In this episode of The AI Growth Blueprint, I sit down with Mike Dixon, President and COO at Hoops, an HR tech and consulting firm on a singular mission: build winning teams for their clients.

We go deep on what's actually broken in the recruiting process, how Hoops uses agentic AI to eliminate guesswork from the hiring funnel, and why the first 90 days post-hire are more important than the entire interview process combined.

We cover:

• The 3 client profiles Hoops serves and the membership model that makes enterprise-grade recruiting accessible to SMBs
• How Hoops uses AI to benchmark compensation, score job market difficulty, and screen candidates before they ever hit a hiring manager's calendar
• Why concentrated turnover in the first 90 days is a five-alarm fire (and what it's actually telling you)
• The AI arms race between employers and candidates and how Hoops navigates it without disqualifying people based on AI-generated resumes
• The radiologist case study: why the roles we thought AI would kill are actually expanding
• Workflow replacement vs. role replacement: the Hormozi framework applied to HR
• The baby bells analogy: what legacy copper wire telephone companies teach us about the pace of disruption
• Mike's 6-year vision for Hoops and the one problem he'd solve with a magic wand

If you're a founder, operator, or HR leader trying to figure out how AI fits into your people strategy without making expensive mistakes, this one's for you.

In this episode of AI Growth Blueprint, Yacine Hacene sits down with Owen Healey, co-founder of First Stop Closers, to unpack a new model for scaling high-ticket offers without the heavy upfront retainers that often come with traditional sales agencies.

Owen shares how First Stop Closers partners with founders on a commission-only basis, helping them refine their offer, build sales systems, create scripts and frameworks, close deals, and eventually hire and train their long-term sales team.

The conversation explores why trust, alignment, and genuine belief in the offer are essential in high-ticket sales, especially as more founders look for lower-risk ways to grow.

Yacine and Owen also dive into the practical role of AI in sales, from AI-powered DM setting and faster speed-to-lead to automated reporting and workflow optimization. Rather than treating AI as a replacement for human sales expertise, they explain why the smartest operators use it to remove friction from the sales process while keeping humans focused on relationship-building, strategy, and closing.

If you are a founder, sales professional, or operator trying to understand where sales, AI, and agency models are heading, this episode offers a grounded look at what is changing, what is being commoditized, and where real expertise still creates an edge.

Matt Dentino is Director of Velocity Coaching at BrainTrust, a firm that has spent 15 years training sales teams and leaders in the art and science of world-class communication. Matt brings 35 years in industrial automation and a deeply personal origin story rooted in family, service, and intentionality.

In this episode, we get into why the real problem in sales and leadership is not a skills gap but a communication gap. Matt breaks down the neuroscience behind first impressions (your brain decides in under a tenth of a second), why hitting people with facts and features before building emotional connection triggers the amygdala and shuts the conversation down, and what "connect before you transact" actually looks like in practice.

We also cover BrainTrust's three-phase engagement model, from their NeuroMessaging voice-of-customer research process to 12 to 24 months of reinforcement coaching, and how they built BTAI, a custom AI role-play tool that gives sales reps a safe space to practice and get scored between sessions.

We close on the bigger picture: the Gallup stat that only 20% of the workforce is actively engaged, what it takes for founders and leaders to flip that number, and why showing up in resonance at work starts with showing up that way at home.

Bill Lennan spent 25 years leading software teams in Silicon Valley, and he built a repeatable system that most executives completely overlook: optimizing your people stack.

In this episode, Bill breaks down the three pillars behind his 40% Better framework, intrinsic motivation, psychological safety, and high-leverage communication, and how they compound into measurable business outcomes.

We talk through a real case study where he took the worst-performing software team in a company and turned them into the best in six months, a 40% jump in coding throughput.

We also get into the true cost of employee churn, why beliefs and mental models are the actual starting point for team performance, and how he went from crippling social anxiety to writing the playbook on talking to strangers.

If you run a software business and you think culture is a soft metric, this episode will change your mind.

Henry Abenaim is the founder of Fundingo, a lending operations platform built specifically for non-bank lenders who have solid deal flow but are drowning in workflow friction.

In this episode, Henry breaks down why most lenders don't have a credit problem, they have a process problem. We get into the origin story behind Fundingo (yes, it involves a fat-fingered wire transfer to a bait shop in Montana), what it looks like to cut loan processing time from four weeks to one, and why band-aid solutions always break at the worst possible moment, usually when an auditor is pulling reports.

We also talk about the future of embedded finance, AI-driven credit decisions, and why in lending, 99% accuracy isn't good enough.

If you're running a private credit fund, a specialty finance operation, or any non-bank lending business , this one's for you.

What if you could know how a prospect thinks before you ever sent a single email?

Matthieu Dejardins is the founder and CEO of Scalience — formerly NextUser — and he's spent two decades sitting at the intersection of psychology, data, and marketing. In this episode, Mathieu breaks down why he walked away from the traditional SaaS model and why that decision was the best thing he ever did for his business.

We get into the cognitive layer he built on top of IBM Watson's personality model — 142 psychographic characteristics extracted from text — and how that data is now used to personalize outbound messaging, ad creative, and sales conversations at a level most marketers don't even know is possible.

We also talk about why everyone doing AI-powered outbound is converging on the same noise, why volume is the wrong game to play, and how aligning your message to how a person actually processes information changes conversion rates in ways that are very measurable.

Mathieu shares real results: a 6:1 ROI for a medical apparel startup launching from zero, and a B2B SaaS client outperforming Google Ads CPL in under three months. No fluff, just the architecture behind it.

If you're in GTM, sales, or building any kind of outbound motion in 2025, this one will reframe how you think about personalization.

Connect with Matthieu

Discover NextUser/Scaliance

Most companies know they need AI. Few know where to actually start.

In this episode, I sit down with Alejandro Mainetto, fractional CAIO, CIO, and CTO at CXO Partners, where he works with PE-backed and mid-market companies ranging from $20M to $500M in revenue. Alejandro is brought in when technology has become a growth bottleneck or when leadership needs to close the gap between AI ambition and execution.

We get into why so many companies confuse having a tool with having a strategy, and why that distinction is costing them time, money, and competitive ground. Alejandro breaks down how he identifies high-impact AI use cases in a single conversation, why agentic AI is the defining shift of 2026, and what it actually takes to build an organization that is genuinely AI-ready across every function.

We also go deep on something few people are talking about yet: the convergence of AI and physical robotics, and what that means for the workforce, for society, and for the executives making decisions today. Alejandro is also publishing a policy paper on this topic called The Last Override, and he gives us a preview.

If you lead a consulting practice, run a fractional operation, or advise companies navigating AI adoption, this conversation will sharpen how you think about the problem and what you recommend.

Connect with Alejandro

Discover CXO Partners

In this episode, Neil Katz, Founder & CEO at Exceptional HR Solutions, breaks down what fractional HR actually looks like in practice, why onboarding is still one of the most underestimated levers in business, and how poor people processes quietly destroy retention, productivity, and revenue.

He also shares his philosophy on AI adoption, why most companies are either ignoring it or jumping too far too fast, and what he is building internally to give clients on-demand HR intelligence without replacing the human element entirely.

If your business is scaling and people operations are quietly becoming a bottleneck, this episode is a practical and direct look at how to fix it.

🔗 Connect with Neil

🔗 Try Exceptional HR Solutions

In this episode, I sit down with Laura Gramling, President of Enspark Consulting, a 25-year organizational development veteran with a refreshingly grounded take on why AI transformations stall, and what to actually do about it.

We cover Laura's two-part consulting philosophy:

• Tapping into the wisdom of every voice in the organization, and leading with a strength-based approach to change
• How she applies it to help leadership teams cut through the noise and build real alignment before touching a single tool.

We also get into the nuances of where AI genuinely helps her work (short-form content scripting), where it falls flat (note-taking that misses the forest for the trees), and why she made a deliberate decision to keep human consultants in the room for client interviews, even when vendors offered her a cheaper AI-powered alternative.

🔗 Connect with Laura

🔗 Discover EnSpark

In this episode, I sit down with Gemma Toner, Founder at TONE Networks, to break down how they apply social media engagement principles to corporate learning, why micro-learning beats 45-minute courses, and what it really takes to drive behavioral change at scale inside a company.

If you're in L&D, HR, or just care about building better teams, this one's worth your time.

🔗 Connect with Gemma on LinkedIn🔗 Tone Networks on LinkedIn🔗 Try TONE Networks