Equity Redefined: How I Stopped Letting Email Steal My Opportunities
One of the greatest tools I have in my toolbox right now is being a compliment purveyor and being educated by AI and reality at the same time. AI is not here to take over my work; it is an accompaniment. It is a teacher, not always a master, and because of that, I get an unbelievable amount of work done with it every day.
I do a lot of things. I am licensed in real estate. I am a barber. I am a voice actor. I am a writer. I am a publisher. I have worked in radio and I have run magazines. If there is one thing I have learned through trial and error in this industry, it is this: if you want to exist forever, keep reinventing yourself and follow your hobbies all the way through.
When Urban Network did not work out, I did not have to beg any of the other magazines for a job. I was able to work at KKBT because I had already been an announcer. When that ended, I took the lessons I had learned and created my own magazine. When I did not want to do the magazine anymore, I turned it into a digital publication. From that digital publication, I built a website that kept growing in different directions. At every stage, I was not starting from zero; I was cashing in on equity I had already built.
Radio Facts is a perfect example. It is back up, but it is not what it used to be, and that is by design. At one time it had over a million backlinks; now it has around a hundred thousand that I have been able to claw back (and growing). Those links connect back to Radio Facts from some of the biggest sites in the world, including outlets like HuffPost, Forbes, YouTube, Wikipedia, major TV networks, celebrity links and more. That is brand equity. The stupid move would be to just repeat what I did before. The smart move is to redefine what equity means now and build on that while tweaking the delivery.
We have to know when the once?sexy girl in the room is now clinging to a barstool, ordering an Ensure and Pedialyte smoothie, while she simultaneously looks for a place to hang her teeth (instead of her purse). Nobody GAS about “Legacy” in todays industry because legacy does not pay bills. Acumen does. “Were” and “Are” are at opposite ends of the spectrum but the “Are” always carries more weight.
Meanwhile, there is the beast almost all of us deal with: email. On a typical day, I get anywhere from 300 to 600 emails. That is way too many for any human to reasonably deal with, especially when you are trying to actually run businesses instead of just babysitting an inbox. Most people know this weight in their chest when they open email after a long day: hundreds of unread messages, most of them noise.
But here is where it got dangerous for me: the noise started costing me real money and real opportunities. I missed a huge opportunity from Disney. I missed another from a major corporate player outside the music industry that does film and TV. Not because I was not qualified or interested, but because their emails got buried under people who wanted something for nothing, people acting like they knew me, and people trying to sell me via “Hey Kevin” like we were old friends.
So I did what I always do: I reinvented the process.
I took one of my email addresses, the one where everything forwards so I can get the whole mess in one place, and I pointed Claude at it. I had it scan 12 months of email and answer a few simple questions:
The smallest percentage, which will not surprise anyone who has a public profile, were the people who came direct with real opportunities. The largest were people who wanted something for nothing. And the cruel irony was this: the rare, real opportunities were the most likely to get lost, buried in spam folders, blocked by filters, or buried under the avalanche of fake familiarity and empty asks.
That is when I changed my workflow completely. Instead of me going through my inbox every day, which is stressful, exhausting, and a complete misuse of my time, I ask Claude one question:
“Is there any email that came in today that I actually need to read or pay attention to?”
By connecting AI to my email in a smart way, I let it handle the triage. It reads everything, classifies it, and surfaces only what truly matters, urgent, genuine, or high value communication. I no longer live inside my inbox. I let AI protect my attention and, more importantly, my equity.
This is what I mean by “Equity Redefined.” Equity is not just backlinks, brand names, or past jobs. It is the cumulative value of all the relationships, reputation, and opportunities you have built over decades. For me, that equity lives in Radio Facts, in my licenses, in my skills, in the people who know my work, and now in the systems I have built around AI. Reinvention is not optional. It is the business model. And AI, used as an accompaniment instead of a master, is how I scale, how I make myself “Scale–Able,” without burning myself out in a sea of emails.