No Plan Survives

What about the curveballs nobody saw coming?

In this fifth and (for now) final episode of No Plan Survives, Mike Carpenter and Benjie Hughes talk about the business challenges no one knew were coming. From unanticipated flops to market shifts and tech transitions, it seems the only thing we’re always coping with is change.

➡️ Mike opens with the story of how his company found a major new opportunity for a decades-old adhesive – and then failed the test that would have opened the door. How are they turning lemons into lemonade? What tools, advisors and inputs help Mike and his team tell real possibilities from pipe dreams?

➡️ Benjie explains (sorry, Bud-lovers) why prohibition and aluminum cans turned U.S. beer to swill for decades, and what the microbrewery resurgence offers our responses to AI.  He recounts the options he saw on the table when he recently repositioned Hopeless Marketing – and he makes his choice.

No Plan Survives is about what happens when our business vision crashes into our business reality – and the new things we create as a result.

This is a limited series: Two entrepreneurs, five days, five topics. Each day we each bring one story from our business journeys, told in three acts:

• What was your plan?
• How did reality wreck it?
• What new thing was born as a result?

Then we interrogate those stories – and each other.

Visit Mike's business here, get Benjie's weekly emails here, or learn more at noplan.show.

No Plan Survives is edited by Kyle Schmidt. Visual design by Bryon Elliot. Music by Benjie Hughes.

00:00 Mike: Breakthroughs and Reality Checks 

03:25 No Plan Survives Intro: Strategy vs Reality 

03:57 Choosing Your Bets on the Business Battlefield 

08:39 Navigating Market Shifts, Regulations and Cost Shocks 

13:24 Adventures with Amazon-Taking and Giving Up Control to Your Advantage

16:50 Benjie: Creative Work & AI through the Lens of U.S. Beer

20:47 Paths for Creatives to Triumph Over AI 

24:13 Emerging with Market Position That's Not Hopeless

29:09 No Plan Survives Series Wrap and Reflections 

When do numbers lead and when do they deceive?

In this fourth episode of No Plan Survives, Benjie Hughes and Mike Carpenter discuss how business data can clarify or obscure – and explore how numbers seem to serve us best when we keep humans at the center of our choices.

➡️ Benjie talks about his first board, his first P&L, and how the pendulum swing from having no reports to over-measuring – and then back again. He shares how he simplified his first company’s reporting and why the KPIs he’s using in his brand-new business are as much about motivation as information.

➡️ Mike recounts an early experience in the biopharma world that had him swimming in more than 300 monthly metrics and explains how he decides what actually matters. He critiques the ACOS/TACOS metric in favor of maximizing gross profit dollars and recounts an Amazon Europe expansion that looked great on paper – but didn’t turn a profit.

No Plan Survives is about what happens when our business vision crashes into our business reality – and the new things we create as a result.

This is a limited series: Two entrepreneurs, five days, five topics. Each day we each bring one story from our business journeys, told in three acts:

• What was your plan?
• How did reality wreck it?
• What new thing was born as a result?

Then we interrogate those stories – and each other.

Visit Mike's business here, get Benjie's weekly emails here, or learn more at noplan.show.

No Plan Survives is edited by Kyle Schmidt. Visual design by Bryon Elliot. Music by Benjie Hughes.

00:00 Benjie: Bagels and a P&L

03:25 No Plan Survives Intro - Dreams Versus Data 

04:09 Early Stage Scorecards 

06:31 Visibility Is Overrated 

08:21 Stories Behind Numbers 

10:21 Killing Bad Ideas Fast 

17:52 Mike: the 300 Metrics Problem 

19:35 Finance Myths and Human Factors

22:48 Marketing Metrics That Mislead

26:54 Amazon Europe Reality Check 

28:24 Humanizing the Data

29:47 Episode Wrap and Reflections 

What if your customers don’t care as much as you do?

In this third episode of No Plan Survives, Mike Carpenter and Benjie Hughes discuss how mission impacts messaging – and ask what happens when customer behavior doesn’t line up with the things we want it to.

➡️ Mike recounts how his company shifted from relying on resellers in the B2C space to managing its own B2C sales – and unpacks the messaging challenges that came along with that. If your B2B audience is quality-obsessed and your B2C buyers are price-sensitive, how do you message for them both without damaging trust?

➡️ Benjie remembers a client whose dream was to “operationalize love” – and unpacks the ways that mission did or didn’t translate to marketing, sales and operations. He argues messaging can’t be fixed at the copy level if it isn’t grounded first in strategy, in the value you deliver and in what your customers think they need.

No Plan Survives is about what happens when our business vision crashes into our business reality – and the new things we create as a result.

This is a limited series: Two entrepreneurs, five days, five topics. Each day we each bring one story from our business journeys, told in three acts:

• What was your plan?
• How did reality wreck it?
• What new thing was born as a result?

Then we interrogate those stories – and each other.

Visit Mike's business here, get Benjie's weekly emails here, or learn more at noplan.show.

No Plan Survives is edited by Kyle Schmidt. Visual design by Bryon Elliot. Music by Benjie Hughes.

00:00 Performance First Adhesives

00:35 B2C Price Reality Check

01:32 Two Product Positioning

02:52 No Plan Survives Intro - Message vs Market

03:53 Testing Prices on Amazon

06:57 Compliance and Certification

08:20 B2B vs B2C Buyer Journey

09:50 Made in USA Trust Signals

12:53 Operationalizing Love Story

17:04 Strategy Before Messaging

20:49 Hopeless Marketing Positioning

25:07 Elevator Pitch and Networking

28:24 Episode Wrap Up and Reflections

Do financial needs reshape your other priorities?

In this second episode of No Plan Survives, Benjie Hughes and Mike Carpenter talk about how values shape the way we manage growth – and what happens when the right thing and the profitable thing don’t seem to line up right.

➡️ Benjie tells the story of how his Chicago wedding music business expanded fast, imploded faster and finally bore unexpected fruit – but only after a drastic reinvention. He reflects on how his value of empowering people shaped both growth and closure, and discusses anxiety, family balance, and grief as they intersect with working life.

➡️ Mike examines how his goal of growing sustainably led to the development of a custom production scheduler and shares how that development process involved collaboration with his team, with outside advisors and with AI. He talks about how a desire to care for team members has led to equipment upgrades, benefit changes and a different approach to the strain of operational growth.
 

No Plan Survives is about what happens when our business vision crashes into our business reality – and the new things we create as a result.

This is a limited series: Two entrepreneurs, five days, five topics. Each day we each bring one story from our business journeys, told in three acts:

• What was your plan?
• How did reality wreck it?
• What new thing was born as a result?

Then we interrogate those stories – and each other.

Visit Mike's business here, get Benjie's weekly emails here, or learn more at noplan.show.

No Plan Survives is edited by Kyle Schmidt. Visual design by Bryon Elliot. Music by Benjie Hughes.

00:00 Benjie: Success and Unplanned Demise 

06:26 No Plan Survives Intro - Values vs Revenue 

07:08 Reminiscing Creative Flow But, Not the Finished Project 

08:28 When Revenue Tests the Value Code 

11:03 Tensions Between Business Growth and Family Values 

13:23 Mike: Finding Values Through the Entrepreneurial Journey 

16:54 Growth Overwhelm and Relief: Building the "Justin-Time" Production Scheduler 

19:39 Where Team Care and Profitability Align 

21:08 Culture As the Real Strategy 

23:54 People are the Big Rocks 

24:11 Similarities and Differences 

27:50 Episode Wrap and Reflection

How does reality reshape your business vision?

In this first episode of No Plan Survives, Mike Carpenter and Benjie Hughes talk about the difference between being a business founder and becoming a business owner - and how business reality reshapes what success means.

➡️ Mike traces his entrepreneurial path from childhood hustles to buying RH Adhesives, a manufacturer in his hometown with a 75-year legacy. He explores the unexpected setbacks that came with growth and the resilience required to keep “hitting singles" day after day.

➡️ Benjie shares why he started Hopeless Marketing after agency work dried up, the challenges of positioning a brand-new business in a changing market, and how multiple shifts and pivots led him to a clearer sense of both his business model and his personal values.

No Plan Survives is about what happens when our business vision crashes into our business reality – and the new things we create as a result.

This is a limited series: Two entrepreneurs, five days, five topics. Each day we each bring one story from our business journeys, told in three acts:

• What was your plan?
• How did reality wreck it?
• What new thing was born as a result?

Then we interrogate those stories – and each other.

Visit Mike's business here, get Benjie's weekly emails here, or learn more at noplan.show.


No Plan Survives is edited by Kyle Schmidt. Visual design by Bryon Elliot. Music by Benjie Hughes.

00:00 Mike's Entrepreneurial Roots and Journey to Owning RH Adhesives 

04:06 No Plan Survives Intro: Founder vs Owner

04:53 Amazon Reseller Betrayal and Distribution Control 

07:41 About RH Adhesives, History and Defining Success 

13:39 Benjie: Hopeless Marketing Origin Story 

19:16 Values Driven Strategy Work 

22:01 Founder vs Buyer Mindsets 

23:58 Comfort Zones and Time Boundaries

26:45 Frameworks, Productivity and Alignment 

28:49 Episode Wrap and Reflections

No Plan Survives is about what happens when our business vision crashes into our business reality – and the new things we create as a result.

This is a limited series: Two entrepreneurs, five days, five topics. Each day we each bring one story from our business journeys, told in three acts:

• What was your plan?
• How did reality wreck it?
• What was born as a result?

Then we interrogate those stories – and each other.

This is a business show that feels more “beer at five” than “Monday morning coffee.” You might hear our tips and frameworks, but it’s not about the frameworks. It’s about what happens when theory crashes into practice – and transforms.

And we get transformed, too.

Hosts:

• Benjie Hughes is the founder of Hopeless Marketing and a classic “Act 1” builder: In his 20s he started a music business from scratch, grew it, scaled it, exited it. Now he’s in his 40s and starting from scratch again.
• Mike Carpenter is the owner and CEO at RH Adhesives and a classic “Act 2” builder: He took over an existing manufacturer with a 75-year legacy and then doubled its business. Now he’s building software tools that might just find a market beyond his own shop’s needs.

They say no plan survives first contact with the enemy. That’s true in all this week’s topics: Vision, revenue, marketing, data and uncertainty.

But it’s also true that when plans die, new things rise up to take their place.

Find and follow Mike and Benjie at noplan.show.