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

https://www.kirkhamirontech.com/

Tom Kirkham has been in cybersecurity for 26 years. He's seen everything from bragging rights hackers in the late 90s to an industrial-scale trillion-dollar criminal industry.

But nothing changed his perspective quite like the day an FBI agent showed up at his office and told him he was on an ISIS kill list — because a company he signed an NDA with got hacked.

Today Tom runs Kirkham IronTech, a managed security services provider ranked in the top 250 MSPs globally for four consecutive years. We talk about how hacking became a $10 trillion industry, why 95% of breaches are caused by human error, how AI is now scaling personalized attacks to target anyone, what ransomware actually looks like from the inside, and why your coffee machine might be your biggest security risk.

Timestamps:

• 0:00 – Intro: What Kirkham IronTech does
• 1:01 – 26 years in IT and security — top 250 MSP globally
• 2:06 – Starting the company from a dining room table on January 1, 2000
• 3:02 – When hackers did it for bragging rights — and when that changed
• 4:11 – 95% of breaches are caused by human error, not technical exploits
• 5:00 – How a ransomware campaign works — the math behind $10M paydays
• 5:26 – The FBI showed up and said: you're on an ISIS kill list
• 6:19 – How he ended up on the list (a Sun Microsystems NDA got hacked)
• 9:14 – Stoicism helped him make peace with it in weeks
• 13:31 – The number one threat to every business: ransomware
• 14:33 – Hacking is now a $10 trillion industry — third largest GDP on the planet
• 16:39 – AI now scales personalized attacks to everyone, not just high-value targets
• 17:05 – Matt's real experience: CEO identity stolen, employees sent to buy gift cards
• 18:14 – Proactive vs. reactive: how Kirkham operates
• 19:07 – Gas pump skimmers, phishing, and cybersecurity beyond the office
• 20:17 – Why traditional antivirus (Norton, McAfee) is no longer enough
• 22:59 – Chinese cyber warfare and the greatest IP theft in human history
• 26:10 – The three pillars: technology, training, governance
• 27:28 – Why old laptops are costing you more than new ones
• 28:48 – Why Tom replaced every Mac in the company within 6 months of Apple Silicon
• 30:22 – They qualify clients as much as clients qualify them
• 32:36 – Clients who've been with them 20+ years — and why churn is minimal
• 35:29 – From a dining room to a radio show — how he built regional brand awareness
• 37:50 – AI in the company: privacy governance comes first
• 42:49 – Executive intelligence briefings — what's coming next
• 46:55 – What Tom would tell his younger self: trust your gut, embrace failure
• 50:17 – MSP 4.0: managed intelligence providers and the AI governance opportunity
• 53:09 – Closing thoughts

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

https://npoint.ventures/

At 17, Marc Snyderman and his brother rented a bay at his dad's dealership, made business cards that said "Exotic Care," and started picking up people's cars door-to-door to detail them. He says it would have been a nine-figure exit if he'd kept going.

Instead he went to law school, interned at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, ran operations at a defense contractor from $15M to $60M ARR, burned out, rebuilt, and now runs seven ventures at once — including a subscription-based law firm, a creator marketplace, a lithium-ion fire extinguisher company, and a coffee brand called Teddy Outdoors.

We talk about how he flipped the law firm model on its head, what 26% annual growth for five years actually looks like from the inside, how to spot the wrong business partner before it's too late, mental health as a founder, and why vibe coding a full app in a weekend is now completely normal.

Timestamps:

• 0:34 – Age 17: Exotic Care, door-to-door car detailing, and the nine-figure exit he missed
• 2:23 – "That would 100% be a nine-figure exit today"
• 3:41 – How he ended up in law: a Hansel and Gretel mock trial in second grade
• 4:09 – Paying his way through law school from day one
• 4:48 – Interning at the Philadelphia Stock Exchange
• 5:06 – From corporate lawyer to COO — and 10 years running a defense company
• 5:58 – 26% annual growth for five straight years — what actually drove it
• 7:19 – Would he need fewer people today with AI? His honest answer
• 8:02 – Excel didn't kill accountants — and AI won't kill lawyers
• 10:17 – Legal as a Service (LaaS): flipping the billable hour model upside down
• 12:14 – Are other law firms copying the subscription model?
• 13:32 – ChatGPT hallucinated a case citation — a lawyer got disbarred
• 14:48 – The private AI tools built specifically for lawyers
• 16:00 – Next Point Ventures: the airport analogy
• 17:03 – The only thesis: "We don't work with assholes"
• 17:22 – Ukreate: a creator marketplace for travel brands and hotels
• 18:58 – VendOnBoard: vendor compliance automation
• 19:55 – The lithium-ion fire extinguisher — why your regular one won't work
• 22:13 – Teddy Outdoors coffee: step outside, put the phone down
• 23:46 – Performance coffee with mushrooms — trying to make it taste like coffee
• 24:34 – Matt's Milton Hershey story and the Switzerland recipe
• 25:40 – Entrepreneurial ADHD: open, focus, move — one window at a time
• 26:37 – Vibe coding a full app with audit capability in a weekend
• 28:11 – How to spot the wrong business partner before it's too late
• 29:26 – Business divorces: the ugly reality of startup partnerships
• 30:05 – The Warren Buffett / Charlie Munger restaurant test for CEOs
• 31:47 – Matt's never held a real pager
• 32:05 – Health, burnout, depression, and the semicolon tattoo
• 33:41 – What Marc would tell his 17-year-old self
• 35:03 – Why failure has one root cause, but success has 100
• 36:53 – Neuroplasticity, individuation, and why talking to younger people is mission critical
• 37:58 – When we all became uncomfortable with our own thoughts
• 40:32 – What gives Marc the most fulfillment

Connect with Casey:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/casey-purington-537103ab/
Website: https://www.usecalltex.com/

Casey Purington has spent 15 years obsessing over one thing: what happens when a customer calls a home service company.

Most of the time — especially after hours — nothing good happens. The phone rings. No one answers. The customer calls the next company on the list. And the HVAC company just wasted $300 in marketing to get that call.
Casey built CallTex to fix that. An AI voice agent that answers in under a second, pulls the customer's history from Service Titan, quotes the right price, books the job, and logs everything — without a single human involved.

We talk about how AI voice agents actually work behind the scenes, why transparency with callers matters, how Casey cold calls companies at midnight to prove his point, his plan to land private equity groups, and why he's betting everything on AI.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Welcome + Casey introduces himself and CallTex
0:55 – From the car business to call centers at 18
2:30 – His first day in a contact center: a chair, a headset, and a notepad
3:40 – What great call handling actually looks like — and why most companies miss it
6:04 – How AI pulled him out of consulting and into building
7:00 – Three buckets: inbound, outbound, and proactive follow-up
8:00 – Happy check calls, tune-up campaigns, and the CRM integration
9:55 – Playbooks, tagging, and how the back end works
11:16 – Who's adopting AI fast — and who's still talking about it
13:39 – The Yellow Pages moment: early adopters win, resisters get left behind
14:36 – Should you disclose the caller is talking to AI?
17:00 – Transparency, hallucination, and the hybrid approach
20:09 – What happens to the call center agents he trained? His honest answer.
22:09 – The full customer journey with CallTex — demo to live
24:47 – Tagging, routing, knowledge base, and advertisement integration
27:12 – This is not an answering service — what makes CallTex different
29:23 – Onboarding takes days, not weeks — but you need one owner
30:18 – Why every home service company needs a call center manager
32:38 – Can the manager role be remote? Yes — and Casey plans to offer it
36:01 – How they find customers: calling companies at midnight
37:00 – The leakage report: Casey records missed calls and sends them to the owner
39:27 – The private equity play — scaling dozens of locations at once
41:00 – "We couldn't get the big players to do what you did" — a client this week
43:22 – Where is AI voice going over the next decade?
45:28 – Why off-the-shelf AI won't cut it — the builders vs. the plug-and-play crowd
48:19 – Matt's take: AI is the direction, human in the loop stays
49:46 – Closing thoughts

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-kennedy/

https://businessclubcotedazur.com/

Joshua Kennedy started his first business at 18. By his thirties, he'd helped a client grow a data center from a €100M dream to a €167M exit in two years. Then he packed up, moved to the French Riviera, and started over.

Today Josh runs Business Club Côte d'Azur — a highly vetted founder community in the south of France — and Next Locals, a social network for people living abroad. We talk about why European entrepreneurship culture is broken, how he grew and sold multiple companies, what it actually takes to scale a service business beyond yourself, and why moving to Nice with two kids and no network was the best decision he ever made.

Oh, and a €150 hospital bill for delivering his son. Yes, really.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Welcome + Joshua introduces himself

0:55 – How Business Club Côte d'Azur started — from a social project to a vetted founder network

2:30 – Why Europe's entrepreneurship culture kills ambition before it starts

3:29 – The Hampton model — what Josh is building for the French Riviera

5:35 – Why he just relaunched the club and what it looks like now

7:30 – Moving abroad changes you permanently — Matt and Josh compare notes

8:15 – The micro-entreprise trap: why most founders in France stay small

11:30 – Surrounding yourself with people who match your mindset

15:17 – How it started: walking out of the chamber of commerce and into his first sale

16:06 – Websites for €30,000–€50,000 and why clients paid it

18:29 – From web design to online marketing to growth agency

20:34 – The data center client: €100M exit goal, €167M actual result in two years

23:12 – Why Josh won't build in AI despite the opportunity

26:49 – How the data center model actually works (simple, brilliant, boring)

31:39 – Entrepreneur ADHD and why focus is the only thing that matters

33:59 – 90 days to change everything in your business

35:03 – Josh flips the mic and starts consulting Matt live on air

36:37 – Niche down or stay invisible — why "B2B founders" is too broad

40:02 – Don't create demand, capture it — the principle behind every good go-to-market

41:20 – If Alex Hormozi is right: go where the hungry crowd already is

42:13 – Life on the French Riviera — 300 days of sun, great food, and kids who forage

44:43 – French healthcare: €150 out-of-pocket for a full private clinic birth

47:00 – The $91,000 US hospital bill and a €150 cup of coffee

50:21 – Raising kids abroad and why Matt thinks the world needs more babies

51:22 – Closing — Matt promises to show up at one of Josh's events

https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephanie-florio-51397765/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderflorio/
https://www.swobapp.com/

Stephanie and Alex Florio weren't engineers. They were marketers — both working at agencies, both quietly dreaming of building something of their own.

The idea hit Alex while using Tinder. What if hiring worked like that? Swipe left or right on candidates. Simple, fast, human.

That idea became Swob — an AI-powered hiring platform built specifically for restaurants, where turnover is brutal, managers are stretched thin, and the guest experience lives or dies by who shows up for their shift.

We talk about how Emma (their AI hiring assistant) works, why restaurants are still struggling to hire despite dozens of job boards, what it's like to build a company with your sibling, and how two non-technical founders with a marketing background are taking on one of the oldest problems in hospitality.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-reich05/
https://www.abundantempowerment.com/

Nick Reich built a state championship basketball team at a school that had never played a home game. Then he walked away from coaching forever.
What he took with him was a question that's driven the last 15 years of his career: what actually makes a team great — and why do most leaders never figure it out?

Today Nick is the co-founder of Abundant Empowerment and the author of an upcoming book, Every Player Is Bigger Than the Program. We talk about why leadership development takes 6 to 12 months (not a ChatGPT prompt), what the People-First Playbook actually looks like in practice, why most people have had 3 toxic leaders for every 1 great one, and what it means to be a full circle leader.

If you lead people — or want to — this one's for you.

Timestamps:

0:00 – Welcome + Nick introduces himself and Abundant Empowerment
0:58 – Who they serve and how the work is structured
1:49 – Can AI replace 6-12 months of leadership development?
2:20 – Why EQ and empathy are more in demand than ever in the age of AI
3:54 – Three paths to work with Abundant Empowerment
5:07 – Online, in-person, or hybrid — how the model works
6:28 – How the company name was born: a GoDaddy domain bought in 2007
8:51 – How leaders and organizations find them
9:06 – The Full Circle Leader framework: 5 characteristics
11:04 – Community-rooted leadership and the Blue Zone connection
13:18 – How they assess leaders before starting a program
14:43 – The People First Leadership Assessment (free, 5 minutes)
15:35 – Nick's story: from school social worker to basketball coach
16:00 – Winning Indiana's state championship without ever playing a home game
17:38 – What he learned from that team that now drives everything he does
18:30 – 3 toxic leaders for every 1 great one — why that ratio matters
19:17 – Great leaders know their personnel and put people in the right roles
20:03 – Leaders are readers — but it's not a knowledge problem
20:30 – The real challenge: taking what you learn and actually implementing it
21:51 – Book recommendations: Leadership Challenge, Patrick Lencioni, Simon Sinek
23:13 – His book: Every Player Is Bigger Than the Program — out September 8
24:13 – What gives Nick the most fulfillment
25:40 – Everyone in your organization is a leader — why that framing matters
26:23 – What's coming next at Abundant Empowerment
28:12 – Why every organization should invest in leadership development now

https://chordify.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenmorris/

Ken Morris left India, landed in Silicon Valley in 2000, and has spent the last 12 years building Chordify — a software engineering firm that helps startups and funded companies build products without burning through their runway.
But what I found most interesting wasn't the technical side. It was how Ken thinks about trust, relationships, and what it actually takes to build a services business in one of the most competitive markets in the world.

We talk about how AI has changed startup development timelines, what happens after Series A when a company needs to scale engineering fast, how offshore teams actually work when done right, and why Ken is now training engineers at a 125-year-old university in Uganda.


Timestamps:

0:00 – Intro: What Chordify does
0:41 – Welcome + Ken introduces himself
1:05 – From India to the Middle East to Silicon Valley
2:24 – How software development has changed over the last two decades
3:05 – Java, mobile, cloud, big data, AI — the evolution in one answer
5:36 – Don't let AI control you — keep the human in the loop
6:04 – Who Chordify works with and at what stage
6:24 – How Chordify was founded: from solo consultant to offshore operation
8:07 – Their offshore development center in Trivandrum Technopark, India
8:30 – Two customer profiles: early-stage startups vs. post-Series A companies
9:44 – MVP timelines pre-AI vs. today
13:05 – Do they work with European companies?
14:58 – Startup success rates: the real numbers
16:12 – A customer who's been with them for 10 years and pivoted twice
19:34 – How they find clients — and why references are the whole game
20:16 – "You're not selling software. You're selling trust."
21:50 – The trust gap in offshore development and how to avoid getting burned
24:00 – The 6-step deal process — and why references skip you to step 5
28:13 – Trust, consistency, and what it looks like in practice
30:01 – Why Ken co-sponsors events for years before expecting anything in return
31:42 – The joy of working with startups vs. enterprise
33:30 – "If you want a nine to five job, this is not the place"
34:06 – Ken reads Matt's mind (seriously)
36:45 – Expanding into Central Asia and East Africa
37:49 – Training 10 engineering students at Uganda's oldest university
39:39 – Building a development center in Mexico in 2026
40:40 – Closing thoughts

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jd-dillon/
Website: https://www.tigoenergy.com/

In Q2 of 2023, Tigo Energy hit almost $70 million in revenue. By Q4, it was under $9 million.

JD Dillon, their Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer, was in the room for all of it — the IPO, the collapse, and eight straight quarters of growth since.

We talk about what actually caused the crash, how they rebuilt, what a real B2B marketing system looks like at a publicly traded company, why JD combined marketing with customer experience, the pricing secrets behind the $.99 you see everywhere, and why the solar industry still has a long way to go on quality.

JD is a West Point grad, a former Army officer, a pricing obsessive, and one of the most structured thinkers I've had on the show.

Timestamps:
0:00 – Intro: What Tigo Energy does
1:14 – Welcome + JD introduces himself
1:36 – Optimizers, inverters, batteries — and Antarctica
2:58 – 101 countries, including Antarctica
3:51 – How JD went from the Army to semiconductors to solar
4:52 – Why he combined marketing with customer experience
7:01 – The solar industry is immature — and it costs everyone
8:29 – Total Quality Solar: what it is and why it matters
11:31 – Self-policing the industry before the government does it
13:47 – JD wakes up at 3:30 AM and drives 54 miles to the office every day
14:33 – 62% of revenue comes from Europe — why early mornings make sense
15:32 – Why he won't use Tesla Autopilot
17:40 – The turnaround: $70M to $9M in two quarters
19:00 – How they rebuilt — eight straight quarters of growth
19:54 – Four strategic pillars: Thunder, Lightning, Roots, and Balance
20:59 – 45 metrics tracked across four areas (yes, in Excel)
22:32 – Four active AI use cases at Tigo — translations, battle cards, routing, and agents
25:26 – Why they're being careful about replacing humans with AI in tech support
27:05 – What gives JD the most fulfillment after 30 years in business
28:48 – His plan to become a college professor (pricing is his favorite topic)
30:22 – The real reason everything is priced at $.99 (not what you think)
31:59 – Book recommendations: Sales Pitch by April Dunford + Lead With No
33:42 – Reading three books at a time — always
36:00 – A plug for his local bookstore in Danville, California

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevecraig20/
Website: https://solmetex.com/

Most people walk into a dental office and never think twice about the water being used on them. Steve Craig says that's exactly the problem.

As VP of Sales at Solmetex, Steve has spent decades in the dental industry, and his message is simple: water is the number one instrument in dentistry, and about 70% of practices aren't properly managing it.

We talk about what's actually in dental unit water lines, why 60% of Americans stopped going to the dentist after COVID, why dental "insurance" is really just a coupon, how Solmetex built the only end-to-end water solution in the space, and what it takes to lead and scale a niche sales organization.

If you've ever sat in a dental chair, this one's for you.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/grzybowskij/
https://penji.co/

Jonathan Grzybowski didn't start with investors, a big team, or a fancy office. He started with a problem he couldn't solve — getting quality design done fast. So he built Penji.

From charging $79/month to serving clients in 80+ countries with 500+ team members and 24-hour delivery, Jonathan breaks down exactly how they did it — and what almost killed them along the way.

We talk about productized services, bootstrapping vs. funding, company culture, AI in creative work, and why the hardest part of scaling isn't sales — it's hiring.

If you run a business and you're wasting time on design work, this one's for you.