Where The Dogs Of Society Howl

Dragons love tacos. Spicy salsa burns the house down.

Every founder I know has both in the kitchen.

Peter Jude Ricciardi and Jeff Litcofsky sit down with Jess Toomey, MBA - Operational Strategist.

Jess is an operational strategist for integrative, functional medicine, and holistic-health founders. She works out of Concord, NH, and with clients nationwide. Her job: fix the back office so healers can get back to healing.

We get into:

→ What an operational strategist actually does

→ Why brilliant practitioners end up with chaotic businesses

→ How to build structure without killing the vibe

→ When a fractional partner beats a full-time hire

→ How a messy back office shows up in your brand

→ Pelicans, snow shovels, and more...

Big deals are slow, human, and messy.

We (myself & Jeff Litcofsky 😂) sit down with Jay Iannini. Jay has spent 20+ years closing complex, high-value deals in fintech, financial services, and B2B tech. His approach: solve the buyer’s business problem, not just sell the product.

We’re getting into:

→ Why long sales cycles stall

→ How to earn trust with skeptical executives

→ What breaks first when you scale sales

→ When a fractional leader beats a full-time hire

→ What AI sales tools are good for (and where they make you sound like everyone else)

A few things you should know about him.

He’s got an MBA in Finance from BU and a degree in Anthropology from Tufts. Human behavior plus how money moves. Good combo. And for 12+ years, he’s sung sea shanties and Irish folk songs with a group called The Portermen.

Join Jeff Litcofsky 😂 and Peter Jude Ricciardi (that is me), as we sit down with Stephen Theiss.

Stephen built a cocktail brand from a tasting room to 300+ stores. Then he co-founded a burger that's half beef and half veggies. Two CPG brands. Two rule books. Zero deep pockets. Now he works with CPG founders who are buried in the weeds of their own brand. Bring your appetite. Bring a cocktail if it's after noon.

Your gut makes the call in about three seconds.

Your spreadsheet shows up late with an excuse.

Most CEOs and sales leaders know it. Almost none of them say it out loud. This Thursday, we sit down with Malisa Nguyen on Where The Dogs Of Society Howl.

She used to carry a quota. Now she coaches the people who do. Speaker, mental performance coach, and founder of MTN Collective. She works on pressure, flow state, nervous system stuff, intuition, and manifestation.

We're getting into:

- What pressure actually does to your body before a big pitch

- A 60-second reset you can use right before a call

- How to tell intuition from plain old anxiety

- Manifestation without the magical thinking

- Quantum leaping, psychic abilities, and soul purpose.

She's bold, smart, and curious!

Bring your mantras, questions, and a fresh salad.

In 1976, the candy aisle was beige. Candy corn. A chocolate bar. Jelly beans so waxy they were basically Easter basket filler.

Then one Tuesday night, DAVID KLEIN was watching Happy Days and got an idea for a better jelly bean. Real flavor. Premium price. A name you could not forget. In the first week, he sold $44 worth.

Then he became "Mr. Jelly Belly." National talk shows. Dancing on stage with the Fonz. The face of the brand before brands had faces.

Four years later, he sold the rights. Months after that, Ronald Reagan showed up to his inauguration with three and a half tons of them. The bean became an American icon. His story mostly got left on the factory floor.

Join Jeff and I as we welcome Beatrice Gutknecht to the show. We're talking positioning, best, worst, what makes founders the hardest people on Earth to position, and more:

- What positioning actually is, versus the buzzword everybody abuses

- Where good businesses go beige, and how to steal them back

- Plus three continents, serious tequila, and a woman who organizes everything except her own bed.

She calls it Vanilla; I call it Brand Identity Fog - two different doors, both silent brand killers.

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.