Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

Steve Preda
  • 5.0 (35)
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Updated Weekly

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

  1. 18h ago

    344: Build User Experiences That Work with Anastasia Golovko

    Anastasia Golovko, President and CEO of Tino Digital Agency, is helping businesses build user experiences that work by creating intuitive digital experiences that simplify complex systems and improve the way people interact with technology. By combining strategy, design, and engineering, she helps startups, enterprises, and organizations in highly regulated industries deliver products that people actually enjoy using.  In this conversation, Anastasia introduces the Agency Growth Framework: Build Relationships, Find What’s Broken, Help Your Team Flourish, Nurture Creativity, and Offer Your Customers Relief. She explains why trust is the foundation of lasting client relationships, how identifying user friction creates immediate value, and why empowering creative teams leads to better products and stronger business outcomes. Anastasia also shares how eliminating user friction through live UX audits accelerates business growth, improves customer satisfaction and conversion rates, and demonstrates the importance of user experience in government digital services. — Build User Experiences That Work with Anastasia Golovko  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Anastasia Golovko, President and CEO of Tino Digital Agency, a team of experts specializing in helping companies and startups achieve their goals by providing comprehensive solutions in strategy, design, and engineering. Anastasia, welcome to the show.  Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.  Well, it’s very interesting that you combine strategy, design, and engineering. I have not seen this combination before. So where does this come from?  The foundation for all of this is user experience and the connection to the user that we’re trying to build for many companies. As soon as you start thinking about the user and their experience, they get to enjoy the product more and more, and they get to find the buttons that the clients want them to find in their product.  Okay. So basically, you have to have a strategy first, then you come up with a design, and then you engineer it. Yeah.  The design supports the strategy, and then you have a good product.  Exactly. We also work with startups, and we work with established companies. With startups, we encourage them to reach the market as fast as possible so that they get to prove their hypothesis. Because up until it reaches the customer and starts getting feedback from the customer, it’s all in numbers. It’s all in the… But it’s still a hypothesis of how it will perform. The sooner we’re there—with as few features as possible, while still being valuable—the better. Some clients call it an MVP, and some clients call it a Minimum Lovable Product. Then they can start getting feedback, and those relationships start building between the final user and the product. Yeah, that makes sense. And Lovable is actually also a vibe coding platform, isn’t it? Yeah.  Yeah. That’s right. Maybe that’s where it comes from—that you can get a lovable MVP very fast with vibe coding. So let me start by asking you, what is your personal “why,” and how are you manifesting it in Tino Digital Agency? I recalled such a wonderful story that I want to share with everyone from my childhood. I was born when it was still the USSR. I’m originally from Ukraine, and when the USSR fell apart, everyone was poor. When I was 13 years old, I remember talking to my friends and saying, “When I grow up, I’m going to drive a Jeep Grand Cherokee.” They completely mocked me. They said, “That’s impossible.” I remember that question to this day: “Do you even know how much money that costs? Have you ever seen that much money?” My brain just flipped a switch. I thought to myself, “That’s just money.  It can be made.” Money is there to be made. That mindset, I think, separated me from my childhood friends by giving myself permission to dream big without limitations. Just like somebody dreamed about sending a car to space, they gave themselves permission to think that up. So, ironically, I ended up owning a Jeep Grand Cherokee. We had it for 10 years. A while ago, there were floods in Houston, and the Jeep Grand Cherokee has very good ground clearance, so we were able to get through them.  After I got that car, I remembered this conversation from back in the day. So we started our agency with zero capital and zero connections. Without growing into connections here, that created a set of blocks. So we were attracted to subcontracting for top agencies in LA, Silicon Valley, and Switzerland. Eventually, we landed a massive contract with one of the top Swiss banks, modernizing their digital products as well as rethinking their strategy toward the younger generation. That was my wake-up call. I realized, “Wow, we’re incredibly good at this.” The Swiss bank had such high standards that we had to fit within their branding. They couldn’t rebrand just because we thought something up.  We had to fit into their tight branding and produce a good product within those guidelines. It made me look around the States and realize that—I had already lived here for more than half of my life—we have so much anxiety around finance and healthcare. After that moment, I decided to move our company in those two directions. Maybe our team can actually reduce that anxiety and make a real dent in the well-being of the nation—the well-being of the people who interact with products that are convenient, don't add to the problem, but instead resolve it and make it intuitive. Share on X   Yeah. That’s great. I never heard the combination of finance and healthcare phrased this way—that both of them are a big source of anxiety for people. And if you can fix their problems in these areas, then you can actually reduce their anxiety and increase their well-being. That makes perfect sense. I also love the example of, you know, “what the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve” kind of thing. Visualization is very powerful. It worked in my life as well.  So this is a podcast about frameworks. It’s called Management Blueprint, and what I’m looking for is some kind of, it could be a mental model. It could be some kind of process. Something that simplifies the world and allows you to see things more clearly, make better decisions, or create a bigger impact. So what comes to mind?  I love this question. I love this question, and I love viewing the answers from your other guests to this question, and how everybody approaches it differently. For different people, it is their own world that they built. So, in our world, first, we build relationships. No cold calls. We build these relationships with our clients and with our team. Share on X The digital agency market is oversaturated with low-quality providers who sign the client, then disappear for four weeks, come back, and drop a product that doesn’t relate at all.  Then they come to us. Some of our clients come to us and say that the agency disappears. It’s really important for us to stay in contact. So our first step is building these in-person relationships. That also means visiting conferences, visiting events, showing up wherever it’s needed—before, during, and after the process as well. So I think what we do by building relationships is that we sell trust, not just the code or the design.  Of course. Yeah, that makes sense. In this AI age, when there’s so much noise. When you’re online, you don’t know what’s real and what’s not. But when you meet someone in person at a conference, then you know they’re a flesh-and-blood human being. Yes. And also, describing to a person that user experience is important, that I can do it, and that I do it really well doesn’t really give them value. Rather than just telling them, I can look through the site face to face and find certain things that are broken right there on the spot. It’s not a simple presentation. It’s already proof of my value. So that helps. So that’s first. The next one is the human element. The human element of the team. Our designers and developers are not machines. Each of those teams needs its own approach. They need their own conditions to flourish.  They need their own conditions to be successful. If we keep a creative person locked into FinTech, compliance-driven products for too long, they’ll burn out. It’s two-faced. We try to avoid that as much as possible, but we consider what they’re telling us. We listen. If a designer tells us something isn’t working out, or they’ve hit a creative block, we try to rotate them, give them different exercises, give them a break, and so on. So, listening and rotating. Rotating between different types of projects. But whenever the FinTech project comes back, we need the FinTech team to work on it.  So at this point… Sorry, I have a clarifying question. The previous point was helping your team flourish, basically. By rotating them, is it about helping them gain more experience, not burn out, or create more ideas? So what’s behind this idea of rotating?  It’s the creativity that for it to exist, it needs different challenges. Let’s imagine a FinTech dashboard. It’s tables. It’s tabular. It’s a similar task that they’re solving. They’re solving how to convert tabular formats into digestible formats. Converting tabular formats into something that the user can comprehend quickly. With a food delivery app or a calorie-tracking app, they get to add more colors, use different styles, and solve a different problem. So I think that when they get to solve different problems, they keep their full creative potential. Share on X   Yeah. You’re not allowing them to fall into a rut and just go on autopilot, basically.  Not everyone. Not everyone. We mainly listen. We listen, and whenever we hear the signs that a person is asking for

    20 min

  2. 2d ago

    343: Build Energy Instead of Burnout with Courtney Berry

    https://youtu.be/_i6C7OstTEI Courtney Berry, President and Co-founder of Bandits & Friends, is driven by a desire to build an advertising agency where trust, creativity, meaningful relationships, and building energy instead of burnout replace bureaucracy and transactional client engagements. Inspired to create more opportunities for women in executive leadership and eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy, Courtney founded Bandits & Friends to prove there is a better way to build both an agency and lasting client partnerships.  In this conversation, Courtney introduces the Bandits & Friends Growth Flywheel: Choose the Right Opportunity, Create Clarity, Empower Ownership, Protect Your Point of View, and Build Energy Instead of Burnout. She explains why selecting the right clients is the foundation of sustainable growth, how clarity and ownership eliminate friction, and why agencies create the most value when they offer strategic judgment instead of simply executing requests. Courtney also explains how trust creates a self-reinforcing growth flywheel and how Bandits & Friends leverages culture, AI, and fractional talent to scale without sacrificing creativity or client relationships. — Build Energy Instead of Burnout with Courtney Berry  Good day, everyone. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and today my guest is Courtney Berry, the President and Co-founder of Bandits & Friends, a full-service creative advertising agency that specializes in stealing attention for brands. Courtney, welcome to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Thanks for having me. It’s good to see you.  Well, you have to tell us first about the choice of the brand—Bandits & Friends. I mean, bandit is not typically something that people would want to start building trust with. But obviously your brand is an award-winning one, so you must be doing something right.  That’s right. Well, we’re in the world of advertising. It’s all about branding, so we had to make sure that we had a good name to back it up. Our name, Bandits & Friends, is as much an operating ethos as it is a name. Bandits—we steal attention on behalf of brands. And Friends, that part of the equation, is how we refer to our clients. Share on X We actually try to never even use the word client in our agency because it creates a certain kind of them-versus-us mentality. And so that’s how we got to the name. We liked that it really infused the way that we operated as much as who we were at the end of the day.  Yeah, I like it. And how do clients react to being called friends? Do they take it at face value, or do you choose clients that you feel could fit—could become friends? How do you do that?  That is a great question. One, when we started, we fully thought the Bandits part of the equation was going to be the thing that potential clients really liked. We thought they would understand that that’s exactly what they’re going to an agency for. But what we have found is that it’s the Friends part of the equation that they have all sparked to so much more. Because sometimes it is a very transactional relationship between clients and agencies.  Sometimes there’s a strong difference of opinion when it comes to certain things, and that can create tension between clients and agencies. So when we talk about friendship, what we really mean is that the basis of all of it is trust. We have to trust each other in terms of the brief being right. We have to trust each other to have really honest conversations with one another to get to the real solution that we’re all trying to reach. Friends don’t waste each other’s money at the end of the day. We don’t want to waste our clients’ money, and we don’t want them to waste ours.  Also, friends are really looking for the best for each other. When we want the best for our clients, and they also want the best for us—because friendship really does go two ways—that's a really important component. Share on X And to your other point, not every client is a friend. Not every client really wants to play in that world of having a back-and-forth relationship, with give and take. If that’s not something they’re interested in, then at the end of the day, they’re probably not the right fit for us and our agency culture. It really resonates with me. I used to be kind of an agency owner. It was an investment banking firm. Whenever we had a friendly relationship with a client who really trusted our judgment, who would let us lead, and who would not be receptive to divide-and-rule tactics from acquirers, then we could get so much more out of the transaction.  Absolutely.  We could negotiate harder because we knew they had our back, and we could really push the envelope to get the best results for them. If we didn’t have that, then it was much harder.  It’s so true. When you don’t have that kind of trusting foundation, there’s an element of fear. There’s an element of fear that they’re not going to do good work for me, or they’re going to overcharge me, or they’re going to do a bait and switch. So yeah, you’re exactly right. It’s the same kind of philosophy and mentality in order to get to better work for them and better outcomes.  Yeah. Yeah, love it. Love it. So let me ask you, what is your personal “why,” and how are you manifesting it in Bandits & Friends?  Yes. I had to think about this question a lot, Steve. Unfortunately, I don’t really have a positive answer for this one. I listened to all of your other podcasts, and I thought, “Oh man, mine’s a little bit of a Debbie Downer.” But I guess it is what it is. I started Bandits & Friends because I was really frustrated by two things. First, when I looked around the industry, there just weren’t many examples of women in real power.  In my last role before starting this agency, there wasn’t a single woman in the C-suite of the holding company that I was working for. Not one. There weren’t women making the biggest decisions. There weren’t many examples of the career path that I was looking for. At some point, I realized I could either wait for someone else to carve out that path or I could be the one to help create it for myself and help create a lot of the opportunities that I wish I had seen. So that’s the first one.  The second one—and I think it really manifests itself in an independent agency culture—is that I was really fed up with the bureaucracy of everything. There was too much energy in our industry being spent on politics, approvals, or process instead of the things that make our work happen: the people, the clients, and the work itself. So I really wanted to build a company that could move faster, trust people more, and focus on the things that actually matter.  What we’re being paid for is to focus our time and energy on our clients’ businesses and on creativity. Removing all the bureaucracy really allows us to focus on that. So I guess, to sum up those two things—and really 343: Build Energy Instead of Burnout with Courtney Berry Share on X   Yeah. I mean, Steve Jobs said there are two functions in business: marketing and innovation. In some ways, those two things are the same because if you don’t keep innovating in marketing, you’re not going to steal anyone’s attention. And you have to remove the bureaucracy to create a culture where people can be creative. That’s right. I love it. That is very interesting.  So tell me about this framework. This is a podcast about frameworks. Maybe it’s a little bit misworded in the description that it’s a shortcut. It doesn’t have to be a shortcut. It’s more of a mental model. It’s a way of looking at and simplifying the world that allows you to do good work or create that Bandits impact. So what’s a framework that you could share with the listeners?  Yeah. To your point, I think it’s more of a mentality and approach versus steps that we take because we don’t work in a very linear business. Often, things are running on parallel paths. The way that I try to approach things—and really what ultimately becomes the culture that we're trying to create at this agency—is removing friction to create momentum. Share on X Because if we’re ever static, we’re wasting our money or we’re wasting our clients’ money. Or, to your earlier point, it means that someone else is going to be able to steal attention before we can on behalf of the brands that we work for.  So, removing friction to create momentum. There are kind of five different components that I’ve thought about for this. The first one, which seems so basic, is that I think a lot of times we get so excited by an opportunity that we forget to stop and ask, “Are we choosing the right opportunity for us and what we can do for the brand?” Because not every opportunity that comes across our desk deserves that momentum. When we first get an RFP or an RFI, or some kind of pitch that’s going to happen, we really ask ourselves two things.  One: Can we make money? Sometimes, in this business, you can’t. The answer is no. The other question that we ask ourselves is, “Can we make great creative?” If neither one of those things is true, we move on, and that helps prevent wasting energy and wasting time. If we can’t answer those questions, then we ask more questions of the prospective client. A lot of times, those clients can’t answer either one of those questions, and in those cases, we also move on. So the first step is really about choosing the right opportunities that we think deserve momentum and deserve the stealing of attention. Share on X   The second point is clarity. I think that, in order to be a great leader, you have to be decisive. You have to be someone who is willing to make decisions when no one else can, or no one else is really tasked with making those decisions. So we’re all about creating clarity becaus

    27 min

  3. 3d ago

    342: Why-Who-What-How Management with Vasily Petrenko

    https://youtu.be/kiaY0bw-4KQ Vasily Petrenko, CEO of Another World, is passionate about making immersive free-roam virtual reality accessible to everyone. Guided by Why-Who-What-How Management, a scientific mindset, and a relentless pursuit of continuous improvement, Vasily has grown Another World from a university escape room startup into a global VR entertainment company with more than 400 signed locations across 50 countries.  We explore Vasily’s Scientific Entrepreneurship Framework: Learn How to Delegate, Hire People Better Than You, Figure Out Your Sales Formula, Grasp the Big Picture and Manage the Why, Who, What & How. Vasily explains why entrepreneurs should treat business like a scientific experiment, using failures as data to improve future decisions, and why delegation is essential to overcoming founder bottlenecks. He also shares how hiring specialists who outperform you accelerates growth, why scalable communication systems are critical for global teams, how Another World is democratizing immersive VR for communities of every size, and his vision for partnering with major entertainment brands to create the next generation of immersive experiences. — Why-Who-What-How Management with Vasily Petrenko  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and today my guest is Vasily Petrenko, the CEO of Another World, a company that offers a solution for opening VR arenas all around the world. Vasili, welcome to the show.  Hello. Thank you for the invitation. Yep.  Yeah, it’s awesome to have you. You’re calling in from Miami, and you just showed me through the window the beautiful weather and the skyline, which is quite impressive. So what’s your story? How did you end up here, on this side of the ocean?  Yeah, thank you for asking. Actually, I started my first business in 2014 with my friends. We were thinking about starting something new, some fresh idea, and we thought about what we could do. At that time, we were writing different scenarios, participating in comedy shows, and searching for different business ideas. We found out that, at that time, classical escape rooms were very popular. We thought, “Wow, it’s entertaining people. It’s something about puzzles.” We were studying at the university at that time, and we were like, “Okay, it’s something scientific.  Make some electronics, puzzles, and so on. You need to think, you need to be smart, you need to be funny.” So it was a perfect match between me, my friends, and the business idea. The thing is, we built our first escape room, and all the money that we collected from our parents and friends—we got back all of the investment in two months. I cannot imagine a business right now where you invest money and get all of that back in two months. The thing is, that’s the main thing that allowed us to evolve in the future: we did not stop at that moment. We decided that we would invest all this money back into the business, and we started searching for new ideas.  First of all, we continued to build the best escape rooms in our city and in our country. Other owners saw that and were like, “Oh, we see your success. We want that too.” So they started calling us, like, “Can you build that business for us in another city?” So from one little business, we opened another one at the same time, which was the B2B solution—opening this type of business for others. Again, we were searching for new ideas, for new products.  Two years later, we thought, “Okay, let’s add a new product: virtual reality.” It wasn’t trending at that moment. The thing is, we hadn’t found anything that would be good for us. We were like, “Wow, this is low quality. We don’t like this.” Basically, there were so many dislikes about everything on the market that we decided we needed to make our own product. It took us about two more years to think about this idea, and in 2018 we came up with the idea of a free-roam virtual reality arenas. Share on X   So I want to correct you a little bit here. In the introduction, you said Another World VR arcades. It’s not exactly arcades. It is virtual reality arenas. And free roam, for those who might not know, means that you don’t have any limitation with wires. So it’s not like playing VR at home, where you put on the headset, sit on the couch, and play. No. Our VR arenas are from 1,000 to 2,000 square feet, and the player can explore the whole arena from one corner to another. They can run, they can jump, they can interact with each other, and there can be up to 20 players simultaneously. We started this business in 2018 as an additional product for our escape room owners. It was an additional game for them. But again, over time, more and more of our partners—and we realized this ourselves—decided that this could be a separate business. Not the escape room, but the VR arena could be a business by itself. And we started doing that.  We did a rebranding, and we started providing not only the best games in the world for our partners, but also the design, brand, website, booking system, and all of that. Share on X So basically, we packed our product into the franchise. By now, this year will be the eighth year of the company, and we have 400 signed contracts all around the world in 50 countries. That means our partners either already own and operate our locations or they’re in the process of opening. They’re doing the construction and opening the business, and we’re helping them with that. So yeah, that’s the story.  That’s fantastic. So are you a licensing business, or are you a franchise business? That’s a really good question. Right now, we’re registering the franchise. I know that in some countries there are strict regulations. So today, we’re licensing our technology and games to our partners. But we want to become an official franchise, so we’re working on that right now and preparing everything for it.  That’s super exciting. So let me ask you my favorite question. What is your personal “why,” and how are you manifesting it in this business?  This is a really good question. For anything that you do, for any of your daily tasks, you should ask yourself: “Why am I doing this and not that?” So why will this idea work? It’s a really good question for you to ask yourself all the time. I’m kind of, in this case, a perfectionist. That’s both the good and the bad side of my personality. I’m also into marathons and triathlons. I’ve already done many ultras. So the good side is that I'm very intense when it comes to working hard. I will do everything so that my business succeeds. I will do everything so that I finish this marathon. Share on X   But after I finish the marathon, the next second I’m asking myself, “Where can I be better? Why did I do this or that?” It’s always about balance. It’s not about work-life balance, but even inside your work, you need to find the right balance between good and bad. I’ve been learning that over the past few years, trying to get better at it. So I think that’s the question. But still, asking yourself, “Why am I doing this and not that?” is always important, in my opinion. So your “why” is to always get better?  I would say yes. Well, okay, let me also add to that. To get better—and there’s no ideal—but there is a way to get on that path. So that’s the first thing. The second thing is that your “why” also describes how you feel about what you’re doing. It might be your work, it might be your business, it might be whatever you’re doing. Actually, my graduation was absolutely not about business. I started at the university studying cytology and genetics. So I used to be in molecular biochemistry, biology, and all of that. I was the kind of guy who was doing research for PCR tests. You might be familiar with them from the Covid..  Oh, yeah. Yeah, the Covid era of those PCR tests. So I was developing stuff like that. I know how to do that. I know all of that. But right now I’m in the entertainment business. The thing is that I really like to consider business with a scientific approach. What I mean is that business is also something where you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. So there are a lot of hypotheses. There are a lot of ideas that you get when you’re brainstorming, alone or with your team. The thing is, first of all, there might be mistakes. There will be mistakes, and that’s absolutely normal.  Like we say in science, a negative result is also a result. So it’s all about experiments. You change one factor, you test one hypothesis, you run the experiment, you see the result, and you make a conclusion from that. If it’s a negative result, okay, don’t do that anymore. If it’s a positive result, okay, how do we scale that and do it better? Again, we might consider that as a “why” question. 342: Why-Who-What-How Management with Vasily Petrenko Share on X   Yeah. I saw your post about the five things that you learned as an entrepreneur. That was pretty interesting. It kind of shows your scientific way of thinking about business as well. So, talking more about the science of business, this podcast is called The Management Blueprint, and what I’m looking for in every conversation is a framework that you’ve discovered while building your business that you could share with the audience, so they can maybe apply it to their own business. So think of something like three to five steps, or a mental model, or a way of thinking about things. Anything come to mind?  Yeah, actually, as I said, first of all, the scientific approach—and don’t be afraid of mistakes. I think this is mostly for young entrepreneurs. Even right now, my little kids are going to some sports, and sometimes they’re upset if something goes wrong, right? I’m trying to teach them not to be afraid. If something goes wron

    26 min

  4. Jul 3

    341: Scale a Culture-First Business with Staff Sheehan

    https://youtu.be/uePyn0u75sY Staff Sheehan, CEO of Project Omega, is driven by a mission to strengthen America’s energy independence and national security by rebuilding the nation’s nuclear fuel cycle and scaling a culture-first business rooted in exceptional leadership and execution. With a career spanning energy, sustainable fuels, hydrogen, and chemical physics, Staff is leading the development of technologies that transform spent nuclear fuel into long-lasting power sources while helping usher in a new era of reliable, abundant nuclear energy. We explore Staff Sheehan’s Scaling Framework — Build the Best C-Suite, Due Diligence Your Investors, Build Things, and Execute, Execute, Execute. Staff explains why exceptional leadership is the foundation of every successful company, why founders should carefully vet their investors, and why hardware startups must prioritize building real products over ambitious concepts. He also discusses how AI-driven energy demand is fueling a nuclear renaissance, why restoring the U.S. nuclear fuel cycle is essential to energy independence, and what it takes to scale both advanced nuclear technologies and a high-growth company. — Scale a Culture-First Business with Staff Sheehan  Hi, everyone. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. My guest today is Staff Sheehan, the CEO of Project Omega, an advanced nuclear recycling company with a mission to rebuild America’s nuclear fuel cycle end-to-end and unlock a new era of energy abundance for the United States. Wow. What a mission. Welcome to the show, Staff.  Thanks so much for having me, Steve. Great to be here.  Wow. You really are not playing small. Rebuilding America’s nuclear fuel cycle and unlocking a new era of energy abundance. Tell me about your personal “Why.” How are you manifesting it through the business? Well, I’ve been working in the energy industry, or adjacent to the energy industry, for a long time. This is the fourth business that I’ve started. Prior to this, I was in sustainable fuels. Prior to that, I was in metals and hydrogen. Before that, I did a Ph.D. in chemical physics. And before that, I was in software, but it was in something that was energy-intensive. So I've always been focused on how we can improve the energy industry in the United States. More recently, especially, that has become more and more intertwined with national security. Share on X   So I would say that for the last 10 years, I’ve spent a lot of time focused not just on energy, but also on national security. Right at the intersection of energy and national security is the nuclear industry. Over the last year, especially since four executive orders on nuclear power were signed, I’ve been focused on the nuclear industry. This has really been the resurgence of nuclear power in the United States over the last year or so. Yeah, it’s super fascinating. So, I mean, stupid question: why is this important?  Well, now I think we’re learning—and we’re having an acute learning experience, especially in the United States—that energy is a key bottleneck. And I think the thing that woke us up to that, in a lot of ways, is AI and the need for compute. But it’s not been only AI. We’ve been exporting manufacturing. We’ve been exporting a lot of things from the United States that rely on electricity or rely on energy in one way or another. Our exporting of that has caught up to us, and we now have to reshore a lot of things that maybe in the ’80s and the ’90s we decided to export out to China, for example. Now that we’ve realized that was not the greatest idea, we now are realizing that we need the energy to power it.  And so energy has become a key talking point, and the infrastructure behind energy has become a key talking point, especially in the United States. People’s electricity prices have gone up, so it’s not just industry and not just the folks who are building AI and data centers. It’s really everybody who’s now feeling the pain of our energy crunch. It’s crunched a little bit now, and I think people see that also because of what’s going on in the Middle East and the high price of gas. But the crunch is continuing because we know we have a high energy demand for all of the AI build-out that we’ve been doing for the last handful of years. Yeah, that is so interesting. And I remember in the 1990s, there was this phenomenon that actually the energy demand was falling, at least in Europe, where I come from, and there was overcapacity, and there was approval of overbuilding capacity. And the discussion was, “Okay, why do we need this? How do we slow this down?” And now the opposite thing is happening, which is pretty fascinating.  There’s a big question as to how idle assets are used, right? Because a lot of people don’t understand how electrical grids work. Everywhere in the world, energy is pretty much generated as you use it. So the energy that we’re using to talk on this podcast is being generated, depending on where you are located in the United States. From my location, it’s probably being generated by a natural gas power plant because it’s 2:10 in the afternoon, and this is around the time when a lot of natural gas peaker plants start to get going.  Depending on where you’re calling in from, those electrons are being generated live as we’re speaking. There’s not much storage on the grid. We do have some storage on the grid. California uses pumped hydro. They’re building battery infrastructure in places like Texas, but they’re not quite there yet. Grids don’t operate by just making the energy and then using it later. No. Grids operate by putting energy into the grid as demand is increasing. So the energy that you use is being generated live. You have to think about it that way.  Historically, back in the ’80s and the ’90s, there were not a lot of sinks for that live energy that was being generated, and people were also really bad at predicting demand. Another thing that happened in the ’80s and the ’90s, as I said right before, is that we were outsourcing a lot of our manufacturing to China. So China was building energy capacity because they saw all this manufacturing demand coming in. Their cost of labor was cheaper than what you guys had in Europe and what we had in the United States.  Robotics was not a thing, so everything was pretty manual. And the energy wasn’t needed here. It was needed, but Europe and the US were outsourcing, so we didn’t have the need for the energy here because we were sending all the jobs over to the Far East. They needed the energy there, so they built a bunch of coal-fired power plants. They built a lot of energy capacity while those conversations were happening in Europe. And now I think we’ve realized that it was a mistake to outsource so many things—and, in a sense, outsource your energy generation as well.  We need to find ways of either storing energy or converting that energy and using it productively. So rather than storing it, you could convert it into chemical products. You could convert it into a variety of different things. I think we've learned a lot since the '80s and the '90s, and I think that ties into the original learning experience: don't outsource everything. You need to learn how to be self-sufficient. Share on X Yeah. Yeah, don’t outsource your key competencies and your key resources. And energy is clearly one of those. Just a quick side question: How much energy is being wasted because it’s not able to be stored?  It depends on where you are. A lot of energy gets wasted in places where you have high hydroelectric utilization. But the cost to produce it is very cheap because hydro is indirect solar. The water evaporates, comes down, and it’s very dependent on the landscape where you can deploy hydroelectric power. In other places where you have power plants that follow load, like natural gas, for example, then you’re probably not wasting quite as many electrons as you are in places where you could potentially overproduce.  But I think we’re generally pretty efficient. We don’t waste too much, and a lot of that is because of the way grids work, where we predict how much electricity is needed, and we ramp production up and down as required.  Okay. Let’s talk about frameworks that you may have in your business. This podcast is about frameworks—the processes that are maybe unique to your business or that you discovered as you were building your business. Anything come to mind that can be explained in three to five steps, or as approaches or perspectives?  Yeah, I mean, I guess the learnings that I've had over all of my businesses. I think the first learning is: hire the right people. Share on X As a CEO, you have to spend an inordinate amount of your time on hiring, recruiting, and finding the right people. It’s super important to make sure that you have the best team. So that was my number one job when I started Project Omega: to hire the best possible team that I could hire.  And that was really, like, I told my investors that your first KPI is: build the best C-suite that you can. And I think I did that. I have a really incredible team of folks at Project Omega who are subject area experts in the parts of the business that they lead, and so I’m really happy with how I did it in this business. I’ve had stumbling blocks in prior businesses, and that’s how you learn. You call them learning experiences for a reason. My biggest stumbling block in my prior company was investors.  I didn’t do proper due diligence on investors. There’s ongoing litigation that I’m a part of that has to do with investors where you may not know where their money comes from. I think the number two thing is: make sure that you do a lot of diligence on who’s backing you. Typically, investors do diligence on founders, but founders do

    24 min

  5. Jul 1

    340: Hire AI in Enterprises with Charles Fry

    https://youtu.be/Ji1OZYu1r1Y Charles Fry, Founder and CEO of CODE Éxitos, is helping businesses hire AI in enterprise to transform software engineering, modernize product development, and build intelligent connected systems.  In this conversation, Charles introduces The Agentic Org Chart Framework: Hire Systems Thinker, Look for Failed Entrepreneurs, and Have AI Replace “Trade Skills”. He explains why AI is fundamentally changing software development, how organizations must redesign their structures for an AI-first workforce, and why systems thinking is becoming more valuable than technical specialization. Charles also discusses how the rise of agentic software development is reshaping the future of SaaS, why combining AI with connected hardware creates a stronger competitive advantage, and what business leaders must do to successfully navigate AI-driven transformation. — Hire AI in Enterprises with Charles Fry  Good day. Steve Preda here, and I’m talking with Charles Fry, the Founder and CEO of CODE Éxitos, building cyber-physical systems for mid-market and enterprise companies, as well as full-stack web, mobile, and SaaS development. Charles, welcome back to the show.  Hey, I’m happy to be here. It’s always great to see you, and I’m looking forward to our chat. Yeah. It’s so interesting to talk to you because the last time we had you on the show, three or four years ago, it was still before the AI age was fully upon us.  Right.  Your business was kind of a different business. I’ve been following you on LinkedIn, and I see that you’ve evolved your approach, and now you’re an AI-first company. So tell me a little bit about how that came about, this whole evolution, and how you found your new focus?  Yeah. Wow. It’s been that long since we were on the show. It was a lot of fun, but here we are. You’re right. AI really sort of came out of left field. I’ll skip all the technical things that suddenly made AI an achievable thing. But really, at the beginning of 2024—and somebody can fact-check my timeline—ChatGPT, if you were aware of it, was kind of passing the Turing test. It was giving pretty reasonable answers to natural-language questions.  And we were like, “Wow, this is interesting.” At first, we were helping our clients think about how to build those capabilities into their products, something we still do. Share on X But by mid-’24, late ’24, it became pretty obvious that one of the best applications of large language models—and expert systems, we used to call them that—is writing software. And so by early to mid-’25, the systems were suddenly not novelties. They were credible at what they were doing, and they were gaining momentum in the quality and credibility of the software they were producing.  Now, CODE Éxitos was started largely to create an opportunity for entrepreneurs and enterprises that needed, let’s call it, garden-variety, well-done software. We built that through the Americas to arbitrage labor rates in Latin America and leverage the time zones. So it was essentially an offshore, blended, hybrid-team model. Honestly, by the middle of 2025, the AI tools for software engineering were as good as, or better than, 50 percent of the human developers that we employed.  And at some point, as a business owner, when you’re out there representing yourself, and your product is yourself, and you’re representing that to clients, you have a moral and ethical obligation to say, “Hey, I think I can still give you the best product that you’re looking for, but I’m going to do it in a different way.” So beginning in late 2025, we were hard into the pivot. Today, all of our software development is done agentically. There are still people. It’s not a complete dark factory. But our mid-level performers and below, we exited them from the business, which caused a lot of human turmoil. I mean, we were at around 100 people. A lot of human turmoil. Our clients were going through the same thing. We were watching what was happening in their organizations and what the leadership demands were.  We just made the decision to lean into it. And here we are, almost mid-’26 now, and it’s actually going really well. Now, AI, of course, anyone who opens an internet browser anymore sees it. AI is everywhere. You read the newspaper. AI is going to change everything.  Every application has an AI layer to it.  Yeah.  Right? Every SaaS application has a button that says, “Use AI here.”  My view, at least—and these are the things people should probably give me some credibility on—I’m going to keep my views focused on how AI applies to the software industry, my industry, and its direct impact. We see, and we have clients working on, things like AI in customer service, the legal department, and the finance department. We do all of those things internally—agentic first, AI first. But those really aren’t my industry. I’m not ready to make a sweeping prognosis about how AI is going to change capitalism in the United States. But in the software industry, it’s a fundamental change. And it’s not done yet.  So what’s your vision? Where is everything going? What’s it going to look like three years from now?  Well, I’m not smart enough to know that. But I think the patterns we've seen—and again, within the world of writing software, and making that a broad category of activities Share on X —are going to continue to consolidate and converge to where humans are important, but they might be only 10 to 20 percent of the input to the process. I really do think we’re going to see a day, sometime in the three-to-five-year time horizon, where a large amount of software will be written and managed by other software systems.  There’s no technical reason to prevent that. For example, I was talking to one of our clients today, a CIO at a great company. A couple hundred million dollars in revenue. A really well-run business. A sizable internal IT team. But there’s a lot of ongoing maintenance and attention required. Building the software is just the beginning of a five-to-ten-year life cycle. So I think in the near term we’re going to see that building the software becomes, “Okay, we got that figured out.” That’s a largely solved problem.  We’ll then progress to the problem of: “Hey, this software has been in production for five years.” “It needs updates.” “It needs attention.” “It needs maintenance.” “It needs to scale.” More software systems will take care of that. Fewer and fewer humans will be involved in that kind of work. So I think that’s where the software industry is headed. I think it’s going to be 60 to 80 percent smaller in human capital than it is today. Sometime soon. Yeah. I really do think it’s about as close as I want to get to calling it an extinction event. Let’s put it that way. Some people say SaaS companies are going to go out of business, and it’s all going to be agents running around doing things for us. But other people say SaaS companies are actually the SOP for whatever activity is out there, and you need that structure. The SaaS application provides that structure. You don’t want agents running in an unstructured way. You’d rather have these SaaS applications. What’s your view?  I think that’s a good way of looking at it. If you’re a dinosaur like I am, back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when you wrote software for a company, everything was custom software because there were no packaged software products, no SaaS platforms. But over the last 20 years, I think SaaS companies have become, for a lot of businesses, exactly what you said. They’re the embodiment of best practices. If you take something like HubSpot, which I’m sure you and many of your audience are familiar with, you really don’t need to customize it.  You just need to follow its baseline processes because they have thousands of customers who have helped refine the sales motions that work. So I think there’s some truth to that. The problem SaaS systems face is that the barrier to competitive entry is much, much lower. If you look at a company like Salesforce—and I think I’ve led three different Salesforce deployments back when I was a CIO or CTO—that software really shows its age. It’s layers and layers of complexity built to serve a wide audience. It’s great. It’s expensive. Emerging companies don’t need that. They can effectively vibe-code their own CRM system, and it works. I think the threat for big SaaS companies is twofold.  One is that the next generation of customers is going to onboard very differently into those systems than the previous generation. Share on X I don’t know what that onboarding ramp is going to look like. The second problem is there’s very little defensibility in having a pure software product. And the other part of our intro—you talked about cyber-physical systems. We’re spending more and more of our product development cycles on hardware-related products, things that have a nexus in the physical world. Here’s a good example. I’m wearing one of these health rings. This Oura Ring. Oura, yeah.  There’s a lot of amazing hardware in here that justifies my monthly subscription for the app. The app we could recreate pretty easily. But the development, manufacturing, and distribution of this physical item create a much higher barrier for a competitor to overcome. So more and more of our clients are companies that have a physical product they either want to make smarter or make more connected.  That’s really what it comes down to. And that’s a pretty exciting space. But for a pure-play SaaS company, I think it’s going to get tough. The competitive pressure is going to be intense. And the barrier to entry is going to be really low. It’s not even about engineering cost anymore because the cost of e

    28 min

  6. Jun 29

    339: 5 Steps to Address a Crisis with Itay Ben Horin

    https://youtu.be/NPL9Rg2tw0M Itay Ben Horin, CEO of Ben Horin & Alexandrovitz, one of Israel’s leading strategic media consultancies, is on a mission to help people and organizations achieve their goals through strategic communication. As the author of Crisis Management, Itay draws on decades of experience helping businesses, public figures, and institutions navigate high-stakes situations where leadership and communication determine the outcome. In this conversation, Itay introduces The Crisis Management Framework: Stay Prepared, Pull Your Team Together, Work Fast and Slow, Pick Your Entry Point, Decide Strategy, and Select Who Speaks, Where, and When. He explains why preparation is the greatest advantage in any crisis, why leaders must balance urgency with thoughtful decision-making, and how identifying the right audience and communication strategy can turn a defining moment into an opportunity. He also shares how AI is reshaping strategic communications, the growing threat of deepfakes, and why books and long-form conversations remain indispensable in an age of AI-generated content. — 5 Steps to Address a Crisis with Itay Ben Horin  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast, and my guest today is Itay Ben Horin, the CEO of Ben Horin & Alexandrovitz, a leading strategic media consultancy in Israel, and also the author of Crisis Management, which just came out in the U.S. Itay, welcome to the show.  Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.  Yeah, it’s exciting to talk to you. I mean, you’re in Israel. You’re growing your business there, and I look forward to your differentiated perspective on things on this show. But before we launch in, my favorite question: What is your personal “Why,” and how are you manifesting it through Ben Horin & Alexandrovitz? Okay. So our vision in the company is to help people fulfill their goals through the media. We're trying to empower people and organizations to achieve their objectives. Share on X And we do it through the media, through communication, and through social networks. This is our expertise: communication, strategic consulting, public relations, and spokesperson services. My specialty is crisis management, but our company provides all kinds of media consulting. And our “Why” is to help people fulfill their dreams. Our way of helping them is through the media. But there are other goals as well.  Yeah. That is interesting. So how does media help people fulfill their dreams? When a person or an organization is talking to one person or two people in a store, or in any other aspect of communication, it has limited power. But when they communicate through the media to thousands or even millions of people—through television, radio, podcasts, or whatever channel exists in modern life—they have the ability to influence more people. So the media helps them. In a good way, and also in crisis management. When something goes wrong, you can use the media to move from a bad situation to a better place.  When I talk to people, I tell them that even in biblical times, people had communication and written communication. And it’s the same stories: Love. Hate. Power. Politics. Everything is the same. The only thing that has changed is the technology we use to communicate with people. Once, people shouted from rooftops and used other traditional methods. Today, they can talk from their homes to millions of people. Yeah. And then social media is a big amplifier of messaging. It’s changing politics as well. So, for sure. Now, you’re running a large strategic communications firm, but you wrote this book about crisis management. So what’s different about communication during a crisis compared to business as usual, when you just want to get your message out? I’m a basketball fan, and today is like the NBA playoffs. So I’m saying—  The Spurs won.  Yeah, the Spurs won. And it’s very interesting to watch a seven-game series. So what I’m saying is that regular communication is like the regular season. You win. You lose. It’s important, but it’s not that important. A crisis is like the playoffs. You can win or lose. If you manage the crisis well, you can be a winner. Share on X You can win the season even if it began with a crisis. But if you lose, you’re out. So a crisis is a moment that can change your destiny—for better or for worse—depending on how you manage it. And I think that’s the difference between crisis management and regular communication. As I said, regular communication is like a very long regular season.  Yeah, I love that analogy. So it’s the yin and yang, right? It’s the crisis and the opportunity. How do you turn a crisis into an opportunity? There’s a saying: “Never let a good crisis go to waste,” right? Something like that.  Yes. I’m not advising people to get into a crisis. That’s not my advice. But if you have a crisis—and in my book, Crisis Management, I write about many case studies, both good and bad examples of crisis management—in some cases, the way people like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama managed their crises helped make them winners because they handled them well. I also write about companies like McDonald’s and Starbucks, as well as crisis management cases in Israel.  If you manage a crisis badly, you can lose your position or even your business. So I’m not advising anyone to seek out a crisis. But when I walk into a room where there is a crisis—and I do that a lot, it’s my day job—I meet a CEO or a manager who is dealing with a crisis, and I tell them: “Please try to look at this moment from another perspective.” “Because these are the moments that define your leadership.” “And if we do well, and if we do our best, you may be remembered as the leader who successfully navigated this challenge.” It’s hard to see that in the moment. But afterward, people often come back to me and say: “I remember what you told me during those moments.”  Yeah. That’s when character really shows up, right? In moments of crisis. It’s when everything gets amplified. Yes. So this podcast is called Management Blueprint. We talk about frameworks all the time. So give me a good crisis management framework. Three to five elements. I’m sure you cover them in your book. If someone is in a crisis, what do they need to think about? What steps should they take? Do you have a framework like that?  Yeah. So the book is like 20 chapters. Sixteen of them are crisis-management cases from around the world and Israel, including some that I managed. And there are also four chapters about this framework and how to manage a crisis. So the first thing that I will tell you is that the best way to manage a crisis is to be prepared for a crisis. I know it sounds like a cliché, but it's really important. Every minute that you prepare—I call it a golden minute. Share on X Every minute that you prepare for a crisis will count as 10 minutes during the crisis when it begins.  Because if you are prepared, if you know who is talking, who is on your team, what the messages are, who your crisis-management advisor is, who your lawyer is, who your accountant is, and who will be in the room, as a manager that’s very important. So that’s the preparation. And even if you don’t prepare, the first thing is to get your team together. I don’t believe that crisis management can be managed from far away. You must be in the same room with all the people and talk together with your team. The second thing is that in a crisis, you need to work very fast and very slowly.  Very fast because you need to think fast and react fast because it’s a crisis. You have a lot of phone calls, a lot of WhatsApp messages, and a lot of activity on social networks. A lot of people are talking to you. But you also need to be very sharp, and you need time to think. The most important thing you need to think about is: What is your entry point for the win? Who is your target audience? Is your target audience the general public? The business ecosystem? A regulator? A minister? In most crises, you have a few target audiences.  But you must understand which target audience can take you to a win. If you’re a political leader, it’s the public. If you’re a business, it can be the market or the stock exchange. If you’re a producer or a manufacturer and you have a crisis, it can be the regulator. So you must think about who your target audience is and then decide on the strategy. Because there are crises that you cannot win. Going back to basketball, maybe you cannot win the series. But it’s better to lose four games to two than four to zero. And that’s okay because you’re building for the next stage. So you have the team. You have the target audience.  You have the strategy. Then you need to decide who is talking to the public and how they are talking. Through Facebook or other social networks? Are you talking to the press? Are you having one-on-one meetings? When are you going to talk? Where are you going to talk? And who is going to talk? The manager? The professional manager? Your legal staff? Your communications staff? These are all the things you need to decide when the crisis begins. And from there, every crisis is different. But that’s where you move forward. Yeah. That’s fascinating. So basically, get your team together. That’s step one. Obviously, you have to be prepared so that you have a team. You have to react fast, but also make room for deep thought. Who’s your target audience? How do you enter this crisis, or where do you need to show up? Decide the strategy. And then who’s going to speak, where, and when. So that’s fascinating.  When and where. What is the technology? Are you doing a press conference? Are you doing a press release? Do you go to your LinkedIn page, your Facebook page, or your Instagram page? Every crisis has its own reci

    22 min

  7. Jun 22

    338: Build AI Superintelligence with Ganesh Krishnan

    https://youtu.be/b_G8krkwKv8 Ganesh Krishnan, CEO of AiHello, is helping Amazon sellers automate advertising, improve profitability, and scale their businesses using AI. Driven by a mission to give entrepreneurs more freedom and enable them to build businesses around products they love, Ganesh shares how AI can eliminate repetitive work while allowing business owners to focus on strategy, innovation, and growth. In this conversation, Ganesh introduces The AiHello Ads Framework: Tap into the Wisdom of Crowds, Find the Right Keywords, Bid at the Right Level, Dynamically Adjust Bids, and Rinse and Repeat. He explains how AI can leverage historical marketplace data to identify profitable keywords, optimize bids automatically, and continuously improve campaign performance. Ganesh also discusses the dangers of AI hallucinations, why Amazon’s incentives differ from sellers’ incentives, how AI has transformed his own company’s operations, and his vision for building zero-hallucination AI systems capable of advancing toward artificial superintelligence. — Build AI Superintelligence with Ganesh Krishnan  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, and welcome Ganesh Krishnan, the CEO of AiHello, an Amazon Ads automation company helping you grow your revenues, reduce work hours spent on ads management, and decrease your ad costs. Welcome to the show, Ganesh.  Thank you, Steve. Nice to meet you  Well, it’s great to have you here, and let’s jump right in. And my first question is, what is your personal ‘Why,’ and how are you manifesting it in AiHello?  So it started off with my thesis that we all need to do good towards the planet. A long time ago, I started having my own natural things, selling chemical-free, ecological, sustainable, good-for-the-planet, good-for-your-wallet, good-for-your-health items, and I would sell organic items. And eventually, what I realized was that it was taking a lot of my time marketing, managing it, changing the bids, doing everything. I started working more and more on AI because I’ve worked in AI commercially. I worked in AI in my industry. That was my job. So I said, “Why not use, apply that to my own startup, to my own industry for selling organic things?” And once I started selling it, some of my friends reached out and said, “Can we use your AI for our own businesses?” And I said, “Sure, why not?”  And then I started opening it up. And then one person came through and said, “Okay, let’s release it to the general public, see how it goes.” And then as we started earning money, I realized that I don’t need to do a job. I can have this startup, and I can help different people have their own lifestyle. You could have your own lifestyle. You could sell your own stuff that you like, e-commerce, usually on Amazon, and then we help you have your lifestyle. So this is my personal ‘Why’, is we need more equality. We need more people doing stuff they love rather than doing stuff they hate to do, and they hate to wake up and go to work. So do what you love. We are here to empower you.  Wow, that’s amazing. So you are empowering people to start their own e-commerce businesses on Amazon, and you help them with AI tools to get up to speed and compete with the big boys.  That is correct.  Yeah. I love it. So on your LinkedIn profile, you mentioned that you are, I don’t know what the word was that you used, but something to do with superintelligence, AI superintelligence. So what is it that you are doing, and what is your vision of how AI superintelligence can be tapped into?  It’s a very long topic. But to start off with, we used the old form of AI, which is a lot of regression, a lot of statistics, a lot of big data learning, and a lot of neural networks, if you felt fancy. And then LLMs became a huge thing. And we launched AiHello probably six or seven years ago. LLMs became a big thing two or three years ago. And it was pretty fancy. It was very good. It made life easy for us. But we cannot use it within AiHello to give it to clients, primarily because LLMs start hallucinating once you go past a certain context. The problem with hallucination is that it exponentially becomes larger and larger. Because if the previous thesis is wrong, if your previous hypothesis is wrong, then it builds on top of it, and it builds the wrong things.  Hallucination exponentially becomes worse. And when it comes to finance, when it comes to ads, and when you’re working with sensitive data, this can be catastrophic. So you cannot use these large language models for finance, for situations where you need precise data, and especially when you have lots of context. It’s going to lose the context of the first part. Just because you mentioned something at the start of the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not important. It is critical. As humans, we understand what is the most critical part of a conversation, and then we keep that in mind. But LLMs, because of context limitations, just keep on going and start hallucinating.  So a few months ago, we came up with the idea that we could use something like a large language model, but not based on the transformer model. And we could base it on data so that there is almost zero hallucination. So instead of building weights, we build it based on data. And we launched this. We don’t use it on AiHello, but we decided to use it on an email service because we have a lot of emails. We process a lot of emails for clients. We process a lot of emails for specialists. So we could use the zero-hallucination approach within emails, and if it is successful, then we can put it into AiHello.  And we can, of course, release it as an API as well. So this is going to set the basis of artificial superintelligence because what is stopping us right now from reaching or breaching that wall of artificial superintelligence is this hallucination. And of course, there is also logic. LLMs are pretty stup*d. They don’t understand. You can teach them, they learn, but they do not question what you teach them. They always take it on blind faith.  Yeah. Wow. That is genius. I love it. You are going to un-hallucinate AI. And if it stops hallucinating, essentially it becomes a lot more powerful and scalable. AI becomes scalable, or this whole process becomes scalable. That’s fascinating. So your ‘Why’, your mission, is to empower all these people to run their businesses. Do you have a framework for this that you could describe in three to five steps? How do you get someone up and running with their own business on an e-commerce platform? Or do you have any other framework that you could share with the audience? Something simple that they may be able to benefit from? One of the caveats of using AI is that it needs a lot of data. So if you’re just starting out with your e-commerce business, you need to put more of your human intelligence, more of your gut instinct, more of your thoughts, and more of your emotions into building it out. And once you have built up enough data, then you can put it into AiHello and start automating it. So what I would say, if you’re starting an e-commerce business, is hire a specialist who can help you launch off the ground.  Do a bit of the hypothesis work, do a bit of the analysis, and then come to AiHello and start automating it. You can only start automating once you have a good idea of how things work for you. And finding how things work for you is something you need to do on your own. It’s like you can’t start running, or you can’t start driving a car, until you learn how to crawl and until you learn how to walk.  Okay. So basically, it’s the age-old innovation thing that you have to innovate something on your own, and then you can scale it with AI. That is correct.  Yeah. So let’s say I came up with some kind of formula, concept, or product that is currently not being promoted, and I believe it would work. Or maybe I’ve already tested it and I want to scale it. I want to get on Amazon and sell it there. What can you do for me? What are the steps for me to be successful with AiHello’s help? So the first thing when you select a product, is: what are the keywords for it? What keywords do you use for that product? The second would be: what are the bids for that product? For each keyword, what is the right bid to put up? And then you have other things like budgeting. Do you change the bid depending on the time of day? Do you change the bid in total? Those are the things that you need to keep adjusting continuously.  With AiHello, we automatically harvest the right keywords for your product. We change the bid. We optimize the bid. We also do dayparting, where you can change the bid depending on the time of day. So there are different things that you can use AI for. You could certainly do all of it manually, but it’ll probably take you days or weeks to do what AI can do in a couple of minutes.  So a couple of minutes. But doesn’t the AI also need traffic data to be able to define things?  Yeah. So one of the other things about AiHello is that, because we have the wisdom of crowds, if you come up with a keyword, we know exactly how that keyword is going to perform. As you say, you have the wisdom of crowds. Can you extrapolate what you’ve experienced with other products and other customers onto a new product that doesn’t yet have a lot of traffic? Is this what you mean by the wisdom of crowds? Or what do you mean by the wisdom of crowds?  Let me give you an example. Let’s assume you want to sell coffee, and you go to our platform and say, “This is my product. It’s coffee. Help me sell it.” So what we do is, we know this is coffee. What are the keywords around it that are going to help sell it? Because we’ve sold other coffee products, we know that organic coffee sells well. We know coffee in the morning sells well. Black coffee sells well.

    25 min

  8. Jun 18

    337: Build Yourself a Growth System with Grant McKinstrie 

    https://youtu.be/xkCGHOYkdC0 Grant McKinstrie, CEO of Digital Position, is passionate about helping eCommerce brands grow by combining customer insights, data-driven marketing, and emerging technology. With more than two decades of experience in digital marketing, Grant has built a team that helps brands increase revenue through SEO, paid media, conversion optimization, and customer-focused growth strategies. We explore Grant’s DP Growth System: Ask AI where consumers congregate, Immerse yourself in their communities, Create content they crave, Engage them on Reddit and Quora, Have influencers create videos, and Turn craved content into ads. Grant explains why understanding customer conversations is more valuable than relying on assumptions, how online communities reveal unmet needs and buying signals, and how businesses can transform those insights into content, influencer partnerships, and advertising campaigns that drive measurable growth. He also shares how AI is changing marketing, the challenges of scaling an agency, and why innovation remains one of the most important drivers of long-term business success. — Build Yourself a Growth System with Grant McKinstrie  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and today my guest is Grant McKinstrie, the CEO of Digital Position, a full-stack agency that builds a growth system for e-commerce brands. Grant, welcome to the show.  Thank you so much for having me. Good to be here.  Well, it’s great to have you here. And I’d like to start by asking you: What is your personal ‘Why’, and what are you doing to manifest it at Digital Position?  Well, specifically when we think about the eCommerce space, there’s so much crap being sold out there. And also, in terms of what AI has done to the industry, it has allowed a lot of people to start a lot of different businesses, sell a lot of stuff, do a lot of dropshipping, and all these different things. It’s about trying to find the gems. It’s about finding the good people to work with and the businesses that are worth growing at the end of the day. There’s so much good stuff out there that gets pushed down because either they haven’t worked with a good agency or they just don’t know how to market themselves well enough.  And I think the drive behind trying to find those people who are genuinely nice to work with and brands that are absolutely worth promoting and bringing out into the world is awesome and very rewarding. Being able to do that is incredibly fulfilling. That’s not to say that we’re perfect in every way, shape, or form. And it’s not like every single business we work with is perfect either. We do what we can. But all in all, I want to be able to help market products, people, and businesses that are absolutely worth getting out into the world and getting more people to know about.  Yeah. That’s so interesting that you say that because I had a client in this space where you are, and they were a little conflicted because some of the brands they represented, they were not really proud of. And I think it really impacted their culture in turn. They felt that they were not operating with integrity with all of their clients, and that created internal friction. And it kind of held them back to some degree. So that’s fascinating that you talk about this. And I also noted on your website that your average client tenure is over four years, which I think bears testament to this. Yeah. In a large majority of cases, I mean, we’ve had certain clients for six years and, in some cases, even eight years. So when you have tenures like that, they certainly last a long time. And sometimes it just doesn’t work, and we’re also very willing to openly admit that. I don’t want anyone to think, “Oh, if we sign up with you, it’s four years, and then we’re just constantly paying you for, I don’t know, whatever reason it might be.” But genuinely, we’re here to see how we can legitimately grow the business and actually bring you profit dollars that you weren’t seeing otherwise.  Because so many businesses that we come across are just not able to allocate their marketing spend efficiently. And they’re just… I don’t know. Not to get too much into the nitty-gritty of things, but in a general sense, 95% of the businesses we talk to are essentially burning money. And in most cases, they’re being worked through an agency churn-and-burn system. And it hurts to see. Literally, I had a pitch two hours ago before this call where every single platform they were on was just burning money. They were trying to remarket to people who already knew about the brand and spending money on people who already knew about them and were already going to purchase from them.  And the agency was trying to tell them, “Hey, all of our metrics are great.” But the business is suffering because of it. It happens all the time. It generally results in tough conversations for us because agencies have such a bad reputation. And we’re always trying to pick up the pieces and revitalize that relationship. Which has its highs and lows in many ways. But we’re out here doing the best we can. Okay, so that’s a great segue because this podcast is all about frameworks—how to do something that maybe other entrepreneurs are trying to do, don’t know how to do, but you figured out. So do you have some kind of framework? Maybe it’s about getting an eCommerce company up and running on advertising and advertising profitably. Maybe it’s some other area in your business that is easy to explain in three to five steps. Does anything come to mind?  The biggest thing that we have realized lately is what we have deemed community engagement. One, because of AI, you can scrape information so easily across the internet, and you can get fed so much crap that AI is just going to automatically generate for you. But what really matters at the end of the day is: who is your audience, where the heck do they hang out, and what are they talking about?  So we are constantly looking to inject ourselves into Reddit threads, Facebook threads, YouTube comments, Quora—wherever those people possibly are. Get into the subreddits. Get into those Facebook communities. Get into the comments of influencers or whoever is relevant within that space, and talk to them. See what they’re talking about within those threads. Engage with them. Have a conversation so that you can understand what actually makes this person tick. What do they truly care about? What do they call things? What are they talking about on a daily basis?  So that when you start creating content that resonates with those people, you know exactly how to connect with them. Because, as I mentioned earlier, so many people are creating commoditized products and content because of AI, because it’s making it that much easier to do. Nobody is truly trying to connect with the consumer at the end of the day. And therefore, you’re going to have so many people who become numb to anything being thrown in their face unless they actually feel like they’re being spoken to.  So the biggest thing is to get to know the person on the other side of the screen. Go to where they hang out. Go to where they’re engaging. And listen to them. I think a lot of people forget that and want to go straight into data, metrics, spreadsheets, and all this stuff. When there is a human-to-human interaction happening within marketing every single day. And that is what you need to continue to focus on. Okay, so maybe that’s the beginning of the framework. So get to know the person—or the customer—or both.  Yeah. And it sounds really simple. It’s funny, when you put it that way, it’s just: listen to the person you’re trying to sell to. But it’s incredible how infrequently that actually happens. Because a lot of people will talk about, “My product is the best. My product is so good because it does this cool little thing that nobody else does.” But who really cares unless it’s actually solving a problem that somebody has? And unless they’re able to understand exactly how it’s going to make them feel in that moment when that problem is solved or how it connects to their core persona or whatever it might be. It’s a very simple framework. But it is the most important thing that a lot of people tend to neglect.  No, I love it. I love it. So what does the actual framework look like? I understand you go to Reddit, you go to Quora, and you listen. But what is the process? How do you even know which part of Reddit you should go to, what you should listen to, and who the customers are? Give me the rundown. What do you do when a new customer walks through the door and you want to figure out how to make them successful?  Yeah, of course. So I think Reddit is just the easiest example. I think it’s what a lot of people are familiar with, but it also provides value because it’s related to all the LLMs and what they like to cite as sources as well. Funny enough, one of the best ways to start is if you have a brand, a service, or something that you’re looking to build. Feed that into AI—Claude, ChatGPT, whatever works for you—and have it help you understand: “Hey, what subreddits should I be participating in?” If I want to sell vegetable seeds, for example—and that’s an example from a client we’ve worked with—or if I want to get more into gardening, where should I go?  It will point you to gardening, DIY gardening, seasonal gardening, and all these different places that have communities of people who are very specific when it comes to anything you want to know about gardening. Then you jump in there and see people talking about: “When should I start planting my tomatoes?” Or: “When should I do any transplanting?” Or: “How do I need to handle my watering schedule?” And then you have layers and layers of

    26 min
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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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