West Point to Zone of Genius

Nine minutes into this conversation, Blaz Marolt delivered his pitch “I help coaches and consultants be and stay in their zone of genius while I do the rest” but it sounded rehearsed, polished, and completely hollow so I knew we had to stop.

What followed was a live coaching session inside the middle of a podcast, and it turned out to be one of the more useful things we have ever captured on this show, because it forced Blaz to say out loud, specifically, what problem he actually solves for people and that is the moment that sets the tone for everything else in this episode.

Blaz is a West Point graduate and US Army Ranger School alum who spent five years in the Slovenian military before moving through manufacturing operations, IT consulting, and regional operations leadership across eight countries. He later became chief of staff for a coaching company that grew from six to seven figures but in 2023, a new boss and a punitive performance plan burned him out so completely that he could not function. What he built afterward, a fractional COO practice for coaches and consultants, only became possible once he stopped listening to what everyone told him he should do and started listening to what he actually wanted.

The Pitch That Got Interrupted, and What Replaced It

Do everything else means nothing to me, are you cleaning my bathroom, cooking me lunch? You're massaging me while I'm on conference calls?

That was my response to Blaz's pitch, and I want to be direct about why. The phrase I do the rest is the kind of positioning that sounds specific but ends up saying nothing at all, it could mean anything, which means it means nothing to the person hearing it, a prospective client cannot picture what they are actually buying, and so, they won’t buy it.

What we did next is worth walking through, because it is a repeatable exercise for anyone whose pitch has gone soft the same way: I asked Blaz what he specifically does and he started listing all the tasks he helped with: fixing funnels, automating CRM systems, systematizing processes, leading teams. They are all true, all useful, but that still doesn’t answer the question, because a list of services is not a position.

“Instead of saying I do all things, I'm a fractional CEO for small business brands, small business coaches, whatever your avatar is, that helps them streamline their operational efficiency so they can grow and scale and make more money. At the end of the day, that's all we give a fuck about, right?”  — Deevo

The fix was not a new tagline, it was rather going back to the outcome his past ten clients actually experienced and building the language from there. Positioning built from your own imagined value rarely lands the way positioning built from the client's actual result does and I think Blaz left the conversation with a sharper answer than he arrived with, captured in real time, which is a rare thing for a podcast episode to actually produce.

Why a Man Raised in Instability Built His Life Around Structure

Blaz is candid that his relationship with structure was not born from a natural love of order but rather from the absence of it. He describes his childhood as marked by instability and abuse, with no consistent ground underneath him. At around 15, he started working toward a military career, specifically because the military was the first organization in his life that offered some stability he could count on.

He applied to West Point as an international cadet at a moment that could easily not have happened. Slovenia, his home country, sends a small number of cadets each year, and Blaz was mid-basic-training in the Slovenian military when the opportunity arrived, he got in, spent four years at West Point, then completed US Army Ranger School, before returning to Slovenia for five more years of military service.

“There was no stability in my life, since I had a lot of trauma and a lot of childhood abuse, which kind of led me to go into the military, which was an organization that always had stability. I knew exactly where I needed to be, what I needed to do, and what my career progression would be.”  — Blaz Marolt

What is worth noting is that Blaz did not simply absorb military structure passively, he resisted parts of it actively, particularly the culture of doing what you are told without asking why. His brain, as he describes it, needed to understand the reasoning behind a process before he could commit to it, and once he understood it, his instinct was immediately to look for ways to make it more efficient. That combination, a deep need for structure paired with an equally deep need to question and improve it, turns out to be the exact profile that eventually became his business.

The Performance Plan That Broke an Entire Team

In 2023, Blaz was thriving: he was a regional operations director, being considered for an even bigger role, running on what he calls dopamine from every win and then his business changed, and with that came a new leader with an idea that, in Blaz's account, was completely wrong: put the entire team on a performance improvement plan simultaneously, increase the pressure, and output would rise under the stress.

Eighty percent of the team quit after that, but Blaz stayed and absorbed the load, working extended hours while watching his own effectiveness collapse in real time. On what turned out to be his last functional day, he worked nine hours and produced roughly what he used to accomplish in thirty minutes at full capacity, he nearly got into two car accidents that same morning because his brain, in his words, was simply not there.

“The amount of work that I was able to do in those nine hours were equivalent to the amount of work I was able to do in 30 minutes when I wasn't burnt out. I think I got almost into two car crashes that morning because my brain was not there.”  — Blaz Marolt

The next morning he went to a doctor and said, plainly, that he could not do it anymore. Six months of sick leave followed before he felt capable of working again, this is the part of Blaz's story that resists the easy career narrative: his burnout did not come from working too little or lacking discipline. It came from an organizational decision made entirely above him, applied to a team that was already performing well, justified by a theory about stress and output that turned out to be exactly backwards.

Good at Something Is Not the Same as Aligned With It

After his sick leave, Blaz took a chief of staff role at a coaching company, using it as what he calls an anchor, a way to understand how a company actually operates from the inside before attempting anything fully on his own. He also told the CEO of that company something that, at the time, felt true: he wanted to eventually become a leadership and career coach, drawing on his 20 years of leadership experience.

He pursued that path for roughly a year, he had the credentials, the track record. Everyone around him, mentors, peers, people he trusted, told him he would be excellent at it, but he wasn’t, and couldn’t force himself to be aligned with it.

“There is something to be said about being good at something but not being in love with it. And unfortunately, most of society sort of falls into the former, which is just get good at something, get on the treadmill, stick with it.”  — Deevo

Blaz describes 2024 into 2025 as a genuine identity crisis. He retreated inward to the point that his girlfriend and his therapist were the only two people he spoke to regularly, while everything else became transactional, functional, minimal. It was inside that retreat that he started asking the question underneath the question: what do I actually want, and why does coaching feel wrong even though I can clearly do it.

The answer arrived in the final months of 2025, he realized that coaches and consultants, by his own definition, give advice, but they don’t build, which is what Blaz wanted. He wanted to be inside a company in an active, hands-on capacity, not offering guidance from the outside…once he named that distinction, everything reorganized around it.

“When I figured that one out, I can tell how amazing I felt, because my body, heart, and guts of my soul were completely aligned. That was the first time in my whole life that the whole alignment came into place, and I was like, yep, that's what I want to do.”  — Blaz Marolt

Who Is Blaz: The Legacy of Talking About What Nobody Else Will

When I asked Blaz who he is, stripped of the resume and the titles, his answer had nothing to do with operations or systems, he said he is someone who enjoys life, and that he works to live rather than lives to work, a distinction that took him 35 years to arrive at because taking care of himself had simply never been part of the plan before.

His answer about legacy was even more direct, if he could leave the planet today and hand over one true gift, it would be his openness about his own mental health journey, because he wants people to understand that visible achievement and internal struggle are not mutually exclusive, and that struggling does not mean something is broken about you.

“I want everybody to know that there's plenty of us that are out there that usually we're afraid to speak it because we think we're alone. If I would want to leave anything, it's that the person is not alone who has mental health struggles, and that there is a light at the end of the tunnel.”  — Blaz Marolt

This philosophy extends into how Blaz now chooses who stays in his life: in the six months following his identity shift, his entire circle changed, relationships that no longer aligned, some of them long-standing friendships, were let go, he is direct that this was difficult, particularly with people connected to years of shared history, but he no longer treats proximity or nostalgia as sufficient reason to maintain a relationship that costs him more than it gives, the same audit mentality he applies to a client's business, he now applies to his own life.

Key Takeaways

• A pitch that lists services is not a position, positioning built from the outcome your past clients actually experienced lands harder than positioning built from what sounds impressive.

• A need for structure and a need to question that structure are not contradictory, in Blaz’s case, that combination became the exact skill set his current business is built on.

• Burnout is not always a personal failure of discipline, sometimes it is the predictable result of a leadership decision applied to a team that was already performing well.

• Being good at something and being aligned with it are not the same thing, and most of society is trained to settle for the former…distinguishing between the two can take years, and it is worth the time.

• Alignment, when it actually arrives, tends to announce itself physically: Blaz in this case describes the moment he found his real direction as the first time his body, heart, and mind were all pointed the same way.

• Letting go of relationships that no longer fit is not the same as being cruel, applying the same clarity to your personal circle that you would apply to a business audit is a legitimate act of self-respect.

About Blaz Marolt

Blaz Marolt is a West Point graduate and US Army Ranger School alum who spent five years in the Slovenian military before moving into manufacturing operations, IT consulting, and regional operations leadership across eight countries. He later served as chief of staff for a coaching company that grew from six to seven figures. He now works as a fractional COO and operations strategist, helping coaches and consultants streamline their back-end operations so they can stay in their zone of genius. He is based in Slovenia and can be found on LinkedIn.

Listen to the Full Conversation

This episode of The Brand Lab covers live positioning coaching, burnout, childhood trauma and structure, the difference between skill and alignment, and what it looks like to rebuild your identity and your business at the same time.

🎧 LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE:

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and all major platforms.

Connect with Blaz Marolt on LinkedIn and his website.

Follow The Brand Lab and connect with Deevo at thebrandstoryteller.com