ve lived through three massive shifts. I first got my hands on a computer in 1980, my uncle’s TRS-80, when I was 16 and had just learned to drive. In 1984 I got online for the first time on a Commodore 64, and that’s when everything clicked for me. I made my first online sale in 1989 on a bulletin board system, four years before the World Wide Web, and I built my first website in 1993. Every one of those shifts came with the same fear. Computers were going to ruin everything! The internet was going to wipe out brick and mortar stores! Well, you can still go to Best Buy and you can still go to Walmart. Yes, things changed, and for the people who moved early a whole new world of business opened up! The AI revolution we’re in right now is the same story all over again, with all the hype and all the fear! Things are going to be different, and I believe that if we do this right, things are going to be a lot better. Fear or Challenge? You Get to Choose Back in 1995, at the last company I ever worked for, a snowstorm shut down our office in Farmingdale, Long Island. We dug about 50 employees’ cars out of the parking lot, and there were UPS packages that still had to go out overnight to Florida. So I said I’d take them. Everyone else was talking about how terrible the snow was, but I grew up driving in Montreal winters and I thought, this is freaking amazing! That’s the whole lesson. You can look at something as a disaster, or you can change the story in your mind and call it a challenge. Fear is on one side and challenge is on the other, and you can’t feel both at the same time. For me, AI is a game where I get to say, let me try this, let me ask it that, and see what comes back! There are no real AI gurus out there, because nobody can be a guru on something changing this fast. And that means you get to be the one who learns it by playing with it. Why Your Experience Is Your Biggest Asset Here’s the one thing that never goes away, no matter how good the tools get, and that’s your experience! AI gives me graphics all the time where the colors don’t work, the layout isn’t balanced, or there isn’t enough room around the text. I catch that because I’ve done this work for decades. Someone with no background just takes what AI hands them and runs with it, and sometimes it’s really wrong. They won’t even know. So drop the fear a little bit, because AI may take your job, but it can’t take your judgment. In fact, your judgment is exactly what clients will pay for! My 4 Rules for Choosing an AI Business I actually started with seven or eight rules and boiled them down to four. Remember, you’re not starting a business IN AI. You’re using AI as a tool, like a digital hammer, and most of the subscriptions run about $20 a month. Rule 1: Cash Has to Come In Within 30 Days Not six months and not years, because you’ve got to eat! Whatever you choose has to put money in your pocket quickly, so you can keep the lights on while you build. Rule 2: Almost No Startup Costs You already have a laptop, or at least a phone, plus an internet connection. Add a $20 AI subscription and you’re in business, with no thousands of dollars up front! Rule 3: Use the Knowledge You Already Have Don’t wander too far outside your lane. You know your industry better than anybody. You know why people call your company, what they’re looking for, and what questions they need answered. That’s an asset, and it doesn’t get sunset just because a tool changed. Rule 4: AI Should Make Your Work Cheaper to Deliver, Not Obsolete A website that once cost $20,000 to build, I could now deliver for a lot less, and much faster, because AI does the heavy lifting. My experience still matters, and now I simply deliver it faster! The Business I’d Start: AI Help for Local Businesses Think about a restaurant owner working 12 and 18 hour days, seven days a week. Do you think they have any space in their brain to figure out how AI can help them? No. But would they hire somebody to do it for them? Sure they would! The same goes for small manufacturers, retail stores, print shops and so many other local businesses. They know AI matters, but they don’t know where to start. Here are some of the AI business ideas for beginners I’d look at first. **An AI receptionist.** Zoom now offers an AI assistant for its phone system. You build a knowledge base behind it, and it answers calls 24/7. Instead of 50 calls waiting in the morning, the staff has one or two messages the AI couldn’t handle. When I set up Zoom Phone at a farm I worked with, the staff was happier because they weren’t answering the same question all day. **Done-for-you social media content.** I used to spend an hour finding one photo for one post. Now I describe the concept and AI gives me an image in a couple of minutes. Sell a package of 30, 60 or 90 posts a month and get paid every month. **A website improvement report.** After rebuilding a friend’s website, I asked AI to review the homepage and list everything it would improve. It found about ten items, and after we made those changes, his traffic started going up every month. You don’t need to be a web developer to sell a one or two page report like that. **A follow-up system.** When a visitor leaves a website without buying, capture their email and follow up based on what they looked at. It’s a little more complicated, so you get a little more money for it. **Answers on demand.** A friend fed his medical test results into AI, asked all the questions his seven-minute doctor’s appointment never allowed, and brought a one-page summary to his doctor. The doctor was blown away, and the lesson here is bigger than medicine. People will pay someone who already knows the right questions to ask. Not Technical? Turn Your Old Job Into a Service This is where your experience pays off. A laid-off marketer can offer done-for-you content for local businesses. A laid-off customer service rep can set up AI customer service and train the staff on it, because they’ve been in the trenches and know the mistakes companies make. You don’t have to become an AI guru to make these AI business ideas for beginners work. You simply have to know more than the person who hasn’t started yet! Not sure what fits you? Ask AI! Tell it your experience and background, then ask what you could sell using AI. I’ve done this with a couple of clients, and the answers blew all of us away. The 30-Day Plan 1. **Week 1:** Pick one industry. Learn two or three tools well enough to set them up for someone else. 2. **Week 2:** Do it for one business you know, cheap or even free, in exchange for a testimonial. 3. **Week 3:** Contact 20 local businesses and offer your service, with that testimonial up front. 4. **Week 4:** Close your first two or three clients. Then raise your price for the next batch. It starts slow, and that’s okay. Years ago I taught people who were stuck with 5,000 postcards in the garage to mail just 100 a week, one roll of stamps at a time. The sales came in, so they mailed 200, then 400, and before long they were buying more postcards! Your business grows the same way, one client, then two, then three. Start Before You Have To In 1995 I built my business around a full-time job. I got up an hour early to work on it, ate a bagel in the car at lunch while I ran errands, and spent two or three hours on it after dinner. Start building now, so if your job does go away, you already have something working for you! — *Want help picking the version of this business that fits your experience? Most people don’t have a tactics problem. They have a strategy problem they’re too close to see, and from the outside it jumps out in minutes. Book a Power Session with me at renegade.club/powersession (https://www.renegade.club/powersession) and let’s map it out together! Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! (https://www.renegade.club/110) This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now (https://www.renegade.club/110) Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet Robert (https://robertimbriale.com/meet-robert/)Resources (https://robertimbriale.com/meet-robert/)Coaching with Robert (https://robertimbriale.com/media/)

3. 

   1 Oct 2026

   Strong and Flexible: How to Handle Setbacks in Business

   (https://robertimbriale.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Ep-15.jpg) Strong and Flexible: How to Handle Setbacks in Business This week’s episode of Renegade Breakthroughs came to you earlier than usual, and it came to you shorter than usual. Let me explain. Late on the night before the show, we started getting text messages from the power company saying they planned to shut off our power sometime in the next 24 to 48 hours, and that it could stay off for several days! So I recorded the show that morning, uploaded it while I still could, and let the system send it out on schedule whether I had electricity or not. That little decision is really the whole lesson of this episode, because it’s a lesson about how to handle setbacks in business when life decides to rearrange your plans for you. A Week Where Everything Went Sideways The power shutoff wasn’t the only thing. It had been one of those weeks! I had to cancel our guest and reschedule her, and she was very understanding about it. Someone who was supposed to interview me called at the last minute to say they had no internet, so that got pushed too. Even at the store, tap to pay failed three or four times before it finally went through! And my hosting account went down for three full days. It was a problem on their side, and there was nothing I could do but stay on them until it was fixed. I’ll be honest with you, I was getting really frustrated. Three days and my websites are still dark? Then I took a deep breath and reminded myself that it’s not the end of the world, the sites would come back, and someone would figure out what the problem was. And sure enough, they did! Then the power company started texting. Why the Lights Were Going Out Here’s the backstory, because it matters. Normally when they shut the power off around here, it’s because of wind, since wind knocks power lines down, downed lines throw sparks, and sparks start fires. Put fire together with wind, heat, and dry brush and you have a recipe for disaster! We lived through that disaster in 2007. San Diego County lost an enormous number of homes in those wildfires. I remember driving up to the top of a mountain with my video camera on a tripod and turning it a full 360 degrees, and in every direction something was burning. It was insane! We were evacuated. And that happened to be the week Dan Kennedy was scheduled to interview me, which I had planned to do from my studio on my good microphone. Instead I did it on a cordless handset from the landline. The content was still good, but it sure wasn’t the interview I had planned! After the fires, the power company took the blame, the lawsuits followed, and in the years since, our electric rates have gone up and up. Now the response to any threat is simple. Turn the power off! We’ve had outages here that lasted five days because it was windy and warm. This time the forecast showed no wind at all, just heat, with highs of 100 to 108 degrees for the next week. I’d never seen them cut the power for heat alone, and last month 108 degrees wouldn’t have triggered anything. But it’s October now, and a new set of rules apparently comes with the new month. Lesson One: Stay Strong, but Stay Flexible I’ve been teaching this for a long time, and this week I got to live it. When a challenge hits, you have to stay strong, which simply means you decide, right up front, that you’re going to get through it. A few days without power is a challenge. It is NOT the end of the world! But strong by itself isn’t enough, because you also have to be flexible. Something that’s too brittle breaks under pressure, while something that can bend survives the storm. So what did flexing look like for me? – I recorded the show early so it would go out even if I had no power. – We watered the grove heavily ahead of time. The ag pumps pull water up from 500 feet down and push it up the side of a mountain, and they need a lot of electricity. With moisture in the soil, the trees have a better chance of riding it out. – I charged the batteries, dusted off the generator, and planned a run for gasoline so it’s ready the minute the lights go out. – I planned for the internet too, with a battery for the cellular booster so we might keep some kind of connection going. Phoebe and I sat down and made a full list of what needed to happen, and I spent the day checking it off. If the power never goes out, and that’s happened before, we’re fine. If it does go out, we have a plan and we’ll get through it. Either way we’re okay! The same thing helped me with the website outage, because I already had a backup plan in my pocket. If the host couldn’t get things running again, I knew exactly where I’d move the sites and how I’d rebuild them. Having that flex ready took a lot of the frustration out of it! Lesson Two: Anger Doesn’t Fix Anything Some people react to this kind of thing with anger. Why me? I’m just trying to live my life! And I understand that feeling. But I’ve lived long enough to know that life is going to get in the way of your best-laid plans. That is simply the way it is. Some things are out of your hands, and I can’t tell the power company what to do. They may get a piece of my mind in a tweet, but that’s about the extent of my influence, because they’re going to do what they’re going to do. So what does getting angry accomplish? It hurts you! There is nothing in your body that loves anger. Go ahead and be disappointed for a minute, let it out, and get it out of your system. Then go straight to the solution and ask yourself, what do I need to do next? Lesson Three: Look at What Hasn’t Changed When something bad happens, most people focus completely on what changed, which is natural, and it’s also the hardest place to stand. So the question I always ask is, what hasn’t changed? Make a list of everything that’s still the same. You still have your skills, your relationships, your ideas, and your ability to work! When you focus there, you keep your comfort and your security, and you stay grounded. And from that grounded place, it’s a lot easier to deal with the one thing that did change. Lesson Four: Resourcefulness Is Your Superpower Here’s where so many entrepreneurs get stuck. An obstacle appears, and they decide the road is closed and there’s no point going any further. Really? Take another road! Get a helicopter, or find someone with a bulldozer and clear the road. There is always a way through if you’re willing to look for it. I could have told myself that without power for a few days, there’s nothing I can do for my business. Why would I ever think that way? Even with nothing but a pad and paper, I can write down ideas, and that would be a win! I can get farm work done on the ranch in the cooler morning and evening hours, and in the heat of the day maybe we go into town where there’s air conditioning. It’s an unplanned break, but a break is a break! You are never totally helpless. If you’re feeling helpless, it usually means you haven’t gotten resourceful yet! Finding the way through has always been my superpower, and I teach people again and again that it can be yours too. Flex or Break We’re in a time of enormous change right now, and with change comes chaos. I believe October may be one of the more chaotic months we’ve seen, so the question for you is a simple one. How are you going to flex with it? How are you going to bend without breaking? I’m not sharing my week because I want sympathy. I’m sharing it because it’s real, it’s happening right here and right now, and you can learn from it. Every situation life throws at you is a chance to learn about yourself, learn how you respond, and find a better way to respond next time. Take the time to learn the lesson, and it will make you stronger and smarter for the next one, because life is always going to throw something at you! Stay strong, stay flexible, and go find your way through! — *Are you staring at an obstacle in your business and can’t see the way around it? That’s almost never a tactics problem. It’s a strategy problem you’re simply too close to see, and from the outside it jumps out in minutes. Book a Power Session with me at renegade.club/powersession (https://www.renegade.club/powersession) and let’s find your way through together! Then listen to the full episode of Renegade Breakthroughs at RobertImbriale.com/list (https://www.robertimbriale.com/listen)en. We’ll be back next week with a full show and a guest.* Download This FREE Library AI Prompts that can save you 10 or more hours per week! (https://www.renegade.club/110) This is for you if you’re an entrepreneur, coach, consultant, or creator who: – Wears too many hats and never has enough hours in the day – Knows AI *should* be saving you time but hasn’t cracked how – Would rather spend your energy on the work only you can do – not on writing every email, caption, and offer from scratch If that’s you, this library was built for exactly where you are right now! Download Now (https://www.renegade.club/110) Free instant access. No credit card, no catch. Meet Robert (https://robertimbriale.com/meet-robert/)Resources (https://robertimbriale.com/meet-robert/)Media (https://robertimbriale.com/media/)

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