Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

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

  1. 3d ago

    367: Implement the Law Firm Success Formula with Jay Berkowitz

    https://youtu.be/vZe016EjE-c Jay Berkowitz, Founder and CEO of Ten Golden Rules, helps law firms implement the Law Firm Success Formula to attract qualified prospects, convert more opportunities, and build five-star operations. Driven by a strong desire to win, Jay applies his competitive nature to helping clients rank higher, sign more cases, earn stronger reviews, and generate valuable referrals. In this conversation, Jay introduces The AI Visibility Optimization Framework—Collect Prospect FAQs, Publish Answers Regularly, Become an Expert on Reddit & Quora, and Blog on Customer-Generated Topics. He explains how businesses can identify real customer questions from sales calls, intake conversations, and AI-generated transcripts, then answer them through videos, blogs, FAQs, and social content. Jay also discusses optimizing websites and Google Business Profiles, responding quickly and empathetically to inquiries, and delivering five-star service that generates reviews and referrals. He shares how referrals, conference speaking, webinars, podcasts, and high-value content drive agency growth and how EOS helped him develop leaders as the company expanded. — Implement the Law Firm Success Formula with Jay Berkowitz  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Jay Berkowitz, the Founder and CEO of Ten Golden Rules, a two-time Inc. 5000 digital marketing agency that helps law firms generate more qualified leads and clients. Jay, welcome to the show.  Thank you so much. Great to be here, Steve.  So we already talked a little bit about it, but I was really curious about why you focus on law firms. There are so many marketing agencies out there, but I’ve never seen anyone that focused on such a narrow niche. And then I’m going to link it to my favorite question. So what is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in your Ten Golden Rules agency? And maybe there’s a connection to law firms as well?  Well, I’ll start with my personal Why, and my personal Why is I really like to win. And I’ve done the StrengthsFinder and different psychology tests, and I’m in the top—whatever—one or five percentile of people who are competitive. And so I was competitive in sports, but I really want to do well in business, and I want my clients to do well. Like, I really, really hate it if my client’s not right at the top of Google and if my client’s not growing in more new cases signed every month.  So that seems to be a really great fit for the business I’m in, which is helping clients with growth strategies, part of which is the marketing piece, getting new traffic to their website. Part of it is conversion, so we do a lot of work with our clients on getting a higher percentage of the folks who do show up to call, to click, to fill out a form. And then we work with their intake teams on converting those opportunities. And the final piece we work with them is really running a five-star operation—meaning that they’re getting more five-star Google reviews and getting more referrals from past clients and referral partners. So we do a lot of work in those three pieces of the business to help law firms grow, and I really want them to win because when they win, I win. Selfishly.  No, I love it. I love it. So are you like an outsourced marketing department and marketing-sales department for these law firms? How do you see yourselves? What is the role that you fulfill?  Yeah, I mean, we are a consulting agency. So first and foremost, we’re going to help them strategically figure out where to focus. And we have a fully functioning digital marketing agency, so we do websites and SEO and Local Services Ads and pay-per-click and social media and video and lots of AI. And then as a part of our consulting practice, we help with intake consulting that I mentioned before and five-star operations. And a big part of that is just finding the right partners because we’ll do high-level intake coaching and point out if they’re not answering the phone, if they’re not putting the right people on the phone, and then we’ll connect them with one of the top intake coaches in the legal industry.  If their back end is a little rough and needs some help, there’s a number of partners. Like, for example, there’s a really great software called Case Status we recommend to all of our clients. And imagine Case Status is an app. So, like, when we all order an Uber or order food, we get updates. “Hey, your driver’s been selected. Your driver will be here in 10 minutes. Your driver’s waiting outside. Do you want to have a conversation with your driver? What temperature do you want?”  And so there’s a great app called Case Status, which can manage the case in an app format that consumers are really used to. “Hey, we got your MRI booked, and here’s the location, and here’s the time. Don’t forget your MRI is tomorrow at 8:00 A.M. Here’s the location. If you can’t make the MRI, click here. Hey, we got your MRI. We forwarded it to the next surgeon,” in a case of a car accident. So using that software helps our firms get five-star Google ratings and lots more referrals, and that’s just one small piece of the pie.  So within the niche of law firms, is this even a narrower niche of injury law firms that you work with?  Yeah, it’s funny because when, as a business person, you go from working on 200 SIC codes and you pick one, “I’m only going to work with lawyers,” everybody always asks, like, “Which niche within the niche are you?” But by the nature of our business, 50% or 60% is personal injury, just because those guys are really invested in marketing. They spend a lot of time and money on it, and we’ve built a little reputation.  But we also have estate firms and family lawyers, criminal attorneys, sex abuse lawyers, securities attorneys. So I always say 50% is personal injury and 50% is everybody else who deals with consumers. Because for the most part, the B2B lawyers, they’re not going to spend a lot on marketing. But we have done some beautiful websites for them.  Very interesting. I have kind of a tangential question, but you may be able to help me answer it because I’m obviously wondering about it. I always see these billboards with the injury law firms promoting themselves, and I get if someone gets in a car accident and there’s a billboard above them, then it’s going to be an obvious thing for them to call, but it probably doesn’t happen that often. So how are these billboards so good for lawyers, or is it just a myth and they’re just wasting their money on it?  No. I think the math is pretty compelling, and the average personal injury firm will make between $10,000 and $20,000 on average on cases. Then there will be one or two or three, what they call whales, every year. So a terrible incident where, like, a FedEx truck or a commercial vehicle hits a family and there’s serious injuries or death involved, and it’s a multimillion-dollar case.  So the lawyers make a third of all the revenue that comes in on those cases, and they do a lot of work and they have a lot of expenses too. But when there’s millions of dollars at stake for just one case, these guys can afford the TV advertising, the billboard advertising, and the digital marketing that they do with us.  So it’s not just a billboard. Yeah. Billboard is just a visible one. It’s basically the general idea that they do a lot of advertising because being top of mind is important.  Yeah, for sure. And if, God forbid, someone you knew had an accident, you’d start noticing that every second ad on TV is also personal injury.  Yeah. Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. So let’s talk about frameworks because that’s what this podcast is about. Business blueprints or concepts that you have developed, you observed, something that helps you make sense or streamline the ideas that you deal with in your business. Anything that comes to mind, something that can be explained in three to five steps?  Yes. Well, I touched on it a little bit a minute ago, and we call it our Law Firm Success Formula. And the first part is attract, the second part is convert, and the third part is five-star operations. But I’ll spend a couple more minutes on it. So the attract piece is, first and foremost, you’ve got to have your website dialed in. You have to have a contemporary website. If your website’s more than five years old, it just sends a subtle, even subconscious message to folks that you’re not current, and the design times change over time.  And also, Google’s functionality is going to change, or the functionality of your website, as it’s friendly to Google, particularly your mobile website, if it’s five years old, is not going to be the current best practice. And Google’s going to come and test your mobile website, and they’re going to send negative ratings back to the algorithm, and you’re going to show up less in the searches. Equally important is your Google Business Profile. And that’s your Google Maps address. And that has to be up-to-date and optimized and constantly updated with new content and blogs and videos and information and photos from your location because I always say that you don’t own your Google Maps, you lease it from Google, but it’s a second and very powerful web presence that a firm can have.  So we do a lot of work on the websites, on the Google Maps, and there’s a whole SEO protocol around local SEO that surrounds the Google Maps listing and how you’re listed on your website and how you’re linked to by local businesses and the Chamber of Commerce and business associations and bar associations. And then the next piece is getting your message out there and optimizing for the AI. And so the AI today that’s important in my part of the business is the SEO AI, or a lot of us are calling it

  2. Sep 24

    366: Get Closer to Revenue with Saul Marquez

    https://youtu.be/lrnG7ydEErk Saul Marquez, Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, helps medtech and healthtech companies get closer to revenue through healthcare-focused marketing strategy and execution. Driven by a desire to be a source of love and inspiration, Saul supports healthcare innovators whose work helps people live healthier, longer lives. He believes companies improving healthcare deserve to succeed and should not have to navigate growth alone. In this conversation, Saul shares his Leverage the 3 Forms of Marketing Framework—Owned (podcast, books, content), Earned (Stages, Testimonials), and Paid (Drive Traffic to What Converts). He explains why companies need a clear strategy and strong owned assets before pursuing earned exposure, and why paid marketing should amplify a funnel that already converts. Saul also discusses growing through primary research, thought leadership, podcasting, and conferences rather than relying on cold outreach. He shares why marketing metrics must connect to pipeline and revenue, and how sales blockers, opportunities, and needs can guide the creation of campaigns and sales enablement assets. —   Get Closer to Revenue with Saul Marquez Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Saul Marquez, the Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, a healthcare-exclusive marketing strategy and full-service marketing execution firm that helps medtech and healthtech companies accelerate their growth. Saul, welcome to the show.  Steve, such a pleasure to be here with you and your listeners. Thank you for the opportunity.  Well, I really have to get my A-game today because I rarely find a podcaster who’s recorded more episodes than I have. You beat that by a multiple of five or six. So definitely, I have to be on my best performance. But my first question is always the same, at least recently. What is your personal “Why,” and how are you manifesting it in your business?  My personal Why. I did some thinking. This was probably about 20 years ago. I did this program. I’ve always been very reflective, and I’m a big journaler. I love to write my thoughts. And I had the chance to, about 20 years ago, do a program called Date With Destiny. It’s a Tony Robbins program. It was a game changer for me. Five days with people that want to just crush it in life—personal, professional, financial, right? Like, they just want to do the best.  And so I had these five days to myself to really look inside, journal, question. And during that session, he has what he calls your primary question. You sort of look inside and you ask and you think about, like, what are those words, the stories that you tell yourself? And the primary question is that question that drives your life. And I was able to uncover that my primary question is, “I want to be a source of love and inspiration to myself and others.” And so I’m driven by love. I’m driven by inspiration. And so that’s my primary question and my primary Why. And then, when you think about it professionally, Steve, I’m very driven by mission.  So because of that, I started my career in medical devices around the same time that I actually did the seminar. And I’m driven by being able to help people live better lives and increase health span, not just lifespan. And that’s why the work that we do focuses around leaders innovating in the healthcare space. So very driven by those things.  But these are very noble ideas. And I mean, who wouldn’t want to live better, live longer? That’s an obvious need from everyone, really. And it’s a great thing if you can create an impact in that realm, that then you are creating something very valuable.  You are, Steve. And the data point here that I’ll share to pair the purposefulness, the data point, because we’re very data-driven as a business, and I’m a data geek, is that healthcare is essentially 18% of U.S. GDP, which represents $4.8 trillion annually. It’s larger than the German economy, and that’s just the U.S. alone. So whenever anybody says, “Oh, your niche is healthcare,” I say, “Well, I mean, my economy that I’m focused on is healthcare.” It’s huge.  Of course. Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah. And probably, I mean, we can get into whether that’s not an overinflated number. Is it really that proportionate value? But if you think about it, the biggest resource is humans, then spending 18% of GDP on the biggest resource is not much.  It definitely isn’t. And then if you sort of zoom out and you take a look at globally, GDP focused on healthcare, it’s definitely higher than most first-world countries. And the outcomes aren’t commensurate to the investment. So the opportunity to improve access, affordability, better outcomes is a huge opportunity. And I'm in awe, and I have major respect for all the entrepreneurs and business leaders in this space that are looking to improve those metrics for us in healthcare, and that's why we love to stand behind them. Share on X   The stats are real. 50% of businesses fail within five years, and something above 80% fail within 10 years. And we believe at Outcomes Rocket that if you’re in the business of helping people live healthier, longer lives, you deserve to succeed, and we want to be behind you. And so that’s why we do what we do. The people doing the work, it’s hard, and they can’t do it alone.  Yeah. Love it. Just as an aside, whatever happened to this initiative of Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos that they announced some years ago that they would reform the—  Yeah.  Healthcare?  Haven?  Yeah. I don’t know what it was called.  Yeah, Haven. So yeah, it was Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and JPMorgan. And it didn’t work. And it shows you that, like, even when the best of the best try to go do something about it, it doesn’t work. It’s hard. It’s hard work. Yeah. It’s hard work.  I bet it’s very hard. So hopefully AI will fix it. Let’s hope. What do you think about that?  That’s a great one, man. Like, AI definitely is not fixing it. However, properly deployed AI in solutions such as ambient scribing that helps physicians spend time with patients and no longer have to do what they call pajama time. Pajama time is the time that they spend at home after hours logging things into the medical record. Like, if you’re able to give a physician time back from not having to do that, and actually time back to look at you in the eyes when you’re in the waiting room, that’s awesome use of AI.  The use of AI in the elimination of waste is also beautiful. So I think as a tool, for sure, there’s huge promise in the use of AI for healthcare. Hell, in robotics, man. Like, I was just at a conference, Steve. I was in Miami. Where do you live, by the way?  I’m in Virginia.  Oh, you’re in Virginia? Cool. I’m in San Diego, where I’m literally at the SRS, so that’s the Society of Robotic Surgery. And I’m in the room, and there was a surgeon in Virginia, actually, and a surgeon in California, and the robots were operating on. It wasn’t a person. It was actually just like a simulation, but it was like a cadaver type of thing. And with AI, spatial AI, and the use of technology, these surgeons are operating in two different states on one person.  Remotely?  Yeah, remotely, and it’s working great through robotics. So all of this stuff, man, is coming together. Yesterday, I had a conversation with an entrepreneur in the materials and 3D printing space. She’s been in it for years, and just chatting with her was inspiring because what they could do now as far as custom-built plates for craniomaxillofacial or foot and ankle, they could literally print this stuff overnight on sheets, whereas it used to take months.  Like, we’re moving fast, and the innovations that are available. She called it patient matching, like the N of one. I mean, what’s possible today for a fraction of the cost than it used to be back then is just inspiring. And it’s happening right before us. So it’s a really great, great time to be alive.  And to stay alive.  And to stay alive. Exactly. Well said, my friend. Well said. Hey, you have to tell me about Summit OS and Fable, man. Like, I love what you have back there.  Well, I’ll tell you all about Summit OS on your podcast, but on this podcast, we talk about you. That’s fair. That’s fair.  I like that. I like that.  So let’s talk about frameworks because this podcast is a podcast of frameworks.  I love frameworks.  And I saw that you have the Discover, Define, Deliver, or something like that. But I’m looking for something more unique. Yeah. So something that maybe that’s more insightful or more unique or more you that you could share with the audience, which still can be explained in four to five steps or elements maximum to which give people an insight as to how to do things better.  Absolutely. So I think you and I are brothers from another mother, Steve, because I just love frameworks as well. So the 3D approach is easy, as you mentioned, right? But it is our approach and how we reproducibly bring about a program from start to finish for a client: Discover, Define, Deliver.  Underneath that, that is the hood to another framework, which when you start to deliver, the framework is essentially a four-part framework that starts with strategy, then it’s owned, earned, and paid, okay? And so those are the types of marketing that you could do. And you mentioned at the beginning we’re a marketing strategy and full-service execution agency, which essentially means we’re a revenue partner, we’re a commercialization partner.  So when you go to market with your value and your value proposition, it all starts with strategy. Strategy is so key. And one of the key quotes that we always share, Steve, is that, “Tactics are the noise you hear

  3. Sep 18

    365: Plug All the Holes in Your Marketing with Dan Salganik

    https://youtu.be/rBR5_jK8fIA Dan Salganik, Founder and CEO of VisualFizz, helps established B2B companies plug all the holes in your marketing through integrated, outcome-focused strategies. Driven by a desire for freedom, travel, and creative expression, Dan built a fully remote agency that allows him to explore the world while helping clients create distinctive campaigns, strengthen their marketing capabilities, and generate long-term customer value. In this conversation, Dan introduces The Growth System 4 Tracks Framework—Brand & Digital Foundations, Staff Augmentation, Transformation, Transition & Expansion, and RevOps Growth Inflection. He explains how companies can select and combine these tracks to strengthen their foundations, expand internal capabilities, support acquisitions and geographic growth, and align marketing with sales. Dan also discusses growing through quality rather than speed, building larger client relationships through trust, and shifting VisualFizz from commoditized services toward solutions focused on business outcomes. He shares how identifying small gaps across the customer journey can improve efficiency, strengthen retention, and create sustainable revenue growth. — Plug All the Holes in Your Marketing with Dan Salganik  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Dan Salganik, the Founder and CEO of VisualFizz, a company that empowers industry-leading brands to maximize their potential with effective marketing strategies and custom-tailored campaigns. Dan, welcome to the show.  Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. I really appreciate it.  It’s great to have you, and I’d like to learn about your personal ‘Why’ and how you’re manifesting it in VisualFizz.  Wow, that’s a big question to start with. I’ll start with my kind of goal for a little bit of freedom, which is funny because the more you grow, the less freedom you have. But for many years, I started VisualFizz because of a need to travel and to have freedom to do what I want. I’m a very expressive person, and after working at a number of agencies and finding things they do wrong, and also being a big traveler, I actually decided to launch VisualFizz almost 10 years ago, which is crazy to me.  And ultimately, we’ve seen this company grow quite a bit in that time. But I built it out to have the ability to travel, to do the things I want, to build a team, to build also campaigns that are fun and they’re unique and build customer value. So you started with a great question, and there’s so many reasons why—my kind of personal philosophies and why I manage and run and grow VisualFizz—but I think travel, freedom, and the ability to see creative campaigns at scale are just a few of them.  So I saw on your website that one of your goals is to travel at least 100 days a year. So is this business travel? Is this personal? Is this a combination?  I’d say almost no business travel counts, right? Because then you’re just doing business. I love business, but that’s totally separate. It’s personal travel. Basically, every single year, yeah, for almost 10 years, I have spent about a little less than a third of the year traveling, and some years a lot more. And so, being a remote company—and pre-COVID we were remote—we’ve built this style and methodology and processes, everything around being a fully remote company or an organization. And so, yeah, I do 30-day trips. I do two-week trips. I do two-, three-month trips.  But for me, it's always very important that work doesn't slow down. But you're going to regret working your whole life. Share on X I like the phrase, “You don’t die with your money.” It doesn’t come with you, but what you do have is experiences that you can remember and memories and everything—photos and things like that. And you’re not going to want to cherish your photo when you’re at a nursing home of you working in front of a computer. It’s going to be you with friends and family, enjoying the world and eating well and drinking well and seeing sights and exploring history and things like that.  Yeah. My dad, he was a doctor. He worked very hard all his life, and he always told us when we were kids that he was going to retire at 60 and travel around the world with my mom. And then when he was 60 years old, he had this opportunity to run this hospital, and one thing led to another, and he turned 70, and then he no longer wanted to travel.  And he literally said, “Oh, I wish we traveled more while we were young because now I don’t want to travel.” So that kind of resonates with me, what you say. It’s great that you have this awareness and you make it happen. So when you travel, do you run your business remotely?  100%. My business runs with my laptop, and if I’m lucky, I have a second monitor with me. Actually, nowadays I travel with a second monitor even on a flight, if I have to take a flight.But I have a second monitor with me. I have my laptop. My business comes with me. That’s number one.  So I might switch my hours a little bit. I might change things around, but I’ve got a great team. I delegate. It’s interesting because in the early days, it was hard to travel because we didn’t have a lot of clients, so we didn’t have a lot of money. Still don’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t have nearly as much when I started the company. Nowadays, we’re a growing business, and it’s great. So finally—it’s the whole dilemma. It’s like we’re finally growing. We’ve got a real business. I can pay myself a real wage.  But you can’t leave the business for too long because then you have other issues. But it’s a good balance between the two, and I always do bring my laptop no matter where I go. You never know what happens. But if I’m truly taking time off, which is very, very hard, I give my wife my cellphone. I either don’t take my laptop or I put my laptop away in the safe, and I don’t touch technology. Because honestly, it’s very easy to get distracted.  It is super easy to get distracted. So let’s talk about frameworks because this is what the podcast is about. So tell me a framework that you have developed or you picked up somewhere that allows you to do something better than other people, whether it’s more effective, whether it’s bigger impact, whether it’s more organized, whether it’s generating an insight that can be explained in three to five steps.  I love that. Actually, this is really great timing because we just built a brand-new framework, and I just soft-launched it to the world. We had a big event last week, and it’s called the Growth System. And it’s for our soft launch called VF3, VisualFizz 3.0. We’ve scaled up. This is kind of our software reboot. There's four tracks. It's a track system, so it's similar to a framework, and they're driven by the following. Share on X Let me actually backtrack a little bit.  It’s developed for mid-market and enterprise B2B companies, especially companies that have been around for a long time, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but have something that’s broken or maybe needs improvement, et cetera. And so they come to us, and instead of saying, “Oh, I think you need SEO. I think you need paid search,” it’s solutions-focused, not services. The services come after. And there’s four tracks that are built off of. Each track can take three months, six months, 12 months, two years, et cetera. It just depends on the business.  The first one being the brand and the digital foundation. Many of my clients come from boring industries, my favorite. They need to rebuild. They came in understanding there’s private equity money, there’s new competition coming up, this, that, and the other. It’s a new brand, rebrand, or brand infrastructure, and then web infrastructure, all focused on sales. So everything here is focused on RevOps, sales, et cetera.  The second one, track, is staff augmentation, capability accelerator. It’s helping brands that are really great at something and really not great at another thing, or have a very expensive team internally where they feel that they can outsource to an agency for a large discounted price, for lack of a better word to put it. An example is we took over the tech arm of one of our clients, saved them about 50% in their budget, doubled their capacity, have a full team, 100% uptime, things like that.  The third, the one that I'm probably most excited about, is transformation, transition, and expansion which is all about mergers and acquisitions, national expansion, franchising, scaling locations, things of that nature Share on X and how to ensure that those are done accordingly, kind of symbiotically, consolidated properly. And the way I put it is, you’re spending $50 million or whatever you’re spending to buy a company, spend half a percent or a percent of that purchase value on the marketing, on the consolidation of brands, on sales materials, HR communication, kind of that side as it pertains to marketing.  And the final one is RevOps, growth inflection. We come in, we look through the CRM, we work with the sales teams, we audit the sales teams, we do interviews with the sales teams, and we make sure that marketing and sales are not oil and water. We combine them, we develop everything, we focus on lifetime customer value, post-sales transactions, and really driven towards long-term growth and revenue, basically generation. So a little bit longer than the few sentences you asked me for, so I apologize. But this is the future framework that VisualFizz will be built upon and scale upon for the future. Share on X Like, we’re just launching this as we speak. My website’s in progress right now.  Yeah. I love it. So the big picture is that you fix the foundations, then you give them people who can actually execu

  4. Sep 4

    364: Offer LLM-Digestible Messages with Parry Headrick

    https://youtu.be/0U9tQ5D2MCk Parry Headrick, Founder of Crackle PR, is helping B2B technology companies offer LLM-digestible messages through earned media, human-centered writing, and strategic communication. Driven by the belief that where people start does not determine where they finish, Parry has built an empathetic, senior-led agency that works exclusively with good companies and empowers its people to share their expertise openly.  In this conversation, Parry introduces The LinkedIn Cheat-code Framework: Post every day, Tap into news stories, Weave in audience impact, and No-CTA. He explains how consistently sharing valuable ideas and expecting nothing in return helped him build an audience, generate most of his leads through LinkedIn, and shorten the sales cycle from three months to one week. Parry also discusses how LinkedIn thought leadership creates a virtuous cycle of earned media and LLM citations, why websites and PR content must be readable by both humans and machines, and how a senior-led agency can scale without sacrificing quality. He also shares why human writers will become more valuable as AI-generated content creates a growing sea of sameness. — Offer LLM-Digestible Messages with Parry Headrick  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Parry Headrick, the Founder of Crackle PR, a B2B tech public relations agency that works with good companies only. Crackle PR is a senior-led B2B tech PR agency built for the LLM era, where earned media is no longer just a brand builder, it is the vital infrastructure that feeds foundation models. Parry, welcome to the show.  It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.  Well, it’s great to have you, and you are all about LLMs and how to get through the AI filters, which is relevant for all of us. But before we jump in, I’d like to ask you my $64,000 question. What is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in Crackle PR?  Yeah, that’s a good question. And I haven’t really been asked that question in that way before, but if I had to nail the answer, it would be this. So I started out with humble beginnings. My family didn’t have any money really to speak of. We wore secondhand clothes. It was the typical scratching and clawing our way up story. And I had a difficult childhood with divorces and everything, and I ended up getting kicked out of high school. Seventh grade was the last grade I actually completed. I was kicked out of two different schools three different times.  And the last time I was dismissed, I was told by the principal that I would have a long life working at McDonald’s. It was a real dagger that he put in my heart as he showed me the door. And I just thought at that point that didn’t seem like something that someone in power should say to someone who had none. And that kind of informed everything that I’ve done since, including being a reporter where I covered stories trying to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, all the way into how I’ve tried to create an agency that is predicated on doing it with empathy.  And we have an ironclad no-assh*les policy. I hope you don’t mind the swear there. That means internally and externally. We won’t work for jerks, and we won’t tolerate brilliant jerks that work with us because that tends to be very cancerous for an organization. So that’s the Why, is where you start doesn't really dictate where you finish, and I'm determined to prove that that's the case. Share on X   Yeah. I love it. And that’s one of the benefits of being in business for yourself. You can select your own clients. You don’t have to accept the ones that you don’t like. But few people actually put a stake in the ground and actually declare it, right? It’s harder to do it than to just make some compromises.  Yeah.  So tell me about Crackle PR. I really like the name of Crackle PR. I kind of sense what it might mean, but why don’t you explain how you came up with this?  Well, good question. I like these layups you’re giving me here. So I started Crackle during the pandemic, actually, when most of us were staring at the walls of our home thinking, “What the heck is going on?” There were riots in the streets. People couldn’t go anywhere, and it was really this sort of just dark malaise that covered the world. And it was that time that I thought, “What if I were to start a PR agency that is the antithesis of the large ones that I had built?”  So prior to Crackle, I had built a couple of the largest privately held tech PR agencies in North America. The models at these large agencies, as you probably know, are very hierarchical, where you trot out the Parrys of the world and the VPs, and then the model demands that you have most of the work done by juniors because that’s how you make the money. And I thought, what if we just, instead of trying to get big at all costs, what if we instead had a very prescriptive model where, instead of paying for offices in Manhattan and San Francisco, what if we just put that money into our talent and had a senior team that did the work, and we didn’t have a whole bunch of overhead? Wouldn’t that be cool?  And what if we also, as I just mentioned, don’t work with any jerks, and we work just with companies that are good people doing good stuff? And that was the true north for the company to start. And so we’ve been very fortunate in the intervening years. We now have 15 full-time employees, another five consultants. We’re hiring prescriptively and slowly. We don’t want to grow for the sake of growth. And we have clients all the way from seed rounds of funding to publicly traded companies. We really run the gamut. It's a B2B tech PR shop primarily. Share on X   But I always thought that the bad people need more PR than the good people.  Well, they may, but we’re not here to put lipstick on pigs. I had somebody that told me in my life one time that you don’t get into the mud with the pigs because the pig will love it, but you’ll both get dirty. And that’s not a game I’m looking to play. So I didn’t actually answer the question about Crackle itself. So the idea was that during that dark, dark time—COVID, riots, craziness everywhere. We wanted to represent a bit of goodness in the world. So I just pictured the world being this heap of ashes Share on X and under those ashes was a little spark, a little crackle of life, a little ember of goodness that was going to come out of all this. And that was really the impetus for the name, and it’s really guided the true north of the company.  Love it. That’s really fun. And your hat looks good, too.  You see the little spark, the little crackle right there?  I see it. Yeah. It’s like a Christmas cracker. So, okay, this podcast is called Management Blueprint because we are looking for, or I’m looking for, frameworks that people came up with, that they stumbled upon, which other listeners might apply to their business. So what’s a framework that you could share with us which can be explained in three to five steps that helps you get an insight or communicate better or organize better, something that helps you be more effective?  Yeah. So this may not be a big surprise. Some of your listeners may follow me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my cheat code. When I first started this business, I went to LinkedIn with my full self. Share on X Determined to tell everyone the good, the bad, the ugly about the industry that I’m in, which is public relations. And a surprising thing happened. At the time, there weren’t a lot of people kind of being truth tellers in their respective industries. But I stuck to that same framework, speaking truth to power, which goes back to my Why.  An interesting thing happened, which is I tended to get a bunch of followers really quickly, and they would DM me saying, “Finally, someone’s just saying it like it really is in the industry. Finally, someone is lifting back the curtain. Finally, finally, finally.” And so I just doubled down on that approach. And so fast-forward to today, I have 82,000 followers on LinkedIn. The majority of my business comes in through DMs on LinkedIn from them having read my posts, my thoughts.  And by the time they actually come to me, they already have a good sense for my ethos, how I think, how I operate, that I work with good companies only. They know me. So the vetting process is 75% of the way done by the time they ever reach out. So that’s the cheat code. I’ve shortened the sales cycle from my old world being three months down to a week. If we have a phone call, we put together a quick proposal, and then it’s done because they are already looking to hire me when they reach out. So that’s the framework, that’s the cheat code, that’s the hack, and it’s applicable to just about any industry.  Okay. So I love it. So let’s break it down. So how do you create this effect where people pick up the phone or DM you and within a week sign you up? What is the process?  Yeah. So the process is just I post literally every day of my life. Maybe weekends I’ll take a break, it depends. But every work weekday I am posting. It is not a nice-to-have, it is a mission-critical function of Crackle PR. I would say up until recently, about 90% of my leads came in through my commentary and writing and posting on LinkedIn.  And it's really me just sharing everything that I know, including commenting on the news of the day tapping into the zeitgeist about issues that are happening from a public relations standpoint, and sharing real-time thought leadership across my… Share on X And so it’s not a simple process of, like, I do A and then B. It’s really more like, what’s happening today? What’s a story that I should tell and comment on today? And then how is that going to positively im

  5. Aug 31

    363: Simplify Your Tech Environment with Denis O’Shea

    https://youtu.be/1xVHNhjP1AY Denis O’Shea, Founder of Mobile Mentor, helps organizations pursue a clear goal to simplify your tech environment while strengthening security and empowering employees to remain productive. Driven by the joy of learning and intellectual adventure, Denis left a 15-year career at Nokia to build a company that learns about emerging technologies, translates them into business outcomes, and mentors customers through change. In this conversation, Denis introduces The Tech Stack Streamlining Framework: Understand Current Tech Stack, Assess Capacity for Change, Benchmark to Peers, Build the Roadmap, and Deliver Simplified Tech Stack. He explains how immersing his team in a customer’s environment, asking thoughtful questions, and benchmarking the organization against its peers can reveal a clear path toward a simpler technology stack. Denis also discusses Mobile Mentor’s fast-growing mentoring service, how its Microsoft partnership transformed the business, the challenge of finding technology professionals who are natural mentors, and why people must remain responsible for the quality and accuracy of everything they produce with AI. — Simplify Your Tech Environment with Denis O’Shea  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, Management Blueprint Podcast. And today my guest is Denis O’Shea, the Founder of Mobile Mentor, a technology service provider helping thousands of clients find and maintain the right balance, securing devices, protecting data, and empowering people to be productive. Mobile Mentor is also a five-time Microsoft award winner. So Denis, welcome back to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me back. And I have to say, you look fantastic. You’re aging gracefully, and I hope I’m doing the same.  Well, unfortunately, my barber is on vacation, so I couldn’t visit him last week. But it’s great to have you back on the show, and we couldn’t agree whether it was two or four years ago that you were here. Anyhow, it’s great to have you back, and I’ve got some questions for you that I’m curious about. And first and foremost, the question is, what is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in your Mobile Mentor business?  My personal Why is probably learning. And I think the reason I went into business in the first place was to learn and grow as an individual. It certainly wasn’t money. I expect money as an outcome from the process, but I didn’t go into it for money. It was really to learn, and the trigger for me was I did an executive education program in Switzerland. I was living there for a few years, and that blew my mind. That just exploded my mind when I started learning all about mergers, acquisitions, turnarounds, management buyouts, all these different ways of growing a business that were nonlinear.  And that motivated me to go on and do an MBA, and that then motivated me to leave my employer, who was a great company. I was working for Nokia for 15 years. They were amazing, but I decided to leave them and go out and embrace all this nonlinear stuff and found a company from scratch. And one day I thought maybe I’ll do a spin-out, or maybe I’ll do an acquisition, and I’ll do all these different things. And it was purely for the joy of learning and the intellectual adventure. So I think that’s my Why. It’s learning.  Yeah. Well, learning is great, and it’s a big driver of businesses when they are able to learn, especially in today’s age. So tell me a little bit about how Mobile Mentor is reflecting this way of learning. Is it a learning organization, and in what way is it?  Oh, that’s an interesting question, Steve. I would hope we are a learning organization. Something I’ve been saying to my kids and my staff for years is, “We’re a learning species. We can learn anything we put our minds to.” And so I would hope we are a learning organization. And the word “mentor” plays a huge part in not just our brand, but how we work. So we’re a technology service company. We’re always unpacking the latest technology and helping customers figure out what to do with it and how to extract value from it.  So I would hope that we’re good at learning what the technology can do and then translating that into outcomes for customers and helping people unlock the full potential of the technology they’ve just purchased. And when we started 22 years ago, we were focused on mobile devices. That’s why the company’s called Mobile Mentor. Nowadays, it’s mainly AI and security and all that. And by the way, we’re going through a rebrand. The company’s just going to be called Mentor going forward. Just Mentor. So that we can work with all technology, so we remove any association with that small device where we started 22 years ago. So I think we are very good at learning, internalizing the new technology, and then translating that into business outcomes for our customers.  Yeah.  That’s what I feel like our core skill is.  Yeah. And I love this concept of mentoring because essentially it’s not about teaching people, it’s about helping people discover how to be great. And if you can do that, that’s amazing. So that brings me to the next question, which is about frameworks. So this, as you know, this podcast is about frameworks, and what I’m curious about is, what’s a framework that has helped you grow this company, build this company, or help your clients or mentor your clients? Maybe it’s a mentoring framework. Maybe it’s a technology framework. So something that comes to mind that can be explained in three to five steps to our listeners.  Sure. We have a really strong framework at the front end of our sales process. It’s an assessment and roadmap we do for customers. And it’s something that’s on our website. It has a price point, so it’s got a value, but we choose to give it away for free when we get a strong, well-qualified opportunity, or when we have a channel partner bring us a strong lead. We will use this assessment and roadmap process to build a vision for the customer. And the way we do it, we’ve got a good framework for this.  We go through an assessment. So we tell the customer, “We’re going to have a look at your environment holistically and get a really good understanding of the technology stack you have today, all the different technologies you’re using, and also get a good understanding of your organization’s capability and capacity for change, and how you embrace change, how you make change happen. “And we’re going to show you how you compare to a whole bunch of other organizations.” I think we’ve done 174, 175 of these in the last maybe three years. And so we show the customer how they compare to others in their industry and also against others roughly their same size. And then, most importantly, we build out a roadmap, and we show them, “Here’s how you can potentially go from where you are today with today’s technology stack,” which is usually very busy, it’s usually a long list of technologies, “to a much simpler technology stack in the future if they’re willing to consolidate on one or two platforms and do all the possible integrations, automations, and simplifications so that they’re extracting much more value from one or two platforms, like Microsoft, than having a whole colorful mix of different technology vendors.”  So we’ll say, “Here’s a journey you could go on,” and then we describe it in vivid detail, showing all the different parts and how they would go passwordless, how they would automate setting up new employees and all the technology they need, how they would automate all their patching and security, how they would embrace AI into their operations, how they would use AI for productivity improvements, and kind of show this technology journey. That process, or that framework, of doing an assessment, and it covers 120 different topics. So we do the assessment, the comparison, the roadmap.  We find that to be extremely powerful because customers will look at that, and they’ll look at the destination and say, “Right. We want to be there. We want to get that outcome,” and then they’re buying off us. We’re not selling to them. They’re basically saying, “Okay. We want to get there. How do we do it? Help us. How can you come in and help us do it?” So the narrative flips from us being a sales organization to then being a mentor and helping the customer figure out how to get there.  And of course, we want to sell services, and we want to sell long-term contracts to say, “Yes, we can take you from here to there, and it’s a three-year engagement to do all those changes.” So that’s what we want. But the customer is buying it off us because they’ve bought into the destination.  Yeah. And that’s the modern buyer’s journey, right? They research you. Before even they come to you, they want to listen to you because you might have something for them. So I love this framework. So what I noted down was step number one, understand the technology stack that they have. Step number two, assess their ability to manage change or to handle change.  Yeah.  Then you benchmark them to others in their industry or in their peer group. Then you build the roadmap, and then you show them the simplified end state, the simplified tech stack.  Correct. Correct. And then we give them options around how we can help them to get there. Usually, there’s three options. And we say, “Well, what style of engagement works best for you? How would you like us to work with you?” And then it becomes a very comfortable, easy sales process from there, and it becomes easy because we’ve done all the listening.  So when we do the assessment and we cover 120 topics, we do 60 questions in 60 minutes. So it’s two one-hour sessions. And we call it our “friendly interrogation.”

  6. Aug 28

    362: Turn Disabilities into Unique Abilities with Dave Goyal

    https://youtu.be/35oNXqlEVf4 Dave Goyal, Founder and CEO of Think AI Corporation, is driven to Turn Disabilities into Unique Abilities by using technology to empower disabled entrepreneurs and help businesses unlock the value of their data. After contracting polio as an infant, Dave transformed physical limitations and early adversity into a passion for solving business problems, building companies, and giving back to society. Through Think AI, he helps manufacturing and healthcare leaders use data and AI to generate real-time insights, improve productivity, reduce costs, and create new opportunities for growth. In this conversation, Dave introduces The 3G AI Augmentation Framework—Gap: Where are we losing time, quality, ability, or capacity? Grow: Apply AI to augment people and improve that work. Glow: Institutionalize the solution so humans and AI collaborate effectively. Dave also shares how his private second brain and AI executive agents save him up to 80 hours per month, why human control and security must remain central to AI adoption, and how authority, trust, people, customers, and culture drive business growth. He also discusses his book, Real-Time Business Intelligence Mastery, and his vision for creating a venture studio for disabled entrepreneurs. — Turn Disabilities into Unique Abilities with Dave Goyal  Good day. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint. And today my guest is Dave Goyal, the founder and CEO of Think AI Corporation, which helps CTOs and CIOs in manufacturing and healthcare turn siloed data into real-time insights and automation, creating reduced downtime, increased efficiency, and going from weeks to days in project launches. Dave, welcome to the show.  Thank you for having me, Steve.  Well, I’m really curious to learn about you and your company, Think AI Corporation, but first I’d like to ask you about your personal why and how you are manifesting it in your business.  So thank you again, Steve. I’m really excited to be on your show. I’m in the data and AI business, and really tech innovation, for the last 30 years. In this particular company, Think AI, I have a partner, Manish Bhardia, and we both have been working very actively with Microsoft partners, the Microsoft ecosystem, and implementing data and AI solutions for midsize companies and manufacturing companies. You went on why, which is amazing.  My why: I’m a disabled entrepreneur. I have this hunger for building businesses. I’ve built nine businesses. We can talk about it later. And five of them were miserable failures in my books. Not all of them were that miserable, as I say. But five of them were failures, and I learned a lot from them. And I’m really motivated now to expand it further, to give back to small businesses.  We’ve been working with midsize and enterprise clients, but to midsize companies, and then motivate—I have a 15-year-old kid—so motivate young people and also small businesses to make use of the power of their own data and use and consume AI on a day-to-day basis. That’s my why.  Wow. So, to learn the power of their own data and use AI, why is this important to you?  The main reason is I am passionate about technology. Everybody is good at something. I am really good at solving business problems using technology. Being a disabled entrepreneur, I did not have a lot of luxury initially, even walking. Eventually, I started using braces, started going to different countries. So the passion became really the source of energy and motivation, and that passion is now going to a level where I want to motivate people like me who are disabled entrepreneurs and want to go into this kind of business. So my real passion is technology and giving back to society using technology, to sum it up.  Wow. So you mentioned this disabled entrepreneur. I’ve never heard this term. I mean, you talk about minority entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs, you know, veteran entrepreneurs, and actually the government recognizes these categories, but I never heard about disabled entrepreneurs. So would you mind sharing a little bit about what happened to you and how you got into this entrepreneurship?  Sure, yeah. And that’s really good, by the way. I don’t see anybody else using that term but me, so probably I should keep it with me as a copyright term. Just joking on it. But having said that, every disability brings some kind of ability. That’s why sometimes they call it differently abled. When you have these abilities, you don’t know the source or the channels to use them. So, for example, blind people, they may have a lot of great listening power. That’s why they are into music most of the time.  Sometimes they have amazing reasoning and critical-thinking power, but they don’t know how to channel it, so they fight on a day-to-day basis with these issues. Bringing it back to me, I have polio. When I was six months old, I got hit by the polio virus. Initially, for a few years, I had to just lie down on the bed, had a lot of physical therapy. Then I was able to get up and sit, at least. Then my father was carrying me to school, and I could see the kids were going out and playing. I got beaten up because of that, too, because kids don’t understand. No fault of theirs that I’m not throwing the ball at them and they are playing.  And so that brought a lot of negativity in me. Eventually, my grandfather and my father helped me get over that, and I started channeling that into building businesses. So I started teaching music. I learned music through some of my friends. I started teaching music during my college days and started making money. And I had a blind friend, and he needed money because he was abandoned by his parents, so I had to help him out. I started making some money. I was doing well with my family, so I could just pay everything back to him. So that seed got planted there, and I didn’t know what to do back then, right?  Still a 14-, 15-year-old kid or a teenager, in this case. So I started getting into that mindset of, how about I build businesses for me and then start helping out the community? I’m still not there yet. I’m going towards helping that community. But I want to identify disability in three ways, not just physical. So those three are physical, but the bigger one is mental. A lot of people are really mentally blocked, and you see people, you know, “Oh, I can’t change anything in my life.” People die by suic*de. Kids get into depression. This is a form of disability, by all means.  I don’t think education, parents, and community are doing so much about that other than having a cliché thing that, “I was a victim of depression, so I’m doing that,” just to show off. But really, to help out the community in a methodical manner, that doesn’t exist. Second, physical disability, like I said, given by God sometimes, like war veterans and others, then you feel really limited. So what to do with that? And I come into that category, so I know that really well. Third is financial disability. So a lot of financial disability is in the mind, too. I’ve heard a phrase called, “You don’t die by hunger; you really die by indigestion.”  So you would find ways and means to make money even if you’re a completely disabled person. So I don’t think finance is an issue in general. So these three areas, to me, are the real disability areas. I’m obviously only working on one today, which is physical disability: how to identify the potential of people who can create something different within that limitation and then make a change in the world. So that’s the motivation. That’s my Life 2.0, where I’m moving now. Love it. Love it. So how did you have time to build nine businesses?  I started it in 1993, ’94, I believe, or ’95, I think. And they’re one at a time. Today I have about three. I sold one. And yeah, I did not have time. One of the big challenges when I built these three in the last six, seven, eight years, the biggest challenge I faced is I do not have time for working with customers, which I love to do—talking and listening to their business problems, solving those problems. I end up doing a lot of operational work.  Post-2020, and it’s a very blunt thing to say, people got lazy. They want to change jobs, make more money, do moonlighting, do multiple things, but not work hard like we did back in the days. And that kind of pushed all of us small businesses to do a lot more management of resources, especially human resources, in a distributed environment. I have teams in India, the Philippines, Canada. So that became a bigger challenge. But having said that, AI came as a savior. In the last 18 months, AI has changed quite a lot.  And if you don’t go into a debate of whether AI is good or bad, or you’re a skeptic or an enthusiast, AI can really help you if you really put together how it can help you. It should not replace you, but it should give you an additional helping arm. In my business, I started deploying C-suite. So I still have a VP of operations. My business partner is into sales. But then I started filling in other functions, like a fractional CFO, as an example. My fractional CFO is monitoring my top line and bottom line. I call him Felix. I have to give names to AI agents.  So Felix is actually looking on a weekly basis at what invoices are billed, if we have vendors or employees, what we need to pay, where our expenses are going, what’s the monthly or maybe six-month cash flow run. Are we within limits? Do we have borderline cash availability so that we can survive? So it started to do a lot of things. But not only that, because we are feeding our own data, our own mind, I have built my own second brain. It started to read off of that and started giving me insights that a human would not give me. And even if I hire a fractional CFO, he will only hear what I have to say,

  7. Aug 26

    361: Generate and Measure Your Pipeline with Carlos Corredor

    https://youtu.be/1ixNS0eJX-0 Carlos Corredor, Co-Founder and CEO of Condor Digital Marketing, is driven by a passion for interpreting data and helping marketing leaders Generate and Measure Your Pipeline with greater accuracy. ith a background in sports analytics and journalism, Carlos helps B2B companies identify which marketing activities generate qualified leads, clients, and revenue so they can invest confidently in what works.  In this conversation, Carlos introduces The Condor Pipeline Generation Framework—Understand Current Pipeline Generation, Map the Process, Move Budgets to Their Highest and Best Use, Fix Measurement Gaps, and Rinse and Repeat. He explains why marketers should begin with clients and revenue instead of clicks and impressions, how the Pipeline X-Ray exposes attribution gaps, and why budgets should move toward channels with proven returns. Carlos also discusses using BANT to diagnose conversion problems and why client champions, paid media, and events drive growth in high-ticket B2B markets. — Generate and Measure Your Pipeline with Carlos Corredor  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and today my guest is Carlos Corredor, Co-Founder and CEO of Condor Digital Marketing, a pipeline generation and measurement firm. Carlos, welcome to the show.  Hey, Steve. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.  It’s exciting to have you and to learn about your secrets of how you generate a measurable pipeline. But before we get into it, I’m curious: What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it through your company?  Yeah. So I’ve always been passionate about sports and the data behind sports, and I actually worked in sports data analysis and journalism. But ultimately, I’ve been passionate about interpreting data to have an advantage, whether that’s playing tennis or doing analysis for baseball teams. And then I eventually started working in marketing, doing sports websites, and I saw the opportunity. In marketing in general, especially with digital, to use data to your advantage. So I would say that’s really what I’m passionate about in terms of my professional life and why I enjoy what I do so much and why I get up in the morning and I really look forward to the day and even to Monday. Because obviously, it’s not all fun. But ultimately, I think it comes from that passion of liking what you’re doing, and the time flies when you work and you like what you do and you see that you’re good at what you’re doing and it’s making an impact. So I would say that’s why.  And have you always been a data person? Are you analytical and like to look at the numbers behind things?  Yeah, yeah. It started with sports. That’s where I realized that I had, let’s say, that passion at the beginning and ultimately that skill. With baseball at the beginning, it was reading the back of baseball cards and then fantasy baseball in high school, and then actually working in that. In kind of like sabermetrics and Moneyball-type analysis in college.  Because I saw, just like it happens in marketing, how back in the old days, even professionals, they were using the wrong type of data or a very antiquated way of looking at things. So it’s like understanding really what has an impact and what is responsible for outcomes. That’s, I think, the part that I’ve always thought was what’s important and what I had a knack for, a talent to do that better than others. So that’s why I went deep into that.  Okay. So how do you do that? So this podcast is a podcast of frameworks. So I wonder if you have a framework of how to create pipeline generation based on data, and perhaps you can share a simplified version of that with our listeners, something that can be explained in three to five steps.  Yeah, definitely. And I’ll give you first the kind of like the philosophy or the mental model, and then I’ll give you those steps because one comes from the other. So in marketing, with all of the data that’s available, especially today, a lot of people start at the bottom. At clicks, impressions, and then they try to build a bottoms-up report to then prove what’s generating leads and clients and revenue. But that is always inexact, takes forever.  What I propose is doing it the opposite: a top-down approach where you start with clients and revenue, and then start figuring out where those leads in your pipeline or clients and the closed revenue is coming from. And you will know all of that at the beginning. So that’s, I think, how it starts, that framework. So the first step of the framework is to understand, which sounds really basic, but you’d be surprised today how many marketing leaders, marketing VPs, CMOs of especially mid-market, definitely smaller mid-market, and even some enterprise companies, don’t have that data readily available to understand how much pipeline did we, as a marketing department, generate, let’s say, last year. So that’s, I think, the first step, is understanding that. It’s asking your team for a report that says that. Now your team’s going to come back and say they won’t know the full picture. Maybe they know 10%, maybe they know 90%. But they’re going to show you something. So then is the second step. You’re going to start adjusting your investments to what you’re seeing there, and at the same time, you’re going to start fixing the dark holes or what you can’t see.  And then simply step number three is rinse and repeat every, let’s say, quarter at the beginning. And obviously, there’s nuances of how exactly you should adjust and what exactly you can fix. But ultimately, that would be the three-step approach that you asked about.  That’s fascinating. So the understand piece is understanding your pipeline or how you’re generating the pipeline? What is it? Understanding what?  Yeah. So actually we have a name for that first step. We call it the Pipeline X-Ray. So let’s say you start a new job as a CMO of a new company. Or simply you’ve been in the job for a while and you’re listening to this and you say, “Okay, actually, I’ve never thought about it that way.  Let’s sit tomorrow with my team and ask the question: How many qualified leads and closed clients have we, as marketing, generated so far this year and, let’s say, last year?” That is understanding that. Now, I’ll tell you, I’d be very surprised if the marketing person or the marketing team or the leader has that data in a way that they can say with 100% certainty what the answer is. In terms of, “We’ve closed these four clients, and we’ve had 72 qualified leads.  And out of the 72, 50 have come from our paid search campaigns, 10 have come from events, and then the others have come from organic.” In an ideal world, that’s the type of answer that you want. But in the real world, again, very rarely do you have that clear understanding right then and there. So that’s when step number two becomes, okay, let’s close the gaps to be able to have an understanding.  Okay. So essentially, when you say adjust and fix, then are you talking about adjusting and fixing the process of generating clients, or actually mapping the gaps in the pipeline first?  Yeah, so that’s a great question. The adjust, I mean move budget around. Not necessarily increase budget. You have to prove what’s working. And obviously, if you don’t have the full picture and understanding, you cannot just go to your CEO and say, “I need more budget.” So with the same budget that you have, what can you pause and move around towards the things that step number one told you with certainty are working. So if, let’s say, out of the 50 qualified leads that you generated, you saw that half of them came from your paid search campaigns, then you say, “Oh, okay.” And then you don’t see anything, let’s say, for conferences, and now you’re going to 10 conferences a year and you’re spending a million dollars on conferences, and you’re only spending $200,000 a year on your paid media spend. Then you say, “You know what? I’m going to stop. I’m going to pause. We’re not going to go to these two conferences this year, and I’m going to move those $200,000, and we’re going to double our spend in Google Ads,” for example. That’s what I mean with the adjust piece. It could be the opposite. It could be pause paid search and then be more aggressive on our conference strategy. It could be, let’s start a paid social campaign, whether that’s LinkedIn or programmatic ads, or let’s be more aggressive on our PR because right now our leads have come from interviews that our subject matter experts have done in certain types of podcasts or YouTube channels.  But that’s what step number one is. But adjust is move budget around. Put your stocks where the returns are positive and where you can expect a better return almost immediately, or at least in the next upcoming months. And then the fix is particularly around the measurement gaps. The fix is what you can’t see, right, on step number one. Step number one is understanding. And a report with all of that. When the person that does the reporting for you came back, or when you did it yourself or whatever, probably a lot of leads are like, “Ah, now it says direct traffic. What is that?” Obviously, they didn’t just come and wake up one day and say, “Oh, I’m just going to go to condoragency.com.” No, they heard you somewhere, but you’re still not sure. You won the client, you know you won the client, the client’s paying you money, but you’re not sure. So maybe, okay, what needs to improve in our measurement framework.  Usually, you can start with your CRM, your HubSpot, Salesforce, for instance, or whatever you use. There’s some web analytics that might need to happen. You need to connect your advertis

  8. Aug 24

    360: Build a Multi-Site Medical Practice with Alex Fernandez

    https://youtu.be/B9j1nlRifHM Alex Fernandez, CEO of Synergy Orthopedic Specialists, is driven by a mission to help physicians Build a Multi-Site Medical Practice that creates wealth, equity, and independence beyond their personal labor. By bringing independent physicians together, building scalable organizations, and expanding access to integrated services, Alex helps doctors operate as entrepreneurs while delivering a more convenient and cost-effective patient experience. In this conversation, Alex introduces The Multi-Site Scaling Framework—Visualize Your Target EBITDA, Align With Your Partners, Remove Yourself From the Center, Build Systems, and Build Margin Around Your Core Business. He explains why starting with the desired enterprise value creates a clearer path for growth, why alignment must be a gate for every partnership or acquisition, and how strong systems allow a business to operate without depending on its founder. Alex also shares how vertical integration, company culture, geographic expansion, and AI-assisted processes can improve profitability while preserving independent medical care. — Build a Multi-Site Medical Practice with Alex Fernandez  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and welcome Alejandro “Alex” Fernandez, the CEO of Synergy Orthopedic Specialists, a team of surgeons and specialists that believes in providing patients with an integrated approach to musculoskeletal—I’m glad I could pronounce this—medical care through 15 locations throughout San Diego. Alex, welcome to the show.  Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. I’ve enjoyed your show, and I’m happy to be here.  Well, I’m always interested when I meet with medical provider companies or CEOs who have been doctors, because I grew up in a family of two doctors, and so I was exposed to some of the challenges of being a doctor and running a hospital. So that’s going to be interesting. So my favorite question that I ask recently to all our founders is, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your practice and in your business?  Yeah, for sure. And so my why, as you put it, comes from where I started. I actually don’t come from a family of physicians. I started not where I ended up. I’m a son of Cuban immigrants. My parents fled Castro in the ’60s, and I was born in Puerto Rico. Later on, my family took a lot of our family in the Mariel boatlift in 1981 and took hundreds of people out of Cuba. But in reality, the concept or the reality is that my parents didn’t have a lot of money. They had some connections, but they believed that I should have a college education.  But I had to work my way through eight years of college to get my bachelor’s. So I landed in healthcare as an accident. It was a small medical practice. I was basically doing front desk and medical records, and then later on learned how to do the billing, all by hand at that time. There were no electronic medical records. And I started basically at the front desk, and I watched something that I never really forgot, which is, you have these brilliant physicians, people that can diagnose patients and help them and cure them, but when it came to business, they were never taught anything about business.  So this is where I believe I have generated value over the years: basically, built companies that actually create wealth, and the wealth for the physicians in particular. Share on X I think physicians are very entrepreneurial. At least that’s the idea to begin with, is, “I’m going to go into the practice of medicine and have my own business.” But somewhere along the line, the business becomes almost like an ATM machine. It’s no different than any other entrepreneur that starts a business. They are the business. Without them, if they go away for a couple of days, the business doesn’t make any money, and they don’t really know how to do that. So what I’ve done over the years is I have gotten smaller groups of physicians to come together, form larger organizations, larger groups, and eventually built larger private businesses that can have EBITDA, equity earnings that can basically provide some additional wealth.  Particularly, I try to help them think of themselves as capitalists, not as day laborers. Because in reality, in most businesses, and particularly physicians, they’re cranking the wheel, and the more they produce, the more they work, the more they earn. But in some cases, they don’t understand how to get away from that. How to earn from all the other things that they control. Because physicians do control 80% of the spend in healthcare but earn probably no more than 5% of it.  Wow. That is shocking. So they’re not using the leverage properly, probably.  Yeah. Sometimes they know it’s there, but physicians in general are risk-averse. Just starting their own business is hard enough. Then having to figure out how to capitalize from all the levers that they have, that’s completely different. And they’re no different than, I would say, lawyers or accountants that start a small business. At some point in time, you have to figure out, how do you make the business big enough that it operates and works without you?  Yeah, I love that. I love that. And what makes you feel strongly for physicians?  Well, particularly independent physicians, I think it’s a dying breed. Years ago, I would hear the stories of my parents where they’d say, “Hey, we took you to the pediatrician,” and my dad would be friends with the OB-GYN that took care of my mom and the pediatrician. And I remember them naming them by first name or even meeting them at the social club. But nowadays, it’s very transactional. It’s very fast. There’s no connection.  So I think that’s why there’s been this whole surgence of concierge physicians where you pay extra. Because in truth, in order to make a living, the business of healthcare is compressed by downward pressures from the government and from other institutions that say, “We’re going to pay you less, but you have to have a significant amount of compliance, and you have to spend more money on this, and you have to do that.” And then at the same time, the cost of living goes up.  The employees need to make more money. Your rent goes up. The supplies continue to increase. So you have the static or lower reimbursement from the different payers, whether it’s Medicare, the government, or private institutions, and then an increase of expenses happening. That’s very strange to any business. In any other business, you say, “Well, if my costs go up, I increase my prices, and then maybe my margins are a little bit less, but I still have a significant margin.” In healthcare, you almost have to just work more in order to generate more revenue, and the expenses hopefully will increment a little bit more, but your earnings will be the same or less. So it’s a very tough situation for an independent physician.  That’s why more and more, especially physicians coming out of training, look for jobs with health systems, with the Kaisers of the world or the different large institutions in the United States, so that way they can go ahead and just go to work and take care of patients and not worry about the business of healthcare.  Yeah. But then these big hospitals turn into bureaucracies, and then they still have to worry about that in a different way.  And that’s personally the second part to that question you asked me. That’s why I like working with physicians and not necessarily with health systems. I’ve never held a job with a hospital. Not that I haven’t wanted to. It’s just, I think the nature of the bureaucracy of a health system creates some things that I’m not personally interested in.  Yeah. Well, I can see that. So Alex, this is a podcast of frameworks, as you know. So what’s a framework that has helped you build your business, maybe generate an insight, understand situations, maybe influence these physicians to come together in your roll-ups? Whatever framework you developed, could you share something with our listeners?  Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Most owners in a business—and I’ll talk in generic terms. I’ll try to make sure I don’t use any slang for healthcare—but most businesses build their business for income. They want to make income for their families, for themselves. They want to be able to take care of the people that they’re with. But they don’t really think about it from a perspective of, “Let me build a business that can multiply.” Maybe they want to, but in a lot of areas, it’s just hard for them.  I actually grew up in the bridal business. My parents had bridal stores. They basically did wedding packages, and that’s the business that I grew up in. Every summer, I would go and do the cash register or help rent tuxedos and things like that, or do filing and bookkeeping. So that’s where my entrepreneurial spirit comes from. It’s my parents. But I always saw them where maybe they built one or a couple stores, two, three stores, and they would kind of stop there. But I think I learned a lot from my dad in particular around multi-site operations in a retail industry, and I took that back into the healthcare business.  So one of the first things I think that a business owner has to do is they have to underwrite their own exit first. Share on X They have to think of growth and particularly of the value of the business if they were ever going to sell it. Figure out what your EBITDA or enterprise value is going to be, and then go from there. Then make the alignments first, but don’t make it the goal. Most people chase the volume, the customers, more locations, more deals, spend years fixing what they bolted on in order to flip it, but they don’t really take the time to align it. So I think the client, the partners

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

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