Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

Chia-Lin Simmons, CEO of LogicMark, helps entrepreneurs go where the pack is going by examining the market forces that determine whether strong people and products can succeed. Guided by a belief that technology should serve people, she leads LogicMark in developing AI-enabled connected-care and personal-safety solutions.

In this conversation, Chia-Lin introduces The Ephemeral Why Framework—Demographic Shifts, Emerging Needs, Adoption Conditions, Opportunity Timing, and Trend Runway. She explains why leaders must examine uncontrollable market conditions before joining a company, launching a product, or making an acquisition; how changing dual-income demographics helped meal-kit services mature; and why aging, caregiver shortages, and technology adoption created an opportunity for LogicMark. Chia-Lin also discusses closing the caregiving conversation gap and shifting personal-safety technology from reactive alerts toward predictive, proactive support.

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Chia-Lin Simmons, the CEO of LogicMark, a company offering Internet of Things and AI machine learning applications in healthcare communications, remote patient monitoring, and personal safety applications and services. Chia-Lin, welcome to the show. 

Thank you for inviting me, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

It’s great to have you, and I’m very curious about what you have developed, your business, and your journey. But I’d like to ask first, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business? 

Sure. I think that’s a wonderful question. For a lot of us who’ve been in the tech business for such a long time, especially at a difficult time where everybody’s asking, “Are we going to be dominated by AI in the future, with AI as our overlords?” there’s always a question of what you are doing and why you are doing what you’re doing, in tech especially. And so the personal why for me is, what can we do in terms of technology to serve people? 

And so that has been what has driven me for a very long time. My personal why of working in tech is, how do we use technology to enable a better living experience for everyone? And so that’s really the framework that I go into every job that I take on, and consideration of every opportunity that I consider in terms of a new role. 

Yeah, I mean, I love the orientation in healthcare and safety. Internet of Things probably also connected to healthcare as well. So obviously that’s a very big area and a very important area. What attracted you to technology? 

Yeah. So I was one of those geeky kids who was always driven by how can we do things better. And so whether or not that came down to, like, creating shortcuts to getting things done or looking for ways to, again, utilize technology in the old days, though, to make things faster, easier, better to understand. And so I actually wasn’t sure that I was going to work in technology purely. I actually came out of the world where I thought I was going to go into publishing. 

And actually, the technology piece came upon this where I was just learning about, for those of us old enough to remember this, the first browser, right? The first Netscape browser or the first browser out there. So in 1993, I looked at that and went, “That would make publishing so much easier.” Like, can you imagine sharing newspapers this way or, like, reading a book? And can you imagine this could be a movie? And this is very early on in ’93 when it’s just the first browsers. None of this was happening. We were lucky if we were able to get text to blink in those days. 

Yeah. And so as an undergraduate, that was kind of what drove me into tech, was that I had this, we could call it, futurist vision of a future where digital media would be portable everywhere. And the only example I had was this browser that was on a computer. Email was still not even in Outlook. It was using Elm and, like, things like this, right? So very text-based. Not a lot of visuals. But I had this vision, and this company called Apple had created something called the Newton. It was pretty sizable. And I postulated that the future was going to be newspapers, magazines, books, and even something like movies and music traveling with us everywhere, and it was going to be in a computer, and you could pick it up wherever you go. 

I think I call it round-tripping, and so being able to sort of look at digital media somewhere on TV or on a computer or a device and pick up where you left off. And so I’ve been chasing that vision ever since. And so it really culminated in then going to Audible and making an audiobook available in a car. That was my sort of last frontier. And going to a connected car company for Aha, which is backed by Venrock. So a lot of what drives my interest in technology has just been trying to look for ways to ease, I think, what we call human problems and human conditions. 

Looking for technology to solve problems that we're seeing versus coming up with cool tech and then trying to shoehorn that into something.
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Okay. So that’s great. So let’s talk about frameworks because this is kind of the meat of this podcast, is what are those frameworks that entrepreneurs like you discover that help you think of the world in simpler terms? Maybe it’s a three- to five-step process that you have discovered or developed, or maybe it’s three ways to look at something, to interpret something, or to communicate. Anything that comes to mind? 

 Yeah. So the first thing that my people ask me, and it’s sort of that time of the year especially, and at a time of crisis when people are talking about, like, “Will AI take my job?” and more things, is how do you make decisions about what you want to do and what companies to pursue and so forth? So I have a framework that I call the three-legged stool of technology success, which is that you have to be driven to go to a company where you feel like you can make an impact on the people, the product, and then the third piece is the part you can’t influence. 

And so you look for whether or not there’s a good condition for that third leg, which I’ll call the ephemeral why. And so that ephemeral why could be a combination of demographic changes, structural changes within an industrial environment. And usually those are things on a macro level that you can’t change. And so when you make a decision about what you want to go into, whether or not that is going to a company, whether or not taking a job, or whether or not you should pursue or develop a technology, you look at this framework and say, “Do I feel like I have the capability to sort of provide the right people to make this change? Do I feel that the product that we can develop can actually effectuate that change?” 

And the third is, is the market condition, the ephemeral why, is it sort of structural? And let me give you an example of sort of how that looks. So in 1999, I had been offered an opportunity to go to a company that was basically like Blue Apron, right? A box company for meals. And so this is 1999. The executives there were fantastic. They were from Webvan. They really knew how to do structural work around shipping produce and things that were perishable. So they had the right sort of leadership. The product seemed like it was conceptually correct, like you box sort of like prepackaged or kit meals created by chefs. It was a very delicious interview, and everything seemed well. 

But the third ephemeral why was the problem, right? So when you look at that in 1999, less than half, like around 40 to 45% of Americans, were dual-income families. Which meant that, to a certain degree, there was somebody in a family, whether or not that’s a woman or anybody, who was going out grocery shopping and doing the cooking, and so it was not a dual-income sort of environment. 

So what was this product going to do in terms of replacing people? Was the demographic and the financial aspect of the economy right for having to ship this particular product? Even if the product itself was good and the leadership was good, was the market, the ephemeral why, there for success? And the reality was that it wasn’t, so I did not take the opportunity. I just felt like it was very much a niche sort of situation, that it just wasn’t there. 

Yeah. 

From the time that Blue Apron sort of rolled around, why was Blue Apron successful even though it’s the same exact product, right? Good leadership, amazing product, good idea, but it’s because the ephemeral why, the market condition, has radically changed. It’s a leg that you can’t control in this three-legged stool of success, right? 

You just need it to be very firm. And it’s because 65% of Americans were dual-income now. Yeah. Whether or not that’s part-time or full-time, people just have less time to cook and to shop, all those things. And so now the market condition was right for it. 

So the ephemeral why, is this a timing issue? Or is there a process to figure out your ephemeral why? 

I think that you would apply the three-legged stool to every sort of scenario, and that third leg of ephemeral why is the one that often people don’t do a very good job analyzing. Because they think that the other two legs, the leadership, the product, so long as they feel very solid about them, then this must be a win. And I would argue that, in fact, using this three-legged stool of success, if the third leg is not there, if you cannot really fundamentally figure out what the ephemeral why would be, then there’s not going to be success at this company or for that product to launch, right? 

The product could be fantastic, the leadership could be fantastic, but the market condition, the economic sort of know-how, the adoption curve, all of those things make up that sort of nugget. And people don’t—because it’s non-controllable, they feel like it’s the lesser of the three legs, and so therefore they kind of, for lack of a better word, cast it aside in the decision-making mode. And I would say that when you make a leadership decision about launching products or going to a company or acquiring a company, that third leg is the one that you need to do the most examination for, and it’s the one that people disregard the most because it feels out of control. It’s macro. 

Yeah, it is out of control, but I guess that’s what entrepreneurs are there for, to tap into it and to find it. 

To find it, to identify it, to understand whether or not, from a timing perspective, there is potential longevity to it.
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Go where the pack is going, not where the pack is. 

Going where the pack is going, exactly. Yeah. I’m a Wayne Gretzky person, right? You don’t skate to the pack. You skate to where the pack is going to be, right? And for those people who don’t play ice hockey, and I’m not an ice hockey player, but I’m a believer in Wayne Gretzky. 

Yeah. Yeah. 

That’s really what you need to do. Yeah. I mean, it’s for entrepreneurs to win. 

Yeah. Love it. So let’s talk about your business, LogicMark. What drives growth in LogicMark? Where is the pack going for LogicMark’s business? 

Yeah. So I think what was very exciting about LogicMark and what drove me to take this job, because when the initial opportunity came, it was not exactly the sexiest thing on Earth. Like, I will tell you, I loved the recruiter. To this day, I think he’s a fantastic recruiter. But in essence, he presented an opportunity where it was like, “Hey, this company’s about to be delisted. It has two lawsuits. Hey, and it hasn’t built any new product since 2015,” and at this time it was like 2021.

“So I don’t know if the money situation is, like, super, super firm, so what do you think?” And so I was like, exactly, I’m like, “Oh, well, thank you so much for thinking of me. Sounds awesome.” But I thought about it some more, and I put it through that framework. I think I could apply the right people to the opportunity. I think I could create the right product. But is that third leg any good? Is the market condition good? And what drove me to this was that it was what I call the tsunami, the sort of perfect storm of all the things that could happen to make a condition really proper. 

That condition really includes the fact that, from a demographic point of view, we’re going to see the largest aging population that we’ve seen in decades, right? By 2040, one in four Americans, and that’s Americans only, will be 65 and over, right? And for people who are 65 and over, one in four will fall. And it’s catastrophic often when they do. And this is the U.S. market only, but if you looked at it and extrapolated it into the larger global market, that number was even worse. In fact, the aging population on a global basis outside of South America and Africa is fairly dire. 

We’re having fewer kids, and our population is aging. And so because there is an asymmetry when it comes to people who are younger taking care of the elderly, there is a gap in terms of the technology for caretaking. But it’s also one where, because it’s not sexy, right? It’s taking care of the aging. People don’t want to think about things that are scary from a health perspective, potentially. Then it’s one that just doesn’t seem like it has a lot of traction, right? 

People like to do things that are like cryptocurrency or interesting, fun things that young people really resonate with from a technology development point of view. But this is one where it’s a large demographic problem. It’s an industry that, from a service perspective, has not been focused on. And then third is that the caretaking demographic has gotten even lower, so people are having fewer kids, but also even professional caretaking post-COVID. 

When we were looking at the data in 2021 about whether or not this was a good opportunity, in 2019, there was a study in which we were having a gap of more than 350 caretakers shortage. And then if you think about post-COVID, where all the healthcare providers were burning out post-COVID it was a lot of sadness, a lot of burnout. That number became astronomical. So suddenly it’s not just about you and your family members or your friends, but it’s about professional caretakers who you may rely on to take care of a loved one in another state, professionally, who were also in short supply. 

So when we talk about the perfect storm of things that make that third leg really solid, it’s the demographics. It’s the industry that does not care, and it’s the young population gap. And then it’s this population of young people, from Gen Z to millennials to Gen Xers, who are comfortable with technology and utilize technology to solve everyday issues but were not seeing that solution offered to them in this very interesting, difficult category area, which is caretaking. So they’re used to having it take care of everything else, but somehow there’s a big gap here. So when we looked at that third leg, it was beautiful, right? 

And the people who deal with this, they have money, right? They are affluent because typically it’s people who are late in their working lives. They’re taking care of their parents, like my age, frankly, and then the parents could also be affluent. 

Yes. 

So there’s a lot of money behind this business, which is also attractive. So what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in this business right now? 

I think we really want to actively solve the issue of what I would call the discussion. So we did a survey this past year about caregiving and the gap between sort of what’s happening. Why are people more reluctant to basically look at caretaking measures from a technology point of view? And it really stems around—it’s not that the technology that we’ve developed is not great or that there isn’t a larger need for the technology. 

It’s actually the gap in terms of communication. It’s that even though 80% of the people who are being cared for, the elderly people, are concerned about what it means to age at home by themselves or, like, being, you know, there’s a burden in terms of caregiving. And for those going as young as Gen Xers, Gen Zers, about the concern and fear of taking care of your elderly loved ones and friends, there is a huge—everybody has that 80-plus percent of fear and concern, but yet only 19% have had the conversation about what it means to age by yourself in a home. 

90% of people who are aging want to age at home, but they have no plan, they have no discussions. And so discovering this and trying to solve that issue of how do you start that conversation when what typically drives the usage is a first incident. Your parent falls and they break their hip, and now things are already deteriorating, so you’re making decisions in this very tight decision-making timeframe. And so the impact of making that decision is big, and your time allotment is very little. 

And so the risk of making poor decisions could be relatively high. So how do we shift that conversation and help people shift that conversation so that it’s about a certain ease of having conversations early before something catastrophic occurs? 

Wow. 

And the way that we look at it is to say we’re not just about reactive technology, helping you when you’ve had a catastrophe, right? This is the typical industry that we’re in.

But we're in the business at LogicMark of saying predictive, proactive technology.
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Like, any of the stuff to basically say what’s in your gait, like, all of these things, do they give us an indicator that you may be more likely to fall? Are you seven years ahead of, like, Alzheimer’s? Like, trying to get ahead would actually allow us to provide that conversation. 

So who should initiate that conversation? Should it be the aged parent or should it be the offspring? 

I’m not entirely sure that I think it matters who. I certainly think that perhaps the discussion should be, if comfortable with the aging parent, like, that’s the best place to start because nobody wants to be the one to say, like, “Hey, you’re really getting old. I feel like you’re going to need some support,” right? And we would actually advise people not to have that conversation, to take a look at aging as not a time of frailty and problems, but one of freedom and flying. I always tell people we’re in the business of actually not trying to stop people from flying.

We’re in the business of offering a safety net so that you can fly. And with the sandwich generation, for the young people and for the old people, my job is to supply the safety net so that when they’re flying, they can fly free, but there’s a safety net should they need it. But our job is not to use that net to control people, right? And so the conversation should be had. And I remember advising a friend, and I was like, the discussion shouldn’t be, “I think you’re going to fall and hurt yourself by yourself,” but more, “Do you want to consider moving near me so you could see your grandchildren more and be a more active part of their lives?” Or, “Are you considering staying at your home?” So that first conversation is not about you’re going to be failing, but more, “We want you as a more active member of our lives, and so what can we do to make that happen for you?” 

And even for the senior parents, it’s saying, like, “I want to live in my home, but I’d like to be closer to you, and what are the ways that we can do that even if we’re in a different state?” “What are the best ways for us to communicate in a way that is valuable and easy to do for both parties?” And having those conversations is not about frailty. It’s about, “I’m going to go and live my life, but what’s the best way for us to stay connected?” Right? 

So how can people tap into what LogicMark is doing in order to improve their situation and to have that conversation and be able to provide their loved ones with the right kind of solutions? 

Yeah. I mean,

I'm a big believer that data drives discussions, and so I would welcome anybody to come and take a look at the recent survey because it's always hard to have that conversation when it feels personal, like it's about you.
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It’s not about you per se, but it’s about the greater, larger ecosystem that we’re in and the discussions everyone should have. So I urge people to come to us and take a look at the survey because the survey’s not about us. We actually worked with an independent third party, and they talked to, like, 1,500 people around the U.S. who are caretakers and loved ones. We just did a survey about women’s safety for, like, Gen Z college women. 

So that data is a great place to start to have that conversation, to say, like, “Mom, have you been…” Like, there’s this great survey, and it’s all laid out nicely in infographics even, to say, like, “Hey, I saw this recently. What do you think? Do you feel like you’re concerned about being a burden?” “I don’t think you should be because we love you and we want to be here for you. But what are the ways that we can do that to make you feel less stressed about it? Do you feel stressed about it?” 

So, like, I saw that 1,500 people said, like, 80% of people said this. Then it doesn’t feel so personal. It feels like it’s a greater part of a conversation everybody’s having. And even that dialogue that I have with my own daughter about personal safety was easier to say, “Hey, it’s not that I don’t trust that you’re not going to get roofied in a bar and you’re going to be drinking.” “Like, it’s not about you drinking. It’s about 65% of young women have been roofied or know somebody personally that’s been roofied, and so that’s a pretty darn high percentage.” “So how do you feel about it, and what does it mean to take care of you while you’re away from home? 

And so what are the things that we can do to help you stay safe?” Yeah. And so then it’s not personal judgments about your frailty or your lack of capabilities or anything. It’s really about this being a larger conversation and fear for a lot of people. It’s a great conversation to have. How do you feel about it? And then what can we do to help you alleviate your concern? 

Yeah. 

And I think that’s a great way to start with us. I mean, we would love for you to buy our products, of course, right? We think that they’re best in class. But I would be very happy if our surveys just started that dialogue so that it’s 80% of people having discussions versus 19% of people having discussions. 

Yeah. Yeah. So where should people go to fill out this survey and to learn more about LogicMark’s products and services and IoT technologies and AI applications? What’s the source? Is it LogicMark’s website? Yeah. Or is it your LinkedIn? 

Yeah, so they could definitely find us on the LogicMark website. And they don’t need to fill out anything. That survey is available and free. It’s already been conducted by third parties, so it’s a great piece to take to people and have that conversation now. Your younger loved ones as well as your older loved ones, great dialogue providers. And if you’re interested in our products, they’re all there as well on LogicMark. And you can feel free to go to our social media on LinkedIn, and I guess it would be Instagram and TikTok as well, to find out more. 

Okay. So if you have family members who are older than you or younger than you, then this is relevant for you, and check out the survey and what it says. I mean, it’s shocking that 65% of women have been roofied. I hope my daughters are safe, but they seem to be. But I didn’t know the statistics. I wish I didn’t know this. 

Well, like 65% of women either have been roofied and/or know somebody who has had experience. 

Yeah. Okay, so that’s a little bit better. Anyhow, so this is very valuable stuff, even if it’s not necessarily the most comfortable thing to talk about, but it’s a must-have. So check out LogicMark. And if you want to hear conversations like this with seasoned entrepreneurs like Chia-Lin Simmons, who runs LogicMark, then make sure you are tuned in. 

Chia-Lin, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your experience and the three legs of the stool and the ephemeral why. I’ve never heard this expression. This is super cool. So thanks for coming, and thank you for listening. 

Thank you so much, Steve.

Mark Emalfarb, Founder and CEO of Dyadic International, shows entrepreneurs how to unleash Moore’s Law for biotech by producing biologics faster, at a larger scale, and at a lower cost. From stonewashed jeans to industrial enzymes and biopharmaceutical platforms, Mark has spent decades developing protein-production technology intended to make medicines, vaccines, food, and life-science products more accessible.

In this conversation, Mark introduces The Emalfarb Success Formula Framework—Develop Drive, Show Determination, Hire A-Players, and Overcome Challenges. He explains why persistence matters when disrupting a resistant industry, how the wrong professionals can delay progress, and why entrepreneurs must monitor the experts they hire. Mark also describes Dyadic’s C1 and Dapibus platforms, its outsourced R&D model, the path from research to commercialization, and the challenge of convincing pharmaceutical companies to adopt faster, scalable biomanufacturing.

Good day, dear listeners. This is Steve Preda with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Mark Emalfarb, the founder and CEO of Dyadic International, a technology company utilizing its proprietary C1 platform to develop high-performing biologics for life sciences, food and nutrition, and biopharmaceuticals to reduce manufacturing costs and improve accessibility for patients and healthcare systems globally. Mark, welcome to the show. 

Thanks, Steve. Happy to be here. 

Now, the introduction was a mouthful, and I wonder if you can simplify it for our listeners. What is it that you’ve been working on for the last few decades? And then it will link into the question: What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it through Dyadic International? 

Right. So we started out pioneering the stonewashed blue jean business, selling pumice stone to soften and fade denim to make it more comfortable, more fashionable. And then we moved into the enzyme sales business to sell enzymes that would replace the pumice stone, and that was to be more environmentally friendly and come up with the same kind of look and feel and fashion and comfort. And then we decided to produce our own enzymes because we saw the future. 

The future was in making proteins. And so we spent the next two decades making industrial enzymes for animal feed, food, textiles, pulp and paper, renewable energy, and licensed the technology to Shell Oil, BASF, Abengoa Bioenergy, Codexis, and Shell. And then we sold our industrial division to DuPont on December 31, 2015, for $75 million in cash, and had an idea that we could then transform the cost of biomanufacturing to bring healthcare costs down for these expensive medicines, things like recombinant protein antigens for vaccines, and then things like treatments for oncology, neurology, immunology, and, of course, pandemic preparedness by making treatments like monoclonal antibodies quicker, faster, and cheaper. 

And so our vision has always been to find in nature or in humanity or in animal health the DNA sequences that encode for proteins and to make those more affordably, faster, quicker, and cheaper than the traditional methods that are, in many cases, very inefficient and are leaving everybody behind. So what I mean by leaving everybody behind, as a general statement, of course, some people have access to healthcare, but to be honest, it’s less than probably 2% of the world that has access to biologics. They’re not affordable. They’re not sustainable. So all the benefits that we have here in the United States and maybe in Western Europe and Japan and Korea, and even in our country, quite frankly, it’s not sustainable. 

People are suffering and dying. They’re having pain or lethal outcomes because the pharmaceutical industry and the governments haven’t really moved with Moore’s Law like they did with tech in biomanufacturing. So we’ve created that sort of Moore’s tech version for biomanufacturing and are trying to get adoption and use on a global basis. 

That’s fantastic. So biologics—is this the science of manufacturing proteins? What are biologics? 

Yeah. Biologics is actually turning a DNA sequence into a protein, and you have to do that through cells. And our cell is a filamentous fungal cell that was engineered and developed over decades for mass quantity, large-scale production, low cost, versus pharma, whose cell lines have been developed for low yield, high cost, and more time. So these two worlds are clashing, and we’re bringing a transformation, kind of like what Elon Musk did in the electric car industry. 

We’re actually bringing a transformation to the way biologics are produced and developed, and we can do it quicker, we can do it faster, we can do it cheaper, we can release it sooner. And the pandemic was just kind of like a prelude to the problems that exist in humanity in terms of not having access to the right medicines at the right time during a pandemic. And, of course, whether it be oncology, like cancer, or it be immunology, like arthritis, or neurology, like dementia and Alzheimer’s, these diseases need proteins, and they have to be made more efficiently. They have to be made at a lower cost. 

They have to be made more accessible. And that seems counterintuitive to the pharmaceutical industry, apparently, and governments don’t really have either the wherewithal, the drive, or the determination or the understanding that this is a gaping hole for humanity, and it needs to be filled, and there need to be better systems. And Moore’s Law did that in tech. We clearly don’t use 386 microchips anymore. However, for the last 35 years, the biopharmaceutical industry has been using the same cell lines that they used and have tweaked over three and a half decades, like mammalian cells, Chinese hamster ovary cells that produce biologics like an antibody. 

But as you saw during COVID, they couldn’t keep up with the demand. The virus shifted faster than they could keep up with it. The costs weren’t really affordable anyway, and that was in America. So if you lived in other countries, especially in places like Africa, you weren’t going to see one of these things because we weren’t even getting them at the right time, at the right cost. And so we need a better way of doing it, and we’ve developed a better way of doing it, and we’re hoping that that’ll get picked up and adopted by more and more people over time and will transform the cost of biomanufacturing. So we’ve been swimming upstream, fighting Big Pharma, which has resistance to change. 

And they’re worried about regulatory agencies accepting new things. And quite frankly, regulatory agencies care about one thing: Prove it’s safe and effective, and they’ll approve it. If you don’t prove it’s safe and effective, they won’t approve it. So it’s an excuse that I think is really not there. It’s just more of their infrastructure, and their margins are so high that they don’t think that increasing access to a global population is important to them. We think it is. 

So essentially, if I understand well, you are disrupting biomanufacturing. You’re bringing Moore’s Law into biotechnology, kind of the headline, and this will help manufacture medicines and cures for diseases in a scalable way. Is this what in layman’s terms, you’re doing? 

Yeah. And I’ll give you an example that is quite frightening. So, and again, I’m using COVID rather than oncology, neurology, and immunology, which is potentially applicable for all those industries as well, or those applications and those diseases, not just infectious diseases. If you look at during COVID, again, COVID-19 was a 1% potentially deadly disease. The bird flu is a 10% to 20% deadly disease. Ebola is a 30% to 50% deadly disease. If one of those mutated in the way that they transformed like COVID did, society as we know it and civilization will not be here in the way that it is today. 

It’s like the Spanish flu on steroids, and there’s no way of addressing it in the right quantities, at the right cost, at the right time.

And our technology can make three batches in the time you can make one batch with CHO cells.
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And whether that be a pandemic or it be people dying of cancer or people dying of or suffering from arthritis or dementia or Alzheimer’s, it seems to be that there are solutions that are here today, and we’re one of those potential solutions, and it needs to be adopted. And I think society and the population, and I think people really need to understand that there’s this gaping hole that’s not being filled, and there are solutions to fill at least part of the hole, part of the gap, in a more efficient, more affordable, sustainable way.

Okay. 

And that’s what we’ve developed. And that’s on the biopharmaceutical side. And then we have a whole other aspect of the technology that is driving more recurring revenues, near-term revenues. And that’s—we went back to what we started with in the industrial enzyme business that we sold off to DuPont and licensed to Shell and BASF before. We had a non-compete, which ended several years ago, and we reinvented ROAM. 

And we now have what we call Dapibus, not C1, a filamentous fungal cell line that is being used to develop things for food, nutrition, and health. Things like alpha-lactalbumin, which is a dairy protein. Potentially casein, which is a dairy protein. We’re using it to make chymosin, which is used to manufacture cheese in a collaboration with a company called Inzymes, and they’ve already commercialized that. We’re producing recombinant human albumin in partnership with a company called Proliant Health and Biologicals. 

They were making albumin from cow blood, from calves, bovine albumin, the second or third largest company in the world doing that. But again, people want non-animal proteins because they don’t carry along certain things in them that might be in the blood. So we’re making those now through biotech, biologics, or recombinant proteins. And Proliant’s launched a commercial recombinant human albumin. We’re now making transferrin, which is another protein that’s used in biopharmaceuticals, research, development, and other areas. And then we’re working on growth factors.

So there are enzymes, there are proteins for feeding the world, fueling the world, and healing the world. And we just have a technology that we’ve developed that came from industrial biotech. It’s, again, a high-yield, large-scale, low-cost, rapid way to make things, and we’re applying that in multiple applications, whether it be life sciences, food and nutrition, and, of course, ultimately healthcare for recombinant protein vaccines and antibody treatments that we think we can actually bring the cost of goods down to the point that even in Africa, people will have access to things that they never dreamed possible. 

That’s amazing. That’s amazing. So Mark, I’d like to switch gears a little bit and talk about business because you’ve been running Dyadic for decades, and you’ve developed amazing technologies. And what I’m looking for is, is there a framework or process that is easy to explain? Maybe it’s a three- to five-step process that you could share with the audience. They might be able to apply it to their business following your logic. Is there anything that comes to mind? 

Right. Well, I mean, what comes to mind is determination, persistence. If you don’t believe in what you’re doing and you don’t put the effort in, you’re not going to get to where you want to go.

And so you need the drive, you need the determination, you need the persistence, you need to be able to overcome challenges.
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I’d say we ran into that at least once, if not twice. I think the professionals you hire, unfortunately, we don’t know these people. We hire these professionals. They represent that they have these skills, and in many cases, they let you down. And we hired some of the best and the biggest in the nation. We had a Big Four auditor. We believe that they miscued some things. They think differently, so we’ll just leave it there. But that caused us a lot of pain and anguish for a decade of, let’s say, delays and things that we would have otherwise brought forth sooner. 

We had legal representation in the past that we felt didn’t do what they represented and failed to do things we asked them to do. And that led to, obviously, problems and delays. There are many things like that. So hiring the right professionals and monitoring them, and having the right, whether it be an auditor if you’re a public company or not a public company, or your lawyers or other professionals, many of them overpromise, underdeliver, and some actually do deliver, so you just don’t know. 

So it’s a long road and a lot of ups and downs. It’s not all ups. I mean, even Elon Musk didn’t live at the high level he’s at today at the beginning. But his persistence, his drive, his belief, and determination have made him the wealthiest person on the planet, right? So we do think that with AI and all the new proteins being discovered and the new genes, these people have to find a way to make them into commercially viable products and to turn these genes into biologics. 

And we have a way to do that, we think, equal to, if not better than, others, at a larger scale, lower cost, and more sustainably. So we’re working with people like the Gates Foundation because they recognize that the existing technologies aren’t going to suit the needs of the African population or developing countries at the cost that they can afford. So if they want to have access to things like RSV monoclonal antibodies or malaria, or in a pandemic, they better have a better way of doing it, or they’re going to suffer and maybe even die. And we’re trying to help solve that problem with the Gates Foundation funding. 

We did receive a $3.1 million grant from them, and we’re working on two antibodies, and that program’s going very well. We’re working with an organization called the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, CEPI, which is another major funder of billions of dollars for vaccines. And they’ve funded a $4.5 million project in collaboration with Fondazione Biotecnopolo di Siena in Italy, which is run by Rino Rappuoli, who used to be at Novartis and GSK and Chiron as their chief scientific officer. 

And he’s joined the journey because he believes that our technology can deliver on its promise. We’re part of the European Vaccines Hub, which is a €170 million project, and we’re working on an Ebola antibody with them today. We addressed an Ebola antigen for a vaccine with the Scripps Research Institute, and we’re trying to move that forward with Rino Rappuoli and his group, and the same thing with the antibody.

So I think if people would have paid attention to the inefficiencies that existed earlier, we wouldn’t have a lot of the problems we have today. And unfortunately, you have people in office and the White House who want to make changes, and they talk about making changes, but in some ways, they are. And whether you like them or you don’t, I think that we have a better mousetrap. And I think that we’re trying to get not only the U.S. government to join on board with what the Europeans have already recognized, which is that we do have a better mousetrap and a potential way to do things quicker. 

We can reduce the time from months to weeks in preparing for pandemics today with our technology, with a non-mRNA approach.
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There are beliefs on both sides of the coin. I’m not going to judge either way. I just think that there’s more than one approach, and we’ve now reduced the timeline for the vaccine space so that we can compete in the timeframes of mRNA at a lower cost with a traditional protein-based vaccine technology platform. And we think that people need to start adopting transformative technology so that if you run the same fermenter and you make 50 times more, you can treat 50 times more people at the same cost. 

It seems to be intuitively obvious, but these companies don’t want to change from what they’re doing. And I think the public needs to demand changes so that they actually get what they need. Otherwise, we’re going to be held accountable to what pharma wants to do or the inefficiencies of the government. Yeah. And it’s not that the people in the government aren’t smart and don’t know this. It’s just that their hands are tied. Congress and the Senate aren’t giving them the funding they need to do everything they want to do, so they have to make choices. 

And I think they’d like to make a choice to do things faster, in larger volumes, at lower cost, more sustainably. It’ll reduce our federal budget as well as the whole global budget for healthcare, which is completely out of control. So I would say that you just need to have the drive and the determination as an entrepreneur to withstand all these hurdles that are thrown in your way to change. 

I mean, it sounds like you have some big hurdles. So Mark, in terms of Dyadic, you mentioned the Gates Foundation, the grant. Are you still in the research phase, or are you already in the revenue phase, where you are already selling these products, and the R&D is just part of the process of evolving it further? 

Well, we took a vaccine into a Phase 1 clinical study during COVID and demonstrated safety, efficacy, and tolerability of the platform for the first time ever. So that was a monumental milestone for us because it was always, “Have you been in the clinic? Have you been in the clinic? Have you been in the clinic? Have you put it in humans? Have you put it in humans?” And the answer now is yes. 

We put a vaccine in human beings using this platform and showed it to be safe, effective, and protective. So now we’re working on, like you said, these are vaccines. I’m not talking about an antibody treatment, which is what we’re doing with Gates. But this is what we’re doing with CEPI and what we’re doing with Rino Rappuoli and Fondazione Biotecnopolo di Siena, with Scripps, with Oxford, and multiple other institutions, the Israeli government, the IIBR. 

So these are things we’re moving towards clinical trials and ultimately, hopefully getting approved as products that are being sold to protect and prevent a disease. The Gates Foundation is still in R&D for the monoclonal antibodies. We’ve put it into non-human primates and shown in hamsters and non-human primates that it’s safe, effective, and protective. But we haven’t taken the antibody into humans, and we hope with the Gates Foundation that we will be able to do that with things like the RSV antibody or the malaria antibody or both, or the Ebola antibody, which is a new one that we’re developing. 

And so once we get those into humans, that’ll open up the door for the antibody treatments and potentially lead to a pathway to saving tens, if not hundreds of millions of lives across the globe, and in a more affordable way. 

So how much of your time is dedicated to building the business as opposed to doing the research? 

Well, my time is more dedicated to building the business. We have other people who are in charge of the R&D and developing the technology, and we’re using some of the brightest, smartest people on the planet. We use an outsourced model, to be honest with you. We developed a platform, and now people who know how to engineer it, we pay them money to engineer the proteins and develop the cell lines and scale them up because they have that expertise, and they’ve developed that expertise over three decades. 

So why reinvent the wheel? And then we also supplement that with people like the Gates Foundation’s funding and CEPI’s funding, the European Vaccines Hub’s funding, getting people like Scripps Research in La Jolla or Oxford and others who are spending their money on our platform. So we’re enabling them with the platform to allow them to develop pipelines of products and to continue to advance the skills needed to make these things at even higher levels, at lower cost, faster. For example, in the case of CEPI, we took it down from two to three months to now 15 days. We can develop a stable pool of transformants that produce, and we can purify the protein, all within 15 days for preclinical studies and potentially to go into GMP. 

So your business is basically developing and monetizing this platform as opposed to doing the research, or does it go hand in hand? 

Well, it goes hand in hand, but our ultimate goal is to monetize the platform, and we are monetizing the platform in different ways and across different industries. Remember, there are platforms with an S, plural, not singular. We have C1 for pharma and Dapibus for food, nutrition, health, and life sciences. And it’s the Dapibus platform that’s not as regulatory-sensitive as C1 for pharmaceuticals. 

We’ve already commercially launched with Proliant, the recombinant human albumin, the chymosin with Inzymes, the cellulases with Fermbox. And we’re developing a slew of other proteins for ourselves. And we’re also then developing cell lines to produce proteins and enzymes for other people, multiple applications across diverse industries. 

So Mark, what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in this business? 

How to get the pharmaceutical industry to adopt a new, faster, quicker, cheaper way of making things. And we’ve addressed that problem. We’ve reached out, and we’re continuously reaching out to have some of the people test it. It’s just, how do we overcome, I would say, the resistance to change? And I think that’s what the Gates Foundation, CEPI, and the European Union are helping us do because they’re working on advancing things through regulatory processes, which will then make pharmaceutical companies more, let’s say, amenable to change. 

And then, of course, when we have other people change in developing countries, it’s going to come home to roost that if they don’t change, they’re going to get put out of business. 

So these technology platforms, are they software? Is this a software platform? And how did you develop it? How did you come up with the concept, and how did you manage to manifest it? 

Well, it’s not software. It’s living biology. It’s a living cell, and in our case, it’s a filamentous fungal cell that, over three decades plus, we modified the way it grows. We enhanced the way it produces things. So it’s producing things at hundreds of times higher levels than it did in nature under a novel morphology or form that allows you to scale it up to 500,000 liters, which is massive scale, which we did for the industrial world. We’re scaling down for pharmaceuticals because in one 500,000-liter vessel, you can make more than enough antigens for vaccines for the entire world in a week. 

So we don’t need to run at those scales. And it runs on very low-cost media. So we’ve engineered it. We did random mutagenesis to modify the cells in the past, back in the ’90s, okay? In 2000, we started using genetic engineering and synthetic biology, and even using CRISPR, things like CRISPR now, to target sites to improve not only the reliability and, let’s say, productivity levels, but to improve stability. So it’s been modified and engineered over decades with the most modern biological tools that we possess and have developed for this particular cell line, because it seems to be one of the world’s most prolific or productive cell lines to secrete proteins into the media. 

Some cells, like E. coli, which are bacteria, can’t produce, let’s say, these more complex proteins that need glyco structures. E. coli doesn’t have glycans, so that eliminates them from making monoclonal antibodies and some of these very expensive drugs. And then when you use E. coli as a bacterium, it doesn’t come out of the cell. It’s stuck in the cell. Then you’ve got to crack it open. You lose a lot of it. You’ve got purification difficulties to get rid of the background noise. So we secrete the protein into the media, so it’s already out of the cell, which makes the downstream purification easier and lowers the cost. 

And the yields are very high. So it depends on what you’re trying to make. Are you trying to make an antibody for human therapeutics? Are you trying to make a vaccine for, I don’t know, cancer, oncology, or HPV, for example, which is a very famous recombinant protein antigen vaccine? It’s a recombinant protein. We think that’s a great target for our technology to drive the cost of that down, and potentially we’re working with some of the smartest scientists in the world to bring us the code, kind of what you would say the software code. 

The sequence of the gene determines the structure of the protein and the function. So we take that sequence and just insert it into our cell line, C1 for pharma, Dapibus for non-pharma, and then we optimize that cell line for productivity and stability, and then we scale it up. Or in the case of pharma, we scale it down because we’ve already scaled it up to way beyond what they need to make the protein of interest for the application that somebody wants to use it for. 

So the platform is the cell line that you developed, and you’re leveraging that cell line for different applications? Yes. Or is it a patented process? What is the platform? 

Yeah. Well, the platform contains the cell line that’s been improved and modified. And I can get into how and exactly why and what for pharma, for example. In industrial biotech, the morphology was changed, so it grows in a less viscous way. That allows you to scale it at much higher scales under low viscosity, which means you need less aeration, less agitation, and then you can get higher output or protein productivity. In the pharmaceutical industry, we modified the industrial workhorse, because remember, we started out in an industrial business and then brought that to pharma, not the other way around.

So we started off developing mass-quantity, low-cost production at large scale, and then we moved it into pharma. We had to modify it to meet the needs of the pharmaceutical industry, which means we had to remove some of the background proteins that were being produced in the cell, like proteases that would chew down the protein. So if we made an antibody and it chewed it down, then that result is zero or unusable. So we had to knock out 15 of the different genes, and we did that one by one by one so we could avoid paying a royalty to CRISPR, or we could have done it faster. But we did that. 

So the cell line for pharma is a protease-reduced cell line, so you have more stable proteins. So the proteases that have been removed aren’t there chewing it down now when you make it. So when it secretes into the fermenter, again, it’s out of the cell. You don’t want the proteases in the background chewing it up, so we got rid of those through molecular biology and synthetic genetic engineering. And then for monoclonal antibodies, we modify the way that the cell puts these sugar patterns, or glycans, on the cells, and we glycoengineer it to make human-like glycans, because fungal-like glycans are different from human glycans. And if you’re going to put an antibody in a human body, you want it to kind of look like a protein it’s used to seeing so you don’t have any immunogenic response. 

And so it took us quite a long time, seven to eight years, to knock out the proteases and do the glycoengineering, tens of millions of dollars. And that’s why the Gates Foundation and others are coming to us, because we actually have something that currently can bind and neutralize viruses equally as well as the way they’re being made today, but potentially at much higher yields, much lower cost, much faster, and that can be released sooner. 

Awesome. So who is it that you would like to respond if they listen to this podcast and engage with you, and how can they engage? Is there a website they should visit, or can they reach out to you? What’s the best way to engage with you? 

Well, to engage with us, go to www.dyadic.com, our website. And then it would be [email protected] to send an email. Who we’d like to, let’s say, respond? Number one, we’d like the President of the United States to actually fulfill his promise of lowering the cost of healthcare. 

Steve Preda: I don’t know if he’s listening, but yeah. 

Yeah. Well, I mean, you asked who. That’s a target. Actually, he, in 2019, issued an executive order, quite frankly, before the pandemic, saying that our technologies were antiquated and needed to be modernized. And then the next administration came in and kind of ignored it. So he’s back, and hopefully he can remember he actually issued that executive order and actually make sure they do something about it. And then, of course, the next person would be the controversial HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy. 

That clearly doesn’t like mRNA vaccines, so we have an alternative to mRNA. So maybe you want to push that and see if you can actually do what they do at the same speed or relative speed, but at a much lower cost and much larger volume. And in much broader uses than just vaccines and, again, treatments. We can make albumin. Supply chain issues. We can fulfill a lot of needs that need to be fulfilled for proteins and enzymes. 

And then, of course, anybody out in the world who’s in the pharmaceutical industry who actually wants to make a change and make a difference. Obviously, the CEOs of the major pharma companies, do you have the vision to actually transform the industry, or do you want to just keep doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results? And it isn’t that they don’t do a great job. They do. They do wonderful things for humanity. But I think that, like all of us, there are improvements that need to be adopted and used. And I think they need to overcome the resistance to change. 

And if they don’t, humanity is never going to have the cures for disease, the prevention or treatments that we need at a cost that’s sustainable for the global population, and quite frankly, even here in America. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb, in 2018, you can look it up on the internet, said 2% of the American public has access to biologics with 40% of our prescription drug budget. No wonder why we’re out of control in our budgets, because we’re not really making the transformational changes in healthcare cost of goods that need to be done to actually bring the cost of healthcare down, not only to the people but to the governments that are actually paying the bill. 

Okay. Well, if you’re listening, Mr. President, Mr. Health Secretary, if you guys are listening, or CEOs of Big Pharma, or people who have the ear of these people, if you’re listening and you are looking for ways to have higher-yield, more scalable, low-cost proteins and other ways to reduce the cost of vaccines and to be able to expand access to these to more people, then reach out to Mark Emalfarb, the CEO of Dyadic. 

Connect with him on LinkedIn or on his website. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because I have exciting entrepreneurs joining us every week. Mark, thank you for coming, and thank you for listening. 

Steve, thank you. It’s been an exciting four-decade journey from jeans with a J to genes with a G, so thank you.

Adam Heitzman, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of HigherVisibility, shows businesses how to generate franchise & multi-unit leads by aligning digital marketing with how buyers search, research, and convert. Driven by competition and the challenge of growth, Adam has helped build a durable agency that continues adapting as search behavior, platforms, and technology evolve.

In this conversation, Adam introduces The Targeted Growth System—Conduct Audience Research, Understand Pain Points, Map the Buying Journey, Find Where They Congregate, Develop Content, and Convert with Copy. He explains how first-party data, recorded customer calls, analytics, heatmaps, surveys, and lookalike audiences reveal what buyers need and where they spend time. Adam also shares why strategy must determine tactics, how AI can improve analysis without replacing human judgment, and why quarterly business reviews should connect marketing activity to business outcomes.

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Adam Heitzman, the co-founder and managing partner of HigherVisibility, a digital marketing agency that helps businesses grow through SEO, paid search, paid social, CRO, and web development. Adam, welcome to the show. 

Thanks, Steve. Appreciate you having me. 

Well, I’m very curious about you and what you have developed, the frameworks, the purpose, the principles. So let’s start with the question: What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in HigherVisibility? 

Well, yeah, I think from a personal why perspective, why I’m doing this, right? Ultimately, my goal and my desire… I really enjoy helping people. I love helping businesses solve problems, and one of the things that I’ve kind of gravitated towards is… I come from a background of competition and sports and all of these things, and so I kind of view this as a competition to some extent. And so the why behind it is the challenge, the challenge of growing a business, trying to figure out what makes it tick and how to help it grow and succeed. And so that’s the why behind it. It’s the challenge more than anything. 

Yeah, I love it. So how do you grow your business? What drives growth in your business? 

Well, for us particularly, I mean, it’s kind of changed a little bit over the years. I think if I take a step back, we started this agency, or I was a co-founder, started the agency back in 2009. So when you think about that versus kind of where we’re at today, then that’s 17 years, right? So things looked different then, right? While there were marketing agencies out there, and we’re specifically digital, the number of digital agencies today versus where they were 17 years ago is night and day. 

I mean, there are new ones getting started every single day. There are thousands and thousands of them, whereas when we originally started, maybe a couple hundred. And so how we went about growing the business was completely different then, and I would probably have to do it completely differently today than I did back then. And so I think in some regard, it’s nice to have, in the sense that we were somewhat of an early adopter or early in this space, right? So because of that, we had historically grown pretty rapidly, pretty quickly, because at the time, like I said, there weren’t a lot out there. 

But at the same token, businesses were facing the same problems that they’re kind of facing today still, which is consumers are looking for solutions to their problems. Our job is to help businesses show up when someone is searching for those solutions, right? Yep. The same thing could be said today as it would’ve been 17 years ago. Now, the mediums and how they go about doing it might be different, but that same principle is still there today. And so for us back then, because there was a smaller pool to go from, growth was quicker, it was easier, and it’s much different now. 

And so when I think about growth, I’m thinking about back then, we were kind of practicing what we preach. We did our own SEO, we did our own paid search. We did all of those different things to drive business. And I come from a lead generation background myself historically, and so that was just natural. And so growing the business and getting enough opportunities or at-bats to kind of generate sales and really start getting momentum, that really wasn’t the difficult part. Now it’s more difficult today than it probably has ever been for us from that standpoint, just because of the sheer amount of agencies out there, knowing that the consumer journey is different today than it was as well. 

Yeah. Okay. So that’s definitely true, and obviously SEO is changing rapidly, and now you have to show up on AI engines, like large language model engines, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. So how do you guys make this transition? 

Yeah. Well, it’s definitely changing how people are discovering information, and I think there’s a tendency in our industry to declare that everything that came before this new technology is dead. SEO is not disappearing. Now, search behavior is changing. Google is still incredibly important, but now you have, like you mentioned, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, all these other ones, right? And they’re influencing how people are searching and researching products and services. 

And I think the interesting thing is that many of these fundamentals haven’t changed nearly as much as people think. You still need authority. You still need useful content. You still need a technically sound website. You still need the digital PR side of things. Again, what’s changing is where and how that information is surfaced.

SEO is still the quickest and most impactful way to show up in AI search.
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A lot of what we’ve done more recently has been through our testing ourselves on our own websites, our own platforms, and also, we’re heavily involved in numerous industry cohorts, right, where we’re doing types of public testing and sharing information to figure out what’s working and what’s not, so that we can then turn around and provide those types of services to our clients. 

Yeah. Yeah, I love it. So you’re experimenting on yourself, and then you sell to clients what works.

Absolutely. 

Okay. So let’s talk about frameworks because this podcast, Management Blueprint, I’m always looking for frameworks, and you have one that I saw on your website. You mentioned it, the Targeted Growth System. So what’s the Targeted Growth System, and can you explain the major steps in the Targeted Growth System and how it works? 

Yeah. So essentially, one of the things that we, several years ago—and it’s similar to kind of what I just talked about earlier, right? When we first started our business, we were one of a couple hundred agencies out there that were doing this type of work. Now there’s tens of thousands. And one of the things that we realized is also along that same line, marketing, if you think about it, marketing today has changed more probably in the last three or four years than it had in the previous 20 or 30. 

It’s completely different. And so we also knew that the model and how we went about operating with our clients had to evolve with that. And so we’ve been really focused on moving away from that traditional agency model where someone, let’s just use SEO as an example, buys SEO services, and the agency immediately starts executing a predetermined checklist of deliverables. We knew that that doesn’t work today, not in the way that it maybe used to. 

The other thing is, we also knew we had to differentiate ourselves, too. So we really leaned into what we kind of were doing, that we were not only doing for ourselves, but that we recognized how things have changed across the web. Think about it from social, right? When you think about it, you go on LinkedIn or these other platforms, people don’t follow companies, they follow people. Yep. They want to have that relationship. And so when you think about it from that perspective, understanding who your audience actually is is crucial, and it’s more crucial today than it’s ever been. And so at the root of our Targeted Growth System is audience research. 

We go through the process of developing and researching who your ICP is. What are their pain points? What are the things that make them tick? What websites do they visit? What is the journey they take to find the solutions that they’re looking for, right? And that is the root of all of this. It’s not a groundbreaking thing, but it’s deep audience research and persona development. So we go through, and we’re really, really focused on that because then that can tell us, if we’re thinking about SEO, that tells us what type of content to create so that we show up across the customer journey. It tells us, all right, from a digital PR perspective, what websites do we need to be present on? What platforms are more important than others if we’re thinking about social, right? 

And so all of these different things kind of help us really create a customized approach and a customized strategy to help our clients win. It’s not just some checklist of items, right? And we think about that, too. Most of the time, when you’re thinking about SEO or paid search or things like that, you’re thinking about, “Let’s get traffic, and let’s get people to our website.” Well, that’s only half the battle. The other half of the battle is getting them to actually convert, become a customer. 

So once you truly understand the audience and what their pain points and struggles are and what they’re looking for, you can strategically do copywriting to speak to those as well, to really influence them and get them to convert further into that funnel. So that’s the root of the Targeted Growth System, and there’s lots of nuanced tactics that we use to kind of really lean into it to further build that. But when we think about some of the big things, it’s: What is the business actually trying to accomplish? What are the goals? Who is the ideal customer? What does the competitive landscape look like? What’s preventing visitors from converting? Is attribution set up correctly? 

And once we know all of that, then we can identify, okay, where’s the biggest growth opportunity? That’s where we can really shape where the marketing investment should go. Maybe SEO is the right answer. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s paid media.

But the strategy should determine the tactics rather than the tactics determining the strategy.
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Yeah. I love it. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. That’s great. And especially the idea of discovering their buying journey and then tailoring the funnel to match the buying journey. 

Exactly. 

And where do they appear? And then you develop the content that is custom to the platform that they are appearing on, so you’ve got good coverage and it’s kind of domain-specific. That’s great. So how do you do the audience research? What’s your process for that? 

Yeah, I mean, there are numerous ways that we go about doing it. So first and foremost, we try to use any first-party data that we have. So when we’re talking to a client, if they’re able to share any internal research they’ve already done, that’s critical. Number two, a lot of times nowadays, people are recording almost every digital conversation that they have, right?

So they’ve got, whether it’s Fireflies or Voma or whatever system people are using, you have these call recordings. So you’ve got actual feedback from actual customers that you can use. So we try to capture that where we can. Independent from that, we’re looking at Google Analytics. We’re looking at, I don’t know if you’re familiar with Microsoft Clarity. It’s a free system, kind of like Google Analytics, but from Microsoft where you add it to the website, and it’ll do heat mapping. 

It’ll do user recordings, like their website recordings of how they’re navigating. So you can kind of see where people are hung up, where they’re not, where they’re hitting errors. We use all of that. There are other third-party tools that we kind of leverage in there as well. SparkToro does a great job of providing user information as well. So there’s a variety of different tools and tactics, and a lot of times, too, what we’ll do is we’ll actually run our own surveys. 

Once we understand, hey, this particular business is in this subject, this is kind of the rough, high-level demographics that make up their audience, we’ll run an independent survey with people that match that criteria and ask them specific types of questions. And then use that information to guide some of our decision-making strategy. 

Yeah. Facebook has a term for it, to build a like audience or something like that. 

Oh, lookalike audience? 

Lookalike audience, yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So in a roundabout way, it’s similar to that, right? We’re creating a lookalike audience and asking them open-ended questions purposely so that we can kind of hear the feedback in their own words. 

Yeah. That’s very clever. So what’s the one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? 

Ooh. Well, I think a couple of different things. Right now, more than anything, probably with a lot of businesses, it’s AI. Where can we use it? How can we utilize it to help our business? And that’s kind of been the biggest thing that we’ve been focused on more recently. I think there’s a balance there. I think we want to use AI, but at the same token, we’re not the business that is trying to run everything on AI, right? 

We still believe wholeheartedly that there need to be people and humans in this decision-making process, in this journey, and so it's trying to balance where those opportunities are.
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And so that’s where we’re using AI more than anything right now, to try to help make things more efficient in terms of data analysis, to then provide that type of feedback to our sales team or our brand success team if they’re the ones communicating with our clients. So a good example of that would be, a lead comes in. This is a pretty simple one. A lead comes in, they’re interested in services. 

Before our sales team actually picks up the phone to then reach out to them, we’re using AI on the back end, analyzing the person, analyzing the company, and gathering any information that we can around that individual and that company so that when that salesperson first reaches out, from the onset, we have a foundational understanding of who the company is, what might be their pain points, and a little bit about that individual, so that they’re coming to it much more armed than they otherwise would have been. 

Yeah. Yeah, that makes, of course, a lot of sense. So what do you feel is the direction digital agencies are going to evolve in? What’s going to be the criteria for being a successful digital agency in the future? 

Adaptation. I mean, you've got to adapt, and I think that's one of the things that I'm probably, honestly, in some ways most proud of, is the durability of what we've built at HigherVisibility.
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HigherVisibility’s continued to evolve through all of it, right? And so we’ve been fortunate to receive some great industry recognition along the way, and I’m proud of that. But I’m probably more proud of the way that we’ve built a company of talented people who can continue to adapt as the market changes. And I think AI is a great example of that, where I think continuing to do things how you’ve always done them is not going to work, especially nowadays with businesses leaning more and more into AI and efficiency and automation. I think there’s a balance there, right? 

And so figuring out what that balance is for each company and each organization is important in the long run. But adapting to, again, everything was Google. It’s still the vast majority of people use Google, but now people are experiencing and searching for things in different ways. And so we have to adapt our strategy to how consumer demand and consumer journeys are changing. Yeah. And so I would say that’s probably the biggest thing. 

Yeah. So how do you reassure your clients that they are in good hands because you’re evolving as fast as the technology requires you to? 

Yeah. And that’s a great question. There are a couple of different ways in which we try to do that. Number one, we’re involved in, like I said, a lot of different cohorts where we’re sharing information. We’re regularly doing kind of our own research and studies. And when we do that research and those studies, we then help publish that across the web, sharing our findings. So when a client knows that we’re doing that type of research and understanding, I think there’s a level of comfort knowing that, hey, we’re not just sitting around following the same thing. 

It’s also interesting because if I take a step back from my own personal journey of getting here, in a lot of ways, I was in some of their shoes before, right? So I’ve been on the flip side where I was a client. And so understanding that from a business perspective, not just from an agency perspective, I think has given me a unique perspective and insight that I maybe otherwise wouldn’t have. And so at the end of the day, the way we try to think about it is it’s not necessarily about SEO in and of itself if I’m using that as my concept, right? 

It’s not necessarily that someone’s looking specifically for SEO, but they’re looking for a way to, at the root of the problem, generate more sales, generate more leads. And our goal is to help them achieve that depending on what platform or service line that kind of aligns with. 

So basically, SEO is just a tool, and that serves the purpose of being discovered. But if you focus on the discovery, then maybe SEO is not going to be the most important tool, or maybe it’s a different version of SEO. So is it more about outcome-driven rather than tool-driven? 

Yeah, exactly. I mean, nobody actually wants SEO. They want the business outcome that SEO’s supposed to create, right? And so I think that’s where, when I’m thinking about it based on my previous experience, right, when you’re on the client side, you’re thinking about revenue, you’re thinking about budgets, you’re thinking about things like that, right? And so I’ve always tried to keep that perspective because I understand that side of it, having been over there. 

Clients don't ultimately care how busy we are. They care about whether what we're doing is helping their business.
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Yeah. That’s fantastic. So how do your clients expect you to measure the performance, to measure this outcome-oriented performance? 

I think that’s an interesting question because it’s something that we’ve always tried to continue to refine and improve upon. Sometimes clients come to us, and funny enough, they don’t know what their goal is. They just know they need this service. And so part of it is us working with them to kind of work backwards, right? And so if we take a step back in that scenario and we’re like, two years from now, let’s just say two years from now, if this were successful, what would that mean for the business? 

Ultimately, what are you trying to accomplish in the business? And ultimately, trying to work back so that we can then create actual… We want ourselves to be held accountable, right? So if we can get clear goalposts and roadmaps of, “Hey, this is what I’m trying to achieve. This is where I’m at today,” then we can develop and create a strategy to ultimately help us get there.

And so I think that’s the key behind all of it, is really, truly understanding it. And we’re also aware that things shift and change, and those types of goals can change and shift. And so when we’re working with a client, we typically like to have these quarterly sprints, right? So we think about it from a 90-day window, right? So a client comes on, we understand, we try to figure out what the goals are. We do our initial work, and every 90 days, we have what we call a quarterly business review, where we sit down and we’re like, “Okay, this was our strategy. 

This is what worked. This is how we’re pacing towards your goal. This is what did not work. And then for the next quarter, this is what our strategy needs to be to kind of help us get closer to that.” And then asking that question from the client’s perspective: Has anything shifted in the business? Have any initiatives changed? So that we can adjust our strategy accordingly. 

Yeah, I love the quarterly business reviews. A lot of companies talk about it, but they’re not disciplined enough to do it every quarter. 

Yeah. 

And do you find that for a quarterly business review to be productive, you actually have to create value with the business review itself rather than just use it to canvass the client’s ideas? 

You do, and I think the other difficult part that tends to happen, at least for us, is people get busy, and it’s an initiative, don’t get me wrong. But I think finding… Typically, for the quarterly business review for us, it’s an hour, hour-and-a-half conversation, right? 

So making sure that the client, and not only just the client who’s our point of contact, but maybe the ones that are actually their superiors, right, that are actually making some of the bigger business decisions, are part of that conversation. Because I think that’s critical, actually getting insight into the actual business. How is the business performing? Have things shifted? And what needs to change? Because we’re only as good as the information that we get as well, right? 

Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. I always thought that for the QBR process to be successful, you actually have to do some thinking beforehand so that you can actually stimulate the thinking of the client in that call, which would be why they would want to have this call in the first place. And then you can mine their ideas so that you can upsell them. But what’s your view of this? 

Yeah. No, that’s a great call. And you’re right. So part of our process is kind of a look back, right? “Hey, this is what worked. This is what did not work.” And be honest about that. “Hey, we thought this was going to work. It didn’t. This is where we’re at today in relation to what your goals and expectations were or are. But based on our research and what we know right now today, this is what we think will help you get to where we want to get to,” right? 

Now, once we have that conversation and we share that, obviously we’re going to get dialogue and information from the business that may shift or change that a little bit. But at least you’re coming to the table having done the research and analysis ahead of time, saying, “Hey, if things are where they’re at today, this is what needs to happen over the next quarter to help us achieve those goals.” 

Yeah. Yeah, I love that. So who is your ideal customer, and how do you want them to connect with you? 

So if you were to ask me that question today and I was starting a new agency today, it would probably be different than what it would have been historically. Because again, there’s a piece of that where we’ve been in this for 17 years, and so over the course of that timeframe, we have worked with a wide variety of different verticals and types of businesses. If I were starting an agency today, I think to be successful, you really, truly have to niche down and focus on a specific type of vertical, and don’t get me wrong, we still kind of try to do that a little bit. 

We do have certain types of industries and verticals that we try to specialize in because we have a history of working with them. And some of those tend to be franchise organizations, multi-unit businesses. While we have worked with a wide variety of businesses in e-commerce and enterprise, the majority of the businesses that I feel like we tend to work with today, that we have the most success with today, tend to be more of your small- to medium-sized businesses. Because over the years, we’ve just become really, really strong in local and geographic marketing. 

And so that’s why the franchise and multi-unit space has been really a big vertical of ours. Underneath that, obviously, home services, legal. We have a lot of success in the personal finance space as well. That’s kind of where my initial background comes from. And so any business that’s reliant on lead generation, we’ve been really, really strong and successful at. 

Wouldn’t you say that almost all businesses rely on lead generation? 

To some extent. I mean, obviously e-commerce is a little bit different because it’s sales, it’s online sales, and there’s a little bit of a nuance there in terms of how all that’s done. But yeah, to some extent. I mean, I think we don’t do a lot in SaaS technology, and honestly, I think that would be a difficult one to be in right now simply because of AI. It’s being very disrupted. And so I think we also try to focus on verticals and industries where they are more reliant on our types of services and need our types of services that are less open to being disrupted from that perspective. 

Okay. So if you’re listening to this and you are in home services, legal, personal finance, and other lead-generation-intensive businesses, then reach out to Adam. Where can people learn more about HigherVisibility? 

HigherVisibility.com. Okay. You can also look at me, follow me on LinkedIn or X, Adam Heitzman. I post regularly on there. I also am on Search Engine Land, Search Engine Journal, places like that. But HigherVisibility.com is usually the best place to go. 

All right. So check out HigherVisibility.com. Check Adam out on social media. He’s prominent on LinkedIn, and you just mentioned X. So check out his thought leadership. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because every week I bring a couple of exciting entrepreneurs who share their frameworks with you. Adam, thanks for coming, and thank you for listening.

Thanks, Steve. Really appreciate it. Had a great time.

Sean McGraw, Founder and CEO of FOR Energy, shows leaders how to sell your story on social while building a scalable, systems-driven company. Guided by servant leadership, Sean runs a mission-centered residential energy business that helps Phoenix-area homeowners lower energy costs, improve comfort, and address indoor air quality.

In this conversation, Sean introduces The McGraw Business Build Framework—Org. Chart, Depth Chart, Playbooks, and Processes. He explains why systems create predictable outcomes, how playbooks combine mission and training with SOPs, and why processes should cover the repeatable 80% without overcomplicating the business. Sean also shares how speed, planning, and execution drive growth, why leaders must empower teams to decide within guardrails, and how FOR Energy uses social storytelling to market a holistic service that customers may not know to search for.

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint. And today my guest is Sean McGraw, the Founder and CEO of FOR Energy, a full-service residential energy company helping homeowners reduce their energy costs, increase comfort, and improve indoor air quality through energy efficiency. FOR is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, where there is rain right now. There is. Sean, welcome to the show. 

Thanks for having me, Steve. Excited to be here. 

Yeah, it’s great. And I was wondering about your business because I have a client who is in the energy efficiency business in Maryland, but they have a completely different climate. So I was thinking that what you have to do is really reduce heat, and what they have to do much of the year is to increase heat. So it’s kind of the opposite thing. 

It is. Yeah. Arizona is a unique place. We get 115-degree heat for three, four months at a time. So our job is to keep heat out. Their job is to keep heat in. It’s actually the same concepts. You’re just dealing with different seasons, and it can still get hot in Maryland. So when they make a home energy efficient, they also want to keep the cold air in in the summertime. 

Yeah, that’s right. And insulation is a big part of it. So we are going to dive into this. But before we go there, I’d like to ask you, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business? 

Yeah. My personal “Why” is very generic and very simple. I want to leave this earth better than I found it. I want to leave a legacy behind me. I’ve got two young kids. And I would tell you this, my perspective’s changed since having those kids. My most important job in life is raising them right, raising them to be high-functioning members of society that give back. They’re philanthropic. They’re good people. I would say that ties into my company too. 

So we’re a very mission-, vision-, core-value-centric company. One of our main core values is servant leadership. So part of our philosophy is, for our entire team, for the people that we hire, hire people that want to serve other people, whether that’s philanthropically outside of the office, whether it’s a coworker needing a hand or wanting to learn a new skill. We’re very big on just pushing and doing good things outward because it always comes back. 

Yeah, I love it. Hire servant leaders. So what does servant leadership mean to you? 

Yeah, I think maybe I have a unique definition, but servant leadership kind of evolved from a book that we had read called The Go-Giver. It’s a phenomenal book. It’s about the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success. And so servant leadership to me is elevating those around you. 

So it could be something as simple as I’m going to go clean up a park with my kids this weekend on Saturday when they could be playing or hanging out with friends doing something more fun.

But I really want to ingrain in people around me, the more you serve and the more you better your community and those around you, the better your quality of life gets.
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Love it. Elevate people around you. That’s definitely a good rule to live by. So Sean, this podcast is called Management Blueprint, and we focus on unearthing great frameworks that people are using. 

Yep. 

So I wonder if you could share a framework with us, with our listeners, that you have discovered which helps you be more effective or a better servant leader or gain clients or serve clients or do something in your business that is easy to understand. It can be explained in three to five steps that people, when they hear it, could apply to their own business. 

Oh gosh, this is a multilayered, complicated question, but I’ll tell you. I’ve read Scaling Up, I’ve read The E-Myth, I’ve read the EOS framework, and I’ve kind of pieced together pieces from a lot of these systems. And really, for us specifically, and even businesses I look at and admire, systems run the business. It’s rarely a person doing a bad— It can happen, of course. But if you’re hiring to your mission, vision, values, you’re hiring, firing, and promoting to those, everything after that should fall into systems. 

And systems from top to bottom of the company run the company and allow a company to grow and keep the train on the tracks and create this predictable outcome.
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New positions are added. Team members may join the team, team members may exit the team. And so keeping that up to date is a foundational piece for us. So that’s number one. Number two is a depth chart. If this person isn’t here, who can do that job? To me it’s ultra important, especially for companies from, let’s say, $1 million to $6 million, $7 million, because you have a lot of single points of failure. You might have one person that knows how to do a very, very important job, and hypothetically speaking, if that person got hit by a bus tomorrow, what do you do? So creating that depth chart. 

The third piece for us was creating playbooks and training and operating manuals for every single position in the company. And we’re not perfect at this. Updating them is kind of the challenge that I think we need to get better at. But people can’t be successful at a job if they don’t have proper training and a proper blueprint to be successful at that job. And then I would say the fourth thing is creating processes around anything that you’re doing 80% of the time. So there’s always going to be one-offs in business. There’s always going to be a phone call I’m not expecting and some kind of challenge that my team or myself have to solve for. 

But for 80% of the business, it’s happening every single day, and those items should be documented and infused in the training for that position and well-known throughout the company. So that framework has served us well. We’ve been gut-punched a lot of times over the last couple of years, Steve. Like, business is harder than it’s been in a long time. We had a pretty good-sized solar company, and there’s been a lot of legislation changes, a lot of bad actors in the space that have completely changed the landscape of solar. 

So we’ve kind of pivoted, and we’re kind of reinventing ourselves and really focused on energy efficiency, which allows us to go back and relay the foundation in a lot of ways. But those are the items that have really served us well, and as we continue to hit these levels in business, we do have to go revisit how we’re doing things. And that system worked at $2 million. Is it going to work at $10 million? Probably not. So we’re always looking at ways to make things better, faster, less expensive with the same or better outcome, and it is most of the time possible to do. 

Yeah. That’s fascinating. So you mentioned playbooks and then process. What’s the difference between playbooks and process in your vocabulary? 

Yeah, to me, they do go hand in hand. So a process is something like, how do we take a phone call from a customer? I’ll use that as a very basic example. So some companies, you can walk into their call center and they just have people saying, “Hello?” It’s not a right way to answer the phone. But if you don’t train somebody on how you expect them to answer the phone, well, shame on you. They did their job. They’re supposed to answer the phone. So, “Hey, this is Sean with FOR Energy. How may I help you today?” There’s a big difference between the two. 

But simply by documenting and identifying something, and then walking them through how to accept an appointment, how to put it on the calendar, how to make sure that by the time they’re done with that phone call, it’s ready for that next step, that’s a process. And that process should be a part of the playbook. The playbook is kind of, I don’t mean this in any negative way, it’s the Holy Bible for that position. Like, you need to follow it like gospel. And if you do, you’re creating a path of consistent results. Without the playbook, you’re creating chaos every single time. 

So the playbook is like a high-level process for the function, and then the process is more of an SOP? 

Yeah, I think that’s a good description. So the playbook might be a collection of SOPs, but it’s going to go deeper than that. It’s going to explain our mission, our vision, our values, the why behind the process. Whereas the process is a step-by-step instruction manual. The process is as simple as, you know, when I was a kid, I played with Legos. I love Legos, and now I have two little boys that love Legos, and I get to play with them again. 

If you follow the instructions on a Lego set, it’s always going to look exactly how it’s supposed to look. But if you get a box of Legos and there’s no instructions in the box, and you are unpacking these Legos, you’re going to have a really tough time doing the job. You’re going to have a really tough time making the Legos look like they look on the box. You might get close, but I bet you’re not accurate. 

Yeah. I like that analogy. It’s a good one, especially with today’s big Legos, like the Millennium Falcon and stuff like that. It’s hard to just intuitively put it together. 

I don’t think a person on Earth could put together that Lego set without instructions. It’s too complicated. And business is really similar. If you look at it like a Lego set, people really do need to know what A, B, C, D, E, F, G, to get from start to finish are. But the whole purpose is you build a masterpiece, and it is exactly the same as it looks on the box. 

Yeah. 

And a good process will do that in business and just create that predictable outcome which everybody’s after, and so many people neglect. 

So how does AI influence this approach? Can you become too mechanical and actually regress? 

Yeah, I think you can. I think you can over-process a business. Owning a business in any vertical is complicated. You’re juggling a couple of different things. You want process, but you want simplification at the same time. I’ve personally done it. I’ve seen buddies do it, where they overcomplicate their business with process. So when we are designing a process, we’re always looking at, is this going to scale? Is this simple to understand? 

You want to ask those questions and really make a process as simple as possible to get from A to Z. Like, if you have a process and can eliminate a step and have a really top-notch, world-class outcome, you should eliminate that step, in my opinion. 

Yeah. Yeah. Simplify, simplify. So what drives growth in your business? 

That’s another really deep, good question. I would say this: speed. If I could boil it down to one word, it’s speed. And then a second would be planning. We’re getting to a stage where we’re creating a predictable model where we feed it $1 and we might get eight back, eight to 10 back if we’re running efficiently. Speed in making decisions and making pivots when you need to is ultra important in every business. We’re living in the age of AI. We’re living in the age of information. 

Starting a business is really hard. It always has been. I think it might be harder now because of costs and things like that than ever before, and maybe, like, a tighter talent pool. But I will tell you, starting a business today, these people starting businesses have all the information in the world sitting in their pocket on their phone. So the knowledge is there. The execution is what’s tough. And the reason I say speed is because if we take a month to make a decision and there’s some young buck that started a similar company to mine that’s just really, really giddy and ready to go, and they make that decision in a day or two days, they might be light-years ahead of us very, very quickly. Speed, planning, and execution drive growth 10 out of 10 times. 

So how do you make sure that you are accelerating your decision-action velocity? 

Well, it’s really on my brain at all times. I’ve just come to know that if I drag my feet on a decision or an opportunity, that opportunity may not be there anymore, or it may change, or I may let somebody else get to it first. So this is just a state of mind for me, and it is hard to drill into my team, and you can do it through process. Like, for instance, today, we haven’t done a great job of planning our marketing for future months. 

So we’re creating a system where, mid-month, let’s call it the 15th, my team is going to present the following month’s marketing plan so we can agree, we can discuss, we can identify issues, poke holes, and get to a place where we all agree and we’re rowing in the same direction. So when that next month comes, we are quick. We have a plan. Now we’re in execution mode. 

It can be done. It should be a mindset. I mean, some leaders have a tendency to drag their feet and ask a lot of questions and create analysis paralysis. But when I look at the leaders I admire the most, they’re making quick, quick, quick decisions. 

So if you doubled your company in the next 12 months, would the number of decisions double that you would have to make as well? 

They could. They could, right? Yes and no. The decisions my team would need to make would definitely increase.

A big piece of growth is empowering a team to be able to make important decisions for their department or their job without me.
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It’s slowed us down. I want others to be able to make decisions with some guardrails, right? They might have a budget, but I’m going to say, “Okay, your budget is X amount of dollars for this month. What are you going to do with your budget? How are you going to create this many demo opportunities, leads with that budget?” And let them fly. 

Yeah. So it’s very much outcome-driven. You give people the outcome and go figure it out kind of thing. 

And I might have a little influence, especially if they’re newer, but I want them to make decisions. I want them to fail. I don’t want them to make a heavy $50,000 mistake, but I do want them to fail because you learn through failure. 

Yeah. No, no question. No question. Success is always the teacher. So what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? 

We’re trying to scale energy efficiency. Now, the reason I say that is energy efficiency is not a product, it’s a collection of products, and so marketing has become challenging. If we were a bathroom remodeling company or a roofing company, I could just go buy leads and promote one product, but it’s not that simple for us. We have to tell our story. We have to say, “Hey, look, you could call an insulation company and get insulation. You can do that, but they’re not going to look at the home holistically.” 

When that insulation person comes to your house, they have one job: to sell you insulation. What if insulation’s not the problem? What if you have attic ceiling issues or disconnected ducts or your windows are outdated? Don’t self-diagnose. Have us come to the home and look at it holistically and make recommendations for you that are going to solve your problem. Same with any product category. If you call an HVAC company or a roofing company or a window company, they’re going to send somebody out with the mission to sell that product to the homeowner whether or not it’s going to solve their issue. 

So we are challenged right now with marketing our energy efficiency program, energy audits, and home energy checkup when it’s not a product category. So we’re getting good, we’re getting close, but we’re not fully there. 

So in your introduction, we talked about reducing energy costs, increasing comfort, improving air quality and energy efficiency as a byproduct. So what is the product, or what is it that you’re selling? 

Time. We’re selling information. So when we set an appointment, we’re setting an appointment to go… It’s almost a home inspection just focused on energy, or a doctor’s visit for your house. When we go out there, we run through a series of tests, visual inspections, measurements. We generate a report that’s about 20 pages long with photos from the depths of your attic, where, Steve, you probably never want to go in your attic. 

It’s nasty, it’s dirty, it’s not a fun place to be, but we specialize in that. But before we do that inspection, we sit with the homeowner and really try to understand, what are you dealing with? Do you have indoor air quality concerns? Is your home uncomfortable? Is your utility bill astronomical? Because rates continue to climb. They’re putting these data centers everywhere and passing the bill to the homeowners. So we really have an amazing value-add, but we have to be able to tell that story to get somebody to set an appointment with us. 

So when we collect all this information, we sit down with the homeowner and say, “Hey, look, it’s all based on pass/fail according to ENERGY STAR standards. These are the five areas you’re doing well. You don’t need to worry about these. But these are the five areas that you should probably make an improvement to fix your issue.” And then we give them a quote on the items that they don’t pass, and hopefully they choose us to make the improvements on their home. 

So how do they reach out to you in the first place? What is the need that emerges for them, or what’s the need that you are creating in their mind so that they respond to you? 

Yeah. We run a lot of ads where we get to tell our story, so social media ads where we get to talk about, “Do you have a hot room? Is your home uncomfortable? Do you have bad indoor air quality or a high bill? Here’s what we do.” And when we run those, people actually get to see our process, and we get a lot of people signing up to have us go out to their home in that fashion. We’ve been in business 16 years, so we have quite a database of people to reach out to and people that have met us in the past. 

We do, I don’t know, 200 to 300 shows and events every year where we set up a table and actually talk face-to-face to somebody and set appointments that way. We have canvassing crews that go door-to-door introducing ourselves and our services. We’ve got a pretty robust marketing system, but scalability becomes the issue because if we have to verbally tell our entire process and we just don’t have somebody searching “home energy checkup in my area.” That’s what we’re struggling with. 

So tell me about these shows and these events. What is the theme of these events, and how do you get people to come? 

Here’s my philosophy, Steve. Our demographic is homeowners, so people that own homes within our geographical area that have a high bill, indoor air quality issues, or comfort issues. And I will tell you, at most shows and events throughout Arizona, we’re going to run into those people. So if we can simply set up a booth and have the chance to talk to people that fit our demographic, we have a good chance of setting an appointment. So the theme of the events, it could be a home show. It could be that people are literally there to improve their home, and it might be us, it might be a kitchen vendor, a bathroom vendor, a lighting vendor, landscaping. Great. Have all the companies that fit their needs. 

We know they own homes, and we know they’re looking to improve their home. That’s a great opportunity for us. But we also do fairs and festivals and farmers markets. I mean, we’ve done a show out here called the Ostrich Festival where they’ve got ostriches that people go see. We also have bigger opportunities where we’ve got a space within Walmart locations where we’re able to talk to people walking by. So anytime I can get a table in front of a large quantity of people, we’re going to run into our demographic and we’re going to book some appointments. 

Do people realize that they have bad air quality? Is this something easy to notice? 

 Yes and no. So we’re in Arizona, and lots of places and parts of the country have this problem, but dust. Where does dust come from? A lot of it comes from what’s in your attic, old, nasty insulation and, sometimes disgusting, but some people have rodents, bugs. Some people think it’s a problem that they can’t fix. But I will tell you, in 2026, most people are very conscious of the air they’re breathing, the water they’re drinking, so it’s on their mind. But that would be an example of an ad that we would need to run to drive results for us. 

Yeah, that’s fascinating. You know, I noticed that when there is persistent rain here, then it creates allergic reactions in me. And I was Googling the other day, what is causing it, what to do. We did some stuff. We have crawl spaces here in Virginia, and we insulated the crawl space, and we put in the air exchange and all that stuff. But yeah, I mean, it does… I did notice that it’s an air quality issue, but I wouldn’t have thought that an energy efficiency company would solve it. I would not have connected that. 

Yeah. So most people don’t. It’s a byproduct of the work that we do. But there’s a lot of things you can do, Steve. There’s the type of filters you use in your HVAC unit matter. There’s air scrubbers and indoor air filters that you can install to help you. Most people don’t know this. The EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, says that indoor air quality is three times worse than outdoor air quality. Most people would never guess that. But if you’ve got things in bloom and you’ve got allergens in the air, they come from the outside. If you’ve got leaky windows or you’ve got a leaky attic and duct system, it’s just another outlet for that to get in the house. 

That’s fascinating. And what can people do in their attic? Do they hoover their attics? So how do you make it non-dusty? 

How do we solve the issue? Is that what you’re asking?

Yeah. Yeah. You said that people have a lot of dust in their attics. 

Yep. 

And then you can fix it. How do you fix it? You go up and vacuum there, or what’s the process? 

 Yeah, it’s a good question. You’re on the right track. So, a couple of things. Every home is different. A lot of homes have different types of insulation, different types of construction. That’s the value in what we do. We’ve worked with almost all of it. In Virginia and Maryland and that part of the country, you’ve got really old homes. Your insulation could be 50, 60, 70, maybe even older than that. Insulation over time breaks down into fine particles. 

And when you have leaky ducts and a leaky home, there’s an opportunity for those broken-down particles to get in the house, and that’s now the air you’re breathing. So in a dream scenario where we’re making a home go from horrible to as efficient as we can, we do get up in the attic. We vacuum out all of the insulation that’s there because it’s older, it’s broken down, it’s not effective anymore, and we create a clean, bare floor space in the attic. And then we do what’s called an attic seal. We use expandable foam and plug all the wire and pipe penetrations, all the chases, voids, top plates. What we’re doing is we’re sealing off… 

Let’s say this is the inside of your home, this is the attic. We seal a barrier. We create an attic barrier so the air in the house is in the house, the air up in the attic is in the attic. And then we re-insulate with a modern fiberglass insulation to keep that heat out, and insulation that’s not going to break down at the same rate as this other stuff, and now you’re in great shape. And the last thing we do often is we seal up duct systems. So when ducts leak, you’re paying to cool the attic space or the crawl space. When you seal them up, that cold air that you worked hard to pay for makes it into the home and stays in the home longer. 

And then the icing on the cake is when somebody has older, inefficient windows that are leaky, maybe they don’t function anymore. We put new high-end, energy-efficient windows in there. And once all those items are done, most people notice a massive increase in comfort, less dust, better indoor air quality, and certainly a lower bill.

Yeah. Love it. That’s great. Well, thanks for explaining this. 

 Yeah. 

This is fascinating. So who are your ideal customers? Are they all in the Phoenix, Arizona area? 

Yeah, they currently are. So Phoenix, we call it the Valley, Phoenix Metro. I think there’s four or five million people within an hour of where I’m sitting right now, which is a pretty special place to be because most places you’ve got rural areas. We are just very dense. So yeah, anybody that owns a home that has a pain point, so a high bill, an uncomfortable house, or poor indoor air quality, we can help them. 

Yeah. Well, if you’re listening and you live in the Valley, then think about your home. Reflect on it like I did on the call. Is your air quality good? Are your windows still fresh? Do you have a dusty attic, or do you have an old house? And if you answered affirmatively to any of these, then probably you need to call Sean and Sean’s team and get an audit to see what’s happening, and then you can make up your mind what to do. 

Sean, that’s fascinating. Thanks for sharing that. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you stay tuned and log on because every week I bring a couple of exciting entrepreneurs who bring their frameworks and their insights. So thanks, Sean, for coming, and thanks for listening.

Thanks for having me, Steve. It was a pleasure.

Danielle Hayden, CEO of Kickstart Accounting, shows business owners how to become a clear-eyed visionary founder by building financial literacy from the ground up. A former corporate CFO, Danielle created an education-first accounting firm that helps entrepreneurs understand their numbers, make confident decisions, and grow stronger businesses.

In this conversation, Danielle introduces The Financial Evolution Framework—The Foundations, The Empowered Business Owner, and The Visionary Business Owner. She explains how business owners progress from understanding sales, net income, and profit percentages to using financial IQ for hiring, tax strategy, and growth, then setting a 10-year vision, three-year plan, one-year budget, and quarterly KPIs. Danielle also shares why accurate bookkeeping must precede CFO strategy, how referrals and partnerships drive growth, and why developing middle managers remains essential as her 50-person firm scales.

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here, and my guest today is Danielle Hayden, the CEO of Kickstart Accounting, a virtual accounting firm that delivers full-service bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services designed to take accounting off small business owners’ plates and get the support they need to understand their numbers. Danielle, welcome to the show. 

Thank you so much for having me. This is my favorite thing to do. Love talking about numbers and helping business owners. 

Well, this is your lucky day because I’m also a CPA by training, although I don’t practice it anymore, and I didn’t qualify in this country. I was in the UK, but nevertheless, my wife is also a CPA, so we get to talk debits and credits over dinner. 

You get the language. I love it. 

So talking about which, Danielle, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business? 

Yeah. My personal why, I don’t think I realized it almost 12 years ago when I started the business, but it’s to help educate other people. Not everyone understands accounting. And I remember my Accounting Principles II professor, he kept on saying to me, “You get it. You have to be an accountant. You get it. People don’t always get it.” And I don’t think I understood what he meant at the time. But

it is a gift, and it's a gift to understand this language of business.
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And so my passion has been doing exactly this, helping business owners understand their numbers so that they can make more empowering, confident decisions in their business, which has this amazing effect in their community. So when I think about loving the community and small business, it’s because every single business owner,

when you finally understand your numbers, you can hire more people, you can serve more clients, you can make a bigger impact in your community.
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Yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more. And actually, there are different levels to it. So you can understand big picture, maybe you understand your P&L first, income statement, balance sheet, and then your KPIs, and then your margins and all that stuff. So just a quick story. Our older son is the one that is following in our footsteps out of four children, who is starting working with PwC, and he didn’t want to be an accountant, but he loved this idea of this is the language of business, and he wants to be a businessperson. So that really resonated with me. 

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. 

So Danielle, this is a podcast of frameworks, so I wonder, do you have a framework that maybe you use to teach people accounting or teach them understand their numbers? Maybe there are levels of understanding numbers, something that can be explained in three to five steps that our audience would benefit from? 

Yeah. So I’ll walk you through our framework of where we see business owners. So I’ve worked with thousands of business owners over the last 11 years. And what I find, people go through this trajectory in their financial education, and we start off with foundations. And when we are learning the foundations, and I don’t just mean as a brand-new business owner. This might be you’re three years in, five years in, and you might still be at the foundational level. 

But what that means to me is that you are learning the basics of the language. What does a P&L mean? What does net income mean for me as a business owner and then for my tax return? How do I look at my percentage of income and how I’m spending my money, and how that benchmarks to other businesses in my industry? Where are my sales coming from? And how do I just start to think about using these numbers as a business owner? So we come in at this foundational stage. 

And then usually, as our clients work with us at Kickstart, so we also build our business and SOPs, frameworks, and our product, what we call the Snapshot. So as our clients, they finally have bookkeeping in place. They’re for the first time looking at clean, organized financials. It allows them to start to learn the language, and then they start to move into empowered. So that empowered business owner, you are starting to embody a CEO seat. So you’re starting to think, “Ah, it’s my responsibility to know these numbers, to use them to make business decisions. I’m thinking about hiring. 

Let me look at my numbers to make that business decision. I’m thinking about tax strategy as well as building a business of value.” So that empowered business owner, I think of it as starting to put that CEO hat on, where you’re no longer hiding from the numbers and you’re willing to open up your email from your money team every single month, really read it and ask yourself, “What happened? Why did it happen? And what am I going to do about it?” So that’s where our bookkeeping clients sit, from foundations into empowered. 

Kind of the last tier that I see is that visionary business owner, where we’re moving from just being the CEO to being a visionary. That means that you are casting the vision for your business, and this is where we work with our CFO-level clients, looking at the 10-year goals. Where do I want to be at in my business and my personal life in 10 years? Call that the North Star. By creating a three-year plan. I can’t get to where I want to go in 10 years if I don’t know where I’m going in three. 

But again, business and personal. And then creating a complete SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. So then ground in a one-year budget where we are planning out the income and expenses of the business, and then from that visionary seat, we can cast the quarterly KPIs for true accountability. So to me, that’s kind of like the top of that pyramid where we can aspire to sit as that visionary who’s going to cast the vision for the business. 

Wow. You got the whole picture. I love it. 

Yes. 

So what’s the timeline for people? So if someone maybe comes in as a newbie, and they have very rudimentary understanding, if at all. They’re just surviving. Just instinctively, they look at their bank balance beginning and end of the month, and as long as they are in the black, they can make decisions. So from that point, for somebody to be able to step up to the empowered business owner stage, how long does it take? 

I’ll say it depends on you, right? It’s like asking, “How long is it going to take me to lose 50 pounds?” Well, it depends. Are you going for a walk every day? Do you go to the gym and lift weights? What are you eating? Do you eat healthy during the week and then eat pizza all weekend? It’s not going to be the same, right? So I use that as an analogy because if you lean in and educate yourself, you ask questions, and you let your money team support you, we actually see clients moving through this pretty quickly. 

I would say about six months. So when our clients come to us, we put their QuickBooks into our chart of accounts, meaning that we’re going to put them in our strategic framework, which makes it easier to use the numbers moving forward. Once we clean up QuickBooks, we start sending our clients what we call the Snapshot, and the Snapshot’s an easy-to-read overview dashboard of their numbers. And we take an education-first approach with our clients. So for the first three months that they are with us, they get a weekly email educating them on one portion of their financial statements and how to read it. 

So for somebody who’s like, “Yes, I’m going to read your email,” you’re going to move from foundations to empowered much faster. If you’re somebody who is not ready, you’re putting your head in the sand, and maybe you even sign up for bookkeeping and tax services, but you don’t answer the emails, you don’t book the calls, you don’t read the emails, and you’re still not ready to actually partner with your team, it’s going to take you much longer. 

Okay. So when you say partner with your team, what do you mean by that? 

So for our clients, we offer, depending on the package, monthly or quarterly financial review calls. So lean in and book the calls. Every month we theme our financial statements. So for instance, last month we talked about net income and what a healthy percentage of net income means. We provide a podcast episode, education, and how it compares to your financials. 

This month, I’m really excited about this month, it’s the balance sheet and understanding your balance sheet trends, cash, debt, and equity. Where’s your cash hiding? And we’ll have, again, a podcast episode, content around that, and then we’ll show our clients their balance sheet. So if you are leaning in, reading the emails, watching the podcast episodes, booking the financial review calls, looking at your Snapshot every month, answering our questions and statement requests when we have them, to me, that’s a partnership. 

And I’ll add one more thing to it. I think often we think, “Gosh, entrepreneurship feels lonely. I sure wish I had someone to ask this question or run this idea by them or bounce these ideas off of them.” Our team is here for that. And so I refer to the partnership as ask us the questions, shoot us the email, let us be there to celebrate with you, and there to pat you on the back when things aren’t going so well. 

So when you talk about the team, you mentioned it several times. So how do you structure your team so that they can provide this advisory function? 

So we have three different teams. We have our bookkeeping team, our CFO team, and our tax team. On our bookkeeping team, every single one of our clients has a bookkeeper and an account manager. Since you speak in frameworks, I’ll speak to this a little bit. Every single one of our bookkeepers follows Kickstart’s standard operating procedures. 

So they’re not allowed to do the bookkeeping in whatever way they want. They have to follow our brand guidelines. And so we have an SOP for, I got to say, I think you’d be impressed, every single line of the income statement and balance sheet, we have a standard operating procedure for it. So our team knows exactly how to do the financials. Our account managers then review the financials and are there for strategic-level questions. 

And so we structure each one of our clients to have a bookkeeper and account manager. If that client also is engaged with us for tax services, they would also have one of our tax team members assigned to their account, and then we have a CFO team as well. 

Wow. So they can reach out to their account manager, I guess, or just you or their provider? 

Yeah, bookkeeper and account manager, yeah. 

Yeah. That’s very cool. So then I’m curious, what drives growth in your business, Danielle? 

So a few things.

Our number one ways that our business grows, first and foremost, is referrals. Our clients, because they feel so empowered and supported by the team, they are usually the ones shouting our names from the rooftops.
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I love it. You’re very structured. I like how you answer questions. You don’t spread the fluff. You basically have a structure in your mind of how you’re going to answer this question. It’s like an SOP for answering questions almost. 

My team will appreciate that because we do. We have an SOP and a structure for everything. 

So okay. So you have a structure for everything, but no business is perfect. So what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? 

Yeah. We have really struggled with middle management. So we have about 50 team members right now, and just having a really strong team to be able to continue to grow, having that leadership structure for people to really own their departments and to be able to continue to grow and mentor and lead the team. So we have done a lot of hiring over the last year and actively training our middle-management team and really excited about what’s next for them. 

So is this something that you figured out, or is this something that’s still a work in progress? 

It’s still a work in progress. Isn’t all of business a work in progress? 

Pretty much, yeah. 

I tell my team all the time, “Yeah, we’re going to figure it out, and then it’s going to be, like, good for three to six months, and then we’re going to grow, and so we’re going to have to figure it out again. And so the SOP that we had six months ago is going to need to be updated, and then we’re going to do it again in another three to six months.” 

Yeah. That is true. I love the Churchill quote that, “The definition of success is going from one failure to the next without losing enthusiasm,” which is not exactly what you’re saying, but it’s kind of some similar idea. 

You’ve got to enjoy the journey. I think that’s been something that’s changed for me, that I used to think it was about these destinations. So got to hit a million dollars in revenue, and then you get there, and you’re like, “Okay. Let me celebrate for a moment. That’s exciting, and now I’m ready to reset the next goal and the next set of issues.” And I think for me, I stopped thinking… I care less about those specific destinations and more about, like, are we having fun this month? Does this feel good? Are we all growing? Do we want to keep doing this? And why? And how can we make this as exciting as possible? 

So why is it… I mean, it sounds like you’re very organized. You’ve got these teams. You’ve got SOPs for every line in the P&L and the balance sheet. You’ve got your teams working together. You’ve got the experts. So how is middle management a challenge for you? 

As we’ve continued to grow, having team members who can lead. We have a great group of team leads who have risen through the ranks, who have become managers. But they need to be trained, and they need to learn how to be leaders, and that takes time. 

Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. That’s true. So who are the ideal customers for you? 

Yeah, our ideal client for bookkeeping is somewhere around $150,000 a year in revenue and growing. So a business owner who is ready to say, “I can’t be the one to do everything on my own. I’m not the best person to do the bookkeeping. I need to understand my numbers.” So moving from that foundations to empowered, but has real revenue, has a real business that’s ready to grow and ready to see themselves as a business owner into CEO. So about $150,000 a year in revenue is where that starts. Our CFO clients, they stay a good fit for bookkeeping through about a million dollars in sales.

Usually around that million-dollar mark, that’s when we see people moving through empowered and ready to start moving into our CFO services. They’re ready to take the next step, create a budget, finally look at the goals, and really create the vision for where their business is going. So our CFO services are usually a best fit for somebody past the million-dollar mark. And then our tax services, our ideal client is somebody who wants a partnership and not a transaction. 

We do what we call tax weeks, where every single one of our clients actually books a tax week. During their tax week, you actually get to speak to somebody on our team, like, live on Zoom, which is unheard of in the industry. We want to talk to you. We want to have a conversation with you. We send a Loom video to recap the tax return when it’s complete, and then we’re there for questions throughout the year. And then around the August, September timeframe, we do another tax planning call where, before the end of the year, right? Like, you still actually have time to do something about it. 

We meet with our clients again, and we look at their estimated tax payments, how much they’ve paid, and any other tax strategies that they can implement before the end of the year. And so our ideal client is really somebody who wants to engage in that level of partnership and is not just looking for a transaction. 

I love it. Especially the tax planning call. I’ve never heard anyone do it. It’s so obvious. I know. So obvious. Because January 1st is too late, right? 

It’s too late. 

You have to do whatever you need to do in the last couple of months of the year at the latest to not get burned, and almost nobody does it. So how did you develop this structure that you’re using? It sounds like maybe something that you kind of democratized. Maybe you saw something done by larger companies and you took it to the lower middle market, or was it completely organic, bottom-up? 

I think it’s bottom-up. So when I left corporate as a CFO, and when I started the business, I thought that I was going to go and provide CFO services for business owners. I went to go build my first few budgets and have these strategy calls.

You cannot build a budget without bookkeeping. Like, if you don't know where you've been, you don't have a clue as to where you're going.
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And I said, “Okay. Hold on. I can’t provide CFO services. I have to start at the bottom. These are building blocks.” And so bookkeeping, it’s not the sexy one, right? Like, you don’t usually hear bookkeeping up on a pedestal. But for me, bookkeeping is everything. We start from the bottom up. And I want every single small business owner, no matter how small you are, to have access to accurate financials and education. Because right now, what happens is you have these larger CPA firms who’ll work with the big businesses. And I’ll never forget, I had a client who came to us and said, “Well, my tax accountant said to me, ‘Your little business.'” She’s like, “I’ve never been so embarrassed.” 

And so I made a point my first year that I would never say, “You’re a little business.” Nobody would ever be too small, that we are going to make sure that everyone has access to this, and we’re going to do it in a way that works. So it’s really creating something that didn’t exist to really compete with the big firms because they don’t want to service our small business owners of the country. 

Yeah. Yeah, I love this, and it’s so true. I come from investment banking. I had an investment banking firm for 10 years, and— 

So you know. —

And that was the problem, that we went in there and then the numbers were all over the place. So we had to start by… We started calling it vendor due diligence, what the private equity calls it when you do your due diligence before the due diligence to make sure that you find where the bodies are buried. So that’s what we started doing so that we actually knew that if we said something, it was that way. 

And it’s a huge problem. So it makes complete sense. By the way, you talk about CFO services. There are so many fractional CFOs, and that has been my impression, that it’s really not a CFO service. It’s more about handholding through the bookkeeping and getting people to a point where they could perhaps talk to a CFO. But it’s not really a CFO. It’s more of a financial babysitting. 

Yes. And that’s why we start at foundations, right? All of our clients start at foundations. Let’s learn how just to read the financial statements. Once we get there and we’re feeling empowered, that’s when we can start to have a CFO conversation. We can set the vision for the business. We can create a budget. We can talk strategy. We can’t do any of that until we know where the business has been. 

So what are you building here? It sounds like you’ve got a very solid foundation in terms of you have a structure, you have SOPs, you have a clear vision of the kind of service you’re providing. So what’s the big vision? Is this something that you’re sharing, or is it very private? 

 So we have a BHAG. Our BHAG is to help one million business owners understand their numbers. So we’ll do that through our podcast, CEO Numbers Network, through our social media platform, Kickstart Accounting, through speaking and connecting, and then through our services.

So our BHAG is one million business owners. When we celebrated our 11 years, when we had our anniversary, we actually went from Kickstart Accounting, where we provided all of our services under one brand, and we actually created three sister companies. So now we have Kickstart Accounting Group for our bookkeeping, then we have Envision CFO for our CFO services, and then KSA Tax Partners for our tax. And the reason we did that is it’s our recommitment to our clients for the next 10 years. We’re in it. We want to continue to grow this business. The mission, the passion, the vision, it’s still there. The energy from me as a CEO is here, and we want to commit to the next 10 years and to the next level of growth. 

Amazing. Amazing. So who would you like to connect with you, and how can they engage with your firm? Can they reach out to you, or do you have resources that you can share? Of course. What’s the way to connect with you? 

Yeah. If you go to kickstartaccountinginc.com/gift, we have some free resources there where you can download some of our resources. Kickstartaccountinginc.com is our website. Come and book a call. You’ll actually talk to myself, or we have a few other team members who take our discovery calls, where we can talk to you about your specific situation and where you’re at in your journey. You can share with us if you are in the foundation stage, empowered, or ready to sit in that visionary stage. 

But our website’s going to be the best place. Come and book a call. We do have our podcast, CEO Numbers Network, so if you’re like, “Ah, just don’t know what the heck to do with all these numbers,” that’s where we talk every single week on how to use your numbers to make better business decisions. 

Amazing. So this is very clear. I don’t think I have had anyone on this podcast, although we did have a few bookkeeping companies, CFOs, that described the stairstep structure so cleanly, so I really love it. You start with the bookkeeping and then you become the foundations. And then, as you explained, the next one is empowered, being empowered so that you can read your numbers and you know what to do, whom to hire, and how to build your business. 

And then eventually you go to the visionary stage where you have budgets, you have 10-year, three-year, one-year plans, SWOT analysis, quarterly KPIs driving the business. So that’s very, very clear. If you engage with this vision and you like this vision, then just walk in, and whether it’s Kickstart or Empower or Visionary, wherever you are, go to… Is it kickstartaccounting.com/gifts? 

Kickstartaccountinginc.com/gifts. 

Inc.com/gifts. 

Inc. It’s the important one. 

Yeah, right.

 Important three letters. 

Yeah, I know being an Inc. and being a C corporation is important. Yes. You’re probably an S corp. I don’t know. But yeah, so inc.com and download your gifts. I’m going to do the same. And if you enjoyed this episode, then make sure that you follow us on YouTube, give us a review, and stay tuned because every week I bring a couple of amazing entrepreneurs like Danielle Hayden, the CEO of Kickstart Accounting and its sister companies, on the show. So thank you for coming, Danielle. 

Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

And thanks for listening.

Tom Pugh, Founder and former CEO of Pugh Associates, shows experienced professionals how to build a supergroup of retired experts by staying in their swim lane, recruiting seasoned peers, and pursuing complex opportunities years in advance. After 35 years in Navy and defense engineering, Tom started his consulting business at 60 to use his expertise while staying home to support his wife.

In this conversation, Tom introduces The Supergroup of Experts Framework—Stick to Your Swim-lane, Keep Tabs on Talented Peers, Identify Opportunities, Nurture Decision Makers, and Eat What You Kill Together. He explains how he assembled experienced engineers, offered their expertise on a fractional basis, and paired them with younger professionals to transfer knowledge. Tom also shares why in-person presence drives growth, how shared-risk compensation helped launch the firm, and why complex contracts should be pursued years before an RFP appears.

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Thomas Pugh, the Founder and former CEO of Pugh Associates, a firm that supports the U.S. Navy, Army, and Coast Guard customers with combat system engineering, integration, test, and program management services. Thomas now consults and advises defense, maritime, and space organizations managing complex technical programs. Tom, welcome to the show. 

Yeah. Well, hey, thank you for having me, and I’ve enjoyed chatting with you just before the show, and I look forward to getting on with it. Be good. 

All right. Well, my first question is really my favorite question that I ask on this podcast. What is your personal why, and how have you manifested it through your business and perhaps your current consulting career? 

Yeah. So it’s an interesting evolution. And I worked for the Navy. I got an engineering degree many, many years ago at Florida Tech, and in my first job, I ended up working for the Navy in their engineering system commands. And spent a bunch of years there. Got involved in the Aegis system, which is an air defense system, and along the way, spent a bunch of years with that. 

Had a chance to go into private industry, worked for Northrop Grumman, and I was on a new ship class design, a Zumwalt class, as a systems engineer. And so, as we got to a critical design review, the tasking kind of ended for the systems engineering group. And I had to either get a new charge number, to quote my boss. If anybody who’s worked for a large corporation, you’ve probably heard that. I don’t know. 

What’s a charge number? What’s a charge number? Is it like a salary? 

Yeah. It’s a new project to work on where they’ll pay you. You couldn’t stay on overhead very long because you were making too much money as an engineer. 

Okay. Got it. Yeah. 

So they didn’t want you on overhead. So when I say get a new charge number, it’s a new project to work. And it coincided with my wife having some health problems. And so the why I started the business was I looked at what I was getting, what Northrop Grumman was charging for me versus how much they actually paid me. And I’m sitting there going, “I really need to help my wife out a little bit,” and going to work every day. Why don’t I print up some business cards? 

And I got my son to build a website. And I said, “You know what, Northrop, I appreciate everything that you’ve done for me,” and we parted ways, and I started a consulting business. So that was the why. It was, “Hey, I have something to offer.”

At that point, I had 35 years' experience or so, and why not provide that as a consultant and be able to help stay at home?
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So how old were you when you started, if I may ask? 

Good question. I started the business, so I must have been 60. 

Wow. 

Yeah. Yeah, I was 60. 

That’s very courageous to start a business at 60. 

Yeah, well, so all you entrepreneurs out there, when you feel like you’re stepping off a cliff, you’re giving up. At that point, I had a six-figure salary, and I’m going into this abyss where there isn’t any salary. And then you’re sitting there going, “Okay, how am I going to do this?” Right? 

Back in the day, Steve, I don’t know if you ever remember, you’re old enough to probably have seen it, but we had a guy who would come on an advertisement, and he was making believe he was selling whatever he was selling. And he said, “I can do that. I can do that.” And then as soon as he hung up with the person he was selling, he says, “How am I going to do that?” 

Sell first and figure out later. Yeah. 

It’s like you’re stepping off into an abyss and giving up a very comfortable salary, but it was worth it because I was able to stay home with my wife. 

Yeah. 

But it was scary. And any entrepreneur, I’m sure, has experienced something very similar. Yeah. 

Yeah. I love that. And for years when I was younger, I thought that I heard the story of Ray Kroc when he started McDonald’s at the age of 53 or 54. Great example. And I thought that was a late age to start a business, and I thought that this is kind of the latest one. But I think Colonel Sanders, he started at 68. 

Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

So it’s absolutely doable. So this podcast, Tom, this is a frameworks podcast.  So what I’m looking for in every episode is a framework that an entrepreneur has developed or figured out themselves or learned to understand, which allows you to simplify the world into a three- to five-step process, something important. Maybe it’s getting government contracts, maybe it’s designing something, maybe it’s satisfying a customer. I don’t know what it is, but does anything come to mind that can be explained in three to five elements? This is a framework that will allow our listeners to connect with your idea and perhaps try it in their own business. 

Yeah. So it was an interesting evolution. Like I said, I had been providing my 35 years of experience through Northrop Grumman at the time and went out to start my own consulting business. I think the first thing is you’ve got to know what you’re selling and really want to do it. In other words, and I call it, stay in your swim lane. So my swim lane was two-pronged. One was systems engineering and project management. And so when I did start off, the first thing I did was contact folks that I knew and started to network for myself. It was just me. 

And I got a small job from an engineer that I had worked for before. He knew what I knew. He knew he needed me for six months, and he threw me a few bucks, and that was it. It started it. Along the way, since I was at that age, it’s the retirement age a lot of people are looking at. And so a lot of the folks that I grew up with that had the same amount of experience as I did started trickling out as well. So I’d call them up, and Bob was my first recruit, a guy I had worked with for 20 years. And I said, “Hey, Bob, what do you want to be when you grow up?” And he said, “I might enjoy doing something consulting.” And I said, “Well, how about thinking about Pugh Associates?” And so that’s how it got started. 

And it trickled along those lines. Matter of fact, it was a great conversation with Bob. So we’re making our first trip, and you were asking, so what’s the thing? First thing is stick with the swim lane that’s yours, that you’re an expert, you know it, and you like it. It’s not something that you dread, you hate it, you went to work every day and hated it. It’s something you really want to do. It could be a hobby. It could be something totally unrelated to what you’re doing. So anyway, stick to a swim lane and then network, sell yourself a little bit. Start small. 

Don’t bite off too much. And then, like I said, as people that I knew, my goal was to corner the market of these guys coming out with the same experience that I had. And so every time I’d hear about a person that had experience in the business, the weapons and combat system business that I knew, I’d have the same conversation. And typically, one of them said no, he wasn’t interested. And guess what? Six months later, he’d call me. So I was able to build up a core of 11 engineers that had similar amounts of years of experience. 

And so when we participated in an engineering project, we were experts in the room, and there was no doubt. And so what does that mean? I don’t care if you’re opening a bakery and you’re going to make cakes, you want to have the best cakes on the planet for a reasonable price. They don’t have to be the cheapest, but they certainly should be the best quality and a reasonable price. And I think that’s the same with what we did. We had some great engineers. 

And then what we would sell, because we were expensive guys, is, hey, we’d go market and say, “Hey, you don’t want to hire my guys full-time. You want to hire us part-time and then glue a bright young engineer to us.” And in a year down the road, after you’ve got them pretty much oriented, they can drop back to part-time, and they get the benefit of your experience. 

It’s kind of a fractional engineering service? 

Yeah. That’s a good… I didn’t think of it that way, but that’s what it was. And so now, and it’s transitioned. If you go to Pugh Associates now, there’s a bunch of full-time employees. There’s still some very seasoned consultants, but there are also a lot of between entry-level and mid-level engineers. And Carol, you met Carol Wood, you mentioned that. Carol’s now the CEO. She took over for me a couple of years ago when I kind of throttled back. But it’s been great, and she’s done good. This past year, she’s managed to exceed our sales goals, and so the company is doing well. Doing well. 

That’s great. That’s great. So what I’m curious about is, it sounds like you managed to hire these experienced engineers because they were also around the same age as you were, and they were kind of getting retiring or going part-time. 

Yeah. 

So that’s a very interesting business model. I’ve never heard about this idea of putting together, like, a supergroup of retired experts. 

Yeah. And because of the demand, and now with President Trump, it’s gone crazy. So he’s really trying to revitalize the defense and the Navy, and of course, what we did was in the middle of all that. And so it’s been kind of interesting to watch how the politics shifted. Yeah, and just to finish the thoughts that I started, once you do that and you get… And I started with Bob, I just won’t mention his last name, but Bob came to me, and he asked me one day, he said, “Tom, how do I know if I’m succeeding?” 

Because he’d been working for the same company for 30-some years, and he had no idea about marketing and business development like that. And I said, “Bob, all you got to do is follow me and show up. And then we’ll talk to people, and it may take six days and it might take six months, but guess what? You’re going to get a task, and people are going to want to pay for you.” Yeah. So it was funny having to explain to a guy, he was an engineer his whole life and never had to do any business development. 

So basically, you brought these people on board, and it was kind of an eat-what-you-kill approach initially, that they would get paid when you found something for them. 

Yeah. And so here’s the deal that I did for them. We shared it. So I said, “Look, you give me your rate, I will pay half of your rate for everything we do, and you just do sweat equity for the other half.” So if a guy was a $50-an-hour guy, I’d pay $25 an hour. He’d show up, and his sweat equity, because that way they didn’t have to put up money up front, and then I knew what would happen. We would get task orders, and sure enough, it didn’t take long at all for any of them. 

Yeah. Yeah. I love it. This is great. This is brilliant. Actually, it’s 60 is the new 50. 

Yeah. 

So people at the age of 60, they might be exiting some company. I have a very good friend who is a partner at Pricewaterhouse, and they have a rule that at 60 you have to step down. And he is— Well, there you go. —he is kind of conflicted about it because he feels like he’s still in his element, and now he has to become a second-rate partner in the firm. And you actually tapped into this energy that, okay, you actually can bloom here and run with it. That’s amazing. 

Yeah. And I would encourage him to do it. Because I’m sure, and I don’t know what kind of benefits they have, but I’m sure he’s been there a while. He’s going to have some good… He’ll have some sort of financial resources to be able to get started. 

Oh, yeah.

Even if you start part-time. Take the secondary back job and start up at night and print up the business cards like I did, and put up a little website and market yourself. And if you’re scared, if you’re afraid to do that leap off the cliff, and I don’t blame people. That’s why a lot of people don’t do it. 

Yeah. 

They don’t want to give up the salary and stuff. 

So Tom, are you still involved with the business, or are you completely moved out? 

Yeah. And so I consult. Matter of fact, I talked to Carol here two weeks ago, and she’s got proposals she’s bidding, so I’ll probably help out on the next bids. Help them write the proposal. And if nothing else, critique, do the red teams. They do red teams to critique all the proposals before they go out. 

So what drives growth in the business of Pugh Associates? 

Yeah. Well, again, it’s like everything else. You have to be proactive, and you’ve got to be present. So with our business, we were on the coasts, being Navy, started out Navy-focused. And the Navy engineering for air defense is in California. Meanwhile, we’re in New Jersey, on the East Coast. And so how are we going to do that? You have to go. I mean, this online LinkedIn stuff, it’s good. You need to do that. As a matter of fact, that’s a way to sustain it, is to make sure that you’re actively engaged in something like LinkedIn. 

Let people see who you are out there and then participate in conversations. If somebody puts something up, hey, comment on it. You don’t have to do a lot, but just, “Hey, I agree with you,” or, “Hey, here’s another spin on that.” And again, people start to see, hey, this person’s got some good background. But then your better thing is in person, and so presence is really everything. So that was a big thing. We had up-front plane tickets for the experts to get them out there, and it worked. We ended up teaching systems engineering at this engineering facility. It was a great run, and only because we were there.

The local guys could look us in the eye. We weren’t just something on a Zoom call. “Oh yeah, that’s a real person,” and “Yeah, I know him.” And all the body language that you miss on a Zoom call when you’re in person. Matter of fact,

the breaks are the most important part of going to a symposium or going to some sort of a meeting.
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Yeah, during the break is when you really get to know people. That’s the networking part.

Yeah. And you don’t get that if you’re doing it on the internet. Yeah. So yeah, do it in person. And then when you start up, you need to be face-to-face in the case of project management and engineering. And it’s probably the same if you’re opening a bakery and you’re going to have a new baker. You want to be with that baker for a little while, first face-to-face, and make sure the products are the quality you want and you understand each other before you let them go out on their own. 

Same with engineering and project management. You want to be in the same place for a little while, and then you can go to remote effectively and do a good job of engineering and design. We did that on the Zumwalt well ahead of Zoom calls, too. We were collaborating literally across the country on the engineering for that. Yep. 

Yeah. That’s amazing. So a business like Pugh Associates, or maybe Pugh Associates itself, what’s something that you guys are actively trying to figure out in this business to make it more successful? 

Okay. So again, backing up, you’ve got to network. You’ve got to know where the opportunities are. And for instance, shipyard, we have people working in shipyards in Mississippi. But matter of fact, I was talking about the presence. Because we’re there and they understand that I have two engineers—Pugh Associates has two engineers there. They’re competent. They really are contributing a lot. And then President Trump is trying to do this big push, so guess what happened? This shipyard is going to get more work, and then these people will be a core to expand. 

So again, it’s networking. Go to the symposia, participate online in conversations. Keep your contacts that you have from your career, and just touch base every once in a while, have a cup of coffee with them. And then presence. So get yourself started somewhere. If it’s only one person, take it. And as long as you’ve got that, like I said, the people that we put in there, they’re experts, and it’s obvious they know what they’re doing. So again, you have to identify that. So that new shipyard opportunity just came. They’re going to start building some Coast Guard ships, and they want us involved. 

And then on top of that, the president wants to do Golden Dome, and of course, air defense is what that is. So that’s another opportunity for Pugh. So then you’ve got to figure out, okay, who are the people that actually are going to be sponsoring it within the Navy and the Army? And then contact them. Make sure you go to any… Because they typically, in the case of the services, they do have open houses where they’ll explain, “Hey, here’s what we’re doing for the next year, and here’s what we’re doing for the next three years.” Go to those, make a list. 

And you’ve probably heard this before, you want to build a backlog. And if you’re going to bid on a job, a complex engineering job like we do, you need to start two years ahead at least to chase it. So that’s why you want to make sure you’re talking to these people. You’re actively engaged with them. And then you put it on your list, and you set aside funds, and you figure out how you’re going to do that and who’s the right person that should be assigned to track that. And then when there’s an RFP, or request for proposal, that comes out, you should already have it basically outlined of what you’re going to say. 

I mean, you just get in front of it only because you’ve been engaged for two years. And that’s a key to success. And like I said, stick to your swim lane. I’ve heard the term chasing shiny objects. Oh, they’re great, and I’ve looked at them myself. “Oh boy, that looks like a great opportunity.” Well, okay, how are you going to do that? That’s like, as that commercial was, “I can do that. I can do that. How am I going to do that?” 

Yeah. Yeah. 

I’ve done that, and don’t bother. Stick to your swim lane. 

Okay. So I find this very interesting. So as you’re saying, stick to your swim lane, so specialize. And when you get to 50, 60, and you work hard, you will have domain expertise that other people don’t have. The second one was picking up people, so keeping tabs on people. So keep tabs on good people, so when they become loose, either they leave or retire, whatever, you can pick them up because you’re top of mind with them. And then you also talked about this long-term orientation to think two years ahead and sow your seeds, so to say. 

Yes. 

Yes. Sow your seeds. And then be visible, basically. You said that, go to the conferences, keep connected with them, maybe on LinkedIn. And finally, you cultivate the decision-makers, you mentioned. Yes. And what was the last one? And you also talked about identifying opportunities. That was also a huge one. 

Yeah. And that’s the key. And like I said, it’s not just something that’s… If you try, for what we do, you can’t successfully bid on a job unless it’s one person for six months. You can’t bid on a complex job and win if you haven’t started two years ahead. You just can’t. So don’t even entertain those ideas. You’ll see something pop up and say, “God, that’s perfect for me. 

I can do that.” You might want to go ahead and find somebody that’s bidding it and offer your services up to them. Help them write the proposal and help them win. But don’t try to be the prime contractor. Don’t try to go after it and just say, “Okay, we’re going to win this.” It’s not going to work. 

Is this because people only work with known quantities, people that they have learned about and learned to trust? Or is this because there’s so much complexity in the project that it’s not possible to pick up the pieces quickly? 

 It’s both. Yeah, because think about it now, and you hit on it. If you’re going to hire somebody, you’re going to want to hire somebody that you know can do the job, especially on a complex job. It’s not just fixing your faucet in the sink. And so you’re going to stick with people. And so part of that two years ahead is you start actually to get to know those people. 

You drop in, “Hey, I’m in town next week. How about we have a cup of coffee?” And that way, they at least get to put a face to a name, and a proposal comes in and, “Oh yeah, I know this guy, and he seems like a pretty logical guy. He’s got a lot of good experience.” So that’s all part of it. Yeah, you start that far ahead, and you can build those relationships with the people that are going to be actually entertaining the business. Yeah. 

So Tom, let me ask you, who is it that you would like to, when listening to this podcast, reach out to you and connect with you? Who are the people that you’re looking for? 

Yeah. So again, I think I said it earlier. I think sticking to the swim lane, certainly people that are in the defense business. And then specifically, command and control is a discipline in systems engineering for defense. So command and control kind of things, as well as air defense. I think those are two swim lanes that we can help in. 

Okay. So if you’re listening to this and you are connected to projects that are air defense or command and control related, then reach out to Tom. He is on LinkedIn, and he’s got a pretty good page there. Also Pugh Associates. You can Google Pugh Associates and check it out. Where else can people find you or find information about you? 

Yeah. So matter of fact, I can provide it to you, but I would think the best thing would be my email address. Feel free to email me. It’s [email protected]. 

Okay. We’ll put this in the show notes. So Thomas Pugh, who was the founder of Pugh Associates, which is still a very prosperous company, a growing company, and Thomas is still active advising different projects, especially command and control and air defense projects. So if you would like… I think you work only in Florida right now, if I deduced it correctly. 

Well, that’s where I’m based. That’s where I’m based. Yeah. But like I said, because of the nature of our business, we have Pugh people in Mississippi. I can go anywhere. I’m free to travel a little bit too. If I need to go to California for a week, I can do that. 

Steve Preda: Yes. 

So okay. 

Wherever you are. 

Yep. 

Wherever you are hit up Tom, and you can tap into his experience, 50 years’ experience probably close to now. So that is amazing. Yeah. And contacts as well, which can be equally valuable. You can be a subcontractor on some big projects of Pugh Associates. So Tom, thanks for coming and sharing your experience and your amazing framework, how to start a company at 60 and make it successful and pick up all the talent. 

And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because every week I bring a couple of amazing entrepreneurs who share their experience and frameworks with you. So thanks for coming, Tom, and thank you for listening. 

Well, yeah, and thank you, Steve. I really appreciate the opportunity. Nice talking to you. Keep in touch.

Christy Setzer, President of New Heights Communications, shows leaders how to build a high-EQ business through flexible work, manageable client loads, and culture-fit hiring. After years in politics and strategic communications, Christy built a consistently profitable firm where emotional intelligence supports workplace culture and attentive client service. 

In this conversation, Christy introduces The High-EQ Business Framework—Hybrid/Flexible Work, Work-Life Balance, Fewer Clients/Advisor, Bring Your Whole Self, and Hire Culture Fits. She explains why emotional intelligence matters in a client-facing business, how limiting each advisor’s client load creates room for deeper strategy and thought partnership, and why growing firms must build systems that keep pace with revenue and headcount. Christy also shares reaching audiences through podcasts, Reddit, and Substack, as well as how online conversations can influence AI-generated answers. 

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here, and my guest today on the Management Blueprint is Christy Setzer, the President of New Heights Communications, a strategic communications and public relations firm supporting labor unions, progressive advocacy, women’s groups, and others seeking to change the world for the better. Prior to starting New Heights in 2010, Christy served as a national spokesperson for the presidential campaigns of Vice President Al Gore, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, as well as numerous state and local races. Christy, welcome to the show. 

Thank you so much for having me. 

Well, it’s awesome to have you, and I don’t know. We’ve had over 350 episodes. I don’t recall having anyone similar to your profile. I mean, we may have had a couple of PR people, but definitely not who have been running campaigns and stuff like that. So that’s super exciting, and now you have a successful business on the back of your experience. But before we dive in, I’d like to ask you, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your practice? 

 Yeah. You know, it’s definitely changed over the years. When I started this business, it was not out of some great desire to start a big business or anything more. And I find that this is actually often true, that there’s a bit of a gender divide. I find that a lot of times when men are starting businesses, especially from politics, it is because, you know, look, we’re going to change the world. 

We’re going to make a lot of money. You know, they have these sort of big dreams about it. And a lot of times, I think with women, it’s more like they don’t feel like they’re being used well in their current spaces. They feel like they’re sort of being overlooked, and look, maybe I would just have more success if I went out on my own or did something else in a sort of non-traditional path. And that was the case for me too. It started rather early. I was, at a young age, in my 20s, given pretty big jobs of, you know, the Iowa Press Secretary for Al Gore, for the sitting vice president, et cetera. 

I had a lot of really good experiences. But by the time I was in my late 20s, I started noticing that men who were my same age and had my same level of experience were getting tapped for much bigger things, and none of my female friends were. And so that sort of planted a bit of a seed. And by the time I was in my early 30s, I had a job in-house working for the Service Employees Union. So a two-million-member labor organization. And I really enjoyed the job, but ultimately, it was sort of a big, somewhat bureaucratic organization where, again, I just didn’t really feel like I had a ton of agency over how high my ceiling was. 

So when I left and started New Heights, it really was just more of an idea of, well, maybe I can kind of create a higher ceiling for myself than what’s been set for me. Over the years, that’s very much changed. And now, I mean, it’s really grown past my wildest expectations for myself. I mean, at one point I thought that the biggest possible dream that I had for my business was maybe one day we’ll hit a million dollars in revenue a year, and maybe we’ll have a team of like, I don’t know, 10 people. And we’ve hit multiples of that, many multiples of that. 

So now the goal is, sure, you know, you keep moving the bar for yourself in terms of the money and the headcount and things like that, but really it’s about, can we have a bigger voice in the conversation? I run a political business. Can we really move the needle for our clients in order to change things and change the world for the better, in our view? 

That’s very broad, you know, change the world for the better. Why is this important for you? 

For some reason, it always has been. I am someone that was interested in politics even in high school. In college, I ran our College Democrats group and our College Women’s group, and I was always on student council. And that was just always something that was kind of interesting and important to me. My parents both sort of gave back in a one-on-one way. My mother was a teacher. She was a public school math teacher for many years. My father was a police officer. 

But I really was drawn to the idea that in politics and policy and legislation, you can make change on a broader, more systemic level. And you can not just change one heart and mind, but you can potentially change millions. So that was kind of what drew me to it. 

Okay. I like it. Change a million lives. That’s very inspirational. It’s probably practical too for you because you are on big platforms, big national networks. So let’s talk about your business, and specifically, this podcast is exploring frameworks that people discover and use. And the idea is that business owners who listen to this podcast, they might get inspired by your framework and they implement some version of it in their business. So what’s a framework that you could share in three to five steps with the audience? 

Yeah. I mean, honestly,

the big one for me has been and continues to be just create a business that's a place where you would want to work.
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But I didn’t want to be in the office 100% of the time, and so we were in the office three days a week, work from where you wanted two days a week. So that was always important to me, was sort of that kind of hybrid piece. Now we’re actually all remote again, but we’ve kind of gone back and forth. And the idea there was that, you know, I thought sometimes I do my best work when we’re all together, and sometimes I do my best work just being able to be head down by myself, no distractions. So that was one thing. 

Two, the work-life-balance piece was always really important to me too. I mean, some of which is, you know, as I said, illustrated in the fact that we were always either hybrid or all remote. But one of the ways that that plays out now is with a lot of PR firms, and most of the people on my team come from other, sometimes really big firms. They would have seven, eight, nine clients at a time, and what happens is that you can’t really go very deep with the clients. We do a lot of media relations, so you can get them that press hit and then move on to the next client. But you don’t really get to learn their why. 

You don’t really get to learn what is driving the client and be able to give them more top-level advice. So

it's not just a good move for my team's work-life balance that they only have, on average, about four clients. It's also good for our clients too
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And then sort of one final piece of that, I would say, is we really bring our whole selves to the office. Because we’re mostly remote, we do get together in person maybe once a month or so for lunch, happy hours, that kind of thing. But in the meantime, and again, it being a remote environment, we’re really into each other’s, like, showing pictures of our kids and our pets, and we have a book club and all of those kinds of things. 

Which I feel like, if you’re not able to bring your full self to work, if you don’t actually enjoy spending eight hours a day with these people, what are you doing, right? So I’m hiring people for culture reasons, and I mean, I’m obviously hiring people who have a very experienced background in exactly what we’re looking for. But I’m also looking for a culture fit too, which is, is somebody going to really just add to our culture as well as just produce good work?

Do you find that men are also as receptive to that part of the culture as women? 

That is a great question. I think PR in general tends to be pretty female-dominated, and at times my business has been pretty 50/50 in terms of male/female. Right now, we’re almost all women. And I do wonder sometimes, yes, if that is, when I’m talking about the way that I’m describing this business, which is, again, we’re very successful, we’re very profitable, et cetera, and we’ve been consistently profitable. But I’m not leading with something that is a cutthroat approach. 

We have targets for things like, again, our profitability or new business, that sort of thing. They’re not “If you don’t hit this, you’re out.” That’s just, I think, not how people produce their best work. And I do wonder if that is gendered. Or even, I’ll give one more example. When I’m interviewing people, I really don’t like to put them on the spot. I really like to have a conversation with them where they feel comfortable being able to kind of give me their best, most thoughtful answers. 

It’s not because you’re not going to have to be put on the spot on the job. Of course you are. But I don’t feel like what is historically more of an adversarial interview process really gets me the people that are ultimately also going to be a good culture fit too. So again, is that gendered? Probably, but it is what I’ve found works well for me and my firm. 

That’s fascinating. I never thought about this, but I had a client which was a PR firm. It was also an all-female PR firm, and I thought it was an accidental thing. There’s another one that I follow on social media, and I know the CEO, and they are almost all female. I think they have one male member. 

Yeah, one. 

And I was wondering, is there something that allows women to be more successful in PR generally than men? 

I think that there is a high degree of emotional intelligence required to be in a client-facing business and in general.
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Am I hearing that correctly?” And she said, “Well, I have this long flight on Sunday. I’d really love to, I was thinking I could read it on my flight.” No problem. Okay. Even just that little thing of just being really attuned to people’s faces that they’re making, the body language, all the nonverbal stuff too, I think is something that is really important. Because we’re always constantly trying to divine, like, yes, what are they saying, but what are they not saying? And I’ll give one more example. 

We do, every week with my team, we do two all-staff meetings. One is just sort of your typical, right, let’s go client by client. What do we have? What are the deliverables for each client each week? What are we putting up on social media? What’s going on with our new biz pipeline? You know, all the sort of usual stuff. And it’s a report-out meeting. But the other one that we do each week for 30 or 45 minutes is a training, the whole team, of whatever. And so the one for this week, our training was, I went through an exercise with them. And I said, “There’s often a discrepancy between why we think people are buying from us and why they are actually buying from us.” 

And I said, okay, a couple of examples. One, let’s say, we’ll keep it gendered here. You go to the manicure place around the corner. They think that you go there because you can get a cheap gel manicure, because whatever, they have all these new products and pretty colors and things like that. But really, you go to them because you can easily book online, because they always have an appointment available, because it’s really just around the corner, et cetera, right? So there’s this discrepancy that in order for you to know how to do both your marketing and how to relate to people, you need to understand that. 

So then I went through an exercise with them. I said, “Think about a client that you have right now. What do you think they most value us for?” And in no case was it, you know, because we get them great media attention, whatever. That’s a given. Of course you have to do that. But what they really valued from us was the strategy, the thought partnership, the stuff that we were seeing that they had not, or even just confirming sometimes, “Yes, you’re right. Your communications director does need to grow,” or those kinds of pieces too. 

So that is what I find is sort of the thing that keeps people coming back.

They might hire you for media relations or for messaging or digital, whatever, but the reason that they keep you on is because of strategy, and thought partnership.
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Yeah. That is fascinating. And I always thought about this. I used to have an investment banking business, and I always talked about reading between the lines. So what are the people not saying? Especially in deal situations, there are a lot of things on the line, and they were hesitant or you felt that their body language or their voice inflection gave something away. Yeah, so that makes sense. That makes sense. 

So this emotional intelligence, especially in your area where there are often critical situations where people’s reputation is on the line, you really have to resonate with them. So we touched a little bit on this, but I’d like us to go deeper. So what drives growth in your business? So beyond the soft things, or maybe you can elaborate more on that. 

Sure. Well, so the first part is what we just talked about, that if you’re providing a consistent high-level service, like, that’s great, but that’s a non-negotiable. You have to be doing more than that. You know, in order for them to re-up the contract and expand it, they need to see that you are going to be, again, a true partner, especially, again, in the age of AI, where so much of some of the work that we can do, frankly, can be at least made easier by AI and shortcuts like that. 

So that’s the first part, making sure that you’re truly meeting them kind of where they are, providing more than just the hard skill stuff. The second thing is, of course, diversifying. For a really long time, my business was a reflection of what my skill sets were, which was media relations, rapid response, some strategy. And again, in a very political sense, political landscape analysis was something that I always brought too. But now we offer messaging, which is probably as much of our business as media relations. The digital space is a growing one. 

And then it’s also, this is maybe part of the second answer, and maybe a third answer, understanding the way in which the landscape is changing in your field, and I don’t mean politics. For me, I mean communications. So obviously, when I started this work, we were still faxing press releases to news stations. And now we’re in a situation where most people say, like, I think it’s the majority of people who say, “I consume no news at all,” and that is by design, that they are burnt out from it. They do not want to consume news. Okay. Well, then, if what we’re trying to get people to do is consume what is essentially political news, then we need to stop… 

Well, we don’t need to stop going on NBC Nightly and things like that. That’s always important. But you need to figure out, how are we meeting people on podcasts, on Reddit, on Substacks? Again, understanding how that field is changing is really critical to getting people to both continue to re-up with us and also getting new clients. 

That is so interesting because I’m one of these people that is on a news detox most of the time. 

Yeah, I mean, understandable. 

Yeah. 

Right. 

And I find it fascinating that people like you are looking for ways to reach us anyway through other channels, and that is very interesting, like blogs and Substacks and perhaps not direct messages. Is there an indirect way of talking about politics? 

Sure. I mean, look back at one of the things that I think Donald Trump’s campaign did pretty well was being able to insert him in non-political spaces. I mean, Joe Rogan wasn’t considered political when he went on his show, right? I mean, he was the guy from a reality television show many years ago. And there was a whole lot of the manosphere thing, right? Like, these guys who go out and are telling you definitely what supplements to use and how to work out and things like that. 

It’s not their main message, but you would notice sometimes, right, that they would end up, as they’re doing their reps, saying something about how they really appreciate his campaign or something, right? Now, being able to capitalize on that was incredibly successful. It was something that was really hard to track because you’re not going to see that support in the latest polling or in them having particularly good stories in mainstream media. But there was this momentum that was growing kind of under the surface. 

Democrats are playing catch-up in that way. And again, I imagine that people who do probably corporate PR have probably already been employing a lot of those strategies. But specifically in progressive and political media and political PR, I think we’re playing kind of catch-up in that way of getting into these sort of non-political spaces. 

That’s super interesting. So it sounds a little bit like influencers promoting products. 

Yes. Some of it is. Some of it is. It’s also understanding where you can kind of control the conversation more. Like, one of the things that we have learned is that Reddit is a space where there’s not going to be as much content probably on your specific niche issue, so you can really dominate the conversation. And then that, of course, impacts GEO when people are asking AI, “What should I know about either this issue or this organization or this company?” So it’s both of those things. It’s finding your ways in, it’s figuring out the places where you can really dominate the conversation and other places where you are going under the radar a little bit more. 

This is maybe an aside, but I thought that Reddit was very vigilant in policing people to not be doing that. 

I think you have to be very subtle about it. Maybe you’re just being very helpful and answering questions for a long time before you can insert the message a little bit more. But there’s a way. 

So it’s about warming up these channels until you get the influence to actually steer them. 

Yes. 

Yeah. So I think Winston Churchill or something like that, if you want to go from A to B, you have to get on a horse and turn it in the right direction or something like that. Maybe that’s what he meant. So let me ask you this. This is a business question. So what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? 

Yeah. So we are going from, right now, a pretty flat hierarchy. I mean, obviously we have, you know, it’s myself, we have a chief of staff, we have leaders in the business, we have what we’d call directors who are client-facing and lead clients, and then below them we have a structure. But what we are going to now is more defined departments. Our earned media department, our messaging department, our digital department, AI is sort of incorporated throughout. 

And then the flexibility that that gives me at that point is that you have people who are sort of, every time an RFP comes in for new work, then okay, well, is it mostly messaging and narrative work? Okay, well, then this person is in charge of it. Okay, are we getting more work in earned media? Okay, then this person’s in charge of it, and that person is now in charge of flagging for me, like, “Okay, I think we’re going to need new staff.” All of that was on me before, so the challenge that I’m trying to work on is that essentially our revenue and headcount have scaled in a way that came before the corresponding systems and processes. 

And also, I’m a campaign girl by nature, which means that you’re ready to wake up each morning and do the rapid response all day, but the long-term stuff is something that often gets short shrift. So the challenge that I’m working on right now is developing the systems and processes of an organization that actually reflects our growth of today as opposed to a couple of years ago. So we basically doubled our revenue in the last couple of years, and great, but it means that, again, the systems that we worked pretty hard to put together don’t really make sense for us anymore. So

the challenge is continually building to reflect the growth path that you're on.
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So how do you scale a professional service firm that is very dependent on the personal relationships? 

Yeah, that is a great question. And that’s why I was sort of talking, too, about how, in the interview process, essentially how someone is with me in the interview is probably how they’re going to be with a client, right? If I find them a little bit too casual or a little bit not as sharp, or obviously all the ways in which I could be judging them potentially in the interview, well, that’s probably how they’re going to come across to a new client as well. 

Is there anything red flag-ish about that? That’s what I’m sort of looking for. Because you’re right, the service industry, everybody on my team, for the most part, almost without exception, is client-facing. And so I’m, yeah, I’m testing those soft skills just as much. We don’t really have a product in that… A paid product, sorry. We do some paid ads, but it’s a relatively small part of the business. 

And so that is harder to scale. It’s partly why, for somebody like myself who actually worked a lot of time for many years on campaigns, we don’t really work with a ton of candidates these days. Why? Because it only makes sense financially if you are someone who has a paid product. Either you are a full-time, 24/7 staffer on that campaign, or you’re, let’s say, someone who, you know, they buy ads and you run ads for them, and so therefore, you’re getting a cut of the buy. That can certainly make financial sense, but for us, it doesn’t make sense to be on 24/7 and still be getting paid like someone without a product. 

Yeah. That would be like a butts-in-seats kind of situation that is not a high-margin product. And how do you differentiate your brand in this market? 

Yeah. So in a couple of different ways, I would say we differentiate. One is that it’s important to our clients, who we would, for the most part, not all of them, but for the most part, they’re what we’d call movement clients, right? They are, again, progressive advocacy. That means they’re doing, let’s say, voting rights, climate change, economic justice, those kinds of issues. 

So it’s important to them that they’re working with a firm that shares their values, shares their political values, and isn’t playing both sides of it. And you see that with a lot of companies, especially PR firms as they get bigger, which is that, sure, they’ve got these, you know, what we would consider kind of mission-driven, good-guy clients, but they’re also on the other side of it, too. So you can’t have like an anti-gun control client and then a pro-gun control client. 

You know? It’s like you need to be able to do both. So one of the differentiators is that we’re not playing both sides of things. Our values are, we wear it on our sleeve. That’s always who we are, always who we have been, et cetera. That’s number one. Number two, we are still able to offer clients senior-level service without doing too much of the switcheroo, which, I mean, I’m sure you’re familiar. It’s where the senior person sells the work, and then you never see that person again. No, we are still both at the size and the way that we’re structured so that the senior-level person definitely still has face time with the client. 

That’s becoming, I think, a little bit more vanishingly rare. And then, third is some of the stuff that we talked about before in terms of both the work-life balance of my team means that they can also spend more time with our clients, and that really is something that our clients can tell. They value it. They really feel like we are part of their team and not just somebody that they kind of see fly by night once in a while. 

Yeah. Did you say switcheroo? 

Switcheroo. That’s what I said. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. 

That’s interesting. So, incidentally, I was running a PR department in a bank, I don’t know, 25 years ago, just for a year or so, and I hired a PR agency, and exactly this thing happened. Right. This guy flew in from London, and he was very smooth and very smart, and as soon as we signed the contract, I never saw him again. 

Well, I mean, that happens in every industry, right? When I was planning my wedding, we met with the DJ. We really liked the DJ. He was awesome. He was cool. But for our actual wedding, it wasn’t him. It was some other guy who we’d never met with and who didn’t seem to have the list of songs that we had given him and all that, right? So nobody appreciates that. No one likes that at all. Yeah. 

And there are ways that you can handle it, right? Like, at least if you’re going to have that person doing the pitch call, then they should be accessible to the client. They don’t have to be on every call. They don’t have to be doing the work, but they need to know that there is a through line between what was sold to them and the actual day-to-day interactions. 

Yeah, no, I agree. And I think that actually works, and it’s more credible because that person, if they are really that good as they seemed on the interview, then they can’t be available 24/7. It’s not realistic. 

It’s not realistic. 

Yeah. Right. But if they can be pulled in and there’s a competent team below them, that’s a perfect combination. 

Yeah. 

So, Christy, if our listeners listen to this and say, “Wow, I really would like to get involved or learn more or talk to someone at this firm or talk to Christy,” where should they go for information to learn more about New Heights and yourself? 

Amazing. Well, so our website, for starters, just newheightscommunications.com. They can email me directly, [email protected], and I would be delighted to connect. 

That’s fantastic. So if you enjoyed this conversation, listening to this, then stay tuned because every week we have a couple of exciting entrepreneurs and learning really good frameworks, such as this framework here, you know, hybrid, flex, work-life balance, making sure you provide substance for these clients, not just be there and do a switcheroo on them, and bring the whole self. 

So employ people who are actually culture fits and who you have fun working together with. That’s a really great way to build a firm and where you don’t mind spending the long hours that you probably do. So thanks, Christy, for sharing your framework, and thanks for listening.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

David Goldberg, CEO and Voice Director of Edge Studio, helps leaders cure their speaking blind spots by improving their words, speaking patterns, and nonverbal presence. Driven by a lifelong passion for the sound and nuance of language, David has recorded voice actors, celebrities, politicians, and media personalities while helping people communicate with greater credibility and authority.

In this conversation, David introduces The Speak with POWER Framework—Purge Hedges, Omit Fillers, Words That Empower, Express Positively, and Regulate Rhythm. He explains how removing uncertain language, replacing filler words with pauses, choosing empowering sentences, and framing messages positively can improve how others receive and respond to our ideas. David also discusses prosody, nonverbal communication, the six-second pause, and the growing value of authentic human voices in the age of AI. He shares how Edge Studio adapted from analog music recording to digital voice production and how Prosody Center helps people strengthen their interviews, presentations, pitches, and everyday conversations.

Good day, dear listeners. It’s Steve Preda here with Management Blueprint. And today my guest is David Goldberg, the CEO and Voice Director of Edge Studio, an international voiceover casting and recording facility, advising, educating, and recording voice actors, celebrities, politicians, and media personalities. David is the author of five books, one with Tony Robbins, and the producer and engineer of 150 albums, including for Deep Purple. David, welcome to the show. 

Steve, it is fabulous to be here. Thanks. 

It’s great to have you, and I’m very curious about your personal why and how you are manifesting it in your business. 

My personal why. 

Yes. 

Because I absolutely have a passion for words, the sound of words, the nuance of words.
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That’s very interesting. Well, you certainly have followed your calling. And so tell me about how you got to record albums for people like Deep Purple. How did you get there? 

Yeah. I’m a musician, and one of my earliest childhood memories was my mom being really mad at me because she would take piano lessons, and she would struggle to learn a song, and then the piano instructor would leave, and I would sit down and play it. And my mom used to say, “Why? Why can you just do it?” She couldn’t do it, and I just sat down and played. So I played piano, went to school for music as a pianist, and somewhere in college I realized it’s just not fun. I played a lot. I was on a good career path, perhaps, but it just wasn’t fun, and I got into rock bands instead. 

And then, Steve, to show my age, in college I found a four-track cassette recorder. And I didn’t know what a four-track meant. Maybe some of the people who are listening don’t even know what a cassette is, but it’s an old recording device. It sounds archaic, but it was on tape, analog tape. And it was the coolest thing because I realized, oh my goodness, I could overdub myself. I could play piano or keyboards, as I had moved on to. I’m also a drummer, so I was able to add drums on top of the keyboards, and I could build my own songs, and that was cool. 

And I realized that my passion, by far, more so than playing and playing in rock bands, was recording rock bands. And so I began recording my own band, and that went well, and then a bigger band, and I worked my way up. 

Wow. This is fascinating. Actually, Paul McCartney has a YouTube video when he does that, and I didn’t know it was a thing. And he basically records every instrument, and then he plays it all together in front of an audience, a live audience in his studio, and this is fascinating. So David, this is a podcast of frameworks. It’s called Management Blueprint. 

And I wonder, what is a framework that you have developed in your business that is helping you to serve your customers better or to understand things or to have and develop an insight or to innovate? Something that can be explained in three to five steps, and the audience members might get inspired by it and implement something in their business as a result. 

Yeah. We have one framework which is so key to us. And is it okay, Steve, if I just give a little brief bit of context here? 

Yeah, please. 

It’s very weird, but for some reason, most of the world doesn’t think about how we speak. My kids, they went through grade school. They took reading, they took writing, but they didn’t take speaking. Yet speaking is equally as important. In business, it’s equally as important to how we look, right? Or how a company looks, how a brand looks. Companies allocate so many resources to making sure that they look amazing. Their logos, they do focus groups on their logos, what color, what font. 

They make sure their website looks nice. They make sure the newsletters look nice. Everything should look nice, and it should. You always want to show attention to detail. But the corporations don’t allocate the same resources to make sure that their people speak well. So customer service representatives and sales and all these people on the phone, even leaders within the organization who lead team meetings, people who give pitches and presentations, leaders who give boardroom meetings and keynotes and toasts. There’s just not enough thought, or sometimes even no thought, on how they speak, which is really weird. It doesn’t make sense to me. 

About two years ago, our older son was beginning to interview with college recruiters, and I said to him one day, I said, “Dude, did the guidance counselor at your school help you with interview training skills?” He said, “No.” And it all hit me at that point. I thought, “This is really weird.” So our public school has like 1,000-plus kids, four guidance counselors. It’s such a big school. There’s money in the town for school, for decent education. It’s a really good school, but they don’t teach kids how to interview well. 

I’m sure everyone listening out there knows that some people interview really well and some people don’t. Now, to go back in time, my music studio did great, and then I ran it for about 18 to 19 years. I worked with bigger bands and finally top national, international bands, things that still play on the radio. I got to play with lots of bands, drums sometimes, piano, keyboards. And when my older son was born, I realized I want to change lifestyles because the lifestyle in the music world was just crazy. The drug scene was absurd. Oh my goodness, and I’m clean. I always was clean. I loved the work. I never fit with the people. 

And so 19 years ago, when my older son was born, I changed my studio from recording music to recording voice. I went from recording music to recording radio commercial soundtracks and soundtracks for documentaries and audiobooks and cartoon soundtracks, and I have five studios now that do that in New York City. Now jumping back in time. So two years ago, my son is interviewing with college recruiters. I thought, “This is really weird. I need to teach my son how to interview because there are little things that you can do with your voice, things that I’ve learned in all of these years of voice recording that could apply to interviewing.” And so I gave him five or six little techniques. 

Okay, like just take a second before you answer a question. It shows that you’re credible. It shows that you’re grounded. It gives your brain a moment to kind of catch itself, to organize the next thought. It doesn’t sound like you’re stepping on anyone’s toes. It really gives you so much more authority when you take a second to respond. And I gave my son five or six things, and we worked on it, and he got into every single college. And I know it’s not because of his grades. 

His grades were good, but his interview skills are top-notch. And so I began applying these for, or offering training for interviews through my business. Now my business is predominantly voiceover, but now I started offering training for interviewing people who are going through a midlife crisis and changing careers or job promotions. And through that, we developed the framework. And for about two years now, we’ve focused on one framework. It’s three steps. I’ve learned that I know, I don’t believe, but I know that most of us in this world are missing three things when we communicate. 

When we communicate, whether it’s interviewing or giving a customer sales pitch, we don’t think about strategizing or optimizing our words. We say whichever words just come out. We have our go-to words. So we have to optimize our words, number one. Number two, we should really think a lot about our speaking patterns, our pacing, our phrasing, the rhythm of our voice, the tone, the timbre, the emotion in our voice. All of the things that allow us to communicate differently, more effectively, yet we don’t learn those things.

So that’s the second thing. And the third thing are the nonverbals, the things that come along with when you speak. Those things are critical. And if you look at those three steps, essentially what it’s saying is that if you think about which words you say, how you say them, and what you look like when you say them, you really come across so much more credibly, so much more in control. Steve, it is outstanding.

When you focus on those three things, it is easy to make great first impressions.
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Ultimately, truly, you shape the way you come across. You shape the way people respond to you. And that’s the cool thing. And so for two years now, I’ve been focused on that framework, and that’s what a lot of my books are about, that framework. 

Love it. Love it. So just to kind of peel the onion a little bit, optimize your words. What does it take to optimize your words? Is it about trying to use the right words and skipping the ums and ahs, or is it a technique or is it an ability? 

That’s an awesome question. This is great. Yes, all three. Seriously, you’ve nailed it. Optimizing your words, a lot of this is just… It should be common knowledge, but we just never learned it. Things like removing hedge words. I will explain what hedge words are because most people don’t know what they are because we never learn this stuff. Hedge words are words that make you appear less certain. 

And there would be no reason to use words that make you appear less certain, yet we all use them every day. Words like “think,” “I think we could do something,” or “probably,” or “maybe,” or “could,” or “should.” I listen to people in corporations, and they perhaps, for example, bring an idea to a manager. They might say, “I think we should do this.” But when you say “think,” you’re discrediting yourself. 

Yeah. 

And there are different levels. You can take it up a notch by saying, “I believe we should do this.” That sounds more credible. But of course, if you just get rid of all the hedge words and just say, “We can do this,” it’s a lot more credible sounding. You carry a lot more authority with you. Now, I recognize that there are times and places for every word, so sometimes you need the word “think.” However, anyone listening to this podcast, catch yourself using the word “think.” 

We use it a lot. In fact, we use a lot of hedge words in American English. We are brought up using them. I catch myself all the time going to use them, and I stop myself, and as quickly as I can, reframe what I was about to say so my words land with more credibility, with more authority. So removing hedge words is one. 

Okay. 

And there are five or six or seven basic things that we can do that really make you come through much more strongly. You said filler words, and let me explain what those are. Filler words are fake sounds that—not fake sounds. I take that back. They’re sounds, unnecessary sounds that we put in place of pauses. So if you’re in between two sentences and you’re not sure what to say next, most people say, “Uh,” “Oh, uh…” They do those kinds of things. Studies conclusively prove that when you use filler words, you appear 25% less credible. That’s a big hit to your credibility. There’s no need to do that to yourself. 

Yeah. 

And when you use hedge words—rather, when you use filler words, you take away the space between sentences, so then listeners get one run-on sentence. Your entire speech is one run-on sentence. You go from the first thing into the second thing, into the third thing, into the fourth thing. There are no breaks. 

Is it draining to listen to? 

Oh, terribly draining. And people can’t parse the information. Steve, if you if you take a book, your favorite book, and you remove all of the periods that separate the sentences, and you remove the commas that separate the phrases, and you even remove the blank line that’s between paragraphs, and you even remove the blank page that’s between chapters, you’re left with all of the same words, and they’re in the exact same sequence, but it’s one massive run-on sentence from the first word through the last word. It’s really hard to figure that out. 

There actually are books like that. 

I hope I never read one. 

Yeah. Well, a guy, a Hungarian guy, he just won the Nobel Prize with a book like that, which I couldn’t finish, to be honest with you. It’s so hard to read. But anyhow, I digress. 

No, no, that’s not a digression. I apologize for jumping in, but that’s exactly the point. You said it’s hard to read because there’s no break, there’s no organization of the words. Yet when people speak, they have so many filler words that the audience, the listener, doesn’t have breaks. And so for them, it’s like this Hungarian guy’s book. It’s endless.

When you speak with people, if you want to communicate knowledge, credibility, authority, if you want to be receptive, if you want them to give you buy-in, if you want them to agree with what you say, take breaks and don't use filler words.
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Yeah. I love it. So we talked about hedge words, we talked about filler words. So what are other ways to optimize speech? 

A lot of it is thinking on the fly about how your words land. I’ll give you some examples. One of my employees last week missed a meeting. They missed a Zoom meeting with a customer, and they sent the customer, our customer, my customer, my business’s customer, I guess I should say. They sent my customer an email saying, “Sorry I couldn’t be there.” I said, “No, no, no.” I said to my employee, “No, no, no, don’t send that again.” And my employee said, “Why? I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.” I said, “Think how those words land with our customer. ‘Sorry I couldn’t be there.'” 

The only way I think that those words could land with our customer is that my employee had something more important. Like if I emailed you this morning and said, “Sorry, Steve, I can’t be there today for the podcast,” you would think, “Well, something else came up that’s more important than the podcast.” So my employee said, “So what should I say?” I said, “Tell them you really want to be there next time. Empower them.” So think about the difference. If something happened today and I couldn’t be here, I could either say, “Sorry, I can’t be there. Sorry I couldn’t be there today,” or, “Steve, I really hope I’m there next time.” 

So when you say it the latter way, the person, the audience, or your customer feels empowered. Another example is my son said to me… Oh, context first. My son is 15. On a Sunday night, right before school, late Sunday night with school the next morning, he said, “Dad, can you take me and my friends to the mall?” In our town, the mall is the big hangout place. I kind of wanted to say, “Dude, no. It’s like 9:00 on a Sunday. You have school the next morning. The mall’s closed anyway.” 

And then I catch my words and I think, “Why do I want my son to feel rejected?” So I said, “I’d love to. However, let’s go tomorrow, earlier in the day when the mall’s open.” And so I was able to communicate the exact same thing and have my son feel empowered and excited rather than rejected. 

Okay, so use empowering sentences. That’s a great one. So what else? Do you have a couple more that set down? 

Positive words. Put things in the positive. 

Is it the same as using empowering sentences? 

No, not empowering. This is positive. It’s very different. A little context. So one of the things I do in our voiceover studios, in addition to owning the business, my favorite role is directing commercials. They’re short, they’re fast, I work with celebrities. It’s super cool. I really enjoy it. We’ve worked on 13,000… Roughly, we estimate 13,000 commercials. 

Wow. 

And my job has become two things. One is to look at the script that’s about to go on air and make suggestions. Which word would be better? Should we change this word for that word? Should we swap that word for this word? And so many of these commercials are tested, and they run through focus groups, and we A/B them and see which gets better results. And after a while, after 13,000 times, you find the common denominators. And at this point, I know that if you take out a particular word and put in a synonym, you might see a 2% increase in sales. And 2% is nice. 

And then if you change another word or maybe contract two words that could be contracted that weren’t contracted, maybe you get another 1% boost. Or the reverse, maybe there’s a contraction, and you separate it, and now you get the 1% boost. And so part of my job is to look at scripts and decide or figure out what words make sense, what should be changed. And then the other thing I do is help the voice actors read those words. I’m directing the voice actors and celebrities or whoever’s reading a commercial.

Sometimes the CEO of a business reads their commercial. A politician reads a campaign. It’s telling them to slow down here or speed up there, add a dramatic pause, get rid of the dramatic pause, whatever it happens to be. And each thing, again, gives a slight bump up in sales, and you realize what works and what doesn’t work. One thing that really works well in advertisements, one thing that is a great way to influence customers and also to avoid misunderstandings, is to keep everything in the positive. 

Begin with positive words. Give things positive spins. So some basic examples of that. In American English, we default to negative words, but anyone listening should switch it to positive words. So if someone walked out of my office right now, my inclination is to say, “Please don’t close the door.” However, I switch it and I’d say, “Please leave the door open.” When you say, “Don’t close the door,” it’s harder for people’s brains to figure out. 

Yeah, close the door. 

Yeah. “Leave the door open” is positive. It’s a really elementary example. However, it makes a big difference in terms of clarity, avoiding crossed wires and misunderstandings. It’s amazing. As you lead people, as you try to promote things, products or sales or services, whatever you offer, put everything in the positive. Yeah. But my goodness, we default to these negatives. People talk about their companies, and you ask them what they do, and they say, “Well, we not only do this, but we also do that.” And to me, that’s two negatives. 

Instead of saying, “We not only…” I’m making this up. “We not only sell air conditioners, but we also maintain them.” The negatives are “we not only.” “Not” is a negative. Why would I want to begin with a negative? “We not only do something.” That doesn’t make sense. In advertisements, we say, “We sell advertising.” Or, sorry, “We sell air conditioning.” It’s not “We not only sell air conditioning.” It’s “We sell.” So yeah, keep things positive whenever possible. 

So maybe this is a digression, but when I read on a cereal that “Now with more fruit,” is this a positive or a negative? 

To me, that’s positive. 

But as a skeptical customer, I would think, “Wow, so they’ve been actually giving me less fruit than I deserved previously?” Maybe that’s just— Possibly. Yeah, it was just skepticism. But no, definitely agree, and I love these five steps. I think it’s very clear. So remove hedge words is number one. Remove filler words, number two. Use empowering sentences, so that is very powerful. 

Put things in the positive, and find the right rhythm and pace. Would that be a good way to express your framework? I know that you said it’s three elements, but if you open it up to five, then maybe it’s easier to action them. 

Sure. Yeah. It is all positive. There are hundreds and hundreds of little small things that we help voice actors and celebrities with on a daily basis, and we’ve always sort of put them under these three pillars of word choice, or sometimes we call it strategizing or optimizing the words. We put them under the second pillar of the speaking pattern, the way you say the words. And then we use the third category as presence or nonverbals. That includes body language. It’s interesting. 

Nonverbals include even the background when you Zoom. It’s the clothing you’re wearing. It’s the way you look at the camera. It’s your smile. It’s your gesticulations. It’s all the things that communicate outside of your words. Interestingly, the second pillar, which I call speaking patterns, there is a real word for that. In our dictionary, there is a word that describes how we speak. There is a word that describes our pacing, our spacing, the emotion in our voice, the tone of our voice, our dialect, our accent, the characteristics of our voice. 

But basically, no one knows that word because we’re never taught how to speak. The word is prosody, P-R-O-S-O-D-Y, prosody. Prosody is defined as the characteristics of your speaking voice. I wish we all learned that word when we were young, but it’s just not something we were taught. 

Yeah. I think it’s pretty nuanced, and we’ve been talking the last couple of days, and you’re helping me out with the narration of my book, which I really appreciate. And even these conversations, there are so many details that came up and so many nuances that I don’t think it’s a slam dunk, but it probably is for you because you’ve been immersed in it for the last 30 years. 

So this is fascinating. So you’re in the business of recording all these ads for celebrities. You wrote a book. You wrote several books. You wrote five books, one with Tony Robbins. So what drives growth in your business? 

Being flexible, dealing with changing times. Tell me more. Yeah, we’ve gone through a bunch of shifts. I began the business in 1989 in my college dorm. That’s when it was just strictly music recording. And at some point in the music recording, we went from analog recording, from that old four-track cassette, we went to digital recording. That was a huge shift. It was a defining moment in my business because at that point, with digital recording, anyone could buy a digital recording studio at home. The musicians didn’t need to travel to my studio, where I had these reel-to-reel tapes. 

At that point, it was two-inch reel-to-reel, and big speakers, and big mixers and everything. No one needed to travel because you could record in your computer. It was so easy and so inexpensive compared to what I had that all of a sudden my business was just disappearing, and I realized at that point that I needed to advertise my experience rather than my equipment. Before then, I could advertise, “I have this model microphone, I have this model mixer, I have these big speakers.” That wasn’t necessary anymore, so that was a big shift. And now, more recently, it’s AI. 

AI can narrate anything in a heartbeat, and it sounds really good. Definitely, it’s changed the way we market again. And so the way we see the… They’re called cloned voices or synthetic voices. The way we handle them is very comfortably. If a company doesn’t need to direct the celebrity or the voice actor, or if it doesn’t have to be the real live recording of a politician, for example, then you can go to AI, and you get whatever AI spits out. AI may take that script and put an emphasis on the first word, or maybe it puts emphasis on the second word. It kind of chooses, and it’s relatively hard to change that, where the emphasis is. 

And unless you’re really trained at understanding where emphasis could go, it’s hard to get it to sound natural. So if you don’t need to direct the voice actor or the celebrity, then AI is great. That’s less work for my business. However, at the same time, the nuance of human speech, the authenticity that comes through human voice, the spontaneity in the way people speak, has never been more important. And so we’ve been busier than ever, by far, because a lot of people who record really want the human voice. 

They want their voice. So we work with lots of authors who record their own audiobooks now, and politicians and celebrities who are recording their own commercials and documentaries, and it’s been great. It’s just been another shift in the market for us. 

You know, maybe it’s counterintuitive, but I wonder, the more AI we get, the more starved we become for authenticity. 

Could be. 

Do you feel the same way? It becomes more important. 

Yeah, I believe so. I’m a fairly good drummer for someone who’s not trained, meaning that if you put me next to someone who’s trained, they’re way, way better. For a self-made drummer, I’m okay. But that’s where I would fall, in the okay area. Yet I remember in bands way back, 25, 30 years ago, I saw a drum machine for the first time, and I remember thinking, “Okay, there goes any chance of drumming,” because being a drummer was a pain in the ass. 

It still is a pain in the ass because you have these big drums you have to lug around with you, and all the microphones. So you need a separate microphone for every drum, and they’re loud to practice. As a kid growing up, my bedroom was so small I had cymbals hanging off of the ceiling because there wasn’t room for cymbal stands in my bedroom. And they’re loud and big, and they get messy and whatever. I saw this drum machine, and I thought, “That’s amazing.” Like, you have this little box, and it does everything perfectly timed. It’s not off by a hundredth of a second. It’s perfect. 

And I really thought, “Yeah, there goes any chance of ever drumming.” Yet there are still drummers, and there’s a… I’m thinking out loud here. We found a really good place in our culture, in the world, where there are live drummers and there are still drum machines. And in fact, a lot of drummers even have drum machines. So we found a place to use, a way to use both. There’s a time and place for everything. 

Yeah, that’s fascinating. 

I think it’s happening with human voice versus synthetic or cloned voices. Time and place for everything. I hope people end up speaking. I hope that doesn’t go away one day. 

Well, I’ve written some books, and my wife always talked me out of narrating myself because she said, “Ah, you have a terrible accent. Get the professional.” And then what I realized when I was listening to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s latest book, which he narrated in his own voice, it was probably halfway through the book in his voice, and how he expressed with his broken Austrian accent the passion and his trials and tribulations through his voice. 

You could actually feel the emotion of how he went through those things, what he felt. And that’s not something that comes through an AI narration, or even a professional voice artist might not be able to narrate it that way. So I thought maybe there’s more to it. So that is pretty exciting. So tell me about your book. Why did you write the latest one, and what is it about, and why did you write it? 

It’s called 6 Seconds to Say It Better. It’s because people are abrupt. We blurt out, and so often people can reflect back on what they said, and they wish they had said it differently. We don’t often get the opportunity to listen back to things. However, I’ll tell you, over the years, if 1,000 people have said to me, “I heard myself on a playback at a board meeting at work, giving a presentation, giving a sales pitch. I heard my voice back at a toast at a wedding, giving a toast, or at a keynote or something, or I heard my voice on a digital video or a podcast,” 99.9% of the time people say, “I didn’t realize I spoke…” 

And then they fill in the blank. They didn’t realize they spoke so fast. They didn’t realize they spoke so high in pitch. They didn’t know they had no emotion when they spoke. They have something they wish they could go back. And it’s a shame that in written English, we have the chance to go back. When you write something that’s important, when you write a letter, you write it, you think about it. Sometimes you have AI help. If it’s really important, you say, “I won’t even send it. I’ll come back in the morning with fresh eyes, fresh brain.” 

Deep breath. Yeah. 

Have someone else review it. When we speak and it’s important, the words are out. Like our conversation now, it’s spontaneous, and it’s done. If you can take a six-second pause before you speak, neuroscientists say that you have enough time to figure out what you need to say, to organize your next thought. If you take six seconds before you speak, you have a chance to catch your breath. 

You won’t get tongue-tied. You won’t speak in circles. However, six seconds is a real long time to wait. Six seconds would be crazy to wait. If you were conversing with someone and everyone took six seconds before they spoke, it would be weird. Really, really weird. While six seconds is optimal, what happens if you take just a second? As I talked about earlier, telling my son when being interviewed, take a second before you respond. It makes such a big difference. Maybe six seconds would make an even larger difference, but it’s just not practical. Six seconds, though, is what neuroscientists say we need to do the best we can. 

Yeah. 

Interestingly, if you are on the spot where what you say is super important, critical to your career, critical to your success, for example, you’re on a company podcast, you’re on a speaking panel, and you’re on stage in front of thousands of people, and you’re asked a big question, if you needed six seconds, that would be weird, as I mentioned, and it would be really bad to fill up those six seconds with filler words. In other words, it would be bad to do this: “Oh yeah, uh, uh.” That would be really bad also, right? 

If you need six seconds, if you need some time, you can say, “That is an amazing question. Give me just a second. Let me think about that.” So if you need the time, take it. We are in this culture where we feel like we need to be fast. We need to blurt out. We need to jump to the next thing, and when you feel that the pressure’s on to do a good job, take your time. It’s worth it.

It's better to wait six seconds if you have to and say the right thing rather than not wait six seconds and say the wrong thing.
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That’s very interesting. You know, recently I started using an AI application for recording my writing. So when I write an email, I just press a button, and then I form the sentences. And what I noticed was that because I knew it was going to be written word, I am much more careful with how I phrase things, and I select my words more carefully. 

And I actually think this is a good tool to practice this, what you’re talking about, this discipline. So I don’t know if you use Wispr Flow or anything like that, and if you have any experience with this, whether this is a good tool. 

It’s an amazing tool to teach people how they speak. When you look back, you realize the number of differences between written English and spoken English. That’s something that I’ve had to work on for 13,000 commercials. Almost every commercial is written with someone sitting at their, I almost said typewriter, it’s weird, at their keyboard, and they type it out. And written English is different. In written English, we often don’t use contractions. In written English, we use lots of commas, lots of punctuation marks. In spoken English, we do use contractions, and we don’t have so many punctuation marks. 

However, when you want someone to read a script, we tend to write it on a keyboard and then give it to someone to read, and then people say when they read scripts, they always sound stilted or stiff or robotic. It’s because they’re reading spoken English. And so my whole company, we specialize, truly, we specialize in being able to take written language and translate it to spoken language. It’s 99% the same. 

It’s just removing some commas and contracting some words and getting rid of some… Just different things like that, just small things. And when you are using a transcription service, like you’re now using on your app, probably use it on your phone, yeah, you realize the differences. A lot of people tell me when they start transcribing their voice, they realize how often they say “gonna” or “wanna.” Yeah. 

Yeah. 

And then you look at your transcription and you think, “Do I really want to text or email someone the word ‘gonna’?” It doesn’t look good in written English, but it sounds good in spoken English. 

Yeah. Yeah, love  it. 

So because more people now listen to audiobooks than read printed books, I always tell authors, and you’re an author, you have great stuff, amazing stuff. I’ve seen your work. I always tell authors to write in spoken English because more people listen to audiobooks than read written books. 

That is so true. So audiobooks are selling much faster. 

Yes. 

So we are getting close to the end of our recording. I have so many more questions, but I won’t be able to ask, so I just want to ask you this. Who is your ideal customer, and how can they reach you? If they listen to this and they want to learn more, they want to talk to you, or they want to learn about your services, what should they do, and who are they? Ideal, thank you.

The ideal customer is anyone who wants to come across better when they speak. So as I mentioned, we can all focus on our hair in the morning and the clothes we wear to an interview, to a keynote, to a presentation, to a pitch, to a meeting. If you also want to sound good, then talk with us. We help people figure them out. Most people have… Almost everyone has blind spots. They just aren’t aware of the way they speak, whether it’s using filler words or lots of hedge words or one of I don’t know how many hundreds of different things that we focus on. 

We really focus on the smallest details of how people speak, helping them find the blind spots that they're usually unaware of, and then we give adjustments.
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Collectively— they add up. They add up to a lot. And same thing with how you speak. So if you want to… I really don’t like the expression “command the room,” but it is the right expression. If you want to command the room, if you want to have more credibility, if you want people to be more receptive to your messages, really, if you want to shape the way people respond to you, then yeah, that’s my ideal customer. And my email address is david.goldberg, that is spelled G-O-L-D-B-E-R-G, @prosody, there’s that word, @prosody, which is P-R-O-S-O-D-Y.center. [email protected]. 

Okay. Well, we’ll put it in the show notes as well, just in case. And then you’re also, if someone visits Edge Studio, would they also learn about what you do? 

Yeah, Edge Studio… Just, sorry, let me step back and say, as I’ve loved words for all of these years, I have two businesses that support words and human voice, and one is edgestudio.com. That was the music studio until it switched over about 19 years ago to recording voice instead of music. So edgestudio.com is for the soundtracks for documentaries. 

We record thousands upon thousands of compliance videos, training videos, social media videos, soundtracks for cartoons and video games, and of course commercials and all sorts of stuff. Narrated apps are big for us right now. Talking books for kids are big for us right now. And so that’s one business, and then prosody.center is the other business for training people who want to just come across better when they speak. 

Yeah. Well, who doesn’t want to come across better, right? We all want to have more influence in our lives, and we want to be a good speaker. So definitely check out David Goldberg, who is the CEO and Voice Director over at Edge Studio and prosody.center. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because every week I bring you a couple of exciting entrepreneurs who are changing the world and who are bringing you their frameworks so that you can improve your business. Thanks, David, for coming and sharing your wisdom, and thank you for listening. 

Steve, thank you so much for your questions. Your voice is great because you’re incredibly calm, and you a charisma in your voice that’s really nice. Your voice is very easy to listen to, yet you speak with credibility because you end your sentences downward with a period as opposed to upspeak, which is another technique we could talk about sometime. You speak great, and I really appreciate your questions. Thank you so much for having me on. 

Thank you, David. 

Thanks, Steve.

Mimi Banks, Founder and CEO of MB Social, helps beauty brands create digestible & resonant content while building social media communities where every customer feels heard. Drawing on 15 years at L’Oréal USA and her experience leading social media for Lancôme, Mimi built a fully distributed agency around warmth, attention, honesty, and genuine community engagement.

In this conversation, Mimi introduces The User-Generated Content Framework—Make It Look Real, Don’t Over-Produce, Use the Product Sensibly, Ensure Light & Sound Works, and Keep the Product Up Close. She explains how brands can create user-generated content that feels relatable while maintaining professional quality. Mimi also discusses using AI to extend limited creative assets without creating fake influencers, growing through social listening and the question “How can I help?”, and keeping humans involved in community management. She shares why brands must listen before engaging on Reddit and how MB Social and Med Creator 101 help beauty brands and healthcare professionals strengthen their social media presence.

Good day. Steve Preda here, and my guest today on the Management Blueprint, Mimi Banks, the Founder and CEO of MB Social, a leading full-service social media agency specializing in beauty, with a strong focus on skincare. MB Social is based in LA but has a fully distributed workforce, and it partners with top-tier brands and experts. Mimi spent 15 years at L’Oréal USA in New York and Paris, where she led social media for Lancôme. So Mimi, welcome to the show. 

Thank you for having me. 

I think you’re the first beauty entrepreneur on this show, so— 

Oh, really? Wow. 

It’s pretty special. 360 episodes in, great to have you here. 

Wow. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to represent the beauty industry today. 

That’s right. You also have a company name which is similar to my former company name. Yours is MB Social. We were MB Partners. 

Oh, I love it. 

Yeah. I love it. It kind of resonates with that. So jumping in, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it at MB Social? 

So just to get straight to the point, my why comes down to one belief. Everyone wants to feel heard. I learned that pioneering community management benchmark at L’Oréal long before community management was even a job title, and I built MB Social entirely on it.

Behind every comment, every DM, every tagged post is a real person who wants to be heard, who deserves a real response.
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Wow. 

And then, so how do I manifest that? I manifest it every day by treating our clients and their audiences in a way I’d want to be treated, with warmth, attention, and honesty. So it’s why our community managers do what they do. They learn the inside jokes. They learn the regulars, and this is actually also how I run MB Social. We listen, and we care. 

Love it. 

That’s our operating system. 

That’s a pretty robust one, I must say. I like to think of a company as it’s a group of people dedicated to a mission. And if you engage and energize and inspire and care for these people, then you can’t go too much wrong. 

That’s true. 

Yeah. So tell me about how you came with this idea that you wanted to… I mean, you had a great career working for the greatest brands in beauty. What prompted you to strike out on your own, or strike out on your own? 

So essentially, at age 30-something, I was given the opportunity to lead social media for the Lancôme brand. Just started it. And I found that, again, at age 30-something, I fell in love with this job. I had been working for a long time, still passionate about working for L’Oréal, but I hadn’t found my why, and then it clicked for me. I fell in love. I saw that I was good at it. 

But what happened was, even after two years winning awards, doing all of the things, being the first, getting cited in the greatest publications, or exceeding my goals, there was nowhere to go. I was too early, and this was in 2014. So I did what many entrepreneurs do, and I followed my belief. I got offered a job to work at a startup that was all about user-generated content, which was absolutely amazing. 

And there I took the leap for six months. People thought I was crazy, but I went based on my belief and my hunch, and the rest is history. I then started off my path with saying, “How can I help?” And that’s been the motto that we’ve had for the past 12 years at MB Social. 

So this startup that you joined was MB Social, or? 

No. So the startup I joined was a startup called Preen.Me. It was a community of creators. They created user-generated content for beauty brands. So I was really passionate about user-generated content, again, in 2014, so it was amazing. And a friend of mine who used to work at L’Oréal worked there. 

And so I left my job that was in a corporate environment, worked out of an apartment in another country, and went there for six months. Learned about business development, learned about brand partnerships, learned about startup life. So really, I took the leap, and it was a leap of faith. 

So tell me about user-generated content. What’s special about user-generated content? 

So user-generated content means it’s actually content created by consumers. So you, me, any person that is not a professional at a brand, let’s say. But sometimes you can actually work for a brand. But it’s essentially content that appears that any kind of person would take it. And what I was fascinated about in social media, social media is about getting that digestible content that resonates. And so any brand or business would love to get that kind of content where it looks like an average person created it, not that it’s so heavily branded.

Because as you know, in marketing, the best kind of marketing is through somebody else, not from a brand.
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And so what I started to see was this is a really interesting new way of creating content where there are people out there who are professionals at creating content for brands that makes it look like a real person. And so that’s really what it was. It was this community of people who were excellent at creating beauty content. And then what we did is said, “Oh, brands should be able to use this.” But again, this was in 2014 when brands weren’t doing that. 

Brands didn’t really understand the idea behind hiring what now is creators, and there’s a huge creator economy. It’s billions and billions of dollars. So they were kind of too early for it, and now it’s really an important part of the ecosystem. But again, that’s 12 years later. 

So when you say “user-generated content,” it’s not people commenting on posts, but it’s creators who are using the product. 

And generating.

Correct. 

Creators who use the product, film themselves, capture photo or video of them using the product in a way that makes it look like a consumer would. 

Huh. Okay, that’s fascinating. So as you know, this podcast is all about blueprints, and I wonder if there is a framework around this, how you create that user-generated content that feels authentic, that resonates with people, with everyday people who would be consuming that content. Is there a recipe for that? Do you have one? 

A recipe for that, for user-generated content, first of all, for using it, you have to make sure it looks actual and real, not overly produced, and using it in a way that would make sense that someone would use it. For example, if we’re talking about a beauty product, showing the product, making sure it’s up close, clear, then using it in a setting that looks real, but making sure that your lighting, your sound, everything is easy to understand. So those are like the three parts that we look at. 

And then when you work with brands, you look at a little bit more details. You look at the quality, you look at the gestures, you look at the music, you look at a lot of different criteria once you’re at the brand level. But when you’re creating user-generated content, what you want to look at is, is the product visible? Does it look like in its natural setting? And is it very up close so that I can see it? Those would be the three things. 

So I actually noted down six things. 

Oh, you did? Well, those are my simplified. Okay, great. 

So you said looks real. 

Yes. 

Which may be the same as natural setting, but looks real. Not overly produced. 

Yes. 

Which is the same as looks real. Or is it? 

I would say no. Two different things because it can look real, but overly produced means there’s too much lighting, too much editing versus authentic. 

Okay. Use the product sensibly. 

Yes. 

That was three. And then a natural setting. Maybe that’s— 

That’s kind of the looks real also. So where would you use your skincare, making sure that it’s in the real place where you would actually use it. 

And then light and sound works.

Yes. —is what I wrote down. Correct. Yes. 

And up close. 

Yes. 

So that’s actually five. That’s great. 

Okay, five. Those are great. Thank you for that. Thank you for the recap. 

Thank you. That’s amazing. So what happens in the AI world with this approach? Does AI have a place in this? Is it creating noise that needs to be overcome? Both? Neither? What is the AI impact? 

AI can help in a few ways. The first thing it can help you expedite your tasks that you repeat over and over again. So

anything that you find yourself repeating, AI is a great place to help you, whether it's to summarize, whether it's to analyze and recap.
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From an execution and output level, there are a lot of different creative ways that you can create content with AI. Now, knowing that you create content, you can take, again, if we go back to the skincare example, a product that you have and put it in a bathroom. You could put it in your purse. You can put it in your gym bag. You can kind of simulate those backgrounds or environments where the product would belong. In other cases, what people have done is they simulate the person using it. We don’t actually do that. Instagram, TikTok has a filter now, which is great, and a tag which says, “This is AI-generated.” We do not endorse that. 

We do not do any content using fake influencers or people. What we’re able to do, though, is to create content based on limited assets. So oftentimes, if we’re working with a brand, they might not have a lot of content, and in order to be successful and to grow on social media, you have to have continuous content production. And so AI helps you extend that life of content and have different iterations based on just even a small product shot. 

Can you give an example? 

Sure. We’ve done it with fragrances before. So fragrances around Christmastime, you want to show them as gifts, you want to show them under a tree, you want to show them with snow, with ornaments, and we’ve been able to do that. We even did one simulating for Halloween, almost turning a fragrance, putting a witch’s hat on it, a witch’s broom to dress up that fragrance. Not impacting the quality of what the pack shot looked like, but you’re able to enhance around it. 

That’s fun. That’s really fun. So Mimi, tell me, what drives growth in your business? 

What drives growth in my business, besides social listening that we spoke about, essentially the audience tells us what we need. If you’re paying attention, that’s the actual engine behind our strategy. So what we do is we ask the same question, “How can I help?” Right now we know that Reddit is very popular. We’re listening. We’re paying attention. So my personal mantra of how we’ve started the business, how I’ve been listening, is saying, “How can we help?” 

And so, for example, now we see Reddit is very important, and so we’re able to say, “Okay, this is what we see. This is what we’re listening to. How can we help?” It’s a question I lead every relationship with, client, partner, my team, and it builds trust very quickly because it’s not a sales pitch. It comes from a deliberate and meaningful investment. 

So can you give me an example of how that works? 

Sure. I have a friend that just started at a new brand. She’s looking at all the different options she has. She’s exploring her team. She needs to create a team, and I said, “How can I help?” And she said, “Well, this is my situation with social. I need to hire someone,” and she gave me the criteria. I’m exploring how we’re looking at social, what we’re doing. I walk through where the gaps were on her side. I walk through what we can do, and now as a result, she wants to bring our team on so that we can fill that area of need that she has. 

And is it as simple as asking the question, “How can I help?” Or is this more nuanced? 

In these areas, I’m direct and say, “Let me know if you need help. Let me know if our team can fit the bandwidth.” Sometimes someone resigns. “Do you need help for six weeks, for eight weeks?” That’s very direct. “Do you need help? How can we help?” Yes, very direct, very transparent. The other area is more diagnostic, so you do a lot of listening, understanding what the client is, how they’re structuring the team, where the pain points are. 

So when I hear pain points, then I understand the areas in which we can help or, if not, point her in the right direction of somebody who can fill that gap. So the answer is nuanced. Yes, there are times you can be direct, or other times you have to ask questions to diagnose where the pain points are. 

What’s your favorite question to diagnose maybe a pain point that even the listener is not aware of having? 

So we just had this recently in an RFP. So a brand comes to us to say, “We need your help on social. Here’s our list of questions.” I love to learn how they found out about us and why they came to us. That’s my first. The second is, what’s not working right now? Because typically they would have an agency or they have somebody in-house. 

What is not working? Because that tells you everything. That tells you, is it the agency? Is it them? Is it the budget? Is it the market? Is it something that’s larger than everybody? Is it mismatched expectations, resources? But that’s a very good question to ask. 

Yeah. So what is one thing in your business that you’re actively trying to figure out right now, Mimi? 

Actively trying to figure out? We’re always trying to grow our team. So grow our team, scale our team, provide as much support as possible. We’re actively integrating AI usage, as I mentioned, to streamline efforts, to be more efficient, to provide those summaries, recaps, and automations. 

So I’m actively trying to figure out how to summarize different articles that I read and have them summarized and go right into Slack for my team in a digestible way. That’s what I’m actively trying to figure out, is how to make that a seamless user experience for my team. 

So when you say scaling your team, is it about scaling the knowledge of your team? 

It’s two different things. So always trying to scale the knowledge, but also we are building and growing out our team. So that’s our team of experts. We have community managers that we are hiring. We have social media managers, and we’re building out our bench of freelance support also. 

So a community manager, would that be someone who is stimulating engagement on posts?

Yes, exactly. Exactly. That’s the person liking and commenting on posts, the person that’s answering the direct messages. Really, the person that’s the voice of your brand. 

Yeah. 

They’re in the comments, they’re responding on your behalf, or they’re proactively joining conversations that are happening where you can add value. 

What do you think about using AI for comments? 

So we have some clients that use AI tools, and the tools that we have in the beginning, I think, are too AI. You have to have a human that’s constantly monitoring those responses until the AI has completely learned your tone of voice. It has to have parameters, it has to have filters on what to say, not to say, what to watch out for. So I think AI is helpful. 

I don’t think it will replace humans because, especially in a social capacity, you still need to have that social element. So the human has to be there. It allows you to do more. So if you’re just behind saying yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, that’s helpful because the response is crafted, but I don’t think it can automatically replace somebody. 

So I saw on your LinkedIn that you have a fully remote team. 

Yes. 

So what’s special about building a fully remote team as opposed to building an in-house team? 

It’s interesting. I don’t know. We’ve always been remote, even before the pandemic. I think there’s a certain level of communication that has to happen, of being present online, to show up every day. So I think that that is number one. The second is building engagement, camaraderie, and enthusiasm remotely. So we’re constantly trying to do different things, whether it’s with our camera on, whether we have what we call brunches because we have different time zones, so we make sure to eat either breakfast or lunch together with our camera on and multitask, do other work. 

And we try to meet up at least once a year in person through what we call an IRL. So I think it’s a certain profile of people that can be extremely organized, connected, and active while working remotely. 

Do you think that women are better at remote work because of the multitasking? Maybe that they’re better at multitasking, and does it translate to better remote work? 

I don’t know. Women versus men, that I don’t know. We happen to have an all-female team by virtue, I think, of the subject matter because we work so much in beauty, so I don’t have the same experience. But I think post-COVID, the skill has been developed across genders. Whatever someone’s natural habitat or preference is, it’s a skill that they’ve had to develop the muscle. 

The reason I’m asking this is because my wife is telling me that she thinks that some of the best people to hire are women who come back from maternity leave. Maybe like sick, parental leave. They had a professional career, but they took a break. 

They come back, and she believes that they have scaled up their efficiency because of having to multitask in a family environment, and they are also extremely focused on doing the job and using time efficiently. And she thinks that, not to mention that often their salaries didn’t scale with the years, and she thinks that they are a special way to hire. So what do you think about that? 

So I think everything that you said about a woman, a working mom, is extremely true about multitasking, about managing your time, about reentering the workforce after being away if they’ve been on maternity leave or raising their children. That develops definitely a different skill set. Navigating uncertainty, dealing with ambiguity, all kinds of different skills I’ve personally learned in the past three years dealing with a toddler and working from home. 

Would I say my husband’s done the same or could do the same? Maybe. He’s already raised three grown children, so I would think so, but I haven’t yet experienced a man in the same because there are also single fathers that might have to be navigating the same thing. So I don’t know. I definitely think that women do have that experience, so I wouldn’t argue with your wife there. 

Okay. All right. So what do you think is going to be the future of your industry? How do you see the beauty industry evolving? 

So that’s really a good question. So the future of the industry. I think right now where we’re sitting… So beauty really sets the bar for everything that we do in terms of community. There’s now personalization with AI helping to tailor products, your routines, and also content for each person. I think Reddit is very important. There’s more community-led discovery. 

I think when you’re Googling now, people go to AI, they go to chat, they go to Claude, and you’re getting social media content. So creators, reviews, and social content are really shaping people’s trust before they buy. And now there’s a higher demand and an expectation from social specifically. People used to go to the 1-800 number, then they go to Facebook. Now they really just go to social, and you expect a response from the brand that you follow. So there’s more dependency there. 

And then from the social ecosystem and landscape, there’s the demand to always have content, so you have to have content from fewer assets. People are using AI to stretch creative, like I talked about, but you have to make sure to keep it authentic and brand-safe. So overall, beauty is moving towards being personalized, community-driven, and responsive in real time. 

I love it that you give so concise answers. 

Oh, thank you. 

It’s very cool. So you mentioned Reddit a couple of times, and I’ve been hearing from clients about that, that if you want to show up on AI, ChatGPT, then Reddit is a really good place to be written about. Is there a strategy that, if you’re a business owner, to actually stimulate Reddit content? 

So Reddit, you have to be careful. So Reddit has very specific rules. If you want to be on Reddit, you first start with listening. You do not do anything. It’s really about credibility, and it’s about understanding the nuances. So what’s happened is that when we’ve worked with brands, we start out by diving into the subreddits where they either are mentioned or the topics, getting to understand what the subreddit’s rules of engagement are and how people are engaging, because Reddit is about authenticity, and so they do not necessarily embrace a brand coming in and speaking. 

So you have to earn your right into a Reddit conversation. If anything, if you see them talking about something that’s meaningful to you, what you can do then is take that insight and apply that to your business. The other way to join Reddit is as a human, as a person, to be able to be actively engaged, but really ask real questions and join as a person. Otherwise, there’s a very real risk that you get kicked out or banned from the community. 

Larger brands, though, you can work directly with Reddit and use them as paid media partners, and you can do advertising, which is approved by the platform, and you follow very specific guardrails and guidelines to be able to do that. And they have campaigns, they have dashboards, and access to a lot of tools where you get qualitative and quantitative insights. So it’s just important to know the rules of the road before diving in. 

So when you say ask a question, let’s say you’re an expert in something. If you’re an expert, you’re not supposed to ask questions about your expertise because you may ask a question that you already know the answer to. Would that be an inauthentic question? 

I think you just have to frame it or maybe be transparent about why you’re asking the question to introduce yourself into the Reddit chat. I mean, most people have a username, so their personal information is not disclosed. But I think to be a person on Reddit or even a brand, you just have to be very transparent. 

So meaning what? My username should be my brand, or how? 

Are you using it for brand work? Then yes. If you’re using it for brand work. If you’re using… It could be business lover, blueprint, podcaster. You introduce yourself. You don’t even have to say your name. Because I’m sure there are subreddits all about podcasts, and so people are on there looking at podcasts, having real conversations. And so you go in there and you see what people are saying, and you would join authentically as you. Versus when we work with skincare brands, when they show up and someone is saying, “I’ve heard this brand does this,” or “I heard that this product does this,” is that a valuable time for the brand to go in to say, “Well, actually, this is what you should be using it for,” or “Well, actually, do this plus this.” Versus if you go in and say, “Hi, I’m the brand. Use my product,” people will not appreciate that. So really, being on Reddit as a brand, you have to offer value. But it’s not your perceived value, it’s actual value. 

So essentially, you have to listen well and then chime in when you have something valuable to share.

That is correct.

It's always about listening on Reddit first. No matter what you do, listen first.
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Okay. That’s very interesting. All right. So who is it that you would like to be listening to this podcast, and then how should they respond? So what’s a good way for them to connect with your brand or your brands and connect with you or learn more about you? 

If you want to learn more about MB Social, you can go to mimibsocial.com. It’s a very creative name, Mimi Banks. So hopefully that’ll be easy to find. You can find me on LinkedIn, Mimi Banks, M-I-M-I B-A-N-K-S. On Instagram, we’re @mbsocial.agency. And if you want to talk to me, I’m [email protected]. That part’s a little confusing, but we are very, very connected and responsive. 

And who are the ideal customers for you or prospects that you would like to be interested? 

So there’s two lanes of people that we… Three lanes, I would say, of people that we work with. We will work with beauty brands on all things social: social media management, content, influencer partnerships. The second area that we work on is community management. So if you are a brand that has a lot of community that can’t keep up with your inbox, your likes, your comments, your DMs, your tags, we offer hourly services, so happy to help you. 

That’s on an hourly basis. It’s a more cost-effective way to work with us. And then the third, which may be surprising to you because we didn’t talk about this, is if you’re a healthcare professional. If you’re a healthcare professional, dermatologist, dentist, hygienist, surgeon, we have a platform called Med Creator 101. It’s a platform to educate you on social media. 

We have our own podcast called Med Creator 101, we have a Substack, and we have a course where we teach you all about social media because when you go to medical school, you don’t learn about social media. When you come out, you’re expected to know all about it these days. So we have a platform. It’s me and a board-certified dermatologist, Dr. Dustin Portela, who created this resource for you to be able to learn about social media. 

And presumably, this channel is feeding into your future demographics of customers somehow? 

Yes. We are building a platform more and more to serve HCPs. Yes. So two different segments here. 

Okay. Well, I’ll tell my daughter, who’s a first-year medical student. 

Oh, yes. You should. Yeah. So the podcast is called Med Creator 101. We interview different med creators, brands, how they work with HCPs. We put that out weekly, and then we have our Substack, which is called Med Creator 101: The Social Playbook, which is more long-form, but it has interviews with top creators and brands. 

Coming up, depending on when this comes out, we’re going to interview La Roche-Posay, which is a L’Oréal brand. It’s one of the leading dermatologist-based skincare brands, originally from France. So we have the head of social that we just had on the podcast, so that’s exciting. 

Fantastic. Fantastic. So if you are a beauty brand or a healthcare professional and you want to learn about social services, community services, or you want to do social yourself, then check out Mimi Banks on LinkedIn, on MB Social, and social media. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you stay tuned because I have fantastic entrepreneurs, as you can see, like Mimi, who come on the show and share their frameworks. And Mimi, thank you very much for being so well prepared and bringing your frameworks and ideas and insights for our guests. 

Thank you for having me. 

Yeah. Thanks for coming. Thanks for listening.

Doug Kremer, CEO of TerraMax, Inc., helps growers discover how to Make Your Crops Bigger, Healthier & Cheaper through scientifically validated microbial products for seeds, crops, lawns, and turf. Driven by scientific curiosity and a desire to reduce agriculture’s reliance on chemical inputs, Doug has spent more than 40 years exploring how beneficial bacteria can improve nutrient efficiency, promote plant growth, and support more environmentally responsible production.

In this conversation, Doug introduces The Crop Nutrition Framework—Proper Nutrient Addition, Pathogenic Control, Irrigation, Soil Health, and Soil Tilth. He explains why microbial products should complement conventional fertilizers rather than immediately replace them, how soil structure affects water drainage and oxygen transfer, and why field trials are essential for proving microbial performance. Doug also discusses expanding TerraMax beyond its science-led roots, communicating its value more effectively, and reaching growers through stronger sales and distribution networks.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Doug Kremer, the CEO of TerraMax, Inc., an agricultural manufacturer applying bacteria to produce powders and liquids for seeds, crops, lawns, and turf to naturally promote plant growth. Doug, welcome to the show. 

Thank you very much, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here and meet you. 

Yeah, I’m very excited because you are running an agricultural production company, which is kind of a unique animal on this show. So I’d love to dig in more. But let me start with my favorite question. What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in TerraMax, Inc.?

First off, I found that to be a very interesting question. My background is more technical, genetic engineering, et cetera. I got into microbes. Literally, it was a fascinating subject to me, partly because most of what we’ve learned was, at the time, 30 years ago, academia, and there was very little successful use of microbes generally, other than other types of products that may not have performed up to the standards that people have gotten used to with chemistries, right? So I’ve been in science for 40-plus years. 

I looked at that as an opportunity. So there is a piece of the committed or should-be-committed individual who said, “I think I can do this better.” So the why was really, if we’re going to complain about the impact of chemistries, yet we don’t develop products that can supplant them in the marketplace, that’s on us. You don’t cross your fingers and hope that nature is going to fool people. That’s why we do field trials, that’s why we do these things, but the onus is on us to develop those. 

So I took that seriously and, like I said, as a challenge. And in the first two years of our company’s life, that’s what I was working on. It was a very small group back then. And so it was taking seriously what we’re doing, and that may sound funny to people, and I’m sure there are people that will disagree, but sending those products through their paces, or the bacteria in some instances. So scientifically generating the data was a big part of what I’ve done and what we’ve done. I really need to, these days, talk much more in plural. We’re still a very small company. 

We’ve been around for 28-plus years, but we’re 29 people. And only a portion of that, a small portion of that, about five people, is dedicated to the research end. But we were lacking a lot of the data we needed in showing the responses. So I hate to get technical right away on this, but things like N-15 work, which is proving that the nitrogen in a plant came from your bacteria. That’s something that was really important to me. Quantifying nitrogen from microbes, while there has been a ton of work on it, is still very prey to the environmental conditions. So there’s always room for improvement, is I think what that comes down to. 

Yeah. But the why, to be—I ramble, and I apologize—but the why was really the personal inquisitiveness to go after these questions, and can we make them? And I could share data with you or anyone who is interested, basically, on what that path has described to us. And I’m happy to tell you we have been fairly successful at the science portion of this. We’re still not where I would like to see us in a business sense. But I believe we’re well-known for our approach using the rigors of science where it’s applicable. Because believe me, when you go out in nature, there’s a lot of variables that you didn’t think about in terms of the expression that these things could have. But in a nutshell, it was a great challenge. 

Yeah. No, I love it. I mean, it sounds like it’s a very visionary approach. You realize that we are… I mean, I’m interpreting it, reinterpreting. The way I hear this is that we are spoiling the environment with chemistry, and how can we use biology to achieve the same aims that we are achieving with chemistry in a less harmful way? Is that what you’re trying to do?

Yes, that is a very good interpretation. I have my own stilted viewpoints that the efforts to rely exclusively on BNF—biological nitrogen fixation is what BNF stands for. But for eons, nature has selected these things as slow-moving. Whereas with the hybrids of today, we’re spoiled in that we had the pricing allowed us to put luxury amounts on. And in fact, in phosphorus, for example, we were taught that you can build a phosphorus bank in your soils, which you can if you want to waste that money. 

So a more on-time type of delivery system is something that we aim for, not to deplete soils, but to use soils and make the delivery more efficient and lower, okay? So there is a lot of misconception about what microbes can do, I think. And I think we can get closer in terms of turfgrass, so lawns, municipal fields, that sort of thing. That system might be a system that we can plug into and provide more of the nitrogen via microbes. But in our row crop agriculture, the corn and soybean, for example, the way corn is and the hybrids that are made, the use rates go up, right? So we’re not in some quaint old system of the farmer goes out and hoses his acreage. We’re in massive acreage in planting and harvesting. 

Same is true, in my opinion, for how we treat these things. We’ve gotten spoiled by that use of chemistry, but now when the price crunch is on, that’s when farmers, producers are looking, “How do I save a buck? How do I do that?” That’s pretty much the description. There are always people out there willing to tell you that they can provide everything the plant needs. My voice is we can supplant, we can, as an adjunct, add to that picture. But in terms of our corn crop, we still have a lot of work to do. Okay, 

Doug, so I just want to slow it down so that our audience, who may not be technicians of your field—definitely they are not—they also follow. Yeah. And they can relate it to themselves and their businesses. So my understanding is that it’s not just that it’s better for the ecology, the way you use the microbes as opposed to chemicals, but it’s also more cost-effective than what these artificial fertilizers can do?

Yes. And that is largely our message, that people come in with the, “I’m looking for something to replace my applied nitrogen.” And my personal advice to them is integrate the system, learn how it works, learn how it’s an additive product, if you will, not a replacement product. And I could cite some chapter and verse, but people who know the marketplace, there are companies that have tried to tell you that if you work the soil microbiome, then you don’t need fertilizer, and I don’t believe that’s true. You do need fertilizer. But the more we can reduce that reliance on… BNF is an opportunity for, what a fancy term, de novo synthesis. 

So the synthesis of nitrogen from the air, the nitrogen in the air, N₂ gas, is a very energy-intensive operation. Phosphorus and potassium have to be delivered. A microbe doesn’t synthesize those two. We’ll just stay on the NPK, if you will, the major nutrients that are used. But the same thing may be true for some of the micros, micronutrients as well. So it becomes more of a nutrient use efficiency question, which is a buzz phrase in agriculture. It’s not about just having it, it’s about how well you are integrating those into your system. 

So, Doug, if I wanted to understand big picture what it takes to cultivate crops healthy and efficiently, what are the three to five things that a farmer would have to keep in mind when they want to increase the crop yield and the crop health? What are the five main elements, let’s say, maximum five main elements, that will take care of 80% of the result that they’re seeking? 

Proper addition of the right nutrients. So whether that, for us, that would be an integration of systems. That’s got to be one of the top ones. Pathogen control, and we’ve done a few things in biocontrol. We have something teed up for going into the EPA, but that’s what makes this question really difficult. The regulatory apparatus is not necessarily in sync with the production apparatus. And there’s a certain way you follow and you do that. So nutrition is up there. 

Some of this you don’t have control over. Water, right? Why people irrigate. But the climate, especially focused on water, is a definite control agent. Look at the irrigation and some of the problems with climate change. That’s introducing another variable to farmers. Soil health is definitely in there. Understanding how the microbiome is integrated into that soil tilth question, I believe tilth and health are pretty much linked in the soil. So you’re talking about structural performance capability of the soil. 

And please understand that we can grow plants in hydroponic systems completely with the right light, which is another variable. That’s why farms are there, but again, one that we don’t control necessarily. But while you can completely artificially grow these things, it’s the cost of production that is more in people’s minds. That’s kind of a scattered three to five, but that gives you a feel. Soil health and soil tilth are definitely going to be big topics in the coming years. There are some things that have been successful at some places. You’ve mentioned a couple of times the use of chemistry. 

I would love to have microbial products perform at the same level that chemistry products do. In some cases, that may be true, but we have a lot of work to do on the microbial side of things. For example, nitrogen. How do you play with the systems internally in the microbe cell to produce nitrogen? And there’s limited ways to do that, particularly because of the energy that it takes to get there. But those are some examples. 

So just to confirm my understanding. So the five things that you mentioned: proper nutrition addition. Yeah. Pathogen control, irrigation. Soil health and soil performance. You used a different word from performance. Did you say health? 

Tilth. Tilth. 

Tilth. What does it mean? 

Tilth is the structure of the soil. So, in other words, a soil in good shape for growth, which is this lofty thing we’re after, is a good granular structure, has water-resistant granules in that soil, consortiums that are good for drainage by… And withstand those kinds of things. That also sets up oxygen transfer, which roots need to grow well. Compacted soils we’ll use as kind of the opposite of tilthy soils that can affect that and change that. There are some instances where chemistries, some of the applied nitrogens, will change pH in the soil and some things like that, that scientists like to prove things out, right? 

So you don’t prove something by seeing it once in a field. You prove it by manipulating and seeing what those responses are. But soil tilth is literally describing the physical difference between a granular soil structure and what’s called prismatic, which is kind of a column kind of response. It’s the packing of soil. And platy, which happens all the time with our large equipment. In fact, it’s one of the areas that farmers will laugh at me when I go present to them because I’ll talk about the rules about generating good soil, and these guys have one overriding concern: plant the seed, harvest the plants. 

They don’t want the details. Don’t give me the labor pains. Just give me the baby. 

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 

So, Doug, I’m very curious about your business. I understand the technique—well, I don’t understand the technical side, but I understand the technical side is very important. What I’m curious about is what drives growth in TerraMax, Inc. as a business? 

Well, that’s a very interesting question. Personally, I think we’ve been led by a scientist too long. I have a different viewpoint. I’m more interested in the techniques and getting the things done as opposed to going out and how do we expand markets. I’m very fortunate that a guy named Tom Proepper is on our staff, and he is the business side of the business. And we just in the last two years, I’ll say, expanded our sales force. Until that time, we had a very limited sales force. 

And we would rely on working with middle people in the marketplace that would approach a particular segment. Yet technically, we are lauded for our understanding and our ability to make microbes work, okay? And that is making the farmer comfortable with inherent failure rates. This is a question that people would tell me not to talk about. But in nature, it doesn’t matter. Hybrids fail, fertilizer can fail, not on the merits of the product itself, but on the nature that we’re putting them in, right? So, for instance, if you plant a certain hybrid and your field gets flooded, it could be gone or a portion of it could be gone, right? There’s a certain set of acreage that, if the water pools there… 

So that’s not the fault of the farmer. That’s certainly not the fault of the seed producer, and we have those kinds of examples in microbes. We don’t understand those systems well enough. Microbiome work really created a lot of excitement. Personally, I was very happy to see the application of those tools to, if you will, the understanding of how these are working. But I believe we’re probably at least a decade, if not several, away from understanding how we may manipulate that situation to the benefit of growers. In other words, skew the populations, those kinds of things that are easy to speculate about, much harder to prove. 

Personally, one of the things we’ve done at TerraMax is we try to go that extra mile to describe the frequencies and the like of using our products beyond our formulation capacity, which, if what you’re doing is delivering dead microbes, you’re not delivering the factories that you should. I would dare say that is one of our fortes, that we know how to set those situations up. There’s proof of those kinds of things that I’m saying in our data sets, and others have worked our data sets, and I’m happy to say our response rate is good. 

So, Doug, what’s one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? 

Not technical? I mean, there’s the science. Not technical. This is the weird juxtaposition of these, right? It has everything to do with it’s time to focus on the market better than we have. Certainly on a non-technical basis, it’s how do we get our message out? Because this is big business. I mean, there are the bigs in our marketplace for a reason. Bayer, Corteva are two examples of large international companies and dictate, if you will, the kind of advertising you need to do to introduce yourself. While we’ve enjoyed being a backwater company, in fact, Tom was really disappointed when a person described us as a stealth company, because his job is exactly the opposite of that. We don’t want to be a stealth company. 

We want people to know and use, if they choose, our products. So really, the non-technical aspects of our business are very close to anybody else’s business. Regardless of what, you have to communicate. You have to let people know you’re there. You have to be, in a sense, on call, particularly with farmers. When they work the weekends, they want to call somebody if they see a problem. And so you have to be ready for those kinds of situations, and a farmer can do some things. 

Yeah, that’s fascinating. So who is your ideal customer that you’re trying to sell to? 

Well, that is another very good question because it’s hard for me to answer. We started with a farmer-dealer network back 28-plus years ago. But there are constraints of that system, right? There’s limited reach, or they know their cousin 10 states over. Guess what? That’s not the market you should be focused on. Then we moved up to really where we’re at today, more middle-market service people, distributors of products, and they have their own kinds of niches that they do. 

We do some overseas business. We’ve been working with Ukraine, for example. It’s just a blurb on Ukraine. I’m amazed that their government is still functioning to the point of we’ve had products registered during this war, with their war with Russia. And so that’s obviously a point of concern for us. They’ve expanded into Poland in the last two years. So they’re addressing their situation and their problems. We have some products that also go to Australia and New Zealand that are largely shepherded by the customer we have that is doing that. That is mainly turf-focused over there right now. So addressing those marketplaces, we’re in the middle of the Corn Belt. 

We’re in the Corn Belt. We have millions of acres that are targets for us around here, and that’s a major focus for the team right now. And again, we try to tie technical how we do things. We field trial, and there’s a step in the field-trialing process. The beginning steps are to convince us. The other steps, geographical expansion, how unique may this be or not. And that’s certainly more specific to our business than other things. 

But those, I think, are some of the business challenges that kind of muddy the waters between technical advances and business advances, if you will, and how to integrate them. That’s a large problem. Yeah. They’re very different people to go sell something than to come up with the formulation to make something. 

Yeah. That’s very  interesting. So you’re in a complex business. You’re very innovative. You are bringing microbes in to improve the efficiency of production as well as the environmental friendliness of production.

Correct. 

And you need to get the word out because that’s why you’re in this podcast, I presume, to get the word out about this big thing. So if people would like to learn more, how can they find out more? How can they learn about how microbes improve crop production, turf production, corn crop production? And how can they potentially connect with you? 

We have a website, www.terramaxag.com. But they can also contact us via that website or my own personal email, and I can’t promise I’ll get back to everybody, but I do try. My name, [email protected]. That’s my personal email here. And I can route the questions to the people who may be better at answering. I often get accused of being passionate, and while that’s a useful thing sometimes, yeah, you want to be steady when you build a company. You don’t want to be always the passionate one. 

You want to… That helps. You mentioned environmental. While I’m not the world’s first tree hugger, I feel strongly that we have a responsibility to know what our products do and know that they work before we begin any conversation about the impact on the environment. Take, for example, the nitrogen and the dead zone in the Gulf, right? The chemistry. The Des Moines Water Works’ federal lawsuit attempting to pinpoint the source of pollution to the farmers. And they did that because every spring, when the runoff would occur, they didn’t know how to deal with the problem, so they were trying to push it, if you will, back upstream to the producer. 

I’m all for cleaning up the environment, and I believe with the right product design and the right performance dynamics, we’ll do that. But I think we’re a long way from breaking that dependency on chemistry. And I don’t know that we… We’re not ready. Yeah. I know that for sure. We’re not ready with product design yet, so that will take time, and other people smarter than me. That’s just how it works. 

Well, as long as we are pushing that boulder up the hill, someone is going to get there. So Doug Kremer, the CEO of TerraMax, Inc., that is revolutionizing how bacteria can help improve crop production and efficiency of production and environmental friendliness. Thanks for coming on the show. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because every week I bring you a couple of exciting entrepreneurs that are bringing their own framework and sharing with you on this show. Thanks for coming, Doug, and thanks for listening. 

Thank you very much.