Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

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

  1. 1D AGO

    331: Drive Growth Using AI Agents with Max Kryzhanovskiy

    https://youtu.be/aQyHwoGfy50 Max Kryzhanovskiy, President and CEO of MOS Creative, is driven by a desire to set an example for his children and show what’s possible through technology, persistence, and innovation. As the leader of a tech-forward agency that builds websites, apps, and AI-enabled platforms, Max helps businesses move from idea to execution by creating digital products that solve real problems and scale over time. We explore Max’s MVP Framework — Define the problem, Determine target market, Prototype the product, Build the MVP, Test and obtain feedback, Iterate — a practical approach for transforming ideas into scalable digital products. Max explains why founders should avoid overbuilding too early, how AI is accelerating prototyping and development, and why businesses must balance automation with authentic human connection. — Drive Growth Using AI Agents with Max Kryzhanovskiy  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Max Kryzhanovskiy, the President and CEO of MOS Creative, a company that builds websites and apps that drive growth. They were also the first company in Baltimore to launch a mobile site. Welcome to the show, Max.  Thank you for having me.  Let me ask you this—what is a mobile site? Is it a mobile phone site, or is it something different?  I mean, now it probably doesn’t matter as much anymore, because everybody obviously has a website that works on a smartphone screen—or a responsive websites. But before mobile websites came out—or I should say, when smartphones first came out—we had to adjust for smaller screens. We were all used to bigger screens on a computer, and then once we started having different screen sizes come out before responsive, we were the first company to have a mobile website in Baltimore. And we actually built a web application specifically to create them ourselves, and then also went to market to offer it to other clients as well. So a mobile website is just like it sounds, a website that’s specifically designed for mobile.  That’s cool. So it sounds like you are very much a tech-forward company, and you are at the edge of technology. And as we were logging on, you said that you would be recording this on your phone because you actually have AI agents running on your computer. Does that mean you have AI agents as part of your team? What kind of agents do you have? Is it still an experiment, or is it already in execution mode?  It’s in execution mode, but we’re always experimenting. We like to think we’re ahead of the curve, but with AI, we’re all experimenting to a certain extent, right? Something new comes out, we try it out, see if it works, and see how it can be applied to your business—what kind of outcomes it can give you. So I’m all about AI. It’s amazing. It’s an amazing tool. But I think AI is becoming a lot more than we thought it was going to be—and also a lot less at the same time. Meaning, when AI launched—for example, when ChatGPT came out to the broader market—I mean, obviously AI had been around for a while—but when ChatGPT launched its chatbot platform publicly, we were amazed by how much work it could done. So it went from zero to a hundred. “Oh my God, it can do all of this,” right? But now, for example, with the more recent models—4.5, 5.0—the improvements are much smaller.  It’s not a hundred percent or a thousand percent better anymore. Now it’s maybe five or ten percent better, but the cost keeps increasing. I just read somewhere that even Claude said Claude Code won’t be included much longer as part of the regular plan. So now it’s only in the $200 higher-tier plan, plus you have to buy additional tokens. So it’s really becoming more like, “Hey, yeah, we can do this for you—but you’re going to end up paying something similar to what you’d pay a team.” At first, it was more like, “Let’s get into the market. Let’s get a lot of people interested.” But now, obviously, they have a lot of money behind them—investors, VCs, public market pressure—and they need to bring in revenue. So I think things are going to change very soon. AI is going to become a lot more expensive because the infrastructure and resources it requires are expensive. So eventually, those costs are going to be passed on to users. Yeah. And I noticed that ChatGPT started to do some ads as well. They’re probably going to go that direction, and who knows what that’s going to bring. But that’s not our topic today. Today, it’s about something else—frameworks. But before I go to the framework question, I’d like to ask you: what is your personal “why,” and how are you manifesting it at MOS Creative? Well, I’m a family man, so my “why” is to see my kids grow up to be amazing human beings—and hopefully to show them a great example of what can be accomplished in sports and in business. So my “why” is also to be a good person. Success can mean different things to different people, but for me, I love the hunt to get to a certain level of success. And then it’s kind of like—us as humans, or at least a lot of people—we reach a certain level of success and we don’t really celebrate it. It’s more like, “Okay, let’s get to the next level.” So my “why” is to show my kids that anything is possible if they really want it. Why I got into this space—it was exciting. You could see how quickly technology was moving, the kind of innovation that was possible, and it excited me. So that was one of the main reasons I got into technology. But the other reason was because I was in a different business, and we created technology that helped us grow. And I thought, “Oh wow, this is a completely different way to scale a business.” So technology became the direction we took. Yeah, I love it. I think inspiring our kids is a huge driver for many people, and it totally makes sense. Technology is exciting. I’d like to switch gears here and ask my other common question on this podcast, because this podcast is all about frameworks—business frameworks—how we can help listeners understand things, simplify things, and see different perspectives. So my question to you is: what is your favorite shortcut to success—or framework? And I don’t mean “shortcut” in a negative sense, but rather a framework that allows you to understand things differently, make decisions, serve clients, and create valuable outcomes. Whatever it is—something that has worked for you, and is simple enough that you can explain it to listeners in three to five steps. Well, I believe in always being open to learning. It’s not specifically a framework—it’s more of a mindset: understanding that we don’t know everything, especially now, with how quickly things are changing. I mean, a lot of people say that AI is going to make humanity a little dumber than we are. But actually, I learn a lot from it as well. If I’m doing something and I think, “Oh, this is a great way to speed up the process,” then I use it. So let’s say, for example, a client asks me a question. There are different ways to approach it. If I already know the answer because I have specific experience with it, I can answer it, right? That doesn’t always mean the answer is going to be correct.  I can research it, or I can get an answer from AI and then verify it through research and experience to make sure the outcome is actually what it says it’s going to be. The learning part is making sure you’re always open to figuring out whether the steps you’ve taken before are the right steps—or whether they can be optimized. I’m a big believer that everything can be optimized, especially now. There’s almost no question that can’t be answered quickly. Maybe there are some deep philosophical questions—but for the most part, especially in business, work, or even life, you can get answers very quickly. For example, I had a kind of vertigo-type feeling, and I was wondering what exactly it was. I entered specific prompts into ChatGPT, and it actually broke things down really well for me. Then I went to a doctor. First, I checked with a friend of mine who’s a nurse, and she said, “This is probably what you have.” And she started asking me questions. I thought, “This is funny—these are exactly the same questions ChatGPT asked me.” And her husband said, “You know what? That proves that medicine is basically a set of questions. As you answer one question, it leads to the next.” So it’s like a dynamic questionnaire. And by the time I got to the doctor, I already had a good idea of what it potentially was, and I knew what questions to ask so I could understand the next steps to fix it.  Yeah.  So what I’m saying is there’s always a way to improve. I’m a big believer in that. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing, because in this age, everything moves very fast—regardless of the business you’re in. That’s true. It’s interesting that you say ChatGPT can answer any question. It’s true—sometimes it hallucinates, but it still gives you an answer. Yesterday, I went to a presentation, and the president of Great Game of Business talked about this. He said, “Today, the answer is everywhere. So it’s not a lack of answers—it’s a lack of good questions.” So what we really have to come up with are good questions to ask. That’s the bigger challenge now—not finding the answer. And I thought that was a really interesting insight. I agree. It’s the same thing, right? It relates to prompts as well. If you have a good prompt, you’re going to get a better answer. If you ask a good question, you’re going to get a better answer. So yeah, I agree with you. Listen, AI isn’t a complete solution, but it’s a huge help—especially if you’re just starting out. Yeah. So what drives your bu

    30 min

  2. MAY 4

    330: Grow Your Business in 3 Phases with James Green

    https://youtu.be/oPA1dSUab9Y James Green, CEO of Cognome and former Pixar executive under Steve Jobs, is driven by a deep curiosity and a pull toward ideas that can create massive impact. From early internet ventures to mobile innovation and now AI in healthcare, James has consistently aligned himself with transformative trends. In this episode, he shares hard-earned lessons from scaling multiple companies and introduces a simple but powerful framework that explains why many startups struggle to grow beyond their early stages. We explore James’ 3-Stage StartUp Growth Framework: Whiteboard Phase, PowerPoint Phase, PDF Phase—a model that captures how organizations must evolve as they scale. He explains why early-stage chaos is necessary, how structure begins to take shape in the middle phase, and why standardization becomes critical at scale. James also dives into the toughest leadership challenges—especially making difficult people decisions—and shares why aligning with strong market tailwinds and creating “pull” from customers is essential for sustainable growth. — Grow Your Business in 3 Phases with James Green  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is James Green, the CEO of Cognome, a health tech company that is solving the problem of how to manage different AI models that are being deployed in healthcare today. Earlier, he worked as a vice president at Disney. He worked directly under Steve Jobs at Pixar, and he has had at least six other CEO roles in ed tech, media, and healthcare. Welcome to the show, James.  Thank you very much. Delighted to be here.  Yeah, super excited. And Steve Jobs—you don’t often have people that have known Steve Jobs now even Tim Cook has resigned. Yeah. Yeah.  And it’s 13 years, I guess. Steve Jobs is being gone. So what was it like working with the man? Was he a difficult boss?  First of all, most of the things you hear about him are accurate. So it’s not one of these things where you hear a lot about Steve Jobs and actually the man was totally different. So most of what you’ve heard is true. And I’ll give you one short anecdote sort of before we go on, which is something that I always found incredibly impressive about him. When you work for him, if you disagreed and said, “Hey, you want it to be white, I want it to be black,” without hesitation he would say something like, “Here are seven reasons why you’re wrong.” First of all, before we go into those seven reasons, what’s impressive about that is he had a number and he stuck with it.  And it happened in seconds and he didn’t know before. So if you think about that, it’s hard to keep all of that in your head. So the guy was just super, super clever. And then he would list them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and you’d be out. Like it’s done. It’s like, “Oh, damn.” So yeah, he was unbelievable human, and it was an honor and a privilege to have worked with him.  Yeah, well, that’s awesome—to talk to you, having worked with him and having some direct experience. Definitely not an easy boss when he has seven guns to shoot you down. Yeah.  But there’s a lot to learn. I mean, you learn the most from these kinds of bosses.  Yeah.  So let’s get into the question—which is normally the first one, but this is the exception: What is your personal “why,” and how are you manifesting it in Cognome, James, and in your previous jobs?  Yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ve tried to come up with what my “why” really is. And what I’ve come up with is I can’t help myself. And I’m going to go through examples of it and what I mean by that. I pay a lot of attention to the world. I pay a lot of attention to what’s going on. I get very seduced by new ideas and new things and things that I think will have big impact. And once I start thinking about it and thinking about what that impact is, I cannot help but start getting involved in it. That sounds very abstract, so I want to try to make that super concrete. So when I was working at Pixar, for example—the internet was being born. This is the late ’90s.  I couldn’t help myself. I started an ad-serving company called Sabela Media. That company got sold to 24/7, then to DoubleClick, which later got acquired by Google. So the internet was there. I had to do it. I had to have something in it. Then after that, I was thinking about what to do next—and mobile phones, if you remember, were still flip phones, mostly used for texting. The second company that I did was putting content onto those phones. It just seemed obvious to me—I couldn’t help myself. I saw the opportunity, and it clearly worked. That company was called GiantBear. It was sold to BlueCora. After that, there was this crazy innovation going on in television of all things with effects. Now, again, we take these things for granted. We’ve got AI creating things all day long, back in the day, we didn’t. So I ran a company called PVI, which is famous for inventing the first-down line you see in football games. So that was kind of the very first virtual object you saw in live things. Again, it may seem like, oh, that’s an everyday event, but back in the day it was totally not. And I think it opened up football to many more people—you no longer needed the chain crew to understand what was going on. And then if we fast-forward—there are a few things in the middle, but I don’t want to bore everyone—to where I am today at Cognome. I even wore my little Cognome shirt so I could advertise it throughout the podcast.  Yeah, that’s smart. I have to do that.  AI is clearly the big thing today. But for me, intellectually, it’s not enough to just say, “I’ll do an AI model,” like everyone else. For me, healthcare is one of the areas that AI will have the biggest impact with. Healthcare for a lot of reasons has been a laggard technologically for specific things about how they store data, so it hasn’t been adopted things like multi-tenant SaaS, because the data has to stay local and things like this. So AI will revolutionize it. And AI will make decisions about whether people live or die, right? So it’s really consequential. And for me, the question is—how are you going to manage that? That’s a super interesting intellectual opportunity. And so Cognome ExplainerAI. So my “why” is: what’s going on, what’s interesting, and what’s changing the world? And the beautiful thing about that is you get a “rising tide lifts all boats” situation. You’re not fighting against a trend—you’re moving with it. The whole world is rising, and you can be part of that. That’s sort of my “why”.  Yeah, so basically—in other words—it’s about coming up with revolutionary ideas and implementing them?  Yeah. I mean, I want to make an impact in the world. I want to make a difference. I’m not a very religious person—in fact, not at all. So I believe our time here is limited. I want to make a difference. I want to be part of what’s going on. So yeah, that’s my “why.”  Yeah—tapping into trends. Well, that’s great. I mean, don’t know if it’s a “why,” but making the most of the opportunity to be here and maximizing impact—that’s a huge one. Love it.  Yeah.  STEVE PREDA: So let me segue to the next one. This podcast is all about frameworks. So the objective here is what’s a shortcut that you can teach the listeners that they can implement in their business? So what is your “shortcut” to success? Maybe “shortcut” is the wrong word. What is the framework you use to interpret the world, understand it better, and make decisions?  Yeah, this is another thing I struggled with a little bit. So I listened to your questions, and I tried to make my answers really personal. I’m trying to be authentic—this is what I actually do all the time, as opposed to this is what I’m doing at the moment, or this is what I did for a second. The truth is, frameworks come and go. There are a lot of frameworks out there. I’ve probably used 15 different sales frameworks. I mostly operate in the B2B world, so there are lots of frameworks you can use—for example, in sales. But I tried to think of something more consistent—a framework I’ve used across every company I’ve worked with, all the time. And the one I always come back to is about growth. So what I want to talk about is: how do you manage a company that’s going through growth? Because it’s not obvious—and I do have a framework for it. And unlike some of the other frameworks—like something McKinsey, Bain, or someone’s invented this framework and you are adopting it. This is really pretty personal to me, and I’ve adopted various little things about it. There are these two ideas that live in parallel. One is in the sales process, where I think companies go through this idea of, I call it a Whiteboard sales process, a PowerPoint sales process. And forgive me for being a little dated, but a PDF style process, something you can’t change. And at the same time, they go through these stages where you are a small company, a medium-sized company, and a larger company. Think of it roughly as fewer than 12 people, then 10 to 75, and then 75 to 100 and beyond. And I’ve managed all of these sizes. And what’s interesting about these is that if you don’t have a framework to manage yourself through these stages, you’re going to fail. You as a leader will be replaced. I personally have replaced leaders who cannot go through those kinds of things. One of the things I’ve done in my career is act as a sort of hired gun for VCs. They make an investment, and then they bring me in to replace the founder if they haven’t been able to navigate that growth stage. And so the framework works like this. When you’re starting a company—what I call the “whiteboard”

    28 min

  3. APR 27

    329: Help Your Clients Sleep Soundly with Andy Seeley

    https://youtu.be/N-og1bznPbs Andy Seeley, CEO of Creatively Disruptive and Ashworth Strategy, is on a mission to become the “8:00 AM call” for small business owners—the trusted partner they can turn to after those sleepless 3:00 AM nights filled with uncertainty. Having experienced the stress and isolation of entrepreneurship firsthand, Andy now helps technician-turned-business-owners (plumbers, gym owners, bakers, and more) build scalable, sustainable businesses with the right systems, strategy, and support. We explore Andy’s perspective on success—not as a shortcut, but as a combination of fundamentals: embracing failure, never giving up, and most importantly, building the right team. He shares how most small business owners get stuck because they try to do everything themselves, and why true growth comes from surrounding yourself with smart, hardworking people of strong character. Andy also dives into a critical operational insight: sequencing—doing the right things in the right order—to avoid overwhelming clients (and yourself) while still driving meaningful results. — Help Your Clients Sleep Soundly with Andy Seeley  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and today my guest is Andy Seeley, the CEO of Creatively Disruptive, an agency supporting local, community-based small businesses, and Ashworth Strategy, an e-commerce, multi-channel marketing agency that is creating sustainable growth for beauty, apparel, pets, and kids industry businesses. Andy, welcome to the show.  Thank you. I’m very happy to be here. Nice to see you, Steve.  Yeah, I’m excited to talk to you. It’s a very interesting combination that you have going here, but I’d like to start with my favorite question: what is your personal “why,” and how are you manifesting it in your businesses? I think the personal “why” kind of straddles all the businesses that we deal with. We typically don’t work with large corporate brands. We don’t typically deal with, not that we wouldn’t want to, but we typically don’t, and we don’t actually even try to focus on them. Because the main  why”, the founding of our business came from when my partner and I were talking—we weren’t very happy with the two different businesses we were operating. We were both working on one project together, but he had his own thing, and I had another thing. We were both there, we’d both gone through some really tough times ourselves and had experiences of feeling very alone, trying to figure things out—sometimes successfully, sometimes very unsuccessfully. And we both talking about our troubles and tribulations, and all of those kind of things. And we were like, wouldn’t it have been nice, wouldn’t it have been good if there was someone there to help us? That “staring at the ceiling at 3:00 AM” in the morning. And the morning is a thing that a lot of entrepreneurs and business owners are very familiar with, right? You wake up at 3:00 AM, staring at the ceiling, thinking, “I’ve got all these things to do.” Or if it’s tough times—how do I make payroll? If there’s a legal issue—what am I going to do about that? Whatever it is, there’s always something. Even in good times, there’s often something. What we thought to ourselves was we are oftentimes, when we were in that situation, we didn’t really have anybody to go to. That 3:00 AM turns into 4:00 AM, then 5:00 AM, and sometimes we were just like, well, I’m just going to get up. And then there are sleepless nights. And we thought if we come from the standpoint, it's a real thing. It's something we’re passionate about is that most small business owners are technicians. Share on X Most small business owners are very good at a thing, like they’re a plumber and they start a plumbing company, or a baker who starts a bakery. The E-Myth.  This is the E-Myth concept.  Right. They’re a gymnastics coach, so they start a gymnastics gym. Most business owners are technicians, which means they’re very good at a very specific thing, not so good at many other things that you have to be. And we wanted to be that 8:00 AM. We wanted to be their 8:00 AM. And what that means is—staring at the ceiling at 3:00 AM, maybe their mind racing for 30 minutes or so—but then they can say, “You know what, we’ll reach out to Andy and Russ at Creatively Disruptive at 8:00 AM. I’ll get some sleep. We’ll get to the bottom of this idea. We’ll get to the bottom of this problem. We’ll get to the bottom of it. And that was really important to us. And it really was a guiding light. That’s why, from a marketing standpoint—you could call us a marketing agency—but I don’t think it really is what we are. Because we do consultancy work. We work through exit strategies. We work through financial goals. We work through a whole bunch of stuff that does not include putting an ad up on Facebook, Instagram, or Google, or building websites. We ask—why are you doing all that stuff? I love your first question, because what’s the point of it all, right? I had a conversation with a frustrated client yesterday, and at the end of the frustration that the client had, they were not frustrated. And I said to them, “Look, we’re talking about a lot of different things, and the reality is what’s going on with you when working with us is there’s some amazing things happening, which you agree with.” But the reality is, you are not talking to us about running a Facebook ad. You didn’t come to us because you desperately want a Facebook ad run, or come to us because you would love your company on Google. That’s not the reason why you came to us. The reason why you came to us is something that those things will change in your life for the better. That’s why you’re talking to us. There’s a reason why you bought this business. So our “why” is really to help those small business owners—who are often technicians, very specialized people—develop a broader skill set and a team that can help them through their challenges. Share on X The beauty of what we do is—we have 120 clients, all dealing with different issues and different situations. Because we engage with them at a consultative level, we hear it all. We hear, many times many subjects, here’s what not to do—and on those same subjects, here’s what to do. And we actually collate that stuff. As you saw on our Zoom, there was a Zoom link we used—you saw my Read.ai. that read.ai As much as it’s for us to make sure that we have our ducks in order when we’re talking to somebody, it’s also an archive for us to make sure that some things that we spoke about, we learned about that now we can put that in our database to help other clients. And it’s not that we show other clients what we’ve spoken about and give state secrets and so forth.  It’s a repository of company knowledge that you have developed.  Absolutely. Me and you having a conversation like this, Steve, is all well and good. The fact that we are recording it is going to allow loads of other people to understand it. For us internally, it allows my team and us to look at stuff and go, okay, well this is a really good thing, let’s actually turn that into a process. Yeah. Love it. So a very long-winded, long thing. The “why” is, we want to be that 8:00 AM call after you’ve had a 3:00 AM wake up. Love it. I mean, that is the definition of trust. If you are the person that they call at 8:00 AM, then they know that they can sleep well because you’re there.  And the big, burning part of that “why” is that we didn’t have it—and it was tough. It was emotionally tough to be so concerned. I had a lot of 3:00 AM wake-up calls during the Great Recession in 2008–2009. It was a very worrying time. There was a market crash. Our house went from being worth $400,000 to being worth $100,000. We owed $300,000 on that house. We had a business that income went from about $500,000 a month. It was a gymnastics gym that my wife ran to making about $200,000 in a two month period, because so many layoffs were happening. My job, which was working for a TV station, we had loads of clients calling in, asking to cancel, trying to figure out how, so there was so much going on. Those 3:00 AMs were very regular thoughts that came up, and I would just sit there not knowing what to do and having no one to talk to. I desperately want to at least be someone that someone can think of, “You know what, we can call Andy. We can call the CD team, and we’ll figure this out.” So anyway, there you go.  Okay, so this is a great segue, because you mentioned Read.ai and how you’re thinking about about processes—and how to use the 120 clients you have and the challenges you solve. How do you turn that into a process so other clients can easily access to it? So this podcast is really about this kind of stuff. It’s called Management Blueprint, and I’m always looking for shortcuts—business shortcuts, frameworks that entrepreneurs have discovered along the way and that they could share with the listeners and could help other people listening to have a better process. It could be anything—three to five steps—looking at something, seeing something in a different light. So what do you have in mind for us?  So a shortcut to success—I’m always a little bit leery of statements like that. “Shortcuts to success”. It always feels a little bit like a 2:00 AM infomercial—blah, blah, blah—and you get steak knives with it. Because the reality is, oftentimes there’s no shortcut. I’m sure you’ve asked this question a million times, and a lot of people say, “Here are the shortcuts.” But my experience is—the real truth is—there are a couple of fundamentals to success. One is being okay with not having it right? That’s a “shortcut,” if you want to call it t

    26 min

  4. APR 20

    328: Set Goals in 5 Steps with David Steele

    https://youtu.be/vmziYo0mPmE David Steele, serial entrepreneur and Founder and CEO of One Wealth Advisors, is driven by a simple but powerful mission: helping people. Whether through wealth management, hospitality ventures, or advising founders and leadership teams, David sees all of his businesses through one lens—service, care, and improving the lives of the people they touch. We explore David’s OKR Goal Setting Framework—a practical system for turning intention into results: identify, articulate, share, measure, and execute. David explains why limiting goals to just a few priorities creates clarity, how articulating and sharing them builds accountability, and why consistent measurement and execution are what ultimately drive outcomes. He also shares how this framework applies differently in life versus business, why simplicity beats complexity in strategic planning, and how a hospitality mindset fuels both growth and long-term client loyalty. — Set Goals in 5 Steps with David Steele  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is David Steele, a serial entrepreneur and the Founder and CEO of One Wealth Advisors. David, welcome to the show.  Oh, thanks for having me.  Well, great to have you. You have a very interesting career and interesting businesses, and you keep a lot of balls in the air. So I’d like to dig in. I was very interested in what I read on your website about your personal mission and why you do things. So would you mind sharing with our listeners what your personal “why” is and how you are manifesting it in your business and businesses?  My personal why—it’s always people. And everything I've done in my life is about figuring out ways that I can help people. Share on X I have done so in what is seemingly different businesses. My primary role is founder and CEO of a wealth management financial planning company called One Wealth Advisors, where we work with a little over 400 families, helping them manage their financial lives. But I’ve also created two restaurant companies that are, I think, involved in the conversation around culture. They’re cool, they’re interesting. They currently have seven restaurants combined, with four more opening over the next six months. And these are seemingly different businesses, but for me, it’s really about people. The financial planning company, I see as a hospitality business—we serve people. I’m very skeptical of the majority of the financial services industry, which tries to sell their value proposition on their technical wizardry or perspective on investing or tricks or whatever. And for us, it’s like—that’s commoditized. Everybody’s doing the same stuff. Our value proposition is that there is nobody who will envelop you with more care, love, service, attentiveness, responsiveness, and proactiveness in the industry than we will. Share on X And we can compete on that. And when I describe my financial planning company that way, and I then talk about restaurants as hospitality businesses—which is not much of a stretch—where we envelop people with deliciousness and great service, the common thread comes through. But maybe the deeper common thread for me is my partners in these different businesses. My role in their lives is to help them—as individuals, as partners in our companies—to live happy, peaceful, productive lives and to feel valued. So for me, I do the same thing every day, all day—but everyone else sees these different weird things. I’m the board of a coffee shop company, another restaurant company, a music band management company, and a music production company. And my view on all of those is that I'm there to provide hospitality and service to the founders and the executive teams of those companies. So for me, it’s all about people. Share on X Very interesting. I mean, the hospitality angle and the quality-of-life angle—I saw it on your website. You really don’t talk about financial performance there at all. You talk about how to improve the life of your clients. That’s kind of the big theme there. And I like the blogs as well—that also comes back to the quality-of-life theme. So anyhow, I don’t want to get too deep into this, because what I’m curious about is frameworks. This is a podcast about frameworks, and I wonder—what is the framework that has worked in your life that is simple to explain, maybe three to five steps, that you could share with the audience? Something they could use to help their own businesses or themselves by implementing or thinking about things in a clearer, simpler way. It’s so basic. The key to life, in my mind, is so basic. Identify goals—two to four. More than five is probably too many. And I don’t care if it’s for your business, your life, a relationship—I don’t care what it is. Actually identify those goals. Articulate those goals—clear, concise, as few words as possible. Try to apply some type of measurement to those goals. And then once those goals are articulated, you can measure them, whether they succeed or fail. It becomes pretty clear what a strategic plan might look like to achieve those goals. And I think that goal setting is human magic.  I’ve written a couple of life plans throughout my life, and I never looked at them again after writing them—until many, many years later. And lo and behold, I achieved everything I’d written on those life plans. I usually don’t look at them for 10 years. And I just think the clear articulation of the goal, sharing the goals with people—because then you become accountable, to yourself and to them—it’s out in the world. You’re going to achieve those things. Share on X Okay, so identify, articulate, share, measure, and execute—is that the framework?  That’s it.  Yeah. Love it. That’s great. Yeah, I mean, goals do have a magic to them, so if you don’t ever look at them, how do you not forget them?  I think that’s the human magic part. I mean, for a business, I do believe goal setting and strategic planning should be a continual process. For life planning, I think it’s probably okay to articulate your goals and maybe not look at them again. And I don’t necessarily think for life planning you need to have a written strategic plan. The human magic part is that if you say you want to do something in life, and you articulate it and you share it with people, the human magic part is it’s now present forever in your subconscious. And so energetically, you’re going to, I think, very naturally orient yourself around those goals just simply in your everyday existence. And I think that’s for maybe for life planning. For businesses, I do think it’s best to have a framework for this, and so my businesses use, and I don’t care what the framework is—we use objectives and key results, OKRs. They’re pretty commonly used now. And I don’t care if you use KPIs, OKRs, or whatever it may be. You and your team should sit down each year, and ideally you already have a long-term vision for the company, which should be pretty concise and focused. And then your annual goal setting in between and what I’ll call tactical plans or mini strategic plans that you can then look at each quarter. With the objectives and key results, we assign a leader to each objective. The leader understands that they are tasked with organizing the necessary team members to achieve the goal. Share on X We have key results that we define in our annual strategic planning meeting, and then we have quarterly check-ins. I’m the CEO of the financial planning company, so I check in with each leader every quarter to see how they’re progressing on their objectives and the key results for those objectives. And then for the restaurant companies, I am the executive chairman of both of them and a co-founder. I meet with the CEO, and then the CEO meets with the team to check in on their progress of their goals. So the human magic part is this idea that you can just say, “I want to do this thing,” write it down, and not look at it again. But for business, I do think it requires a more consistent, structured, written approach.  So help me with these OKRs. I mean, I’m familiar with the OKRs, but what I’ve always wondered is, when you have key results for every objective, then is this not too limiting in terms of having to choose the kind of objective which you can measure with the key results, as opposed to—and maybe this is my blind spot here. Maybe there are objectives that don’t really lend themselves to regular measurement of key results, but because they are maybe binary. Either we acquired this new location or we didn’t, there’s not really much key results other than it has to be a size, profitability, whatever. So I don’t know—maybe I’m rambling here—but what’s your view on this?  Well, I mean, I would push back a little bit on that. Let’s say your objective is to acquire—through vertical or horizontal integration—another business. I think a key result could be, over the course of the year: what is the process by which you’re identifying potential companies to acquire? What is your vetting process? What is the activity around outreach, vetting, and analysis? Maybe sometimes there’s a bit of a square peg, round hole problem with this, but I don’t think there’s a negative to articulating the binary objective, even if it’s imperfect key results that you’re going to be using to measure them. Yeah, I think I need more clarity on this. I always thought of the two sides of the coin is you’ve got the easily measurable things, which typically pertain to the business—growing the business, executing processes, doing sales activities, this kind of stuff, which is working on the present. And then you have those bigger—what do you call them—OKRs or Rocks—those big objectiv

    20 min

  5. APR 13

    327: 3D Print Your Software with Piyush Jain

    https://youtu.be/_FEQAirQyWY Piyush Jain, Founder and CEO of Simpalm and co-founder of Ducknowl, is on a mission to solve real-world challenges by combining technology and entrepreneurship. With over 15 years of experience building custom software solutions, Piyush helps businesses turn complex ideas into practical applications by blending technical depth, business acumen, and a strong problem-solving mindset. We explore Piyush’s AI Ideation Framework—Validate idea, Proof of concept, Design, Competitor analysis, and Feature selection—a practical approach to building software in the post-AI era. Piyush explains how AI can help teams better understand user personas, validate product assumptions, and rapidly prototype ideas, while human expertise remains essential in design, architecture, and production-grade development. He also shares how prompt engineering, peer-reviewed prompting, and a right-shoring delivery model can help businesses build smarter, faster, and more cost-effectively. — 3D Print Your Software with Piyush Jain Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Piyush Jain, the Founder and CEO of Simpalm, a custom software development company, and the co-founder of Ducknowl, a candidate screening and assessment application business for high-volume recruiting. Piyush, welcome to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Thanks for inviting me.  Well, I’m very curious about the stuff that you have to share with us, and I’d like to ask first about your personal purpose. What is your “why,” and how are you manifesting it in your business?  Yeah, so that’s a very interesting question. And I think for every entrepreneur or tech founder, really, that’s the motivation—why you want to do certain things. So for me, if I look at it, my personal “why” is: why are we not solving challenges? Or why are we not solving them the right way? Why are we not transforming our lives? I grew up in India and then came to the US, so I’ve seen many different parts of the world—from Asia to North America. I see people face different challenges, but then we are not focusing on solving those problems. A lot of it I see is there’s a lot of challenges in the world because I believe there are not enough entrepreneurs. Because entrepreneurs are the ones who really take risks, combine everything, and create solutions. That was like me, right? That’s what I learned growing up, that I think I can do that, right? I can combine the technical knowledge and the business acumen and create solutions that people like, solve their challenges. Growing up, like I'm more on the technical side. Share on X I was inclined more toward science and technology, but then as I got into my undergrad and grad school, I realized that I have that entrepreneurship aspect, but it’s still around science and technology. That’s when I realized that, you know what, I cannot be a pure scientist or maybe a pure entrepreneur, but I can be someone who can combine these two, because my main driving factor is problem-solving. I can combine these two and then live my life, be very happy with what I do. That has been my motivation. I like it. So solving challenges and being an entrepreneur, and kind of combining the two—being the technical expert and the entrepreneur in one. Now, one of the things that we always talk about on this podcast is frameworks. And you have developed a really good one for AI ideation, which I think is something that everyone needs to do these days or use these days, and it helps you create business apps and other business applications. Can you share with me how that framework works, and what are the steps in it?  Sure, yeah, definitely. So just to give you a brief background, we’ve been building software for the last 15 years. Some companies have used different frameworks, whether it’s Agile or Waterfall in SDLC, in building the software, right? There are different methodology that companies have used, and they’ve been good, successful—they’ve played their role. But now, with the advent of AI, things have changed. We had to figure out, in our organization, how to use AI, and that’s how this framework was built. My team helped me building this framework as well. Share on X But we realized that we were losing business—we were losing clients—since we didn’t have an AI framework that would fit our clients. Again, for me, it’s a challenge. So anytime I see a challenge, it create brain juice in me, right? So I said, okay, let’s figure out how we create this framework. How did you do it?  So really, we built this framework—very interesting. A lot of the steps are similar, but then a lot of things are different. Share on X Whenever client comes to us and says, “Hey, we want to solve this challenge,” what we do is we do enough research. And now we use a lot of AI tools to really understand the problem better and understand the user persona. When you build any software application, there is a person who’s going to use that. Sometimes we used to do user research or focus studies to understand that. Now, with the help of AI, we can get a lot of ideas about the user persona. For example, maybe we are building a healthcare application for an anesthesiologist. I don’t know much about that. I know, I mean, because I have been through some medical surgery and all that, but I can’t fully understand their user persona or their requirements with respect to the application we’re building. But now, with AI, I can actually ask different AI models, “Hey, we are building this app for anesthesiologists. What are their pain points? How would they see it?” So all that deeper mindset and psychology we can get using AI.  You are validating the idea by interrogating AI applications.  What users are going to like and all that. So I will always use this term earlier. In software engineering, now we have this pre-AI and post-AI, right? If you read history, we talk about before Christ and after Christ, right? Yeah. So it’s a similar thing now. Yeah, exactly. Or before Covid, after Covid. Before AI, after we did all the user research and everything and created a requirements document, we would usually do design, create like a visual design of the software. But now, with the AI framework, we don't do that. That's not the next step. What we do instead is create a quick prototype using AI platforms. Share on X   So there are a lot of AI platforms—like Lovable, Claude. Now ChatGPT launched Codex for coding, and Replit. Depending on what kind of application you’re building—for example, maybe if you’re building a web-based application—then I recommend using Lovable or Replit. They’re very good at creating that. Whatever software you want to build, whatever user personas that you’re addressing, you can feed into that and it’ll create like a prototype application. Okay.  So what that does is actually, then this prototype, clients can just take it to their customers or internal users and get feedback. A picture is better than a thousand words. Organizations discussing an idea is very different from when they actually see something. Then everybody starts chipping in—“Oh yeah, I see this in the prototype, but I don’t want this,” or “I want to move things around,” or “This is what I want.” Basically, building a prototype on AI platforms is much faster than building wireframes and design prototypes like we used to do earlier. So that has changed. So you’re 3D printing your software, right?  Yes, exactly. There you go. Well, that’s a very good way you put it together. Yeah. So, yeah, exactly. You’re just 3D printing the software, right? So you can see it, visualize it, and then once you go through that, it creates a lot of better ideas about the software in faster time. So once you have that, then you go into UI/UX design. So in that also, there are two steps. One is wireframing. Wireframing is like creating the flow in black and white. It’s like creating a skeleton of your software. It does not have the color, the font, or the branding, but you just create all the different user journeys, the screens, the flow, and the fields that will be there on the screen. So we have integrated AI into that step as well. Earlier, it used to be created by a designer or a business analyst. Now we are using software like Uizard or UX Pilot, where we define what we want—what kind of user journey, flows, and screens—and it creates that. It spins out those wireframes in minutes. So really that has reduced now. The time it used to take to create wire frames is faster now.  So you’re designing the wireframes with AI?  Yes, but it’s just the wireframe part of it, and it’s still guided by our expert VA or designer—someone who knows how to really visualize things and has done a lot of wireframes and sketches. So they know what to tell the AI. Prompting is very important. It’s very important that you know how to prompt—what to ask for—so that you can get variations and differentiation in the wireframes. You don’t want a standard AI-created wireframe. Everybody can recognize AI-generated images now, right? If I show you one, you’d say, “Oh yeah, it’s AI-generated.” I know that, right? Yeah. So again, we keep the human intelligence. We’re not asking AI to create the full software end-to-end. It never works—it’ll never work. It just doesn’t. I know that’s a strong statement, but I’m saying that based on experience and an understanding of human behavior and psychology. So AI agents will not be able to code software, in your opinion?  No, they can do the coding, but they cannot build the whole software end-to-end—a production-deployed software. Because these software are being used by humans. You have to have human intelligence to understand and define what you need and how it work

    24 min

  6. MAR 30

    326: Steps to Leads on LinkedIn with Anthony Blatner

    https://youtu.be/UcnTlk-Zv3A Anthony Blatner, Founder and CMO of Speedwork Social and host of LinkedIn Ads Radio, is on a mission to help B2B companies turn LinkedIn into a predictable growth engine. With a background in technology and marketing, Anthony helps businesses cut through noise, leverage authentic content, and use LinkedIn ads to consistently attract and convert high-quality prospects. We explore Anthony’s LinkedIn Lead Funnel: Top of Funnel (Tips & Tricks + Case Studies), Middle Funnel (Lead Capture), and Bottom Funnel (Boost Post & Retarget)—a simple yet powerful framework for generating demand, capturing leads, and converting them into customers using a combination of organic content and paid amplification. Anthony shares why traditional tactics like cold connection requests are losing effectiveness, how AI is reshaping content creation, and why human-driven, personality-rich content still wins. He also breaks down how to structure content, budget effectively, and build a sustainable LinkedIn strategy—even with limited time. — 3 Steps to Leads on LinkedIn with Anthony Blatner Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Anthony Blatner, the Founder and CMO of the Speedwork, LinkedIn Ad Agency, helping great companies get great customers with LinkedIn ads. Anthony, welcome to the show.  Hey, Steve, excited to be here and to talk to you today. It’s great to have you here. So before we dive into all things LinkedIn, I’d like to ask my favorite question on this podcast, which is, what is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business?  Yeah, I’ve always been just really into business. I grew up being around a lot of business owners. My dad ran his own business, and he was in the finance world, so he worked with a lot of other business owners. So since I was a kid, I've always been around a lot of business owners, and I've always just really enjoyed business, and then I just naturally gravitated to the marketing world there because I just really enjoyed the side of the business world. Share on X So my ‘Why’ has always been around helping and growing businesses. I come from the technology space doing software development, and now I’m in the marketing space and it’s just something I’ve always loved doing and it’s a very exciting space and it’s always changing very fast. So that’s been my personal ‘Why’, and just manifesting it every day in what we do in our work on LinkedIn. So it’s just always fun to be working with growing businesses.  Yeah, this LinkedIn is a fascinating platform. I’ve been on it, I don’t know, probably over 20 years now. Is this possible?  Yeah.  Something like that. And there were other platforms at the time like Plaxo—I think that was one competitor platform—and I was on multiple platforms. Then I quit Plaxo, and I’m glad that I actually built on the right platform. I’ve also witnessed how people are getting more and more active on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is becoming kind of non-negotiable for B2B businesses. So tell me how you see this evolution and how LinkedIn has changed over the past 10 years.  Yeah, it definitely has changed a lot. Back in the day, when we were first getting started, a lot of people would ask me, “Does anybody even use LinkedIn?” Ten years ago, it wasn’t as widely used, especially on the social side. It’s always been like the digital resume. The big change happened with Covid, when everyone was had to get online more. That’s when the big shift happened. Everyone got used to using it a lot more. And then since then, people are used to using it, and it has definitely evolved into being kind of the number one social platform for professionals. So anything business-wise, business content, people are going to go on LinkedIn to share that and talk about that. So it was kind of cemented in this place there. Then they just continued rolling out additional features and things that are useful for both users on reading, connecting with your colleagues, but then also on the marketing side of things. So the advertising platform has kind of come a long way. There’s a lot of new features, a lot of new capabilities there. So it’s been very interesting to watch how it’s evolved. And I think also at the same time we kind of see how other platforms have evolved differently. I feel like these days, if I ever go on Facebook, it’s just a lot of like AI-generated garbage content. So during the workday or during the work week, I want to be reading business stuff. I want to be learning things and I’m going to apply to my job. That’s why I go on LinkedIn to read that type of content. And I know that’s why a lot of other professionals do it. So it’s kind of just grown into its place there in the ecosystem. So people are used to using it a lot more. And there’s been a lot of new features that have come out to help marketers use it as a marketing channel.  I’m glad you brought up this AI evolution, because I see that more and more people are writing their posts with AI. There can be benefits to that, because some people don’t write as well as an AI copywriter does—most of us, perhaps. On the other hand, the posts start to look a little bit more alike. So I wonder, what is your perception of this? Do you think people are posting more, and if they post more, do people read less? How is this evolving?  Yes, it’s a continually evolving space. I don’t think we know a hundred percent what the outcome is right now, but I think what I see across all the people that we work with—and just using the platform—there’s a lot more content these days with AI. People can use AI to generate content, so there’s a lot more content out there. But volume does not always mean quality. There’s more content, but not necessarily the best content. The best stuff that we see performing well in our ad campaigns—and also organically on LinkedIn—usually has a human angle to it, where maybe you wrote it yourself.  You can use AI to generate content—AI is great for that, and it’s great for writing—but you probably want to take what it gives you and then add your own edits and personality. That’s a big piece. The more personality you have in your content, the more people are going to engage with it. So across the board, we see that human content still wins. AI is great for generating the bulk of the content, but then you want to put in your own voice, add some personality to it, and then that's going to help it perform kind of even better… Share on X   Well, that takes me to the next question, which is about connection requests and people reaching out. So how is this evolving, and how do you see people reacting to connection requests? I remember 20 years ago, it was a big deal if you got a connection request, and we basically reached out to all the people we knew and connected with everyone we could. Now, there are different schools of thought. Some say that you should not connect with anyone you don’t want to do business with because it dilutes the exposure of your content, and you’re not going to go viral. You’re also not going to be able to follow the few people you can actually do business with. Other people say the more, the merrier. So what’s your view on this topic?  I think the marketers went very heavily into connection requests—especially during the Covid period—and maybe burned it out. As users, we’ve all been burned out by the connection requests and the messages we’ve been receiving. So as a platform, and in terms of how people use it, that tactic has definitely simmered down a lot. It’s still a usable, viable tactic—prospecting is never going to go away. Whether it’s email, cold calling, or LinkedIn, delivering the right message to the right person at the right time will always matter. But it is changing and evolving. Users are burned out by the messages, so they’re much more skeptical now. People accept far fewer connection requests because they can usually see the intent coming from a mile away. I still recommend connecting with people you do know—your colleagues and your clients—and also connecting with your prospects. But be aware that everyone else is cautious when they receive a connection request. They often assume you’re going to try to sell to them. So start with the people that you do know that you are working with. Prospecting will probably never go away, but definitely the platform as a whole—and what works on LinkedIn—has definitely shifted. Connection requests don’t work as well as they used to. People have shifted more to the content side of things on LinkedIn, and I think it does provide a better user experience to the end user and also for the marketer too. At the end of the day, it’s about the end user and the experience you’re… Share on X I’m a LinkedIn user, you’re a LinkedIn user, so we want to have a good experience. We don’t want to just receive spam from everybody, or else we’re not going to use it. But the platform evolves, so it’s a lot more about the content you’re posting on LinkedIn. Other people are going to discover that content, and then maybe they choose to follow you at that point. Maybe they choose to send you a connection request. But it doesn’t have to be just that. When LinkedIn sees people starting to engage with your content, they’re going to show more of your content. So it’s kind of becoming a discovery platform, and there is a network effect to it. So there’s definitely a shift toward the content you’re posting. It’s much more about thought leadership. I know the LinkedIn product team is trying to be very intentional about the content they surface to users. They want it to be high-quality, thought leadership content. As a platform, they know they’ve had a spam problem

    25 min

  7. MAR 16

    324: Get Customers 17 Ways with Vance Morris

    https://youtu.be/47bH911YFF0 Vance Morris, consultant, coach, and speaker, helps service-based businesses break free from the ordinary and create extraordinary customer experiences that generate loyal customers for life. After spending more than a decade working for the Disney Company and learning its powerful systems and processes for customer service, Vance launched his own businesses and built them around those principles—eventually creating companies that run largely without his daily involvement. We explore Vance’s Customer Experience System, a framework for turning ordinary interactions into memorable moments that create lifelong customers. The system focuses on mapping all customer points of contact, ideating experiences for each boring touchpoint, prioritizing the biggest impact moments, and memorializing those experiences in systems or playbooks so they can be delivered consistently by the team. Vance explains how businesses can create “tellable moments,” recover from service mistakes in memorable ways, and build repeatable marketing systems that generate referrals and long-term customer loyalty. — Get Customers 17 Ways with Vance Morris Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Vance Morris, a consultant, coach, and speaker, who helps advisor-based businesses break free from the ordinary and step into the extraordinary. Vance, welcome to the show.  I appreciate it, Steve. Thank you so much. Your background is very interesting and your whole idea of making customer experience unique, and also you have unique ways of acquiring customers. So let’s get into it. But I’d like to start with my favorite question: What is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business?  My personal ‘Why’ is very strong, and that is I never want to be an employee ever again. I make a lousy employee. I don’t like to be told what to do. And so knowing that has kept me on this entrepreneurial path for the last 19 years.  Okay, well, I can relate to this. I can relate to this. That’s a big thing when you are in charge of your own time. It’s a big blessing. Some people make a lot of money, but if they don’t own their time, it’s not ideal. I agree 100%. Yes, sir.  Yeah. Love it. Let’s talk a little bit about your journey. I mean, how did you end up being a non-employee and being your own boss and advising companies, what the route led you down this path?  Sure. Well, the long and short of it, I spent a little over a decade working for the Disney Company down in Orlando, Florida. Magnificent experience. Great company to work for. Towards the end, I was starting to get that inkling that maybe I should be doing something on my own. So I went out and worked as an employee and a consultant at the same time for a couple of different restaurant concepts. And then I had a couple of high-profile positions. I was catering director for the Smithsonian Museum System, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, things like that. And along the way, I realized that I do indeed make a lousy employee because I got fired a couple of times. So I own up to it. I’m okay with it. But I said to myself, let’s put something together that will be your own and we’ll be able to afford the lifestyle that you’re looking for. So about 20 years ago, I started a couple of home service businesses. I took all of my Disney knowledge and Disney systems and processes—both on customer experience and customer retention Share on X and importantly pricing—and put those all into those businesses and started to grow them. And people started asking me, well, geez, Vance, you don’t look like you’re working very hard. How are you doing that? So I back in 2013, I started consulting with other companies, primarily professional services, on how to really deliver extraordinary customer experiences that will lead to what I call raving fans for life, or customers for life.  I love it. No better place to learn than at Disney, right? Yeah, I mean, it was great. And one of the first things I learned there was that Disney operates 100% on systems and processes. I mean, I ain’t sure we learned how to pick up trash and smile at people, but the biggest lesson was Disney has a process for everything. You want to carry a tray in a restaurant, they got a process. You want to change a bus tire, they have a process. So I took that everywhere I went, which has actually led me to be fairly autonomous from my home service businesses because I put systems and processes in place, and I only spend about 90 minutes a week on those businesses.  That’s fantastic. So let’s talk about these processes, particularly the customer experience processes that you have installed. And actually you have a process for installing processes, which is kind of a system to enhance the customer experience and then keep customers for a long time. You talk about keeping them for life. So tell me about that system and how do you delight customers on a schedule?  Sure. So the process is called Systematic Magic, and there’s seven magic keys to this system. And it’s designed to really look at all different parts of the business in order to surprise and delight folks. Some of it is not very sexy. I will admit that ahead of time. Some of it you’ll be like, oh my God, I get it. So the first thing that you have to do, though—and this is the unsexy part of it—is you have to map out your customer journey. And you have to do it from the point of view of your customer. So what is the first point of contact a customer has with you? Is it a phone call, a visit to the office, a website? What is that first contact? And then figure out how to create an experience out of that. And then what’s the second contact? Now in between first and second contact, let’s say you’re a financial advisor, and in the first meeting you get all the numbers and all their information. You say, okay, it’s going to be about seven to ten days, I’ll get you a proposal or a plan a week and a half or so. So while the financial advisor is working, they’re actually doing something. What is the customer doing? Absolutely nothing. They’re sitting there waiting. And waiting is painful. While waiting, things start to go through your head. You start to possibly have buyer’s remorse. You’re rethinking this purchase. Is there somebody out there better? Is this guy even paying attention to me? I just met him and I haven’t seen him in a week and a half. So Disney—people wait for a lot of things at Disney. You wait for the rides. You wait for transportation. But they figured out that they need to entertain you while you’re in line to make it not feel so bad. And they call it “linertainment.” So this is something that I’ve brought to other businesses is how do you entertain your customer while they are waiting for you to do something? It could be as simple as a maybe a sequence of a handwritten note that goes out in the mail on the first day. A follow up call from your assistant saying, Hey, Bob’s working on your plan. He hasn’t forgot about you. And then maybe you’ve written a book. And so getting that book in the mail to your client would be another step, really trying to make that wait period not feel so long. And also remind the customer that you’re still thinking about them.  Yeah. Love it. That’s brilliant. So you talk about this process of mapping out the points of contact, and then you talk about the boring touch points. You talk about ideating experience in each boring touch point. So tell me about boring touch points. I understand waiting is definitely boring.  Sure.  It’s such much a touch point. It’s more of a boring time period.  Disney has figured out how to create an experience out of all of the boring and mundane things we have to do to keep our business up and running: answer the phone, greet a guest, show them how to enter a building. So I’ve brought that to the real world. Quick example. So I have a insurance broker. And he’s got Allstate agent, and he has about 17 other Allstate guys in his area, in addition to all of the other regular insurance guys in his area. And he needed a way to stand out because insurance is a highly commoditized business. You don’t really know what’s the difference between one guy and the next. One has a lizard, one has a something else. So I got to his office. I noticed that he was a rock and roll fanatic. I mean, he had autographed guitars on the wall, gold records, posters, and everything. And I said, well, I think you should lean into your personality a little bit and be the rock and roll insurance guy. Share on X And his receptionist was the one that came up with the way to answer the phone. Before, like most companies, they would say, “Thank you for calling Dave’s Insurance. How can I help you?” Boring. Everybody says that. So his receptionist suggested, well, we should probably, let’s sound like a radio DJ and really make it an experience out of answering the phone. So now they say: “Thank you for calling Dave’s Allstate, the agency that rocks.” That’s a little corny the first few times you say it, but if you think about it, your marketing is designed to do two things: repel the people you don’t want and attract the people you do want. So just by answering the phone this way, they sift, sort, and screen out anybody who would be a bad customer.  Yeah. Love it. That’s a good example. How do you know which are the biggest impact points in this series of touch points, and we have to focus your energy?  Well, what you want to do once you’ve completed journey mapping is look at points where you may have the most impact on either the experience or on your profitability. Or is there something glaring that’s like, “Oh my God, we have to fix this”? And so you look

    21 min

  8. MAR 9

    323: Take 5 Steps to Transitioning Your Business with Laurie Barkman

    https://youtu.be/_A__xfP6HBM Laurie Barkman, strategic growth advisor, former $100M CEO, M&A expert, and author of The Business Transition Handbook, helps construction, architecture, and engineering firms build scalable, sustainable businesses that create time, freedom, and long-term value. Having experienced a major acquisition firsthand and led companies through significant growth and change, Laurie now focuses on helping mature business owners navigate the complex journey of building enterprise value and preparing for future transitions. We explore Laurie’s BUILT Method—Blueprint, Unlock, Integrate, Lead, Transition—a strategic framework designed to help founders of established businesses scale beyond owner dependency and prepare for successful leadership or ownership transitions. Laurie explains how aligning the owner’s personal vision with the company’s future strategy creates clarity, why measuring enterprise value can unlock new growth decisions, and how proactive transition planning helps entrepreneurs avoid the identity crisis that often follows a business exit. — Take 5 Steps to Transitioning Your Business with Laurie Barkman Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS Group, and today my guest is Laurie Barkman, a strategic growth advisor, former a hundred-million-dollar CEO and M&A expert who’s helping construction and engineering companies build scalable, sustainable businesses that creates time, freedom, and value. Laurie is also the author of the Business Transition Handbook. Laurie, welcome to the show. Steve, thank you so much. I’m so excited to be with you today. Yeah, it’s great to have you. And you have a really interesting niche with the business transition and helping construction or architecture engineering firms. So what brought you to this point? What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your practice? My personal why has been evolving over the years through my career. I think I was always an entrepreneur at heart. I had orbited entrepreneurial companies, like startups, in a big company. I was always the maverick. I was trying to be an intrapreneur and ultimately found myself in a position of finding a way to help business owners in the back part of their journey. While I love startups, I have found that my niche is in working with mature companies—so companies that are over five to seven years old—and helping entrepreneurs in the tough decisions. Share on X It’s the tough decisions that they really wrestle with, feel alone, and I’ve been in executive shoes, right? I’ve been lived that world. I’m living in the entrepreneurial world right now, but again, in this mature space where we think about life differently, we think about transitions differently, and I’ve just kind of embraced that idea, especially as a Gen Xer, of how to help other Gen Xers in that in-between. So is there like a personal reason why you are attracted to this whole idea of the transition?  I’ve lived a lot of transitions, especially in the corporate world, going through an acquisition about 10 years ago, I was an outside hire at a third-generation company, and they said, “We’re looking to hire you not for the next three years, but for the next 20,” which was really exciting, but it ended up being three. And the reason why is because a little Bluebird, who wasn’t so little, a global company who was very in acquisitive, I was interested in this business, third-generation company. It was over a billion in revenue. My business unit was about 10% of the total. So again, sizable business unit, and myself and the other executives had to work really, really hard to keep our foot on the gas pedal, making sure that the deal, if we were, was going to go through that we helped make it go through—which we did. It was out of the blue. The company was not on the market. But I saw firsthand the innovation, the growth, and the transition over the three generations of the stories of how it went from one to the next was just so fascinating to me. So when I ultimately was part of the integration team, I left the business. The short answer was that I was just there for three years. And so after that I really saw an opportunity to help other entrepreneurs on their journey. So this notion of that we’re going to grow, we’re going to innovate, and then eventually we’re going to transition—maybe it’s a family business, maybe it’s founder-led. Nonetheless, we want to create value, we want to have good handoffs, and I saw things were working well. Share on X As I mentioned, I joined at the point of the third generation. Then it was up to the corporate gods take it from there. And so I thought about ways to add value and work with inspired entrepreneurs who envision a future legacy for themselves, the people they love, the communities they serve Share on X but they’re just stuck. They feel stuck in some way. They’re kind of on their path. They’re not at the end of the path. They’re on it, and they need that support. That’s really what’s been motivating me and driving me for the last seven plus years. Yeah. That’s a wonderful journey, and it’s a very wordy thing because these entrepreneurs, they build a company, and then they don’t know how to allow it to grow up. And you basically are there and help them with the empty nesting and the pre-empty nesting, getting them into good courage. That’s also very important. So one of the ways you, I understand you do this is you call it the BUILT Method, which is kind of neat because you work with construction, engineering, architecture firms. So what is the BUILD Method is about, and how does it help people?  Yeah, the  BUILD Method is definitely an acknowledgement that we are in a physical world, and I appreciate you making that connection. Share on X And it’s not lost on our audience, hopefully. It’s such an important space. We really, in a time of AI and such dramatic change, the built environment of architecture, engineering, design companies that are envisioning their futures. There’s like any industry, there’s a lot of changes. And so this is a blueprint, if you will. That’s the “B,” right? It’s a blueprint for what is your vision and what is the firm model, what should it be in the future? It’s really that roadmap of future growth. The “U” is an unlocked. So many of us feel stuck. Maybe we’re stuck in the day-to-day because we have owner-dependent businesses. Maybe we feel stuck because our revenues are plateaued or declining. And we see ourselves as a bottleneck. Maybe we’re a bottleneck for a variety of reasons, which I’m sure we could talk about. The “I” is all about integration. And so, what do we need to do to document our systems and put things in place so that we don’t have risks in terms of not only owner dependency, but any other employees where there could be gaps should someone leave the organization or have some other untimely departure? The “L” is lead, and lead is not used lightly. Lead is really with clarity and not with chaos. And for owner-dependent businesses, people that have companies that can’t thrive without them, this tends to be a real challenge that they want to lead from the front, but they’re not. And they're so in the weeds in the business, they can't see the forest for the trees. They're not working on the business. So really helping my clients find that clarity is so important. Share on X And then the “T”, last but not least, stands for transition. It’s probably my favorite word at this point. And it’s not just transition or change for any sake. It’s good to have that confidence and to be in control, to be in the driver’s seat, and to be proactive about change. It’s why I wrote the book, The Business Transition Handbook. It’s really encouraging entrepreneurs to not think about an exit as a point in time and a finite point in time. It’s why I do talk about exit and I do talk about exit planning, but my recognition is that this is a finite action, and a transition is a journey. It's a path, and that's why my business is named Business Transition Sherpa, because I am with you on your journey. So the BUILT Method is really all about these different aspects and helping entrepreneurs on their journey. Share on X STEVE PREDA: Yeah. This is very cool. And there is a lifecycle to business, and there’s a lifecycle to an entrepreneur as well. And hopefully the business’s lifecycle is much longer than the entrepreneur’s. So someone is going to take it on, and you want to create a great legacy and a great business. So your way of the blueprint or your version of blueprint is different. Is it like what people call mission, vision, values kind of thing or there’s more to it? I think it does start with that. I mean, those are so fundamental, and my overall approach with strategic transition planning is the acknowledgement that there’s different aspects of the planning that we need to do as business owners, and one of those aspects is a blueprint for the business. And the business fundamentals of where do we want to be in five to seven years or ten years. Another part of that, which is a dovetail, is where does the owner want to be? What’s their personal future vision? And we start to intertwine those things, especially in this age and life stage. I work a lot with, as I mentioned, Gen Xers, and so we are in the mid-fifties of our lives, and statistically speaking, we’re about five to seven years away from a significant life transition. A lot of the Gen Xers, especially business owners I work with, are saying, “I’m looking ahead. I see what the baby boomers have done, and I don’t want to do it their way. I want to do it differently. I’m not going to die at my desk, and I want other things out of my life. My business has provided this and that f

    27 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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