Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

Debbie Howard, CEO of Senior Living SMART, helps senior living operators build a sense of belonging while guiding older adults and their families through complex, emotional decisions. After working at the community, regional, divisional, and national levels, Debbie founded the agency to make senior living easier to understand, more transparent, and more centered on the consumer. Her mission is to help prospects become the heroes of their own stories while giving operators the strategy, technology, analytics, and resources required to grow.

In this conversation, Debbie introduces The 3W Senior Living Growth Framework—Whether (move or not yet), Where (brands, amenities, reputation), and When (degree of urgency). She explains how senior living marketers can map consumer questions, content, and channels to each decision stage while addressing both emotional and informational needs. Debbie also discusses creating an always-on nurturing system with no dead ends between marketing and sales, measuring each channel’s contribution across a 28-to-42-touchpoint journey, and prioritizing long-term revenue over short-term occupancy. She shares how proprietary products such as marketing certification, transparent pricing, virtual tours, and predictive move-in modeling can create better consumer experiences and more scalable agency growth.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and today my guest is Debbie Howard, the CEO of Senior Living SMART, an agency with a strategic focus on innovative marketing and sales enhancement, propelling the growth of occupancy rates through targeted strategies of senior living homes, I presume. Debbie, welcome to the show. 

Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me. 

Well, that’s super exciting to have you because I don’t remember having anyone running senior living homes or a business regarding to that. So my first question will probably resonate with you. What is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in Senior Living SMART? 

Yeah. So before starting the company, I kind of grew up in senior living, senior housing. And just so listeners know, like, what does that mean? It really means anything in the spectrum of aging, from 55-plus kind of luxury living to retirement, active adult, and then some of the needs-based care, like assisted living and memory care, or a continuum of care, which is typically nonprofit. That would be, you know, CCRCs or, like, continuing care retirement communities or life plan communities. 

And so it’s a big business. And we are an aging population, and the business is booming and doing very well. But I grew up in a time when people didn’t understand what senior living was. They only kind of knew their home and the home. And nobody ever wanted to go to the home. And so then came an industry that no one really had a lot of knowledge about, which was beautiful, luxury, private-pay lifestyle plus healthcare, which was not a nursing home and provided more support than home care could. And so it was a new market. It was something that was kind of a blue ocean at the time, so we were selling a concept that nobody really understood.  

I started working at the community level, helping families make the best decision for themselves or their loved one.
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And it was more outbound marketing. It was more secret keeping. Like, “We’re not going to really tell you anything. We’re going to force you to call or come in because we know everything about this industry that you don’t understand.” And people were in an emotional state, right? There’s a lot going on. It’s a big deal to move into one of these communities, and nobody kind of walked alongside the prospect and really helped guide them, and we thought we could do better. 

So we started Senior Living SMART. SMART’s an acronym for Strategy, Marketing Automation, Analytics, Resources, and Technology. Strategy because a lot of operators have tactics but not strategy. Marketing because at the point 14 years ago when we started the company, digital marketing was just coming out, so they had a lot of traditional marketing, but they were really confused and wary of digital. There was no marketing automation. 

Analytics, because they either had no data or they didn’t understand the numbers and information they had. Resources, because they didn’t know where to go for what. What’s the best CRM? Where do I get floor plans? Nobody understood. We’d worked with everybody at the national level, so we knew all of the resources. And then technology, because 14 years ago, they were really behind on technology and still using spreadsheets and sticky notes. And

we thought if we could help them just be smarter, that we could help them be more successful and scale, but we could also create a better experience for consumers.
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So it sounds like you have, like, a complete franchise model that you can license to people, so they don’t actually have to buy a franchise, and you can provide this information to them and they can grow their practices. 

Well, I would say that most of our clients do have a franchise model. So they are mostly third-party management companies. So the REITs and private equity tend to own the real estate, and then they hire third-party management companies, and then the management companies contract for us. So some clients might have five locations. Some have 60. Some have close to 100. And so when you get to that scale, it really becomes very much of a franchise model. 

Very interesting. So basically, you provide a fully outsourced marketing and sales enhancement approach, including technology, consulting, and even execution? 

Yeah, everything. Some clients have us do everything, and some of the larger companies have us kind of work within a specific skill set where we might be a complement to some other partners. But I would say most of our clients work with us as an agency of record because they get the full package, right? They get the right tech stack. They get the right strategy. They get turnkey but customizable tools and resources that they might not be able to find on their own. 

And we also create a lot of proprietary products that we’re bringing to the market because we see gaps and needs in that. And as you know, marketing agencies are very human-driven. It’s a lot of labor, and it’s hard to find margin. So we needed to really add products to our mix as well. 

Okay, so that just triggered another question that I’d like to ask you, but I’m going to defer it later. This is about the human versus technology question. 

Yeah. 

What I’d like to ask you now is about your favorite framework. So this is a podcast of frameworks, business frameworks. And I wonder if there is something, whether it’s the SMART acronym—and you already discussed this—but is there something that you figured out along the way of running this company, building this company, that helps the senior living businesses have a better conception of how they’re going to grow themselves and what are those elements that they need to figure out along the way, or some other framework that you find useful? 

Yeah. So I have a couple that I think might be helpful.

One is we look at stages of decision, and we are creating marketing programs to attract consumers, so prospects.
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And so it’s really complex. It’s a very emotional decision. There’s a lot of stakeholders and decision-makers that are trying to get to the same place, but they take different paths to get there, and different things resonate with them. So one of the things we look at are the stages of decision because it could be that the older adult’s in one stage and the adult child is in another stage, and you have to meet both of them kind of where they are simultaneously, which is very complex.

So we break it down in a couple ways. Number one is to look at where they are in terms of the three Ws. So the three Ws for us are the Whether, the Where, and When.
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There’s, like, all of these Whether decisions, and multiple stakeholders are going through these Whether decisions, pros and cons, weighing choices, and they have to kind of get through that. And mostly they want to remain independent during that. They expect to be able to get all of that information with a lot of transparency because they’re not really ready to talk to sales. Then they get into the Where stage. Okay, well, there’s lots of different senior living community options. In most markets, you’ve got multiple brands that kind of all say the same thing. They all have the best care, and they’re all beautiful, and they all have wonderful dining and transportation. 

And so trying to find that differentiator is confusing for prospects. And if you don’t differentiate, then it just comes down to location and price, which is just a race to the bottom. And so people spend a fair amount of time touring different communities, calling, looking at testimonials and social media and reviews, and they’re asking their friends, and they’re just trying to figure out where I should go. And then the When is really the urgency. Some people are really moving with an external motivation. Unexpected event lands them in the hospital or rehab, and they can’t go home, and they’re making this decision in crisis. 

And then other people are better planners, and they’re just making sure that they’re researching all of their options before they’re in crisis. And so people really enter at different phases, right? The planners have more time to be in the Whether stage. The people who wait for a crisis might have to land right smack dab into the Where stage or the When stage. And it puts a lot more pressure on the consumer to make an informed decision without a lot of time. 

So how do you use this framework? How does it facilitate your work? 

Yeah. So we take a look at all of the touchpoints along the prospect journey, all the questions that they ask. Of course, AI now makes that a lot easier because we can actually put transcripts into AI and figure out what are the top questions that consumers are asking when they call into the communities. We can do a lot of Claude and deep research around search volume and keywords and what types of information is most valuable, and what is the kind of velocity in terms of research of what people really are looking for in order to make that informed decision. 

Then it becomes content development, right? So what channel for what content? So we know social media is much better for visual content and videos and things that are more emotional, things that might give you a glimpse into the day-in-the-life type of an experience, where you can really start building that sense of belonging. They can see themselves or their loved one living there. They’re seeing the type of people who are living there, what their days look like, and so social media is great for that. And then the website’s great for more informational, so blogs and guides and e-books and pillar pages and FAQs really do well on that type of a channel. 

And then paid ads has different messaging. And so what you try to do is really map out the entire prospect journey. What’s important to them at each of these stages? Which channels can deliver what type of information? Because we’ve really moved from attribution in marketing to contribution in marketing. It used to be everybody just cared about first touch and last touch. So what was the first thing that they did to find your brand, and what was the last kind of channel that they touched before they converted? And now it’s like the customer journey, and there’s so many things, so many places that they can go to get information, that we really have to look at what is the marketing contribution. 

There’s not that one-to-one—they clicked an ad and then moved in—because they might click an ad at the beginning of their search, but a lot of people are not. They’re clicking it later on in the search. Now, that ad still produced value. It still contributed to that conversion, to that revenue, but we can’t just look at first-touch and last-touch attribution. So I would say that’s really how we do it, is we make sure that every question in each of those three stages has a channel that’s answering it, and usually multiple channels that are answering it, some intellectually and some more emotionally because people make decisions emotionally and then support them with research and intellect. 

So this is fascinating. It feels like this is a very complex map that you have covered just in a few words. And how long does it take for you to really develop all these channels for someone? Someone comes to you and says, “Yeah, I’d like this full-stack marketing and sales enhancement approach, multi-channel, build up the assets on the different platforms, social, website.” What does it take? How many hours does it take to build this complex model that will then fire on all cylinders? 

Yeah. We do a few things right up front, and we learn a lot in the sales process. It takes months for people to make a decision to choose a marketing agency because it can be a disruption, and there’s a lot of moving parts and pieces. And so we try to do as much research as we can kind of upfront. Then we do what’s called a Total Online Presence Audit. So we look at every one of their marketing channels. We audit every one of them, so we understand what’s the baseline that we’re inheriting. Do we need a new website, or can we just refresh the website that they have? Do we need to write a lot of new blog content, or do they have pretty good blogs, but they’re just really not formatted well for AI search, and so we just need to make those kind of reformatting changes? 

So each of our departments goes in. They audit social media, the tech stack, every piece, Google Business Profile, local search, SEO, website. So each leader on our team goes in and does a deep dive. Then from that, we come back with recommendations. Those recommendations become the scope of work. So from those audits, we come to the table with the prospective client and say, “This is what’s working. This is what’s not. This is what your competitors are doing. This is where you compare against them, where they’re beating you, where you have the advantage.” 

And then we come up with a plan. And the first 30 days are getting to know the brand.

We do a lot with doing an exercise with our brand experience team to get their voice and tone and build a custom GPT that represents them uniquely.
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Yeah. 

So we dive into that as well, and then we put out a roadmap. We put out a plan. There are some things that are quick wins. We try to get those quick wins in, as many as we can, right up front. Some levers create impact quicker, and some of the best levers take a long time. So you have to really set the expectation that here are the things that we can impact in the next 30, 60, or 90 days, and then this is something that’s going to take more than that first quarter. But they’re going to be more sustainable. 

And how long does it take for someone to go from zero to 60 miles per hour? 

Yeah. I would say about in month four is when we have all the foundations built. We’ve gotten some quick wins. And it really happens when we either build a new website or refresh a website and then combine that new launch with marketing automation. So we’re a HubSpot shop. We build everything on HubSpot because we have to have that hyper-personalized nurturing. It’s a long sales cycle. It can take three months to over a year to get one prospect through a decision journey, and 28 to 42 unique touchpoints that have to be accomplished to guide them to that decision. 

So there’s a lot going on. You have to have great content. You have to have personalized email marketing, as close to one-to-one as you can get. So lots of branching logic, lots of segmentation, just a lot of strategy. It’s heavy lifting to build a marketing automation lead nurturing infrastructure, and you’re never done. You’re always building that next workflow. But I would say once the foundational lead conversion journeys launch with that refreshed website that’s technically sound, is AI-first, it’s mobile-responsive—a lot of older websites, we have to go and do a lot of foundational work. 

And once we go live with—we have three conversion journeys, two sales-qualified lead conversions, which are schedule a tour or speak to an advisor, and then one marketing-qualified conversion, which is download a community brochure. And that goes into more of that longer lead nurturing cycle. Once we launch all of that together, we’ll start seeing major impact in 30 days. So if we can get the quick wins in those first 90 days, and then everything goes live together in month four, that’s when we really start seeing the velocity. 

So when you say MQL driving and SQL driving, so is this if you can get them to an SQL, you’re going to have them as an SQL, i.e., contact someone? And if you can’t, then you give them more content and long-term nurture, or it’s two completely different paths? 

Sometimes they go back and forth. It’s not linear. This decision is not linear. People go dark, get scared, get overwhelmed. They might come out of the gate strong and be a sales-qualified lead, and then they schedule a tour and everyone’s moving forward, and it looks like we’ve got some momentum. And then they go home and they think about, “I got to sell the house, and I’ve got to do all these things, and what am I going to do with 60 years’ worth of belongings?” 

And I’ve got to get my family on the same page, and I’ve got to get my parent feeling good about this and confident about this.” And so in our marketing infrastructure, we just want to make sure there are no dead ends and there are no blind spots between marketing and sales because that’s where most of the lost opportunity happens, either because marketing just gets them to an SQL, hands them to the sales team, and wipes their hands of them and says, “Not my problem anymore. They’re in the CRM. 

The sales team has them. See you later. I got to go get more leads.” And then they go dark, and then sales moves the lead to cold or lost but not disqualified, and it’s over. It’s completely over. So we have all of these re-engagement triggers through the CRM that set these re-engagement campaigns on autopilot. So if they are post-tour more than seven days, 14 days, and they haven’t connected with them, we automatically enroll them into a post-tour or a “What Are You Waiting For?” campaign. 

If they are stuck in lost or cold for more than 90 days, we re-enroll them into our “Stay in Touch.” If they’re early stage, if they’re a marketing-qualified lead that doesn’t advance to sales-qualified through that nurturing, when that campaign is over, we’ll automatically enroll them into “Still Thinking?” Are you still thinking about senior living? We’re here for you. We want to be a resource. And all of those things combined keep the brand top of mind and make sure that the prospect just never hits a dead end where people just stop reaching out to them. 

Because a lot of times we’ll see salespeople moving them to cold in the CRM, but then we’re getting notifications from the website that they’re back on the website, or they just opened up an email. But the sales team has written them off. So we have to create this safety net of this always-on. Until they move in or unsubscribe, they’re going to get something from our clients. 

Yeah. That is fascinating. This is a very nuanced approach, and I’m sure that it’s taken you many years to figure that out. And it’s an ongoing process probably. The figuring out never ends. So let me ask you this. So your customers are often maybe private equity or REITs or maybe individual homes. What drives growth in your business, Debbie? 

It’s an interesting question because I think that the perception is that occupancy drives growth. Because you can’t make a profit in this business unless you’re about 85% occupied. So it’s a high bar to have to hit. But I think that it’s the wrong approach. I think what they should be looking at is that growth equals revenue, and sometimes those things work against each other. If you’re just going after occupancy, if that’s the only number you’re looking at, you’re likely going after volume and velocity. 

And to get those leads, you have to use these very high-priced aggregators, which is high volume, low conversion, so your sales team ends up spending 80% of their time on leads that only qualify or move in about 3 to 6% of the time. Or you’re spending a lot of money on paid digital ads, which is highly competitive and very expensive. But if you look at things from a revenue perspective, you make completely different decisions because the same sources that give you those quick leads that are going to move in fast—these are people that are going to move in in 30 days—and everyone’s impatient. 

Like, we need move-ins today. We need move-ins by the end of the month. And so they get overly dependent on these very expensive sources. They’re also the ones that move out. They have the shortest length of stay, right? They have the least amount of revenue. You’re paying the most for them, and they’re leaving the quickest.

If people change their mindset and are a little bit more patient, and they start focusing on organic and AI and earned leads and great reputation and friend and family referrals, unpaid referrals from all different healthcare sources, then you have a pipeline, and you have highly qualified leads that are going to stay longer and provide more revenue. Because every time that occupancy churns and somebody only stays nine months or 12 months in your community, you have all these remarketing costs. You have to turn the apartment. You need new carpet. You need new paint. 

Yeah. 

And all of the costs just keep adding up. But it’s an interesting mindset that people seem to be more interested in occupancy, “Just get me more leads,” than they are in revenue. 

So ultimately, there’s no easy button. You have to do the right thing. You have to take care of your customers to make sure that they are happy, that they get good reviews, testimonials, and then you have to nurture your leads that you generate with your content and so on. So, Debbie, a deeper-level question. What about your business, your agency? What drives growth for your agency? 

Right now, we are kind of focused on new product development because what we do is so people-intensive and labor-intensive. We don’t take shortcuts with AI. We still have human beings writing blogs and building websites and doing content. You’re not going to see AI visuals. We had a client who left recently, got wooed away to another agency, and the first thing we see on social media is this awful AI image, and it just broke our hearts because, like, we would never have done that to them. And so it takes a lot of people to do things right and to do things well. 

Revenue’s not a problem. We can always grow top-line revenue because the industry is booming. More and more people are getting into this space because they see the opportunity. So there’s plenty of growth, but what happens with us is we grow revenue, but we grow expense at the same rate, and so it’s hard for us to get that margin. So this year we’re introducing, first of all, a Senior Living Marketing Certification course. There is no certification for senior living marketers. Anybody can come in, take a job in marketing, and they don’t have to have a degree in marketing. 

There’s no senior living-specific marketing certification. And so we just launched that today. So hopefully people are out there signing up to become Senior Living SMART Marketing Certified, and they can carry that with them. So that’s revenue that, once we create it—a very smart man said to me last week, “Debbie, you’ve got to create revenue when people are sleeping or when you’re sleeping.” And I was like, “Oh, the course is going to do that.” We created a pricing tool, a price estimator tool, because pricing is not transparent in our industry, and yet consumers want it. 

Consumers, if you want to build trust with consumers, you have to be transparent with your pricing. If you hide it, they’ll just move on. So we created the only industry-specific pricing tool where people can pick the apartment they want, how much care they need, how many medications they take, all kinds of things, and get their price, not some weak starting-at price that doesn’t cover anything. And then we created 360 tours. So it’s all under the SMART. So we have SMART Tours, which are 360 virtual tours. We have SMART Pricing. That’s our price estimator tool. We’re working on SMART Match, which is a predictive move-in modeling to take a look at all of the hundreds of leads sitting in the database. 

Who matches your resident profile behaviorally and demographically and geographically? Who should the sales team focus on? Who has the best match to your current resident mix? So, like, we do believe that products will give us, first of all, things that make the agency sticky because they can’t get them anywhere else. They’re proprietary. And also that once you invest in them and you build them, the revenue is higher because once they’re set up, there’s no ongoing labor involved. 

Yeah. So you’re basically developing products that are unique and that differentiate you, potentially new streams of income that are more proprietary than just marketing. That’s fascinating. So if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be?

Oh, geez. Got to think about that. I think I would probably fix reporting because you’ve probably heard, just in the few minutes we’ve talked to each other today, it’s highly complex, this whole marketing journey to get consumers through this decision. And right now in the industry, data lives everywhere. Like, there’s all these third-party widgets and tools, and the widget kind of owns your data, and you’re having to go into the survey tool or the chatbot tool or a price estimator tool. 

So what we’re working on in the next 12 months is to really build everything on the ecosystem of HubSpot because it has the ability to build out all of these tools, but also help people own their first-party data and then also have everything in one place. Really consolidating data is a problem. So that’s what we’re working on, is if we can build the website, the marketing automation machine, the chatbot, the survey tool, call tracking, AI predictive modeling, the 360 tours, all of those things, if they can all live in one place, then number one, our clients can get away from renting a lot of these widgets. 

Because once you build them in HubSpot, you own them. You build them once, and you own them, and you don’t have to pay these rentals. Some of these rental tools are $550 a month, and all you’re doing is renting it, and then they own your data. It would also help with attribution and contribution of marketing channels. If they’re all living in a different place, it’s really hard to know when the C-suite says, “We’re spending millions of dollars on marketing. 

What’s working, and what’s our cost to move-in, and what channels are producing?” And if you have to go into 10 different places to answer that question and it’s manual and it’s all spreadsheets, that’s a real problem. So I think for us it’ll be a kind of consolidation on one platform that’s best for our clients and also really is a differentiator for our agency. 

Wow. That sounds very exciting, an all-in-one platform where you would own the technology, basically, or maybe it’s on a platform of HubSpot, but it would be your know-how. Love it. So who is the ideal customer for you that you’d like to get? 

Yeah. Our ideal customer is a regional or national owner, operator, third-party management. They typically have more than 10 communities. I would say our sweet spot’s kind of 10 to 100. They operate in multiple states. They have different levels of care. For us, it’s really somebody also who has the right technology stack. Sometimes we get these clients and the first question that I always ask them is, “What’s your CRM, and where’s your website hosted?” 

And there are right and wrong answers to that. And if your website is a parent-child website, or if you have all different domains for each location, the complexity and the quality of the technology stack that we inherit really contributes to the amount of success that we can offer to a client. So we try to find someone who’s in alignment, and also somebody who has the same mindset to put the prospect at the center of the marketing rather than putting the brand at the center of the marketing, and is willing to have the level of authenticity and transparency that today’s buyer wants. Because right now we have a self-service buyer. 

AI and Boomers have collided into this place where people want instant answers. They want full transparency. They want to run their own decision. They don’t want to talk to sales until the very end. And people that are willing to reduce friction with prospects, create clarity sooner, and are going to empower the prospect to self-research, self-qualify, and self-advance, those are the brands that are going to be successful, and those are the brands that we want to partner with. 

Yeah. I love it. I mean, it sounds like you’re on that journey yourself, and you want to work with others who share that mindset of authenticity and transparency. So provided some of these people are listening on the show, what would you like them to do? How can they learn more about what Senior Living SMART does, and how can they connect with you personally, potentially? 

Yeah. I’m very active on LinkedIn, so you can definitely find me on LinkedIn. It’s under Deborah Howard, my formal name that nobody uses unless they’re angry with me. And then also on the website, there’s tons of information about senior living marketing, all the products and courses about the agency at seniorlivingsmart.com. So those are probably the two best ways. 

Wow. Okay. So if you want an authentic and transparent marketing for your regional or national operator of senior living homes, and you have the right mindset, you’re willing to not take shortcuts, Senior Living SMART is your potential partner. Check out the website for the resources. Reach out to Debbie. 

And if you enjoyed this conversation, then stay tuned because every week I have a couple of entrepreneurs that are building exciting businesses that you can learn from, learn their framework, and learn their mindset and their Why’s. So thank you, Debbie, for coming and sharing your experiences and wisdom, and thank you for listening.

Jay Berkowitz, Founder and CEO of Ten Golden Rules, helps law firms implement the Law Firm Success Formula to attract qualified prospects, convert more opportunities, and build five-star operations. Driven by a strong desire to win, Jay applies his competitive nature to helping clients rank higher, sign more cases, earn stronger reviews, and generate valuable referrals.

In this conversation, Jay introduces The AI Visibility Optimization Framework—Collect Prospect FAQs, Publish Answers Regularly, Become an Expert on Reddit & Quora, and Blog on Customer-Generated Topics. He explains how businesses can identify real customer questions from sales calls, intake conversations, and AI-generated transcripts, then answer them through videos, blogs, FAQs, and social content. Jay also discusses optimizing websites and Google Business Profiles, responding quickly and empathetically to inquiries, and delivering five-star service that generates reviews and referrals. He shares how referrals, conference speaking, webinars, podcasts, and high-value content drive agency growth and how EOS helped him develop leaders as the company expanded.

Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Jay Berkowitz, the Founder and CEO of Ten Golden Rules, a two-time Inc. 5000 digital marketing agency that helps law firms generate more qualified leads and clients. Jay, welcome to the show. 

Thank you so much. Great to be here, Steve. 

So we already talked a little bit about it, but I was really curious about why you focus on law firms. There are so many marketing agencies out there, but I’ve never seen anyone that focused on such a narrow niche. And then I’m going to link it to my favorite question. So what is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in your Ten Golden Rules agency? And maybe there’s a connection to law firms as well? 

Well, I’ll start with my personal Why, and my personal Why is I really like to win. And I’ve done the StrengthsFinder and different psychology tests, and I’m in the top—whatever—one or five percentile of people who are competitive. And so I was competitive in sports, but I really want to do well in business, and I want my clients to do well. Like, I really, really hate it if my client’s not right at the top of Google and if my client’s not growing in more new cases signed every month. 

So that seems to be a really great fit for the business I’m in, which is helping clients with growth strategies, part of which is the marketing piece, getting new traffic to their website. Part of it is conversion, so we do a lot of work with our clients on getting a higher percentage of the folks who do show up to call, to click, to fill out a form. And then we work with their intake teams on converting those opportunities. And the final piece we work with them is really running a five-star operation—meaning that they’re getting more five-star Google reviews and getting more referrals from past clients and referral partners. So we do a lot of work in those three pieces of the business to help law firms grow, and I really want them to win because when they win, I win. Selfishly. 

No, I love it. I love it. So are you like an outsourced marketing department and marketing-sales department for these law firms? How do you see yourselves? What is the role that you fulfill? 

Yeah, I mean, we are a consulting agency. So first and foremost, we’re going to help them strategically figure out where to focus. And we have a fully functioning digital marketing agency, so we do websites and SEO and Local Services Ads and pay-per-click and social media and video and lots of AI. And then as a part of our consulting practice, we help with intake consulting that I mentioned before and five-star operations. And a big part of that is just finding the right partners because we’ll do high-level intake coaching and point out if they’re not answering the phone, if they’re not putting the right people on the phone, and then we’ll connect them with one of the top intake coaches in the legal industry. 

If their back end is a little rough and needs some help, there’s a number of partners. Like, for example, there’s a really great software called Case Status we recommend to all of our clients. And imagine Case Status is an app. So, like, when we all order an Uber or order food, we get updates. “Hey, your driver’s been selected. Your driver will be here in 10 minutes. Your driver’s waiting outside. Do you want to have a conversation with your driver? What temperature do you want?” 

And so there’s a great app called Case Status, which can manage the case in an app format that consumers are really used to. “Hey, we got your MRI booked, and here’s the location, and here’s the time. Don’t forget your MRI is tomorrow at 8:00 A.M. Here’s the location. If you can’t make the MRI, click here. Hey, we got your MRI. We forwarded it to the next surgeon,” in a case of a car accident. So using that software helps our firms get five-star Google ratings and lots more referrals, and that’s just one small piece of the pie. 

So within the niche of law firms, is this even a narrower niche of injury law firms that you work with? 

Yeah, it’s funny because when, as a business person, you go from working on 200 SIC codes and you pick one, “I’m only going to work with lawyers,” everybody always asks, like, “Which niche within the niche are you?” But by the nature of our business, 50% or 60% is personal injury, just because those guys are really invested in marketing. They spend a lot of time and money on it, and we’ve built a little reputation. 

But we also have estate firms and family lawyers, criminal attorneys, sex abuse lawyers, securities attorneys. So I always say 50% is personal injury and 50% is everybody else who deals with consumers. Because for the most part, the B2B lawyers, they’re not going to spend a lot on marketing. But we have done some beautiful websites for them. 

Very interesting. I have kind of a tangential question, but you may be able to help me answer it because I’m obviously wondering about it. I always see these billboards with the injury law firms promoting themselves, and I get if someone gets in a car accident and there’s a billboard above them, then it’s going to be an obvious thing for them to call, but it probably doesn’t happen that often. So how are these billboards so good for lawyers, or is it just a myth and they’re just wasting their money on it? 

No. I think the math is pretty compelling, and the average personal injury firm will make between $10,000 and $20,000 on average on cases. Then there will be one or two or three, what they call whales, every year. So a terrible incident where, like, a FedEx truck or a commercial vehicle hits a family and there’s serious injuries or death involved, and it’s a multimillion-dollar case. 

So the lawyers make a third of all the revenue that comes in on those cases, and they do a lot of work and they have a lot of expenses too. But when there’s millions of dollars at stake for just one case, these guys can afford the TV advertising, the billboard advertising, and the digital marketing that they do with us. 

So it’s not just a billboard. Yeah. Billboard is just a visible one. It’s basically the general idea that they do a lot of advertising because being top of mind is important. 

Yeah, for sure. And if, God forbid, someone you knew had an accident, you’d start noticing that every second ad on TV is also personal injury. 

Yeah. Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. So let’s talk about frameworks because that’s what this podcast is about. Business blueprints or concepts that you have developed, you observed, something that helps you make sense or streamline the ideas that you deal with in your business. Anything that comes to mind, something that can be explained in three to five steps? 

Yes. Well, I touched on it a little bit a minute ago, and we call it our Law Firm Success Formula. And the first part is attract, the second part is convert, and the third part is five-star operations. But I’ll spend a couple more minutes on it. So the attract piece is, first and foremost, you’ve got to have your website dialed in. You have to have a contemporary website. If your website’s more than five years old, it just sends a subtle, even subconscious message to folks that you’re not current, and the design times change over time. 

And also, Google’s functionality is going to change, or the functionality of your website, as it’s friendly to Google, particularly your mobile website, if it’s five years old, is not going to be the current best practice. And Google’s going to come and test your mobile website, and they’re going to send negative ratings back to the algorithm, and you’re going to show up less in the searches. Equally important is your Google Business Profile. And that’s your Google Maps address. And that has to be up-to-date and optimized and constantly updated with new content and blogs and videos and information and photos from your location because I always say that you don’t own your Google Maps, you lease it from Google, but it’s a second and very powerful web presence that a firm can have. 

So we do a lot of work on the websites, on the Google Maps, and there’s a whole SEO protocol around local SEO that surrounds the Google Maps listing and how you’re listed on your website and how you’re linked to by local businesses and the Chamber of Commerce and business associations and bar associations. And then the next piece is getting your message out there and optimizing for the AI. And so the AI today that’s important in my part of the business is the SEO AI, or a lot of us are calling it AEO, answer engine optimization. So a lot of the work we’re doing with our clients is answering questions on video, and those videos go on YouTube, and then we also use the video on a blog on the website. 

And you can use those videos throughout the internet, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter. Very importantly, add a video to your Google Maps every week. So we generally shoot a series of at least a dozen videos with the client every quarter and have them answer questions. Because again, when you’re asking questions of Google or ChatGPT or Claude, “Who’s the best car accident attorney if I was hit in an Uber?” So we literally answer that question, and the attorney will say, “One of the things I’m getting asked all the time now is, who’s the best car accident attorney if I’m hit in an Uber? Do I need a car accident attorney?” And they’ll go on to answer that question, but literally, we put the question in the video. 

The question goes on their blog, goes on their website, goes on their Facebook, their Twitter. So it’s a very effective strategy to target the AEO, or the answer engine optimization. And by the way, there’s a couple other pieces that are very important to come up in the AI. So number one is answering questions. Number two is becoming an expert, so getting written up in journals and your bar association, your Chamber of Commerce, whatever industry you’re in, getting on Wikipedias and things like that, and answering questions on Reddit and Quora, which are the answer engine websites. And then the final piece is some technical stuff you can do on your website, as simple as adding frequently asked questions. Most people only have five FAQs on their website. You should have 50 or 100 today in this world of answer engine optimization. 

So the first piece in our formula is attracting traffic to the website and getting the brand right. And then the second piece is conversion. And I mentioned things like answering the phone. Super critical today that you answer the phone. And I know that sounds obvious, but Google’s actually tracking how long it takes you to answer the phone when someone clicks off a Google ad or a Google Maps listing. And if it takes more than 15 seconds and three rings, Google’s going to, again, downgrade you for future listings. And it’s not nefarious. There’s nothing negative. It’s just like when people use Google, Google wants them to have a successful experience. 

Yeah. 

So if they’re looking for a car accident lawyer or a shoe repair or a pizza, if you don’t answer the phone quickly, the next time, they’re going to put you down a little bit lower in the listings. So conversion is a multifaceted program that we help our clients with: answering the phone, answering the phone with empathy, answering the phone with a professional who can handle the call, not somebody who’s a busy trial attorney or a busy paralegal, and they don’t even want to take calls. So you really need a professional who’s trained to convert those opportunities. 

And then we’ve also built some software to optimize any missed calls, and we even have a software when people fill out a form on the website, it immediately sends a text to the intake team so you can call them back. Because we’ve all had that experience where you fill out the form on the website, and you wait five minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, a day. Well, by then, you forgot whose form you filled out, and you filled out a couple other forms on other law firms’ websites or other marketing agencies’ or consultants’ websites, right? So very important that we have the software that immediately texts the form information to the intake team. 

They can call the person right back. And then the final piece, I talked about five-star operations, and we have several programs to help our clients get more Google reviews and get more referrals from their existing clients and their referral partners. And one of the subtle things that a lot of people don’t do, and this is the easiest, most cost-effective marketing piece, is just sending out a monthly newsletter. 

I mean, every business and every law firm and every marketing agency has to have a monthly newsletter. It’s very inexpensive. You can use Mailchimp or Constant Contact and send out some valuable information, some of your community activities, if you’re speaking at the Chamber of Commerce or your bar association, or I’m speaking at an industry conference. And every time I send out a newsletter, I get two or three calls. “Oh, Jay, I was meaning to call you. We want to redo our website.” Or, “Jay, would you be on my podcast?” Thank you for that, Steve. And just being top of mind increases your business opportunities, those referrals. So there’s a number of those programs that we do to help our clients get more five-star Google reviews and more high-value referrals. 

That’s fantastic. You’re really very systematic about it. I mean, this is a huge framework, so I don’t know if we can promote it. It’s not going to be easy to promote all parts of it. But I really like the AEO optimization element: answering questions, becoming an expert on Wikipedia, Reddit, Quora, and the FAQs. Is there anything else there in this AEO optimization that may be important? 

Well, the first part about answering questions, I can give you a couple clues there. One of the areas to get questions is to monitor the questions you take on a regular basis. And we use an AI called Fathom that records all my phone calls. And it creates a transcript, and I asked another AI, like a Claude or one of the AIs, to read all 200 most recent sales calls and transcribe all of the questions that I answered more than once. And there were several questions that I answered 20, 30 times and several that I answered two, three, four times. 

It came up with 269 questions that I get asked on a regular basis on my sales calls, and now we’re systematically answering those questions on videos and blogs and content on our website because we know those are the questions that we get asked on a frequent basis by people who are interested in our products and services. So if you can find the true questions that you’re asked, I often joke that Margaret, the receptionist, you should give her a little clipboard beside her desk, and every question that comes in through the intake department, you want her to write it down and then hand that off to your marketing department and write a blog post. 

Because literally, the questions that people are asking about car accidents or divorces or consulting services or marketing blueprints, those are the questions that people are asking Google, ChatGPT, and Claude. So if you proactively collect and answer the questions, that’s very powerful. And then in the expertise area, things you can do like getting in Wikipedia’s, which is hard to get. You really have to be a known public figure today to get approved for a Wikipedia. But Grok has its own Grokipedia, and there’s several other pedias out there. Just making sure that you’re properly listed in all of your industry association listings and your local business associations. 

When you just take a look at who’s linking to your competitors, you’re going to find a list of 200 websites that link to and list your competitors, and you can get listed in all those places, in most of those places, because there’s multiple chambers of commerce and business associations and bar associations in every region. And that’s true for every business, not just for lawyers. And then the final piece about the five-star operations, the simplest insight there is if you want lots of five-star reviews, you have to run a five-star business. You have to think of yourself like a five-star hotel. 

And when you show up at The Ritz or The Four Seasons, which I’m lucky enough to do a couple times a year because I go to lawyer conferences, and those guys don’t fool around. Even as you pull up, they’re like, “Oh, welcome, Mr. Berkowitz.” I’m like, “How do they know that?” Probably because I told them what type of car I was coming in. Or they’ll ask you, “Are you staying here?” And your name is Mr. Berkowitz. And then as soon as the person hands your bags off and they take you to reception, you’re Mr. Berkowitz for the rest of your stay. They know who you are. 

They recognize the staff are trained to give you that high level of service. And then when you go over to the concierge, there’s someone whose whole job is to make your visit great and get you fantastic dinner reservations and nurture your whole relationship, get you theater tickets or concert tickets. So if you think of your business as a five-star operation from the first time they call to every conversation, they should know Mr. Berkowitz. They should be able to pull up your file. They should know what the status of your business relationship is or your legal case. 

And in fact, we recommend the software I talked about earlier, so they’re proactively sending you updates on your case. You don’t even have to call in. And the number one bar complaint is, “My lawyer doesn’t answer the phone and doesn’t give me updates on the status of my case.” And I think that’s true for every business. So if you’re proactively sending out updates and information to your clients, they’re proactively happy as opposed to reactively trying to chase you down. 

Basically, you cannot fake being a good business. You have to be a good business. But it’s good to be reminded of what it takes to be a five-star service-oriented. 

Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Five years ago, you could fake it. Today, you can’t fake it. The Google reviews are omnipresent, and I think in 70 or 80% of businesses. I saw a data point the other day, people look at Google reviews before they work with a company. 

Yeah. That is true. That is true. Well, thanks for reminding me. So what drives growth in your marketing agency business? 

I think there’s three big chunks of business opportunities for us. The first one, and the best one for everybody, is always referrals. And so I do a lot of hard work to nurture my referral base. As a matter of fact, I’ve even created my own sort of networking group, if you will, of other people who call on the same types of businesses that I do. And I make sure that I reach out to them and have a quick Zoom call. I met with two of them this morning on just a half-hour Zoom call, finding out what’s up in their life, what type of referrals they’re looking for, and asking how I can give, and giving as many referrals as I get. 

So building those relationships, we call it know, like, and trust in networking. And constantly building those relationships and then spending time with them at the industry conferences to really put a focus that I think I made a mistake and I ignored that up until the last four or five years. And now I spend more time at a conference on the trade show floor with the other vendors as I do trying to meet the attorneys, because if you build a relationship with a vendor who has 200 clients, you can get 200 referrals. If you build a relationship with a one-off prospect, you can get one. 

Maybe he’ll refer you to someone he does business with. But really building those relationships, those referral relationships, has been fruitful for me. And then the second piece is those trade shows. And there’s an expression we use in my mastermind, which is, “Stage time is money time.” And if you can become an expert and develop a book and a presentation and get featured at your industry conference, that’s the best way to attend those conferences. And if you haven’t spoken on stage at your industry conference, I highly recommend it. 

There’s about 10 benefits that you don’t even know about, that people reach out to you beforehand, even before the conference, to book you on their podcast or book a meeting with you or introduce you to someone. At the conference itself, there’s often a green room, which is a private area where you can do some business, where the other speakers are, and often the media is also in the green room. So you’ve got access to some of the most influential influencers at the conference itself. And then obviously, after you’re on stage, everyone wants to be your best friend if you do a good job, if your presentation is high value. 

Yeah. 

So that’s one of the best conference hacks. And then we try and do everything to optimize having a booth and having a presence at the conference or whatever we’re doing there. We often host a party or a dinner as well. And a lot of times, we do that with our vendor friends that I talked about earlier. And it really gives you a chance to stand out at the conference itself. 

And then the third piece is marketing. We’ve been very fortunate and successful. We started a webinar series six years ago, and every month for six years, without fail, we’ve done a webinar. SEO for lawyers, pay-per-click for lawyers, social media for lawyers, video for lawyers, and then branching out into things like EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System. We do an annual business planning webinar. And thankfully, about two years ago, February, one of those videos took off on YouTube. 

Something in the algorithm, it just loved it, and people were watching a long time on this video, and they were watching other videos after they watched this video. And I used to be so proud because I had 2,000 or 3,000 people who watched my webinars, and this one started going to 20,000, 30,000. Today, I believe it’s been viewed 95,000 times. It’s called the Top 10 Hottest Technology Tips for Attorneys, and that one seemed to pull the whole channel with it. So now, on a regular basis, we’ll get 50,000 or 60,000 views each month, and our overall channel’s up to 1,300,000 or 1,400,000 views on YouTube. 

So creating high-value content has been a great sort of foundation for us, and then we’ll also market that in several different ways. We send emails: “Hey, please come to our monthly live-streaming event. We’ve got a great panel. We’re going to teach you all about the latest technologies in AI for lawyers.” And then those panel partners will promote the event as well. And then we send the emails in advance to the webinar. We post on our LinkedIn, my personal LinkedIn, company Facebook, Jay’s Facebook, Twitter, company Twitter. 

And then after, “Hey, a lot of people said they missed the webinar. They couldn’t get the link to work. Here’s a replay of the webinar.” And then we take snippets from the webinar and put it in our social media. So that and a weekly podcast has been very, very powerful inbound marketing and thought leadership marketing for the firm. 

Love it. That’s really cool. You’ve got some good processes, and thanks for sharing. This is interesting, the 10 technology tips. And it’s got a good title for sure, and I’m sure that it’s a good niche as well, and well done doing this. So no business is perfect, of course. What is something that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business? 

Well, I’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful at hiring salespeople. And a number of my friends in my mastermind say the best day of their life is when they hire a salesperson who can sell better than them. We have a great sales process, and we have a great sales team, but I haven’t yet found the person who’s a little bit more effective in nurturing and closing the sales. So I definitely have some work to do still in building a sales team. 

Yeah. I mean, you’re two times Inc. 5000, so you must be growing fast. And in fact, I saw that you doubled the number of employees in the last couple of years. How do you make sure that the leadership is growing with the number of employees? How are you growing your leaders? 

Well, Steve, thank you, because that’s one of my favorite topics. And we’re big proponents of EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operating System, and the book Traction. And by the way, my hot tip to anyone who’s hearing this and is a business owner: don’t read the book Traction first. Read this book, Get a Grip. Because Get a Grip tells you the story of Traction, but it’s told as a story. And if you’re the founder, what EOS calls a visionary, Traction’s more like an operations manual, and that’s for your COO, your chief operating officer. So read Get a Grip, and then we got started three or four years ago self-implementing EOS. 

Yeah. 

And two and a half years ago, we hired an implementer and did a full-scale EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System, integration into our business. And that was when we were around 10 or 12 people. And when you’re a small business, five, six, seven employees, all of them can report to the CEO, and we had very hands-on training. And as the business grew and we got to 10 or 12, that’s where you’re supposed to develop leadership specialties. 

And obviously, 12 people can’t report to you, and you’re getting busier in sales and marketing and speaking and flying all over the place. So as we built this EOS leadership team, it’s been a real fantastic awakening for me because now there’s people who are very, very competent at what they do. They’re leading each of our departments, and I don’t have to sit in all the seats anymore. I found people who are better than me, smarter than me at what they do to lead each of those teams. 

That’s pretty cool. That’s pretty cool. So if someone is running a law firm out there and listening to all that advice and they’d like to learn more, where should they go and where can they connect with you? 

Well, the easiest thing is to go to tengoldenrules.com, or I’m Jay Berkowitz on most of the social media because when a new social media comes out, I always grab the name Jay Berkowitz. And probably much to the chagrin of a couple guys who are probably more important than me, Professor Jay Berkowitz and Chiropractor Jay Berkowitz. And if you guys are hearing this, I’m sorry, Dr. Jay Berkowitz, but I’ve got the Twitter and the Facebook and the LinkedIn handle. 

Yeah. That’s pretty cool. Actually, I was wondering because this podcast has been running for six years, and I had the recollection that I had a Jay Berkowitz on this show four or five years ago, and I had to make sure that it wasn’t you. So it’s funny that you mentioned this. Yeah. That’s awesome. So this is pretty impressive, not just as a law firm or a law firm owner, but anyone. 

I mean, these ideas that, Jay, you shared with us—how to attract people on your website, how to leverage AI and become an expert and create those FAQs and harvest them from your sales conversations, and then how you build a five-star operation so that you actually retain those clients and get them to refer and give you testimonials—that’s very, very valuable stuff. So I recommend all of you to look into implementing some of this stuff or reach out to Jay at one of the Jay Berkowitz handles or on the Ten Golden Rules website. 

So, Jay, thank you for coming and sharing your ideas and experiences and frameworks, particularly frameworks. And if you enjoyed listening, then stay tuned because every week I bring a couple of amazing entrepreneurs to this show. So thanks, Jay, for coming, and thank you for listening. 

You’re welcome, Steve. Thanks for having me. 

Thank you.

Saul Marquez, Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, helps medtech and healthtech companies get closer to revenue through healthcare-focused marketing strategy and execution. Driven by a desire to be a source of love and inspiration, Saul supports healthcare innovators whose work helps people live healthier, longer lives. He believes companies improving healthcare deserve to succeed and should not have to navigate growth alone.

In this conversation, Saul shares his Leverage the 3 Forms of Marketing Framework—Owned (podcast, books, content), Earned (Stages, Testimonials), and Paid (Drive Traffic to What Converts). He explains why companies need a clear strategy and strong owned assets before pursuing earned exposure, and why paid marketing should amplify a funnel that already converts. Saul also discusses growing through primary research, thought leadership, podcasting, and conferences rather than relying on cold outreach. He shares why marketing metrics must connect to pipeline and revenue, and how sales blockers, opportunities, and needs can guide the creation of campaigns and sales enablement assets.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Saul Marquez, the Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, a healthcare-exclusive marketing strategy and full-service marketing execution firm that helps medtech and healthtech companies accelerate their growth. Saul, welcome to the show. 

Steve, such a pleasure to be here with you and your listeners. Thank you for the opportunity. 

Well, I really have to get my A-game today because I rarely find a podcaster who’s recorded more episodes than I have. You beat that by a multiple of five or six. So definitely, I have to be on my best performance. But my first question is always the same, at least recently. What is your personal “Why,” and how are you manifesting it in your business? 

My personal Why. I did some thinking. This was probably about 20 years ago. I did this program. I’ve always been very reflective, and I’m a big journaler. I love to write my thoughts. And I had the chance to, about 20 years ago, do a program called Date With Destiny. It’s a Tony Robbins program. It was a game changer for me. Five days with people that want to just crush it in life—personal, professional, financial, right? Like, they just want to do the best. 

And so I had these five days to myself to really look inside, journal, question. And during that session, he has what he calls your primary question. You sort of look inside and you ask and you think about, like, what are those words, the stories that you tell yourself? And the primary question is that question that drives your life. And I was able to uncover that my primary question is, “I want to be a source of love and inspiration to myself and others.” And so I’m driven by love. I’m driven by inspiration. And so that’s my primary question and my primary Why. And then, when you think about it professionally, Steve, I’m very driven by mission. 

So because of that, I started my career in medical devices around the same time that I actually did the seminar. And I’m driven by being able to help people live better lives and increase health span, not just lifespan. And that’s why the work that we do focuses around leaders innovating in the healthcare space. So very driven by those things. 

But these are very noble ideas. And I mean, who wouldn’t want to live better, live longer? That’s an obvious need from everyone, really. And it’s a great thing if you can create an impact in that realm, that then you are creating something very valuable. 

You are, Steve. And the data point here that I’ll share to pair the purposefulness, the data point, because we’re very data-driven as a business, and I’m a data geek, is that healthcare is essentially 18% of U.S. GDP, which represents $4.8 trillion annually. It’s larger than the German economy, and that’s just the U.S. alone. So whenever anybody says, “Oh, your niche is healthcare,” I say, “Well, I mean, my economy that I’m focused on is healthcare.” It’s huge. 

Of course. Yeah. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. And probably, I mean, we can get into whether that’s not an overinflated number. Is it really that proportionate value? But if you think about it, the biggest resource is humans, then spending 18% of GDP on the biggest resource is not much. 

It definitely isn’t. And then if you sort of zoom out and you take a look at globally, GDP focused on healthcare, it’s definitely higher than most first-world countries. And the outcomes aren’t commensurate to the investment. So the opportunity to improve access, affordability, better outcomes is a huge opportunity. And

I'm in awe, and I have major respect for all the entrepreneurs and business leaders in this space that are looking to improve those metrics for us in healthcare, and that's why we love to stand behind them.
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The stats are real. 50% of businesses fail within five years, and something above 80% fail within 10 years. And we believe at Outcomes Rocket that if you’re in the business of helping people live healthier, longer lives, you deserve to succeed, and we want to be behind you. And so that’s why we do what we do. The people doing the work, it’s hard, and they can’t do it alone. 

Yeah. Love it. Just as an aside, whatever happened to this initiative of Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos that they announced some years ago that they would reform the— 

Yeah. 

Healthcare? 

Haven? 

Yeah. I don’t know what it was called. 

Yeah, Haven. So yeah, it was Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and JPMorgan. And it didn’t work. And it shows you that, like, even when the best of the best try to go do something about it, it doesn’t work. It’s hard. It’s hard work. Yeah. It’s hard work. 

I bet it’s very hard. So hopefully AI will fix it. Let’s hope. What do you think about that? 

That’s a great one, man. Like, AI definitely is not fixing it. However, properly deployed AI in solutions such as ambient scribing that helps physicians spend time with patients and no longer have to do what they call pajama time. Pajama time is the time that they spend at home after hours logging things into the medical record. Like, if you’re able to give a physician time back from not having to do that, and actually time back to look at you in the eyes when you’re in the waiting room, that’s awesome use of AI. 

The use of AI in the elimination of waste is also beautiful. So I think as a tool, for sure, there’s huge promise in the use of AI for healthcare. Hell, in robotics, man. Like, I was just at a conference, Steve. I was in Miami. Where do you live, by the way? 

I’m in Virginia. 

Oh, you’re in Virginia? Cool. I’m in San Diego, where I’m literally at the SRS, so that’s the Society of Robotic Surgery. And I’m in the room, and there was a surgeon in Virginia, actually, and a surgeon in California, and the robots were operating on. It wasn’t a person. It was actually just like a simulation, but it was like a cadaver type of thing. And with AI, spatial AI, and the use of technology, these surgeons are operating in two different states on one person. 

Remotely? 

Yeah, remotely, and it’s working great through robotics. So all of this stuff, man, is coming together. Yesterday, I had a conversation with an entrepreneur in the materials and 3D printing space. She’s been in it for years, and just chatting with her was inspiring because what they could do now as far as custom-built plates for craniomaxillofacial or foot and ankle, they could literally print this stuff overnight on sheets, whereas it used to take months. 

Like, we’re moving fast, and the innovations that are available. She called it patient matching, like the N of one. I mean, what’s possible today for a fraction of the cost than it used to be back then is just inspiring. And it’s happening right before us. So it’s a really great, great time to be alive. 

And to stay alive. 

And to stay alive. Exactly. Well said, my friend. Well said. Hey, you have to tell me about Summit OS and Fable, man. Like, I love what you have back there. 

Well, I’ll tell you all about Summit OS on your podcast, but on this podcast, we talk about you. That’s fair. That’s fair. 

I like that. I like that. 

So let’s talk about frameworks because this podcast is a podcast of frameworks. 

I love frameworks. 

And I saw that you have the Discover, Define, Deliver, or something like that. But I’m looking for something more unique. Yeah. So something that maybe that’s more insightful or more unique or more you that you could share with the audience, which still can be explained in four to five steps or elements maximum to which give people an insight as to how to do things better. 

Absolutely. So I think you and I are brothers from another mother, Steve, because I just love frameworks as well. So the 3D approach is easy, as you mentioned, right? But it is our approach and how we reproducibly bring about a program from start to finish for a client: Discover, Define, Deliver. 

Underneath that, that is the hood to another framework, which when you start to deliver, the framework is essentially a four-part framework that starts with strategy, then it’s owned, earned, and paid, okay? And so those are the types of marketing that you could do. And you mentioned at the beginning we’re a marketing strategy and full-service execution agency, which essentially means we’re a revenue partner, we’re a commercialization partner. 

So when you go to market with your value and your value proposition, it all starts with strategy. Strategy is so key. And one of the key quotes that we always share, Steve, is that, “Tactics are the noise you hear before the war is lost.” And I have to say, Steve, and everybody with us, in marketing, there are so many tactics. Too many. And guess what? 

Today, with AI, there are so many tactics. I was just on a podcast a couple days ago where I made this connection. I hadn’t made the connection yet, but you have to have an AI strategy. If you don’t have an AI strategy, you become part of somebody else’s plan, and even worse, you become so fragmented, and it’s reflecting in your P&L. Like, you not having an AI strategy is showing up in your P&L in a big way. But anyway, back to the marketing thing and the framework. So start with the strategy. 

Inside of your strategy are some very basic things, such as your personas, your ideal client personas, which is like firmographic, kind of number of employees, revenue, et cetera.
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I liken it to the Rubik’s Cube. I was watching a YouTube video with my nine-year-old, and he was like, “Hey, Dad, figure out how to solve this.” I brought him a Rubik’s Cube from a conference. I watched this four-part video. The guy’s name is Cubastic. Have you ever watched it, Steve? 

No. 

No? Okay. Cubastic, literally, he’s a genius. Like, in four 10-minute videos, walks you through how to solve a Rubik’s Cube. And I can solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes and 30 seconds reproducibly now. It’s actually one of my conference tricks now, like whenever I go to a booth. And so I’m sitting there thinking, like, yes,

no matter what, wherever the pieces are on the cube, if you use this algorithm, it's a four-part framework it gets you to the same end.
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So I’m thinking, that’s exactly what we do. So the strategy, then owned, earned, paid, in that order. So owned is everything that’s on your website, what you put out on social. If you have a podcast like yours, Steve, this is owned. You own this. It’s the narrative that you own. Newsletters. Then you have earned. Why does this order matter? Well, if you try to do earned media, like if you hire a PR agency to do earned media, get you media attention, and you don’t have your strategy or your story straight, you’re going to confuse the market even more. 

So that’s why earned is after owned. And with earned, it’s everything that you get. There’s a gentleman that put it really great. I have to get his name, but I got this from him. OPS, he calls it Other People’s Stages. And there’s digital and there’s physical stages. I’m on your digital stage. You’ve built this thing, and you’ve invited me, and I’m grateful for it. And by the way, I’m going to have you on mine. I want to learn about Summit OS, and I want to learn about your frameworks, and I want our audience to also learn about those. 

So there’s an asset here, and we’re doing an exchange, which is beautiful, and we’re spreading ideas that make a difference. So in earned, you’re getting opportunities like on OPS, and those could also be written. So you get a byline article on a publication, right? Or you get invited to speak at a conference. That’s earned. And then there’s paid. And people ask me the question, like, “Hey, I’ve got these paid campaigns going on.” And I’m like, “Dude, you have nothing on your website that supports a narrative. Nobody is talking about you. Why would you even pay for anything?” I don’t care what it is. 

Unless you got all those other things right, paid is there, like paid conferences, to get more people that’ll read the brochures that are owned, that’ll see the testimonials that are earned, that’ll convert to opportunities to check out your demo or sit with you to consider what you’re doing as a business to solve problems. And so the paid is essentially a way to increase traffic to an existing funnel that converts. 

So essentially, this framework of strategy, owned, earned, paid is the framework of marketing that, if done right algorithmically, you will get results.
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So you’re not really selling a quick fix here, are you? 

It’s not a quick fix. There are no quick fixes. You have to commit to the process and get it done. 

Yeah, I like it. I mean, that makes complete sense. You have to have some assets that you start with that you own. I like the podcast. Okay, books can be like that. Yeah. Website, of course. Your frameworks are your asset, basically. And then you have to earn the right to actually share what you know. I love it. People validate, go through the stages, and get the testimonials, so you have to deliver. You have to prove that those assets are actually working, right? 

Yes. 

And then when you have a funnel, you already have a product that has proven itself, then it’s all about increasing the throughput. So paid is what?

That’s right. 

There is an amplifier. 

That’s it. That’s it. Yeah. Yep. Yep. 

It makes complete sense. It’s a very good framework. I’ve never thought about it this way, but it makes complete sense to me. 

And it’s algorithmic. No matter where the pieces in the cube are, if you run it, you’re always going to end up with the same color on each side. It just works. 

Yeah. So if you don’t have your assets, you haven’t earned your right, then you are just wasting your money on paid. Yeah. 

Yeah. You’re wasting it. You are. Now, there’s a use case for paid to accelerate learnings. If you’re working on copy that you just need feedback on, there’s a use case to get mass targeted, like your ideal client looking at and interacting with it to understand how to better convert. That’s a use case, right? You’re after conversion optimization data. That’s fine, right? That’s fine. You could use paid to fine-tune conclusions as well. 

Can you use paid for market research?

Oh, yeah, for sure. 

What you should be selling? 

Yeah. You could definitely use paid for market research, for sure, if you have an end in mind. If your end in mind is to get more target, and then you just have to decide, right? Like, what payment model should you deploy? Should you put an ad out, or should you work with a partner that has access to a pool of qualified survey respondents? Would it be more efficient to just go through them, right? So it’s just a matter of what the end goal is. 

That makes sense. So let me ask you a question, Saul. What drives growth in your business? 

So a couple things.

We do thought leadership, and so the thought leadership that we do is on healthcare marketing.
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So thought leadership based off primary research. So every quarter, we do two new reports. We conduct surveys focused on marketing strategies and tactics. Some of the latest ones we’ve done—we did one on podcasting, which is very interesting. We released this one about three weeks ago. This one’s gotten crazy media hits. Like, we’ve gotten over 30 media hits on this one. 

PPC covered us, because it’s sexy still. Podcasts are sexy. But we had a lot of findings, and I’ll share the link with you. We don’t charge for our research. It’s free. We offer it to people so that they could do better marketing. Now, the thing that was most intriguing about that report for me, out of a lot of things, was that people are measuring the wrong thing as it relates to podcast marketing. You’ll see the results, but I remember these numbers. 57% are measuring engagement and downloads. 

And that’s the wrong thing to measure. I’m going to segue to that later.

The right thing to measure if you're a business is pipeline and revenue, not engagements and downloads.
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The other one that got a lot of really good traction earlier this year was one on chatbots. We analyzed over 5,700 citations to figure out what exactly are chatbots looking for. And we took a look at those 5,700 citations. It was a breakdown of Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok. And so we said, why and what do these value? It changed the way that we actually post content on our site and our clients’ sites. So that’s a really valuable report that I would literally just take from our site, download into Claude, and say, “Based off of this report from Outcomes Rocket, how should I change up my copy and how I lay out my posts?” Because that’s going to help you get more AI visibility. 

We actually have been running those plays on clients, and our numbers on ChatGPT and Claude Search and Gemini Search have gone up for them, right? It’s working. So we do this thought leadership stuff because we don’t like to experiment with our clients’ money. We like to actually do stuff that works and actually figure things out. So that’s thought leadership. And then the podcast is another thing that we do. So I love podcasting, Steve, as we were talking about before we hit record. I get a chance to connect with awesome people. Like, I keep thinking about Summit OS. 

I’m going to learn about it on my podcast. I guess I can’t learn it on this one, but I get to meet people like you. We get to connect with listeners, like the ones—like, you’re listening to this because you want to be better. You want to improve your business, and it’s a chance for me to connect with you right now. And I’m going to invite you to reach out to me if something that I said resonates with you, because that’s why we do this. So podcasts are one of our great funnels, Steve. We do podcasting, and we meet a lot of great friends and collaborators and partners and clients through podcasting. And also conferences. So conferences are another amplifier for us.

So I would say thought leadership, research, podcasting, and conferences are the best ways for us to grow our business. That's how we do it.
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That’s very insightful. What I’m not hearing here is cold calling, cold emailing, spamming people. You’re not doing any of that. What I’m hearing here is you are giving people great content. You’re teaching people, and you’re connecting with people. 

Yes. 

Because podcasts, I agree with you, it’s all about connecting with people at a deeper level around interesting topics. Conferences are the same thing. You create relationships, and then you can follow up with the people who you like at the conference and turn them into partners or clients or whatever. 

Yeah. 

I love it. Love that. 

And Steve, you’re a really insightful guy. I’m glad you went to that point. And so I was sitting there literally probably like five months ago, and I was having a conversation with a client of ours, and she was like, “Man, these cold emails that we’re doing,” because they wanted to do them, “I mean, we’re seeing clicks, and we’re seeing opens, but we’re seeing no replies and no meetings booked.” And I said, “Because the way we have to do it is through content.” Yeah. You have to offer. 

If you go fishing and your hook has no bait on it, you’re not going to catch any fish, unless a dumb fish runs into your hook. You don’t want that fish anyway, right? That’s what you’re going to catch. And so I said, because I am kind of a data geek, as I shared with you, I said, “I want to own this frustration that you have right now. And here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to hire four lead gen agencies, and I’m going to put one on your account, I’m going to put two on our company, and I’m going to…” I had another client that I was having this conversation with. “I’m going to put another one on their account.” And so I paid for this research project. 

I said, “I’m going to learn. I’m either going to learn how to do cold email really damn good because I’ve been not doing well at it.” Guess what? Secret. Nobody’s freaking doing good at it, okay? So, like, three months later, they failed miserably. Nobody was doing anything. So then I said, “Okay, let’s try this. Don’t ask for an appointment. I want you to, on this mass cold email project, I want to change the copy, and I want to put, ‘I want to invite you to my podcast.'” These are the same people that were not replying. Steve, I kid you not, man. Like, within one week, we had 13 people in line that want to talk to them. They’re thrilled. So my takeaway was, cool. 

You know what? I’ve been playing too small in sort of these podcast outreaches. I mean, look, at the end of the day, it’s working, but I said, “I’m going to use this mass email failure and turn it into a success by inviting even more people.” So now what we’re doing is actually, with these pools of people that are interested, taking a look at webinars too, so one to few. One to one, one to few, so that we could serve the many. 

And so from the ashes of those failures, not only did I feel better about myself, like, dude, nobody is winning at cold email marketing. Nobody. But if you’re thoughtful about it in the way that you do it and what you offer, it’s got to be content-forward. But anyway, I wanted to pick up on your insight there and share our experiment that we ran. 

I think also that you and I have been doing podcasting a long time. It’s actually now a huge thing. When I started it, for the first five years, I had no idea what I was doing, why I was doing it. I enjoyed it. 

Yeah. 

But it wasn’t really a thing. And then now I realize that a lot of people are now starting to do podcasting, but when you have a brand-new podcast, people are going to be much more circumspect to engage with you because they assume it may just be a lead gen engine. But when you have an established podcast with a lot of episodes, then you are a legit media, and then they will engage. 

So anyway, that’s an aside. So let me ask you this, Saul, because you’re really a systems thinker, and I like that. What is one thing that you are trying to actively figure out in your business right now? 

Right now, the thing that I’m actively working to figure out is really scalability and processes around delivery. So we have a very talented team. We’re small but mighty. There’s 25 people on my team, right? What we do is very bespoke, and our clients really do love how we execute and get results for them. What I’m working on is to master our delivery model so that we are more in line with our clients’ business growth. A few of the things that we’re doing to that end is getting closer to revenue. 

What I mean by that is, I don’t know about you, Steve, but my career was mostly in sales in medtech before starting the agency three years ago full-time. And I realized that whenever there was a crunch in a business, some of the first positions to go were marketing. But nobody ever got rid of salespeople. So I started having this conversation with my team about we have to get closer to revenue, right?

Get closer to the revenue conversations, have clarity around the revenue conversations. Because if you're close to revenue and you're helping drive revenue, you become more indispensable.
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We might get T-shirts. I was kidding around that our theme is indispensable, and we might get T-shirts that say “Indispensable.” But that’s what we’re working on right now, is solidifying and optimizing our delivery so that we are more indispensable and we can continue growing at the pace that we’ve been growing to the next goals in our year and then our five-year and our 10-year plan. 

So essentially, are you saying that getting closer to revenue means getting more directly impacting revenue, more directly making sure that the client is increasing revenue? Because marketing, you can increase marketing, but if it doesn’t have an impact, then it’s going to go away. So is this what you mean? 

Exactly. 

Yeah. 

Because again, back to the whole thing, the quote, right? Like, “Tactics are the noise you hear before the war is lost.” In marketing, it’s so easy to report on metrics. But if your metrics are not tied to revenue, good luck. 

Yeah. And there are some people who are doing great marketing, but they are doing very poorly in converting their leads, and therefore they’re wasting the marketing, and they might fire the marketing agency because you don’t have any clients. But they actually are downstream screwing things up. And if you can help them there, then your marketing is going to be much more resilient. 

Yeah. And we’re getting awesome feedback from our clients. They love this. They’re telling us what they need. Right now, where we’re at, it’s three. So we do our weekly reporting, right, to our clients on kind of like what we’re doing on campaigns and research projects and execution. And so in our weekly report-out, we are finalizing sort of these three slides that are essentially sales. Like, the first slide is essentially the top five opportunities for the month and where they’re at. Sales blockers, sales opportunities, and then big needs, like sales needs. 

So when the sales call happens, we get a transcript from that call, and the marketer asks the questions about, “Hey, what’s holding you back? What could help you move these deals faster?” We get that transcript, and then we create sales enablement assets or landing pages or campaigns that help move those deals forward. And that’s been awesome. Like, being able to do that, that’s being close to revenue, and it’s something that we’re adapting and being responsive to client needs, and that’s sort of where it’s taken us recently. 

Yeah, I love it. Blockers, opportunities, and needs. So how are needs different from resolving the blockers and capitalizing the opportunity?

A lot of times there’s overlap there on both of those. Yeah. The overlap is that a blocker could pair with a need that we could solve. But sometimes a blocker could be out of our control. Like, hey, we were going to sell them our microscope, but the MRI machine broke, and now they need to spend money on the MRI machine. Sh*t. There’s nothing we could do. Like, we’re pushing this deal to next quarter. Now, you could try to do stuff, creative financing or stuff like that, and we could have those conversations, but there’s some things that are out of our control. 

I wonder if it’s needs or wants. Because I was thinking that maybe the needs are what the client already articulated as something that they realize that they need in order to grow revenue, whereas the blockers and opportunities will give you ideas how you can grow it in ways that they have not thought about. 

Yeah. 

And therefore, maybe instead of needs, it is the wants, and the needs are the ones that you add based on the blockers and opportunities. I don’t know. 

I like that. I like it. No, no, I like it. I like it. And is the idea that, like, wants is a little more creative and open? 

No, wants is something that they already articulated themselves that they want to do because they realize that they need that. But they need to do other stuff that they haven’t realized, and that’s what you come up with based on the blockers and the opportunities. 

Correct. Correct. 

It’s the unidentified wants basically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like that. I like that. I’m going to give some thought to that, Steve. 

Yeah. 

I like the idea. 

Thank you. Thanks for the opportunity to give you a framework, or a framework.

I love it, man. I love it. I had to pull it out of you. I had to pull it out of you. Actually, I didn’t. I couldn’t do it. You gave it to me, right? No, no. When the student is ready, the teacher comes, right? 

There you go. Well, in that case, the teacher was inspired by the student, but— 

I love it. 

Whatever. 

I love it. 

So you said it’s medtech and healthtech companies and payers also that you target?

Medtech and healthtech. And the payers, we actually—our clients sell to payers. So we do have a payer podcast where we interview payers and vendors in the payer market. But yeah, our main clients are health technology. So think Software as a Service, AI companies in healthcare, and then medical technologies like medical devices, implantables, wearables, that kind of thing, FDA-approved devices and technologies. Software as a medical device, that’s the medtech space. 

Yeah. Love it. So these are the ideal ones. So if these people are listening to this podcast or they are seeing you on social media, you’re promoting this podcast together, where should they go? What do you want them to check out? How can they connect with you? 

Yeah. Thank you, Steve. If you’re in the healthcare space and you want to raise your marketing game, increase your revenue, increase awareness of what your company’s doing, we’d love to be a part of it, whether it be you consuming our content. We don’t expect anything from you. Our content is all on outcomesrocket.com. Or you could find me on LinkedIn. If something that I post or that we post inspires you or makes you think differently, we always invite a conversation to explore working together. And so, yeah, outcomesrocket.com and LinkedIn are the best ways to reach us. 

Okay. Saul Marquez, the CEO of Outcomes Rocket, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your awesome frameworks. I really enjoyed them. And if you’re listening to this, I mean, this is a goldmine for you guys. So make sure you follow us, you tune in to many episodes, because every week I bring a couple of fantastic entrepreneurs that will help you grow your business. So thanks for coming, Saul, and thanks for listening.

Dan Salganik, Founder and CEO of VisualFizz, helps established B2B companies plug all the holes in your marketing through integrated, outcome-focused strategies. Driven by a desire for freedom, travel, and creative expression, Dan built a fully remote agency that allows him to explore the world while helping clients create distinctive campaigns, strengthen their marketing capabilities, and generate long-term customer value.

In this conversation, Dan introduces The Growth System 4 Tracks Framework—Brand & Digital Foundations, Staff Augmentation, Transformation, Transition & Expansion, and RevOps Growth Inflection. He explains how companies can select and combine these tracks to strengthen their foundations, expand internal capabilities, support acquisitions and geographic growth, and align marketing with sales. Dan also discusses growing through quality rather than speed, building larger client relationships through trust, and shifting VisualFizz from commoditized services toward solutions focused on business outcomes. He shares how identifying small gaps across the customer journey can improve efficiency, strengthen retention, and create sustainable revenue growth.

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Dan Salganik, the Founder and CEO of VisualFizz, a company that empowers industry-leading brands to maximize their potential with effective marketing strategies and custom-tailored campaigns. Dan, welcome to the show. 

Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. I really appreciate it. 

It’s great to have you, and I’d like to learn about your personal ‘Why’ and how you’re manifesting it in VisualFizz. 

Wow, that’s a big question to start with. I’ll start with my kind of goal for a little bit of freedom, which is funny because the more you grow, the less freedom you have. But for many years, I started VisualFizz because of a need to travel and to have freedom to do what I want. I’m a very expressive person, and after working at a number of agencies and finding things they do wrong, and also being a big traveler, I actually decided to launch VisualFizz almost 10 years ago, which is crazy to me. 

And ultimately, we’ve seen this company grow quite a bit in that time. But I built it out to have the ability to travel, to do the things I want, to build a team, to build also campaigns that are fun and they’re unique and build customer value. So you started with a great question, and there’s so many reasons why—my kind of personal philosophies and why I manage and run and grow VisualFizz—but I think travel, freedom, and the ability to see creative campaigns at scale are just a few of them. 

So I saw on your website that one of your goals is to travel at least 100 days a year. So is this business travel? Is this personal? Is this a combination? 

I’d say almost no business travel counts, right? Because then you’re just doing business. I love business, but that’s totally separate. It’s personal travel. Basically, every single year, yeah, for almost 10 years, I have spent about a little less than a third of the year traveling, and some years a lot more. And so, being a remote company—and pre-COVID we were remote—we’ve built this style and methodology and processes, everything around being a fully remote company or an organization. And so, yeah, I do 30-day trips. I do two-week trips. I do two-, three-month trips. 

But for me, it's always very important that work doesn't slow down. But you're going to regret working your whole life.
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Yeah. My dad, he was a doctor. He worked very hard all his life, and he always told us when we were kids that he was going to retire at 60 and travel around the world with my mom. And then when he was 60 years old, he had this opportunity to run this hospital, and one thing led to another, and he turned 70, and then he no longer wanted to travel. 

And he literally said, “Oh, I wish we traveled more while we were young because now I don’t want to travel.” So that kind of resonates with me, what you say. It’s great that you have this awareness and you make it happen. So when you travel, do you run your business remotely? 

100%. My business runs with my laptop, and if I’m lucky, I have a second monitor with me. Actually, nowadays I travel with a second monitor even on a flight, if I have to take a flight.But I have a second monitor with me. I have my laptop. My business comes with me. That’s number one. 

So I might switch my hours a little bit. I might change things around, but I’ve got a great team. I delegate. It’s interesting because in the early days, it was hard to travel because we didn’t have a lot of clients, so we didn’t have a lot of money. Still don’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t have nearly as much when I started the company. Nowadays, we’re a growing business, and it’s great. So finally—it’s the whole dilemma. It’s like we’re finally growing. We’ve got a real business. I can pay myself a real wage. 

But you can’t leave the business for too long because then you have other issues. But it’s a good balance between the two, and I always do bring my laptop no matter where I go. You never know what happens. But if I’m truly taking time off, which is very, very hard, I give my wife my cellphone. I either don’t take my laptop or I put my laptop away in the safe, and I don’t touch technology. Because honestly, it’s very easy to get distracted. 

It is super easy to get distracted. So let’s talk about frameworks because this is what the podcast is about. So tell me a framework that you have developed or you picked up somewhere that allows you to do something better than other people, whether it’s more effective, whether it’s bigger impact, whether it’s more organized, whether it’s generating an insight that can be explained in three to five steps. 

I love that. Actually, this is really great timing because we just built a brand-new framework, and I just soft-launched it to the world. We had a big event last week, and it’s called the Growth System. And it’s for our soft launch called VF3, VisualFizz 3.0. We’ve scaled up. This is kind of our software reboot.

There's four tracks. It's a track system, so it's similar to a framework, and they're driven by the following.
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It’s developed for mid-market and enterprise B2B companies, especially companies that have been around for a long time, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but have something that’s broken or maybe needs improvement, et cetera. And so they come to us, and instead of saying, “Oh, I think you need SEO. I think you need paid search,” it’s solutions-focused, not services. The services come after. And there’s four tracks that are built off of. Each track can take three months, six months, 12 months, two years, et cetera. It just depends on the business. 

The first one being the brand and the digital foundation. Many of my clients come from boring industries, my favorite. They need to rebuild. They came in understanding there’s private equity money, there’s new competition coming up, this, that, and the other. It’s a new brand, rebrand, or brand infrastructure, and then web infrastructure, all focused on sales. So everything here is focused on RevOps, sales, et cetera. 

The second one, track, is staff augmentation, capability accelerator. It’s helping brands that are really great at something and really not great at another thing, or have a very expensive team internally where they feel that they can outsource to an agency for a large discounted price, for lack of a better word to put it. An example is we took over the tech arm of one of our clients, saved them about 50% in their budget, doubled their capacity, have a full team, 100% uptime, things like that. 

The third, the one that I'm probably most excited about, is transformation, transition, and expansion which is all about mergers and acquisitions, national expansion, franchising, scaling locations, things of that nature
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And the final one is RevOps, growth inflection. We come in, we look through the CRM, we work with the sales teams, we audit the sales teams, we do interviews with the sales teams, and we make sure that marketing and sales are not oil and water. We combine them, we develop everything, we focus on lifetime customer value, post-sales transactions, and really driven towards long-term growth and revenue, basically generation. So a little bit longer than the few sentences you asked me for, so I apologize. But

this is the future framework that VisualFizz will be built upon and scale upon for the future.
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Yeah. I love it. So the big picture is that you fix the foundations, then you give them people who can actually execute, then you transition. Does the transition mean that from staff augmentation, you transition to their own team? Or what does— 

No, not necessarily. They don’t have to go one after the other, and that’s something I’m trying to work around communication-wise. You might start with brand infrastructure and go straight into demand gen, RevOps. Because we need to scale now. Or you might say, “Hey, VisualFizz, why don’t you just take over our SEO department fully?” Or it’s a little bit of both. 

I’ve talked to a lot of mid-market and larger, a couple quite large billion-dollar-plus companies that said, “You know what? I don’t need a new website, but I really need to understand how we focus on communication with our sales teams,” or, “We do need visual improvements for our brand. We don’t need the new website.” So you can pick and choose a little bit. My goal is to not have to do that, but there’s not a linear step that you have to take between one, two, three, and four. It’s really, “Hey, we need to scale. I do $500 million today. 

I want to buy three locations across the United States. This is what I’m looking at. My goal in five years is $750 million. How do I get there, VisualFizz?” And we lay out year one, two, three, four, and five, what we do, and how we plan to scale alongside the company. 

Love it. So you basically productized your offering to these four major situations, and they can be implemented piecemeal. You can start anywhere, and you can keep stacking them. That’s super interesting. So let me switch gears here and ask you, what drives growth in your business, in VisualFizz? 

For a lot of time, it was the very generic hustle and bustle of just trying to do good. Be a—how do I put it? Being there. Being the fastest to answer the phone, being the fastest to email back, getting the best proposals, because that’s what you do as a small agency. But as you grow, you don’t win on speed, you win on quality. It’s different. As a startup or as a startup who’s interested in an agency, you go fast, fast, fast. But I actually tell clients, “I’m not interested in speed.” That’s why these tracks that I told you, they take a year, two years, three years. 

So now the growth is really driven around my clients’ peace of mind and my prospective clients’ peace of mind, knowing that they’re working with a decade-old agency, with team members who’ve predominantly been on our team for five years or more. Almost everybody is senior on my team. What drives growth is not so much quantity, never really has been, but it’s quality. And so my intent is not to win more customers. It’s to win bigger and better customers that are going to allow us for longevity, growth, and longer sales cycles internally. That’s really what drives growth today, is less stress and better clients. 

So what does it take to land those larger, better clients? 

A lot of work. I think there’s a couple. One is trust. Some clients will start small, and that’s where this whole model came from. I had a lot of clients come to me and say, “Hey, Dan, I need a new website.” And I’m like, “Okay, great, but your brand doesn’t look good.” I respect the brand, and I’m not somebody to say, “Oh, you need to do a $100,000 rebrand,” because some companies really don’t need that. But I say, “Let’s look from the inside out.” And before you go, “Hey, I need a new website,” or, “Oh, I need demand gen. I need paid search ASAP,” I go, “Wait a second. Hold up. 

I’m not going to spend $50,000, $100,000 on sending traffic to your website when your brand and website can’t accommodate that.” And so we start small with execution around a brand implementation. That moves into web development. That can take some time. We’re not an AI cloud web builder. Like, it’s just not going to happen. We build proper sites for proper companies. And then moving forward after that, it becomes a marketing campaign. That lasts for years. 

So for me, it's really driven around that methodology to work with clients and keep growing them and scaling them.
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So are you going to land large clients, or are you landing small clients that you grow into large clients? So how do you actually execute the strategy? 

It’s both. Over the years, we’ve really pushed to be B2B-focused, and in doing so, our client size revenue—not for us revenue, but their revenue—has been larger. So maybe back in the day we would land $10, $20 million companies. Now it might be $500 million companies. But the engagement was the same. Same size. And so now it might be the same difference where we land a $300 million company, but we can start small, but there’s more room to scale up over time, kind of what I told you earlier, as we build trust. So it might just be a small engagement. 

Like I said, “Hey, let’s just do a brand exercise.” And then it moves into, “Oh wow, you guys actually provided value. The ROI was there. Let’s move into something else.” I’d say our close rate is lower, unfortunately, but our average statement of work or proposal is higher. And so again, it’s quality over quantity. I may lose nine out of 10 because I’m competing against larger companies that do technically have more to offer. But there’s those clients that say, “You know what? I really like the small boutique agency. 

I don’t want to go with the 100-person shop. I want to go with the 20-, 25-person shop. I’m going to be a big fish in a small pond versus a mid- to small fish in a big pond. I’m going to go with them.”

And so those are the customers that I do win right now, the ones that understand they're going to be my big fish. They're really going to be well taken care of.
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Yeah. So what’s one thing that you’re trying to figure out in your business right now? 

My pivot. That’s a really tough one. My business has changed a lot in the past year. From a leadership perspective, I’ve become the sole owner of the company, which I wasn’t before. It was a good decision for everyone. I think everyone left happy. And beyond that, it’s really now, how do I build VisualFizz up? One of my biggest challenges that I face, and I think a lot of agencies face, especially when they don’t internalize their problems, is we’ve become very commoditized. 

All of our offerings that we have get compared to AI, as well as there’s a lot of offshore agencies that their biggest barrier to entry was their language. And now with AI, that’s no longer a problem because we can all do our work fluently. Smart people, but being a U.S. agency, that was our advantage. We charge what we charge because we’re U.S., and the barrier to entry was high. But now there’s all these other folks, as well as AI, as well as software, as well as everything else. 

And so I realized that we can’t rest on the laurels of being a 10-year-old agency. That doesn’t matter to people. What matters is results. And so my biggest challenge right now is, how do I pivot my company from being this commoditized service? Even if they’re good, even if you’re the best, it doesn’t matter because it’s a commodity. You could have the best concrete in the city, but if you get an RFQ and the other guys are five cents cheaper, they’re going to go with them a lot of times. Not always, but a lot of times. 

And so my intention is what I said earlier: focus on the solutions and focus on the outcomes within our system that I’m building, because I think customers are going to care more to hear, “Hey, I’m not Dan who offers SEO services for you forever. I’m Dan and VisualFizz who take your company from $75 million to $100 million in the next year.” Like, that’s what I think drives their interest. But my challenge is, how do I prove that model out? Because it’s not a standard model that people know yet. It’s not been drilled down like the agency model has been for so many years. It’s new. 

And do you feel like you can control the client’s business? You’re so good that you can control their growth, you can make them grow? 

No. I would be overzealous and confident to say that I can do that. But the thing I can do is I could help work alongside them to do our best to get there, right? And I’ll give you a couple examples because, I mean, it’s all in the case studies. I took one company with my team from $150 million to $350 million with them, with them, to then have a merger of equals, and now they’re probably worth half a billion, $600 million, something like that. 

And then another company, at a certain time during the—I’m going to kind of keep it vague—from $700 million to $800 million to $900 million. But that wasn’t VisualFizz. That was the economy. But it’s about finding opportunities and holes within your client ecosystem that help. So, for example, I saw a hole in what they were currently doing. Their brand was totally off, so we worked on that first. But after that, you could have a pretty website, it might return, but what happened after that is I found a hole saying, “There is so much demand for this product right now. 

There’s a big gorilla in the room, a massive, massive company, and there’s you guys, maybe third, fourth, fifth, whatever. But no one’s running paid ads, for example, because it’s a commodity. And why would you run paid ads for commodities?” We did that, and the return on ad spend and return on investment on that has been exponential. Just to get us on the top of that list, it’s an obvious statement, but that coupled with a good-quality website, all the sales materials, trackability, CRM improvements, da da da da da, the list goes on. 

I can’t control if the economy goes poorly, if another war breaks out. I’m a nobody.

But what I can do with my team is identify little holes that eventually do integrate sales teams better, save time, save money.
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It’s 25 points. We stop at point 20. Sales team takes over from 20 to 24, and we start again at 25 with that same client we already won. So we could take them from whatever they were, $500,000 to $2 million for our customer. So, okay, that was a very long tangent, but gives you an idea of what I think I can control. But no, I can’t control company revenue. I don’t have that much power. 

Yeah. No, the only reason I ask this is because if you’re selling an outcome-based approach, then they will ask you, “Okay, show me the outcome that you’re going to deliver for us.” And it is really hard to deliver that and to control that, or it’s impossible even. However, I really like this concept of plugging all the little holes in the bucket, right? 

There’s a lot.

Yeah. If you plug that, then they’re not going to lose their customers, and they’re going to grow naturally without even having to add on the top. So if you had a magic wand then and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be?

Agencies are such hard businesses, as you probably know, right? I would probably ideally like to fix the sales pipeline, which is obvious. Anybody would. But I’m only one person. It’s a small team, and I do manage. I’m a pretty active founder and owner and a CEO. And candidly, I’m not an outbound salesperson. I’m good at understanding people’s needs and the marketing world, but I’m not out there speaking at events every day. I’m not out there kissing babies and waving around and winning clients. 

There are people who are really good at that, loud people who have a great social presence, like the Gary Vees of the world and the Neil Patels. They’re great at this thing. I’m okay. But what I am good at, and what my team is good at, is being knowledgeable about our clients’ needs and how to, again, figure out those challenges, plug the holes, and be useful. We’re not like a vanity agency. We don’t sell pretty little things. So sometimes it’s hard to say that we’re the agency for them when they don’t have the pretty little thing. So for me, what I would wave my wand around and say is, if I could have a really strong sales team member who works beside me, and again, I could hire somebody. 

I know this. But I haven’t seen the best success with outside salespeople helping, like SDRs, et cetera, because no one sells the agency work like the agency owner until you get to a certain size, until you get to 100 people or whatever, and you deal with different challenges. So having somebody who understands the business and can find the leads when we need them, because I know that once we get them in the door, it’s pretty—it’s not crazy complicated to win that work. 

But getting them at the right time to understand what we’re offering and, let’s say, speed up the sales process, which right now is very slow for most agencies. I’ve talked to a lot of owners. It’s a very slow sales cycle. That would be what I’d do, at least for now. 

So who’s an ideal client? I mean, you mentioned that there are some small ones that you grow. You mentioned that you used to maybe shoot for $10 million to $50 million. Now it’s $300 million to $500 million. So what’s an ideal client that would find VisualFizz to be in their sweet spot? 

The thing with revenue in my industry is it doesn’t matter. If you work with e-commerce or CPGs, it could be a $30 million company with a larger budget than my billion-dollar client. That’s just the nature of it. So the revenue doesn’t matter as much. But I do think half a billion to a billion dollars is a sweet spot. A known company, but one that needs a lot of background work. And so for me, a lot of my clients are in manufacturing, industrial, construction, and logistics, among other similar complementary spaces. 

Most of them are 20 to 100 years old, and most of them do not have a fully fleshed-out marketing team. And so I do have a client right now that is my ideal client, and I would love to have 10 of them. They’re a client that doesn’t have a marketing department. They’ve kind of let us become the marketing department. They’re open to our ideas, and they’ve allowed us to really take on the role of the marketing team. And so they have many locations across the country. 

They’re in the industrial space. They’re growing. They’re open to our ideas, and they want us to be kind of the people that do the work for them. Everything else comes as it does, right? But the attitude that comes with a good client, that’s my ideal customer profile. But for more of a vanilla answer, I would say half a billion to a billion dollars, looking for growth, boring industries, commodities, service businesses, B2B space, many locations, wants to grow, healthy budget. 

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a big difference maker. If you can find someone that trusts you, I always found that it’s so much easier to deliver value to a customer that trusts you than one that second-guesses you, right? So it becomes a win-win if they can trust you. 

Yes. And I’ll be honest, the quality of my team’s work, even if it’s not directly shown, because we are a business and we do the work for our clients no matter what. But I’ll tell you just upfront that when my clients respect my team members—because I’ve had people that aren’t very respectful. I’ve had clients who are not nice. A lot of them are great, some of them aren’t. They’re not respectful to my team, and though my team has to do the work no matter what, if the client’s really bad, I talk to them and I tell them, “This is not allowed.” 

It’s my team over my client every day. But if they’re just not polite or they second-guess all the time, the team isn’t going to care as much about the project and do as good of work and really go out of their way. They’ll do the work. They’ll check the boxes. They’ll do what they have to do, but they’re not going to think at 10:00 P.M., middle of the night, “Oh my God, what about this idea for this client?” And I’ll tell you, the clients that my teams love, not because they’re nice and they’re pleasant, it’s because they respect one another. They will always go out of their way and come up with new, better ideas because it’s happening top of mind all the time. 

And the other ones, they’re trying—and it’s anybody—they’re flushing it out of their system until the next time they’re needed. I don’t want to make it sound like we don’t care about our clients, but at the end of the day, it’s the same thing. You have bad relationships and you have good relationships. You’re going to call your friend who’s nice and wants to hang out with you versus the guy that pushed you on the street. Just makes sense. 

Plus, you’re in a creative business, and sometimes you have to take a risk in order to create something really nice. And if they don’t trust you, then you’re not going to take a risk for them. Absolutely. 

Exactly. 

So that’s fascinating. So if I’m the CEO or CMO of this half-a-billion-dollar industrial company with 20 sites, and we don’t have a marketing team and we really have to get going, where can I find out about you and how can I connect with you? 

Well, shoot me an email. I’ll give the easy one. It’s [email protected]. Shoot me a LinkedIn request. I mean, any way to get to me is great. I will always take a call, a strategy call. I’m not a pushy sales guy who says you have to sign up right away. If somebody has ideas and just wants to run them by me and say, “Dan, listen, I may need you, I may not, but you’ve got 30 minutes, you’ve got an hour,” I, as much as I can make the time, try to make the time for anyone. 

In fact, I was talking to the sales and marketing person at a company for two years. She never ended up even working with us because of budget constraints. I still have an excellent relationship with her. She’s very nice. We would talk probably once a month. So I’m big on just when the timing is right, it will work out. So I’m happy to help. 

All right. So if you are one of these companies—industrial, maybe old economy, multi-sites, maybe in the Midwest, who knows where these companies are—a couple hundred million dollars to a billion dollars, and you want a really great marketing team and maybe someone who will fix your digital foundations and build your website, or give you staff, or help you transform, transition, and expand, and build your RevOps and marketing and integrate everything, then reach out to Dan, Dan Salganik, the founder of VisualFizz, and he will take care of you. 

And if you enjoyed listening to this show, make sure you follow us on YouTube, give us a review, because every two weeks—sorry, every week—I bring you a couple of exciting entrepreneurs who are building great businesses and share their unique framework with you. So Dan, thank you for coming. Thanks for listening. 

Yes. Thanks for having me. I so appreciate it.

Parry Headrick, Founder of Crackle PR, is helping B2B technology companies offer LLM-digestible messages through earned media, human-centered writing, and strategic communication. Driven by the belief that where people start does not determine where they finish, Parry has built an empathetic, senior-led agency that works exclusively with good companies and empowers its people to share their expertise openly. 

In this conversation, Parry introduces The LinkedIn Cheat-code Framework: Post every day, Tap into news stories, Weave in audience impact, and No-CTA. He explains how consistently sharing valuable ideas and expecting nothing in return helped him build an audience, generate most of his leads through LinkedIn, and shorten the sales cycle from three months to one week. Parry also discusses how LinkedIn thought leadership creates a virtuous cycle of earned media and LLM citations, why websites and PR content must be readable by both humans and machines, and how a senior-led agency can scale without sacrificing quality. He also shares why human writers will become more valuable as AI-generated content creates a growing sea of sameness.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Parry Headrick, the Founder of Crackle PR, a B2B tech public relations agency that works with good companies only. Crackle PR is a senior-led B2B tech PR agency built for the LLM era, where earned media is no longer just a brand builder, it is the vital infrastructure that feeds foundation models. Parry, welcome to the show. 

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

Well, it’s great to have you, and you are all about LLMs and how to get through the AI filters, which is relevant for all of us. But before we jump in, I’d like to ask you my $64,000 question. What is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in Crackle PR? 

Yeah, that’s a good question. And I haven’t really been asked that question in that way before, but if I had to nail the answer, it would be this. So I started out with humble beginnings. My family didn’t have any money really to speak of. We wore secondhand clothes. It was the typical scratching and clawing our way up story. And I had a difficult childhood with divorces and everything, and I ended up getting kicked out of high school. Seventh grade was the last grade I actually completed. I was kicked out of two different schools three different times. 

And the last time I was dismissed, I was told by the principal that I would have a long life working at McDonald’s. It was a real dagger that he put in my heart as he showed me the door. And I just thought at that point that didn’t seem like something that someone in power should say to someone who had none. And that kind of informed everything that I’ve done since, including being a reporter where I covered stories trying to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, all the way into how I’ve tried to create an agency that is predicated on doing it with empathy. 

And we have an ironclad no-assh*les policy. I hope you don’t mind the swear there. That means internally and externally. We won’t work for jerks, and we won’t tolerate brilliant jerks that work with us because that tends to be very cancerous for an organization. So that’s

the Why, is where you start doesn't really dictate where you finish, and I'm determined to prove that that's the case.
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Yeah. I love it. And that’s one of the benefits of being in business for yourself. You can select your own clients. You don’t have to accept the ones that you don’t like. But few people actually put a stake in the ground and actually declare it, right? It’s harder to do it than to just make some compromises. 

Yeah. 

So tell me about Crackle PR. I really like the name of Crackle PR. I kind of sense what it might mean, but why don’t you explain how you came up with this? 

Well, good question. I like these layups you’re giving me here. So I started Crackle during the pandemic, actually, when most of us were staring at the walls of our home thinking, “What the heck is going on?” There were riots in the streets. People couldn’t go anywhere, and it was really this sort of just dark malaise that covered the world. And it was that time that I thought, “What if I were to start a PR agency that is the antithesis of the large ones that I had built?” 

So prior to Crackle, I had built a couple of the largest privately held tech PR agencies in North America. The models at these large agencies, as you probably know, are very hierarchical, where you trot out the Parrys of the world and the VPs, and then the model demands that you have most of the work done by juniors because that’s how you make the money. And I thought, what if we just, instead of trying to get big at all costs, what if we instead had a very prescriptive model where, instead of paying for offices in Manhattan and San Francisco, what if we just put that money into our talent and had a senior team that did the work, and we didn’t have a whole bunch of overhead? Wouldn’t that be cool? 

And what if we also, as I just mentioned, don’t work with any jerks, and we work just with companies that are good people doing good stuff? And that was the true north for the company to start. And so we’ve been very fortunate in the intervening years. We now have 15 full-time employees, another five consultants. We’re hiring prescriptively and slowly. We don’t want to grow for the sake of growth. And

we have clients all the way from seed rounds of funding to publicly traded companies. We really run the gamut. It's a B2B tech PR shop primarily.
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But I always thought that the bad people need more PR than the good people. 

Well, they may, but we’re not here to put lipstick on pigs. I had somebody that told me in my life one time that you don’t get into the mud with the pigs because the pig will love it, but you’ll both get dirty. And that’s not a game I’m looking to play. So I didn’t actually answer the question about Crackle itself. So the idea was that during that dark, dark time—COVID, riots, craziness everywhere.

We wanted to represent a bit of goodness in the world. So I just pictured the world being this heap of ashes
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Love it. That’s really fun. And your hat looks good, too. 

You see the little spark, the little crackle right there? 

I see it. Yeah. It’s like a Christmas cracker. So, okay, this podcast is called Management Blueprint because we are looking for, or I’m looking for, frameworks that people came up with, that they stumbled upon, which other listeners might apply to their business. So what’s a framework that you could share with us which can be explained in three to five steps that helps you get an insight or communicate better or organize better, something that helps you be more effective? 

Yeah. So this may not be a big surprise. Some of your listeners may follow me on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is my cheat code. When I first started this business, I went to LinkedIn with my full self.
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An interesting thing happened, which is I tended to get a bunch of followers really quickly, and they would DM me saying, “Finally, someone’s just saying it like it really is in the industry. Finally, someone is lifting back the curtain. Finally, finally, finally.” And so I just doubled down on that approach. And so fast-forward to today, I have 82,000 followers on LinkedIn. The majority of my business comes in through DMs on LinkedIn from them having read my posts, my thoughts. 

And by the time they actually come to me, they already have a good sense for my ethos, how I think, how I operate, that I work with good companies only. They know me. So the vetting process is 75% of the way done by the time they ever reach out. So that’s the cheat code. I’ve shortened the sales cycle from my old world being three months down to a week. If we have a phone call, we put together a quick proposal, and then it’s done because they are already looking to hire me when they reach out. So that’s the framework, that’s the cheat code, that’s the hack, and it’s applicable to just about any industry. 

Okay. So I love it. So let’s break it down. So how do you create this effect where people pick up the phone or DM you and within a week sign you up? What is the process? 

Yeah. So the process is just I post literally every day of my life. Maybe weekends I’ll take a break, it depends. But every work weekday I am posting. It is not a nice-to-have, it is a mission-critical function of Crackle PR. I would say up until recently, about 90% of my leads came in through my commentary and writing and posting on LinkedIn. 

And it's really me just sharing everything that I know, including commenting on the news of the day tapping into the zeitgeist about issues that are happening from a public relations standpoint, and sharing real-time thought leadership across my…
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I’m always doing it with the intent to simply share value and expect nothing in return. I almost never ask for anything. Occasionally I’ll say, “Hey, does anybody know a good account manager?” But I’m not out there selling my wares on LinkedIn. I’m very simply ungating my brain and letting everyone have access to it, and the right people find me at the right time. 

Love it. Love it. So the four steps I heard were: post every day, tap into the zeitgeist or the story of the day, how to impact your key audience, so essentially the story and how can you turn it into something that helps people, and no CTA at the end. 

That’s right. 

Yeah. Love it. That’s a great framework. 

Yeah. It’s great. And you know what’s interesting is that it’s multifaceted in the sense I’ve told you already that the majority of my business comes from LinkedIn, okay? Because I share what I know. It’s thought leadership in real time, and it’s a captive audience. The byproduct of that is interesting, which is that I am constantly written about in the news by, like, The Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, you name the publication. Because they’re finding me on that platform and reading what I have to say and reaching out for comment to expand on those ideas. 

So it's got this virtuous cycle where, as a PR guy myself, it's interesting that I'm putting thoughts out into the world and I'm attracting earned media
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So basically, you’re drinking your own Kool-Aid. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder, a lot of marketing agencies, they sell marketing, but they are not able to market themselves well. 

“The cobbler’s children have no shoes” is the common expression. 

Exactly. But you are the cobbler’s child who found a pair of shoes, and this is actually doing what you’re preaching others should do. So that’s kind of very, very counterintuitively intuitive. 

Well, just to add on that quickly. So public relations, we’re about promoting and publicity and all of that. The bizarre irony is that the vast majority of people who are great at writing, great at promoting, like me, don’t post on LinkedIn. They’re not sharing their thoughts out there. They’re not doing what they were born to do, which is a really fascinating thing. 

And I think part of it is where they work and they’re afraid they’ll say the wrong thing or maybe lose a client or whatever it may be. But my idea is, and I tell my team this, my staff this, is like, “I want you out there sharing how smart you are every single day. I’m under no illusions that you’ll be with me until the end of your life, okay? But while you’re with me, I want you sharing what you know, the good, the bad, and the ugly about our industry, because that’ll help you gain a brand, and it’ll help me attract an audience.” 

It’s a win-win. So I wish more people had that mindset where they weren’t stingy about who has a voice but rather empowered everyone across the organization to use that voice for the better of the organization and for themselves. 

Yeah, but it takes discipline to write every day. It’s not easy. It’s not easy at all.

It’s easier for others than some. I mean, I was a journalist. I came up writing, so for me, it’s just a natural thing, and most PR people are writers. So you’d think it would be pretty easy for us because we write every day for our clients, but I would say probably 85-plus percent of the people in my profession are either afraid or don’t have time or just don’t want to do it, and I just think it’s a shame. They’re leaving a lot of at-bats on the field. 

No, absolutely. Absolutely. So you kind of half answered my question that I’m going to ask, but I’m going to ask it anyway because I’m curious about other aspects to it. So what drives growth in your business? 

Yeah. So if you asked me this six months ago, I would’ve said primarily it’s LinkedIn and referrals. Today, I’m happy to report that it’s referrals and LinkedIn, and also my optimized website, my website that’s optimized for the LLM era. Again, another example of eating my own dog food here, where I’m making my website readable both to humans and the machines that cite, and I’m preemptively going after the earned media pieces that will then fuel citations for my company and for my website. 

So again, I’m trying to create this flywheel here, and I think I’ve been pretty successful so far. I would argue probably among the most successful in PR agencies, where I’m feeding the beast constantly and prescriptively doing so, so that my website, my LinkedIn work, my earned media hits all effectively get scraped and cited by these LLMs, which is the future of search, obviously. 

Yeah. 

I still use Google occasionally, but even Google is just the AI explanation up top. You’re not even going down, scrolling anymore. You’re just getting the quick explanations. And so everything is headed that way, and I think that being a first mover on that front is particularly important. And I think any marketer that is not looking at the LLM landscape as the next great frontier is missing the boat. 

Oh, yeah. I love it. So how do these LLMs work? Do you have an insight, a deeper insight as to how to create these quotes or how to show up? Is it just writing every day, making original posts, or is there more to it? 

There’s a bunch of things, and this could be a topic for a podcast in and of itself, but I’ll just talk in basic terms to not have your audience’s eyes glaze over. It used to be that, for example, we would write in PR a press release that was very narrative in structure. X company today announced, and the CEO is proud, and all of that kind of stuff. And then that was used to then go pitch the media. 

Well, the LLMs are scraping these press releases now, and what you want to try and do is make it as easy as possible for them to lift the essence of that information
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And by the way, whether it’s Gemini, ChatGPT, all these different models, they all look for different things. So some of them rely heavily on places like Reddit. Some of them rely heavily on places like YouTube. Some of them ingest things more frequently than others. So there’s a whole cornucopia of things that has to be done if you’re really going to dial it in because no two LLMs are alike, and they value different things, and they weight them more heavily.

So it really is a science, more so than an art form, which is what I think PR is largely known to be, more of an art form.
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Yeah. Yeah. So at the beginning of this conversation, you shared that you have been part of big PR companies, and you wanted to do it differently. You wanted to have a senior people-heavy agency where, I guess, people get straight from the horse’s mouth what they want to have. So is this model scalable? And if so, how? 

Yeah, it is scalable. And I think there’s a distinction. So when I say senior talent, I’m not talking about only VPs. So we have account directors, we have account managers, we have senior account executives. So they’re a little further down on the scale. 

But what we don’t have is interns and account coordinators and the very earliest players. So everybody has at least four to five years of experience on the team. And so in that sense, it is scalable, provided that the minimum retainers are sufficient. So we have a $12,000 minimum monthly retainer, and that’s very intentional because we know what we need to do to be able to be profitable and to continue to hire and scale, to your point. 

So yeah, it is scalable, but it takes work, and it took a lot of hand-wringing and mistakes along the way to get to a point where we’re able to do it now. But it’s kind of beautiful in the sense that I don’t want to be a huge 250-person agency. I think I’m comfortable in the 20- to 50-employee range, and then I’ll probably, in a few years, ride off into the sunset, having made a very good earning or good living, rather and I’m not trying to become a billionaire here. 

So who are your ideal customers that you’ll hire? 

Yeah. Typically, it’s, first of all, good companies doing good things. We don’t want to work with tobacco companies or people that are negatively contributing to the world. And it’s typically B2B technology companies in A round, B round, C round, D round of funding, or even publicly traded companies. It’s a pretty wide swath, but the common thread is B2B tech is the sweet spot. And again, we’re looking for largely challenger brands. There are some that are the leaders that we have, but

I think it's much more interesting to help build a brand than it is to maintain one. So those are the kinds of clients we tend to look for.
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So do you do the same thing for them that you do for yourself, for your agency, or is it a different approach? 

Yeah. No, I mean, we focus a heck of a lot more on earned media for our clients because that still is the lifeblood of a traditional PR program. But the earned media, as we just talked about, inform the LLMs that are now citing them in their answers. So we got thrown kind of a bouquet in PR. Everybody’s talking about AI being difficult and losing jobs, and a lot of that is true. The PR industry got kind of fortunate in the sense that earned media is more important than it’s ever been because LLMs rely on them to cite their sources. 

And it’s an unfortunate problem because at the same time

PR is more important than ever, reporters in the media landscape are dwindling faster than ever.
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Now, this isn’t to say there aren’t opportunities out there to pitch the media because there’s more people, and it’s just more diffuse. So you have all these different audiences that you didn’t have before, like Beehiiv and Substack and podcasts and all of these disparate groups, whereas it used to just be, “Here’s my 25 newspapers and magazines we’re going after,” and that was the entirety of it. So now it requires a lot more work, a lot more research to find out where your audiences are and who they’re reading or what they’re watching or which podcast that they’re looking at. 

So it requires PR people to be more resourceful, to spend a lot more time researching who they're going after and making sure they're very precise in their outreach
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Yeah, it’s becoming a very fragmented business. So what is your expectation of the future as these big media outlets are disintegrating, consolidating, or even disappearing? Is it just going to be more atomized, or is this a cyclical thing where you have the fragmentation, and then it’s going to consolidate again? 

Yeah. The answer is I’m not sure. What I would like to happen is what some—I know some countries actually fund the free and fair media to make sure that it’s a healthy ecosystem where there are checks and balances. I am not under the illusion that that’s going to happen in this country anytime soon, although I wish it would, because it’s really for the betterment of everyone. 

But I think what will happen in the short term is more of what’s happening now, which is the atomization of all these folks going to different platforms to try to eke out a living on their own. They’re taking agency of their lives. But I would like to think against that backdrop there’ll be a movement, because businesses are going to require it at some point, that there’s third-party validation from trusted sources. 

I would like there to be a consortium of some sort built where companies of a certain size are all contributing to the same pool to try to get this healthy landscape that we need. I don’t know the answers. I haven’t solved it. If I did, I’d be a very, very wealthy man. But I know that the government in some countries are actively funding a free and fair press, and I really wish we would do that here. 

So let me switch gears here and ask you a very different question. 

Okay. 

If you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your company in the next 12 months, what would that be? 

I think it would be that I could adequately teach everyone in the organization how best to utilize tools like Claude Code and others to automate much of the grunt work that takes time away from strategy.

So we are really strategic. We do a lot of brainstorming. We are great at our thinking and our writing and pitching and all of that.
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But there’s a whole heck of a lot of stuff that’s related to reporting and research and stuff that just takes a whole lot of time. So I wish everybody could just instantly understand how best to use these tools to eliminate the drudgery from our jobs, to focus instead on the strategy. 

Why do you think it’s not happening? 

There’s a learning curve, and frankly, there is an expense. These tokens are not inexpensive, so you have to pay a bunch of money for these things. You have to put the time in. You have to have an appetite to learn it, and then you have to have the aptitude to learn it. Now, I’ve gotten pretty, pretty good at this stuff. I’m self-taught. I built my own website using these tools. I mean, I’m pretty deep myself. But at the end of the day, most of my employees are working their butts off on their client stuff, and this stuff I’m talking about is kind of extracurricular and difficult to do. 

And so what I’m trying to do.

We just talked about this last week is putting aside office hours for everyone to figure out these big, hairy projects they want to get better at and learn and devote time to it on my dime.
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Yeah. I mean, it is uncomfortable when people have to learn something that is completely different from the skills that they have been making their money with, right? 

Yeah. Well, and I’ll take it a step further. So I’ve been quoted in a couple of, like The Guardian recently, about some of these commencement speeches where you have one of the heads of Google and all these bigwigs at college commencement speeches talking about AI and ushering in this new revolution, and they’re getting booed. They’re getting booed while they’re speaking because the students in these halls recognize that there’s an existential threat right now in the form of AI. 

They already have enough challenges relative to affordability and buying a home and all these different things, and now you’re telling them that AI is going to take a huge chunk of their jobs before they even get out of the gate. And against that backdrop, they’re not being equipped in college to be able to come out into the real world with the coding skill, the Claude Code skills I’m talking about now. 

So they’re coming out handcuffed and kneecapped out of the gate into this world that they’ve been foisted upon. And I think that’s a big challenge. And so bringing it back to my office, or anybody who’s in the situation we are, everybody’s kind of grudgingly learning how to do this stuff or else. Or else you’ll fall behind, or else you won’t have a job, or else someone will take your job. And I think that’s a very real angsty feeling that a lot of people have. 

And so part of me feels guilty for wanting to tell my people, “Look, we’ve got to get skilled up on these things,” because I know a lot of people would rather it just didn’t exist. But pretending something doesn’t exist isn’t the way forward.

You've got to look it square in the face, realize what it is, and then do your level best to try to maximize what you can with it. And that's where we're at.
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Do you see a lot of disruption happening in PR, or are agencies just waking up to this issue? 

Yeah, I see a lot of disruption, and I think it’s for the worse. I think right now what we’re seeing is there are a whole lot of agencies that are taking the AI slop, spray-and-pray approach. Like, they are literally using these AI machines to pitch all these reporters who, by the way, can tell when they’re getting pitched with AI, and then they’re immediately getting blacklisted because they don’t want to deal with the machine. So yes, there’s disruption, but I think it’s noise instead of a positive disruption. I think there’s not much to be gained from the AI tools that way. 

I will say it’s disrupted the way some of the largest agencies have operated because for years they worked on a time-and-materials model. That’s a little difficult to justify now when you have machines doing in seconds what used to take weeks or sometimes months from a research standpoint. So that’s disrupted the whole agency model. And I would argue that’s for the better because the time-and-materials model, I think, was an excuse for busy work. 

Yeah. That is true. What do you suggest if someone is looking for a PR agency? What is the criteria that they should apply to evaluate an agency? What kind of agency should they be choosing? 

Yeah. So I mean, I think there’s a couple things I would say. One is, make sure that you understand who’s actually doing the work on your team. There’s a classic bait-and-switch problem in PR. I already talked about this, where it’s like you talk to me during the call, and then you have an intern doing your work, and that obviously isn’t very equitable. So there’s that. I think having proficiency in the new world relative to large language models and share of citation. 

I think that stuff is really important now because directionally that’s where we’re headed. And then for me, the one thing that is so true it was true the day I started my agency, and it’ll always be true is hire strong writers, real human writers. Because the AI slop is nauseating out there. Something like 60% of posts on LinkedIn are now written by AI, as reported by LinkedIn. And people are just getting really sick of this sea of sameness because AI really is just the average of everything that’s come before it, everything that’s been written before it. 

It’s an average of that. And that’s a path to mediocrity really, really quickly. So strong writers, senior leaders who are doing the work, I think, are key, and then obviously prowess around the idea of how to get your products and services cited across the LLMs that are becoming increasingly important every day. 

Love it. Love it. That’s very encouraging because what I see is that these platforms, like Claude, they offer to codify your writing voice and write in your voice. What do you think of these approaches? 

Yeah. I think probably for some lines of work it might make sense. For our world, it just does not. If you’re a writer and you’ve valued the English language, you can very quickly determine what’s AI and what is not. And that’s the case with all of the reporters that are covering our clients every day. So they know what’s AI. People in our industry know what AI is, and you can just tell when someone is responding with AI. 

You’re getting a note in the mail that’s written by AI. You’re getting an email back from AI. It’s just nauseating, and it’s just disheartening. And I think that there is going to increasingly be a premium placed on human writers and human artists and people who are doing human work that has real value and real thought versus the distillation of everything that’s come before it, which is what AI is. 

So if people would like to learn more about you or read your posts or connect with your team, where should they go? 

So cracklepr.com is the website. I am Parry Headrick on LinkedIn. You can find me there. And I’ve gotten off of most of the other social platforms because I’ve had some issues with the Facebooks of the world, and so I canceled those a long time ago. So Bluesky would be another one. Parry Headrick on Bluesky. 

Okay. Well, if you liked what you heard and you want real writers who will be discovered by LLMs, and you want to get your company featured on ChatGPT and Claude and the other platforms, then check out Parry Headrick, Founder of Crackle PR. Start reading his posts, which I will be. I think I already am. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then stay tuned because a couple of times a week I’ll bring an exciting entrepreneur who has changed the world and will share their unique frameworks with you. So thanks for coming, Parry, and thanks for listening.

It’s been my pleasure. Thanks.

Denis O’Shea, Founder of Mobile Mentor, helps organizations pursue a clear goal to simplify your tech environment while strengthening security and empowering employees to remain productive. Driven by the joy of learning and intellectual adventure, Denis left a 15-year career at Nokia to build a company that learns about emerging technologies, translates them into business outcomes, and mentors customers through change.

In this conversation, Denis introduces The Tech Stack Streamlining Framework: Understand Current Tech Stack, Assess Capacity for Change, Benchmark to Peers, Build the Roadmap, and Deliver Simplified Tech Stack. He explains how immersing his team in a customer’s environment, asking thoughtful questions, and benchmarking the organization against its peers can reveal a clear path toward a simpler technology stack. Denis also discusses Mobile Mentor’s fast-growing mentoring service, how its Microsoft partnership transformed the business, the challenge of finding technology professionals who are natural mentors, and why people must remain responsible for the quality and accuracy of everything they produce with AI.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, Management Blueprint Podcast. And today my guest is Denis O’Shea, the Founder of Mobile Mentor, a technology service provider helping thousands of clients find and maintain the right balance, securing devices, protecting data, and empowering people to be productive. Mobile Mentor is also a five-time Microsoft award winner. So Denis, welcome back to the show. 

Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me back. And I have to say, you look fantastic. You’re aging gracefully, and I hope I’m doing the same. 

Well, unfortunately, my barber is on vacation, so I couldn’t visit him last week. But it’s great to have you back on the show, and we couldn’t agree whether it was two or four years ago that you were here. Anyhow, it’s great to have you back, and I’ve got some questions for you that I’m curious about. And first and foremost, the question is, what is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in your Mobile Mentor business? 

My personal Why is probably learning. And I think the reason I went into business in the first place was to learn and grow as an individual. It certainly wasn’t money. I expect money as an outcome from the process, but I didn’t go into it for money. It was really to learn, and the trigger for me was I did an executive education program in Switzerland. I was living there for a few years, and that blew my mind. That just exploded my mind when I started learning all about mergers, acquisitions, turnarounds, management buyouts, all these different ways of growing a business that were nonlinear. 

And that motivated me to go on and do an MBA, and that then motivated me to leave my employer, who was a great company. I was working for Nokia for 15 years. They were amazing, but I decided to leave them and go out and embrace all this nonlinear stuff and found a company from scratch. And one day I thought maybe I’ll do a spin-out, or maybe I’ll do an acquisition, and I’ll do all these different things. And it was purely for the joy of learning and the intellectual adventure. So I think that’s my Why. It’s learning. 

Yeah. Well, learning is great, and it’s a big driver of businesses when they are able to learn, especially in today’s age. So tell me a little bit about how Mobile Mentor is reflecting this way of learning. Is it a learning organization, and in what way is it? 

Oh, that’s an interesting question, Steve. I would hope we are a learning organization. Something I’ve been saying to my kids and my staff for years is, “We’re a learning species. We can learn anything we put our minds to.” And so I would hope we are a learning organization. And the word “mentor” plays a huge part in not just our brand, but how we work. So we’re a technology service company. We’re always unpacking the latest technology and helping customers figure out what to do with it and how to extract value from it. 

So I would hope that we’re good at learning what the technology can do and then translating that into outcomes for customers and helping people unlock the full potential of the technology they’ve just purchased. And when we started 22 years ago, we were focused on mobile devices. That’s why the company’s called Mobile Mentor. Nowadays, it’s mainly AI and security and all that. And by the way, we’re going through a rebrand. The company’s just going to be called Mentor going forward. Just Mentor. So that we can work with all technology, so we remove any association with that small device where we started 22 years ago. So I think we are very good at learning, internalizing the new technology, and then translating that into business outcomes for our customers. 

Yeah. 

That’s what I feel like our core skill is. 

Yeah. And I love this concept of mentoring because essentially it’s not about teaching people, it’s about helping people discover how to be great. And if you can do that, that’s amazing. So that brings me to the next question, which is about frameworks. So this, as you know, this podcast is about frameworks, and what I’m curious about is, what’s a framework that has helped you grow this company, build this company, or help your clients or mentor your clients? Maybe it’s a mentoring framework. Maybe it’s a technology framework. So something that comes to mind that can be explained in three to five steps to our listeners. 

Sure. We have a really strong framework at the front end of our sales process. It’s an assessment and roadmap we do for customers. And it’s something that’s on our website. It has a price point, so it’s got a value, but we choose to give it away for free when we get a strong, well-qualified opportunity, or when we have a channel partner bring us a strong lead. We will use this assessment and roadmap process to build a vision for the customer. And the way we do it, we’ve got a good framework for this. 

We go through an assessment. So we tell the customer, “We’re going to have a look at your environment holistically and get a really good understanding of the technology stack you have today, all the different technologies you’re using, and also get a good understanding of your organization’s capability and capacity for change, and how you embrace change, how you make change happen. “And we’re going to show you how you compare to a whole bunch of other organizations.” I think we’ve done 174, 175 of these in the last maybe three years.

And so we show the customer how they compare to others in their industry and also against others roughly their same size. And then, most importantly, we build out a roadmap, and we show them, “Here’s how you can potentially go from where you are today with today’s technology stack,” which is usually very busy, it’s usually a long list of technologies, “to a much simpler technology stack in the future if they’re willing to consolidate on one or two platforms and do all the possible integrations, automations, and simplifications so that they’re extracting much more value from one or two platforms, like Microsoft, than having a whole colorful mix of different technology vendors.” 

So we’ll say, “Here’s a journey you could go on,” and then we describe it in vivid detail, showing all the different parts and how they would go passwordless, how they would automate setting up new employees and all the technology they need, how they would automate all their patching and security, how they would embrace AI into their operations, how they would use AI for productivity improvements, and kind of show this technology journey. That process, or that framework, of doing an assessment, and it covers 120 different topics. So we do the assessment, the comparison, the roadmap. 

We find that to be extremely powerful because customers will look at that, and they’ll look at the destination and say, “Right. We want to be there. We want to get that outcome,” and then they’re buying off us. We’re not selling to them. They’re basically saying, “Okay. We want to get there. How do we do it? Help us. How can you come in and help us do it?” So the narrative flips from us being a sales organization to then being a mentor and helping the customer figure out how to get there. 

And of course, we want to sell services, and we want to sell long-term contracts to say, “Yes, we can take you from here to there, and it’s a three-year engagement to do all those changes.” So that’s what we want. But the customer is buying it off us because they’ve bought into the destination. 

Yeah. And that’s the modern buyer’s journey, right? They research you. Before even they come to you, they want to listen to you because you might have something for them. So I love this framework. So what I noted down was step number one, understand the technology stack that they have. Step number two, assess their ability to manage change or to handle change. 

Yeah. 

Then you benchmark them to others in their industry or in their peer group. Then you build the roadmap, and then you show them the simplified end state, the simplified tech stack. 

Correct. Correct. And then we give them options around how we can help them to get there. Usually, there’s three options. And we say, “Well, what style of engagement works best for you? How would you like us to work with you?” And then it becomes a very comfortable, easy sales process from there, and it becomes easy because we’ve done all the listening. 

So when we do the assessment and we cover 120 topics, we do 60 questions in 60 minutes. So it’s two one-hour sessions. And we call it our “friendly interrogation.” But what happens during that time is what I call a selfless immersion in the customer’s world. So we don’t talk about us. We never talk about us. Everything is about them, their technology stack, their environment, their processes, their technical dependencies, all the things about their organization. 

So we get this really rich understanding of their environment. And at the end, guess what they say, Steve? Or guess what they say at the end of that interrogation or that assessment session? 

I don’t know. Give it to us. What do they say? 

They say thank you, which is extraordinary, and it surprised me when it started happening. But people love to be heard. We’re not selling. We’re not pitching anything. We are just seeking to understand their environment and asking a whole bunch of really good questions. So we don’t need to tell them who we are and what we’ve done, that we’ve won Microsoft Partner of the Year and blah, blah, blah. We don’t need to do any of that. 

They know that we know our stuff because of the questions we’re asking, because those questions have been refined and refined and refined. So we’re able to get right into the heart of their issues, and they tell us all about their environment and their issues and concerns and frustrations. And at the end of the assessment, they say, “Thank you.” And I remind them, I say, “We haven’t delivered anything yet. All we’ve done is asked you a whole bunch of questions.” But they feel like it was almost a cathartic process of unloading and sharing all of it. And then we do the second session, and the rapport gets even better, and they bring in some different people. 

So by the time we get to the end of the assessment, we’ve had a really good conversation about 120 different things. There’s now a high degree of trust. And so when we come back in the third session, we say, “Okay, we heard you. Here’s where you are. Here’s how you compare to others. Here’s where you could be, and here’s what the journey would look like to get you there, taking all the complexities into account, all the dependencies, all the legacy, all the technical debt you might have. “Here’s what it would take to get you to where you want to be.” They’re now listening and they’re trusting us because we’ve listened to them. 

Yeah. I love that. That is very powerful. And asking good questions is actually not always easy. In the age of AI, answers are omnipresent, but good questions, good prompts, that’s a skill, right? To ask the right question. 

It is. And it’s interesting you mention AI because we’re not using any AI in the way we do this. We could choose to send out a form to the customer and say, “Please fill out this form.” Actually, we tried that. We tried that 10 or 12 years ago in our New Zealand operation, and it was a complete disaster. Nobody wants to fill out a long form and answer all those questions. But if you have a conversation face-to-face, on Teams or Zoom, whatever, you can have the conversation. You’ll get all the information. 

But now we’re establishing rapport between us while we do that, and that also gives them a flavor of what it’s like to work with us. How we interact and how we follow up the question, how we drill down, how we clarify and confirm, “Did I understand that correctly?” in a way that you don’t get from just filling out a web form. And we also don’t use AI to analyze the transcript and try and fill it out. We actually do it based on us understanding it, because we find we get way more detail and nuance than relying on a transcript. 

That’s very interesting. Definitely, when there’s a human on the other end who is interested in what you’re saying and is listening deeply, it’s a highly motivating and even inspiring thing. That’s why it’s hard to make a talk without the audience, because you need the energy of the audience. So you provide the energy for them to come up with the goods and explain where they are, right? 

Yeah, yeah.

So let me switch gears and ask you this. What drives growth in your business? 

What drives growth? Two things. One, that process sets us up to be able to sell something. The fastest-growing thing that we sell is a service called mentoring, which is very closely aligned to our brand and the way we work, and it’s something that’s very unique to us. So what we figured out is that there are some customers who just want to bring in a partner to build something for them let’s say to deploy some new technology, and then they want the vendor to go away and leave them with it. There are other organizations who don’t want to touch the technology. They want somebody to provide a managed service, so you get all the outcomes. 

And those two technology service categories have been around forever, right? Microsoft has 400,000 partners doing this kind of work, doing project work, or providing managed services. We found a huge white space in the middle between those two. We found there’s a big white space in the mid-market, in particular mid-market organizations, where they have their own IT team. They don’t want to give the keys away to a managed service provider and let go. They want to learn all about the new technology. 

They want to internalize the knowledge, and they want somebody to come in and help them deploy it with them, and be hands-on-keyboard, and do it together with them, and do lots of knowledge transfer, and help them build the documentation and the knowledge base, and get the experience and the skills so that their skills grow, their confidence grows. And we call that service mentoring, where we’re doing that for them. So we’re not just building it and walking away, we’re building it together with them. And it can be a one-year, two-year, five-year engagement where we’re building out this complex technology capability, but we’re doing it together, and they become the experts over time. That is our fastest-growing, top-selling service. 

That’s fascinating. So it’s essentially coaching, mentoring, and still you turn it into an ongoing engagement because it’s not simple, right? There are a lot of layers to it. And what’s the timeline of such a relationship? 

Typically three years. Typically. It can be as short as one, it can be as long as five. But for most of the technology transformation projects we’re doing, I would say they’re two, three, four years for the organization to change and embed all the changes and turn off all the legacy technology and fully embrace the new way of working. So our typical contract is three years. And then we set up all the cadences so that we’re working together every week through specific things, and there’s a weekly cadence, our engineers doing all that stuff, and then monthly coming up for air to see how we’re doing against the roadmap. Do we need to make any changes? What’s the focus for next month? And that’s a rolling process that keeps going on and on. And so the two teams end up working extremely closely. 

Our engineering team, and we’re bringing in different architects, engineers, and there’s obviously a consistent project manager across it. And on the customer side, they’re bringing different engineers or architects depending on the piece of work we’re doing. But it’s generally all modernizing the way they work with Microsoft technology primarily, and changing from legacy stuff to very modern, invisible security, embedded AI, really trying to accelerate their maturity as an organization. 

Yeah. Love it. 

Does that make sense? 

So it makes sense. I’m wondering, I mean, most businesses these days, they want to have recurring revenue, and even though you have a three-year engagement, it’s still not an evergreen engagement. So what do you do to turn these engagements into more of an enduring one, or you’re not trying to do it because it’s not the purpose? 

That’s the $64 million question for our business, Steve, is how do we turn a two-year or three-year engagement into something longer? And it actually comes back to where you started with the learning thing. So what we need to be doing, and this is a constant battle for us, is learning about the latest and the newest technologies and staying ahead of the customer. Always staying ahead in terms of our knowledge so that we can keep adding new things to the backlog of work that needs to be done. 

So that we might deploy technology A and get that done and do the migration and modernization, but then we need to move on to B and C and D and E. And there’s always new stuff, and actually the rate of change is accelerating now with AI. Everything is changing so fast, it’s unbelievable. But our job is to stay ahead so that we can always have something new and edgy that we can bring to the relationship. That we’re always able to give new knowledge, information, value. 

So is it a managed technology business or is it more of a consulting business? 

Ah, we are three different things. We do a lot of project work where people will come in and say, “Migrate us from platform A to platform B.” So we do that. We do this mentoring service where we’re doing the change and modernization together with the customer. We’re also a managed service provider. We have a lot of small and medium businesses that say, “We don’t have an IT team. We don’t want to have an IT team. Manage this stuff, make it invisible to us. Just give us great service and give us great reports and be transparent with us.” And that’s part of our business too. 

So I would say we’re roughly one-third professional services, project work, one-third mentoring, and one-third managed services. So more than half the business is recurring revenue in any given year. 

So what makes this kind of business hard to scale, or what makes it easy to scale? 

What makes it hard to scale is finding great people who can learn and share that learning with customers, so people who are natural mentors. So what we do not want is to hire geeks who want to just put on noise-canceling headsets and sit in front of a screen coding all day. They would not work for us. We want people who are head up, good people skills, want to learn it, but want to share it. Naturally very good at sharing. So getting the right people, that’s one constraint to growth. The thing that makes growth easy for us is our relationship with Microsoft. That’s unbelievable. 

We didn’t have a relationship with Microsoft 11 years ago, and they came to us and asked us to become a partner, and we did. And they asked us to work with them on a specific technology that was very immature at the time. And I set a goal for our team. I said, “What would it take us to become the best in the world at that one specific technology? To become the best in the world on that technology as it matures and grows?” And we set that as our North Star and really went after that and focused everything on that. 

And that enabled us then to win Microsoft Global Partner of the Year based on our focus on that. And by winning that award, that got us noticed because they got 400,000 partners. So at the time, I was based in New Zealand, so basically the second-last rock before the end of the earth. And so we were nobody in a nowhere place and not noticed, and we’re just one of 400,000, completely lost in the noise. We got noticed when we won Global Partner of the Year and when we got recognized for being the best in the world at that one technology, and that changed everything, and I moved to America. 

Then Microsoft introduced us to a whole bunch of customers, including the largest healthcare organization in the world, the largest education provider in the world, and largest government departments. And so now our business is totally different to what it looked like 11 years ago before Microsoft. And this goes on and on. So almost every day, they contact us to say, “Hey, we got this customer over here, and they got this problem, and we thought of you.” And then they introduce us, and we do our assessment, show them how they compare, build a roadmap, and say, “What would you like to do from here?” 

Yeah. I’m just very curious about what is that technology, and what is the ideal customer for you for that technology?

That technology is a platform called Intune. It’s a device management platform, so it’s for managing desktops, laptops, MacBooks, smartphones, tablets, and all that. And everything we do, of course, starts with a device. And so it’s the technology that secures and manages and configures our devices. Microsoft Intune is the name of the product, and that’s where we’ve got very, very deep expertise. But that leads us to all the other parts of the Microsoft 365 environment, and most organizations are using Microsoft 365 to some extent. 

So in most cases, they’re coming to us and saying, “Hey, this customer has bought our licenses. They’ve got Microsoft 365 E5 or E3, whatever. They’re not using it all. They’ve got all these overlapping competitive products. They want to consolidate, reduce costs, or they want to improve security, or they want to simplify their environment. Can you help?” And we’re like, “Hell yeah, we can help. That’s right in our wheelhouse.” And so we have a discovery call with the customer. They tell us what they want to achieve, and if they’re a good fit for our assessment and roadmap, then we’ll propose that. So we’re not trying to sell anything at that stage, and we’ll do that. 

It’s many, many hours of work. We’ll do that roadmap and assessment at our cost. Sorry, that’s our investment. That’s our investment in the relationship, so that we’re showing that we’re giving value back to the customer and to Microsoft because they brought us that lead, and we’re creating value from day one. And sometimes the customer will go, “Thank you. We understand the journey. We’re going to do it ourselves,” or, “We’ve got an existing partner,” or, “We don’t have budget,” whatever. And so we don’t land them all, but we’ve got a very high conversion rate. We land a lot of them. 

And even if we don’t, I know that we deliver a huge amount of value through the process, and the customer goes, “Wow, that was great. That was a great process. We learned a lot. We can see where we need to go. We might be back in touch in the future when we do have budget or when the stars align.” 

Or they refer someone else. 

Yeah. 

So if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be? 

I would say it would be doing more with AI internally. Some days I feel like an imposter because we are selling a lot of AI services, and we do a lot of AI work for our customers. But I, as the leader, I don’t do enough. I’m not doing enough with AI. I’m not building enough capability. I’m leading the charge, but I’m not savvy enough myself. And I feel like our leadership team could be doing more. So I feel like doing more, embedding more AI into how we work, is something I want to change or fix in the next year. Not just doing it for customers. 

Yeah. I mean, you can never do enough with AI, right? There’s so much out there and so much changing, and to stay ahead of it, one’s head is spinning all the time. It’s very inspiring, but can be also overwhelming. 

That’s true. And one of the things I’m dealing with is managing what we call AI slop, where we see people internally and externally producing things that are not good-quality outcomes because it hasn’t been double-checked. So just because it could be produced quickly and easily by AI doesn’t mean it’s great or specific enough or detailed enough or accurate enough for the result, whether that’s an internal report or an external thing. 

So the coaching I’m giving people is you’re still responsible for the thing, the quality of the thing. You have to read it, make sure it’s on point, it’s detailed enough, the customer’s going to be happy with it or your manager’s going to be happy with it. We are still responsible for the thing we produce. Let’s not get lazy. 

Yeah. And the more content you generate and the more solutions you generate with AI, the more the mental load on the decision-makers to actually filter out what’s not real and what’s real. 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 

Yeah. I can see that happening. So if someone is listening to this and says, “Wow, I love this idea that you benchmark me, you figure out what our tech is, learn our tech, benchmark us, come up with a roadmap, and evaluate the organization, how fast we can manage change, and then come up with a roadmap and mentor us to get there and simplify our tech stack,” and would like to learn more and perhaps connect with you, where should they go? Where can they find out more information? 

I’m on LinkedIn only. I’m not on other social platforms. I’m a bit of a Neanderthal in that regard. But Denis, with one N and O’Shea, O-S-H-E-A, on LinkedIn, and my company is Mobile Mentor. It will be Mentor soon, but we’ll keep the Mobile Mentor alive for quite a while. And so go to the company, mobile-mentor.com. And yeah, love to talk to any of your listeners and audience if this is a technology journey they want to go on or want a partner to work with them. That’s the role we play, being a mentor and helping people get the outcomes, but internalizing it and becoming experts while doing so. 

Yeah. So if you want to filter out the AI slop and the AI noise, and you want real people who will look at your specific situations and help you and mentor you and help your staff get up to speed and simplify, then reach out to Denis. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because every week I bring a couple of entrepreneurs who are sharing their frameworks of how they’re improving and growing their businesses, and you can implement some of these things yourself. 

So thanks, Denis. Denis O’Shea, the founder and CEO of Mobile Mentor, soon to be called Mentor. Thanks for coming on the show, and thank you for listening.

Thank you, Steve. Always a pleasure.

Dave Goyal, Founder and CEO of Think AI Corporation, is driven to Turn Disabilities into Unique Abilities by using technology to empower disabled entrepreneurs and help businesses unlock the value of their data. After contracting polio as an infant, Dave transformed physical limitations and early adversity into a passion for solving business problems, building companies, and giving back to society. Through Think AI, he helps manufacturing and healthcare leaders use data and AI to generate real-time insights, improve productivity, reduce costs, and create new opportunities for growth.

In this conversation, Dave introduces The 3G AI Augmentation Framework—Gap: Where are we losing time, quality, ability, or capacity? Grow: Apply AI to augment people and improve that work. Glow: Institutionalize the solution so humans and AI collaborate effectively. Dave also shares how his private second brain and AI executive agents save him up to 80 hours per month, why human control and security must remain central to AI adoption, and how authority, trust, people, customers, and culture drive business growth. He also discusses his book, Real-Time Business Intelligence Mastery, and his vision for creating a venture studio for disabled entrepreneurs.

Good day. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint. And today my guest is Dave Goyal, the founder and CEO of Think AI Corporation, which helps CTOs and CIOs in manufacturing and healthcare turn siloed data into real-time insights and automation, creating reduced downtime, increased efficiency, and going from weeks to days in project launches. Dave, welcome to the show. 

Thank you for having me, Steve. 

Well, I’m really curious to learn about you and your company, Think AI Corporation, but first I’d like to ask you about your personal why and how you are manifesting it in your business. 

So thank you again, Steve. I’m really excited to be on your show. I’m in the data and AI business, and really tech innovation, for the last 30 years. In this particular company, Think AI, I have a partner, Manish Bhardia, and we both have been working very actively with Microsoft partners, the Microsoft ecosystem, and implementing data and AI solutions for midsize companies and manufacturing companies. You went on why, which is amazing. 

My why: I’m a disabled entrepreneur. I have this hunger for building businesses. I’ve built nine businesses. We can talk about it later. And five of them were miserable failures in my books. Not all of them were that miserable, as I say. But five of them were failures, and I learned a lot from them. And I’m really motivated now to expand it further, to give back to small businesses. 

We’ve been working with midsize and enterprise clients, but to midsize companies, and then motivate—I have a 15-year-old kid—so motivate young people and also small businesses to make use of the power of their own data and use and consume AI on a day-to-day basis. That’s my why. 

Wow. So, to learn the power of their own data and use AI, why is this important to you? 

The main reason is I am passionate about technology. Everybody is good at something. I am really good at solving business problems using technology. Being a disabled entrepreneur, I did not have a lot of luxury initially, even walking. Eventually, I started using braces, started going to different countries. So the passion became really the source of energy and motivation, and that passion is now going to a level where I want to motivate people like me who are disabled entrepreneurs and want to go into this kind of business. So my real passion is technology and giving back to society using technology, to sum it up. 

Wow. So you mentioned this disabled entrepreneur. I’ve never heard this term. I mean, you talk about minority entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs, you know, veteran entrepreneurs, and actually the government recognizes these categories, but I never heard about disabled entrepreneurs. So would you mind sharing a little bit about what happened to you and how you got into this entrepreneurship? 

Sure, yeah. And that’s really good, by the way. I don’t see anybody else using that term but me, so probably I should keep it with me as a copyright term. Just joking on it. But having said that, every disability brings some kind of ability. That’s why sometimes they call it differently abled. When you have these abilities, you don’t know the source or the channels to use them. So, for example, blind people, they may have a lot of great listening power. That’s why they are into music most of the time. 

Sometimes they have amazing reasoning and critical-thinking power, but they don’t know how to channel it, so they fight on a day-to-day basis with these issues. Bringing it back to me, I have polio. When I was six months old, I got hit by the polio virus. Initially, for a few years, I had to just lie down on the bed, had a lot of physical therapy. Then I was able to get up and sit, at least. Then my father was carrying me to school, and I could see the kids were going out and playing. I got beaten up because of that, too, because kids don’t understand. No fault of theirs that I’m not throwing the ball at them and they are playing. 

And so that brought a lot of negativity in me. Eventually, my grandfather and my father helped me get over that, and I started channeling that into building businesses. So I started teaching music. I learned music through some of my friends. I started teaching music during my college days and started making money. And I had a blind friend, and he needed money because he was abandoned by his parents, so I had to help him out. I started making some money. I was doing well with my family, so I could just pay everything back to him. So that seed got planted there, and I didn’t know what to do back then, right? 

Still a 14-, 15-year-old kid or a teenager, in this case. So I started getting into that mindset of, how about I build businesses for me and then start helping out the community? I’m still not there yet. I’m going towards helping that community. But I want to identify disability in three ways, not just physical. So those three are physical, but the bigger one is mental. A lot of people are really mentally blocked, and you see people, you know, “Oh, I can’t change anything in my life.” People die by suic*de. Kids get into depression. This is a form of disability, by all means. 

I don’t think education, parents, and community are doing so much about that other than having a cliché thing that, “I was a victim of depression, so I’m doing that,” just to show off. But really, to help out the community in a methodical manner, that doesn’t exist. Second, physical disability, like I said, given by God sometimes, like war veterans and others, then you feel really limited. So what to do with that? And I come into that category, so I know that really well. Third is financial disability. So a lot of financial disability is in the mind, too. I’ve heard a phrase called, “You don’t die by hunger; you really die by indigestion.” 

So you would find ways and means to make money even if you’re a completely disabled person. So I don’t think finance is an issue in general. So these three areas, to me, are the real disability areas. I’m obviously only working on one today, which is physical disability: how to identify the potential of people who can create something different within that limitation and then make a change in the world. So that’s the motivation. That’s my Life 2.0, where I’m moving now.

Love it. Love it. So how did you have time to build nine businesses? 

I started it in 1993, ’94, I believe, or ’95, I think. And they’re one at a time. Today I have about three. I sold one. And yeah, I did not have time. One of the big challenges when I built these three in the last six, seven, eight years, the biggest challenge I faced is I do not have time for working with customers, which I love to do—talking and listening to their business problems, solving those problems. I end up doing a lot of operational work. 

Post-2020, and it’s a very blunt thing to say, people got lazy. They want to change jobs, make more money, do moonlighting, do multiple things, but not work hard like we did back in the days. And that kind of pushed all of us small businesses to do a lot more management of resources, especially human resources, in a distributed environment. I have teams in India, the Philippines, Canada. So that became a bigger challenge. But having said that, AI came as a savior. In the last 18 months, AI has changed quite a lot. 

And if you don’t go into a debate of whether AI is good or bad, or you’re a skeptic or an enthusiast, AI can really help you if you really put together how it can help you. It should not replace you, but it should give you an additional helping arm. In my business, I started deploying C-suite. So I still have a VP of operations. My business partner is into sales. But then I started filling in other functions, like a fractional CFO, as an example. My fractional CFO is monitoring my top line and bottom line. I call him Felix. I have to give names to AI agents. 

So Felix is actually looking on a weekly basis at what invoices are billed, if we have vendors or employees, what we need to pay, where our expenses are going, what’s the monthly or maybe six-month cash flow run. Are we within limits? Do we have borderline cash availability so that we can survive? So it started to do a lot of things. But not only that, because we are feeding our own data, our own mind, I have built my own second brain. It started to read off of that and started giving me insights that a human would not give me. And even if I hire a fractional CFO, he will only hear what I have to say, look into some of my books, and then give me some blanket suggestions. 

Here, this is really tailor-made to our problems, our situation, and it worked phenomenally well. So I’m building that as a product now. It’s not done yet. Then I also deployed my own CMO called Sasha, and she started to look into my marketing angles, my branding, my voice, my identity. I love writing, but now AI can help me—not just create a blanket AI post or something, but really read how I write, what I write. So I create ideas. It helps me research, does a factual check on it. So I give 100 words. It can take those ideas and then expand into newsletter articles or a big campaign. 

I can start building different case studies for our customers, proof of concept, building podcasts such as these. So this started freeing up—I only talked about two executives, and I have seven of them—but they started to help me free up my time. And believe it or not, I am getting about 40 to 60 hours, and in good months, about 80 hours per month. So 30 to 50% of my regular time is freed up. So that time is now going into this movement that I’m thinking about, which is disabled entrepreneurship. 

Wow, that is impressive. So tell me a little bit about this. This is a podcast of frameworks. So do you have a framework for maybe launching an AI agent like that? 

I definitely do, and I want you to expand on it. But in terms of what I have, I look into three things. Where is the gap in terms of human? Where I see either performance issues, quality issues, or availability and capacity issues. So what are those things which don’t hit my security side of things, don’t interact with my customer, and still help me in my operations? That’s the gap we look into. How can we use and fill that gap to grow what we need to work on? And then last, so I use three Gs with my last name, Goyal, right? So Gap to Grow to Glow. 

So now how can we use this in our business to glow and create an environment where even humans can interact with this AI persona? So we are always big on human-in-the-loop or human-in-control with any AI solution. So it always starts with the gap. Where is the gap? Where is it taking time from one of the human sides of our team? 

I like that. I like that you isolated those things which are less risky to develop, because I think a lot of people are held back by this idea that it’s a black box, you don’t know what you’re getting into, you don’t know what you don’t know, and it’s risky, and then they don’t do anything. 

But you actually isolated that customer interaction is a risk you don’t want to live with right now, and security is another one you don’t want to, which, I mean, it’s obvious. But if those are not hurt, then really what is the risk you’re running? So I like it. So how do you fire up an AI agent like that? 

So in terms of technology, I’m using a few things. I’m using Claude Code, the full Claude environment. So we build it off of that. Back in my days, I worked as a white-hat hacker, so the security angle we mentioned, I’m always so worried about hacking and security. So I have a completely isolated environment at my home on a Mac Mini, a really powerful Mac Mini, and that cannot go out on the internet and do things. And nobody can inject anything. 

But then I still need to feed information to it, so I have another machine where the only job of that machine is to provide information to this system. So I have my own second brain mapped into Obsidian, which is a note-taking application, but it’s really organized. So I first fed all my knowledge. I’ve recorded lots and lots of audios and documents, and it has learned. So I built that system first, like Dave’s second brain. And my second brain has learned everything about me. Nobody can see it but me. That’s my initial basis, right? 

After that, I built a working memory for my agents, for my company, and I’m doing it for one company at a time. Think AI is not completely live on the system, but Data & AI Studio is, which is a solo entrepreneurship business that I have. It is learning everything about that business as we speak. Even the transcripts from these podcasts and other places go into it, and it learns from it. There will be some insights which it will find, so it retains them. So Claude Code, Mac Mini, Obsidian—these are the basis. And then I’ve deployed my own personal models, like DeepSeek, and that is sitting locally on that machine. 

So the model is local. The downside is it’s not getting updated, so I only update it when I feel that it’s right. Not risk, it’s really the downside. There’s no risk in it. So you’re not on the latest and greatest, but you don’t have to be on the latest and greatest all the time. So Claude Code is on the latest and greatest, but when we deploy, it may not apply certain features that Claude Code is making available. And that’s fine. That’s the risk I’m taking. That’s the trade-off I’m taking. And the system is working great for the last six months. 

In the last 18 months, even though I started AI about 28, 30 years ago, the last 18 months is when I learned the new-age AI, and the last six months is when I started building this in an iterative manner. And it is pretty stable now. It can do a lot of things like I mentioned.

So your agents are running on your Mac Mini off the grid? 

Yes. 

And then you’re feeding information with another computer to it to essentially give them the raw material from which they can build stuff, right? 

Right. A good example there, if I may expand: we use QuickBooks in our accounting system. It cannot read QuickBooks directly, but we, being a Microsoft partner, understand technology. I can write a job which can push data into the Mac Mini. It doesn’t read off of it. My Mac Mini, which has the agent, doesn’t know where that data has come from. It has the data, so it’s already synthesized. 

It cannot communicate with others. So that’s the calculated risk we take, right? Getting the data from one angle, one way, and then it’s synthesizing and analyzing data and getting insights out of it. So that’s the balance of systems that I have. 

I love it. That’s very clever. And what is your main business anyway? Because you talk about three businesses right now. What is your core business? What is your flagship business? 

The flagship business is Think AI. It’s a consulting organization, a three-time Inc. 5000 winner in terms of growth. We have our own team, but then we also use a lot of vendors which are qualified by us throughout the world. And we are Microsoft Advanced Specialization partners. What that means is we are in the top 2% of the worldwide partners within the Microsoft ecosystem, which is about 500,000 partners. And we work mainly with midsize manufacturers, and sometimes healthcare if they are okay and open to AI, and if not, data. So we go in there, look into whether they have a data and AI strategy. 

If they do, we work on their initiatives. If they have the initiatives. If not, we create the initiatives for them by doing some POCs and whatnot. And once we get engaged, we do deliverables like consulting services. But it’s not like typical consulting services where you place a resource. It’s really a value-based delivery model where we try to understand two business imperatives. One is what can help them make more revenue. And if we cannot find that, what can help them be more productive and have cost-cutting in one way or the other. 

So these are the two main business imperatives we work on. When and if we align with that, then we give them a roadmap, a phase-wise approach, which they can do with us or with somebody else, and then we keep delivering on it. So that’s the whole model. 

So what drives growth in the Think AI business? 

I mean, finding more customers, to say the least. And that becomes difficult because today everything is becoming a commodity. So one good learning, by the way, I need to share with the audience here. When you’re a small business, you think your brand is the value that you have. It’s the founders who are the brand. So it’s Manish and me. Manish, my business partner, is really big in productivity, project management, and that kind of thing. And I’m really good at building solutions using tech. And together we have about 55 years of experience. 

And then our key team members are ex-Microsoft or MVPs, Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals. So we hire a really strong key team. And the team below, we can either fill with our members, hire our own members, or go to the vendors also, and we tell it to our clients also. So our delivery model is we are the ones who are delivering. The guarantee is taken by Manish and Dave, not by Think AI. We have gotten into that situation. We are about 95% successful, so there’s a 5% failure. And the failure is either because we have the wrong team member, the communication between the client and us was not clear, the scope was not clear, the definition of value and done was not clear, and we have learned from it. 

So our business model is towards that, and that brings us growth because we work with a number of partners. Manish is part of a lot of Microsoft channel partner networks. We provide complementary services to those partners. So one channel is we work with a lot of partners because the trust is there. Authority and trust are the two factors we have understood which establish your business, and it’s the founders’ authority and trust, not the company. Company will build on its own. So we started building our own authority and trust, and that gets us growth. It’s not at the level we’d like, but we are happy. 

You are happy. Okay. So what is your vision? What would you like to make out of this? 

So we have an exit plan, at least on Think AI. And like I told you, Manish has his own. That is up to him. For me, I want to create this venture studio for disabled entrepreneurs, get the funds from here, and then harvest, go across the world. So three hobbies I have. 

One is travel. Second is reading, writing stuff, books. And third is music. And entrepreneurship comes in this whole surroundings, in this whole ring, so it’s the foundation of it. So we’re going to build this disabled entrepreneurship venture studio with a little bit of funds from our exit, and hope to grow there and hope to retire or die with that thinking. 

Love it. Love it. It’s fascinating. So you have a book that is on your LinkedIn page, Real-Time Business Intelligence Mastery. So tell me about this book. Why did you write it, and what’s it about? 

Sure. So we went into a coaching program. Up until 2022, we were arrogant enough to say, “Oh yeah, we can do everything on our own.” And then slowly we realized we need help, and we started taking help. We went to a couple of coaches in India where they were coaching us either on how to manage operations and operational excellence, and then another coach who’s like a life/building-your-brand marketing coach, and he inspired us to write a book. 

Now, I’ve been writing in my own native Hindi language, songs and compositions, but writing a book was a dream, and I thought it’s a big undertaking. But with their little bit of motivation and help, not in writing, but in the angle of what a book can bring. So I have a lot of experience working in midsize manufacturing organizations, working with CTOs and CIOs, and business intelligence is delayed. So it’s either a one-day delay or a week delay or a month delay, and it’s more reactive in nature. 

So the book was more about how you can build a real-time business intelligence culture so that you can get the insights from your data, make actionable insights, take actions on it, and grow your business for those two imperatives I talked about, which is grow your revenue or increase your productivity and decrease your cost. 

So are you writing about some of the things that you talked about? Leveraging AI, building AI agents? 

It has more about—so I wrote it in 2022, I believe. It has a lot more detail about. AI was not as popular, right? I mean, I did write about AI in it, but it was more about building a data culture than AI. It does talk briefly about AI because real-time is going very closely with AI. That’s the enabler for AI insights or data insights through AI. So it does talk a little bit about AI, but it talks more about tech leaders like CIOs and CTOs. What do they need to do? How do they need to build a culture around harvesting data, bring the data, build the team, where to take it? So it has those details. 

Okay. That’s fascinating. Who is this book for? Is it for founders? Is it for C-level executives? Who is the target? 

Like I said, it’s for tech leaders, CIOs, and CTOs of midsize organizations. 

Okay. That’s awesome. And these are the people that are your target customers as well at Think AI? 

Yes. That’s our true ideal client profile too, and that’s whom we have worked with all our lives. So they’re close friends, target audience, and customers. Future customers and current customers. 

All in one. All in one. That’s so nice when you write a book to your friends. That’s a very cool concept. So let me ask you this, Dave. If you had a magic wand, you’ve done a lot of things in your business, you built nine businesses. You learned from some of the failures that you had, which is part of entrepreneurship, and now you created AI agents, and then you have a second brain, and you’re leveraging all that technology. So if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would that be? 

I wish I had more senior leadership. Any business works with delegation. We have a couple who are really amazing, and they wear a lot of hats. But growth depends on three things, right? Being in front of the right customer, having the right team, and having the right product. Our product is people, unfortunately and fortunately. Customers, we are very happy and excited, and they trust us. We know how to get to them. We know how to create value for them. We are very satisfied. Everybody would say, “I need more customers,” and we would do that too. 

But I think more important is what product you are offering. So then people are what we are offering, and we are competing against big ones like Accenture and Avanade and Cognizant of the world in our business, the tech consulting business. But then we are not competing against cost; we are competing against value. So how do you create value? You find a valuable customer. They understand our language. The next level is, where is the product, which is the people? And that management becomes quite difficult. And harvesting and getting the right people in place is a job by itself. 

So kudos to those large companies if they’re harvesting one, although that’s debatable because when we go to the client, they complain a lot about their resources as well. So harvesting the right product and the right team is the key. And how do you do that? If you have the right leaders on top. Two partners alone cannot do that. So building more leaders underneath is the key. We are able to build a few, and I wish we could build a lot more. So when you have the right core team, your growth comes in, is my belief system. It could be different for everyone else. 

No, I think it’s a very deep insight, and very few people actually talk about this idea that the purpose of a business, especially in today’s AI age, is to build leaders. That’s your purpose, because people will take care of everything. They’re going to run your AI agents. They’re going to manifest your vision. But you can’t have just AI agents in a company, right? 

Because then the mental load is so much on the leader, and then the single-person dependency becomes critical. So is this what you mean by this? Where do you come from with this idea of harvesting people and leaders in the business? 

Absolutely. You said it well. Building leaders doesn’t just apply to an organization, whether small, medium, or big, but even to countries. If you don’t have the right leaders in place, it’s going to bite you back. And all cultures, some of the top management consultants will teach you to go into succession planning. That is what they really mean by that. 

It’s not succession planning by, okay, replace a CEO with a CEO. It’s the mindset. Apple is a great example of it. Steve Jobs hired Tim Cook from Compaq, from that world, and he had that vision. Obviously, he had a mission, but he had the vision—who to take, where to take, and what they would do. And that legacy continues even today. So Apple didn’t change a single bit in their model. And people would argue and debate, and that’s fine. 

But when I see it from my eye, he built a great leader. When he did that, the company stayed the same, right? So it’s not about what products Apple is creating today, whether it’s iPhone or iPad or Apple Vision Pro or some of the other things that they are doing, but it’s really that leader. Same thing went with Google, or Microsoft, Satya Nadella. And you see the right leaders were built by these founders. And by any means, we are not that big, and hopefully we can get to some place which is pretty good in our books. 

But finding and building the right people, it gives you a lot of satisfaction, happiness, bliss, if you can give it back to somebody who’s capable enough. And I’m always in hunt of the right people, building the right team in place. 

It’s so interesting you mention Apple because when Isaacson came out with the Steve Jobs biography, he said, basically, I think it’s in the preamble of the book, that Steve Jobs wanted people to remember him not for the products that he created, but the company. So his biggest contribution was creating a company. And I didn’t get what he meant by it. 

But if you witness the last—since he died 13 years ago—the last 13 years, this company has gone from strength to strength. Ninety percent of its market capitalization has been created since he died, right? So it keeps growing and keeps going from strength to strength, and that is the culture and the people that he built. This is the company he built. So it’s quite an amazing idea. 

I was about to comment on company. Something came back to me or reminded me that companies generally build on three pillars: customer, people, and culture. And if you don’t have the right balance of it—so, the right people, but if you don’t have the right culture, they’re going to run away. If you don’t have the right customers, you should have the ability to say no to certain types of customers too. Like Apple never targeted small, cheap products. 

And when I say cheap, meaning which doesn’t have the right quality in place, not about the cost. It’s always cost versus quality. So they have really struck the right balance in those three angles, and I think that’s the right way to do it. Some are able to do it, some are able to push through to do it, and some are not. But that’s where I think the focus needs to be if you are a founder. Find that right balance of people, client or customer, and culture. 

Yeah. 

And that is your core values too. 

Yeah. I agree with you. That’s wonderful. If you are listening to this conversation with Dave Goyal, and you would like to learn more about him and what he does and Think AI Corporation, where should our listeners go to learn more? 

Thank you for this opportunity, first of all. And people can find me on LinkedIn by my name, Dave Goyal. I’m very active there. I recently started a YouTube channel with the name Dave Goyal, so you can find me on YouTube. And mainly on LinkedIn, I have a newsletter on AI, and I’m pretty passionate about what’s happening in AI. 

So I even publish AI news this week, but with a different angle, a builder’s angle in mind. And last but not least, you can connect with me through LinkedIn for a 15-, 30-minute call. No angle there. I will just come and help you if you really want to do something with AI. I can listen to your challenges or your fear of missing out, if that’s the case, and tell you if AI is the right fit for you or not, and what you can do on your own also. And if you need our help, we are happy to. 

That’s fantastic. So take Dave up on his offer, which I think is very generous. And obviously, Dave, you know what you’re talking about. You built a second brain. You’re running AI agents. Your C-suite is chock-full of AI agents, which is very impressive. I’d love to learn more about this myself. 

So if you’re curious about that, make sure you book a call with Dave or check out his stuff. Where is your newsletter? Is it a Substack? Where can people find your newsletter? 

It’s on LinkedIn. It’s called Data & AI Demystified in my profile. 

Okay. So that’s easy. So we can go to Dave’s LinkedIn profile. And if you enjoyed this conversation, make sure you subscribe and follow us on Apple Podcasts and YouTube. Give us a review because every week I bring in a couple of exciting entrepreneurs like Dave who share their favorite frameworks with you. So Dave, thanks for coming, and thank you for listening.

Carlos Corredor, Co-Founder and CEO of Condor Digital Marketing, is driven by a passion for interpreting data and helping marketing leaders Generate and Measure Your Pipeline with greater accuracy. ith a background in sports analytics and journalism, Carlos helps B2B companies identify which marketing activities generate qualified leads, clients, and revenue so they can invest confidently in what works. 

In this conversation, Carlos introduces The Condor Pipeline Generation Framework—Understand Current Pipeline Generation, Map the Process, Move Budgets to Their Highest and Best Use, Fix Measurement Gaps, and Rinse and Repeat. He explains why marketers should begin with clients and revenue instead of clicks and impressions, how the Pipeline X-Ray exposes attribution gaps, and why budgets should move toward channels with proven returns. Carlos also discusses using BANT to diagnose conversion problems and why client champions, paid media, and events drive growth in high-ticket B2B markets.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and today my guest is Carlos Corredor, Co-Founder and CEO of Condor Digital Marketing, a pipeline generation and measurement firm. Carlos, welcome to the show. 

Hey, Steve. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. Great to be here. 

It’s exciting to have you and to learn about your secrets of how you generate a measurable pipeline. But before we get into it, I’m curious: What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it through your company? 

Yeah. So I’ve always been passionate about sports and the data behind sports, and I actually worked in sports data analysis and journalism. But ultimately, I’ve been passionate about interpreting data to have an advantage, whether that’s playing tennis or doing analysis for baseball teams. And then I eventually started working in marketing, doing sports websites, and I saw the opportunity. In marketing in general, especially with digital, to use data to your advantage.

So I would say that’s really what I’m passionate about in terms of my professional life and why I enjoy what I do so much and why I get up in the morning and I really look forward to the day and even to Monday. Because obviously, it’s not all fun. But ultimately, I think it comes from that passion of liking what you’re doing, and the time flies when you work and you like what you do and you see that you’re good at what you’re doing and it’s making an impact. So I would say that’s why. 

And have you always been a data person? Are you analytical and like to look at the numbers behind things? 

Yeah, yeah. It started with sports. That’s where I realized that I had, let’s say, that passion at the beginning and ultimately that skill. With baseball at the beginning, it was reading the back of baseball cards and then fantasy baseball in high school, and then actually working in that. In kind of like sabermetrics and Moneyball-type analysis in college. 

Because I saw, just like it happens in marketing, how back in the old days, even professionals, they were using the wrong type of data or a very antiquated way of looking at things. So it’s like understanding really what has an impact and what is responsible for outcomes. That’s, I think, the part that I’ve always thought was what’s important and what I had a knack for, a talent to do that better than others. So that’s why I went deep into that. 

Okay. So how do you do that? So this podcast is a podcast of frameworks. So I wonder if you have a framework of how to create pipeline generation based on data, and perhaps you can share a simplified version of that with our listeners, something that can be explained in three to five steps. 

Yeah, definitely. And I’ll give you first the kind of like the philosophy or the mental model, and then I’ll give you those steps because one comes from the other. So in marketing, with all of the data that’s available, especially today, a lot of people start at the bottom. At clicks, impressions, and then they try to build a bottoms-up report to then prove what’s generating leads and clients and revenue. But that is always inexact, takes forever. 

What I propose is doing it the opposite: a top-down approach where you start with clients and revenue, and then start figuring out where those leads in your pipeline or clients and the closed revenue is coming from. And you will know all of that at the beginning. So that’s, I think, how it starts, that framework. So the first step of the framework is to understand, which sounds really basic, but you’d be surprised today how many marketing leaders, marketing VPs, CMOs of especially mid-market, definitely smaller mid-market, and even some enterprise companies, don’t have that data readily available to understand how much pipeline did we, as a marketing department, generate, let’s say, last year.

So that’s, I think, the first step, is understanding that. It’s asking your team for a report that says that. Now your team’s going to come back and say they won’t know the full picture. Maybe they know 10%, maybe they know 90%. But they’re going to show you something. So then is the second step. You’re going to start adjusting your investments to what you’re seeing there, and at the same time, you’re going to start fixing the dark holes or what you can’t see. 

And then simply step number three is rinse and repeat every, let’s say, quarter at the beginning. And obviously, there’s nuances of how exactly you should adjust and what exactly you can fix. But ultimately, that would be the three-step approach that you asked about. 

That’s fascinating. So the understand piece is understanding your pipeline or how you’re generating the pipeline? What is it? Understanding what? 

Yeah. So actually we have a name for that first step. We call it the Pipeline X-Ray. So let’s say you start a new job as a CMO of a new company. Or simply you’ve been in the job for a while and you’re listening to this and you say, “Okay, actually, I’ve never thought about it that way. 

Let’s sit tomorrow with my team and ask the question: How many qualified leads and closed clients have we, as marketing, generated so far this year and, let’s say, last year?” That is understanding that. Now, I’ll tell you, I’d be very surprised if the marketing person or the marketing team or the leader has that data in a way that they can say with 100% certainty what the answer is. In terms of, “We’ve closed these four clients, and we’ve had 72 qualified leads. 

And out of the 72, 50 have come from our paid search campaigns, 10 have come from events, and then the others have come from organic.” In an ideal world, that’s the type of answer that you want. But in the real world, again, very rarely do you have that clear understanding right then and there. So that’s when step number two becomes, okay, let’s close the gaps to be able to have an understanding. 

Okay. So essentially, when you say adjust and fix, then are you talking about adjusting and fixing the process of generating clients, or actually mapping the gaps in the pipeline first? 

Yeah, so that’s a great question. The adjust, I mean move budget around. Not necessarily increase budget. You have to prove what’s working. And obviously, if you don’t have the full picture and understanding, you cannot just go to your CEO and say, “I need more budget.” So with the same budget that you have, what can you pause and move around towards the things that step number one told you with certainty are working.

So if, let’s say, out of the 50 qualified leads that you generated, you saw that half of them came from your paid search campaigns, then you say, “Oh, okay.” And then you don’t see anything, let’s say, for conferences, and now you’re going to 10 conferences a year and you’re spending a million dollars on conferences, and you’re only spending $200,000 a year on your paid media spend. Then you say, “You know what? I’m going to stop. I’m going to pause.

We’re not going to go to these two conferences this year, and I’m going to move those $200,000, and we’re going to double our spend in Google Ads,” for example. That’s what I mean with the adjust piece. It could be the opposite. It could be pause paid search and then be more aggressive on our conference strategy. It could be, let’s start a paid social campaign, whether that’s LinkedIn or programmatic ads, or let’s be more aggressive on our PR because right now our leads have come from interviews that our subject matter experts have done in certain types of podcasts or YouTube channels. 

But that’s what step number one is. But adjust is move budget around. Put your stocks where the returns are positive and where you can expect a better return almost immediately, or at least in the next upcoming months. And then the fix is particularly around the measurement gaps. The fix is what you can’t see, right, on step number one. Step number one is understanding. And a report with all of that.

When the person that does the reporting for you came back, or when you did it yourself or whatever, probably a lot of leads are like, “Ah, now it says direct traffic. What is that?” Obviously, they didn’t just come and wake up one day and say, “Oh, I’m just going to go to condoragency.com.” No, they heard you somewhere, but you’re still not sure. You won the client, you know you won the client, the client’s paying you money, but you’re not sure. So maybe, okay, what needs to improve in our measurement framework. 

Usually, you can start with your CRM, your HubSpot, Salesforce, for instance, or whatever you use. There’s some web analytics that might need to happen. You need to connect your advertising platforms. You’re probably going to need to start talking to your sales team so they ask the right questions when they have discovery calls with prospects. I mean, there’s a few things you can do, but I’m talking specifically about measurement gaps so you can have the full picture. 

So when you talk to new prospects or clients, can they answer one most of the time? 

They can partially answer one. I would go a step beyond because, I mean, that’s not the sexiest answer. I would say it’s usually, let’s just say, around 50% of their leads and clients, they can know who was responsible. And then there’s a couple of parts there. First and foremost, not only for your sake, but for the sake of your alignment with the C-suite and with the CEO and the CFO and even the sales team. You want to know, is marketing responsible for this? Number one. Because then that’s very important. 

Because that’s what’s going to justify the existence of the marketing team. Then later, if it came from a paid search campaign or a paid social or a conference, if those all are in the marketing budget, that’s secondary. But most importantly, you want to make sure that, number one, you’re bringing pipeline as a marketing department, and number two, you know exactly what pipeline you’re bringing. Not only you, but then also your CEO and your CFO.

So then it’s like a luxury, let’s say, to see if it comes from, the tough part is that you won’t know that it comes from marketing unless you’re tracking paid search and you’re tracking conferences in the CRM the right way. So obviously, they are related in that way. 

Okay. Love it. So understand your pipeline generation, and then adjust the budget to make sure you’re supporting the ones that generate the most, and fix those that are not optimized. So maybe optimize them or replace them or come up with a new one. How else do you fix other than your measurement gaps? 

Okay, you fixed the measurement gaps. Now you can measure it. You have a full picture. Then you have a slate of options, and how do you know what to choose if you’re not doing enough? 

Yeah. So I think there’s a couple of things there. One is understanding if you… Because, obviously, you always want to generate more pipeline. So you have to then say, “Okay, is my problem that I’m not generating any interest in the first place at all?” Like, there’s nobody visiting my website. Or even downloading some pieces of content, what traditionally is called conversions or marketing-qualified leads. Obviously, that’s not the goal. 

The goal is that they turn into clients. But you have to know that if people are not visiting your website and you’re not seeing marketing-qualified leads coming into your CRM, then you have to do certain things. Whereas if the problem is, “Okay, no, that’s not the problem, Carlos,” and this is actually more common, which is a little counterintuitive, but the more and more that we work with mid-market clients, we realize this is the case.They are generating marketing-qualified leads.

There is activity in the CRM. There are companies, new companies, that you see are visiting your website, downloading and consuming content. But then, for some reason, they are not becoming clients. So that’s where we have to dig in and understand. Maybe they downloaded a white paper that was very educational in nature. And they’re not ready to buy. Which is fine, and I’m not saying you have to not show that white paper, but you know that white paper is not going to bring you ready-to-buy customers. 

So that’s when we have the concept of what sales and marketing people call a BANT-type of lead, which is a lead that has the budget, the authority, the need, and the timing. You want, obviously, a lead that has the four things. Now you start, you measure. Okay, we had 10 leads, and they had, let’s say, the budget and the authority. They were the CTO. The lead of the technology department in the company that we know has the budget. But they just downloaded this and didn’t convert. They didn’t have, let’s say, the timing or the need. 

Then maybe you rely more on, for example, paid search, which is a channel that, by searching the right keywords, the bottom-of-funnel keywords, for example, we are a pipeline generation firm. If somebody is looking for, “What is Google Ads?” That’s educational. Now, if somebody’s searching for “experienced agencies in B2B managing Google Ads.” Now, that’s somebody that’s ready to hire an agency to manage their Google Ads.

So that’s why, for example, in this case, if the component that’s lacking is the need and the timing, paid search could be a way to do it. Or intent data, which is now something that is out there not only via paid search, but you identify certain signals and you can target them on programmatic ads or YouTube or whatever. That’s another alternative. So that’s something that you could do, for example, if you have a pain in moving leads down the funnel and closing clients, and you also realize that you’re talking to the right people, but then they’re simply not converting. 

And the opposite. You get a lot of people that need your service. But they may be too small, or they may be just a manager and they don’t have the authority to approve a high-ticket service. Then you go towards maybe LinkedIn targeting, or you do a campaign that is based more on account-based marketing, or ABM. Where you know you’re talking to the right people. So again, that’s another adjustment that you can make. So I don’t know if I… Sorry if I deviated a little bit from the question, Steve, but hopefully that’s still— 

No, it makes sense. It makes sense. So first you want to measure, and then you diagnose. If you’ve got some activity but it’s not converting, why is it not converting? Maybe it’s not the right approach to build trust. Maybe there’s another approach. 

And then you look at the different elements: budget, authority, need, timing. That makes sense. So let me turn it back to you. So what drives growth in your business? 

So for us, I would say if we do that, let’s say, Pipeline X-Ray. And we actually did. We’ve been in business for almost 10 years now. And if you would do a Pipeline X-Ray, the number one driver of leads and new clients are, let’s just call it, Condor champions that switch jobs. And not switch jobs that were working with us, but they were working with one of our clients. 

And they worked with us, and they saw the work that we did, and they ended up moving to another agency within the same space, for example, or in B2B services, or even if it’s something a little more niche like tech services, which is an area that we also specialize in. And then they say, “I already worked with Condor for either measurement or paid search campaigns or demand generation in general, and I like working with them, so they’re going to call us.” And then some people, they switch multiple jobs.

So embracing that and obviously using that to fuel and to focus even more on doing a great job and maintaining relationships with people, obviously most importantly while they’re a client, but even if they switch, not forgetting about them. That has been the main driver. Obviously, we don’t want to only rely on that. And then more recently, we’ve given more structure to our own sales and marketing department for that. And, for example, we closed a client that came via a paid search campaign. But that’s still… We haven’t scaled those yet. 

We’re still making sure. We’re still in that measurement phase where, yeah, we’re putting budget behind a few things and some of them seem to be working better, but not yet at the point of truly scaling that. We’re ultimately also a relatively small firm, which obviously makes decisions differently than if you are, let’s say, a mid-market or enterprise. But those, I would say, in order of importance, have been our three main drivers of growth: the champions that switch jobs, number one, and then I would say secondarily, paid media and events. 

Yeah. So these are the three things. And what about the events? Why do you put events as a third? I’m just thinking that you’re a B2B company and trust-based. Would events not be better than paid media? 

I would say they’re not mutually exclusive. Actually, they rely a lot on each other. And honestly, for us, I just put number two and three, but I would say they’re tied for second, and then the other ones are four and below. And the reason why I think events are important, what we’re seeing not only for us but for our clients, the outbound activity is really saturated. 

I think cold email or cold outreach in general, because it used to be via email, now it’s on LinkedIn as well, it’s really, really saturated. It’s really hard to be heard or to get a reply with cold outreach in general. Paid media, you can be a little bit more creative because you have visuals. Whether that’s video that hopefully you can leverage. So I’m a believer in paid media more than the actual cold outreach via email or LinkedIn. But then the events are also great precisely because of that. 

People are saturated and tired of being bombarded with messages from people they don’t know. Whereas especially after COVID, people started going back to both the office and simply going out there. It doesn’t have to be a big yearly conference. It can be just a dinner where you invite four or five people and talk about certain topics or any in-person activity. Well, I mean, a webinar can even be considered an event. Where you’re educating your audience on certain things. And especially if your target audience is more on the manager side or below, or director and below, webinars can be an avenue. 

But to answer your question, I think that personal connection is really, really powerful. And people forgot about it with, let’s say, the boom of cold outreach and digital and now AI, and especially during COVID. But definitely in the last few years, we’ve seen not only that people are more willing or prefer to meet people in person, but we see that in the data as well, We see cold outreach campaigns that are bringing less and less results. And then when you connect in person. 

Especially high-ticket. I also give this example. If you’re selling B2B services, which are usually high-ticket. It’s a project of either $50,000. It could be an engagement of $2 million over two years. Obviously, you want to know the company, but you also want to trust the human that is going to deliver on that promise. I always give the example: If you’re selling an iPhone cover that costs $25, yeah, maybe you can get away with a pretty image on an Instagram ad. You click and you buy. Boom. Great. You can fully leverage digital for that. 

But when you’re selling a cloud migration project of a million dollars, you’re going to want to talk to somebody, trust that person, dig in a little bit more, have a couple of meetings. So it’s more complex. So in particular for those instances, that’s why I think the personal connection, that it’s even better if it starts at an event, or however you manage to do it, helps a lot. 

So for Condor, do you make a distinction between B2B companies and B2C, and where you can help them the most? 

Yeah. We have a couple of direct-to-consumer clients, but the majority of the work that we do is either for B2B or, if not B2B, it’s lead generation. So e-commerce, for example, is a different world. E-commerce, as I mentioned, depending on what you buy, it’s immediate. You track things. You have a platform like Shopify or something similar. It’s a whole different world. Whereas that’s immediate, and you can see everything, and it’s all kind of automated and based on an inventory. 

Whereas in either B2B services or lead generation, it’s more about, okay, what happens after the initial action, after that initial either visit or conversion. Because a conversion is not a purchase. In e-commerce, in direct-to-consumer, in the example that I gave you, we made it. We sold the cover. That’s our business. In here, it’s like, okay, they downloaded a white paper. Or they signed up for a webinar, but that’s only the first step of a long journey of closing, again, a $1 million service client. 

So we specialize in that. In what needs to happen, not only to generate the initial raise of hand, but to make sure that the people that raise their hands are the right people, because otherwise they’re not going to end up buying. And ultimately, the entire process of lead generated to client closed. Which is a big universe in itself. So that’s where we want to focus. 

So you basically help them not just to get the leads but to convert the leads and turn them into a client. 

Right. Right. 

So Carlos, if you had a magic wand and you could fix just one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would you use the magic wand for? 

I would say accelerate. I would accelerate by five or 10 years the structure and how mature our sales and marketing team is. I would love to wake up tomorrow morning and have a team of five people in the marketing department and five people dedicated to sales, with SDRs and a sales leader, that is already generating, that we’re closing 10 clients a month. So I would say that’s… But that obviously takes time. 

And you want to go one step at a time, otherwise, to prove ROI and to grow without, let’s say, wasting unproven budget or wasting money. But I think a lot of owners—I don’t know if it’s a cheap answer—but I think a lot of owners would probably answer the same thing. 

Yeah. So essentially what you need to do is you need to have scalable sales and marketing so that you can just add people and it’s going to—it’s like a coin-operated system, right? 

Yeah. Yeah. 

So if the listeners would like to go through that process and they would like to understand, okay, how do we map our leads, where they come from, evaluate it, and then adjust and fix and scale, where can they learn more and how can they connect with you? Yeah. 

So if they go to our website, it’s condoragency.com. Condor, like the bird. There are some options there on how to work with us or even some information, even if they want to try and do it by themselves, right? Again, what I mentioned earlier, the Pipeline X-Ray. It’s a quick project that we do to get to that, where you can start seeing some valuable information to take action on fairly quickly. 

We can get that done in a couple of weeks, the exercise of the Pipeline X-Ray, so then you know what to start adjusting and fixing. And obviously, you can contact me directly also on LinkedIn or via our website. I’m glad to obviously have a subsequent conversation and see if and how we can help. 

Awesome. So if you are out there and you want to improve your sales and marketing, then you have to start with the Pipeline X-Ray because you are getting leads, you just don’t know where they are from and how effective they are, and then how you tweak the process so that you’re putting energy behind the more effective ones and readjusting your budget, and then fix the gaps. 

So Carlos can help you with that, right? So make sure you reach out to Condor and get the X-Ray. So Carlos, thanks for coming. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you subscribe and follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, because every week I bring a couple of entrepreneurs who are sharing their frameworks with you. So Carlos, thanks for coming, and thanks for listening.

Alex Fernandez, CEO of Synergy Orthopedic Specialists, is driven by a mission to help physicians Build a Multi-Site Medical Practice that creates wealth, equity, and independence beyond their personal labor. By bringing independent physicians together, building scalable organizations, and expanding access to integrated services, Alex helps doctors operate as entrepreneurs while delivering a more convenient and cost-effective patient experience.

In this conversation, Alex introduces The Multi-Site Scaling Framework—Visualize Your Target EBITDA, Align With Your Partners, Remove Yourself From the Center, Build Systems, and Build Margin Around Your Core Business. He explains why starting with the desired enterprise value creates a clearer path for growth, why alignment must be a gate for every partnership or acquisition, and how strong systems allow a business to operate without depending on its founder. Alex also shares how vertical integration, company culture, geographic expansion, and AI-assisted processes can improve profitability while preserving independent medical care.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and welcome Alejandro “Alex” Fernandez, the CEO of Synergy Orthopedic Specialists, a team of surgeons and specialists that believes in providing patients with an integrated approach to musculoskeletal—I’m glad I could pronounce this—medical care through 15 locations throughout San Diego. Alex, welcome to the show. 

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. I’ve enjoyed your show, and I’m happy to be here. 

Well, I’m always interested when I meet with medical provider companies or CEOs who have been doctors, because I grew up in a family of two doctors, and so I was exposed to some of the challenges of being a doctor and running a hospital. So that’s going to be interesting. So my favorite question that I ask recently to all our founders is, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your practice and in your business? 

Yeah, for sure. And so my why, as you put it, comes from where I started. I actually don’t come from a family of physicians. I started not where I ended up. I’m a son of Cuban immigrants. My parents fled Castro in the ’60s, and I was born in Puerto Rico. Later on, my family took a lot of our family in the Mariel boatlift in 1981 and took hundreds of people out of Cuba. But in reality, the concept or the reality is that my parents didn’t have a lot of money. They had some connections, but they believed that I should have a college education. 

But I had to work my way through eight years of college to get my bachelor’s. So I landed in healthcare as an accident. It was a small medical practice. I was basically doing front desk and medical records, and then later on learned how to do the billing, all by hand at that time. There were no electronic medical records. And I started basically at the front desk, and I watched something that I never really forgot, which is, you have these brilliant physicians, people that can diagnose patients and help them and cure them, but when it came to business, they were never taught anything about business. 

So this is where I believe I have generated value over the years: basically, built companies that actually create wealth, and the wealth for the physicians in particular.
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Particularly, I try to help them think of themselves as capitalists, not as day laborers. Because in reality, in most businesses, and particularly physicians, they’re cranking the wheel, and the more they produce, the more they work, the more they earn. But in some cases, they don’t understand how to get away from that. How to earn from all the other things that they control. Because physicians do control 80% of the spend in healthcare but earn probably no more than 5% of it. 

Wow. That is shocking. So they’re not using the leverage properly, probably. 

Yeah. Sometimes they know it’s there, but physicians in general are risk-averse. Just starting their own business is hard enough. Then having to figure out how to capitalize from all the levers that they have, that’s completely different. And they’re no different than, I would say, lawyers or accountants that start a small business. At some point in time, you have to figure out, how do you make the business big enough that it operates and works without you? 

Yeah, I love that. I love that. And what makes you feel strongly for physicians? 

Well, particularly independent physicians, I think it’s a dying breed. Years ago, I would hear the stories of my parents where they’d say, “Hey, we took you to the pediatrician,” and my dad would be friends with the OB-GYN that took care of my mom and the pediatrician. And I remember them naming them by first name or even meeting them at the social club. But nowadays, it’s very transactional. It’s very fast. There’s no connection. 

So I think that’s why there’s been this whole surgence of concierge physicians where you pay extra. Because in truth, in order to make a living, the business of healthcare is compressed by downward pressures from the government and from other institutions that say, “We’re going to pay you less, but you have to have a significant amount of compliance, and you have to spend more money on this, and you have to do that.” And then at the same time, the cost of living goes up. 

The employees need to make more money. Your rent goes up. The supplies continue to increase. So you have the static or lower reimbursement from the different payers, whether it’s Medicare, the government, or private institutions, and then an increase of expenses happening. That’s very strange to any business. In any other business, you say, “Well, if my costs go up, I increase my prices, and then maybe my margins are a little bit less, but I still have a significant margin.” In healthcare, you almost have to just work more in order to generate more revenue, and the expenses hopefully will increment a little bit more, but your earnings will be the same or less. So it’s a very tough situation for an independent physician. 

That’s why more and more, especially physicians coming out of training, look for jobs with health systems, with the Kaisers of the world or the different large institutions in the United States, so that way they can go ahead and just go to work and take care of patients and not worry about the business of healthcare. 

Yeah. But then these big hospitals turn into bureaucracies, and then they still have to worry about that in a different way. 

And that’s personally the second part to that question you asked me. That’s why I like working with physicians and not necessarily with health systems. I’ve never held a job with a hospital. Not that I haven’t wanted to. It’s just, I think the nature of the bureaucracy of a health system creates some things that I’m not personally interested in. 

Yeah. Well, I can see that. So Alex, this is a podcast of frameworks, as you know. So what’s a framework that has helped you build your business, maybe generate an insight, understand situations, maybe influence these physicians to come together in your roll-ups? Whatever framework you developed, could you share something with our listeners? 

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Most owners in a business—and I’ll talk in generic terms. I’ll try to make sure I don’t use any slang for healthcare—but most businesses build their business for income. They want to make income for their families, for themselves. They want to be able to take care of the people that they’re with. But they don’t really think about it from a perspective of, “Let me build a business that can multiply.” Maybe they want to, but in a lot of areas, it’s just hard for them. 

I actually grew up in the bridal business. My parents had bridal stores. They basically did wedding packages, and that’s the business that I grew up in. Every summer, I would go and do the cash register or help rent tuxedos and things like that, or do filing and bookkeeping. So that’s where my entrepreneurial spirit comes from. It’s my parents. But I always saw them where maybe they built one or a couple stores, two, three stores, and they would kind of stop there. But I think I learned a lot from my dad in particular around multi-site operations in a retail industry, and I took that back into the healthcare business. 

So one of the first things I think that a business owner has to do is they have to underwrite their own exit first.
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If I run into an acquisition that we’re looking at, and I don’t see the alignment from whoever I’m going to partner up with, I know it’s going to be a deal that’s going to go bad eventually. We all have to be thinking the same way. Then the other thing, like I already mentioned this a couple of times, but you have to take yourself out of the center. If you’re the CEO, you’re the business owner, and the business depends on you—you can’t go on your two- or three-week vacation to Europe or wherever you want to go, and when you come back, the business is in disarray or didn’t survive—you don’t really have a business. 

You just have a job that costs you a lot of money to maintain. I think that’s where operating systems earn their keep. I haven’t really run the EOS program, but I’ve read the book, and I really like the idea of the scorecards, and I used it particularly when I came to this opportunity in San Diego. Getting everybody to row in the same direction. A business that runs with a founder and a single thing, it’s one that won’t get very far. 

But on the other hand, if the founder figures out a way to build systems around them and bring in the right people, that’s going to make the business way more successful. And the last one I would say is own the margin around your core. Don’t just sell the core service. Figure out what else you have. And I think in healthcare in particular, I was mentioning this: doctors control a significant amount of what happens to a patient, but they don’t figure out ways to vertically integrate the business to have access or have the opportunity to earn some revenue and some earnings from the actual business they refer to. 

So what I’ve done over the years, particularly in gastroenterology, I grew a medical practice of gastroenterologists. A couple of them came together, and it was around 50 million in revenue when I came in. And one of the first things I started doing was figuring out, how do we add, let’s say, imaging services? So we added CT. How do we add infusion services? Because back then, there were some significant drugs that were coming into market around infusion. But later on, we said, “Hey, we have an investment in an ASC, but why don’t we do the investment so the investment’s part of the group? So all the doctors can benefit from that. 

And when we actually equitize the business in the future, that could be part of our exit if there’s equity there.” And then the next question was, “Well, why don’t we sell the prep that we give people before they get the colonoscopy?” So we got licensing around pharmacy, and then we said, “Well, what about anesthesia? What about pathology?” And so on and so on. So when I went to New York City and I ran a dermatology group, we built a path lab for the derms. When I came here to the orthopedic group, we had PT locations, expanded to multiple PT locations, improved the contracts around durable medical equipment, the bracing, even added anesthesia and started our own ambulatory surgical center. 

So always trying to figure out, how can you vertically integrate the business to try to capture as much as you can from the client that’s in front of you? Not only just from a money perspective, but also from an experience perspective, being able to provide it all under one roof and being able to give the patient, the customer, a great experience. You want to provide outstanding medical care. Quality medical care is kind of like a base. If you go to a doctor, you expect to get better. But what we see in healthcare a lot is that people don’t think about it. 

Like, in our offices, we say, “Thank you for choosing Synergy Orthopedics.” We know patients have a choice, so we have to develop a model that allows the patient to say, “Hey, I want to go here because these guys have it all under one roof.” But more importantly, that’s typically what the hospitals have. But hospitals charge for the same thing I provide two and three times more because they have a different type of leverage with the contracts. So I always say, “Why did the duck cross the road? Oh, because they went from the hospital to the ambulatory surgical center to get a colonoscopy to save 700 bucks.” I mean, it’s literally that simple. 

And I don’t think patients in general know that, but I think the doctors have a great opportunity to control the delivery system, provide a great experience for the patients, and at the same time, make some money from things that they don’t physically have to do. They can hire the physical therapist, et cetera. 

Yeah. Okay, so that’s great. So what I’m hearing, the framework is: think of growth first—what’s the EBITDA you want? Then create alignment, take yourself out of the center, build systems, and build margin around your core business. So that’s wonderful. Now, step two, I’m not 100% clear on. So you said make alignment with partners, but don’t make it the goal. What do you mean by that? 

Well, because particularly I’ve been involved in private equity medical groups. So with private equity, you have cash, you have leverage, so you can go and buy, buy, buy, buy. In private equity, to a degree, they want growth. But I’ve been in deals where the thesis was, for example, we’re all going to be rowing in the same direction with the same flag, same brand, and we’re going to transfer from having—there were four medical groups, so four different, distinct medical groups—and we’re putting them together under what’s called a management services organization, a management company, and basically form one larger group. 

But that was never aligned because the doctors, in their head, said, “You’re acquiring me, so you’re buying this magnificent, outstanding business. Now why do you want to change my electronic medical records? Why do you want to change the way we do our, let’s say, revenue cycle management or billing? Why do you want to change our brand? Our brand’s fantastic.” Even though they were all called Dermatology blah, blah, blah, something and something. So you have to make sure that the people that you’re going to bring on board, whether it’s through acquisition, merger, or just employment, that they really believe in your story, that they believe in the core vision of the business. 

Not just try to put people in there and make more deals, get more locations, spend more years, and then you put all these things together and you bolt them up, but you spend more time trying to fix it. In my Gastro Health and in the ortho business, we always started with, “Let’s make sure we have our house in order before we go out and start growing the organization and adding more to what we have.” The last thing you want to do is add more and then find out that you have to spend more time fixing it. 

No, that makes sense. But then you qualified it. You said, “Don’t make it the goal. Don’t make alignment the goal.” So how does it become the goal? What’s the risk there? 

So no, make it the gate, not the goal. Meaning, alignment is extremely important, but you want the alignment to be the one thing that puts you together. But at the end, everybody has to be buying into the idea. It’s not the only goal. Their goal is also money. The goal is growth. But it has to be one of the key things. In healthcare, I tend to think, and particularly with private equity, that’s not perceived. It’s more about getting deals done. 

Yeah. They don’t care about the mission. They don’t care about the vision, the alignment. 

I think they do. In their thesis, they do, and they want it. But it’s kind of like, at the end, you’re looking at this business. They want to sell, you want to buy, you have money, they want money, and sometimes it’s just easier to say, “Well, we can grow from $30 million to $60 million, from $10 million of EBITDA to $20 million of EBITDA. We’re going to get, instead of a 10 multiple, we’re going to get a 15 multiple.” 

So sometimes that gets in the way. And I would say, by the way, I worked with great and fantastic private equity firms, so I’m not saying they all think that way. But for sure, the perception is that they’re going to go in and try to make deals happen because they do have an end goal. Their end goal is to their investors that gave them funds, that they told them they were going to get them a four-, five-, seven-times multiple on their investment. 

So in your own business, Synergy Orthopedic Specialists, is this a private equity-funded business or is it bootstrapped? 

No. No, it’s bootstrapped. The physicians, when I came on board—at that time, I started with them six years ago in 2020, and the market was really hot still, ’21, ’22, ’23, and then the interest rates went up, and then things have softened. I think also they got softened for what we’ve been discussing earlier. There’s been a lot of deals that have been done where acquisitions were done in multiple states. There’s not a lot of synergy or a lot of things that were worked out to try to make sure that the organization was working together, the multiple organizations that were acquired. 

And the idea was, if we buy four million-dollar businesses, they will be, instead of an eight-times multiple, they’ll be a 10- or 12-times multiple. So I think there’s a lot of deals that are stuck in the marketplace right now, and the groups are trying to figure out how to evolve the organization after five, six, seven years from, “Hey, we let you alone. We let you be. But now we need to start integrating. Now we have to start building an enterprise. Now we have to start building a real platform.” And I think that the organizations that did that earlier have been able to exit and done a much better multiple and growth. 

And also the key is, in these transactions where people get together, a lot of times it’s all about the fun. “Hey, we go out to dinner, and everybody’s well, and everybody’s happy, and how much money we’re going to make,” and blah, blah. But nobody really asks the tough questions, or some people do because they actually don’t want the deals to get done. But I think it comes from the buyer. The buyer needs to be very upfront with what they want to accomplish with a transaction, whether, again, a merger or an acquisition. 

You want to make sure that you’re extremely transparent about what the end goal is going to be. And if the end goal is like, “Hey, I’m going to leave you alone for a year, but in a year and one day, your name’s going to change, your software’s going to change, your HR is going to change. And by that time, we’ll figure out about your staff, and we might probably cut 25% of your staff because you’re bloated, and we actually have to make you a little bit more fit and trim so you can actually be able to grow and provide better care to your patients.” 

So what I’m seeing is, it’s quite impressive. You have 15 locations, you have a huge service mix. You have, compared to the number of locations and service mix, a limited number of people. So how do you maintain the Synergy standard? And how do you manage this complexity with such low—low per— It took— How many people? 

Yeah, it’s—right. Yeah, I agree. It’s taken some time. Again, I wouldn’t say that it’s perfect. We’re always evolving, changing. I mean, I always say the only constant thing in healthcare is change. But it started with the company culture. When I first got here, there were four or five organizations that came together, and they were still using their old names. Synergy Orthopedics was like this little kind of byline under their business cards. It wasn’t really the brand. 

And then over time, we got people in the organization rowing in the same direction, using the same flag, and over time we started to dominate the market. We started to be perceived, and we are today, the largest independent medical orthopedic group in San Diego. So when people think of MSK, we take care of the hockey team, we take care of the soccer team, we take care of professional players. The larger organizations reach out to us about developing contracts, direct contracts to provide services to them. 

So that took a long time, but it started with building that company culture. And along the way, some people left. Some people just didn’t fit what we were trying to build. And it wasn’t just me. I didn’t do this by myself, of course. The reality was we built a team around what we were trying to create. Physicians, in this case, are the leaders. Physician leadership was there, and this is what they wanted as well. So I think, yes, when we’re now in other counties we’re in Riverside County, so we’re north of San Diego. We’re all the way to Palm Desert and looking to grow into Orange County and L.A. County eventually. 

So the goal is also in growth, and size allows leverage and negotiation power with the different payers. And that’s very different than in other industries where you have a payer, let’s say Blue Shield or Anthem or United, that kind of controls how you’re going to provide service, how much they’re going to pay you, et cetera, et cetera. So the only way to really have any type of seat at the table is that your organization has to be large enough and a market leader and basically be something, or an organization, that they can’t say no to, that they want to have in their network. So that’s how we’ve been able to do this over the last five, six years now. 

So what drives the growth? Is it the acquisitions? Is it geographic expansion? Is it payers refer business? What’s the driver? 

All of it. You have to do everything. It’s like that movie, Everything Everywhere All at Once. It’s like you have to do everything. We started by first creating the brand and the company culture, expanding that brand and company culture by figuring out who having the right seats on the bus, making sure the right people that wanted to be with us were there. And then we said, “Okay, we don’t have a spine program. Let’s figure out how we recruit a spine doctor. Let’s figure out how we recruit a pain doctor. 

Let’s get a foot and ankle specialist because we don’t have one. Let’s expand our sports medicine program.” So we took over a fellowship training program in San Diego that was probably going to expire, and then we took it over and continued the legacy of the physician that started it from the beginning. We’ve done some mergers. We’ve done some acquisitions. We’ve done some new locations. We’ve expanded our physical therapy footprint. We built out an ambulatory surgical center. That was a big endeavor. These things cost millions and millions of dollars. Just in construction alone, it was like $600… I think our overall investment’s somewhere around $12, $15 million, so highly leveraged. We brought in a partner, a national partner, to help us run and fund the enterprise. 

We started an anesthesia division. So I would say you have to do everything, and all of it together, as time goes by, creates that vision. As long as you have the vision, like I said, the beginning thing is you have to start with the end goal. And the end goal is we want to build a business that’s independent. That’s our goal. We don’t want to be sold or be part of the hospital system. So you have to build the end goal, work through the process, grow it, and do all the things at the same time, which is extremely hard, I would say. 

Yeah. This is fascinating. So you have a lot of complexity. You have a lot of locations, a lot of services, 50 providers. I mean, sometimes doctors can be cats, hard to manage them.

Eagles, eagles. I always say, try to get eagles to fly in a straight line. Impossible. Yeah. 

But if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would it be? 

I will be honest, it’s expenses. Expenses can and I’ve talked about this before the pressures in the healthcare industry really are driven around expenses. We just got an increase in minimum wage in healthcare, specifically in California, where a physician practice now has to pay $23 an hour for a minimum-wage job, where minimum wage is almost half of that if you’re in any other industry. So I think everybody should make more than $23, particularly in San Diego. It’s a very expensive place to live. 

But I think it’s more around the pressures that are put on the industry, but the levers are not there to increase revenue to be able to support or subsidize those expenses. So, for all intents and purposes, we’re looking at how we increase revenue by keeping expenses the same, or fixed, or a little bit higher than what they are, by augmenting with AI, like every other industry is doing. Figuring out whether it’s using AI in your MRI to be able to process the imaging faster, clearer, better, and be able to add three or four more patients a day. That profit goes straight to the bottom line. 

It might be before we had people that are scribes that basically did the documentation of the history, the notes, and the medical records. Now doctors are using—well, they’ve been using voice recognition for a while—but now you’re doing ambient AI, where basically it’s listening to the conversation with the patient, of course with the patient’s approval, and being able to document all that information into the record much faster, quicker, better, and more precise. And so on. Answering the phones, being able to—when the patient gets statements, we typically send out statements every two weeks. 

But when we send them, we send thousands of statements, so we get thousands of phone calls. You can’t get all those phone calls when somebody says, “I owe $50, and I don’t know why,” and being able to have an AI that tells you, “The $50 is because you had a copayment or you had a deductible, and it’s due to your insurance program with whatever the insurance is.” And they’re like, “Oh, okay.” “You want to pay that right now?” “Yes.” It sends you a text to your phone, qualifies who you are, you click on it, you put your payment information. The information goes in, the payment gets posted. Nobody got involved. AI took care of the whole process. So we’re trying to figure out how to assist the staff without having to let go. At least my intent is not to let go of people. 

My intent is to try to make sure that we do the best job possible and use AI to augment the process, not to replace the staff. I get very worried, in general, about what’s going on with AI as an industry, where people are saying, “Well, I use it as my assistant. I use it as this.” Well, I started at the front desk. If there are no front desk jobs, how could I have been CEO of this multimillion-dollar organization if I didn’t get a foot in the door to begin with? So I feel very worried for my kids that are growing up. One’s studying to be a psychologist, the other one’s in marketing. How are they going to learn and grow in an industry or a business if they can’t get their foot in the door? 

Yeah. That is a concern. I don’t know if we can fix it, but I’m worried about it too. So Alex, who would you like to listen to this podcast and to take action? And what kind of action should they take? 

Well, I think it’s generic. I always say, I have an MBA in healthcare administration, but I could have gone and done any type of business. Like I said to you, I grew up in the retail industry. So I think it’s more around, if you’re an entrepreneur and you have talent and you’ve worked really hard at doing something, you have to figure out how to hire the right people so that they can do a job that maybe you don’t know how to do, how to scale up a business by investing in it, making sure you don’t look at your business as an ATM machine or a salary that pays you every week or every period of time, but look at it as you’re an entrepreneur, a capitalist. 

You’re building an organization. You’re providing jobs for people. But at the end, the business has to give you more than your salary. There has to be equity in the enterprise, and that’s the money you’ll be able to use to maybe have leverage or to use in order to add that next location or look at what’s the next opportunity, whether you’re, again, a doctor or you’re running a retail organization that wants to have multiple locations. The key is, think of the end goal. And the end goal, not necessarily that you’re going to sell, but what is it going to be? What is the business that you want to have valued at, and how have they grown? 

Look and listen to other people like yourself, Steve, and all the different things that you do in regard to building that journey of the business, and figure out how to take the next step and the next step and the next step. It doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t get from a $50 million company to a $150 million company. It took me seven years to get there. But it’s done by augmenting and adding features and adding services, but doing it very intelligently, thinking it through, not just adding it for the sake of adding it, then, like I said before, having to bolt it on and try to fix more of the problems, creating more problems. 

No. Fix your house, figure out where you’re at, make sure it’s earning equity. Maybe you have to reprice. Maybe you have to figure out how the business needs to run a little bit nimbler. Maybe you have to use technology, whether it’s AI answering the phone because you’re the guy that—you have a pizza shop. Why do you have to have people answering? Have the AI take the order, have the AI tell people to go to the website, and so on, so you can have pizzas going out of your store every five minutes. So for sure, there are great opportunities. And if you’re a business owner, I want you to think that you can. It’s not impossible. It can be done. You don’t need an MBA. You just need to work hard and think it through and come up with a business plan and an idea on how you want to get there. 

Yeah. Well, this is very inspiring. So if you are a founder, you’re running a business, or you’re about to start a business, look at what Alex has done. He was a son of Cuban immigrants, came to this country, built from nothing a 15-location, 50-provider medical group, and works with private equity, advises companies as well. Follow his example. 

So Alex Fernandez, thank you for sharing your wisdom on the show. And if you’re listening and you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because I have a couple of exciting entrepreneurs every week who come on the show and share their secrets and frameworks with you. So thanks for coming, Alex, and thank you for listening.

Justin Nassiri, Founder and CEO of Executive Presence, is driven by the power of human connection and a mission to harvest CEO stories that reveal authentic experiences and valuable insights. By serving as thought partners to C-suite executives, Justin and his team transform personal perspectives, mistakes, and lessons into compelling LinkedIn content that builds trust and distinguishes leaders from generic, AI-generated voices.

In this conversation, Justin introduces The Content Strategy Framework—Use the 40:30:20:10 Content Formula, Harvest Stories, Borrow Thought Patterns, and Apply Curiosity. He explains why leaders should build visibility through personal profiles, how skilled interviewers uncover stories executives may overlook, and why Thought Leader Ads can extend the reach of proven content. Justin also discusses growing through referrals and warm relationships, using 10-week improvement cycles to revisit every business process, and developing autonomous team members who use AI to solve problems while preserving human connection.

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here, and my guest today again is Justin Nassiri, the Founder and CEO of Executive Presence, a fully managed LinkedIn thought leadership service for C-suite executives at growth-stage B2B companies. Justin, welcome back to the show. 

Great to be back. Thanks, Steve. 

So we just reminisced that it was three years almost to the day that you came here, and I can’t believe it. It feels like yesterday. But your business has grown dramatically during that time, so I think you have some new insights that you’ll be able to share with us, I’m sure. 

Thank you. It’s good to be back. We just made the Inc. 5000 list, which is a first for me. I’ve never been on that before, but we’re celebrating that. 

Yeah. Congratulations. That’s a great milestone to hit. And you only started in 2022, right? 

Yeah, yeah. 

So, pretty freshly minted, fast-growing Inc. 5000. So my question to you is, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in Executive Presence, in your business? 

There’s a very potent macro or micro why for me, and then probably a broader why. I think that the biggest why for me right now, like many parents, is my kids. I’ve got a three- and a seven-year-old. And so when I think of my professional life,

I certainly think about not just providing for them but also trying to set an example of someone who is trying to do their best and trying to stretch and trying to grow.
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And so I think that’s probably the highest leverage that I have. But I think the through line in the companies that I’ve done is just the value of human connection. My first company was all about companies using Instagram in a way to be more authentic and more genuine with their community, and that’s very true to what we’re doing now at Executive Presence, just really helping people connect to other people. 

In this case, it’s executives using LinkedIn to connect with a broader audience, but I really feel like that human connection is so important, and I think it’s becoming even more important in the era of AI. So that’s a little bit more specific why in what I do right now. 

Yeah, it’s fascinating how human connection is evolving in the age of AI, and I agree. I mean, I see that because there’s so much more noise out there, human connection is perhaps more important than ever. People want to make sure that they are talking to authentic people and hearing from authentic people who have authentic lived experience. So how does that impact communication for executives on LinkedIn? How do they have to evolve their voice or how they approach things? 

I think if you look at LinkedIn in particular right now, I think it still remains the place where the largest source of our professional network is. And so I think there’s still a lot of value there, and I think that LinkedIn is facing a lot of growing pains. Specifically, I think that there are three things driving it. One is more people are just showing up on the platform. The secret is out, and people realize that there’s value to LinkedIn. 

So, all things else equal, more people are more active on LinkedIn, which generates a lot of noise. And then the second thing is AI is making it easier to create content, so I think it’s creating not just more content, but lower-quality content. And then the third thing is it does seem as if LinkedIn is following what Facebook did over a decade ago and saying, “Look, to get reach, you’ve got to put money into ads now.” 

And we saw that transition with Facebook company pages a long time ago, but it really does feel like you cannot get as much visibility today as you could have two years ago unless there’s some sort of ad buy behind it. And so I think those are kind of the three problems. I think that the answer is still there’s value in showing up, but I think that you have to show up even more human. I think that the experiences that make you unique and the mistakes that make you who you are and the things that you know and the stories that you can tell, those still hold value, and that differentiates you from generic or AI-generated content. 

I also think that there’s value to using LinkedIn ads, and we can talk about that, but I think that that has to be part of one’s strategy now if you’re trying to significantly use LinkedIn for what it’s good for, which is brand building. 

Yeah, and maybe this is a slight question, then we’re going to talk to you about the framework. But as I understand, LinkedIn now allows individuals to also boost their posts as opposed to just companies, which used to be the case in the past. So how does it impact companies? Is there more emphasis now? Is emphasis shifting to individual posts because there’s no real reason to build up the company pages? How is that evolving? 

Yeah, I mean, four years ago when I started the company, before these Thought Leader Ads, these individual people ads were a thing, I still would’ve said to you, “Look, there’s not much value in company pages. People connect with other people. They’re not going to connect with a faceless organization.” So even four years ago, I would’ve said, “Man, if you really want to raise visibility for your organization, you’ve got to do that through your key leaders. 

You’ve got to do that through actual names and faces and voices and perspectives.” And I think that the ads make that even more pronounced now because I can now take my personal post as Justin Nassiri. If it does well on LinkedIn, I can put a $50 or $500 ad buy against it, and I can make sure that essentially specific people are going to see my post. If I’m selling to CEOs of tech companies in Cincinnati that have grown 10% last year and they’ve been at their company for five years, I can have an insane level of targeting, and I could put my personal content in front of them in a way that most people still don’t realize is an ad. 

It will say, “Promoted by,” and then the company name, so “Promoted by Executive Presence.” Most people, when scrolling, don’t even notice that. Yeah. And so I think there’s a tremendous opportunity then to take very human and personal content and put it in front of exactly whoever you’re trying to get in front of. 

Yeah, I love that. You also say on your LinkedIn page that it takes an executive only 90 minutes a month to actually work with you guys and have you amplify them. So how do you extract all those personal stories and experiences? What is your framework for that so that when you meet with an executive, you’re able to create those posts without them having to be involved?

Yeah, I think the framework is pretty universal for anyone listening. We tend to start with the content strategy. And the way that we typically start is we’ll say, okay, 40% of the content we would call industry thought leadership. And that is great if you can talk about current events and relate them to your industry. It’s great if you can share things about your industry that no one knows or that you disagree with people. 

But do that 40%, which is the biggest of any of the categories, as really the education, as the subject matter expert. You are showing up as an authority in cybersecurity, or you are showing up as an authority in leadership, or you’re showing up as an authority in B2B supply chain. And I think the key here is the more niche, the better. The more narrow, the better. We are not Joe Rogan. We’re not trying to get 300 million people to look at your content. We want to get in front of a very narrow group of people, typically prospects, customers, potential employees, potential investors. 

We really want to narrow where your voice can be fairly large in a very finite realm. So that's the industry thought leadership piece.
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So that’s a way of us imparting one of their values or something that they know, but wrapped in a story from their history, which humanizes them. And that would be generally 30% of the content. Twenty percent, obviously they’re doing this to promote their company, so 20% would be about their company, spotlighting an employee, recent events, things like that. Again, trying to do it through stories if possible. And then the last 10% is usually the highest-performing 10%, and we would call that work-adjacent content. So we want to, again, make them a three-dimensional person. What do they do outside of the office? Is that family? 

And we usually use what we call the dinner party test for this. If you were with prospects and potential employees, what’s fair game to talk about over dinner and drinks? Some people would definitely talk about their kids. Some people would never talk about their kids. Some would talk about their hobbies. Some would never talk about that.

So that's a good filter to figure out what they could talk about that's not just always talking shop. So that's kind of the framework that we use.
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But I think that the way that we harvest this information is really the skill of the people that I hire on my team. It’s people who are really good at pulling insights out of someone and getting someone to open up and having that heat-seeking missile approach of, what is a story that they’re sitting on that they don’t even realize is a compelling story? And that’s one thing that has stood out. Some of the best-performing LinkedIn posts, the person didn’t even think that that would be interesting to anyone else. 

We’re often not the best filter for ourselves of what’s going to land. And that’s one of the values of LinkedIn, is that you can actually put out ideas and stories and insights, and very quickly, in an 18-hour time period, get signal from the market if people value that from you or not, and then follow that trend. 

Yeah. That’s fascinating, and it sounds a little bit like being a ghostwriter for someone, that you can really get those stories out and you can have them open up so that their brain is going to surface those things that maybe they don’t think about. Maybe they are not extroverted and they won’t be able to bring this up on their own. But if you catalyze it, then they come to life that way. 

Yeah. I think of it as a thought partner. I kind of realized this because I hosted a podcast for a long time as well, and you kind of realize the power—exactly what you’re doing—the power of curiosity and the power of distance, right? You are showing up, you’re curious about my experience. 

You have enough distance from it that you’re asking questions that might even seem intuitive to me, or it might be one of those things where I’m like, “Well, everyone knows this.” But then you bring an outsider in, and it’s like, “No, not everyone knows this,” or, “I think people would find this interesting.” So having that thought partner to be the outside observer of what others would benefit from. 

Yeah. That’s amazing. That’s a real skill, and that also brings in that human skill that an AI is not going to be able to prompt those kinds of questions, that kind of curiosity, that there’s an emotional driver behind it. That’s a very journalistic trait, I suppose. That’s a new form of journalism that you’re practicing here, isn’t it? 

Yeah, it is. And the type of person I hire to do that are ex-consultants because they’re really good. They’re really good at coming into a business and understanding the objective and understanding how to get very senior people—because we work with CEOs of publicly traded companies and CEOs of smaller companies—to really get very prominent people to open up. And being comfortable interrupting or redirecting or pushing back, it really is a unique skill set. 

Yeah, I love that. So that brings me to my next question. What drives growth in your business? How did you get, in four years, on the Inc. 5000? What was the engine here, the fuel? 

Well, it’s so funny because I ask this of every CEO I meet with as well, to learn from them. Everyone always says referrals, so I’ll be generic and say referrals do drive—it’s probably the single biggest source of revenue. When I first started the company, I actually used LinkedIn. And so this actually came out of another company that I was running, and they had the idea. And so I went to LinkedIn and I said, “I think that the type of person who would be interested in this is CEOs of companies with at least 50 employees.” And I put that into Sales Navigator, and it came up with a couple hundred first-degree connections. 

And I just sent out a fairly generic message of, “Hey, Steve, just wanted to give you a quick update. I’m launching this new service, and this is what we do. Let me know if you know of anyone who would like to chat.” And I actually got probably 60 or 70K in monthly recurring revenue from that, of people I wasn’t really aware of what they were up to. One of the guys who’s still a client, I had met with him 10 years previously when he was an investor, and then now he was CEO and founder of a company that ultimately went public. 

So I wouldn’t have thought of that person, but that’s a great thing about LinkedIn, of saying, “Here’s someone who might be interested in what I’m doing.” And so that sort of outbound of warm connections has played a role. Obviously, I’m active on LinkedIn. I get a lot of leads from that. I do a fairly good job of keeping in touch with my network and seeing when people might be needing us. I think, back to the human connection, I do think conferences are playing a bigger role. 

I’m starting to go to more conferences and realizing the value of meeting people in person and how that kind of seems to accelerate the process of building trust and building relationships. We do cold email. We do AdWords. We do a newsletter. We do a lot of content marketing, and so I think each of them plays their own part. But referrals certainly are the biggest one. LinkedIn is probably number two.

Yeah. That’s very interesting. And do you see a lot of competitors? Is this a crowded field? 

It is. We have expanded beyond LinkedIn largely because of the competitive nature, where I think just as people have flocked to LinkedIn. I would say the biggest faction is a lot of solopreneurs. A lot of individuals will work with a few executives, and so that’s probably the lower-level competitors. There are a handful of companies that are doing something similar to us, and then more established PR companies that will say, “Yes, we do LinkedIn as well.” But I think at this point, we’ve got the deepest track record of executives. 

We work with over 400 now, which, as far as I’m aware, is the largest set. We actually present our data to LinkedIn every year because it is the largest data set of just executives rather than influencers. And I think the play for most professionals and most executives is different than what an influencer would do on a platform like LinkedIn, and I think it’s important to do what’s appropriate for an executive. 

So you mentioned on your LinkedIn page that you bootstrapped this company to three million ARR. 

Yep. 

So what do you expect to be different from going from 60,000 monthly recurring, 700 ARR, to three million, to going from three million to 10 million? How is it going to be different? 

Yeah, that’s such a good question. And I balance this because I really like Paul Graham’s thought that you have to do things that are not scalable to be able to scale. And so oftentimes, I’m looking for things to do consistently, but it’s really helpful for me not to constrain myself in that way and to think of things that—it still feels like guerrilla warfare at times—what are little things that we can do to get an edge? 

I think that the thing that I think about most right now in getting from three to 10 million is creating a machine for experimentation, and experimentation not just in our service, but also in our sales and marketing. And so how do we create a culture? Let’s just take the service side of things. I never want our service to plateau. I have run a company before where our product became stale and a competitor put us out of business. I never want that to happen again. And that the way that we minimize the probability that that happens is that we are always experimenting. 

We are always listening to our clients and understanding what else we could do to make their life better.
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And where GEO is getting more and more prominence for organizations, we see a world where it’s very important not just to cultivate a human audience and a human group of people who view and like your content and respect you, but also essentially cultivating an AI audience and making sure that your content is visible by LLMs and making sure that Claude and Perplexity see you as the authority and are referencing you. And so that’s something that our clients aren’t yet asking for, but we’re already developing a solution and a thesis because we think that that’s the way that the world is going. 

But the central point is, how do we create an engine for experimentation so we are always testing out new things and seeing if they work, and reinvesting in the ones that work and letting go of the ones that don’t work? And I think that if we can do that for our clients and for ourselves, it always keeps us evolving. We’re always upping the game. We’re always improving, because I think the moment that we stop doing that, that’s when we stagnate or that’s when someone else comes along and puts us out of business. 

So how do you maintain this alignment and this entrepreneurial energy? Because experimentation is innovation. It’s entrepreneurship in your business. How do you perpetuate it? So as you’re growing the business, you’ve got 40 people now, maybe you’re going to have more, you’re going to have AI agents running around. So how do you keep that experimentation and this entrepreneurial energy as you are getting further and further from the newest hires? 

So the first thing that I love—and this is my VP of Ops, Shelby, who came up with this—but I really like it. She instituted a 10-week cycle composed of one- to two-week sprints. And she oversees all of our client work. So what she did is she broke everything we do for our clients into different sections. She instituted a system of saying, “Okay, these are all the different things we do. If you have an idea about how to do something better, or if you have a complaint about how something’s not working, or if a client mentions something, I want you to put it in this spreadsheet so we can keep track of how we can improve each thing.” 

And what we’re going to do is, this week we’re doing a sprint on interview questions—how we prepare our interview questions for our clients. We are going to invest a week-long sprint in improving that process through technology, AI, and processes. And then we’re going to go through every other aspect. But guess what? Ten weeks later, we’re coming back to interview questions again. What that does, I think, in today’s landscape is not only does that keep us always thinking of improving something, but every 10 weeks we’re re-looking at specifically AI to see, what are its capabilities now? It’s changing so quickly. 

From 10 weeks ago, it might be able to do something better or different. So let’s create a system so that we are periodically refreshing every aspect of our business from team feedback, client feedback, but also technological improvements. And it’s mind-boggling to think that that’s the pace now, and that 10 weeks might not even be sufficient in the future with the rate at which things are changing. That’s the best example I can think of how we’re trying to create that mindset of constant and incessant improvement. 

And how do you build your team? Are you remote, or do you have an office somewhere? 

We are all remote. Yeah, we are 100% remote. So we’re in seven different states, all still in the United States. It does pose challenges as you grow of how do you get in person and create connection. And so we’ll do things like happy hours online and different ways to get to know each other. But I also think, for those others listening who create a remote-first culture, you filter for people who thrive in that environment and do their best work when they have a fair amount of autonomy. And I think that autonomy for us has been helpful because we want people who are individual problem solvers, and I think that overlaps well with people who prefer a remote-first workplace. 

Yeah, that’s fascinating. So if you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would you do? 

That is a really good question. I mean, it almost feels like the world is moving towards more entrepreneurs, not fewer ones, which I, for one, like. I’m a huge fan of both entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. But if I could wave a magic wand, it would be making everyone on the team think like an entrepreneur, which would have probably been a liability 12 months ago. But the way I approach everything now is—I literally, right before this, was using Claude for my personal finances. 

On the business side, it is now connected to QuickBooks, and on the personal side, I have a system of creating a report exactly the way I want it, which I, for one, love—the capability of AI to personalize things. I don’t have to use Mint or QuickBooks anymore. I can build it exactly in the way that works for my crazy brain. But I was updating and realizing that the tools have changed, and so, like, upgrading the way that I track my personal finances. And that’s just kind of very natural for me, and I do that for my kids’ menus, and I do that for everything. I kind of have a project or an approach on AI. 

And I think that that’s a similar mindset that I need for my team, is thinking like an entrepreneur. How do you get better at everything? How do you get more efficient at everything? How do you look for new ways of solving things? I think it used to be that the entrepreneur was the visionary and setting the vision for the company, and everyone was more or less following orders or a system. 

I still see a role for the visionary, but it's almost as if everyone on the team has to be their own visionary of envisioning how to improve their workflow
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But the way that it works for you is going to be different than me, and that will be true in a team. So, very long answer, but

if I could wave that magic wand, it would be imparting that entrepreneur mindset of finding problems and the best way to solve them, and never stop solving problems.
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Yeah. So it’s just a feeling, and maybe I won’t articulate it well, but I’m just looking at your business. You’re building this remote team, and then you’re making everyone more autonomous so that they are working with AI to improve their productivity. In a way, it is supercharging everyone individually, but what about the team cohesion? So how do you make sure that people don’t get isolated? 

Isaac Asimov has a novel which is in the distant future, on a distant planet, and basically everyone has 1,000 robots, and everyone is in their own world, and they just communicate on video screen because personal contact is no longer even appropriate. And everyone gets super rich and super efficient, but something gets lost. 

So I wonder, how do you see the tension between empowering people, having AI help everyone be super productive in their individual way, in a remote culture? How do you keep this constellation together going forward? 

Yeah. It still comes back to human connection for me. I think that, let’s just say on a client level, if my company’s doing our job well with our clients, if we are having them become thought leaders, having them grow influence and audience, I want that to lead to more human connection for them. And the way that I have seen that showing up is they go to a conference and people know them and people come up. 

Like, people are literally—they might not have created connection before, but they recognize them, they know who they are, and that draws them to in-person interactions. That’s human connection coming out of what we do. For our team, I hope it leads to more human connection, that as we become more efficient, as we become better at what we do, as the company grows, we will get together in person more often.

We'll be able to be in the room together and brainstorm because that becomes more valuable, and we're all craving that.
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So, sci-fi is my favorite genre of literature and cinema, and I don’t think that we will ultimately end up with VR goggles on our head and not talking to each other. I think that in the same way that we have seen with social media, that it has a purpose, but we still want to be around each other and benefit from being in person. I think that we will become more and more like that. I don’t think it will drive us apart. I think it will lead to more connection. That’s my optimist view on it. 

Yeah. Love it. Well, I hope you’re right. 

Yeah. 

Okay, so if someone who is a founder of a business, a growing business, or maybe a C-level in an enterprise, and they don’t have time to manage their LinkedIn, but they realize that they’re missing out with their thought leadership and they need help or they want to explore, where should they go and how can they connect with you and your colleagues? 

Yeah, I appreciate that. I would just say, in general, every leader needs to know that their personal brand is going to impact both their career as well as their company, and them being able to articulate their viewpoints and what they think and believe is going to be a vital skill. And that could be on stage at a conference, it could be on YouTube, it could be on LinkedIn, it could be in a book, it could be in articles, but they have to have a way to know what they believe, to know what knowledge they have that is valuable, and find a way to add value to others. 

I think that that’s just more and more the direction things are going. And it can be really hard because you are probably growing an empire, you are probably doing so many different things. And just know that there are people like Executive Presence, where our skill set is figuring out where your zone of genius is and figuring out what stories you have that are really good assets, and figuring out who you are and how you want to present online, and then helping you do that consistently across different channels. 

And so if that’s of interest, I obviously love talking about this stuff, but I’m happy to talk with anyone who listens to the show. If you go to executivepresence.io and fill out our contact form, it gets to me. You can find me on LinkedIn, Justin Nassiri, or my email is [email protected]. Any of those three work. But I just believe that this is going to be more and more valuable for leaders to develop that skill, and would love to help anyone listening do that. 

Well, if you’re out there listening, you see that something is working because Justin propelled his company from a standing start to the Inc. 5000 in three or four years, and he is pushing the envelope on generative AI and reinvention every 10 weeks of his company. So if you’d like to be part of that and you have to take advantage of promoting yourself on LinkedIn with a cutting-edge approach, then reach out to Justin Nassiri on LinkedIn or executivepresence.io.

And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned because every week I bring a couple of successful entrepreneurs who are sharing their frameworks of how they’re being successful. So thanks for coming, Justin, and thanks for listening.