David Anderson, Founder of Off Madison Ave and Lighthouse PE, is passionate about helping people and companies thrive through leadership coaching, board service, and team development. We explore how David helps companies build high-performing teams using his High-Performing Team Framework, which includes: psychological safety, a learn and grow mindset, the chemist mentality, and attention to team dynamics when introducing new members.

David also shares lessons from his book Leader is not a Title, emphasizing that true leadership is about influence—not hierarchy. We talk about building trust, breaking silos, and knowing when to evolve as a leader.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And today I have David Anderson with me on this episode, who is the founder of Off Madison Avenue and Lighthouse PE, two companies that are now doing their own thing. And he is spending his time sitting on boards and doing leadership team coaching as an executive coach, business coach. He’s also the author of Leader is Not a Title, which actually has a very cool cover. You have to read it closely to really see what is the title, what is not the title. But we can get into this later. So David, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on today, Steve.

Absolutely. And let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice and perhaps in your businesses as well?

Yeah, awesome. Great question to kick it off here this morning. My personal “Why” is to help people and companies thrive. I have been very blessed over the years to had a lot of things go my way, be lucky. Believe me, I’ve had my fair share of rough times and screw-ups and bad businesses, but overall, I’m very fortunate. And as you mentioned early on, I am the founder, technically CEO of two companies, Off Madison Ave and Lighthouse PE. I’m not involved day-to-day with those anymore. And I really am helping people and companies thrive now by working as an executive team coach. I really focus on building high performing teams. As we all know, you can have the best strategy in the world, but if you don’t have the right people, it doesn’t really matter. I do speaking on this topic and a few other things and also sitting on boards of directors, helping companies really thrive. So it’s all about helping people and companies thrive.

Love it. Well, okay. So help us and help our listeners thrive as well. And so let’s talk about this thing that you mentioned, the building high performing teams. I totally agree. A company is really a group of people committed to a cause. And if they’re not thriving, then the company is not thriving. So what does it take for a business owner or CEO to build a high-performing team? What are the steps? What is your framework on this?

Well, there’s a few things. There’s lots of factors that get you to a high-performing team, but a high-performing team is one where everybody’s roles are extremely clearly defined. People know how to interact with each other to accomplish the common goal, the strategy, the vision that they’re going to. There’s no silos. Many organizations get caught in silos. They keep it from being a high-performing team. They know how to communicate with each other. 95, I would even say maybe more percent of our challenges are poor communications, lack of communications that get us in the way from ensuring that we are a high-performing team. My most favorite analogy of that, I don’t know how many of your listeners out there are race car fans, maybe race cars once in their life, whatever, but think of a pit crew for a Formula One, IndyCar, NASCAR race.

The driver actually is very important, just like a CEO, chair of achieving goals, winning the race, but it doesn’t happen without the pit crew. And the pit crew is the best example I have been able to come up with of a high-performing team. When they come over the wall, everybody knows exactly what they need to do. I need to jack the car up. I need to take the lug nut off. I need to put the new tire on. I need to adjust the tips for better aerodynamics. I need to clean the windshield. In Indy, you got to refuel. Formula One, you don’t refuel. I know exactly how much fuel it is to get to the next lap or to win the race. That is a high-performing team.

Yeah, it really is and it’s amazing. In Formula One, I remember when I was a kid, it was 15 seconds to do all that stuff and now it’s down to just a few seconds. I don’t even know what it is. Is it like five seconds or less?

It’s unbelievable and if one of those team members, something goes wrong and it becomes a 15 second pit stop, a 20 second, that means the race. It can very well mean the race. So, the question I ask a lot of CEOs that I work with, chairs of the boards and others is can you draw your team out as a pit crew? Who has this role? Who has that role? How does this role interact with the others? Do you have somebody who’s coming over the wall that maybe was good when you were in the minor leagues of auto racing, but now you need a better person to come over the wall, more experience, has done it before, whatever, to ensure you achieve your goal?

One of my absolute favorite people and favorite books is Marshall Goldsmith. While he’s been ranked the number one business coach in the world many times over, but one of his books, he has several, is What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. And as high-performing teams, you may have great people, very good people, but you have all the right people in the right seats at the right time to accomplish the current goals. And that’s a high-performing team when you can say, yes, we have all of those people. 

Okay. Yeah. Now, in our pre-call, you also touched upon a couple of concepts I’d like to bring up here. One is psychological safety. So what do you mean by psychological safety and how does one create that?

Yeah, it’s a great question. And that’s one of the factors that with you can have, again, the best people in the world, but if your team doesn’t have psychological safety, I need to come up with a better term. That’s a Harvard term for it, McKinsey, all of those guys, it’s not a Dave term. Does your team have frank conversations? Do they debate? Do they maybe even argue through that? Does everybody in the team feel safe to bring up issues? Does the CEO allow it?

Because the absolute best incomes always come from a team environment where there’s deep conversations where you’re bouncing ideas off of each other and go there. In my book, I talk about the difference between brainstorming and conflict is one thing, ego. Well, actually, let me take that back. Emotions is the one thing, but ego leads to emotions. And does your team, are you able to communicate as a leadership team without emotions? People’s feelings don’t get hurt because you all know that you are working for the good of the organization. And that doesn’t mean we all always agree.

What it does mean is that each person in the room feels heard, and when they leave that room, you leave with one voice. You may not all agree, but you leave as one voice. So again, only difference between brainstorming for the good of the organization and conflict is emotions. And it’s the CEO or the leader’s responsibility to ensure that the emotions are kept to a minimum and it doesn’t become personal. Emotions mean it’s becoming personal. Don’t let it become personal.

Okay. So another concept I’d like to just switch to it that you mentioned was the learn and grow mindset. What do you mean by learn and grow mindset?

Yeah, great question. So I am a graduate of a school here in Arizona, Arizona State University. I’m a little older. It’s an amazing university. Now, I sure had a great time in college, but when I graduated, well, first of all, my grades were never that great. But when I left, I didn’t continue a mindset that I need to learn and grow and expand not only my skill sets, but my personal skills of how do you have a learn and grow mindset where I don’t know everything. As a matter of fact, I’m far from knowing it. How do I have a mindset to hire people that are better than me with skills and that? How many podcasts do you listen to a month? How many books do you read? How many articles do you read? How many would ChatGPT, the greatest thing ever to allow you to learn and grow, dive into topics to learn more?

And it took me a lot of years before I realized that, Dave, you are so far from knowing everything. And there is just about everything I’ve gone through. Thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of people have gone through before are experts of things, learn from their experiences and make yourself better. 

Love it. Another concept that you talk about is the chemist mentality. So is this about personal chemistry on the team? Or what is this about? 

Yeah, I do. In my book, I talk about CEOs are really chemists. If you think about it, what do chemists do every day? They mix different ingredients. They bring things together to try to get to a formula that provides an outcome. In pharma, in industrial, whatever, it’s all about that. Well, think about your team in the exact same mindset, that it’s the right mix of people, skills, mentalities, levels of experience, all of that that lead to the best outcome. That means a high-performing team that’s achieving the corporate goals, whatever it may be, your division goals or whatever. But, so many times, a new person comes into the mix and we don’t give enough thought to of how that changes the chemistry of the team. How does that change perspectives, all of that? So we constantly need to be thinking about our teams as the outcome of what we are building as chemists and how do we mix and change, adapt that to get there. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. I mean, I see this all the time. I’ve got some clients where there’s a lot of stability on the team, sometimes too much stability and no new team members coming and things starting to get stale. And I often recommend to the CEO that bring in one person who is going to be the yeast in this team, who’s going to stir things up and make everyone perform at a higher level. If you bring in an A player, a high performer, they’re going to pull everyone up with them. And I was fortunate to have such a person on my team, in my business, 15 years ago that I brought in from basically a college professor.

I gave a donation to his foundation and he referred his best student to me. Boy, this guy was really awesome and he really moved and shook things up and he was very creative, he was very ambitious and he was very driven and it elevated the whole team up. So that can be a very, very useful thing.

I completely agree with you. We all worry so much about turnover and too much turnover can be a challenge, but not enough turnover can also be a huge challenge. We get comfortable in what we’re doing. If you’re a CEO listening, is your team too comfortable? How do you shake it up? And something that I had to deal with, I had to know too, when it was time for me to move out of the role that I was in and that somebody different needed to come in and be the president, CEO, pick whatever title you want. The agency’s been around for, I think, 26 years, I know more than 25 years. That’s probably too long for one CEO. So when is it that you bring in the next person to help? And that goes right back to the foundation of Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There to go through.

Yeah, and sometimes, a lot of people say private equity is you’re just focusing on EBITDA and they fire a bunch of people. But I do think that sometimes private equity is really helpful because a company gets stale, maybe the founder already fulfilled their vision and then you need the fresh energy, someone to come in and have another vision and climb another mountain. And then you can keep rejuvenating these companies and they can actually grow faster that way.

Absolutely. I mean, look at Bill Gates stepped aside and brought other people in. There’s tons and tons of examples. What I say is focus on what you really enjoy doing, not what you think you have to do. So many founders think we have to stay in a specific role. I’m not a detailed person. I’m not a great day-to-day person. So you got to go back to the chemistry. And the difficult part of that is that we have to include ourselves in that formula as CEOs, chairs, founders, whatever it might be, because I’ve dealt with, and I’m sure you have too, Steve, companies where it’s the CEO founder that is the biggest obstacle to growth going forward. So you need to evaluate. Those are always fun conversations, but it’s the truth.

Yeah. I like to say that the bottleneck is always at the top of the barrel.

Very good. I like that. Yeah.

All right. So, I mean, you are a good example of stepping out and letting someone else come in and take things forward from there. That’s very impressive, actually. You did that with at least two companies that I saw on LinkedIn. There’s a software company, the AI company that you founded, and then this Off Madison Avenue, which is an advertising agency. So how did you know that it was the right time to move on? And was this a difficult thing to do, or it was kind of something that you yearned to do it and you kind of intentionally got yourself to the point where you could do this at some point?

Well, there’s a lot to that question, so I’ll try to keep it simple. First of all, my own coaches helped me realize that, my own business coaches. I am also a member of and have been very involved in the global leadership of an organization called EO, Entrepreneurs Organization. So I am part of a forum in EO with other CEO’s, CEO forums. I’ve traveled the world with the organization meeting entrepreneurs around the world. And so I learned a lot from them. Some of them had done it. So I learned from that. Now I will tell you the first time I did it, I completely screwed it up and made a total mess of it because I brought a person in to run and they started on Monday. And on Tuesday, I was like, I’m out, good luck, which was about the stupidest thing I could do.

Anytime you do that, you have to ensure there’s a good transition. I would say at least a year transition with kind of stepping down, going forward. So the first time after, about four months, I lost three of the six leadership team members because the new guy was so bad. Then the new guy, he technically quit, but he knew his days were numbered to go forward and then I had to rebuild. The second time I did it, I did much better, but not great. I hired somebody within and they did a very good job to a point. And then I realized that what got you here helped us get to the next step, won’t get you there. And it took me too long to make a change to the person that I have in now, again, because I got complacent and it was easy.

And then it wasn’t. And the third time, we’re only about more than six months now in, and it’s going fabulous where we had a transition. I did bring somebody in from the outside. I had a transition schedule. I did extensive interviewing, cultural stuff. We use culture index a lot. So, a lot of that we went through and the new person in a matter of six months has made such a significant difference. Now I just wake up and go, well, why didn’t you do that 18 months ago? So it’s there, but it’s a live and learn and you know where you’re going from there.

Yeah. And what’s important is that you did it and now you are on to your next thing. So that brings me to the question of your book. You wrote a book which is titled Leader is Not a Title, but it’s a very cute way of saying you’re a leader and then you have to look really closely to read what’s the subtitle? Is not a title. Okay. 

Yeah. 

So it is the title, but it’s not the title. So tell me a little bit about why you thought it was important to say this and what is the message? What is the outcome that you are trying to foster with this book?

Yeah. Great. Thank you for asking. So I wrote the book actually back in 2019. And as a thank you for the compliments about it, it’s less than 100 pages. It’s not a long book at all. If you read the intro, you will say that there is no earth shattering, groundbreaking new research on this. What I just basically did was take my learnings, my experiences that I had personally and that I had seen so many of my fellow EO members go through and broke it down to a simple leadership guide that we can use for newer people coming into leadership. It’s a great refresher for people coming into leadership.

But the basic message is, as we’ve seen people go through our organization, they’re always so focused, well, what’s my title gonna be? I’m gonna be assistant vice president. I’m gonna be a vice president. I’m gonna be executive vice president. And I’m like, what’s the difference between all of those? None. You can be christened with a title, but it doesn’t mean you have any more influence. On Monday, you get a promotion and a new title than you have on Tuesday. Leadership is about, first of all, you’ll read in the book, leadership equals influence. That’s all that it is. If you can’t influence people, you’re not really a leader. You just have a title. And how do you influence people? We influence through motivation. How do we motivate people to do what we need them to do for the good of the organization and then the good for themselves?

That’s where my helping people and companies thrive comes together here, is motivating people. How do you motivate people? You motivate every single person differently. There’s no manual on blonde-haired people, gray-haired people, you motivate this way. You have to get to learn the people. But think about your organization’s people that have no significant title, but have huge influence in the organization that can help protect your culture, help do other things because people respect them, they listen to them, they know that they’re trustworthy, they know they have integrity. And I’ve had some leaders I’ve worked with that lacked all of those, but thought they were pretty big crap because they had a title.

Yeah, I’m with you. I mean, leadership is all about leading people. It’s not about the authority. It’s about the influence. And for the people to know that you have their best interest at heart, so you’re worth following. Because you are leading them to somewhere good that you want to get to. It’s huge.

Absolutely. I agree. One of my favorite quotes, John Maxwell, is before you can lead others, you have to lead yourself. And I believe that’s a big part of leadership. Just take a minute and think, okay, if I’m a leader, what do I want in the leader that I have? Integrity, motivation, they care about me. Level five of John Maxwell’s stuff is, it’s about creating other leaders. You are a level four, level five leader when you are creating other leaders because you know those leaders will help the overall company go forward. So, if you follow John Maxwell, your focus should be on developing leaders because that, by naturally, will allow the organization to achieve what it needs to.

Yeah. And I guess this is what you’re doing by coaching leaders. You are developing them. You’re using this force multiplier effect where you are creating leaders who are going to create great organizations and who are going to help a lot of people be successful. That’s pretty awesome. So, I have a question about your previous life still, which is being an entrepreneur. Maybe it’s your current life because you haven’t sold your businesses as well. What is the hardest decision that you ever had to make in your businesses?

That’s a great question. The first hardest decision I ever had to make was when to hire the first person, because now, I’m responsible for another human being and their family and whatever. You can always deal with if you’re not getting a paycheck or whatever, but once you hire that first person, you’re committed. So that was a long time ago, but that was the big one. For me, the hardest part is still on the people side as you’re a growing organization and you need to have the difficult conversations with, you’re a great person, you’re valued here, we appreciate your loyalty.

This day and age too, sometimes people cap out at salary levels and other things too, where you just have to have the tough conversations of how much they’re appreciated and valued, but the what got you here won’t get you there. Now, I’m not in any way saying that you always have to replace somebody, but if people don’t have the right learn and grow mindset that you asked me about early on. Sometimes people just cap out at where they are and those are the toughest conversations if you like the person. Sometimes it’s just time for a change because people, attitude, they think they’re entitled, whatever, just being blunt, those need to change. But the people conversations are always going to be the hardest. 

Yeah, and I see some entrepreneurs who have this idea that they want to make the company their second family, and then at some point, they hit the ceiling because they realize that, well, there’s a difference because I won’t be able to grow this company if I keep all the family members here. And in a family, you obviously cannot fire family members, but in a business, it can be counterproductive and you tolerate people that don’t fit anymore and then it can backfire.

100% you are. That family mentality, while I understand it, can also be a real challenge to people, as your organization evolves and grow. And again, there’s probably a place for them. It’s just maybe not what they want, what they expect, the title they want, the salary they want, but that’s where you need to make those tough conversations. And it’s even more challenging when there’s family members in the business or family businesses or other things that makes it even more difficult. But you gotta have them or you gotta bring somebody in like me. I’m consulting with a company right now and I just went and did a leadership training and there were 19 people in the room. I’m like, this is your leadership team?

And they were like, yeah. And the mentality when I asked later on was, well, such and such has been with us for so long. So just as they kept adding people, you can’t have a leadership team of 19 people. You just can’t get it done. You can tier it. You can, you know, executive committee, senior leadership, you can go down. But to have 19 people on your leadership team because you don’t want to have the tough conversation of you’re no longer part of this team is going to hamper their growth.

Well, sometimes they want you as the coach to have this conversation. I had a client that merged because it was kind of a veterinary horse. It was a family business founded by the father and then the son was a very talented guy. He also founded his own business and both businesses became successful. And then, at some point, they went to merge it and the father wanted the son to take over, but not just yet. So we had this situation where there were 18 people on the leadership team or everyone came on the leadership team who was in either company and we basically had to use this process of coaching them to whittle it down over time. So there were other issues. But yeah, I agree with you. Big teams can be really, really challenging to do, but sometimes you have to do it because no one else will. 

You’re exactly right, Steve. 100% they bring us in to be the bad guys to do that. The consultant said, we need to do this. It’s happened over and over again. Or the same situation of this person’s been there 20 years, and they were the director of operations when the company was doing two and a half million dollars. And now it’s doing 10 million. It’s probably not the right person to continue to be doing the operations. You need somebody who’s taken a company from 10 to 50 million to get where you need to go.

Absolutely. So, David, if someone would like to learn more about your approach, read your book, check out your businesses, where should they go and where can they learn about you and from you?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Steve. Well, first of all, the book is on Amazon, Leader is Not a Title by David W. Anderson. I also have a website, my personal website for my coaching, my speaking board of directors, which is [email protected]. The W is my middle name. So [email protected]. You can reach me there. There’s a bunch of information about me. There’s a “Contact Me.” You can find me on LinkedIn. Also there’s a few David Anderson’s in this world. So, look for David Anderson, DWA Leadership, Off Madison Ave in Arizona. You can find me that way through the search on LinkedIn.

Yeah. So definitely check out David’s website, dwaleadership.com and check out his LinkedIn page as well. There are good posts that you can read there and learn about the businesses. So, David, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom about coaching and building high performing teams on this show. And those of you listening, if you enjoy this conversation, then you know that every Monday, we’ll have a new episode. So make sure that you subscribe to us on YouTube, you follow us on LinkedIn, on Apple Podcasts to give us a review and stay tuned because we bring great guests every time. So thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

Dr. Sharon Spano, Executive Coach, Business Strategist, and author of The Pursuit of Time and Money, is driven by a mission to help leaders realize their fullest potential and elevate their impact across business, family, and community.

We learn about Sharon’s journey helping high-performing leaders navigate stress, growth, and transformation through The Awareness Elevation Framework. By guiding them to witness themselves, build awareness, observe patterns, and shift behaviors, Sharon empowers deeper personal and professional growth. In this episode, Sharon unpacks the 12 stages of adult development and reveals why many leaders plateau early—despite external success. We explore how awareness creates lasting change, and how the “emptiness of success” often mirrors one’s inner relationship with time, money, and life.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And I have today Dr. Sharon Spano, Executive Coach and Business Strategist, and the author of The Pursuit of Time and Money. As my guest, Sharon, thanks for joining me on the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Steve. I am looking forward to this.

Yeah, I am very curious about what you’re bringing to the table. You have some original ideas on executive coaching and business strategy. But let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice?

Well, that’s a very big question. The “Why” is all about helping people realize their fullest potential. And the reason that it’s so important to me is because I have seen just so much damage across the country and across the world from individuals who have been under poor leadership. And I really believe that leadership is just a very important part of our economy and how businesses are run. And so anything that I can do, the primary focus is to help leaders as I’ve moved into this other stage of my career, really help them discover and uncover some of the things that are holding them back, even though they may be successful. I find there’s always something more that they’re looking for so that they can be better leaders for themselves, their families and their businesses.

Yeah, I think it’s such an overlooked idea that leaders are multipliers. And when you coach a leader and you make them better, then you improve the quality of not just the family, but their employees and the employees, and they are happier then they’re going to help the customers and their family. So it’s a real force multiplier that you do when you coach your leaders the right way. So this podcast is a podcast of frameworks, and I’m always after frameworks, as you know. So I’m wondering about your framework that you could share with us. We talked about a three-stage transition framework for entrepreneurs. I don’t know if that’s the right title for it. Can you talk a little bit about this framework?

I operate, as most of us do, I think, from many frameworks. The primary framework that I use is grounded in human development because I believe that’s a very important part of how we become more effective leaders. Many people don’t understand that the stages of human development are exactly that opportunity. But if we wanted to boil it down to some of the things that you and I talked about, we talked about being able to witness oneself, have that awareness of awareness, and then to look at how to leverage opportunities for growth so that if something is going on in your life, for instance, it might feel like it’s very, very challenging, it is actually an opportunity to move into another stage of development. And then to look at what is the best option to get there, because sometimes, we’re not able to do that on our own.

We need other people to walk alongside of us. And that’s why I believe the coaching profession has grown in the way that it has is that as people are experiencing more and more stress and not understanding what that means in their lives or how to move through it, they often need a professional and sometimes it’s therapy, sometimes it’s just an executive level coach to help walk alongside them as they move through whatever’s going on in their life.

Okay, so is there a framework that you could talk about to help people actually visualize what they need to do exactly? So are there like a three or four step approach that would help people think about, okay, I need to become a better leader. How do I do this? How do I put one foot in front of the other? And how do I start in this process to getting there?

Yeah. I think the first thing is to look at the patterns in your organizational system and also the patterns that you’re seeing within yourself, because those are the flags that tell us there’s something more that needs to be done here. And then to me, the second one is what I alluded to earlier is that to understand there are 12 stages of human development as we know of them today based on research.

The average person in the workforce is at stage four or five so that tells you there’s a great opportunity for growth there. You don’t necessarily have to know about the stages but to know that there is an opportunity for growth. We’re not just stuck at where we are based on our age or even our career choices or outcomes. So to know there are stages, there’s opportunity for growth. Look at the patterns first. And then where is it that I need to grow? Once I look at the patterns, that should give me some clues that, okay, maybe it’s in my interpersonal skills, maybe it’s in my moral capacity, maybe I’m feeling that emptiness of success that I often talk about, So I need some spiritual development. We look at six lines of spiritual development in my work as well. And then to develop the awareness.

And that in my work is teaching people how to witness themselves in the moment, which takes some practice and why you need someone to walk alongside you through that process, so that I can really see myself in the moment and the kinds of things that I’m doing. Most of that is at a subconscious level. So when I develop the awareness of awareness, then the final piece is I am able to make different or healthier choices once I have that deeper understanding of what it is that I’m about and what it is that I’m doing that is working for me versus what’s not working for me.

Okay, that’s really interesting. So let’s unpack this for a moment. So one of the things that you talk about is witnessing yourself. So how does a person witness themselves?

We don’t do that. So, let me tell you how it looks for most of us, and then I’ll tell you how you learn to do it. Most of us have an awareness, let’s say, after the fact. Let’s say we get impatient in a meeting with one of our employees or a superior even. And then after the fact, we recollect, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I did that again. And we feel bad. We go into regret or remorse or shame or whatever. The process of learning to witness yourself is a very high level skill. And it’s about really expanding consciousness. So what I do with clients is we develop obviously a full program, but then within that context I have practices that are customized that I write for each one, each client specific to whatever’s going on with them and the topic and objectives that we’ve agreed upon.

So I might, for instance, if I have a client, here’s a good example. If I have a client who’s very intense, as I did some years ago, that she was in marketing and the boss said, I’m going to fire her because she’s got her nose in every department’s business and she’s too aggressive and she was just a big personality. So we got to the root of what that was about for her. And then like her very first practice as an example was I asked her to just observe herself throughout the course of the day, one or two moments where she kind of felt herself getting intense. But I didn’t have her do that in the heat of the day in meetings, that would have been too much. I had her notice, how does she get her kids up for school in the morning? How does she load the dishwasher? How does she talk to her husband?

And what she started to see, it came back to me that even the very first week was, oh my God, I’m so intense all day long. I’m so high strung everywhere I go. And then we built upon those observations, eventually moving into the meeting space where she started to see how domineering and aggressive she was at every meeting. And then typically once someone starts to witness themselves in the moment, they’re able to make those changes in the moment. Eventually, they stop those behaviors altogether once they realize that it no longer serves them or the people around them.

Okay, that’s really interesting. So just go through the day and if you have identified something or someone helped you identify something that is maybe holding you back, then you just stop yourself and say, okay, what am I doing here? Am I exhibiting this? And why I might be doing it? That’s fascinating. And then basically, you create the awareness and self-awareness and then you can do something about it.

And that’s an oversimplification even as I’m stating it because again most people do not have awareness of their behavior as problematic. I find at least with most of my clients that we tend to think it’s the other guy’s fault because basically the way we are wired as human beings is what we call a first-person perspective. I’m only able to see my point of view. So, it takes a lot of work to expand consciousness to where I can have a second, third, fourth, even fifth-person perspective and see beyond my own point of view. But that is part of the developmental trajectory and why this work is so important and so different because we’re not just coaching for goals. We’re coaching for developmental growth, which is a completely different approach.

Yeah, I love that. So people witness themselves, then you help create the awareness, and then how do they actually get going from there? What is the process? Let’s say I realize I’m intense, I’m packing the dishwasher, I’m slamming some plates in, and I’m kind of very curt with my wife. I realize, oh, wow, I should not be doing this. How do I get out of this habit?

Well, a lot of times, once you have awareness, I always say awareness is the first opportunity for change. So with my clients, I’m not even suggesting or dictating the change. I’m just helping them. I’m creating the container for them to witness. And then we work through it. They report the patterns back to me. And in reporting the patterns, they start to change automatically. If there’s areas where there’s trauma, and often there is trauma in the background, then we have to do another layer of work to deal with that trauma. And there’s many different ways that I do that because all of my work is trauma-informed. But if they’re on their own and trying, they’re only going to probably get so far.

Because again, if you don’t have a trained professional that can see what you’re not able to see and hear what you’re not able to hear, you’re only going to go so far. So I like to think of the developmental stages, the 12 of them, like a mountain, even though it’s not a hierarchy in the traditional sense. If you imagine stage one is a baby in a crib and all that baby can see is their fist and they don’t even know it’s their own fist for a long time. But as you expand consciousness, you have, let’s say now you’re at the top of that mountain, and imagine on a clear day you can see seven states from there. You have a much broader awareness and a much broader understanding.  We know that people do not move into the later stages of development unless they do a significant amount of work, and it can take probably anywhere from a year to two years to move to a later stage. The idea, Steve, is not necessarily to move to a later stage, but to live the most robust experience of life at whatever stage you’re at.

I find most often if people, for instance, entrepreneurs often fall at what we call the achiever stage, where they’re chasing time and money and all the accolades and all the things that all of us as entrepreneurs even look for, then as they move on, sometimes that’s where that emptiness of success comes in is now I have all that, but what does it really mean? And I’m working extra hard to keep the machine running and I’m feeling very sad or anxious or depressed. Often that means they’re leaning into another stage and they’re wanting something different or more. And that’s where I think they’re wise to seek out a developmental coach or if they have severe trauma in the background, which many do, then even more extreme measures depending on the nature of the trauma.

Okay. So that’s very interesting. So basically there are 12 stages of development and to expand consciousness.

Yes.

And then you are on a certain stage, you’re not aware where you are, but with coaching you can figure that out. And then your solution may just be to have a more robust life in whatever stage you are. You become aware of what you’re missing at later stages. So you want to get to the next stage and then you want to work on this. But it’s kind of optional whether some people want to go there, some people don’t want to go there.

Yeah, and the other thing that we say about stage development that I think is important to understand is that we say everything transcends and includes, means it goes with us. So even that shadow side of us, that dark side of us, if we’re not doing the work, we might advance to another stage, but we’re bringing all that dark side with us. So, we want to do that work around those elements that are not serving us so that as we advance, we’re healthier. And I like to compare it to an infant because we’ve all been infants or been around infants. And so when we talk about development, I always say, easiest way to think about it is a baby does not forget to crawl when they learn to walk, when he or she learns to walk. They just crawl less and less often. So we bring everything along with us as we advance, good, bad, and ugly. The point is to perhaps do something that allows us to bring more of the healthier side along.

So why would someone not want to advance to the next stage or to higher stages? What would be the good reason for that?

Well, there is no real reason not to want to advance. I think that the thing is that most people don’t even know about the stages. So they hit a wall in their career or their life. Maybe they go through a divorce or something happens and this is when I get them, they think, oh my God, my life is over. Something terrible is going on and I’m a failure. And it’s like, no, no, this moment, sometimes we grow the most through our suffering or through the negative events ‘cause we learn if we’re looking, we grow when we look to make meaning out of what has happened to us. And that’s, again, sometimes where we need a professional because all we can see is, oh my gosh, this terrible thing has happened to me.

I’ve lost a bunch of money or my wife left me or my kids are on drugs or whatever. The stages are just a way that we talk about the expansion of awareness and consciousness, meaning I understand things differently. And there’s a great amount of peace that comes into being in the later stages because you have more wisdom, you have more patience, you have more compassion, more love, if you’ve done the work to get rid of that shadow side of yourself.

Yeah, no, no, I get it. And I’m just reading a book and it talks about the friction that you need to have in order to be able to work on yourself. If you have a very easy life, then you have no raw material to work with. It’s a fascinating topic. But what I’m curious about is that they’ve worked with you, they realize that they’re at a certain stage, they have the awareness, you help them find the awareness of it, and now they are aware that there are other stages. Why would someone not want to get there? That’s kind of what I’m wondering.

Yeah. I’ve not met anyone that once they know about the stages, don’t want to get there, and even if they don’t know about the stages, they want something more in their lives. They’re trying to figure out what that more is or how to get that more even if they know it. I don’t think it’s a question of not wanting to. I think it’s a question of not knowing that human development is available to us. I mean, here’s how I think about it, Steve. It wasn’t that long ago that we used to think people didn’t develop or mature beyond the age of 21. And we were basing that on the frontal cortex of the brain, because that is about that.

It’s a little different for men than women, but that’s when that frontal cortex fully develops in the human brain. But if you think about it, that’s really kind of ridiculous. Because we continue to have all these life experiences after 21. So we’re going to either grow or we’re going to regress. And people that get stuck in the earlier stages, I mean like the adolescent stages, what we refer to as the pre-conventional or conventional stages, they are often so traumatized, or there might be a drug addiction, for instance, that keeps them kind of stuck developmentally. Our prisons are full, unfortunately, of human beings. When I wrote the book on the pursuit of time and money, I did it looking through the lens of the stages. And we know that people in the earlier stages, they don’t have the ability, literally do not have the ability to see the ramifications of their actions in terms of time and money.

It’s instant gratification kind of thing. And so that alone, if you’re having trouble with time and money, that’s something to look at, to tell you there’s an opportunity for growth there. Because as you mature, you should be able to see further out in terms of time. I should be able to see, well, if I do this, this is going to impact me the next five, ten years. And also with respect to my use and appreciation and responsibility around money.

Okay, so we’re going to talk in 30 seconds about your book, The Pursuit of Time and Money, but I’d like to just ask a final question on what you mentioned about the emptiness of success. So why do people get to feel the emptiness of success and how does that connect to the pursuit of time and money? And then also please share with us why you decided to write this book.

I decided to write it because what I saw with my clients was people either had a lot of time and no money or a lot of money and no time because they were working so much. So I was curious about that. So the emptiness of success comes to what I mentioned earlier is you acquire a lot, particularly the achiever stage. That’s what that stage is all about. As I said, your entrepreneurs land. Expert stages before that, it’s not necessarily directly correlated, but we see a lot of people like your financial advisors, engineers, people of that nature in that stage before the achiever. But often they just get to a point where they have all the degrees, the clients, the money, the house, the cars, all of that.

And then again, something is missing. And so I wanted to explore that through the lens of developmental stages in time and money. And we saw very interesting things in that early research. And one of the most interesting was that moderate scarcity and moderate abundance looked the same in terms of the things people were saying and doing. The difference was that the moderate scarcity, they were making fear-based decisions rather than sensible decisions for the future or whatever. So it’s very complicated and hard to talk about in a few seconds, but I hope I answered your question there.

Yeah. So basically, they feel like they achieved the success they set out to achieve, but it doesn’t feel as good as they thought it would feel because it’s just not enough to have the money, but you also have to have meaning and there are lots of layers there. So tell me a little bit about the book, The Pursuit of Time and Money. How does it help people? So, let’s say I reach this, I feel this emptiness, I’m financially abundant, but I don’t have friends, or I don’t have good relationships or I don’t know why I’m doing this in the first place. Whatever it is, what does it do for me if I read this book? How is it going to change me?

Well, what I did in the book was I made the correlation between the abstract and concrete nature of time and money. We don’t talk about the two of them and how really intertwined they are often. But what I found was that people have issues with time, they often have issues with money. So we did some work around that, and then I break it down into the stages and how each stage, there were categories that came out of the initial research, and we kind of help helping people see, for instance, generosity is one but each of the stages look at generosity differently. What is responsibility look like? And then I have reflective practices at the end of each chapter so you can really start to look at, well, how is this showing up for me? Another aspect that was very important in the book was giving people a chance to understand that how you use your time and money in relation to the people in your life really tells them how you value them. Am I giving my children my time? Am I hoarding my money?

For instance, we had a gentleman that came, he was moderate scarcity, which was a great example in that he was doing the right things, saving for retirement for him and his wife, but he was so worried about retirement, which was like 30, 40 years out, I can’t remember exactly that he wouldn’t even take his kids on vacation or to Disneyland. And they lived in the Disneyland LA, Southern California area, which to me is missing the point. If you’re making those kinds of fear-based decisions and you’re not even enjoying your life, you’re saving for something. That’s a good thing, but maybe for many of the wrong reasons. So those were some of the things that we looked at in the book.

The other thing, Steve, I want to say for your listeners is that we have developed a moderate quiz because the way we look at where people are in terms of their stages is very complicated. The assessment is complicated and it’s quite expensive. So I developed a quiz that looks at the six major stages that most people in the workforce are in. And it also has input in the report around your propensity for time and money use and experiences. They can go to that or we’ll have also your podcast and everything on a specific page on my website. And that is sharonspano.com/managementblueprint. And if they go there, they can take that quiz and also the podcast that you and I are doing today will be there as well.

Okay, fantastic. So we’ve got it already in place. We’re going to put it on the show notes as well, so people can just click on it and find it, but definitely through your website as well. So, let me ask you kind of more of a general question, which is not connected to your work directly, but you’ve worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and you see how they operate and what are the good decisions, the bad decisions they make. What do you consider the most important question for any entrepreneur to ask themselves?

Well, that’s a great question. I think, because again, everything I do is so customized and dependent on what’s going on with the individual. But maybe it’s about asking, am I being the most effective leader/human being that I could be? Meaning not just in my business or my work, but for my family, because I see that disconnect every day. And it’s a great concern to me that we are losing families for the sake of our businesses. And I would like to see high impact leaders be well-rounded and that their life is integrated in such a way. I’m not one that believes in work-life balance, but integrated in such a way that they’re fulfilled in every area of their life is integrated in such a way.

I’m not one that believes in work-life balance, but integrated in such a way that they’re fulfilled in every area of their life. So if you’re not feeling that, like I run into a lot of people who are, they don’t know how to connect with their kids now. And we literally, like, I don’t have a relationship with my children. Well, then that’s an area that we might focus on in our work together if that’s something the client wants. So I don’t think you have to sacrifice your family for your business, I guess is what I’m saying. And if it feels that way, then maybe some things need to be recalibrated.

Yeah. I always felt like it’s the easy thing to just focus on a single thing and neglect everything else. That’s kind of a cop-out. Because of course we can be better than others if you’re just simply focused on one thing. But life is more of a marathon than a sprint and you have to keep more plates in the air to have long-term success, which is very difficult. So before we wrap this up, Sharon, I’d like you to just run through the 12 stages of development. So what are the 12 stages?

The names of them? Okay, well.

Yeah, whatever short way you can.

I mean, that’s a very big question because there are many. The first one is like Conformis, there’s Expert, Achiever, then we go into Pluralist, there’s Construct Aware, that’s not all of them. And then there’s Illumined. I mean, I don’t remember them all, but the ones I’m focusing on most of the time are Expert, Achiever, Pluralist, and Construct Aware. The earlier stages are babies. That’s the very, very early stages from like infancy to adolescence, the first four. And then from there on, it’s kind of anyone could be anywhere as adults. But the final two, we don’t really have people in the workforce that we know of that’s like 1%. Think of like the Dalai Lama or someone like that, way up there. Jesus might be way up there.

Construct Aware is about 5% of the population as we know now based on the research. And I did have a client years ago that was a pluralist. She was an attorney, which surprised me. So each one has different perspectives and things that matter to them, which is what I go on in the book. So for instance, with money, again, I mentioned the Achiever is chasing money. But when someone gets into the later stages, like Construct Aware, where the 5% of the population are, it’s more about they think of money at that stage as in service to humanity. So they want less, want less toys, jewelry, they’re going to be more of a minimalist and thinking more about the greater good. One is not wrong or better than the other, it’s just different.

Yeah. So it feels like it’s all about the consciousness of the person growing over time. And first, you’re just a conformist. I mean, I can see in companies, people join in the company and they don’t experience and they just want to follow blueprints. They want to be told what to do and be accepted that they are doing what they need to do. And then as they develop their expertise, then they develop more autonomy. And over time, they start to manage people and then they start to lead people and then they have to think about the bigger context of the organization as the ranks and the CEO is thinking about the annual plan. And then maybe an entrepreneur that has multiple businesses, they are thinking about the industry and the impact and then you become a statesman, then you can think about the generations and stuff like that.

But you can still be at those levels thinking of all those things and still be at an early stage. That’s the interesting piece is that often the earlier stages are more concrete in their thinking. Like I’ve seen this in the United States right now. I believe our leadership for the country is very concrete, achiever stage, and not necessarily thinking about the rippling effect of actions on the global. They’re not able to think globally, where people in the later stages are much more likely to be abstract thinkers and have consciousness and understand the rippling effect of one action on many, many others versus just what I want. So it’s very interesting because I think it’s happening around the world. It’s almost a backlash.

We’re moving into more autocratic leadership, which is seemingly more egocentric and concrete in nature than what you might see of someone who years ago we used to talk about teal organizations and they were organizations that were the opposite of autocratic. They would be more flat, less hierarchical, more input from the masses kind of thing. So who knows where all this is going to land, but my job is one person at a time because I feel like if I can help one leader be more effective in his role as a leader, but also in his personal life, then the rippling effect of that is generations because we know now from the field of epigenetics that trauma is generational. So if I can help be an interruption to that, I feel like it’s worth the effort.

Yeah, we have to make the difference that we are positioned to make and make the most of what we have. So I totally agree with you. And it’s just a fascinating topic and we could take this to different directions and make it much bigger. So I love the frameworks that you shared about witnessing yourself and creating the awareness and observing the patterns and working through some trauma potentially and make some changes in our lives and try to get to the higher level of consciousness and development. So if you would like to learn more about Dr. Sharon Spano, then check out her website and her LinkedIn page. So Sharon, can you share your website?

Yeah, it’s easy. It’s just my name, sharonspano.com. And then for the assessment that I mentioned, it would be /managementblueprint specific to this. I’m going back to your first question, just quickly would say that quiz, we’re looking at the center of gravity, meaning the higher percentage of which stage you’re in. But we also give you a report that shows you all of them of the six, not all 12. And it tells you specific things that you could do for the other two that you are also, ‘cause you’re never just in one, but you are, you do have a center of gravity. So, it gives an opportunity to take that first part of the framework and develop some awareness.

That’s awesome. So, definitely check it out. sharonspano.com/managementblueprint. That’s that’s easy. And check out the six stages where you are, what you can do. And if you want to do further work, then reach out to Sharon on LinkedIn or through our website. Well, thank you very much, Sharon, for coming and sharing your wisdom on the development stages and witnessing ourselves and creating more awareness of becoming a better leader. And if you enjoyed the show, then stay tuned because every week we have a great entrepreneur or subject matter expert sharing the knowledge that can help you as a business owner. So thanks for coming and thank you for listening.

Seth Tillotson, CEO and Founder of Your Business Consultation, is driven by a mission to empower everyday professionals to become confident entrepreneurs and business owners.

We learn how Seth’s journey—from launching service businesses to helping others transition from 9–5 roles—inspired his purpose. He shares his framework, The 7 Profit Improvement Areas, which helps entrepreneurs uncover hidden revenue and boost profitability by focusing on: Lead Generation, Conversion Rates, Closing Rate, Client Retention, Increasing Average Sale, Increasing Sale Frequency, and Cost Reduction. He also explains how to use squeeze pages to accelerate conversions, outlines the Captivate–Fascinate–Educate–Close method, and discusses how entrepreneurs can avoid the trap of staying busy instead of being effective.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Seth Tillotson, the CEO and founder of Your Business Consultation, and an investor in multiple retail-oriented businesses. Seth, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Steve. I’m excited to be here.

All right. So you’re a very young entrepreneur to be on the show in general, but that’s great because you’re bringing a different perspective, you’re bringing a different energy, and you have certainly big ambitions and already a good track record. So, tell me a little bit about your personal ”Why,” what is driving you, and how are you manifesting it in your business?

Sure. So, my personal “Why,” it comes from a feeling that I got. I’ll tell you a specific story. The first time that I helped somebody transition from a nine to five employee to their own business owner. So, I, at one point, owned a booth rental hair salon and I encouraged everybody to have their own business as they rented the space from me. I came across a young lady who was timid and shy working a nine to five that wasn’t really being treated the best at that salon. And so I said, you know what, if you come over and rent a booth, then I’ll sit down with you for as long as it takes and we’ll set up the whole LLC, get your registration, EIN, taxes, all that fun stuff, insurance, all of it. It took about four hours, but by the end of it, I could tell that she was feeling confident in having her own business and excited to have her own brand and be able to choose her own hours. If there was a specific service that she didn’t want to offer, she didn’t have to.

I had no rules other than to keep the space clean and sanitary, pay the rent on time, that’s it. So, about a year later, I had an interview with her and I sat down and asked, how’s it going? And just the glow from her eyes and the body language, everything, it’s so different. It was confident, it was inspiring. And the feeling that I got from doing that, from being a part of that transformation, the only thing that I can think of it is akin to when I was flying helicopters. And so, like the feeling of that freedom and the responsibility, I guess, it lit a fire in my soul. I’ll put it that way. And I knew then that this was one of my sole purposes, something that not only am I good at helping people with that transition and answering all their questions, but it’s something that I feel like I’m here to do.

Love it. That’s a very inspiring story. And I mean, hey, entrepreneurship can be life changing for sure. It probably is life changing. Now, not all the time for the better, but it’s definitely if you embrace it, then it can make your life much more autonomous and rewarding. So, you started offering this service and, in fact, on your LinkedIn page and website you talk about a 60-minute conversation with an entrepreneur and you basically look at seven different areas in their business and you offer to identify at least six figures of profit improvement, which is quite a bold claim. So, tell me a little bit about how that works. What are those areas and how can you do that in 60 minutes? How can you even scan all those areas in the business?

Sure. So I’ll go over the seven key areas in business that increase your profits when you pay attention to them. The first one here is lead generation. So how much are you getting qualified leads for your business? And then that turns into how much of those are converting. So second one is conversion rates, and that’s getting an appointment or a proposal together or something like that. And from there, how much of those appointments are you closing? So, if there is closing rates, and that’s converting those into paying clients. Once you’ve converted them into paying clients, now you have those clients you want to keep them. So fourth one is client retention. Maximizing a lifetime value of a client or a customer, that’s really the only metric that you need to scale the business. So then you’re gonna be able to know how much you can spend on acquiring that client if you know the lifetime value. The fifth one is the average value of your sales.

Something as simple as increasing your prices by 5%. It’s instant and it gives you a lot more revenue to work with in most cases. Six would be increasing your sale frequency. So, if you do have a returning client or customer, maybe you can increase the amount of times that they purchase within a year. And last but not least, definitely, is cost reduction. Identify all the areas that you could automate or combine services into one that you’re paying for and reducing those costs is generally the first step, even though it’s the seventh on the list.

Yeah, I mean, cost cutting is easy, but it doesn’t grow revenues. So it’s kind of a defensive step. But nevertheless, some businesses, they have to start there because bleeding money is the worst thing that can happen to them. Okay, so what I’m curious about is really 60 minutes enough to cover all these areas and do you have some specific questions that allow you to be able to investigate all these areas in a short time?

Sure. So I claim the 60 minutes as the exploring these different areas. But before the 60 minutes, I usually do 30 minutes of actually getting to know the business owner and their business, where they’re at, and just digging deeper into their “Why” and their number one goal, where they’re trying to get with the business. So in total, it would be 90 minutes would be what it would take. As far as exploring all the key areas, I currently have 22 strategies in those different areas. And within 60 minutes, I usually get to around three or four of them. And by the time the three or four of them are projected and implemented, it’s above six figures.

So you don’t even have to go through all of them?

Right, exactly. And it’s more of a focus on one at a time. So if I’m working with our clients, obviously, we’re not going to overwhelm anybody here because business ownership is already overwhelming. We’ll focus on one strategy at a time and maybe get through four of them in a year, but that’s also because we take time to look at what’s working and what’s not working and we quickly pivot the strategy if it’s not working.

So let’s start with lead generation. So what are the like the top most obvious or most popular ways or what you have found works the best, lead generation for small business?

Sure, so lead generation, it kind of closely correlates to the other key areas around there. Lead generation into conversion rate. The quickest or the easiest way to get lead generation is to offer something of value up front for free. For instance, on my website, I have my Revenue Revolution. It’s a free ebook, you can download it, but you got to put your email in at least. So that’s the quickest, easiest way to set up any sort of gathering information on getting emails, phone numbers for lead generation.

You find this works for any type of business? This information like an e-book?

So far, yes. And I won’t say it always works. You might have to explore other ways to do it. Some creative ways, or I’ll give you an example of a creative way that I’ve done it recently, just going on to a social media, like I’ve been on threads, and instead of trying to post a bunch of content, I just follow other people’s posts and comment on those. And again, you have to offer something of value. So I definitely believe in giving without the expectation to receive. So if I go on business threads and somebody’s asking a question, well, how do I start an LLC, then I’ll just tell them right there, step by step.

Yeah, and there’s more where this comes from kind of thing. Yeah, I like it. What about conversion rate? What’s the obvious way to improve that?

What you’re going to want with conversion is, first of all, you need to captivate. So you’ll need a headliner, something that touches on a pain point or sparks an emotion. And then the second step is fascinate. So your subheader then would be explaining the solution of that pain point and then educate them on it. So that could be a video sales letter or something of that sort. The best method that I would say is when you’re driving traffic to your website, instead of landing them on the homepage or on a product page, develop a squeeze page, something in between that has all of those elements that captivates them so they click on it, fascinates them with a simple, quick solution to their problem, and then educates them on how your unique proposition can be valuable to them. And then obviously at the end, you got to close them and book an appointment or call, something like that, download our ebook, anything really. That’s the best method that I’ve found for conversions.

So does it actually work against someone if they have a full-fledged website?

No, it actually works better than the website.

Yeah, so a website is kind of counterproductive because people stop meandering in different direction.

Yeah. Let me put it this way. A website is like having a brochure and a squeeze page is like having like an advertisement, an educational advertisement. The point of it too is to differentiate yourself from the rest of your competition in the market to what makes you unique. Everybody’s got a website. And most of the time when I go on a website, if I can’t immediately see what the offer is in the first few seconds, that’s a problem. People need to be able to know, can you solve their problem? Well, first of all, you know what their problem is and then you know how to solve it quickly or affordably or in a unique way that a system that you’ve developed or something nobody’s done before. And then obviously they’re going to need to know about you and what you do to build that trust and credibility too. So you got to educate them on that.

So the squeeze page forces them through a certain sequence of reading or watching?

No, it would be like if you had an advertisement or if you were just posting content on your social media and you have a link, instead of sending them to your website homepage, then it sends them to a page that’s only available through that link. So like you wouldn’t be able to get to the squeeze page from your website. Your website still exists, so if they want to go educate further and look at the website, then they sure can. But the squeeze page takes the information that’s on that website and brings it to the closing or converting sequence that captivating them, fascinating them, educating, and then closing. It’s not for somebody who’s already trying to research your business.

That would be what the website’s for, but usually websites don’t offer enough information for somebody to decide right then and there to schedule an appointment. It might have a list of services, but it doesn’t specify a particular pain point or get them to have the emotion that they need to take the next step. We’re emotional beings and we don’t usually make decisions like purchasing or setting an appointment based on logic. It’s more on how we feel. So that’s the whole point of the squeeze page.

Yeah. Okay. That’s very good. It’s great that you explained it because I’ve been aware of squeeze pages, I’ve even used them, but no one explained it to me in such a clear terms of how it’s different from a website and how does it work. And it’s almost like having a conversation with another person through that squeeze page and letting them influence you basically.

Yeah. And that’s the whole point of what the video sales letter would be. So in the whole page, it would be nothing but you have your footer at the bottom, your copyright for the business, but it’s just a video and then maybe a button to schedule on your calendar, just links to your Calendly or other scheduler. There’s nothing else on there to distract them from it. It’s just going to say, is this your problem? Do you need this solution? Listen to this five minutes and I’ll give you 10% off the service if you decide to take this path. Something like that.

What’s the right way to collect emails? Is it before they watch the video? So is it the first thing that when they come on to request their email? Or you basically give them the spiel and then if they want to sign up, then they click on the email? How does it work?

So, the squeeze page would be separate from any email marketing. The point of the squeeze page is to two for one. So you capture the lead, but you’re already qualified that lead and turned it into a booking or an appointment or a proposal by that time. So instead of having like a qualifications caller or somebody reaching out, it would skip all of that. So by the time that they already booked an appointment, you’ve educated them on the service, you’ve qualified that they have this problem, otherwise they wouldn’t be booking.

Do you recommend people to regularly create multiple screen pages for different approaches?

Yes, and you should have a customer or client profile, like super specific, like your ideal client, what are they wearing? What do they eat? What do their daily habits look like? What are they listening to? What movies do they watch? All that stuff like you should know your customer. And then, say you have four different particular pain points and solution to those, you could have four different squeeze pages for that four different advertisements running. Another reason for that is also the touch points. It takes on average 20 to 100 touch points of somebody seeing your logo or your service or hearing about you somewhere in order for them to be interested enough to take a step into booking appointments or purchasing a product. Using the Captivate, Fascinate, Educate and Close method brings that down to between 4 to 20 touch points because now you’re taking them wherever they are on their buyer’s journey, and you’re moving them along. So maybe they didn’t know that this service existed before. Now they know that it exists, and they know that you offer a solution to their particular problem.

So captivate, fascinate, educate, and impose? That’s the sequence? Okay.

It’s a conversion formula.

In the past, I knew what AIDA, Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. That kind of sounds a little bit similar.

Yep. That’s pretty much the same thing.

Same thing just with a different acronym. Yeah. Okay. So let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about your entrepreneurial ventures and your story as a business owner. What was the hardest decision yet you’ve ever had to make in your business or your businesses?

Probably just sell, to sell early. When I purchased Cut and Style, the hair salon, I’d purchased it with my ex-wife and then getting divorced, having to take care of that brick-and-mortar business. Plus, I was also managing as a managing member for nine other real estate companies as well. It became quite a bit at that time, it was Tillotson Construction Company as well. I was trying to show, from real world experience, from nothing to actual business operating, my cousin how to do it. He was a roofer and a sider, good at things like that. So I said, okay, well, I’ll help you walk through doing that as well. And all of it together, I was working 16 hours a day, at least. I mean, few hours of sleep every night. It was unsustainable. You can’t do it. And because of that, the businesses started to suffer. I couldn’t focus enough on areas that I needed to, that my laundry list of items to do was way too long.

Even if I hired somebody to help me with it, I don’t even think we could have gotten it done. So deciding to sell it early instead of the 15-year exit plan, it became a little over two years, but it did end up selling to one of the renters there. I didn’t make a profit off of the actual valuation of the business, but what I did make during owning it, I would consider that a profitable sale, but yeah, it was difficult because to want to run a good business where the people who you service are happy and you’ve helped them solve a problem and to do it with integrity and honesty, accountability and respect to everybody. Watching it suffer, I think was the hardest part of that.

Yeah, it’s a big responsibility to be a business owner. It’s not just an opportunity, it’s a responsibility as well. And if someone doesn’t take that seriously, then it can cause a lot of damage to people. And yeah, not everyone feels conscientious about this, but I’m glad you do. Okay, so as an entrepreneur, what would be your advice for other entrepreneurs? What’s the most important question you have to ask yourself every now and then?

The one question you have to ask yourself, am I working on the right thing? That would be it. So oftentimes, you get caught up in busy work, you don’t move the needle. It’ll get you stuck at a revenue cap or you’re not generating any more leads or clients, customers. So you should focus on high impact activities. It’s the Pareto Principle. The 20% of what you do results in 80% of your total revenue. So, focus on those key areas and keep the business moving forward.

Yeah, love it. Well, that’s a very good answer. It’s very easy to get busy and not to be effective. Don’t confuse busyness with business.

Yeah, work on the business, not in the business.

That’s right. As Michael Gerber would say. All right, well, Seth, so you are the founder of Your Business Consultation. You have the seven area audit for businesses to add six figures within 60 minutes to their business. So if people would like to take advantage of this offer and get your views and your insights on their business so that they can improve it, where should they go and how can they find you?

Yeah, so I’m active on most social media, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can follow me there @SethTillotson. You can Google me, it’ll show up on there. And if you would like to look at the 22 strategies, free ebook is at yourbusinessconsultation.com. So just head over there and like I said, I’ll capture your email. So that’s my lead gen, but for sure, these strategies, they’re free in the ebook. I don’t believe in gatekeeping. And if you are engaging with me on social media or shoot me a message anywhere that I have an account, I will answer questions and do my best to help out.

Well, that’s awesome. I mean, who wouldn’t want six figures to their profit within 60 minutes? It’s a pretty good ROI on time invested. So go to yourbusinessconsultation.com and check out Seth Tillotson’s profile and reach out to him. So Seth, thanks for coming and bringing your perspectives. And if you are out there listening and enjoying this episode, please like us and follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, wherever you’re getting your podcasts. Give us a review and keep coming back because every Monday we have an exciting entrepreneur or other thought leader come and share their business frameworks with us. Thank you for coming, Seth, and thanks for listening.

Andrew Amann, CEO and Co-founder of NineTwoThree Studio, is driven by a passion for building great products and embracing the entrepreneurial journey alongside his team and clients.

We learn about Andrew’s journey as a founder and his philosophy of finding joy in the process. He introduces The AI Operating System, a practical framework that helps companies adopt AI with clarity and speed. The system begins by building an internal knowledge base, then moves into deploying simple AI agents to automate repetitive tasks, and culminates in managing these agents through a Super-Agent that orchestrates workflows and interacts with external systems using natural language.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Andrew Amann, the CEO and co-founder of NineTwoThree Studio, an AI consulting agency, building products for funded startups and established brands such as Consumer Reports, NPR, and Experian. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Great to have you. And I will start with my favorite question as always, what is your personal “Why,” Andrew, and how are you manifesting it in your business?

Sure, so we’ve been at this for 12 years, and I believe that many entrepreneurs would answer that question depending on the year that they’re in. As you grow, my personal”Why” originally was to build the biggest company to be on the tallest building in Boston and to have the logo basically replace Fenway Park. And that dream has has sailed. I don’t think I’m interested in that anymore. It seems aspirational and I think necessary when you’re starting a company to have those levels of aspirations and dreams because you have to run through things that most people wouldn’t and you have to achieve things that most people would give up on.

So the journey of entrepreneurship, I’ve discovered that my “Why” is to be part of the journey. I’ve read a lot of books recently, basically around the philosophy of the process of like Siddhartha is a great example, or The Alchemist, or even Life of Pi. That’s been my last year of inner research about what I want to be when I grow up. And what I discovered in all three of those books is the journey is what matters, the story is what matters, and the process of success, the process part is what matters. And many entrepreneurial friends, they sell their business and they lose that aspect of their lives because they forget that the process was what was fun.

The ability to learn, the ability to grow, and the ability to be part of the team is what I truly admire. So when I was asked this question in a CEO group, they said, Andrew, what do you want to do next? I said, I kind of want to do the same thing I’m doing now. And they said, well, who do you wanna work with? And I said, the teammates that I currently have. And they said, well, what type of clients do you want? And I said, the clients we currently have. And so I think my “Why” is just kind of living in the moment, being part of the process, being successful, but also supporting the teammates that we have so that they can be prosperous, that they can find their purpose. They can be great problem solvers, but they can also be great providers for their family. And so my “Why” is to support that journey and that process that we’re going through right now.

Wow. Okay. Well, you look very young for having such a wise “Why,” but it’s good. You shortcut the process. I do agree that the journey is the destination, perhaps. It definitely is very important. And as an investment banker, I can testify that sometimes you saw businesses for people and then they fall into depression because they lost their identity. They didn’t know how to recreate the success that they were having along the way. And so that’s pretty awesome. So having said that, you are in a very highly evolving area, which is AI. You’ve worked very actively in AI. I mean, you do other stuff as well. But we talked about AI on our pre-call and I was very intrigued by the framework that you’ve developed around what you call the AI Operating System. So what is an AI Operating System and how do you get one in your company?

Sure. So I come from a supply chain background. I built nuclear submarines for the first five years of my life. And when you build for the government, you have to learn processes, but you also have to learn throughput. One of my favorite books of all time is The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt. And it’s just a phenomenal book that teaches you about throughout and bottlenecks and relieving those bottlenecks to get to the next step so that you can ultimately achieve the profit. So with AI, we’ve been at this for eight years now. We’ve been developing a process and a strategy of how to implement AI into businesses.

What we’ve discovered is that CEOs are very scared of deploying something new, something that they don’t know and something that their friends or CEO friends are not doing the same way that they are. It was very easy to say, let’s move to the cloud because it had such a promising effect on the company that they could work from anywhere. The cloud would store all the data, they wouldn’t have to worry about servers going down. And all of their friends are moving to the clouds, all the other CEOs are moving to the cloud. So it was a transition that I think a lot of organizations took upon, whether it was Microsoft or Amazon, it didn’t matter. The movement to the cloud mattered. From our standpoint, AI is not so simple. AI becomes a very individualistic goal. It is something that your IP or your company has this fingerprint around, and you’re trying to AI that, which means it’s something different from your friends. It’s different from other companies. It’s a different organization.

And because everybody’s fingerprint is different, everybody’s adoption of AI is going to be different. But we’ve created a process of a workflow that you go through, we call it, you start with exploration, which is free, where you come through us and you try to figure out exactly what you’re trying to solve for. We then go through what we call product strategy and engineering discovery. And what that specifically does is diagnose what the problem is inside of the company and what the return on investment would be if we solve that problem. Now, I’ve been kind of making fun of Deloitte and Accenture for the last year because those two companies have this strategy session as well. It costs a million dollars, and they have great success with it. I’m not touting them for their success because a lot of companies see the value in hiring those types of consultants. What I am kind of knocking on is that to find value with AI should not take more than one or two months. The return on investments that we’re seeing are in the seven figures or even eight figures with a $200,000 investment. And AI changes the game for that initial discovery phase for what I call the strategy sessions. Because within a month, we should not only be able to determine what the ROI is, we should be very accurate with that. Because when AI is deployed properly, it either decreases costs or increased revenues. And we’ve seen that two dozen times in a row at this point. And we have the track record to prove that.

But the process should point out that once you solve for the KPIs, or once you’re trying to determine what the ROI is of this investment, it is now a system that you put in place to develop or implement that solution. It is no longer a what if, let’s test these three avenues. AI allows you to prototype, experiment, and deploy much quicker to get those results. So we like to say that every project we’ve worked on in the last, I would say, six to seven months has been less than four months of effort to get to a production release. We don’t build MVPs anymore, we don’t build prototypes, we build first production releases that get people into the system, working with it, testing it, and most importantly, seeing what the return on investment truly is based on the estimate. And if we achieve that return on investment, well, there’s more money to be had to keep building AI solutions. So everybody wins.

Okay, so let’s unpack this. So what does it mean to find the ROI? Give me an example of a project that you had kind of a hypothesis or an initial idea, and then you tested it and it showed an ROI and then you scaled it up. What does it look like?

Sure. So we had a consulting firm that worked for legal, it was a legal consulting firm. They help lawyers and paralegals determine what documentation and what information went into whether it’s prison reports or people that were sentenced to prison. We were able to double the revenues of that company and reduce the costs by about 90%. Now, when that happens, you’re basically allowing individuals to work the same way they did before. Nobody was fired. Everybody’s still supporting the initial goal, but they’re creating more revenue with the efforts they’re putting in. They’re also doubling down on what they’re good at, and they’re removing their waste. So, when an AI solution comes in, it allows all the consultants on the team, or a lot of the people that are doing the research to start getting this energy around what a new process looks like when built upon AI. And so this specific company, I mean, they have seen great success from not just the product itself, but from the time it takes to build the report.

Okay. So can you be more specific? What is it that they do differently with these reports? And how did you cut the cost by 90% if you kept everyone on the payroll? How is that even possible? What kind of costs could you eliminate?

Yeah, so the process that works very well with AI is when you’re looking at research or you’re looking at information of how a person is just looking at thesis paper or college kid looking through a thesis paper, it takes a lot of time to gather all of the links and the resources needed to write that thesis paper. And so let’s say it takes 10 hours to gather the information, another 10 hours or five hours to start writing that outline, then another few hours to take that outline and turn it into segments. And then finally, the writing of the thesis paper is your accumulation of all of that knowledge into one final paper. All of those steps can now be almost replaced by AI, except for the final writing piece. That piece in which the individual needs to take the knowledge that they’ve retrieved and make something new out of it.

That is where AI does not have a great success factor. It hallucinates. It doesn’t know what the human is trying to draw out of the research. And that’s where humans are so good. We can connect dots that don’t seemingly need to be connected, and we can make that connection. I mean, Malcolm Gladwell is phenomenal at connecting two unknown dots and then making you believe that that’s the truth. I’m not saying that he’s falsifying it, but he’s doing a great job at analogies and summarizing how things relate to each other. And humans are really good at that. But the cost of research, the cost of outlining, the cost of brief, that goes to the AI. So you’re reducing the cost of needing to do that aspect of it. All of the employees are still doing the human aspect of it, which is reporting the information necessary back to the client or the legal client and saying, this is what we found.

This is what the research told us. And instead of taking 20, 30, 40 hours to do that, you can do that in one hour. And so, you’re creating revenue, and the cost of performing those reports just goes from 20 hours or 30 hours down to one. More importantly, you can do 10, 20, 30, 40 reports where you used to be able to do two a week. And so that’s how the costs go down. It’s not that it’s like fabricated costs. Those costs would have existed if you got 40 on your desk, but they don’t exist because you have time to take on 40 new reports that you never did before.

Yeah. So, so essentially the cost per project goes down by 90%.

That’s right.

The actual cost of the company doesn’t, it stays the same perhaps.

That’s right.

And the revenue increases dramatically.

That’s right. I mean, cost is always a determination of it’s a ratio. COGS or operation expense, it’s always a ratio of revenue. So as you increase your revenue, as a team draws in more, you’re moving the bottleneck from the operations to the very end, which is the sales. And so, if sales is the limiting factor of how many reports you can do, well, no longer is that the case because the number of reports you can do, the throughput is much higher. So you can increase sales and have the same amount of throughput or increased throughput.

Yeah, okay, that makes sense. So that’s a really great way as a certain processes, AI can essentially streamline it, save a lot of time and let people do the stuff that only people can do for now, which is synthesizing, perhaps, certain concepts. So what are the types of AI solutions that you can deploy? So this is definitely creating research is one type. In our pre-call, we talked about AI agents, we talked about orchestration. So what kind of approaches there are big picture for AI deployment that someone could consider.

Yeah, there’s really three areas and they build on each other of where AI is going. The third one is not talked about much and we’ll get there in a second. But the first one is every company has a cadence, an IP, a knowledge base, a place in which they spend most of their time, whether it’s on Google Drive, sharing documents, trading information back and forth, communicating in Slack, all of that creates what we call culture, company culture. And Microsoft’s culture is very different than HubSpot’s culture. In fact, HubSpot has a glossary of three letter abbreviations that I don’t even know what 90% of them mean. But if you work at HubSpot, you surely do. And there are many cadences and there’s many cultures that have differences between their competitors. And what’s important about that is that it’s documentable, it’s proceduralized, and it’s also very, if you get hired into one and you move to another, you might not fit, even though you’re in the same industry. And what I’m trying to point out is that that culture and that cadence is an IP.

And every company has one, and they’ve been drilling for years and years and years, what they’re very specifically good at. They’re good at customer service. They’re maybe the cheapest price out there. Maybe they’re very good at how they relate to their clients. Maybe they go on site and they do certain consulting things. Maybe it’s a SAS product or maybe it’s a dropshipping and they’re the best dropshippers because they have two day delivery. Each one of those matters and that is why a knowledge base is the first place that AI should be built for every single one of these companies. When Amazon heard about large language models, guess what they did?

They built an internal large language model that only Amazon employees can use so that when you’re writing an email, you can say, what are the 900 emails that were similar to the one I’m trying to write internally for Amazon? Not around the world, not competitors, not other SaaS products. Internally on Amazon, what were the 900 emails related to how I wanted to ask for a new hire to get a promotion? That’s a very Amazon way of asking. They have a different promotion plan than most companies do. So to train that knowledge base on your internal IP and your company is the first step that every company should be doing. Now, Co-Pilot and Google Workspace are trying to enter into this space, and I would still argue that if you’re really interested in building AI, you need a consulting firm to come in and help you organize this the right way, because otherwise you’re just going to be what Google wants or what Microsoft wants. But that is 100% the first step. Once you have that knowledge base secured, you now can go to the second aspect, which is the agents.

You can deploy agents to do things like chat. You can deploy them to do invoice reconciliation. Or you can do, which our favorite is, workflow automation. When somebody passes documents from one person to the next, there’s an opportunity to reduce that workflow and either approve it or validate it or disapprove it or not allow it, whatever word you want to use to reduce the back and forth paperwork that humans have inside of companies. So agents can be deployed, they can have specific tasks, they can perform different functions, and that becomes your second introduction to AI. And it doesn’t work unless you have a knowledge base to relate back to. Like if you just deployed an agent, it’s not going to know how to act or how to perform or when to stop or when to misbehave or when to not behave or behave. So that agent thing becomes your second wave. Now the third one is where we’re heading. And that is when companies communicate to other companies through a large language model or through what we’re calling natural language.

No longer are APIs going to be the plumbing of the internet. Natural language is going to communicate between two pieces of software. So not just engineers can ask a question, but anybody in the organization can ask a question about their software. What is the invoice related to? How many orders are coming on plane 72 so I can get the shipments out the door? What is my cadence for understanding the exact processes of what I’m trying to do right now? What are the steps needed for me to do process A, B, and C? That is when I have to communicate with software, other systems, or even competitors. And as a product manager, designer, finance, HR, or developer, natural language or English should be the code of this plumbing line. And that’s what everybody’s building. That’s where we’re heading. That’s when a phone communicates to a laptop. That’s when your wife texts you, pick your kid up at six o’clock. And she doesn’t tell you the details, but it understands your calendar. It understands that every six o’clock ninja class happens and you need to go pick your kid up.

These things are coming down the pipeline and they’re coming fast and that only happens when a knowledge base is set up for either yourself or your company. Agents are deployed, which we’re calling MCP Service, but like basically these places are secure for agents to ask questions on your behalf and thirdly, for it to go outside the walled garden of your personal data and retrieve information for you.

Okay, so I’m trying to relate this to the use of ChatGPT, and maybe that’s not a good way to do it. But I’ve got a ChatGPT teams subscription, which is supposedly private. So what I do is, ChatGPT knows about me, knows what I do, knows the kinds of clients I’m working with, and understands some of the products I have. And then I basically ask it to do certain things. So I wonder if that’s similar to deploying agents. So now it knows my knowledge base. Maybe it’s not completely built out like it should be, but at some level it knows. So I can ask questions and then even create workflows. But the third step is to communicate with software, other competitors, and so on. I don’t understand exactly how that works. So what is the step between agents and this natural language communication? What is the missing step that needs to be breached to get there?

Sure, so in relationship to ChatGPT, the first thing that you’re doing is creating a knowledge base of things you know so that ChatGPT when it prompts back to you and retrieves the answers for you, it’s retrieving in context that you understand. So while you have a mini knowledge base and you’re putting information into a project or to Microsoft Co-Pilot, that knowledge base is what’s informing ChatGPT of the answer it should be giving. That’s step one. Step two is the agent that you are, like a web agent. When it crawls the Internet, that is an agent going out to crawl the web, looking at the first eight links of Google, grabbing information back and bringing that to you to say, hey, I searched the Internet for you and I found this answer.

That’s an agent. But you can also imagine an agent with your Excel documents. Maybe you put in a number of shipments every single month into column B2. Well, an agent can do that for you after the shipment is retrieved from your invoicing documents. So because it has a knowledge base and because it has a knowledge base and because it has information about your shipping reports and your books, you can write an agent to say every time we retrieve our shipments, go up to this Excel sheet and fill in the correct number. But it’s not just an API, it’s smart enough to know that a half a shipment matters and it should be 7.5. It’s smart enough to know that if you have a negative shipment, well, that also means that the stuff is on the way, it just hasn’t been fulfilled yet.

It’s basically an automation that I create that will do repetitive tasks.

That’s right, it’s automation to create, and any agent can do, there can be small agents, they can be teeny tiny to do something simple, and they could be massive agents, like a chatbot that answers customer queries. Those are the level of agents. And the third one is going outside your walled garden. The best example that I’ve given repeatedly is you’re standing on the corner, you’re at your house and you’re ready to go to the airport. You should be able to say, I would like a ride to the airport and I would like to stop and get maybe some deodorant or maybe you want to get a sandwich on the way to the airport. And I would also like to get there a little bit early so I can have a presentation. I can do a phone call from the lounge.

Now to do that, two things need to be happening that don’t happen right now. One is security and privacy. The other one is the ability for these agents to send information out discreetly on your behalf. In this scenario, the ultimate goal is that agent goes out and crawls Uber, locates an Uber car for you and brings it to your house at the specific time needed for you to go to the airport. The second one would be to understand the mapping system between your house and the airport to figure to stop at CVS and maybe just stop at a sandwich. Most importantly, a sandwich shop that you’ve been to before that you like, that you’ve said before you’ve enjoyed. And then lastly, to understand your calendar, gather the meeting that you’re trying to be in, make sure that you’re at the airport with plenty of time for you to get through security and to your meeting. That requires your agents to communicate with other servers that you don’t have privy to or information to, or maybe you have a login to Delta and maybe you have a login to get to their security and make sure you’re validated. But these agents need to have security when they go out, just like an API call has a secret key.

Those agents are going to have to go out and on your behalf, act on what you want them to do and securely keep your information away from prying marketers that then intercept that. And all of a sudden, Fluffy’s car service shows to pick you up. And if Fluffy’s car service shows up and you were expecting Uber, you’re not going to be a happy client. But what happened there is Fluffy’s car service decided that they had a better marketing team and they were able to intercept these agents and deliver cars all around the world. And that’s what can start happening if we don’t keep these things secure when they go out and make the requests on our behalf.

So that sounds like a lot of complexity. How far are we from these super agents that can use my personal information?

So on Google, it’s already here. It’s unfortunate that iPhone has such a large footprint in America because I don’t think people are realizing the advancements Google has made in the last two months on their Gemini platform. I, right now, can book a trip, I can play a song, I can just have Spotify playing in the background, which seem relatively general, but when you have a large language model that understands your calendar, Gmail, your text messages, and also your internal drive, like my personal drive, it knows information about me while I’m requesting in my voice assistant. And so Google has made these great advancements with what they call Gems in the last month. I imagine that we’re gonna see an Uber Gem, an Airbnb Gem, all of that is going to come into this Google ecosystem. And they’re three years ahead of Apple at this point, in my opinion.

Wow, that’s pretty crazy. Now, what about the security aspect of it? Because obviously, I mean, more and more, I tried to download something, it always asked me to confirm that I trust this company, it can use all my information, it has access to my email and all that stuff. And it’s very scary. Sometimes I say, no way, I’m not going to do that. It’s just feels too intimidating to do this. And then plus people are concerned about government listening in. How can this thing can grow without people being overly exposed to their information?

Yeah, so recently, we’ve always had this problem and we haven’t been able to name it, just like we weren’t able to name what Retrieval-Augmented Generation was. There was always these things that we were doing inside of our company, as we’re AI consultants, we build these models all the time. And we were doing exactly this, we just didn’t have a name for it. And recently, Claude, I believe, was the first to coin the phrase Model Context Protocol. It’s a standardized way for AI applications, which basically like think of large language models, that to interact with external tools and data sources. And they act as like a universal connector. So think of like a USB-C and a USB-C port. You have the USB-C port and you want to plug into Uber and Airbnb and the receiving end, and you need a USB-C receiver to plug into. Well, it secures your privacy. It secures your information.

It secures who you are and kind of tokenizes you. And so, then every time you want to use an Uber request, the large language model can use that Uber request securely to retrieve your information about your Uber and back to you. So it’s kind of the new plumbing that’s happening across the internet. That MTP server is becoming the terminology that we’re using of how that all works. It’s the plumbing of APIs for large language models.

Yeah. And so all I have to do is trust Google who owns all these products?

No, I’ve been speaking about this. I hope that companies like Perplexity or Claude are, they have the ability to get onto hardware. And so, right now, Google and Apple have a massive advantage because they have the hardware and the voice assistance built into those devices. So they, for sure, have a duopoly around where most people are going to be sharing their information. And Google already has been doing it for me for a few months now. I hope that Perplexity and Claude and even OpenAI comes out with hardware that I can select that piece of hardware where I maybe own end-to-end encryption about the device in my large language model so that I can control the data security. So that little checkbox that you’re saying when you ask for your calendar to be shared, maybe that checkbox is something that you truly can protect against and Google doesn’t just know about it anyways.

Yeah. I mean, even when companies request me to sign in through Google, I always think, okay, what is it going to leak from Google to this company? I’m giving some permission. Do I really understand exactly what permission I’m giving? It’s just a very uncomfortable situation.

Exactly. And I think that hopefully can be reversed because if you have all the information necessary on your phone through the large language model, hopefully we can call apps and retrieve like if I wanted to buy a toaster, I don’t need to go to Amazon to search toaster to find one. I should be able to search my voice assistant for the best toaster, decide that it’s on Amazon and click purchase and the agent should take care of the rest from there.

Okay. Well, brave new world. Definitely very exciting. So I love this clarity around building out the AI. So first, the knowledge base. Create your own knowledge base and train your own AI, and then deploy agents. So essentially automate all your repeatable processes so that you can save all the energy to bigger tasks. And then maybe leverage something like Gemini that will coordinate multiple of these agents, super agent kind of thing. Maybe I misunderstand it, but it feels to me that it’s kind of a coordination of multiple agents, it’s kind of the manager of the agent workforce that is going to be doing things for you and you just give them instructions. It’s essentially a delegate to this personal integrator, whatever you want to call it.

Exactly. No, you got it. That’s the process.

That’s, that’s awesome. Okay. So our time is coming to the end here. Let me ask you one more question here. So as an entrepreneur, it was very interesting how your “Why” evolved. You wanted this tallest building with the logo and now you really want to journey and to enjoy working with the great people and working on exciting projects. What do you feel is the most important question any entrepreneur should be asking themselves?

I think the obvious one to me now is the vocation. Like chasing money is one thing. But if you truly like what you do, you shouldn’t have to worry about the money because you should be able to find enough work in that area to be successful. So, there’s a lot of entrepreneur advice out there of chasing dropshipping or chasing different areas that are the hot topic of the day. And it seems like a quick way to make money. But if you truly can’t see yourself being there for 10, 20 years, it might not be worth the effort to go into a market like that. And I also would say the same thing about TAM, like if your total addressable market is just not that big, and it’s a little tiny market, it might not be advantageous for you to put all your energy into that.

I would look at your next 10 years or 20 years and figure out where do you really enjoy being, who do you enjoy talking to, who do you enjoy working with, and what type of work do you wanna do in 10 years, and then start learning in that direction. Because if you work the other way and chase the money, you’ll end up in an industry with all these skills that might not be fruitful for a long period of time. So I truly love what I do. So I’m in the camp of finding an area. I love consulting. I love being an apprentice. I love building products. And being a consultant is all three of those, especially an AI consultant. I think people should look at that first and figure out, all right, what would excite me in 10, 20 years? And is there a big enough market that I can make my million dollars in that area and work backwards and try to figure out how to learn to be in that vocation?

Yeah, I think it’s very smart, especially because if you were to choose for the money, then it’s gonna be really hard for you to be successful without not loving what you do.

Exactly right.

So it might not even work. I mean, maybe it’s not just the fleetingness of those areas. Maybe dropshipping is a fleeting thing. I don’t know. It’s a hype thing, but you can’t even get there without loving the stuff.

I agree.

Yeah, that’s cool. All right. Well, so Andrew, if people would like to build their own AI Operating System? Where can they find you and how can they get more information or get started?

Sure, so I’m on LinkedIn. I post once a day. You can message me there. I read all the comments. Andrew A-M-A-N-N, and my company is NineTwoThree. You can fill out a form if you’re interested in a project, but for the most part, following us is the best thing I can ask for.

Well, definitely go and follow Andrew Amann, check his posts and also get immersed in AI because it’s moving very fast and you’re gonna miss the boat if you don’t. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you follow us on YouTube and give us a review on Apple Podcasts and join next week when an exciting entrepreneur is going to bring a framework to us. So, thank you for coming, Andrew, and thanks for listening.

Alistair Gordon, CEO of Expertunity, is driven by a mission to empower technical experts to reach their full potential by mastering enterprise skills that elevate their impact.

We learn about Alistair’s journey into expert development and his creation of The Expert-ship Model, a framework that helps technical professionals move beyond subject-matter expertise to become influential leaders within their organizations. The model outlines nine core capabilities across three domains: Technical, Relationship, and Value—ranging from solving complex problems and transferring knowledge to collaborating across teams, engaging stakeholders, understanding the business, and leading change.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Alistair Gordon, who is the CEO of Expertunity, a new global enterprise dedicated to helping technical experts everywhere reach their full potential. Alistair, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Steve. Thank you for the invite.

It’s great to have you and learn about this opportunity for experts, how to get them to reach their full potential. So, let’s start with your personal “Why,” your personal mission, and what are you doing to manifest it in your business?

So, over many years, I’ve worked for lots and lots of organizations, Steve, in many roles as a leader and as a consultant to lots of businesses. And mostly my prominence, if you like, is leadership development. Sort of topics that your podcast covers, very relevant and very familiar to me. But along the way, sort of 10 years or so ago, we discovered this large group of people who weren’t really being developed, technical experts most of your listeners will, I’m sure know one or other of these people, highly technical, they might be in finance, they might be in IT, whatever. And they’re technically brilliant, but they’re very stuck and frustrated, and not really fulfilling their potential and not necessarily having a fully fulfilling work life because they’re technically brilliant, but they’re missing some of what we call these enterprise skills that really help them add value at 2X, 3X to their organization. So having spotted the gap, we’ve done lots of research. We’ve worked with thousands and thousands of them now over the years and feel like we know them really well, Steve.

And the most fulfilling part of this is that once you show a technical expert how they can be a better expert, they attack it with military precision and they really lean into it. And both themselves and their families and the organizations they work for get just extraordinary benefits from them really leaning in and making the difference they know they can make.

And why do you think, Alistair, there is this gap? Is it not natural to not have the gap or is it the difference between the entrepreneur who develops a multifaceted approach to the expert who is more of in a silo and they just never got the chance to develop it. Why does that happen? Is this the corporate environment that takes care of it?

I mean, it’s absolutely the right question, Steve, from my perspective, because the answer is, as you might expect, multifaceted. So if we just look at it from the organizational perspective, most large organizations, even medium organizations, I know a lot of your listeners are, will have someone responsible for developing talent, but

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They even have a model called the 9-Box Grid, which most large organizations use to establish who is high potential talent and they are the people who get spent lots of money on them developing their skills and what have you. And the definition of potential for most organizations is the ability to lead more people in the future. So it’s people leadership orientated and what have you. And in a 9-Box Grid, they have this little box at the top left of the grid you can look it up on Google, 9-Box Grid, and you’ll see a box called technical experts. In some models, they call the box technical stars to make the technical experts feel a bit better. But basically, they’re very high performers, but they’re low potential because technical experts are not seen as potential future leaders. So, we work with those organizations closely to change their definition of potential and say it’s the potential to add more value they should be thinking about, in which case a lot of the technical experts move across into this sort of investment pool.

So, on the one hand, it’s the organizations. The talent team’s been given the mandate to find our next generation of leaders and that kind of excludes a lot of technical experts who don’t want to be people leaders. It’s not necessarily playing to their strengths. The experts themselves feel that the way to progress is to become even more expert and deeper and deeper experts. And that actually moves them further away, actually, from that sort of broad knowledge of their organization that they need in order to really deploy their technical expertise to the maximum extent.

Yeah, I can relate to this. I had a good friend of mine who was in computer programming and database architecture, and he kept moving to bigger and bigger companies. And at some point when he worked for IBM and Oracle, then he had to move and go to a bigger country where they would be able to pay for his expertise. And then he ended up with a very big company that went public. And that was his only way to increase his value was to work for bigger and bigger companies who serve bigger clients and with bigger value product to be able to get the leverage.

And I stayed where I was and I went into the leadership line because I realized that we were in the periphery and the only way to advance would be to generalize being more of an expert. So that’s very interesting. Very relatable. So, let’s talk about a framework that you developed, which you call The Expert-ship Model. What is this model and what is this designed to do?

Most organizations, larger organizations like your colleague went to, would have complex leadership capability frameworks. So, in other words, really a roadmap for people leaders as they grew through the organization. So there’d be the capabilities you need to have and master in order to be a frontline leader. And then the next one would be the capabilities you need to master to be a middle manager and then a general manager. And then, God at the end, as a CEO. The interesting thing is that we discovered is there’s no similar capability framework for technical experts.

They might have a capability expert, a capability framework specifically for their expertise, like project management or coding or what have you. But in general terms, how to be the best expert inside your organization. There was no roadmap or capability framework. So, we built this one. We decided to call it expert-ship rather than leadership because it is its own skill set in its own right. And the framework itself has nine capabilities. And these are the sort of capabilities that our research showed that the very best experts around the world have mastered all nine of these capabilities. Three of them, Steve, are what we call technical capabilities, which most experts are already very good at. But the other six are what we call enterprise skills. Occasionally, experts will call them soft skills. It’s not a good description. I’m on a personal mission to abolish this phrase from the vernacular because there’s nothing soft about these skills.

They’re quite difficult to learn and they have very high impact and so on. So we built this sort of roadmap and we use it to help organizations develop their experts and we work with experts themselves to assess where they’re already very strong in those capabilities and which capabilities are growth opportunities for them. And this helps generate a much more well-rounded technical expert,

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So there are nine skills, there are three technical skills and six expertise skills. And I think you mentioned that there are within the expertise skills, there are value skills and there are relationship skills.

That’s correct. So there’s three domains of capability, if you like. Technical capability, so that’s their expert knowledge, it’s how they go about solutioning or finding solutions to problems, which, of course, technical experts spend a lot of their time doing. And also, knowledge transfer is in that technical skills. How good are they at explaining what’s happening technically and training other people to build up their skills. And then in the relationship domain, we’re talking about things like collaboration, personal impact and stakeholder engagement.

So, most technical experts, just to use the example of your colleague, which is a great one, Steve, by the time that person arrived in a large organization, he would have had a very complex stakeholder map. He’d have been working on multiple projects globally. He might’ve had a line manager somewhere, but I bet he had three or four other really critical stakeholders that all of whom he was aiming to deliver for simultaneously probably. So, stakeholder engagement skills, collaboration skills, the way you influence people, communicate with people, and understand what is driving them, what motivates them, what their objectives are and KPIs are. Those sorts of skills, most technical experts are pretty good at having conversations with other technical people, but they struggle when they start working with generalists. So, that’s a skill set that they’re partially good at generally. I’m making these generalizations from all the data that we’ve captured because we assess experts against this model all the time, hundreds and hundreds of them every quarter.

And so, we’ve got a lot of data that suggests that they’re very good with some stakeholder groups and not with others. And then the final one is the value domain, which is usually the black hole, Steve. It’s the business acumen market context,

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Well, the Cobbler’s Sons are always bare feet. It’s kind of normal. But yeah, I mean, it sounds like it’s a very big program because expert knowledge, finding solutions, knowledge transfer, being able to do that and then collaborate and making a personal and big impact and selling your impact and then managing your stakeholders. And then business acumen, just one of nine. That is huge. And then understanding the market and the change. So this is an enormous lift. It’s almost like being an entrepreneur, like an intrapreneur training, that kind of thing.

Yeah, I think that’s a really good way of describing it because most technical experts are advisors to their organization. People sort of say, okay, well, how do we take cyber security as an example, which is obviously very topical at the moment. So, the organization is hiring people who are cyber experts and those people are supposed to develop systems and what have you that protect the assets and indeed the employees of the organizations they’re working for. But at the same time as while they’re doing that, they’re down usually, I mean in the weeds, Steve, because there’s a lot of detail involved in doing that. But at the same time, the organisation is saying, what do we need to do to do this properly? And those technical experts need to build a business case for the right sort of investment, tools, people, and software and so on.

And very often, they know what the organisation needs, but they’re not necessarily particularly good at articulating that to generalists. So they’re building an entrepreneurial case and getting the funds and resources needed to do that job properly. That’s the bit very often they’re missing and, by the way, frustrates them a lot. And yet ,all of those skills are, in my view, they’re easier to learn than the technical skills that’s their ticket to the game. But a lot of technical experts don’t see the enterprise skills as important. And as leaders, we’re partially responsible for that, I believe, because we tell them what a great technical job we’re doing, they’re doing, but when we see them engage and collaborate with a stakeholder, we don’t make a big fuss of that, and we should do, because that’s kind of the additional skill on top that makes all the difference.

Yeah, that’s interesting. And what about the personalities of these technical experts? Because often introverted people are the ones that gravitate toward expert-ship, and extroverted people, they want to communicate, they want to be out there and shake some trees and convince people, persuade people. So how do you get these experts out of their shells and motivate them to want to engage more and want to be more of a contextual person that collaborates?

It’s a great question. I’d say, I mean, we’ve now worked with thousands and thousands of experts and I’d say, again, just sort of thinking of the data, probably 75 to 80% are introverted, and some of those are very introverted. And I think you’re right. I do think the mentality of technical experts is very widely misunderstood by management and by senior leadership. They do operate in their technical bubble. It’s a safe space, Steve. That’s where they’re expert. When you’re a technical expert, your whole sheet is what you know at the end of the day. So I think they’re misunderstood because they can be perceived as negative.

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But they’re extremely good at seeing the downsides of suggestions first. And they tend to articulate these very articulately very early on. And a lot of your listeners will have had the experience at some stage or another in their careers, they’ll ask you, an IT person, what do you think of this idea? And the IT person will tell you 19 reasons why it won’t work. And then you might say, so you think it’s a bad idea. And then they’ll say, no, no, it’s a great idea. I just wanted you to understand how difficult it is going to be for me to execute it. So the answer to your question is we ask them to articulate what their challenges are and what their aspirations are, where they believe they can add extra value. And we help them work through what’s getting in the way of them being able to add that new value. The development is all about taking them to the next level of value creation at the end of the day. And once they’ve identified what the barriers are, some of which are management, for sure, but some of which are with their deficits in their skill set, then we work through a plan and say, right, what bits are you going to attack first? They’re generally very ambitious to add that extra value.

And once they see the value of developing some of their mastering, some of these additional enterprise skills, as I mentioned earlier on, they’re all terribly smart. So they’re very quick at being able to develop these skills. And to be honest with you, Steve, it’s an absolute professional joy to watch. And I just get a huge kick out of it, as my team do, because it’s amazing when you do something and you see the impact that you’re having. And this has impact, by the way, not just in their organizational settings, but so many people I’ve coached say it’s completely changed the way they operate and communicate with their family as well. And it really enriches their home life, not just their work life.

I can imagine. This makes them a much more multifaceted individual. One of the things that I was wondering, I mean, obviously you say that you bring these people out of their shells and they are eager, they know how to develop expertise and they realize that this is another level of expertise they can develop and they do it with gusto. But one thing that you said, which struck me, which was said that you can teach experts to be good with people at will. So can you elaborate on this idea that what does it take to make people good with other people at will?

I think one of the things that we learned very early on, Steve, is that you actually can’t teach a technical expert anything. You can’t be that sort of teacher and stand up there with a PowerPoint presentation and tell them, right, here’s how you should deal with people and here’s how you should say nice things to them and what have you. They have to want to be able to learn it themselves. They have to be able to see the payoff of putting the effort into it. Because most technical experts, because of the way I think we react to them as leaders sometimes, they think they’re just being more and more and more technical and having broader and broader technical scope, as your colleague did, is the way to go when in fact it’s adding a few additional skills that will be the case.

So most of the work that we do with technical experts is in group, and we ask them a lot of really difficult questions and challenge them to come up with incredibly insightful and smart answers. And of course, you can imagine they love this challenge, right? This is their whole sheet.

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But it definitely starts with saying, if you want to have more influence and impact and you’re currently not having that, what’s in the way? And I guess the one thing we do tell them is it’s not all management’s fault. It’s 50-50 here and yes, management need to think differently about your expertise and listen to you more, but you need to be very good to listen to. I’ve experienced a lot of experts when they get the chance to be in front of the CFO or the CEO, they completely mess it up by going into too much detail. And you see the CFO losing the will to live, Steve, with all this technical detail that the cyber experts going on about, I’m engaging with this learning. It’s that ability to help them probably build skills that maybe you and I have learned as through our leadership journey, which is versioning, figuring out what people actually want to know rather than what do we want to tell them and all of those sort of basic things that because experts have been so focused on building their technical skills, they’ve missed out on learning those things as they’ve gone along. So we’re helping them catch up.

Yeah, love it. Very interesting. So Alistair, you wrote a book, the title is Master Expert. So why did you write this book and what is your main message with this book?

Yeah, so I think we know we’re a relatively small company, although we have lots of very big clients, ironically, around the world. And we established that there’s 40 million technical experts, we think, in the world. And we think about 38 million of them need help. And we figured that we’re not going to be able to do that. So, the reason for writing the book was to say, well, people can’t necessarily attend our courses or afford that. And so, how do we get this message out to experts that this is an approach they might want to take? So the book is really a textbook and it’s structured in such a way that they can take our assessment for example and then figure out which chapters they really want to focus on and so on. You can imagine it goes through all nine of those capabilities. What does being an expert look like? What does master expert look like? What’s the difference? What skill sets do we need to master? How would an expert go about mastering them? What sort of actions would they take? What sort of people would they interface with and so on?

So if we take market expert, which the market context, I should say, which is the areas that you described earlier on, I mean, the business acumen piece and what have you is absolutely critical. You and I know as entrepreneurs and business leaders, we really need to understand what we’re doing and what our customers are doing and what our competitors are doing, what are those value propositions? How can we influence those value propositions so more people come to us? Those sorts of things are generally speaking, not things that most technical experts that have been on our courses are familiar with. So, in the chapters in the book around that, it’s like, how do you go about acquiring that knowledge? What sort of stakeholders do you need to start interfacing with? When you meet the CFO at a meeting, you don’t ask him or her, how are they? You have some very specific questions ready.

Most technical experts hate networking, Steve, because of the personality traits that they tend to have, being a bit more introverted. So we work very hard with experts to say, you’re not networking, you’re intelligence gathering. That’s the whole point. You suddenly got four minutes with a CFO. What questions are you going to ask that puts you on the map with that person, but also demonstrates that whichever technical team you’re representing is interested in financial performance, capital management, whatever the case may be? So, it’s that ability that the book is basically a manual for how to acquire these skills if you don’t have a coach or you can’t go on a formal programme.

Love it. So Alistair, if people would like to learn more, they want to read this book, they want to do the assessment, they want to maybe reach out to you, where can they find you?

Yeah, so I think the easiest thing to do is to go to expertship.com and on there they’ll find first and foremost this assessment that they can take if they want to. I mean, a lot of your listeners will be people leaders and entrepreneurs. A lot of them will probably have one or two technical experts. It struck me preparing for this interview, Steve, that the smaller businesses, it’s even more fraught finding the right technical expert. And then you’re likely to find a technical expert who needs this sort of development. So if you’re a people leader or a manager of an expert, you can buy them this book. And half of the book is online for free at expertship.com and there’s an assessment there. They can obviously reach out to us. We have coaches who are accredited in expert-ship around the world. So, if they need some coaching, which very often they do in terms of interpreting the assessment, then that’s easy for them to reach out to us. But a lot of value can just be leaning in, thinking about what’s getting in the way and using these tools, which are certainly the assessment tool is completely free, Steve, for anybody to figure out which areas have they got some skills deficits and how do they attack them.

Yeah. Okay. This is fascinating. So if you are a technical expert and you want to upgrade your skills so that the C-suite will listen to you and will want to promote you, or if you have some technical experts on your team that you would like to have a bigger impact or you want to have them have a bigger role so that they’re more energized, motivated for your business and you can allow you to keep them because these people always want to advance and they might go for a bigger company if you don’t look after them, then check out Master Expert, the book from Alistair Gordon and also expertship.com. Check out the evaluation, see where you land, and what are the next steps you need. So thank you Alistair. That was a very eye-opening interview and for those of you listening, if you found this interesting, then please follow us on YouTube and give us a review on Apple Podcasts. Thanks for coming, Alistair, and thank you for listening.

Want to become a more adaptable and effective leader? In this episode, Kevin Eikenberry—trainer, author, podcaster, and founder—shares powerful strategies from his latest book, Flexible Leadership. As a leadership expert dedicated to helping organizations, leaders, and individuals unlock their full potential, Kevin reveals how to flex your leadership style to navigate uncertainty, make smarter decisions, and empower your team.

Good day dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Kevin Eikenberry, a trainer, author, podcaster who’s empowering organizations, leaders, and individuals to fulfill their potential through transformative and effective learning strategies. Kevin, welcome to the show.

Steve, I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Well, I was excited to have you because you have some really cool ideas about leadership and how to make it flexible, which is what the people need. I mean, it cannot be one size fits all solution. But let’s start with my favorite question which is, what is your personal ‘Why’ and how are you manifesting it in your practice?

Well, I am fortunate that my personal ‘Why’ is directly connected to our organizational ‘Why’. I suppose when the company has my name on it, that’s a privilege.

We are in the business of helping leaders to be more effective because we know that if leaders are more effective, we can make the world a better place.
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Yeah. So there’s a multiplication going on there and that’s a great opportunity, but also a great responsibility.

A Hundred percent, for sure. I mean, when I think about leadership in general, Steve, that I think about those two things, right? Leadership is a tremendous responsibility, right? If we’re a people leader, a capital L leader, we have positional power, people are watching us. We have the responsibility to make sure that what we’re doing is modeling what we want from others.

We have the responsibility of setting goals and outcomes that are desirable to reach.
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Love it. I love it. So, let’s talk about your brand of leadership, because you developed this concept of Flexible Leadership. So can you explain to our audience what you mean by Flexible Leadership? And then what is your framework around it? Because you also have a framework that you developed around it.

All of this is related to my new book, Flexible Leadership: navigate uncertainty and lead with confidence. And so let’s start here. What does it mean to be a flexible leader? To be a flexible leader is to be a both and leader. Too many folks think, well, I’m either this or I’m that. I’m either going to do this or I’m going to do that.

Leadership is about reaching valuable outcomes, or leadership is about developing the people that work for me. It's either about tasks or people, and I would suggest it's about both of those things.
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Okay, so let’s dissect this because you talked in our pre-interview, you talked about Intention, Content, and Flexor. So how does that all come together? What do you mean by each one of these ideas?

Sure. So that is the Flexible Leadership approach, right?

Intention plus Context plus Flexors equals being a flexible leader.
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And number two, intention to say in this moment, perhaps I need to flex. It’s both a mindset and a skillset and the skillset comes from the other two components. But if we don’t have that mindset right, it doesn’t matter. I mean, I can teach you skills and you can say, those are fine and dandy, Kevin, but I’m not going to do ’em. They don’t match up with what I believe. They’re not what I believe will be most effective. I don’t think they’ll work. So get the mindset with intention, and then the next part is context. Let’s just say it this way, Steve. All of us have had this experience where you have a decision to make as a leader or just as a human, or someone comes to you for advice. And when they ask for it, or when you think about the situation, you say, well, what should I do? Well, it depends.

Well, what does it depend on? Well, it depends on the context. Like, what’s the nature of this situation? And it is understanding the nature of that context that gives us the chance to say, well, maybe I should do it differently. I’ll stop there. I’ve been talking for a long time. Anything you want to add or comment on before I go any further?

Yeah, I like this idea, the mindset that be ready to be flexible if you need to be, so that you can serve your purpose. And then the context service determines that. But can you give an example of different contexts and then the leader being manifesting differently?

Yeah, absolutely. So in the book, I share the work of Dave Snowden with what’s called the Cynefin Framework. And in the Cynefin Framework, it’s think about it like a map. Like, if I put you in the wilderness and I said, okay, get out, leave to this location. The first thing you’d ask me for is a map. I mean, the first thing a lot of people ask me for, is there a GPS on their phone? I say, well, there’s no cell signal. I say, okay, I’ll take a map. And the Cynefin Framework is like a map to help us see the terrain. In this thought experiment, once you see the terrain, it gives you a clue about which direction you should walk to your desired destination. And the Cynefin Framework is like that. It gives us a picture for us to help us see where are we now so we can decide where to go next or what to do next. So the Cynefin Framework has four parts. There are four parts to the framework, and one of those is called the clear context. And Steve, that’s the one that most of us are most comfortable in. Most of us have spent the most time in, and importantly, assume that we’re in most of the time. And the clear context is a situation where we sort of know the causes and effects. We sort of know what will happen. We’ve done it before. 

Our expertise or someone’s expertise is enough and policies will work and best practices reign, and

if we've got the right process, we'll probably get the right result, clear context.
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Maybe we can find them out or get a clue about them. We probably can’t do it alone. We probably need to do it with others. We might be able to develop some good practices that might help us a lot of the time, but there are unknowns that we either need to try to figure out or at a minimum, we have to recognize. But a complex situation, well, a complex situation is the ones that we’re in a lot of the time. There are unknowns that we don’t even know about. Like anytime you think about a situation that happened six months ago and say, man, I wish I would’ve known all those things. I would’ve done something differently. I didn’t realize those dominoes were going to fall. There were going to be those unintended consequences. If I had known that, I’d have done something differently. And that’s an awful lot of our work today. And so if we find ourselves in that complicated or complex situation, the way we need to lead is different than when everything’s clear.

The fourth context is what’s called chaotic. And my observation is that a lot of people say, well, that’s where I’m at all the time. Kevin, it’s either clear or it’s chaotic. And I would say, and Snowden would say in the creation of this framework, that there’s very little that we live in. That’s chaos, truly. And even if it is, it very quickly becomes complex because when things are chaotic, we just need to do something. Think about where you live. It was about 5 years ago, Steve, as you and I were having this conversation, that we locked everything down and we sent people to work from home. At first, it was chaotic and we just needed a leader to tell us what to do. Here’s what we’re going to do first, but very quickly, it was no longer chaotic. It was actually highly complex. And yet, in many cases, leaders continued to act like it was chaos for a very long time with all sorts of consequences that people didn’t love. So that’s a very quick, very high level sort of look at the context. And what I have come to learn, Steve, is that the more we understand the context of our situation, the smarter we are, the wiser we are, perhaps, and that when we have this framework or this map that we can pull out and think about and look at, we put ourselves in a much better position to lead more effectively.

Okay, got it. So, we have to have the intention to be flexible. Then the context can be simple, it can be complex or chaotic or a mixture of those, right? And then you have this flexor. So what are these flexors, anyhow, I think you have 19 of them? And what do they do and how do they help you to navigate in these different contexts so that you can make and exert the right leadership?

Yeah. And so flexors is a word related to our muscles, but I took the word to describe what we’re about to talk about. So I’ve hinted at this already. When I said that we can have two things that may seem like they’re opposed, but they’re actually symbiotic. I said, are we trying to be consistent or are we trying to be flexible? While that’s not one of the 19 flexors, that’s a flexor, because the reality is it’s not one or the other, it’s both. It’s not either or it’s both ends. And so the question is how can we be like the tree? How can we be both consistent and flexible? And which direction on that flexor do we need to be leaning to be most successful in the context in which we’re living in that moment? And so, like you said, there are 19 of them in the book. And then I say in the book, okay, it’s really not about the 19. As you start to see this, you will see flexors everywhere, right?

You will see this idea that there’s a tension between two ideas, both of which have merit and value, but if we lean into one end of that or the other, we’ll likely have challenges or problems. The thing for us, as leaders, is that we have a natural tendency that’s probably or very possibly near one end or the other of one of those flexors. And so what we have to do is, intention says, oh, maybe I need to think about this differently. Context says, how should I think about it differently? And the flexor says, what do I do about that? So let’s just pick one, a simple one. Let’s call it the answering-asking flexor. So the answering-asking flexor is, should I answer people’s questions or should I ask more questions? And the answer is yes. The question is, when should I do more of one or the other? And all of you listening probably know of a leader that you think of, well, they’re on the answering end all the time. Like, you have a question, they’ve got an answer, they’re like the answer person. And at some point, that’s not serving them or you very well, right? Like the ends of the flexors aren’t usually the best answer.

The ends of the flexor are not very flexible.

Exactly. And so it’s about, where should I be leaning in this moment, with this person in this conversation for this decision to help us get better success? So intention. Yeah, it’s a good idea and it’s worth considering being flexible, in this situation, context, what does that tell me? And then where should I or how should I flex on one or more of these things based on that context?

Yeah. So I’m trying to translate this. So I’m thinking about the 3 contexts you mentioned. The first one is a simple context. So I’m a leader. It’s a simple context. Everything is according to plan perhaps, or according to best practices and so on. So as a leader, I can maybe make decisions relatively easy. So my goal is to engage my team, that’s why I’m asking questions, but I also can be fairly dynamically directive. In a complex situation, a complex context, I would think that I have to ask a lot of questions to understand really what’s going on, but then I have to reduce the complexity so that people can move forward. So I have to make some decisions as a leader. And then the chaotic things is maybe it’s just make decision. It’s when you appoint a dictator basically to get things done and to move you out of danger, little danger kind of thing. Is this how that works?

It’s pretty darn close, I would say. And the thing is about the chaotic piece. You got that right, except that people end up staying there too long because it’s kind of seductive. I’ll just keep making decisions. I’ll just keep pointing and people will go, and at some point, it’s no longer chaos, it’s actually complex, which means we need to engage people. Like, what are we actually seeing on the ground? What’s actually happening? What’s going on? And the goal then is not to create a new policy, but to pilot stuff, to try stuff. Let’s see what happens. Let’s take 7 steps this way and see what we learn. If you think about any movie that you’ve seen, I don’t know, about a war situation, during Covid, I watched a lot of old Westerns.

So like, if a group of people are trying to figure out what’s going on, they all walk around with a flashlight, maybe not in a Western, maybe it’s a lantern, but they’re all walking in a different direction and they’re communicating. So in a movie today, they’d then be communicating on the radios about what they’re seeing, and they’re all gathering information to help us decide what to do. And that’s kind of a somewhat oversimplified way, but it’s a way to think about complexity. Like all of us should be gathering the data.

As a leader, we need to be making sure that we're hearing all that, valuing all of that, and taking and trying stuff based on what we're learning as we're learning,
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Okay. I love it. So tell me a little bit about the book, I mean, obviously, Flexible Leadership. So probably, you’re discussing many of these things. Why did you decide to write this book, and what is the main message of the book?

Well, I think because of your great question so far, Steve, we’ve unpacked the big message. The big message is that in times of uncertainty, which we live today, the anecdote for that is to be flexible. If we’re not changing, think about it this way. Let’s say at the beginning of 2020, you were leading in a certain way, before the pandemic. If you’re leading in exactly that same way, being consistent, not being flexible, right, being consistent. If you’re leading the same way that you were leading then, do you think the world has conspired to help you be more successful? Like, has the world sort of moved in the direction of your natural tendencies from the beginning of 2020? Not likely. I’d bet against that. So we need to be able to flex, to navigate uncertainty. And when we can do that, we can build our confidence.

So that’s the big picture message of the book. And why did I write it? Well, because there’s more uncertainty than ever. What I was trying to codify and capitalize on is what I’ve been learning as I’ve been on this leadership journey for 30 years. I’ve written a bunch of other books. I believe, hopefully, and with the help of people like you having me on your podcast. Hopefully, we’ll be the most impactful of all, because I think it’s a way to help us frame uncertainty so we can get our arms around it enough so we can act, but not act out of cockiness or overconfidence, but act from sort of a sense of perspective and wisdom that can help us be more successful. I’m not telling you exactly what to do here. What I’m telling you is giving you a framework for you to figure that out in real time.

Yeah, love it. And I’m sure these flexors will help the readers navigate in different situations where they’re wondering, okay, how should I be more flexible in this context, whether it’s chaotic or complex and what are the tools available to me to flex and to respond? Is that right?

That’s exactly right. I believe that when people read the book, that’s what they will get. And then we spend the last part of the book trying to help people. How do I turn that knowledge, how do I turn that skill into a habit of actually applying those ideas? Yep, that’s exactly right.

So if I’m a leader or entrepreneur and I try to figure out what flexors to use, what is the most important question I should ask myself?

Well, I think it starts with that word I said earlier, which is, it depends. Like, when you think about a situation, say, well, it depends, but what does it depend on? Look at the possibilities in front of you. When you think about that, and then you say, well maybe I need to ask more. Maybe I need to listen more. Maybe I need to move in a direction. Maybe I need to focus more on my team and less on the outcome. Maybe the vice versa of that. Maybe I need to give more positive feedback. Maybe I need to give more corrective feedback. Maybe we need to change faster. Maybe we need to change slower. Just like hitting on a few of those flexors here. The point is, if I stop enough to have the mental conversation about where we are on the map, then I can make some more informed choices about how to flex rather than simply reacting based on how I would normally have reacted.

So if the question is where are we on the map, then what helps me decide where I’m on the map?

Well, obviously read the book and get a whole lot more insight about the Cynefin Framework, which is the map we’ve talked about. And obviously, Steve, you’ve been very gracious to let me describe some of that and yet we couldn’t go very deep. So, quite honestly, I will say that the map will help you understand your context better, which will help you think about how to flex. But even if you don’t do that, simply saying, okay, what am I seeing here and what might I do given what I see? If what I see, I know is incomplete, meaning that it’s probably complicated or complex, who do I need to get into conversation with me so we can have a better, clearer picture?

Love it. Love it. Well definitely read Kevin Eikenberry’s book, Flexible Leadership. It’s coming out March 25th, right?

That is correct. As we’re having this conversation, that’s tomorrow.

Yeah, tomorrow. It’s coming out tomorrow. So we’ll try to publish this very quickly so that it’s going to be fresh. So if you hear this, then go on Amazon and buy the book or where else can the book be purchased?

Yeah. You should be able to get anywhere you buy your books. Amazon, of course, is probably the most likely choice. But if you go to kevineikenberry.com/flexible, that’s kevineikenberry.com/flexible. There you will find a sample chapter of the book and all the links to buy the book, Amazon, other places, as well as some bonuses if you buy multiple copies. So lots of good stuff there. Kevineikenberry.com/flexible, Steve.

Well, definitely check it out. And leadership is one of the most important skills in today’s world, probably it always was, because it’s a multiplier and it requires both IQ and EQ to navigate. And you need to be flexible as well, which is much harder than being rigid as a leader. And then you read the book, then you’ll find out what the contexts are and what is your mindset that you need and what are the flexors that you can apply in order to be a great flexible leader. So thank you, Kevin, for coming and sharing your thoughts about Flexible Leadership on the show. And if you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you follow us on YouTube and give us a comment, give us a review on Apple Podcast. And stay tuned because every week we come with a very exciting thought leader or entrepreneur who shares their frameworks with us. So thanks, Kevin, for coming and thank you for listening.

Marcus Hamaker, CEO of [bu:st] USA, is driven by a passion for helping small businesses find their pursuit of value by simplifying projects, optimizing processes, and streamlining operations for sustainable growth.

We learn about Marcus’s journey from growing up in a family business to leading [bu:st] USA, where he applies lean principles to help organizations improve alignment, communication, and execution. He explains the 5 Steps to Finding Value framework—Organizational Alignment, Communication, SOPs, Change Management, and Project Controls—guiding businesses to remove inefficiencies and drive sustainable growth. He also shares how the Boost Method ensures teams operate with clarity and purpose, emphasizing fastest time to value as a key metric for success. He highlights key leadership lessons and the mindset shifts entrepreneurs need to scale effectively.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Marcus Hamaker, the CEO of [bu:st] USA, a consulting firm that helps you simplify your projects, optimize your processes and streamline your organization. He is also the host of The Pursuit of Value Podcast. Marcus, welcome to the show. 

Hey, Steve, how are you? Thanks for having me. 

Yeah, I am super pumped to have you. It’s going to be a great episode and we are going to start as usual with the ‘Why’, because that’s what powers great entrepreneurs. They have a strong ‘Why’. So what is your personal ‘Why’, Marcus, and what are you doing to manifest it in [bu:st] or any of your businesses?

Yeah. So, my personal ‘Why’ is just to make companies better. Ever since I was younger, growing up in the family business, watching my dad work hard. I’m very intrigued by business and it’s really interesting to me why one business can succeed exponentially and another business really struggles to get off the ground. And so what we do at [bu:st] USA, what my podcast is about,

The Pursuit of Value, is really helping small businesses be better.
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Yeah. And small businesses are always exposed to market forces and there’s no way to take it easy and you always have to strive to be competitive and make a profit and definitely is a powerful force for reducing waste. And I’m making this point because one of the things that [bu:st] does is to apply Lean principles. Tell me a little bit about the [bu:st] method that your company, your group developed, and how do you bring in Lean? 

Yeah, so when we talk about Lean, it really has to do with value and it has to do with defining what is valuable to the company. So what’s valuable to a manufacturer might be very different to what’s valuable to a service company, right? So in our [bu:st] method, we always want to start with defining the future picture. What is success to that company? Or more simply, what is the solution to the problem that they’re running into? So you define the future picture, you define the targets, you build the roadmap. 

And through that whole process of defining the value, you also want to throw out what’s not valuable. And that’s where it lines up with Lean. And we always really try to focus on making every step, every process as efficient as possible. And that’s what’s really important. And that’s what we do really well at [bu:st] USA. 

So what’s the process for improving the process? 

Well, again, it really depends on each person’s issue. Oftentimes we’re brought in to solve a problem and that usually happens at the project level. Sometimes we’re brought in just for strategic planning and so on, but it really depends on what specifically is going on and oftentimes, and just full disclosure, the problem is really just a lack of alignment or communication within a team. It’s not necessarily this big, glaring thing. It’s the fact that not everybody’s on the same page, not everybody has the same motivation, roles and responsibilities aren’t defined and they’re not clear. And then the communication platform is not efficient. So, really, it’s just getting everybody on the same page and saying, okay, are we all tracking the right way? Are we all heading in the right direction? If not, let’s stop. Let’s make some adjustments and move forward. So it’s very problem specific. It’s very organizational specific. What we’ve learned over the years is organizational alignment and communication are two of the biggest issues. It’s not necessarily the project. That’s not necessarily the thing that they’re working on. 

So how is the [bu:st] method different from EOS and Scaling Up and I don’t know, McKinsey & Company for management consulting. So, what’s the unique attribute of the [bu:st] process? 

Again, personal opinion. I’m not familiar with all of them, but what I’ve seen in my consulting career is that what we do with the [bu:st] method is we approach everything at the project management level. We approach everything as project managers, and it’s very much that we view everything through a project management lens—PMP, Lean, and CAPM. Our project managers, our consultants are certified, so we look at it differently. We’re not just stepping into it going, okay, we’re going to fix this. We’re very specific on the roadmap, what’s valuable, what’s lean, what’s necessary, what’s not necessary. So it’s very methodical on how we approach it. And then each and every week, we have a session with all the stakeholders where we’re aligning everybody.

It’s never just a report that we send out. We come together and we are talking strategic alignment with every single stakeholder. And then we’re allowing the people, the stakeholders that we’re talking to, we enable them to report up to their executives, to the people that they report to. So it’s very methodical and how we do it. It’s not just a, hey, we’re doing this, throwing it out at you. There’s always a purpose behind what we do. Again, because

we're always focused on what's going to bring value.
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What is the fastest time to value when we step into a corporation? And oftentimes, just no need to hide the secret sauce here. It’s just helping people communicate better. 

Fastest time to add value. So how do you figure that out? Is this that you have multiple problems that could potentially solve and then the low hanging fruit that you’re going to start with or how does that work?

Logically, going after the low hanging fruit is the easy part, and we see that in the discovery sessions. We see that relatively quickly. But what we really want to quantify is can we see a difference in how the team, the stakeholders are behaving? And I’ll use an example. We had one project recently where we went into a large project, multiple stakeholders over. It’s going to end up being roughly a 2-3 year project. And right from the beginning, we saw that nobody was aligned. I mean, this guy didn’t know what this person was doing. She didn’t understand what was going on there. Then there’s people over there going, who is this? Who’s this company [bu:st]? What are they doing here? It’s like, hold on a second, bring them all together. And one of the simplest things we did is we developed a template for them to run a meeting. Simple. It was that simple.

So when they were to start a meeting, we gave them a very specific set of protocols to go through, laying out the agenda, touching on what happened the last meeting, any calls to action that needed to get done. And so we were able to see that they came to value quickly because the next meeting that we observed, they went right through it. Then the next one, they went right through it. And so all of this chaos that was going on really subsided just in a very simple, you know what, let’s give them a methodology, let’s show them how to use it, why it’s important. And so that was one of our fastest time to values is because everybody went from chaos mode to like, oh, okay, this meeting is going to actually make a difference. We’re having it for a specific purpose and what we want to get out of it, we will get out of it as opposed to most readings where they just kind of show up, people come together, they waste time, they walk away, like, what just happened there? And that’s not what we want. 

That’s great. So, Marcus, the way you approach clients, you told me about the 60 minute discovery session that you run, and you said that it had a very specific structure, I think there were 5 steps to it? Can you share this with our audience what it looks like and how it’s powerful? 

Yeah, well, it’s really 5 areas that we focus on, and I touched on two of them already. The first one is organizational alignment. And that’s typically a company at the end of the year, they’ll establish their next year goals, strategic plan. And who does that go out to, if you’re not in the company, let’s say the CEO puts it together and maybe the executive team gets it, but maybe the people in manufacturing or wherever, not everybody sees the executive plan, or if everybody does see it, they don’t know how it applies to them each and every day. So,

super important that we establish what is the goal of the company, what is the future picture and what is happening in that organizational alignment.
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And real simple, it’s looking at the org chart, is it updated? Does it make sense for today’s company? What is that future org chart look like when we’re at the end of this plan that we’re on? And then looking at the roles and responsibilities. As a consultant, one of the first things you learn to do is just to talk to the employees, just get a feel for the culture, find out how everybody’s jiving. And you’d be surprised that most employees don’t understand how their day-to-day tasks impact the goals and the vision of the organization. And that’s pretty common. And so organizational alignments, number 1. Communication, always number 2. Operational procedures, standard operating procedures, that’s where we kind of dig into the processes, that’s number 3. Number 4 is change management. This is something that I think a lot of people don’t understand is that in today’s business environment,

there is always some component of change that is happening inside of an organization.
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There’s always some component of change, new employee, right? You name it. There’s a change going on. Change affects people more than what most realize. They may not be able to put their finger on it, but change disrupts a comfort level in most people, whether they realize it or not. And that affects the culture of the organization. So we always want to address the change. And then lastly, and this is more specific, but it’s project controls and project support. So any sort of internal company project that’s going on, if they’re having issues with that, we want to address that. And so when we look at those 5 categories, we can, within an hour, determine what needs to happen, especially if the company doesn’t know. And we’ve had that situation where, like, I don’t even know where to start. So we’re like, okay, let’s start at org alignment. Let’s look at your org chart, and usually we can camp there for a good 30 minutes. And then the next 30 minutes is on communication. And then we got enough out of those 2, to put a scope of work together, to help them get out of their pickle.

And then after, let’s say you run a project, you fix the communication issue or the alignment issue, whatever it is, then do you go back and do another 60 minute audit to see what the biggest lever becomes after the first one or two cleared? 

Yeah, it really depends. I mean, oftentimes we’re brought in for something very specific, whether that’s a UL certification, ISO certification, or it’s a new plant industrialization, new product line, whatever. So we come in very specific. If it’s more strategic in nature, we have the discovery session and we’re able to pull out what they need help on. And another simple example, we were helping a construction company just understand that if he wants to grow to X million dollars beyond what he is today, his current infrastructure won’t be able to sustain that. And so we had to do today’s org chart and say, okay, if you want to 10X your revenue, can this current org chart sustain that? Well, the answer to that is no, you’re going to have to add project managers, engineers, you’re going to have to add salesmen, more administrators. And so we were able to help him see what he needs to do in order to scale in revenue to a certain point. And honestly, a lot of people don’t understand that, you know what? If I want to add $5 million to my top line, that’s a lot of money. What does that take? If you’re only at $3 million today, how can you really justify doing that if you don’t have a strategic plan in place to grow and scale, step, right?

It can’t just be, hey, I’m going to hire a sales guy. Let’s go. It doesn’t work like that, especially in small businesses. So we try to take on everything very methodically, very strategically. Again, I always want to add value. And if we’re not adding value. We’re out. It’s like, well, I don’t want to be a burden to you. I don’t want to cause more issues with us being around.

So we're always very specific and very strategic on how we approach our customers.
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Okay. So I’d like to switch gears here and talk a little bit about [bu:st] and maybe your other businesses that you’ve worked for. What was the hardest decision that you ever had to make in business? 

Yeah, well, there’ve been a few. I think the hardest decision to make is a couple of, well, there’s two, really primary. One is letting somebody go, I think is always a hard decision, because

the way I approach leadership and management is very, again, value driven. I want to add value to my people.
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Yeah, I mean, letting people go is really tough. Yeah, it’s not a fun part. And you always feel like you should have done something different so they didn’t get to this point. And it’s a self examination. So, what about the other side? What are the important questions that entrepreneurs should ask themselves? 

Yeah, I think it goes back to your first question, what is your ‘Why’? And again, I love business. I have done a lot of study on it. 30% of all businesses fail within the first 2 years, 50% by 5 years, 70% of businesses fail by 10 years. That’s just the U.S. metric, I imagine when you get overseas, it’s roughly the same. There’s roughly 33 million small businesses in the U.S. There’s about 400 million worldwide. So the numbers are huge. And then there’s 3 to 4 million that start every year. So those numbers are pretty massive. So when you look at the number of businesses, the numbers that start and then the numbers that fail. My experience, when I dig into this, I see that there’s a mindset issue with the entrepreneurs, and that’s knowing the difference between a lifestyle business and a growth business, understanding that if they don’t have a firm direction when they start a company, it’s going to be a challenge, understanding what’s valuable, what we talked about previously. And I’ll give you an example of that. When I started my construction company, when I started it, what was valuable was very different from what it was a year into the business. And then it became me doing everything, pouring concrete at 5:00 AM, getting off work for doing estimates, paying bills, invoicing, wearing every hat.

And then I came to the realization how stupid that was. I needed to hire somebody to help me. Well, that was hard because I did it all. I had to train them. Then I had to trust them. And so there’s this whole dynamic and small business that I got to just dig in and do it myself bootstrap mentality, and that’s great, but eventually that becomes pretty stupid.

And you have to understand that you have to learn to duplicate yourself in a way to scale your business.
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So Why, What, and How.

Yeah.

love it. Yeah. So why is, you know, the purpose. What is, what is the core business that we are trying to build here? And how is, maybe, how different from everyone else? 

Yeah. And so it’s really vision, mission, and then execution. Like how am I going to execute? And part of that, how, and part of that why, and what is really saying, okay what’s different about me? What can I bring to the table? When I started my concrete company, I wanted to be really professional. I grew up in it and I saw all the subcontractors that my dad was around and all the builders. And the one thing I picked up on is that there weren’t very many people that handled themselves very professionally. It was construction. You could show up dirty. You could yell and scream at people. It was all just kind of, that was the culture of construction. When I started my business, I was like, no way, I’m going to build a portfolio. I can hand it out to potential customers. My truck’s going to be clean, I’m going to dress nice. I mean, I had this thought in my head that I was going to be professional. And I did it. And it worked for me, but I think back and there’s probably 25 other things I probably should have focused on, but you know, you learn and it works. So I think that you  got to find what  that is that sets you apart, what makes you special? 

Yeah. I mean, there’s a certain clientele that wants to deal with professional contractors and they are willing to pay a premium. So it’s probably not a bad differentiator. I had a client who was a fire and water remediation company. And for them, one of the core values are professionalism because it was a table stakes thing.

They were looking for people who could present themselves, who could talk to the owner, who would clean up after themselves and that’s a huge differentiator for them.

Yeah, really, that’s the low hanging fruit in construction nowadays, unfortunately, but very true. 

Yeah. So, tell me a little bit about the POV podcast.

Yeah, so it’s The Pursuit of Value Podcast, and this is something that was sparked in me back in 2020, 2021, the Covid days, and really just wanted to take everything that I’ve learned, what I learned growing up, what I learned in business, and I just wanted to share it. And so to me, the thing that always rings in my head is, how do you pursue value? And there’s a fundamental, first question to that is defined value. What is that? And in the context of business, what’s valuable to you, Steve, it could be very different to what’s valuable to me because it is subjective, but what I really want business owners specifically to focus on and understand is for them to sit down and ask themselves that question, like what is valuable to me today in my company? Is it growth? Is it a lifestyle? Is it my employees? What service is it? What is it? And then if they can focus on that, and then come up with a strategic plan to execute on that each and every day, man, there’s no reason why businesses should fail at the rate that they do. And that’s my heart. I really don’t like looking at those statistics and seeing that 30% fail in two years and 50% because I’ve lived through that. I remember my dad going through some hard times during the recession of the ’80’s. I went through hard times in 2008 when that happened and there’s nothing harder or worse for a person to have to go through a business that is not succeeding. It’s very challenging, very difficult.

And so The Pursuit of Value Podcast is just my way of sharing that. And so season one was all about the business owner mindset. Season two, we were for sessions in, and that’s about company culture, the next season, we’ll be talking about strategy, strategic execution. So we’re talking about things that most don’t think about, because I know company culture is kind of a buzzword, but do you really understand what creates a company culture like personal character, integrity? There’s these things that are these intangible things that a lot of people don’t necessarily think about when they’re thinking about their culture. And then

the business owner mindset in season one, that was a fun one because how you view yourself and your business is critical to success.
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Well, definitely, and I resonate with this whole idea of eliminating these business failures. I call it Business Covid. And according to my math, it’s 180,000 businesses that fail, that disappear each year. Businesses between 10 and 250 people, it’s about 17 million of such businesses. And I believe that with the right approach of coaching and advising, all those companies could be saved and that would create 2 million jobs a year, and a 4% boost to the GDP. 

Yeah, right.

That’s awesome. So if people would like to learn about your podcast, about learning about your your company, [bu:st] ,or yourself, or want to reach out, where should they go and where can they find you?

Yeah. So for the POV podcast, it’s just www.thepovpodcast.com. Go to the website. We’ve got the episodes there. We got blogs there, all the resources. We have a free eBook that’s on the website. For [bu:st], it’s www.bu-st.com. And they can reach out to us there. And then obviously, Marcus Hamaker on LinkedIn.

Well, definitely check out Marcus. He has got great concepts around growing businesses and the 5 areas of alignment, communication, SOPs, processing, change management and project controls. I love this. I have not thought about number 4 and number 5, and they are super important. It really is true that people hate change. And it’s an effort to get them to embrace it, it’s a whole project in itself. So I love the message. So if you’re listening to this and you want to learn more, then go and check out bu-st.com, spelled in a unique way. And Marcus Hamaker, CEO of [bu:st]. Thanks for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. And those of you listening out there, if you enjoyed it, please follow us on YouTube, review us on Apple podcast and stay tuned because every week we come with a new episode and with an exciting entrepreneur talking to us. So thank you, Marcus, for coming and thanks for listening.

Lawrence Armstrong, Chairman of Ware Malcomb, is driven by a mission to help leaders layer their leadership by integrating creativity, strategy, and empowerment to build resilient, innovative organizations.

We learn about Lawrence’s journey from architect to CEO, how he transformed Ware Malcomb into a leading international design firm, and why he developed the Layered Leadership framework. Inspired by architectural design, he explains how leadership, like architecture, involves synthesizing different layers—Light, Sound, Emotion, and Thought—to build strong, visionary organizations. He shares how leaders can apply these 4 Layers of Leadership to inspire teams, create strategic clarity, and drive sustainable growth. He also introduces the Visible Light Spectrum metaphor for business diversification, discusses the importance of fostering a culture of innovation, and offers insights on making tough leadership decisions.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest is Lawrence Armstrong, Chairman of Ware Malcomb, a leading international design firm. He’s also an accomplished business leader, architect, artist, and the author of Layered Leadership. Larry, welcome to the show.

Oh, Steve, thanks. Thanks for having me on.

Well, what a bio, what a CV. I’m proud of having you on this show. So, we’ll get into all of what you are doing, but let’s start with why you’re doing it. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your different business, and I guess authorship is part of artistic activities?

Thanks. Well, I think I wrote the book and pretty much everything else I’m doing right now is trying to help people. We had a great time building our company and I’m involved in a lot of other pursuits at this point. Some of the ideas and the creativity we brought to leadership I thought could really help people build their organizations.

So, let’s plunge right in. When you talk about leadership, what is your experience about it, and what made you want to write a book about it?

Yeah, I think that I have a little bit of a different take on leadership than maybe most people do. So that’s why I wrote it. The idea behind Layered Leadership is this conceptual idea of the way I see the world. Architects think of layers when they design space and buildings and different aspects of a building. And so I’ve sort of tried to expand that thinking to different concepts and different inspirations and how we can utilize inspirations in our life and turn them into strategies to build an organization and to inspire growth. And so using that creative thought, whether it be a business, a concept in a business book or a metaphor for a physics lesson from high school or a discussion about the example set by Leonardo da Vinci, would

bring different ideas together and synthesize those into strategies to build an organization.
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So, what does layered leadership look like? I mean, are there like figurative layers that you have to build in order to be a great leader? How does it work?

Yeah. So it’s sort of the baseline of, first of all, understanding your company and where you want to go and what you’re trying to do. And then inspiring your people to help build it. And so, the various aspects are understanding your company, what it does, what it does not do, I think is very important. And then how you want to expand it, how you leverage and encourage your people and empower your people to help get there, and how you build those people and how you encourage them by empowering them and training them, and then just infusing different concepts that inspire in a creative way to build up.

So, Larry, in our earlier discussion, you told me that this layered concept or layered vision, you also call it, this comes from the architectural design process, and I think you talked about light, sound, emotion, thought. How do these inform an architect? And then how can you transform these or transfer these concepts into leadership? What are the representative analogies in leadership for them?

Yeah. So these are great analogies. You think about, especially in a very abstract way, some of the art I produce is all based on conceptual layers, and layers occur physically in the built environment and physically in the unbuilt environment and in natural environment in a different way, sort of an orderly versus a chaotic type of layers of space. And it occurs in light, in shadow and sound, and layers of sound, layers of instruments and music, layers of thought and emotion when you’re in a room of people. And so it’s a very conceptual way to think about the space-time. Then if you transfer that into how can we synthesize various layers of learning and creativity and concepts, and put them to work as strategies to build your company or your organization. So it’s kind of a very conceptual idea, but it really works once you start taking these different types of input that you might be inspired by and adapting them to a strategy to inspire your people and build your company.

Okay. That sounds super intriguing. So can you give me examples of maybe each? So, we talked about light, sound, emotion, thought. How do you practically turn them into strategies?

Yeah, so for example, we are a design firm that specializes in commercial real estate. Well, when we started, we were an architectural firm in Southern California that specialized in industrial and office building design for commercial developers. That was our specialty. Very vulnerable to the shocks of the economy. So we set out to diversify our company, both from a geographic standpoint, from a product standpoint, and a service standpoint. So early on, we were trying to figure out, okay, we don’t want to try and do everything, so how do we diversify and protect ourselves from the ups and downs of the economy at least a little bit more than we are? And so I used a metaphor from high school physics class called the visible light spectrum. And so the visible light spectrum is the colors of the rainbow. Outside of the visible light spectrum are infrared on one side and ultraviolet on the other side, and you can’t see them. So, when we were discussing, okay, how do we diversify but stay in business that we can dominate and we can lead? So, we needed to stay within commercial real estate, but we could add retail. We could add medical office buildings. We could add advanced manufacturing. We could add high-tech facilities. We could add interior design. We could add branding and building measurement and we could add a whole series of offices in important geographic locations that were important to our clients, but we were not going to design stadiums. We’re not going to design a military bases. We’re not going to design custom homes or churches, and so the visible light spectrum was a metaphor that we’ve used for many years, actually, to define our diversification so we could build our company. So that’s just one way that we’ve used

kind of an inspirational input to design a whole strategy for our company.
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That’s interesting. So I guess you can brainstorm around this. Okay. What are the visible lights? How do we stay inside the rainbow, but diversify into different activities so that we reduce our shock exposure, I guess. Well, the other thing that you say on your website is that building a culture is an artistic expression. What do you mean by this and how do you build artistically a culture and what are the elements of it?

Well, I think that design firms tend to think artistically all the time about the work we do, the actual services we produce. But, we want to sort of infuse that same creativity into building our company and how do we do it. So one way we have done it, is to inspire all of our people to think creatively about how we can improve our company. So we conceived this idea called WM3.0 several years ago where we solicited ideas from everyone in the company around three broad categories and encouraged them to think creatively and come up with ideas that would really improve the company. Some of them were small and easy to implement. Some of them were bigger and needed some cultural shifts to make happen. But we got over a thousand ideas and they were amazing. And so we had working teams in different categories to study, prioritize, and implement some of these ideas. I mean, we didn’t implement every one, but we got a lot of great ideas out of it, and it really improved our company. So we’ve done that several times after that, and we continue to have that process in our company today.

That is very interesting. I heard about a similar process, and I think the Japanese companies, when they have this idea box, and then they have these committees studying the ideas and giving feedback and even the lean approach to have people innovate in their own areas and kind of create a culture of continuous innovation. One thing you mentioned, you mentioned the word several times and it’s kind of one of my favorite words, you say inspire, you have to inspire people, you have to create a culture that inspires people. You are very empathetic about inspiration. So how do you inspire people in different ways? What inspires people to be a great organization?

Yeah, so I found that if you create a culture that empowers people, encourages them to take risk, encourages them to make sure we understand where they want to go in their career and then spend time and resources mentoring and coaching people and building people up. We kind of call ourselves a leadership academy here. We spend an awful lot of time encouraging our people and training them. We have a program called WMU, different classes they can take, different subjects that affect our business. We have a formal mentoring and a formal coaching program, and we have all kinds of leadership training. We have big leadership meetings three times a year. So, we have built our company in the model of Jack Welch that he did at GE, which was an inspiration, by the way, to build a leadership academy so that, as we grow, we have people that are growing in their careers to fill the leadership positions that we need in our company. So, we found that by encouraging our people and inspiring this idea of empowerment and growth it just creates this culture of inspiration and excitement.

Yeah, it’s kind of interesting that you brought up Jack Welch because he was also called Neutron Jack. So he wasn’t always in an inspiring mood, sometimes he was in a firing mood. So I wonder if the inspiration of Jack Welch, is it just because of the academy or there are other things that he did that inspired you?

Jack Welch has taken some criticism over time, which is understandable, but I think that in total, he built GE into an amazing company. So you can take inspiration from different things. I mean, obviously his performance, at least for me, was amazing. Obviously he had to make some tough decisions.

Part of leadership is sometimes you got to make tough decisions. I think that's a good lesson that he taught us as well.
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Yeah, I agree. He was an amazing leader. He was the son of an Irish railway conductor and then he 20x the market cap of GE and became the biggest company in the world. So definitely, we can’t take anything away from him. So talking about tough decisions, you mentioned that that’s one of the things that good leaders have to do. They have to do tough decisions. So what is the hardest decision that you have ever had to make in your business?

Yeah. So in our business, especially being tied to commercial real estate, even with diversifications, we’re still somewhat vulnerable to the ups and downs of the economy. The toughest decisions I think we’ve ever had to make is during recessions, downturns, because projects stop, so you have to get smaller as a company, because you are smaller, because you have less revenue. So along with that, you have to have fewer people to do the work, and so you have to have layoffs. And those are always the toughest decisions because you’re affecting people in their livelihood. But it has to happen and it has to happen in a timely basis if you don’t want to put your company at risk. And so those are definitely the toughest ones for sure.

Yeah. And I’ve been there as well. Not once, unfortunately. And it’s tough not just because of the people, obviously, that is very tough, but it’s also, I mean, at least I felt like I failed people. So it’s not just I hurt them, but I even failed them because I didn’t live up to the implied promise of maybe growing the business and making it successful and making it a stable place for them. And that’s really tough to face up to that personal failure.

It’s tough to face up to and it does feel like failure and it is in many regards. But on the other hand, you can control what you can control and geopolitical events in the world economy is something we normally can’t control. So I think facing the tough decisions is really the lesson. No matter how you got there, you still have to make some tough decisions sometimes.

And ultimately people can land on their feet. And if a company is suffering, it’s bad for the people as well, even if they keep their job because they know that their job is unstable and they are not succeeding. It may not be their fault and it erodes their self-confidence and their market value ultimately. So it can even be seen as a way of not hurting people.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, no good comes from delaying the tough decision. It just doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse, actually.

Yeah, I agree. That’s awesome. So before we wrap up this conversation, one final question, and maybe we can talk about your book as well. What is the most important question any entrepreneur should be asking themselves?

Well, this is a question I ask myself every day, and normally because when you’re the entrepreneur, you have the ability to affect any part of your company every day. And so usually when I get up in the morning, it’s like, okay, what can I do today to make the biggest impact on my company? And different days require different focuses depending on what’s going on. And so it could be a new proposal or a new client or a pursuit or tough decision-making time or dealing with a big contract or a big invoice or a personnel issue or a hiring opportunity. And so I think

it's important to keep your head out of the weeds when you're an entrepreneur,
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So in a practical sense, does it mean that you have to keep your desk empty and your schedule fairly open so that you can respond in real time and you can actually focus on those things that might not be in your schedule?

It’s important to not overschedule yourself. I think that that’s a trap people fall into. And so obviously you’re going to have schedule every day. You’re going to have things on your calendar, but you’re most effective if you can have that time to think and definitely you got to keep yourself organized, uncluttered, desk clean, email cleaned out, all of that stuff is important if you wanna be effective.

Yeah, Jeff Bezos said in an interview that he only wants to make three decisions each day. Nothing else, but just three important decisions and he wants to focus on it and he sleeps well, he exercises, he eats well, just to make sure that he’s in the best possible shape to make those three decisions.

That’s right. And I’ve got stuff in the book about stuff like that. I think eating right and taking care of yourself and exercising is all part of it. You have to do that. People say, I don’t have time. Well, you don’t have time not to do it. You have to do it.

Yeah, love it. So, Layered Leadership. So what’s the biggest message of the book? If people who should read it, who is looking for what?

I think any business leader or someone who is trying to build an organization of any kind, I think it can help. It gives lots of different leadership ideas, tips, goals, things that I’ve done, everything from writing a business plan to taking some of these creative initiatives to taking care of yourself the right way, to managing your finances the right way, to having a succession plan. There’s a lot in there about succession plans. So, anybody that’s trying to build a company or a business or an organization, I think hopefully there’s something in there that will help you.

Yeah. Well, definitely check it out, Layered Leadership from Lawrence Armstrong. And one more extra question. I know I said this was going to be the last one, but you’re also an accomplished artist. And I see a piece of art behind you, which may be your creation, I don’t know.

Yes. 

So, tell me a little bit about why you became an artist and how did that connect to the layered vision and the Layered Leadership idea, and how do you even have time for that?

Yeah, so I’ve been an artist my whole life. I decided 12, 13 years ago to begin showing my work, finally. And so I show in galleries all across the US and Europe and some in South America. And all of my work is abstract expressionist and studying this concept of layers. All of my work is a manifestation of that idea. And so, I can keep studying this for a long time. And it goes to the art, it goes to my company, it goes to the book, this whole idea of synthesized layers.

And why are layers important? 

It’s just the way I see the world and I see it as a way to express an understanding of the world and my application to how you build an organization.

Is it about complexity or synthesis or both, or neither? 

Yeah, I think so. The world is complex. It’s my way of trying not to make it less so by understanding different layers and how to synthesize those layers for the result you want.

So if you can articulate the layers, then you can systematically approach things perhaps. That’s awesome.

Yeah. 

All right, well, if people would like to learn more about your art, your books, your company, your future ideas and visions, where should they go?

Yeah. So you can find the book and see some podcasts, see some blogs, all that sort of stuff at www.layeredleadershipbook.com 

All right, well, Larry Armstrong, business leader, artist, author, architect, and so much more. Thanks for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom of layers. And if you enjoyed this conversation half as much as I did, then please give us a review on Amazon and follow us on YouTube and check us out on LinkedIn as well for short snippets of these episodes and stay tuned for following episodes. Thank you, Larry, for coming and thank you for listening.

Ron Monteiro, Keynote Speaker, Facilitator, Trainer, and Author of Love Mondays, is driven by a mission to help professionals discover their purpose, build fulfilling careers, and burn their boats to fully commit to meaningful work. 

We learn about Ron’s journey from a finance executive to an entrepreneur, speaker, and author, and how he embraced the Ikigai framework—a Japanese philosophy for finding meaning in work. He introduces the Path to Entrepreneurship Framework, a four-step approach that helps individuals transition from corporate life to a career they love: Find Your Purpose, Build Your Bridge, Burn Your Boats, and Flex Your Muscle. Ron shares insights on overcoming fear, learning to say no, and balancing financial stability with the pursuit of passion, while also exploring the mindset shifts needed to create a career where every day—not just Mondays—feels meaningful and exciting.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Ron Monteiro, keynote speaker, facilitator, trainer, and the author of Love Mondays. Ron, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Steve. I’m very excited to be here.

Well, it’s exciting to have you. You have a very interesting career coming across the world to be here with us. And you also have some interesting frameworks that you’re using. So, let’s start with what drives you. What is your personal “Why?” And what is this Ikigai process that you mentioned on social media and your posts that help people find theirs?

Yeah, I want to rewind. Like I’m a big proponent of purpose and life work and things like that. Many years ago, I would be shaking my head because I wasn’t clear on my purpose. So, I’ve done a lot of work and a lot of personal development work that a lot of it talks about how do you start with what is your “Why,” what is your purpose? Simon Sinek, as you’ve mentioned. And my purpose now is I get a lot of joy from helping others. So, the way I’ve phrased it, how do I help myself and others love Mondays and every other day? And I think it connects to my book, which talks about how do you love Mondays? So today’s a Monday that we’re recording, and every other day. And then

Ikigai is a beautiful Japanese concept that talks about people who don't even have a word for retirement. They love what they're doing so much, and it's connected to their life purpose.
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There’s a whole book on Ikigai, if anybody’s interested, which asks four simple questions. “What do you love to do?” is the first one. And this is something we journal. So let’s say five years from now, what I love to do might be slightly different than today. So it’s not a fixed destination. It’s one of those iterative processes. So, you start with “What do I love to do?” The second is, “What am I good at?” So for me, I love teaching and I think I’m pretty good at it. I’ve done it for a while now. So, what do I love doing? The third is “What does the world need?” Okay, so if I continue with my example, I think the world needs people to teach them things. So, for me, one of my favorite topics to teach is soft skills and story time because I really struggled there. I landed a company that helped me overcome my fear and now I teach it for a living. So that in itself is a “Why” for me. And then the fourth question is, “What can you get paid for?” I know inflation and all these things are coming into play. So, if you can answer those four questions and it’s right in the bullseye, right in the heart of those, and think about four circles, concentric circles. If you find something that’s in the middle there, it’s your Ikigai, it’s your reason for living, it’s your reason for waking up on a Monday and every other day. And that’s, to me, a lifelong journey. And if you hit any of those two questions in isolation, it might be a profession or a vocation or something like that and so there’s a beautiful visual and I can send it to you, I’ve included it in my book, which shows it graphically. And so if you take the time to journal on those four questions, you can find your Ikigai. So I love the concept.

Yeah, that’s awesome. Jim Collins talks about this idea of the economy engine, and what is the economy engine of your business, and it has to be your “Why,” your purpose, and what you are really good at. And the third one is “What can sell?” And then in the middle, but that’s only three circles. So, you have a fourth circle and that’s the Ikigai in the center. Very interesting. So, tell me about how you found your Ikigai. How did you land on what you love doing and what people need and you also pay for? What was your process?

Yeah, I love Steve Jobs’ quote, which talks about, it’s really messy going forward, but when you connect the dots backwards, it makes a lot of sense. So, one of my favorite examples ever in business is he took this course on typography when he had dropped out of college because he was interested and then he brought it to the Macbook. So, my story is obviously not comparable to Steve Jobs, but it’s very messy going forward. I didn’t have this plan. I was just trying to do things that I love to do, like teaching and training. And I was doing a lot of speaking for free, whenever I could get some experience to do what I wanted to do, invest the time and energy. I did a free webinar, for example, where I was speaking around the world during COVID. I wasn’t getting paid, and that’s where I met my business partner.

So many things that I’ve tried to do within that Ikigai concept. What do I love to do? What am I going to do? Even if I do it for free, it’s in the spirit of building confidence and competence because I went through a 20-year corporate career. I was doing finance and now I’m a speaker and author and trainer. It’s a very different profession. So I had to find a way to bridge between the two. And I actually hired a coach. And one of the big things was how do I spend more and more time doing the things I want to do, while at the same time, I’m still working full time because I had to pay my bills. So it’s a clean process if you look backwards, but at the time it was very messy. And entrepreneurship for me has been a fun road, but there’s times where it’s been very stressful, there’s times it’s been messy, and even now with all the stuff going on in the political world, many companies might put a hold on training, I still have to say, okay, I’m going to work that much harder to get my business going. So yeah, it’s been a fun road, but but challenging and exciting at the same time.

Yeah, I like to think about this, what you’re talking about, what you’re describing is that during the eight to four, whatever, nine to five, you really are selling your hours to someone. And then the rest of the time, you can work on building your own business. And when you do that on your own time, it’s really hard. It goes very slowly. You’re trying to figure things out. And when you get to this tipping point, then you can leave that job and make your entrepreneur venture the full time. That’s fantastic. But then you have the challenges of entrepreneurship. So, yeah, it definitely is messy. I can relate to this. Let’s talk about your framework. So this is a podcast of frameworks and I’m always looking for something unique. We are over 250 episodes in and what is a framework that you or your colleagues have developed or stumbled upon that really helped you achieve something?

Yeah, so one of the frameworks I use in the book is, how did I get from working full-time to now running my own business? And the four steps, and I go through them in detail, I share my own experiences, I share other stories. Number one is what we talked about already, find your purpose. And so you could use your Ikigai, you could use the Jim Collins framework you mentioned, but let’s be clear on, what is our “Why,” what’s our purpose, what’s our reason for being? So that’s step one. And we’ve got some exercises in there to say how do people actually work through it? That was very important to me. Step two is what I call build your bridge.

So this is me, picture me as a finance person who now wants to go speak on stages and do training sessions. It was foreign to many people. So what I did was I actually hired a coach and he had this brilliant metaphor for me, which is build your bridge. And he always used to say, Ron, one line at a time. We’re gonna do this, we’re gonna do it one line at a time. And, honestly, if I didn’t have that coach, his name’s Wayne, he’s a dear friend of mine now, I probably would not be talking to you today. Because another big lesson I learned is surround yourself with the people who are gonna uplift you and are gonna help you get to where you want to go. So I slowly built my bridge one line at a time. And that step is all about building enough confidence and competence. You talked about, what’s that time to take the leap? Okay, so that’s step two. Step three is pretty provocative. It’s burn your boats. If this is the time, go all in. For me, it was resigning from my job because I now felt like I could do this on my own. And what it also does is it just says, look, you’re going all in.

There’s no paycheck coming in every two weeks. I didn’t have a paycheck coming in every two weeks after that. And that’s when it’s like, okay, it’s time to sink or swim. And I had to fight for it. And so that’s an interesting time. And I never tell people to do that too early because you have to do a lot of work ahead of time to get there. That’s the burn your boats. And step four is flex your muscle, which, look, we’re in a constantly changing world. I always want to say it’s a constant journey. There’s never a destination. Like, I listen to a lot of podcasts. I listened to one on the weekend where it was this billionaire and he was talking about there’s no door where you hit the door and okay, success is here. It’s the constantly evolving journey. So that’s my four step framework. And again, it’s like, it’s iterative, like you may do it and then come back to it because your purpose is slightly evolved and change it. So it’s a fun framework that I work through that I reflected on after. Again, when I went through the process, it’s not like I had this four part framework I was working on, but what I tried to do is say, for future entrepreneurs, for people trying to find their Ikigai, here might be a little bit more of a methodical process than what I used.

Yeah, I like this to build the bridge and then burn your boats. It’s when you’re back against the wall and you really have to deliver. It’s amazing the energy it can release, but it’s a scary thing. And I kind of have this thought that the most successful entrepreneurs are the ones that are willing to put themselves in the biggest jeopardy because they know that they have the internal resources that they can mobilize, but they will only be mobilized if you really have to, because it’s very hard, you have to dig really deep. And the ones that are willing to put themselves there, I mean, Elon Musk is not a perfect example these days, but he did sleep under his desk in Tesla when he was trying to get it to 5,000 a week production. He did appoint himself as head of engineering of SpaceX when he was in over his head with how to even do that. So this kind of mentality really helps, but it’s also super scary. You have to have the confidence that you will be able to prevail. What’s been the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make in your business?

In my business, I think what’s hard is also saying no. So for me, it was a great lesson to learn, but it was hard. When I first started, again, as a finance executive, I’m trying to make a living now, I was struggling. There was zero revenue coming through. So what I decided to do is anything that had a dollar sign to it, I’m doing it. So whether it’s write an article, train on subjects which I have no business training on. I did a lot of things in the beginning to say, okay, I just need to start generating revenue. I got to the point where now a lot of opportunities were coming my way and I had to learn how to say no. So it was hard to do, but it’s a wonderful thing when you learn it because before it’s almost like, FOMO, fear of missing out. Am I missing out on an opportunity that I could have some revenue and grow my business and things like that?

And I found, again, it connecting back to the Ikigai concept. I think I learned that a good framework for making a decision of yes or no is not money, it’s “Am I going to add value?” Am I going to love that? So, for example, now if I still, look, it’s a business, so there’s certain things I do where in an ideal world I might not do it, so I don’t want to paint a picture where it’s all rosy. But there’s certain things where I’m just very clear, is it a hell yes or a no? And if it’s not a hell yes, then maybe it’s not worth doing. So that was a hard lesson for me to learn. And then I think the hardest decision was the decision to quit my job. To say, look, I’m going to go in and I’m going to basically tell them I’m leaving. And two weeks from now, there’s no paycheck coming in. Zero. So that is a very hard decision. But that was the burn the boats, as we talked about before.

Yeah, because

at some point, your time becomes the most valuable commodity and your attention. And if you have to split it between your job and between your venture, you're never going to give what your venture needs to really take off.
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Yeah. Amazing. And we’re all different. Like if some people want to run their business as a side hustle and they still love their day job, that’s perfect. Everybody’s journey is a little bit different.

Yeah. So actually what happened to me about 25 years ago now, it’s crazy to think, 23, is that I got fired from a bank and I was 35 years old and since the age of 20 I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur but I had these great opportunities that, it’s like I was in a golden cage situation and suddenly I got fired and I just said, okay, this is my time and I’ve walked across the street and I got fired on Friday. Monday, I was in business and it was a wonderful thing in one way to have the freedom that nobody’s looking over my shoulder but then obviously the reality set in as well that there’s no help now. I’m on my own, I have to do everything myself. My company name is completely unknown and people will not necessarily take my call because they just took it because I was part of this big bank and they had this big balance sheet behind me. So that was super scary.

Yeah, I can see that. But that’s a lot of courage you took.

Well, that’s the point that I did have to take the courage because I was pushed. I was by default courageous. But anyhow, tell me a little bit about your book and why did you pick this title, Love Mondays, and how to love Mondays? How should we love? How do we get to the point where we can love Mondays?

Yeah, so I’ve been in business for 20 something years, working for businesses and I always used to hear people, oh, it’s Monday, like the energy is very low. And then you get to the middle of the week, oh, it’s pump day, a little bit of excitement. A hint of a smile. Well, before that, I even hear Happy Junior Friday, which is Thursday, and I’m just like, I get it, like I love the weekends as well, but imagine a world where everybody was excited on Monday, where people were like, happy Monday, and they really meant it. And when people do not have as much anxiety on Sundays, because many people feel anxiety on Sundays, because the work week is starting. And I know people in my book who jump out of bed at 4:30 in the morning on a Monday because they’re so excited about the week. I’m not quite there yet. I love what I’m doing, but imagine if we can help more and more people find what they truly love to do. So that’s the reason behind the book. And I’ve been fortunate to have a lot of people around me who have helped me build my business to the point where I love Mondays. I do love it, so I want to share. How do other people who maybe don’t believe it’s possible, go step by step and find that journey and that path.  

I used to love Mondays a lot. I still actually like them, but I absolutely loved them when my children were small, and sometimes the weekends felt like a heavier lift than the week. It was a combination of, I love my business, I knew I was gonna do my stuff on my business. I couldn’t wait to get going. Sunday afternoon, I already started. And it was also my comfort zone because I no longer had to chase these three or four year olds down the playground and I could actually work at my desk in a comfortable situation with my mind. And I hated Fridays because I was always guilty that I still haven’t finished my stuff and it’s already the weekend and I have to go home and I have unfinished stuff. So I kind of cringed about this Happy Friday for years because I thought it was very lame.

But that’s a wonderful example. If you loved your Mondays and every other day to the point where you weren’t super excited about the weekend. My kids are teenagers now, so I know what stage you’re talking about. And for me, it’s like, how do I find, I don’t wanna use the word work-life balance, how do I find harmony between the two where I love both? I love the weekends and I love the week. I love everyday. And that’s what I’m chasing. Like, how do I find that sweet spot? And it takes a lot of work. It’s like the flex your muscle. You gotta keep flexing your muscles.

Yeah, that’s right. I love the flex. So, the flex your muscle, so what is the process exactly? How do you flex it? So you burned your boat, you’re kind of gaining traction with your business. How do you go from kind of surviving or getting by to flexing your muscles?

Yeah, so I think the way I was using flex your muscles is really adapting to the environment as well as adapting to changes in yourself. And I’ll give you two examples. So, for example, during COVID, I had to switch from in-person session to Zoom or Teams, like most of us did. But you could look at that as a glass half empty, which is, oh man, I’m gonna have to learn Zoom and it’s gonna be so hard. Or you could say, instead of now, I live in Toronto, Canada, instead of my market being Toronto, Canada, it’s the world. Taking that opportunity to say, wow, now instead of just being limited to Toronto, I can keep around the world. I got this chance to teach in Vietnam, in Hawaii, in India.  Whereas before the pandemic, I was doing it in Toronto, which I loved.

But now, so that’s number one, being flexible to say, okay, maybe there’s an opportunity even when something seems hard. And now the second part of adapting to yourself. So, when I first started, I wanted to be a coach, personal coach 101.  I realized where do you get paid and it hits your other questions was corporate training, so I started switching more into corporate training. I still do coaching as well and now my latest evolution is because I wrote the book there’s more speaking opportunities I want to adjust to. So it’s being able to really be flexible and say, okay, there’s coaching, there’s training, there’s speaking and if I just said, oh, I want to be a coach and I’m not leaving that zone, that would have really limited me. So I’m saying, okay, how do I be flexible but still try to hit those Ikigai questions and adapt to the environment and myself because I’m changing. I’m a different person than four years ago when I first started my business.

I mean, what’s wonderful about writing books and being a speaker is that you grow from coaching one-on-one to coaching one-to-many and then to speaking one too many, like keynotes. And then with the book, you can reach people who are in different time zones and they are following you through your books and you’re expanding your audience, you’re expanding your impact. So if your Ikigai is to help people, then this is a really great opportunity to do that. So just a question related to this, the switching, the flexing the muscle and kind of shifting the priorities and saying no to things that are not, hell yes. One way for me to do that is to look at, okay, where do I deliver more value? What are the ways I can deliver more value? And if I prioritize those ways where there’s more value and say no to the lesser value, then I’m freeing up time to be available for those opportunities with the higher way. Of course, there’s the in-between when I’m not doing it, but how do you make the difference? Do you just use your emotional resonance to it?

Yeah, I was thinking about that question even this morning. I go for a morning walk with our dog, and I have these thoughts going on in my head, and I actually still think I’m doing too many things. I was listening to a podcast by Seth Godin, and he has this concept which I’ve heard before. He’s like, how do you be the best in the world at one thing? And so, it’s something I’m starting to think about to say, okay, I’ve taken on a lot. I still have a lot of things I’m doing. Do I need to refine that search? Do I need to bring it in a little? But again, it takes a little bit of courage to, but it’s a little bit of another burn the boats moment, which says, okay, I’m getting revenue from a few different things here. If I stop A, B and C and focus on D, there’s probably gonna be a short-term dip again. And it’s gonna take that same courage, that same persistence, that same resilience. So I think it’s a continuous journey. But I think, again, when you think about people who are very successful, many of them have chosen to be best in the world at one thing, which is very hard to do. Even for me, it would be very hard to let go of these things I’m pretty good at, to say, okay, I’m just going to do the one thing I’m great at. So maybe that’s like a future discussion between me and you.

Yeah, and then obviously there’s a risk that you pick the wrong lane and suddenly that market dries up and then you have completely bet on the wrong horse. I love this quote from Andrew Carnegie when they ask him that, Mr. Carnegie, why do you put all your eggs in one basket? And isn’t that too risky to just double down on the steel industry? And he said, I put all my eggs in one basket and then I watched that basket.

Yeah, a wonderful story. I mean, I think he commissioned Napoleon Hill to write Think and Grow Rich. So, he knew what he was talking about. And so like, for example, where I started my business was soft skills for accountants. If I doubled down and said, I’m gonna message every single accountant I know, and I just focused on it, I think I could be very successful. So, I think it’s like, it’s another level of courage to say, I’m going to just go all in on one thing.

Especially in a globalized world where people want to seek out the number one expert in something because our time is so valuable. We don’t want to squander it on second rate people. You want to find the one person and let them teach you so that you become the best in that regard. Well, I also started life as an accountant, so I can totally relate to this.

Yeah.

All right. So as we are wrapping up this interview, what do you think is the most important question an entrepreneur should be asking themselves?

I think it is what we are just talking about is like, what is the value that you’re providing to your customer? What’s the value you’re providing to the world? And being very authentic, like, what is Steve uniquely positioned to provide value to his clients and serve them in a way that’s, like there’s a book somewhere on my shelf, I think I see it’s a yellow book, it’s called Unreasonable Hospitality. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that book. But it was a restaurant that basically became the number one in the world because they were unreasonable in the way they served their clients. So, I think with entrepreneurship, and it’s very hard to find a company that just says I’m going to be the best in the world at this. So, I think the big question, to me, is like what is something that you, or your listeners, or me say I can do this better than anyone in the world because I have passion, energy, skill, all these things that when business gets hard, you’re still gonna be motivated.

And I have like 20 people in the back of my book who, for example, Nancy MacKay, the CEO of MacKay CEO Forums, I’m a part of that organization. She tells me she wakes up at 4:30 in the morning and she’s excited to run her business. And then she can connect it back to her childhood where she wanted to be a teacher and she’s, in a way, a teacher now. And so it’s like, think about those people, like so excited, like you were talking about how you were excited on those Mondays and not excited on Fridays. You’re naturally going to do it even when the going gets tough. Because in business and life, we’re going to hit these tough periods. And to me,

the people who are willing to just fight through those tough days are the ones who ultimately are happy, fulfilled, have more joy.
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Was your wife happier as well?

My wife’s very happy. She actually was such a big support, because look, we have two kids at the time. They were less than 10 years old or just around 10 years old. Big mortgage, big bill. So, it wasn’t an easy decision. She was very supportive. And what’s been amazing is now she’s on her own journey. Like she’s a teacher, but she’s learning how to be a yoga instructor and she went on this retreat a few weeks ago and stuff. So she’s kind of seen what I’m doing and now she’s on her version of that journey and she’s inspiring a whole bunch of people to do that. So, it has this nice ripple effect when you, as you talked about risk earlier, and I don’t want people to take an uncalculated risk, a risk where you’ve done the preparation ahead of time, you’re ready to burn your boats is such a rewarding risk. Because I honestly, even if my business didn’t succeed and I went back to corporate, I would be a much happier person because I tried. And so it’s a good lesson in life is to, a lot of us have these ideas and many times I never acted on them. I now talk about, okay, what’s the one action I’m going to take?

Actually, I know people who have tried entrepreneurship and failed and went back to corporate life and they were actually much more contended in their corporate life.

Amazing, I love that.

They knew that entrepreneurship was not for them, they didn’t leave anything on the table, they did try and now they know that they were in the right place, they were doing what was the right thing for them and they didn’t worry about missing out, they didn’t have the FOMO anymore.

Yeah, one of my favorite quotes is by a guy named Wayne Dyer, a spiritual guy, I don’t know if you’ve ever read his work.

I read books from him.

Amazing, and he says,

Don't die with your music still in you.
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And what’s the worst thing that can happen anyway?

There you go. And I’m naturally an introverted person. Like I’m very quiet naturally, but now like, because I’ve done all these things, I have so much to talk about and share with people. And similar to you, like I see your book beside you and I see all those books there and I see how much you’re sharing. Here’s what I’ve done in my entrepreneurship journey.

That’s awesome. Well, Ron Monteiro, keynote speaker, facilitator, trainer, and the author of Love Mondays. So if people would like to connect with you or learn more about it or buy your book, where should they go?

Yeah, so my book, Love Mondays, bright yellow book, it’s on Amazon. So go to your local Amazon. And LinkedIn’s where I spend most of my time. So I’ve chosen to spend time on LinkedIn and pretty much nothing else on social media. So LinkedIn is my place to be.

That’s right. So you’re inch wide and mile deep on LinkedIn. You’re doing the right thing. You’re burning your boats on Twitter and the other social media. Very good. So Ron, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. And those of you that enjoyed this interview, please make sure to comment and follow us on YouTube and give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to your podcast. Thanks for coming, Ron, and thanks for listening. 

Rob Levin, Chairman and Co-Founder of WorkBetterNow, is driven by a mission to help small and medium-sized businesses find top Latin American talent and scale efficiently.

We learn about Rob’s journey from his early passion for entrepreneurship to launching WorkBetterNow, a company that connects SMBs with skilled professionals from Latin America. He explains the hiring process his company has developed—from sourcing top-tier talent to precision matching and seamless onboarding—allowing business owners to delegate more effectively and focus on growth. He also shares insights on the challenges of hiring in today’s market, the importance of building a strong company culture, and why core values should guide every aspect of a business.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and I welcome Rob Levin, Chairman and Co-Founder of WorkBetterNow, an agency that provides high-performing talent from Latin America for small and medium-sized businesses. Rob, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Steve. Great to see you.

Great to see you, and I’m excited to have this conversation. So let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and how do you manifest it in your business?

Since I was a kid, I always loved the world of entrepreneurship and more importantly, entrepreneurs, business owners. My dad, while he didn’t start his business, he did end up owning a business. And I just remember even going with him, as a teenager, to meetings with his accountant and asking his accountant questions about other businesses that they were involved with. And I was reading Inc. Magazine as a kid. And I’ve always thought of business owners as one of the groups of heroes of this country, along with first responders and military members, what they do, what they go through, and what really is the output of all of that, the effects. Almost all of my career has been spent helping small businesses in one way or another. I started my career as an accountant, and even though I was at a big firm, I was working with the owners of closely held businesses. I was an executive in several fast-growing small businesses many years ago before I started my own, my first company, which was the New York Enterprise Report, a media company for business owners, and then now with WorkBetterNow, this is what I love to do, is to help business owners fulfill their dreams.

That’s awesome. So, what was the moment that led you to starting WorkBetterNow, this business that you’re in right now?

Well, I’ll give you the medium-length story. So, I hired my first assistant maybe 11 years ago, and having the right assistant changed my life. I mean, I was not doing the work that I shouldn’t have been doing. I had more free time to spend on higher value activities, more free time to spend with my family and friends, and it just changed my life. And because I know a lot of business owners, I mean, hundreds, if not well over a thousand, a lot of people were asking me about my assistant. They knew she wasn’t in the office with me and she was remote from Latin America. And I was employing her through this other company based in Latin America. And at some point I said, you know what? I can do a better job than these guys are. And I won’t go into the details there, but I was then in Portland, Oregon, and a friend of mine from college met me there and we were having drinks. And I said, hey, I think I’m going to start this business for, at the time, it was different than what it is today. It was just providing assistance to business owners. We believe every business owner should have an assistant. I mentioned this to my friend A.C. and he said, I’ll do it with you. And that was 2018 and we’ve been off to the races ever since.

That’s exciting. And this is an exciting time to grow a business with virtual assistants. With Zoom, a lot of barriers came down during the pandemic, as you say. So, what’s the process for finding talent in Latin America or anywhere else? Can you describe it for someone who hears about that, maybe this is a weird idea or maybe they heard about it but they don’t know how it works and how they should even wrap their mind around it? What is this?

Let’s start with the wrapping of the mind around it. Let’s start there. I could talk about this for an hour, but I’ll try to condense it. So, business owners have to realize that we have been in and we will continue to be in a talent crisis. Don’t look at what you’re reading in the papers about how all these companies are doing layoffs and the power is shifting back to the employer and all of that other stuff. It’s really a large company thing for the most part. In a small business, every single seat counts. And if you look at the demographics and then changes. The demographics, meaning the Baby Boomers now leaving the workforce, and there’s so many more of them than there are of the younger generations coming into the workforce. Combine that with the fact that there’s differences in, let’s just say that there’s differences in work habits of the younger generations and my generation, Gen X and the Baby Boomers as well.

You ask most business owners and they’re struggling to find good talent. They may have everybody they need, but they’re like, you know what, if there were more people available, I would definitely be changing a few people because, as I said, in a small or mid-sized business, every single seat counts. So what a lot of companies are doing, and I really believe we’re at an inflection point now where this is gonna become the norm and not the exception, is they’re realizing that there is incredible talent all over the globe, particularly in certain areas of Asia like the Philippines and Latin America, which is where my company focuses on, that these people have great skills, fantastic attitudes, great English skills as well. And by the way, not only can you find fantastic people there, but because the cost of living is a lot less in those countries than it is here, it’s also less expensive. And there are other benefits, too. So that’s just to get your head around it. And then if you’d like, I can talk more about how my company works, but other companies work probably somewhat similarly. Would you like me to do that, Steve, like this whole notion of a talent provider?

Yeah, so we talked about this framework. I think we called it the New Talent Playbook. So when you recognize that there is a talent crisis, and there’s all that talent in Latin America and the Philippines, what do you do about it? How do you weave that into your organization? How do you get on board with this remote employment approach?

Yeah. So, first, I’ll back up for a second. So, you mentioned the new talent playbook, which is my book that’s coming out in March. And it goes into a lot more than offshore talent. It talks about how you have to just change your approach to, or at least evolve your approach to how you look at talent and how you manage talent from the culture of your company,

culture is now more important than ever, to how you retain talent, how you attract talent.
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It’s all changed in the past few years, how AI and automation can help, and yes, how offshore talent can also really mitigate the talent crisis. In terms of how it works, companies can go about doing it on their own. They can post jobs on LinkedIn and Indeed and other websites and try to go through the process on your own and then setting up some sort of employer of record in different countries where you’re employing people or you can work with, we came up with this term talent providers or talent partners, companies like WorkBetterNow, my company, where we will take out 95% of the hiring process away because we have the machine in place and the employer brand where we get thousands and thousands of applications a month. And then we have this thing called the top talent filter that whittles it down to the top one or two percent And then there’s a precision match process where we combine what our client is looking for in a particular role, with three candidates that they can interview and within a few days, they can have this person start to work with them. If you think about it, Steve, and you know this as well as anybody, most small businesses don’t like the hiring process, and they’re not good at it. So, in addition to providing amazing talent, in our case from Latin America, we’re taking 95% of the process off of their hands.

Wow, that’s definitely helpful. Because a lot of people who cannot afford to have an internal recruiting office or even nature function, and for them it could be very helpful. So how does that partnership work? So if you’re talking about, I think your term is talent partner, if someone wants W.B.N. as a talent partner, then how should they think about you?

So, like I said, there’s a lot of companies like us both for Latin America and the Philippines, and I can’t comment on how they do things. I can just tell you how we do things, but I would say that they’re all going to be somewhat similar, maybe just the differences will be in the details in terms of the approach. So as I had mentioned, we do all the recruiting, and the assessments, and all of that stuff and screening people. And then a prospective client will have a consultation. It’s about a 20-minute call with one of our client consultants. If they don’t have a job description ready, we will put one together ready for them. We give that information to our recruiting department. They then use this precision match process to line up three candidates that the prospective client will interview for each role that they’re trying to fill. And more often than not, after those three interviews, they’re ready to select at least one of the candidates. If not, we can repeat the process, doesn’t happen often, but it does. It does happen from time to time. And then, like I said, within four days or so, they’re working for the client, making an impact. And then there’s no contracts.

And we basically designed the company in the process to treat our clients the way that we would want to be treated if we were using such a service.
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Now, you also talk about improving the culture of a business. So how do you do that and do remote employees help or hinder your culture building activities?

That is a really interesting question. There’s not a straightforward answer to it. So I’ll just give you the way I think about this. As I’ve said before, and it’s going to be in the book too, if you don’t have a good culture in the office, and this, by the way, goes for a remote person that could be in the United States or anywhere else, because there’s really no difference, by the way. If you don’t have a strong culture in the office, you’re not going to have magically a great culture, remote or even hybrid for that matter. So really, the key is when you’re bringing on remote people, whether again from inside the US or out, the key is to integrate them into the company as well as you can, meaning if you’re hybrid, which you would be if you have an office and people come into the office and then hiring remote, have meetings where everybody’s participating through Zoom or you can have everybody in the office on one camera. Make sure you’re communicating not just in the office, but again, through whatever mechanisms you have, like we’re a hundred percent remote. We have a fantastic culture. We ask our employees both anonymously and then off the cuff all the time.

We have a fantastic culture. You can look up what our employees have to say on Glassdoor and a lot of the things we do. And we're a hundred percent remote.
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We over communicate. We have weekly calls for the entire company. Every department has their weekly L10, we run on EOS. We have fun activities that are all done remotely. We do happy hours, we do meditations, we do talent shows, we recognize people on Teams because we’re a Microsoft shop, and we encourage people to get together in person, and our employees are doing this on their own. They will visit each other and they’ll actually travel from country to country, which is just a great thing to see. So, it really starts, and I get into this in the book, it really starts by having a culture by design. To borrow a term from Jack Daly, it starts not a culture by default, which I’ve done in previous companies, but being really intentional about the culture that you want and walking the walk and not just talking the talk.

That’s very interesting. So, culture by design. You mentioned the weekly meetings with everyone in the company, and you talk about all these engagement events that you organize, like the talent shows and the meditation and get-togethers, are there other elements to culture by design? So, what other design elements did you like to choose?

Great question. I think, for us, it really starts with our core values. We have six core values. The first one, by the way, when my partner, A.C., and I decided to start the business in that bar in Portland, Oregon, we actually came up with our first core value because I told him, we have to put our talent first, and I need to know if you’re on board with that. That’s a foreign concept to a lot of people. And he said, absolutely. And then we were off to the races. Over the years, we put five other core values together. You can find them on our website, and we have a mission, and these aren’t just like words to put on a website or on a wall. We live and breathe these core values all of the time. So they’re involved in the hiring process. If we need to let go of somebody, it’s usually because of a core value misalignment, if you will.

When we recognize people with our W awards, which is a really cool, easy to produce recognition system that we have, it's all based on core values.
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So, developing those core values and living those core values, I think, makes a huge impact on our culture. And the other part of it is if somebody on the team, regardless of whether they’re a superstar or not, is not living those core values, they’re not going to last for too long.

Okay, that’s cool. That’s really cool. I mean, obviously, that’s great. If you model how to build a great culture and your people are part of this culture, they’re going to infuse that, hopefully, into your client companies, and they can get better as well. So I’d like to switch gears here and talk a little bit about your personal journey. And specifically, I’d like to ask you what personal sacrifices have you made for your business? I mean, it’s not easy to be an entrepreneur. Sometimes, people wonder if it’s even worth it. What kind of sacrifices did you have to make?

First of all, if being an entrepreneur is right for you, then it’s worth it. So if I go back to the New York Enterprise Report, that magazine that I started in 2003, I think too many sacrifices. I mean, that was a really challenging business. It was fun, but it was very, very challenging. And I was out almost every night when my kids were in their formative years, working on weekends and stuff like that. And in that case, that business was ultimately not very successful, although it did provide a lot of the intangible assets that we’re using today in WorkBetterNow. Many sacrifices. Now, with WorkBetterNow, less sacrifices. Why is that? A few reasons. Number one, I decided that I needed to do less. I need to focus on my unique ability and do less and let other people do a lot of the lifting. And funny enough, we’ve grown a lot faster with this approach.

Again, using EOS terms, I’m the visionary in the company and staying in that visionary lane has meant that I don’t have to make that many sacrifices. And, of course, having a partner, I think, goes a long way. Now, one thing I do want to say for anybody thinking about being an entrepreneur or people who are entrepreneurs today, and I just said this to my son last night, who’s a sophomore at Brandeis University, that you’re likely to make sacrifices being a business owner. You make sacrifices when you work for somebody else too, different types of sacrifices.

You're probably doing things you may not want to do, but the biggest thing you get, I think, from being an entrepreneur is you get freedom.
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You get freedom to do things the way you want to do them, including I can decide who we do business with, and it’s not just me, but it’s my partner and other members of the leadership team.

When we have a client just doesn’t fit with us, for whatever the reason is, and this has happened, we might say to that client, we have done this, like we can’t work together anymore. When you’re working for somebody else, you may not have that luxury, but you also have the freedom of time. I take vacations when I want to, I don’t need to get approvals for anybody. Of course, I’m not going to take a vacation when I have a speaking engagement, but I have the freedom of time and there are other freedoms too. So it’s a trade-off. It’s like people saying, well, it’s risky being an entrepreneur. Well, it all depends on how you evaluate risk. To me, risky is being in a corporate environment where I have a lot less control over my life. That to me is risky. And for people who work in a corporate environment, taking my own money, a lot of it, and putting it to work in a company, that might seem risky. That was less risky to me. So it’s a matter of perspective.

Yeah. I like to think of it as that, when you’re a corporate employee, you basically have one client. And if that client is not happy with you, they fire you, then you don’t have a job.

It’s a good way to look at it.

Yeah. If you’re an entrepreneur, you have many clients. Maybe you have 10, 20 or more clients. And if one doesn’t like what you’re doing, then you lose one client. And that’s a much better position than losing 5% of your business than losing 100% of it.

Yeah, this is an unrelated point, but I just posted something on LinkedIn, a comment on somebody else’s LinkedIn yesterday, the day before to this end, one of the things that I think entrepreneurs struggle with is, well, I like being this size, and sometimes they don’t say it, but they subconsciously do it. They want to be this size because they think it’s riskier to be bigger. And I actually think it’s the opposite.

I think the bigger you are, if you do it the right way, there's much less risk. You probably have less customer concentration risk.
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You have more opportunities, more different sources to borrow money from, if you need to, you’ll have more options when you’re selling your company, you can attract more talent the bigger you are, because you should have bigger margins and bigger gross profits. So I actually think that, even within entrepreneurs and business owners, people look at risk differently.

Yeah, it’s easier to adjust. If you have a bigger company, you can cut some costs and actually downsize. If you are a solopreneur, what are you downsizing, your personal expenses? There’s not that much room to adjust. So definitely agree with you. So, before we wrap up, let’s talk about your book. So, the New Talent Playbook. So, why did you write this book, and what is the main message of the book?

Yeah, this book came out of my speaking engagements. So, when I decided to start speaking at conferences and things like that and got asked to speak at conferences, I didn’t just want to talk about offshore talent. I could, and occasionally I’ll do it. I really wanted to put this in the perspective of the bigger issues that small and mid-sized businesses are facing, which is this talent crisis, which is a combination of these demographic changes, as well as the fact that the younger generations of the workforce, everything changes for them. The reasons they’re going to stay at your company has changed. And let’s say, my generation, the Gen Xers, the things that are going to attract them to your company are going to change. So, I really wanted to take all of this knowledge that I gathered, and there were a few areas where I wasn’t an expert, we brought in contributors to help out, and really create the definitive book on the intersection of talent and small and mid-sized business, because again, if you’re reading most things around talent, they’re designed for large companies that has nothing to do, almost no crossover, as what it takes to lead and manage talent in a small and mid-sized business.

Okay, so really, you’re democratizing talent management for small to medium-sized businesses.

Yeah, that’s one way to look at it.

That’s awesome. So, you talked about entrepreneurship. What do you feel is the most important question for an entrepreneur to ask themselves?

I think it depends on their stage, but in general, I think the most important question is what do you really want? What do you really want? Well, now, why is that an important question? Some entrepreneurs are fixated on a revenue number. I want to get to this revenue number. Well, why do you want that? If you’re focusing on a revenue number, that sounds like an external gratification that you’re looking for. Because, really, what matters to you is going to be two things at the end of the day from a financial perspective. One is your net income. And number two, potentially, if you’re going to sell the company, what the proceeds will be. And obviously, there’s a correlation with revenue, but there might be easier ways and quicker ways to get to what you want to that aren’t necessarily revenue-based. What else do you want as an entrepreneur? Do you want freedom of time? Do you want freedom of who you’re doing business with? Really think about what you want and then what you’re willing to do to get there. And in most cases, from what I’ve seen, where there’s a mismatch with what they want and what they get, it comes down to a few things. Number one, letting go. Number two, building up a team of really talented people. And number three, really delegating and elevating to them, really being very clear on what we’re trying to accomplish and cascading that down all the way throughout the workforce and getting everybody behind, a common theme. For us, at WorkBetterNow, for example, we’re not focused on a revenue number. We’re focused on how many people can we impact. And we measure that by the number of WorkBetterNow certified professionals that are working for our clients. It’s one number that we can all get ourselves around and it creates simplicity. And again, that could be cascaded down to every department and everybody knows how they’re making an impact into that one number, into that mission.

Yeah, I just love it. That’s the Profit per X number, perhaps the number of certified professionals. So, these professionals, they go out and they help place talent? What do they do?

No, our certified professional, that is the talent.

They are the talent who you’ve certified that they are good people.

Yeah.

Okay, that’s awesome. So, if people would like to learn more about the services that you offer or your book, or maybe they want to connect with you, where should they go?

Yeah, so for the company, workbetternow.com, all the information you’re looking for. By the way, also a lot of content related to the New Talent Playbook, and a lot of content on how to go about getting an assistant, because we started, it was just about providing assistance to business owners. You can find all of that at workbetternow.com, best place to connect with me, and you’ll also see updates for the book would be on LinkedIn, just type in Rob Levin, WorkBetterNow, and you’ll see my picture of my bald head up there somewhere.

Awesome, well, Rob Levin, Chairman and Co-founder of WorkBetterNow, an agency placing extraordinary Latin American talent for small businesses, small and mid-sized businesses. Thanks for coming and sharing your thoughts on entrepreneurship and building a team and the culture with our listeners. And if you enjoyed the show, please follow us on YouTube, and like and review us on Apple Podcasts, and keep coming back because we have other exciting entrepreneurs joining us. So, thanks for coming, Rob, and thanks for listening.