Edward Francis, executive coach, IBM alumnus, and doctorate holder in Management Consulting, is driven by four lifelong commitments—family, faith, the city of Atlanta, and experiential learning. That fourth commitment fuels his mission: helping leaders bridge the gap between theoretical competency and real-world performance through outcome-based, measurable coaching.

We explore Edward’s distinctive EMF Coaching Framework, which integrates authenticity, mindfulness, equanimity, and neuroplasticity to help leaders develop soft skills for next-level leadership. Edward explains why authenticity protects your future self, how mindfulness deepens connection and listening, why fulfillment (equanimity) must replace “I don’t know,” and how managing the brain—rather than letting it run the show—creates space for vision and innovation.

Edward also shares how he teaches passion for the future, why it can be acquired through practice, and how he measures intangible soft-skill growth with precision. For leaders seeking transformation, Edward describes what “serious coaching for serious clients” truly looks like.

Ian Leaman, Summit OS® Guide, former investment banker, senior finance executive, and investor, is driven by a mission to help entrepreneurs build, scale, and successfully exit their businesses by applying the hard-won lessons he’s learned from more than 100 exit journeys.

We learn about Ian’s path from growing up around small family businesses in the UK, to training with Deloitte, advising entrepreneurs through hundreds of M&A processes, co-founding a SPAC, and ultimately relocating to the United States to embrace a more optimistic and opportunity-driven business culture. Ian explains his Can-Do Framework, a mindset blueprint inspired by the contrast between European “can’t-do” thinking and America’s bold, frontier-style optimism. He also breaks down how Summit OS® empowers owners to achieve “private equity–level growth without giving up private equity,” and why the 45-Day Execution Momentum plan creates faster change than a typical 100-day private equity program. Ian closes with a gripping case study illustrating how leadership blind spots and misaligned incentives can devastate exit outcomes.

Corinne Gavlinski, high-impact leadership and team development coach and creator of the Executive Table Read (XTR) method, is on a mission to help leaders improve communication, understand their people, and drive stronger team performance by transforming how leaders read, interpret, and utilize the strengths of their teams. 

We explore Corinne’s Executive Table Read framework: table read the script, understand the actors, get how to utilize them, and optimize team performance—a method that helps executives gain clarity, reduce friction, and build alignment inside leadership teams. Corinne shares why many leadership issues stem from misunderstanding roles, how actor awareness reshapes collaboration, and why structured team conversations are essential for building healthy, high-performing executive groups.

Tim Rexius, Serial Entrepreneur and Founder of Omaha Protein Popcorn, shares how he helps people reach their personal greatness through health, fitness, and nutrition.

We explore Tim’s journey from homelessness to multiple successful ventures, the strategies behind Omaha Protein Popcorn, and how purpose-driven leadership creates long-term impact.
Tim introduces his Entrepreneur Creation Framework—Identify Them, Give Them a Voice, Coach & Mentor, Secure Financing, Let’em Do It Their Way—a system that turns talented employees into entrepreneurs, scales businesses, and drives innovation across industries.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the host of the Management Blueprint Podcast and the founder of the Summit OS® Group with the Summit OS® Business Operating System. And today I have an exciting entrepreneur on the show. When do I not have exciting entrepreneurs on the show? I always do,  but this is probably next level. So Timothy Rexius, he’s a serial entrepreneur, including the owner of the world-famous Omaha Protein Popcorn, which is launching in like four countries a month. He was Entrepreneur of the year, and he’s creating companies left, right, and center. So without further ado, let me introduce Tim Rexius. Tim, welcome to the show. 

Thank you so much for having me. I’m honored to be here. 

Well, it’s exciting to have you here, and we’ll have a good conversation talking about your special sauces. So let’s first start with your ‘Why’, your personal ‘Why’. What is driving you, and how are you manifesting it in your entrepreneurial ventures? 

My ‘Why’ is, especially when it comes to the fields I’m in, all the companies I own are around health, fitness, and nutrition, and helping people find their own personal piece of greatness is an honorable trait. I wake up every day knowing I get to help people, and that for me is everything.

You’ve seen the power of helping someone look and feel their best and what that can do to change them.
Share on X

And the fact that I get to be part of that is amazing. For me, it still gives me chills up my spine all these years later and that I get to be part of that story. It’s my ‘Why’. I’ve seen the power of helping somebody lose a hundred pounds. I’ve seen what that can do. And helping somebody overcome a death, a financial reversal, a divorce, or whatever it might be. And I get to be part of that story page, and that’s just awesome. 

Yeah, that’s great. Shouldn’t all leaders think that way? Because this is what leaders do, right? We help people become the best version of themselves, be more than they imagined they could be,  and that’s highly empowering. Tell me about Omaha Protein Popcorn, and also tell me about how you’re launching all these businesses. Maybe that’s going to be your framework that you’re going to discuss because you are creating entrepreneurs. But let’s first start with the story of how you created yourself as an entrepreneur,  and then how you stumbled upon this protein popcorn concept.

I’ll give you the quick and ugly version. I started in nutrition back in high school and into college. Loved it. I got the chance. I was really poor when I was 19, 20. I mean, most people are, but I was really poor. I was sleeping in my car, homeless for a while. And I was like, “Okay, what do I have?”  Well, I’ve got the ability to talk. I can talk like nobody’s business, like I can sell, so it looks like I’m selling myself. Something easy to do in the Midwest here in the United States in the summer is mow lawns. So I started my first business, Poor College Kids Lawn Service, and just started hustling door to door, and got myself out of my homeless situation, and loved it, as far as the money.

And I loved being on my own. Wasn’t a big fan of mow and lawns, but I could do it. So I loved the nutrition, and it was in college, and college really didn’t prepare me for the entrepreneurial journey. I didn’t have family money. It was on my own. And it didn’t really prepare me for finding alternative financing measures or how do I start a business. So I worked in corporate America for six and a half, seven years. When I was 29, I was just young enough and dumb enough to go for broke. I quit my really good paying job, and start my first nutrition store in Omaha, Nebraska, called Rexius Nutrition. Named it after myself, brought in the whole mom-and-pop feel back to what I thought was an over-corporatized industry. And one store led to two stores, led to three stores, and I met my amazing wife. And within a year of meeting her, we went from one state to five states. And now we have franchises operating in five, and it just worked out really well. And it was still the highlight of the retail store experience, and we just had a different experience there. And at the same time as we’re scaling that business.

I’m sorry, Tim, how is Rexius Nutrition different from other nutrition stores? What was so attractive that you could spread like wildfire? 

None of my staff knows what I make on anything. Their job isn’t to know what I make on anything. My job as an owner is to know where the pluses and minuses are. My job as an owner is to know where the gross and net profits are. My staff’s job is to make happy customers. That’s it. And I think that in nutrition, it really got turned into high moving, high sales, high pressure, talking into the most expensive stuff. And realizing when it comes to health and wellness, it’s each person is their own individual storybook.

There is no cookie-cutter. There is no one-plan-fits-all. It doesn’t exist. So if you have a bunch of 18- to 19-year-old kids selling products they don’t understand for the highest commission they can get to people of different walks of life, you’re not going to have a lot of success other than a moral standpoint. I felt it morally. I thought it was wrong, but from a business standpoint, it didn’t make sense. Because you’re not creating customers for a lifetime, you’re creating a one-time transaction. And I thought, okay, if I focus on the person and solving their problem, I create a 20, 30, 40, 50 year repetitive business cycle.

And the only job I’ going to do every day is add one more person to that cycle. And all of a sudden you can grow an empire. And I’m doing it morally sound. I’m doing it based on your health. If you come in with a list from a trainer of the 20 items they want you to take, and I start asking you questions about your health, your medications, like where are you at? Like your lifestyle. I start asking all the questions. I’m like, hey, you don’t need these 20 things, you need these 2. Yeah, I’m not going to make as much money today, but now that person trusts me for the next three or four decades to the point that they’re bringing in their network, their family, their neighbors, their kids, everybody.

And

that's how you grow a health business is by looking out for the constituents' health and their end goal more than mine.
Share on X

Okay. I love that. 

That’s how I did it. That’s how I built the structure of it. And so how we built the franchising structure of it was the same thing. Once I had a great manager and they understood it. Okay, cool, you need to be an owner. I’ve taught you, I’ve trained you, you know how to do this. You’re talented. I mean, if you’re really talented, you’re not going to stay working for me. Let me make you an owner. Let me show you the fun of being an entrepreneur and being underneath our cloud of expertise that we have. We can help you, and boom, store after store. And it’s always been kind of true and I got to be for other people what I needed at that younger age that I didn’t have. And that’s also part of my ‘Why’.

I can create better, more well-equipped business owners who deserve the opportunity versus just the rich kids who had family that had money to help them start.
Share on X

Tim, what does it take for someone to turn into a successful franchisee? So when you see a talented individual who does a good job for you, how do you know that this person is cut out for being a franchisor, for being an entrepreneur? 

Well, I look at every person that I employ from top to bottom. It doesn’t matter what stage life they’re in, what position they’re in. As a future either business partner interview or a franchisee interview. I’m going to see what you’re made of, and as you progress up the ladder in whatever organization I own, I’m going to start challenging you with budgets. I’m going to start challenging you with running an event and see how you do.

Like knowing that I’m here to help them and I don’t micromanage. I give them an opportunity. I let them figure out where they’re going to screw up. I let them figure out where their talents are and where they need help. Are they egotistical? Are they going to ask me for help or not? And I get to see those things, and

I get to kind of nurture that process and help them become more well-rounded in their entrepreneurial capabilities so that all of a sudden, like, and I'm a good judge of talent.
Share on X

So that’s how you build your franchise? And then we’re going to circle back to this whole idea of turning talent into entrepreneurs. But let’s go onto the story. So you had this Rexius Nutrition franchise, what was next? 

That same model feeds into all of it. Then in 2017, you know what,

we've been in the franchising now for 8 years, and it was growing well, and I had good employees still working for me at the Rexius Corporate.
Share on X

I already know what you’re made of. You already work for me. You already do much more than you get paid for. No brainer. Now we have a multimillion-dollar, multiple-gym fitness industry business here in Nebraska that grows by leaps and bounds. And so it worked again. At the same time, because I’m nuts, my wife and I got obsessed with the idea of protein snacks, and most protein snacks out there, especially in the US, are garbage. They’re very low quality. They’re just focusing on the macronutrients, the sugar, the carbs, the stuff that basic people who don’t understand health are looking at. 

Yeah. They call it glorified candy.

Yeah. Well, it is. And they’re using low-grade protein that won’t repair. So here’s the one, but I also have 6 children, and so I have this spread of kids from 25 to 6, right? So I got a real good spread at home. So I have this great market test at home. And then my parents are in their seventies, and they’re another group that doesn’t eat enough protein, that does a lot of muscle wasting. But they’re not going to eat protein bars. They’re not going to drink the shakes. The gen-pop person just isn’t going to eat those things. But there’s the one thing they will eat, popcorn. Popcorn’s the number one confectionary snack item in the world, in every country. And that’s crazy. So my wife and I have a tendency to get obsessed with things a little bit.

 And after 600 batches over a year, we finally hit our eureka moment. We were able to blend the highest-grade hydrolyzed proteins into a caramel corn by removing all the bad stuff — no high-ose corn syrup, gluten-free, non-GMO — all the health standards we wanted. The macronutrients fit athletes post-workout perfectly. As a former fitness coach, it’s perfect and we knew it tasted really good. No one could tell. But we knew our family wouldn’t believe us. Because we were always doing healthy stuff. So we put out big bowls of it out at Christmas and didn’t tell anybody it was healthy. And my whole family — and my brothers are doctors — they’re just mowing this stuff down. And then all of a sudden I’m smiling, and my older brother’s like, “Oh God… this is healthy.”

I said, yeah, but you didn’t know. And then my daughters, love them dearly, I think they were just doing it to mess with me, but they kept bringing home these gigantic bags of Smart Pop white cheddar. Just because I’m like, okay, game. So we invented the white cheddar, and so the top two flavors in the 16 current countries we’re distributing in are white cheddar and caramel corn. And so for the first five years, I’m not going to lie to you, brother, it floundered. It did not go well. It was called a different brand name, Optimal Performance Popcorn. But

I knew there was something there. People who bought it loved it, they just couldn't get more people to buy it.
Share on X

We really spread it out. But in 2023, we got the chance to rebrand it to the Omaha Protein Popcorn Company. And my daughters and my wife, who do significantly more shopping than I do, which was the problem. I designed it for me and I don’t buy anything. I work, I’m a dad, I buy the cheapest stuff, I buy by the pallet. When you have a huge family, that’s what I’m trained to do. My daughters and my wife who have more Amazon, TikTok Shop, and Facebook packages show up at my house on a daily basis. I should have had them do it from the beginning. So they redesigned it, they designed a mascot, they designed a new color scheme, new bag, a really good looking product. And we are up 16,000% in 24 months. 

Wow. That’s crazy. Who would’ve thought that the packaging counts so much? 

Apparently not me, until it happened. So, yeah. Yeah, it was amazing difference it made just by targeting our avatar. Who are we marketing? I marketed originally toward athletes because the macronutrients made sense. And they loved it, and they did, but you know, that’s only 5% of the population. And I needed to target the 95%.And so that was where the packaging happened. The 5% athletes still respect it. They love it, they still buy it, but we needed the packaging to get to the other 95%. And we are up 16,000% in 24 months. 

Yeah. That’s amazing. Okay. So, very healthy popcorn. Who wouldn’t want that? It makes a complete sense. Although for five years it didn’t make sense, and now it does make sense. Packaging does matter. Let’s drill down on this framework of identifying talented people and turn them into entrepreneurs. So is it just, “Okay, you do a good job, and go on and run a company,” or is there more to it? You actually have to help them finance it, help them believe that they can do it.

I mean, there are challenges with any business startup. How do you help them get through it and also not lose your franchisees, not burn them out, or what do you do? What is your process? 

Well, the first process when I’m identifying the talent is like, okay, it’s bringing them into discussions and decision-making. Letting them have a voice, and literally knowing that they need to come up with something new. Are you able to think outside the box? As entrepreneur, there is no straight game plan. I mean, you have to be able to think on your feet. You have to be able to adapt quickly, make sound decisions, and don’t get stuck into an indecision moment either. Because you can’t get paralyzed on the fear of making the wrong decision. I mean, because it is something obviously, as entrepreneurs, we’re not sitting on boatloads of cash, especially startups. You don’t want to make a wrong decision, but indecision can cost more money than wrong decisions.

So I put them in situations where they start to have a voice. I want to see. Do you think outside the box? Are you regurgitating stuff you heard online, or have you actually done some research? Have you looked into the cause and consequence of this decision? Have looked at the 3, 6, and 12 month result of making this decision? And I start to bring them in here with the financial consequences. That way I can really build their business acumen and see how they respond to that challenge. Honestly, a lot of times they come up with a great idea. How do they respond to being told no? That’s the other thing, and a lot of people aren’t used to it or don’t handle it well.

Then when we figure out, okay, this makes sense now, I’ve had guys buy franchises that are able to secure financing. Maybe they’re a veteran, maybe they’ve got a house, and they can co-sign. There’s different things, and we kind of go through that process. I’ve had some franchisees that now  were employees that did such an amazing job, and I knew they had the talent. I knew that they couldn’t scratch two pennies together, and so I financed it to them. I’ve done that. If I believe in them enough, my wife and I will talk it over obviously, and be like, okay, I think this couple, I think this people, like they’re really worth it. And now we get to be for them what we didn’t have and let’s go ahead and make a deal.

Let’s finance it to them, or let’s do some seller financing. Where we helps with the bank. A lot of times if you’re doing an SBA loan and they want me to sell our finance 10 or 20% of it, or 30%, depending on the size of the loan. We’ll do that just to assure the bank that, hey, I’m not getting my money either. So you get your money. So that usually seems to help. And if somebody’s got family, and I’ll walk them through the process. Here’s the banks I like and the locality. Here’s the kind of bank you want to go with. Here’s some different financing institutions you could use. Here’s some different grant applications.

We’ll pull the thread from every single one that we can to help people, and it’s challenging financing. The last couple of years, especially 2023 and 2024 economy were very rough in the discretionary spend market. So getting banks to finance was a real nightmare. But I know a lot of wealthy people in the venture capital area, the angel investors who like to own physical businesses who don’t have a lot of trust in the stock market. So who like to have little pieces and things, and explaining to our franchisees or our business partners, here’s what they want for an ROI, here’s what they’re going to look for. 

Okay. So, you identify the talent. That’s step one. 

Yep. 

You give them a voice, you involve them in decisions so that they see what you are going through when you’re making the decision. Then you coach them to make good decisions, how to handle and “No”, which is not easy. Then you help them secure financing, whether through other people or yourself. 

Yep. 

What’s then they launch and off they go? 

Yeah, no, and we’re there the whole step of the way. We’re there at every opening. We’re there when we need them. At the same point, it’s what you find is, even though that we have a great relationship present and let’s say that they know, they’ve learned from me a lot, they’re all going to go do it their own way to a certain degree. And I don’t get overbearing. My franchise disclosure document, as most people know, they’re about 120 pages long.

I only enforce two pages of it. I don’t enforce it at all. I have it there for legal reasons, but I’m like, it’s your store. My job here is to help you be successful. Not to tell you what to do. And the reason they’re stepping out into ownership from our system is because they’re ready for that change.

A lot of franchise systems, it's more or less you're handcuffed to the operating model, and I feel like in the health and wellness field, it needs to be built around the person owning the store and running the location, because it's all about…
Share on X

It isn’t like McDonald’s, which the golden arches, which are so recognizable that they can give you bad service 9,000 times, but you’ll still go. Small business has a lot more on the table. So I do it a little bit differently because everyone has a different skillset. And I’m there to help them. They’re all going to figure it out their own way. And here’s the thing, it’s always funny, even guys who worked for me for say 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years, they get in their own store, they want to try something that I said no to before. I’m going to go ahead and let them figure it out. 90 to 120 days later, we’ll have a conversation. And I never do it from a, I told you so, or a put-down method. I’m like, hey, how do you think this is working for you? Do you think there’s a better way? And it’s more of a coaching aspect. I’m not there to be your boss anymore. I’m there to coach. 

So basically you are allowing experimentation, which is the entrepreneurial process. Super interesting. 

But let me add a caveat to that. It’s I’ve gotten some flack from people about that before. Like, well, hey, that’s your store. It’s your brand’s, your name. And yeah, there’s risk with that, with them doing it their own way. It has led to some of the most ingenious moves and additions to our chain over the last 20 years that I could begin because one guy started selling essential oils. And I’m like, I’m just not into that. It’s just not my thing. He killed it. He brought in a whole demographic that is discretionary-spend heavy. We’re looking at the moms, right? The 45 to 65-year-old crowd. The moms and grandma crowd, the discretionary. They make 80% of the buying decisions for the household.

He brought them in droves by carrying a line that I wasn’t super comfortable or educated on, and I never would’ve allowed as an employer. So when a franchisee does that, I’m like, oh, I don’t know, I’m coming in, tell me how this works. And all of a sudden now everybody’s doing it. So it’s risky, yes, but it leads to a lot of more ingenuity that you would have otherwise with a very structured, you can only do X, Y, Z type franchisee plan.

Very interesting. So are you creating entrepreneurs who are not franchisees, or they are all franchisees? 

No, some are franchises, some are business partners and businesses with me. Some go on their own. I’ve been an investor in, depending on what it is and how they want to structure it. I mean, they all know that I’m the first person that they should go to. I’m glad that I’ve done a good enough job that I am the first person that they go to. A lot of times I’m just coaching them. They’ve decided to step out on their own and to make a parallel business or horizontal move, whatever it might be. And they’re always coming to me for advice and like thoughts.

Sometimes I invest, sometimes I don’t. But I’m part of that process. I get the opportunity every time, which is an awesome position to be in. I had a group of my franchisees who decided to make a vertical, have a secondary business. They started an energy drink company. And get to coach them with that. See how that worked. They wanted me to invest. I wasn’t super comfortable with it. Just because it’s not a field that I’m super familiar with. And I actually advised them maybe it’s not the best idea, but they were super into it, and they really believed into it and I’ve never been more happy to be wrong. Because these guys are killing it, and now they’re at that next stage, and I get to help coach them on that stage. So it just puts me in a great position of opportunity to either be a partner, be an investor, be a franchisor, but it puts me in this position where we leave it open-ended. 

So Tim, surely not all of these opportunities stand out. What is your success ratio? How strong did you have to feel that this is going to succeed for you to pull the trigger? 

I’d say right now, between franchisee investment, business partner of everything I’ve done, and it might sound crazy, I’m at about a 96% success ratio. 

Wow, that’s extraordinary. 

Well, because if you find out the integrity of the person, if the person has integrity, they have character, they have drive, and if I’ve done my job when I employed them and taught them, then as they say, if there’s a will, there’s a way. And if the person wants it as bad as they want to breathe, they will find a way to make it work. And that’s the spark that I look for more than anything is how resourceful are you? Do you throw your hands up when things get hard? Or do you get busy? And if you’re a get busy type, okay, cool. All you need is somebody with a little bit more experience to help guide that in the correct direction.

But if you have that kind of drive, that kind of, I’m not going to give up mentality, you’ll be successful. My grandfather used to have the greatest expression.

There’s well over a million ways to make a million dollars. You just need to pick one and go.
Share on X

If you’re not successful, the only person you have to blame is you. Especially in today’s society, with these devices, the cell phones that give us access to everyone on the globe 24/7, 365, there’s no excuse left. If you have the ability to talk to people and sell, you have the ability to be wealthy and successful. You just going to keep grinding. And the only non-successes I’ve had, to be honest with you, were due to government regulations, something that’s completely and utterly out of our control. 

So I agree with you in general. Nevertheless, there is risk involved in entrepreneurship.

Always risk. 

Even if you do things right, you’re very resilient, you keep trying, you keep managing your risk, but something black swan event happens and you can be taken out the game. 

Oh, the 2008–2009 housing crash completely bankrupted me. And so I just was starting my first Rexius store, and all my money was invested in real estate. And I had to file a Chapter 13 sub-reorganization bankruptcy and pay it off over five years. And then we’re killing it, right? I got the gyms, I got the stores, I got the brands, everything’s going crazy. And then the pandemic hits. We lose 11 locations due to government regulations. Nothing I can do about it. And yeah, it cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. And that’s where the closures happen. Then you have the 2023–2024 post-pandemic economy, which discretionary spending was at an all-time low, globally and domestically. And you just have to learn the ebbs and flows of that. So yeah, it’s risk and reward. I always say that I’m willing to take a greater risk, so I should be available for the greater reward.

It’s not for the faint of heart. And that’s part of my identification process when it comes to expansion and leveling up with franchisees is do they have the mental stability? The emotional stability to handle the ebbs and flows? And everyone’s happy when they’re raking in dough and they get the new car.

What kind of choices do you make when you hit seasonality that goes down? Are you resourceful? I mean, here I was when I started Rexius, lost all my money in real estate, two master’s decreases, selling supplements. And since it was a new venture, the economy wasn’t doing great, I believed in it enough. So what do I do at night? I delivered pizza at night, three nights a week. In my thirties with multiple master’s degrees. Why? Because I’d had to do, I mean, nobody else is going to cry for me. I have to go do what’s necessary to make it happen.  And I don’t blame other people. Yeah. And the black swan is like, who was going to think the whole entire housing market was going to crash in ’08–’09? I mean, I thought real estate was the safest investment ever. I was wrong. And and it’s the post-pandemic economy that I didn’t expect. I mean, I knew that lending would be tight, but I didn’t expect it would get so tight to the point that it destroyed the discretionary spend market.

And every one of these things that has happened has cost me money, but me having multiple income sources has in different types of income, where one goes up, one goes down, that diversification in my portfolio allows me to weather those storms. 

Okay, so we’re running close to time, but I want to ask you this final question. What do you think is the most important question any entrepreneur should be asking themselves? 

What am I good at and what am I bad at? It’s

the biggest thing that I have to have conversations with people is having an honest audit of themselves.
Share on X

Okay, well, that I get it. But do you want to work 60 hours a week and have a smile on your face? Well, no. Okay, well, then you’re not built for this. So it’s having an honest audit of yourself. What am I good at and what am I bad at? And if that person can be truly honest and audit themselves, like, hey, I suck at this, I’m super awesome at this, I need help with this, then they have the chance of being successful. Most people, I believe dilute themselves into thinking they’re great at things that they’re truly not. They just want to be great at them. And it’s, are you a good number one? Are you built to be that entrepreneur?

Can you take the heat? Can you take the pressure? Or are you better at number two? Or you a good number three? Nothing wrong with either one of those. Us number ones, the crazy entrepreneurs, we need that number two, we need that number three, we need that number six. Not everyone can be an alpha number one. And so just having an honest audit of yourself, and do you want to be an entrepreneur because you just hate your job you’re in now and do you think that’s an escape? Or do you want to actually create something and put it all on you? And so that honest audit of yourself is the greatest thing that can be done. 

Yeah. Love it. Self-knowledge. Know thyself. Yeah. I think something you mentioned at the very end is also important. It’s also do you have a worthy purpose that will keep you going when the going gets tough? 

Exactly. 

If it just the money, it’s not always enough. Because you can make money in an easier way. You can get a cushy job and make money, but do you have a bigger purpose that emotionally drives you that is going to help you through this tough time?

When I went from homeless at 19 to working in corporate America, and I made a lot of money for somebody who was homeless to making at that time, this is 20 some years ago, making two, three hundred thousand dollars a year, but in a job that I didn’t enjoy, that I wasn’t morally aligned with. And I think having your morals and your values in line with your career is a huge deal.

What you’ll find is that when you don’t get that passion check from your paycheck, you end up spending all your money on things outside of your work to bring happiness to your life that doesn’t fulfill from your work, and you still end up broke. And here’s what happened: ’08–’09 housing crashed. I didn’t like my job and I made a lot of money. I bought land, I bought all these things, and then it crashes. And so now I don’t like my job, and I’m broke. I’m like, okay, well, let’s go for happiness and purpose instead. And that purpose, that happiness, I knew what I was trying to create drove me on those days that no one came into the store.

It drove me on the days when there was too much month left at the end of the check. And I’m like, okay, but I like this. I’m going to figure it out, whatever it is I have to do. And so, yeah, I preach that a lot when I’m at high schools and university speaking. And I’m like, what’s your purpose? Make your passion your paycheck. Literally, it’s then it’s no, like you’re going to have hard days. It’s still work, don’t get me wrong, but there’s a purpose behind it. 

Yeah. That’s great. I think Bob Dylan said that: A man is a success when they get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and in between, they do what they love to do, right?

Yeah. 

So that’s awesome. So, if people would like to connect with you and learn more about your companies, the Popcorn, maybe they want to be a distributor for the protein popcorn, the Omaha Protein Popcorn, where should they go to check you out and to connect with you? 

Easiest way to go to my website’s, just timrexius.com. That’s  timrexius.com. That links to all the socials, it links to all five companies, popcorn, speaking engagements, all that stuff. That’s the place to go. You email in, my assistants will probably reply, but they’ll get everything to me. And if there’s any way I can help out anybody, if I get a chance to, I’d love to do that. I like helping people and I think that drives me as much as anything. And just thank you for the time and the honor of being on your show. I really appreciate it. 

Absolutely. So where is next?  What’s the next country you’re launching your popcorn in? 

The Grand Caymans — I’m heading there next week, the Cayman Islands of all places. I’ve gotta go in November, leaving Nebraska, but the Cayman Islands is top of the list. Because we were at six degrees yesterday here, so I was very happy to go someplace warm. So that’s next, and then right after that we’re looking at Ghana, West Africa, and then going back to London. 

So all the southern countries are being launched in the winter, which is a great time.

It works out pretty well for me. 

Yeah. Alright, Tim, well, I really enjoyed having you. Thanks for coming. And for those of you listening, don’t forget to follow us on YouTube. Check us out on LinkedIn, on Apple Podcast, and while you’re at it, check out SummitOS.co — our new website on the Summit OS® Business Operating System. Thank you for coming and thank you for listening.

Alana Dobbins, Executive Director of the Business Owner Success Alliance (BOSA) and Business Development Specialist at W.G. Nielsen & Co., shares how servant leadership and active listening help advisors and entrepreneurs make smarter, faster, and more aligned business decisions.

Alana introduces the 5-Step Listening Framework she developed through her extensive experience in investment banking and business development: Mandate, Plan, Team, Execution, and Self-Awareness. This framework helps leaders build trust, uncover risks, and strengthen alignment between vision and execution. She also discusses BOSA, an upcoming mentorship platform connecting business owners with trusted advisors through short, video-based guidance — creating an accessible way to get sound advice at the right time. From building chemistry with clients to balancing empathy with accountability, Alana shares how genuine listening and mentorship drive growth and confidence in the world of M&A.

Good day, dear listener. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast.  I’m the founder of the Summit OS Group, which developed the Summit OS Business Operating System. And today my guest is Alana Dobbins, the executive Director of the Business Owner Success Alliance and The Business development specialist at W.G. Nielsen and Company and Mid-Market Investment Bank in Denver, Colorado. Alana, welcome to the show. 

Hi, Steve. It’s such a pleasure to see you again. I enjoy every time I get to share a conversation with you. 

Yes, you’re referring to me being a guest on your podcast, which I very much enjoyed, and I’m sure this one is even gonna be better than that one. So let’s get into it. And, you know, I’m very interested in what drives people, and I always ask on this podcast, what is your personal why and what are you doing to manifest it in your professional life? 

I love that question. I’ve seen you ask that on the podcast I’ve watched yours. Gosh, everything is different when you get older and over the years you realize what is important to you, and I wanna live a good life. And I don’t wanna walk by somebody that needs help and not help them. I don’t wanna over promise and under deliver like I have in the past. So I think that would be my why, and manifesting that in my career,

it's every day we're serving business owners every single day in some capacity we're showing up
Share on X

Yeah, it is so true. And when I was younger, even not that much younger, even a few years ago, like 10 years ago, I wasn’t really aware of this whole idea of why it’s important to think about who you are serving and how we are helping people, but it’s really a huge tool to empower ourselves to do our best work. And also to be able to have a long-term perspective, which helps iron out some of those rollercoasters that we all face. So yeah. You love your servant philosophy. You have developed an organization called the Business Owner Success Alliance. So what made you want to be involved with this organization and what is the mission of this organization?

What I’ve seen and witnessed over my career are the business owners who are in growth mode, the business owners who are looking to exit the business owners who are leaning on others for sound advice, to make business decisions. And I’ve been very fortunate to have been exposed to this environment since I was 19. I was very fortunate for that and in seeing so many different types of business owners.

The mission around BOSA is to bring together advisors and mentors that have sound advice that can very easily address something that might change the trajectory of a business owner's decision and having that advice at the right time along with it…
Share on X

Wow, okay, so this is a unique format. It sounds like, that you’re not bringing the peer groups together live, but it’s more about communicating through asynchronous video.

And giving them a platform where they can look at other questions that have been posed and review other content as short video snippets that they can easily digest and go, ‘Oh, I need more information on that. Maybe I’ll reach out to that advisor’. But having that video library of other things, business owners in their realm, so questions that mom and pop business owners have are going to be different than established businesses in growth mode. So we have a dynamic way of allowing the person that owns the company in growth mode to see relevant contact and vice versa for the other stages of growth. 

I love it. This is very interesting. And how many members are there in this alliance? 

So we haven’t launched our platform yet. We are taking pre-registration via our website, and so we have quite a list of business owners and we’re building up our business advisors. When we want to launch, we want it to really add the value that we’ve built it for. So, we’re looking for additional mentors and advisors. We have quite a few business owners who are waiting. So we’re in the process. So if you’re a business advisor with an excellent career that you think you might be able to donate a little bit of your time. Mentors that are leaders in various different spaces, that’s what we’re looking for. 

It’s so important. I actually was asked to do a keynote last week and there were only very short time, I only have 20 minutes and I picked three topics. One of the topics was mentorship and how important it is and actually looked through my life and I realized that I used a lot of mentorship, but I also missed out on a lot of mentorship. And I think the better mentors you find, the faster we can grow our businesses. So I allowed this initiative. I think this is very smart and very useful. 

We’ve been exposed to so many in our careers. I know you and I have talked offline and so many in our careers have taken the time to lift us up and help us through things and, and teach us. So this is an— it’s giving back, but it’s also allowing an avenue where the newest and greatest tools, you know, forget AI. I love AI. But this is one-on-one real advice from experienced people. 

Yeah. And the couple of things there I’d like to mention. So, you know, AI is very useful. It really helps with productivity, but a couple of things AI cannot do. So AI is not always able to filter information. It can create a lot of information, which is sometimes overwhelming. But you need wisdom, not just information, and you need to filter this. And mentors are able to bring that wisdom to the table. Mentors can also give you validation sometimes, you know, because as entrepreneurs we don’t just need good advice. Sometimes we need someone who actually gives us some encouragement so that we are doing good work, even though we are struggling. And the third thing is accountability. So again, it’s not possible to be accountable to a machine, right? But it is to a human being. So AI, ChatGPT is not replacing mentors. For sure. 

Well, and when you mention all of those, it’s, you know, the failures that we learn the most from. I don’t think AI can draw from its failure in business. You know, there’s going to be triggers in our mentors and our business advisors history that something that triggers something that they failed on, that they had to really learn the hard way. And, helping business owners avoid that. That’s our mission really. 

And really, you are not gonna learn big things without failing big, I believe, because that is the forcing function to push you to be creative, find a solution, and then it could be a unique solution, which then gives you a competitive edge. So it is huge and mentors can help with that. Alright, so obviously the reason you are putting this together, because you are, and I experienced this when I was on your podcast and you were asking the questions. You’re a really good listener. 

Thank you. 

And I think that’s why you have utilized a five step listening framework that you talked about in, on the pre-call to this interview. I’d love you to share it with our listeners what those five steps are and how do you go about, you know, actively listening with this framework. 

And you know, when we talk about framework, we all make whatever we’re doing specific to our world, our universe who we’re helping. And as an investment banker and someone that’s been doing mergers and acquisitions for a very long time,

I've found that this process of listening, it not only applies to my industry, but every single person that is running a business that has a specific job, it's helped me immensely for years and years.
Share on X

In this conversation that I could bring to the table that they’re expecting me to bring to the table to it speaks to alignment.

Alignment in our world is so important. Alignment around what we're trying to do for a client, what our client is trying to accomplish in a merger acquisition transaction.
Share on X

So in a conversation about with a business owner, maybe I’m going to ask him, you know, what are the specific objectives that you have in place to accomplish your vision? So getting a plan, conversation going, that is usually pretty scattershot when you’re first talking to someone and your conversations centering around what they’d like to do. There’s going to be a lot of talk about what their plan is, but then what they need to do, their plan, do they have. So if you can kind of drill down and get more granular on the plan related to the conversation, the topic at hand, you could kind dive deeper in every question. So what are you trying to accomplish? What will move your mandate forward? What are the specific initiatives that will move those objectives forward? And then

that conversation partner ends up really starting to think through that granular aspect of the plan, no matter if it's selling their business or growing their business, or whatever that looks like.
Share on X

I just wanted to reflect on this because as an investment banker, I also come from an investment banking background, although I left the profession about 12 years ago, but what I really noticed was that those clients who didn’t have a mandate, you know, maybe they just felt burnt out. They just wanted the relief and they want to sell their business, or maybe they wanted the windfall that comes with it, but they didn’t know what to do with their lives afterwards. They didn’t have a mandate. They really struggled after selling their business. They struggled with meaning. They struggled with the new challenge of managing their money, which was uncomfortable for them. And they had FOMO, you know, they had, they missed their business, because  they couldn’t channel their energies. And now I can really relate to this idea of what’s the ultimate objective and then how are we gonna get there? That’s the plan. So if someone knows what their mandate is and what their plan is, what’s the next step? 

Okay. And, I wanna just touch on what you said because it’s very important what you just said. You brought up the risk. In that plan along with timeline, which a lot of people have a general timeline, but as you get more granular then you say, well, what are the risks we’ll be facing? And our risks as advisors are a business owner that doesn’t really have a plan after they sell their business. That’s going to bring issues to them greater than they can possibly imagine. So what is the risk to us? What is the risk to them? So addressing risk in that plan bucket is always a really good idea. I’m glad you brought that up.

Now that we've identified our mandate and we have a plan and we understand the plan, we've gotten more granular.
Share on X

And ultimately, the team is important because any business is basically a group of people with a mission, you can have a software, but someone needs to develop that software and to troubleshoot it and promote it. So without people, it’s really hard to build a business. Maybe in the age of AI, it’s gonna be possible, but not yet. Right. So we got the team. 

Another thing that I bring up, I like to bring up in conversations when we’re talking about team members a lot of times there’s promotions within the organization and the management, the owner, whoever is making these decisions, they don’t always ask the question, is this role good for the team member? And I think when you take a step back and you say, oh, you know, I think they would excel there, but is that good for them? And so when those questions are brought to the table, a different lens is able to be brought in. Okay. So there’s not just that one way view. 

Can you give an example? 

Sure. So if there’s a professional, and it seems like a natural progression for them to promote into a higher role that will manage team members, but personally, they’re in a position in their life where the additional responsibility isn’t timed right, but they have all the capabilities, they’re solid, they’re loyal, they are a huge part of that team. Promoting them might not be the best, the best decision for them. Yeah. 

Yeah. I experienced this. I had a very young, talented executive who did really well, investment banking, and I started kind of side business and I promoted him to be the managing director. And I totally burned him out and he ended up leaving and that was a huge loss for us.

And one more thing in that vein is the chemistry. You know, we all are so different. All everybody’s so different to find that, you know, is the chemistry right? And if it’s not right, that’s okay. It might just take some shuffling but to address that question, people like to push aside personalities and just say, well there, you know, this is the job at hand and we’re gonna get it done. And we’re all professionals. The truth is chemistry matters and Steve, you know, as well as I do, we don’t take clients on that one principle if the chemistry isn’t there.

We are working in very intimate parts of operating businesses and very confidential aspects of a personal and professional life of a business owner.
Share on X

Yeah. Love it. Love it. Okay, so we have learned about the mandate, we have a plan, we have a team. So what else do we need to listen to? 

Well, none of that means anything if you can’t execute. So you can have the best plan, you can have a solid team. You can, everybody could be rowing in the right direction and know and there’s alignment. But how that execution actually plays out is going to determine if it’s successful or not. And so if you’ve planned well, if the team is aligned, if all of this is set to take off and you’re ready to pull the trigger, let’s talk about that execution. So how are decisions going to be made? That’s one of the questions I love to talk about because that is something that can, I’d say an SOP, absolutely can be in place for how decisions are made, but then to go outside that standard operating procedure, have you given your management the knowledge that they should go outside of that, and establishing that ahead of time is going to give everybody independence.

Know exactly when to call an audible and when it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Getting to the right decisions at the right time. And you know that execution going hand in hand with managing complexity. You have to have a rhythm for that, you have to be able to look at your progress, look at what you’ve done, understand you need to pivot in this area, and so that execution can continue to improve and you’re not going to make the same mistakes twice if you have a plan in place. To understand how you’re executing, then you’re going to be better positioned to fix anything that’s off kilter or isn’t working at all.

That rhythm usually comes in the form of a calendared regularly occurring meeting and you know, it's one thing, bolts from the blue where something comes up and you're going to need to address it.
Share on X

Yeah, I mean, I agree that if you want to have good decisions, you need to harvest the ideas and engagement of your people. And you need a structure for this. It’s not gonna happen by default. You have to communicate that you are, you want their opinion so that they actually should bring it. And then you need to create space for it. And then you are gonna get, you’re gonna teach people to make decisions, and you’re gonna get better decisions by people who are closer to the action. It’s all very good. However, none of this matters without self-awareness. So how is self-awareness plays into this listening structure? 

And I love this because all of those conversational, active listening topics that we’ve talked about, we’re here, Steve, you and I are business advisors, and we’re here to gather information so we can help them be better and help them accomplish something, growth, you know, whatever that might be. But there’s a personal aspect to active listening. When you know somebody, it’s easier to understand how they might present information because they believe a certain way or what’s important to them. So when you are working with someone that’s self-aware and understands everything about like if they’re risk adverse, then what they might project to you when you’re talking about risk is that there’s no way that could happen because they are so scared of taking any risk. You know that, well, no, I’m not going to believe that. I know that it might be able to happen. They’re just highly risk adverse, so being able to filter what you hear from a conversational partner and then understanding more about their personality and how they view things.

And so some of the questions I might ask somebody I don’t know well, and I like to lead with these is, you know, what do you value? What’s important to you? What are your personal aspirations? And I just spoke to someone yesterday via Zoom that I hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting. Very interesting individual, very engaging. I don’t think anyone had asked him what his personal aspirations were outside of what he’s doing right this moment. And it was so interesting to hear him start talking about that. So that gave more depth to see how he’s going to color all of these other areas about his mandate and his plan and his team. But then to get to the, you know, the real understanding, personally, I know what he wants to aspire to do now and then if you’re able to, which I know you are, to see them interacting with their colleagues, you know. How does this person interact with other people? Are they bringing this happy go-lucky attitude? Are they always looking at the glass half full or half empty? Are they, you know, however that goes.

It's all of these different little tidbits of information lead you to what is this person's self-awareness. And if you know that, then you'll be able to do better helping them.
Share on X

Hopefully. Especially if they’re aware enough, if they have very low self awareness, it’s gonna be difficult to coach them. People are not coachable when they’re not self aware. Now, this is great. This is a great framework. So this is the power listening framework. And mandate, plan, team, execution and self-awareness. One thing that struck my ear, you mentioned that a risk aversion, so sometimes people are risk aversion. Risk averse. It is true, but also entrepreneurs are often poor in risk management. Sometimes they’re risk averse and then they don’t make decisions, but sometimes they are risk unaware, perhaps. And maybe it’s not intentional risk seeking, but risk unaware or not sufficiently careful, cautious. And they make bad decisions. Stupid decisions. Why do you think that in general, the risk management is not so much of a strength of entrepreneurs? 

The entrepreneurial journey is up and down. It’s not for the faint of heart, and we attract people to build, grow, establish, build, and grow businesses that tend to take risks and they’re independent. They typically have certain advisors or someone in their network or a few people in their network that they lean on for advice and when their ideas can be confirmed, it’s pedal to the metal. We’re gonna grow this thing, nothing’s gonna stop us. That is what’s in their character to do so as entrepreneurs, experience those ups and downs, that I think is typically why we find so many willing to take risks. But if, you know, if you actually ask enough questions that can get to where those boundaries are, then you can advise from a much better position.

Okay. 

Yeah. 

So this is fascinating. So you are about to start your work at this investment bank, W.G. Nielsen and Company. 

Yes. 

How are you going to approach your work? I mean, business development has changed so much over the past 15 years since I did it for my investment banking firm. And we used to be able to cold call people and send them your newsletters, printed newsletters, and they would actually read– it’s no longer the case or it’s much harder. So what do you see as being the best practice business development process in investor banking? If you can talk about this. 

I’m happy to talk about it. And unlike you, I was in this space before, there were online data rooms. When we would share information with interested suitors, we would literally make Xerox copies and we’d put them in binders and we would FedEx them, and then we’d wait three days to follow up and make sure they had what they needed in the information we sent. So, you’re right, it has changed dramatically. And with all of the opportunities there is a very specific process, I think, regardless of the industry to approach them. And that’s, you know, if I can have an introduction through someone I know, obviously that’s the best. A nice warm introduction. Someone saying, ‘Hey, you need to make meet Alana, she knows what she’s talking about.’ Something like that would be ideal. But, you know, nine times out of 10 we don’t have that, that luxury.

So, somehow getting in front of them, whether it be through a video clip and a podcast that has something that interests them, being on LinkedIn and posting something that adds value to a question they had, but we bring a very unique in the investment banking space, and especially the middle market and lower middle market.

We bring a very unique skill to a very important problem. So my goal in business development in this day and age is to show our expertise in their space and to offer them an ear for them to ask questions.
Share on X

Yeah. This is very, very insightful. So it’s basically building the trust and building the awareness top of mind awareness that you’re there to help them when they need help. And also, I mean, I think the trust piece is very important in this business. Yeah. I mean, what I experienced was that people were very reticent about sharing their plans because they didn’t want competitors to get wind of it, didn’t want their staff to know. So for them to be willing to even share that they are thinking about exiting required a high level of trust from the investment bankers that they talk to. So if you have a good process to build that trust and you have a good team that is trustworthy then it’s a good spot to be in.

And that, you know, it speaks to that chemistry, again, it speaks to if there’s five different investment bankers, which there’s usually 10 or 15 investment bankers talking to the same people, the same attractive business owners that run operations that a buyer would be interested in. But not all of them really care and business owners are astute. They know when they’re trying to be bamboozled. They know when someone’s trying to sell them something. When you come to the table, honestly, offering help and honestly wanting to give them direction, whether it involves your firm formally engaging or not, they sense that, and that’s I think why some people are successful and some people aren’t. Do they really care? Do they really wanna help or are they trying to land a new client, which in our space there’s a lot of both. 

Yeah. And that brings us full circle to your why– helping people and the servant,  leadership, why that is so important. So, Alana, if people would like to learn more about the Business Owner Success Alliance and potentially W.G. Nielsen, or you, they would just like to connect with you and maybe have a conversation or invite you to a podcast, where can they find you?

Okay, well I’m on LinkedIn. You can search Alana Dobbins,  you’ll be able to find me A-L-A-N-A-D-O-B-B-I-N-S. We are, as I mentioned, we are accepting applications for pre-registration on BOSA, so you can go to bosuccess.com and give us your information. We’ll reach out once we receive it, and we’ll talk you through our projected timeline and if we think it’ll add value to what you’re doing. So looking forward to that. W.G. Nielsen is W-G-N-I-E-L-S-E-N.com.  I’m looking forward to just this next year. There’s been a lot of ups and downs in a lot of different spaces. So the M and A activity is, it’s a very busy space right now. A lot of deals are being done, and a lot of questions people have with tariffs and other things. Speak to a professional. Don’t try to figure it out on your own. We have answers. We can help guide you, and you don’t formally engage anybody, just to get advice on something like that. Reach out to people you respect, you know, or someone like us and we can help guide you. 

Okay, well, I can vouch for you, Alana. You are a great person. I would trust you with advice. So when I want to start my company, which is not gonna happen the next five years, I’ll try to keep you in mind. 

Thank you. Thank you. 

So, yeah, thank you. Thank you for coming to the show, to sharing your wisdom about powerful listening about the Business Owner Success Alliance, for which I wish you success.

Thank you. 

And, those of you listening to this conversation, if you enjoyed and you found this informational make sure you follow us on YouTube and on LinkedIn and stay tuned because we’ll have an exciting entrepreneur or subject matter expert on the show every week. Thank you for  coming, Alana.

Thank you, Steve. This is always so much fun to talk with you. Thank you again. 

Thank you. And thank you for listening.

Pál Jalsovszky, founder of Jalsovszky Law Firm — Hungary’s fastest-growing commercial law firm — shares how he built a top-tier legal practice by challenging tradition and creating a firm that reflects his values of professionalism, creativity, and clarity.

We explore Pál’s journey from international firms to founding his own, and how his Straightforward Legal Advice Framework—being Practical, Specific, and Risk-Weighted—reshaped the client–lawyer relationship. Instead of theoretical opinions, Pál believes lawyers must take responsibility, quantify risk, and give actionable answers that empower clients to decide with confidence. He also discusses building a culture of collaboration, training lawyers to think like business partners, and how AI will transform the legal profession—from due diligence and analysis to redefining what young lawyers should focus on next.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Pal Jalsovszky, the owner of the Jálsovszky Law Firm in Budapest, Hungary, which is the fastest growing commercial law firm there, with a special focus on tax and the mergers and acquisition law. Pal, welcome to the show.

Thank you. Nice to speak to you. 

Yes. We go way back with Polly, 20 years probably. We were one of your first clients when you started the law firm in 2005 and we’ve worked together on many ideas and I, we met recently and I thought that would be a great guest on our podcast, sharing your journey of how you built up this very successful market leading law firm in Budapest. But before we go there, I like to ask my favorite question, what is your personal why and how are you manifesting it in your practice upon it? 

Well, to tell you honestly, I didn’t have a personal why for quite a long time because if we just go back to my history, I worked for international law firms and 10 years ago I made the decision to separate from the international law firms and start up my own venture. It was an incidental decision at that time, and it was not a well thought and well elaborated, decision and step. I can tell you the story. The story is quite short that  I worked for Linklaters and I was working for the legal industry for seven years and eight years, mainly in the tax department, and I still believe that I need some more improvement in tax, so I wanted to go to an international advisor firm. And then I started my interviews and one of them was very positive to me. And we finalized the deal or this early we said that, okay, I would start working with them. So I was just leaving Linklaters, and, I believe that I would join that firm but there was a turning point when that firm started with the new head of a department who didn’t want to increase the number of employees.

And then from one day to another, they said that they are not able to offer me a job. It was actually 20 years ago. And then, from one day to another, I quit a law firm and I didn’t have a new job. So it was just a decision what to do with myself. I start my own career. So it was not a very, well thought and well elaborated decision to start my career. So I didn’t have ‘why’ at that time. So I was just going with the flow. I was giving advice, I was trying to attract clients, and it came up that I’m valuable and I was needed by the client. So I just had one more client and one more employee, one more colleague. So I broadened my spectrum. I broadened my expertise. So when I started my law firm, I didn’t have any such type of a goal or specific vision. But since then, so I’ve been doing this firm for 20 years now. So in the meantime, such type of wise and such type of impact or answers have in fact elaborated in my life and in my way of thinking. And now just starting, so preparing for this discussion, I just put together all the things that I have in the back of my mind that really just may be the idea or the drive  to come to this point. And one was actually to be the law firm that on one hand is professional, but which is also out of box, which is actually reflect my own personality, which is on one hand, services clients in the highest professional manner. On the other hand, 

a law firm that is creative, that is exceptional, that is unique, that is actually the corporate myself.
Share on X

Yeah. 

The other is to build a community, because a law firm is a bunch of people and the most important asset of a law firm are the people. And, it was so lovely to see that I started to hire people under my own methodology. I wouldn’t say that I have a very good sense of creating personal relationships and in my private life I had some problems with that, but it turned out to be that I had quite a good sense of feeling to select those people around me who fit together each other and who can work in a combined manner and who can cooperate efficiently and who can create a society, can create  a common workshop. And creating a set of people, just the community became a very important part of my goal and my achievement. And then third came the market impact so that it’s not only an impact that I can create for 20-30, and now we are 60 people, but

we can create something for the society, for the community, for the country, for professional community so that to create something which can also add something in a bigger manner.
Share on X

Yeah, yeah. No, I love it. And, when we first met, it was actually an interesting story because the building where we met turned out to be located on a plot of land, which was owned by my great-grandfather. So that was kind of a very interesting realization. But what really struck me when we first met was that you were a really good listener and you were very thoughtful how you gave advice and you had some really good out of the box ideas at the time. It was the tech structuring for an M and A transaction. And I was very impressed with your creativity there. And then we started working together on different projects and I remember you were hiring some people who were kind of picking things up and tell, and really following the style that you introduced. So what I’d like you talk more about at this point is your process. So, how is your approach different and what is it that you do differently? And you talk about being, providing straightforward legal advice. Maybe you can call it the straightforward legal advice framework. So what does that framework look like and what are the elements. 

So if you speak to lawyers in many countries and also for Hungary, lawyers tend to avoid giving you a straight answer. So in most of the cases, you receive an ambiguous answer from a lawyer telling to you that if you see from this angle you can get to this result. Come and other angle you can get to another result. And then nothing is black and white. Everything is great. And, I don’t believe that it helps the client in any way. I’m sure that you need to give a comprehensive answer to the client, so not just saying yes or no, but I believe that when you give advice, the advice is that what the client should do. So you need to assume the responsibility of providing clear guidance to the clients that in a certain situation where he should go. And, in doing so, it’s not only your gut feeling or your internal belief that you’ll need to take into account, but also the perception of the client because a certain advice is valid for one client, but it’s not valid for another client. I believe that there’s an art in that when you understand the problem of the client, you have the legal reasoning behind, you come to an understanding of what are the risks what are the circumstances, what are the legal aspect of a certain case, and then you dare to go to the client. Tell him that in your situation, I would do this, or I advise you to this, or I would advise you to do that.

And, this is very rarely done in the legal profession. And most of the lawyers, they believe that this is an excessive responsibility. That if you say something to the client, then you assume bigger responsibility. If you just described the social situation and leave it to the client what to do, I don’t believe this is the case, especially if you tell the client that he or she should go probably to this direction, but okay, it has this type of, or this amount of risk, you do not just propose the client to take one road or one direction, but also tell him that, if he just opts for this decision that, what consequences it can have. Whether those consequences, they are deep, they are risky or they are negligible. Actually, I’m not only a lawyer but also an economist. And I have a very good mathematical background. And, what I just elaborated is to giving the percentage to the client that what is the percentage of the risk, or what is the percentage of the negative outcome, which is very rarely done by lawyers. Lawyers tend to say it is a significant risk or low risk or medium risk. So they tend to use certain words or certain objectives, which I hate because this really just a type of direction which can be open to many interpretation I like to give percentages.

Sorry, I stop you. So how would you describe the right kind of advice? What are the elements to it? You know, this podcast, we are always trying to break things down so that people can more visualize what it is and how to do it and have a clearer understanding about it. 

So, on one hand you need to describe the entire situation to the client from a legal perspective. So, you cannot avoid just saying yes or no, such as saying that the final conclusion of your situation is A or B. But give a legal reasoning that in your situation, what are those legal elements that should be taken into consideration? Then the next step is that you evaluate this legal risk and this legal situation and come up to options to the client that actually you have two or three options. And then you clearly describe that, what their options are, and then give a suggestion to the client that in your situation, in your personal situation, in the business situation and, in my best legal and business opinion, you probably, you are best off with this option. Okay, this option, we have this and this risk, but those risks can be mitigated or they have just a low profile or they are not substantial. But, yeah,

you should build up on one hand an understanding of the client that what his or her legal situation is,
Share on X

Yeah. So what you mentioned to me earlier was that you really want to be practical in your advice, so not a theoretical, but a real practical thing approach that can be implemented. Then be very specific about, what to do. And then as you described, kind of a risk weighted approach that, okay, this is what I would do– it’s 80% chance that it’s gonna work out. These are the risks. 20% chance that we could have complications. Sometimes you go to the doctors and they tell you that, okay, your shoulder has to be operated on because you have this tear in your shoulder, and it’s an 80% chance that it’s gonna heal without any problem. There’s a 20% chance that we might have to go in and do some adjustment. But you still can recover. It’s just gonna take a little bit longer. So is this the kind of approach that you’re describing? 

It’s in fact the approach and parallel with the lawyer, with the doctors is extremely well because all profession is for many perspectives are very close to each other. And, yeah, what I expect from my doctor is to give me a clear indication what I should do. And obviously, when I go to a doctor, I just understand half of what he’s saying to me because I’m not a professional and even the best doctor can explain to me not a full extent that exact problem and it’s exact physical biological courses that I have at the moment. And me as a lawyer, I should take into account this example because probably for the clients that came, come to me, they have the same problem with understanding legal concepts. 

So, I should not start from a legal point of view or a lawyer’s point of view that you know what representation warranty is, you know it exactly. You know what indemnification is. You need to start explaining from the basics, and obviously the client will not come to the same level of understanding the laws where you are, but you should explain to him in such a manner and in such a simple way that he comes to an understanding of what is at stake, what are the risks and where he should go. One important factor is that what we are talking about at the moment is myself. And, they, honestly, I believed that I was a good lawyer and, I could have, to, lot of the clients like, I helped you and I helped your colleague. But real trick and

real beauty is that to transfer this way of thinking also to my colleagues, and you can expect that I recruit colleagues from all over the country,
Share on X

And what was a real challenge is to train those lawyers to have the same mindset that I have. And you can expect, and this is really a very funny story, that the lawyers are those ones who work with international law firms and who’ve been with international law firms for many, many years, and they got a type of ideology of those law firms of not assuming responsibility, not to give a clear advice to the clients and then try to limit the responsibility to the highest tax possible. And when I recruit a lawyer from international law firms the first couple of months go on with trying to persuade him that assuming risk or giving a clearer advice to the client is not bad. On the contrary, it is what the client wants, but it needs training, it needs exercises. And I’ve gone through many, many occasions, especially with senior lawyers who come to me, the 10 or 15 year experience and who had a completely different mindset.

Yeah, I love that. There’s a thought leader in professional services and who was actually a former lawyer, David Meister, and he wrote about this. He wrote the book, The Trusted Advisor. It talks about this idea that the trusted advisor has to take risks in helping the client, and it’s like a personal risk because you might tell this client something that they don’t like to hear, and they might not like you in the moment for giving them this information. Of course, you have to do it in a tactful manner, but if you’re not doing it, if you shy away from it, then you are doing a disservice to the client. And often these clients are powerful individuals who are not getting pushback from the people below them.  They are not used to frank feedback and there is a risk that they will not enjoy hearing that. And they will you know, want to shoot the messenger. If you don’t do it as an advisor, then you are not giving full value to your client. So..

Correct. And this is again, a very good parallel with the doctor. So if you go to a doctor and you feel bad, what you do not expect is just neglecting your situation. Then telling you an unreasonable advice that, well, you will hear, there is no problem, just make some exercise. You want to understand the whole situation, even if the situation is painful and, it’s negative and, it has complication. So for many respects, we can learn from the doctors. So when you go to a doctor, you would like to receive transparency, a full set of information of your expected process situation. This is exactly what you request from a lawyer. 

Yeah. Love it. Okay. So you, you have your straightforward legal advice framework. So be practical in your advice specific and, share what is the risk or different outcomes. Make a suggestion, make a proposal, take some risk, and advise your client. This is very,  very helpful. Now I’d like to switch gears here and talk a little bit about how the legal profession is evolving. AI is impacting, is disrupting many, many professions and almost all types of knowledge work. And I wonder what you see is happening in this profession and what is going to happen? What is your vision? How AI is going to transform the legal profession? 

I believe there are two answers for that. The one answer is that I participated a presentation and the presentation started with a quote and the quote said that technology will transform the legal industry completely within five years. This was the quotation and he asked us that what we believe the date of this quotation was. And people started to think 2010, 2015, and no, it was 1985. So the real question is, again, that, when I believe that the the technology will transform the whole legal industry, and I believe it is the case. It has been ongoing for decades now, and people tend to say that the legal industry will be subject to a full technology transformation. And it did not yet happen, or did not yet happen too much. We are still working in a very old start fashion. And especially, I, sometimes I feel guilty that in many industries technology and digitalization has already made a very big part, not yet in the legal profession. We still have a very traditional, very old fashioned profession. So on one hand it may go on and there are old style lawyers who would like to keep up their current status quo, and they would like to maintain their current lifestyle and style of advisory. So on one hand there is a drive to try to avoid the changes and the technology development.

On the other hand, I do believe, and actually this is my clear answer that the technology will, the question within, how much time and within how many years completely transformed legal industry and the lack of the lawyers. And, this is obviously accelerated by the rival of artificial intelligence. And we already start using a certain part of artificial intelligence in our daily life. But I would say, it has an influence of 5% of our daily life, not both of 5%. And if you just think it over that open AI just came to the market and made its eruption to the market three years ago. And even at that time, it was told that, oh yes, artificial diligence will completely transform the market and all industries with a very short period of time. Well, in three years, it’s just made a 5% difference in our daily life. So I don’t know how fast this development will be, but there are lots of visions how the legal industry will look like in certain amount of time. And, you can just imagine that what we are doing as lawyers, we are putting together contracts, those contracts are made out of already existing contracts. So they have already been typed, created, put together. And this is an exercise that sooner or later can be taken over by artificial intelligence.

Analysis of laws, analysis of pieces of law, analysis of core decisions. It’s again, something, which is at the moment the prerogative of lawyers. But in a couple of year time, it’ll be taken over by AI, and the AI is developing so fast that, in one or two years, I believe, an AI will give a better summary of certain legal regulations or court decisions than a trainee lawyer. The more the IBB develop, the more sophisticated legal factual background can be given to the AI, so that it can formulate in all its own decision. The third issue was the third territories due diligence exercises. So at the moment, what we do with due diligence, we receive thousands of pages of documents we need to review. And there are humans in front of the computer, they’re reviewing, they’re trying to pinpoint the intricacies or the pain points or the red flags in company documentation. And then with hundreds, 200, 300 of job, we are putting together a due diligence report. And on one hand this can be replaced by computer and by artificial intelligence. And the second I believe in a short time, the artificial intelligence will be more accurate than a lawyer. So probably a couple of years time I will more, I will be more confident with the AI than with the junior trainee lawyer who has been given a certain type of training, he has already had a little bit of an experience, but it’s knowledge and it’s capability to review documents being far from the competence of AI.

So, where it’ll be if you lead, it’ll lead to a lower amount, lower demand for junior lawyers. So the junior lawyers work will transform, which will create lots of problems for law firms. And, I can tell you just a couple of those, on one hand, this is the practical knowledge and training of young associates. So what we did so far is that we learned, or we taught our junior the associates at the charge of the client. So we have given them a certain job. On one hand, we could invoice it to the client. On the other hand, they were trained. So it’s the best of the two worlds. And this will miss out because the client will not pay for junior associates. They will pay for the artificial intelligence. So if I need to train my lawyers, it’ll be at my own cost and not at the cost of the client. So this is on one hand, the problem. The other problem is also invoicing because we are invoicing hours of lawyers and the biggest invoice is not sent out over a one hour discussion that I have with you, I have with a client, because you can invoice just one hour, you can invoice it with 200 euros, 300 euros, 1000 euros. But it is just 1000 euro, one hour of work. And big bulk of the big amount of invoices were made out of big jobs which included lots of hours of training junior lawyers works, for example, the due diligence or putting together memos or reviewing court files, which be no longer be there. The real question that how we can maintain the amount of billings that we submitted to the client each month these days. So this is just a couple of problems that will be created by AI, but I’m sure that will, this time will come that we question,  is that when it’ll arrive. 

That is super interesting what you’re describing, and it’s been since the industrial revolution people were afraid of new technology destroying jobs. And it did happen. New technology was destroying jobs all the time, but at the same time, new jobs were created, which took, absorbed the labor force from those destroyed jobs. And it’s just, became a transition of the new jobs. And the question is– is AI qualitatively different types of this type of disruption than the previous disruptions were, and is it going to eradicate jobs without creating new jobs, or it’s gonna create more wealth and more demand for services that maybe we can’t envisage yet that has to be provided by people and therefore it’s just going to transform our economy?

When I read Mr. Hari’s book on the 21st century, he opted for the first alternative so that there will be no further work and, all of us will live a very happy life without the need for working. And we will receive a global salary each month. Okay, there will be a small cush, a small part of the population will still work and who will enjoy working, but the bigger part of our society will just trust in the sunshine, beaches and drink cocktails and get a universal salary. I would rather predict the second option, what you’ve described that even with the AI, new types of jobs will be created and more specifically, we, humans, we need to exercise, or to create a stimulus to our brain we do not like to be lazy and to stay at home without achievement or without goals or without objectives in our life. I would rather predict a world, when we will still have jobs. And we still work,  depending on what part of the world you’re living,  seven hours, eight hours, or even up to 11 or 12 hours per day. But the professions or the jobs, will be different. And,  we will need a different type of contribution to the circle of the world.

I think the desires to have meaningful lives, and I mean, you can see it in societies where, for example, a lot of women don’t join the workforce or they quit early, they raise children and then children leave and then they might not need a job because maybe they are financially secure. But they’re going to do, and they’re going to do volunteer work. They’re going to go back to college, they’re going to spend time with their grandchildren because people are always searching for meaning. And it’s the human condition, I think that’s how, that’s how we have worked. So, our time is up. Thank you for this conversation.  Polly, this was the most enlightening. So if our listeners were predominantly in the United States, but some are in Europe, if they would like to learn more, and connect with you and perhaps, seek you out, where should they go? And, where can they find you? 

Thank you very much for this conversation. I enjoyed it thoroughly. First, I encourage you to come to website this www.jalsovszky– it’s J-A-L-S-O-V-S-Z-K-Y.com. So, you’re invited to come to our website, but we also have a Facebook account. We also have an account on Instagram and we have some special thematic websites on one hand on asset management, on the other hand, tax or certain investigations, but it is just for deep insight or if you want to get deeper and dive more into activity, I will very happy to invite you on those thematic websites. But the key where you can get some further information on our practices and activities in our general website, jalsovszky.com, so you are more than welcome.

So check out jalsovszky.com. If you’re watching on YouTube, you’ll see the spelling of Pal’s surname, so just follow that, or just click on our show notes and it’s gonna be there and you can click through there. Polly, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. And those of you listening, if you enjoyed the show, make sure you follow us on YouTube and stay tuned because every week I bring an exciting entrepreneur or subject matter expert to the show. So thanks for coming. And thanks for listening.

Adam Joseph, entrepreneur, 5-time PE-funded CEO, two-time Fortune 100 executive, and Summit OS Guide™, shares how developing people through ownership, mentorship, and trust drives leadership growth and organizational success.

We explore Adam’s journey from first-time founder to leading multiple private equity–backed companies, and how his Leadership Growth Framework—Identify Talent, Launch Careers, Mentor, and Allow Them Room to Fail—has helped him build empowered, high-performing teams. Adam explains why potential matters more than experience, why CEOs must coach forward instead of managing backward, and how giving people space to fail builds resilience and confidence.

He also discusses the “Burn the Boats” mindset—what it means to go all in as a leader—and shares how to balance ambition with purpose, family, and fulfillment.

Good day. Dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast, and my guest today is Adam Joseph, who’s an entrepreneur, a five time private equity funded CEO. A two time Fortune 100 executive and the Summit OS Guide. Adam, welcome to the show, 

Steve. Thank you. It’s been a long wait. I’m thrilled to be a part of blueprint.

It’s good to have you here on the show and, you know, let’s dig in. I always ask guests about their personal why and how they manifest it in their professional life, in their business, in the practice. So what is yours? 

So, I know this sounds cliche, but you know me a little bit, so I think you can validate that. I really try to live life to its fullest when it comes to my career. I love to fill my days with people that share my passion for building. When I come home, I wanna be with people I love, and when I have time off, I want to enjoy the adrenaline sports that give me energy, whether it’s skiing or biking or hiking. Or climbing, whether it’s with other experts or newcomers who wanna learn. For me, that’s what energizes me. And I have found in my career that it’s possible to do this in business as well. I can remember as a young entrepreneur, building my first company, trying to get my very small team to be as productive as possible and to work as hard as possible. And part of the magic with that was to get the most out of them. I bought two cheap hockey goals at a Costco, and every day at lunch we play a little roller blade hockey. Not only did it make them more fit, but they, we really got to know one another and, and enjoy one another aside from sling and code. And I, not only rewarded them with a little bit of fitness, but we were fortunate to get a trade sale just a few years later. 

Wow. 

I truly believe in all things you need to savor the journey, not grind to the finish line. It’s true in a bike race, it’s true over dinner, and it’s certainly true with a business.

Yeah, I like to say also that it’s so hard to make a business successful if you don’t at least enjoy the ride and you don’t have fun along the way. 

Absolutely. I mean, and there was absolutely times in my business career where it was nearly impossible for me to come up with that right balance and it impacted my family, it impacted my personal wellbeing. I would argue that many of the management skills I developed as an operator were so that I could make the time to recover that balance between work and everything else. 

So what does it take to create the time? What does it take to have this balanced life as a top executive? It’s not something that CEOs brag about, that they are having balanced lives.

Well. A lot of it is being part of or building a great team.

To me, the best thing you can do is have people that you know and trust, that you can not only delegate things to, but know that they'll be done as well or better than you can.
Share on X

So what does it take to be at a team, such a team around you? How, how do you attract these people? 

Great question. So important and rewarding. One of the things I’m most proud of in my career, you know, are some of the people that I brought along the way and certainly appreciate others doing the same for me,

the first piece, and again, this is one of the parts I also really enjoy, is identifying talent.
Share on X

Sorry Adam. So how do you know who has potential? How does it show up? 

So some of it is just, you know, understanding what drives them, understand how they interact with you, how they interact with others that, you know, get, oftentimes you’re finding out about them because of a reputation, because of something they’ve done. Peel under the covers, understand, you know, where they want to go with this, how they got these skills, et cetera, and so forth. And in many cases, it’s giving them a test drive, taking people that have never managed anyone in their lives and saying, today you’re not gonna manage people. You’re gonna manage a project, a blueprint, what have you. And maybe that becomes a business and you get to read it or lead it, or maybe it doesn’t. That the main thing to me, whether you’re developing a leader or an individual contributor, is work with them on an idea that they can own with plenty of wiggle room for them to grow and innovate within that idea, right?

The concept of a business within a business or an entrepreneur, working for an entrepreneur makes absolute sense and really gets you to exploit the best of that person, the things that they're passionate about.
Share on X

I like what you said about ownership. You  mentioned, you used the word ownership. You’re looking for people who are willing to own their function. What do you mean exactly by owning their function? 

Owning their function. So again, it begins with you as their leader, giving them lots of rope saying, we have a problem. Right? We’re trying to, I can look at my, think back to my experience with Dan Grom at Concur. Dan was a star collections manager at Concur. He was collecting millions of dollars from some stingy CFOs who didn’t want to pay us. He came to me and said, I want to be part of your customer success organization. I wanna touch customers on the positive side not take their money after they’re already onboarded. So we came up with some ideas on things he could help me with on a fledgling business that was auditing customer expense reports. I said, Dan, figure out a way to do this less expensively and more effectively than we do today. It took months and months just to come up with the scheme, eventually resulting in us creating a thousand person global operation that Dan, who managed, you know, five collection agents when he joined me, was overseeing and generating over a hundred million in revenue. We applied his ability to connect with people. The idea that we could automate a service that we were previously doing with people to create a business that represented roughly 10% of our company’s revenue before we sold it. 

Okay. So, that’s ownership. He had an idea and you let him run with it. And he created a business within the business, kind of an entrepreneur type of situation. So, when you identify the talent, what’s the next step? What do you need to do with the talent that you identified? You give them ownership. What’s the next step? 

Oftentimes, when, before giving them ownership, getting them hired means really enticing them, right? And leveraging, you know, their own entrepreneurial spirit. For me, as a grower, right, and someone who’s building businesses, having someone with that passion is important and convincing them. That joining our team, being part of a, a bigger function and taking on a meaningful role is something they really wanna do. You know, once I bring them on board, once we give them that challenge, it certainly requires a great deal of investment in them. Training, mentoring, et cetera and so forth. You know, when it comes to mentoring, my guidance is really think about coaching people forwards, not backwards. Spending a lot of time on the things they should, or could or would’ve done isn’t gonna help them scale, you know, instead provide a framework that allows them to make mistakes. I mean, let’s face it, we’re not surgeons or nuclear scientists. So if a mistake is made, no one’s going to die. But oftentimes,

that leader or potential leader learns more from making that mistake and getting collective feedback on how they could have handled it differently than watching someone else do it or telling them how to do it.
Share on X

Yeah, yeah. Just an aside, so I just got off the call with a client. And he told me that he was very frustrated because one of his team members made a $50,000 mistake. And I said, okay, and what did you do? He said, the first thing I did was I called that person and I told her that her job is safe. This is not gonna count against her, and we are going to figure out how to solve this. And just don’t panic. Do your job and you’ll figure this out. So I think this is super important. Even Jack Welch tells a story when he blew up a factory and then he got a promotion afterwards. 

No, I think that’s great. All right. As an entrepreneur, you gotta be in it for the long haul. Right? And bumps will happen, mistakes will be made, and great ideas will evolve over time. But having people with the spirit and the confidence that you’re invested in them just as they’re invested in you and the business is critical. And by the way, just because you’re giving them a lot of rope doesn’t mean that mentoring, you know, in the form of informal conversations and feedback is super important. I strongly suggest having those conversations, if not monthly, then quarterly with your highest potential people. Keep it human, keep it informal questions like, ‘Hey, what’s working great’, ‘What would you have handled differently next time?’, ‘How can I better support you?’, those are all amazing conversation starters, right? You don’t have to end there, but start there and you’re having a conversation as peers and you’re learning. What they’re learning and helping them evolve.

Yeah, that’s great. When you actually help the person grow and they feel that you have their best interest at heart and you’re doing it not just for the business, but because it’s the right thing to do for them, that creates tremendous loyalty in my experience. 

And it’s better for the business. Right. You know, it just goes along with, you know, when there’s an opportunity to highlight. Those people share the spotlight. Get right, give them the win. Think about their next career step in the business, even if it may not be with you. My best leaders were always promoting their people, not just within their own function, but talking about to their peers and saying, this person really deserves to be a manager. This person would really develop great if they could do a stint in Europe, whatever it might be. We’re all in it for the long haul, and I view leadership development not as a nice to have, but, but really one of the highest responsibilities as a leader and truly your company’s growth, your profitability, your exit value depends on, on developing people.

I mean, it’s all about the people that run the business for you. So we talked about identifying talent. We talk about empowering them, having them own their function, and then mentoring them, help them become entrepreneurs and, you know, allow them to make mistakes. Obviously, they, you want, don’t want them to make mistakes. They don’t want to make mistakes. You’re willing to grant them the right to take some risks. Reasonable risks that can have a positive outcome and help them grow and learn what else is needed to grow your people. Anything else that you do or, or you have done over your–. 

I mean, those are certainly the primary ones, a lot of it as we’ve talked in past is also creating that framework for success. Things that they can apply to their teams, right? It’s great when you see a smooth running senior leadership team, but after all, everyone in the room has been doing that job for, in some cases, decades. Figuring out how to push it down to the next level. Give them tools, give them examples, give them processes and playbooks that they can use with their teams. And oftentimes they may come back and say, ‘Hey, the playbook that we use up here doesn’t work down there’, so this is what we’re going to do differently. But providing proven tools and being available not just to them, but being available to do the skip levels,

to learn from their team, what we may not be doing right in the boardroom, is super important to support those various parts of the business and set those leaders up to be part of your succession plan.
Share on X

Yeah. And, this is a great segue because I’d like to ask you, you know, having gone and exited five companies as a private equity funded, CEO working for Fortune 100 companies and executive. As an executive, I mean, why don’t you just keep doing what you’re doing and what made you decide to become a Summit OS Guide and help other businesses as a guide climb the mountain, so to say.

I certainly loved what I did for, well over 30 years, as an entrepreneurial CEO and operator. I still love working with high energy people who truly wanna build businesses. But honestly, after being hands-on and neck deep for that long, I decided now was an opportunity for me to pay it forward as a professional leadership guide, it gives me a chance to apply my expertise using a framework you might have heard of called Summit OS to continue my work as a coach instead of a team captain.

So what is it that most excites you about being a coach rather than working and, and running the business? After all, it’s the CEO who has all the power, right? The coach can only lead people, they can help them see things that they don’t see themselves, but ultimately, you’re not gonna make the decisions and the power is vested to the CEO.

But I love working with those CEOs, right? Even in my own businesses. Working with a line of business leaders, right? They’re the ones with the passion, they’re the ones with the vision. I’m helping them identify blind spots. I’m helping them empower their team and get more from their organization. I get to be in the meetings when they’re making some very critical decisions or really thinking about how they accelerate growth, how they apply their profits to expanding their business, et cetera, and so forth. But at the end of the day, I get to go home and see my family, and they get to spend the night doing email they couldn’t do during our meeting. And preparing to, then execute on this grand plan that I got to have some small part of. 

Yeah, I totally relate to this idea that you want to work with passionate people. You know, I find the same, that when I work with a passionate entrepreneur and I spend eight hours in the room with them in heated discussions and, you know, solving difficult problems on my feet. And when I leave, I feel energized. I feel I have more energy leaving the room than what I walked into because this passion that they have is so contagious.

Right. Well, no, absolutely, and I’m certainly, there’s days where I want to, you know, come back the next day and, you know, figure out what I can do to help. But honestly,

I believe at this stage in my career, I'm more valuable providing the tools and helping to tune the operating system of the company and allow people who created that idea,
Share on X

Yeah. And, and the CEO, you know, as you said, they have to go back and still do their days, work often after the session, and, and they really, have to go the extra mile, and make tough decisions. What was the hardest decision that you had to make in your career? 

I’d say I’m not proud to say that I had to do this more than once, but I think the hardest decisions are doing company restructurings. Good people, unfortunately, lose their jobs, even if the drivers are, things like investor issues, or product slips or a global pandemic, it’s always gut wrenching and at some level it’s your fault. 

How do you get over this and how do you process it as a CEO, especially when you feel like it’s your fault or partially your fault, maybe you could have done something that you didn’t realize at the time or, and then you have to make the decision and then you have to break the news. How do you process it? How do you move on? 

Well, you know, to begin with,

regardless of whose responsibility it is. It's your responsibility to be professional in managing the changes, determining what is necessary for the longevity of the company, making sure the team is treating the departing talent with respect,
Share on X

Yeah, I think there is momentum in businesses is super important, and when you feel like you have momentum, then maybe you are going to keep the stuff on longer because you feel like the momentum is going to carry you through the difficult patch. And often it does, right? And then by the time you are willing to put the plug, it’s already too late to some extent. And then you have to make a deeper cut. And I don’t know if that can be alleviated entirely. 

Yeah, no, it’s hard, right? I mean, certainly, you know, in companies where you have a, a direct sales organization for example, and at the end of the day the number of feet on the street, you know, directly correlates to how quickly you can grow. And it’s easy to be mesmerized and say, we need to put people in every NSL city not realizing that, that some markets for some products are going to be stronger. You find that all of a sudden. Putting offices in secondary cities or setting people up that don’t have the resources they need from headquarters or regional experts makes it that much harder for them to get productive. So you’ve made this very significant investment in an organization, in a team that’s not even been given a chance to prove themselves before you say, ‘Hey, you know what? We’re gonna shrink the sales organization and count on the people that are already performing for us.’ 

Yeah, it does happen. And sometimes it’s a board level decision. Maybe there’s a merger that happens or the board gets jittery and  they are going to mandate a change that is counter to your vision. And,  sometimes this, a CEO, a heightened CEO will have to, you know, execute. 

Right. No, it’s a painful process. I will say I learned from every one of those, right. And I bled along the way. Then you find yourself in another situation, or in our current world, right, in the role where you know you are coaching an organization and saying, you know, for whatever reason it appears that you’re really overweighted in this department and you need to figure out how you can do more with less.

Yeah, absolutely. So what is the most important question that any entrepreneur should ask themselves on a regular basis in your opinion? 

So to me, and, and first and foremost, you gotta do it day one, right? Before you tie other people’s lives to your vision. It’s, you know, are you ready to burn the boats? Right? And not just necessarily for the idea, that first idea you had, that was the spark that motivated you to quit your job and start your own company. But are you so committed to being an entrepreneur in this segment, leveraging your knowledge and passion that you are going to bet everything to turn it into a success, which not only has financial implications about lifestyle implications and you know, certainly is going to be all encompassing as you build that team. ’cause you know, you start out with a team of one and a business plan and your bank account. So unless you’re truly committed to doing those things and then making sure your significant others support you, then you may fail before you start. If you have that passion and you can’t let it go and you’re willing to, to play the long game, it’s a wonderful experience and, and so rewarding, but absolutely not for the faint heart. 

So why is it important to burn the boats? 

I think if you’re half in, you can’t get there unless you’ve invented some new industry with no competition. There’s someone else who’s staying up later and working harder, I’m not sure. And in the entrepreneurial world, smarter helps, but smarter doesn’t usually get it done. It’s passion and hard work and strategy and execution that get it done. And I think if you’re already thinking of your plan B. Or where you’re going to get a job to rebuild the piggy bank, then you’re not ready to start off as an entrepreneur. We’re a strange breed, but yeah, you need to make sure you’re one of us before you take on the risks and, and the pressures of building a business. Even you have, having done it multiple times, every time I look back and say, wow, that was a lot harder than I thought it would be, with a lot more mistakes than I intended, and it took a lot longer than I thought.

It takes twice as long and costs twice as much or more. I relate to that. So who are the ideal clients for you that you can really help climb that mountain? What kind of businesses do you love to work with the most? 

Based on my experience, I love SaaS businesses, so I’ve spent my career in enterprise software. Nearly all enterprise software is now software as a service. So that’s an area where I have a lot of passion and experience, I think. Being tested by your customers every day, having to deliver in order to collect that recurring revenue stream is also something that I thrive in. I’ve worked in a number of different segments. I certainly have enjoyed being an early innovator in the cybersecurity world. Even more recently in the physical security world. I had some great experiences in the financial technology world that just continues to scale and scale. I look at the way we did expense reports at Concur, and it seems so antiquated now that people are basically being given a third party credit card, and all they do is spend their money and it allocates and reimburses them in real time. But for me, it’s really tech enabled services and enterprise software that is my core.

But honestly, I’ve worked with a number of companies, well outside my domain space, and have come to discover that growth stage companies are independent of the product, whether they’re selling an individual skillset or a hard good or a service, the challenges we face, right? You know, with people, with the performance of the organization, with how we measure against our competition and benchmark what’s possible. And then in turn, ideally, and sometimes it takes a while, turn that into profits that then power new investments for the company. And expansion is surprising how similar businesses that I thought I knew nothing about. Once peeling under the covers  and talking to the leaders and saying, these are the problems I’m facing. Might say, well, yeah, I’ve been there and I’ve been there and I’ve been there. And let’s, you know, talk about  your alternatives. Oftentimes they have the vision and they have the answers.

It's just having the conversation of how we put them in order and work with the broader management team to execute against them.
Share on X

Okay, so if someone from our audience would like to learn more and, and connect with you and maybe have a conversation about their business, where can they find you? 

Well certainly they can find me on LinkedIn. They can go to ACJ Advisors, my website. And there’s also a wealth of information on the Summit OS CEO website. Not just coaches like myself, but there’s always fresh information on the site that you might find interesting as an entrepreneur. 

Awesome. Well, Adam Joseph, entrepreneur and five time CEO of private 200 businesses, twice Fortune 100 executive. So been in the trenches and now helping other small to medium sized businesses scale. Thanks for coming on the show and sharing your experience and wisdom, and those of you who enjoy this conversation, stay tuned because every week I bring another seasoned entrepreneur or CEO to discuss their framework that they came up with on the show. So thanks for coming, Adam, and thank you for listening.

Tinsley Galyean, CEO of Curious Learning, is on a mission to eradicate illiteracy worldwide by helping people reframe how they think, learn, and lead through curiosity.

We explore Tinsley’s journey from the MIT Media Lab to co-founding Curious Learning, a non-profit transforming education for children in over 200 countries. He introduces his Eliminate Limiting Beliefs Framework, which guides leaders to let go of defensiveness, open up to curiosity, ask questions to understand, and create awareness of their assumptions.

Tinsley explains how curiosity dissolves barriers to change, why awareness precedes transformation, and how these principles can drive both personal growth and global literacy. He also shares stories of communities teaching themselves to read and offers a surprising belief that 90% of leaders would disagree with—challenging traditional notions of control and leadership.

Good day, dear followers of the Management Blueprint Podcast. My name is Steve Preda. I’m the host and my guest today is Tinsley Galyean, the CEO of Curious Learning, a nonprofit that is working to eradicate illiteracy around the word. And Tinsley received an Emmy nomination for his work on the Discovery Channel and has recently authored Reframe: How Curiosity and Literacy Can Define Us. So please, welcome Tinsley Galyean to our show. 

Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me here. 

Yeah. It’s great to have you and you have a really inspiring nonprofit. 

Thank you. 

Normally, I don’t have  nonprofits on the show, but yours was an exception because I really like what you’re trying to achieve here. So let’s start with my favorite question, which is, what is your personal why and how are you manifesting it with Curious Learning? 

That’s always a good question. Thank you. I’ll take a quick moment to do a little bit of background to lead up to that because I think like most people, my personal why has evolved over time. So I, my background is in computer science, electrical engineering, as well as design and media. I ended up doing my PhD work at the MIT media lab in the early nineties. Then was in the world of technology and media, mostly kids, space, and often had an educational component for a couple decades as a result of that. And then shifted my work more towards kind of nonprofit philanthropic work and was asked to work with the Dalai Lama to start the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. From there, asked to come back to MIT and teach and start to get involved in research projects. One of those research projects was asking whether children could learn to read if the only resource they had was a tablet with some curated apps on it and left to their own devices. This kind of skunks work research project was done in remote Ethiopia and gave kids that had no access to school and no one in the village that were literate that access to these tablets and left them alone for a year.

And after a year, they were roughly at the same place. They would’ve been in a well-resourced US kindergarten, which was an astonishing realization. And I was kind of at the right time, at the right place with the right history and the right skills to say, you know, what does this mean? Can we replicate this? Can we scale it? What could the impact be globally if we could make it a reality? And you know, that kind of became the birth of Curious Learning, you know, in terms of getting back to your real question, which is the personal why during that journey

I came to believe and understand that a big part of what we're doing as humans in our lifetime is learning and growing.
Share on X

Yeah. That’s amazing. So how is, how can you achieve that, these kids with a tablet that they even know what to do with it and keep it charged? I mean, you see people who are highly educated, forget to charge their mobile phones. I wonder how can you get this who come from very disadvantaged backgrounds to actually be organized enough to even do this?

And I think there’s a distinction between kids, and adults too. Right? You know, when we handed out the devices in those first remote villages and we replicated this experiment in a number of places around the world, we don’t even tell the kids how to turn them on. We just give them. And then, you know, if they ask what they should do, we said, you figure it out. And it usually takes about four minutes at a maximum before some kids figured out how to turn it on. And it usually is not more than 20 minutes before every kid has it turned on, and they’re sharing and collaborating and talking to each other and working. It’s, there’s this innate curiosity that when you facilitate it and enable it. Just kind of takes over. And there is something magic about the touchscreen. The touchscreen is unlike a traditional computer interface where you have a keyboard and you have to know your letters. This, the touchscreen is something you really can’t engage with as a pre literate person. So that kind of innate person curiosity is part of the magic that makes it happen.

Yeah, that I mean, curiosity is such a huge motivator of people and it’s a huge, huge driver of progress. So this is amazing. So tell me a little bit about Curious Learning as it is in the name of your company as well, and how do you help people grow in a broader terms, maybe in a, you know, 30,000 view. What is blocking people from growing in general, and how do you help them get envelope? 

Yeah. So, I talk about this a lot in the book and we can kind of touch on the high levels of it here and there’s a lot more depth in the book, but a big part of what we’ve kind of discovered over our journey over these last 10 years is that we all have beliefs that we hold about how things should work and how things should operate. And that’s certainly true in the educational system around the world, right? Those beliefs can be very helpful for us.

They can frame how we act and what we do and help us make decisions about whether something is appropriate or good to engage with or not.
Share on X

Okay. So that leads us to the theme of our podcast, which is frameworks that any entrepreneur or business leader can apply to their own business and their own situation. So what is the framework here? What is the framework for alleviating limiting beliefs? 

Okay, so I’ll give you the high level one, the starting point. There’s a lot more depth in the book and there are a lot of examples, kind of global examples too that are very helpful to see in here as you go through it. But the general premise is that anytime you’re in a conversation with a prospective customer or a client, even somebody within your own organization, you can usually feel into that moment when there’s some resistance. Where either resistance in yourself or in the other person you’re talking to or both and you bumped up against something where people wanna kind of shut down that conversation and often they say something that does feel like it’s an end of the conversation and you know, it’s at those moments we tend to, we have to kind of fight our internal nature to just kind of say, it’s over. Let’s move on. Right. And the question is how do we do two primary things. One is that if there’s any kind of resistance or defensiveness that builds up in ourselves from that having happened, let go of that, make a conscious effort to let go of that in turn. On the other side of that coin is curiosity that we were just talking about, which is get very curious about what’s behind this without judgment, you know, start asking questions. Now questions like, tell me more about what you’re, what you’re thinking, or what kind of experience are you drawing upon that made you think that way or feel that way? And as you ask these questions, you can start to get down to what is the belief that person is holding or even for yourself, what belief you’re holding that’s creating that resistance.

Can you give an example? 

Well, I’ll give you an example from our World of Curious Learning. We’ll be in a conversation with, say, a Ministry of Education in an African country, and they’ll put forward the idea of using mobile devices to help the kids learn to read. They’ll be like, you know, that’s, that’s not possible. We’re not interested in it. Right. And there’s, we will start probing. Okay, so what’s behind that? What do you, you know, why do you think that’s not possible? We have a lot of evidence that this is possible. We have a number of examples of how it’s been used, and often what comes up is we kind of dig deeper into it, is that there’s one of two things that tend to come up on that particular conversation. One is that they don’t believe that many of the people in the country actually already have a smartphone. And that there isn’t one there. And the reality is that base is growing so fast and so big so quickly that even they’re unaware of how entrenched it is. The second one is there’s the belief that screen time is bad for children and that they shouldn’t support it. Where, and, and this, that’s one that’s got a lot going on at that particular belief in society, right? There’s a lot of feelings from parents that, too much time on screens right now is bad for kids, but we take the stance that it’s what you do with that screen time. It’s a medium. Anything.

There's good things you can do with it and there are non-productive bad things you can do with it, and you need to learn to help your kids choose the good ones.
Share on X

Yeah. Is that in your book how to do that? 

Yes, it is. 

I definitely have to read it, although we are empty nesting now, but we’ll have grandkids at some point and, we wanna apply the knowledge. So, okay, so you basically, you have this conversation you, you let down your guard, your defensiveness, you, you try to be, have an open mind and hear what’s behind their belief, and either they have limiting beliefs or maybe you have, or I have limiting belief in this conversation. Or maybe both of us. 

Yeah. 

And then how does that unfold? Because if I give assertive examples of, it’s not possible, but I can prove you that it’s possible they might shut down. Right. So how do I do it in a tactful way so that they don’t feel threatened by my argument?

Well, yeah, and I think part of what you’re doing is first you unearth the belief and give it voice. Actually say what that belief is. Right. You know, I feel like you have the concern that many of the children that we would wanna reach don’t have access to a smartphone. Right. Maybe that’s true. Maybe that’s not. What could we do to test that? Could we run a campaign and see how many kids we can get and parents can get to download it and look at the numbers and see if that makes it viable or not. And then in that context, kind of have have a discussion about, well, maybe that belief ought to be relaxed. Maybe we should consider modifying that belief. Maybe that belief is more like, you know, a lot of people already have them, but we still, there’s still a base of people that we’re gonna need to reach in the future. And we’ll watch that over time to see when that’s gonna be available. You start to suggest a modification to the belief and then move to that, and you know, like anything that’s a new belief that

will have a certain amount of time that is very helpful, and then eventually reach its expiration date. But that's part of learning and growing.
Share on X

So Tinsley, if you continue this example that you talked about the education ministry in the African country. So they have this belief, you present the evidence, but then what’s this, the verbiage that you use in order to not be at that resistance wall and help them engage with your idea without losing.

Right. Well, I’ll tell you something. I’ll actually tell you a little story about what we started doing a lot of times is that when we started meeting with Ministries of Education, we would sometimes find that they would be resistant to the idea that kids could learn on these devices and would even enjoy playing the apps or have access to them. What we started doing is that a couple weeks before we had the meeting with the Ministries of Education, what we would start to do is run ad campaigns in and around the area that anybody who works in the Ministry of Education lives to try to get parents to download and use the app. Now, what happened when we came to the meeting is inevitably there was at least one person who had seen their kids or their grandkids playing the app before we got to the meeting. They would stand up and talk about how wonderful it was, and we would preempt the first half hour of the conversation about whatever limiting beliefs they had and cut them got the loop before we even got to them. 

That is crazy. You hear this kind of advertising happening in some places that, you know, the White House gets a lot of these geo the advertising, for example. And, it is a way to lobby for changes and it’s pretty  interesting. So, moving on to the book, because the title is Reframe, which is kind of what you’re doing is reframing–

Yes, absolutely. 

Their beliefs. So the title of the book is Reframe: How Curiosity and Literacy Can Be Define Us, and maybe that’s not in the book. I haven’t read your book because it hasn’t come out yet, but one of the thing I was wondering, how’s it gonna change the world if illiteracy was completely eradicated? 

Well, you know what I’ve come to learn, which is, you know, one of the reasons this is such a strong passion of mine is that literacy is so foundational. The UN has adopted SDG four, which is that everybody should have the right to education for their whole life, But you know, so we’ve reached a point in the history where we believe access to education is effectively a human right. And one of the reasons we believe that is because it’s such a lever for access to so many things, and literacy is the foundational piece. You have to have literacy to get access to other types of education that are out there. So we know that for every year of literacy, you get your income increases by practically 10%. So it’s a massive impact on you economically. As a result, a massive impact on the globe, in terms of GDP around the world, the estimate for the the global GDP is about $1.2 trillion a year of GDP is lost from male literacy. At the same time, two thirds of the people who are literate are women. So it’s a gender issue, it’s very difficult.

The pandemic was a perfect example of how difficult it is to get health information out to people if they’re not literate. Child labor, human trafficking, all of these things are in the long term, mitigated by an educated, literate population. Okay. All those things relax on. The dilemma we have is that, you know literacy is never life threatening. These other things often are, so you have to make a longer term investment in literacy, but you know it’s gonna move the level on all those things in the long term. So one of the premises that we gets us particularly excited about this is that it’s very rare for a literate parent to raise in illiterate child, which you have the skills of some level of skills of literacy, and you know the value of having those skills. You work very hard to find a way to get your child literate. So if you can get a set of parents literate them and all their offspring will remain literate kind of indefinitely.

So if we could get an entire generation literate, we could effectively inoculate the world against illiteracy kind of indefinitely, and that's a powerful idea.
Share on X

Yeah. So how far are we from this? What is the percentage of population with literate? 

Unfortunately, we’re really far from it 

Really?

There’s about pre pandemic, you know, there’s about 770 million adults in the world that were effectively have no literacy skills. It was expected that about 660 million kids would join them. The number of kids that reach grade level literacy by fourth grade in Africa is only 10%. It’s about 12% in India right now. Those numbers, they were a little better than that before the pandemic. They’re a little worse after the pandemic. So there’s a large group of people that we have to reach to make this change, and the problem’s gonna be exasperated over the next 25 years because of the massive population growth. It’s about ready to happen in Sub-Saharan Africa. 

10% of the of the population is electric globally.

Excuse me, is of what? Yeah. That’s probably about right. That’s probably about right. And there’s complete illiteracy. There’s a whole secondary group that is, doesn’t have complete functional literacy, that has only kind of partial literacy skills.

Wow. This is, this is a very worthy why. This is a very worthy mission. It feels like something that may be doable within our lifetimes. 

I think so, and I don’t, and I don’t think it would’ve been without the advent of the new kind of technologies and approaches that we have. I think, you know, a few decades ago you couldn’t have fathomed a way of achieving it, and it’s a byproduct of some of the technological tools we have on hand that could make this a reality. And the fact that infrastructure is effectively being paved by the sale of smartphones and internet connections. 

Yeah. That’s amazing. So, tell me about your book. What is it about? And obviously a lot of the stuff that we already covered is in the book, but, right. What was your objective with the book? With the book? 

Well, I think there, you know, there are two primary objectives of the book. You know,

one is to bring awareness to this issue, to the global literacy issue, and the work that needs to be done by us and others to make it a reality,
Share on X

So what has been your experience growing your nonprofit and with such a valid mission? Is it easy to attract good people to the company who want to join that mission? 

Yeah, I think so you know, we’re very, you know, we’re a very diverse group of people. We have, you know, roughly 20 people that are working with us, you know, all the time. Plus contractors. You know, we have hundreds of contractors that are native speakers of language. We operate in 60 different languages. Our apps are used in all 257 countries and territories around the world. We focus a lot of our effort on kind of 30 to 40 countries. But, you know, so it’s a very, you know, we have folks in the US, folks in Europe, folks in several parts of Africa, and you know, India, Philippines, Georgia, you know, scattered around with a variety of different skills and, you know, they’re there because they’re inspired by the mission and wanna be part of it. And, and that kind of diversity also breeds a lot of learning and growth for all of us. 

Yeah, that’s amazing. So how do you manage this organization which is in, you know, diverse time zones. How do you get the culture around. 

Yes. It’s, you know, that’s always a challenge, particularly since everybody’s coming from very different cultures, right? Yeah. There’s a lot of work that’s done asynchronously, you know, with all the time zone that’s, it’s done there. We do try to connect to smaller groups at different times. You know, there’s a magic hour for me. The magic hour is 10:00 AM in the morning, which I’m almost always booked ’cause, and it’s very rare for me to be on a call that doesn’t have four or five time zones represented. I think, you know the inspiration of being part of the mission is a big part of it. We do try to convene together at different parts around the planet at different, with different subgroups of our organization at different times, often at sites where we’re trying to do work. 

It’s very interesting. And what would you like our listeners to do as a result of our conversation? 

Well, I think, I hope that the framework of, you know, and the thoughts around limiting beliefs are of aid to you. So I encourage you to kind of engage with that. Some of my early readers from the book have talked about not only how it has inspired. Them to think about the global problems that are there, but also how the framework of limiting beliefs thing are things that they’re starting to apply to their personal life and how they even interact with them within their families and with their friends. And so I am hopeful that it’s of aid to that. So I encourage people to look at that and use that. Anything people can do to help bring awareness to the cause I’m an advocate for, and you know part of that can be hopefully buying the book and spreading the word so that it’s of help to everybody. 

Okay, so your book is coming out on October 24th. Is it October 20— 

Yes, it’s October 24th. It’s available for pre-order already.

Pre-order, so people can go on Amazon and Google your name Tinsley Galyean and the Reframe: How Curiosity Literacy Can Be Define as is the title of the book. 

Absolutely.

So do that. If people would like to reach out to you and, and talk to you or contact you, where should they go?

LinkedIn. I do monitor, so that’s easy to get me at curiouslearning.org is our website. You can certainly reach me through that. We have, you know, forms there can reach me. I’m pretty visible. They’re not many Tinsley Galyean pretty easy to find me if you remember my name. 

Alright, so Tinsley Galyean, the CEO of Curious Learning. So check out Tinsley’s book, Reframe on Amazon. It’s already out on pre-order. And also check out curious learning.org to see what they’re doing. I think it’s amazing mission that you are supporting and I think it’s super exciting that our generation can achieve this potentially to eradicate illiteracy and all the ailments that come with it. If you’d like to reach out to Tinsley, maybe you wanna be part of his mission, then connect with him on LinkedIn. Tinsley Gallian. G-A-L-Y-E-A-N is his surname.

Yeah. And Tinsley, T-I-N-S-L-E-Y. My first name, even if you just remember that, [email protected] gets to me as well.

Yeah. Okay. That’s the email and, and yeah, Tinsley is not a very common name either. So Tinsley, it was super interesting to talk to you. Thanks for coming on the show. And for those, those of you listening, if you enjoyed the show, then make sure you follow us on YouTube and stay tuned because every week I have an entrepreneurial leader joining us on the show. So thanks for coming, and thank you for listening.

Bill Ryan, Founder of Ryan Consulting, helps organizations maximize their investment in technology and people by ensuring they work together efficiently and effectively, regardless of location.

We explore Bill’s journey from technologist to consultant and his mission to connect people “over time and distance” by giving them what they need at the time of need. Bill introduces his Culture of Curiosity Framework, a leadership model designed to foster innovation, engagement, and problem-solving inside organizations. The framework emphasizes being willing to say “I don’t know”, making it safe to ask “why”, encouraging employees to figure out solutions, and provoking thoughtful conversation that sparks collaboration.

Bill also shares why curiosity is the foundation of leadership, how leaders can model vulnerability to build trust, and why he views learning and development not as an expense but as a strategic investment in long-term performance and retention.

Good day. Dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Bill Ryan, the founder of Ryan Consulting, helping organizations maximize their investment in technology and people by ensuring they work together efficiently, effectively, regardless of location. Bill, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Steve. Glad to be here. 

Well, I’m excited to have you and, to hear about your personal why and how you are manifesting it in your practice and activities. 

I love that question. You told me you were gonna ask it. It made me think for a little bit and it took me back to like my very, very beginning part of my, of my career and it was all about how to use technology to send the message across time and distance. And I think that’s my fascination is my focus has really been centered on how to connect people over time and distance to the things that they need to support their performance at the time of need. And it’s kind of guided me through the various levels of technology of the various boxes we needed, the various places we stored information. But

the way I kind of manifested is that it's all about centered on the person and making sure we meet their need at the time of need so that they can be successful.
Share on X

That’s fascinating because ultimately you have to meet your clients where they are, and you can’t just put them in a box or put them on a cookie cutter framework and just hope that it’ll do the job you need to figure out what they need and how you adjust to that. Now, this is a good segue because you developed a framework called Strategy On A Page. It’s really a five step process and you call it SOAP. And other than the acronym I’m trying to still figure out what the connection of SOAP and this process is. Maybe you can enlighten me and also tell me about this process that you have come up with. 

Well, and I wanna be clear, I didn’t invent this somewhere earlier in my career. I ran across this idea of a strategy on a page, and it was really, and it stuck with me, it has stuck with me through all of my years about how we as, as leaders, can convey our strategy to both our stakeholders, but also our leaders in a clear and succinct manner. So at the end of a process that I’ll talk about in just a minute, is this one pager, a strategy on a page. But to collect it, I have found kind of takes five key steps. And the first part really is about talking to the people in the organization and at all levels. And you said something just a moment ago that I think is so important because where I focus this idea of this soap results in is that it’s not a cookie cutter. So you have to really go talk to the people at all organizations, the part-timers, the hourly employees, the front office, the back office, the middle managers, supervisors, leaders, executives. But you have to really go talk to them and ask ’em a lot of questions ’cause they’re living the work. And then the second step is you listen.

You know, poll questions. I’m a big fan of the five why’s. There’s a book on that, and I just gave the entire premise away. You ask why five times and you’ll get probably the good basic root cause of a problem, but you listen to the people and you kind of start to see themes. You can start to synthesize what they’re saying, what they’re living, what they’re experiencing. And more importantly, the things that they can see that would help them do their jobs better so that they’re successful. And after that, you kind of pull all that together. You go talk to leadership, but you frame it in the language of their people. I have found more success when I quote the people by using their words. I don’t, you know, put it, you know, I don’t put Joe Smith under the tray, under the truck right away, but I use that words and, and I wanna be very specific to leaders can understand and help kind of create that bridge of the context of the worker and their work back to the leader. So that they can kind of see it and you frame it in their own words and then you kind of help connect the dots. You help them understand that strategy has to be linked back to the tactical applications.

So you bring focus into what will help make the organization move forward. You kind of help them identify the needs versus the wants.
Share on X

And that I think is a key part because that’s when the plan kind of gels together. You know, we’re not adding something new to workplace because too many idea, too many times. I know in my career we had, oh, the next great idea, well, we just had one two years ago and we had another one and we’ve never taken them away.

So part of this strategy that I do is to help the leadership understand that you know, your workers only can do so many things. So let's take this now that we've kind of helped connect all these dots. And go from a plan towards how we can people…
Share on X

Okay, so, let me just zoom out here because sure there’s a lot in there and I’m afraid, I mean, I find it challenging to keep up and maybe the listeners who do something else motor loans or drive their cars, they will also find it. So the first thing that I’m really trying to grasp or,  grasping here, or maybe it’s, it’s talking to me, is this idea of crowdsourcing solutions from the people in the organization. So as a consultant, you know, sometimes we are guilty of coming in and we have preconceived ideas and we think we can fix things and, we just, you know, wanna be the smart, smartest person in the room or whatever it is. And then we just, you know, vomit ideas. But the level of buy-in into our ideas is gonna be a lot lower than level by in the ideas and the people inside the organizations, and then the other thing that struck me was that you talk about the language that the people are using on the front lines and feed that language back in and creating the context of the work worker or the lower level employee in the organization and synthesize, use the word, synthesize it back to the leadership so that they understand it may be in their own language. What those people are saying in their language. So are these critical components of this, this whole process that you crowdsource the ideas and then you synthesize it and transmit it to leadership and basically help to bridge the communication divide between them, help them figure out the strategy. Is this, how you see it as well? 

Absolutely. I think the best thing I can, I can bring into an organization sometimes is the willingness to ask questions that some people aren’t. But I think the people within an organization, you know, the majority of the time, a high majority of the time, already have ideas on how to do things better, faster, cheaper, safer. If you just ask them. And I think, yeah, I’m willing to go ask, you know, Mike, I’m driven by curiosity. You know, those, those people are highly skilled. Ask ’em, they’re experts. 

Yeah, no,  that’s definitely, and you know, it, it takes some level of humility to ask questions and not lead with answers, but lead with questions and let other people take the credit for the ideas. And that’s often in short supply and. Plus you bring,the objective, they are outsider as well, right?  So you are, you can ask those dumb questions that the inside people would don’t dare ask because of, you know, they might feel being shamed for them. Okay. So you basically connected that. So I think some of the things you mentioned her was talk to the people, listen and synthesize,  give the feedback, help connect the dots and craft a plan. So what does it take to help connect the dots? Is there like an, an approach that you take or some, is it just your experience of several decades of doing this? You kind of do this intuitively or is there a madness to the method or method to the madness, rather, how to connect these dots.

You know, I got 25 years plus of doing this, so there was a little bit of, I have done this a few times, but a lot of times it’s the partnership that I have created with the people in that organization about getting their understanding of what it makes to the strategy the high executives have come out with to make it actually work. The special sauce is being helpful in, again, asking the questions, but you know, how do we take strategy and make it tactical? How do we bring that focus back to the operational implementation and how do we measure it? Those folks tend to know those in that information in greater detail than I possibly could, but I can help create the link between what the corporate strategy plan is and how to make it actually work. And that, I think is where we help connect the dots. And I can go back up to leadership at that point in time and show them, you know, you wanna do this, here are the steps that will get us there. And a part of that is you know, kind of going through and going, here’s the needs and the wants, and let’s focus on the needs that’ll move the business forward, and we’ll put the wants. And if we have extra time and money, sure we can go for those too. 

Yeah. Well. It’s very rare that there’s extra money lying around, but you never know. So you talk about the curiosity of asking the right questions or asking any questions, being curious, what does it take to help an organization be more curious to kind of create a culture of curiosity? 

Oh that’s a great question. And I think this is where it does start with leadership. I think this is where, we, as leaders, have to model the behavior. The way how it was impressed in my brain was you know, my leader at the time, very openly coming up at one point saying, I don’t know. How we find out it to this day, I mean decades later. The power of that statement has resonated with me and I have tried to emulate that through my own journey, along my own professional journey. And I think

this is when you know, you have to acknowledge what you don't know. And get people around you to help figure it out and to show that it's okay not to know, to not be the expert.
Share on X

Yeah. So if you make it okay for people to not have to know the answers and you empower them to go and search for it and then share it, then you are essentially creating the structure.

That I think that, and the idea that if they question your statements, you know, that’s the other part too of that is you don’t take offense. It’s okay to say why. You know, why are we doing that? That’s a good question. I think we’re doing it because of this, you know, instead of coming back, going, you know, ’cause I say. So again, leaders modeling behavior, that opens up discussion that increases the chance for collaboration. 

Yes, I’m trying to remember the long time, the name of the long time CEO of General Motors who had this practice that when there was a topic on the board and basically there was a consensus on what to do. He always was suspicious that maybe there wasn’t enough curiosity involved in order to cons to this decision. And then he would adjourn the meeting and say, okay, so gentlemen, don’t come back until you have all the counter arguments against doing this thing, and then we can have a conversation. 

I think that is a very healthy attitude. The same manager that I was referring to earlier had one of his favorite catch phrases at the time was he liked to provoke conversations. And I’ve used that line for years because I think it does, it helps  create a healthy discussion. And, you know, I mean, when you’re curious, it starts exploring the, the possibilities pro and con. And it can start saying, well, if this doesn’t work. What will happen and how will we recover? How will we be better prepared? How can we mitigate the circumstances that that might lead us there in a faster, more efficient way? It’s not only, you know, I think being proactive, but it’s also being a growthful and I think it’s allowing people to start stretching,

to broaden and build them as participants and partners as well as curious workers.
Share on X

Yeah, and I think the value of curiosity is just going to go through the roof with all the information being at our fingertips with AI and with all the search engines and it’s not about the information, it’s about connecting the dots and being curious why this is so, does it even make sense? And asking the questions and being a little bit skeptical. Just to reflect on what you said about.  what if it doesn’t work? You know, what’s the worst thing that can happen? How do we recover from it? One of the exercises we used to do in a COP group, I was working with was, you know, let’s put someone out of business. So picked, we picked someone in the group, and okay, we are, let’s put him or her out of business and show them what are the ways that the competitors would come up with to put them out of business and reflect about, what to do about it, how to prevent this happening.

Again, having that chance to ask questions. I think just, you know, having other people to pose you– that’s one of the things I ike about AI, which is actually kind of, you know, associated with this is, is to bring something out and, and have it challenge me. You know, go up and go, you know, poke the holes in, in this attached document, you know, to find out what, what could go wrong and, and, and having again, you know, that intuitive process. And allowing you to broaden and build your own thoughts. But I think that, that the result is, especially as I found with my teams, is that when we had that kind of, you know, pro and con and we had to make a decision by then, it was actionable and it was pretty innovative and we were ready for anything that was, could or might go wrong.

Yeah, it’s good. It’s good to have the emergency plan in the back pocket for sure. 

Always, always. 

So let me switch gears here and ask you kind an unrelated question. You’ve been in this business as a consultant for several decades and you’ve seen a lot of things. So what’s one belief that you hold that 90% of leaders would disagree with?

I think the biggest thing people would disagree with is that learning and development is not an expense. Most people that I work with look at this and say, oh, training, well that’s an expense. So, you know, it’s one of the first things that want, we need to save money, let’s cut training. And I kind of go with them and I go, yeah, no, it’s not. There is a return on learning and I think they would, most people would disagree. But I’ve been able to have conversations where I can at least expand the idea and the viewpoints. But you know, the key is, is that, you know, I think many leaders, and I’ll throw some of my own L and D folks, you know, into this bucket too. We have sometimes measured the wrong things and we’ve measured metrics that really don’t matter and then make it look like we’re an expense. Things that nobody cares about. How many classes did you offer? How many people were there? What were their test scores or quiz scores?

And nobody cares about that stuff. What they care about is, you know, did the people that go through the programs perform better or faster when they, you know, came back? So, you know, did we move the needle on the business metrics? Did we increase retention? Did we reduce on the job injuries? Sick days? Did we have fewer environmental citations or human resource citations? You know, the kind of things that I think are key to the business sometimes. We don’t track them as, as we should. So I think leaders, if I said to them, you know, there is a return on learning, I think they would look and go, it’s an expense. And I go, I disagree. 

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s all about learning. If you don’t turn your company into a learning organization, then you’re gonna be passed by. 

Yeah. 

By all the other ones that are gonna disrupt you. That’s for sure. So sometimes you have these counter beliefs. So is there, was there a time when you’ve gotten a common advice and you ignored it and it paid off big for you?

I had one in particular that still makes me smile. I was part of an organization with a large call center that was out offshoring and outsourcing some of its work. And I had been tracking the learning and development team, the time that we spent on maintaining the content. Now we’re highly regulatory environment. So a lot of changes state by state, all those kind of things. So to make sure that we were still compliant and up to date, it took a lot of work, both from supporting our performance,  support tools within the systems, the assessments and development of the content. So I’ve been tracking that and I’ve been told for a long time, you know, you’re just wasting your time. Nobody cares about that stuff. And I disagreed. So fast forward all of a sudden we’re getting a big audit and we’re gonna reduce our force and we’re going to reduce our employee headcount because we’re offshoring and we’re outsourcing. And I, you know, obviously we won’t be teaching as many, you know, domestic workers. And I was called into, was told my number, and I said, okay. That’s fine. Our vendors prepared to do the following things, and here, by the way is my tracking for the last couple of years of the time we spent maintaining and updating and keeping us compliant with the laws of this content. I’ve got all the stuff that here, but you know, are they ready to take that over as well? At the end of the day, I ended up getting approval to hire additional staff. 

That’s pretty neat. That’s very interesting. Well, so if people would like to learn more about your Strategy On A Page and how to interview people and transmit the information and connect the dots for leadership and your turn strategy into tactics, or where should they go and where can they connect to you?

I would welcome them to check out my website. There’s a free fill in the blank template of a Strategy On A Page there that they can find too, along with some eBooks and other things. But my website is www.williamjryan, all one word, williamjryan.com and I’m always found on LinkedIn. Or email me at [email protected]. 

Okay, well that’s a great website. No one’s gonna steal it from you. Bill, thank you for coming and sharing your wisdom with us and your frameworks. And those of you listening, if you enjoyed this, please follow us on LinkedIn, on YouTube, on Apple Podcast. Give us a review and stay tuned because every week I come with a thought leader or entrepreneur who is sharing something smart that you can implement in your business. So thanks for coming, Bill, and thank you for listening. 

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it, Steve.

Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, has devoted his career to helping people grow their businesses by turning contacts into lasting, valuable relationships.

We explore Jon’s journey from creating GoldMine, one of the first successful CRMs, to founding Nimble, a relationship-focused CRM that brings contact management back to its roots. Jon shares his personal “Why” — to grow his soul by helping others grow theirs — and explains why relationships, not technology, are the real key to business success.

He introduces his signature frameworks: the Five F’s of Relationships (Family, Friends, Food, Fun, and Fellowship) for building authentic connections, the Five E’s of Brand-Building (Educate, Enchant, Engage, Embrace, and Empower) for expanding influence, and the Three P’s (Passion, Plan, Purpose) for achieving personal and professional goals. Jon also describes how Kanban-style workflows and selective automation enable entrepreneurs and teams to manage contacts at scale without losing the human touch.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is John Ferrara, the CEO of Nimble, a pioneering relationship focused CRM company. John has dedicated his career to helping people grow their businesses by turning contacts into lasting valuable relationships. John, welcome to the show. 

Thank you, Steve. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me for this conversation. Hopefully the listeners are going to be able to take away nuggets that will help them achieve their dreams. 

Well, definitely you have a really interesting framework and topic, and business that works on that and in that area. So let’s get to it. But before we start talking about your business, I’d like to ask, what is your personal why and how are you manifesting it through your work at Nimble and Beyond?

Steve, I think my personal why is that I am on this planet to grow my soul in the brief period of time that I’m here. And I believe that the best way to grow your soul is by helping others grow theirs. The analogy I like to use is I found that I got better at chess the more people I taught how to play chess.

Yeah. I mean, that’s the best way of learning– teaching others. 

Yeah. And I think, it’s the best way of growing is growing others.

Okay. Well, I couldn’t agree more. It’s the way to multiply yourself or your knowledge in others. That’s definitely a good way to grow. 

Yeah. And my summary is the more people you outgrow, the more you will grow. 

I mean, it’s the old what was this business? 

Zig Ziglar?

Zig Ziglar. You know, if you have enough people to get what they want, then you’re gonna get what you want. 

It really is the basics, like life is about the basics. It’s not that complicated. 

That is true. So tell me a little bit about your work in CRM and then you founded Goldmine, one of the first successful CRMs, and then you are now running Nimble. So what was the lessons from building Goldmine and what inspired you to then move on to Nimble and create something, a next generation CRM. 

From my perspective as helping to pioneer contact management– call it Outlook and CRM, call it Salesforce, is at the heart of all that are contacts– their relationships, and that’s why CRM stands for ‘customer relationship management’, and it grew out of the contact management market.

You really have to know the past in order to understand the present, and you could actually predict the future if you have a good handle on all of these things.
Share on X

And that’s where I came into this, I was in sales and they basically told me to go get ’em and I had no tools to do it. And I think the best products come from your own need ’cause you’re past about it and you understand the problem. And my problem was not just that I wanted to be better at selling to my prospects and customers, but more than that,  because I recognized that in my sales cycle I was doing enterprise sales to large corporations, but at the same time building relationships with distributors and resellers to try to access customers at their customers at scale. I found that I didn’t work in a vacuum. I worked as part of a larger team, and everybody in that team was touching the customer, and I wanted to run a wire through all of our Daytimers so everybody was on one page, so that no matter who picked up the phone, you knew who you were talking to. ‘What happened? Who did it? What’s gonna happen? Who’s gonna do it?’ That way, you’re all on one page. It’s kind of like when you call American Express, they know who you are, they know what happened and they know what needs to happen. And this didn’t exist in corporate America at that time in 1986, 87, 88.

And I wanted to do more than that. I wanted not just a team contact platform, which is the basis of shared contacts with shared history and pending. But I wanted to be able to automate the sales process in order to do not just pipeline management, managing a sales pipeline, which we used to do in spreadsheets, but to be able to do some automation because we all know what we should do, but we don’t do it, ’cause we’re human. We’re too busy, we forget, right? And it’s the follow up and follow through. It takes 22 touches before somebody’s in a buying cycle, and most people give up to the first to third touch. Why? It’s a lot of work to call people up and send them emails and, and manage all those workflows and processes. So I trademarked automated processes and that was the basis of email marketing. And so my history in conduct management,

CRM Salesforce automation and email marketing is– I was in the infancy of it and I created it to solve my own problems, but it turned out that millions of people had the same problem.
Share on X

Okay. So that is fascinating. Now, a lot of people have misgivings about CRMs because they feel like it’s overwhelming or they don’t have a good overview of what the information is in it, and then you have to update, and the automation makes a lot of sense, if you can update it with automation, but ultimately, how does one use a CRM to build relationships? So what, what does it take? Is it just reaching out and sending email automations or  it’s something more than that. 

It’s way more than that, Steve and I like to reduce that to know technology. Let’s just go to the basics. How I used to teach people before there was technology. Do you see my walls, Steve? If you look closely at my walls, you could see the books I read, the degree, the school I went to, the records I collect, the knickknacks, the photographs, all these things give you a clue into who I am. And I, and relationships are built on what I call the five F’s of life– family, friend, food, fun, and fellowship. These are the commonalities of life that build the deeper connections that stay across time. It takes 60% of your energy to get a car up to speed, to get a rocket into orbit, or to initiate a relationship. It takes very little to keep it going.

And when trouble hits the road– tariffs, price changes, supply chain issues, your prospects and customers will stay with you.

If you've built a relationship, you've done what you said you're going, you've said what you're gonna do and done what you said you're gonna do.
Share on X

CRM happened after management saw all those sales people running around with those contact managers and they wanted to command and control the database and to track what the sales reps were doing. And Siebel was sort of evolved and then Salesforce, and that’s why CRM failed is because people don’t use it. It’s not built for them. It’s built for management and it really doesn’t help them. And today, if you buy a CRM, it’s not enough for the sales person. They have to go out and buy ZoomInfo to enrich the leads with data about people and companies. You have to buy Outreach IO to automate the process of scraping leads from LinkedIn and basically putting ’em on sequences to qualify them. And you have to buy a sales navigator to be able to manage your LinkedIn contacts and it’s overwhelming. And so I think that many people, most people don’t use a CRM. There’s 225 million global businesses. Less than 1% use any CRM because CRM isn’t built for relationships anymore. It’s built for command and control and reporting, and that’s what I’m trying to do is bring CRM back to its roots, back to relationships. 

Okay, so let’s not talk about CRMs now. Let’s talk about building relationships.

Yes. 

You mentioned the five Fs. So how do I use the five Fs to build relations? What are the five Fs and how do we how do I use it to build relationships? 

You bet. So the five Fs are what I call the commonalities, the softer side of life. Family, friend, food, fun, and fellowship. These are all the commonalities that you might share with another human being. You like the same sports teams. You’re both parents. You like the same band, you went to the same school– the commonalities, and you don’t lean on that. You don’t do it too much, and you don’t do it in an icky way. But you learn how to do it just in the same way as you learned how to behave in the playground, in the classroom.

We're taught all these things, through life, but that's just the beginning of it really.
Share on X

So that people see you as the trusted person. So when they need your products or services, they not only pick up the phone and call you, but they drag their friends with them.
Share on X

You don’t walk into a cocktail party and say, ‘Hey, anybody wanna buy some CRM?’ ’cause people are gonna look at you and say, ‘What the heck?’ You walk in and you look around, you find a group that you might want to connect to, and then you go and stand adjacent to the group and you begin to listen to the conversation and eventually you find your moment that you can add some value and then the person next to you is gonna go. ‘Wow. John, you seem to know a lot about that CRM stuff. What do you do? Tell me more.’ Right? And that’s the same way as you do that out in the digital world where you begin to share your expertise. And an easy way to do that if you’re not a good writer, is just share other people who inspire you. So other thought leaders in around the areas of your product, products and services. And this is the way that I built. The Goldmine brand and the Nimble brand is by identifying thought leaders in and around the areas of our promise of my products and services.

Thought leaders in social sales and marketing begin to share their content, hashtag the category pound sales, pound marketing attribute their name. And not just share the title of whatever they wrote, but to rewrite it and add some value. So it actually looks like I took the time to read it and I’m adding value to it. And if you do that in a series of ways over time. Not only will the people who are looking to be better, smarter, faster at those areas of promise and services begin to follow you and connect with you, but also the audience of that thought leader and the thought leader themselves, so that now when new people walk into the cocktail room and they see you standing next to the other thought leaders and business,

then they're gonna see you as one of the thought leaders because you've built your brand and your network, and we all know that your network and your brand are your net worth.
Share on X

Okay. What I find a little bit challenging is the idea of being there for everybody. So you mentioned a different platform, so what do you recommend? How does one prioritize their time? If I can’t be on..

I would basically just stick with LinkedIn..

And then I can’t be in every conversation there. So, how do I prioritize, you know, did they say that a person can have a relationship with up to 150 people? 

Yep

And then you basically, max out, so. 

Yep. 

How do I limit the people on LinkedIn? How do I even select them? How, how do I do that? 

Right. That’s where a good contact platform comes in.

Okay. 

Because the biggest problem with CRM and contact management are just databases.  It’s a Rolodex, but the problem with the Rolodex on the Daytimer is you can’t segment, you can’t build sets. And the analogy I like to use for that is your holiday card, or if you’re gonna throw a party. How would you go and determine who to send the card to? Who to send the invite to? So you’re saying that you could only maintain 150 to 200 people at one time, but the reality is for you to get a hundred to 150 people of the key people you need to achieve your dreams. You need to cast a wider net. That’s what building your identity in the places where people are having conversations about how to become better, smart and faster in around the areas of your products and services. Begin to share your ideas. Because you’ve forgotten more about your products and services than most people will ever know in their lives who are gonna buy it.

You share your ideas teaching people to fish, so you figure out yourself, fishing bulls, share other people’s idea to build relationships with other thought leaders in your space, and then begin to add people to your database. But you can’t maintain the connection with everybody, but

you can maintain the connection with the right people if you put the right information in the database.
Share on X

And I think one of the key things to remember is, as I shared earlier, it takes a lot of energy to build a relationship. It takes very little to keep it going because you’ve built that connection. They know who you are, they trust you, they like you. And, you ever seen the guy with the plates on the pencil where basically he gets the plates on the stick and he gets ’em rolling? And then he just goes by every once in a while and it ninjas it. So I can tell you, Steve, that there are friends of mine from high school that I haven’t spoken to in 30 years, and if I met them, it’d be like we never parted because that bond and connection that was there. And the same is true for business friends, acquaintances, colleagues that have worked with over time. And so. You don’t need to be constantly connecting with people in order to maintain relationships. And you don’t need to do that with everyone outside of your key sphere of focus, but

you do need a database in order to manage those contacts effectively.
Share on X

So one of the things that you talk about is using Kanban, a Kanban process to manage relationship building. So how does that Kanban process work? 

Let’s boil it down to how most people manage contacts today. They manage ’em in spreadsheets. There’s 225 million global businesses. Less than 1% use any CRM. Most people’s CRM is a spreadsheet. So why do people use spreadsheets? They’re easy to see and manage, right? But the problem is that they’re static. So if you put a series of rows and columns together to manage an outreach to get some press about a new business, you’re opening. Then essentially the last time you contacted them, the last reply that they had, all the nuanced things that you’re tracking, it’s just a dead sheet of paper. Now, you could look at a process with a spreadsheet with some columns in it, or you could take that same spreadsheet and convert it into a Kanban board because each one of a Kanban board for those that don’t know, is a series of stages that you define for a process you wanna put people through initial outreach, connection, follow up, commitment, close, whatever it is for whatever purpose.

And remember that what we’re talking about is not just applicable to sales. Most people are not in sales in a business. Most people are in other roles, PR, bizdev, investor relationships, accounting, HR, whatever. And we all have repeatable processes that we need to manage, and most people are doing it in spreadsheets at best. And so a Kanban board allows you to find what are the stages that you want to put the people and companies through in a repeatable way, and then each card is a contact or a company with the data necessary for you to manage the process. And that card would be the same thing as data in a row, in a spreadsheet. So you could look at Nimble workflows and we call our repeatable process Kanban Boards Workflows. In each workflow you define the stages, you define the data in the rows and columns. And then you can manage those cards and flow them through the workflow, and there can be automations that happen. So I’ll give you an example. We were hiring recently for a new position used Indeed to do it.

We used Nimble Prospector to select the people that passed the ‘sniff test’ I call . It basically means that, ‘yeah, this person could be right’ prospector grabs him out of Indeed on the webpage, that’s Nimble’s Prospector Chrome plugin. Puts ’em into Nimble and puts ’em into a workflow. The first thing that happens in that workflow when they go in the first stage is they get an email asking to schedule a meeting. If they schedule a meeting, they’re moved into the second column, in which case  you have the meeting. If they pass that sort of first meeting, then they put into another workflow and we send them an assignment for them to basically do some work, some work product. And if that passes, then they do an interview. And so basically the workflows allow you to manage repeatable people and company business processes that most people do in spreadsheets. And we enhance it with automations because we’re all human and we don’t do it all. And messaging so that you can automate the process of putting people through those workflows. 

Okay, that makes sense. So someone comes, basically you can use automated processes to watch certain signals and then transition those people automatically into a workflow. And then they get first message and then you start to pursue them and try to get them to meet with you and, and to qualify them and so on.

But I think the key to remember Steve, is in our age of AI and over automation and over messaging, that there needs to be a human aspect involved throughout the whole thing, that it can’t just be automations. There has to be some connection aroused, you’re just going to, it’s not gonna work. And so that’s why Nimble has the workflows and automations, but the humans involved in the work process. But by having the organization of the workflow, the Kanban boards, and the automations, and the automatic messaging.

A normal human being can scale much higher and achieve much better results than by them just doing it by themselves or in a spreadsheet.
Share on X

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So what is the role of AI very briefly, ’cause we, we are running– coming to the end of the conversation, but what do you see is the role of AI in improving relationship management?

You bet. Good question. So number one. Most people are doing some type of prospecting. What is prospecting? That means that you might go to LinkedIn and you are looking for certain type of people, and you’re gonna do that when you’re having, you’re wearing certain hats. It, most entrepreneurs wear many hats. So you might wear a sales hat, you might wear a biz dev hat. If you’re trying to do a business relationship with another company, you might, you wear a PR hat. If you’re trying to get somebody to talk about you, you might wear influencer marketing hat. If you’re trying to get an influencer to talk about you. You might wear an investor relations hat, if you’re trying to get somebody to invest in you. You might wear a HR hat if you’re trying to hire somebody or accounts receivable. So all of these are different hats. And so if I’m using Nimble Prospector in my Chrome browser, our AI will enable you to, based off your role, so the role I might be reaching out for PR purposes, and my intent could be in a PR role just to be able to pay it forward a relationship and I’m not asking them for anything, or I’m actually wanting them to write about a product release I’m doing. So what hat am I wearing and what is my intent? So my hat I’m wearing is PR. My intent is to get them to write about me. Nimble will know– Nimble Prospector over the LinkedIn record will know if this person is a fit for you.

And if they are a fit, it can automatically grab that record, put ’em in a workflow, and tailor a message or a series of messages to that person to achieve the goal all without you having to do a thing. Because Nimble uses AI to determine who that person is and what their business is about, who you are, what your business is about, what product or services or intent you have, and what’s the best pathway to achieve that. Is it a LinkedIn invite? Is it a LinkedIn message? Is it a single email? Is it a series of emails? Or is it a series of things that include beyond just an email? So you could basically have, the AI will basically say, well, you don’t want to just send them an email first. What you want to do is you want to begin to walk into the digital footprint, add value to the conversation by commenting on their stuff and sharing their stuff a few times. And then you could reach out for a LinkedIn invite or a message, and maybe about that time they’re gonna reach out to you. And so AI just enables you to scale more, because most people don’t do the homework. They don’t look at, look somebody up, determine who they are, what the business is about, what their problems might be, how they might be able to solve them, and

they craft a methodology in order to start a conversation that gets them in the game to achieve their goals. And so AI basically would enable you to do that better, smarter, faster.
Share on X

That makes sense. So it helps basically accelerate the front end of the prospecting  process and allow you to talk to people who are already being, to some degree, qualified and express interest. Of sense. So fascinating stuff, John. So if someone would like to learn more about contact management and how to use potentially Nimble, to manage their contact or maybe generate the prospects that they can siphon out of LinkedIn and warm up with their AI process and start messaging and tee them up for a conversation, where can they find out more about that and connect to you?

Well, if you want to know more about nimble.com, it’s free. You could sign up for two weeks without a credit card. Try it out at nimble.com, and if you do decide it will fit your needs and wanna subscribe, use the code Jon 40, J-O-N 4-0, and you get 40% off your first three months. If you wanna connect with me and let me know how I might be of more service to you, you can Google me and determine which platform or channel fits you best. Or make it easy, email me [email protected]. But I challenge you today to Google yourself. Do you show up on the first page? Are you happy with what you see? If not, if you follow my five Es of building your brand and growing your network, educate, enchant, engage, embrace, and empower. And  I can define that at another time where I could slip it to you on the side, but the whole idea is just giving you knowledge away with the intent to help other people grow and then engage with them not to see what you can get most out of them, but really what you can, how you can help them grow. These are the ways you can get a hold of me, and I look forward to hearing from your audience. 

That’s awesome. I loved the five E’s particularly. I mean, we had the five Fs, which is the finding, the commonalities, the five Es, which is to actually engage people and get them, get closer to them through communication.

And I have one more for you, the three Ps if you wanna achieve your goals in life. I read a book called Think and Grow Rich and Napoleon Hill. Many people I know who retired early, like I did read that book and attribute their success to it. And here’s the nuggets I got out of it. Figure out what your passion is. Build a plan to achieve it. Make it your purpose on the daily basis, most people don’t have a passion, and if they do, they’re, they’re not focused on getting there. And so what I say is figure out what your passion is, build a plan to achieve it, and put that plan on your mirror or your refrigerator. And every day you get up and say, ‘What am I doing today to get there?’ You may not get there, but you’re gonna get someplace and it’s gonna change your life. 

Yeah. That was an old story in Napoleon Hill when Andrew Carnegie taught him to talk to the mirror every day and tell himself that he’s gonna be a bigger person than Andrew Carnegie. And he eventually achieved it because he touched more people. Awesome. Well, John, thank you for coming on the show, and if you enjoy this episode, stay tuned because we come every week with another entrepreneur sharing their framework. Thank you, John for coming and thanks for listening. 

Thank you, Steve.