How SAGE became SAGE

SAGE didn’t start with a business plan. It started with a decision Bari had to make — the kind where there’s a safe option and a terrifying one, and you know in your gut which one you’re supposed to pick.

It was 2004. She’d just come through the hardest season of her life, and she needed to figure out what came next. There was a practical option on the table — stable, comfortable, close to family. And there was New York City, where she didn’t know anyone and couldn’t really afford to live.

She picked New York. Got an apartment on Broadway — literally, Walker and Broadway, one block below Canal Street. And she started building SAGE out of that apartment with a business card and a big idea. If you’ve ever heard Bari tell this story from stage, you know it’s one of the best origin stories in the industry. We’ll leave the rest for her to tell live.

What matters here is what happened next.

During her first year in the city, she met Blue Melnick. He was running a video production company for live events — the cameras, the broadcast, the technical side of making a room look and feel like something worth being in. They started dating in 2009. By 2010, they’d combined their businesses and started building SAGE into something neither of them could have built alone.

Bari brought the room. She understood why an audience says yes — the psychology of enrollment, the architecture of a three-day event, the exact moment to make the ask. Blue brought the systems. The production infrastructure, the technology, the operational backbone that let one great show become a repeatable model.

For nearly a decade, SAGE produced live events and ran a full video production arm alongside them. Big ballrooms, big stages, big clients — the names you’d recognize if you’ve spent any time in the high-ticket space. Dean Graziosi. Amy Porterfield. Russell Brunson. Allison Maslan. Jeff Walker. Mary Morrissey. The list kept growing because the events kept working.

Around 2018, they started shifting focus. The video production arm had served its purpose, but the real value — the thing clients kept coming back for — was the strategy. How to structure the offer. How to build the event around the close. How to fill a room with the right people and then serve them so well that selling feels like the obvious next step. SAGE started leaning harder into education, teaching others the playbook they’d spent fifteen years refining.

Then March 2020 happened.

Every event on the calendar disappeared in a single week. Sixteen years of ballroom expertise, and suddenly there were no ballrooms. Most production companies froze. Some folded. Bari and Blue had twenty-one days to answer one question: does what we know about a room still work through a camera?

They moved their first client online in three weeks. And here’s the thing — it didn’t just work. A virtual room, produced with the same discipline they’d brought to a thousand live stages, outperformed the ballroom. Lower cost per attendee. Higher engagement. Better conversion. The math was undeniable.

That moment became the second great pivot — not unlike the first one, sixteen years earlier, when Bari chose Broadway over the basement. Both times, the safer path was obvious. Both times, they went the other direction.

The studio in Charleston became SAGE Studios — a broadcast facility designed around the close. The software they built to run their own shows became Obvio. The playbook became TVE (The Virtual Event on Virtual Events) and LEAP, their flagship coaching program. And everything they learned bringing AI into LEAP to support their coaching clients is becoming Obie — a platform that gives coaches and consultants the same capability, whether they’re running a high-ticket mastermind or a course with a thousand students.

Bari and Blue married in 2012. They’ve now been building together for over two decades — and they’re still in the room every week, still producing, still refining the playbook. The past gave them the foundation. The work they’re doing right now is what actually matters.

If there’s a through line from that first apartment on Broadway to where SAGE sits today, it’s this: the best version of the business has always been on the other side of the harder choice. Every time.

So — what’s yours?