Fix My Fees

Shital "AL" Dhakal is co-founder and CEO of Conflation Labs, which builds AI for zoning research and plan review. He spent 15 years building data systems across three continents, including as a senior product manager at AWS, where he launched geospatial capabilities in Amazon SageMaker and helped lift North American delivery rates by double digits. He started out as the GIS guy for a city planning department.

Chapters

00:00 — From Amazon SageMaker to city zoning code
02:14 — The GIS guy who sat next to the planners
05:15 — Two customers: the regulator and the regulated
07:53 — "It's not that governments like to move slow"
09:01 — A 500-page ordinance and four departments
12:03 — ChatGPT, but married to your local zoning code
16:49 — Why developers just assume eighteen months
18:21 — Ninety percent of product strategy is what you don't build
20:29 — Thirty thousand jurisdictions, thirty thousand codes
24:03 — The gray areas AI hands back to a human
26:58 — The data center this city already turned down three times
30:35 — The residents who couldn't read the map
37:03 — "Cut this sandwich in half"
40:21 — Free subscriptions and the geographies opening next
44:06 — Stacking four AI tools instead of trusting one

http://conflationlabs.com · mailto:[email protected]

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http://FixMyFees.com · @fixmyfees

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A conversation about zoning and permitting, why municipal approval takes as long as it does, and where AI actually helps a land investor versus where it will confidently tell you what you want to hear.

Mark Sherwood is a naturopathic doctor, three-time bestselling author, and co-founder of the Functional Medical Institute with his wife Michele. Before that he spent 24 years in law enforcement, ten of them on a SWAT team.

Chapters

00:00 — From SWAT team to naturopathic medicine

02:18 — Watching coworkers retire, then not last long

03:00 — The number he pulled for his own department

04:31 — “Protect and serve” without a badge

05:24 — Why he went after root cause instead of symptoms

07:43 — Wellness debt vs. wellness equity

09:36 — Inputs and outputs

10:34 — Where the intake actually starts

12:03 — The thirty-thousand-foot view of a blood panel

13:37 — Elevated liver enzymes nobody had explained

15:29 — Why your doctor gets seven minutes and one problem

17:04 — Buying a suit one department at a time

19:25 — Twenty-five thousand people, one at a time

21:20 — What aging actually is

22:46 — Life expectancy vs. biological potential

26:47 — What to watch for as you step back from your business

28:36 — Purpose, and what happens when you lose it

31:36 — “I work twelve hours a day and don’t know where to start”

35:06 — What working with them looks like

43:52 — Date nights, and two trips booked ahead

functionaldr.com · drmarksherwood.com · drmichelesherwood.com

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FixMyFees.com · @fixmyfees

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A conversation about preventive health, root cause medicine, purpose after selling a business, and why owners put their health last.

Andrew Schulz is president and owner of The Insight Studio, a HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner he co-founded seven years ago. Before that he spent thirteen years in Alaska as a US Coast Guard captain and fishing guide.

Chapters

00:00 — What an expert actually is

02:15 — Founding The Insight Studio, and where revenue operations sits

04:25 — Thirteen years guiding in Alaska, using HubSpot for Christmas cards

05:45 — A 30-year-old college freshman in Missoula

08:29 — HubSpot vs. Salesforce vs. everything else

10:20 — Which problem you have decides where you start

14:06 — Using your CRM badly usually means you’re doing fine

15:21 — If you have no technology, you probably do

16:11 — The client who photographed his Rolodex

17:04 — Adoption starts with whether leadership logs in

18:07 — The foundational mistake: contact, company, and deal

20:38 — Next step. Always next step.

21:28 — Selling a CRM to the salesperson who hates CRMs

24:28 — Automating the work that happens after the call

25:46 — What changed when HubSpot rebuilt on AI

27:06 — 10x leads in 90 days from headers and meta tags

29:57 — The Crayon Initiative, and marketing that still runs years later

31:28 — IPads in trucks, and four questions that changed everything

33:28 — Minnows and whales: lead scoring for a bass fisherman

37:22 — Who he works with, and what an audit actually finds

44:00 — Four seasons, and a puppy who loves everyone

theinsightstudio.com · mailto:[email protected]

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FixMyFees.com · @fixmyfees

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A conversation about CRM adoption, revenue operations, sales process, data hygiene, and getting a team to actually use the tool you bought.

Tim Vogel is founder and CEO of Scenthound, a subscription-based dog wellness franchise he co-founded with his wife. He’s a board member at the Titus Center for Franchising and has spent over a decade coaching entrepreneurs.

Chapters

00:00 — What SCENT actually stands for

02:57 — Mobile grooming, and realizing six months in it wouldn’t scale

05:23 — The neighbor whose Labrador “didn’t need grooming”

06:14 — One of the top ten breeds needs a haircut. Nine don’t.

07:30 — Building a new category instead of a better grooming shop

09:08 — Why early adopters buy from first adopters, never from you

10:20 — Gum disease by age two, and years you could get back

12:57 — Migrating wolves, carpet, and why nails matter

14:47 — From the backyard to the pillow

15:24 — Dog ownership spikes during recessions and pandemics

18:41 — Why a subscription, and why once a month

21:05 — Making the model simple enough for an average operator to win

22:14 — What the franchisor actually does for you

25:06 — How involved you have to be, and who they turn away

26:34 — De-risking with half a million instead of five

27:28 — Eighteen months to your second location

28:48 — The 16-step recruitment process and the FDD

30:37 — Meet the pack: the dinner before the decision

33:13 — The corporate refugee problem

35:16 — The break room wall of member dogs

37:22 — Promote enough people and you have to open another location

41:45 — Building it with his wife, and running on Scaling Up

scenthound.com · scenthoundfranchising.com

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FixMyFees.com · @fixmyfees

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A conversation about category creation, franchise unit economics, subscription models, and building a system an average operator can run well.

The clinic had been stuck at nine providers for fifteen years and lost money every one of them. Two years later it had nineteen and finished $250,000 above budget. Management never changed a thing.

Eldon Solomon’s argument is that the resistance you’re fighting is the most useful signal you’ve got. Trained as a marriage and family therapist and now coaching business leaders, he spent 34 years arriving at a position most people push back on immediately: resistance isn’t a sign someone isn’t ready to change — it’s a sign they are. People resist to protect something they value, and once you know what that is, you stop arguing and start building around it. He also makes a blunt case that most strategic plans fail long after the plan is finished, at the execution layer nobody consulted.

Chapters

00:00 — Transactional vs. transformational, and the bridge between them

03:17 — Why most strategic plans die at execution

05:28 — The therapist who asked his professor for the secret

07:10 — On the witness stand, nine months out of grad school

08:15 — “She was too resistant” — and why that answer failed him

09:22 — Decision-making is a leadership skill

10:20 — Resistance isn’t unreadiness. It’s readiness.

11:13 — The $30 million pitch and what the questions really mean

12:54 — Resistance is about protection, not defiance

13:27 — Selling cars: the buyers with no resistance never bought

14:50 — What happens to sales numbers when you stop fighting it

15:19 — Value-based questions, and how to ask them

18:34 — Building the plan around the resistance, not after it

20:00 — Nine providers, fifteen years, and what changed

24:17 — The mistake almost everyone makes with pushback

25:21 — Why AI can’t do this part

26:02 — What a lying five-year-old is actually protecting

29:37 — The path of least resistance is rarely the path

33:04 — Who he works with, and what he doesn’t do

35:56 — Forty years married, four sons, three grandkids

Eldon Solomon runs Bridge the Gap Consulting. He’s a licensed marriage and family therapist with more than 30 years across clinical work, corporate leadership, and executive coaching.

Eldon Solomon on LinkedIn

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If you’re a business owner doing something worth hearing about, reach Tavious at [email protected].

FixMyFees.com · @fixmyfees

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A conversation about decision-making, organizational resistance, why strategic plans fail at execution, and turning pushback into a signal you can use.

Mark Sherwood is a naturopathic doctor, three-time bestselling author, and co-founder of the Functional Medical Institute with his wife Michele. Before that he spent 24 years in law enforcement, ten of them on a SWAT team.

Chapters

00:00 — From SWAT team to naturopathic medicine

02:18 — Watching coworkers retire, then not last long

03:00 — The number he pulled for his own department

04:31 — “Protect and serve” without a badge

05:24 — Why he went after root cause instead of symptoms

07:43 — Wellness debt vs. wellness equity

09:36 — Inputs and outputs

10:34 — Where the intake actually starts

12:03 — The thirty-thousand-foot view of a blood panel

13:37 — Elevated liver enzymes nobody had explained

15:29 — Why your doctor gets seven minutes and one problem

17:04 — Buying a suit one department at a time

19:25 — Twenty-five thousand people, one at a time

21:20 — What aging actually is

22:46 — Life expectancy vs. biological potential

26:47 — What to watch for as you step back from your business

28:36 — Purpose, and what happens when you lose it

31:36 — “I work twelve hours a day and don’t know where to start”

35:06 — What working with them looks like

43:52 — Date nights, and two trips booked ahead

functionaldr.com · drmarksherwood.com · drmichelesherwood.com

Subscribe for new interviews twice a day.

If you’re a business owner doing something worth hearing about, reach Tavious at [email protected].

FixMyFees.com · @fixmyfees

Apple Podcasts · Spotify

Keep more. Grow more. Live better.

A conversation about preventive health, root cause medicine, purpose after selling a business, and why owners put their health last.

Clive Mayhew watched his AI model jump from 75% accuracy to 99.9% overnight, without touching a line of code. The next morning he spent a quarter of a million dollars on golf.ai.

Clive is a tech entrepreneur with a couple of exits behind him who spent lockdown in Australia deciding what to do with the rest of his life. He’d played 85 of the top 100 courses in the world and gotten his handicap under five. What he built is an AI layer for golf — a rules assistant, a talking caddy, and a concierge that answers the pro shop phone and takes the booking. That last one matters beyond golf: 60% of tee times are still booked by phone, and up to 40% of those bookings never show up. He demos the whole thing live on a real course in San Antonio, and he makes a specific argument about where payments go next.

Chapters

00:00 — A golf nut, a tech entrepreneur, and six months locked down

04:20 — Every golf app made him start over from scratch

05:00 — The rules database that lived on one man’s spreadsheet

06:00 — 75% to 99.9% overnight, and what actually changed

06:40 — The morning he bought golf.ai

07:50 — “Stop playing by golf rules. Nobody does.”

09:00 — What an AI caddy actually says to you

10:31 — The call from a course: 60% of our bookings come by phone

11:17 — Where payments go next, and why it’s a new channel

14:00 — Live demo: booking a real tee time in San Antonio

16:04 — The 40% no-show problem and how prepay fixes it

17:30 — Outcome-based pricing, $99 to $1,000 a month

18:08 — Why a 56-year-old demographic still prefers the phone

20:12 — Whose voice the AI uses, and why trust matters

21:25 — Keeping the phone in the bag

24:37 — Six shots better on a course you’ve never played

26:14 — The breakfast ball is not a rule

27:42 — One conversation across every golf service you use

32:00 — Why golf is the most data-dense sport there is

36:06 — Pendants, glasses, and the interface after the phone

39:17 — The balance problem when your business is your hobby

41:06 — Vertical AI: build for the thing you already know

Clive Mayhew is co-founder and CEO of golf.ai, an AI platform for golfers and courses. Sir Nick Faldo is an ambassador and lends his voice to the concierge product.

golf.ai · courses.golf.ai ·

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FixMyFees.com · @fixmyfees

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A conversation about vertical AI, voice agents, phone bookings, no-shows, and how payments change when the interface is a conversation.

Matt spent 30 years in consumer finance — Capital One when it had 180 employees, then GE, Fleetcor, Credit One, and finally president of Premier Bankcard, which climbed from the 19th to the 10th largest issuer during COVID. What he kept noticing was that companies train the mechanics and ignore everything underneath. His argument: about 80% of what drives a business is psychological, teams own culture rather than CEOs, and most goal-setting fails because people jump straight to action without doing the work first.

Chapters

00:00 — Texas football, Notre Dame, and minor league baseball

02:16 — Why sports gives feedback in minutes and business takes a year

02:54 — Capital One at 180 employees, and what came next

03:42 — What he missed about teams when he left sports

04:30 — Everyone knows what to do. Under pressure, they can’t.

07:39 — The iceberg: mechanics on top, psychology underneath

08:52 — An industry built to steal your attention

10:33 — Twenty minutes to get your focus back

12:46 — You can’t leave work at work

14:17 — Teams set higher standards than leaders would set for them

15:33 — Top-down gets compliance. It never gets commitment.

16:00 — Who owns culture when the lights go off?

19:06 — Form, load, flow: how a capability actually gets built

20:41 — Why your goals die in three weeks

21:20 — Awareness and alignment before action

24:55 — Half your dopamine, spent before 9 AM

26:50 — Trust and respect, defined as behaviors

28:36 — “Don’t tell me about the money. Tell me what it did for them.”

29:45 — The 50% performer who became a top performer

31:04 — Why leadership training became all mechanics

35:03 — Beliefs, thoughts, emotions, actions, results

36:23 — The washer on a string

37:18 — What he sees running programs inside prisons

37:57 — Seventh grade in Texas, and the thing that never left

41:35 — Leadership as the transference of energy

42:00 — The man who waited at the door in Tampa

43:44 — Love the person, address the behavior

45:56 — How to work with him

49:57 — Breakfast with his kids, and the mistake he’d undo

Matt Krall is an executive coach and former president of Premier Bankcard, with 30 years in consumer finance. He runs individual coaching and an organizational program built around self-leadership practices.

MattKrall.com · GoElevateU.com

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If you’re a business owner doing something worth hearing about, reach Tavious at [email protected].

FixMyFees.com · @fixmyfees

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A conversation about self-leadership, team culture, goal-setting, executive coaching, and why most leadership training doesn’t change behavior.

The report described a place where you delivered or you were gone. Cutthroat. He was traveling through New York when he read it, and it changed how he led — starting with parting ways with senior people who insisted the problem wasn’t real. Bart runs The Humphrey Group, a leadership communication firm of more than 50 people working with Fortune 500 companies. This conversation covers why the skills that got you promoted stop working, why leaders hold onto under performers for years, and why being able to explain what you do is a separate skill from being good at it.

Chapters

00:00 — Leadership has nothing to do with your title

02:30 — Influencing people who don’t report to you

04:12 — Speechwriting for CEOs, back when slides were acetate

06:00 — The mine supervisors who couldn’t get management to listen

07:31 — What got you promoted won’t get you further

09:15 — You don’t have to play a part. You have to be authentic.

09:52 — Why promoted people won’t let go of the old job

10:45 — The CEO who skips four levels to fix things himself

12:15 — Information doesn’t move people. Inspiration does.

13:43 — Natural communicators worked unnaturally hard

14:14 — Shaping culture when you don’t run the company

16:06 — The survey that said his own culture was cutthroat

17:46 — Making the hard call, and paralysis by analysis

19:53 — Loss aversion: why the underperformer stays two years

20:59 — Poker, aces, and separating the decision from the outcome

24:13 — The Fortune 500 team that asked who he was and why he was there

25:56 — The private equity firm that outgrew needing him

27:13 — The curse of knowledge and why experts can’t explain themselves

29:22 — Who actually comes to them, and when

33:40 — “You need more gravitas”: what that really means

36:30 — Three kids, a bike, and the limits of influence

Bart Egnal is CEO of The Humphrey Group, a global leadership communication firm, and host of the Inspire podcast. He’s written a book on jargon and how leaders lose people with it.

Connect with Bart and The Humphrey Group on LinkedIn.

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If you’re a business owner doing something worth hearing about, reach Tavious at [email protected].

FixMyFees.com · @fixmyfees

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A conversation about leadership communication, executive presence, company culture, and making hard personnel decisions.

A Ford plant spent three years and $3 million on a training program and couldn’t point to one thing that changed. Bruce Bennett walked the floor and asked people why.

They told him the training was great. Life-changing, even. They used it with their spouses, their kids, at church. They just didn’t use it at work. That gap — between what people learn and what they actually do — is what Bruce has spent thirty years working on. He builds 360-degree feedback surveys for coaches, corporations, and the federal government, and he’s blunt about how badly most organizations run them. He also built an automated phone-coaching system that started with recovering addicts in the 1990s and ended up cutting repeat offenses in half.

Chapters

00:00 — Cutting through the trends to what actually works

01:41 — Developmentally self-reliant: leaders fixing themselves

03:18 — The Ford study that kept pointing one level up

04:00 — $3 million, three years, no measurable change

05:00 — “I use it at church. I don’t use it here.”

00:01 (pt 2) — Beliefs drive behaviors. Behaviors drive results.

01:28 — Beliefs written in marker vs. etched in glass

03:07 — How a 360 survey actually works

04:28 — The blind spot that ends careers

05:32 — The neighbor who nearly quit over his results

05:59 — The Nobel Prize winner nobody wanted to work with

08:09 — Self-guided discovery: using a strength to find a weakness

10:00 — Why a long list of improvements guarantees zero

13:06 — Why the big offsite stops working by month three

15:07 — Overconfidence, and when leaders stop listening

16:26 — “It’s in my briefcase, but I can’t tell you”

17:42 — The 1990s study that gave addicts a phone

19:16 — Small nudges from people who matter to you

20:54 — The morning a phone call turned a car around

22:28 — Three control trials, and a 50% drop in repeat offenses

24:11 — Why the person has to control every setting

26:48 — Who he works with, and 53 countries

31:30 — Chairlifts, e-bikes, and a car trapped in a Greek market

Bruce Bennett is founder and CEO of Star 360 Feedback, sole provider of 360 surveys to the federal Office of Personnel Management. He also runs Real Victory, a nonprofit applying phone coaching in the criminal justice system.

Star360Feedback.com · Sprezie.com

Subscribe for new interviews twice a week. If you’re a business owner doing something worth hearing about, reach Tavious at [email protected].

FixMyFees.com · @fixmyfees
· Apple Podcasts · Spotify

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A conversation about leadership development, 360-degree feedback, why corporate training doesn’t stick, and building habits through small nudges instead of big events.