Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

Steve Preda
  • 5.0 (35)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Weekly

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

  1. 4d ago

    377: Sell Your Story on Social with Sean McGraw

    https://youtu.be/X_Tmw9SdNtY Sean McGraw, Founder and CEO of FOR Energy, shows leaders how to sell your story on social while building a scalable, systems-driven company. Guided by servant leadership, Sean runs a mission-centered residential energy business that helps Phoenix-area homeowners lower energy costs, improve comfort, and address indoor air quality. In this conversation, Sean introduces The McGraw Business Build Framework—Org. Chart, Depth Chart, Playbooks, and Processes. He explains why systems create predictable outcomes, how playbooks combine mission and training with SOPs, and why processes should cover the repeatable 80% without overcomplicating the business. Sean also shares how speed, planning, and execution drive growth, why leaders must empower teams to decide within guardrails, and how FOR Energy uses social storytelling to market a holistic service that customers may not know to search for. — Sell Your Story on Social with Sean McGraw  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint. And today my guest is Sean McGraw, the Founder and CEO of FOR Energy, a full-service residential energy company helping homeowners reduce their energy costs, increase comfort, and improve indoor air quality through energy efficiency. FOR is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona, where there is rain right now. There is. Sean, welcome to the show.  Thanks for having me, Steve. Excited to be here.  Yeah, it’s great. And I was wondering about your business because I have a client who is in the energy efficiency business in Maryland, but they have a completely different climate. So I was thinking that what you have to do is really reduce heat, and what they have to do much of the year is to increase heat. So it’s kind of the opposite thing.  It is. Yeah. Arizona is a unique place. We get 115-degree heat for three, four months at a time. So our job is to keep heat out. Their job is to keep heat in. It’s actually the same concepts. You’re just dealing with different seasons, and it can still get hot in Maryland. So when they make a home energy efficient, they also want to keep the cold air in in the summertime.  Yeah, that’s right. And insulation is a big part of it. So we are going to dive into this. But before we go there, I’d like to ask you, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business?  Yeah. My personal “Why” is very generic and very simple. I want to leave this earth better than I found it. I want to leave a legacy behind me. I’ve got two young kids. And I would tell you this, my perspective’s changed since having those kids. My most important job in life is raising them right, raising them to be high-functioning members of society that give back. They’re philanthropic. They’re good people. I would say that ties into my company too.  So we’re a very mission-, vision-, core-value-centric company. One of our main core values is servant leadership. So part of our philosophy is, for our entire team, for the people that we hire, hire people that want to serve other people, whether that’s philanthropically outside of the office, whether it’s a coworker needing a hand or wanting to learn a new skill. We’re very big on just pushing and doing good things outward because it always comes back.  Yeah, I love it. Hire servant leaders. So what does servant leadership mean to you?  Yeah, I think maybe I have a unique definition, but servant leadership kind of evolved from a book that we had read called The Go-Giver. It’s a phenomenal book. It’s about the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success. And so servant leadership to me is elevating those around you.  So it could be something as simple as I’m going to go clean up a park with my kids this weekend on Saturday when they could be playing or hanging out with friends doing something more fun. But I really want to ingrain in people around me, the more you serve and the more you better your community and those around you, the better your quality of life gets. Share on X So it’s really, really important.  Love it. Elevate people around you. That’s definitely a good rule to live by. So Sean, this podcast is called Management Blueprint, and we focus on unearthing great frameworks that people are using.  Yep.  So I wonder if you could share a framework with us, with our listeners, that you have discovered which helps you be more effective or a better servant leader or gain clients or serve clients or do something in your business that is easy to understand. It can be explained in three to five steps that people, when they hear it, could apply to their own business.  Oh gosh, this is a multilayered, complicated question, but I’ll tell you. I’ve read Scaling Up, I’ve read The E-Myth, I’ve read the EOS framework, and I’ve kind of pieced together pieces from a lot of these systems. And really, for us specifically, and even businesses I look at and admire, systems run the business. It’s rarely a person doing a bad— It can happen, of course. But if you’re hiring to your mission, vision, values, you’re hiring, firing, and promoting to those, everything after that should fall into systems.  And systems from top to bottom of the company run the company and allow a company to grow and keep the train on the tracks and create this predictable outcome. Share on X So I would tell you the first framework that really changed things for me and my company is simply putting together the structure of the company and kind of the platform that we’re going to use to grow. So the first step for us in that was putting together a living, breathing org chart. And that’s just the first step. But most companies don’t have an up-to-date org chart, which to me is crazy in a lot of ways because it’s the hierarchy, it’s the communication channels. And the reason I say it’s living, moving, breathing is because positions change.  New positions are added. Team members may join the team, team members may exit the team. And so keeping that up to date is a foundational piece for us. So that’s number one. Number two is a depth chart. If this person isn’t here, who can do that job? To me it’s ultra important, especially for companies from, let’s say, $1 million to $6 million, $7 million, because you have a lot of single points of failure. You might have one person that knows how to do a very, very important job, and hypothetically speaking, if that person got hit by a bus tomorrow, what do you do? So creating that depth chart.  The third piece for us was creating playbooks and training and operating manuals for every single position in the company. And we’re not perfect at this. Updating them is kind of the challenge that I think we need to get better at. But people can’t be successful at a job if they don’t have proper training and a proper blueprint to be successful at that job. And then I would say the fourth thing is creating processes around anything that you’re doing 80% of the time. So there’s always going to be one-offs in business. There’s always going to be a phone call I’m not expecting and some kind of challenge that my team or myself have to solve for.  But for 80% of the business, it’s happening every single day, and those items should be documented and infused in the training for that position and well-known throughout the company. So that framework has served us well. We’ve been gut-punched a lot of times over the last couple of years, Steve. Like, business is harder than it’s been in a long time. We had a pretty good-sized solar company, and there’s been a lot of legislation changes, a lot of bad actors in the space that have completely changed the landscape of solar.  So we’ve kind of pivoted, and we’re kind of reinventing ourselves and really focused on energy efficiency, which allows us to go back and relay the foundation in a lot of ways. But those are the items that have really served us well, and as we continue to hit these levels in business, we do have to go revisit how we’re doing things. And that system worked at $2 million. Is it going to work at $10 million? Probably not. So we’re always looking at ways to make things better, faster, less expensive with the same or better outcome, and it is most of the time possible to do.  Yeah. That’s fascinating. So you mentioned playbooks and then process. What’s the difference between playbooks and process in your vocabulary?  Yeah, to me, they do go hand in hand. So a process is something like, how do we take a phone call from a customer? I’ll use that as a very basic example. So some companies, you can walk into their call center and they just have people saying, “Hello?” It’s not a right way to answer the phone. But if you don’t train somebody on how you expect them to answer the phone, well, shame on you. They did their job. They’re supposed to answer the phone. So, “Hey, this is Sean with FOR Energy. How may I help you today?” There’s a big difference between the two.  But simply by documenting and identifying something, and then walking them through how to accept an appointment, how to put it on the calendar, how to make sure that by the time they’re done with that phone call, it’s ready for that next step, that’s a process. And that process should be a part of the playbook. The playbook is kind of, I don’t mean this in any negative way, it’s the Holy Bible for that position. Like, you need to follow it like gospel. And if you do, you’re creating a path of consistent results. Without the playbook, you’re creating chaos every single time.  So the playbook is like a high-level process for the function, and then the process is more of an SOP?  Yeah, I think that’s a good description. So the playbook might be a collection of SOPs, but it’s going to go deeper than that. It’s going to explain our missi

  2. 6d ago

    376: Become a Clear-Eyed Visionary Founder with Danielle Hayden

    https://youtu.be/pLxW3zFIff8 Danielle Hayden, CEO of Kickstart Accounting, shows business owners how to become a clear-eyed visionary founder by building financial literacy from the ground up. A former corporate CFO, Danielle created an education-first accounting firm that helps entrepreneurs understand their numbers, make confident decisions, and grow stronger businesses. In this conversation, Danielle introduces The Financial Evolution Framework—The Foundations, The Empowered Business Owner, and The Visionary Business Owner. She explains how business owners progress from understanding sales, net income, and profit percentages to using financial IQ for hiring, tax strategy, and growth, then setting a 10-year vision, three-year plan, one-year budget, and quarterly KPIs. Danielle also shares why accurate bookkeeping must precede CFO strategy, how referrals and partnerships drive growth, and why developing middle managers remains essential as her 50-person firm scales. — Become a Clear-Eyed Visionary Founder with Danielle Hayden  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here, and my guest today is Danielle Hayden, the CEO of Kickstart Accounting, a virtual accounting firm that delivers full-service bookkeeping, accounting, and CFO services designed to take accounting off small business owners’ plates and get the support they need to understand their numbers. Danielle, welcome to the show.  Thank you so much for having me. This is my favorite thing to do. Love talking about numbers and helping business owners.  Well, this is your lucky day because I’m also a CPA by training, although I don’t practice it anymore, and I didn’t qualify in this country. I was in the UK, but nevertheless, my wife is also a CPA, so we get to talk debits and credits over dinner.  You get the language. I love it.  So talking about which, Danielle, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business?  Yeah. My personal why, I don’t think I realized it almost 12 years ago when I started the business, but it’s to help educate other people. Not everyone understands accounting. And I remember my Accounting Principles II professor, he kept on saying to me, “You get it. You have to be an accountant. You get it. People don’t always get it.” And I don’t think I understood what he meant at the time. But it is a gift, and it's a gift to understand this language of business. Share on X   And so my passion has been doing exactly this, helping business owners understand their numbers so that they can make more empowering, confident decisions in their business, which has this amazing effect in their community. So when I think about loving the community and small business, it’s because every single business owner, when you finally understand your numbers, you can hire more people, you can serve more clients, you can make a bigger impact in your community. Share on X And it’s just like, oh my gosh, this is such an amazing mission to be on to spread small business.  Yeah. I couldn’t agree with you more. And actually, there are different levels to it. So you can understand big picture, maybe you understand your P&L first, income statement, balance sheet, and then your KPIs, and then your margins and all that stuff. So just a quick story. Our older son is the one that is following in our footsteps out of four children, who is starting working with PwC, and he didn’t want to be an accountant, but he loved this idea of this is the language of business, and he wants to be a businessperson. So that really resonated with me.  Yeah. Yeah. I love that.  So Danielle, this is a podcast of frameworks, so I wonder, do you have a framework that maybe you use to teach people accounting or teach them understand their numbers? Maybe there are levels of understanding numbers, something that can be explained in three to five steps that our audience would benefit from?  Yeah. So I’ll walk you through our framework of where we see business owners. So I’ve worked with thousands of business owners over the last 11 years. And what I find, people go through this trajectory in their financial education, and we start off with foundations. And when we are learning the foundations, and I don’t just mean as a brand-new business owner. This might be you’re three years in, five years in, and you might still be at the foundational level.  But what that means to me is that you are learning the basics of the language. What does a P&L mean? What does net income mean for me as a business owner and then for my tax return? How do I look at my percentage of income and how I’m spending my money, and how that benchmarks to other businesses in my industry? Where are my sales coming from? And how do I just start to think about using these numbers as a business owner? So we come in at this foundational stage.  And then usually, as our clients work with us at Kickstart, so we also build our business and SOPs, frameworks, and our product, what we call the Snapshot. So as our clients, they finally have bookkeeping in place. They’re for the first time looking at clean, organized financials. It allows them to start to learn the language, and then they start to move into empowered. So that empowered business owner, you are starting to embody a CEO seat. So you’re starting to think, “Ah, it’s my responsibility to know these numbers, to use them to make business decisions. I’m thinking about hiring.  Let me look at my numbers to make that business decision. I’m thinking about tax strategy as well as building a business of value.” So that empowered business owner, I think of it as starting to put that CEO hat on, where you’re no longer hiding from the numbers and you’re willing to open up your email from your money team every single month, really read it and ask yourself, “What happened? Why did it happen? And what am I going to do about it?” So that’s where our bookkeeping clients sit, from foundations into empowered.  Kind of the last tier that I see is that visionary business owner, where we’re moving from just being the CEO to being a visionary. That means that you are casting the vision for your business, and this is where we work with our CFO-level clients, looking at the 10-year goals. Where do I want to be at in my business and my personal life in 10 years? Call that the North Star. By creating a three-year plan. I can’t get to where I want to go in 10 years if I don’t know where I’m going in three.  But again, business and personal. And then creating a complete SWOT analysis: strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. So then ground in a one-year budget where we are planning out the income and expenses of the business, and then from that visionary seat, we can cast the quarterly KPIs for true accountability. So to me, that’s kind of like the top of that pyramid where we can aspire to sit as that visionary who’s going to cast the vision for the business.  Wow. You got the whole picture. I love it.  Yes.  So what’s the timeline for people? So if someone maybe comes in as a newbie, and they have very rudimentary understanding, if at all. They’re just surviving. Just instinctively, they look at their bank balance beginning and end of the month, and as long as they are in the black, they can make decisions. So from that point, for somebody to be able to step up to the empowered business owner stage, how long does it take?  I’ll say it depends on you, right? It’s like asking, “How long is it going to take me to lose 50 pounds?” Well, it depends. Are you going for a walk every day? Do you go to the gym and lift weights? What are you eating? Do you eat healthy during the week and then eat pizza all weekend? It’s not going to be the same, right? So I use that as an analogy because if you lean in and educate yourself, you ask questions, and you let your money team support you, we actually see clients moving through this pretty quickly.  I would say about six months. So when our clients come to us, we put their QuickBooks into our chart of accounts, meaning that we’re going to put them in our strategic framework, which makes it easier to use the numbers moving forward. Once we clean up QuickBooks, we start sending our clients what we call the Snapshot, and the Snapshot’s an easy-to-read overview dashboard of their numbers. And we take an education-first approach with our clients. So for the first three months that they are with us, they get a weekly email educating them on one portion of their financial statements and how to read it.  So for somebody who’s like, “Yes, I’m going to read your email,” you’re going to move from foundations to empowered much faster. If you’re somebody who is not ready, you’re putting your head in the sand, and maybe you even sign up for bookkeeping and tax services, but you don’t answer the emails, you don’t book the calls, you don’t read the emails, and you’re still not ready to actually partner with your team, it’s going to take you much longer.  Okay. So when you say partner with your team, what do you mean by that?  So for our clients, we offer, depending on the package, monthly or quarterly financial review calls. So lean in and book the calls. Every month we theme our financial statements. So for instance, last month we talked about net income and what a healthy percentage of net income means. We provide a podcast episode, education, and how it compares to your financials.  This month, I’m really excited about this month, it’s the balance sheet and understanding your balance sheet trends, cash, debt, and equity. Where’s your cash hiding? And we’ll have, again, a podcast episode, content around that, and then we’ll show our clients their balance sheet. So if you are leaning in, reading the emails, watching the podcast episodes, booking the financial review calls, looking

  3. Oct 26

    375: Build a Supergroup of Retired Experts with Tom Pugh

    https://youtu.be/wlAcWeaQaFs Tom Pugh, Founder and former CEO of Pugh Associates, shows experienced professionals how to build a supergroup of retired experts by staying in their swim lane, recruiting seasoned peers, and pursuing complex opportunities years in advance. After 35 years in Navy and defense engineering, Tom started his consulting business at 60 to use his expertise while staying home to support his wife. In this conversation, Tom introduces The Supergroup of Experts Framework—Stick to Your Swim-lane, Keep Tabs on Talented Peers, Identify Opportunities, Nurture Decision Makers, and Eat What You Kill Together. He explains how he assembled experienced engineers, offered their expertise on a fractional basis, and paired them with younger professionals to transfer knowledge. Tom also shares why in-person presence drives growth, how shared-risk compensation helped launch the firm, and why complex contracts should be pursued years before an RFP appears. — Build a Supergroup of Retired Experts with Tom Pugh  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Thomas Pugh, the Founder and former CEO of Pugh Associates, a firm that supports the U.S. Navy, Army, and Coast Guard customers with combat system engineering, integration, test, and program management services. Thomas now consults and advises defense, maritime, and space organizations managing complex technical programs. Tom, welcome to the show.  Yeah. Well, hey, thank you for having me, and I’ve enjoyed chatting with you just before the show, and I look forward to getting on with it. Be good.  All right. Well, my first question is really my favorite question that I ask on this podcast. What is your personal why, and how have you manifested it through your business and perhaps your current consulting career?  Yeah. So it’s an interesting evolution. And I worked for the Navy. I got an engineering degree many, many years ago at Florida Tech, and in my first job, I ended up working for the Navy in their engineering system commands. And spent a bunch of years there. Got involved in the Aegis system, which is an air defense system, and along the way, spent a bunch of years with that.  Had a chance to go into private industry, worked for Northrop Grumman, and I was on a new ship class design, a Zumwalt class, as a systems engineer. And so, as we got to a critical design review, the tasking kind of ended for the systems engineering group. And I had to either get a new charge number, to quote my boss. If anybody who’s worked for a large corporation, you’ve probably heard that. I don’t know.  What’s a charge number? What’s a charge number? Is it like a salary?  Yeah. It’s a new project to work on where they’ll pay you. You couldn’t stay on overhead very long because you were making too much money as an engineer.  Okay. Got it. Yeah.  So they didn’t want you on overhead. So when I say get a new charge number, it’s a new project to work. And it coincided with my wife having some health problems. And so the why I started the business was I looked at what I was getting, what Northrop Grumman was charging for me versus how much they actually paid me. And I’m sitting there going, “I really need to help my wife out a little bit,” and going to work every day. Why don’t I print up some business cards?  And I got my son to build a website. And I said, “You know what, Northrop, I appreciate everything that you’ve done for me,” and we parted ways, and I started a consulting business. So that was the why. It was, “Hey, I have something to offer.” At that point, I had 35 years' experience or so, and why not provide that as a consultant and be able to help stay at home? Share on X So that’s the why I started the business, and that pretty much sums it up.  So how old were you when you started, if I may ask?  Good question. I started the business, so I must have been 60.  Wow.  Yeah. Yeah, I was 60.  That’s very courageous to start a business at 60.  Yeah, well, so all you entrepreneurs out there, when you feel like you’re stepping off a cliff, you’re giving up. At that point, I had a six-figure salary, and I’m going into this abyss where there isn’t any salary. And then you’re sitting there going, “Okay, how am I going to do this?” Right?  Back in the day, Steve, I don’t know if you ever remember, you’re old enough to probably have seen it, but we had a guy who would come on an advertisement, and he was making believe he was selling whatever he was selling. And he said, “I can do that. I can do that.” And then as soon as he hung up with the person he was selling, he says, “How am I going to do that?”  Sell first and figure out later. Yeah.  It’s like you’re stepping off into an abyss and giving up a very comfortable salary, but it was worth it because I was able to stay home with my wife.  Yeah.  But it was scary. And any entrepreneur, I’m sure, has experienced something very similar. Yeah.  Yeah. I love that. And for years when I was younger, I thought that I heard the story of Ray Kroc when he started McDonald’s at the age of 53 or 54. Great example. And I thought that was a late age to start a business, and I thought that this is kind of the latest one. But I think Colonel Sanders, he started at 68.  Oh, yeah. Yeah.  So it’s absolutely doable. So this podcast, Tom, this is a frameworks podcast.  So what I’m looking for in every episode is a framework that an entrepreneur has developed or figured out themselves or learned to understand, which allows you to simplify the world into a three- to five-step process, something important. Maybe it’s getting government contracts, maybe it’s designing something, maybe it’s satisfying a customer. I don’t know what it is, but does anything come to mind that can be explained in three to five elements? This is a framework that will allow our listeners to connect with your idea and perhaps try it in their own business.  Yeah. So it was an interesting evolution. Like I said, I had been providing my 35 years of experience through Northrop Grumman at the time and went out to start my own consulting business. I think the first thing is you’ve got to know what you’re selling and really want to do it. In other words, and I call it, stay in your swim lane. So my swim lane was two-pronged. One was systems engineering and project management. And so when I did start off, the first thing I did was contact folks that I knew and started to network for myself. It was just me.  And I got a small job from an engineer that I had worked for before. He knew what I knew. He knew he needed me for six months, and he threw me a few bucks, and that was it. It started it. Along the way, since I was at that age, it’s the retirement age a lot of people are looking at. And so a lot of the folks that I grew up with that had the same amount of experience as I did started trickling out as well. So I’d call them up, and Bob was my first recruit, a guy I had worked with for 20 years. And I said, “Hey, Bob, what do you want to be when you grow up?” And he said, “I might enjoy doing something consulting.” And I said, “Well, how about thinking about Pugh Associates?” And so that’s how it got started.  And it trickled along those lines. Matter of fact, it was a great conversation with Bob. So we’re making our first trip, and you were asking, so what’s the thing? First thing is stick with the swim lane that’s yours, that you’re an expert, you know it, and you like it. It’s not something that you dread, you hate it, you went to work every day and hated it. It’s something you really want to do. It could be a hobby. It could be something totally unrelated to what you’re doing. So anyway, stick to a swim lane and then network, sell yourself a little bit. Start small.  Don’t bite off too much. And then, like I said, as people that I knew, my goal was to corner the market of these guys coming out with the same experience that I had. And so every time I’d hear about a person that had experience in the business, the weapons and combat system business that I knew, I’d have the same conversation. And typically, one of them said no, he wasn’t interested. And guess what? Six months later, he’d call me. So I was able to build up a core of 11 engineers that had similar amounts of years of experience.  And so when we participated in an engineering project, we were experts in the room, and there was no doubt. And so what does that mean? I don’t care if you’re opening a bakery and you’re going to make cakes, you want to have the best cakes on the planet for a reasonable price. They don’t have to be the cheapest, but they certainly should be the best quality and a reasonable price. And I think that’s the same with what we did. We had some great engineers.  And then what we would sell, because we were expensive guys, is, hey, we’d go market and say, “Hey, you don’t want to hire my guys full-time. You want to hire us part-time and then glue a bright young engineer to us.” And in a year down the road, after you’ve got them pretty much oriented, they can drop back to part-time, and they get the benefit of your experience.  It’s kind of a fractional engineering service?  Yeah. That’s a good… I didn’t think of it that way, but that’s what it was. And so now, and it’s transitioned. If you go to Pugh Associates now, there’s a bunch of full-time employees. There’s still some very seasoned consultants, but there are also a lot of between entry-level and mid-level engineers. And Carol, you met Carol Wood, you mentioned that. Carol’s now the CEO. She took over for me a couple of years ago when I kind of throttled back. But it’s been great, and she’s done good. This past year, she’s managed to exceed

  4. Oct 23

    374: Build a High-EQ Business with Christy Setzer

    https://youtu.be/QAb3mfutLYM Christy Setzer, President of New Heights Communications, shows leaders how to build a high-EQ business through flexible work, manageable client loads, and culture-fit hiring. After years in politics and strategic communications, Christy built a consistently profitable firm where emotional intelligence supports workplace culture and attentive client service.  In this conversation, Christy introduces The High-EQ Business Framework—Hybrid/Flexible Work, Work-Life Balance, Fewer Clients/Advisor, Bring Your Whole Self, and Hire Culture Fits. She explains why emotional intelligence matters in a client-facing business, how limiting each advisor’s client load creates room for deeper strategy and thought partnership, and why growing firms must build systems that keep pace with revenue and headcount. Christy also shares reaching audiences through podcasts, Reddit, and Substack, as well as how online conversations can influence AI-generated answers.  — Build a High-EQ Business with Christy Setzer  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here, and my guest today on the Management Blueprint is Christy Setzer, the President of New Heights Communications, a strategic communications and public relations firm supporting labor unions, progressive advocacy, women’s groups, and others seeking to change the world for the better. Prior to starting New Heights in 2010, Christy served as a national spokesperson for the presidential campaigns of Vice President Al Gore, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, as well as numerous state and local races. Christy, welcome to the show.  Thank you so much for having me.  Well, it’s awesome to have you, and I don’t know. We’ve had over 350 episodes. I don’t recall having anyone similar to your profile. I mean, we may have had a couple of PR people, but definitely not who have been running campaigns and stuff like that. So that’s super exciting, and now you have a successful business on the back of your experience. But before we dive in, I’d like to ask you, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your practice?   Yeah. You know, it’s definitely changed over the years. When I started this business, it was not out of some great desire to start a big business or anything more. And I find that this is actually often true, that there’s a bit of a gender divide. I find that a lot of times when men are starting businesses, especially from politics, it is because, you know, look, we’re going to change the world.  We’re going to make a lot of money. You know, they have these sort of big dreams about it. And a lot of times, I think with women, it’s more like they don’t feel like they’re being used well in their current spaces. They feel like they’re sort of being overlooked, and look, maybe I would just have more success if I went out on my own or did something else in a sort of non-traditional path. And that was the case for me too. It started rather early. I was, at a young age, in my 20s, given pretty big jobs of, you know, the Iowa Press Secretary for Al Gore, for the sitting vice president, et cetera.  I had a lot of really good experiences. But by the time I was in my late 20s, I started noticing that men who were my same age and had my same level of experience were getting tapped for much bigger things, and none of my female friends were. And so that sort of planted a bit of a seed. And by the time I was in my early 30s, I had a job in-house working for the Service Employees Union. So a two-million-member labor organization. And I really enjoyed the job, but ultimately, it was sort of a big, somewhat bureaucratic organization where, again, I just didn’t really feel like I had a ton of agency over how high my ceiling was.  So when I left and started New Heights, it really was just more of an idea of, well, maybe I can kind of create a higher ceiling for myself than what’s been set for me. Over the years, that’s very much changed. And now, I mean, it’s really grown past my wildest expectations for myself. I mean, at one point I thought that the biggest possible dream that I had for my business was maybe one day we’ll hit a million dollars in revenue a year, and maybe we’ll have a team of like, I don’t know, 10 people. And we’ve hit multiples of that, many multiples of that.  So now the goal is, sure, you know, you keep moving the bar for yourself in terms of the money and the headcount and things like that, but really it’s about, can we have a bigger voice in the conversation? I run a political business. Can we really move the needle for our clients in order to change things and change the world for the better, in our view?  That’s very broad, you know, change the world for the better. Why is this important for you?  For some reason, it always has been. I am someone that was interested in politics even in high school. In college, I ran our College Democrats group and our College Women’s group, and I was always on student council. And that was just always something that was kind of interesting and important to me. My parents both sort of gave back in a one-on-one way. My mother was a teacher. She was a public school math teacher for many years. My father was a police officer.  But I really was drawn to the idea that in politics and policy and legislation, you can make change on a broader, more systemic level. And you can not just change one heart and mind, but you can potentially change millions. So that was kind of what drew me to it.  Okay. I like it. Change a million lives. That’s very inspirational. It’s probably practical too for you because you are on big platforms, big national networks. So let’s talk about your business, and specifically, this podcast is exploring frameworks that people discover and use. And the idea is that business owners who listen to this podcast, they might get inspired by your framework and they implement some version of it in their business. So what’s a framework that you could share in three to five steps with the audience?  Yeah. I mean, honestly, the big one for me has been and continues to be just create a business that's a place where you would want to work. Share on X So for many years, we were all remote, and that’s because we were small. It was myself and a few other people. But even before COVID, we became hybrid. There was a year in which we went from four people at the start of the year to eight people at the end of the year. And so I thought, okay, we should actually be meeting in person.  But I didn’t want to be in the office 100% of the time, and so we were in the office three days a week, work from where you wanted two days a week. So that was always important to me, was sort of that kind of hybrid piece. Now we’re actually all remote again, but we’ve kind of gone back and forth. And the idea there was that, you know, I thought sometimes I do my best work when we’re all together, and sometimes I do my best work just being able to be head down by myself, no distractions. So that was one thing.  Two, the work-life-balance piece was always really important to me too. I mean, some of which is, you know, as I said, illustrated in the fact that we were always either hybrid or all remote. But one of the ways that that plays out now is with a lot of PR firms, and most of the people on my team come from other, sometimes really big firms. They would have seven, eight, nine clients at a time, and what happens is that you can’t really go very deep with the clients. We do a lot of media relations, so you can get them that press hit and then move on to the next client. But you don’t really get to learn their why.  You don’t really get to learn what is driving the client and be able to give them more top-level advice. So it's not just a good move for my team's work-life balance that they only have, on average, about four clients. It's also good for our clients too Share on X They know that our people are not burned out. They know that they’re getting real attention. And again, all of this is about sort of like, create the business that you would want to work at.  And then sort of one final piece of that, I would say, is we really bring our whole selves to the office. Because we’re mostly remote, we do get together in person maybe once a month or so for lunch, happy hours, that kind of thing. But in the meantime, and again, it being a remote environment, we’re really into each other’s, like, showing pictures of our kids and our pets, and we have a book club and all of those kinds of things.  Which I feel like, if you’re not able to bring your full self to work, if you don’t actually enjoy spending eight hours a day with these people, what are you doing, right? So I’m hiring people for culture reasons, and I mean, I’m obviously hiring people who have a very experienced background in exactly what we’re looking for. But I’m also looking for a culture fit too, which is, is somebody going to really just add to our culture as well as just produce good work? Do you find that men are also as receptive to that part of the culture as women?  That is a great question. I think PR in general tends to be pretty female-dominated, and at times my business has been pretty 50/50 in terms of male/female. Right now, we’re almost all women. And I do wonder sometimes, yes, if that is, when I’m talking about the way that I’m describing this business, which is, again, we’re very successful, we’re very profitable, et cetera, and we’ve been consistently profitable. But I’m not leading with something that is a cutthroat approach.  We have targets for things like, again, our profitability or new business, that sort of thing. They’re not “If you don’t hit this, you’re out.” That’s just, I think, not how people produce their best work. And I do won

  5. Oct 21

    373: Cure Your Speaking Blind Spots with David Goldberg

    https://youtu.be/KI18Wt307FA David Goldberg, CEO and Voice Director of Edge Studio, helps leaders cure their speaking blind spots by improving their words, speaking patterns, and nonverbal presence. Driven by a lifelong passion for the sound and nuance of language, David has recorded voice actors, celebrities, politicians, and media personalities while helping people communicate with greater credibility and authority. In this conversation, David introduces The Speak with POWER Framework—Purge Hedges, Omit Fillers, Words That Empower, Express Positively, and Regulate Rhythm. He explains how removing uncertain language, replacing filler words with pauses, choosing empowering sentences, and framing messages positively can improve how others receive and respond to our ideas. David also discusses prosody, nonverbal communication, the six-second pause, and the growing value of authentic human voices in the age of AI. He shares how Edge Studio adapted from analog music recording to digital voice production and how Prosody Center helps people strengthen their interviews, presentations, pitches, and everyday conversations. — Cure Your Speaking Blind Spots with David Goldberg  Good day, dear listeners. It’s Steve Preda here with Management Blueprint. And today my guest is David Goldberg, the CEO and Voice Director of Edge Studio, an international voiceover casting and recording facility, advising, educating, and recording voice actors, celebrities, politicians, and media personalities. David is the author of five books, one with Tony Robbins, and the producer and engineer of 150 albums, including for Deep Purple. David, welcome to the show.  Steve, it is fabulous to be here. Thanks.  It’s great to have you, and I’m very curious about your personal why and how you are manifesting it in your business.  My personal why.  Yes.  Because I absolutely have a passion for words, the sound of words, the nuance of words. Share on X It’s really fascinating. Different languages, different accents, different dialects. For some reason, it’s been in my head since I was born.  That’s very interesting. Well, you certainly have followed your calling. And so tell me about how you got to record albums for people like Deep Purple. How did you get there?  Yeah. I’m a musician, and one of my earliest childhood memories was my mom being really mad at me because she would take piano lessons, and she would struggle to learn a song, and then the piano instructor would leave, and I would sit down and play it. And my mom used to say, “Why? Why can you just do it?” She couldn’t do it, and I just sat down and played. So I played piano, went to school for music as a pianist, and somewhere in college I realized it’s just not fun. I played a lot. I was on a good career path, perhaps, but it just wasn’t fun, and I got into rock bands instead.  And then, Steve, to show my age, in college I found a four-track cassette recorder. And I didn’t know what a four-track meant. Maybe some of the people who are listening don’t even know what a cassette is, but it’s an old recording device. It sounds archaic, but it was on tape, analog tape. And it was the coolest thing because I realized, oh my goodness, I could overdub myself. I could play piano or keyboards, as I had moved on to. I’m also a drummer, so I was able to add drums on top of the keyboards, and I could build my own songs, and that was cool.  And I realized that my passion, by far, more so than playing and playing in rock bands, was recording rock bands. And so I began recording my own band, and that went well, and then a bigger band, and I worked my way up.  Wow. This is fascinating. Actually, Paul McCartney has a YouTube video when he does that, and I didn’t know it was a thing. And he basically records every instrument, and then he plays it all together in front of an audience, a live audience in his studio, and this is fascinating. So David, this is a podcast of frameworks. It’s called Management Blueprint.  And I wonder, what is a framework that you have developed in your business that is helping you to serve your customers better or to understand things or to have and develop an insight or to innovate? Something that can be explained in three to five steps, and the audience members might get inspired by it and implement something in their business as a result.  Yeah. We have one framework which is so key to us. And is it okay, Steve, if I just give a little brief bit of context here?  Yeah, please.  It’s very weird, but for some reason, most of the world doesn’t think about how we speak. My kids, they went through grade school. They took reading, they took writing, but they didn’t take speaking. Yet speaking is equally as important. In business, it’s equally as important to how we look, right? Or how a company looks, how a brand looks. Companies allocate so many resources to making sure that they look amazing. Their logos, they do focus groups on their logos, what color, what font.  They make sure their website looks nice. They make sure the newsletters look nice. Everything should look nice, and it should. You always want to show attention to detail. But the corporations don’t allocate the same resources to make sure that their people speak well. So customer service representatives and sales and all these people on the phone, even leaders within the organization who lead team meetings, people who give pitches and presentations, leaders who give boardroom meetings and keynotes and toasts. There’s just not enough thought, or sometimes even no thought, on how they speak, which is really weird. It doesn’t make sense to me.  About two years ago, our older son was beginning to interview with college recruiters, and I said to him one day, I said, “Dude, did the guidance counselor at your school help you with interview training skills?” He said, “No.” And it all hit me at that point. I thought, “This is really weird.” So our public school has like 1,000-plus kids, four guidance counselors. It’s such a big school. There’s money in the town for school, for decent education. It’s a really good school, but they don’t teach kids how to interview well.  I’m sure everyone listening out there knows that some people interview really well and some people don’t. Now, to go back in time, my music studio did great, and then I ran it for about 18 to 19 years. I worked with bigger bands and finally top national, international bands, things that still play on the radio. I got to play with lots of bands, drums sometimes, piano, keyboards. And when my older son was born, I realized I want to change lifestyles because the lifestyle in the music world was just crazy. The drug scene was absurd. Oh my goodness, and I’m clean. I always was clean. I loved the work. I never fit with the people.  And so 19 years ago, when my older son was born, I changed my studio from recording music to recording voice. I went from recording music to recording radio commercial soundtracks and soundtracks for documentaries and audiobooks and cartoon soundtracks, and I have five studios now that do that in New York City. Now jumping back in time. So two years ago, my son is interviewing with college recruiters. I thought, “This is really weird. I need to teach my son how to interview because there are little things that you can do with your voice, things that I’ve learned in all of these years of voice recording that could apply to interviewing.” And so I gave him five or six little techniques.  Okay, like just take a second before you answer a question. It shows that you’re credible. It shows that you’re grounded. It gives your brain a moment to kind of catch itself, to organize the next thought. It doesn’t sound like you’re stepping on anyone’s toes. It really gives you so much more authority when you take a second to respond. And I gave my son five or six things, and we worked on it, and he got into every single college. And I know it’s not because of his grades.  His grades were good, but his interview skills are top-notch. And so I began applying these for, or offering training for interviews through my business. Now my business is predominantly voiceover, but now I started offering training for interviewing people who are going through a midlife crisis and changing careers or job promotions. And through that, we developed the framework. And for about two years now, we’ve focused on one framework. It’s three steps. I’ve learned that I know, I don’t believe, but I know that most of us in this world are missing three things when we communicate.  When we communicate, whether it’s interviewing or giving a customer sales pitch, we don’t think about strategizing or optimizing our words. We say whichever words just come out. We have our go-to words. So we have to optimize our words, number one. Number two, we should really think a lot about our speaking patterns, our pacing, our phrasing, the rhythm of our voice, the tone, the timbre, the emotion in our voice. All of the things that allow us to communicate differently, more effectively, yet we don’t learn those things. So that’s the second thing. And the third thing are the nonverbals, the things that come along with when you speak. Those things are critical. And if you look at those three steps, essentially what it’s saying is that if you think about which words you say, how you say them, and what you look like when you say them, you really come across so much more credibly, so much more in control. Steve, it is outstanding. When you focus on those three things, it is easy to make great first impressions. Share on X It is easy to get buy-in, as my son did when he interviewed. It is easy to get great receptivity.  Ultimately, truly, you shape the way you come across. You shape the way people respond to you. And that’s the cool

  6. Oct 19

    372: Create Digestible & Resonant Content with Mimi Banks

    https://youtu.be/oIGvtm47c2c Mimi Banks, Founder and CEO of MB Social, helps beauty brands create digestible & resonant content while building social media communities where every customer feels heard. Drawing on 15 years at L’Oréal USA and her experience leading social media for Lancôme, Mimi built a fully distributed agency around warmth, attention, honesty, and genuine community engagement. In this conversation, Mimi introduces The User-Generated Content Framework—Make It Look Real, Don’t Over-Produce, Use the Product Sensibly, Ensure Light & Sound Works, and Keep the Product Up Close. She explains how brands can create user-generated content that feels relatable while maintaining professional quality. Mimi also discusses using AI to extend limited creative assets without creating fake influencers, growing through social listening and the question “How can I help?”, and keeping humans involved in community management. She shares why brands must listen before engaging on Reddit and how MB Social and Med Creator 101 help beauty brands and healthcare professionals strengthen their social media presence. — Create Digestible & Resonant Content with Mimi Banks  Good day. Steve Preda here, and my guest today on the Management Blueprint, Mimi Banks, the Founder and CEO of MB Social, a leading full-service social media agency specializing in beauty, with a strong focus on skincare. MB Social is based in LA but has a fully distributed workforce, and it partners with top-tier brands and experts. Mimi spent 15 years at L’Oréal USA in New York and Paris, where she led social media for Lancôme. So Mimi, welcome to the show.  Thank you for having me.  I think you’re the first beauty entrepreneur on this show, so—  Oh, really? Wow.  It’s pretty special. 360 episodes in, great to have you here.  Wow. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to represent the beauty industry today.  That’s right. You also have a company name which is similar to my former company name. Yours is MB Social. We were MB Partners.  Oh, I love it.  Yeah. I love it. It kind of resonates with that. So jumping in, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it at MB Social?  So just to get straight to the point, my why comes down to one belief. Everyone wants to feel heard. I learned that pioneering community management benchmark at L’Oréal long before community management was even a job title, and I built MB Social entirely on it. Behind every comment, every DM, every tagged post is a real person who wants to be heard, who deserves a real response. Share on X   Wow.  And then, so how do I manifest that? I manifest it every day by treating our clients and their audiences in a way I’d want to be treated, with warmth, attention, and honesty. So it’s why our community managers do what they do. They learn the inside jokes. They learn the regulars, and this is actually also how I run MB Social. We listen, and we care.  Love it.  That’s our operating system.  That’s a pretty robust one, I must say. I like to think of a company as it’s a group of people dedicated to a mission. And if you engage and energize and inspire and care for these people, then you can’t go too much wrong.  That’s true.  Yeah. So tell me about how you came with this idea that you wanted to… I mean, you had a great career working for the greatest brands in beauty. What prompted you to strike out on your own, or strike out on your own?  So essentially, at age 30-something, I was given the opportunity to lead social media for the Lancôme brand. Just started it. And I found that, again, at age 30-something, I fell in love with this job. I had been working for a long time, still passionate about working for L’Oréal, but I hadn’t found my why, and then it clicked for me. I fell in love. I saw that I was good at it.  But what happened was, even after two years winning awards, doing all of the things, being the first, getting cited in the greatest publications, or exceeding my goals, there was nowhere to go. I was too early, and this was in 2014. So I did what many entrepreneurs do, and I followed my belief. I got offered a job to work at a startup that was all about user-generated content, which was absolutely amazing.  And there I took the leap for six months. People thought I was crazy, but I went based on my belief and my hunch, and the rest is history. I then started off my path with saying, “How can I help?” And that’s been the motto that we’ve had for the past 12 years at MB Social.  So this startup that you joined was MB Social, or?  No. So the startup I joined was a startup called Preen.Me. It was a community of creators. They created user-generated content for beauty brands. So I was really passionate about user-generated content, again, in 2014, so it was amazing. And a friend of mine who used to work at L’Oréal worked there.  And so I left my job that was in a corporate environment, worked out of an apartment in another country, and went there for six months. Learned about business development, learned about brand partnerships, learned about startup life. So really, I took the leap, and it was a leap of faith.  So tell me about user-generated content. What’s special about user-generated content?  So user-generated content means it’s actually content created by consumers. So you, me, any person that is not a professional at a brand, let’s say. But sometimes you can actually work for a brand. But it’s essentially content that appears that any kind of person would take it. And what I was fascinated about in social media, social media is about getting that digestible content that resonates. And so any brand or business would love to get that kind of content where it looks like an average person created it, not that it’s so heavily branded. Because as you know, in marketing, the best kind of marketing is through somebody else, not from a brand. Share on X   And so what I started to see was this is a really interesting new way of creating content where there are people out there who are professionals at creating content for brands that makes it look like a real person. And so that’s really what it was. It was this community of people who were excellent at creating beauty content. And then what we did is said, “Oh, brands should be able to use this.” But again, this was in 2014 when brands weren’t doing that.  Brands didn’t really understand the idea behind hiring what now is creators, and there’s a huge creator economy. It’s billions and billions of dollars. So they were kind of too early for it, and now it’s really an important part of the ecosystem. But again, that’s 12 years later.  So when you say “user-generated content,” it’s not people commenting on posts, but it’s creators who are using the product.  And generating. Correct.  Creators who use the product, film themselves, capture photo or video of them using the product in a way that makes it look like a consumer would.  Huh. Okay, that’s fascinating. So as you know, this podcast is all about blueprints, and I wonder if there is a framework around this, how you create that user-generated content that feels authentic, that resonates with people, with everyday people who would be consuming that content. Is there a recipe for that? Do you have one?  A recipe for that, for user-generated content, first of all, for using it, you have to make sure it looks actual and real, not overly produced, and using it in a way that would make sense that someone would use it. For example, if we’re talking about a beauty product, showing the product, making sure it’s up close, clear, then using it in a setting that looks real, but making sure that your lighting, your sound, everything is easy to understand. So those are like the three parts that we look at.  And then when you work with brands, you look at a little bit more details. You look at the quality, you look at the gestures, you look at the music, you look at a lot of different criteria once you’re at the brand level. But when you’re creating user-generated content, what you want to look at is, is the product visible? Does it look like in its natural setting? And is it very up close so that I can see it? Those would be the three things.  So I actually noted down six things.  Oh, you did? Well, those are my simplified. Okay, great.  So you said looks real.  Yes.  Which may be the same as natural setting, but looks real. Not overly produced.  Yes.  Which is the same as looks real. Or is it?  I would say no. Two different things because it can look real, but overly produced means there’s too much lighting, too much editing versus authentic.  Okay. Use the product sensibly.  Yes.  That was three. And then a natural setting. Maybe that’s—  That’s kind of the looks real also. So where would you use your skincare, making sure that it’s in the real place where you would actually use it.  And then light and sound works. Yes. —is what I wrote down. Correct. Yes.  And up close.  Yes.  So that’s actually five. That’s great.  Okay, five. Those are great. Thank you for that. Thank you for the recap.  Thank you. That’s amazing. So what happens in the AI world with this approach? Does AI have a place in this? Is it creating noise that needs to be overcome? Both? Neither? What is the AI impact?  AI can help in a few ways. The first thing it can help you expedite your tasks that you repeat over and over again. So anything that you find yourself repeating, AI is a great place to help you, whether it's to summarize, whether it's to analyze and recap. Share on X Those we find tremendously helpful. We use AI to tell us what’s going on in the ecosystem, whether it’s trends, whether it’s looking at articles, benchmarking, and then quickly translating to how we can

  7. Oct 16

    371: Make Your Crops Bigger, Healthier & Cheaper with Doug Kremer

    https://youtu.be/COQT4g-johk Doug Kremer, CEO of TerraMax, Inc., helps growers discover how to Make Your Crops Bigger, Healthier & Cheaper through scientifically validated microbial products for seeds, crops, lawns, and turf. Driven by scientific curiosity and a desire to reduce agriculture’s reliance on chemical inputs, Doug has spent more than 40 years exploring how beneficial bacteria can improve nutrient efficiency, promote plant growth, and support more environmentally responsible production. In this conversation, Doug introduces The Crop Nutrition Framework—Proper Nutrient Addition, Pathogenic Control, Irrigation, Soil Health, and Soil Tilth. He explains why microbial products should complement conventional fertilizers rather than immediately replace them, how soil structure affects water drainage and oxygen transfer, and why field trials are essential for proving microbial performance. Doug also discusses expanding TerraMax beyond its science-led roots, communicating its value more effectively, and reaching growers through stronger sales and distribution networks. — Make Your Crops Bigger, Healthier & Cheaper with Doug Kremer  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Doug Kremer, the CEO of TerraMax, Inc., an agricultural manufacturer applying bacteria to produce powders and liquids for seeds, crops, lawns, and turf to naturally promote plant growth. Doug, welcome to the show.  Thank you very much, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here and meet you.  Yeah, I’m very excited because you are running an agricultural production company, which is kind of a unique animal on this show. So I’d love to dig in more. But let me start with my favorite question. What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in TerraMax, Inc.? First off, I found that to be a very interesting question. My background is more technical, genetic engineering, et cetera. I got into microbes. Literally, it was a fascinating subject to me, partly because most of what we’ve learned was, at the time, 30 years ago, academia, and there was very little successful use of microbes generally, other than other types of products that may not have performed up to the standards that people have gotten used to with chemistries, right? So I’ve been in science for 40-plus years.  I looked at that as an opportunity. So there is a piece of the committed or should-be-committed individual who said, “I think I can do this better.” So the why was really, if we’re going to complain about the impact of chemistries, yet we don’t develop products that can supplant them in the marketplace, that’s on us. You don’t cross your fingers and hope that nature is going to fool people. That’s why we do field trials, that’s why we do these things, but the onus is on us to develop those.  So I took that seriously and, like I said, as a challenge. And in the first two years of our company’s life, that’s what I was working on. It was a very small group back then. And so it was taking seriously what we’re doing, and that may sound funny to people, and I’m sure there are people that will disagree, but sending those products through their paces, or the bacteria in some instances. So scientifically generating the data was a big part of what I’ve done and what we’ve done. I really need to, these days, talk much more in plural. We’re still a very small company.  We’ve been around for 28-plus years, but we’re 29 people. And only a portion of that, a small portion of that, about five people, is dedicated to the research end. But we were lacking a lot of the data we needed in showing the responses. So I hate to get technical right away on this, but things like N-15 work, which is proving that the nitrogen in a plant came from your bacteria. That’s something that was really important to me. Quantifying nitrogen from microbes, while there has been a ton of work on it, is still very prey to the environmental conditions. So there’s always room for improvement, is I think what that comes down to.  Yeah. But the why, to be—I ramble, and I apologize—but the why was really the personal inquisitiveness to go after these questions, and can we make them? And I could share data with you or anyone who is interested, basically, on what that path has described to us. And I’m happy to tell you we have been fairly successful at the science portion of this. We’re still not where I would like to see us in a business sense. But I believe we’re well-known for our approach using the rigors of science where it’s applicable. Because believe me, when you go out in nature, there’s a lot of variables that you didn’t think about in terms of the expression that these things could have. But in a nutshell, it was a great challenge.  Yeah. No, I love it. I mean, it sounds like it’s a very visionary approach. You realize that we are… I mean, I’m interpreting it, reinterpreting. The way I hear this is that we are spoiling the environment with chemistry, and how can we use biology to achieve the same aims that we are achieving with chemistry in a less harmful way? Is that what you’re trying to do? Yes, that is a very good interpretation. I have my own stilted viewpoints that the efforts to rely exclusively on BNF—biological nitrogen fixation is what BNF stands for. But for eons, nature has selected these things as slow-moving. Whereas with the hybrids of today, we’re spoiled in that we had the pricing allowed us to put luxury amounts on. And in fact, in phosphorus, for example, we were taught that you can build a phosphorus bank in your soils, which you can if you want to waste that money.  So a more on-time type of delivery system is something that we aim for, not to deplete soils, but to use soils and make the delivery more efficient and lower, okay? So there is a lot of misconception about what microbes can do, I think. And I think we can get closer in terms of turfgrass, so lawns, municipal fields, that sort of thing. That system might be a system that we can plug into and provide more of the nitrogen via microbes. But in our row crop agriculture, the corn and soybean, for example, the way corn is and the hybrids that are made, the use rates go up, right? So we’re not in some quaint old system of the farmer goes out and hoses his acreage. We’re in massive acreage in planting and harvesting.  Same is true, in my opinion, for how we treat these things. We’ve gotten spoiled by that use of chemistry, but now when the price crunch is on, that’s when farmers, producers are looking, “How do I save a buck? How do I do that?” That’s pretty much the description. There are always people out there willing to tell you that they can provide everything the plant needs. My voice is we can supplant, we can, as an adjunct, add to that picture. But in terms of our corn crop, we still have a lot of work to do. Okay,  Doug, so I just want to slow it down so that our audience, who may not be technicians of your field—definitely they are not—they also follow. Yeah. And they can relate it to themselves and their businesses. So my understanding is that it’s not just that it’s better for the ecology, the way you use the microbes as opposed to chemicals, but it’s also more cost-effective than what these artificial fertilizers can do? Yes. And that is largely our message, that people come in with the, “I’m looking for something to replace my applied nitrogen.” And my personal advice to them is integrate the system, learn how it works, learn how it’s an additive product, if you will, not a replacement product. And I could cite some chapter and verse, but people who know the marketplace, there are companies that have tried to tell you that if you work the soil microbiome, then you don’t need fertilizer, and I don’t believe that’s true. You do need fertilizer. But the more we can reduce that reliance on… BNF is an opportunity for, what a fancy term, de novo synthesis.  So the synthesis of nitrogen from the air, the nitrogen in the air, N₂ gas, is a very energy-intensive operation. Phosphorus and potassium have to be delivered. A microbe doesn’t synthesize those two. We’ll just stay on the NPK, if you will, the major nutrients that are used. But the same thing may be true for some of the micros, micronutrients as well. So it becomes more of a nutrient use efficiency question, which is a buzz phrase in agriculture. It’s not about just having it, it’s about how well you are integrating those into your system.  So, Doug, if I wanted to understand big picture what it takes to cultivate crops healthy and efficiently, what are the three to five things that a farmer would have to keep in mind when they want to increase the crop yield and the crop health? What are the five main elements, let’s say, maximum five main elements, that will take care of 80% of the result that they’re seeking?  Proper addition of the right nutrients. So whether that, for us, that would be an integration of systems. That’s got to be one of the top ones. Pathogen control, and we’ve done a few things in biocontrol. We have something teed up for going into the EPA, but that’s what makes this question really difficult. The regulatory apparatus is not necessarily in sync with the production apparatus. And there’s a certain way you follow and you do that. So nutrition is up there.  Some of this you don’t have control over. Water, right? Why people irrigate. But the climate, especially focused on water, is a definite control agent. Look at the irrigation and some of the problems with climate change. That’s introducing another variable to farmers. Soil health is definitely in there. Understanding how the microbiome is integrated into that soil tilth question, I believe tilth and health are pretty much linked in the soil. So you’re

  8. Oct 14

    370: 15 Ways to Boost Your Direct Mail with Brad Kugler

    https://youtu.be/0tIqsoczeVM Bradley Kugler, Founder and CEO of DirectMail2.0, helps marketers uncover 15 Ways to Boost Your Direct Mail by combining physical campaigns with digital tracking, targeting, and attribution technologies. Driven by a desire to help others, Bradley shares the experience and lessons he has gained from building businesses, navigating disruption, and reinventing his career. His goal is to help marketers achieve stronger results while ensuring that traditional direct mail remains relevant in a digital-first world. In this conversation, Bradley introduces The Direct Mail Edge Framework—Tactile Makes Memorable, Use for $1000+ Offerings, No Privacy Regulations, and Access Multiple Readers. He explains why direct mail is most effective when customer value justifies the cost, how a physical piece can reach multiple household members, and why less mailbox competition makes mail more memorable than digital advertising. Bradley also discusses combining direct mail with email, social media, programmatic advertising, QR codes, and call tracking to create eight to twelve impressions per target. He shares how his AI platform analyzes more than 80,000 campaigns, 2.1 billion mail pieces, and 18 creative attributes to predict engagement and improve campaigns before they are mailed. — 15 Ways to Boost Your Direct Mail with Brad Kugler  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with Management Blueprint. And my guest today is Bradley Kugler, the Founder and CEO of DirectMail2.0, an omnichannel marketing system designed to seamlessly track direct mail campaigns and enhance overall results by integrating 15 digital technologies in one user-friendly platform. Brad, welcome to the show.  Steve, thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here and spread the word on something that is old that is new again.  Well, I’ve been a big fan of direct mail for my entrepreneurial life, and I’m very curious about the state of the art and whether it’s still alive and in what areas it’s still alive and whether it’s thriving, so we can dive into that. But before we go there, I want to ask my favorite question. What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business?  I would say my personal why, I always like helping other people. I get the most satisfaction about taking the experience, wisdom, and knowledge I’ve gained over the years, as I’m not a young man anymore. Tried a lot of things. A lot of things haven’t worked. And I’m able to impart this, and I really love to share and help other people, which is the main reason I do this podcast. I feel that I do have some valuable things to share, and I’m very proud of what I’ve done and my family and my children. And if I can help one person, even if I have to talk to 10,000, then I feel it was worth it. Share on X   I love it. I mean, ultimately, that’s what’s behind the best advice that people have, and I’ve heard a lot, is helping other people and how do you contribute to human flourishing, as Eric Kreitz says in his latest book. So let’s talk about direct mail because I built my first business on the back of direct mail. I was part of Dan Kennedy’s subscribers of his newsletter, and then he was a big copywriter.  You probably heard of him. I copied some of his techniques and that of some other copywriters, and it worked really well. And when I moved here, it kind of stopped working, and I thought this was because I was doing something wrong, which probably was the case. So tell me about the state of direct mail and how it works and how it has changed over the past 10 years or so.   Absolutely, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to just tell a quick story of how I arrived here. For 23 years, me and my brother and my father had a business distributing packaged media. Packaged media is DVDs, CDs, VHS, things that nobody uses anymore. One of our most successful marketing actions is we would send postcards of black-and-white 1930s disasters, ships turning over in a harbor, a train crash, a plane crash, and we would send these things to video stores and companies as a kind of an impingement-type photograph and tell them, “We’re here to solve your problems. If you had a disaster with inventory or managing your inventory, this is what we’re here to do.”  And it worked phenomenally for almost two decades. All right? It stopped working. It stopped working because there were less and less video stores, and people weren’t selling packaged media. It wasn’t for the fact that the marketing stopped working. The market changed, and we were facing impending doom. There was no way around it, and that isn’t really what triggered me, “I want to get in the direct mail business.” It wasn’t. It was the thought of knowing that I’m in a business that’s disrupted by technology. Everything was going streaming. Packaged media was no longer to be, and there was nothing I could do about it.  So I spent about a year researching. I never finished college, so I read all of the latest business books that MBAs read on their studies, and I sort of brought myself up to speed, and I came upon something. Number one, I wanted to be a disruptor and not a disruptee. I want to be on the other side of this technology curve. Share on X I want to find something that is in danger, and I want to do something with it. That was number one. The other issue was the revenue model. I wanted a recurring revenue model, like everybody does, okay? So I was able to, through my connections, a very good family friend had a printing business that specialized in direct mail, who we had used for years, and she always asked, “Why aren’t you doing your postcards anymore?” I’m like, “Ah, they don’t work.” “Ah, nonsense.”  Obviously, I realized the industry, what didn’t work. The things are, direct mail is expensive, and if not done right, you can have a bad result, and it’s much more painful. Sending 5,000 postcards or letters is much more expensive than sending half a million emails, so this is what’s happened to this industry. So this friend of mine in the direct mail business said, “Hey, we have this little burgeoning idea of technology. We want to spin it off and sell it to other direct mail producers.” Took me almost a couple weeks to understand it because I didn’t really know anything about direct mail other than I used it, and I didn’t know anything about digital marketing or the technology behind direct mail.  So I forced myself to get over that hump as a 50-year-old man with three kids in college facing a new career, and I did that, and here we are seven, eight, nine years later and still growing. We have two other brands, and it’s all focused around technology that improves the chances of success with direct mail. That’s the overall story. We can get into the details as you ask for them.  Yeah, so what I’m curious about is how has this industry changed? So what is it about direct mail that worked really well in the past that doesn’t work anymore? And what is the area that perhaps was neglected in the past and evolved to be more successful right now?  So that’s a good and more difficult question than it appears to be. I’m sure you remember us being the same age some 20, 30, 40 years ago, our mailboxes were full in the United States of advertisements, a stack of them. As the digital revolution in marketing came upon, direct mail has waned. There were cheaper ways to get quicker attribution and more verified results. Direct mail was expensive, it wasn’t trackable, it wasn’t attributable, it was hard to measure the success. So as digital marketing was going like this, direct mail was going like this.  That’s not to say there aren’t still millions and millions of pieces going a day, but it had its pressures. As digital marketing became almost a background noise, everybody in the United States gets 10,000 digital messages a day. All right? How many messages do you get in your mailbox? Two? Maybe three? So it's now become a point that it's less crowded, which is bringing new interest to it. Share on X Still very expensive, more expensive than ever, but you can now do things like you can track the arrival, you can have QR codes, text-back numbers, call tracking numbers to see the number of calls.  You have identity resolution pixels you can put on the website to see if the person got the mail, went to the website, and then you can identify the address they live at and match back. You can also use digital programmatic marketing to target the homes or the people going into certain businesses by geography, by drawing polygons around digital programmatic marketing. So we offer all of these as partners, our 15 technologies, so that now direct mail is as attributable as an email click or a digital ad click. So this is how it’s evolved over the last 10 or 15 years.  That’s fascinating. Yeah, that’s very deep. I like the 15 digital approaches. That’s probably not something we can cover on this podcast, but it’s something maybe the listeners can explore after the show. So let’s switch gears here a little bit because this podcast is all about frameworks, business frameworks. So what’s the right framework for direct mail? If someone wants to use direct mail for their marketing, what should they be thinking about? What are three to five things that if they nail, they’re going to have a successful campaign? I’m probably oversimplifying.  Great question. Great question. And I’ll put it to you this way. The ROI has to be commensurate with the spend. All right? So if you are literally spending $1 per target and you’re mailing to 5,000 or 10,000 people, that’s an expensive campaign to hit somebody one time, right? Now, if you’re going to send 10,000 emails, they’re a fraction of a penny each. So you’re having to sort of fit this type of marketing into

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