Default Profitable

Matt Nettleton
  • 5.0 (13)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

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. 13h ago

    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.

  2. Sep 8

    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.

  3. Sep 1

    Ep190 Larry Lannan, Founder of LarryInFishers.com: Fourteen Years Free, Then a Business

    What do you do when the news business is dying and you've just retired? Larry Lannan started covering it himself. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Larry Lannan, founder of LarryInFishers.com, a local news website and podcast covering Fishers, Indiana. Larry moved to Fishers in 1991, when about 9,000 people lived there. After more than a decade as a journalist and broadcaster and 28 years with the federal government, he retired and launched the site in January 2012 as a volunteer effort: concise summaries of the government meetings busy people can't attend. His first big story was the 2012 vote that turned the town of Fishers into a city. Today Fishers is past 100,000 people, and for a little less than a year Larry has been running the site as a business. Learn more about Larry Lannan at https://larryinfishers.com/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

  4. Aug 25

    Ep189 Amanda Hill of Connections of Hope: The Founder Who Actually Had a Plan

    Amanda Hill started her business because her therapist told her to. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Amanda Hill, founder of Connections of Hope, a private counseling practice she launched in 2020 and has grown to five locations and 14 therapists. She'd been a counselor for 20 years and was working four jobs, teaching college on top of multiple counseling agencies, when her own therapist, a private practice owner, told her she couldn't keep going the way she was going. Amanda ran with it. What she didn't see coming was how much she'd like the business side. Six years in, she says she enjoys building the company about as much as she enjoys the counseling itself. The reason she keeps opening locations is simple: people who need a therapist end up on waiting lists, and every new office is a way around that. Learn more about Amanda Hill and Connections of Hope at https://connectionsofhope.com/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

  5. Aug 4

    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.

  6. Jul 28

    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.

  7. Jul 21

    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.

  8. Jul 14

    Ep185 Build It Like a House: Jon Meeks, Owner of the Jon Meeks Agency

    In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Jon Meeks, owner of the Jon Meeks Agency, to trace an entrepreneurial path that winds from fixing tanning beds and running a tanning salon to a mortgage company, a construction business, and the Farmers Insurance agency he's run since 1999. For most of those years the agency simply bumped along in the background, until Jon had the realization that changed everything: build the business the way you'd build a house, by handing the work to people who are great at it. Jon shares the mindset shifts behind that turnaround, from why surrounding yourself with confident people beats trying to do it all, to how the "birdcage theory" gets others invested in your goals, to what he means when he says you're either part of your own plan or part of someone else's. Founders and operators will pick up practical lessons on delegation, recruiting people who buy into your vision, and why his number-one piece of advice for anyone opening a business comes down to one thing: keep selling. Whether you're launching your first venture or breathing new life into one you've run for years, it's a candid look at how vision, people, and a little stubbornness add up to sustainable success. Learn more about Jon Meeks and the Jon Meeks Agency at https://agents.farmers.com/in/anderson/jon-meeks Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

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5
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Matt Nettleton
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    205
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2026 All Rights Reserved
  • Show Website
    Default Profitable

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