Christian Brim has spent 28 years running Core Group, a firm that helps entrepreneurs in creative industries trade financial anxiety for clarity. But the conversation with Sam Sapp quickly moves past spreadsheets. Christian argues that the same inflated ego that makes entrepreneurs successful is the exact thing that caps their growth, and he ties that idea to a study where a founder's brain lit up identically for photos of their kids and their business. From there it goes to delegation, faith, bankruptcy in the oil patch, and why he still can't explain why he bet everything on a franchise in 1997.
What You'll Hear
- Why Christian won't engage with anyone who pitches him on LinkedIn before asking a single question
- The MRI study showing a founder's brain treats their business the same as their own children
- How a family bankruptcy in the oil patch during Christian's high school years shaped his view of business
- The day the Prudential recruiter told him he'd failed the sales aptitude test, and why he laughed
- Why he bought a franchise on a credit card in 1997 with two young kids at home
- The home church calling he tried to refuse, and the tabernacle moment that answered it
- His take on why the modern American church is playing 'sin management' instead of preaching the gospel
- The one-line warning he'd give his 21 year old self: beware the power of self deception
Why LinkedIn pitch slaps don't work, and what does
Sam and Christian met through a LinkedIn outreach message, which gave them an honest opening to talk about how broken the platform has become. Christian's line is direct. If someone buys a Sales Navigator seat and pitches him the second they connect, he won't engage, even if they're selling exactly what he needs. It's a matter of principle. Don't start a conversation you haven't earned.
Sam picks up the thread with a story about a networking meeting where a stranger locked eyes with him across the room, crossed it, and launched straight into a pitch. Sam said he felt like chum in the water. There was a moment of excitement, a hope that a real conversation was about to happen, and then nothing but the pitch.
Christian's analogy lands hard. Walking up to a stranger at a bar and asking them to go home with you is not a sales strategy. It might work one time in a thousand, but even then, the standard it sets is the problem. The alternative, he says, is closer to karaoke. Be interesting. Be entertaining. Give value first. People gravitate toward that.
It's a theme that returns later in the conversation. The transactional version of business, faith, and relationships all fail for the same reason. They skip the human part. Sam's read is simpler. His one professional gift, he says, is being interesting enough that other people find him interesting back, and that's mostly been enough.
The ego that builds the business is the ego that caps it
Christian's current work is helping successful entrepreneurs get unstuck at the plateaus. He's identified a pattern. The first plateau usually hits when a founder needs to hire. But the bigger plateau, the one that traps people with 25 employees, is when the business is still fundamentally reliant on the owner. They're the bottleneck.
Why does it happen? Christian calls it an ego problem, and he's careful about how he frames it. The characteristics that make an entrepreneur successful require an inflated ego in the first place. You have to believe in yourself enough to ignore the naysayers and move on what's possible instead of what is. He puts it plainly. We're all a little mentally ill when we start this.
The catch is that the same trait becomes a liability. Founders who can't delegate authority, not just tasks but the actual right to make the call, stay stuck. Christian is specific on the distinction. Responsibility is not authority. If every important decision still has to flow through the founder, the team is executing, not leading.
Sam names the paradox directly. If something's wrong with the company, it's on leadership. You also need the ego to push through. And yet that same ego is what caps you. Three things that shouldn't play well together, but have to find a happy medium.
Christian's answer is that the mature entrepreneur eventually comes to understand that the business is not them. There's an identity underneath that doesn't depend on company outcomes. If you can't untangle the two, every decision becomes existential. Screw it up, and you become a failure. That's not true, but it's the perception, and it's enough to keep a founder frozen.
The MRI study that explains 'that's my baby'
This is the point in the conversation where Christian shares the study that reframed how he thinks about founder identity. Researchers put 25 male entrepreneurs in an MRI machine and showed them photos of their own children, their business, and a mix of other images. The part of the brain that lit up when they saw their kids was the exact same region that lit up when they saw their business.
Christian's takeaway. When an entrepreneur calls the company their baby, they mean it literally. The brain is not metaphorical about it. That's why success feels like pride and a down quarter feels like shame. The business is wired as an extension of the self.
He notes the study was only run on male entrepreneurs and doesn't claim the wiring is identical for women. But the implication for any founder is the same. You can't rewire your brain out of this pattern. What you can do is understand it and build a separate identity that exists outside the company.
He draws the parallel to parenting. A good parent learns that their child's success or failure is not their own. You did your best. The credit and the blame both belong to the kid. The same logic applies to a business. The entrepreneur has to make that distinction consciously, because biology isn't going to do it for them.
This is where the phrase 'ego tension' sits at the center of the episode. It's the gap between the ego you need to start and the ego you need to shed to scale. Christian says it's a willing transaction, not an extinction. God, or growth, or maturity, whatever you want to call it, doesn't want you to stop being you. It wants your will to stop being the center of everything.
From the oil patch to a franchise on a credit card
Christian grew up in a small town in Oklahoma. His earliest career ambition, in second grade, was astrophysicist, inspired by Carl Sagan. His family ran a multi generational business in the oil patch. When he was in high school, that business went bankrupt. Family members declared bankruptcy and left the state for work. The material loss wasn't what hit him. It was watching the family come apart.
He went to college on a vague plan to be an investment banker, landed in accounting because someone told him it was the hardest major in the business school, and rode the feeder system into public accounting. He remembers sitting with a partner on a weekend engagement, listening to the partner call his wife to say he'd be a few more hours. That was the moment he decided the partner track wasn't a prize worth chasing.
He lasted long enough to start a family, realized constant travel wasn't the life he wanted, and left to become a commercial lender at a small Oklahoma bank. The bank got acquired by a larger Kansas City based bank with what Christian describes as a regressive 1950s culture. He had to put on a suit coat just to walk to the bathroom. Every loan officer in the room was a white male. He didn't fit.
He started applying to brokerage houses, chasing his old Wall Street era fascination. Every one of them rejected him. The last call came from a Prudential recruiter who told him he'd failed the sales aptitude test. He laughed out loud on the phone. In the moment, he says, he knew it was a door being closed on purpose.
What he did next still surprises him. He saw a classified ad in the back of the Journal of Accountancy for a franchise called Comprehensive Business Services, reached out to the owner, took out an SBA loan, flew to Orange County for a three week training, and put the rest on a credit card. He had two kids and a part time working wife. He opened the franchise in 1997 and sold 30 clients in his first 12 months. That was the origin of Core Group.
Burning the boats, and why some founders never could any other way
Christian doesn't pretend the franchise leap was a calm, well reasoned move. He can't reconstruct his own mindset. What he can say is this. He had the foresight to realize that the longer he stayed on his current path, the more success and responsibility would accumulate, and the harder the leap would get. He also had nothing to lose.
He describes the first year of the franchise as Cortez burning his ships. No fallback. He had to go sell. The training had been hands on. The franchise took trainees into Orange County shopping centers and warehouse districts for live cold calls, then had them run the same plays on the phone the next morning. For accountants, most of whom couldn't sell anything, that was unusual and it worked.
Sam sharpens the point. For some founders, the boats have to be burned. They would never have made it on a safer runway. Christian agrees and goes further. He meets a lot of entrepreneur curious people running side hustles on top of a day job. His advice is blunt. If you don't have a fire, don't do it. There's too much you don't know, too much that will suck, and without real hunger you won't push through.
They touch on a line attributed to various founders, including the CEO of Nvidia. If you could go back and start over knowing the full cost, would you? Most say no. Christian connects the idea to faith. God doesn't show us the whole future, he says, because we couldn't handle it. The PayPal founders have made the same observation about fraud and compliance. If they'd known what they were walking into, they never would have started.
For Christian, starting a business wasn't a choice. Looking back, he believes it's what he was created to do. He'd never have been satisfied working for someone else, no matter what they paid him. At the time, he thought he was chasing control of his finances. The deeper motive only became clear later.
When faith and work stop living in separate rooms
For most of his career, Christian kept his faith and his business in separate compartments. He never hid what he believed, but he didn't bring it into the office. No religious conversations. No political ones. Polite company rules.
Five years ago that started changing. He describes it as God calling him out. The compartmentalization, he now says, lent itself to a quiet lack of integrity. Integrity in the literal sense. Being the same person in church, at work, and at a bar. Not the same words in every room, but the same core. When he carved faith out of the business, he gave himself permission to operate by slightly different rules there.
Then, three years ago, he felt called to start a home church. He resisted hard. He'd been part of a large congregation and a small Sunday school class for 30 years. He didn't feel worthy of what was being asked of him. Driving to work one morning, he describes an oppressive, dark feeling settling over him, beyond depression, once he realized what was actually being asked.
He got to the office and took a scheduled call with his business coach, a former Orthodox rabbi. Christian asked him what the spiritual qualifications were to be a priest in the Old Testament. As the coach started referencing the tabernacle, Christian says the volume on the call seemed to drop. He was taken back to a summer camp years earlier, where he'd volunteered as a high school counselor with no kids of his own in high school, and had an encounter he describes as being filled to the point of saying, no more, I can't take any more of you. The answer that came, he says, was simple. You are worthy because I am.
He started the home church. In the three years since, he says he doesn't force faith into conversations, but he stopped avoiding them. When scripture is relevant, he brings it, and it hasn't mattered whether the other person is Christian. Doors have opened to people he'd never have met under the old rules. He's careful to say the business hasn't boomed because of it. That wasn't the deal. What changed was access.
Sin management, the pursuit of truth, and the power of self deception
The last third of the conversation moves into harder theological territory. Christian references a Tony Campolo story he once heard in person. Campolo said a rough word from the pulpit and felt the collective gasp from the congregation. His response. You are more upset about that word than you are about the homelessness and addiction in your community. That, Christian says, is the problem with what he calls the modern American church. It's playing small ball. Sin management. Regulating behavior around what you shouldn't do, while missing the larger call.
He doesn't spare any denomination. Watching the new pope step out onto St. Peter's Square, he says, felt like the furthest thing from the church Christ established. He says the same of 90 percent of American congregations, regardless of size or label. Sunday mornings, he thinks, are often self help dressed up as gospel.
Sam asks the more useful question. If someone is listening and isn't sure what to believe, how do they start looking for truth? Christian draws a line between many truths and the one truth. There are half truths everywhere. The question he says every person has to answer is who Jesus was. You can disagree with what he said. You don't get to ignore the question.
The wrap up includes Sam's standing prompt about giants. Christian names his grandmother, who spent years introducing him to Christ. He tells a hard story about lying to her on her deathbed at 15, saying he believed when he didn't. Her love, he says, kept him on the path anyway.
For the closing line, Christian offers the pithy saying he keeps coming back to. Beware the power of self deception. If he could go back and tell his 21 year old self one thing, that would be it. Much of his life, he says, he was flat out lying to himself and didn't know he was doing it. Sam ties it back to the plateaus. Getting out of your own way. Christian agrees. That's the whole game.
About Christian Brim
Christian Brim is the founder of Core Group, a 28 year old firm that helps entrepreneurs in creative industries move from financial anxiety to clarity around their money. At the time of recording he was rebranding a separate coaching and consulting practice aimed at successful entrepreneurs who have hit a plateau. He also leads a home church and draws heavily on his faith in how he works with founders.