Default Profitable

Matt Nettleton

Are you an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner looking to sharpen your skills and grow your business? The Default Profitable podcast delivers powerful lessons from real bootstrapped business owners who have navigated the ups and downs of starting, running, and scaling their ventures. Join Matt Nettleton and tap into a wealth of knowledge and firsthand experiences, learn to avoid common pitfalls, and stay ahead of industry trends. Whether you’re launching your first venture or optimizing an established one, each episode provides actionable insights and fosters a community of support, helping you achieve sustained, profitable success.

  1. 4 天前

    Ep193 Calvin Ellison, President of The Executive Impact Group: The Paper Doesn't Lie

    Calvin Ellison figured going independent would be a slam dunk. Six months in, he was calling his dad to borrow money. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Calvin Ellison, president of The Executive Impact Group, an Indianapolis executive coaching business built around peer groups, where CEOs and senior leaders meet on a regular basis and use each other as an advisory board. Calvin grew up in California, went to UC Davis, and worked his way east through Philly and Detroit before landing in Indy, with three Fortune 500 companies on the resume along the way. The last one was Xerox, where he taught sales training, and when he left in 1993 the business started as exactly that. Around 1999 it shifted to management development, and it's been leadership work ever since. He and Matt have known each other for twenty-some years, so this one has war stories in it. Wife, four kids, grandkids. Pretty busy. Matt usually asks every guest the same three questions. This time he skips them, because Calvin has spent close to thirty years inside other people's businesses and Matt wants what he's seen. Start with who belongs in a peer group. Not every CEO does. The ones who fit are green and growing no matter how long they've had the seat, and they've got the courage to hear feedback they'll never get inside their own company. Why they don't get it: a business starts with friends and family, then fills up with strangers who have a paycheck to protect, so problems go to a buddy instead of the boss and the leader ends up the last person to know how bad things are. It's worse in a second or third generation business, where the employees are still loyal to the founder and the new leader is building trust from scratch. Calvin's advice there is go slow to go fast. He tells the story of a next-generation leader whose rapid changes set off rumors that the company was about to sell, and how the group got him to hit pause and start over with the why instead of the what. Buy-in isn't a features-and-benefits pitch. It's modeling the way, saying it consistently, and saying it again after you're sure you already said it, until behavior changes. Calvin left corporate for freedom, not money, and says the first thing nobody tells you is that it's harder than it looks: the umbrella is gone, and revenue, the P&L, taxes, and your own sanity are all yours now. Ask what he'd tell himself the night before going out on his own and he's got it. Document the plan, put it away, come back and edit it. Everything sounds great in your head. Like game film the day after a win, the paper doesn't lie. Learn more about Calvin Ellison and The Executive Impact Group at https://eigcentral.com/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

  2. 9月15日

    Ep192 The Layoff He Prayed For: George Powell Jr., Founder and CEO of Exponential Equity Group

    George Powell hated his name until he looked it up. It means farmer. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with George Powell Jr., founder and CEO of Exponential Equity Group, an Indianapolis real estate development firm he describes as faith-driven, building affordable housing alongside churches, nonprofits, CDCs, and grassroots groups that have underused land and a vision but not the capital or the capacity to develop it. George spent most of his career in the vacation industry at RCI, working with resort developers and brokers, and toward the end he could feel a shift coming. His dad had planted real estate in him early. George worked for him in his twenties and later partnered with him on a portfolio that by 2020 was in distress, so he founded the company that year as a fix for the family holdings. Dad wasn't ready for the fix. George asked what lane he was supposed to be in instead, and mentors in community development showed him one: single-family investment, then an affordable housing project in Anderson, then multifamily. The RCI building where he spent lunch breaks walking and dreaming up the company is now being demolished. Learn more about George Powell Jr. and Exponential Equity Group at https://www.exponentialequitygroup.com/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

  3. 9月8日

    Ep191 Seventy-Six Simple Steps to Running A Service Business: Katie Smith of All Pro Heating, Air & Plumbing

    Her team named her Bosslady. She just kept it. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Katie Smith, co-founder of All Pro Heating, Air & Plumbing, the Indianapolis HVAC and plumbing company she and her husband started at their kitchen table in 2012. It wasn't the first one. Before this there was direct sales, selling legal services, and then a general contracting outfit they closed on their attorney's advice. All Pro is the version that stuck. They ran punches, HVAC, and plumbing at the same time long enough to learn those are three separate businesses staffed by three different kinds of people, so they picked HVAC and stayed there for more than a decade before adding plumbing back in the last two years. Nobody has a passion for crawl spaces in July. What they had was a lack of opportunity where they were working, and a decision on a sofa that Katie can still picture. Matt asks every guest the same three questions. Six months of savings, a detailed strategic plan, a clear read on what customers would pay. Katie had a rough plan and the knowledge that the work made money, and that was the whole of it, which puts her in company with nearly every founder who's sat in that chair. What she has now is a system, and getting to it took a convention in Miami two years ago where the real question was scale it or get out. She thought a service call had 13 steps. She mapped it. It has 76. Her leadership team guessed five. Along the way she fired her first employee after two weeks, learned that growing and scaling are different problems, and found out that the system that gets you here is never the one that takes you to the next level. Ask what she'd tell herself the night before going full time and there's no pause: document your processes. Then go do the market research she skipped. Learn more about Katie Smith and All Pro Heating, Air & Plumbing at https://callallproindy.com/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

  4. 8月4日

    Ep188 Nobody Gets Into Insurance on Purpose: Jenna Romens, Owner of Martin & Martin Insurance

    In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Jenna Romens, owner and agent at Martin & Martin Insurance in downtown Noblesville. Jenna spent 16 years at Erie Insurance, moving through customer service, marketing, and agent roles before being promoted to district sales manager over agents across Hamilton, Marion, and Tipton counties. Then one of the agents she supported asked her to come to the agency side as part of a perpetuation plan. It took three asks before she and her husband Andy sat down and weighed the company car, the health insurance, and the steady paycheck against the chance to own something. Nine years of working side by side with the owners later, they retired, and last July she took over an agency that had been in business 37 years. The insurance part she had down. What she didn't expect was everything else: payroll, the bills, hiring decisions, and a line of people asking her to sponsor things she now had to fit inside a marketing budget. The thing she got right early was the team. Before the purchase closed, she and Andy sat down with every employee to make sure they were on board and staying, then found ways to pay them better once they owned it. Matt runs his usual question about whether there was an actual business plan, and this time the answer is yes. Jenna and Matt also get into why the agency competes on coverage instead of price, what she tells people thinking about leaving a steady paycheck to run their own shop, and the one thing she'd tell herself on day one as an owner. Learn more about Jenna Romens and Martin & Martin Insurance at https://martinandmartin.biz. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

  5. 7月28日

    Ep187 Real-World Grad School: Bob Fasick, Certified EOS Implementer

    In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Bob Fasick, a Certified EOS Implementer based in Fishers, to trace a path that runs from a corporate career at Charles Schwab to a property management company he and a friend started without either of them knowing how they'd get paid. Bob moved to Indianapolis in 1992, spent about a decade at Schwab helping the firm transition from discount brokerage to advice provider, then took his first entrepreneurial leap in 2003 — one manufactured housing community in Urbana, Illinois, grown to roughly twenty-five inside two years. Then the 2008 downturn hit, occupancy covenants got missed, the banks moved, and the portfolio had to be sold. What came next is what ties the story together. Bob landed at Defender Direct to lead a division, got handed a copy of Traction, and watched what happens when a fast-growing company gets everybody rowing in the same direction — rocks, scorecards, a weekly meeting pulse, and the most accountability-focused environment he'd ever worked in. Years later he became an EOS Implementer himself. He and Matt get into the gap between an MBA and what Bob calls real-world grad school, the delegate-and-elevate problem he still hasn't solved (he likes ordering the lunch), and the advice he'd hand his 2003 self on day one: don't do anything stupid financially, plan for uncertainty, and remember that leaders eat last. Learn more about Bob Fasick at https://implementer.eosworldwide.com/bob-fasick/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

  6. 7月21日

    Ep186 The Worst Timing on the Planet: Gerry Bailey of Corvano

    In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Gerry Bailey, founder of Corvano, a veteran-owned technology consultancy in Fishers, Indiana. Gerry spent twelve years in the Air Force before landing at Sprint, where he learned what a P&L actually was, then spent nearly a decade helping grow someone else's consulting firm across South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and the UK. He founded Corvano in 2016 while still employed, named it for Core Values Now, and left to run it full time on December 31, 2019, with plans to take a quarter off first. Three months later the market he'd built the whole plan around stopped buying anything. Gerry is the rare guest who answers yes to all three of Matt's prerequisites — the strategic plan, the savings, the clear read on what customers would pay — and the episode is mostly about what happened next anyway. He and Matt get into why no plan survives contact, why you need a fallback to your fallback, and the discipline Gerry credits to growing up poor in Marion: never let your lifestyle expand to meet your maximum income. His advice to anyone about to start something is blunt. A good idea is not a business plan, whatever timeline you've got in your head is a third of the real one, and when the opportunity shows up, stop protecting your pride and go sell. Learn more about Gerry Bailey and Corvano at https://www.corvano.com. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

簡介

Are you an aspiring entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner looking to sharpen your skills and grow your business? The Default Profitable podcast delivers powerful lessons from real bootstrapped business owners who have navigated the ups and downs of starting, running, and scaling their ventures. Join Matt Nettleton and tap into a wealth of knowledge and firsthand experiences, learn to avoid common pitfalls, and stay ahead of industry trends. Whether you’re launching your first venture or optimizing an established one, each episode provides actionable insights and fosters a community of support, helping you achieve sustained, profitable success.