The Unshackled Owner

On this podcast, our intention, our goal, our mission is to help you to find interesting, creative ways to build your business, to create systems, to build processes, to build culture. All so you can be focused on what you’re great at and so that your business can run and grow and scale without having you become an indentured servant to that business. That’s what this whole idea of being unshackled is. Every podcast, I try to bring you fascinating people who are doing really interesting and maybe a little unorthodox things. Today’s guest is no different. His name is Hugh Stewart.

We’re going to be talking to another super interesting entrepreneur sharing his story that you’re going to find interesting and it really relates to so many people that I meet. A lot of the things that I hear from people of why things won’t work or how their situation is different or whatever, I think you’re going to turn those excuses on their head today as we talk to my friend.

Remember, this is the podcast where I’m trying to introduce you to people and ideas to help you take control of your business. Rather than being the most critical employee in your company, you’re the owner, you’re the director, you’re the chairman of the board, you’re leading the business, you’re as involved as you want to be, but you also have the flexibility to start other businesses, take personal times, spend time with family, do whatever else you wanted to. Because the business doesn’t own you, you own the business. We’ve got a great example of a real world, a very common situation in entrepreneurship with a very uncommon result.

We’ve brought some great guests on for you over this last number of weeks. Today’s guest is going to be just another cherry on top of the sundae. Today, we’re going to be talking with Jim Bennett. He’s the founder and CEO of a wonderful company called NOW CFO. Jim is a CPA by training. He saw an entrepreneurial opportunity to really be able to bring great high-level bookkeeping and accounting and CFO work to lots of businesses who don’t really have maybe the budget to have a full-time CFO or controller. Maybe you’ve got an accounts payable clerk or accounts receivable clerk right now, but this is a way to really bring top-notch talent into a budget that growing businesses can afford.

Today’s going to be a really fun show for me because I get to have here with me, and I get to introduce to you the greatest influence on my life, the person who’s done the most, who shaped me over my adult life, the person who’s my best friend, my sweetheart and my wife of 30 years, Michelle Young. Michelle is a life coach. She does all kinds of really cool stuff. She works with clients from all over the world; from regular workaday people to others that are famous, from people that do really high-risk jobs like doctors and firemen and stuff like that, to people that are just doing business, working in offices, and so on. She works with all kinds of interesting folks. She has run retreats down in Tulum, Mexico. She’s just done all kinds of great things.

She’s a wildly successful life coach. She’s also an outstanding mom to our four kids and a great grandmother to our two wonderful grandchildren, Indigo and Pierson. I can’t say enough positive things about my wife. I could spend an hour just talking about how cool she is. Today, I wanted to bring her to you so we could talk about how to really build a life by design. I just heard her give a talk about this a few days ago. I thought this would be a great topic to share with people on The Unshackled Owner.

Today, we’re going to be talking to one of my favorite people, one of the most powerful leaders out there amongst women and really fording women’s issues and causes. The founder and CEO of Women Network, the woman who is in charge of her company. The company that she runs, Women Network, they produce this amazing conference, this gigantic conference, called the California Women’s Conference. This happens about every eighteen months down in Southern California at the Long Beach Convention Center. I’ve been able to attend there. There’s nothing I love more than being surrounded by powerful, intelligent, badass women; that’s the California Women’s Conference. I’m super excited to introduce you to my dear friend, Michelle Patterson.

Today, we’re going to be talking with Chris Smith. Chris is going to tell you a little bit about his unusual background. But I’ll tell you, this guy, he comes from a rodeo background. He’s this country boy who’s turned big city stuff on its ear. He’s the creator of The Campfire Effect methodology. A lot of people are sharing with the world that stories are important and you really have to learn to tell your story and you’ll get good at telling your story. But I’ve never met anybody who’s nailed exactly the story to tell to make a huge emotional impact on your listener, on your prospective client, on your employees. This guy has figured out the magic of storytelling. I’m really glad to bring him on here to the Unshackled Owner podcast.

The fellow that I will be talking to, who we’ll be visiting with today, is Berny Dohrmann. He’s the founder and Chairman of something called CEO Space. I discovered CEO Space about six years ago, 2011. I went for the first time in September of 2011 and got to know Berny a little bit. I was then invited to be a presenter, a speaker, a trainer at his events. Now, these events have been going on for 30 years. You’d think that’s a whole career, but actually Berny had a whole other career as an investment banker before that.

I wanted to get Berny on the show to talk to us about, how do you build businesses and how do you help other people build businesses through raising money and so on. What is an investment banker looking for? What does somebody who’s a mentor and a guide and a trainer to tens of thousands of CEO’s, what does he learn from talking to all these people?

I’m really excited about our guest that we have on today. You’re going to learn some really important tips from him. I met Nicholas Kusmich last June of 2016 at an event. The host of the event was very excited that this man was going to come. I didn’t know his name but I heard that he was some kind of a demigod as it relates to Facebook advertising. The host, Pete Vargas, who has been on the show before, was super excited that Nicholas was going to be joining us.

I remember I wrote back to my marketing team, which includes my son and my son-in-law and then some great employees. I said, “Somebody is coming. Some guy named Nicholas Kusmich.” They’re like, “Oh my gosh. Are you serious? I follow everything he does. This guy’s amazing. He’s a miracle.” He gets there to the event and we meet. I remember him saying at dinner, we were sitting on this deck looking out over Colorado Springs. I said, “Do you do a lot of speaking?” He said, “No. Actually, I really don’t. I was excited to come here because I spend most of my time staring at my computer screen working for my clients.”

He got up and he gave his talk the next day. He blew the whole room just out of the water. There were a lot of great speakers, but there was something, at least for me, that Nicholas, he had a tone that was both inspiring, educational and super applicable for anybody who has a brain to do marketing, which isn’t me, but thankfully I know people. I’ve been watching him as he’s been doing things since June. We were finally together a couple of weeks ago in San Diego. I said, “Do you have time? He said, “Yes.” I want to welcome to the show the founder and the president of H2H Media, NicholasKusmich.com, and I’d like to say it’s a burgeoning friendship that I have with Nicholas Kusmich.

Scott Duffy is our guest for this episode. He has had so many successes in his career. Currently, he is working on Business and Burgers, a show that is sponsored by Microsoft. In this episode, we discuss the secret to big success, which is really quite simple: be you! He shares some personal experiences as well as disasters that he went through, and how he came out of them stronger.

Pete Vargas is the founder of Advance Your Reach, a company that helps millions and millions of people to get their stories and their voices on stages so that more and more people can learn and be touched by these powerful and unique messages. He gives us a real life, personal example of how a message from a speaker has touched his own life.