Anya Cheng, Founder and CEO of Taelor, is making personal styling accessible to everyday professionals with an AI-powered clothing-on-demand service built for busy men and influencers. After 15 years leading product teams at companies like Meta, eBay, McDonald’s, and Target, Anya turned her own frustration with shopping and laundry into a mission-driven business that helps people look great, feel confident, and save time—while also supporting sustainability by keeping more clothing out of landfills.

We explore Anya’s Product Management Framework, the structured approach she uses to build and scale products. Instead of starting with technology, she begins by Identifying the Right Problem, then Looking at the Persona, Validating the Buying Journey, and Identifying Pain Points. From there, she Selects Decision Criteria to prioritize what matters most, Brainstorms Solutions, and finally Identifies the Right Solution based on impact, feasibility, and business value. She explains how this framework guides everything from launching Taelor to deciding which AI features to build next.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, Founder of the Summit OS Group. And my guest today is Anya Cheng, the Founder and CEO of Taelor, an AI-powered clothing on-demand service for men and social media influencers. Anya, welcome to the show. 

Hello, this is Anya from San Francisco. I’m the founder of Taelor. We use AI to pick clothes for busy men. In the old days, only celebrities had their own human stylists. Now everyone can have their own AI stylist, and we send people real clothes to rent. Before starting the company, I spent 15 years in big tech companies. Most recently at Meta, where I helped build Facebook and Instagram Shopping. I was Head of Product at eBay and helped them launch new businesses in the US, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. I was also a Senior Director at McDonald’s, where I helped build their food delivery business globally when Uber Eats just started, and I helped Target build a tech office here in Silicon Valley. I’m excited to share more. 

Okay, well we already got a lot out of you, so thank you for giving this quick bio. What I’m very interested in is what drives you. So you worked for Target. I think you worked for Amazon, at least with Amazon. You worked for other big tech. 

EBay, McDonald’s, and Facebook. 

Yes, so big tech companies like Meta. What makes someone who is a successful leader in big tech break out start as an entrepreneur? What is your personal “Why” that drives you and that you want to manifest in your business? 

Yeah, it actually start with my personal problems that I had. When I was working for Meta, I was a few female leaders there leading large technology team. So I felt a little bit of imposter syndrome. I wanted to look great, but I don’t want people to find out that I’m freaking out every day. So I tried some subscription boxes like Stitch Fix, which is similar to the old Trunk Club. It’s good that someone styles you. But once you receive those boxes, you have to decide right away: how many times am I going to wear these clothes? And you have to buy before you can wear them. So can I find something even cheaper somewhere else? How do I pair these items? And once I buy them, I have to do laundry, ironing, and folding. It’s just a lot of work.

So I started using rental companies. I rented from companies like Nuuly, which is a $500 million revenue company, or companies like Rent the Runway, which is a public company. They are all great—you can rent, you don’t have to buy. But they require people to pick from hundreds of thousands of garments. You spend two hours picking, picking, picking, browsing, browsing, browsing. And I’m not into fashion. I don’t like fashion. I don’t have time to do shopping. I’m not fashion-forward, so I don’t even know how to pick. That was the “aha” moment for me—

I realized most fashion companies are designed for people who are into fashion, not for people like me who just want to get ready for the day and be successful.
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So I started doing research. Are there other people like me—who hate shopping and laundry but need to look good, be socially active, go to meetings, close deals, get jobs? It turns out there are a lot of people like me: busy men, single guys, salespeople, consultants, pastors, recruiters, professors. There are 15 million single men, 14 million sales professionals in the U.S., and it turns out we started Taelor to help people like me look great without having to think about fashion. 

Well, I don’t know—if you look at my shirt, I probably could also use some Taelor treatment, an AI telling me how to dress better. So what drives you? I understand this is a great idea and definitely necessary, but what makes you excited about it? 

I think I’ve personally always been passionate about helping people achieve their goals. I started as a blue-collar kid—my mom is a housewife, my dad is a factory worker, originally from Taiwan, and they’ve been in the U.S. for 20 years. As an immigrant, I came to the U.S. and was very lucky to have a lot of people help me. I got a student long ago, went to Northwestern University, got my MBA from the University of Chicago. I came to the U.S. without knowing anyone here, but many people helped me achieve the American dream. So it has always been in my heart to help more people achieve their dreams.

What I realized was that dressing well really helped me—almost like a student who buys a textbook and feels ready for the exam even though they haven’t read it yet.
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But this business is an additional way to help people achieve their goals. At the same time, my co-founder, Phoebe, who is originally from Malaysia, she has been in the U.S. for 20 years. Growing up, she wanted to be a fashion designer, but in an Asian family, she became an accountant and finance professional, eventually a CFO. She always had a little spark in her heart to do something related to fashion, and she is very passionate about sustainability. She constantly talks about how today, 30% of clothes go directly from factories to landfills, generating 10% of carbon emissions and polluting 20% of the world’s water. Sustainability is really close to her heart. By the time she had worked for 15 years, she felt ready for a change, and we both shared the same vision. That’s how we started the business together. 

Love it. It’s really a mission-driven company. I didn’t realize this when we first talked, but a lot of people are held back by not being well-dressed. Again, I don’t want to be the example here. I also like the idea because my daughter talks a lot about throwing away clothes and how much damage it does to the environment. I really like that you help people wear and buy only the clothes they actually need and send back the ones they don’t. This is awesome. So let’s switch gears here. I’m really curious about how you develop your products because this is a very creative business. You have to develop a new, revolutionary concept and product. Do you have a framework for developing these products? 

Yeah, absolutely. We always start with the problem we are solving. I teach product management at Northwestern University, and most people, when they think about building a product, their first thought is, “Hey, what product am I building? How do I build it? What technology should I use?” We use AI to build this—we build AI agents—but in fact, you should take a step back. There are two equally important questions you need to ask: what problem should I solve, and what solution should I pick?  Most people spend 95% of their time thinking about what solution to pick. But first, you need to figure out what problem you should solve. The problem you solve is actually the most important thing, because if you’re solving the wrong problem—one that people don’t care about, or one that won’t help your business, or one that you can’t actually solve—then no matter how great your solution is, it’s going to be a waste of time.

For example, what we found is that we are totally different from women’s rental companies. The problem we are solving is for guys who are busy but socially active. They have dreams. As a realtor, I want to sell one more house. As a small business owner, I want to grow my business to open a second restaurant. So they have a dream.

Dressing well and looking good is something that helps increase their chances of success—getting a job, closing a deal, showing up confidently.
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So we want to look great every single day and want to wear different things. So wearing different thing versus, I don’t want to think about it, is actually totally different problem. So if you think of our business model financially is different. For example, in women’s rental businesses, margins are very low because people rent clothes and don’t buy. On top of typical e-commerce costs like shipping, there are additional costs like laundry, so margins remain low. But in our business, customers use the service as “try before you buy.”. They want to save time and save space. So a lot of our revenue actually also come from people actually buying the secondhand clothes.

And those people are people who would never buy secondhand before because they don’t have time. So those are white-collar, busy men renting clothes and also buying them. In addition, they ask me where to buy shoes or accessories, Valentine’s Day gifts, where to get haircuts, even where to go on vacation. They treat us more like an executive assistant service. They give us lots of feedback, and we monetize that feedback back to fashion brands to help them predict what’s going to sell. 

Okay. That’s fascinating. So it’s a two-way business because you are also selling the data that you’re collecting from people.

Customer feedback, like “the sleeve is too long,” “the fabric is too tight,” “this isn’t flexible,” and also insights like, “This is an amazing brand, but it’s too expensive compared to 90% of our other brands on the platform, so you should lower your price.” We give that feedback to brands so they can improve.

Yeah, which is basically data they don’t have—and it’s very valuable. That’s fascinating. So, going back to the framework—because we’re a podcast about frameworks—I want to make sure we have a clear framework. You identify the right problem first, and then you reverse-engineer from there. What are the steps to get from the right problem to the right solution? 

Yeah, so going from the right problem to the right solution—that’s step number one. To solve the right problem, you first need to understand your personas. For example, a simple persona for us is a busy man who isn’t into fashion, such as a single guy, a busy dad, a sales professional, a consultant, or a pastor. Then you map out their journey. For example, they might need to go on a business trip, attend a meeting, go to a birthday party, or go on playdates with their kids. Along that journey, they realize their clothes are old or out of style, and they need different outfits. But when they look at what they have from last year, the clothes are already too small or too big.

So you identify the journey. So for example, they realize they need new clothes, and there’s a moment they say, “Okay, I can either buy exactly the same thing as last year, or… hey, I heard people are actually renting through women’s counterpart—maybe there’s something like that for me.” It’s like when you’re bored and deciding whether to stick with Comcast or try Hulu, Disney+, or Netflix. So identify the journey. After mapping the journey, the third step is identifying the pain points. A simple feature, for example—Facebook. We all use Facebook, and one feature is the birthday feature. The personas are people who have a birthday and people who want to wish their friends a happy birthday. The pain point for the birthday person is: “I’m not sure if I should tell people, but I also don’t want everyone to forget my birthday.” For friends who are close to the birthday person, their pain point is: “I forgot my friend’s birthday.”

So you have a lot of different pain points. Once you have your persona, their journey, and their pain points, the fourth step is to define your selection criteria. For example, you want to pick the biggest problem to solve. What should your selection criteria be? How many people are impacted, how painful it is for those people, and how likely you are to be able to solve the problem effectively. Then you choose one pain point to focus on. For example,

for Taelor, we pick that we want to help busy men who are not into fashion to dress well. The pain point we addressed is helping them save time and look great.
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Now you have the pain point. For example, for me, it is helping people have peace of mind and achieve their goals. Now you start using exactly the same framework for your solution. You pick your selection criteria and identify different solutions. Take Facebook birthday as an example. Oh, the problem I want to solve is that for people who are birthday boys or girl’s friend, they want to host a party. Now you can come out with plenty of solution. For example, the solution one could be AI generating party locations. The solution two is AI generate invitations. The third could be AI suggesting a party game or activity. Then you do the same thing—you identify your criteria. There are so many solutions, so what’s my criteria? The criteria are: which solution solves the pain point better? Which one requires fewer engineering hours? Which one can drive more engagement, traffic, or revenue for the company? Then you use the framework to pick the solution. 

Yeah. Love it. Okay. That’s fascinating. So you find the right problem. Then you look at the persona that has that problem. Then you identify the pain points that really bother these people. 

You find those persona and journey. That’s how you find a problem.  

The journey as well. So the persona. Okay. And these are busy men, so you map their journeys. They need to go to church, they need to go to meetings. Then you use your criteria to select the solution. 

That’s right. 

And then you basically stress test. Is this the right solution? Does it fit the criteria? Does it handle the pain points? Fascinating. 

Yeah. So you’re selecting criteria for your problem. And after you pick the problem, you have the same different selecting criteria to pick your solutions. 

Yeah. Got it. So how do you decide what features to develop? You have your product—you’ve got the clothes. People can order them, try them out, and send them back. You take care of the laundry. They don’t have to worry. AI gives advice. How do you know what features to develop to define your product further? 

Yeah. So the features to develop use the same framework. We start with the problem. Then we ask, what feature—or solution—solves that problem? For example, our customers say, “I hate shopping.” The solution is our AI shops for them. But they also say, I have a little bit points of views. So then we offer them a chance, they have a style quiz. They can upload a picture, say “I don’t wear pink, blue, or green,” And they can say, “I never wear turtlenecks.” And then they show a few pictures of the style that they like, if they have any, or we show them pictures to like or dislike. This way,

we understand their preferences and pain points. And then when they decide a feature, we're thinking about the solutions to address their pain points.
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If you are really going into product management, how do you find out the solution using quant and qual? For example, you interview your customers, run focus groups, check Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Shopify data, QuickBooks—your data points. Then you have qualitative and quantitative numbers. From there, you see the opportunity for a feature. You might identify a pain point: everyone comes to our homepage, but they drop off on the second page. Why? The homepage isn’t very clear. There’s no clear call-to-action button; the button was hidden. It was below the fold. Users have to scroll three times before they see the button. So, okay, I have a hypothesis.

The hypothesis is that people drop off because they don’t see the call-to-action button. So I’m going to come up with a solution. Solution one: move the button to the top. Solution two: have a floating button that is always visible. Solution three: show a pop-out button. And then using the same framework, like, okay, these are three great solutions. Which one take less engineering hours? Which one will potentially solve the problem better? Which one do we think will be more effective or generate more revenue? And then you decide. That’s how we decide on the features. 

Yeah, that’s great. Then the AI keeps learning your criteria, keeps refining, and keeps suggesting better and better-fitting clothes. It gets faster from there, I presume. 

Yeah, because the customer provides feedback. Your Netflix shows—when you start, you might watch all the true crime. But after a few weeks, you start watching other things, like romcoms or Korean dramas. They see what you watch, and you start seeing those suggestions too.

At the same time, what’s different at Taelor is that we know the problem we’re solving: helping people try something a little out of their comfort zone, because that’s why they want a stylist.
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And then, is this a global business, Taelor, or is it focused on the U.S.? 

It’s focused on the U.S. We serve nationwide—anywhere the post office can reach. After people sign up, shipping takes one to three days. They wear the clothes for a couple of weeks. After that, they return the clothes in a prepaid envelope. They can go to the post office, or use a post office app with one click to schedule a free pickup. You can also drop it in blue collection boxes on the street. If you’re traveling—say, to New York for business—you can just return it at the hotel lobby. It’s prepaid, just like any package. You ask, “Can I mail it back?” It’s prepaid. They always say yes, and then you go home, and new clothes has arrived. You don’t have to do any laundry when you get home. 

And you don’t have to check in your luggage. 

Exactly. You don’t have to. 

And to get on and off the plane quickly. I love it. That’s great. So if people would like to learn more, or they’d like to check this service out, or want to connect with you personally, where should they go? Where can they find you? 

Yeah, go on https://taelor.style. Use the code PODCAST25 to get 25% off your first month or use the code PODCASTGIFT to buy a gift card with 10% off. And if you are great suppliers or business owners, you also want to tap on and work with your product, perfect for man who are busy. We love to partner with you. We work with dating sites, fitness centers, career coaches, and executive coaching companies. We also do holiday gifting, employee gifting, and new hire gifting to help your employees look great and save time. For investors, we are now backed by some of the largest consumer investors in the U.S., such as Goodwater Capital, the investors behind Lyft and Socar, Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify. Reach out to me at [email protected]. 

That’s perfect. So, just so we don’t forget, you’re an AI-driven company. That’s amazing. So, if those of you listening to this enjoyed this conversation and learned something, you learned how to build a product: starting from identifying the right problem, looking at the personas, determining the persona, the journey, the pain points, selecting the criteria, and then picking the right solution. So, if you want to learn more about that and similar frameworks that accelerate your business, make sure you stay tuned, because every week I bring an exciting entrepreneur or thought leader who’s going to help you fast-track your business. Anya, thank you for coming, and thank you for listening.

Hannah Bauer, CEO of Heartnomics Enterprises and a leadership strategist grounded in Lean Six Sigma, Zig Ziglar, and Baldrige Excellence, is driven by a personal ‘Why’ of transformation—helping people live with love, excellence, and fulfillment. 

We explore Hannah’s remarkable origin story: diagnosed with a serious heart condition as a child, enduring years of unpredictable tachycardia and two heart attacks at age 10, and ultimately receiving a pioneering ablation procedure that saved her life. Out of that journey, she built Heartnomics—the “economy of the heart”—and teaches her HEART Leadership Framework: Hope, Empowerment, Accountability, Results, and Trust, a values-based model that fuses emotional resilience with operational discipline to create ethical, high-performing leaders and cultures.

Good day, dear listener. Steve Reda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Hannah Bauer, a leadership strategist who teaches leadership performance, continuous improvement. She’s also the CEO of Heart Enterprises, and she is well-versed in Lean Six Sigma, Zig Ziglar Baldrige Excellence, and many disciplines. So I’m excited to welcome you to the show, Hannah.

Thank you Steve. Thanks for having me.

Alright, so you have lots of interesting stories and lots of interesting concepts and frameworks, which we are into. I’m also interested in your personal ‘Why,’ and how are you manifesting that in your coaching practice?

Well, my personal why is transformation. I believe that as human beings, we have the authority and ability to transform, and I believe the way that we do that is through love and excellence.

We've all been created by love and the ability to do good works, excellent works—the ones that are going to leave a positive footprint.
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Wow. So love, access, and fulfillment. That is a very positive vision. I am happy to sign up for that.

It’s positive. It’s true. You know, and I think that’s the thing. It’s like we really can attain that in this lifetime. And sometimes we look at it like, “Oh, it’s so far away.” or “One day,” but it’s like—that’s the amazing thing that we have as human beings. We have the ability to live that out regardless of what’s going on.

Well, that’s a very significant for you to say that because it’s part of your story that when you were 10 years old—and correct me the details—you were diagnosed with a serious heart condition. So tell me your origin story, and how did you actually beat out of this huge challenge and obstacle that you had, the kind of life that you are teaching others right now?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for asking that. Yeah, I will say probably the ones harder than me. I would think of many points as my parents, because I was the kid, right? I was the kid. I was diagnosed at four, when at the time was considered a terminal diagnosis with heart; a lot of research had not been done yet at that time—we’re talking about like the late seventies, early eighties. So there was not really much information on heart disease.—for women, much less on kids. Kids just don’t get heart disease, right? I mean, if there’s anything, it’s like a structural thing. In mine, it was where my heart would go suddenly really fast into tachycardia, but it would also be arrhythmic, which would be abnormal rhythms.

It was unexpected. It could be just—I’m just talking to you—I sneeze, and then it would just go into tachycardia, or I’m in the middle sleeping and I turn the wrong way, it will start going into that tachycardia. And that would be like—think about a resting, normal resting heart rate is between the sixties to eighties. Well, for me, a normal heart rate would be anywhere from 180 to 240. So basically like on—yeah, on like that zone five—what you all are feeling when you are working out. That’s what my heart would be as a kid. But it wouldn’t just be for like, a few minutes. It could last hours, days into the extreme. It lasted weeks, and drugs didn’t work for it.

Interventions didn’t work. I’ve had a DH of 10 actually, which was significant at that time. So I went through two heart attacks. That’s really what— really the both a miracle and what opened the door. I think always our greatest opportunities are always surrounded by the greatest of circumstances and obstacles. And as much as painful as that whole experience was, it also opened the door for my parents to courageously uproot our family, come to the US in search of a cure that didn’t yet exist. And it was a journey for about five years. Nothing really inside as far as the, “Hey, if we do this, this will happen. If we do that, again.”

It was a lot of the things that happened were research. It was going on hope, and that's where my lessons came in because I got to see very intelligent, dedicated professionals really rely not only on skills but really on hope.
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So in 1992, there was an opportunity for an innovative surgery called the heart ablation. And that’s where they basically did a recircuiting. They did the circuits in my heart, burning away parts that were making those fast heartbeats, being able to identify those and having a clear pathway to then energy was able to flow. And ever since then, I’ve been well. So I’m here. I am well in the heart, in a sense. I think with having five kids, they did a really good job because I’m still here. You know, the kids will cause a lot of stress, and being an entrepreneur itself, but that’s where my story started. A lot of things I couldn’t do.

My childhood obviously was very different. You know, things like that were simple—going to school, getting up, getting dressed—there were no options for me. Many times I lived tied to a bed. Four weeks, I lived in the CCU, the cardiac care unit, for many weeks, months at a time. And that’s where I learned actually the beat method. That’s where I learned. That’s why I say regardless of the circumstances, as a kid, you don’t understand. I didn’t understand all it meant. I didn’t even understand what I had the surgery until 20 years later, when they called me to do a documentary on it. And that’s when I realized that I was the first of 3,000 children that were impacted by this innovative surgery that saved their lives.

Wow, that’s an amazing story. And what’s even more amazing to me is that out of this experience, you built your business. It’s called ‘Heartnomics’. 

Yeah.

The economy of the heart. And then you have several frameworks, which are all always revolved around the heart. And one of the frameworks I want to ask you about is the Heart framework itself, which is a values-based leadership framework. So can you tell our audience about what it is, and how did you come up with it? Why did you come up with it? Yeah. And what does it look like?

Yeah. Well, like I said, as a kid, there were a lot of things I was just felt like were happening to me, right? Like there was just like all this things. I didn’t really have much of an option on stuff, and I didn’t understand all the innuendo. But I did understand how people did things, and that how later on in life I came to understand that those were values—those were values that people dealt with.

And that's where the heart, the values-based leadership. It wasn't just something that I learned with me; it was I learned in observing when words weren't there.
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And as I went on in my own leadership journey, I’ve been able to observe with those leaders that have high values are also leaders that are high performers and leaders that really make that impact and influence. And

when I came down to really looking at what those values that really impacted me, that's where Heart comes from. The value of hope, the value of empowerment, accountability, result, and trust.
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If you don’t have trust, you’re not going to be an ethical leader. And we need ethics and leadership. Accountability is not just about holding really anybody—like a punitive thing—but accountability really talks about community, because you can’t be accountable outside of being in a community. And we’re talking about the empowerment—really not just bringing solutions to the people, but

bringing ownership to the people that we lead so that we can come up with those solutions together, which definitely fits back into hope.
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So I love it. So the HEART is really the acronym. So H for Hope, E – Empowerment, A – Accountability, R – Resource. You also already explained empowerment, accountability, and trust. I’d like to ask you about the other two: Hope and R esource. So first of all, hope. How do you create hope? How do you tap into hope? Is there a process? Is it something an important thing? Is it something that evolved in us due to our experiences or environment that maybe contributed to your hope? How do people manufacture hope?

Well, I believe we all are born with that hope. I mean, I see that as with having had five kids—they always have, like, you know, they’re hopeful in a sense. It comes out as a wish. They think it’s a wish. Sometimes people confuse a wish as a hope or like a positive thinking, but really hope. It’s a powerful force because it hope what it does is that it really makes you find a way where there is no way. I realized that sometimes, you know, as I went through my life and things that I said, well, I just don’t have time for this, or I don’t have time for that.

I realized that it wasn't a matter of time management, it was that I had even lost hope in those areas.
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So I see that areas where I didn’t have hope are also areas that I was not looking for a solution or a way to improve. I believe that… How do you know? How do you grow in it? Well, one is identifying, right? What are those? Some of those areas, you’ll find that those areas where you’re focusing on, where you’re believing in, you also find that those are areas that you have high hope on, and those areas that maybe you haven’t thought in a while… it’s like, well… maybe, is it because you lost hope in that because you did try it or you got to put it away? Put it to the side. But hope is a catalyst because hope will help you move into action. It’s not passive at all. It’s not this just this great old feeling. It’s honestly a skill for leaders to be able to not only start looking for solutions.

I mean, look at that area. I know it’s not what it’s supposed to be like, you know. I couldn’t deny how I was feeling when I was going through my heart. My doctors couldn’t deny that all the drugs and the open-heart surgery and those things just didn’t work. We can still speak hope, and hope came in when we were still looking for a solution in life. No solution. When I still chose to live as much a life that I could, even from my bed, because I was hopeful that there will be a time where things will be better, where I could even make that time better. I mean, I would play with different things and hope that’s what will make you do. It’ll move you into action. It’ll start helping you look at the circumstances differently. It’s the start. 

What catalyzes hope because some people are hopeful because they have a strong spiritual belief.

Yes.

And they hope in God, for example, that, you know, God’s going to help me. That allows them to have hope even in a situation which is maybe hopeless. Or some people have a strong belief in something, like they’re fighting for their country, and that gives them a hope—this bigger goal that their person gives them hope. Some people are very curious, and maybe the curiosity tells them that there is something that they don’t know that they can still find, and it gives them hope. How do you catalyze hope? Is it an inborn thing that some people are more hopeful than others, or is it something that can be cultivate?

I do believe it is divinely ingrained in us, and the object of my hope is my divine Maker, God, and He's the author of hope for me.
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hope will raise—which is what is so important for a leader in organizations is to raise hope.
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Now, we’re not talking about false expectations. We’re talking about in light of, like I said, “Hey, I know this is what it looks like right now, but it’s not the end of the story. It’s not how this finishes. There’s a mission, there’s a vision, there’s greatness.” And of course, if the part of faith goes with hope, I mean there’s a lot of why we do what we do. We’re operating in faith. You can say faith—it could be from the way that you have seen things in the past—but really, faith is also, I believe, also a divinely ingrained that can be grown in. I mean, we can grow and nurture faith. We can nurture hope. We can nurture love. The same way love comes in again. I believe 100% from our Maker.

But there’s also, I think, and I’m not a scholar, but there’s a line in the Bible, which paraphrase something like, “H elp yourself, and God will also help you.” Let’s say in a business situation, your business is being disrupted. You know, you see that AI is going to eat your business, and you kind of become the respondent, and then you wreck your brain. What can I do? How can I avoid it? How can I pivot my business? Then, you know, a couple of days later, you have an idea, and then you have hope. This idea will give you hope that you can pivot your business and you can take it further. Then you really are helping yourself so that you can get God’s support as well.

Oh yeah. I mean, absolutely. There’s a part where he says, “You do all that you can do, and God will do all you cannot do.” So you’ll do what you can. We rely on that: He will do all that we cannot do way beyond, above what we can think or imagine. So absolutely, we do what we can. And that’s to a certain point, right? I mean there’s, for example, there’s a lot of times even with goals, right? Like we set out goals, and as much as we… you may want to like, “Oh yeah, maybe it’s like a financial goal or a health goal, whatever that is.” We really are not in charge of that outcome. We are in charge of the activities that will lead to that outcome. I can control if I send a health goal on what I put in my body, I can control on, like how much rest do I give? I can control those things. Now the overall help—that’s really why I’m trusting that my activity, along with the divine help, is going to be that, right?

Same thing with income. There’s only so much I can do—am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing? Am I doing the phone calls? Am I getting myself, keeping up and with my skill? Am I making pitches? Am I making sales calls? You know, those things. Again, I can’t control somebody buying from me, but I can control the activities that will allow people to buy from me.

Yeah.

So that, and relying in that divine part.

That’s a great for way of setting it. Okay. So, got it. I understand hope. What about resource?

So resource. Yeah, resource goes to… there has to be an outcome to the activity, right? There has to be a way we’re measuring, a lot of times I hear like, “Well, we want the world to be a better place,” for example. Better—well, better for what?

Resource is a way to be able to as a leader, to quantify what maybe we only can.
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There has to be a way that I can measure, from that qualitative data to the quantitative data, right? From things that we say that are mission-critical. What is that? You know, how do I know I am closer to that mission? How do I know I am closer to that purpose? How do I know with that? So results very much also deals with alignment.

So as a value, it’s that I’m not just going to do things for the sake of doing them, but I’m going to do things intentionally. I’m going to do things purposefully. And the purpose can be measured; the intentionality can be tracked. Those things like, I don’t just say, “I’m intentional.” Well, there’s a tracker to that. Okay. How am I going to? 

Can you give an example how you track intentionality? 

Absolutely. So every morning I’m going to do 20 minutes of meditation, right? So I can be having… well, my intentionality actually may not even be 20 minutes. That would be my goal. Intentionality is to have time where I’m setting my day up correctly. Well, that’s my intention. I need to… okay, well, how do I do that? Maybe starting that before I do anything else. So my intentionality is then transferred into something that I do like, something like, “Oh, either what I think, or how am I going to make sure that I’m going to get in the right mindset to start my day?” Well. I’m going to have to get up early. Like I have to do it early in the morning. I might have five kids, for example. They wake up at different times. If I was going to really be intentional and this is where the rubber meets the road for the results—am I willing to get up before everybody else so I can have that time?

So intentionality is not just like, “Okay, this is what I’m going to do and hope all this stuff, but the result attached with that, being able to transfer that intentionality to it—it is actually preparing. Like I started looking, “Okay, if I’m not intentional with this, I also am aware of some of the obstacles that come in, but I need to put in something in place to measure that intentionality,” to where maybe I don’t get all seven days, but maybe five days, three days, but I’m taking that from one dimension to the other.

And results: when you are committed to results, there is intentionality with that is not just putting in, this is what we're going to do
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And it has to be transferred to something maybe three times a day, a week. It’s not enough for me, and I have to measure that at the end of the week. Maybe I do need to up four, or maybe, you know what, with one, I’m good. So I don’t need to be killing myself three days. I just need to do one time, you know? So that is dealing with as my intention as I’m going out and trying it out, but I’m also looking at the results because we have greatest of intentions, right? But the smallest of action is going to trample the greatest of intention. So it’s not just about being intentional and having this feeling. You have to be able to be able to translate that into something else, and that result is going to help dictate. 

If you don’t measure the resource, then maybe you are going to your intention may dissipate. You have nothing to reinforce it.

Absolutely.

And then you’re going to lose it. But what’s really important is really interesting to me is the way you talk about intention and hope. There’s a lot of emotional juice behind this. So it’s not just about rational plans and systems and processes and logic and structure, but it’s also the emotional charge that is required. So hope is emotion. You know, you feel that it’s going to get better. It fuels you. If you really are committed to doing this thing, getting up and making this happen, it’s an emotional charge that you have, and even trust. You know, it is an emotional connection that you have the intention to bear that bond with the other person, to trust them, and then they can trust you in return because it has to be a two-way street. Do I get this somewhat right? 

Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, if you look at it, for example, like, today is January. We’re the beginning of January, but the job reports came out. What is that supposed to do? Yeah, it’s a very quantitative thing, but really what it measures is confidence. It’s all about confidence. Confidence is an emotion. The volatility that’s going to come from that, the confidence that you either have or don’t have in whatever it is—the system that you do have or don’t have. It’s really going to dictate the next actions that you’re going to do. So yes, it’s definitely very emotional trust that you can have. And we do have a very structured way to may portray or communicate something, yet it’s the emotion, right? You talk about trust and in business.

Absolutely. Who do we do business with? With whom we like know and trust? Trust. In sales, it’s an exchange of emotion. I’m selling you a benefit like, we look at advertising, we look at things. So yes, there is the emotional very much component attached to that. Even at the confidence levels, the confidence is going to—if we degrade the confidence in what we do, the economy, the faster we’re going to move, the more we may invest. So there’s an action that’s followed with that. But yes, definitely we’re emotional beings. It is a language that we speak. So yes, all of these are going to be attached with emotion along with the organizational part, and that’s really where Heartnomics came in. That mixture of both. It’s hard—the emotional part that what we value, the assets—but then the economy, the economy of the heart, which is the systems, the way that we measure things, the processes, the reports, all of these parts, because it is an economy of the heart.

That’s really interesting, this concept of emotion and the machine, essentially the spirit or the human spirit and the system coming together and creating the result.

Yeah.

I mean, you’ve been in business for a long time. You’re also teaching in business. What was the hardest decision that you’ve ever had to make in your business?

I think in businesses, there are seasons to everything. So I think the hardest decision would be—I mean, my hardest decision at the beginning was just to get started. That was sometimes like the hardest decision, right? Like, okay, can I do this on my own? Is somebody going to go forward? So sometimes that seemed, at that time, it seemed like the hardest decision ever. Like, am I going to leave this to go after this? Later on in the business, like staying—okay, everybody else is going this way. Do I need to follow everybody else, or do I keep on doing what I’m doing? Am I being completely blindsided by my passion and what I believe it is?

You know, in a sense of stubbornness. So sometimes I would say the hardest decisions have been, and really identifying and clarifying the purpose of what it is that I do in light of consistent change. I came to find that, I think I would say that the one that had the initial biggest ripple effect was when I was in my previous company, when I had the publishing company, and we had to really look at—there was this whole battle of content versus platform when you had the rise of the eBooks versus the print books, right?

To where suddenly what was so valued, which was the printed book, the knowledge, suddenly the knowledge part seemed to have lost its value because knowledge was everywhere by everyone. So you saw things happening, for example, with Britannica Encyclopedia to where people—that’s where you would get knowledge from—to suddenly having a Wikipedia, where people wouldn’t pay for, and it was like added by anybody.

So the curation part. So it’s like, what do we do? You know, do we develop or go into platform development, or do we go into content development? Do we still stay true? And the hardest decision was really in having to not only in taking the time when it seemed like everybody’s going a hundred miles per hour to really, in a sense, shut everything off and get back in touch with, well, what is our core? What is it that we’re here for? I see that a lot in business owners today with the rise of AI. The rises of all this technology is going super fast, the speed of change, and it’s like, do we need to change the way we do business altogether? Like everything—do we even—is there even value in what we do?

Because now technology tools are doing the work that we say we do. So I would say the hardest part is really getting down to slowing down enough and listening—turning up your listening ears enough in a time where it seems like you can’t afford to do so to be able to move forward. Because I know for me it seemed like, oh my goodness, we’re losing ground if we stop right now, this speed up everybody, but actually in the slowing down is what really gave birth to the next phase of what we needed to do. I’ve seen that again and again.

Sometimes it can be an unleashing of something because often we get comfortable doing something and we stop learning because we’re successful. You’re not being pushed, and then a disruption comes, and then we have to really have some source switching and go back the roots, to what we’re really about. And that can release the next level of evolution. Basically, it’s the yin and yang. So danger is the opportunity.

Always.

Yeah.

Always. That’s what I said, like you know, the greatest of your greatest opportunity is usually surrounded by the greatest of opposition, challenges, all this stuff. I mean, like I said, even with me, like that’s what I saw with the surgery, right? That innovative surgery, it hadn’t been done before. We had a whole track record of failure. You know, everything around it was failure, and yet you had to look at that there was still an opportunity. And that opportunity honestly unleashed just the way that even heart disease is treated today.

There had to be the opportunity, there had to be the pioneers, there had to be the ones that were willing to go and the ones that are willing to also—there is a prize for being first, we see that in the marketplace.
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Yeah. That’s a great way to look at it. So we are the creators, we are the governors of things, and they’re just a tool. It’s an amplifier. It changes the nature of the work. It turns the work from execution-oriented to creation-oriented.

Yes.

Which can be uplifting but also burdensome.

Oh. Yes. And that’s where we are. I believe we’re the guardians of that, right? I mean, that’s where leadership comes in because in leadership you are able to set up clarity. That’s one of the greatest things that what we serve as leaders.

We also protect, we also guide, we also do all these things. And ethics is a big part.
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And that is also where we still will have a role to play on the ethical being a leader that leads by ethic integrity—not only integrity in how we do things through the process, but integrity of who we are. The whole part of being, which is not something you can—again, it’s just a tool. The tool helps with that. Like you say, amplify the tool helps with even helping, unleashing and create. I know there’s things that we can definitely do faster, but we can’t lose the opportunity of the opening that tool allows us to be able to create even more, to be able to add value even more in a different way.

Yeah. And I think when you say ethics, I’m thinking that it’s, how it manifests is, doesn’t it manifest through being aligned with our values?

Yes.

And knowing our values so that we can align ourselves. Because I see people who are not aware of the value of the values that are dear to them, and they don’t articulate it, and then they get confused, and they feel frustrated, but I don’t know why. And they can’t align with it because it’s not explicit. So, yeah. 

It’s everybody-based leadership. Its heart. Exactly. 

That’s basically it. You know, heart-based leadership’s probably value-aligned leadership is a another way of saying it, right?

Yes.

Also, yeah. Emotionally resonant leadership.

Yeah, we’re emotional beings, and in all these tools—again, like the stock market is very much driven by emotion. Like, you see what happens when you’re in fear, when people start selling off, it’s fear. We have the whole, again, the confidence. We have a barometer, like the ‘Elderman Barometer of Trust’ is all it does is to measure trust. We talk about morale, we talk about that trust. That barometer of trust is used to lending practices. I said how people feel about organizations, how people feel about things. So you think about that— we cannot ignore emotion, like the humanness of being human, as we’re moving forward in innovation. And that is a call to the human-centric and valuing something that we say in Maxwell. One of our core beliefs is that we are people of value that value others and add value to them.

So in utilizing these tools, in integrating the tools as a leader is how are they adding value to the human? Because it still has to be human-centric. We’re still selling products to the human, and AI is not going to buy. I mean, they’re not AI.

AI doesn’t have emotion. I think—I’m not aware of it. Maybe the newest ChatGPT 6.0 will have emotion. I don’t know. But the currently, maybe that’s a big difference—that AI doesn’t have emotion, so it doesn’t have that energy. And maybe that’s the spiritual energy, and who knows where this comes from. And that is a big driver of human decisions and desires and intentionality. And it’s not just about, you know, the tokens and the logic and the ideas and the information. It’s also about this energy, this emotion, and we bring this to the table. And AI cannot do this yet.

Yeah. And let me tell you something. When I went to the documentary, when they did a 20-year anniversary for my surgery, and they were interviewed with the doctor, they did actually connected me back to my nurse. They connected me to the person that was there that checked me in. I got to go see the surgery room. And then I got to hear the doctor really for the first time now as an adult, now as a mom. And it is like they asked him, well, what was going on? You know, first of all, he said, “What were the odds of this working?”

He said, “Well, imagine yourself you are in a pitch-black room, and you’re trying to find out one little switch is going to turn the light on, but wait a minute, the room is spinning at the same time.” So that was the odds of this happening, of it being successful. And he said it was just like a miracle that just happened in front of them, where they were able to get to the right spot to do that. And that was the first time where I actually saw not only the logical part, as a doctor, as a skill, but he also called it the medical miracle. Definitely their hands were divinely guided. But not only that, he also added this other part that he said, “Well, what were you doing with her this whole time?”

I said, “We’re just hoping, we’re just trying to keep her alive long enough for technology to catch up.” And that’s where it hit me as I’m hearing this. It’s like if I was to say what was the birth of Heathnomics, that was it. Because I’m like, well, what kept me alive long enough? It was love. That’s what sustained me.

That's what the love of my grandmother as I was going through this agonizing pain, my parents, their courage that it took to do what they did—it was love.
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So we can't just go by what logic said, but love was such a more powerful force
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Yeah. And then you are still projecting this. This is amazing. You have a lot of— you’re like a mini nuclear reactor. You know, you’re protecting this positive energy. I love it. I think it’s going to shine through this episode. Final question. What do you think is the most important question that an entrepreneur should be asking themselves?

What question am I not asking myself? So they’re like the mistakes. You know what the biggest mistake, and you probably heard this mistake that we have, is not asking what mistake I am making? So as an entrepreneur, I would say it’s that because it takes a humility. So I would say that would be part what the parts, I know we talk a lot about a grid and getting out there and all this stuff, and I understand that. Trust me, I get it. I also feel, and I see that one of the greatest things with entrepreneurs right now, especially in the light of all the stuff that we have, is that humbleness that has to come.

Because without humbleness, we won’t listen to the ideas of our great teams. Without humbleness, we won’t be open to the great possibilities.

Without humbleness, we won't be able to look at our mistakes and not be afraid of them but embrace them for what they are. And they are all steps and lessons to the process.
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Yeah, and they can be very painful to look at. 

Yeah, very. If you’ve ever done a SWOT analysis, they’re brutal. And you know, when you’re looking at your strengths, your weaknesses as your threats—I remember doing that with my team. Like, oh, this is a great team building. I feel like it was a nuclear world, it’s horrible, but we got through it. So yes, one of the greatest services that we can do as a leader—and it takes humbleness to do it. It takes humbleness to take a look at this. And it’s going to take that love, honestly, to look at things the way that things are and bring out that hope. That is going to help you get through and get to the next innovative part because we need innovation. 

And innovation doesn't necessarily mean that it has to be a brand new thing, like never been done before, like a new invention.
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New combination over existing things. No, there’s nothing new under the sun. Love it. Well, so if someone would like to learn more about Heartnomics and your work and maybe want to explore working with you or connect with you, where should they go? Where can they find you?

Oh, well, thank you. To connect with me, best way is to go through LinkedIn. You can look me up there, Hannah Bauer. Also on my website, I have a special assessment for you for aligning with your individual alignment. It’s going to go, it’s based on heart. And also for the organizations that is based on the core of the organization. So I would love to have you there. Take a complimentary assessment, and then we’ll connect.

That’s awesome. So if you like this conversation, you like the Heartnomics ideas and the love that is read, think through it. Then go and check out  Hannah Bauer’s website and LinkedIn page. Check out the self-assessment. Reach out to her. And if you enjoyed this show, then make sure you subscribed on YouTube, you follow us on LinkedIn, Apple Podcast, wherever you get your podcast. And stay tuned because every week I bring an exciting thought leader, entrepreneur to the show like  Hannah Bauer.  Hannah, thanks for coming and sharing, and thank you for listening.

Tim Martinez, Value Creation, Strategic, and Exit & Succession Planning Advisor—also known as “The Inside Man”—is on a mission to empower entrepreneurs and make the world a better place with his philosophy of “No entrepreneur left behind.” 

In this episode, Tim shares how he evolved from starting small businesses as a teenager to advising founders on high-stakes growth and exit decisions. We explore Tim’s 3 Exits Framework, which breaks exit planning into three critical phases: Mental Exit (separating identity from the business), Role Exit (building leadership and succession so the business can run without the owner), and Technical Exit (valuation, deal structure, and the formal sale process). Tim also explains why AI is accelerating business disruption, why minimalism is a competitive advantage, and what keeps so many businesses stuck at the $3M revenue ceiling.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS Group. And I have as my guest today Tim Martinez, who is a Value Creation, Strategic, and Exit & Succession Planning Advisor, also known as “The Inside Man.” Tim also has a successful Substack with lots of followers, which has a similar title, Inside Man. He’s also built his own ChatGPT API, so he’s running with the times. Tim, welcome to the show. 

Thanks, Steve. Great to be here. 

Finally, we have someone who is ahead of the curve on AI and the technological evolution that’s part of this new industry revolution. So let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal ‘Why’ and how are you manifesting it in your practice and in your business? 

Yeah. My personal ‘Why’ is to make the world a better place and to empower entrepreneurs. “No entrepreneur left behind” has kind of been my motto. Since I was a kid—I started businesses very young, like 15 or 16—people would ask me, “How are you doing this?” And I would help however I could. And it was just

always felt really good to help my fellow entrepreneurs, whether I was helping them in a small way or a big way. And there's nothing better than seeing some of the advice you're able to give someone actually get implemented.
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Well, you have a boundless energy, because you are writing books, you are writing your blog, you are doing these podcasts. Then you also have to gather the information, right? You have to work with clients—otherwise there’s no raw material. That is very impressive. So what took you to this point? How did you evolve? I mean, you started at 15, but surely you were not coaching or consulting people at 15. 

Yeah, so I probably spent about 10 years just starting small businesses. I had the lemonade stand, then a coffee business and a silk-screen business. I had a DJ business, a retail store, a marketing and advertising agency, a small one, but I was able to sell it. And I got lucky and sold a couple of these small businesses. I built websites, built apps—I mean, anything you can do to make a buck. I was just kind of hustling and figuring it out on my own. And at a certain point in time, maybe like 10 years later, someone asked me to help them write their business plan. It was the first time I thought, “Huh, someone wants to pay me to help them write a business plan. That sounds interesting.” Okay. And I had written all of my own business plans for 10 years. I used to go to SCORE—the Senior Corps of Retired Executives, a division of the SBA—and they would consult for free. They still do, by the way.

And I always said my long-term goal was to be an old advisor at SCORE, because they helped me so much when I was a kid.
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So I charged money for my first business plan. That person was able to raise money from their uncle. Then they said, “Well, hey, we got this money. What do we do now?” So I said, “Well, I think I can charge you. I think this is called consulting. Maybe I’ll just charge you to help execute your business plan.” It was a small business, and I went to Barnes & Noble and bought a book that was like this big—How to Start a Consulting Business. I just sat there and highlighted the whole thing. It had CD-ROM forms in the back. I knew nothing about consulting. And probably for the next handful of years,

I just focused on writing business plans and helping people. That’s kind of what got me into consulting and working with bigger businesses. It really started with business plans and small businesses.
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Yeah. I mean, business plans are great because you are envisioning the future of the business, crunching the numbers—what’s going to happen with your top line, bottom line, costs, overhead, margins—and essentially it helps you visualize the skeleton of the business. Then you can put the meat on the bone, kind of thing. 

Yeah. And I had worked on hundreds of business plans, and  pitch decks, financial models, and market research. That documentation aspect of a business, I had spent a good, let’s say, 10 years working very heavily with clients as an analyst in consulting firms. And that’s really what got me into the game and got me into bigger and bigger businesses, because I got very good at doing that with no formal training—and we didn’t really have what the internet is today. I remember going to the downtown library in Los Angeles, finding articles, and taking scanned copies of them. That’s how we did our market research. And business plans used to be like a dictionary. The SBA would require business plans to meet all these requirements, so we ended up with huge business plans. Now people want a one-pager, maybe a 10-slide deck, and call it a day. Where I got my chops was from understanding every imaginable nuance of every business in all verticals.

I worked around the world with businesses, and I guess I was in the right place at the right time for it.
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Yeah, that’s very humble. So one of the things that you do is you help people prepare for exit, and you came up with this framework called The 3 Exits Framework. I thought it was fascinating to think about exits from different perspectives and to have different mental models for them. How did you come up with this, and can you explain to the audience what it looks like, how it works, and how it helps entrepreneurs?

Yeah. And it’s important to note that I started my career starting businesses, helping people get the start. And as I got older, the businesses I worked with were also getting older. And as I got a little more gray hair and a few more wrinkles, people would take me more seriously at the later stages of the business, when they maybe wouldn’t take me so seriously when I was in my early twenties. So my business had evolved from starting to growing and then eventually to exiting, and that’s where most of my clients are now. What I’ve discovered is most people enter the exit planning conversation at the very end, asking, “What is my business worth? Who wants to buy it?” Needing a business valuation is the most common first question: “Whoa, what’s it worth?”

But after working with a handful of companies through this whole exit process, you start to realize that there’s far more than just the numbers.

The 3 Exits Framework says there are three exits that need to occur before you’re out and on your yacht, sailing into the sunset.
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The second exit is really your role exit, because eventually someone needs to run this business in your absence. The whole tenant of selling a business is that you’re not going to be in it. You might have earnouts or some transitional involvement, but eventually, you will not run this business. So you have to replicate yourself. Most people say, “I’ve tried, but it hasn’t worked.” Well, you know what? Now’s the time for this to work. It’s time to build SOPs, standards of excellence, and get someone who could be better than you ever were in that seat. So that role exit is a big part, and that would be true succession. The other part of that is it’s not just the CEO or the owner. A lot of times it’s them and they’re number one, or they’re number two, or number three, because in many cases those people also have equity and ownership in the companies in some cases. So we need to get succession in line for multiple roles. 

And then the third exit is your technical exit. It’s the one piece everyone feels like they start with that is your valuation, getting your documentation together, running a formal auction process, making sure that you’re looking at multiple buyers, whether strategic or financial. And just running a very thorough, formal process that’s going to get you the highest valuation possible. And structuring a deal that there’s going to be a little bit of give and take. Most deals die because of misaligned expectations. And they’re usually misaligned expectations on that final exit.

So when you put those three things together and someone says, I want to sell my business, or we're thinking about exiting in the next couple years, I just start first with the identity part.
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Yeah. And people underestimate the significance of that. It can sound touchy-feely and like an afterthought in most cases. And people think that just by earning a sack of money, their life will be solved and all problems will disappear. But actually, problems exist at all levels. Elon Musk probably has more problems than most listeners here. 

Sure. 

So, it’s not going to solve your problems, and identity is huge. I talk to people—I was also an M&A advisor for over 10 years, sold many businesses, visited former clients, and went out on their boats on the lake. Often, that was the one time they actually used the boat, because they didn’t really need it. They thought they did, but they didn’t. Next time, the engine wouldn’t start, or the boat was full of water. Or they’d go out on the golf course, meet new people, and ask, “Who are they?” It turned out they were just retired rich people—not interesting entrepreneurs or CEO. That’s a huge change.

And with the Great Wealth Transfer and the aging Baby Boomer population, there’s a statistic that says 50% of business owners are forced into an exit—meaning there’s some life event that occurs that says you now need to sell your business and get out. And you and I both know that if you’re forced to an exit, you’re going to be taking a major discount. But those forces can happen when you have a heart attack, or someone in your family has a health issue, or your grandkids and everybody moves multiple states and you want to go with them. All these things happen. So our recommendation is just start having the conversation now. 

Yeah. And so I think it’s a little bit like saving for retirement. A lot of people keep putting it off, and eventually there’s no time left to do it, and then they’re in trouble. So how do you even raise awareness with people about this? How do you work with them to prepare this? Can you actually raise awareness and make them feel this is a real issue? How do you raise awareness? 

Well, I have my blog, and that’s probably where I do most of my conversations. I wrote about the 3 Exits Framework. Any chance I get to speak, I always use it to raise awareness around the subject. In my consulting practice, I work with a handful of consulting firms and investment banks.

Anytime I get pulled into a conversation about exit planning, I usually just pause for a second and just talk about their life goals.
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Otherwise, they would’ve been the chairman, and just meeting with their CEO, who’s running the business. That’s usually not the case with these owner-operator businesses. And that doesn’t mean they’re small, by the way. I mean, they could be running a $50 million business and still the choke point where everything has to run through them and they’re just exhausted and burnt out. 

Do you think that this AI revolution is going to change things? Is it going to make more people exit-ready because it’s easier to create systems? 

Perhaps. Yeah, I think it’s helping the service provider world be more efficient. In my world as a management consultant, I’m 10 times more efficient. I’m sure you’re 10 times more efficient with tools like the one we’re using here, and it just helps us speed things up. I’ve noticed people use it as a thought partner, as a psychiatrist, even as a best friend. I’ve seen people go into deep dialogue like, “Should I sell my business? Give me five factors.” The ones who are aware of this are using it fully. The people who aren’t are a little behind the times. And then from an operational standpoint, yeah, I mean with the bots and all the many things you could put in your business to make you more efficient, but that doesn’t apply to everybody. I would say there’s going to be a 10 to 20% group of people that are already on it, making it work for them, and then there are the laggards who will probably never touch it. 

Or is it that—okay, maybe we can be more efficient with AI, but we’ll have the appetite to do more, and there will be more complexity? Some things we’ll simplify, but we’ll create other complexities that replace the previous ones. What do you think about it? 

Yes. So businesses typically have cycles. There’s usually a five- to seven-year cycle where a business hits its peak, and then it starts to trend down. And they usually have some level of innovation that has to reoccur for it to hit another up cycle, and then there will be a down cycle and so on and so forth. So it’s always like an up slope after an up slope. When you’ve been in business for 30 or 40 years, you’ve gone through multiple rounds of these cycles—three or four rounds of those cycles. What I’m hearing right now is business owners that are, let’s say, at retirement age, they’re saying, “I don’t know if I have what it takes to go through this AI cycle. Maybe I had what it took to make it through the eighties, nineties, and two thousands, but now we’re in 2026. I’m not sure I’m equipped, or my team who’s also very senior, they don’t feel like they have what it takes to get through that next cycle without hiring young talent. But even then, they don’t really understand what they’re talking about. So there’s this gap. And again, I’m hearing it more and more of people saying, I think now’s the time to get out and let some other company that has gas in the tank, vision, and capacity to come in and do that thing. 

Yeah, that’s interesting. Do you think a multiple-AI–enabled company versus a post-AI company is going to be markedly different? 

Maybe. Because it all comes down to revenue—it comes down to the revenue story. I’ll give you a perfect example. You have a very profitable company, but they’re using an old CRM. A new company comes in and says, “Hey, you’re already profitable. If we buy you and put in a new CRM, maybe we could be even more profitable.” That’s cool. So we don’t really need you to put in all the tech. We’ll come in and do all that, and then we’ll get the upside on that. Just as long as you’re profitable, as long as you’re profitable, yet you don’t have major client concentration, your business has all the components. A new company with new vision could come in. That would largely be a strategic buyer. The PE buyer, the financial buyer, most likely is going to want to inject capital into your business so you can go and reinvest, and build new tech, or become a platform, whatever you’re going to be. But that would be a different arrangement.

So it’s basically a numbers issue. It doesn’t matter your technological evolution. And maybe it’s even worse if you’ve already implemented AI and that only allows you to make five million dollars—there’s less upside for the buyer. 

Yeah. The bigger concern is: Is your industry at risk because of AI? Is your particular business at risk? And that’s why I think people need to adopt it—so they can say, “No, we’re not at risk. We’ve adopted it, we’re applying it in whatever fashion we’re doing it, and we’re going to see the results.” We’ve already seen a major downswing in a handful of industries because of AI. I mean, advertising agencies are getting hit really hard. People used to be able to charge for writing press releases, to write blogs, to write social, to do video editing on social media. A lot of that’s gone, so the bottom tier of those agencies is just gone—there’s no need for them anymore. 

Do you see people proactively working on making themselves AI-resilient?

Everyone knows that they need to do it. Nobody is unaware that today, it’s like websites. There was a time when everyone knew they needed a website. They just didn’t really know how they were going to build it or who was going to build it. They knew it was going to be expensive. It’s kind of where we’re at right now. Everybody knows they need AI. They’re just not exactly sure how they need AI, what it can actually, literally do for them.

I think for some people, that big dream that it was going to do everything quickly got taken off the table
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But it’s just not going to do everything. Like, I still need an accountant. I still need an account manager. I still need someone to do these things, but maybe I don’t need as many people as I once did. So we’re seeing kind of some leveling off there. But I would say largely most people don’t know what AI can do for them, and they’re not really prepared to make those investments. We have a client right now that just made a half million dollar investment into an RFP tool that’s going to help them move faster than their competitors, submit more on RFPs, build everything out in a very complicated way, but they’re making a half million dollar investment. How many companies out there are saying, let’s go, give me the invoice. I’m ready to roll. There’s still a lot of pause there. 

What you’re describing feels more like a defensive play—okay, we know AI is coming, so we have to implement some AI tools. But I’m thinking more about the big picture. Is my industry going to be disrupted by AI? And how do I pivot my business before I lose momentum, so I become like Netflix—going from a video rental company to a streaming company?

Yep. 

Do you see companies rethinking their business model? 

I think from what I’ve seen, people are rethinking everything—top to bottom. Because you have to start with labor. That’s usually where people start. “AI can do all these things—do I need less talent on the deck?” And if I do, then what can AI do so I don’t have such heavy overhead? Because overhead is also liability, and it has this employment risk behind it. So if you can go from a thousand staff to 800 or 750, great, let’s do it—why wouldn’t you do it? Most people are saying, “Let’s figure that part out first.” The next thing is the industry disruption, which is what’s our competitors doing to service clients better, manufacture faster, or do things cheaper, so then we’re not left in the dust.

So from a production standpoint, we need to figure this out quickly. What I’d say—what I do—is, as an analyst, as a consultant and advisor coming in, that’s why I built my AI. I built my AI to fire myself. I basically said, “What I used to do as a management consultant is now irrelevant, because AI is better than me.” So let me just build the digital me and not worry about that side of my business anymore. So I just don’t worry about that anymore. I don’t even really take on assignments that I used to, because AI can do it better and faster. Now, if you want to hire me and allow me to use my AI tool to handle the technical work, I’m more than happy to do that. But I’ll tell you firsthand—save your money. 

So you’re giving it away, or are you selling it? 

Yeah, it’s free. It’s free. It’s on ChatGPT. What people can’t do is sit down and have an honest, sincere conversation and ask them the hard questions and challenge them. That’s where AI still lacks the human component. I can take a client and say, “Hey, let’s hang out. Let’s get lunch. Let’s go play golf. Let’s bring in your kids. Let’s talk to your kids. Let’s talk about the family dynamic.” Let’s just have a sincere conversation. Let me hold space and create a forum where I can hear people. And that human component is the only thing that I’m worried, like I’m working on now. I’m out of the technical side, because that part of my job is gone. 

So fascinating. So does it mean you have to be more of a social animal? 

I think so.

If you're not going to be a social animal and you're just going to sit at your desk, you should probably be building software using tools like Replit, n8n, or any of these different software tools and just go all in.
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Yeah. But maybe we connected originally through LinkedIn. I don’t know where, how we connected, but we may have have connected through a bot—actually. 

It’s possible. 

Yeah. 

It’s possible. But I’ll tell you, I connect with maybe one or two percent of people now. Previously, because I didn’t get so many inbound inquiries, I would connect with more, because I felt like there was a sincere person on the other end. Now, I really don’t know. I’ve become very skeptical. 

Yeah, I’m with you. Let’s switch gears, because our time is running out. And there are a couple of things that in our pre-interview you talked about, and one was minimalism.

Yeah. 

What is minimalism? How do you do it? And what’s a low-hanging way to start to become a minimalist? 

It’s kind of like that first-principles idea of what really matters. It’s essentialism. It’s kind of getting down to the one thing, that was my recent blog, if there was only one thing you could do this year, but it would make all the difference, what would it be? And anything that gets in the way of that one thing is just noise.

For me, minimalism is really about reduction, and kind of getting rid, and being aware and cognizant of things that really shouldn't be on your desk, on your to-do list.
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If you think of a pyramid, at the very top is where the most value that you can add would be. But yet we spend all of our time, if this is a time pyramid, most of our time is spent at the bottom, the wide part that pretty much anyone can do. So we kind of got to invert the pyramid. To get there, you have to reduce and extract. To protect your time, you have to treat it as very precious and focus only on the most important thing at all times. It is a very hard thing for all professionals to do, and it’s always been a hard thing, but I just take it upon myself and say, okay, well, as a minimalist, I mean, if you were to come to my house and see how sparse my furniture is on purpose. How sparse my closet is on purpose. I’m trying to get rid of options. It’s like Steve Jobs and the black turtleneck—if I have one less thing, because

I can only make so many choices and decisions in a given day, let me spend my time on the things that are the most important and most impactful.
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And that’s not always, because it’s going to put millions of dollars in my bank account. Sometimes it’s just helps me sleep better at night. So I don’t need 50 clients. If I’m going to have 50 headaches. What if I just have five clients? And every one of those was one that I felt very good about, and that would allowed me to charge more. It allowed me to go deeper with them. It’s that concept—then you’re free to see where your scalable opportunities are. It’s the story I told you about a monk who was carving away at this beautiful elephant. Someone walks up and asks, “How did you learn to do this, carving away this elephant in the stone? And he says, Oh, I just chip away everything that’s not the elephant. So for me, I have to have a very clear picture of what the elephant is. I have to see the picture in my brain first—like what my life is, what I’m trying to build, how good of a dad I’m trying to be, how good of a husband I’m trying to be, how good of a business partner or a service provider, an advisor. This is my life’s work as a masterpiece, so let me just get rid of anything that doesn’t belong as part of that picture.

So that, to me, is kind of how I would explain it. And my approach toward it is I just get rid of everything. It’s not about accumulation. I don’t really need more information, because AI already has all the information. Anything I’m going to absorb, I have to be very intentional about—why am I reading it? I see all the books on your shelf. I could show you my bookshelf—tons of books, right? I feel like I’ve read them all. Am I going to learn anything new? I could also just go back to the books I’ve already read. I try to highlight them and stuff, but it’s like, what more do I need at this point? 

Yeah. So I’m wondering about this idea of a lifestyle business versus a growth business. Because what I see is that people who are building a lifestyle business, it’s easier for them to be a minimalist. Because you just do this most valuable thing. You don’t have to build the business. You don’t have to worry about necessarily all the other people, systems, and processes, or making sure of quality control. You just do your high-value work, and at the end of the day, you can put things down and relax. Whereas a growth business, it’s different. 

I would say with the clients that I have—some have thousands of employees, some have hundreds—I still encourage them to reduce and subtract. Even though they’re in high-growth, highly scalable businesses, sometimes the conversation is: How many direct reports do you have, and why do you have that many direct reports? How are you delegating? How are you giving authority? How are you limiting all the inputs? Because a lot of it is noise in your given day. So how do I make your day a little more silent so you can have a little more peace to make better decisions while you run this highly scalable business? Just because you’re scaling doesn’t mean it needs to be pure chaos. That’s what people think—they think, “Oh, if I scale, that means chaos.” I’m anti-chaos. 

Okay. But let me ask you this: Two of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time are Elon Musk and Jensen Huang. Elon Musk runs six companies, so he’s got a lot of direct reports and goes deep in each of them. And then Jensen Huang has, I don’t know, 20, 30, or 40 direct reports—he basically has a million direct reports as well. And that actually allows them to be closer to decisions and make sure things don’t go off the rails and their vision gets manifested. So that’s what I’m kind of wondering—whether minimalism means you’re going to, maybe the flip side is you have to accept less growth, or maybe not. 

So I’ve met with a lot of entrepreneurs in my life. Not one of them has been Elon Musk. So I would say we’re looking at the median of entrepreneurs, the average entrepreneur. Those are the people I deal with. I’m not dealing with Elon Musk. I would love to, but I don’t have those types. I have the family-owned business who took it over from their dad and they’ve been running it for 50 years, and he has 250 employees, and he’s got pure chaos, and I’m getting the call to go in and try to sort him out.

These are not always the highly sophisticated Steve Jobs types of the world. If you really take a look under the hood with Elon—I read his book and listened to the audiobook with my kids, so I’m very familiar with his story, because I’ve heard it twice now—what they don’t really mention is all the heroes underneath Elon. He wouldn’t be who he is without all the many heroes, all the systems, and the Six Sigma and other processes and procedures. That’s not to say he doesn’t take a deep analytical look at everything, but who are those heroes and what are the processes? I’m far more interested in hearing about his VP of Operations than about Elon.

Because what has his VP of Operations worked out? What systems have they implemented that allow him to scale and build a Tesla? Or his COO, like, what do they have going on? Elon’s a face. Elon’s a madman. He creates all this momentum and chaos, and then he has teams of people behind him who make sense and order out of that chaos. That’s why you have what you have with Tesla. If he were just Elon Chaos, without that, I don’t believe he would be where he is. But he had people that wanted to get in line. He had a lot of people that wanted to get in line. They believed in his vision. He had huge visions, and it’s very inspiring to get behind those visions. Then they say, “Okay, give me the ball. We’ll create the infrastructure that allows this thing to take off.” So I’m far more interested in the infrastructure that allows for that scale. 

I agree. I’m just thinking whether there is this kind of dichotomy. Because I see that many entrepreneurs—when I was an investment banker—until they sold their business, they were not able to have that simple lifestyle they perhaps desired, because they were building, they were reinvesting. And it wasn’t just reinvesting their cash—they were reinvesting their time. So every time they simplified, that was the opportunity cost of not using that time to improve their business. So they plowed it back in, plowed it back in. 

Well, it’s kind of like the E-Myth is a bit skewed. It’s almost like the E-Myth is a myth. E-Myth is a dream—a dream that you can work on your business, step out completely, and everything about it runs itself. It doesn’t really work that way. If you’re going to be a successful entrepreneur, you’re going to have late nights, long weekends, and you’re going to feel like every major problem is your own because you’re taking all the legal risks. I’m not telling people not to scale. I’m not telling them not to have chaos. What I’m trying to help them do is get clear on what they consider to be important. 

And not get killed in the process, and not get divorced. 

Statistically, that can happen—the more successful someone gets. 

Yeah, it does. Because our time becomes much more valuable, and at some point, it’s really hard to say no to the million-dollar hour—to spend that hour watching Netflix with your spouse, right? Exactly. Just feels harder to do. 

Exactly. 

Yeah. 

That was good. 

Alright, well, I enjoyed this tremendously. So one more question, one more question that I have to ask you. You talk about this $3 million rule—what do you mean by that? That’s a really interesting concept. 

Yeah. So most small businesses get stuck around $3 million, statistically. The question is, why? Why do they get stuck there? A large majority gets stuck and it’s because they create a lifestyle for themself around $3 million. They’re taking enough off the table that they would never be able to find a job that would be able to replace that type of income.

So they’ve made their small business their sole business, their job, and they say, “This is good enough for me,” because let’s say half a million dollars, more or less, is going into their bank. They’re filling up their 401(k), sending their kids to private school, giving themselves big bonuses. If they’re profitable, they don’t really see the need to take more risks or double down to go past that wall. I’ve seen many businesses kind of stay there. They’ll go fluctuate up and down through the years, but more or less they’ll hit that wall. They could stay there for 20 years and never make any progress. It’s not until they put on new thinking and say, we’re going to grow through acquisitions, we’re going to target a different market, new products, we’re going to innovate in some way. But that takes extra gas in the tank. Sometimes, a lot of entrepreneurs, once they hit that first level of success, say, “This is good enough for me,” because it usually takes them about five to seven years to get to that first major breathing point. 

They’re not hungry enough anymore. 

Exactly. 

Does someone has to be a little crazy to still want to eat more, even though they’re already full? 

Yeah. Some people are just wired that way. Some people just more and more, and that’s no slight against them. They’re never satisfied. They always want more—another dollar, another nickel. If they saw a nickel on the floor, they would stop and pick it up. They want every piece of everything. And those people usually are the ones that go and go and go and go. They’re usually the ones that just keep going because it’s an insatiable appetite. I’m not talking about people who get—well, I don’t want to call it lucky—but sometimes things do fall out of the sky. Sometimes a big client falls out of the sky, or an opportunity opens up, and people are smart enough to buy their competitor when the competitor approaches them. Or sometimes they make these little moves, and that gives them a leap.

I’m not talking about those people. Those are outliers to me. I’m talking about your average entrepreneur that built a $3 million business on his own with no major clients falling, just hard work, blood, sweat in tears. The average Joe typically gets stuck around that $3 million. 

Yeah, that’s interesting. Fascinating. Alright, well, if you don’t want to be stuck around $3 million, or if you want to get to the next level, then reach out to Tim and check out what he’s doing. So where can our listeners find you? Where can our listeners find you if they want to learn with you, learn about you, read your Substack, read your books? Where should they go? 

Just go to Google or AI and type in Tim “The Inside Man” Martinez. The Inside Man is an acronym for Tim. You’ll find my LinkedIn—happy to connect with you, just tell me you heard me on Steve’s podcast. You can also check out my blog: it’s Tim “The Inside Man” on Substack, or go to www.theinsideman.biz, my website. I’d love to connect with anyone.

Well, do check out Tim’s Substack—it’s awesome. You’re going to get more of what you heard on this podcast. And if you enjoy listening, make sure you follow us. Subscribe on YouTube, LinkedIn, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts, because every week I’m inviting—and luckily more and more people want to come on the show—to have a conversation.

So thank you, Tim, for coming, and thank you for listening.

Joshua McMahon, President of McMahon Custom Homes and a business coach, is driven by a purpose he discovered the hard way: money wasn’t his ‘Why.’ His real ‘Why’ is lifting others—helping people find clarity around their purpose, unlock their potential, and gain traction toward it. We explore Josh’s journey from C-suite construction leadership and integrator roles to building his own company as an “evolved visionary.” Josh shares his Satisfaction Pyramid, explaining how customer experience is created upstream through brand awareness, team support, trade partner support, and training, which together produce the outcome every builder (and business) is chasing: customer satisfaction. Along the way, he breaks down why the construction industry struggles with talent, how coaching becomes a competitive advantage, and why McMahon Custom Homes wins through transparency, collaboration, and guiding clients to align budget with what truly matters.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS group and the host of Management Blueprint. And my guest today is Joshua McMahon, the president of McMahon Custom Homes and a business coach. Although I don’t know how much time you have for that these days, josh. Welcome to the show. 

Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. We go a long way back, so it’s an honor to be a business owner and now be on your show. 

Well, yeah, you are a business owner. In your previous, recent life, you was an integrator, a COO of a business. So you’ve been running construction businesses and have been C-level in other construction businesses, where we also collaborated. So we have been tracking each other’s journey, for sure. So, Josh, let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business? 

Yeah. I think this is always a great question. And the real truth of this question, Steve, is that I didn’t know what it was for so long. I thought my personal ‘Why’ was just to make more money. And every time I made more money, I was just more miserable. I was never happy. So my ‘Why’ was never money. I really think my ‘Why’ is all about lifting others. And what I mean by that is

I have this ability to extract other people's 'Why' and their purpose from them, help them better see that, get clarity around it and then help them get traction to go attack that 'Why'.
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That is fabulous. And I can see that, as a business coach, that’s really very appealing to people when you can do that. How does it manifest in your construction business? You have these Custom Homes construction business, how does that help you there? 

And this is where it was really born. So in the C-suite and as I grew in my business, the one part that you have to do is you have to know how to recruit. At least, I had to know how to recruit. And in order to recruit, you have to find the right talent at the right price. And what I was really looking for was that potential. I was looking for the right attitude—the right hunger. I was looking for those right pieces that I could make you a construction individual. I could make you a great construction manager, but I couldn’t fix those other things. And so when I could tap into that and take and help somebody see the vision of what I could do and what our company could help you do in your career, that’s where I was able to really take and 10X my recruiting ability, but also to really tap into that untapped talent that’s out there.

Because, Steve, we have a hard time finding talent in the construction industry. Well, the talent’s out there. What’s making it hard is that we don’t recognize that talent, and we’re saying, you’ve got to be this perfect candidate. You’ve got to fit all these marks. You’ve got to check all the boxes.And I’m saying, no. I just need you to check a few boxes. I’m going to help you see how you can really fit into this organization and how we can help you thrive.

So that's where my ability to see that in them, help them see that in themselves, and then help them tie it to our vision as a company. That's where it really gets a lot of fun.
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Yeah. It’s so interesting that it’s not just about doing the job, but it’s about being emotionally invested in doing the job. And how do you get your people emotionally invested? You have to find the motivation that they have inherently that you can tap into, and then you have to make your business attractive so that it inspires them, so that they feel excited to work with you there.

That’s exactly what you’re trying to do. It’s like you’re not trying to fool anybody on anything, but to think people just get excited to come do work, or just do the job, or just collect the paycheck. If that’s your motivation, that’s the type of candidate you’re going to get. Then what type of culture do you have? So if you flip that and you say, “Hey, we want to help you  transform who you are, transform your career for the better, and it’s going to help us get to our vision. Well, Steve, that sounds like a win-win scenario to me. And that’s a really appealing piece. And that’s a thriving culture. 

Yeah, culture eats strategy for breakfast, as Peter Drucker said. And especially in the age of AI, it’s probably even more important, isn’t it, that you have a great culture, because AI can copy everything, but it won’t be able to copy your culture. 

No, that’s exactly right. I think AI is a great tool. It’s really going to help us magnify and improve our businesses. But if your culture is broken, AI is just going to magnify the brokenness of your culture, and then AI’s going to tell your people how to go find another job.

That is probably true. I haven’t thought about that. So you developed this framework, we are a podcast of frameworks. I’m always looking for the framework and and you talked about this Satisfaction Pyramid framework. Yeah. Is this also something that helps create that culture? Tell me a little bit about this pyramid and how did you come up with it and what does it do? 

Yeah, it’s an interesting thing, right? So you understand Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. These are the things you need for survival and for happiness. And I’ve said, look, in home building, we’ve always talked about customer experience and customer satisfaction. We want people to be happy. And I’m saying, well, I don’t know what that means. I don’t know—if I hit my schedule, if I hit my budget, if I do everything on time, but they’re still not happy—so what exactly am I missing? What’s the missing link? 

And kind of tying the hierarchy of needs to this triangle of customer satisfaction or happiness, I found that there are some really key fundamental pieces that we’ve got to lock into place to really get to the customer satisfaction and customer experience that we’re seeking.

For me, I think brand awareness is first. If your brand awareness is out there and it's really strong, people are going to gravitate towards it organically.
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That’s going to decrease your SEO spend, you decrease your marketing, decrease your turnover for people, because people want to be part of that. The interesting story on brands — and I don’t know how true it is, I meant to look it up before this — but I saw something on social media about Tommy Hilfiger. And before he launched his clothing brand, he didn’t have anything, but his brand was so far out in front of himself that people thought this was this great designer, and he hadn’t designed anything. And it was all tied to that piece of brand. So if your brand is strong enough, you can do incredible things. So I think brand is super important. 

Yeah. Let me just interject here. So probably 20 years ago, I was working with a company, and it was actually in the construction space. It was in the environmental construction space. And this company had an amazing brand. So the founder was a great thought leader, and he was blogging and talking in forums. And I really thought that this company’s got to be a $50 million company. I mean, they’re so powerful. And then they invited me to their board as a board member. I said, “Wow, this is such an honor.” This big company. And it turned out it was just a $5 million company. But the brand was so powerful that they looked much bigger. 

Yeah. And that statement, that’s an appealing thing. So if you think of yourself as a high level achiever, an A-player, and you are gravitating to that brand, that’s what it’s going to do.

You're going to bring in the right people, and then if you've got the right culture and the right other pieces, you're going to stick around with that company.
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And to this day, I have no idea what the heck that means. But what he did show me was he wasn’t going to support me. He wasn’t going to encourage me. He wasn’t going to help me grow. He was basically going to let me swim in the deep end. And if I made it, great. And if I didn’t, no problem — there’s another guy behind me. And that’s the mentality of the construction industry. And what I said was, we do a great job of spending money for our sales team. Sales team needs training, we’ll spend the money on training. If the executives need training, we’ll spend the money on training. 

But who’s training the middle managers? Who’s training the young men and women coming into the industry? Who’s training the people who don’t have the experience? There’s a big myth in that world. So I think from an internal standpoint — and mind you, coaching is a buzzword right now, just as leadership is — not everybody’s a coach, and not everybody’s a leader, and that’s okay. But if you do have somebody who can coach on your team, and you can coach your team up internally, it’s a very big value add.

And so for me, my coaching ability has been a real value add for people that I've recruited, for people I've had on my team, and people I’ve really invested in and helped grow.
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I said, “Because they don’t have me.” I said, I’m not saying this is an arrogant thing to say. I’m saying that I’m going to pour everything from me into you and help take you to where you want to go. You won’t get that anywhere else. Because when we’re done after three years, you can go anywhere you want. And that young man is currently making almost as much as I was making as a C-suite employee, and he’s out in the field running projects. And that’s only like a three or five year period. Like that’s incredible growth, but it’s because of the investment we made in him. 

Yeah. There’s this saying — I think it’s Zig Ziglar — that people don’t invest in their people, they don’t coach their people, because they’re afraid that they’re going to go away to the competition. And then Zig Ziglar asks, “Okay, but isn’t there a greater risk that you don’t coach them and and they stay?” 

Yes. This is always the thing. And I think a lot of people have a scarcity mindset where they’re so afraid of, if I pour into you, you’re going to go and you’re going to take it somewhere else. What I say is, I’m okay with that. Because when you go somewhere else, you’re going to say, “Josh McMahon built me up. He gave me the foundation for my career. He put me in the position I’m in today. I have what I have because of my start. You should go there and get the training from him. There’s no sham e in that because, again, we go back to point number one: brand. That’s tight. That’s my brand out in front of our company that adds value to our company. 

So I started my career at KPMG, and one of the ideas they had was this pyramid structure — up or out. But the idea was to take care of the people that even when they leave, they become ambassadors for you on the client side. And then they’re going to convince the client to hire KPMG to be their auditor. And I really like this. 

It’s so special, right? Because what you, I mean, Steve, you think about this, we worked together two or three years ago. We still stayed in touch. Even though there’s no financial gain, we still help each other where we can because I want the best for you, as you want the best for me. And that’s what you’re really looking for. 

Yeah, that’s true. And the thing about coaching is you have the double benefit, because the company benefits because it has motivated employees who are performing at the higher level than when they came in, and at a higher level than where you hired them, frankly.

Correct. 

And then they are building a career. So they are building a career equity for themselves. And actually that’s why you get a better ROI on these people, because they have more career equity, they have more skill level than what you have to pay them because you are growing them. 

That’s exactly right. You’re building into those individuals that generational wealth that most of us are seeking, or think is out of reach. It’s there. We just need somebody to believe in us, and that’s really that piece. The third thing for me, especially in construction, it’s the trade partners. And when I think about it, as a general contractor, look—I’m wearing a collared shirt. You’re not going to see me on the job site swinging a hammer. I’m out there with the building plans. I’m verifying things. I’m scheduling. I’m doing more management-level work. That means my trade partners are carrying the lion’s share of the work that actually goes into place. And as a construction company, we don’t make money unless work goes in place. 

So I have to do the same thing I'm doing with my internal staff with my trade partners. I have to build them up. I have to elevate them. I have to put them in a position to win.
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Yeah. 

So the trade partners is my next big pillar. 

And it’s harder to manage trade partners. I mean, I’m not in the construction, but it’s going to be harder because they are part-time with you. They have other commitments that they have to observe. They don’t wear your brand. They are being paid by someone else who may have a different corporate culture than your company has. And you have to bring them in part-time and make them as good as your standard. 

Yes. The hard thing is you have to share with them your vision first. This is who we are. This is what we stand for. Share with them your core values. And then build them up and show them that they’re truly a partner in this. Most of us don’t treat them like partners. We treat them like subcontractors. We treat them like they’re inferior individuals—less than me. And I think they can work for you part-time and do that. And you’re absolutely right. But if we treat them like people, we build them up, they’ll be there. Because I want to treat them in a way where, hey, you might be a great plumber, but you’re a terrible business person, and I can maybe help you better understand. I say this because I’m working with a young plumber who’s bidding things, and he’s just all over the place. And I’m saying, “Hey, how did you come to this number?” “Well, I just know I need to make X dollars.”

And I’m like, “Well, how do you know how much money you need to make? What’s your break-even number? What’s your overhead burden?” Starting to help him better understand how to break down the P&L, how to charge the right margin on the job so that you’re getting work as consistently as you want,

but most importantly, so you can grow your business and continue to support my business as it grows too.
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Yeah, you want to create stability for them as well. And if you treat subcontractor well, then they’re going to prioritize you, won’t they? So they have other customers that may not treat them as well. You’re going to get the most of the energy from them if you treat them well. And that’s also a huge benefit for your business.

There’s nothing lost in that, right? Again, you’ve got brand ambassadors out there talking about, one, this guy builds a great house. He treats everybody great. You made the right choice buying with with McMahon Custom Homes. Because, Steve, if you’ve ever been on a job site, the trades will tell people what they feel, whether it’s good or bad. Yeah. So you are getting it no matter what. 

Yeah. You go and you look at the construction site and ask around, and then you will get exactly the kind of general contractor you may be dealing with. 

Yes. I mean, absolutely. We love to talk, and so you want people talking about good things and talking up your business and what’s happening in the field, and that’s extremely valuable.

Okay, so step number one, brand awareness. We talked about that. Then supporting the team. Yes. So that they feel that they are growing and they are recognized as individuals, that you care about them. Yeah. Then the same goes with the trade partners. You support them even though they’re not your employees. 

Yes. 

What’s step four? 

Yeah. Step four is training. Okay. And training, I think of training in terms of systems that you’re putting in place. Constant, never-ending improvement on those systems. Systems are not static, so training is a nonstop thing that we’ve got to continue investing in and keep helping to grow our team.

So constant process improvement. Having KPIs in place, or metrics in place. And the reason for those metrics is simply where do we need to focus our attention? What levers do we need to pull? And then I go back to the training. So then we train up on metrics that maybe aren’t working the way that we want them to, or we’re not getting the result that we want to get out of them.

That’s where the training really comes into place. And if we don’t have that training in-house, what stuff outside of the company can we get them into? What type of training do they need to level them up? Because as I think about training, Steve, most of us think you’ve got to fit every box, you’ve got to be the perfect candidate. But you and I both know that I’m good at three out of the five things, and you’re good at two out of the five things. So we make a damn good team together. And that’s okay, and

we need to better learn how to cross-train each other, level one another up, and then find those right tools.
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Absolutely. Okay, so what’s the final piece of the flywheel? 

Yeah. Well, I feel like

if you're doing all these things, brand awareness, team support, trade partner support, and the right training, and you're doing this continuous basis, you're going to have customer satisfaction.
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So I have the minimum standards. Now, if your budget says, “Hey, we can’t quite reach that level,” well, we can certainly reduce our standard. And when I say reduce our standard, I don’t mean cut a corner. I mean change from, say, a Kohler faucet down to a Delta faucet. It’s still a great faucet. It’s still a great brand. Maybe just not the same brand that I would use at this level of home. Or we can go the complete opposite direction and elevate that standard. But just having that set in place, so that if I say, “Steve, this home’s going to cost you $1.2 million,” and you’re like, “Oh, great. Well, the other builder’s $1.3 million, so you’ve got a better price,” okay, great. But what goes into the price? What are you getting for the price? So if I have those minimum standards baked in, I can tell you, This is what you’re going to get for $1.2 million. Now we can go in and customize it and make it your home.

Having clear expectations. How important are clear expectations even in our coaching business, right? And it’s not just clear expectations from me to you, it’s clear expectations from you to me. I need to understand what your expectations are. I need to know that I can achieve your expectations. And I think that if I believe I can’t, I need to be honest and say, look, I’m not the right builder for you. I’m not the right business for you. But here are.. 

Or maybe your expectations are not realistic. Sometimes, for the budget you have, you need to make some trade-offs. Maybe you can have this man cave, but you’ll have to cut back on the kitchen, and you’ll have to discuss it with your wife.

And that’s really key.

So the thing that I love about being a custom builder is that my focus is on collaboration.
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That’s very interesting. This whole framework, the culture that you build here. Is this something that connects this whole framework, this idea that you have, how you’re projecting the culture out into the customer service? Is this why you started the McMahon Custom Homes? 

It truly is. Well, two parts, Steve. One, I’m an entrepreneur at heart and I have fought this my entire life, and I’ve always thought there was something wrong with me. Why can’t I just get on board? Why can’t I just drink the Kool-Aid? Why can’t I just get in line? And two or three years I go into a company, I do great things, I start rebuilding things, and then I start to get that itch. And then I’m like, okay, I need to go somewhere else. And for a long time I thought it was, well, I’m just moving to a new company to make more money, which was true. I was making more money, but then I wasn’t happy. Again, it was never tied to the money, so it was really just that entrepreneur need.

But the second piece was, I’ve noticed for ten years—a decade—that our industry is in need of a massive transformation. The antiquated way of doing business and how we do things. I think the builder suites and the stuff that we have at our disposal is really good, but it’s not what everybody’s looking for. But I couldn’t tell you, the owner, Hey, we’ve got to scrap this. We need to do this. Because ultimately, even as the integrator, my job is to bring your vision to life. And if this is part of your vision, then I need to bring this to life.

And so I started to realize with my entrepreneur spirit and my own ideas, I needed to start developing my own home building business to start bringing some of that to life, to really satisfy who I am and do the things that I wanted.
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Yeah, this is so important because, as entrepreneurs, we have this frustration. We are somewhere and things are not going as well as you would like. And we don’t get to tell the boss how to do things because they have their own ideas and their own set ways, and then they just get irritated by all those ideas and they feel like we are just being disgruntled employees, and this frustration eats away at you. And at some point you say, okay, what the heck? I’m just going to rip the Band‑Aid off and try to figure it out, right?

It’s very true. I mean, it’s funny now looking back on it because there were so many times where I just didn’t understand. I was like, “What the heck is the matter with me?” But you’re exactly right — you’re going to bang your head against the wall, and not everybody’s cut out to be an entrepreneur, right? I mean, it sounds really great being self-employed, doing your own thing, making your own hours. It sounds great. 

But I tell you something, Josh, not everyone is cut out to be an employee either. 

No doubt, Steve. So true. 

So it’s the other side of the coin. I think many of us become entrepreneurs because we basically eliminate all the viable alternatives. 

Yeah. Burn all the boats, right? 

Yeah. 

I think there’s so much value in this. The second time we really got introduced and got to work together, you introduced me to the book Second in Command by Cameron Herold. I’m a  Cameron Herold fan in the Second in Command book, and I read that book and I said, “Man, this is me. I can do this.” I love being more in the shadows, helping a visionary grow their business, and doing all that stuff. What happened was, I started to really enjoy being out there, networking, putting myself out, and getting in front of people. 

And I was like, well, I’m a visionary. I can see what’s going on in the future. And I think I was more of a visionary than the person who said he was a visionary. So it was really like, then we’re clashing heads on which vision are we chasing. And I’m like, I got to get outta here because I’m steering you away from what you want to do, and that’s not fair to you. 

I think there are two major types of visionaries. There are the born visionaries, and then there are the evolved visionaries. So you have the born visionary who is a visionary because they are just not able to execute, but they can come up with all the big ideas. And if they find people who can execute for them, they’re in luck, and they might build a company. And then you have the evolved visionary who starts out doing the work, grinding, figuring things out, teaching themselves discipline and work ethic. And then they start to manage people because they’re doing it better, so they get more responsibility, and then they become an integrator or operator. And at some point, they want to come out of the cocoon and do it themselves. And maybe you’re that version of it, the evolved visionary. 

You summed that up perfectly because that’s exactly how this whole thing transpired. 

Love it. So tell me about, what makes McMahon Custom Homes unique? Beyond the culture—is it the culture that makes you unique, or is there something else? From the eyes of the customer, what makes you unique? 

I don’t know that it’s our culture that makes us unique. I think what really makes us unique is our process—how we do things. We start everything with an initial consultation, just myself meeting with the homebuyers. Typically, it’s a virtual meeting where I want to learn more about your project. I’m interested in what you want to build, what your expectations are, what your non-negotiables are, and I just really explore everything under the sun about your project. 

Then I’m going to ask the dreaded question: what’s your ideal budget? Most—or a lot of—people say, “You know what, I don’t want to give the budget. So I’ll say, “Okay, what budget number scares you?” Because as a custom home builder, I’m going to help you design the home that you want for the price that you want. But I’m going to also share with you if it’s not possible. If you have a home design that’s more than what your budget is, I’m going to share that with you in real time, as soon as I can. So I’m very transparent. And I learned this from working in my past, where we wouldn’t share those numbers with clients. We had a client where we were a million dollars over their ideal budget. It was six to eight months of working with them and about $25,000 in actual costs. I don’t need to tell you—the homeowner was not pleased, and the homeowner did not pay that bill. 

So that was a major lost opportunity in the build, but also the opportunity cost and how much time we spent on it.

I learned from that and said, “Hey, I don’t want to do that. I don't need every buyer to be a yes. If I’m a good fit for you, and I’m a good builder for you, great—let’s go.
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You want to build a home, I’m going to guide you through this process, help you with each step of the way. Help you with the county side, the field side. I’m here to guide you through that whole thing. We really work towards your budget, your ideal budget. We build it out. We’re very transparent. A lot of clarity on what we’re doing, where we can collaborate, where we can maybe say, Hey, instead of $80,000 tile package, we can get a $45,000 tile package. Because we’re really looking for what’s your vision for it. 

Yeah. 

What do you want to see? How do you want to feel? And we can help you pull that together. 

Yeah, I think that’s very interesting, because I can see that there is value being created when you have an empathetic CEO who runs the business. You, in that case, who really gets to feel what the lifestyle of the individual is, what their vision is. You help them paint the picture so that you see it as well, and then you measure each element in proportion to their desires. Because maybe they want something like a really flashy countertop in the kitchen, but they really don’t care about what the deck is going to look like. Maybe it’s a stup*d example. And when someone buys, I don’t know, a standard home, then you are going to pay for stuff that you really don’t care about, and you are not going to get the stuff that uniquely is important to you. And with that approach that you’re doing, you are measuring everything to the right degree, and it’s going to be a perfectly balanced meal for the customer.

That’s a great way of looking at it. That’s exactly right. And the deck versus man cave or versus this, that’s exactly the right way to look at it. A deck is a great add-on. It can be done anytime in the build. It can be done anytime. It’s a minimal barrier to entry. Well, something on the inside of the house, the kitchen, the showstopper kitchen, that’s a different story, right? Because now you’re impacting your life. You’re changing things. If we understand that the kitchen is a really prime target, then we want to make sure we commit enough money to that area. We want to make sure we commit enough design hours to that area. And maybe other areas are like, “Hey, minimum standard’s great with us.” Perfect. Done. 

Yeah. We only sleep in the bedroom, we don’t do anything else. 

Exactly. Great point. 

Which is a problem in itself. Anyhow, if someone would like to learn more and maybe learn your ideas—maybe they want to be coached by you, or they want to learn about McMahon Custom Homes, what it takes to align with your vision—and particularly if they’re in Central Virginia where you work, where should they reach out and where can they find you?

Yeah, so several different places. McMahonCustomHomesLLC.com is our website, so you can certainly find us there. We have an active Instagram account, McMahon Custom Homes. I have an active Facebook account, again, McMahon Custom Homes. I do have a LinkedIn account, McMahon Custom Homes, LLC.

Also for myself, my wife and I host a bi-monthly podcast. We took a year hiatus, and we just started again in 2026. Our podcast is not on McMahon Custom Homes, but it’s really about the construction industry, different things that you experience, and really just giving back and trying to help others learn from maybe stuff that we did or things that we’re experiencing. My wife is a designer. I’m the home builder, so you kind of get a good mixed bag. And that’s Feed Me Your Construction Content, if you’re ever interested in tuning into that. 

Yeah. And if you would like to see what a collaboration between Josh and his wife looks like, then check out his website,  McMahon Custom Homes. You can check out his house, or their house, that they built together. And it’s a beautiful house. 

Yeah. Thank you. 

It’s a good place to start. Josh, loved it. I loved your content. Really interesting how you created the Satisfaction Pyramid in construction. I think that parallel applies to other businesses as well. Obviously, the elements are slightly different, but brand awareness, supporting the team, supporting your partners, training your people, pouring into them, and then creating that customer satisfaction are important in any industry.

So thank you. If you enjoyed listening to this show, make sure you follow us on LinkedIn and on YouTube. And stay tuned, because every week I bring an exciting entrepreneur or thought leader on this show. Thank you for coming, Josh, and thanks for listening.

Jason William Johnson, PhD, Founder of SoundStrategies, is driven by two lifelong passions: creating and teaching. Through SoundStrategies, Jason designs AI-powered learning experiences and intelligent coaching systems that blend music, gamification, and experiential learning to drive real skill development and engagement for enterprises and entrepreneur support organizations.

We explore Jason’s journey as a musician, educator, and business coach, and how he fused those disciplines into an AI-first company. Jason shares his AI for Deep Experts Framework, showing how subject-matter experts can identify an industry pain point, envision a solution, brainstorm with AI, leverage AI tools to build it, and go after high-value impact—turning deep expertise into scalable products and platforms without needing to be technical. He also explains how AI accelerates research and product design, how “vibe coding” enables rapid MVP development, and why focusing on high-value B2B impact creates faster traction with less complexity.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS Group, developing the Summit OS Business Operating System. And my guest today is Jason William Johnson, PhD, the Founder of SoundStrategies. His team designs AI-powered learning experiences and deploys intelligent coaching systems for enterprises and entrepreneur support organizations blending music, gamification, and experiential learning to drive real skill development and engagement. Jason, welcome to the show. 

Thanks for having me, Steve. 

I’m excited to have you and to learn about how you blend music and learning and all that together. But to start with, I’d like to ask you my favorite question. What is your personal ‘Why’ and how are you manifesting it in your business? 

I would say my personal ‘Why’ is creating and teaching. Those are my two passions. So when I was younger, I was always a creative. I did music, writing, and a variety of other things. So I was always been passionate about creating, but I’ve also been passionate about teaching. I’ve been informally a teacher for my entire adult life—coaching, training. I’ve also been an actual professor. So through  SoundStrategist, I’m kind of combining those two passions:

the passion for teaching and imparting wisdom, along with the passion for creating through music, AI-powered experiences, gamification, and all of those different things. So I'm really in my happy place.
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Yeah, sounds like it. It sounds like you’re very excited talking about this. So this is quite an unusual type of business, and I wonder how do you stumbled upon this kind of combination, this portfolio of activities and put them all into a business. How did that come about?

So Liam Neeson says, “I have a unique combination of skills,” like in Taken. I guess that’s kind of how I came up with SoundStrategist. I’ve pretty much been in music forever. I’ve been a musician, songwriter, producer, and rapper since I was a child. My father was a musician, so it was kind of like a genetic skill that I kind of adopted and was cultivated at an early age. So I was always passionate about music. Then got older, grew up, got into business, and really became passionate about training and educating. So I pretty much started off running entrepreneurship centers. My whole career has been in small business and economic development.

SoundStrategist was a happy marriage of the two when I realized, oh, I can actually use rap to teach entrepreneurship, to teach leadership skills, and now to teach AI and a variety of other things.
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So pretty much it was just that fusion of things. And then when we launched the company, it was around the time ChatGPT came out. So we really wanted to make sure we were building it to be AI-first. At first, we were just using AI in our business operations, but then we started experimenting  with it for client work—like integrating AI-powered coaches in some of the training programs we were running and things like that. And that really proved to be really valuable, because one of the things I learned when I was running programs throughout my career was you always wanted to have the learning side and the coaching side.

Because the learning side generalizes the knowledge for everybody and kind of level-sets everybody.
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So with me having been a business coach for over 15 years, I knew how to train the AI chatbots. It started off as simple chatbots, and now it’s evolved into full agents that use voice and all those other capabilities. But it really started as, let’s put some chatbots into some of our courses and some of our programs to kind of reinforce the learning, personalize it, and then it just developed from there.

Okay, so there’s a lot in there, and I’d like to unpack some of it. When you say use rap to teach, I’m thinking about rap is kind of a form of poetry. So how do you use poetry, or how do you use rap to teach people? Is it more catchy if it is delivered in the form of a rap song? How does it work?

So you kind of want to make it catchy.

Our philosophy is this: when you listen to it, it should sound like a good song.
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One of the things we also make sure to do is introduce concepts. The best way I could describe this is this, and this might be funny, but I grew up in the nineties, and a lot of rappers talked about selling dr*gs and things like that. I never sold dr*gs in my life. But just by listening to rap music and hearing them introduce those concepts, if I ever decided to go bad, I would have a working theory, right? So the same thing with entrepreneurship, and the same thing with business principles.

You can create songs that introduce the concepts in a way where if a person's never done it, they’re introduced to the vocabulary.
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Let’s introduce lived experiences. Let’s introduce key concepts so that when people are done listening to the song, they memorize it, they embody it, and they connect with it. Now they have a working theory for whatever the song is about. 

And are you using AI to actually write the song? 

No, we’re not. That’s one of the things we haven’t really integrated on the AI front, because the AI is not good enough to take what’s exactly in my head and turn it into a song. It’s good for somebody who doesn’t have any songwriting capability or musical capability to create something that’s cool. But as a musician, as somebody who writes, you have a vision in your head on how something should sound sonically, and the AI is not good enough to take what’s in my head and put it into a song. Now, what we are using are some of the AI tools like Suno for background music. So at first, we used that to create all our background music for our courses from scratch.

We are using some of the AI to help with some of the background music and everything and all of that so that we can have original stuff
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Okay, that’s pretty good. We are going to dive in a little bit deeper here, but before we go there, I’d like to talk about the framework that you’re bringing to the show. I think we called it the AI for Deep Experts Framework.

That’s the working title right now, but yeah, we’re still finalizing it. But that’s the working title. Yeah. 

But the idea—at least the way I’m understanding it—is that if someone has deep domain expertise, AI can be a real accelerator and amplifier of that expertise.

Yep. 

So people who are listening to this and they have domain expertise and they want to do AI so that they can deliver it to more people, reach more people, create more value, what is the framework? What is the five-step framework to get them there? 

Number one:

provided that you have deep expertise, you should be able to identify a core pain point in your respective industry that needs solving.
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So obviously, you’re still going to have conversations to better understand the pain point further. You’re going to look at your own lived experiences and things like that. But now you can also leverage AI tools—using Perplexity or Claude—to do deep research on a market opportunity. So whether or not you have experience in market research, you can use an AI tool to help identify the total addressable market. You can brainstorm with it to uncover additional pain points, and it help you flesh out your value proposition, your concept statement, and all of those things that are critical to communicating the offering. Because before we transact in money, we always transact in language, right? So pretty much, AI can help you articulate the value proposition, understand the pain point, all of those different things. And then also

if you have like deep expertise and you haven't really turned it into a framework, the AI can help you framework it and then develop a workflow to deliver value.
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So now you have the framework, you have the market understanding, and all of those different things. AI can even help you think through what the product would look like—the user experience, the workflow, things like that. Now you can use the AI-powered tool to help you build that. You can use something like Lovable. You can use something like Bolt. You could use something like Cursor, all different AI-powered tools. For people who are newer to development and have never done development before, I would recommend something like Lovable or maybe Bolt. But once you get more comfortable and want to make sure you’re building production-ready software, then you move to something like Cursor. 

Cursor has a large enough context window—the context window is basically the memory of an AI tool. It has a large enough context window to deal with complex codebases. A lot of engineers are using it to build real, production-ready platforms. But for an MVP, Bolt and Lovable are more than good enough.

So one of the things I recommend when building with one of these tools is to do what's called a PRD prompt. PRD stands for Product Requirements Document.
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So this basically outlines the goals of the platform, target audience, core features, database, architecture, technology stack, all of the different things that engineers would need to do in order to build the platform. So you can go to something like Claude, or ChatGPT, and you can say: “Create a PRD prompt for this app idea,” and then give as much detail as possible—the features, how it works, brand colors, all of those different things. Then the AI tool—whether you’re using ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini—will generate your PRD prompt. So it’s going to be like this really, really long prompt. But it’s going to have all of the things that the AI tool, web-building or app-building tool needs to know in order to build the platform. It’s going to have all the specifications. So you copy and paste. 

Is this what people call vibe coding? 

Yeah, this is vibe coding. But the PRD prompt helps you become more effective at vibe coding because it gives the AI the specifications it needs and the language that it understands to increase the likelihood that you build your platform correctly. Because once you build the PRD prompt, the AI is going to know, okay, this is the database structure. It’s going to know whether this is a React app versus a Next.js app. It’s going to know, okay, we’re building a frontend with Netlify. The stuff that you may not know, the AI will know, and it will build the platform for that.

So then you take that prompt, you paste it into Lovable, paste it into Cursor, and then you can kind of get into your vibe coding flow. Don’t let the hype fool you, though, because a lot of people will say, “Oh, I built this app in 15 minutes using Lovable.” No—it still requires time. But if you can build a full-stack application in two weeks when it typically takes several months, that’s still like super fast. So pretty much, on average, you can build something in a couple of weeks—especially once you get familiar with the process, you can build something in a couple of weeks. But if this is your first time ever doing this, pay attention to things like when the app debugs and some of the other issues that come up. 

Start paying attention because you’re going to learn certain things by doing. As you go through the process, you’ll begin to understand things like, okay, this is what an edge function is, this is what a backend is. You’ll start learning these different things as you’re going through the process, right? So you get the platform built. Now the next step is you want to distribute the platform. So obviously, if you’ve been in your industry for a while and you have some expertise, you should have some distribution. You should have some folks in your space who are your ICP that you can kind of start having some customer conversations with and start trying to sell the platform.

One of the things that I always recommend is going B2B and selling something for significant value
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And the reason for that is a couple of different things. Number one, when you have to do a lot of volume, your business model becomes more complicated. And then you have to introduce things to manage that volume. Whereas if you’re selling a solution that’s a five-figure to six-figure offering, like 10 clients, 15 clients, the amount of money that you can get to with less complexity in your business model. So I always say go B2B, at least a five-figure annual offering, because I know most of the offerings that we offer are at least high five figures, low six figures—subscriptions, SaaS licensing, or whatever. And that way it just introduces less complexity to your business model, and it allows you to get as much revenue as possible.

And then as you go to market, you’re going to learn. So the learning aspect, you’re going to learn maybe customers want this or this feature. We thought the people were going to use the platform this way, but they’re actually using it this way. So you’re always learning, always evolving, and adjusting the offering.

Okay, so let’s say I have deep expertise in some area—maybe investment banking or whatever. I want to use AI. I identify an industry pain point that I’ve addressed or maybe I personally experienced. I visualize a solution, then I brainstorm with ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, figure out what to do, and then I leverage AI tools like Cursor, Lovable, or Bolt. I set the price point. I go B2B. Is this something that, as a subject-matter expert, is efficient for me to do myself because I have the expertise and the vision? Or is it better for me to hire someone to do this? 

It depends on what your bandwidth is. I mean, pretty much I’m of the firm belief that like these are skills that you probably want to unlock anyway. So it might be worth going through the process of learning the tools, leveraging them, and everything, and all of that. And that’s kind of how you future-proof yourself. Now, obviously, if you have bandwidth limitations, there are firms and organizations that you could hire, et cetera, et cetera, that can do it for you.

Obviously, developers and things like that. But the funny thing about a lot of developers is, even though they’re using AI, they’re still charging the prices they charged before AI, right? They’re just getting it done faster, and their margins are a lot lower. So you’re still going to pay, in a lot of instances, developer pricing for a platform. Those are the things that you have to consider as far as your own personal situation.

But me personally, I believe these are skills worth unlocking.
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And what would you say is the time requirement for someone to get competent in vibe coding? 

Three months minimal. You could be pretty solid in three months. 

But three months full-time or three months part-time? 

Three months part-time. 

So three months. That’s about 143 working hours in a regular month. So that’s basically around 420–430 hours if you were full-time. 

If you spend weekends working on your project, learning how to build it, taking notes, and actually going through the process, you can get pretty decent in a couple of months. Now, obviously, there are still levels as you continue and to progress and things like that, but you can get pretty solid in a couple months. Another thing you want to consider is who you’re selling to. You obviously wanna make sure that your platform security is really well, is really done. So even if you build it yourself and then you have an engineer do code review, that’s cheaper than having them build it. I think if you spend three months, you can get really good at building solutions for what you need to get done. And then from there, you just get better and better and better and better. 

How do I know that, let’s say I hire someone in Serbia to do a code review for me? Let’s say I learn the vibe coding thing and create the prototype, then I have someone to clean the code. How do I know that they did a good job or not? 

You really don’t. You really don’t know until the platform’s in the wild, and it’s like, okay, it’s secure. So there are some things that you can do to check behind people. Let’s say you don’t have the money to do a full security audit or hire someone specifically for a security review, a developer for security review. One of the things that you can do is you can do multi-agent review. Like you take your codebase, have Claude review it, have OpenAI Codex review it, have a Cursor agent review it. You have multiple agents do a review. Then they kind of check each other’s work, if you will. 

They kinda identify things that others may not have identified, so you can get the collective wisdom of those three to be able to be like, “Okay, I need to shore this up. I need to fix this. I need to address that.” That gives you more confidence. It still doesn’t replace a person who has deep expertise and making sure they build secure code, but it will catch common issues, like hard-coding API keys, which is a risk, right? It’ll catch those type of things that typically happen. But let’s say you do have a security, a code review, you could just kind of take that same approach also to check their work. Because they shouldn’t find any major vulnerabilities. The AI agents that come in after it shouldn’t really find any major vulnerabilities if it was like done securely securely. Another thing to consider is that a lot of these tools use Supabase for the backend and database. Supabase also has a built-in security advisor, including an AI security advisor, that points out security issues, performance problems, and configuration errors.

So like you do have some AI-powered check and balances to check behind people.
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Interesting. So basically, I can audit their applications, and the AI will check the code and tell me what needs to be improved? 

Yeah. And they can make the fixes for you. 

Yeah. Wow, that’s amazing. It still sounds a little bit overwhelming. It’s basically a language, a new language to learn, isn’t it? 

It’s not really — it’s English. That’s the amazing thing about it—it’s English. I mean, you literally talk to AI in natural language, and it builds stuff for you, which is, if somebody is like, had a idea for a minute, because I mean, pretty much running entrepreneurship centers, I’ve known so many people who’ve had ideas that they were never able to launch or build, and then they see somebody build it later.

If you learn these skills, you get to the point where anything that's in your head, you can kind of start bringing it to life in reality.
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And even if you’ve got to bring somebody in to make sure it’s secure and production-ready, it’s way cheaper than having them build it from scratch. And then another thing that you’ll find also is if you’re able to build something, let’s say you want to turn it into a startup or something, right? It’s a lot easier to bring in a technical co-founder when they don’t got to build the thing from scratch, and then they also see that you were able to build something, they’re able to see your product vision, et cetera, et cetera. It becomes a lot more easier to recruit people who actually have that expertise into the company because you’ve already handled the hard part. You got something and it works. And all they got to do is just come in, make it safe, and make it work better. 

Yeah, that is very interesting. It feels analogous to writing a book yourself or having a ghostwriter. Because essentially, you are vibe coding with a ghostwriter, right? You tell the stories, and then the ghostwriter writes the book for you. Probably now you can use 

AI to do that. Yep. 

But that’s a skill. Not everyone has the skill to write it themselves, and then they need to go to the ghostwriter, but still is their book, right? 

Yep. 

So it sounds a little bit similar. That’s fascinating. So what’s the path to launching an MVP? So let’s say I’m a subject matter expert, and I want to launch an MVP within a few weeks. Is there a path for me to go there? 

Once you get good with the platform, once you get comfortable with the tools, yeah. So for example, we’re launching an AI platform. It’s an AI coaching platform, but it’s also a data analytics platform. Basically, it’s targeted to entrepreneur support organizations and municipalities supporting small businesses. So on the front end, it’s an AI-powered advisor — it’s a hotline that people can call 24/7. But on the back end, the municipalities and entrepreneur support organizations get access to analytics from each of those calls. We built this in two weeks. We’re already talking to customers, we’re already having conversations, and all of those things. We literally brought it to market in two weeks. So the thing is, once you kind of get caught up with the tools—and I’m not a developer, I’m not a developer by trade at all.

I had a tech startup before, but I was a non-technical founder. I just know how to put together a product.

But once you get good with the tools, that's very conceivable. And then you just go out there, and you go in the market, you start having conversations with your ideal customer profile.
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Now, you can get a new feature added in the afternoon. It allows you to go to market a little bit faster. You don’t have to have the ideal feature set. You don’t have to have the ICP figured out. You get out there, you learn, and then you’re able to iterate a lot faster because the cost of development is super cheap now, and the speed in which like new features can be added or deprecated is a lot faster. So it allows you to go to market a lot faster than in the past. 

Okay, I got it. You can do this, you can code. What do you recommend for someone who’s starting out? You mentioned Lovable, Bolt, and then Cursor. Is Cursor like an advanced product? 

Cursor’s a little bit more advanced, but if you want to build production-ready software, it’s something you’re going to eventually have to use.

But can you convert from Lovable to Cursor? 

Yes, you can. Yep. So what you typically do — and I still do this to this day — is every time I launch a product, I build it in Bolt first. You could use Bolt or Lovable, either one’s fine. I use Bolt because Bolt came out first, and that’s what I started using. Then Lovable came out like a month later. But I use Bolt. I’ll spin up the idea in Bolt. And the reason I like doing it in Bolt or Lovable is that it’s really good at doing two things. It’s really good at quickly launching your initial feature set, and then spinning up your backend. Your database — it’s really good at that. So I start off in Bolt, then I connect it to a repository. 

For those who aren’t familiar with GitHub, there’s a button in Bolt or Lovable where you can easily connect it to a GitHub repository. So then once I kind of get the app to a point where the basic skeleton is set, then I go into Cursor. Then I pull the repository into Cursor and do the heavy work. The reason Cursor has a learning curve is because there are still some traditional developer things you need to know to spin up a project. Your initial database — it’s a lot harder to spin up your initial database and backend in Cursor. It’s also harder to identify your initial libraries and all of those things.

If you’re a developer, it’s not difficult. But if you’re new, it is. Bolt and Lovable abstract those things out for you. So you start it off in Bolt or Lovable. Basically, since they’re limited in their context windows, when you’re trying to build something complex, eventually they start making a whole bunch of errors. They basically start getting stup*d. That’s when you know it’s time to move to Cursor, because Cursor can handle the heavy lifting. So if you build in Bolt or Lovable until it gets stup*d, then you move to Cursor for the heavy lifting. 

And then is there a point where Cursor gets stup*d as well?

No. Cursor has a couple of different things that allow it to extend its context window, which is his memory. You can put documentation into Cursor. For example, whatever your PRD prompt was, you can save that as a document in Cursor. You can also set rules. One of my rules in Cursor is: I’m not technical, so explain everything in layman’s terms. And then as you’re starting to build code, you can save that code or you can point it to that repository.

So there's some more flexibility with Cursor as far as managing your context window.
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Fantastic. Fantastic. So, Jason, super helpful information for domain experts who want to build an application that will help them promote their product or manifest their ideas in product form. I think that’s super powerful. So if someone would like to learn about SoundStrategist and what SoundStrategist can do for them in terms of learning and experiential products, incorporating music, or building curriculum, or they would just like to connect with you to learn more about what you can do for them, where should they go? 

Jason William Johnson, PhD, on LinkedIn, or www.getsoundstrategies.com. 

Okay. Well, Jason William Johnson, you are really ahead of the curve, especially connecting this whole idea of vibe coding to people who are subject matter experts and not technical. And you know it because you don’t come from a technical background, yet you’ve mastered it.

I’m living it. Everything I’m sharing—this is not like a theoretical framework. I’m living all of this. So everything I’m saying. Super authentic. And especially coming from you—you understand what it’s like to not be technical person, learning this, applying this. 

So if you’d like to do this, learn more, or maybe have Jason guide you, reach out to him. You can find him on LinkedIn at Jason William Johnson, PhD, or visit www.getsoundstrategies.com.

And if you enjoyed this episode, make sure you follow us and subscribe on YouTube, follow us on LinkedIn, and on Apple Podcasts. Because every week I bring a super interesting entrepreneur, subject matter expert, or a combination of the two—like Jason—to the show, who will help you accelerate your journey with frameworks and AI frameworks in that gear. So thank you for coming, Jason, and thank you for listening.

Rich Kahn, CEO and Co-Founder of Anura, is driven by a mission to help businesses grow by eliminating digital ad fraud that silently siphons marketing budgets. A lifelong entrepreneur and developer, Rich is passionate about ensuring that advertising dollars reach real users—not bots, malware, or human fraud.

We explore Rich’s journey from launching an early digital advertising platform to uncovering widespread fraud that threatened his own business—and how building an internal solution eventually led to Anura. Rich breaks down his Ad Optimization Framework—Minimize Fraud, Optimize Conversion, Refresh Content—and explains why fraud must be addressed before any meaningful optimization can occur. He also shares how ad fraud impacts ROI, why lifetime value matters more than cost-per-click, and the conviction required to build and scale a SaaS company in a crowded market.

Good day, dear listeners. My name is Steve Preda, the Founder of the Summit OS Group, and the creator of the Summit OS Business Operating System. And today, my guest isa Rich Kahn, the CEO and Co-founder of Anura, an ad fraud solution that monitors traffic to identify real users versus bots, malware, and human fraud. Rich, welcome to the show. 

Thanks for having me today.  

Well, it’s super interesting business you have and the entrepreneurial journey. So let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in Anura? 

My personal ‘Why’ has always been to help people. Fraud is a huge problem. And it’s no longer a question of if you have fraud, it’s a question of how much fraud you have. And I’m watching people spend millions and millions of dollars on digital marketing and getting it siphoned out by fraudsters with bogus traffic. So the ‘Why’ is that, in all the businesses that I’ve done,

I’ve wanted to help people grow their business. I want to help people grow their staff. I wanted to help people grow, just in general.
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Yeah, definitely. And until we talked, I was not aware that fraud is rampant, especially in ad spend. It didn’t occur to me. And I kind of wonder why this is happening. But tell me how you found this problem, and why do you want to solve this, and how did you get to this point to launch a company about it? 

Well, in 2003, my wife and I launched a digital marketing firm. Think of Google, but really small. So it’s text-based ads you can target by keyword, bid price, geography, audience, like it had all these targeting criteria. We launched it in 2003. By 2004, we had a nice, stable list of clients, but we started getting some complaints about the traffic quality. Something wasn’t right. And I’m a developer, so I started looking at the code and realizing, looking at all the analytics and the data, and realized that it was bad traffic, it was fraudulent traffic. So I figured, you know what?

I don't want to solve fraud. I want to go out, buy a fraud solution, bolt it onto my platform, and just continue doing my business.
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Kind of like buying McAfee for your laptop. You just buy and let it scan and do its thing. But in 2004, it didn’t exist any fraud solutions. In fact, the first commercial available fraud solution didn’t start selling until 2008 or ’09. So I was a developer, and I said, we’re going to lose our business if I don’t do something. So I figured it out I’d build it myself, and we did. I wrote the software. It worked great. We had to continue evolving it as fraud evolved. And it got to the point where we started having clients ask—if not beg—to use our software outside of our network. And that’s when we kind of got the idea that this might be a good tool to sell by itself, as opposed to baked into our platform. And that’s where we launched it, in 2017. We ended up launching a Anura as a standalone solution. 

Wow. I mean, it’s definitely, if this is a big problem, it’s going to affect everyone who advertises. So it could be hundreds of millions of people. How can someone even make money with fraudulent traffic? How does it help them to make money?  

Well, what happens is internet advertising fraud is not illegal. There’s no law that says you can’t do it. So if you do find somebody that’s doing it, it’s really difficult to prosecute them in the U.S. But a lot of it happens overseas, so it’s even worse. There’s a lot of countries that allow all kinds of stuff. So basically, what we focus on is that their job is to try to make money. And I read an article one time from another company that was doing stats on fraud detection. They said the average fraudster—and this is why they do it—makes $5 million a year.

But how? 

There’s a lot of different ways. It depends if they’re buying from Google, Facebook, DSPs, or affiliate marketing. But I’ll give you a simple example. One example, which is affiliate marketing. A lot of companies use affiliate marketing. I think it’s a $20 or $30 billion industry at this point. It’s a big market. So what happens is, right now, you or I can go to Amazon and sign up for their affiliate program, and every time we send them a new client, they’ll give us 5% of what they spend. So I’m getting paid on the spend, right? So what if I sent fake users there? I’m not going to get paid for anything because they’re not spending money.

But what if I’m the fraudster? I use stolen credit cards to make those purchases. So if the purchase gets made and shipped, I get 5%. Affiliates usually get paid net 7. So I get paid net 7, somewhere across that month, maybe the next month, the person whose credit card was stolen says, “Hey, wait a second, I recognize charges that don’t belong to me.” And then the investigation starts and takes months before it comes back to Amazon and says, “Oh, you shipped out a product to a fraudulent credit card. You’re not getting paid for this. We’re taking the money back.” But by then, they’ve already shipped the product, so they’re out the hard cost of the product. They’ve already paid out the affiliate. The affiliate has already been paid. The affiliate can continue to do that for weeks, knowing that it’s going to take months for them to get caught. Once they get caught, they just set up another account. And what they’re doing is making those affiliate margins. So if they spend a hundred dollars, they make five. If they create dozens and dozens of accounts, you can quickly see how they can make a lot of money in a short period of time. That’s just one example. 

Yeah. That’s very interesting. Very interesting. So, okay, that’s really cool. So you basically help people not have the fake traffic. So whatever traffic they have, it’s real. So they pay real prices for real value. That’s got to be a significant improvement in advertising efficiency. What is the kind of improvement that you see on average happening for people? 

On average, it’s 25% improvement. So 25% of the marketing dollars that they’re spending is fraudulent. Now, if they buy from like Google and Facebook, it’s probably around 10%—they’re on the lower side. If you buy from the programmatic space, like The Trade Desk and things like that, it’s upwards of 50%, and then everything else falls in between. All the digital types of marketing. If you’re doing influencer advertising, if you’re doing affiliate advertising, each one has different levels of fraud that we’ve found. But on the high side is programmatic, and on the low side is probably search and social.  

Okay, so this seems like a big part of optimizing an ad, and making it perform better. So what I’d like you to share with us—and we’d talked about this in the pre-call is that you have a framework for generally optimizing digital ads. So what would that look like? And one element is fraud, but what are the other elements, and how do you go about optimizing your advertisement? 

Sure. Like the heaviest hitter, in my opinion, is fraud. So you start with fraud, you look at where fraud is, and you minimize that, right? The next thing you want to focus on is conversion value. Every campaign has some level of conversion. It could be as simple as a click. It could be as simple as watching a video. It could be purchasing a product. It could be generating a lead for, let’s say, Hey, save money on my car insurance, and you fill out a lead. So what you want to do is look at where that conversion takes place. First off, you want to analyze the conversions because not all conversions are real conversions. You’ll get conversions like credit cards, fake credit cards being used, or fake information being used in fill in forms, and that’s where the fraud comes in. Once you eliminate that, now you can rely on the data that you see in your conversion value, and you start optimizing your campaigns around that conversion value.

So as long as hey, this source is generating me a 20% conversion, this source is generating me 10%. Guess what?

I want to stop spending on the 10%, spend more than the 20% just optimizing for the conversion value. And that's what's going to get your campaign to perform at its highest level.
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So what are ways to optimize conversion beyond the fraud piece?

Yeah, so once fraud’s out of the game, we’ve eliminated fraud, it’s really focusing on the data. What source you buy the traffic from, what sources they get the traffic from. Because sometimes you might buy a source of traffic like Google, and it may not come from Google. It may come from one of its syndicated partners like a CNN or a weather.com or Bloomberg, somewhere where you’re not familiar with, but if they’re getting traffic, that’s their partner network. They’re getting traffic from there. So you want to identify the sources. It could be by keyword, right? You can take a look and break it down by keyword.

If you're looking at Google and maybe you have certain keywords that have a much higher performance because it's a better audience to target
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So if you say, “Hey, anything less than a 10% conversion, I’m going to get rid of. And anything greater than 10%, I’m going to buy more of.” So that’s kind of where you focus on your conversion value. And ultimately, it’s to try to maximize your conversion while still spending your budget. Because let’s say if you’ve got a source that’s converting at 80%. It’s going to be far and few between, and they’re going to be expensive, and the volume of traffic is going to be light, and it’s not going to be enough. Because if you’ve got one conversion a month, that’s probably not enough to survive your company on.

So you got to get somewhere in between, where you get the volume and you get the conversion value that you're looking for to give you the best possible campaign.
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So basically, you calculate your ROI on each type of conversion, and you get to a point where you still get a positive ROI. Is there like a rule of thumb? What is the kind of ROI do you need in order for it to generally be worth taking the risk of doing the advertising and putting in the effort? 

Yeah. It’s very different from client to client. It’s got to be specific to a client. And I’ll give you an example. I used to work with a company called TigerDirect. They were a huge reseller of electronics, computers, computer components, and stuff like that. And they would spend $110 to generate a $20 sale. So everybody knows that’s losing money, right? You’re losing $80 on every sale you generate, or whatever the number is. If they’re spending $100 to generate a sale just to get a $20 sale, why would they do that? 

Well, they know once they get a client in the door, they market. They used to send weekly magazines of all the new stuff that’s out in the market, the new pricing index, constant email bombardments. They would call you and say, “Hey, I saw you bought recordable CDs. We have a special on recordable CDs if you’re looking for them.” They would market like crazy to their client base, and they would average over $300 per client. 

So that’s the lifetime value.  

Right. Their lifetime value was much greater than their cost for acquisition. And they were comfortable and in a position to spend that money to acquire the client knowing that they would make the money over time. Most companies don’t operate that way. Most companies operate like GEICO—they pay $15 or $20 to get somebody to fill out a form saying they want to save money on car insurance. And they may close 15% of those leads into actual deals. And when they do the math, they’re making money every single lead that they get in, the ones that convert. And on the ones they lose, they’re making enough money on the wins that the losses are outweighed, and they’re still making money. So again, every company, every product—it’s different. I’ve seen the same industries, like car insurance. Let’s stick with car insurance. I’ve seen four or five companies where I’m looking at their conversion rates.

Conversion rates are different. Their ROIs are different, their spend is different—everything’s different. It's just targeting different audiences.
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So if I had unlimited funding, let’s say, and I want to ramp up as fast as possible, but I wanted to make it in a smart way. Is there like a rule of thumb that your lifetime value—the profit you make on a customer—has to be 3x the amount you spend on advertising? And the lifetime is measured by the profit, not the top line, but the bottom line. 

Yeah, I haven’t seen a specific rule of thumb to give clients. Obviously, your lifetime value of a client needs to be more than the cost to acquire that client.  And if you want to be profitable, not every company starts out profitable. Look at Uber—they were a billion-dollar company before they went profitable. They were able to raise enough money to keep everything going, because all they cared about was client acquisition. 

Yeah. 

Let me get as many clients and as many drivers and riders in the door, as many drivers and riders in the door as they can possibly get so they can own the market. They had a great idea. Lyft was right behind them. They didn’t care. They were able to raise enough capital to just keep spending like crazy, knowing that in the long game,

once they owned the market in all the different markets they were targeting, they were going to be profitable.
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Doesn’t that mean that there are some actors in the advertising market that inflate prices because maybe they’re venture-funded, and one out of a hundred company is going to make it unicorn? And the other 99 are going to be spending money on advertising, driving up prices.

So if someone comes in and they’re bootstrapping, they’re going to be hard-pressed to actually make a return on their Facebook ads, because there’s so much demand chasing results without appropriate expectation. 

Well, if there’s enough demand, then the bootstrapper can make it work. I’ve been a bootstrapper my whole life. So if you’re in a market where there’s enough demand, it’ll work. But if you’re in a situation where, let’s say today, you decide to come up with a rideshare app, you’re going to be hard-pressed to win riders and drivers as a new bootstrapped company. Personally, I don’t think Uber would be where it is today if it were bootstrapped. A business model like that required to grow fast, and they needed the capital to do it.

So there are certain industries that bootstrappers just aren’t going to be able to touch, because you’ve got a company like Uber that was losing money while acquiring all these new clients, knowing that down the road they would own the network and they would be able to be profitable. That’s a big gamble.

Yeah. But it’s also all the other companies that get funding but never actually make it. And the venture capitalists are spreading their risk because they invest in ten companies, and if one blows up, that’s enough. 

Yeah.  

So that means that there’s a lot of fake demand, basically. 

Well, I’m talking about the demand from the client, not demand from the company. The company has the product, and they’re trying to generate demand for their product. So when I say demand, I mean demand from the customer. 

No, I mean, demand for advertising. 

Oh, okay. Yeah, I see what you’re saying. 

So clicks.  

Yeah. So there’s a limited number of people that are looking for that term. You’ve got a lot of people spending money. It’s going to make it difficult to get it unless you’re spending a lot per click.  

Yeah.  So that means that maybe pay-per-click advertising is not for the faint of heart. 

I wouldn’t say that. 

Yeah.  

It’s not for everybody when you’re talking about every industry, right? Certain industries—I’ll give you an example. Let’s say you’re a roofer. Pay-per-click is going to work great for you because there are only so many roofers in a given area, and there’s a high demand for roofing. You can get away with spending a couple dollars a click, where it’s not going to break the bank, and you get that phone ringing.

My son, for example, owns a power washing and holiday lighting company. And he does Facebook and Google ads. He’s a small company, bootstrapped, and generates plenty of demand because of that situation. But again, if he decided he wanted to compete with Uber, he’d be lost. So it really depends on the industry, Insurance.

Let’s say you want to start your own Rich Kahn insurance company. Well, I’m going to be competing against Allstate, Progressive, GEICO—all these companies that are spending heavily in that sector. The only way you’re going to get action is to spend more per click than they do. And if I’m spending more per click, and I don’t have the scale like they do, I’m going to lose money.

Yeah. Super interesting. So let’s circle back to your framework. So we talked about fraud minimization as a way to optimize ads. We talked about conversion. What’s the third leg of this stool? 

For me, it’s content.   So let’s say you’ve got fraud out of the game. You optimize by campaign and your ads are showing up number one every single time, but the copy doesn’t draw. Or you don’t refresh the copy often enough, then it gets stale, and people see it and think, “Eh, let me try somebody new.” So they’re always looking for newer content, a way to hook the client. You really have to optimize campaign copy. So again, working with Google—that’s ones out there—you have the ability to put up multiple ads, multiple creatives. Their system will automatically take titles and rotate them for you so they stay unique. And then they’ll push more traffic to the ones that are getting a better conversion rate or a better click-through rate. So it’s about constantly staying on top of your copy.

Just like when you watch TV. You’ll see the same companies advertising over and over again, but it’s always a different commercial because they’re trying to hook you. If they played the same commercial for the last 20 years, you’d just tune it out. 

Tune it out. Yeah.  

Yeah. But when you see something new, it’s like, “Oh, let me watch that one.” It’s kind of cool. Because the commercials have to have good copy. If it’s boring, stale copy, nobody’s going to pay attention. 

And if it’s entertaining, then it’s even better, right?  

Exactly. If it becomes memorable and you think, “Oh my God, you’ve got to see this commercial I just saw, it was amazing,” that’s the kind of commercial you try to build—but it’s very difficult to build. 

Yeah, that’s very interesting. The creative element is very important. To catch attention and keep it, it has to be creative, curiosity-inducing, and potentially entertaining. That’s wonderful. 

Yeah. 

So when did you decide to go all in on Anura? 

Yeah. We launched it April 1st, 2017. We spent that first year trying to figure out who we were as a business. Because I’d never sold SaaS before, so I was trying to figure out—do I have a pitch deck? How do I talk to people? What works best? How do I get the person to say they’re interested and want to get on a call? There was so many things that we were struggling with that first year. I don’t know if we signed up more than one or two clients that first year. By the second year, we signed up a bunch of clients because we started to figure out what was working, who we’re talking to, the right trade shows to go to, the right Google ad campaigns to run. 

And as we started getting that, we started getting our traction and we started growing the client base. So I guess we would say we launched in 2017, but really went all in in 2018. That’s when we saw our first couple of clients jump on the software, fall in love with it, give us case studies and reviews, and say, “I can’t believe how you changed my business. This is amazing.” Once we got into the hands of a client, and we had one or two clients that really embraced it, that’s when we felt, “Okay, we’re onto something special. We’re all in.” That was about 2018. 

And then you started winding down your consulting business and went all in on the SaaS business? 

Yeah. We left the Google competitor, the really small Google competitor marketing agency. We left it up for a couple years because we had some clients that were still buying and using it. As the client attrition naturally occurred, we got to a point where we said, “Okay, it’s time to shut it down.” That was also around 2018–2019. Basically, in 2018 we pulled all the resources from it and just kept it running for the clients that were still there. They’d been with us for years, so we kept it stable. We weren’t going to trade shows, we weren’t advertising it. Support was handled by two of us, the client support, actually the whole company was run by two of us, three of us, and we just let it run for a couple of years until the last client jumped off, and then we shut it down.

Yeah. Actually, that’s a great approach—to evolve from a business that maybe has a ceiling, find another opportunity, start putting more time into it as it takes off, reallocate resources, use the legacy business as a cash cow, your legacy business and then once the new business takes off, then basically cut bait. That’s very interesting. And I’ve seen this happen. I’ve done it myself as well. So what’s the hardest decision you’ve ever had to make in your business?  

I’m going over the last 22 years. The hardest decision I ever had to make was firing a best friend. And unfortunately, it actually happened twice. My two best friends—one was a partner and one was an employee. We were working together, and it just got to the point where we had to go our separate ways from a business standpoint, and that hurt the relationship. We stopped talking. It was a bad breakup. And I just ran into them about a year ago, and we picked up where we left off—bygones be bygones. It was tough back then because you have a good friend, and it’s like, “Oh, I want to bring my friends into the business.

So I always tell new business owners when they're starting: if you're going to start the business with friends as a partner, that's different.
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Yeah, I agree. I agree. I had this experience as well, and it’s it was super painful for both of us. It did impact the relationship, even though we both put up a brave face over it, but it kind of breaks the trust. 

Yeah. It’s not fun.  

Yeah. So, final question I want to ask you is: what is the most important question an entrepreneur should ask themselves, in your opinion? 

Am I willing to not give up? Like I said, when I started this company, it wasn’t a new concept. If it’s a new concept, it’s a lot easier to say, “Man, I’m going to crush this.” Because when we started this, there were probably about a half a dozen different fraud solutions in the marketplace back in 2017. There was a handful of them that were out. They were already getting a lot of traction. I think all of them were fully funded and doing really well. It’s not the greatest time in the world to enter the fraud detection market when you have traction like that—kind of like entering the market trying to compete with Uber.

But I looked at it and thought, based on everything I was doing,

I think we have a better product. And once we started getting that feedback from clients who use the other products and realized we had a better product, it made me more convinced that this is the direction we want to go to.
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It’s also a balance. It’s a belief. Maybe this is what you’re talking about that, do you have this conviction that this is going to work out in the end? 

Yeah. 

So how do you know? How do you know that you are willing to not give up? What makes you be able to make this decision? Is this a decision or is this like an ongoing question that you keep asking yourself? 

For me, it’s: I’ve got to run it through my head and feel that it’s an unfillable business. And then I got to feel it in my heart. If I don’t feel it in my head and my heart, I’m not going to do it. I’ve had cut dozens and dozens of great ideas, some that I think would be phenomenal even in today’s standard, but I didn’t have the resources I wanted behind them.

I didn’t really have the heart in those businesses, so I didn’t start them. I wasn’t all in. Like I said before, with this business, when we started it, I was all in with my toe. And then once I started getting feedback from clients, I jumped in. Because then I knew, it wasn’t me saying I’ve got the best solution, it was my client’s telling me I got a better solution. And then as I get client after client, so now you know, you look at seven, eight years later, I’ve got new people in the office. I started working for this new fraud company. I see they’re kind of small compared to some of the other big companies out in the marketplace. And then they’re on the phone with clients who are like ranting and raving about our software.

They come back—now they’re all in. And that's really what I want is I want every team member to feel that, to know that they're with the right company. It’s not just for me—it’s for the team too. 
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Yeah, the team. I agree. That’s super important. Well, I love that. And this whole idea of the client feedback, reinforcing the value, and making people confident to sell it is huge.

Yeah. 

All right. So if people would like to reach out to learn about your solution—maybe they’re advertising, they’re spending a lot of money, and they want to save the 25% without losing any conversions, or they just want to reach out and learn more about and get to know you—where should they go and how can they reach you?  

I would start with anura.io or www.anura.com . We own both. And on there, we have huge amount of resources. We publish several blogs every week. We have dozens of eBooks online. We have the world’s only comprehensive guide on ad fraud, it’s about an 80 page document. So plenty of ways to learn. And then once they want to talk to somebody, once they’re ready, and like they’ve done their research and they’re ready to talk to us, they can fill out a form and we’ll reach out, or they can just pick up the phone and call us. If they want to follow me on LinkedIn, that’s my social media of choice. I post videos like this on there, some wacky videos sometimes with me and my grandkids. The best way to find me is just Rich Kahn on LinkedIn. I’m easy to find.  

Awesome. Well, Rich, thank you for coming and sharing your framework—the Ad Optimization Framework. So it’s content, fraud minimization, conversion, and this idea of conviction: when you are willing to not give up concept. It’s fabulous. For those of you listening, if you found this valuable, follow us on YouTube, check out our LinkedIn page, and stay tuned because every week we are going to get a wonderful contributor like Rich Kahn, the CEO of Anura.

So Rich, thanks for coming and thanks for listening. 

Appreciate it.

Tish Squillaro, CEO and Founder of CANDOR Management Consulting and author of HeadTrash: Cleaning Out the Junk That Stands Between You and Success, is driven by a belief that solutions exist simply because we can create them. A lifelong problem solver and serial entrepreneur, Tish helps leaders identify the internal obstacles that prevent clear thinking, strong decisions, and consistent execution.

We explore Tish’s journey from founding the first-ever dog daycare business in 1997 to building a career in human capital consulting and leadership development. Along the way, she uncovered a recurring leadership challenge: people often know exactly what to do—but don’t do it. That insight led to HeadTrash and the Mental Headspace Framework, a practical system for understanding and managing the emotions that silently sabotage performance.

Tish explains how everyday emotions are not inherently negative, but become destructive when they cross the line and begin to manage us. She walks through the **seven HeadTrash emotions—control, insecurity, arrogance, paranoia, anger, fear, and guilt—**and shows how leaders can recognize when emotions cloud judgment, stall decisions, and create chaos inside organizations. The episode also explores how HeadTrash shows up in entrepreneurs as shiny-object syndrome and non-listening, and how leaders can manage emotional reactions in themselves and others without suppressing or “fixing” them.

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS Group. And here I am today with Tish Squillaro, the CEO and Founder of CANDOR Management Consulting, and the author of HeadTrash: Cleaning Out the Junk That Stands Between You and Success. Tish, welcome to the show. 

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

Well, I’m glad you are here, and I’m also curious about all the head trash I have coming into this conversation, and hopefully you can help me clear it out a little bit. 

I will do my best.

Okay. That’s great. So before we get into that, let’s start with my question that I’m always asking every guest: What is your personal ‘Why’, and what are you doing to manifest it in your business and in your practice?

My personal “why” is because I can—

I love problem solving. I've always found myself interested in not having “no” be the final answer, or someone can't, or it's too difficult.
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That’s good. I mean, as Henry Ford famously said, “If you believe you can, or if you believe you can’t, you’re right either way,” and you’re in the latter category, which is great. So tell me about your journey. How did you get to the point where you were writing books about Head Trash and being a management consultant and a coach? What led you to this point in your life? 

Sure. I wish I could say it was a clear journey.

I’m not as organized, and had a plan, but everything I did was based on what I enjoyed and had passion for—and I think that itself was the journey.
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So from that business, I started to enjoy working for myself. I enjoyed the entrepreneurial energy, the fear, the unknown — I loved it all, and I just stayed with that.
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I found a very solid niche in HR, which was people dynamics — people growth, insightfulness on people collaborating, engaging, communicating.
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That’s interesting. And as you described that you came up with this doggy daycare idea because you had a need and you saw there was no solution for it.This is one of the best way to actually create a business because you really know the customer because the customer is you. So you know the problems and you know what would work as a solution. So that is fascinating. So you became an HR consultant and HR entrepreneur. Then you wrote a book in 2013, which is HeadTrash, and then you had a follow-up book, also called HeadTrash 2.So tell me about this HeadTrash idea and how you stumbled upon it. 

So I had been working for quite some time already with individuals, and the tough growing pains of self-awareness—making sure you do your job well, asking, Is this the right job for me? And I was on a project with another consultant, so I co-authored both these books. And there was this constant hesitation of a leader doing the right thing. They know what to do. We talked about it. We scripted it out. We created the environment so that the message that he was going to deliver would be perfect for the business. And at the last hour, he hesitated and didn’t do it. And I looked over at the coach that I was working with, so we were working together. He came in from one angle. I came in from another to help this one company. I said, “What’s up? Why is this guy struggling?” He said, “It’s his head trash.” I said, “Well, what’s that?” He goes, you know all that junk that sits inside your head that you can’t get out of your own way? I said, “Oh my God, I love that.

We should write a book about that. I bet other people have this. And so that was the birth of me becoming an author, I had no idea what that meant. Similar to opening up a dog business—if I thought about it, I probably would’ve talked myself out of it, because writing a book isn’t easy. You have to have a passion for it. There’s a lot of time that goes into it, and then you have to launch it. So we did it.

We wrote the first book, which was identifying your head trash, and those are everyday emotions.
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But not every emotion impacts you to not do what you need to do. And so what I realized is out of the seven, every time we looked at a person’s challenge, one of these emotions sat right in the center. And so we created this index called the HeadTrash Index to help people identify which one of these emotions am I really working up against? Because once you know it, you can manage it. It’s when you don’t know it, you make up excuses why it’s not you — it’s something else — and that keeps you from doing the right thing. So HeadTrash came to birth out of everyday situations that we saw leaders going through, and when we peeled back the onion to help them problem solve, and you need to know what the root cause is, it was one of these emotions.

And so that was really the first book. The second book was a couple years later, because as we worked with launching and doing a lot of PR with the book, I kept getting the same question. Well, what if someone else has it? How do you deal with someone else’s head trash? So that’s what the second book is written about. It’s taking head trash as you now are engaging with living with, or someone you have to kind of work with that has these one of these seven. And the first one is very business focused. So my stories that I talk about are real business situations. The second one is actually life situations, so a lot more people might resonate, because I talk about my background. I’m a Catholic, I’m Italian, and I have guilt as a neighbor. I mean, it sits at every table we go to, right? So there’s things that, as a personal side of us, these emotions impact us differently. So that’s the two books. And they do very well for both an individual or companies that are trying to figure out why is my team not making decisions? Because all head trash identifies is why decisions are not getting made. 

Okay. So this is fascinating. So you say there are seven of these emotions, which maybe we want to call them negative emotions, or I don’t want to label them because emotions are there for a reason. I wonder that, do we want to suppress these emotions or do we want to help them run their course? What are we trying to do? Are they negative in themselves or just in that situation? And how do we know that it’s not a valid signal from our nervous system that we should be aware, or be cautious, or do something different?

You know, Steve, it’s a great question, and to answer your first thought, we never want you to suppress emotions, that’s not healthy. And these emotions when not becoming trash are actually everyday lovely emotions. We should have a little control in our life. We’re all going to be a little insecure, that makes us want to get better, right? We’re not perfect. We all have fear, otherwise we’re reckless. So every one of the seven are certainly not negative until we make them negative, until we allow them to make decisions for us. Cloud our judgment, misalign our priorities. So then I call it the crossing the line. So when some emotion, ‘fear’, is with us, it keeps us on our toes and it makes sure we’re not reckless.

But when it crosses the line to head trash, it stifles you and has you not make moves, you stay still. That’s not going to help you. So how does that then translate into what do you do? Well,

I'd like to think about how to manage the emotion. So let's have it and it's going to come. So we can't suppress it.
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Yeah, that’s very interesting. I like this idea of managing, because sometimes you get stuck and if you can take a few small steps, then you get unstuck and then maybe you are more rational about the situation, you’re not overreacting. Maybe an emotion is an overreaction, and then you can get back to the balance and have a more reasonable assessment of it. That’s fascinating. So what are these different emotion? I mean, you mentioned some of them, but how do you manage these emotions? Are they all the same? So let’s say fear or insecurity, are they all managed the same way, or you need to do different things for each?  

Well, I would say first you want to identify, right? I do think these emotions are so casual. We have them all. So I can’t imagine there’s one person out there that has never felt one of these emotions. The key is to identify which ones catch us off guard, and really cause us the challenges or become our head trash. Once we identify it, then we have to figure out what to do with it, because it’s not leaving, and it is going to cloud our judgment. And that’s the managing part. So each one has their own route to manage. So on fear, I try to give people baby steps to gain confidence. A clear head and everyone can manage things small.

Not everyone can manage things really big, so we could probably get through the process. It’s like me and skiing. I learned very late. I look down at that mountain and I’m frightened every time, but I take little baby steps and I get down each mountain and as I go down and I look back up, I realize, wow, look what I’ve done. But if I looked up and all the way to the bottom and didn’t take baby steps and think, how am I going to get from there to there, I probably would stay frozen at the top. So it’s kind of in that same way. Another example is insecurity. Insecurity is something most of us live through. We always question, can I, should I? And insecurity is that negative voice that tells you’re not good enough. No, you shouldn’t do that. Are you sure you know what you’re doing? And I do think we all have that at some moment. I have it. When I meet a new client, can I help them? I always ask myself that.

And then the other side of me says, of course you can, because insecurity isn’t one of mine. But if it were, I would talk myself out of it. So how do you get through that? One is, first of all,

look at what you are comfortable doing and think about the things you're good at, not always the things you're not good at.
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And the last one I’ll give you an example of is anger, which is my number one. And anger doesn’t mean I’m mean and nasty. That’s not what anger means. Anger means we react. Someone who reacts to no. Or something that happened they didn’t like, and their immediate reaction to whatever discomfort they have is not nice, that’s anger. Where you kind of react and you don’t give yourself a chance to think it through and then respond. And so for me, I created something called the invisible zipper, which is zipping my mouth real fast. Because I could feel when anger is coming, especially with my 22 and 21-year-old, I could feel it from my pit stomach, ready to rise and out my mouth will say stuff that I can’t take back. But when I do this, because I have to be action oriented. Usually, people who react, use your action oriented, use their hands, show their emotions. They need to do something because they’re about to implode. So the “do something” for me is I zipper up, and that motion reminds me why I’m doing it. Okay. Don’t say it, Tish. This is not a good time. Those are not the good word. I wouldn’t be using those words. So I then talk myself out of reacting in that moment, because time will be a better friend to someone with anger than wasting time. 

Yeah. My mother always used to tell me to count to 10 before you say something out of anger.  

Yeah. And look, it’s true. My mother would say, it’s not what you say, but how you say it. So someone angry is allowed to be disappointed, upset, not happy. I’m not recommending you look past all that. What I am recommending is how are you going to say you’re angry, upset, or disappointed? That’s what’s going to impact the situation. 

Yeah, that’s great. I remember these stories I read about Lincoln, how he controlled his anger. I forget the names of the participants, but there were some generals who didn’t cross the Potomac and didn’t chase the Southern troops. They could have annihilated them and kind of ended the Civil War two years early. But he didn’t do it. He stopped at the river, and then the troops could recover. Those troops could recover, and it dragged out the war. And he basically, instead of reacting with anger, wrote a letter but didn’t send it, and decided it was a better idea not to alienate that general and to use some other approaches.

So that’s fascinating. Now, Tish I’d like to switch gears here and ask you about the opposite. I agree with you that when you have an emotion that holds you back, you want to really get out of this lizard brain so that you can more objectively judge the situation. However, the opposite thing is also happening with entrepreneurs, which is the shiny object syndrome. They get so excited about something they shouldn’t be excited about, or they should take a breath and create some distance between that thing and what they’re doing. What that causes, sometimes for entrepreneurs and business owners, they overwhelm themselves and then they create all sorts of chaos around them with their staff, because it becomes stop-and-go. They can’t sustain the effort, and then they lose momentum that way, or they essentially get themselves into a negative cash flow situation. So what is your thinking on that, and is your approach also able to handle this kind of overreaction rather than holding yourself back? 

Yeah. I would align the entrepreneur — which I am one, and I’m a culprit of this at times — with arrogance, because we’re not listening. So the one thing I’d always say to entrepreneurs, are you listening to what your people need, what your business is saying, what the market is saying? Because a lot of times we just run on our own theories, our own thoughts, our own energy. And you kind of need that as an entrepreneur. Being one myself, if I listened to everything everyone said, I may not have done half the things I’ve done. But I still listened, because it made me smarter and probably better prepared. I didn’t always take their advice. So

what I always say to entrepreneurs is: make sure you’re listening. Because if your company is struggling and you're not paying attention to that, then you're not listening.
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If the market is saying your product is not on demand, you may think it is, but it’s not, then you’re not listening. So I do think arrogance is one of those emotions that are shown in a couple of different ways. You could be arrogant, which is cocky, know-it all. And you know what? The good side of arrogance, the healthy side, is that you do have confidence and you stand up for yourself. You’re able to kind of really know the right thing or the right set of data, right? You do know it, so be confident about it. When you become a non-listener and you’re the only voice that’s heard, that’s that crossing the line we talked about. So with entrepreneurs in particular, they’re so sure this is going to be a home run that they stop listening — and that’s a form of arrogance.

Yeah. But also, some people say it’s also insecurity in disguise. 

It could be. I mean, a lot of these are what I call combinations. I call them a healthy cocktail, because there are two that often work together. So insecurity and arrogance can work together, because people are hiding behind a mask. There’s also control and arrogance — that can be a combo. These emotions sometimes overlap, which is why you really have to identify the root cause, which is why I created this index called the HeadTrash Index, because some of them look alike. And if you’re going to try to cure or manage arrogance, it’s going to be different from how you’d manage insecurity, right? So I want to make sure you work on the root cause of what’s driving it. There’s always one. Now, one may feed into having a combo, but there’s still the root cause. So the one with the insecurity root cause can be displayed as arrogance as one of the things they do, but it’s not an arrogant thing that they’re struggling. They need to build self-confidence in who they are. Then they’ll be able to shed the arrogant approach. 

Yeah, that is so true. But that’s a longer-term process to build up. 

Well, knowing what it is the key. I do say people should spend the time to get to know who they are. And I think people feel that’s a waste of time because they think, I know who I am. I see myself in the mirror. I know what I do. But the truth is, do we? And the only way you really get to know yourself is you start to look at how you impact others. How you impact situations you’re in.

You’ve got to be humble enough to step out of your body and watch what you do and how you do it, and then look at how that impacts. Because then you’ll start to navigate whether or not you really know yourself.
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That’s great. So what about when you are trying to fix the head trash of other people? Is this a different process? 

Well, it’s not necessarily fixing it. Again, we’re not going to have these emotions disappear, but when you identify them, you then can counteract and work with that situation. So if you know someone’s insecure, you don’t go in and poke and criticize everything they do. Perhaps, you go in and start to highlight that things that they do well, and tell them they don’t have to be great at everything, but you got these things you’re really good at. No one’s going to be great at everything, so you start having positive conversations with them. So yes, there’s a way to help manage with another person you’re sensing or identify they have it, but you’re not fixing.  

Yeah, you’re right. That was the wrong word I used. Yeah. So basically, there’s a process to manage that. Can you give an example? Let’s say someone is angry and they overreact to something. How do you manage that? How do you calm them down?  

Well, if someone has anger and I already know it, I would probably start off with, Don’t get upset. I’m going to tell you something. Let me finish it all the way through, because I have it all spelled out. Or we may not be able to do this, but I have another solution. Let’s talk about options. People who get upset, like me, who get an anger reaction, I don’t like when my options are done. I say when they’re done. I think there’s always a way, which is why my ‘Why’ is, if I see a problem, I try to create the solution unless we do a talking through it, right? So I do think someone with anger, you don’t get them to react, but you get them to converse and have a discussion. That would be the goal with them. 

Also, if they’re so upset about something and you’re coaching them, or a friend because you see they’re going to do something that’s going to be a problem, tell them write it down and then go read it one more day later and tell me if you still want to do that. Write down what you want to do. Journal the thing that’s bothering you. Before you send that email, write it out, minimize it, go back to it in a couple hours. I guarantee you over time your emotions settle. You’ll be able to read or think through a better plan. And so that would be the two ways I would look at someone with anger.

Yeah. I wish I did that in my early thirties. I sent some emails too early.  

Oh, we’ve all done it. We’ve all done it, Steve. When I was young, growing up in the dog business, it’s funny — we got dog-like names. I was called the pit bull. Now, that is not attractive dog language. I’ve had to learn not to be the pit bull. 

Sometimes it helps. I was called the pit bull as well. I was working with a capital markets team. I was still in Central Europe, in Hungary, and I was talking to the London traders. I was working on a bond issue, and they just wanted to blow me off because my idea was too small for them to spend time.  And I was just very persistent, and I overheard them saying, “Ah, this guy’s a pit bull.” But eventually they helped me, and the deal closed. So it worked out in the end. That’s awesome. So if someone would like to learn more about their head trash and they want to do this assessment that you mentioned, where should they go and how can they do it? And then also how can they contact you directly? 

Well, my website probably is the simplest and no one’s intruded. I don’t come after anyone that goes on my website. So if you want to safely navigate and learn about me, my website has everything from the HeadTrash Index, you’ll find it there to go take. There is my background and podcasts like this that I’ve done. A little history on the different client situations I’ve worked in. Testimonials about leaders that have worked with me. I do think step one, hit my website, it’s https://candor-consulting.com. Easy to find. I would say second is, I’m always open to talk to folks, so if you want to email me, I would love to hear from you, it’s tish@candor-consulting. And if it’s an emergency, look, I’m even open to have my phone out there, so you can find that as 610-613-4864. 

I believe the work we do is so critical in the moment. Sometimes you can save someone from making a big mistake just by giving them a rational place to talk through. And so I would say that the HeadTrash Index is simple. It’s about 25 or 26 multiple choice questions. You’ll get it immediately once it’s completed, your results, which tell you which of the top one you have with a little bit of a summary of what you might want to do with that. And again, when you get that, if you wanted to ask me questions, you can certainly email me. No one will solicit anyone, so don’t feel that you’re going to be inundated by thousands of emails or marketing. I really put it out there. There’s no cost, it’s very simple, very revealing, and typically accurate.

That’s fantastic. I’m going to do it myself when we hang up. Tish, thank you for coming and sharing your HeadTrash management framework. I think we called it ‘The mental Headspace Framework’. So you first have to identify your head trash, how it impacts you, and then manage the seven emotions. And I’m sure there’s more information on CANDOR Consulting that people can check out. So thanks for coming, and if you enjoyed listening to the show, make sure you subscribe and follow us on YouTube, on LinkedIn. And stay tuned because every week I bring a fascinating thought leader or entrepreneur on the show. So thanks for coming and thank you for listening.

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

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

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

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS Group, and the host of this podcast. And my guest today is Edward Francis, a seasoned coach who provides soft skills for next-level leading with an outcome-based and measured approach. He’s an IBM alumni and holds a doctorate in Management Consulting, so he knows a lot. Edward, welcome to the show. 

Thank you, Steve. Glad I could be here. 

Yeah. Great to have you. I always ask our guests because I think it’s very important that we have a mission, a purpose in life. Because if we lean into it, then we are going to get a lot better results. So what is your personal ‘Why’, and what are you doing to manifest it?

Good question, Steve. I like that. Well, my personal ‘Why’ are my commitments, and I have four of them. Oh. And those commitments are me, they make me who I am. The fourth commitment is why we are here today talking, but I’ll take a minute and touch on the first three because I think they’re worth touching on briefly. The first commitment, and not necessarily in order, is family. I’m a father, uncle, godfather, caretaker for a dog and cat — family. My second commitment of the four is faith. And obviously, I could talk a lot about that, but I won’t. But that is a big commitment that makes me who I am. The third commitment is actually to the city of Atlanta, because that’s where I am and where I have served throughout the years several boards of directors — the large ones that we all know about, some for profit, some not for profit, and some of the smaller ones that we haven’t heard about.

I'm at that stage now where I end up doing on boards and doing things that nobody else wants to do, but I think it's very important.
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I have a passion for that. And that bridge can be coaching, leadership development, mentoring, and so it is experiential learning.
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And I began to enjoy those sessions, but found that they really were important for the person coming as well as me, because I learned a lot as well. And then when I went on to study my doctorate and my MBA, I studied experiential learning, where I began to do research on soft skills. 

So what are soft skills?

Earning trust. Can you teach someone how to earn trust? I prove that you can. Passion for the future. Can you teach passion for the future? Can that learn? Is that an acquired skill? Is that an acquired competency? Yes, it is. So experiential learning, I have a passion that comes into my coaching, which is why I coach at a business school, at a major university. And I have clients, private clients as well. Those are my ‘Whys’. And because that’s who I am. I am those commitments. 

Yeah, that’s fascinating. So let’s talk about some of the things that you do, because I find it very interesting. But I’d like to start with the framework that you developed, which is a unique coaching framework. I’ve not seen anything like that before, and I think you call it the EMF coaching framework after your name. And it involves authenticity, mindfulness, equanimity, and neuroplasticity. Can you explain what this is, how you discovered it, why it’s important, and how do you apply it?

Well, my research brought it to the forefront, but my clients have really discovered it for me. When I work with a client, I take them where they are. Typically, it’s someone with a set of outcomes that they’d like to achieve, or outcomes that they want to develop. Sometimes we don’t know outcomes change, and I also have the ability to measure their outcomes, which is fairly unique. I mean, I give them measurements. People say they want measurements, but I can do them and do them well. But the framework is a way of communicating blocks that we build on, and blocks for active listening on my part. 

So what is the authenticity? How do you use authenticity in coaching? 

To make sure that you are aware of it, to help you measure your authenticity, to make you value your authenticity, to get you to focus on it as an important element of what you want to do and who you are, so that at the end of your career, or when you’re changing careers because you have one behind you, you can look back on it and feel good about it. And you’re not some sad old guy or sad old lady who wishing you had paid attention to your authenticity. Because what happens when you have that sadness, you end up impacting the people that love you the most. Your wife, your children, grandchildren. So you want to protect this period of time by making sure you pay attention to authenticity. And so we spend a good bit of time working on it, identifying, but more than anything else, letting you know how important it is.

And of course, authenticity, I mean, we grow, we bend, we assimilate the cultures, but there’s still an authenticity that you want to measure, promote, and understand. I attempt to drive home that meaning, but

more than anything else, I listen to what's important to you about authenticity, it's about listening.
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Okay. So there’s a lot there. We won’t be able to completely unpack authenticity. Maybe that’s what you do with your client so we don’t have to do it on this call. But let’s switch to the next one, which is mindfulness. So is it about meditation? What does it mean? 

Well, mindfulness is all over the place, right? We hear it all the time. It’s almost cache. I mean, it’s all over the place. But

in coaching and in my building blocks, we want to examine the benefit to you as my client in achieving your outcomes. The benefit of just understanding and listening rather than making an impression.
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So being present with the person? 

Not only present, but giving a lead to listening.

What does that mean? 

It’s hard to hear them if you are talking. And this type of mindfulness, you want to make sure that you are being more listening than you are trying to impress or engage from your perspective. That type of mindfulness in that moment and in each moment. So we spend a good bit of time understanding that level of engagement, and if that engagement is even authentic to you, but the benefits of that.

Can you give an example? 

Sure. You go to someone and you want them to help you with something, not necessarily small talk, but find out where they are at that moment, where they are mentally, where they are socially, how’s their day? It’s more than small talk before you engage because you’ll find that them even hearing you, if you show that you care about where they are, their level of listening can be increased. So an example is finding out where the person is before you engage with them. 

Okay. So let’s switch gears and let’s talk about equanimity, because that’s something I don’t hear people talk about. Mindfulness is a common topic—maybe not your brand of it—but what’s equanimity, and how do you use it in coaching?

Sure. Equanimity means a lot of things, but when we talk about coaching in the framework, we’re really talking about fulfillment.

Equanimity can mean how you handle stress or how you handle disturbances.
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an equanimity is understanding fulfillment and that pursuit of fulfillment, and it can change.
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And if you’re saying “I don’t know” at age 30, my fear is you’ll be saying “I don’t know” at age 45. So being able to pick a horse and ride it, have the flexibility to change whenever you want is critical. Plus, just think about it: let’s say you want help. I remember plenty of times people would come to me wanting help, and if they had a target, it was much easier for me to help them if they had a target. They say, I want this, it’s going to be available. Then this is the decision-maker. Can you help me with this venture capital team to see if I can get it swayed my way? They got a target. But if you come to me and say, Edward, help me figure out what I want to be when I grow up, that’s a whole other discussion.

It’s very difficult to help you. So when you have a target, when you have an answer, other than, I don’t know, we have a direction to move in. So “I don’t know” is not good for most people. Yeah. And you can honestly not know, but you going to pick something. Because when you pick something, even if you’re going the wrong way, you may see what’s the right way. But you never would see that right way if you hadn’t taken that first step, even in the wrong direction. 

Give the information and then you can iterate from there. Yeah, I agree. And I love it. So let’s go onto neuroplasticity, which was also a very interesting concept that you talked about. 

Sure.

How do you use neuroplasticity in coaching? 

Sure. Well, neuroplasticity is the brain’s ability to create additional neurons, but in coaching it’s also the suggestion and the consideration that you move outside of your brain — that you don’t let your brain run you, you run the brain. That brain will get you in trouble if you are just running around following it. First of all, the brain’s number one job is to protect the body. That’s the number one job for the brain. So therefore, it often has a negative bias. The brain will think that things are worse than they are. That’s part of the way it protects you. You think a lion is going to jump out of the bushes and devour you when it’s just a little puppy dog who’s coming up to you.

So if you keep going, most of the time you’ll see it’s not quite as bad as you thought it was — most of the time. So following the brain, you have to step outside of your brain and manage your brain. The front part of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, is in charge of visioning and innovation. But the funny thing about the prefrontal cortex is that it wants to be filled. It doesn’t want empty space. So wherever you are, it’s going to fill itself with something. And you going to say to your brain, no, we are not doing that. I’m not going to let you get filled up. I’m going to keep room so that I can vision.

Visioning and innovation takes time and it takes room, and the brain wants to stock in as much as it can to stay filled
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You create some free space. There was a time when professors, way back in the day, had their sabbaticals. Well, that was well-meaning. That was well-meaning — having that time for visioning. Well,

as we have blueprints for business, as we have goals, as we look for moving forward, it requires vision, but vision takes time.
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Yeah. And maybe they are giving themselves time. They go on a fishing trip, or a golf trip, or travel. And the best ideas come when you’re not in the office, right? 

But I’m talking about more granular than that. Not just vacations or climbing a mountain, I’m talking about just sitting still and breathing. I’m talking about family time, a meal, book, listening to some good music, a walk in the woods, things that help your mind empty out those monkeys, so that you can have space to take the time for the visioning and innovation that’s critical for moving forward. A lot of times you get to where you are by keeping that mind full. You’re always having fires to put out, and that’s fine. We’re experts at putting out fires. But at some point,

to take that business to that next level — that soft skill for next-level leadership — you're going to have to manage your brain to create space so that you have time for vision and innovation.
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Yeah. I love that. And I often notice that I’m driving my car and I think, okay, I’m going to switch on the audio book or podcast. I say, no, I won’t do that. I just want to sit here and just daydream over the wheel and just let my mind go different places.  And actually I love that time, and I like the long drives, and I don’t take in information. And I guess that’s what’s happening. I didn’t call it that, but I am emptying out my brain and giving it space. 

Well, you have to manage that brain because it will get you in trouble if you just let it run the show. I mean, really, it’ll take you to some odd places. You have to say to your brain, “No. That’s not what we are doing. That’s not the plan.” 

Okay. That’s awesome. So your coaching framework is authenticity — being aware and living an authentic life so that you can look back on it with satisfaction. Mindfulness — being present, listening, giving space for other people. Equanimity, which is fulfillment and having that feeling of fulfillment, of living with purpose. That’s why I ask you about the purpose as well, so I totally relate to this. And neuroplasticity, I love that concept. I think few people talk about it, especially this way. It’s very powerful. So before we wrap up, I like to ask you about what you mentioned at the top of the conversation about teaching people passion for the future, I’m fascinated by this idea. I thought passion was more of an internally developed thing. Maybe there’s also talent for passion. Maybe it’s part of nurture, but how can you actually teach it, I’m very curious about that. 

Sure. Passion for the future. That’s when you want to be passionate about capabilities and opportunities for impacting your clients, impacting the world, and you deeply believe in the quality and breadth of personal, exceptional capability. And the key with passion for the future, when you really are doing it well, then you are energizing others about unique opportunities, and you are conveying passion for the future with them. I have an exercise—several exercises—that we go through and talk about. 

So, Edward, just a quick question. So does that mean that you are passionate about the potential of your own and the other people around you? So your passion is derived not from what the politics is doing, or geopolitics, and I don’t know, AI, and that stuff, but is it about the humanistic potential that you see is there and can be manifested? 

Actually, Steve, it is outcomes-driven. So it is outcomes-driven, but what I see—and when it works well, you see it—it spreads. It’s not that you start out saying, I want to have passion for this client, I want to have passion for this business, or passion for this opportunity. But once you grasp it—the wins or the losses, the yeses, the no’s, or the maybes—you take them all. And you are still passionate about winning. You create sense of pride, you’re seeking opportunities, you confront behavior that’s contrary to the values and to reputation. So we teach this and it can be fun, but I’ve also seen tears come from it as well. It can be a tearful experience, but it’s part of what we do, and we do it well. And it’s not cookie-cutter. I take my client where they are. So this is not just some rope that I’m going to take you through.

We really have to see this as an outcome that's going to benefit you and an outcome that's desired, and an outcome that you're willing to invest in.
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So you can turn a sheep into a wolf? 

Yes. If there is a real support in doing it. If there is personal support in doing it, or corporate support in doing it, or if it’s passionate support in doing it, yes, we can do it. There is a price, but it can be done. A personal price. A mental price, yes. 

But doesn’t the mentee or the  coachee have to be willing to pay that price, or can they get the passion without paying any price? Personally, the company will pay, but can they do it? 

Sure. Well, first of all, the person needs to be coachable. And it needs to be an objective, or it needs to be an outcome that you see now, or an outcome that you developed over your period of time in working with me. So we can start out that way or it can come, but yes, you have to see that it’s worth it because it does take work. But once you get it, I see it spread, and you in fact are passionate about the future, and you weren’t there in the first place. You might’ve been pessimistic, actually. 

That is amazing. I mean, if you can do that, then you can really empower other people that maybe would must be able to empower themselves or be empowered by the usual patterns and approaches. 

And we measure it. I have a measurement. I can measure your progress or lack thereof. And let’s be clear, every story is not a success story. But I can measure your progress or lack thereof, and we can agree on a matrix and see how you’re tracking towards that matrix for passion for the future. 

So how do I measure my passion, or how do you measure my passion? 

I’ll get you to give me an analysis, and I have some questions. And I’ll get you to give me an analysis of those questions, and then I’ll ask you those same questions another way. And then we’ll do training, and then we’ll come back to that and then we’ll do an analysis of where you were and where you are now that we are at the next phase. So that’s one way we can do, we can measure it to see your progress or lack of progress. Now,

I also have a role play that we can do. So there's several things we can do. There's role play, there's reading, but primarily it's me listening.
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Well, the questions are more important than the answers. Because a lot of answers can pertain to one question. That is very fascinating. So if people would like to be coached by you — and I saw on your LinkedIn page that you offer serious coaching for serious clients, so it’s not like dabblers please don’t bother applying kind of thing. So what does it look like? 

Serious coaching looks like a commitment of time and resources from someone who’s coachable. It starts when you contact me to schedule a chemistry session. That’s typically can be as short as 15 minutes, most of them are an hour. So it starts with a chemistry session. Then once we get out of the chemistry session, it starts when you pay me, that’s when it starts. 

Okay. So if those listeners that are taking in this episode, they’d like to explore whether they have the right chemistry for you to coach them, or whether they are considered serious enough for coaching, where should they go and how can they find you?

There are two places you can find me. Of course, you can find me on LinkedIn: Edward Francis. I think it’s Edward Francis, DBA (Doctor of Business Administration). So Edward Francis. Or you can go to my webpage, www.edwardmackfrancis.com. 

Awesome. So if you’re listening to this and you want a serious coach with serious coaching, and specifically want to be a more authentic person can be more present for others and feel more fulfilled, and have a bigger brain capacity through neuroplasticity, leveraging neuroplasticity, or you want to be more passionate about the future, then do reach out to Edward Francis. You will not be disappointed. And if you have a company and you want to grow it, then reach out to me at the Summit OS Group. So, Edward, thank you for coming, and for those of you out there, thank you for listening. And stay tuned because we have exciting entrepreneurs and thought leaders joining every week.

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

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

Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS® Group and host of the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today here is Ian Leaman, who is a Summit OS® Guide, a former investment banker with over 100 exits under his belt. He’s also a senior finance executive and an investor. So Ian, welcome to the show.

Hi, Steve. It’s great to see you, and thank you for having me on. 

Absolutely. And we go way back, and one of your international board positions I think I’m sharing with you, but I’m not going to go into that because it’s long in the past. What I like to explore is what you’re doing now, why you’re doing it, and some things about why you moved to the States. I mean, both of us moved to the States since we were on this particular board for different reasons. And I’d like to explore your framework, which is very intriguing. So let’s start with your ‘Why’. So what is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business life? 

What I’m doing right now, Steve actually squares the circle. It brings us back together as working colleagues. You mentioned that we worked previously on an international board. Today we’re working together as Summit OS Guides. How did I get here, and how does this relate to my ‘Why’? Well, my business journey started really in my youth, where my parents had small businesses. And so the conversations over the evening dinner table were all about the trials and tribulations, the successes, failures, challenges, et cetera, of running a small business. So that got into my blood very early. That translated through a career in finance, where I qualified originally as an accountant with Deloitte in the UK, and then progressed into the transaction side of finance, helping entrepreneurs grow and exit their businesses. As you said, having come through more than a hundred successful exits, but many  more which didn’t cross that finish line. 

I really became interested in the differences between those who succeeded and those who didn't, what they were doing in their businesses, which made them attractive prospects from an M&A point of view and made their processes successful ones.
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Yeah. I totally relate to this, and I often felt guilty even when we sold the company, and I felt like we could have gotten more for it if the company was improved, and there were some low-hanging fruits that we could have helped fix in a short order. And then we can do it now, and that’s very fulfilling.

That’s right. I mean, there are many war stories, if you like, from that phase of my working life that illustrate very well the point you just made. For example, on the positive side, I can recall a conversation with an entrepreneur. I met him for the first time at his place of work. It was a distributor of electronic components, so they bought in bulk, stocked, broke into small pieces, and sold and distributed at a good margin, electronic components. They had a big warehouse. He and I had an initial discussion and he was quite an impressive guy. I remember in his very austere functional office, and he said, would you like to look around? I said, yeah, of course. I’d love to. So we walked together from the upper level where his office was down a stairway into the warehouse.

And just as we got to the foot of the stairway, we encountered one of the warehousemen. His name was Jim, and he said, the owner said, Hey, good morning Jim. How’s it going today? And Jim said, 81%. Why did Jim say 81%? I asked myself, I left it at that moment, but they were both very satisfied with Jim’s answer. When we returned from the visit to the office, I said, so what’s 81%? He said, well, that’s Jim’s metric. Jim has to measure a certain number of things he’s doing and relate them to that day, and he was well within his range of target, and that’s how this guy ran his business. All that translated into a very successful exit at a multiple one or two points above the regular for a distributor in that sector. Because he was growing fast, he was doing it really well, and he built a business which was somewhat independent of him. 

That’s great. And just a quick reference to the LinkedIn post that you put up yesterday, where you mentioned that a lot of people who are trading time for money and working 55 or more hours is basically a leading indicator that they’re not going to build a self-managing business, they’re not going to scale, they’re going to burn out. So it’s great if someone has good KPIs to make sure that they know where they are and where they’re moving towards where they want to be. Okay, so let’s switch gears here. And you have a really intriguing story of how you made it to America and particularly to LA. So what was your calculus, and how did you end up there?

I’d been working successfully as an M&A advisor — as you had, Steve — working with entrepreneurs on that journey. And a lot of that was about the growth of their companies, about building them somewhat before they actually made the exit, often through acquisition or financing. And one day I got a phone call from a friend who was a headhunter who joked with me when he got on the call: “Ian, don’t put the call down. I’m going to talk to you about a new role, which is not doing what you’re doing.” I guess his call landed at a particular moment when I was restless for a change, and he described a role as the third co-founder of a startup to be newly listed on the London Stock Exchange as blank check company, often known as a SPAC in the US. Long story short, I was a good fit for the team of two entrepreneurs who had built previous businesses, financed, acquired, IPO’d, and then sold. We got together and set out on a path of acquiring businesses in the US, even though the listing was in the UK, in the oil and gas services sector. That experience was amazing.

It put me on the front line as a principal, doing many of the things I'd seen done secondhand and getting my hands into the weeds of operations much more than I had previously. And these were great learning experiences
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That’s awesome. And that’s very similar to what we did in many ways. So tell me about this Can-Do framework. So how do you break it down? How do you make it more tangible? What differentiates an American entrepreneur or American businessperson — or just a general person — and European or UK in terms of their outlook on business or life?

Okay, so it’s all about positivity. And that manifests itself with just really at the start of any conversation about anything within business, whether it’s a small change to an existing business or perhaps something at the opposite end of the scale, a big new opportunity that hasn’t previously presented itself. It’s all about the positivity. Americans will enthusiastically embrace change, generally — in my experience — without the cynicism overtaking them. Americans have just as much valid experience of what can go wrong as you build and change businesses as Europeans, but instead they choose to parlay that experience and those learnings into positive aspects of change rather than cynical aspects of resistance to change. So, for example, in America, if as a businessperson you hit some failures and those failures result in a failed business or a personal bankruptcy, those things are not regarded as necessarily negatives, which can impede your progress in the future. Quite the opposite — they can be seen as great learning experiences, which leave their battle scars in a positive way.

Yeah, that is indeed amazing. I mean, you can even become president in America after failing several businesses, right? The sky’s the limit. 

The sky’s the limit. That’s the point. 

Yeah. 

And there’s no one else’s negativity, which is going to constrain the optimistic American entrepreneur from striving to achieve their goals.

All right. Okay, so there’s the positivity. I get it. So interpreting changes as looking at the positive aspect of it rather than the negative aspect. It’s more of a bold, fearless attitude rather than a conservative, resistant attitude. What else would you say characterizes this ethos?

I’d say another facet of it would be the confidence to challenge the status quo. So much of European culture and business is based on history, and that history is a kind of anchor to the past, whereas America still has this frontier feeling — a sense that it’s a new country, a new world. And the status quo, such as it is, isn’t an anchor to the past. It’s actually something to be critically praised and challenged with confidence if relevant. I think that very much resonates with me personally. I recall when I was choosing my firm to join and to become an accountancy trainee, leading through a qualification to becoming a chartered accountant, and at the quality end of the range were the Big Eight in those days. I interviewed with three of the Big Eight, and interestingly, it was number eight of eight, which was the newcomer on the block, the one that resonated most with me.

They were confident, they were challenging, and ambitious, and somewhat fearless in the face of challenging the establishments in the UK.
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Yeah, that’s right.  Touche Ross was the number seven or eight, I remember, when I applied, because I went through actual same training as you did. And when I applied it was the Big Eight, and by the time I got accepted it was the Big Six — they merged — and now it’s the Big Four. So anyhow, that’s less interesting for listeners, but you’re talking about describing this underdog mentality or underdog attitude. I resonated with that as well, because when we started the investment banking business in Hungary, actually our number one competitor was Deloitte in Hungary.

They were the big 500-pound gorilla, and we were the underdog. I hired some of the people who had been passed over by Deloitte, and they had a stone in their shoe about it. And we made it a kind of quest that we were going to show these snooty, self-important people that we were actually better because we’re scrappier, more innovative, and so on. That was a big driver for us — this underdog attitude. So would you say that this is something that also resonates with Americans? 

I think very much so. I think that there isn’t that respect for the status quo, and the 500-pound gorilla on the block is not necessarily there to be feared, revered, or left alone. Quite the opposite. In American business, they’re the incumbent to be challenged. Challenger businesses grow to huge success in America. And actually, that links really nicely with the topic we’re here to discuss — Summit OS® — and how it provides a framework for entrepreneurs to build their businesses using many of the tools and techniques which the big successful businesses have adopted. And using that to their advantage, to creep up on them from behind and sometimes take market leadership. 

Yeah, that’s a big objective, obviously, and we would be happy to talk about this, but then we would overrun our time for sure. But what is a specific concept that you enjoy about or which you are intrigued about with Summit OS® that resonates with you?

One of the things that really resonated with me, Steve, having a background in investment banking as you have, is the notion that private equity doesn’t have a monopoly on expecting and delivering high growth from businesses. That principle, that objective, that achievement can be something which the entrepreneur, owner, manager can adopt just as validly. So

one of the potentials of Summit OS® is private equity without private equity. You can set yourself the objective of, let’s say, 3x value in three years.
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Yeah, I’ve often seen business owners who sold a large minority or a small majority stake to private equity. And then someone came in with an MBA but with a lot less experience, and they would start telling the business owner what they knew that they had to work on to begin with. Maybe they were not disciplined enough or not focused enough, but a coach — a good coach, a guide like you and I — could have helped them to do that without giving away a big piece of their business.

Now granted, putting capital to use can be a very effective way of achieving high levels of growth. And the scale of capital that’s available from private equity may not be available to an independent owner-managed business. But having said that, I was with an entrepreneur last week, one of a group of partners who’d sold his business initially to PE, that PE had been refinanced to an even larger one. And he described his experience with those PEs as being managed by spreadsheet. It sounds like a bit of a cliché, Steve, but it’s real — that’s his actual experience. And another negative experience, from a negative point of view, that a lot of entrepreneurs have shared with me is this notion of inappropriate interference.

The young MBAs just don’t get where appropriate boundaries are between them as investors and the leadership team in the businesses, and so the areas they interfere in are often not value-adding. I’ve experienced that myself, actually. I was engaged once by a private equity firm to be a consultant on a transition period. The business in question had been an orphaned subsidiary within a very large multinational corporation. When people talk about orphan subsidiaries, what they essentially mean is this businesses that don’t particularly fit within where the big corporation had moved to, and are kind of left adrift — but within.

So they’d sold this business to a private equity, and the private equity engaged me to help with a transition. A transition of the business from this orphan state into an independent business. And the private equity really was clueless. The people there were absolutely clueless as to how best to manage the transition of the team, particularly the team and the way they interrelated to their ownership from how it used to be to how it was now. It’s a very good example of poor management, and I suspect it wasn’t one of one. It was one of a big pattern. 

Yeah. I mean, experience is really hard to replicate in the classroom. And some of these MBAs, they come out from great business schools, and they do excellent case studies, but they just don’t have the reps to develop the pattern recognition that some of these business owners who have been in the trenches for 20 or 30 years have, right? 

Yeah, you can’t put a high enough value on less experience. Yeah. And if

you then harness that experience into a framework which enables people with that experience to share it really effectively with clients, that's a really powerful combination.
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Yeah, I love it. Yeah. By the way, we all know that private equity groups, they often have their 100-day plan. They come into a company and then they want to make a string of changes, like a new prime minister or president would do as well. So is there an equivalent process in Summit OS® to do that? Can you speak to that? 

There is, actually. And there’s a big premium today on speed of change. And the private equity guys think that a hundred days is rapid. Well, it’s not. Summit OS® has got a 45-day Execution Momentum plan, which takes the business through some very actionable processes, which result in very rapid and noticeable change. So that the 45-day Execution Momentum takes the business leaders through 2 one full-day meetings in which very heavy agenda is filled with things that really interesting and opposite ends of the scale. What do I mean by that? At the very macro, high end, there will be an examination — possibly for the very first time — of why the business exists, what it’s on the earth for, how is, how’s it going to create a dent in the universe over a 30-year period? What really big changes can an ambitious management team make in the business?

And this at the opposite end of the scale, a whole bunch of very day-to-day actionable skills like how to run a really good business meeting that’s super effective and results in measurable change. And then things in between those two, which join the very high macro level to the very daily micro level. Putting these things into action over the 30-day separation period between these two days, and then a 15-day follow-on, gives you your 45 days. And that results in these really measurable, perceivable changes, which catapult the start of a company’s journey with Summit OS® — very quickly, double the speed of PE.

Yeah, that’s definitely. I do believe that there’s no reason why every company should not adopt all the good management practices that already exist and widely known. And the faster we get them to adapt it, the faster they’re going to get a big push, a big momentum, and then it’s going to open them up for other changes. And suddenly this whole change management is not going to be that difficult because people will say that it actually works. So why not do more of it? Before we wrap this conversation up, can you share from your experience as an investment banker or senior CFO a story that really you feel relates to the work that we’re doing here?

I can, and I’m going to illustrate this with a something negative, not something positive to learn from the negative, as I suggested. It was really valid for me to do learning from all the reasons businesses failed to get across the exit line and what we can do to help build businesses better. So, I was engaged to sell a business — owner-managed, a very successful call center business based in the UK, but with an American client base. And the vertical in which the call center business work was technology sales. So they were being engaged by large American technology houses to generate leads for selling their products into European customers. The entrepreneur who started it was an experienced businessman, but from the moment I met him, what I recognized was a brutish personality.

A very tough taskmaster, very unforgiving, and actually very cold and lacking in emotion. He built this business to quite some success with a very high growth rate, and soon I got to meet his management team. These were young, thrusting, ambitious people who had been early enough in their careers for him to mold them into a likeness of his own. So what he’d created was a team of very similar-behaving, similar-acting people who were aggressive, over-assertive, cold, non-emotional in the business context and actually quite a scary team. Well, that could have been okay were it not for the fact that early on in the process, I had a word with him and I said, “Look, Chris, you’re going to need to motivate these guys in the exit. They’re well paid, but you need to give them a little bit of a taste of the proceeds you’re going to receive as the founder and 100% owner of this business. Otherwise, you might see some trouble brewing.” Nope — he wasn’t having any of it. This was his business. He was going to do this his way. Guess what happens, Steve?

At the 59th minute of the 11th hour, as we came towards closing the transaction with a great buyer, the animals turned on their master. And they turned with a viciousness that was similar to his own character, and they basically held him to ransom. It cost him 30% of the business. He had to give 30% of the equity in order for them to come along and be supportive in the discussions they were at this stage, having with the buyer around satisfaction with the working there, continuing to work post-transaction and all those things that were super important for the buyer. So there’s an example, a real case study. We did actually get the business closed. It cost him millions more than it could have done had he done this deal with them early on when they didn’t have the whip hand. And here’s a great example of how adapting the way you work, respecting the senior people, and nurturing them into positions of ownership of their parts of the business, not just in terms of being mini CEOs, but actually sharing some of the equity of the business could have made a huge difference, both to the risk in the process and to the dollar outcome for him.

Yeah. I think this is a common failing that the entrepreneur, they take under their wings, these young people, and they feel like that they owe everything to them for raising them. But they forget that those people stuck around because they actually had internal drive and they had ambition. It wasn’t the entrepreneur who create these people. These people were there to begin with. They just took advantage of the opportunity to have bigger responsibility, and as they rose in capability, if the entrepreneur or business owner didn’t recognize that and reward it, they’re going to go somewhere else and they’re going to get rewarded another way, or they’re going to turn on their master.

Yeah. So this is a very tricky thing and you need a degree of self-awareness to realize that it’s not all you and you have to reward them. Even if you help them get there, you still have to pay them more because they did get there. 

That’s right. It’s all part of respecting the people you work with and rewarding them appropriately.

Yeah that’s a great way to finish this up. Okay. So, Ian, if the listeners would like to learn more about you, maybe connect with you, learn what you could do for them, where would you advise them to go? Well, it’s very simple. 

They can contact me at https://ianleaman.com. There you’ll find some very comprehensive and interesting material all about coaching and about Summit OS® in particular, and how we work with businesses to help elevate them. 

Awesome. So do check Ian out at https://ianleaman.com, not hard to remember. He is also has a great LinkedIn profile. And if you enjoyed this conversation, stay tuned, because every week I bring an exciting entrepreneur or business operator, or thought leader in some cases, who come and share their frameworks with us. And if you’d like to learn more about what Summit OS® can do for you, then visit SummitOS.co, and check out all the downloadable tools, videos, process maps, and everything, and client stories to learn more. So Ian, thank you very much for coming and sharing your war stories and experiences, and thank you for listening.

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

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

Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder and CEO of the Summit OS® Group, and I have as my guest, Corinne Gavlinski today, who is a high-impact leadership and team development coach and the creator of the Executive Table Read, or XTR process.  Corinne, welcome to the show. 

Thank you, Steve. Pleasure to be here.

Well, it’s exciting to have you here and to learn about your wonderful framework. But first thing first — tell me about your personal “Why,” and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice and business? 

Yes, I’d be happy to. If I’m honest, Steve, I’ve enjoyed and led an accomplished career, much like my colleagues, and the clients that I have. And I realized far too late in that great career that I was paying attention to the wrong things. And I wasn’t being intentional about the legacy that I really wanted to leave from a leadership perspective. And that only came on the heels of a pretty big identity jolt, which was losing both of my parents in succession. And so today, I work with leaders who care about their legacy, who care about their people, and have pressures on them to perform that perhaps distract them from that intention. And so I teach that which I, too, had to learn. And I work with executive leaders to do just that. 

I like it. This is very noble. So what is your legacy that you are pursuing? 

I hope my legacy is that I grew others. And as I said, I’m not sure I did that my whole career. In fact, I’m darn sure I did not. It took me a long time to realize that my own growth would be enhanced and amplified by me allowing others to grow that were on my team. And so if I had to say a legacy that I hope I leave, it’s that I left others with a strong sense of self, that I helped them develop new skills, and that they grew in areas that they hadn’t even dreamed possible, perhaps.

Love it. Well, I mean, that’s the beauty of coaching — that if you are able to amplify whatever you learned and pay it forward multiple times, it can have a big impact on people get there 20 years earlier, 30 years earlier, then imagine how much they can achieve in that time. 

That’s right. 

I love it. That’s great. So tell me about this process that you developed — the Executive Table Read. It sounds like very Hollywoodish. 

Yes. 

It’s very interesting. What is it? 

I put my money where my mouth is. I’m not only a coach, but I hire my own coaches. And this was born out of a working session that I did with one of my coaches, and I was interested in doing something that started with the team. And I wanted to reorient leaders to that focus on their team and not just on the self. Much like a director in a movie or a sitcom might do, they often will get actors around the table to do a table read. And I thought, what a fun play on words if I can get corporate leaders to do a similar exercise whereby they are learning about people around their table in a new way, so that they can understand how to optimize those individuals that are on the team, perform at perhaps a higher level, and agree together what behaviors will make them successful.

And so from that was born the Executive Table Read, and it’s a series of activities that, in under 45 days, will arm a leader and his or her team with data, custom analysis, and real performance measures that they can both take on a day one and 90 days later to ensure that they are being accountable to what they said was most important.

Yeah, that’s fascinating. So it’s an exercise where, as a leader, you can learn about other people, and then you can get them to commit to goals and to objectives, and then you follow up with them. So is this a repeatable process, or is this a one-off thing? 

It takes an evolution.

I think there's an initial Executive Table Read, whereby we go through a three-step process of collecting data, analyzing and sharing that data out with the team, determining behaviors that are important
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Yeah, I like it. And I think a lot of leaders and even coaches miss the opportunity to really analyze the personalities that are around the table. 

Yeah. 

When they start working with them, they can fail to exploit the opportunity to improve them and improve the communication, knowing the different communication styles and approaches between people. And a dysfunctional team is going to be much, much slower to the momentum. 

Yes. That’s right. I think leaders do a very good job of understanding how their team members fit into the roles in which they’re assigned, where they may not do as good a job. And I say that because I did not do as good a job in really understanding how those individuals think. How they inherently behave during times of when they’re not under duress and stress. And when you do, you get a better sense for the capabilities on your team. And moreover, where there may be friction points on your team that might not have been obvious before, but have a reason behind them. And then you can go about addressing that. So you can go about optimizing the talents on your team because you now understand how people think, process information, and innately or inherently behave, and you may have uncovered that if you have team members who are extremely different from one another, you can see where that friction could occur and mitigate any conflict as a result. So it’s a powerful tool when layered with some custom analysis because you get some real insight that maybe you didn’t have the time or the energy to do yourself.

So when you do this analysis, do you then use it as a group and facilitate the resolution, or is it a one-on-one tool? 

We do. We do. We do both actually, Steve. So an individual will receive a bit of coaching one-on-one as well as the team. So we start with some insight around individual thinking styles and behaviors, and helping that person to understand who they are. And then we, as a team, meet and debrief the results of the analysis and talk a little bit about how that helps the team to be successful, where might friction occur? How can those talents be better utilized, and based on the behaviors identified in the team, what are the most necessary for their specific discipline, whether that’s sales or an executive team, for example, there are differences in what they might want to pursue. And so it’s a little bit of both, but it’s predominantly geared around the team and the team working together to solve some of these questions. 

Is it always productive to have the team, let’s say there’s an inherent conflict in the team. Is it always productive to solve it in a team setting, or sometimes it’s better to solve it in a one-to-two settings, or one-on-one setting?

I’ve not encountered anything such a conflict that it required individual time and attention beyond what we were able to do in the format that I typically do it in. What has happened is that there’s been an opportunity for me to work with that leader one-on-one subsequently, to help that leader to better work with his people so that those conflicts don’t arise or they get headed off at the pass if you will, before they even start to show themselves. And that’s been very effective because

a leader then can understand, what some techniques might be to help those individuals both lean into what is so good about their behavior and see what might be a blindside for them.
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Yeah, that’s super interesting. So if someone doesn’t do that, is this what you call lazy leadership? 

Yes, a bit. I talk about lazy leadership because again, I believe I was lazy in my career. There were times when I was very centered on self and my own achievement and was a bit lazy about the things that were most important. And so lazy leadership, when we talk about that, is all about not someone lacking leadership prowess or not lacking the ability to lead a group of people, but instead being very distracted. Today’s environment is so pressurized. The political stakes are very high. There’s board demands, private equity demands. The CEO demands perhaps, and leaders have a lot to contend with. It’s very easy to take their eye off the ball of the actions that they want to take. And it’s very seldom that they have quiet space to be able to think about the legacy that they’re leaving or building. So lazy leadership is all about intentionality or the lack thereof.

And when I talk about that, what I mean is, how distracted are you? Are you being intentional about the things that you say matter to you? And if not, let us help you get back to that state of being an impactful leader who has influence and control. And if you’re in some of the other places, which we would call the leadership quadrants, you might show yourself in disengagement, you might show yourself in erosion or chaos. And if you find yourself there, how do you thrust yourself back into the impact zone? And one of the best ways to do that is by doing the XTR. 

Okay. So, let’s take an example. So I am suffering from lazy leadership. I’m being distracted. I’m the CEO of this company. There is someone who wants to acquire us. The board wants to cut costs. My people want pay rises. We are losing talent, and a competitor is trying to disrupt us. So all these things are happening. I’m totally distracted. How do I use the Executive Table Read process to get back on track, refocus, and get productive again? 

Yeah. Yeah. Here’s the thing. Leaders at that level have very little time. There’s a lot of time scarcity. And as you’ve just outlined, they have a lot of pressures. They have pressures to do more with a lot less in a lot of cases. And so the way that you might use the Executive Table Read is to intentionally stop time for a moment to focus on the team and the exercises that we bring so that you can get clear on what is it that you should or want to be focusing on, and how do your day-to-day actions represent that. Once you’ve figured that out, we can go through a process whereby you’re really being very specific with your week and precise about how you’re making decisions quickly for yourself and your team, so that you can get back in control. And that’s difficult. The scenario you just laid out is complex. It takes multiple angles of discussion to be able to work through that, but it can be done. And I think what leaders, more than anything really need is this concept of time and space to think, because they don’t have that in their day-to-day life. 

The more senior you become in leadership roles, the less likely you have a confident who doesn’t introduce additional demands on your time or who doesn’t represent some level of political risk. And so the reason that leaders seek out an executive coach is because they crave that confidentiality, that high-trust partnership, and someone who is willing to be a reflection of what their actions are versus what they say they want. And that’s a powerful competitive advantage when you’re an executive leader. But it comes with confidential setting, confidence in the person that you’re working with, and a very high-trust situation.

Well, it is very lonely at the CEO spot. It can be. I used to run a couple of CEO peer groups, and we did coaching, we did content speakers, all the stuff, but the biggest reason they wanted to be there was to have a peer group that they could confide in, share some things that they’ve heard about. They have a coach that would listen to them. It wasn’t even so much for any suggestions or ideas. It was just being a sympathetic ear who understands where they are. So that is true. 

No question. Leaders really don’t have people that often tell them no or that often challenge them. And I think that’s exactly what an objective partner can do for someone is not just be that reflection back to them of what someone sees, but to challenge them a bit in their thinking and game play out scenarios that may be challenging for them. Where there’s no one asking for them to do anything other than themselves, and there’s no one introducing additional political risk or navigational relationship risk. And so when someone has that, you’re right, it’s someone who understands them, who is there to listen with them and has no agenda or objective other than that support. It’s something frankly, I wish I had sought in my career and I didn’t. It was never even offered or discussed, and I was a fool for not seeking that on my own. I could have had twice the impact, I think I did have, if I had sought some external counsel.

Yeah, mentorship is so important. I did a keynote speech two weeks ago and they told me I only had 20 minutes. And what are the three most important things that I want to share with the audience? One of them was to seek out mentors. And I actually look back, I had so many mentors, whether in person, books, or conferences, thought leaders. So I think I did a lot, but then I also felt like I missed out on even more, because sometimes I just didn’t have the self-confidence to go to a mentor. I didn’t want to hear what they had to say. I felt overwhelmed. I felt insecure. Many times people who have been there and done it, they love to mentor younger people because they get a lot of satisfaction for being able to share what they know.

Yeah. 

What I’d like to ask you about is, so often people think they have a problem, but actually they have something else that is causing their frustration. It’s not what’s ostensibly the problem — it’s the real problem. 

That’s true. 

So how do you help them dig and find the real problem underlying their pain?

Yeah, you’re very right. Executives, especially highly accomplished ones present with a certain framework of problems, right? They’re largely the same from executive to executive. What I find is the linchpin to uncovering what might really be going on is that trusted relationship. Nothing comes without that. And there’s a bit of magic in executive coaching in that you really have to have the right rapport with people, and I can’t undersell that. I often say to people, whether you choose to work with us or not, I want to give you an idea of what it might be like to work with us, so that you then can compare to other programs or other individuals who you might work with, because it’s all about your personal comfort level with someone.

Once that occurs, then we quite rapidly can come to what’s really underneath the surface. And

for us at The GAV Group, that's really about a sharing of experience.
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And then just becoming aware of what is causing that, is it enough? Or you actually have to help people move on to something else to be able to replace that lost meaning that they had? 

Oh, yes, that’s not nearly enough. Then we have to get to work and action around it. So I am an action-oriented individual. I often joke that I am not a “woo-woo” coach, and I mean no disrespect for those who are more  woo-woo”. But I am all about getting into action around things. So once we start to pull the thread of what may be going on for them, then it’s time to get into action. And that’s where really what they want to build comes into play. So understanding and really doing some reflection themselves of where is it I’m trying to have an impact? Where is it that I want to have influence, and how do I want to be perceived — is critically important before getting into action. And then once we understand that, then it’s a series of “let’s try this and report back,” so that we can continue to move that needle towards where they’re trying to get to.

Do you find that just the fact that someone starts taking action is already helping? 

Yes, there’s a bit of lightning, if you will. A release of some amount of stress when someone gets back into control because action puts them back into control. And the moment they start to feel that, the moment they really start to show up differently, and it doesn’t have to be this momentous action. Sometimes it’s the consistent attention to some very unsexy tasks or some very unsexy behaviors is what starts to move the needle. And once someone really feels that, the momentum starts to gain, and then we can build upon. 

Yeah. I read this somewhere about writers — sometimes writers have writer’s block.

Yes, right. 

They’re not able to write. 

Yeah. 

And they are procrastinating and suffering and don’t know what to do. And one of the advice I heard was that if you’re not able to write, just sit down at your keyboard and just start writing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And just by taking the action, you’ll actually start to get the hang of it and you will start to write things up.

It breaks the pattern, right? I think sometimes leaders say to me, well, Corinne, I’d love to work with you, but I just need this one thing to happen first, and that’s an immediate tell for me. That’s an immediate sense of, does that really need to happen? What would happen if we started to work together and that thing changed completely? Or you approach that thing with more decisiveness, or you approach that differently because of the influence you want to have. And so this is a human instinct to want to, I just wanna have this all in order before I work with you, but the real thing is you’re feeling a sense of being not in the game you once were in, or not in control of the way things are happening. And

the fastest way to get in control is to have a conversation with someone, so that you can get clear on what it is you're trying to do, and take the smallest step possible to get there.
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Yeah, I’m with you. It’s the clarity and knowing that, okay, maybe there are thousand directions that I can go, but if I just go this direction, it’s going to be okay.

That’s right. 

Love it. Now, we’re close to the end of the time, but there’s one thing that you mentioned in our pre-interview that really struck me — when you said that what’s important, and something I’ve never heard anyone say before, is that you have to match the intensity of your client to be effective. So what does that mean exactly, and how do you do that? 

Yeah. I think, beyond the fact that leaders really want someone who is that high-trust partner, they also want someone who is engaging, maybe a bit sarcastic or witty, maybe someone who matches their drive. I think because for me, I have been often, in often cases, in their shoes, I’m able to match their intensity, not just because, frankly, I’m a “get it done” kind of woman, but also because I’m not afraid to be a bit, I refer to myself sometimes, as being sassy. I can be a bit sassy. I can be a bit provocative. I can be a bit challenging. And I’m not afraid to match the intensity with which they manage their business in order to get their attention over something important. 

And not all coaches will do that because there is a belief in the coaching world that the client is always the driver, right? The client is always the main architect of what they want out of the coaching relationship. I think I’m a bit different in that I believe that my experience can also lend itself to the conversation, and affords me the opportunity to say things maybe that might not otherwise be said, because I’ve got a lived experience that backs that up. And so I think it’s a combination of I’m not afraid to be that reflective mirror. I’m not afraid to be provocative, and I can be rather direct and have a sense of humor at the same time. So I’m not afraid to poke fun of myself, and I can sometimes poke fun at my clients once we have that trusted relationship, and that usually unlocks another level of our relationship.

Yeah, I agree. And sometimes what I find that the more the leader is used to getting their way in their environment in the company, the more they need someone to really push back on them. And they actually realize that they might not enjoy it in the moment, but they realize that this is needed and they don’t get it elsewhere. And it’s kind of a precious thing, and they respect it. 

Yeah, it is. When you can find that right partner, even advisor, sometimes it can make a big difference in how you show up and how you lead, and that’s what I hope to do. Yeah. That’s amazing. 

So if people would like to engage with what you’re doing and learn a bit more and maybe have a conversation, see if you can help them, where should they go and where can they find you? 

Yes. If you are a leader and you are curious about whether you are in the impact zone and how you are leading a legacy that you would be happy with, you can get in touch with me directly at corinne@thegavgroup. You can go to www.thegavgroup.com, or you can find us on LinkedIn. 

Well, definitely don’t miss this opportunity and get a kick in the pants by Corinne and The Gav Group. Go visit her, check her LinkedIn out. And if you enjoy this conversation and you felt like it helped you see your business in a different light, then don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter, it’s SummitOS.co./newsletter.  Thanks for coming on the show, Corinne, and for those of you listening, thanks for listening, and please stick around next week. 

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