Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

Steve Preda
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Interviews with CEOs and Entrepreneurs about the frameworks they are using to build and scale their businesses.

  1. vor 19 Std.

    339: 5 Steps to Address a Crisis with Itay Ben Horin

    Itay Ben Horin, CEO of Ben Horin & Alexandrovitz, one of Israel’s leading strategic media consultancies, is on a mission to help people and organizations achieve their goals through strategic communication. As the author of Crisis Management, Itay draws on decades of experience helping businesses, public figures, and institutions navigate high-stakes situations where leadership and communication determine the outcome. In this conversation, Itay introduces The Crisis Management Framework: Stay Prepared, Pull Your Team Together, Work Fast and Slow, Pick Your Entry Point, Decide Strategy, and Select Who Speaks, Where, and When. He explains why preparation is the greatest advantage in any crisis, why leaders must balance urgency with thoughtful decision-making, and how identifying the right audience and communication strategy can turn a defining moment into an opportunity. He also shares how AI is reshaping strategic communications, the growing threat of deepfakes, and why books and long-form conversations remain indispensable in an age of AI-generated content. — 5 Steps to Address a Crisis with Itay Ben Horin  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast, and my guest today is Itay Ben Horin, the CEO of Ben Horin & Alexandrovitz, a leading strategic media consultancy in Israel, and also the author of Crisis Management, which just came out in the U.S. Itay, welcome to the show.  Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.  Yeah, it’s exciting to talk to you. I mean, you’re in Israel. You’re growing your business there, and I look forward to your differentiated perspective on things on this show. But before we launch in, my favorite question: What is your personal “Why,” and how are you manifesting it through Ben Horin & Alexandrovitz? Okay. So our vision in the company is to help people fulfill their goals through the media. We're trying to empower people and organizations to achieve their objectives. Share on X And we do it through the media, through communication, and through social networks. This is our expertise: communication, strategic consulting, public relations, and spokesperson services. My specialty is crisis management, but our company provides all kinds of media consulting. And our “Why” is to help people fulfill their dreams. Our way of helping them is through the media. But there are other goals as well.  Yeah. That is interesting. So how does media help people fulfill their dreams? When a person or an organization is talking to one person or two people in a store, or in any other aspect of communication, it has limited power. But when they communicate through the media to thousands or even millions of people—through television, radio, podcasts, or whatever channel exists in modern life—they have the ability to influence more people. So the media helps them. In a good way, and also in crisis management. When something goes wrong, you can use the media to move from a bad situation to a better place.  When I talk to people, I tell them that even in biblical times, people had communication and written communication. And it’s the same stories: Love. Hate. Power. Politics. Everything is the same. The only thing that has changed is the technology we use to communicate with people. Once, people shouted from rooftops and used other traditional methods. Today, they can talk from their homes to millions of people. Yeah. And then social media is a big amplifier of messaging. It’s changing politics as well. So, for sure. Now, you’re running a large strategic communications firm, but you wrote this book about crisis management. So what’s different about communication during a crisis compared to business as usual, when you just want to get your message out? I’m a basketball fan, and today is like the NBA playoffs. So I’m saying—  The Spurs won.  Yeah, the Spurs won. And it’s very interesting to watch a seven-game series. So what I’m saying is that regular communication is like the regular season. You win. You lose. It’s important, but it’s not that important. A crisis is like the playoffs. You can win or lose. If you manage the crisis well, you can be a winner. Share on X You can win the season even if it began with a crisis. But if you lose, you’re out. So a crisis is a moment that can change your destiny—for better or for worse—depending on how you manage it. And I think that’s the difference between crisis management and regular communication. As I said, regular communication is like a very long regular season.  Yeah, I love that analogy. So it’s the yin and yang, right? It’s the crisis and the opportunity. How do you turn a crisis into an opportunity? There’s a saying: “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” right? Something like that.  Yes. I’m not advising people to get into a crisis. That’s not my advice. But if you have a crisis—and in my book, Crisis Management, I write about many case studies, both good and bad examples of crisis management—in some cases, the way people like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama managed their crises helped make them winners because they handled them well. I also write about companies like McDonald’s and Starbucks, as well as crisis management cases in Israel.  If you manage a crisis badly, you can lose your position or even your business. So I’m not advising anyone to seek out a crisis. But when I walk into a room where there is a crisis—and I do that a lot, it’s my day job—I meet a CEO or a manager who is dealing with a crisis, and I tell them: “Please try to look at this moment from another perspective.” “Because these are the moments that define your leadership.” “And if we do well, and if we do our best, you may be remembered as the leader who successfully navigated this challenge.” It’s hard to see that in the moment. But afterward, people often come back to me and say: “I remember what you told me during those moments.”  Yeah. That’s when character really shows up, right? In moments of crisis. It’s when everything gets amplified. Yes. So this podcast is called Management Blueprint. We talk about frameworks all the time. So give me a good crisis management framework. Three to five elements. I’m sure you cover them in your book. If someone is in a crisis, what do they need to think about? What steps should they take? Do you have a framework like that?  Yeah. So the book is like 20 chapters. Sixteen of them are crisis-management cases from around the world and Israel, including some that I managed. And there are also four chapters about this framework and how to manage a crisis. So the first thing that I will tell you is that the best way to manage a crisis is to be prepared for a crisis. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it's really important. Every minute that you prepare—I call it a golden minute. Share on X Every minute that you prepare for a crisis will count as 10 minutes during the crisis when it begins.  Because if you are prepared, if you know who is talking, who is on your team, what the messages are, who your crisis-management advisor is, who your lawyer is, who your accountant is, and who will be in the room, as a manager that’s very important. So that’s the preparation. And even if you don’t prepare, the first thing is to get your team together. I don’t believe that crisis management can be managed from far away. You must be in the same room with all the people and talk together with your team. The second thing is that in a crisis, you need to work very fast and very slowly.  Very fast because you need to think fast and react fast because it’s a crisis. You have a lot of phone calls, a lot of WhatsApp messages, and a lot of activity on social networks. A lot of people are talking to you. But you also need to be very sharp, and you need time to think. The most important thing you need to think about is: What is your entry point for the win? Who is your target audience? Is your target audience the general public? The business ecosystem? A regulator? A minister? In most crises, you have a few target audiences.  But you must understand which target audience can take you to a win. If you’re a political leader, it’s the public. If you’re a business, it can be the market or the stock exchange. If you’re a producer or a manufacturer and you have a crisis, it can be the regulator. So you must think about who your target audience is and then decide on the strategy. Because there are crises that you cannot win. Going back to basketball, maybe you cannot win the series. But it’s better to lose four games to two than four to zero. And that’s okay because you’re building for the next stage. So you have the team. You have the target audience.  You have the strategy. Then you need to decide who is talking to the public and how they are talking. Through Facebook or other social networks? Are you talking to the press? Are you having one-on-one meetings? When are you going to talk? Where are you going to talk? And who is going to talk? The manager? The professional manager? Your legal staff? Your communications staff? These are all the things you need to decide when the crisis begins. And from there, every crisis is different. But that’s where you move forward. Yeah. That’s fascinating. So basically, get your team together. That’s step one. Obviously, you have to be prepared so that you have a team. You have to react fast, but also make room for deep thought. Who’s your target audience? How do you enter this crisis, or where do you need to show up? Decide the strategy. And then who’s going to speak, where, and when. So that’s fascinating.  When and where. What is the technology? Are you doing a press conference? Are you doing a press release? Do you go to your LinkedIn page, your Facebook page, or your Instagram page? Every crisis has its own recipe. I’m saying that there are pe

    22 Min.

  2. 22. Juni

    338: Build AI Superintelligence with Ganesh Krishnan

    https://youtu.be/b_G8krkwKv8 Ganesh Krishnan, CEO of AiHello, is helping Amazon sellers automate advertising, improve profitability, and scale their businesses using AI. Driven by a mission to give entrepreneurs more freedom and enable them to build businesses around products they love, Ganesh shares how AI can eliminate repetitive work while allowing business owners to focus on strategy, innovation, and growth. In this conversation, Ganesh introduces The AiHello Ads Framework: Tap into the Wisdom of Crowds, Find the Right Keywords, Bid at the Right Level, Dynamically Adjust Bids, and Rinse and Repeat. He explains how AI can leverage historical marketplace data to identify profitable keywords, optimize bids automatically, and continuously improve campaign performance. Ganesh also discusses the dangers of AI hallucinations, why Amazon’s incentives differ from sellers’ incentives, how AI has transformed his own company’s operations, and his vision for building zero-hallucination AI systems capable of advancing toward artificial superintelligence. — Build AI Superintelligence with Ganesh Krishnan  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, and welcome Ganesh Krishnan, the CEO of AiHello, an Amazon Ads automation company helping you grow your revenues, reduce work hours spent on ads management, and decrease your ad costs. Welcome to the show, Ganesh.  Thank you, Steve. Nice to meet you  Well, it’s great to have you here, and let’s jump right in. And my first question is, what is your personal ‘Why,’ and how are you manifesting it in AiHello?  So it started off with my thesis that we all need to do good towards the planet. A long time ago, I started having my own natural things, selling chemical-free, ecological, sustainable, good-for-the-planet, good-for-your-wallet, good-for-your-health items, and I would sell organic items. And eventually, what I realized was that it was taking a lot of my time marketing, managing it, changing the bids, doing everything. I started working more and more on AI because I’ve worked in AI commercially. I worked in AI in my industry. That was my job. So I said, “Why not use, apply that to my own startup, to my own industry for selling organic things?” And once I started selling it, some of my friends reached out and said, “Can we use your AI for our own businesses?” And I said, “Sure, why not?”  And then I started opening it up. And then one person came through and said, “Okay, let’s release it to the general public, see how it goes.” And then as we started earning money, I realized that I don’t need to do a job. I can have this startup, and I can help different people have their own lifestyle. You could have your own lifestyle. You could sell your own stuff that you like, e-commerce, usually on Amazon, and then we help you have your lifestyle. So this is my personal ‘Why’, is we need more equality. We need more people doing stuff they love rather than doing stuff they hate to do, and they hate to wake up and go to work. So do what you love. We are here to empower you.  Wow, that’s amazing. So you are empowering people to start their own e-commerce businesses on Amazon, and you help them with AI tools to get up to speed and compete with the big boys.  That is correct.  Yeah. I love it. So on your LinkedIn profile, you mentioned that you are, I don’t know what the word was that you used, but something to do with superintelligence, AI superintelligence. So what is it that you are doing, and what is your vision of how AI superintelligence can be tapped into?  It’s a very long topic. But to start off with, we used the old form of AI, which is a lot of regression, a lot of statistics, a lot of big data learning, and a lot of neural networks, if you felt fancy. And then LLMs became a huge thing. And we launched AiHello probably six or seven years ago. LLMs became a big thing two or three years ago. And it was pretty fancy. It was very good. It made life easy for us. But we cannot use it within AiHello to give it to clients, primarily because LLMs start hallucinating once you go past a certain context. The problem with hallucination is that it exponentially becomes larger and larger. Because if the previous thesis is wrong, if your previous hypothesis is wrong, then it builds on top of it, and it builds the wrong things.  Hallucination exponentially becomes worse. And when it comes to finance, when it comes to ads, and when you’re working with sensitive data, this can be catastrophic. So you cannot use these large language models for finance, for situations where you need precise data, and especially when you have lots of context. It’s going to lose the context of the first part. Just because you mentioned something at the start of the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not important. It is critical. As humans, we understand what is the most critical part of a conversation, and then we keep that in mind. But LLMs, because of context limitations, just keep on going and start hallucinating.  So a few months ago, we came up with the idea that we could use something like a large language model, but not based on the transformer model. And we could base it on data so that there is almost zero hallucination. So instead of building weights, we build it based on data. And we launched this. We don’t use it on AiHello, but we decided to use it on an email service because we have a lot of emails. We process a lot of emails for clients. We process a lot of emails for specialists. So we could use the zero-hallucination approach within emails, and if it is successful, then we can put it into AiHello.  And we can, of course, release it as an API as well. So this is going to set the basis of artificial superintelligence because what is stopping us right now from reaching or breaching that wall of artificial superintelligence is this hallucination. And of course, there is also logic. LLMs are pretty stup*d. They don’t understand. You can teach them, they learn, but they do not question what you teach them. They always take it on blind faith.  Yeah. Wow. That is genius. I love it. You are going to un-hallucinate AI. And if it stops hallucinating, essentially it becomes a lot more powerful and scalable. AI becomes scalable, or this whole process becomes scalable. That’s fascinating. So your ‘Why’, your mission, is to empower all these people to run their businesses. Do you have a framework for this that you could describe in three to five steps? How do you get someone up and running with their own business on an e-commerce platform? Or do you have any other framework that you could share with the audience? Something simple that they may be able to benefit from? One of the caveats of using AI is that it needs a lot of data. So if you’re just starting out with your e-commerce business, you need to put more of your human intelligence, more of your gut instinct, more of your thoughts, and more of your emotions into building it out. And once you have built up enough data, then you can put it into AiHello and start automating it. So what I would say, if you’re starting an e-commerce business, is hire a specialist who can help you launch off the ground.  Do a bit of the hypothesis work, do a bit of the analysis, and then come to AiHello and start automating it. You can only start automating once you have a good idea of how things work for you. And finding how things work for you is something you need to do on your own. It’s like you can’t start running, or you can’t start driving a car, until you learn how to crawl and until you learn how to walk.  Okay. So basically, it’s the age-old innovation thing that you have to innovate something on your own, and then you can scale it with AI. That is correct.  Yeah. So let’s say I came up with some kind of formula, concept, or product that is currently not being promoted, and I believe it would work. Or maybe I’ve already tested it and I want to scale it. I want to get on Amazon and sell it there. What can you do for me? What are the steps for me to be successful with AiHello’s help? So the first thing when you select a product, is: what are the keywords for it? What keywords do you use for that product? The second would be: what are the bids for that product? For each keyword, what is the right bid to put up? And then you have other things like budgeting. Do you change the bid depending on the time of day? Do you change the bid in total? Those are the things that you need to keep adjusting continuously.  With AiHello, we automatically harvest the right keywords for your product. We change the bid. We optimize the bid. We also do dayparting, where you can change the bid depending on the time of day. So there are different things that you can use AI for. You could certainly do all of it manually, but it’ll probably take you days or weeks to do what AI can do in a couple of minutes.  So a couple of minutes. But doesn’t the AI also need traffic data to be able to define things?  Yeah. So one of the other things about AiHello is that, because we have the wisdom of crowds, if you come up with a keyword, we know exactly how that keyword is going to perform. As you say, you have the wisdom of crowds. Can you extrapolate what you’ve experienced with other products and other customers onto a new product that doesn’t yet have a lot of traffic? Is this what you mean by the wisdom of crowds? Or what do you mean by the wisdom of crowds?  Let me give you an example. Let’s assume you want to sell coffee, and you go to our platform and say, “This is my product. It’s coffee. Help me sell it.” So what we do is, we know this is coffee. What are the keywords around it that are going to help sell it? Because we’ve sold other coffee products, we know that organic coffee sells well. We know coffee in the morning sells well. Black coffee sells well.

    25 Min.

  3. 18. Juni

    337: Build Yourself a Growth System with Grant McKinstrie 

    https://youtu.be/xkCGHOYkdC0 Grant McKinstrie, CEO of Digital Position, is passionate about helping eCommerce brands grow by combining customer insights, data-driven marketing, and emerging technology. With more than two decades of experience in digital marketing, Grant has built a team that helps brands increase revenue through SEO, paid media, conversion optimization, and customer-focused growth strategies. We explore Grant’s DP Growth System: Ask AI where consumers congregate, Immerse yourself in their communities, Create content they crave, Engage them on Reddit and Quora, Have influencers create videos, and Turn craved content into ads. Grant explains why understanding customer conversations is more valuable than relying on assumptions, how online communities reveal unmet needs and buying signals, and how businesses can transform those insights into content, influencer partnerships, and advertising campaigns that drive measurable growth. He also shares how AI is changing marketing, the challenges of scaling an agency, and why innovation remains one of the most important drivers of long-term business success. — Build Yourself a Growth System with Grant McKinstrie  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and today my guest is Grant McKinstrie, the CEO of Digital Position, a full-stack agency that builds a growth system for e-commerce brands. Grant, welcome to the show.  Thank you so much for having me. Good to be here.  Well, it’s great to have you here. And I’d like to start by asking you: What is your personal ‘Why’, and what are you doing to manifest it at Digital Position?  Well, specifically when we think about the eCommerce space, there’s so much crap being sold out there. And also, in terms of what AI has done to the industry, it has allowed a lot of people to start a lot of different businesses, sell a lot of stuff, do a lot of dropshipping, and all these different things. It’s about trying to find the gems. It’s about finding the good people to work with and the businesses that are worth growing at the end of the day. There’s so much good stuff out there that gets pushed down because either they haven’t worked with a good agency or they just don’t know how to market themselves well enough.  And I think the drive behind trying to find those people who are genuinely nice to work with and brands that are absolutely worth promoting and bringing out into the world is awesome and very rewarding. Being able to do that is incredibly fulfilling. That’s not to say that we’re perfect in every way, shape, or form. And it’s not like every single business we work with is perfect either. We do what we can. But all in all, I want to be able to help market products, people, and businesses that are absolutely worth getting out into the world and getting more people to know about.  Yeah. That’s so interesting that you say that because I had a client in this space where you are, and they were a little conflicted because some of the brands they represented, they were not really proud of. And I think it really impacted their culture in turn. They felt that they were not operating with integrity with all of their clients, and that created internal friction. And it kind of held them back to some degree. So that’s fascinating that you talk about this. And I also noted on your website that your average client tenure is over four years, which I think bears testament to this. Yeah. In a large majority of cases, I mean, we’ve had certain clients for six years and, in some cases, even eight years. So when you have tenures like that, they certainly last a long time. And sometimes it just doesn’t work, and we’re also very willing to openly admit that. I don’t want anyone to think, “Oh, if we sign up with you, it’s four years, and then we’re just constantly paying you for, I don’t know, whatever reason it might be.” But genuinely, we’re here to see how we can legitimately grow the business and actually bring you profit dollars that you weren’t seeing otherwise.  Because so many businesses that we come across are just not able to allocate their marketing spend efficiently. And they’re just… I don’t know. Not to get too much into the nitty-gritty of things, but in a general sense, 95% of the businesses we talk to are essentially burning money. And in most cases, they’re being worked through an agency churn-and-burn system. And it hurts to see. Literally, I had a pitch two hours ago before this call where every single platform they were on was just burning money. They were trying to remarket to people who already knew about the brand and spending money on people who already knew about them and were already going to purchase from them.  And the agency was trying to tell them, “Hey, all of our metrics are great.” But the business is suffering because of it. It happens all the time. It generally results in tough conversations for us because agencies have such a bad reputation. And we’re always trying to pick up the pieces and revitalize that relationship. Which has its highs and lows in many ways. But we’re out here doing the best we can. Okay, so that’s a great segue because this podcast is all about frameworks—how to do something that maybe other entrepreneurs are trying to do, don’t know how to do, but you figured out. So do you have some kind of framework? Maybe it’s about getting an eCommerce company up and running on advertising and advertising profitably. Maybe it’s some other area in your business that is easy to explain in three to five steps. Does anything come to mind?  The biggest thing that we have realized lately is what we have deemed community engagement. One, because of AI, you can scrape information so easily across the internet, and you can get fed so much crap that AI is just going to automatically generate for you. But what really matters at the end of the day is: who is your audience, where the heck do they hang out, and what are they talking about?  So we are constantly looking to inject ourselves into Reddit threads, Facebook threads, YouTube comments, Quora—wherever those people possibly are. Get into the subreddits. Get into those Facebook communities. Get into the comments of influencers or whoever is relevant within that space, and talk to them. See what they’re talking about within those threads. Engage with them. Have a conversation so that you can understand what actually makes this person tick. What do they truly care about? What do they call things? What are they talking about on a daily basis?  So that when you start creating content that resonates with those people, you know exactly how to connect with them. Because, as I mentioned earlier, so many people are creating commoditized products and content because of AI, because it’s making it that much easier to do. Nobody is truly trying to connect with the consumer at the end of the day. And therefore, you’re going to have so many people who become numb to anything being thrown in their face unless they actually feel like they’re being spoken to.  So the biggest thing is to get to know the person on the other side of the screen. Go to where they hang out. Go to where they’re engaging. And listen to them. I think a lot of people forget that and want to go straight into data, metrics, spreadsheets, and all this stuff. When there is a human-to-human interaction happening within marketing every single day. And that is what you need to continue to focus on. Okay, so maybe that’s the beginning of the framework. So get to know the person—or the customer—or both.  Yeah. And it sounds really simple. It’s funny, when you put it that way, it’s just: listen to the person you’re trying to sell to. But it’s incredible how infrequently that actually happens. Because a lot of people will talk about, “My product is the best. My product is so good because it does this cool little thing that nobody else does.” But who really cares unless it’s actually solving a problem that somebody has? And unless they’re able to understand exactly how it’s going to make them feel in that moment when that problem is solved or how it connects to their core persona or whatever it might be. It’s a very simple framework. But it is the most important thing that a lot of people tend to neglect.  No, I love it. I love it. So what does the actual framework look like? I understand you go to Reddit, you go to Quora, and you listen. But what is the process? How do you even know which part of Reddit you should go to, what you should listen to, and who the customers are? Give me the rundown. What do you do when a new customer walks through the door and you want to figure out how to make them successful?  Yeah, of course. So I think Reddit is just the easiest example. I think it’s what a lot of people are familiar with, but it also provides value because it’s related to all the LLMs and what they like to cite as sources as well. Funny enough, one of the best ways to start is if you have a brand, a service, or something that you’re looking to build. Feed that into AI—Claude, ChatGPT, whatever works for you—and have it help you understand: “Hey, what subreddits should I be participating in?” If I want to sell vegetable seeds, for example—and that’s an example from a client we’ve worked with—or if I want to get more into gardening, where should I go?  It will point you to gardening, DIY gardening, seasonal gardening, and all these different places that have communities of people who are very specific when it comes to anything you want to know about gardening. Then you jump in there and see people talking about: “When should I start planting my tomatoes?” Or: “When should I do any transplanting?” Or: “How do I need to handle my watering schedule?” And then you have layers and layers of

    26 Min.

  4. 15. Juni

    336: How to be a Trusted Advisor with Rick Chess

    https://youtu.be/P0M24kc23U0 Rick Chess, attorney, real estate strategist, capital-raising expert, and trusted advisor, is passionate about helping entrepreneurs, investors, and business owners navigate complex decisions that can dramatically impact enterprise value and long-term success. Throughout a career spanning more than five decades, Rick has raised over $100 million for multiple organizations, guided companies through acquisitions, governance challenges, and strategic growth, and helped owners prepare for successful exits. We explore The Capital Raising Framework — Focus on Individuals, Not “the Market”; Be Ready to Sell; Start With Who You Know; Connect on Emotion; and Find a Problem to Solve. Rick explains why raising capital is ultimately about understanding people, not pitching ideas, why investors care more about their needs than your opportunity, and how trust-based relationships create opportunities that compound over time. He also shares lessons from raising capital, building influential networks, serving on boards, and helping entrepreneurs avoid costly mistakes when pursuing funding, growth, and exit strategies. — How to be a Trusted Advisor with Rick Chess  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Rick Chess, who is a real estate and exit strategist. He helps business and real estate owners, and the trusted advisors who guide them, turn complex decisions into strategic moves that grow enterprise value and maximize sale outcomes. Rick, welcome to the show.  Thank you. Appreciate it, Steve.  Well, it’s great to have you. And I’m going to ask you my favorite question, which I always ask: What is your personal ‘Why’, and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice?  When you go back in my career, 50-some years, where I’ve been most happy is either growing an organization. That can be a community, that can be a business, it can be an association. And then, at some point, individuals in that association want to move on, whether that’s to retire, to go someplace else, or whatever. And I find that in that world, there are certain things where they might have a Steve Preda who helps them with how to manage day to day. But they get to certain big issues that they’ve never done before, and maybe they’ll never do again. That’s where I like to come in because I know I’m critically important to them. So you’re a trusted advisor. You like to grapple with the big challenges people have in their lives, whether it’s a big real estate transaction, getting ready for an exit, an acquisition, or something like that.  Yeah.  Yeah.  So, I mean, the things that would be—for instance, most folks, if they’re talking about real estate, they have some idea how to fix a toilet. They have some idea how to buy a property. But when they get to a certain point, it’s like, “We need to raise $10,000. We need to raise $100 million,” whatever the amount is, because there’s either a great opportunity or they want to keep moving upward. And they have, again, a Steve Preda who can help them through the process. How they get that capital often is what trips people up. So that’s where I kind of first got into this.  I was an acquisition guy. I knew how to spend other people’s money, but I didn’t know at that time how to raise the money. And I’ve done it several times. I’ve raised $100 million for three different companies. And like everything in life, like with Summit, there is a process that you go through. And I love doing it. I just love doing that kind of stuff.  Okay. So when you are doing capital raising, fundraising, M&A deals, or real estate transactions, is there a framework that has helped you, that you figured out along the way? And think about something that is three to five steps. Maybe it’s a mental model of how you look at things, or maybe it’s a process. How would you describe that framework that you have, or that has helped you, so that the listeners would also benefit from it?  The listeners are best served if they step back from their preconceived notions of, A, how they think capital is attracted, because they usually are wrong. And they step back from how wonderful they are. And those two things are difficult. Because the reality is, no one is waiting to give you money. That’s foolish. You’ve got to sell the concept like you have to sell everything else. And what you sell is not what you think is wonderful. It’s what the market is going to think is wonderful. It’s like with any other product you’re making. “Hey, I made this great widget.” And the population looks at it and says, “I don’t need it. I don’t want it. I don’t know what it does.”  And depending on whether you’re trying to raise $100,000 from friends and family or $100 million on Wall Street, you look at who it is that you know. Because people that you know might at least return your phone call. So if you don’t know Bill Gates, thinking that you’re going to go to Bill Gates and get a billion dollars is, well, stup*d. But if you’re just trying to raise money from friends and family, and you have an aunt who lives three states away that you don’t see very often, and she has some money, okay, then you start with who you know. So, for instance, thinking about one of the many ways that you can raise money, there’s something called intrastate. And it is something that’s allowed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. If all of your money is raised within your own state, there are certain allowances for that.  But if you do one transaction outside the state, it all collapses. So like everything else on the business side, where there are certain rules that you can’t violate without getting into trouble, it’s the same thing when raising money. And I get so many people saying, “I’m going to list this on Wall Street, and I’m going to make…” It’s like, “No, you don’t. You better be prepared. If you’re going to list something on Wall Street, you’d better have $25 million that you can risk just to get it out there. And nine times out of ten you’re going to fail.” Not because there’s anything wrong with you.  It’s just that if you’re going to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with a pair of Keds, a T-shirt, and some shorts, you’re not prepared to climb that mountain. It’s no different when raising capital. And also think about when you were a kid. At a certain age, your parents let you cross the street to see your buddy. Then ten years later, they’ll let you get in the car and drive, but you’ve got to get home by midnight. It’s the same thing with raising money. And there aren’t a lot of folks who have done what I’ve done. So talking to your local lawyer or accountant—who may be wonderful people—but if they’ve never raised money, they’re not the people to talk to.  One of the ways people get taken advantage of on a regular basis is they’ll go to a securities attorney. The securities attorney will charge them $100,000 and write this great offering document, and no one ever gives them a penny. Because lawyers generally have no clue what’s happening in the marketplace. I own my own securities broker-dealer. I’ve also raised money for three different companies. It’s not easy. But like having read your book, Steve, if you follow certain paths, there’s at least a chance for success. Same thing here. Fascinating. So what I’m taking away in terms of a framework: Be aware that people are not out there waiting to give you money. You have to sell them. So that’s the first step. The second one is: start with who you know. Don’t start on Wall Street. Start with the people you know, where you have some trust, the people you understand, and where you have a chance to get there. And then look at some special circumstance that’s going to give you a leg up. For example—  Absolutely. Again, this is coming right out of your book on the business side. You create a widget. So what? But you create a widget that solves a problem. Ah. Then you have something. So it’s the same thing. When you get over onto the money-raising side, it’s: who do you know? Where do they live? How much money do they have? How do I approach them? But then, in the end, it’s not what’s in it for you, it’s what’s in it for them. And for them, if it’s friends and family, your mama may give you some money because she thinks you’re cute.  Your aunt might give you some money because she’s related to your mama. But at some point, you’re going to people who really have a checkbook. They have money in the checkbook. They’re not going to give this up just because you’re cute or you have a great idea. You’re either going to get them because you have something they’ve never heard of, or you have something that really feels like it could solve one of their needs. And their needs are not always what you think. Some people think, “Well, what they need is high cash flow.” What if they don’t need cash flow, but they’re really interested in a cure for cancer?  What if you think, “Well, it’s really going to go up in value”? Well, they have all the money they need. They’re not looking for that. But is this something that is going to allow their nephew to come work for you? Yeah. When you start thinking that you know what other people are thinking, that’s when you’re going to fail. When you can step back and just ask them, “Well, what’s important to you?” If you can’t have a conversation, one, you’re never going to date anybody, and you’re never going to raise any money.  And don’t be slick. You can be slick for three sentences, and at that point they’re going to reject everything you say thereafter. So don’t talk about how much money you’re going to make and all the rest of it. No. Talk about

    22 Min.

  5. 11. Juni

    335: Building the Connected Car Before the iPhone with Allen Nejah

    https://youtu.be/a3c1oxvhgMc Allen Nejah, CEO and System Solution Architect of SunMan Engineering, is driven by a lifelong passion for aerospace, invention, and solving complex engineering problems. From dreaming of becoming an astronaut as a child to working with major aerospace, defense, automotive, medical, robotics, IoT, and semiconductor organizations, Allen has built a career around turning ambitious technical ideas into real-world systems. We explore The Allen Nejah Engineering Framework — Live with Integrity, Be Intensely Curious, Get Organized, Plan Every Baby Step, and Learn from Mistakes — a practical mindset for building breakthrough technologies with discipline and resilience. Allen explains why integrity must exist not only in business relationships but also in the engineering itself, how complex projects must be broken into testable steps, and why curiosity, visualization, planning, and iteration are essential to solving problems across industries. He also shares the story behind InfiniGear, his AI-powered adaptive transmission system, and the healthcare technology inspired by his mother’s experience in assisted care. — Building the Connected Car Before the iPhone with Allen Nejah  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Allen Nejah, the CEO and System Solution Architect of SunMan Engineering, dedicated to providing customers with high-quality, on-time engineering and on-budget solutions for their product development and prototyping needs. Allen, welcome to the show.  Yes, that is correct.  Great to have you on the show. And I’d like to ask you my favorite first question: What is your personal ‘Why,’ and how are you manifesting it in your business?  So Steve, first I want to thank you for having me on your podcast. I really appreciate your time and interest. Of course.  As a kid, for whatever reason, I always wanted to have an airplane manufacturing company, an aircraft manufacturing company—something I always wanted to have. And I always wanted to be an astronaut. As a matter of fact, I studied aerospace and mechanical engineering with the dream of being an astronaut, going to fly and all that. So that’s kind of something that’s still in my pocket and that I still want to do. From there, it kind of pushed me in this direction. And yeah, now I work with a number of different companies in the aerospace industry. I work with the Air Force. I’ve worked with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and a number of others. And I work on both space and aviation projects that really kind of bring my dream to life. So I still haven’t gone to outer space yet, but I still have a little more time.  Yeah. Elon Musk is promising a million people, and his bonus is linked to putting a million people on Mars as the first colony. So there may still be room there.  They need a lot of us to go there, trust me. Well, actually, we’re going to do a lot of activities on the Moon first, and then from there, I’m sure they’re going to be looking for older people, older men, to do some tasks over there. And I’d volunteer to go.  You may be familiar with the Mars trilogy—Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars. It talks about people moving to Mars and how they terraform it. And then they figure out how to extend life to 150, 200 years. So if that works out, then maybe there’s another lifetime to be lived on Mars.  Yeah. I definitely believe that we will end up living on other planets, for sure. I see that very clearly. It could be 50 years or more before we actually become a space-based civilization. But the Moon has already started, right? We’re going to be there in the next 5 to 10 years, trust me. So anyway, I’m very excited about that. Yes.  Yeah, it is very exciting. What I’m looking for on this podcast—what makes it kind of unique—is that I am a junkie for frameworks and mental models. We are almost 400 episodes in, and every episode has a different mental model that our guest comes up with or shares. So think about something that helped you build your business, or maybe helped you develop your products, or how you work with your engineers, or how you work with clients. So think about something that has three to five steps or three to five aspects that create a result.  That’s very clear to me. Those are the key things for any successful person. First of all, honestly, you have to be interested. You have to be in “go” mode. You cannot push somebody to start building something, like a building or actual construction, if their mind is not into it. The very first thing is, it’s got to be you. That’s number one, right? And you know it. Definitely organization is a very key factor for me. Being organized, being detail-oriented—that’s something that is super, super important. Planning and organization make a huge difference in whatever you do, right? And most importantly, integrity. I mean, that’s number one. That’s number one, number two, number three, number four—all of it.  So integrity is all of it. No matter what you do, if there’s no integrity, people will walk away from you. At the beginning, every business makes mistakes, and they learn and so on. So don’t beat yourself up. It’s okay. You make a mistake, you learn from it, and then you don’t do it again, right? Learn from it. So yeah, I would say those are at least three. If anything else comes to mind, I definitely will share it with you. But the most important things are integrity, organization, and clear planning based on knowledge. Not just planning for the hell of it, but planning based on understanding what you’re doing. That’s important. Integrity comes into your personality. It comes into the quality of the work you do.  It comes into the engineering you do. It comes into all of that, right? Even in engineering, it’s not only on the personal level that integrity has to be there. On the engineering level, integrity has to be there too. Whatever you do, you’ve got to make sure it’s working. One of the things we learned the hard way after 35 or 36 years is that it’s very important to have the knowledge base and to do things in a very organized way. And that’s kind of part of my personality. If I’m not confident about the end result, I don’t even commit to it. I’ve got to see it in my mind. Whatever problem comes up, if I don’t see the solution in my mind, I won’t even commit to it. It comes back to quality, integrity, and all of that. And I guess what I was going to say earlier is that everything that we do—as part of, again, the quality and integrity I mentioned—is that we have a lot of baby steps built into the process.  That’s what I wanted to say earlier. So for every step, the whole plan is split into, I don’t know, tens, hundreds, or thousands of different steps and branches. Because technology is not one thing. It’s usually a combination of different sciences. So mechanical engineering, electronics, material science, firmware, AI—those are all different types of expertise. And you’ve got to bring them all together. And for all of those baby steps, you’ve got to have some sort of test at the end of each step before you move on to the next one. Iteration.  Yeah. So, okay, what I’m hearing is integrity is number one. And then curiosity, perhaps. So curiosity is this driving force. Visualization is important. I’m thinking about Einstein, who said that imagination is more important than knowledge because imagination is infinite, while knowledge encircles the world. I think it was something like that. So visualization is important. Get organized. Do thorough planning. And learn from mistakes.  Yes. Absolutely. Okay.  That’s great. So what do you call this? Is this the Allen Nejah Framework, or what’s it called?  One more thing. One more thing. Again, that’s kind of under the umbrella of integrity. So I have two families. It’s one family. I have a family at home, and I have a family at work. And believe it or not—and you already know this—we all spend more time with our family at work than with our family at home. That’s true. It’s true for me. It’s true for a lot of people. You go to work, I don’t know, from 8:00, 9:00, or 10:00 in the morning until 5:00, 6:00, 7:00, 8:00, or 9:00 at night. That’s almost 12 hours. And by the time you go home at 5:00, 6:00, or 7:00, what? You spend two hours with your family, maybe three hours at most, and then it’s back to work. So the team is part of my family, and truly it is part of my family. Those are the first group of people, the first group of associates, that you have to take care of.  You have to be a brother to them, be a friend to them, be a father to them, be a mother to them. Seriously, it’s all about human interaction. It’s all about, “I like you, I don’t like you,” and it goes from there. “I feel good about you. I don’t feel good about you.” And so it’s very important to have those relationships in your business, or whatever it is you do. For me, all our people, all our employees—even from 35 years ago—are still in touch with us. I have kids who came through as junior-high interns, then high-school interns, then university students, even master’s degree students. Now they’re 40 years old. And we’re still in touch. So I’m in touch with hundreds of engineers and people that I’ve worked with over the past 35 years. And that’s a lot of value. That’s the biggest asset.  Yeah. Basically, they call it a school. You create a school, right? Your own professional school. That’s wonderful. So tell me about this special gear called InfiniGear. How is it special? How did you come up with it, and how is it being used? It’s an interesting question. First of all, let me explain to you very quickly what I-Gear is. So I-Gear is an AI robotic adaptive gearbox,

    24 Min.

  6. 1. Juni

    334: Pull 5 Levers to Bootstrap Your Firm with Preetha Pulusani

    https://youtu.be/Eojj9hN2UKg Preetha Pulusani, CEO of DeepTarget, is passionate about helping people realize their potential and leveraging technology to create meaningful business growth. After spending 25 years in corporate America and learning hard lessons from an early entrepreneurial failure, Preetha built DeepTarget into a bootstrapped fintech growth company that helps banks and credit unions acquire, engage, cross-sell, and retain account holders through advanced data analytics and intelligent marketing. In this conversation, Preetha shares the DeepTarget Bootstrap Framework, a leadership and innovation model built around five principles: Combine Pros with Fresh Graduates, Think Big but Start Small, Be Agile with a Flat Structure, Fail Quickly, and Keep a Tight Customer Feedback Loop. She explains how blending experienced professionals with emerging talent creates powerful teams, why rapid experimentation outperforms large-scale product launches, and how customer feedback should guide innovation. Preetha also discusses using data to drive growth, selling outcomes instead of technology, and building a successful SaaS company without outside funding. — Pull 5 Levers to Bootstrap Your Firm with Preetha Pulusani  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Preetha Pulusani, the CEO of DeepTarget, a company that helps hundreds of financial institutions increase loan demand, promote product adoption, and support intelligent marketing through advanced data mining and analytics. Preetha, welcome to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me. Thank you for inviting me. I’m looking forward to it.  Yeah. You have a very interesting business and very interesting profile, so I can’t wait to jump in. But let me ask you my favorite question. What is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business?  I guess you could say that my personal ‘Why’ has evolved over several years. I spent 25 years in corporate America, and that was the best business education I could have ever received. My first failure as an entrepreneur, though, added to that significantly, and that was right before I started DeepTarget. Luckily, it was a quick failure, but that doesn’t mean it was not a difficult one. And in every way, the lessons learned have come in handy today. So I believe that I’m in my final chapter of my career, so I can speak from years of experience. And my personal ‘Why’ is—it’s always been about people for me. I’ve never believed in the lone genius.  I believe that every person has some spark of genius in a different way. And I have always been inspired by pulling out that spark and weaving a tapestry of people. Share on X And that happened even in my job in corporate America, but it happens even more with my team today as an entrepreneur at DeepTarget. So it’s about empowering people to use that spark rather than focusing on something that they may not be as good at. It’s pulling out that strength and making it the collective strength of a solution, of how we serve customers, and of the business itself. Does that make sense?  Oh, yeah. This is great. I love that. My experience is that nearly none of the companies I talk to—or basically none of them, literally none of them—capitalize on the maximum talent of their team. Because it’s impossible to maximize it completely, but you can work on it, and that is wonderful.  Yeah.  So do you have a process for how you do that? Is there a mental process? Is it just an awareness? Is it a curiosity? Is it a natural thing that you do, or do you actually have a way of doing this?  So I have found that I think I read people. I think I’m intuitive in that way. And so I see myself as being the orchestrator of whatever it is, whether I’m working on today’s problem or whether I’m working on the big vision. I don’t know that it’s a process so much, but I have used it over and over again. It’s become a very natural thing for me.  So you talk about the big vision. What is that big vision?  So as a company, my focus is on making our clients successful. What that means is helping them grow their financial institutions. Share on X We work with credit unions and banks, and it’s all about growth. And we use innovation to leverage that growth for them. How do you acquire new account holders? How do you cross-sell to them? How do you communicate with them? How do you retain them? I’m a techie at heart, so it’s been about how do I leverage data? How do I leverage—today, of course—AI, kind of a combination of data and AI, to make sure that they are able to see the growth they need for their financial institutions? And that’s kind of become the mission that we have adopted for the company.  Yeah. I noticed that on your website you have this map of, I think, seven or eight different ways that you’re driving adoption and contact with people and—  It’s highly data-driven. It’s not wishy-washy. We’ve evolved from being a marketing company to a growth company. And when you take anything that’s data-driven into marketing, yeah, it’s something that people like to do. But what we like to do is use the technology to get to the human—to get to the individual. So we are helping our credit unions and banks reach individuals, understand each account holder, and understand what their financial needs are. And the only way you can do that at scale is by using technology and data. So we’ve built a platform that enables them to do that. That’s why the front end is all data, right? We can accept as much data as they want to give us so that we can do the right things to help them grow and engage their account holders.  Yeah. I like that you’re very techy, as you say—techy and data-driven. So I wonder, what is your mental model when you think about the end customers of your financial institution clients? What’s your mental model for how you innovate this process? So what are the major elements? If you had to synthesize it down to maybe three to five elements—your levers that you can pull—what are those?  Great question. So I’m going to start with the people because, for me, everything revolves around people. What I’ve been able to do is combine very seasoned pros with fresh graduates from local universities, and that has been a potent combination. Okay? That’s number one. Whether I’m talking about development, customer success, or sales, that’s been the combination that has worked for me. And as a bootstrapper, that has also helped me financially. You have a very seasoned pro that I’ve worked with for years, and you know exactly what their strengths are.  And then you put some fresh graduates under them. I’m telling you, there’s nothing better. That combination is second to none. The second thing is, I believe in thinking big, but starting small and scaling quickly. I learned that over time. There was a time when we used to have the big-bang theory of creating products. Share on X We have moved so far away from that. So think big, start small, and be agile. And as a small company, that’s a big advantage for me. We have a very flat structure. And so we’re able to have the agility we need to move markets, frankly. If you’re going to fail, fail quickly.  Have a tight customer feedback loop. And if something isn’t going to work for your customer, just abandon it. Abandon it quickly. I can’t say, in all honesty, that I’ve done that every time, but it’s always on my mind: “Should we really even pursue this?” I know we’ve had projects that we thought would be very successful, but they weren’t. But when you’ve only made a small investment, it’s easier to set it aside. “Okay, it’s not working. This is not what we need to do. Let’s move on.”  Yeah, I love that. Can you give an example where you invested in a process and really believed in it, and it turned out not to work, and then you had to pivot from it?  So the way we help banks and credit unions engage and cross-sell to their account holders is primarily through digital banking. We put up very personalized offers using data in the digital banking environment and use that real estate very effectively. It works like a charm. That’s what we do today. We did get a little sidetracked by expanding that into email, and we didn’t see the kind of growth we expected. So we tried to understand that. We did kind of an autopsy. And the difference is that when you log into digital banking, you’re being served something. The difference with email is that you’re pushing something out. It has its uses, for sure, but the particular aspect of what we had done in the product didn’t take off like we expected. So we just said, “Okay, let’s do more of what we can do within the digital banking environment.”  But that works for farming existing customers of the banks, right? Do you also help banks acquire new customers?  Yes. And that’s where email works, by the way. And so does direct mail, and so do digital ads. When you’re cross-selling to existing account holders, you have a lot of information about them. For example, if they rent a home, you would never give them a HELOC offer, right? But on the other hand, what we’re doing for new account acquisition is still using data. We’re looking at who the most profitable customers are that your credit union or bank has, and using that as the model to find more likely customers within a particular radius of their branches. So we are still using data, but in a different way and using different channels to reach them versus digital banking.  That’s fascinating. So what drives growth in your business?  Well, if you had asked me that question 10 years ago, I would have said innovation drives growth. But what we have found and learned over time is that innovation is an engine.

    22 Min.

  7. 26. Mai

    333: Turn Your IT into Your Growth Engine with Tom Kirkham

    https://youtu.be/sUyjA0muVgM Tom Kirkham, Founder and CEO of Kirkham IronTech, believes business should create value for everyone involved — employees, clients, vendors, and the broader community. After overcoming major personal challenges and rebuilding his perspective on leadership, Tom embraced stakeholder capitalism and built a company culture focused on long-term partnerships, trust, and continuous learning. In this conversation, Tom shares the IronTech Framework — a practical approach to modern IT management built around three core pillars: Generate ROI and Productivity, Make Cybersecurity Core, and Surround it with a Governance Layer. He explains why businesses should stop treating IT as an expense and instead view it as a strategic investment that improves productivity, protects the company from cyber threats, and aligns technology with leadership goals. Tom also dives into the massive scale of the cybercrime industry, why governance is often the missing piece in cybersecurity, and how proactive IT strategy can dramatically improve business performance. — Turn Your IT into Your Growth Engine with Tom Kirkham Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and today’s guest is Tom Kirkham, the Founder and CEO of Kirkham IronTech, where he helps businesses build strong, secure IT foundations, whether fully managed, co-managed, or cybersecurity only. Tom is a keynote speaker on cybersecurity, and he’s the author of two books, Hack the Rich and The Cyber Pandemic. Tom, welcome to the show.  Oh, it’s great to be here, Steve.  Well, great to have you here. And I am curious to dive in, and would like to ask you my favorite question. What is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in Kirkham IronTech?  That’s a great question. So the company’s about twenty-six years old. I went through a lot of personal health problems, and then my wife was real sick, and she ended up passing away—it’s been about eleven years ago now. And I was fortunate enough to put a friend of mine in the company, and he was able to take over while I was dealing with this for a couple of years. And when most of it was done, I took some time off and did a lot of traveling and a lot of thinking and a lot of reading. And I’m a lifelong reader, a lifelong learner, and I went back through my history of investing techniques, understanding what makes a good company great. If you’ve read Jim Collins, you know what I’m talking about. And so during those times, I was reflecting, studying philosophy, studying biographies of other CEOs like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Andy Grove—gosh, the list goes on and on. Whether you like them or hate them, it doesn’t matter, right? There’s always something you can learn. And I came upon and read a lot about stakeholder capitalism. Like Peter Drucker says, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” And I understood what that meant, and it was kind of weird. So when I re-engaged with the company, I identified one of the weaknesses, and I said, “Well, if we need to do marketing in this business—which we have to do in any business—I really need to master marketing.” So I spent a lot of time with marketing gurus, most of them are what I would consider household names these days, and re-engaged with the company to do marketing to establish a great culture around stakeholder capitalism. In other words, we exist as a for-profit business not just for the shareholders but for everyone—the community, vendors, employees. And I really wanted to be around people I enjoyed being around. I wanted them to enjoy coming into work. Share on X And so we’ve been trying to perfect that system in the culture for the past ten years. Of course, no one’s perfect, but if you pursue perfection, you can achieve excellence. And I think we’ve done a really good job. We have very low turnover. Everyone seems genuinely happy to be there, and it’s really fulfilling. It’s more of a personal feeling because I’ve been a successful investor practically my whole adult life. I started investing in stocks when I was nineteen, and I’m sixty-four now. So I didn’t really need the company. I could have just closed it up or sold it or whatever. But I really wanted to have my own reasons. Those are the things that drive me, and I hope they drive everyone else too.  What resonated with you with this idea of stakeholder capitalism? It just made sense. The obvious part is with employees—all of that is true. That’s obvious to any good leader or manager, right? As you well know, there’s a difference between leadership and management, and understanding that distinction, and the difference between sales and marketing, and understanding those things. A good example is dealing with vendors. There are all sorts of vendors that supply products and services to us, so we carefully vet these tools and vendors to see if their values align with ours, just like we do with prospects. But especially with vendors, if it’s something new—a new tool that we’re going to invest a lot of time, money, and energy into to make their product or service successful for us and successful for them—we make a commitment to that vendor.  So it’s not about the money or how cheap I can get it. What I want is a good partnership with every stakeholder. And I want to make sure that when I’m dealing with a vendor, if it fails for us, it’s not our fault—it’s their fault, right? Either they oversold the product or they didn’t deliver on the service component. I didn’t want it to be because we failed to do the right training, or didn’t communicate properly, or missed all the other things that are just part of doing business the right way. And that applies to our employees, our local community, and every stakeholder in the company.  Yeah. I like it. So you’re looking for partnership-based relationships where it’s win-win. And yeah, if you want people to stick around, it has to make sense for them too. You can’t exploit your partners forever without consequences. So that makes a lot of sense. So Tom, let me ask you this other question. This podcast is called The Management Blueprint because I’m always looking for frameworks—something practical that helps businesses achieve results. Usually it’s some kind of three-to-five-step process that helps you grow the business, get customers, improve operations, or understand something at a deeper level. So when I ask about your favorite business framework, what comes to mind?  Well, we have a thing we call the IronTech Framework.  Okay.  And it was something that we came up with many years ago and started practicing seven or eight years ago, and it’s a framework. It’s like the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. I looked at NIST and there’s five components to it, and it’s about cybersecurity. And I looked at this and I go, “None of this works without the right policies and procedures in place.” The security training—it’s not enough just to throw it out there and tell all your people to take it. You’ve got to follow up, you’ve got to manage, and coach, and everything like that. And so I started adding this governance component to the way we sold it, presented it, and practiced what we do for our clients day in and day out. Help them develop the policies and procedures for all of the different things, the protocols.  If somebody accidentally fires off a ransomware attack, they need to know they’re not going to be penalized for it. We need to know as soon as possible to stop it. And just little things like that, there’s a lot that really improve the effectiveness of all of these tools and services that we provide to their clients. And unbeknownst to me, NIST, who has the cybersecurity framework, they added governance about three years ago to the other five things. And so that was kind of nice to know that we were exhibiting some thought leadership. And so when we go in, it’s all well and good if you want to put these protections in and these particular products, but we’re a best-of-breed company. Like one of our critical tools that’s required for our clients to put in place, to buy it and use it every single day on every single computer, is what’s known as an EDR. And it’s basically an AI-based super turbo antivirus.  To even call it an antivirus is not doing it justice. So there’s three legs to the IronTech Framework. We want to make sure that you’re getting a return on your investment in IT, because that’s why you buy it. If you treat IT as an expense, you need to kind of change the way you’re thinking. You want to improve productivity and efficiency. Share on X The second leg is cybersecurity, because a bad cyberattack can put you out of business. I think the last stats I saw were something like 40 to 60% of businesses go out of business within two years of a significant cyberattack. And then finally, the third is governance. That’s the three legs of our IronTech Framework. So part of governance is engaging with our clients’ management and leadership—the CEO, finance, of course the CIO, the CISO or security officer, and maybe even the board sometimes. Really getting to know: what are your objectives, and how can we utilize our services to best help your company realize those objectives? Because for most companies, there’s no other vendor they engage with as much as us.  We’re talking to Susie every day. We’re talking to Bill every day. We know that Mary’s out sick and Steve’s on vacation. I mean, when you’re running help desk, stopping attacks, providing training, and all the support we provide along those lines, we get to know their company better than practically any other vendor by far. So it really helps if our clients treat us as a partner to help them realize their goals and objectives. And when all of that clicks into place, then it makes

    21 Min.

  8. 18. Mai

    332: 5 Steps to Engineering Breakthroughs with Drew Allen

    https://youtu.be/tU0kHdf7oXo Drew Allen, CEO of Grace Technologies, is driven by a mission to lead a life of adventure and impact. At Grace Technologies, that impact is tangible: the company develops electrical safety and predictive maintenance solutions that help industrial teams prevent downtime, improve productivity, and, most importantly, send workers home safely at the end of the day. We explore Drew’s Product Engineering Framework — Clarify the Problem You’re Solving, Understand the Constraints, Think from First Principles, Build a Prototype, and Iterate within a Time Limit — a practical approach to innovation in technical product development. Drew explains why rapid iteration beats overbuilding, how constraints can unlock better engineering decisions, and why time-boxing product development prevents teams from getting stuck in endless perfectionism. He also shares how Grace Technologies is expanding into the data center market, where rising power density is creating new safety challenges and new opportunities for growth. — 5 Steps to Engineering Breakthroughs with Drew Allen  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and today’s guest is Drew Allen, the CEO of Grace Technologies—the leading innovator of electrical safety products and predictive maintenance solutions that help companies maximize productivity and foster a safety culture. Drew, welcome to the show.  Hey, thanks for having me, Steve. I’m excited. I’ve really enjoyed your books, and they’ve had a big impact on our business. So it’s great to have this conversation today.  Yeah, glad to have you here. So if you enjoyed the book or read Pinnacle and Summit OS perhaps, then you’re going to be familiar with this question. What is your personal “Why,” and how are you manifesting it Grace Technologies?  So my personal “Why” is to lead a life of adventure and impact. And I think that manifests in our company. We try to be as innovative as possible. Typically, around 30% of our annual sales come from products released within the last two to three years. We try to take risks, not in kind of a willy-nilly way, but we try to be smart about our risk-taking, but still make sure that we’re taking risks and we’re on the forefront of the technology edges. In our business, it’s really easy to see the impact that we have. Not many businesses get to say that we literally send people home at the end of the day. We literally save lives, and we don’t take that responsibility very lightly. And so it’s a little way that we can kind of make a dramatic impact in the world. We get a lot of stories of people who have been going to go to work on an electrical system. They were just moving throughout their day, trying to do their work, and all of a sudden they saw that our unit was indicating and they were about to put their hand on that bus bar or that cable, and they stop and realize, “Oh, there’s still power there.” And they could have been either severely injured or dead. And so we get those stories quite frequently, and so it's really impactful to hear that, to know that we're doing that kind of good in the world. Share on X   Yeah, I love that. And yes, I mean, it’s dangerous. My son actually worked for an electrical contractor last year, and they told him the story that they were in big industrial facilities and one of their workers was trying to fix a light and he got shocked. And the only way to save him was to kick the ladder out from under him. He ended up breaking his leg. So it was kind of funny story afterward, but also a very dramatic one at the same time. So yeah, you definitely want to avoid situations like that.  100%.  And I think what you do is really great, and focusing on the safety aspect is very important as well. What I’m wondering—because I’m a framework guy and I’m always looking for new frameworks people have developed—and obviously within the Pinnacle system there are a lot of frameworks. But you’ve been doing this for a few years, and I’m sure that you have come up with your own. So what is your favorite framework—something simple enough for listeners to understand in maybe three to five steps—that could help them improve their business?  My favorite framework really comes from Jim Collins’ work on the Flywheel. And I think you reference it in your book as well, Steve. I think if people can see their business—or even their life—through the lens of a flywheel, it becomes really useful. So in our business, our flywheel is relatively simple. And I think there are probably only a limited number of flywheel models companies really operate under. Our version of a product flywheel works like this:  We start with amazing new products and services. If we do that well, we naturally excite our channel partners. When our channel gets excited, they can’t help but get us specified by customers. Once we’re specified by customers, it grows our revenues, unit sales, and customer base. Share on X And as that happens, it expands the power of the brand, which allows us to set high prices and deliver higher gross margins to be able to reinvest into R&D for amazing new products and services. And I think while maybe there’s a couple of pieces in ours channel-specific or whatever, we found that most of my focus as CEO is just constantly figuring out how do I push those pieces of the flywheel, and where is the current bottleneck in the flywheel? Is the bottleneck getting the specifications? Is the bottleneck the wrong product? One of the challenges in our business is that we have a 12-month product development cycle plus an 8-to-12-month sales cycle for products. So if I miss, I’m basically down for two years. And I don’t really know it early enough unless I’m paying close attention to the leading indicators—which we’ve become much smarter about over the last few years. A lot of business people tend to focus only on lagging indicators, and they’re not always clear on what the leading indicators are in their business—or how correlated those leading indicators are to the lagging results.  I’ll say this: the most recent releases of Claude have made it incredibly easy to input a bunch of variables and figure out how strongly your leading indicators correlate with your lagging success. I probably haven’t done that kind of work since college and deep regression analysis or logarithmic modeling. And now Claude makes it so easy. So if you can identify the leading indicators tied to your future success, and you know there’s an 80% or 85% correlation, then that leading indicator is almost as valuable as the lagging indicator itself. And if your lagging indicator is revenue, that gives you a pretty strong signal about what you should actually be focusing on. Share on X Yeah. That’s a great way to reverse-engineer those leading indicators from the outcomes you’re targeting. I love that. So when you say that one of the flywheel cogs is for people to specify your product, what do you mean by that exactly? We come out with a product, and then we get meetings with large end-user customers. Okay? Our products are really sold into two major markets. One is the industrial market—everything from where things come out of the ground, like oil and gas, pulp and paper, and mining—to all the downstream processing industries, including automotive, tire and rubber, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, all those kinds of industries like shipbuilding, naval yards, and all those kinds of environments. All of these places have complex electrical and control systems. And when a factory or facility is being designed or upgraded, someone is writing a specification document.  That specification literally defines how everything should be built—including the machinery and the electrical systems. So we want to make sure our products, from an electrical safety perspective, are included in those specification documents. We’ve been really fortunate to get into some of the world’s largest companies’ control specifications Share on X companies like Amazon, Procter & Gamble, GM, and Ford. These large organizations really see the value in our products from both a productivity and a safety standpoint. And that’s really the key to our success: driving specifications with large end-user customers. Yeah. So it sounds like when you get specified, then essentially you’re baked in to their product, and then you kind of have, at least for the time being, you have a monopoly of supplying them. Is that the case?  Yeah. And some specifications are a little more open. They may specify our type of device, or they may even list competitors as alternatives. And then it becomes a little more of a street brawl when we’re competing. But either way, we want to grow the overall market for products like ours—not just our own products—because we’re in the safety business. And I think it’s really shortsighted to be selfish about that. I think we have much more opportunity if the overall pie grows than if we focus only on increasing our individual slice of the pie. Of course, I’m going to do the best I can to grow our share. But ultimately, electrical safety and electrical reliability in factories are still major problems. And the number of deaths, injuries, and life-changing accidents we hear about—it continues. We hear those stories all the time, and we don’t want those things to happen. Yeah. Love it. So your business is innovation-driven, and you are designing these electrical appliances that increase productivity, reduce risk. What is the major success factor in being able to come up with new products along these lines?  Yeah, so I guess I’ll tell you my biggest failure. Okay? I’ll use the failure to illustrate the point. That’s good. I think I was about 25 or 26 years old, and I was working with a c

    23 Min.
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