Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yep. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yep. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You get the language. I love it. 

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, bookkeeper and account manager, yeah. 

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

So a few things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretty much, yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s too late. 

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

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

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

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

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

So you know. —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kickstartaccountinginc.com/gifts. 

Inc.com/gifts. 

Inc. It’s the important one. 

Yeah, right.

 Important three letters. 

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

Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

And thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay. Got it. Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

Wow. 

Yeah. Yeah, I was 60. 

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

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

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

Sell first and figure out later. Yeah. 

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

Yeah. 

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

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

Oh, yeah. Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s kind of a fractional engineering service? 

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

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

Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. 

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

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

Oh, yeah.

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

Yeah. 

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

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

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

So what drives growth in the business of Pugh Associates? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Yeah. 

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

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

Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steve Preda: Yes. 

So okay. 

Wherever you are. 

Yep. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you so much for having me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. I mean, honestly,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, one. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, I mean, understandable. 

Yeah. 

Right. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. Did you say switcheroo? 

Switcheroo. That’s what I said. 

Yeah. 

Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

It’s not realistic. 

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

Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

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

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

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

Steve, it is fabulous to be here. Thanks. 

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

My personal why. 

Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, please. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. 

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

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

Okay. 

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

Yeah. 

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

Is it draining to listen to? 

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

There actually are books like that. 

I hope I never read one. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive words. Put things in the positive. 

Is it the same as using empowering sentences? 

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

Wow. 

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

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

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

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

Yeah, close the door. 

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

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

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

To me, that’s positive. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could be. 

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

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

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

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

Yeah, that’s fascinating. 

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

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

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

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

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

Deep breath. Yeah. 

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

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

Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. 

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

Yeah. Yeah, love  it. 

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

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

Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you, David. 

Thanks, Steve.

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

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

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

Thank you for having me. 

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

Oh, really? Wow. 

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

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

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

Oh, I love it. 

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

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

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

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

Love it. 

That’s our operating system. 

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

That’s true. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And generating.

Correct. 

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

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

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

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

So I actually noted down six things. 

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

So you said looks real. 

Yes. 

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

Yes. 

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

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

Okay. Use the product sensibly. 

Yes. 

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

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

And then light and sound works.

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

And up close. 

Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you give an example? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. 

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

What do you think about using AI for comments? 

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

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

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

Yes. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love it that you give so concise answers. 

Oh, thank you. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for having me. 

Yeah. Thanks for coming. Thanks for listening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tilth. Tilth. 

Tilth. What does it mean? 

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

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

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

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Correct. 

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you very much.

Bradley Kugler, Founder and CEO of DirectMail2.0, helps marketers uncover 15 Ways to Boost Your Direct Mail by combining physical campaigns with digital tracking, targeting, and attribution technologies. Driven by a desire to help others, Bradley shares the experience and lessons he has gained from building businesses, navigating disruption, and reinventing his career. His goal is to help marketers achieve stronger results while ensuring that traditional direct mail remains relevant in a digital-first world.

In this conversation, Bradley introduces The Direct Mail Edge Framework—Tactile Makes Memorable, Use for $1000+ Offerings, No Privacy Regulations, and Access Multiple Readers. He explains why direct mail is most effective when customer value justifies the cost, how a physical piece can reach multiple household members, and why less mailbox competition makes mail more memorable than digital advertising. Bradley also discusses combining direct mail with email, social media, programmatic advertising, QR codes, and call tracking to create eight to twelve impressions per target. He shares how his AI platform analyzes more than 80,000 campaigns, 2.1 billion mail pieces, and 18 creative attributes to predict engagement and improve campaigns before they are mailed.

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with Management Blueprint. And my guest today is Bradley Kugler, the Founder and CEO of DirectMail2.0, an omnichannel marketing system designed to seamlessly track direct mail campaigns and enhance overall results by integrating 15 digital technologies in one user-friendly platform. Brad, welcome to the show. 

Steve, thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here and spread the word on something that is old that is new again. 

Well, I’ve been a big fan of direct mail for my entrepreneurial life, and I’m very curious about the state of the art and whether it’s still alive and in what areas it’s still alive and whether it’s thriving, so we can dive into that. But before we go there, I want to ask my favorite question. What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business? 

I would say my personal why, I always like helping other people. I get the most satisfaction about taking the experience, wisdom, and knowledge I’ve gained over the years, as I’m not a young man anymore. Tried a lot of things. A lot of things haven’t worked. And I’m able to impart this, and I really love to share and help other people, which is the main reason I do this podcast. I feel that I do have some valuable things to share, and I’m very proud of what I’ve done and my family and my children.

And if I can help one person, even if I have to talk to 10,000, then I feel it was worth it.
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I love it. I mean, ultimately, that’s what’s behind the best advice that people have, and I’ve heard a lot, is helping other people and how do you contribute to human flourishing, as Eric Kreitz says in his latest book. So let’s talk about direct mail because I built my first business on the back of direct mail. I was part of Dan Kennedy’s subscribers of his newsletter, and then he was a big copywriter. 

You probably heard of him. I copied some of his techniques and that of some other copywriters, and it worked really well. And when I moved here, it kind of stopped working, and I thought this was because I was doing something wrong, which probably was the case. So tell me about the state of direct mail and how it works and how it has changed over the past 10 years or so. 

 Absolutely, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to just tell a quick story of how I arrived here. For 23 years, me and my brother and my father had a business distributing packaged media. Packaged media is DVDs, CDs, VHS, things that nobody uses anymore. One of our most successful marketing actions is we would send postcards of black-and-white 1930s disasters, ships turning over in a harbor, a train crash, a plane crash, and we would send these things to video stores and companies as a kind of an impingement-type photograph and tell them, “We’re here to solve your problems. If you had a disaster with inventory or managing your inventory, this is what we’re here to do.” 

And it worked phenomenally for almost two decades. All right? It stopped working. It stopped working because there were less and less video stores, and people weren’t selling packaged media. It wasn’t for the fact that the marketing stopped working. The market changed, and we were facing impending doom. There was no way around it, and that isn’t really what triggered me, “I want to get in the direct mail business.” It wasn’t. It was the thought of knowing that I’m in a business that’s disrupted by technology. Everything was going streaming. Packaged media was no longer to be, and there was nothing I could do about it. 

So I spent about a year researching. I never finished college, so I read all of the latest business books that MBAs read on their studies, and I sort of brought myself up to speed, and I came upon something. Number one,

I wanted to be a disruptor and not a disruptee. I want to be on the other side of this technology curve.
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Obviously, I realized the industry, what didn’t work. The things are, direct mail is expensive, and if not done right, you can have a bad result, and it’s much more painful. Sending 5,000 postcards or letters is much more expensive than sending half a million emails, so this is what’s happened to this industry. So this friend of mine in the direct mail business said, “Hey, we have this little burgeoning idea of technology. We want to spin it off and sell it to other direct mail producers.” Took me almost a couple weeks to understand it because I didn’t really know anything about direct mail other than I used it, and I didn’t know anything about digital marketing or the technology behind direct mail. 

So I forced myself to get over that hump as a 50-year-old man with three kids in college facing a new career, and I did that, and here we are seven, eight, nine years later and still growing. We have two other brands, and it’s all focused around technology that improves the chances of success with direct mail. That’s the overall story. We can get into the details as you ask for them. 

Yeah, so what I’m curious about is how has this industry changed? So what is it about direct mail that worked really well in the past that doesn’t work anymore? And what is the area that perhaps was neglected in the past and evolved to be more successful right now? 

So that’s a good and more difficult question than it appears to be. I’m sure you remember us being the same age some 20, 30, 40 years ago, our mailboxes were full in the United States of advertisements, a stack of them. As the digital revolution in marketing came upon, direct mail has waned. There were cheaper ways to get quicker attribution and more verified results. Direct mail was expensive, it wasn’t trackable, it wasn’t attributable, it was hard to measure the success. So as digital marketing was going like this, direct mail was going like this. 

That’s not to say there aren’t still millions and millions of pieces going a day, but it had its pressures. As digital marketing became almost a background noise, everybody in the United States gets 10,000 digital messages a day. All right? How many messages do you get in your mailbox? Two? Maybe three? So

it's now become a point that it's less crowded, which is bringing new interest to it.
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You have identity resolution pixels you can put on the website to see if the person got the mail, went to the website, and then you can identify the address they live at and match back. You can also use digital programmatic marketing to target the homes or the people going into certain businesses by geography, by drawing polygons around digital programmatic marketing. So we offer all of these as partners, our 15 technologies, so that now direct mail is as attributable as an email click or a digital ad click. So this is how it’s evolved over the last 10 or 15 years. 

That’s fascinating. Yeah, that’s very deep. I like the 15 digital approaches. That’s probably not something we can cover on this podcast, but it’s something maybe the listeners can explore after the show. So let’s switch gears here a little bit because this podcast is all about frameworks, business frameworks. So what’s the right framework for direct mail? If someone wants to use direct mail for their marketing, what should they be thinking about? What are three to five things that if they nail, they’re going to have a successful campaign? I’m probably oversimplifying. 

Great question. Great question. And I’ll put it to you this way. The ROI has to be commensurate with the spend. All right? So if you are literally spending $1 per target and you’re mailing to 5,000 or 10,000 people, that’s an expensive campaign to hit somebody one time, right? Now, if you’re going to send 10,000 emails, they’re a fraction of a penny each. So you’re having to sort of fit this type of marketing into a box where the ROI justifies the expense. Does that make sense? There are certain industries that direct mail excels in, and you probably know them by visiting your own mailbox. Financial offers. Retirement. 

If you’ve had a kid in college, all the offers from universities. Nonprofits. We have found that an average order size of $1,000 or more justifies the expense of a direct mail campaign. So I’ve mentioned some that fall into that category. I’ll tell you some that usually do not. A pizza place, a donut shop, probably a dry cleaner, unless they use them every week. There are certain industries. A car wash. It’s very hard to get the individual lifetime value when your average order volume is below 1,000 bucks, unless it’s a weekly thing that you’re going to do, or you eat a lot of pizza, let’s say, for 25 bucks each. 

Yeah. 

 So you need that high average order volume to justify the expense of direct mail. And

if you can justify that expense, the conversion rate on direct mail is, and studies will show this everywhere, is higher than email or banner ads or digital targeting.
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Okay. So that’s great. So I think as a rule of thumb, it has to be an order value of $1,000 or more on average. 

 Or a lifetime customer value of over $1,000. So if it were pizzas, you’d have to be selling about four a week to the same guy. 

Yeah. I understand. So that’s one element. What other elements are there for a successful direct mail campaign? 

So we’ve all heard about the CCPA and all of the government regulations on digital advertising. I’ll tell you an industry that has no privacy or security regulations. It’s direct mail. You can send anybody anything without getting in trouble with anybody, any regulatory body. And there’s a lot of industries that are highly regulated online. The cannabis industry, anything health or medical, financial that targets certain types of demographics. 

You can’t legally target these people online without getting pushback from Google or Meta or any of these large carriers. That is completely avoided in the direct mail industry. So you can send those sensitive things directly into the homes of people with no privacy, security, or regulatory reduction in that. 

Okay. So that’s the second one. Are there others? Are there a couple others? 

Yes,  there are. The other issue is when you’re targeting an individual online, you’re targeting the one individual. When you mail to a household, you’re most—I think there’s a—I don’t remember the stats, so don’t quote me, but I think it’s 60% of the people in the household see that same advertisement even though it’s directed to one person. Yes. So you have mom and dad and the kids all flushing through the mail every day. When you’re sending a digital ad, an email or a banner ad to one person, that’s it. They’re the only ones that see that if they’ve targeted right. 

Now, some people can look at that as a plus or minus. They’re getting more impressions for other people either in the household or they’re not. But sometimes those impressions aren’t targeted ones, and you’re paying for them. You are absolutely paying for them. You don’t pay a cent extra to have the other people in the household see that piece of mail. All right? There are also big-time studies as far as retention in terms of memory. Having a tactile ad that’s a piece of mail, you are going to remember that. And again, I’m not up to date on the latest studies, but it is known that tactical advertising—tactile, not tactical, touch—is remembered much more than a digital ad. Of course, there’s the big one. There’s three or four pieces of competing ads in your mailbox. Go on your computer, you’re probably seeing thousands per day. Thousands. 

Yeah. 

What are you going to remember from that? 

Yeah. That’s great. That’s great. So what I always wondered about is consumer versus B2B. The big challenge for me when I came here was that in Europe it was easy to mail to business owners and CEOs because there were regulatory requirements for them to file their accounts, and you could actually find their home addresses, you could mail to them and reach them. And when they are behind gatekeepers, it becomes a much lower proposition for them to actually see the mail piece. So is there a way to overcome this? 

With the mail, yeah, just like you said, we can go and we use a data company and get their home address, send the mail direct to their house. 100%, we do have customers who do it all the time. It is difficult. We recommend doing both. I know that’s an additional cost of data and an additional piece, but you can get the person at their home. I don’t care what kind of email address you have. Most CEOs or decision-makers in any sort of company doing more than a million, $2 million are getting 300 to 500 pieces of email a day. 

So again, it’s a fight for the eyeballs. And I’m not saying that our product doesn’t do this. It does this in conjunction with direct mail. It’s perfectly timed. We start doing follow-on ads four days after the mail is delivered. Then we start doing targeted ads for the next 30 days. So the premise of our platform, because we’re combining digital with direct mail, is we’re taking that one piece of mail and we’re multiplying the impressions through multiple digital channels: email, social, programmatic. So you’re getting that message, we’re shooting for eight to 12 times. 

And

most studies say what you get told eight to 12 times, you will remember.
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Yeah. Love it. That’s very cool. All right. So let’s talk about growth. We talked about the framework. I’m curious about what drives growth in your business? 

Our growth is driven, I’m going to say, a lot by economics. The first thing that businesses tend to cut back on in times of economic thinning, as I call it, we have right now, is marketing. It’s the easiest controllable expense. Nobody likes to lay people off. That’s sort of a last-ditch effort. They can’t change their rent. But what can they change on a moment’s notice? They can change their marketing spend. So you get some, I’d say most, that pull back the reins a little bit on marketing. It’s the smart people that actually pour the coals on the marketing, and I’ll tell you why. 

You’ve got a lessening of messages from a multitude of people. It is the best and cheapest time to increase your marketing budget because the competition is not as much.

More successful businesses break out and grab their beachhead in times of leaner economics than in boom times.
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Because I tell people to do this, I tell people to do this sort of like, “Listen, we’ve got money in the bank. Why don’t I do my own case study?” We’ve doubled our marketing budget, and we’ve doubled or tripled our lead inflow. Sometimes doubling your marketing budget, you’re lucky to get a 15%, 20% increase in your lead inflow. Well, we’ve more than doubled our lead inflow, and I have to believe it’s because most marketing agencies, most companies are cutting marketing expenses. We have less noise going to the same audience. 

Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. It’s difficult to do, but it makes a lot of sense. 

 Yeah, especially if you’re spending more money and you’re not making as much money. That’s one thing that keeps business owners up at night. What’s the best way to sleep at night? A strong cash flow. So I’m going a little bit against the grain. We are increasing our spending on marketing, not only as an experiment, but to prove what I’ve been preaching. So far, so good. Ask me in six months, and then I’ll have a better idea.

I love it. I love it. So Brad, what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? 

It’s the thing I mentioned right now. We are doing a lot of A/B testing in trying to drive new top-of-the-funnel activities, new leads in. I did something I don’t normally do. I’ve always had a fear of hiring a consultant, okay? And I paid a gentleman who sold me on marketing and told me some things that we should be doing, and I paid him a five-figure number to guide us through this sort of jungle, okay? 

So we’re doing a very specific funnel, socially targeting a certain type of business with a certain type of offer to get our product in front of more people. And it is working. Again, our sales cycle is 45 to 60 days, so this just happened in the last two or three weeks. So I don’t have dollars to share on this, only what I mentioned, that our lead flow and top of the funnel is wide open, the widest it’s been open in a year. 

So that’s the major constraint, to increase the lead flow. 

For us, because we’re in such a narrow TAM, we’re basically talking to commercial printers that specialize in direct mail or direct mail advertising agencies. This is a niche within a niche. Because our TAM is so narrow, we’re opening that up a little bit, and we’re kind of giving ourselves to a wider market than we have normally done. And will they convert into paying customers? That’s an experiment that’s mid-route. But yes, we’ve opened the top of the market significantly. The top of the funnel, I should say. 

That’s very interesting. So what do you think of how AI is disrupting digital marketing, and how it might help or how it’s going to impact direct mail? 

 That’s something that I’ve been working on for the last 18 months. Having been a previous disruptee for packaged media, this was not something I was going to allow. I can tell you that we’ve built our own platform. You can see it at DM20.ai. And basically what it does, it takes, we have tracked results of over 80,000 direct mail campaigns. That’s 2.1 billion pieces of marketing mail. 

We have the attribution results, meaning I know by industry and by address what consumers and businesses have responded to, okay? That’s one half of the data modeling equation. The other is, I have all the creative pieces. So we have digitized them. We’ve mapped every pixel. We’ve identified 18 different attributes in the creative, and I’ll give you examples: QR code, size and color of the phone number, size and color of the URL, the image-to-text ratio, the use of colors and what type of color palettes. 

We’ve mapped the keywords and the headline and the call to action. So we’ve got all these campaign results. We’ve got all of this creative that’s been mapped. And when I say campaign results, we also know the number of pieces, when it was mailed, how many times it was mailed, and it’s a lot of data. So we hash all this together by industry so that it’s correlatable. You can’t correlate a mortgage offering to a landscaping offering. So we put all of these into 150 different buckets, and then we’ve looked at what is the average engagement rate per bucket. 

And then we further break it down by size of mailing, type of mailing, time of year. And we’ve established a benchmark for every vertical called engagement rate. So based on the number of pieces of mail, what was the percentage of people that engaged with that piece of mail by that vertical, by that timing, by all the things I just mentioned, and then we’ve got a benchmark. So now somebody comes in, and they upload their mail piece. Before they mail it, they upload, I think it’s 11 questions on their targeting that correlates to our data schema, and it digitizes that mail, looks for all the things they have, and it plots, based on that information, where it would rank. 

So if the average engagement rate for financial offers is 2.3%, and this comes in at 2.1%, we now look at what creative or what things were different that could raise that to at least be on par, if not above par. And then we have all three frontier models that take our algorithm and our data, and then we use Gemini to feed it to one, we use Chat to feed it to the other, and then we have Claude take both of those responses and compare and contrast them and normalize the response, eliminate hallucinations and outliers, and give a cohesive summarization of how they can raise their engagement rate based on our data. 

This is a product that we came out with just in April, by the way. People are raving about it. I don’t have any case studies yet. It’s pretty new. We allow people to retest. It costs anywhere from $25 to $99 to test your mailing, and again, the value prop is simple. If you’re going to spend $3,000 or $4,000 on doing a direct mail campaign, why not spend $25 to $100 to see how it’s going to perform and take those recommendations, execute on them, and retest again, no additional fee, and see if you get the desired result? 

So we are going to market with that, and we are doing guerrilla marketing on that to people we found that do direct mail. So that’s, again, very early in the life cycle of this. This is a product that’s never existed, nobody has ever developed. We have the largest database of direct mail, I believe, at least in the United States. I even acquired a company two years ago called Who’s Mailing What, that had been collecting samples of direct mail since 1984. So we’ve incorporated aspects of that database into the modeling as well, and are providing users that say, “Here’s what other people are doing in your similar targeting and similar industry, and this is what they’re doing.” So we’re offering a competitive intelligence tool along with it. 

So that’s what we’re doing in AI. All of our platforms have been retooled to get away from filters and searches to plain-language AI-type question and answer. So we’re staying on top of this. I’m not getting disrupted again. 

Yeah. I love it. This is fascinating. I mean, sounds like you have the data, which is the most valuable thing these days. Yeah. Because AI can work with it, and you got your frontier models processing it too. 

 Yes. 

That is fascinating. How do you handle the evolution of copywriting over the years? When you compare mailing pieces from 1984 and the 2020s, how has that changed? I mean, has that even changed at all? 

 Very little. The messaging and the offering and the creatives, the only things that are different are you’ve got QR codes and text-back numbers. Obviously, URLs didn’t exist in the ’80s and early ’90s. Those things are must-haves. Thirty, forty years ago, you didn’t have any of that. Sometimes you didn’t even have a phone number. People would just be given a little coupon code and told to walk in. So obviously, with the advent of technology and these different things being immediately, in real time, attributable and trackable, you’re able to do that. 

Plus, now you can track mail delivery into a home like you can track a package, so you can predict exactly when that mail is going to arrive. And with things like that, you know when to do follow-up, you know when to man your phones or man your stores if it’s a brick-and-mortar. So there’s a lot more technology that has gone into this over the years, and direct mail is not the same, as much as it looks the same as it was in the ’80s and ’90s. But it’s just a matter of using these technologies. And I’m not trying to be all things to all people, but any of these technologies, you can go and do them yourself or find multiple vendors to bring them together. 

We bring them together all in one place, so that’s part of our value proposition. We don’t expect you to go to a telephonic company and then a company that tracks AI or QR codes, and then work out with the post office how you’re going to track the mail, and then trigger emails based on when the mail arrives, and target social campaigns at the same time the mail’s arriving. That’s a lot of work. We do it all on the back end, and it’s all automated. 

Love it. Okay, well, final questions. I’m a junkie for direct mail, so I can’t resist asking this. Is lumpy mail still a thing? 

Lumpy mail? You’re talking about the little packages with bubbly enclosures that things get.

Yeah, putting, yeah, bubbly, probably bubbly, and putting something in the mail. Is it seen as a gimmick, or does it still work? 

Yes. In fact, it works fantastically, but the price goes up three-, four-, fivefold when you get above two ounces. All right? So people remember it. I’ll give you an example. We did a bubbly mailing for customers last year where it was a puzzle, where you had to move the ball into a hole. You’ve all seen that, right? And if you get it in the right hole, the puzzle unlocks, and on the inside of the puzzle, we had one half of a $100 bill, currency. 

And obviously, somebody could just smash it or whatever, but we wanted to make a game of it. And they said, “Okay, well, you get your demo, and we’ll send you the other half of the $100 bill, and you go to your bank, and you unlock it.” It was a very successful campaign. I think we got a 50% or more response rate. But again, if you include everything, I was $100 and some dollars into that investment. And if I don’t get that other half hundred back, guess what? It still was over $100 per investment. It gets very expensive to scale something like that. But those bubbly packs absolutely work. Quantities are low, so you have to be very targeted on those. 

Yeah. Yeah. Love it. All right. So probably we could have another episode on the intricacies of direct mail, but we can’t do that. However, if you are listening to this and you are thinking about up-leveling your marketing in this very noisy digital marketing time, then definitely don’t neglect looking at direct mail, especially since it’s attributable, trackable. It can be part of a campaign. 

You can keep the costs low by staying under two ounces, and if you have an offering of $1,000 or more, this is a real viable thing. So if people would like to explore more, where should they go? Where can they find out more? You mentioned your data model. Where can they use that application? How can they connect with you? 

 The easiest thing is go to dm20.com. That’s dm20.com. You can find me. You’ll be able to find all of our other direct mail performance stack that we’ve been discussing here. And you can find me on LinkedIn if you want to communicate with me directly. 

Awesome. Well, Brad, thanks for coming on the show and sharing your wisdom. You’re definitely at the cutting edge on this topic. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned. I have a couple of entrepreneurs every week sharing their frameworks with you. Thanks, Brad, for coming, and thanks for listening. 

Thank you, Steve. It’s been great. Thanks for the time.

Randy Perkins, CEO and Co-Founder of FreightPro.ai, is helping commercial transportation move From “Fill-the-Seat” to Trust-Based Recruiting by connecting quality drivers with quality carriers. Driven by a desire to support underrepresented people, Randy built FreightPro.ai to give drivers a stronger voice, help carriers create safer workplaces, and raise standards across the transportation industry.

In this conversation, Randy introduces The Aligned Driver Recruiting Framework—Build Driver and Carrier Profiles, Validate with Research & Questions, Match Driver and Environment, Build Trust Through Human Touch, and Refine Continually. He explains why effective recruiting requires understanding a driver’s experience, endorsements, safety record, home-time needs, personality, and ability to handle specific routes and working conditions. Randy also discusses using AI and FMCSA data to evaluate 25 qualification measures, reduce recruiting noise, and identify stronger matches without replacing human judgment. He shares why trust and consistency drive growth, how FreightPro.ai combines blue-collar industry knowledge with technology, and his vision for connecting fragmented transportation data into one secure network.

Good day. Steve Preda with The Management Blueprint. And my guest today is Randy Perkins, the CEO and co-founder at FreightPro.ai, building a platform centered on commercial driver recruiting, retention, and workforce alignment for carriers, 3PLs, and transportation companies. Randy, welcome to the show.

Pleasure to be here, Steve. Thanks so much for having me. 

Well, absolutely. I’m curious about this business that you’re in. We talked a little bit about the podcast recording that I’m always thinking about what these drivers’ lives are like, and you see that there are all those stickers in the back of trucks that they try to recruit drivers. So it’s going to be a tricky business, and you’re in the middle of it. So we’re going to talk about this. But before we start on this, I’m curious about what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in FreightPro.ai? 

My personal why. That’s a touchy subject. It’s a good subject, but it’s touchy. I got a soft spot for individuals that need others. I grew up in a less-than-ideal environment, and I wish that I had more individuals that would’ve helped me out.

So growing up my whole life, I knew I wanted to contribute something in regard to giving back to somebody that needed it.
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Through getting into logistics, I worked at ITS. We were a great brokerage there. They were one of the best in class. Man, it was phenomenal. My exposure in that realm of logistics, which is broker-to-carrier and broker-to-shipper, shined light on a layer deeper, which was the driver-to-carrier. And it struck me similarly to children, where it was a class that is underrepresented and means so much to the industry, right? Where the futures of drivers are just as important. 

And I don’t know of an industry where you can have somebody that has the potential to make upwards of six figures plus and not have to have a resume or have any sort of consistent tenure at any one job, where you don’t have to have professionalism to back it. And that’s driven, I think, partly in context to the stereotypes that have been driven over the years. Drivers for the longest time were classified as unintellectual, right? Didn’t have an education. They got classified as roughnecks, brutes. 

The reality is they are roughnecks to a certain extent because they have to be, because that environment is critical. It is extremely dangerous. And yeah, so to a certain extent, but that’s in a positive way, not in a negative. But for a long time, those stereotypes that were landed have stuck, and there’s been a stigma. And drivers have essentially turned into a recurring revolving door of employment, where they’re tossed to the curb during slow times and they’re brought on real quick, and it’s a knee-jerk reaction. 

And how do you expect to have any sort of quality on the road and safety if the carriers and drivers don’t take it seriously to work amongst themselves? And that was what kicked open the door for me when I was at ITS, and I was like, “Man, you hear carriers talking about their drivers and drivers talking about their carriers, and I’m going, “Man, how come there’s not just a mutual agreement where everybody worked together collaboratively?” And I knew that I couldn’t accomplish that at ITS, so I broke off and started FreightPro. And the whole mission of FreightPro was to raise the standard of the industry, and we’re starting off by working diligently on engaging drivers via human contact as well as through our technology, and pairing up those quality drivers that we identify with quality carriers that we identify, doing the same thing in the other direction. 

We're increasing our overall values. We're increasing our overall compliances and metrics to get in.
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And unless there’s an economic hit, the general public doesn’t realize how detrimental it can be having an unsafe driver on the road until your family’s the one that’s in an accident on the road. And they don’t realize how severe it can be and the lack of guardrails that have been in place and the lack of enforcement throughout the years, and we want to fix that. This is just the means to get there. And when you start talking about that, it kind of elevates the conversation much more than just a recruiting platform. We want to really change the industry. 

Well, that’s very interesting. So this podcast is a blueprint podcast. It’s all about business frameworks. I wonder what the framework is in your business that you look at. And it could be something to do with how to recruit drivers. It could be how do you improve the relationship between driver and carrier. It’s how to market to them. It’s how to serve them. I don’t know what it is, but is there a framework that helps you understand this dynamic better and helps you serve your drivers better? 

I would say there’s not one single framework. The industry is intertwined with so many other realms that you can’t just say it’s one framework. What I will say is that over the years, working at my previous employers, I got insights into fleets, into drivers, into brokerages, into shippers and receivers, into compliance demands, into managing assets. You name it, I was exposed to it. And through that, you develop your own unique framework that we’ve established that allows you to develop an established relationship with drivers that’s based off of something more than just a monetary figure, but because we care. It’s the reason we’re implementing a social media platform here in the next few weeks. There’s going to be another vertical for that because we want drivers to come to a place that they want to go to. 

That’s not just when they’re needed, right?

So we're working on developing strong relationships with drivers, and that's through showing them that we care, not just through the jobs, not just through social media, but also legislation.
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We want to have them back us in more than just, “Let’s go get a job.” But it’s, “We love that company,” right? “They represent us. They give us things that other companies don’t, and more importantly, they hear us.” And then we do the same framework on the carrier side. The ones that are quality, the industry right now is not as scary for them. There’s been actually a lot of upside for the quality carriers in the industry, the ones that take the time and due diligence to recruit correctly and to treat their drivers well and actually pay layover and detention. And those are the same guys that we want in our corner on the other side. We don’t want to have over-compliance either. We don’t want to have any one government ruling things more than they need to or overrule or overstep, but we need to have stronger foundations. 

And the carriers right now that are already of quality are already doing that for the most part. They already make sure that their drivers are quality when they’re interviewing them in the process. It’s not fill out an electronic application and three hours later come hop in a cab. It’s let’s do our due diligence of work, and we want those two to partner up through a relationship. So that’s what we’re establishing, and that’s our framework. We’re basing care and quality over any sort of quantity number, and I think that people are desiring that, and our framework is based almost intuitively. It’s based off of what the carriers need. 

So what are the elements of caring for the drivers? Are there, like, three or four or five elements that you can identify that will allow someone who is hiring drivers to take good care of them or to maybe vet them to make sure that they are the right quality? What would that look like? 

Yes, sir. So we do a thorough background of the drivers. So when we speak to them verbally, drivers first  go on and register. Once they’re registered on our platform with the basic profiling, we go on and get a more advanced understanding on what their background and capabilities are, right? So things like endorsements, years of experience, whether or not you have any violations, or whether you’re SAP-friendly or even pet-friendly needs, right? We go through and we get more of a microcosm of what the driver actually is needing. And then that’s what we help pair up with the carriers.

So on the carrier side, it’s the same thing in reverse order. We profile them diligently. What are your routes? What are the types of drivers that you need? What are the types of terrains that you drive within? Not just can the driver hold onto the steering wheel? Not just did he pass a test, but can he handle and manage the situations that you’re going to be putting him through? Has he gone through a security guard check at a government facility if you’re working with a government customer? Those little things that people take for granted, those are things that are imperative. And they’re not being done consistently enough because it’s been considered a transaction game. 

And that’s where we’re stepping up on both sides. It’s by getting more information. It’s collecting more info, and then we combine that with a little bit of human touch, right? We’re still a technology platform, but ultimately, we have a small group with us of anywhere from 10 to 12 people, given the day, where we’re always engaging our carriers and our drivers to make sure that those are reiterated, right? So right now, it’s a verbal validation. So we’re calling them up and cross-referencing with open-ended questions and getting to understand them. And more than just, “You’re a number,” right? So number 328A, you’re up next. We want to know what kind of individual do you want to work for, right? And then we help, to the best that we can right now. We want to help out and pair that up, and we’re going to continue to advance that. 

But a major one on the carrier side that’s often missed is when is the actual expected home time? When is that actually going to be a thing? You can’t just say local, OTR, regional. You can’t just say that because everybody’s definition of that in the industry is different. So we call up and we ask, “What does that mean? You say local, but does that mean daily? Does that mean every 72 hours? What does regional mean in your eyes?” Because that’s another thing that’s an issue in the industry, is nothing is the same from a vernacular standpoint. 

There’s all this ambiguity floating around. Why not remove that? Actually mix recruiting, which is what they tried to do, with the actual industry, which is what’s never been done, right? For the most part. You got a few companies right now that do it to a decent extent. But getting actual experts in there that aren’t just recruiters, but they know how to recruit, and then they can validate that. And mixing the best of those worlds. Right now, you go to a recruiting agency, you’re not getting somebody that’s specialized in logistics. They don’t know what a kingpin lock is. So when you call up somebody saying, “Hey, are you looking for a job?” And they go, “Yeah, I am, but my kingpin lock’s stuck.” And they go, “Oh, that’s crazy. What does that mean?” 

How is that going to feel to a driver if a recruiter’s contacting them, telling them that? Where if they can say, “Hey, are you available?” “Yeah, I’m sitting here at a receiver.” “Oh, man. Sounds like you’ve been there for a while. You frustrated?” “Yeah.” “Are you getting detention?” That, just that, just a little nuance in the industry goes so far because it’s been so undervalued this entire time that anybody who puts a little bit of care into it will go so far. And that’s what we’re doing differently, is we’re actually mixing the two. We’re blending an actual recruiting platform with the needs of logistics. 

That’s very interesting. So what drives growth in your business, in FreightPro.ai? 

The simple answer is trust and consistency. That’s really it for any business, to be honest with you. This just snowballs on itself. When you have lack of trust, these guys talk. It spreads like wildfire. And if you’re not consistent with your values, if you don’t uphold the things that you’re saying, you’re going to go down in a heartbeat. This industry spreads more than any other industry. I’ve never seen anything like it. The networking here is phenomenal. You’ll have, on the West Coast, a driver get treated a certain way, and by the end of the day, drivers on the East Coast have already heard about it and posted it up on the internet. It is flying around right now. 

You have to be able to work just as quickly. If you can’t work just as quickly and be just as diligent in your approach and drive the trust through consistency and quality, you don’t have a leg to stand on. You’re going to be out before you have a chance to even enter the door. I mean, realistically, I know that probably sounds like it’s a very basic answer, but there’s no secret to the success. It’s hard work, grit, and being able to put your name and back it out there. If you’re out here saying that you’re going to do it, you got to do it. Or at least do your best to. 

How do you create this consistency that other people are not able to? 

You focus on it. As companies continue to grow, you lose that. It becomes a watered-down effect. You’ve always heard the saying, “Quantity grows, quality diminishes.” And I don’t want that. I want to stand against that. I’ve worked with companies that have opposed that and that have worked hard to turn the tides on that. I want to continue that. But for the most part, too many businesses right now, fundamentally, they lose track of what initially got them there. They stop focusing on the customer. They stop focusing on the outcome, on the results. They start just focusing on after you’ve had a 20% turnover month, what do you do? What’s happening in the moment? 

When are you rolling up your sleeves and calling a customer if there’s disgruntlement and actually trying to validate what’s happening? Those are the things that, quite frankly, most companies are missing right now, and it’s just that little bit of care, and it’s missed throughout a lot of industries, not just this one. Care and decency, quite frankly, are somewhat of a rarity, and that’s hard to find. It’s hard. It’s not easy to find nowadays. It’s unfortunate to say. It is. But those who actually hold true to themselves and do the things the right way, they have a much higher likelihood to succeed. 

It really intrigued me when I saw that you’re building essentially a blue-collar business. Maybe it’s not, maybe it’s white-collar because it’s recruiting, but you’ve worked with blue-collar people, and you are introducing AI. Because most people say that’s the last sector that’s going to be disrupted by AI, which is the traditional contracting and blue-collar jobs. So how do you use AI to disrupt, and what gave you the idea that it will really work in your industry? 

Because you’re using it to make the user better and not to replace the user. I think that’s a big part of what people miss, is the technology’s supposed to be there to buffer you up. It’s supposed to be there to make you efficient and effective, minimize your clicks in order to see the end result, but it shouldn’t replace the user. Not right now, not in its current state. It’s not intuitive enough. And you mentioned it earlier. You said maybe we are white-collar because we’re recruiting. 

But I would 100% say the opposite. I would say we’re blue-collar putting on the mask of a white-collar. That’s what we’re doing right now. Our technology is white-collar, 100%. It’s polished, it’s pristine, and it’s going to get better by the day. But our workers, they’re blue-collar. I mean, we’re out helping out local communities, putting out fires during the day, helping out the cause there when you have the local fires here in our backyard. You have us going to truck stops saying hi to drivers, not for anything else. If you don’t want a job, that’s fine. 

We’re talking about the industry. We’re talking about just, “Hey, just know who we are so later on when we represent you, come see us.” I would say we are blue-collar. I would say that we put on a good front and a facade, but there’s grease under the nails. That’s the beauty of what we’re doing right now, is we’re taking the hard-grit feel and we’re putting it into the white-collar piece, so you get the mix that is needed in order to see it. And I think, like the metaphorical headhunting recruiting agencies, I think that there is definitely a concern for AI to come in and disrupt that sector significantly.

I would say that there’s a difference, though, in our sector compared to other sectors where you have your standard recruiting firm. If you’re going out and hiring somebody that needs to be a clerk at a grocery store, you can do that on a generic scale. And I think AI can do that and find very solid candidates very easily and effectively for those types of employee needs.

But I do think that you have these—I would consider it skilled labor. You’re driving an 80,000-pound missile, and you can’t miss the mark on this. I mean, too many people have recently, and it’s caused deaths, fatalities, and an uproar, quite frankly. And you need to have that human touch. The carrier needs to be able to pick up the phone and call them, not even us. We’re still the intermediary. We’re just calling the driver saying, “Are you a quality driver? Let me get some info. 

And do you need a job?” And if they say yes, we help them through it. But I think the bigger thing is even the carrier side. They need to have that touch to them to where they’re taking the time. Those who aren’t, they need to develop it and take the time to truly connect with the drivers and understand they’re isolated for 12, 14, 16 hours a day at a time. And you need to find the person that fits behaviorally also and structurally. The candidate can’t just be your standard layman. Just because they passed a test, they’re immediately ready. They need to be the right fit personality-wise, from an integrity standpoint. 

How do you do that just through AI? You can have them get you to a point, which is what we help with, right? We’re the point that helps you best decipher the white noise to get to that point of stronger filtered quality. But it still will not remove the fact that the carrier needs to pick up the phone and talk to a driver. 

So how do you leverage AI? Do you have an API to ChatGPT and essentially query the data that you collect from the carriers and the drivers? How does that work? 

So we have—yeah.

What we do is we field carrier onboarding and driver onboarding, and we're integrated with FMCSA.
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And through that, you get a determination of a score of 25 different qualification measures, 20 of which are data sets and five of which are more intuitive in nature that we field upon verbal engagements. And we take that information, combine it with our expert suggestion data, whether or not we actually feel they’re a quality candidate as well. We combine all of that, and our carrier-side user, they post up job opportunities, or career opportunities is what we like to call it. And through their career opportunities and general company profilings, we take all of their unique details that they have, and we overlay all of that information together, and we pair them up. And that’s essentially the long and short of it for the moment. And we have AI that comes through. 

They do a once-a-week AI check-in for quality engagement to be ahead of the verbal communication with the actual human. It’s more of a pre-vetting, so we have AI come in to do that. But I don’t want AI to come in and overtake that human touch. So I’m very aware of the user’s sentiment to feel like, “Oh man, here comes AI taking it over.” We want it to be very selective. So the only thing that we have is a quality engagement bot that calls ahead of time saying, “Hey, how do you like the system right now? Are there any inadequacies? Are there any positives you’d like to communicate ahead of time?” 

So then we can go through and vet it. It helps us identify proactively where there might be a gap, if there’s a failure, and what we can improve. And then we store that information, and we drill it down the pipeline, and those who come up the most as far as common theme issues are the ones that get prioritized the most. 

That’s fascinating. So what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in your business right now? 

How to truly put the pieces together. It’s fragmented. The industry is fragmented. Everything is available. I feel like if you could snap your fingers right now and just connect the dots, any one person could do it very easily. But the problem is it’s privatized. It’s data that’s held close to the chest. I don’t blame them for doing it, but everybody has pieces of data. I want to be the person that can help holistically try to make it a whole. So, for example, I know there’s just a launch of CDL validation and licensing that has some sort of advancement where you can put in CDL numbers and find out whether or not they have backgrounds to a certain extent. 

That’s a huge value prop that we’ve actually been working to try to construct for a while as well. But taking something like that and overlaying it with an endorsement strategy, and then overlaying that with state-level violations to make sure that it’s not seeping through the cracks on a minor scale. And then also taking that information and backing that up with an actual formalized resume that you can find. So taking all of those pieces and then overlaying it, and then also on the carrier side, taking that information, not to use it against them by any means. It’s to help them out. 

But identifying what is your actual turnover ratio, right? What is your out-of-service compliance? Maybe that’s the reason. What are your benefit packages right now, right? That’s where we want to step in and help really bridge that gap because a lot of carriers, quite frankly, they’re great at providing a service, but they’re not great at recruiting. They’re not great at creating a company that a driver wants to necessarily work for, right? So we also want to help bridge that gap. So I think the biggest thing for us is collecting all of these pieces of data and bits of information that are scattered throughout the industry and trying our best to bring it all into one network and make it seamless.

You have a few clicks, and you can find out as much information from a public standpoint as possible while protecting the privacy needs of the drivers and of the carriers, and doing it that way and creating a network.
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Love it. Love it. So who’s your ideal customer? I mean, are the drivers your customers as well as the carriers, or are you focused on one or the other? 

We’re focused on both. Our revenue side from a customer standpoint are carriers and our only paying clients. We want our drivers to have a safe place to go to, and that was mainly spearheaded by the social media aspect, the vertical that we’re getting ready to launch, is we want to have a place to where logistics professionals can go and just talk. And you can remain private if you want. You can go public if you want, and you can also create a network of drivers to where if you’re on the road, you can meet other drivers that are shut down, and you guys are CB buddies and you want to do the dance there. But on the carrier side, it’s a paying product because we’re doing the service for them. 

We’re fielding this driver information so that they can thoroughly drive safety, quality, and improve the standards at that carrier level, right? We’re here as a value prop for our drivers, but we’re here as a support mechanism for our carriers. We don’t teach our drivers to drive, but we support them. We back them. We promote them. We want to make sure that they’re in the best possible environment, getting treated fairly. The carriers, we want to help any way that we can, and we don’t know everything. I’m not claiming that we do. But there are certain things that a lot of carriers do wrong. There are very little things, nooks and crannies, that we can help them out that are even outside of our platform.

And that’s where the human element comes in, is when you’re paying for FreightPro, you get the technology and you can hire drivers that are quality and do that self-feeding all day long. But it takes a human to call you up and say, “Hey, I saw your job posting here, or your career posting said this. Flip this verbiage. I know that you had a 401(k) and benefits package. You didn’t have that posted up on your career posting.” It doesn’t matter how much you want AI to prompt you. It doesn’t matter. It’s irrelevant right now. There’s this clash between technology and trust where people are right now. 

They want the technology, but they don’t trust the technology. So if you just have AI doing the whole thing, drivers especially, if you have an AI bot calling our drivers and that’s the only means, they’re going to think that you’re a scam artist before anything else. You have to find the hybrid there, and that’s having great technology overlaid with a quality staff. And it doesn’t take a large staff. It just takes a staff that cares enough to actually do the job, pick up the phone on off-hours. 

If you’re actually struggling and you call us and tell us you’re struggling, we will look through with our experts and find out where we can help you out, or we’ll determine this isn’t the right fit. You’re right. We’re not going to be able to help you. We’ll be upfront with you about that. If you’re open with us, we will be open with you. We’re not for everybody, but we are for the quality that knows that it takes longer than 72 hours to turn and burn a driver into a seat. It takes some diligence. 

And that’s the type of carrier that we want, is the carrier that has that quality to them. It doesn’t really matter their size. It can be a small mom-and-pop. I love those companies because you get to talk to them, right? And really get a feel for who they are as a person. I love those companies. But then you have the larger-scale companies, two to 500 and above that. We haven’t seen very many above 500, but the two-to-500 scale, we’ve seen quite a few, and they’re solid as well. And it’s helped us overcome some key pain points, like sharing profilings. 

So as you move up the scale and tier of who you're servicing and how you're servicing them, you find out on a grandiose scale how much you can improve as a technology.
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Yeah. Love it. So if people out there are listening who may be a CEO of a carrier or a C-level executive and they want to improve their driver recruitment and retention, where can they find out more about FreightPro.ai and connect with you personally? 

Yeah, you can connect with me personally, [email protected]. You can also contact the company in general at [email protected]. I would actually suggest anybody that’s listening, just go onto our website. Like I said, by the time you’re listening to this, our social medias will probably be out, and there’s a meetup functionality for our drivers where they can meet in the network and actually talk to people on a safe, friendly platform. It’s validated on our side and monitored, so we help out with that. 

But if there is any interest in just being with a solid company that just cares about the industry, forget recruiting even, hop onto FreightPro. Just go to www.freightpro.ai, or you can just type in freightpro.ai on your browser. It’ll pop right up. It’ll be the first thing that pops up. You can check us out on social medias too. We’re heavy in the community here locally, based out of Sparks, Nevada, right in Reno. So we’re very heavily in the local community in the Pacific Northwest and the West Coast. 

You can go on TikTok, LinkedIn, Facebook, X. Any of those major accounts, we’ll be on there, and you can check out any of our other podcasts that we’re on. I would just say for anybody that’s an advocate for the industry, in the industry, or just wants to think about the industry, you should definitely check us out. It’s going to be a fun adventure and a cool technology and application. You can download it on the Google Play Store or Apple. And like I said, when you download it at that point, when the audience is seeing this, we should have the social media vertical live and see some cool things that are specific to logistics. You have to be a logistics professional in order to gain access. 

You have to have a CDL number or an MC number to gain access. So you’re protected, but you’re also shielded. If you want to remain private or protect yourself from seeing anybody else looking at you, you can block them immediately. So we made sure that we were thorough in what our drivers and carriers wanted when it came to all aspects of our platform. So hop on and check us out, guys. It’s a cool time. Again, my name is Randy Perkins, CEO of FreightPro.ai, and I look forward to seeing you guys coming on board. 

Awesome. So if you are a commercial driver, check it out. Thank you, Randy, for coming and sharing your story of how you bring AI to perhaps a neglected sector and help the great drivers find great employers, carriers, and vice versa. And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you follow us on YouTube and stay tuned on Apple Podcasts because every week I bring a couple of entrepreneurs like Randy who share their experience and their frameworks. Thanks, Randy, for coming, and thank you for listening.

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

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

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

Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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