AI is moving fast, but most businesses are still stuck running yesterday’s software and making tomorrow’s staffing decisions on hype. From the floor of the Q2 Board of Advisors Convention in Dallas, we talk with Dima Semensky, founder of DevCom, about what long-term software success actually looks like when you build custom enterprise systems, keep talent for decades, and treat client trust as the product.

Dima shares his path from Ukraine to building a U.S.-based software development agency with delivery teams in Ukraine, plus the rare kind of retention most companies only talk about: clients that have stayed 25 to 26 years. We unpack how DevCom grew through referrals for years without even having a website, why customer IP ownership matters, and what it takes to support industries like construction services, direct sales, and healthcare fintech with practical systems like quoting, job management, payments, and operational software.

Then we get tactical on AI and legacy systems modernization. Dima argues AI is best used as a force multiplier: automate routine work, raise your team’s output, and scale value instead of rushing to replace people. He also outlines his push toward an AI-assisted “software factory” approach that turns hard-won processes into faster, cheaper delivery without sacrificing clarity for non-technical owners.

Subscribe for more founder-level lessons, share this with a business owner who’s wrestling with AI decisions, and leave a review with the biggest legacy system problem you want to solve next.

About Board of Advisors

Board of Advisors is an invite-only community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and executives dedicated to helping one another grow personally and professionally. Through quarterly events, strategic introductions, peer-to-peer mentoring, and a culture built on giving first, BA creates an environment where leaders can solve problems faster, build meaningful relationships, and unlock new opportunities. When you're in the right room, anything is possible.

Subscribe for more conversations with members of the Board of Advisors community as we continue releasing exclusive interviews recorded live from our Q2 Dallas event.

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Points, miles, and punch cards look powerful on paper, but most people never get to the payoff. That gap is exactly what we explore with Paul Mattimoe, the founder behind Shopr Rewards, a fintech platform built around a simple promise: instant cashback inside a mobile wallet, designed to work at enterprise scale. Paul joins us from our Board of Advisors quarterly event near Dallas, where dealmaking, partnerships, and growth plans are moving fast. 

We talk through why traditional loyalty programs are becoming obsolete, especially “brand locked” points that take years to matter for casual customers. Paul explains how Shopr Rewards flips the model by routing cashback from everyday spending and making rewards feel immediate, tangible, and easy to use. We dig into the B2B2C growth strategy, where landing one organization can open the door to tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users, with onboarding that ranges from API integrations to simple QR-based self-enrollment. 

Then we get practical about real-world use cases: sports teams looking for fan monetization beyond the stadium, airlines trying to serve both frequent flyers and casual travelers, and brands tired of funding discounts that crush margins. Paul also shares the founder journey that led here, how he and his wife run lean, why in-house customer service matters for reputation, and how patents and a clear buyer roadmap support a build-to-exit strategy. 

If you’re interested in customer loyalty, cashback apps, mobile payments, fintech infrastructure, and enterprise partnerships, this conversation is packed with ideas you can steal. Subscribe, share this with a founder or operator, and leave a review with your take: would you rather earn points or instant cashback?

About Board of Advisors

Board of Advisors is an invite-only community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and executives dedicated to helping one another grow personally and professionally. Through quarterly events, strategic introductions, peer-to-peer mentoring, and a culture built on giving first, BA creates an environment where leaders can solve problems faster, build meaningful relationships, and unlock new opportunities. When you're in the right room, anything is possible.

Subscribe for more conversations with members of the Board of Advisors community as we continue releasing exclusive interviews recorded live from our Q2 Dallas event.

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“I know them” is easy to say. The harder question is the one that actually predicts outcomes in business: “Do they know you?” From the Ritz-Carlton in Las Colinas, Texas, we sit down with Chris Dennert, founder of Dugout Mugs and one of the earliest members of Board of Advisors, to unpack what he’s learned from a decade of building relationships that answer texts, open doors, and stick around when things get tough.

We get specific about the mechanics of becoming unforgettable without being fake. Chris shares why repetition and consistency matter more than charisma, how small details make you memorable (yes, including a metal business card), and why authenticity is the cheat code for long-term trust. We also talk about the “go first” mindset, the long tail of relationships, and why most entrepreneurs waste energy trying to stay shallow with everyone instead of going deep with the right 10% who align with their values.

Then we zoom out to the stuff that actually shapes your leadership: micro habits like gratitude that rewire your attention, and family-first choices that don’t fit the usual hustle script. Chris explains why he doesn’t buy “work-life balance,” how he designs his days around his kids, and what changed after getting seriously sick. One of the biggest takeaways is his idea of “multiple currencies” money matters, but time, experiences, purpose, and health also compound, and they can keep you steady in a down season.

We wrap with the Dugout Mugs story, including why the product shows up everywhere from corporate gifting to media backdrops, and how licensing and co-branding create leverage. If you care about relationship building, networking, authentic leadership, and building a business that fits your life, this one is for you. Subscribe, share this with a friend who needs the reminder, and leave a review with your favorite takeaway.

About Board of Advisors

Board of Advisors is an invite-only community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and executives dedicated to helping one another grow personally and professionally. Through quarterly events, strategic introductions, peer-to-peer mentoring, and a culture built on giving first, BA creates an environment where leaders can solve problems faster, build meaningful relationships, and unlock new opportunities. When you're in the right room, anything is possible.

Subscribe for more conversations with members of the Board of Advisors community as we continue releasing exclusive interviews recorded live from our Q2 Dallas event.

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Paid ads are getting more expensive, attention is harder to buy, and customers are smarter than ever about spotting a pitch. So what do you do if you’re a founder who still needs leads, trust, and growth? We sit down with Remy Davenport of KingsMedia to talk about the organic content strategy that helps CEOs and founders go viral, build real credibility, and create marketing that doesn’t disappear the second you turn off spend.

We dig into what changed when platforms like TikTok rewired distribution, why Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts made “free reach” a real business tool, and how organic content supports every part of the funnel. Remy explains why an empty profile (or a feed full of ads) crushes conversions, and why consistent founder-led content becomes the proof people look for before they buy. Then we get tactical: find your baseline average views, hunt for outliers that outperform the norm, and study the rare breakout posts in your niche to learn patterns you can repeat.

You’ll also hear a concrete case study where patient publishing turned into massive results: audience growth, community momentum, and revenue that arrived fast once trust was already built. If you’ve been treating content like a quick flip, this will reset your expectations and give you a clearer path to building a personal brand that compounds. Subscribe, share this with a founder who’s stuck on ads, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

About Board of Advisors

Board of Advisors is an invite-only community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and executives dedicated to helping one another grow personally and professionally. Through quarterly events, strategic introductions, peer-to-peer mentoring, and a culture built on giving first, BA creates an environment where leaders can solve problems faster, build meaningful relationships, and unlock new opportunities. When you're in the right room, anything is possible.

Subscribe for more conversations with members of the Board of Advisors community as we continue releasing exclusive interviews recorded live from our Q2 Dallas event.

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A great product photo might earn a split second of attention, but a reflection of you can stop the scroll. We sit down with Jabine Zaidi, founder of Spring AI, to unpack how her team went from building a browser-based AI visual production platform to creating Glass, a trademarked AI mirror experience that turns customers into the content itself. The goal is simple but bold: replace guesswork with confidence by letting people instantly see themselves in the story a brand is trying to sell. 

We get into the real pain points behind retail and ecommerce conversion including awkward fitting rooms, uncertainty that drives high return rates, and the massive revenue lost when shoppers browse but never commit. Jabine explains why Glass is more than a virtual try-on tool: it can place you into a lifestyle context, like running a trail in new shoes, stepping onto a court, or seeing how a swimsuit looks by the pool. That context is where emotion, identity, and decision-making meet, and it’s where brands can finally learn what imagery and scenarios actually convert. 

We also explore Spring AI’s expansion into fitness and health, including body transformation visuals designed to motivate behavior change. Jabine shares the challenges of scaling a new category inside slow-moving enterprise retail, why faster verticals like gyms and live events can accelerate adoption, and what an online “shop by looks” experience could mean for the future of personalized shopping and merchandising analytics. Subscribe for more founder deep dives, share this with a brand builder or retail operator, and leave a review with your take: would an AI mirror make you more likely to buy?

About Board of Advisors

Board of Advisors is an invite-only community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and executives dedicated to helping one another grow personally and professionally. Through quarterly events, strategic introductions, peer-to-peer mentoring, and a culture built on giving first, BA creates an environment where leaders can solve problems faster, build meaningful relationships, and unlock new opportunities. When you're in the right room, anything is possible.

Subscribe for more conversations with members of the Board of Advisors community as we continue releasing exclusive interviews recorded live from our Q2 Dallas event.

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A $3,000 legal lead calls once, and the next few minutes decide whether a law firm signs a case or loses it to the next Google result. From a hotel in Las Colinas outside Dallas, we talk with Dave Lucado, founder of Rapid Sign Now, about the systems and human skills it takes to turn high-stakes intake calls into signed clients while keeping the experience personal, calm, and real.

Dave walks us through his unlikely path from selling insurance across Georgia to becoming an investigator for a small law firm and then seeing a bigger vision: build a boutique intake center that can serve not one attorney, but hundreds. We get specific about what “full intake” really means in personal injury and similar practices, including e-sign on the call, collecting IDs and key documents, and packaging a complete file so the attorney’s team can move fast. The big idea is simple: when a caller invests real time and feels cared for, they stop shopping and start trusting.

We also dig into training and quality control. Dave explains why his team avoids reading scripts off a screen, how empathy can be trained like any other skill, and why offshore call centers often miss the moment that matters most. Then we look at the future: AI call listening software that grades calls across categories like empathy, knowledge, and momentum so managers can coach smarter without letting robots talk to injured clients.

If you care about law firm intake, lead conversion, client experience, and scaling a service business without losing the human touch, you’ll get a lot from this conversation. Subscribe, share this with a founder or managing partner, and leave a review with your biggest intake challenge so we can tackle it next.

About Board of Advisors

Board of Advisors is an invite-only community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and executives dedicated to helping one another grow personally and professionally. Through quarterly events, strategic introductions, peer-to-peer mentoring, and a culture built on giving first, BA creates an environment where leaders can solve problems faster, build meaningful relationships, and unlock new opportunities. When you're in the right room, anything is possible.

Subscribe for more conversations with members of the Board of Advisors community as we continue releasing exclusive interviews recorded live from our Q2 Dallas event.

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Most fundraising advice skips the part that actually decides the outcome: whether investors trust your story enough to keep leaning in after the first meeting. From the Ritz-Carlton in Las Colinas, Texas, we catch up with Jerry Conni of Legacy Capital Professionals and the Visionary Growth Fund to talk about what happens behind the curtain when a fund manager screens opportunities and decides what makes the cut. 

We get specific about the “bridge to Series A” problem where companies are past the startup phase but still struggle to raise meaningful growth capital. Jerry shares his buy box, why discipline beats chasing every maybe-deal, and how his team evaluates founders and CEOs early so they do not waste months on diligence that falls apart at the finish line. He also explains how deal flow really works in family office and private equity circles, including the practical funnel from one-sheet to deck to data room to proposal. 

Then we dig into the mechanics: background checks before taking a dollar, improving investor decks with benchmark and industry data, and why most companies undersell themselves with documents that do not match reality. Jerry also walks through how Reg D 506C and accredited investor onboarding fit into a customizable fund model where investors can choose among multiple active projects. 

If you are raising capital, building a fund, or just trying to understand what serious diligence looks like, this conversation gives you a clear map. Subscribe for more operator-level finance conversations, share this with a founder who is fundraising, and leave a review so more people can find the show.

About Board of Advisors

Board of Advisors is an invite-only community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and executives dedicated to helping one another grow personally and professionally. Through quarterly events, strategic introductions, peer-to-peer mentoring, and a culture built on giving first, BA creates an environment where leaders can solve problems faster, build meaningful relationships, and unlock new opportunities. When you're in the right room, anything is possible.

Subscribe for more conversations with members of the Board of Advisors community as we continue releasing exclusive interviews recorded live from our Q2 Dallas event.

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Booking a flight should never feel like a leap of faith, but private aviation still has too many gaps where fraud and illegal charters can slip through. We talk with Jacob Baumler from Coach Air FinTech AI about the moment that pushed him into this space: a private trip that turned out to be an illegal charter, paired with aircraft issues serious enough to spark real fear. That experience became a mission to build public-safety-grade infrastructure for private aviation booking and the next wave of advanced air mobility.

Jacob breaks down what air taxis actually are: electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL) designed for fast city and regional trips, staged at the airports and future “vertiports” that will make Jetsons-style travel practical. The big question isn’t just when air taxis arrive, it’s how everyday passengers will book them safely and legally. We dig into Coach Air’s approach: real-time charter verification, FAA and DOT-aligned compliance checks, end-to-end audit trails, and AI-driven booking inside apps branded by operators, brokers, FBOs, airports, and concierge-style partners.

We also get concrete on payments, because money flow is part of safety. Coach Air uses fintech escrow mechanics so funds don’t simply disappear upfront; payment is protected until services are delivered, helping reduce fraud while ensuring operators get paid when they perform. We close with what Coach Air needs right now (investment, early adopters, and strong advisors) and why Jacob believes the market is moving faster than most people realize. Subscribe, share this with a friend who flies private or loves future mobility, and leave a review with your biggest question about air taxis and eVTOL travel.

About Board of Advisors

Board of Advisors is an invite-only community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and executives dedicated to helping one another grow personally and professionally. Through quarterly events, strategic introductions, peer-to-peer mentoring, and a culture built on giving first, BA creates an environment where leaders can solve problems faster, build meaningful relationships, and unlock new opportunities. When you're in the right room, anything is possible.

Subscribe for more conversations with members of the Board of Advisors community as we continue releasing exclusive interviews recorded live from our Q2 Dallas event.

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A sport can be fun, but a sport with the right economics can become a full-blown movement. We talk with Ryan Higgins of Wakit Rakit about how he keeps spotting trends early and why padel is the next one he’s betting on. Ryan shares his path from building million-dollar information product launches to buying Bitcoin at $10, then stepping back for a decade-long sabbatical before getting pulled into a racket sport that’s spreading fast worldwide.

We get specific about what made padel stand out the first time he played in Australia: courts booked out for days, payments handled through an app, and a business model that can run with surprisingly light staffing. Ryan explains why that matters to operators, how padel differs from tennis, and why the US chose pickleball while much of the world chose padel. Then we zoom out to the opportunity: the United States is early in court count compared to places like Spain, and Ryan believes the market is hitting an inflection point.

Ryan also breaks down the two-part strategy behind Wakit Rakit / Wakit Padel: helping others build facilities by selling padel courts and consulting, while also operating their own clubs with a plan to scale “franchise-like” across the country. You’ll hear why their first two locations are intentionally different, how they think about demographics and awareness, and the key hire they’re chasing to fuel rapid multi-city launches: a marketing leader who can educate a market from zero to obsessed.

If you’re into startups, sports business, franchise growth, or trend-driven investing, you’ll walk away with a practical lens on timing, operations, and go-to-market. Subscribe for more conversations like this, share it with a friend building in consumer or fitness, and leave a review with your take: is padel the next breakout sport in America?

About Board of Advisors

Board of Advisors is an invite-only community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and executives dedicated to helping one another grow personally and professionally. Through quarterly events, strategic introductions, peer-to-peer mentoring, and a culture built on giving first, BA creates an environment where leaders can solve problems faster, build meaningful relationships, and unlock new opportunities. When you're in the right room, anything is possible.

Subscribe for more conversations with members of the Board of Advisors community as we continue releasing exclusive interviews recorded live from our Q2 Dallas event.

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Scaling gets celebrated, but it also gets companies killed. Dylan England sits down with Cruz Galboa, CEO of Ascend Growth Ventures and the mind behind ScalingCFO.io, to unpack why “we need to scale” is often a dangerous misunderstanding. We get specific about the gap between chasing revenue and building a business that actually produces profit and cash flow, especially when margins are thin and working capital is quietly tightening the noose.

Cruz breaks down the difference between growth vs scaling in plain language: growth can mean revenue rises and costs rise right alongside it, while true scaling is when revenue increases without costs increasing at the same rate, so profits expand faster. We talk through what makes founders feel pressured to grow, why “profit first” is a smarter north star, and how a business with less revenue can be healthier than a bigger company with higher stress and zero profit. Cruz also introduces his concept of the “cash void,” the painful time lag between spending money on ads, payroll, or operations and getting that money back, and why that timing risk can force bad financing decisions at the worst possible moment.

We also go beyond spreadsheets into the real role of a modern fractional CFO: strategy, decision support, and founder readiness. Cruz shares why finance leaders often become strong CEOs, why understanding your numbers is non-negotiable, and why AI finance tools should support judgment rather than replace it. If you’re thinking about scaling a business, improving financial forecasting, or building systems that won’t break under demand, this conversation gives you a grounded framework to act on.

Subscribe for more founder-grade conversations, share this with a business owner who’s chasing growth, and leave a review with the biggest “scaling mistake” you’ve seen so others can learn faster.

About Board of Advisors

Board of Advisors is an invite-only community of entrepreneurs, CEOs, investors, and executives dedicated to helping one another grow personally and professionally. Through quarterly events, strategic introductions, peer-to-peer mentoring, and a culture built on giving first, BA creates an environment where leaders can solve problems faster, build meaningful relationships, and unlock new opportunities. When you're in the right room, anything is possible.

Subscribe for more conversations with members of the Board of Advisors community as we continue releasing exclusive interviews recorded live from our Q2 Dallas event.

#BAPodcast #BoardOfAdvisors #BACommunity #Entrepreneurship