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.

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.

David Shavzin, President of The Value Track, is driven by a mission to help business owners know and make their number when exiting their companies—maximizing financial returns and securing their legacies.

We learn about David’s journey from corporate leadership to founding The Value Track, where he helps business owners strategically prepare for and execute their exits. He explains the What’s Your Transition Looks Like Framework, which guides business owners through understanding the M&A process, estimating transferable value, refining their advisory team, conducting due diligence, and enhancing business value before a sale. He highlights the importance of early planning, maintaining business momentum, and avoiding common pitfalls that can derail a successful exit.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is David Shavzin, President of The Value Track, which helps business owners set out an exit strategy and then sell their companies by optimizing price and sale terms so that they can monetize their life’s work. David, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Steve. I appreciate you having me. Looking forward to it.

It’s great to have you and we have good topics to talk about. So let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your business?

Yeah, for me, it really has been helping people. That’s sort of number one. And of course, we tend to do that in the way that we know or our background or our experience. So for me, that has come through decades of working in the business world, more generally, a lot of large organizations, and so helping the smaller business owners and the smaller companies in that lower bid market, I get to be pretty rewarding for me.

Well, definitely, you’re projecting that enthusiasm about helping people, which is awesome. So what was the defining moment that led you to starting your business?

It’s interesting. It came really at the tail end of my large corporate career and was transitioning out, looking at what I wanted to do exactly. And early on, ended up helping a friend with their business, just kind of went in to see what was going on. And I realized that while they had a good business, they’d been working really hard, they did not have all that help around them for either maybe outside advisors. They didn’t have all the resources in all of the companies that I’ve had, the experience. And there was so much that they could be doing to make that company run better, stronger, faster, more valuable. And that kind of triggered it for me. And I just got engaged and started working more with, like I say, those smaller companies because there was just so much I could bring to the table. That’s really what kicked it all off.

Yeah. So you basically helped them with their exit and you actually have developed the process to do that because it can be quite complicated. There are many moving parts. So what does your transition framework look like and can you walk our listeners through what you do when you meet with a new client and kind of help them figure all these things out?

Yeah, it really starts out, Steve, with just a lot of conversation. We want to understand not just the business in depth, but what their personal goals are. So they’ve been often at this business for 10 years or 20 years, 30 years, and haven’t taken the time often to think about, okay, what’s next whenever that is? What do they really want out of, I’ll say, the company, but also out of life after that? Some people might go that traditional retirement route. Some people might be thinking about another business venture, but they’re just kind of running day to day. So we want to understand what those goals are, when they want out, how much money they might need, what they want to have happened to the company, to employees, what’s going on with family, just that whole context to then start with understanding the company and then how we might advise them going forward. So, it’s that initial conversation and then most of the time they’ve not been through the sale of a business. They started this, it’s it, that’s their business. And so we want to get them to understand what that sale process looks like, what the M&A process is. I think when you haven’t been through it before, there’s this assumption that it kind of you wake up one day, I’m ready to sell, I’ll have a buyer the next week, I’ll get a check the following week. That kind of thing. And so we want to explain that it takes a lot of time. It really can take six months at a minimum, nine months, a year, sometimes longer. And so what does that mean? What are the implications on the business? What they need to be doing along the way while we’re preparing to sell and then get through the sale. So with that understanding goes with options. Again, if they’ve not been through it before, they’re typically thinking they’re going to find one person or one company to buy them. And there’s really a lot of options that might better fit their goals that I was talking about a moment ago. So there’s a lot of options once we know what their real goals are.

And then the second big piece is talking about value of the business getting an understanding across as to how somebody from the outside will look at the business and the value of that.
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So it may be that they’ve spent 30 years, blood, sweat, and tears, built a nice business, but when it comes down to it, the reality is that someone who’s going to potentially buy the company is looking at it through a very different lens. And so, we want to talk about value, what we call transferable value, not what you think it is,  but what that buyer will look at and how they’re going to scrutinize it. So that idea that it’s not some absolute value today, or it’s not a value that you want or maybe need, it’s really going to come down to optimizing this from that perspective of the buyer. And yeah, we could talk a lot more about value.

It is a fascinating topic. I remember I read a book years ago, Private Capital Markets, which talks about the different valuations. You can have 8 or 10 different values depending on what is the purpose of the valuation. Is it about giving stock to your employees? Is it about transitioning it to an ESOP? Is it about selling to a strategic buyer? A private equity buyer? Is it about management buyout? Selling to the management buyer? Is it about insuring the business? So all of these scenarios attract different valuations and that is fascinating. The other thing that really struck me when I was an investment banker was that there were some value that the owner actually perceived and had as part of owning this business that a buyer would not have. So for example, optimizing their taxes was something that the buyer didn’t have, or the prestige that came with being a business owner. They would have to keep that up, but they would actually not get anything for it, and that was a different thing to grapple with. And of course, the perks of being a business owner, the golf club memberships and the trips and all that stuff. So, that’s definitely interesting, but I digress.

No, I think that’s really important points. And that’s what you just walked through is key element of what we do with our clients because they need to understand all those things. And I would add just there’s one more layer to it, which is, you’re right. I mean, it depends on the purpose of the valuation, but also if you look at say 10 potential buyers, they also have all kinds of different priorities in what they may or may not purchase or value. And so you can get 10 people all the same information everything you would possibly want to know about this company and initial offers from those 10 could be extraordinarily different in a wide range and that’s always surprising to our clients. And so the other overlay in this process when we’re talking with our clients and looking for buyers is to think about if the seller’s trying to maximize the price when they sell, what profile of a buyer might be the best for them in their situation. In that quick example, you’ve been through this, it may be if there’s a competitor down the street, they may pay more because they know that they can take out a lot of the expenses of the company that they’re buying, whereas if it’s somebody that maybe just left a corporate job. They need everything that’s in that company. They may not be able to pay as much. So, the same company, the same P&L, the same balance sheet, this single company can be looked at from a value perspective in so many ways. And that’s what we need to get across. And then once they understand that, what’s fun is, right away, they get it and they start to make daily business decisions differently.

Understanding, they could be making a lot of really good decisions tomorrow, but which ones of those are really going to optimize value over time.
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Yeah, well, that’s also very interesting that there are steps they can do to make the business look better to a buyer, but I always felt like the most important thing that they should be doing is just to keep running their business so that they don’t take the foot off the gas and they don’t slow the momentum because that’s what can really kill a deal or valuation when the momentum slows. As you said, it’s a nine-month or six-month, 12-month process and the buyer is going to see the signs of that owner is no longer focused and the business starts to lose momentum and then the poor valuation, it’s not going to be a blue sky valuation anymore. It’s going to be more of a risk management type of valuation.

Yeah, we kind of say don’t take the foot off the pedal. We say actually accelerate. In other words, keep going because anything that they can do in that time period to raise up value even incrementally can really be impacted on the purchase. We had a client who was just doing what we said and was kind of doing it naturally where we were talking to a buyer. We actually got a letter of intent with a good faith, first run at an offer price and she just kept bringing contracts in and contracts in even after that letter of intent was received and we were able to go back and argue for a higher price because these were long-term contracts. So, yeah, if they’ve been working hard for decades, we want them working even harder for that period of time at the end.

Yeah, well, and if then we renegotiated the price twice and, basically, they kept getting new contracts. In the end, they decided that they keep the company and would not sell it. And a year later, there was a change in government. They had a lot of political contacts and essentially the company declined rapidly from that point and it went into Chapter 11 a few years later. So they actually missed their window, they were too greedy, they wanted even more, they were not happy with the values they got and they would have done well actually accepting it. But anyhow, so we talked about educating clients on the M&A process, as to be a transferable value. So what’s next?

So, well, and these aren’t necessarily linear in order, but really we talk to them about their advisory team, who is working with them currently, what they need to really optimize the process going forward. So, it’s a complex world, and this is probably the biggest transaction of their life, business or personal. Often, sometimes too often, but they’re usually really counting on this for retirement and needing a lot of money. So it’s a critically important decision, and they really need that advisory team.

So we want to understand who they're working with now, who their CPA is, if they've got a financial advisor, maybe an estate planning attorney, and others to make sure that those folks are the right ones to go forward.
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So they may have been very helpful over many years, but maybe haven’t really been in the world of working towards that transaction, executing the transaction, or just bringing the expertise needed in this last period, I’ll say, which could be a few years ahead of getting out. But that team needs to be their personal wealth advisor, state planning attorney, we’ll need that M&A attorney to work on the deal. Bankers typically involved in some way. The CPA and in the mix there, the tax experts, and then somebody who’s going to lead the transaction process for them. So, it goes beyond that, if there’s enough time and some of the things that we’ll get into, not just the transaction but actually helping them get ready over time, and then you may get into advisors in all parts of the functions of the company. If there’s enough time, we may have external advisors around marketing or IT or finance, supply chain, and so on. So that advisory team is critical. Some of the pushback sometimes is the thought that is going to get expensive. And in our world, we try to manage all of that, but we also try to explain that we’re trying to optimize this business. Sometimes we’re trying to grow the value, and they need to look at that advisory team as an investment in that short-term growth and in making the deal happen and the transaction happen, and you know this very well. They can spend a year, year and a half, have a buyer, be a week away from closing, and it just falls apart. And then having that team in there helps to minimize those risks of that not happening.

Yeah, that does happen. Another thing that I noticed business owners really struggled with is to not write everything off in the day before the sale and show some profit in the accounts even if it took some tax payment because the profit that they pay tax on is much more credible than the adjusted profit that may or may not be there. And it’s worth doing that investment. But again, there’s risk. What if it doesn’t close? The transaction doesn’t close. So that’s another thing. All right, what happens then? So you’ve got your advisor team in place, then you’re good, or what’s next?

So, again, it’s a little bit of an iterative process, but really the next thing is, what we call and we tell them is a due diligence. In other words, what the buyer does is a due diligence when they’re looking at the company. We want to do that early on, which just means going in to look at everything that’s happening in the company, going through financial statements, sales, records, people, just every part of it, compliance, see if there’s risk. So we go through everything and just try to identify, first of all, any big problems that we know we want to address before going to market to sell. We want to look at areas that might have, in the timeframe that we have before sale, some upside in terms of building out sales and revenue, and potentially taking out expenses in different areas. So it’s really optimizing everything. Now you can’t do everything all at once, especially if you’ve got just, say, a year or two or three.

So we'll go through that exercise and come away with a game plan.
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sometimes it's not just value, but what's going on now in the market, let's get clean, at least so we're always ready.
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Yeah. So what is the best time for them to approach you?

I say half jokingly, but not really, yesterday. The earlier that we can at least have a conversation, we can share with them some things that they can start doing right away. We can have that conversation even if we’re not engaged in a long-term project, at least we can get them to understand what we just talked about the M&A process and the value process. The sooner they can start that, the sooner they can start on building value, frankly. So even if they’re 5 or 10 years out, they can already be making some strategic decisions. So we want them to get started early, early, early on. And then even if they can’t do a lot, they can do a little bit incrementally each month, all of that focusing on value.

Yeah. So switching gears here a little bit from your clients to your own business. I mean, you’ve been in business for a long time as an exit advisor, M&A banker. Quick story. So I had a client, which was like that. They kept bringing in new contracts and coordinates as a construction company, investment banker. What was the hardest decision that you ever had to make in your business?

That’s a good one. Probably several. One that comes to mind is firing a client. Yeah. And that’s not a lot of fun. You asked me early on at the beginning why I do what I do, what I like about it. It is helping people. But we had a client where we did a lot of that upfront work that we’ve talked about, explained how all of this works, but they were really fixated on putting out a price that was literally three times what we felt it was worth. And we talked and talked and explained and tried to get it across that it just wasn’t there, the value wasn’t there, it wasn’t gonna sell. We collectively wouldn’t look very good if we did that. And so we did have to just kind of part ways and that’s hard because I don’t think they’re gonna get different advice going to somebody else down the line. And I don’t know what will become of that company over time and to them personally as they look to retirement. So that was probably the toughest one.

Yeah, you can only help people that are open to it. If they’re not coachable, then really at some point you have to put up your hand and say, hey, if you don’t let me help you, then I can’t. Or if you don’t trust me that I can help you, then I can’t help you. And that’s just how it is.

Yeah, it usually works. We usually can get them there. Sometimes it just takes some time.

Did you find that typically the longer someone is in business, the older an entrepreneur, the less they are willing to be coached and the more they feel like they know it, they’ve seen it all and they don’t take anything at face value?

So, I would say it’s a range. I know you’re asking the question. I know you’ve seen all of that. I would answer that two ways. Yes, in a lot of cases that does happen. They’ve worked for 30 years. They’ve had a great company, made a lot of money, put the kids through college, bought their second home and on and on. And they didn’t need me all that time, why do they need me now, kind of thing. That can happen. I will say though in the last several years, as folks are getting older, and if they’ve been in business 30 years now, they’ve gone through 9/11, the recession and now Covid. And so I’ve seen over the last several years a little bit more, I’ll say humble outreach. A little bit more awareness that they can’t do all of this on their own. I really saw that switch in terms of initial conversations over the last few years. But like I say, it takes time. And so, because of all that, yeah, it may be three, four, five, six conversations that take place, and slowly they may get there. The other thing I’ll say is the thing that helps is if we’re talking to them with other advisors. So if there’s one or two or three or four of us, and then they start to hear the same thing collectively, and that makes sense, but they’ve got to come around to it. We have a client that reached out almost two and a half years ago, had many conversations, and then didn’t hear from them, about a year and a half ago, reached out again and said, hey, I’m gonna do this. We have a big plan to do some things and I said, okay, I can help, all of a sudden silence. And then came back a third time and then they were ready to get going. And it’s a great case study, if you will, in that journey, in their heads that they have to get to it. We’re there for them. We can spend the time, educate, but they’ve got to eventually say, okay, I’m ready.

Yeah. And especially if you show them the reality, it can take time for them to process it, and to accept it, and come around to it, and stop thinking about the impossible and accept the possible. And that can be not an easy process at all. Especially if you’re in business and you have your dreams and you may not fully accomplish it, but half of something is better than all of nothing.

Yeah, and it’s even getting started. I understand that a lot of what we’ll do in those cases is share a lot of stories that are real cases, real issues that our clients have had, especially in the not starting to address things or delaying things. And that becomes even more critical the older they are. It’s one thing for a 35-year-old business owner to say, oh, I’ve got time. They can make it through another couple of economic cycles. But when we’re talking to folks in their especially 60s, 70s, even 80s, there’s not as much room for error or not as much room to wait.

Exactly, you need time to enjoy the fruits of your labor as well. So on this vein, what is the most important question that business owners, entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?

There are so many very most important questions, Steve, but I think the first is, it’s a little bit of what I talked about at the beginning. What are my goals? What do I really want to be doing? The business has been my life. I enjoy it, but am I going to do this until I’m done living?  So what are my goals? What do I want to do? Related to that, really importantly, we always say, get a really good understanding of the value of the business today. What am I worth today? How much money do I need? It’s that combination of questions where they intersect. And so if they can simply get an idea of value and work with a financial planner to understand what they might need, that gets eyes opened. It’s really the kick in the rear end to say, okay, it’s worth, let’s say, 5 million, but my advisor says I need 10. Okay, now we really need to do some things. But if they don’t get that wake-up call, they’re not going to get there. So really hard conversations with themselves, family, spouse, about where we’re headed, and understand where we are. That’s that combination question. So I cheated. I didn’t ask one question. I asked two or three.

No, it’s a good one. I think they are interrelated. What is the magic number that we need, and why, and how are we going to get it? And that’s what you can answer. Excellent. So, if people would like to learn more, maybe they want to have a conversation with you around that. Where should they go and where can they find you?

Thanks, Steve. Yeah, they can email me. It’s [email protected]. They can look me up on LinkedIn and the website is getonthevaluetrack.com.

Yeah. Well, that’s a good idea to get on the Value Track, the sooner, the better. So, David, thanks for coming and sharing your 5-step process of getting that value out of your business. Figuring out what this process looks like, what’s your value, putting the team together, making sure you shake those skeletons out of the cupboard, clean them out before the investors come, and then enhance that value, get to your value. And those of you listening, if you enjoyed this conversation, then stay tuned because I have a wonderful entrepreneur coming on the show every week. So, thank you, David, for coming and thanks for listening.

Dr. Karen Hills Pruden, Founder and CEO of Pruden Global Business Solutions Consulting and the Sister Leaders Community, is driven by a mission to increase the number of women in senior leadership and help them go from intrapreneur to entrepreneur with the tools to sustain long-term success.

We learn about Karen’s journey from struggling to find mentorship in middle management to breaking into senior leadership and founding organizations that empower women professionals. She explains the Learn, Practice, Teach Framework, a structured approach that helps professionals transition from intrapreneurship (working for others) to entrepreneurship (leading their own ventures). She also introduces the Professional Equity Model, emphasizing relationships, reputation, and expertise as key drivers of career and business success. She highlights the power of mentorship, strategic growth, and continuous learning in building expertise and staying competitive.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest today is Karen Hills Pruden, the founder and CEO of Pruden Global Business Solutions Consulting and the Sister Leaders Community, a global community of exceptional men and women leaders of every generation committed to increasing the number of women in senior leadership. Karen is an expert in empowering businesses to build high performing leaders, and the author or co-author of, wait for this, 32 books. Karen, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I’m excited about this conversation.

Well, I am excited too. I’ve never met such a prolific author as you are. So, let’s start with your “Why,” because someone like you, I’m sure, has a very powerful “Why.” So, what is your personal “Why,” and what are you doing in your practice and in your business to manifest it?

Absolutely. So my “Why” in helping women professionals acquire and sustain themselves in senior leadership has to do with a pain point that happened in my career about 16 years ago. 16 years ago, I was in middle management, had lingered there for about a decade and I wanted to go into leadership, but I did not know of any senior leaders who happened to be women. And so at that time in my career, LinkedIn was about five years old. I jumped on LinkedIn, I did some research, looked for women leaders who look like me, African American, who were in a vice president position and who had been in that position for at least a decade because I wanted a mentor. So I got my two, number one and number two choices, shot off a direct message through LinkedIn with a copy of my resume with the request for mentorship. And then they made me wait about two weeks. And then at that two-week mark, my number one selection came through and said she will be glad to be my mentor for $350 an hour. Now, back then, I wasn’t rolling like that so $350 an hour was a lot for me but what do you do when you are looking to achieve a goal and someone has achieved it and they can share that blueprint with you. So I negotiated one hour a month for one year. So my contract with her was one $350 for one hour a month for one year. And I worked with her for one year, four months after that one year, I was invited to apply for a senior leadership position. I went through the 4 month process and I have been in senior leadership since then. And so, in terms of my personal “Why,” I devised my professional development corporation for women professionals because it should not be this difficult to find a mentor when you are looking to go to leadership. And so, that is the whole vision and mission of my organization.

The mission is to increase the number of women in senior leadership and allow them the experience and education to sustain themselves.
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That’s great. That’s very good work. And you were very smart to invest in a great mentor because that’s one of the best things a young person, even a not so young person can do to basically follow the people who’ve already done it and just to do what they are doing and what they learn and cut years out of your learning curve. So that’s amazing. And you also launched this big community, the sister leaders community. So you’re helping other people. So how are you helping other people? And we are a podcast of frameworks and you have several frameworks that you talked about and it was kind of hard to pick, but we picked one which helps intrapreneurs to evolve into entrepreneurs. So first, please share with us what’s the difference between an intrapreneur and an entrepreneur and then what is your three-step process to get there?

Yeah, absolutely. So, an intrapreneur is simply someone who works for someone else to facilitate their mission and their goals. So, if you are not the owner of where you work, then you are an intrapreneur. You have the same competencies as an entrepreneur, but an entrepreneur actually works for themselves to facilitate their own vision. So, if you’re working for someone else, you are an intrapreneur. If you’re facilitating your own company, facilitating your own goals, then you are an entrepreneur. And yes, I do have several frameworks that I work with high-performing professionals.

And one is the Learn, Practice, Teach framework that I have.
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Yeah. Well, I had a boss many years ago, maybe 30 years ago, I was working at a big bank and I was the assistant to the CEO of this bank, and I would attend all the executive meetings and take notes. And in one of the meetings, the CEO said, first, you have to work and then you can manage. And it was about someone who was wanting to be promoted, but they didn’t have the practical experience. And he basically said the same thing. First, you have to be really good at what you do. And in order to even practice, you have to learn the craft so that they allow you to practice. You won’t allow a brain surgeon to operate before they have done their medical school and their residency and all that stuff. Very good. So what is the typical framework for going from learn to teach? What’s the timeframe that most people are looking at if they start with the learning phase?

Well, there’s no standard timeframe because, of course, it depends on the individual, their skill set, their capability, and their commitment, their commitment to elevation. But I can tell you if you are doing something every day, all day, generally,

if you learn from your opportunities that you have and working in that industry, because we have all of our challenges and opportunities, you will become more than just proficient.
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Yeah. I mean, we’re all familiar with the famous 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell popularized. I think he also talks about this, that there’s a big difference between practice and intentional practice. And they say that some people have 15 years experience and other people have one year experience 15 times. So how do you make sure that someone will have that 5 or 10 or 15 year experience and not, you know, how do you become intentional about your experience so that you move fast in this?

Awesome question. I love it. So you are looking at what are the receipts that one has generated by the work in the marketplace? And when I say receipts, what are the results that you have generated as you’re doing the work? And so, your work will tell how well you are doing what it is that you do. For instance, my area of expertise was 28 years, I worked at head of HR. While working HR for 28 years, head of HR for about 15. And so, my metrics, because I believe in, that’s my love language, metrics and technology are my love language, my metrics would show that I help populate the workforce of organizations with the right people, with the right skills at the right time, based on the departmental’s capabilities of achieving their departmental goals. And so, you have to have quantitative results-based metrics associated with your work to show how proficient you are. And again, that can be acquired at 15 times or 15 years. It just depends on what is your proficiency doing that period of time.

Okay. So there’s no rhyme and reason of how to be intentional about, if it’s more about KPIs, how do you measure the output and the effectiveness and the deliverables? And I mean, I can see that if someone is winning work for their employer and they are successfully executing projects, then essentially, they are creating those receipts that you’re talking about?

Absolutely. So I will say that the more that you practice your skills, the more opportunities you have to reach those different anomalies that happen just by operating business. And you’ll get that, you’ll acquire the knowledge of how to address those ancillary situations that happen just by you doing the things that you do. So, you gave an example of someone doing something 15 times or someone doing something 15 years. I’ve never been an advocate about how long someone has held a job.

I've always been an advocate about how proficient you are in a job that you say that you are expert of.
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And so just rolling on the clock and being in a position for a period of years does not mean that you’ve actually hands-on done the work, dealt with the complexities of the work, have dealt with the evolution of the work, because work does evolve. How we do it in terms of processes, systems that we use, the talent that is required to do the work evolves over time. And sometimes that, depending on the industry that you work in, that can be a lot. That can be a lot of change. I have IT professionals that jump jobs every two to three years because they get different certifications based on the new software and hardware that are out that have changed the game. If you think about just the number of different programs that we have out here that have changed how we do business. Think about AI. People are incorporating AI, talking about AI, the impact of AI. We weren’t talking about AI five years ago, not the way that we’re talking about it now. And so, the individual who’s going to be extraordinary and super proficient using their skill set is the person who grows. They stay current and they grow what’s going on in their industry and they are constantly doing the work. Or at least supervising those who are doing the work so they know what the strengths, the weaknesses and the opportunities and the threats are of doing business the way that they do business at that time versus how they did it previously.

Now, you also talk about this concept of professional equity. So it’s interesting because it also rhymes with this idea that even when you’re an entrepreneur, you can start building your professional equity. Maybe you don’t have a business where you are accumulating financial equity, but you can build your professional equity. So, how do you accumulate professional equity and how does it help you start the business?

Absolutely. So, equity is really something that you can tap into when needed. A lot of us think about equity when we think about those things that increase in value over time. If anyone has home ownership, it is commonly associated with home ownership. Professional equity has three components to it. It is relationships, reputation, and area expertise. And I’m going to explain each very quickly. So, the reason why it is three is because

successful individuals professionally, even if you're not in leadership, have learned how to leverage relationships up and down the chain, and they know how to communicate with specific parties in and out of business.
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And what I mean by in and out of business is that sometimes lunch and dinner with vendors, with supervisors outside of the office, a lot of deals are talked through, a lot of deals evolve and are made during those particular times. And so, there are opportunities for us to elevate our value within the workplace when we have those working lunches, working dinners, and different things like that. So, relationships are the people you work with, the peers you have, your customers, your vendors, your volunteers, your potential vendors, because you always want to always have one or two potential vendors on deck in case you lose a particular vendor. Otherwise, your business comes to a standstill. So, relationships is one leg. The second leg is reputation. What are you known for? What problem do you solve in your market that you are known for? When someone hears your business name or hear you as an individual, what do they think of? And usually it has a lot to do with the problem that you solve. And so, in order for people to be aware of that, you have to put that out into the ether. You have to make it common knowledge as to what problem you solve. You usually have to have a track record or some receipt that are known, that can be validated and that are repeated. And so, that is your reputation. And then your area expertise. Generalists are wonderful. They understand how everything kind of works together, but it is the expert that is called upon to save the day. And so, when you have an area expertise that everyone knows that this is your area expertise and know that you operate very well in this area expertise, when it is needed, people will think of you. People will hire your business, create opportunities. And so, professional equity is what you tap into during market chaos, why one customer may choose your business over another. For a professional, the way that we can leverage it is doing a reduction in force. When they have everybody’s name on the table, when they’re talking about the pros and cons, the strengths and opportunities of each of these employees and what they can afford to lose, such as critical positions versus those that they possibly can afford to lose, your name may make the cut simply because they know what it is that you offer and you resolve in terms of your skill set within an organization. And that is how you leverage your professional equity doing industry chaos or market chaos.

Yeah. I mean, it’s really interesting how you articulate this because I was vaguely aware of this before I started my business at the age of 35. I felt like it helped me to have accumulated experience and built relationship, but I didn’t think about it as a professional equity, which is kind of the equity I was bringing into my business. Whereas if I started at 21, I would not have had this equity and it would have been much, much, much harder to do. So that’s interesting. Yeah, even when I came to America, I didn’t know anyone, but at least I had the expertise. I had my reputation on LinkedIn, so people could check me out. I already had a couple of books. So talking about books, I’d like to ask you, so you have authored and co-authored 32 books, and many of them are bestsellers. So, if someone would like to get familiar with your work, where should they start? What should they read?

Two books in particular. One for the professional or one that wants to be a high-performing professional is Pruden Principles, 10 Strategies to Propel Women to the C-Suite. C-Suite is a synonym for senior leadership because every business does not necessarily have officers who begin with a C, but it is strategically written and intentionally written 10 whole chapters that talk about everything about data analytics and the power of data analytics. It talks about for women leaders that you don’t have to act like one of the boys so that you don’t have to simulate and emulate a man and men-like mannerisms when you make it to leadership. It talks about images more than a blazer. It talks about having a specialty. It talks about how to negotiate your salary and 20 different things that you can ask for in addition to salary to increase your total compensation. And so, it really is an in-depth blueprint for that professional who is looking to move into senior leadership and want to know exactly what it is that they should at least start by taking a look at. And then I have my most recent book, which is the Comprehensive Business Audit, which is part of my Amplify Your Value series, which is 100 questions that you can ask within your business. It determines your organizational readiness.

So, you can determine if you have the right people with the right skills at the right time, based on what your organizational goals are.
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You can determine whether or not you have the right system operating for what it is that you need your business to do utilizing the system. And then it can help you determine where you are in terms of your processes and how efficient those processes are. And so, it’s broke down to those three sections. There are about 33 questions each section. And once you go through that book, you will have a very good idea on where the gaps are within your business and those things. And then you can kind of prioritize those things that you want to address based on capabilities, financial capabilities and talent capabilities.

Wow. That’s very comprehensive. So, the Pruden Principles is all about someone trying to get on the C-suite and what are the 10 areas they’d have to master to be successful and the other one is 100 questions to essentially maximize your business and make your business as good as it possibly can. That’s great. I mean, if you gather the C-suite and then you have your 100-question plan and you execute that, you’re probably going to make it to CEO.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Or you at least have a plan, information that you can devise a plan based on what it is that you consider to be your priorities, whether it’s for your career or for your business.

Wow. Okay, well, as you’re winding down this conversation, I’d like to ask you this last question. So, you transitioned from intrapreneur to entrepreneur, you are running and CEO of Pruden Global Business Solutions Consulting. So as an entrepreneur, what is the most important question that you suggest any entrepreneur should ask themselves?

It depends on where they are in their entrepreneurship. So if you are a new entrepreneur, I would ask you, what do you believe is your value in the marketplace? Because that is going to determine where your customers come from. Are your customers going to be looking for you or are you going to be spending most of your money marketing and branding, trying to find your customers? So I would ask, what is your value in the marketplace if you’re a beginning entrepreneur? If you are an entrepreneur who have been in business for more than five years, I would caution you to look and make sure that your infrastructure is set up for your success. Because if you reach the five year mark, a lot of businesses go out of business by five years. So congratulations if you have made it to five years. But now let’s take a hard look at your infrastructure to make sure that you are set up in terms of your system, your processes, and your talent to take you beyond five years so that you can not only be competitive, so you can sustain yourself to another five years. And then if you are a seasoned entrepreneur, I would challenge you to shake up the way that you do things. You cannot continue to do things the way that you do things and have done things for the last two or five years, there are always going to be small changes that you can make even if your company is successfully doing it the way that you’re doing it. Figure out how you can incorporate some software, systems, or processes so that you can stay more competitive in your market by maybe having a leg up on your competitors because you’re constantly revising, tweaking your business. And so based on where you are in your entrepreneur journey, whether you just got your LLC, whether you’ve made it to five years, or whether you’re a seasoned individual, there is always ongoing work to do.

Yeah, that’s a never-ending process and the world is fast commoditizing. That’s how I see it and you have to be, I mean, this is the old Ray Kroc, McDonald’s founder, when the staff was complaining that Burger King and Wendy’s were all copying McDonald’s and he said, ladies and gentlemen, we just have to innovate faster than people can copy us. So that’s the thing. So Dr. Karen Hills Pruden, the founder and CEO of multiple organizations. If people would like to learn more about what you do, connect with you, where should they go?

Absolutely. So I would direct you to LinkedIn. That is my playground. That’s kind of where I hang out at. I also have a website that is my namesake where you can stay in contact with me, www.drkarenhillspruden.com. But I also want to offer a free gift to anyone who is listening to me. And so, I will provide a link to a free downloadable that will give you 20 additional things that you can ask an employer for if you happen to be an entrepreneur that are not salaried. So, it will give you the opportunity to see those things that maybe you can negotiate. And listen, I’ll let you in on a secret. You do not have to be new and applying for a job, you can be asking these things of your ongoing employer as well. So, I will provide that to be part of the podcast notes so that you can download it and maybe we can increase your total compensation by next quarter.

Okay, I’m all for that. Thank you, Dr. Karen Hills Pruden. Thank you, Karen, for coming and sharing your wisdom with us. And I look forward to the download as well. And those of you listening, stay tuned because we have successful entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes and colors coming to the show and sharing their experience with us. Thanks for coming and thank you for listening.

Adam Goldman, Franchise Coach, Consultant, and author of The Franchisee Lifestyle, is driven by a mission to help individuals find their dream franchise opportunities and align them with their goals for a fulfilling lifestyle.

We learn about Adam’s journey into franchise coaching and his 3 Filters Framework, a tool he uses to match individuals with franchise opportunities. The framework evaluates three key factors: sales vs. execution, full-time vs. part-time engagement, and brick-and-mortar vs. service-based models. Adam explains how these filters guide potential franchisees to discover opportunities that fit their skills, preferences, and lifestyle. He also shares insights on the differences between lifestyle and growth businesses, the keys to franchising success, and the importance of finding the right cultural fit.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Adam Goldman, a franchise coach and consultant and the author of The Franchisee Lifestyle. Adam, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Steve. So great to be here today.

Great to have you here. So, let’s start with your “Why.” What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your business?

So, I really have two “Why’s.” Let’s start with them and they’re in no particular order. For my personal “Why,” it’s really to kind of have a great life in general. I’m talking about things such as working at my own schedule, being able to be there for my kids. My daughters are seven, nine, and 13 and I’m not getting any younger. So, to kind of make the best out of this time through travel or through fitness or whatever that might be, and my business allows me to do that. In many ways, my business is a lifestyle business. And number two, my “Why,” when it comes to my company, is really I’m here to help people.

So, what that means is my work is, I almost see myself as a dating agency between individuals and franchise brands.
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That’s interesting, and we’ll get into what you do and being a franchise coach. But what struck me that you mentioned in your introduction is that you said that it’s very much a lifestyle business. And I think you’re not just preaching franchise, you are a franchisee yourself. Or are you not?

No, I’m actually not a franchisee per se. I’m part of a network. But we’re not a franchise organization.

Okay, well, some of the franchise coaching organizations are franchises.

That’s right, that’s correct. We’re not one.

You’re not one, okay. So then my question is, what differentiates in your view, a lifestyle business from maybe a growth business or whatever the other category you call it? And what are the pros and cons?

That’s a great question. The way I see a lifestyle business is being one with flexibility. I have friends that are amazing entrepreneurs and I love them to death, but they have young kids, they don’t see them. They might be traveling on a roadshow all year long. And I’m just not willing myself to kind of, for me, it’s about time. What kind of hours you’re working, what kind of flexibility do you have on a day to day basis?

That makes sense. That’s a great perspective. And I have not really considered this before. So it’s a great argument in favor of a franchise or any other kind of lifestyle businesses. And do you consider franchises as more likely to be lifestyle businesses as opposed to maybe growth businesses? What is your view on that?

So, I think franchises could be both depending on which one it is. So, let’s talk about it being a lifestyle business. If you have an amazing system that’s working and maybe it’s one where you’re managing it through managers and it’s a low employee headcount, then it could be a lifestyle business. Now, by the way, just because a business starts out as a lifestyle doesn’t mean it can’t be growth. And let’s say something’s pure growth. I might have an amazing opportunity. I have friends that are multi-unit owners that don’t necessarily have obligations outside of their work, and they’re able to scale these things up, and that’s kind of become their life, and they’re okay with that.

So basically, a franchise can be either or both?

Absolutely. And look, I’m gonna throw a wrench in this, Steve. The same franchise that was a growth business could be a lifestyle business down the road. It just all depends on the cycle of the business.

That’s interesting, which means that maybe there’s a restaurant and you grow it to capacity and then there’s nowhere to grow anymore without starting another unit. And if you don’t want to, then it becomes a lifestyle business.

Yes, absolutely. I mean, look, my own example is when I owned my office cleaning company, my day-to-day at the beginning was much different than eight years in. We were already established. I had more employees working. It was not a lifestyle business at the very beginning. It was very hands-on, working on Sundays as well and just trying to build this thing up.

Yeah, I like it. I mean, you’re kind of flipping my script because generally I look at growth businesses as something maybe more valuable or has more potential or has certain advantages over lifestyle businesses. But certainly you’re opening my eyes up to the advantage of lifestyle businesses. And it really depends on the life of the individual that they want to live, whether they choose one or the other. That’s great. So, let’s talk about franchises and let’s talk about your framework that you have developed or you’re using, helping mentees pick a franchise. So someone you’re coaching, what do you look at? What are the three or four things that you look at to determine what could be a good franchise for them?

So, the first one I’m looking at is sales versus execution. Meaning how good of a salesperson is this person? Are they really sales heavy, the system, or is it more something that has an engine where I don’t care who that person is, it’s gonna be successful? The second thing I’m looking at is full versus part-time. There’s a kind of a misconception, Steve, in my industry that every single franchise business is flipping burgers in the back for a brick-and-mortar retail. That’s not the case. There are a lot of part-time or semi-absentee opportunities. The third framework is brick-and-mortar versus a service business. Again, misconception, franchising, first thought, quick service restaurant, fast food. My candidates I connect with 75 industries and many of them are non-brick-and-mortar businesses. In fact, 70 to 80% of my placements last year were non-brick-and-mortar. And that’s really an interesting way to kind of divide it between brick and mortar storefront and service companies.

So, give me an example of brick-and-mortar. So obviously a restaurant would be a brick-and-mortar unless it’s maybe a home delivery service. I don’t know. But what delineates between a brick-and-mortar and the pure service? What are the features of each?

The main definition of the difference is one is a storefront, like a restaurant of a fitness studio. And the second one does not have a storefront. Now, they might have a physical location to store product, but it’s not something that’s on Main Street and that’s retail.

Do you find that most franchises are B2C rather than B2B?

In my experience, many of franchises are B2C as opposed to B2B. There are B2B franchises, no question, but B2C tends to be more popular in my industry.

Do you have any insights as to why that may be?

I have no idea. It’s a great question. So, I mean, I think, look, if you look at a process, it’s got to be something that’s cookie cutter. And my only take on that is that, and look, there are commercial-related businesses. My business was B2B. I dealt with commercial cleaning. I’m sure you could appreciate that the local regulation in California, when it comes to doing services towards business, might be different than other places. That might be part of it, of regulation state by state.

So maybe when you have a B2C business, it’s easier to tailor it to a specific niche where it becomes pretty cookie cutter. You can systemize it and then teach someone to do it, whereas a B2B may be more distinct. I mean, the customers are more or less alike when it’s B2B than when it’s individuals?

That’s one theory. No one’s ever asked me more B2B or more B2C and more importantly why. I haven’t really spent much time thinking about that. That’s my theory.

Yeah, no, no, it’s very interesting. So, you’re talking about full-time and part-time, so how can someone run a franchise part-time?

So, number one, they have to be good. I have this really cool guy here in Houston and he ran a fitness studio. It was Pilates. He’s a pastor on the side. So he has his church. He’s just good with people. You gotta, hopefully, if you’re a successful pastor, you gotta be good with people. So, the way he ran it on the side is, in the morning, he sat down for coffee with his manager, Monday through Thursday, for an hour. And that’s how he kind of ran it. Went to his church, and then the next day he saw them at 8 to 9 AM. He had a good person that was running it day to day, and that’s actually one way of doing it part time. Every franchise system is different, but that’s one example of one way to do that. I have certain businesses that are more hands-off than others. If I think about a market like salon, suites, which are just kind of a situation where it’s a real estate play and very hands-off, no employees whatsoever, you take space and you rent it out to beauty professionals, pretty easy once this thing’s up and running to run it on your cell phone or your computer. I mean you don’t have any employees at all, it’s pretty hands-off.

Very interesting. What about the sales versus execution paradigm? And maybe I misunderstood, but you said that you’re looking at this person is good at sales or you can have a solution for them even if they’re not good at anything. I mean, you didn’t use this word exactly, but what did you mean by that? And is execution not a talent? Do people not have to be good at execution to run an all sales franchise?

So, look, let’s kind of talk about sales heavy franchises. I have franchises in my inventory where the requirement of the person running the business is they’ve got to be good at selling. They need to, it might not necessarily be door to door, but it’s got to be someone that’s comfortable and kind of showing their face and maybe even being the one going out on appointments or hiring to have someone like that. Or very quickly, many of them actually require the owner operator to actually be good at sales. In many ways, you’re buying a sales job. That’s one bucket. I’ve got another bucket of franchises. Sometimes things kind of fit in between where you don’t have to be a great salesperson. You could be someone that’s an amazing operator, but you hate selling. You might even hate face-to-face contact with customers. You might prefer to be in front of a computer. And look, my example for this is that I have businesses that have leads that are just coming, just unbelievable amount of leads. So, for instance, in Houston, where I live, in swim schools, it’s easier to get into private school than to get into a swim school. And that means that when my friend owns a swim instruction franchise, he has 200 kids on his waiting list. It becomes less of an issue of finding kids to actually swim than actually finding people that will be the swim instructors.

Yeah. So, some people say hiring is the new sales.

Yes.

Sometimes it’s selling people to be your employee on being at your employees is much harder and find the right people. So let’s switch gears here. Let’s talk about what makes a brand successful. So, you represent many brands. It’s hard to get to qualify, to be even on your roster of brands. What are the kind of brands that you want to work with that can have the potential to be successful?

So, look, I would say that what makes a brand successful, in my opinion, is if they’re able to create a network of franchisees that are successful themselves in making money. That’s the definition of success.

They have to do two things. They as a franchisor need to scale, number one, but number two, they need to make sure that their franchisees are happy.
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So, you’re basically running two businesses in one, is what you’re saying?

I’m saying that you got to expand and you need to take care of your franchisee base at the same time. That’s hard.

So you’re running your own business and then you’re building a different business, which is being a franchisor and you have to be able to juggle both.

So what I’m saying is, actually I’m not talking about running your own separate business. Let’s just say you just decided to go into the franchising world. You can be an amazing marketer. There’s stories about franchise brands that are amazing at selling, but horrible at execution with their franchise base. And then next thing you know, in a year or two, they’re all closing and they’re all unhappy. I’m saying that it’s two roles for the head office. Number one to actually expand, but number two, to actually make sure that they’re happy and this model’s good.

Yeah. But isn’t it the same for any business? They have to get new customers and then you have to serve those customers. So they need to use and they need the delivery skills at the same time.

Absolutely. Look, it’s the same thing, but this is a little bit more challenging because you’re herding cats. You’re dealing with all these people that want to be entrepreneurs, that have gone ahead and invested many times much of their life savings, and they have expectations from you. And sometimes these expectations aren’t in your disclosure document. And sometimes, frankly, the expectations aren’t realistic or aren’t reasonable. But that doesn’t matter. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. They expect you to actually perform and to be making tons of money yesterday.

Yeah, that’s interesting. So what about the other side? So what makes for a successful franchisee?

Well, first thing is they have to find the right system, because it’s very hard to throw a dart and be like, oh my gosh, I found this amazing franchise. Another misconception in my industry is that people think, oh, all franchises are the same. That’s not the case at all. It’s kind of like a marriage. I see my role as being like eHarmony or Match.com where I’m trying to make this perfect fit. And presuming they have that perfect fit, I coach my candidates that they have to see themselves as being a silver bullet. And what I mean by that is, is that what makes a successful franchisee is someone that’s done everything in their power to be successful. One of my favorite mentors that I met when I was in Eastern Europe, at the beginning of my career, told me that the difference between excellence and average is just working 2% more. And so I liken that to being a franchisee. Have you made relations with the head office that you haven’t had before? Do you have people inside the system that are like you or that are mentors that you can cultivate and then you can kind of rely upon to satisfy, to actually do a little bit better from your business point of view.

So, a franchisee has to be a highly coachable person?

Absolutely. I mean, if you’re the kind of person and we can talk about this, but like if you’re the kind of person that that doesn’t want to have golden arches, you want to have golden circles and you want to sell kebabs instead of hamburgers, you probably shouldn’t be in the franchising world.

So, can an entrepreneurial person be a good franchisee in your opinion?

Absolutely, but there are different types of entrepreneurs. I think of myself as being an entrepreneur. I’m just the kind of entrepreneur that kind of needed help on the operations side. There are operational people that want better operational excellence. They want to be in a system. I mean, the successful franchisees, even ones that are very entrepreneurial minded that are willing to follow the system and see the value in the system come back to me. And they say to me, Adam, I want to thank you, because you have saved me by making these matches, all this money and mistakes I otherwise would have made.

So, who is the wrong candidate for a franchise? Let’s say someone coming out of corporate America and they had some level of success as an executive, they have the money to invest in a franchise, they need to find that new living. They are not yet 45, 50 years old. They can’t retire yet. So they have to make it successful and they still don’t work out. So, what prevents people from succeeding if they kind of have the high level criteria?

There are these black swan events like COVID. Where you buy a fitness franchise and then you get shut down, you’re undercapitalized. But in my opinion, the number one reason is it’s just a bad fit. They’ve done it on their own. They’ve actually decided to invest in something they probably shouldn’t have invested in before. If you do your homework and you find something that really fits what you’re looking for from a culture point of view and from a characteristic point of view, your odds of success are quite high.

But surely not everyone succeeds.

I get it.

Yeah. So, what happens? Why is it that some people don’t succeed?

So, if I look back at my past of things that haven’t worked out, it’s been a cultural fit. It’s been something where someone is a white collar person and they buy a blue collar business and they’re used to having all these things in corporate America. And then they’re in this business. It probably isn’t the right business for them. And then they say, wait a second here, I made the wrong choice. And it’s already too late. They realize, wait, I really don’t wanna be involved in a service business. I don’t wanna be managing these employees. I don’t wanna be making estimates. This is different than what I thought this might be. I’m used to working in my cush job, and this is not the right fit for me.

Yeah, I can see that. Do you find that the coach is able to eliminate most of these dead ends and can avoid the pitfalls that people can fall into?

I do, but I actually, look, I’m someone that comes from the IT industry, Steve. And what I would say is this, that I think there are two different things when it comes to IT errors. There’s user error and there’s a system error. And if I look at the, I can make the most amazing match in the world, it could be Chick-fil-A in an amazing location, but the person’s not gonna do the work, then it’s not gonna work out no matter what.

Okay, that’s fair. So let me ask you in closing, what is the most important question any entrepreneur should ask themselves in your opinion?

What’s their “Why?” I mean, in general, if it’s franchise or not. Meaning, why are you doing this? How does success look like for you? How do you measure success? What kind of KPM do you measure? I’m a huge Jesse Itzler fan. He’s the one that wrote a book. He’s one that married to Sarah Blakely. The Spanx founder, and just an amazing entrepreneur. And he has a different philosophy on different things. But look, it’s really understanding what you’re doing. And it’s not a question only about your business, but it’s about your life in general. And is your business, is this the kind of thing that’s really taking you to where you want it to take you to, your life in general?

Yeah, I feel the same way that, what’s your ideal life and the business can be a vehicle if you’ve got the right business to it. But what is it that you really want out of life and then maybe reverse engineer into the business that you need.

And look, that’s the number one reason why people invest in franchises. Because many people have this drive to start something. And a great franchise brand is a great vehicle to kind of get you there if it’s done right.

Okay, so a fascinating thing. There are a lot going for a franchise. So if people would like to explore whether they could be a good franchisee or whether there are franchise formats that could be exciting or inspiring for them, how should they go about this?

So, my company, Franchise Coach, provides a free service that’s a matchmaking service between potential franchisees and brands that are pre-screened that are in 75 different industries. And the next step is, if anyone’s interested in this, is to go ahead to my website, franchiseadam.com, schedule a quick 15-minute chat with me. If I don’t think you’re fit, I promise to let you know. Alternatively, you can go to franchisecoach.net to just find out a little bit more about our brand and also to just go ahead and to book a time there as well.

Okay. So, franchisecoach.net, franchiseadam.com.

That’s correct. That’s right.

So do check it out. So, Adam knows his stuff, I read his book. It’s a very good one. Franchisee Lifestyle. So if you’re interested to potentially become a franchisee, even if you are thinking about becoming a franchisor, I would recommend this book. It’s a good one. It’s a quick read too. And some customer stories as well. So you can really put yourself in the shoes of the franchisee and what they need to do. So, check out his book on Amazon and check out Adam’s websites and I think you’ll enjoy it. So, Adam, thanks for coming and sharing your perspectives on franchising. Fascinating. And those of you listening to the show. If you enjoy this, give us a like and review follow us on YouTube and help us push the show to a bigger audience. Thank you for coming and thanks for listening.

Mark Josephson, Executive Coach, three-time CEO with three exits, Founder, Advisor, and Investor, is driven by a mission to empower leaders and think big to achieve clarity, purpose, and lasting impact in their organizations and lives.

We learn about Mark’s journey from leading three companies to successful exits to coaching leaders and teams to unlock their potential. He explains the Wouldn’t It Be Great If framework, a four-step approach to setting ambitious goals: pushing away from the desk, asking bold questions, identifying what needs to be true to achieve them, and brainstorming without constraints. Mark also introduces the Balcony vs. Dance Floor framework, which helps CEOs balance strategic vision with operational focus. He shares lessons from his entrepreneurial journey and insights from his podcast Critical Moments.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Mark Josephson, Executive Coach, three-time CEO with three exits, Founder, Advisor, and Investor. Mark, welcome to the show.

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

Oh, it’s exciting to have you. You have built two companies up to exit. Oh sorry, three companies. That’s very impressive. And you’re advising other companies. And now you’re going to advise our listeners, which is very cool. So, let’s start with my favorite question, which is, what is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice?

Great question. I believe that we have a choice that we make every single day that we wake up to put goodness in the world or to take goodness out of the world. And I wake up every day, most days anyway, with the intention of helping the people I meet, the people I come across have better days than they did yesterday. It is that simple. I want to make a positive impact on the people around me. I will say that I have three goals as it relates to those “Why” more personally and I borrowed this from somebody else so I didn’t invent this but it resonated. Number one, I want to stay married to my wife. And I’m specific because that’s the most important relationship that I have in the world. We will be celebrating our 26th wedding anniversary next week. And we met in college and have been together for over 30 years. So it is the number one most important thing that I need to do every day is make sure my wife is happy. Number two is I want to be thin and fit and why I say that is because I want to live a long time. I want to be healthy. Another really important relationship in my life is with me and my health and well-being. So I want to take that seriously and the third goal, Steve, is that I want my sons and I’m blessed with three sons, 22, 20 and 17. I want them to call me when they need help. That’s it. I’m going to be really happy and healthy and will die a happy man if those things are true.

It sounds like that’s a great formula. Relationships, purpose, and more relationships. It helps.  I mean, they say that these are the three most important things that are required for happiness, so, definitely, you seem to be on the right track. No surprises there. Well, before we talk about the framework, I’m curious about these three businesses that you ran and exited.

Sure.

Tell me a little bit about that. Is this, is all this private equity, what companies did you find them? How did you come about it?

Sure, so to start at 10,000 feet, I’ve spent 30 years in technology startups with being born and raised in dot-com one in the 1990s. And I was blessed to be at a high growth company that went public and sold. And I ended up having 12 different jobs in five years there, like truly a rocket ship kind of ride. That was a company called about.com. And I got my MBA in the world there. That was incredibly foundational for me. I have been the CEO three times. The first two times I was hired in, and the third time I was a founder. The first company was a company called Outside.in. In 2008, it was a Union Square Ventures company that was trying to organize the web’s information by location. We believe that the explosion of independent and self-publishing created a lot of news and information that would be a whole lot more valuable to people if they could place it in some context. It was 2008. The iPhone was just coming out. The intention was to build a consumer application. We ended up pivoting and building a B2B Sass platform for media companies to aggregate, curate and publish news and information at a lat long, at a very specific location. We sold that business to AOL in 2011. AOL at the time was making a big investment in local, and they had many problems, two specific problems in their business. The editorial costs were too high, and the ad products and monetization were too low. So the intent was to use the aggregation software platform that we built to improve the cost structure and efficacy of the team at AOL Local. I spent two and a half wonderful years there, loved almost every minute of it until I was called back to my calling, which is to be a leader at a high growth, smaller company. And the second company was link shortening company, Bitly. And you may know the bit.ly, the really small links.

Yeah, we use them.

So, Bitly is one of the most widely used and least understood businesses that I’ve come across. But even in 2013, when I joined the company, the global usage was in the billions, not in the hundreds of thousands, I mean, truly the billions. If the usage was here, monetization was here. So, over the first three years in that company, the usage kept growing, but we got monetization to the level that we were profitable and growing. And then we sold to private equity at that point, three years into Spectrum Equity, San Francisco and New York. I then spent three years inside of private equity, scaling the business a couple of times over that. The third time as the CEO, I made the classic case of hubris. I could start something after being hired in CEO. And I started a company with some venture funds called Cast Iron. And Cast Iron is Etsy for homemade food. And we sold that business to a private company in October of 2024. And it’s being expanded and growing. Yeah. So, pretty diverse set of things.

That’s good. That’s good experience. And now you’re here and you’re giving back. So please give something back to us in the form of a framework. What you talked about in our pre-interview is that, it’s really important for CEOs to be able to tap into the thinking of their team and to allow them and empower them to brainstorm well. So tell me about your framework, how to achieve that?

Sure. Let me start by saying this framework started as a conversation between my wife and me about our personal lives and our strategies that we’re trying to, how we wanted to live our lives. Our kids are getting older. The first one is about to finish high school. And I had, this was the time I was starting to think about leaving Bitly, like, all of that stuff was going on. I remember ‘cause I had a cocktail, she had a glass of wine, and we pushed back and we’re thinking, I said, wouldn’t it be great if I never had to ride New Jersey Transit ever again? And wouldn’t it be great if I could be at every single one of our son’s lacrosse games his senior year of high school? Because I’d missed 90% of them before. And there’s a bunch of other things. But what that turned into was a plan to make those things happen. We weren’t looking at the next week saying, how do I make that game on Wednesday at 3? Because that’s actually really hard to do. I’ve got a meeting, I’m going to be in the city, I’ve got employees, I’ve got all this stuff. But it’s actually almost easier to say, how do I go to every game versus go to any one individual game? And the reality of the world and the wall that’s in front of you at that time makes it really difficult to make those decisions and those leaps. So that’s translated into a framework that I use with my clients today, and it’s Wouldn’t It Be Great If. And Wouldn’t It Be Great If is just that, it is freeing yourself. I urge my clients to literally push back from the keyboard, sometimes put their feet up. If it’s late in the day, let’s have a drink. But let’s think about why you started this business or you’re in the job. What are your personal motivations? Is it to win or is it to just get by? What are your hopes and dreams that you want to accomplish in this business? And oftentimes I’m encouraging them or unlocking for them the true ambition that they have, which is to be really big and really successful and build the best software company in the world. That’s why you start these things. And they can be really big and meaningful. And a great example, and then I’ll talk about how we use it, is a lot of my clients just went through annual planning. An annual planning is a really complex way of exercise and negotiation with the leadership team, with your investors, with your own hopes and dreams. And I had a client came back and said, just had the team, we approved the plan. We’re going to grow it 46% next year. And I said, okay, is that really what you want to do? It’s like, oh, well, you know, our run rates, the marketing says they need more budget, sales is telling me about a product and all that stuff. And I said, but Billy, not his real name, wouldn’t it be great if you doubled next year? And it’s not outside the realm of possibility, in the growth stage of the company. And he said, well, I don’t even know how to think about that. I said, so let’s push back. Wouldn’t it be great if you doubled next year? That’s the first question. The second question is, what needs to be true for that to happen? Well, we’d need to hire 10 more salespeople and have them ramped by the end of Q1. Oh, we need to reduce churn by 15%. We would need to add a new product and move up market. But then you just keep working backwards to what would need to be true and you stack rank them and you start to attack them. And that is, Wouldn’t It Be Great If in a nutshell, is jumping far into the future, to the future you want, and then working backwards around what needs to be true in order for that to happen.

I love it. That’s great. It’s great future pacing, I think some people call this. Wonderful. So that’s your framework. Do you have a name for it?

Wouldn’t It Be Great If.

Okay. That’s the Wouldn’t It Be Great If framework.

Yes.

Love it. So let’s switch gears here and let’s talk about your podcast. So you have a podcast, Critical Moment. Tell me why you started this and what is your mission with it?

Thank you for asking. So I’m so passionate about the entrepreneurial journey and the leadership journey. The leadership journey that so many of my peers and my clients and my associates are in the middle of, and I’m sure so many of our listeners. And what I found when I looked at the landscape of podcasts, and the world doesn’t need another podcast from somebody like me, but what I do think it needs is a different kind of story. And the bell curve of startups and entrepreneurs, there’s a lot written about this over here, there’s a lot written and talked about over here, but there’s not a lot about the fat, meaty part in the middle, which is real people building real careers, real companies and real lives in tech. And so what I want to do and mean to do with critical moments is not get on the phone, a call with somebody and ask them, tell me your journey, tell me the tropey kind of, it’s not how I built this. It is one specific moment that can be really big, such as one of my guests talked about having the company just about sold, thought it was sold. A nine-figure deal, and to the point where the eight offices of the company all had t-shirts and cupcakes and champagne for the new company, for the acquirer. The top 50 people in the company had already been told what their new comp plans were by the buyer, and the next 50 people knew they were getting laid off in the transaction. That’s how real this was until the phone rang. And it was the head of Corp Dev saying, I never thought I’d have to make this call. That’s the critical moment. What were you doing? What did you do? And what did you learn from that, like real specific things that happen? I had a really powerful episode with a leader, she’s gone on to be incredibly successful. But it was the first time she was up for a C-level job in a promotion and she didn’t get it and she asked why and the CEO said, because people don’t like you. Could you imagine that moment being told that as a grown up professional who’s killing it by the way, and every single metric that the company measured itself on. And so there are critical moments in everyone’s career. Those are just two powerful examples. There’s lots of other ones as well. But I want to normalize the roller coaster of the journey and show that there are moments every day in our careers and our moments that we can learn from and make them more real.

Yeah, I mean, these tipping point moments, they really reset careers. And I have found that often when these critical moments happen, then we already are facing a flattening learning curve. And even though this is a shock, it pushes us to expose ourselves to another learning curve, and then it can become a really beneficial shift.

Yeah, and I don’t usually think about it this way, but when you’re building muscle, like the practice of lifting weights actually creates micro tears in your muscles that then have to form back over, like, and it’s kind of painful. If you’re doing it right. And that stuff happens every day. And the things that I’m most interested in in those conversations, which I think is really relevant to leaders, is how do you respond in the moment? And like, how do you react? What were you thinking when you got that feedback? Like, do you remember what room you were in? Who was the first person you called? Because you can see great leaders tune their instincts the right way and can do that. And I think you can prepare for that a little bit. If I’m ever in a situation, it’s okay to say, let me take a minute to think about that, for example. I also think there’s really important learnings that we could share. So for example, one of the biggest takeaways from that episode of the acquisition, which didn’t go through, was there were two things. One is that he had never met the CEO of the acquirer. Tried 15 times and they said, it’s just not necessary. It’s just, you don’t need, trust me, it’s a big buyer. Like it wasn’t like out of the ordinary that you wouldn’t ever get to meet the acquirer CEO. But what happened was in the final meeting, which was supposed to be a rubber stamp, because everybody but the CEO had approved it at this point, the deal’s champion was out sick. And so the champion’s, number two, had to defend the deal to the CEO who said, what? And so number one, he’s like, I’m never going to not meet the CEO of an acquirer ever again. And number two, I’m going to build champions up and down the organization and across the organization so that they can stay. Anyone can stand up and defend this opportunity. Wow, that’s so helpful to hear for anybody who is maybe a first time CEO in a conversation with a potential acquirer.

And don’t pick a champion who is prone to sickness.

Yes, that’s right.

Strong enough.

Healthy. You want a healthy champion for sure.

Awesome. So what is the most important question in your opinion a CEO should ask themselves on a regular basis?

I think it’s really important to elevate. So another framework that I use is Balcony vs. Dance Floor. And that’s the difference between working in the business and on the business. And I think it’s really important that CEOs spend time in the balcony. And I think it’s really important that CEOs actually get away from their laptop and go for a walk or go for a run or whatever it is that one does to invest in themselves because it is a fact and research proves this, that when you stop thinking about the problem in front of you and think about something else, your brain is still working on it. And it will come through. We all know this experience that happens to us, but you can manufacture that time. And I think the most important question that a CEO needs to ask themselves, ask herself on a regular basis is, what am I trying to do here and am I doing that? Really, what am I trying to do with this company and with this opportunity? There’s a lot of objective strategies and tactics, but I started this company because I wanted to achieve X, or I took an investment in this company and I told them that I was gonna get to Y. The difference between being on the dance floor and getting jostled and moved around versus the balcony saying, am I really doing what I set out to do here? The best CEOs I’ve met are methodical about their focus on the top of the mountain. It’s the ones who start to take paths and wind and get distracted that becomes really problematic.

Do you recall a moment when you asked yourself this question and you decided to shift what you were doing?

Better than that or worse than that I’m not sure. In the moment it felt worse. I remember being asked by an investor, actually I wasn’t asked, I was told, Mark, I have no idea what you’re trying to do with this company. What are you trying to do? I mean, that was a critical moment for me because I was like, what do you mean? We have board decks, we have strategy conversations, we have like all this stuff. But what the question really was is like, I don’t understand, you’re doing a lot, but why, to what effect? Are we moving up market? Are we cannibalizing somebody else’s business? Is it a competitive thing? Are you trying to get to 100 million so you can do A, B and C? Like, let’s have like the real conversation about what you’re trying to do. I know you’re operating. I know you’re growing. But what are you really trying to do? It’s a hard question. I remember it.

Even when you have a vision, this can be a relevant question to ask.

Yeah, I think so. And I think it’s a very basic one. And you asked the question about personal “Why” at the beginning, and it’s the same question. It’s what are you trying to do here? Because when you’re a leader and you can clearly define that, it’s actually a superpower. Because one, people want to help you. They will know how to help you. That turns into plans that you can roll to your team and goals you can roll to your team that ladder up to that objective. And every employee I’ve ever met broadly wants to be successful. And as the leader and the CEO, you define what success looks like in your organization, and they can’t read your mind. You have to be clear about it.

Yeah, I love it. That’s very powerful. And I think people are hungry for purpose in life. And most people don’t have a self-awareness or they don’t have the context or they don’t have the perspective to be able to come up with a worthy purpose. And if they can tap into a company, if they work for a company that has something that is exciting and attractive and they can latch onto it, it can really energize them to bring their life and soul to the company.

There’s an incredible piece that I read, and I’m going to tell the story wrong, but hopefully communicate what I want to communicate, is it’s around starting with “Why.” And it tells the story of the difference between Apple and, I’m going to say, Hewlett-Packard, HP. Both make consumer electronics. And 15, 20 years ago, they were probably making very similar products. But one feels very different than the other, and why? And when Steve Jobs would get up and talk about why you want to have the music in your pocket, why you want this all in one device versus a we are going to create a printer for you that’s going to do this many dots per inch and this many pages per minute. It’s like the feature, feature, feature versus the world is changing.

How do you put a dent in the universe? I love the Steve Jobs quote to Joe Scully when he enticed him over to Pepsi and he asked the question that, do you want to sell sugar water to kids or come with me and change the world?

That’s right. Yeah, and I don’t think it’s wrong to say that you can find a “Why” in most businesses in just about any business. It doesn’t have to be change the world. I always err on trying to find the change in the world or change our part of the world in the businesses that I’m in. But the truth is, is that businesses change and landscapes change and competitive marketplaces change. And in my very first job, I worked at a marketing firm, and I remember as we were developing strategic narratives for companies and positioning, you start with the four quadrants and you want to be upper right, but if the world is defining upper right as something that you’re not. I remember erasing the Axies names and writing in new ones so that we were upper right in redefining that and leading the world to that new tomorrow.

Yeah, love it. All right, well, Mark, thank you for coming and sharing your wisdom with our listeners. So if people would like to learn more or connect with you or get you, hire you perhaps, where should they go?

They can find me in three places. The first is on LinkedIn. I’m more active than I want to be, but I actually do love LinkedIn and the connections that I have there. You can find me on LinkedIn. My website is markjosephson.net. And if you want to hire me for coaching, if you want a one-off conversation or two, you can find me on intro.com, and you can book a meeting with me there.

Awesome. So, Mark Josephson, three-time CEO with three exits, Founder, Advisor, Investor, and Coach. Thanks for coming. And those of you who enjoyed this conversation, make sure you follow us on YouTube, you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, give us a review and so on, and keep coming back because every week we have a wonderful entrepreneur or CEO coming to share with us their wisdom. Thanks for coming, Mark, and thanks for listening.

Mark Josephson, Executive Coach, three-time CEO with three exits, Founder, Advisor, and Investor, is driven by a mission to empower leaders and think big to achieve clarity, purpose, and lasting impact in their organizations and lives.

We learn about Mark’s journey from leading three companies to successful exits to coaching leaders and teams to unlock their potential. He explains the Wouldn't It Be Great If framework, a four-step approach to setting ambitious goals: pushing away from the desk, asking bold questions, identifying what needs to be true to achieve them, and brainstorming without constraints. Mark also introduces the Balcony vs. Dance Floor framework, which helps CEOs balance strategic vision with operational focus. He shares lessons from his entrepreneurial journey and insights from his podcast Critical Moments.

(1:31) Mark’s personal Why

(6:59) The Wouldn't It Be Great If Framework

(11:17) Insights from the Critical Moment podcast

(16:35) The Balcony vs. Dance Floor Framework

(22:24) Connect with Mark

Links and Resources