Coffee, Chaos, & Cashflow

Coffee, Chaos, & Cashflow
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Entrepreneurship
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 ☕️ Coffee, Chaos & Cashflow 🎙️Fueling your business journey with real talk, laughs, and a dash of caffeine! Join Eric Griffin, Aram Street, & Yemi Ogunbase as they share wins, missteps, and candid advice on turning chaos into cashflow. Real stories, real lessons—entrepreneurship, unfiltered. 🎧 

  1. 3d ago

    #69 Brian Raney: How to Build a Team For Profit and For Purpose

    Send us Fan Mail Brian Raney is back for round two — this time for a themed deep dive on building a team, which he happens to do two very different ways at once: as CEO of APAX Software (for-profit) and Awesome Inc (the nonprofit startup community), under one roof. The contrast drives the whole episode. Regardless of which org, Brian's still hiring for the same culture and core-value fit — but Awesome Inc openly doesn't compete on compensation ("if salary's your top priority, this isn't the fit"), while APAX can match or beat market rates. He's candid that he can't outbid a coastal software company for a remote developer living in San Francisco, but flips it into an advantage: APAX competes hard on value and price when winning those same clients, and most of its remote team actually started in-person in Lexington, absorbed the culture, and earned the flexibility later. The meat is his hiring bar — three non-negotiables, each tied to an Awesome Inc core value. First, 100% trust (Be Good): you're getting the passwords and the keys, so it's all-or-nothing. Second, "FIO — Figure It Out" (Be Excellent): every candidate, intern to director, faces a real figure-it-out task with two rules — hit the deadline, and ask no questions. And third, the road trip test (Be a Friend): could he sit in a car with you for four-plus hours and survive it? 🚗 From there he gets into how a strong culture polices itself, why it's easiest to set culture when you're tiny (your first two or three hires are the people you're "essentially marrying for the life of the business"), and why culture is maintenance, not a set of posters you hang in year one. Then the hindsight. Brian's team read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team together and he realized accountability was the gap in their first decade — and that, counterintuitively, good people crave being held accountable, because "being clear is being kind." His single piece of advice for anyone building a first team is to think first: he took a one-month sabbatical built around a workout, a surf, and an hour of quiet thinking a day 🏄, and came back a believer, because — as he quotes Andy Stanley — people plan toward what's good and drift toward what's bad. Define your culture on purpose, or it'll get defined for you. In this episode: Building a team two ways: for-profit payroll vs. nonprofit missionWhy Awesome Inc doesn't compete on salary — and why that's fineRecruiting developers against coastal pay, and winning clients on value insteadThe three non-negotiables: trust, "Figure It Out," and the road trip testHow a strong culture polices itselfWhy culture is easiest to set when small — and must be maintained as you growThe Five Dysfunctions of a Team and the accountability gapWhy good people crave accountability, and "being clear is being kind"The one move for a first-time team-builder: go sit in a quiet room and thinkFind Brian, Awesome Inc & APAX: Awesome Inc: awesomeinc.org Email: brian@awesomeinc.orgIn person: Awesome Inc, 348 East Main Street, Lexington — and at Lexington entrepreneurial and networking eventsAPAX Software https://www.apaxsoftware.comMentioned in this episode: The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) · Crucial Conversations Keywords: building a team, hiring, company culture, core values, leadership, nonprofit, for-profit, startup incubator, entrepreneurship, remote work, talent acquisition, accountability, EOS, team building, small business, Awesome Inc, APAX Software, Lexington Kentucky, startup community #BuildingATeam #CompanyCulture #Leadership #Hiring #CoreValues #Startups #Entrepreneurship #Accountability #RemoteWork #AwesomeInc #LexingtonKY #CoffeeChaosAndCashflow #Podcast #TeamBuilding Support the show

  2. Sep 3

    #68 Greg & Hannah Holden: Building Clarity Interpreting While Building a Marriage

    Send us Fan Mail The show's first-ever duo: Greg and Hannah Holden, married, in business together at Clarity Interpreting — now 50-plus interpreters statewide — and raising five kids while they're at it. Everyone says never go into business with family, and definitely never with your spouse; the Holdens have done exactly that for almost twenty years 💍. They come from nearly opposite worlds — Greg from an Eastern Kentucky preacher's home (where his pastor dad ran side hustles like "Holden House Breads," the kids doing the selling), Hannah from a missionary childhood in Honduras — and their two paths crossed at the University of Kentucky. The business was born out of Greg's first career as a state child-abuse investigator: a Spanish-speaking case with no good language options pushed him to talk Hannah into getting certified, and she became one of the first state-certified interpreters in Kentucky. Then came the 2008 crash, a fresh MBA that employers wouldn't touch next to a social-work résumé, and Greg driving a yellow cab through the night — bar runs, jail pickups, and Hannah calling every couple hours to make sure he was alive 🚕. That pressure was the push. They started Clarity in 2009 on about $9,000 and the public library's Wi-Fi (a librarian once shushed Greg mid phone-interview), and grew it into a 24/7 operation where Greg literally slept with the phone. But the heart of the episode is what it actually takes to run a company with the person you married. Type-A, detail-driven Hannah and big-picture, jump-off-the-plane Greg needed about four years to find their balance — "grace, lots of grace," relationship before Clarity, and learning to hand off and stop being half-present in two worlds while five kids grew up answering the business line. It's a real business story too: Hannah is the majority owner, complete with a certification-class saga where the women business owners grilled Greg for showing up; a rival's abrupt shutdown that helped double their revenue in three years; and a clear-eyed take on why AI has interpreting "in the crosshairs" yet can't touch their high-stakes, in-person niche 🌐 — punctuated by the florería-mistaken-for-"Florida" story that nearly cost a single mom her kids. In this episode: "Never go into business with your spouse" — and doing it anyway for 20 yearsTwo different worlds: a preacher's kid and a missionary's daughterHow a child-welfare case accidentally became an interpreting companyThe 2008 crash, an unusable MBA, and driving a yellow cabStarting Clarity on $9k and the library's internetType A meets big-picture: dividing the labor without dividing the marriageBuilding a 24/7 business while raising five kidsHannah as majority owner and the woman-owned certification classA competitor's collapse that helped double their revenueWhy AI has interpreting in its crosshairs — and why their niche is safeThe mistranslation that nearly removed kids from their momFind Clarity Interpreting: Website: clarityinterpreting.comEmail: office@clarityinterpreting.com~20 of the most common languages in central Kentucky and statewide — built for HR, compliance, medical, and legal needs, not everyday consumer use#MarriedInBusiness #FamilyBusiness #Interpreting #LanguageAccess #Entrepreneurship #SmallBusiness #WomanOwnedBusiness #ClarityInterpreting #LexingtonKY #AIandWork #CoffeeChaosAndCashflow #Podcast #FoundersStory Support the show

  3. Aug 27

    #67 Rachel Edenfield of Swell: Care Before the Crisis

    Send us Fan Mail This week we sit down with Rachel Edenfield, founder and CEO of Swell — a preventative mental and relational health platform built to make care radically more accessible. A former social worker turned product builder who's raised $1.7M and started by serving warfighters and their families 🎖️, Rachel reframes the whole category: the question isn't "is there an app for mental health," it's whether you can build help for the people least likely to ask for it — and reach them before the crisis, not after. The insight underneath Swell is that most people who need help don't identify as needing it, so the app meets them at the early signals instead — a fight with your partner, "I want to perform at work but can't get motivated" — and quietly applies the kind of clinical interventions you'd get in therapy years earlier. Rachel walks through the mechanics: a proprietary 63-trait archetyping engine, and a "Connections" feature that can predict relationship dynamics (like the pursue-withdraw loop couples fall into) and coach you through them 🧠. She's clear it's not a therapy replacement — even if therapy were free tomorrow, there are only enough U.S. therapists for about 12% of the people who request a session — so Swell works as the tier before a therapist, softening resistance, freeing up clinicians, and escalating to real help when its risk detection flags someone. Then the founder story, which is a saga of its own: a still-active musician raised by a single mom, briefly homeless as a kid, who hustled custom MySpace layouts and once started a Robin-Hood credit-card-processing company to undo her own sales job's markups — before web design, a stint at Lyft through its IPO, and product roles in epidemiology and defense tech. She's refreshingly blunt about the money: 330-plus investors, genuinely terrible timing (SVB's collapse, rising rates, a mental-health VC hangover), landing a TRICARE contract by spotting a C-SPAN hearing and cold-calling a senator's office, and the hard-won conviction that revenue is the only thing that matters — and that founders, not VCs, are the ones creating the value 💸. In this episode: The real question: building help for the people least likely to ask Why "preventative" — catching patterns years before therapy How Swell works: the 63-trait archetyping engine and "Connections" Why software can't (and shouldn't) replace therapy — the 12% shortage Why she started with the military community From social worker to product builder — via MySpace layouts and Lyft The $1.7M raise: 330 investors, brutal timing, and refusing to die Landing a TRICARE contract through a C-SPAN clip and a cold call Fundraising truths: revenue is king, and who really holds the power Building a startup in Louisville instead of on the coasts Find Rachel & Swell: App: Swell in the App Store · getswell.app LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/redenfield/ She writes for the startup newsletter The Distill: https://kycombinator.beehiiv.com/ Support the show

  4. Aug 20

    #66 Meet Gabbi McErlean: Horses, Hustle & the Third Chair

    Send us Fan Mail New season, new voice. For four seasons the third chair belonged to Eric — this season it's Gabbi McErlean, and today Aram and Yemi flip her into the guest seat so you can finally meet the woman, myth, and legend (aka G Funk 🎙️). She even runs her own intro! Gabbi walks us down what she calls her windy road. She grew up in California wanting to be a vet — mostly because it looked like her only way to work with horses. When chem, microbio, and calc made the case for "mercy," she swapped the vet track for a marketing degree, having realized her real gift is rapport and that, in her words, marketing is sales. She moved to Kentucky at twenty for a horse-training job, paid her dues mucking a twenty-stall barn, and ran headfirst into the horse world's brutal price of entry — so she built a marketing career to fund the horse life instead of chasing the horse life broke 🐎. Then come the turning points: an equestrian-apparel marketing gig that folded in February 2020, a jobless stretch of the shutdown (Google Ads certs, Bojack Horseman, and cooking Matt dinner two feet from his work-from-home desk), and a landing at Fleet Feet where the franchise model and life as "number two" lit the entrepreneurial fuse — you can propose all the changes you want, but you don't get teeth without owning it. Now she's an agency marketer living in paid media, websites, and CRM, breeding sport horses on the side because "they're a business now," and she says yes to a business podcast for the same reason she says yes to everything: the hunger to keep learning outside her own lane.  In this episode: The windy road: wanting to be a vet, but really just wanting horsesLeaving the vet track for marketing, and why "marketing is sales"Paying dues in the horse world and its brutal price of entryGetting laid off in Feb 2020 and riding out the shutdownFleet Feet, the franchise model, and the itch to own somethingBreeding sport horses as an actual business (write-offs and all)Lightning round: the coffee order, the cruise she'd never take, and her most-Kentucky confessionFind Gabbi: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gabriellafunk/Marketing: https://www.spottysquadmarketing.com/Horses: https://www.spottysquadwarmbloods.com/ Support the show

  5. Aug 13

    #65 Edd MacKey on Building a Future for a 140-Year-Old Opera House

    Send us Fan Mail A building that was very nearly a parking lot is now one of the most storied stages in Kentucky. This week Aram and Gabbi sit down with Edd MacKey — from Mt. Sterling by way of the Bahamas, a former LFUCG engineering technician who helped design the trails Lexington walks and bikes on, and now the man running the Lexington Opera House 🎭. (The friendship started, as Aram recalls it, in a Kroger checkout line.) Edd makes a case that engineering and the arts aren't nearly as far apart as they look — everything from the sciences to the cosmos is design, he says, and the performing arts are just a more flamboyant sphere of it. From there the history pours out: the Opera House's original site at Broadway and Main, where the Hilton now stands and where Kentucky's first governor was inaugurated; how talking pictures gutted theaters nationwide and turned this one into a movie house before it shuttered entirely; and how absentee owners with no stake in the community left it slated for demolition in the 1970s. It was saved by locals who were invested — W.T. Young, Jim Host, and George and Linda Carey, with Linda spearheading the effort — at the same moment the city was spending $40 million on Rupp Arena. Gabbi asks the important question about ghosts. Edd can neither confirm nor deny 👻. The rescue came with foresight that still defines the building: the Opera House Fund, which in fifty-plus years has put more than $13 million toward helping local performing arts groups afford a stage that would otherwise be out of reach. Edd explains the two halves of his job — managing thirteen local companies that each use the stage two to three times a year, plus the Broadway Live touring series now marking fifty years in Lexington — and how the calendar actually gets built, with Broadway dates locked first (touring routes wait for no one), then local groups slotting into their three optimum dates each. He also walks through Broadway Buddies, the thirteen-year-old outreach program started by Linda Carey and his predecessor Luann Franklin, which brings roughly 250 underserved kids a season in for a tour, theater etiquette, and a session with the technical crew on how spotlights, fog, and flying scenery actually work — then brings them back to watch a real Broadway show, paid for by donors 🎟️. Then the conversation widens to the whole ecosystem Edd sits at the center of: the Fayette County Public Arts Commission, which evolved from an approval body into a funded one that backs murals, sculptures, and gardens across the county; and the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, now led by Grammy-winning artistic director and Lexington native Zach Brock. He shares a surprising thread between his birthplace and his adopted city — discovering E.P. Taylor's monument at Thoroughbred Park, a Kentucky horseman who developed property in Nassau and was tied to a Bahamian racetrack dating to the 1700s 🐎. And he closes with what still happens inside those walls: one of the country's first integrated stage productions in the early 1920s, Josephine Baker, three Netflix comedy specials, a UK Opera broadcast seen by millions on KET, and The Lexington Theatre Company's Les Misérables, the highest-grossing production in their history. In this episode: Why an engineer ended up running an opera houseThe original Broadway and Main site, and Kentucky's first gubernatorial inaugurationHow talking pictures killed America's theaters, and how this one nearly became a parking lotThe locals who saved it, and why absentee ownership abandons a communityThe Opera House Fund: $13M+ over fifty years for local performing artsTwo jobs in one — thirteen local companies plus fifty years of Broadway LiveHow the season calendar actually gets builtBroadway Buddies: ~250 kids a season, and what changes when they know how the fog worksBecoming "comedy central for Central Kentucky," Netflix specials and allThe Public Arts Commission, murals, and funding neighborhood artChamber Music Festival of Lexington and Grammy winner Zach BrockA Bahamas-to-Bluegrass connection hiding in Thoroughbred ParkBasketball, bourbon, and horses — and why Lexington's mix is its strengthFind the Lexington Opera House: Website: https://www.lexingtonoperahouse.comBroadway Live & Variety Live lineup: https://www.centralbankcenter.com/lexington-opera-house/broadway-live-variety-live Support the show

  6. Aug 6

    #64 Built to Outlast You: Craft, Legacy, and the Long Way Around feat. Pat Martelli

    Send us Fan Mail What does it take to build something still standing in a hundred years? This week Aram, Yemi, and Gabbi sit down with Pat Martelli — master carpenter, former high school history teacher, and founder of Boone Creek Construction — for his first-ever podcast appearance 🎙️. The conversation is about the tension at the heart of modern building: an industry that rewards speed and efficiency, and a builder stubbornly convinced the techniques that have stood the test of time are still the ones worth using.  Pat opens on what actually separates a builder from the guy with "quality craftsmanship" painted on his trailer over the cheapest house wrap money can buy. He talks sourcing premier suppliers from out of state — including the airtight Arizona-built Western Windows going into a winery project, the first building in Kentucky to have them — and why he refuses to mark up materials, adding only his builder's fee to whatever crosses his desk. It's a practice other builders call crazy, but Pat's math is long-term: spend fifteen or twenty grand up front, or watch the client pay forty to fix it in a year. As Aram's dad used to put it, you can do it right the first time or right the sixth time, but eventually someone will have to do it right 🔨. From there it gets personal. Pat grew up on his father's job sites, started digging ditches as an eighth-grade summer laborer, and worked his way up through framing and trim carpentry. Then he spent five years teaching high school history and coaching swim — a passion job he says he'd return to tomorrow if he won the lottery — until he did the math on a sub-$40K salary and realized his summer trim-carpentry side business was earning half that in two months. He shares the story of a student on the run from police who turned up hiding in his classroom, and how that same instinct now goes into mentoring blue-collar guys in their twenties who are being told by influencers they're on the wrong track. The crew also gets into the tech that's helped and hurt: 4G walkie-talkies (a deliberate step backward Pat loves, and a moment of silence for Nextel), construction management software, Pinterest boards that quietly torch budgets, and AI renderings that finally let clients show a builder what's actually in their head. Then the legacy question — and Pat's answer isn't only buildings. It's the block mason's job site with four living generations on it, a ninety-year-old still packing mud, and a check that feeds all of them. When Gabbi asks what someone tearing into his work a century from now should find, Pat deadpans that he leaves a Boone Creek token in every house, immediately admits he doesn't, and Aram is fairly sure he's going to start 😄. In this episode: What actually separates a quality builder from the marketing on the trailerSourcing premium materials, and the first Western Windows install in KentuckyNo material markup: why Pat's "unusual" pricing is a long-game referral strategySpend it now or spend double later — the real cost of cutting cornersFrom eighth-grade laborer to master carpenter to business ownerFive years teaching history, and why he left (and would go back)Mentorship, strong role models, and the pipeline into the trades4G walkie-talkies, jobsite communication, and the Nextel we lostPinterest budget blowups and how AI renderings are changing client conversationsBuilding a company that runs without him — systems, foremen, and being a present fatherLegacy as buildings and relationships: four generations on one job siteBoone Creek Millwork: bourbon barrel goods, and a third business on the wayFind Boone Creek: Boone Creek Construction: https://boonecreekconstruction.com/Boone Creek Millwork: https://boonecreekmillwork.com/ — bourbon barrel coasters, muddlers, cigar rests and more 🥃  Support the show

  7. Jul 30

    #63 Alex Smith on Selling the Invisible: The Business of First Impressions

    Send us Fan Mail What do you sell when your best work is invisible? This week Aram, Yemi, and Gabbi sit down with Alex Smith, who spent five years in digital marketing before becoming business developer at Green Solutions Land Care, a veteran-owned commercial landscaping and site-work company in Lexington. His big idea: curb appeal isn't lawn care, it's a first-impressions business — the kind people only notice when something's gone wrong. Alex breaks down the "three-ring binder" a client once taught him — the landscape, the front office, and (yes) the bathroom — and how nailing all three wins people every time. He gets into the hidden costs owners miss until they're expensive (those 12:30 a.m. sprinklers quietly wrecking your turf and your water bill), and the fleet of 52-inch all-electric autonomous mowers that turned a four-man, ten-hour Danville property into a four-hour cycle — roughly 15% labor savings on year one 🤖. Then the conversation widens: the military precision behind a veteran-owned crew, the seasonal whiplash of a job that changes four times a year (mowing to snow-and-ice, with dormant-season cutbacks keeping local crews working through winter ❄️), and the private-equity roll-up wave reshaping the industry — why Alex bets that staying local, accessible, and relationship-driven is the real moat when the competition's billing you from an office in Dallas. He closes with where the industry's headed (electric equipment, AI-assisted irrigation) and one thing every property manager should check today: the trip-hazard trench between the sidewalk and the turf. In this episode: Why curb appeal is really a first-impressions business — and the "three-ring binder" that wins clientsWhat translated from digital marketing to landscaping (and what didn't)Autonomous electric mowers: real labor savings, and a local thought-leadership playReading the customer — industrial vs. retail vs. multifamily first impressionsVeteran-owned culture, crew buy-in, and military-grade logisticsRunning a business whose job description changes every seasonThe private-equity roll-up wave and the case for staying localWhere the industry's going: electric equipment and AI in irrigationFind Green Solutions Land Care: Website: https://greensolutionslandcare.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/green_solutions_landcare/Connect with Alex: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexsmith02/  Support the show

  8. Jul 23

    #62 Brisket, Bitcoin & Solar Panels — The Serial Builder feat. Michael B. Stevenson II

    Send us Fan Mail What do utility-scale solar, Bitcoin mining, hotshot trucking, and Texas barbecue have in common? Michael B. Stevenson II has built in all four. This week Aram and Yemi are joined by guest host Gabbi McErlean to talk with Yemi's brother Michael — a builder who turned a 12-year solar career into a launchpad for venture after venture, and is now betting it all on brisket. 🤠 Michael takes us from graduating into solar and building Sunscreen, a QA/QC app born out of eight-inch paper binders, to Mine2Hodl — the garage Ethereum rig (once running out of a hotel room 😅) that grew into a ~3-megawatt Bitcoin self-mining and hosting operation. He breaks down why hosting beats self-mining for steady cashflow, how a 401(k) rollover (ROBS) funded his second mining company Hash Hive, and the July 4th phone call that ended his trucking company Open Air Logistics overnight. 💥 Then the heart of it: That Good Smoke — the New Age Tex-Mex concept he co-founded with his fiancée (an Army-vet cook 🎖️), run as a five-kid family business. Pecan-wood, 18-hour smoked brisket, everything from scratch, signature sauces heading to retail shelves, and a plan to go from food truck to brick-and-mortar. Michael's leaving his project-management career at the end of August to chase it full-time — and his advice for anyone scared to leap? Just go for it. 🙌 In this episode: 12 years in solar & building the Sunscreen app (and the equity lesson he learned the hard way)Mine2Hodl: from a $5K hobby rig to a 3MW operation — hosting vs. self-mining explainedUsing a ROBS 401(k) rollover to launch Hash HiveOpen Air Logistics and knowing when to walk awayThat Good Smoke: family business, from-scratch Tex-Mex, and sauces going retailLegacy, calculated risk, and betting on yourself🔗 Find That Good Smoke: Website: https://www.thatgoodsmoke.com Support the show

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 ☕️ Coffee, Chaos & Cashflow 🎙️Fueling your business journey with real talk, laughs, and a dash of caffeine! Join Eric Griffin, Aram Street, & Yemi Ogunbase as they share wins, missteps, and candid advice on turning chaos into cashflow. Real stories, real lessons—entrepreneurship, unfiltered. 🎧 

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  • Creator
    Coffee, Chaos, & Cashflow
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    70
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Coffee, Chaos, & Cashflow
  • Show Website
    Coffee, Chaos, & Cashflow