Mike Catoggio has been selling for thirty years, and he has the rare receipts to prove all of it worked. He sold as a stockbroker when the phone was the whole job. He founded Puf Cigarettes and learned what it costs to build a brand with your own money — a jump from Wall Street to founding an e-cigarette company that the Staten Island Advance covered back in 2014. And then he trained the floor at FreedInsure, the company Tino Lardi founded and built alone. It started when Mike began drilling a 17-year-old Tino to sell, and became a health and life insurance brokerage licensed across roughly forty states, run by one person, doing roughly $1.3M a year with three-quarters of the book renewing instead of being re-sold.
Mike's side of that machine is the craft: the pitch drilled until it was premeditated, the picture painted so the customer could see their own outcome, the tonality that carries conviction down a phone line, and the daily habits he compressed into three words the whole company ran on — "drips become puddles." The Premeditated Sales Academy's method is his method, refined across three decades of doors, desks, and dial tones.
Mike writes about the part of selling no software fixes: what you say, how you sound, and what you do every day before the phone rings. His rule, same as Tino's: no invented statistics, no borrowed war stories. Everything on this site was run on their own floor first.
Where to start with Mike's writing
The craft side: the pitch, the picture, the sound, and the habits.