A clear leader is easy to follow. A fuzzy one leaves everybody guessing.

Stephen D. Black spent 47 years leading in the grocery business and now coaches the people in the chair. He founded A Brighter Day.Life, a Maxwell-certified coach, the National Grocers Association's endorsed leadership voice, and the author of The Five Rules.

We covered:

- The Five Rules: do your job, be kind, no surprises, no drama, protect the brand

- What leading with intention actually looks like day-to-day

- How a clear, concise leader gets a team rowing together

- Where a good plan breaks on the way to the floor

Plus alligator boots his wife earned with a rifle, a serious Traeger habit, and Hawaii.

Most designers never have to live with their own work on a real shelf. Aaron Feiger does. He runs Food Court Creative and owns Pinball Cider, so he designs the brand and then has to sell it. His own packaging gets a sales report.We cover:- Why genuinely good CPG brands still get walked past- What packaging is really saying when the cues stop agreeing- How a small brand out-signals a giant with a way bigger budget- Where AI clarifies a brand vs. just makes prettier fog- Plus a t-shirt brand that blew up in Japan, a brutal split-board climb up Camp Muir, and the synth-buying habit he'd rather we didn't mention.

She’s built a career in wellness and lives it harder than people half her age.

Julie Elder calls herself “ancient but still awesome.” She’ll also tell you she left home at 18 to join a band, has topped out at 120mph, and would rather be chasing storms than sitting still.

That’s not a contradiction. That’s her whole point about health.

We sat down with Julie to talk about wellness as a way of living — not a marketing word:

→ What “being well” actually means when you’ve packed three lives into one

→ How much of health you can buy vs. how much is just how you live

→ Where honest health marketing ends and snake oil begins

→ Why so many genuinely good natural brands stay invisible on the shelf

→ And what the wellness industry gets dead wrong about getting older

No corporate script. No service soup. Just a woman who’s spent a career around health and clearly took her own advice — full-throttle, no apologies for the speed.

He set tile for a living. Now he sells Toy of the Year.

Derek Love didn't take the usual road into startup sales. He took the one with knee pads. Years setting tile, top-notch, then a hard pivot to Sales Manager at Wigglitz, the startup behind 2026's Toy of the Year and a 250-character collectible obsession.

This Thursday we're sitting down with Derek to dig into the stuff nobody puts on LinkedIn: → What construction teaches you about sales that no training ever will → How you scale a startup when demand outruns your systems → What creative leadership actually means when you carry a number → Two kids he can't always name, two marriages, and one very honest hour

No corporate script. No service soup. Just a guy who traded grout for growth and isn't precious about how messy the leap really was.

14 years as a Marine officer.

More near-death experiences than he can count.

Now he decides whether your brand lives or dies in the first 3 seconds on a screen.

Eric Martindale joins us on Where the Dogs of Society Howl.

Eric runs the digital shelf — Amazon, TikTok Shop, Instacart, Target Roundel — the places where "fine but forgettable" brands quietly bleed out.

We're getting into:

- Why great products die on the shelf when the story's foggy

- How upstream signal drift becomes downstream damage — bad packaging, buried proof, panic discounts

- Scaling when the economy won't sit still

- And the part most business shows won't touch: near-death, consciousness, and what the edge teaches you about building

She sold out rooms across three continents.

Now she's fighting for three seconds in a grocery aisle.

Gina Sicilia spent 15 years as an acclaimed blues singer-songwriter, 11 albums, a Blues Music Award nod, stages across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

Then 2020 killed the tour. So she built something else.

Gina's Italian Cuisine; no-sugar-added, low-carb Italian food, now on shelves at Kroger, Publix, and climbing on Amazon.

This week on Where the Dogs of Society Howl, we get into:

→ The pandemic pivot from touring musician to CPG founder → Going from a Nashville kitchen to a national grocery shelf → What performing taught her about making a stranger feel something — fast → The scaling stuff nobody warns you about

Blues stages to grocery aisles. Same hustle, different room.

She walked into an American Idol audition.

Twice.

Most people wouldn't do it once.

Erica Bruno-Martin has spent 15+ years in a business where trust is everything, and buyers decide whom to believe in seconds, the car business. She's turned struggling dealerships into growth machines, coached leaders people actually follow, and somewhere along the way sang on stage with Keith Urban.

We're digging into:

→ How a brand earns belief in the first 3 seconds → The story your business thinks it's telling vs. what customers hear → The ugly part of startup growth nobody posts about → Why the guts to bomb an audition is the same guts every founder needs

No fluff. Just grit, story, and a little stage fright.

Open forum on two things that wreck brand credibility. Part One: Why do brands cave on price when they can't articulate value? Part Two: Every brand now has an AI website. Most sound like it. When does AI amplify signal vs. erase it?

Join us for diagnosis and debate.

She drinks seven beverages a day and is building a company around the one that actually works.

Vy Vo is the founder of SpaceTime, a performance drink built for the people who can't afford a crash. Founders. Traders. Engineers. Operators. People whose whole livelihood depends on staying sharp.

She's in the CPG trenches. Real operations. Real supply chain chaos. Real fundraising conversations in a market that doesn't exactly hand money to physical product brands.

Jeff Litcofsky 😂 and I sit down with her on Where the Dogs of Society Howl. We're going to look at what CPG actually costs you. The ops nightmares that don't make the pitch deck. The capital reality. The founder psychology that keeps you in the game when everything is telling you to quit.

And yes. We're talking about all seven beverages.

Most communication is broken.

Not a little off. Actually broken.

Dan Roth has spent 15 years in advertising, journalism, podcasting, and corporate comms doing one thing: fixing it. He works fractionally. Goes in fast. He figures out what's not working and why. Then he fixes it.

We're getting into:

Why most CPG brands blow it before the buyer even picks up the package

What fractional creative work actually looks like when it's done right

Creative leadership — what it is and what it isn't

His take on a word he uses to describe himself — and why it's not what you think

The conversation will be blunt, honest, and useful.

Set the reminder. Come hang.