The Human Connection Podcast

"Even if you have a big multi-million dollar or euro revenue company behind you, you're still not Jensen Huang. […] People are not coming to you. You've come to them." — Jonathan Koifman

Your platform can do nineteen things. The buyer across the table has one problem, and it keeps them up at night. (Guess which list your website is written from.)

In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Jonathan Koifman breaks down stakeholder-focused communication for founders and executives who keep pitching a platform and getting polite nods. Jonathan is the US-born, Swiss-bred CEO and co-founder of FrostForge, building a cooler future by turning heat into cold. After years of building relationships across continents to deploy renewable tech, he now sells that technology one specific customer problem at a time.

What you'll get from this episode:

• Why "platform" language loses the room, and the supermarket test: buyers walk in wanting chocolate milk, not a huge nebulous idea of ESG
• The one-sentence product pitch ("I have a box, you give it heat and on the other side you get cold") and why nobody needs the ammonia-and-salt chemistry
• A simple rule for pitch Q&A: answer the question first, defend yourself afterward, plus the notepad trick that keeps you out of the weeds
• How pride in "your baby" quietly wrecks early pitches, and why walking in as far from the smartest person in the room makes people like you and listen
• Same technology, two products: cold energy sold by the kilowatt hour to a utility with off-grid users, and a chiller that pre-cools water for a data center (Jonathan's figure: 20–30% off the electric bill)
• Why messaging matters more now that AI can build your website in a day, and why finding a buyer's pain is still a human job

No matter if your business is B2B or B2C, it's H2H: human to human. Happy connecting.

#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #B2BRelationships #RelationshipDrivenGrowth

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You can connect with Jonathan Koifman here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathankoifman

https://www.linkedin.com/company/frostforge

https://www.frostforge.ch

You can connect with Karl Pontau here:

www.vouchedconnections.com

www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

"A lot of companies will think that they need to replace an ERP system. And when I go in and talk to them, I often find that there's a lot of misalignment across the business units." — Augie Santa Maria

You've got the budget for the new system and a slide about AI. What you may not have is one agreed version of how your departments actually do the work. (The software was never going to settle that argument for you.)

In this episode of The Human Connection Podcast, Augie Santa Maria breaks down company culture transformation strategies for leaders about to bet big on technology. Augie is an ERP and systems modernization advisor and the founder of Cognogent Services, with 20+ years across business intelligence, data analytics, and ERP modernization. He's learned that the technology usually reveals the real problem before it solves anything.

What you'll get from this episode:

• Why "we need a new ERP" is often a misdiagnosis, and the cross-department misalignment that surfaces the moment someone asks about the technology
• The change-management framing that earns buy-in: only this part is changing, everything else stays the same
• What stakeholder-focused communication takes: clear messaging, real training, and back-and-forth between leadership and employees on their questions and concerns
• A case study: joining two cost systems into one dataset, automating reconciliation, and getting accounting and finance out of manual work with accuracy near 100%
• What happens when repetitive work comes off your team's plate: time to learn the new system, connect with each other, and come up with better ideas
• Where to start as an executive: find out how work really happens day to day, and check whether a process document exists at all

No matter if your business is B2B or B2C, it's H2H: human to human. Happy connecting.

#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #B2BRelationships

===

You can connect with Augie Santa Maria here:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/florida-augie

Website: https://cognagentservices.com

You can connect with Karl Pontau here:

www.vouchedconnections.com

www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

"The sales reps are doing the work that should have been done before the product was launched. I call it rolling a boulder uphill versus rolling a pebble uphill." — Craig T. Ingram

Karl talks with healthcare commercialization strategist Craig Ingram about the single most common — and most expensive — mistake venture-backed MedTech and health tech startups make right after they close a round: hiring a sales team before anyone outside the building has heard of them. Craig breaks down why revenue is a lagging indicator, why "just increase activity" is bad advice, and the five-point framework he uses to turn a sales team's job from pushing a boulder into rolling a pebble.

Craig T. Ingram is a healthcare business strategist and commercialization advisor, and Co-Founder of Int'l Commercialization Growth Partners. He was named MedTech and HealthTech Advisor of the Year (2024) by IAOTP, and works with MedTech, biopharma, and digital health startups to fix go-to-market strategy before it becomes a hiring problem.

What you'll get from this episode:

• Why hiring sales reps right after a raise is "the worst decision" a startup can make — and what to build instead before the first cold call
• The 5-point framework (awareness → attention → attraction) that turns your sales team's job from pushing a boulder into rolling a pebble
• Why revenue is a lagging indicator of effective commercialization — and what the leading indicators actually look like
• The 8-to-10-year survival data on MedTech and HealthTech startups, and the root cause behind it
• Why "consultative selling" is the comfortable habit sales leaders default back to under pressure — and why it's costing them the deal
• What separates the rare companies that hit $10M in revenue from everyone else chasing the same market

#MedTechStakeholderEngagement #HealthTechClientSuccess #B2BRelationshipTactics #KarlTheBridge #HumanConnectionPodcast

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You can connect with Craig T Ingram here:

www.linkedin.com/in.craigtingram

@craigtingramofficial (instagram)

You can connect with Karl Pontau here:

www.vouchedconnections.com

www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

"If a capital raise is gonna take place next year, start building relationships now... it always amazes me how so many founders, so many CEOs, so many teams think, 'we're gonna start marketing the raise once the raise is live.'" — Jason Fishman

Karl talks with Jason Fishman, CEO of Digital Niche Agency, about why founders lose capital raises before they ever open a pitch deck — because they treat relationship-building as a launch-week activity instead of infrastructure they should've built a year earlier. Jason and Karl dig into why investors fund the person before the product, why hiding your personal life costs you trust, and why the founders who raise fastest are the ones who started earliest.

Jason Fishman is the co-founder and CEO of Digital Niche Agency (DNA), an investor-acquisition marketing agency that's worked with hundreds of brands raising capital through equity crowdfunding, and hosts the Test. Optimize. Scale. podcast.

What you'll get from this episode:

• Why "B2I" — business-to-investor — marketing fails the same way B2B does when it skips the human relationship-building step
• The exact timing mistake that kills a raise before it starts: waiting until the round is live to begin marketing yourself, not just the deal
• Why investors invest in you by first name, not your logo — and what that means for how you show up in a pitch video
• The overlooked leverage of sharing your personal life (family, hobbies, milestones) as fundraising infrastructure, not distraction
• How third-party validation and social proof compress the trust-building timeline investors actually need
• Why rushing the "nice lunch" straight to a term sheet reads as suspicious — and what a seeded relationship looks like instead

#StakeholderEngagementStrategies #RelationshipDrivenGrowth #StartupLeadership #KarlTheBridge #HumanConnectionPodcast

===

You can connect with Jason Fishman here:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/jafishman/

You can connect with Karl Pontau here:

www.vouchedconnections.com

www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

"We're told the lone wolf is the most powerful person out there — that's what we're aspiring to be. I think it's done us more disservice as men than almost anything else... We may have a large company. We may not be connected at all." — Mark Platten

Karl sits down with author and leadership guide Mark J. Platten to name the thing most C-suite leaders won't say out loud: the subconscious patterns wired into you before age seven are still running your boardroom. Mark and Karl dig into why the "lone wolf" leadership model quietly wrecks trust, decision quality, and retention — and what to do instead.

Mark J. Platten is an author, educator, and founder of the Integral Man Institute, drawing on two decades spanning U.S. Air Force service, university faculty roles, and international leadership consulting to help people close the gap between who they perform and who they actually are.

What you'll get from this episode:

Why 90–95% of your "strategic" decisions are running on a subconscious script written before you turned seven

The real cost of the lone wolf leadership model — and why your team can tell when you're performing confidence instead of having it

How to tell which decisions need data and which need your gut (and why mixing them up quietly erodes trust)

Why coaching your Gen Z and Millennial hires instead of managing them is the highest-leverage retention move nobody's making

What actually changes in your culture the moment you stop needing to have every answer in the room

#StartupLeadership #CompanyCultureTransformation #TrustedAdvisorRelationships #KarlTheBridge #HumanConnectionPodcast

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You can connect with Mark J Platten here:

https://www.youtube.com/@MenMidlifeMenopause

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mark-j-platten/

https://www.markjplatten.com

You can connect with Karl Pontau here:

www.vouchedconnections.com

www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

"We're a lot easier to fire if you don't have a personal connection to who we are."

That's Jared Harman naming the quiet math behind every churned account: nobody leaves a company they have a relationship with. They leave a vendor. Most leaders build their retention strategy around the brand, the deck, the "differentiated service" — when the thing actually keeping a client is the person who picks up the phone.

Jared is CEO and co-founder of The One Group Agency, a full-service marketing agency based in British Columbia specializing in brand strategy and scalable systems for growing businesses. His path started selling rink-board sponsorships for a junior hockey team, where he learned sponsors weren't buying ad space — they were buying a relationship with people they liked. That lesson became the whole business: in a market where every agency has access to the same tools and the same AI, the only real differentiator left is the relationship.

He also names the failure mode that quietly kills accounts before anyone notices: "set it and forget it" client management — the work runs fine on autopilot until it doesn't, and by then the relationship has already degraded past the point of a quick fix.

What you'll walk away with:

• Why "the client left because of price" is almost never the real story
• What actually happens when your best rep leaves — and why "their clients went with them" isn't bad luck
• The "set it and forget it" trap that quietly erodes retention long before a client cancels
• Why a service nobody can prove is "the best" still needs a real answer to "what's your differentiator"

No matter if your business is B2B or B2C, it's H2H — human to human. Happy connecting.

#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #B2BRelationships #ClientRetention #RelationshipDrivenGrowth

===

You can connect with Jared Harman here:

@theonegroupagency (IG)

www.onegroupagency.ca

You can connect with Karl Pontau here:

www.vouchedconnections.com

www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

"I wouldn't necessarily say there's a way for employers to win."

That's Drew Albrecht's honest read on the health benefits market — and it's not a reason to give up, it's the reason most executives are losing money on a line item nobody's actually reading. Benefits get treated as a "set it and forget it" expense that renews once a year. Meanwhile the claims data sitting inside that renewal has been quietly telling a story nobody in the building bothered to open.

Drew is Director of Consulting and Operations at Cambridge, where he specializes in employee benefit strategy for middle-market employers. Seventeen years into group health benefits — he started in underwriting — he's built a practice around one expensive fact: healthcare inflation has run double digits for two decades, and the insurance carriers and pharmacy benefit managers writing the rules are for-profit businesses with no incentive to help you win. The only lever an employer actually controls is how closely someone is watching the claims.

Drew walks through three real cases where watching the claims was worth six figures — a $3,000-a-month prescription that's two $10 generics wearing a trench coat, a $600K dialysis claim rerouted to a 95% discount without the patient changing chairs, and a $500K infusion treatment renegotiated down by $485K without touching the care plan.

What you'll walk away with:

• Why "second-largest expense outside of payroll" should scare you more than it currently does
• The exact prescription drug trick costing employers tens of thousands per employee, per year
• How reference-based pricing cut one dialysis claim by 95% without disrupting a single treatment
• The one question to ask before your next renewal: when did anyone last actually look at this?

No matter if your business is B2B or B2C, it's H2H — human to human. Happy connecting.

#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #B2BRelationships

===

You can connect with Drew Albrecht here:

www.linkedin.com/in/drew-albrecht-cebs

You can connect with Karl Pontau here:

www.vouchedconnections.com

www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

"We're not anti-surgery. We're just anti-inappropriate surgery."

That's Dr. Mary O'Connor's mission statement in one sentence — and it's also the best diagnosis of a mistake that has nothing to do with healthcare. Executives reach for the big, expensive, dramatic fix constantly: the platform overhaul, the process relaunch, the AI rollout. Rarely do they reach for the boring, unglamorous work that would've actually solved it.

Mary is co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of Vori Health, a virtual-first musculoskeletal care company. She's Professor Emerita at Mayo Clinic, a past professor at Yale, an Olympic rower, and the author of Taking Care of You. She's spent a career watching patients — and the systems built to treat them — default to the invasive fix when the patient work would've gotten them further.

The episode's best moment isn't even about surgery. It's Mary almost not offering a telehealth option to an older patient because she assumed the woman wouldn't want it — and catching her own bias just in time. That's not a healthcare story. That's every leader who's ever decided what a client, employee, or stakeholder wants without asking them.

What you'll walk away with:

• Why the "quick fix" instinct costs more than it saves — and how to spot it in your own org before it costs you a client
• The bias-catching moment that changed how Mary asks questions, and how to build the same check into your own decisions
• What actually drives adoption of anything new (hint: it's rarely the thing you'd guess)
• Why "movement" — literal and organizational — is the one lever that compounds every other outcome

No matter if your business is B2B or B2C, it's H2H — human to human. Happy connecting.

#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #HealthTech #ClientRetention #B2BRelationships

===

You can connect with Mary O'Connor here:

https://www.vorihealth.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/maryoconnormd/

You can connect with Karl Pontau here:

www.vouchedconnections.com

www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

"Surveillance is power over people. Visibility is power with people."

Adam Johnson has led AI strategy work inside Microsoft and Amazon, and now spends his days telling mid-sized companies the thing they don't want to hear: their AI rollout isn't failing because of the technology. It's failing because they never built the trust required to roll anything out successfully in the first place.

Karl and Adam dig into why so many AI initiatives are stalling out, why the resulting layoffs are less about AI and more about years of leadership teams optimizing for systems instead of people, and what it actually takes to rebuild the kind of trust that lets an organization move fast without breaking itself.

What you'll get from this episode:

• Why most AI rollouts fail — and it's rarely the technology
• The leadership skill gap AI adoption has quietly exposed across executive teams
• The real difference between surveillance and visibility, and why only one builds a functioning org
• Why blaming layoffs on AI often masks years of overhiring and weak strategy
• Adam's concept of "evolutionary capitalism" — treating profit as a constraint instead of the goal

#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #AIStrategy

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You can connect with Adam Johnson here:

raferconsulting.lovable.app

linkedin.com/in/adam-johnson-454277

calendar.app.google/gsdRqLPjUyZWtXDSA

You can connect with Karl Pontau here:

www.vouchedconnections.com

www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!

"Aggressive is assertive. Men are assertive and women are aggressive. Same behavior."

Dr. Liz DuBois Erskine has a PhD in conflict resolution and has coached leaders through Disney, iHeartRadio, and beyond — and she spends up to half of every coaching session doing one specific thing: rehearsing how her clients talk, not what they know. Because on paper, the barriers are gone. In practice, 40% of American companies are run by women — and only 4% of the companies making seven figures or more are.

Karl and Dr. Liz dig into the "bitch vs. boss" double standard, why the advice to "just be your authentic self" can actually sabotage women leaders, and why the leadership skills the modern business world actually needs — empathy, listening, consensus-building — are the ones women have been told for decades to downplay.

What you'll get from this episode:

• The stat every executive should sit with: 40% of companies are women-run, only 4% of million-dollar companies are
• Why "just be authentic" is often bad advice — and what Dr. Liz does instead with high-performing clients
• The role-playing exercise Dr. Liz runs with a top-10%-intelligence attorney client, and why it takes up half their coaching time
• How unconscious bias — not individual malice — is what actually keeps this gap in place
• Why the leadership skills the AI-era business world rewards most are the ones historically coded as "soft" — and who's already better at them

#H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #WomenInLeadership

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You can connect with Dr. Liz DuBois Erskine here:

Website: https://drlizdubois.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bizdrliz/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/bizdrliz

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedrliz/

You can connect with Karl Pontau here:

www.vouchedconnections.com

www.thehumanconnectionpodcast.com

https://www.linkedin.com/in/kpontau

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUbf_bDWwB9KVrFn5Sj3u2w?sub_confirmation=1

Please like, subscribe, and share this episode with somebody you care about!