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. 1d ago

    359: Harvest CEO Stories with Justin Nassiri

    Justin Nassiri, Founder and CEO of Executive Presence, is driven by the power of human connection and a mission to harvest CEO stories that reveal authentic experiences and valuable insights. By serving as thought partners to C-suite executives, Justin and his team transform personal perspectives, mistakes, and lessons into compelling LinkedIn content that builds trust and distinguishes leaders from generic, AI-generated voices. In this conversation, Justin introduces The Content Strategy Framework—Use the 40:30:20:10 Content Formula, Harvest Stories, Borrow Thought Patterns, and Apply Curiosity. He explains why leaders should build visibility through personal profiles, how skilled interviewers uncover stories executives may overlook, and why Thought Leader Ads can extend the reach of proven content. Justin also discusses growing through referrals and warm relationships, using 10-week improvement cycles to revisit every business process, and developing autonomous team members who use AI to solve problems while preserving human connection. — Harvest CEO Stories with Justin Nassiri  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here, and my guest today again is Justin Nassiri, the Founder and CEO of Executive Presence, a fully managed LinkedIn thought leadership service for C-suite executives at growth-stage B2B companies. Justin, welcome back to the show.  Great to be back. Thanks, Steve.  So we just reminisced that it was three years almost to the day that you came here, and I can’t believe it. It feels like yesterday. But your business has grown dramatically during that time, so I think you have some new insights that you’ll be able to share with us, I’m sure.  Thank you. It’s good to be back. We just made the Inc. 5000 list, which is a first for me. I’ve never been on that before, but we’re celebrating that.  Yeah. Congratulations. That’s a great milestone to hit. And you only started in 2022, right?  Yeah, yeah.  So, pretty freshly minted, fast-growing Inc. 5000. So my question to you is, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in Executive Presence, in your business?  There’s a very potent macro or micro why for me, and then probably a broader why. I think that the biggest why for me right now, like many parents, is my kids. I’ve got a three- and a seven-year-old. And so when I think of my professional life, I certainly think about not just providing for them but also trying to set an example of someone who is trying to do their best and trying to stretch and trying to grow. Share on X   And so I think that’s probably the highest leverage that I have. But I think the through line in the companies that I’ve done is just the value of human connection. My first company was all about companies using Instagram in a way to be more authentic and more genuine with their community, and that’s very true to what we’re doing now at Executive Presence, just really helping people connect to other people.  In this case, it’s executives using LinkedIn to connect with a broader audience, but I really feel like that human connection is so important, and I think it’s becoming even more important in the era of AI. So that’s a little bit more specific why in what I do right now.  Yeah, it’s fascinating how human connection is evolving in the age of AI, and I agree. I mean, I see that because there’s so much more noise out there, human connection is perhaps more important than ever. People want to make sure that they are talking to authentic people and hearing from authentic people who have authentic lived experience. So how does that impact communication for executives on LinkedIn? How do they have to evolve their voice or how they approach things?  I think if you look at LinkedIn in particular right now, I think it still remains the place where the largest source of our professional network is. And so I think there’s still a lot of value there, and I think that LinkedIn is facing a lot of growing pains. Specifically, I think that there are three things driving it. One is more people are just showing up on the platform. The secret is out, and people realize that there’s value to LinkedIn.  So, all things else equal, more people are more active on LinkedIn, which generates a lot of noise. And then the second thing is AI is making it easier to create content, so I think it’s creating not just more content, but lower-quality content. And then the third thing is it does seem as if LinkedIn is following what Facebook did over a decade ago and saying, “Look, to get reach, you’ve got to put money into ads now.”  And we saw that transition with Facebook company pages a long time ago, but it really does feel like you cannot get as much visibility today as you could have two years ago unless there’s some sort of ad buy behind it. And so I think those are kind of the three problems. I think that the answer is still there’s value in showing up, but I think that you have to show up even more human. I think that the experiences that make you unique and the mistakes that make you who you are and the things that you know and the stories that you can tell, those still hold value, and that differentiates you from generic or AI-generated content.  I also think that there’s value to using LinkedIn ads, and we can talk about that, but I think that that has to be part of one’s strategy now if you’re trying to significantly use LinkedIn for what it’s good for, which is brand building.  Yeah, and maybe this is a slight question, then we’re going to talk to you about the framework. But as I understand, LinkedIn now allows individuals to also boost their posts as opposed to just companies, which used to be the case in the past. So how does it impact companies? Is there more emphasis now? Is emphasis shifting to individual posts because there’s no real reason to build up the company pages? How is that evolving?  Yeah, I mean, four years ago when I started the company, before these Thought Leader Ads, these individual people ads were a thing, I still would’ve said to you, “Look, there’s not much value in company pages. People connect with other people. They’re not going to connect with a faceless organization.” So even four years ago, I would’ve said, “Man, if you really want to raise visibility for your organization, you’ve got to do that through your key leaders.  You’ve got to do that through actual names and faces and voices and perspectives.” And I think that the ads make that even more pronounced now because I can now take my personal post as Justin Nassiri. If it does well on LinkedIn, I can put a $50 or $500 ad buy against it, and I can make sure that essentially specific people are going to see my post. If I’m selling to CEOs of tech companies in Cincinnati that have grown 10% last year and they’ve been at their company for five years, I can have an insane level of targeting, and I could put my personal content in front of them in a way that most people still don’t realize is an ad.  It will say, “Promoted by,” and then the company name, so “Promoted by Executive Presence.” Most people, when scrolling, don’t even notice that. Yeah. And so I think there’s a tremendous opportunity then to take very human and personal content and put it in front of exactly whoever you’re trying to get in front of.  Yeah, I love that. You also say on your LinkedIn page that it takes an executive only 90 minutes a month to actually work with you guys and have you amplify them. So how do you extract all those personal stories and experiences? What is your framework for that so that when you meet with an executive, you’re able to create those posts without them having to be involved? Yeah, I think the framework is pretty universal for anyone listening. We tend to start with the content strategy. And the way that we typically start is we’ll say, okay, 40% of the content we would call industry thought leadership. And that is great if you can talk about current events and relate them to your industry. It’s great if you can share things about your industry that no one knows or that you disagree with people.  But do that 40%, which is the biggest of any of the categories, as really the education, as the subject matter expert. You are showing up as an authority in cybersecurity, or you are showing up as an authority in leadership, or you’re showing up as an authority in B2B supply chain. And I think the key here is the more niche, the better. The more narrow, the better. We are not Joe Rogan. We’re not trying to get 300 million people to look at your content. We want to get in front of a very narrow group of people, typically prospects, customers, potential employees, potential investors.  We really want to narrow where your voice can be fairly large in a very finite realm. So that's the industry thought leadership piece. Share on X The second one, about 30% of the content, we call it leadership and career journey. And what we’re trying to do here is a blend of humanizing the executive while also giving them credibility. And so if we are working with someone who is a CEO at a company, well, they’ve done things prior to that. So what did they learn in college or a previous workplace? What was a mistake that they made? What was a mentor that said something to them?  So that’s a way of us imparting one of their values or something that they know, but wrapped in a story from their history, which humanizes them. And that would be generally 30% of the content. Twenty percent, obviously they’re doing this to promote their company, so 20% would be about their company, spotlighting an employee, recent events, things like that. Again, trying to do it through stories if possible. And then the last 10% is usually the highest-performing 10%, and we would call that work-adjacent content. So we want to, again

  2. 3d ago

    358: Stay Put in Your Convictions with Tanner Taddeo

    https://youtu.be/jPTlkjF8M-c Tanner Taddeo, CEO and Co-Founder of Stable Sea, is driven by a mission to bring Wall Street-grade financial services to Main Street while embodying the principle Stay Put in Your Convictions. By combining blockchain technology, stablecoins, tokenized capital markets, and AI advisory services, Tanner helps businesses access investment opportunities, put idle cash to work, and move money globally with greater speed, transparency, and capital efficiency. In this conversation, Tanner introduces The Lionel Messi Startup Framework—Develop a High-Level Thesis, Talk With and Learn From the Market, Run 30-Day A/B Tests, Iterate Your Offering, and Stay Resolute With Your Convictions. He explains why founders should observe patiently, validate their ideas with customers, and act decisively when market opportunities emerge. Tanner also discusses balancing long-term conviction with continuous experimentation, unlocking 24/7 liquidity through tokenized capital markets, reducing friction in cross-border payments, and finding urgent “morphine” problems that customers cannot afford to leave unsolved. — Stay Put in Your Convictions with Tanner Taddeo  Hello everyone. Steve Preda here, and my guest today is Tanner Taddeo, the CEO and Co-Founder at Stable Sea, an autonomous treasury management platform that helps finance teams and global businesses access capital market products and move money around the globe to 40 currencies with the cheapest FX rates. Tanner, welcome to the show.  Steve, thanks for having me. Excited for the conversation today.  It’s very interesting that this is how you position your business because most businesses in your industry, as I see them, position themselves with low transaction fees, but really their money is made on the FX. So if you do preferential FX rates or cheap FX rates, that can be a very transparent way of getting business. So I don’t know if that connects to your personal why, but I’d love to learn about your personal why and how you manifest it in your business.  Yeah, definitely. At Stable Sea, we’re very mission-driven in terms of everything that we do. The team itself comes from Block, which was formerly known as Square. Yeah. And everyone on the team has been focused on building products for the real economy, for consumer use cases, for business use cases, et cetera, over the course of everyone’s career.  And so when we started at Stable Sea, our primary thesis was, with blockchain, with stablecoins, with some of the tokenized capital markets products like money market funds, bonds, equities, et cetera, that are coming on-chain, how can you really take Wall Street-grade financial services and provision them out to Main Street for businesses that need them the most? And so the why for Stable Sea, for myself, for the team, is really around helping businesses drive greater capital efficiency in their operations. And we service businesses in the real economy that typically make widgets or some sort of physical hardware devices, and they need to send them around the world.  We help them because we give them access to different types of capital markets products, so money markets and private credit and fixed-income products, et cetera. And then we help them move their money around the globe a little bit more efficiently than they could with either their state bank or their credit union or some third-party cross-border payments provider. Because our firm thesis has always been, if you and I ran Coca-Cola or a large organization, we would have the best-in-class transaction banks helping us put our idle capital to work at every point in time during the day.  If you and I ran a steel manufacturing company in Missouri, you typically have a checking account and QuickBooks, and that’s about it. And so for us, it was always about helping businesses grow, save more money, and then operate more efficiently with some of the new technologies that are out there today. Share on X   So that means, presumably, that what you focus on is more about the investment side of the business rather than crypto and blockchain, and helping people access financial products through the blockchain. Help me understand a little bit what you do and how it is different from what people can get from banks?  Yeah. So everything that we do, all the technology that we build and provision, is on-chain. So all of the capital markets products are tokenized. So tokenized bonds, tokenized equities, tokenized fixed income, tokenized money markets. All of the payment services and settlement services that we offer are through the use of stablecoins, and we can send that around the globe, settle it instantly, and then have low FX rates off the back of that. And then we have some of our AI advisory services.  But from a broad paintbrush perspective, at Stable Sea, you’ve got three products that hang off of our platform. You’ve got capital markets, you’ve got global settlement, and you’ve got advisory services. And then with all of that, we share a common architecture, and that architecture is built across many different blockchains. And then we utilize stablecoins and we utilize RWA tokens, or real-world asset tokens, to provision those use cases.  So everything that we do is stablecoin-native, but we don’t lead with that from a messaging perspective. And the reason we don’t lead with that from a messaging perspective is that if you and I ran a bakery here in Brooklyn, New York, and we had a point-of-sale terminal that just got offered RTP access from the Fed for instant settlement, the bakery owner doesn’t really care about the technology underneath it.  They just care, “Do I trust it? Is it going to get me my money quicker, and is it going to be cheaper than my current alternative?” How it happens, not very many people care unless you’re in the industry and you’re a builder, product manager, et cetera, and you want to nerd out on the actual mechanical nature of how the product works. But for us, it’s always been leading with the narrative of, what is the value proposition and how can we drive greater value to the businesses? So that’s how we lead. But to your point on what the difference is, with any new technological paradigm that occurs, rarely is it so disruptive in nature that folks can’t recognize it.  Everything that happens in terms of the innovation paradigm is typically you stand on the shoulders of giants and you make things incrementally better. And so for us, what we do with capital markets is, the first value proposition is that many businesses in the United States just don’t have access to a diverse array of capital markets products. So the first thing that we have done is just provision access, which is an innovation in and of itself because in the traditional markets, if you want to access a money market fund or a fixed-income product, you typically have high hurdle rates, meaning that as a business, you need to invest at least $10 million at the asset manager in question.  You need to hold that there so then you can get access to all these products. With us, you don’t. There’s only a $1 minimum to clear, so I think most folks can handle a $1 minimum. And then secondly, as things go on-chain, the value proposition there is that you have 24/7, 365 liquidity and tradability. And so what that means is that, just from a money market fund perspective, the interest accrues daily and it pays out daily.  So you get this interest that is dripped into your account daily as opposed to waiting for a month. You also have the ability—so let’s say that you and I run this bakery in Brooklyn. Let’s say that we close our business on Friday, and we’ve got $100,000 sitting in our checking account, and we’re closed on Saturday, Sunday because it’s the July 4th holiday. So we know $100,000 is just going to be sitting in our checking account Saturday, Sunday, not being put to work. With Stable Sea, you can put that to work in a tokenized money market fund because it operates 24/7, 365.  So what we see is businesses now that close their books on Friday can just do an auto-sweep into a money market fund, generate yield Saturday, Sunday, get back to U.S. dollars for their open of business. And again, it’s one of those things where it might not sound like the most revolutionary concept in the world, but if you can help businesses, especially in the mid-market, lower mid-market, operate a little bit more efficiently, I mean, saving an additional $20,000, $30,000, $40,000 a year is a big value-add to them in the real economy, right? If you’re a large Fortune 100 company, you probably don’t care, or it’s not as valuable. But for us, the companies that run on us, these small increments, standing on the shoulders of giants, a small derivation in innovation is actually really valuable for the end user. Share on X   Well, I think it is because, looking at the inverse of it, I used to be in banking, and I know that one of the biggest moneymakers for banks is float. Yeah. So it’s basically the money that doesn’t earn interest, which they have access to just because they cash the check a day later or make the wire two days instead of one day. And essentially, what you’re doing is you’re taking this money from the bank and you’re giving it to the company that actually should have it in the first place, right? Yep.  Then the question is, how are the banks going to survive if you take away their bread?  Yeah. That is the debate that’s happening right now. I think if you’re one of your G-SIBs, your major banks, you’re going to be okay. So the top 25 banks in the U.S. are going to be just fine, and they make money in tons of different ways, and you’re not going to disrupt that trust ultimately. In the long tail is where I worry because a lot of credit unions and a lot of state banks, they just

  3. 5d ago

    357: Lead, Guide, & Educate with Zane Keller

    https://youtu.be/eXF5DVyddJ8 Zane Keller, CEO of Ducere Wealth Management, is driven to Lead, Guide, & Educate clients and employees by helping them solve meaningful problems and achieve their goals. Through personalized financial guidance and a culture of empowerment, Zane supports clients with complex financial needs while giving employees the tools, trust, and opportunities they need to grow professionally. In this conversation, Zane introduces The Turn the Ship Around Framework—Delegate Decisions to the Source of Information, Put the Right People in the Right Seats, and Remove Friction That Impedes Performance. He explains why informed employees should have the authority to make decisions, how leaders can remove barriers instead of controlling daily operations, and why culture must remain a priority as a company scales. Zane also discusses macro patience and micro speed, creating opportunities for employee ownership, encouraging intrapreneurship, and helping multigenerational families coordinate their investments, tax planning, estate planning, and financial legacies. — Lead, Guide, & Educate with Zane Keller  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Zane Keller, CEO of Ducere Wealth Management, with a vision to be the leading provider of tech-driven, tax-optimized wealth management services for clients through their advisory support, that every client’s assets, time, and relationships are prioritized. Zane, welcome to the show.  Thanks, Steve. Appreciate you having me.  So, Zane, before we jump in and talk about Ducere Wealth, I’m very curious about your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in the company through the company’s business?  Sure. Well, early on, I knew I liked—one of my biggest passions was helping people solve problems. And one of the amazing things about being in the wealth management industry is you get to help people solve a lot of problems that are personal for them, and that’s their finances. It tends to be a personal subject for them, and allowing them guidance, support, understanding, and being a listening ear is what I find to be extremely rewarding in the business we have. But starting a company and having a team, and building that team, and building all the infrastructure and support and all of that, to me, the employees are as much clients as our clients are clients.  And so it’s an interesting position that I’m in, where it’s a dual role of both looking at it from a standpoint of how do we help our clients with the day-to-day or yearly challenges they face, but also how do I make sure that our employees are empowered to deliver the right client service and feel that they can continue to grow and expand in their careers. So I just like helping people, and I get to do it every day. Share on X   Yeah. Okay. That’s great. So when you talk about solving problems, obviously finance is a mirror for all an individual’s life aspirations, problems, challenges, opportunities, all that stuff. Your people are also humans, individuals, and they probably have similar challenges, so that’s a really neat mosaic there. So what is most challenging in building a wealth management firm like that?  I think the most challenging thing is all of the decisions are on you. And when I talk to other business leaders, there isn’t a roadmap, there isn’t a manual in terms of how people build their businesses, build their teams, and a lot of it is a balance of both trusting your instinct and what your background and lessons have been, as well as trusting those that you have brought in to help build the enterprise.  I was fortunate that I get to work with my dad, who had gone through this venture before, and we’ve gotten a chance to partner together and build it from the ground up. We went from a year ago, I had to order two laptops on Amazon, get a URL from GoDaddy, and start from scratch. And, you know, a year later, we find ourselves with 14 employees, an office in Newport, an office in Las Vegas, $600 million in assets under management, and continuing to want to grow, and being fortunate that we have a tremendous client base who trusts us.  But we’ve been able to attract and retain top-quality employees and team members who we rely on every day to continue building out the vision.  Well, I mean, building $600 million in assets under management in a year in a business like wealth management sounds almost like an impossible goal. Did you have a portfolio that you kind of imported into this business, or was that completely from scratch?  No. We had clients that we had worked with previously. We had left a big bank.  Okay.  And so some of those clients came over with us, but a lot of it was growing organically through COIs, through other marketing efforts, and bringing on other advisors who wanted to leverage our platform to provide a better service for their clients.  That’s fantastic. So how does one start a wealth management business? It sounds like one of the hardest businesses to start because it’s a trust-based business, from what I see, and it’s a very slow-burn kind of business. How do you actually grow a business like that?  Well, I think first is, in our industry, what’s interesting is there’s a lot of different business types. You have the wirehouses, the broker-dealers. There are people that are very successful just being anchored to a Wells Fargo or a J.P. Morgan or Merrill Lynch and building within that. Then you have folks who have gone to the roll-ups. Private equity has become pretty involved in our industry—a lot of roll-ups, a lot of consolidation.  Their value proposition is defined platforms that you can just plug in. And then you have what I consider the true independents, ourselves included, where we had a vision of we didn’t want to be held back or bogged down by two areas. One, as things get larger and larger and larger, the wheels turn slower and slower. And I think we're in a unique area from a business evolution cycle that leveraging AI, leveraging the technology, being able to make decisions quickly is going to be a substantial differentiator over the next several years. Share on X   And we didn’t want to have the conflicts that inherently come when you are backed by investors, and the focus is how do you maximize revenue, even if it may be at the expense of clients or at the expense of employees or at the expense of growth that you don’t see the return on investment for several years. So we decided that we were going to do it from scratch. Luckily, I had a background in—at the previous firm, I had helped build out all of the tech stack.  I’d worn almost every hat you can have at an RIA, and I had the experience from my father having gone through this, that between the two of us, there was enough goodwill or brand equity to build it out. But the other thing that we decided to do is there’s a reason it’s not called Keller Wealth or Keller Investments. The goal was never to have it be about ourselves. It was about creating a brand and a vision where others feel like they can be a part of.  So Ducere is actually a Latin term meaning “to lead,” “to guide,” and “to educate.” And we felt that that really resonated with what our value proposition and our mission statement is, both for our clients and for the employees. So as we brought on employees, I’ve challenged them that they have a responsibility to make an impact on the organization, and we start with culture. People have to be a culture fit first. We will not sacrifice culture for all the money on God’s green earth because I can confidently say that I don’t know how much business or revenue we’re missing out on if the team is not functioning at the highest level possible. So the first and foremost is a cultural fit. Then we look at the skills, the competencies, the ability to grow. But for us, culture is number one.  Yeah, love it. So what does it take to grow a wealth management firm? What drives growth in your business?  I think it takes three kind of main pieces. One is understanding that there’s a term GaryVee uses called “macro patience, micro speed.” And what we had set out initially is I knew that there were several steps between SEC registration, getting relationships with a custodian, getting relationships with tech vendors, finding office space, all of that that needs to be done just from a basic business foundation standpoint. What I needed to do, when we needed to do it, and logging every week.  I actually would send emails to myself and my dad for the first two months before we had employees of everything that got done the previous week, and what we needed to get done the next week, and what our blockers were if things couldn’t get done. Then that kind of grew into, as we had employees, becoming a consistent weekly check-in as we were heading towards what I consider our launch date, which was July 28th, because that’s when we actually received SEC approval.  So the first two months was just building the architecture, building up where we’re going to work, what we’re going to work with, all of those decisions being put in place. I’m fortunate enough that I’ve been involved with a lot of different companies in the industry over the years. So I had people who had done this before, people who had worked with large RIAs, small RIAs, and everything in between to lean on as advisors.  I think one of the things that I was more than surprised by was the amount of outpouring of support. “I’m happy to help you. What do you need? What can we do to make you successful? I know someone that I can connect you to.” And I think that's kind of the unique thing about our industry, is that there is a lot of camaraderie and willingness to help each other, even if you may be competitors in some aspects. Share on X   That’s int

  4. Aug 14

    356: Create Operational Rigor with Abhi Jadhav

    https://youtu.be/_OpJcRFbACk Abhi Jadhav, Founder and CEO of Bay Leaf Digital and Founder of Brazenly, helps B2B SaaS leaders create operational rigor while embracing AI, innovation, and disciplined execution. Driven by the freedom to experiment, anticipate change, and take the road less traveled, Abhi builds businesses that combine human expertise with AI-powered systems to help teams remain competitive and shape their own futures. In this conversation, Abhi introduces The Operational Rigor Framework—Aggregate To-Dos, Import Them into a System, Prioritize Weekly, and Execute. He explains how turning commitments into organized, prioritized tasks prevents work from falling through the cracks and improves execution across client projects, internal initiatives, and personal responsibilities. Abhi also discusses keeping humans in the loop when deploying AI agents, responding to rapid changes in the SaaS market, and driving growth through visibility, exceptional people, and innovation. — Create Operational Rigueur with Abhi Jadhav Good day. Steve Preda here, and today I’m joined by Abhi Jadhav, founder and CEO of Bay Leaf Digital, a B2B SaaS marketing agency he’s run since 2013. And he’s also the founder of Brazenly, an AI agent orchestration platform he’s building for marketing teams. Abhi, welcome to the show.  Thank you for having me, Steve. Appreciate it.  Well, great to have you here. And I’m super interested in how you are evolving your business and your focus on SaaS companies, which is very interesting. But I’d like to start with the question, your personal why. So how are you contributing to human flourishing? What is your personal why, and how do you manifest it in your business, in Bay Leaf Digital?  Yeah. So I gave this some thought. It’s been several years since I’ve been running the agency, so it took me back a few years to figure out, well, why did I even start this? So I’m going to date myself, and this is way back when I was in business school. One of my dear friends and classmates at the time, she pointed to me when she was asked, “Who’s most likely to strike it out on their own and run their own business?” And I thought that was really funny at that time because I had no desire to be my own entrepreneur or guy running your own business, et cetera. I was through and through a corporate guy.  And a few years later, I realized that I don’t really get energized by playing corporate games to climb the ladder. I prefer freedom to do things and to experiment. And I love taking the road less traveled, and it’s not just speak, it’s actually doing. Yeah. There’s a sign here. It’s a Jeep sign that says, “Road ends and fun begins.” And that kind of encapsulates who I am, really. Yeah. So when I saw this sign, I’m like, “This is me. It needs to go on my wall.” Okay. So that’s my personal why, how I ended up doing what I’m doing.  So how does it manifest in Bay Leaf or even Brazenly? What is that road that has not been traveled yet that you are embarking on?  So it is more about being able to anticipate what is coming and being able to be ready for it. I think that is primarily the difference, or to me, that is being my own business owner, it allows me to do that. So moving from an agency and seeing what is coming, AI is going to touch all of us. It already has in so many different ways.  So understanding where we are going and being able to do something about it rather than wait for someone else to come along and tell us, “You guys are now obsolete, and we are now moving on to something else.” So it allows me to chart my own path and be able to control, to a certain extent, I can’t say 100%, to a certain extent, what our business destiny is going to be.  So where are we going? What is your vision of the direction?  AI has tremendous power, right? And we are still very early, in the early stages of where it’s going to take us. But I’m a firm believer that the human in the loop is extremely important, and that we need to shape AI systems, our posture, in a manner that we maximize the use of AI while making sure that it is being run for the benefit of humans. So the way we approach it is, yes, we will adopt AI, but at the same time, we will never compromise on human in the loop in that process.  So our approach is, let’s take things that are easily automated. Let’s take things that we would otherwise not have been able to do. I have a framework on how we deploy AI, and the lowest part of that framework is obvious processes need to be automated. Top part of that framework is things that you could not ever do because it was impossible, impractical to do, automate that.  But in all of that, there is a certain amount of co-piloting or piloting that is needed in order to get valuable outcomes. Where I see us going is we will become pilots or co-pilots with extremely efficient and informed agents that will do the work, but they will not do the work exactly as is needed unless there’s a human in the loop that’s guiding it, right?  Yeah.  And I foresee this for the next several years. At some point, and this evolves all the time, but that’s kind of our posture at the moment.  Very interesting. So basically, AI agents do the work, or much of the repetitive work, a big part of the work, and the humans are directing the agents. Is that your vision?  Humans are directing the agents as well as checking on agent outputs, basically being the guide on making sure that things get done the way they should be done. So more and more, we are leaning on domain expertise, people who know what needs to be done, have that knowledge to be able to man these agents today.  Yeah. That is fascinating. So you mentioned that you have a framework. So what is your framework?  I have multiple frameworks. Let me talk about probably the most fundamental, foundational framework that can be used by anyone and everyone. Again, going back to my days before the agency, when I was in the corporate world, we would do 360 feedbacks. And at one point, one of the feedback I got, obviously it was constructive feedback, but it was that, “Abhi’s got a great team and he’s a great leader, but sometimes the team does not follow through on things that we’re committed to.”  I looked at that feedback and I said, “This is not something that my team needs to fix. This is something that I need to fix. It’s not a team problem.” So we took that weakness and we turned that into a core strength. That is one of my foundational approaches to the way we work, the way we run the business. I’ll break it down for you. Here’s what we really do.  Yeah, please.  So you and I are having a conversation. Something comes out of that conversation and I tell you, “Hey, I’ll follow up. I’ll get back to you.” And great, I’ll make a note of it. We have 100 different conversations like this throughout the day. I talk to my clients, I talk to my team. Everyone has something that they need or they’re going to offer. So there’s a pile of things that need to be done.  And without having operational discipline around it, things fall through the cracks, right? So a very simple manifestation of that is, hey, make a list. Make a list of things. But there’s a lot more to that. Yeah, you can make a list. You can write it in pencil on a pad, and then it gathers dust, and then you look at it after a few months, you’re like, “Oh, I never really got back to this person, didn’t really do it.” So what we’ve done is we’ve evolved that into an operational rigor where nothing, almost nothing, ever falls through the cracks.  We talk, we’ll organize our thoughts. We’ll put it—it doesn’t matter. It’s a framework, right? It’s not a set of rules. So people might take down notes. They might use Zoom meeting transcripts, whatever it might be. But at the end of the day, we are constantly putting together a list of to-dos. And that’s never enough because at the end of the week, you need to make sure that you’re working on the most important things. So we’ll go through a prioritization process.  I go through it, my team goes through it, and then that defines what we do in the following week. It’s very agile-like, but it’s not quite agile. It’s a set of tasks that eventually kind of come together for a greater purpose. So we’re looking and we are prioritizing and going, “Which is important, which is not?” So the conversations that we have with our clients, I have internally with the team, the conversations are never about, “Hey, whatever happened to that thing?” It never happens. The conversations are more about, “We talked about this last week. Here’s where we are.  Here’s why we are going to either change course, not do it anymore, or we have found a different way of doing it.” In terms of just an extremely important skill, whether you’re a business owner, in the corporate world, to me, operational rigor that leads to disciplined execution is absolutely key.  So what are the steps to this operational rigor framework? How do you actually do it? What are three to five steps or elements that will allow us to communicate to our listeners and maybe for them to try it out?  Yeah. Let’s just list them out. So the first thing is just pulling together the to-dos, right? So whether it’s from OneNote or a pad or transcripts, at the end of the day, set aside 30 minutes, an hour max, typically towards the end of the week, to allow you to go through that list of things that you want to do, okay? Put them into a system that allows you to keep track of the status.  We use our systems. We use a tool called ClickUp. We’ve used many, many different tools, but today we use that tool. We are able to change priorities, we are able to increase or reduce the size of those tasks, and we are able to collaborate wit

  5. Aug 12

    355: Go from Wholesale to D2C with Sheldon Poon

    https://youtu.be/XA9qR5WnmnA Sheldon Poon, Founder of Drive Marketing, helps established brands go from Wholesale to D2C through performance-driven advertising grounded in data, technology, and human expertise. He is driven to build a company that reflects his values—one where people enjoy their work, have flexibility and autonomy, and continuously learn from and teach one another. In this conversation, Sheldon introduces The A.I.D.A. Framework—Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. He explains how businesses can eliminate friction across the customer journey, use clean data to improve AI-powered campaigns, and balance automation with human strategy. Sheldon also discusses why genuine relationships are driving B2B growth, how AI is reshaping internships and early-career development, and how Drive Marketing helps successful wholesale brands build direct customer relationships without jeopardizing their valuable retail partnerships — Go from Wholesale to D2C with Sheldon Poon  Good day, listeners. Today, I have Sheldon Poon as our guest. He’s the Founder of Drive Marketing, a Montreal-based paid ad agency specializing in performance-driven marketing with a heavy emphasis on using data to make informed strategic decisions. Founded in 2013, Drive Marketing positions themselves as a technical-first partner that bridges the gap between business goals and technical execution. So they’re not a creative agency. They are a technical agency improving your ads. Sheldon, welcome to the show.  Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. I’m happy to be here. Yeah. Great to have you here. And my first question is, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in the business? How are you contributing to human flourishing?  That’s a very big question for a small ad agency.  It is.  Yeah. So when I first started the company, I kind of, like a lot of entrepreneurs, right, it came from me kind of looking at my life and where I was in my career and kind of getting frustrated at what I was seeing with my day-to-day job. So I was in a very, very privileged position. I was able to take a bit of a sabbatical from my day job where they held my position, which was great, because if everything went downhill, I could always just jump back to my job.  And I was like, “You know what? Like, I have an opportunity here. I’ve always wanted to start a business.” But because I had been working for somebody else for almost, at that point, I think like a decade and a half, I had a lot of experience, and I saw a lot of things that I was like, “This is what I don’t want.” So when I started my company, my internal mission and vision was to build the company that I would want to work at, to build the company that is kind of true to myself and my values, and something that I would enjoy going into day to day. Share on X And then what does all that mean? So the company that I wanted to work at, as I started working and hiring people, what I found was I wanted to have flexibility in my schedule. We treat everybody on the team as an adult. Everybody’s responsible for their workload. And as long as they meet their deadlines, I don’t care when you’re clocking in, clocking out. I’m a night owl. I like working till like midnight, 1:00 a.m. I don’t like doing mornings, so I’m often coming into the office late.  A lot of my team are doing the same thing. Some of them are early risers, and they like to leave early to have their afternoon free. So as long as everybody’s more or less—everybody’s on top of their tasks and more or less working during the day so that we can have our interactions and meetings, that’s perfectly fine. Another thing I think that's core to what I wanted to build was that I've always been very passionate about learning and teaching. In another life, I was teaching high school. Share on X   And when I started building the company, one of the things that we made very clear when we’re hiring is that everybody on the team learns because they’re passionate about what we’re doing. And everybody on the team teaches. Even if you’re just an intern coming in, we need to know your perspective because you’ll have a different perspective than me, who’s been doing this for like two decades, where I’m kind of blind to maybe some of the newer stuff that’s happening or some of the stuff that’s like on the ground.  And I want to know when I talk to our interns, when I talk to our juniors, like, “Hey, guys, what are you seeing?” Like, you guys are—you guys are like 20 years younger than me in some cases. Like, I want to know what’s going on with the kids. My personal, like, kind of like personal why of this is that it’s not so much about the end goal. I want to make sure that I enjoy my day-to-day, I enjoy what we do, and I’m not going to pull my hair out going into the office. So, like, I think we built something where everybody on the team is excited to work on stuff because they’re doing the work that they would want to be working on.  They’re learning the stuff that they would want to be learning, and then they get to implement it in a way that is impactful for the company, for the client, for what we’re doing. And my challenge as a leader is to figure out, okay, how do we take that exciting stuff and make it so that it generates money for the company so that we can all continue doing this? Yeah, this is very inspirational. I love it. You’re tapping into people’s curiosity, desire. I like the learning organization idea as well. So do you have a framework for this? Because this podcast is all about frameworks.  Yes.  How can someone create something like that? What are the steps to create it?  So it’s not one framework. Like I said, I’m very passionate about a lot of different topics, and one of the things that’s a personal interest of mine is just business. So, like, looking at business case studies, and from that you start seeing what works and what doesn’t. It’s a lot of different frameworks kind of layered on top of each other for various reasons. For the practical ad side, what we do for our clients strategically, there's a framework there that we like to use called AIDA. So attention, interest, desire, action. Share on X   Very standard funnel. The idea is that the reason we like using this is because when you break down the customer journey, this process is just logical. It’s been proven time and time again. If you’re going into Marketing or Business 101, this is one of the first things that you’re going to learn about. Like, what is a funnel? A funnel is, you know, the client’s never heard of you before, and you do something to grab their attention.  Now they’ve heard of you, but that’s not enough. You have to have many touch points, and you have to build interest. So, like, once they’ve heard about you, you got to make sure that it’s a good fit and they’re interested in the pain point or the thing that you’re fixing for them in their lives. And then if you hit them up with that interest message often enough, they’ll start imagining how their life is better with your product or service, and that creates desire. And then once you continue hitting them up at desire, as long as you don’t have any friction between the desire piece and the final call to action, then you’ll get that action at the bottom.  And the thing that people talk about, like, there’s a lot of people that talk about this framework, but I don’t think they’ve studied it properly. Because when you actually look at the history of it, this framework was first introduced in 1898 in a magazine that was talking about ads. This framework arguably predates the term marketing. And when you think about how that framework looks in modern day, it’s changed a lot, right?  When you were running ads in the early 1900s, you could get away with saying whatever the heck you wanted and making whatever wild promises just to get people’s attention. The way that you did it was you maybe had, like, some sort of print or some sort of, like, literally talking to people, getting them to show up to a convention or an expo back in the day, and having those interactions with their audience.  Fast-forward over 100 years, and it looks very different how you grab attention today. Paid ads. People talk about SEO. People talk about viral content. It’s very much changed. What hasn’t changed is the framework. So what that tells us is that human behavior, right? So the framework is based on human psychology: attention, interest, desire. These are all things that are, like, within the human experience. That has not changed. What’s changed is the other end. The technology has changed, so how you implement that.  So the strategy is still the AIDA that we use, right? But our tactics are constantly changing. Now we’re looking at AI. The new thing about ads is that Google just announced that they’ve added an extra option next to PMax, which is the AI option, so that you can actually start showing up in Gemini. So now this has changed our tactics. But our strategy is still based on this human psychology. That's the framework over on kind of the front end. Share on X And then, like I said, we have a bunch of other frameworks. I don’t know how much you want me to get into it, but for hiring, for internal processes, for all sorts of things.  Yeah. No, no, no. I love it. I love the AIDA. It’s been a long time I heard about it, and I love the simplicity of it, and I think it still works. So you mentioned something that really interests me. You said that you grab the attention, interest, building the desire, and as long as there’s no friction in the desire, then you’re going to get—the call to action is going to work. So what do you mean friction, and give me some examples of what it could look like.  So when you’re talk

  6. Aug 10

    354: Build AI Revenue Engines with Brian Hong

    https://youtu.be/eUqMjIq3r2U Brian Hong, Founder of Infintech Designs, Flowbots.ai, and BigEasyData.ai, is driven to Build AI Revenue Engines that create freedom by helping businesses generate more leads, sales, and revenue while increasing the productivity of their teams. By combining SEO, AI automation, business intelligence, and human expertise, Brian helps companies improve their marketing, systemize their operations, and enhance their people with AI rather than simply replacing them. In this conversation, Brian introduces his Team Building Framework—Attract and Assess A-Players, Productize and Systemize, Hire People Who Can Follow Instructions, and Enhance with AI Capabilities. He explains how placing people in roles where they can thrive creates stronger teams, why clear processes and blueprints make it easier to scale, and how AI can enhance employees by increasing their productivity instead of replacing them. Brian also discusses how SEO is evolving with ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews, why businesses need to build brand authority and entity breadth, and how business intelligence can identify the specific areas where AI can create the greatest revenue impact. — Build AI Revenue Engines with Brian Hong  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and today my guest is Brian Hong, the founder of Infintech Designs, Flowbots.ai, and BigEasyData.ai. These are New Orleans-based companies, including a digital marketing agency, focused on building more leads, more sales, and more exposure online with strategic SEO and digital marketing strategies. Brian, welcome to the show.  Thanks. Thanks for having me.  So you have quite a portfolio. I also read on your LinkedIn page that you invest in other companies, and then you support them as well. So it sounds like you have a lot of irons in the fire. But before we get into all that, my question to you is, what is your personal “Why,” and how are you manifesting it in your business, or businesses?  Why do I work so hard? Why do I want to build all these companies? To me, money creates freedom. I’m trying to bank as many freedom points as I can to live life on my own terms, and to do and have experiences with the people I love. That’s my “Why.”  Wow. How does that manifest in your businesses?  That’s a good question. I'm building AI automation to get my time leverage, to create duplication, so I can 10x the productivity of my employees. Not hire more people, but keep my A-players. Share on X Because if I have an A-team, or can cultivate an A-team, then I think I can bank more freedom points at a more efficient and scalable process. Don’t hire more people. Hire people intentionally, and 10x their productivity. That would be a domino effect to align with gaining more freedom points.  So what’s the maximum number of freedom points? Is it like a 100-point scale? What does it look like to have 100 freedom points?  It’s working because I want to, not because I have to. Because I love working. It’s living life on my own terms and focusing my time on things that I want to do. For instance, I have a house cleaner. I don’t want to clean the house. My time is better spent doing something else that I passionately want or love to do. Unless I loved cleaning houses. That’s fine. Maybe that’s therapeutic for some people. But it allows me to live life on my own terms. Money is the key that unlocks those opportunities to live life on my terms. Share on X   How do you maximize your freedom points? What does it look like when your freedom points are maxed out?  Then I’m working because I want to, not because I have to. I still want to work. I still want to build. I love building things. I’m not the type of guy who wants to go to the beach, sit on the beach, and do nothing all day. I might do that for an hour. I’ve got to be doing something. I have to be building. It’s just the way I’m programmed. Maybe I don’t want to work as much as I do now, but I can’t imagine a life doing nothing. To me, that doesn’t serve a purpose.  Yeah.  I like building. I love contributing. I love being a part of the equation of success. It's just fun to me. I get gratification out of it. I like creating jobs. Share on X I like creating communities. I like meeting people. It’s interesting to me. It fills my bucket. That bucket is filled to then, I mean, try and give me freedom points to then go spend some personal time creating experiences with the people I love, mainly my wife and my child.  That’s amazing. Okay, let me take a step back. You have multiple companies. You have Infintech Designs. You have a couple of AI companies as well. How does that portfolio work?  I essentially do this. I have a construction company as well, TurnKey Renovators, a GC for residential. I have a couple of e-commerce companies. Really, I’m doing the same thing over and over. Earlier in my life, I used to wait tables. My takeaway from that experience, from working at Applebee’s to fine dining, is: How many different dishes can you make with the same ingredients?  With my knowledge, my resources, and my skills, how many different things can I do with them? This is my version of it. All those companies, by the way, I’ve never stroked a check. I pretty much say, “Give me half your company, and I’ll help you grow it.” I’ve never cut a check because I give them what they really want, which is the outcome they want to achieve with that money. They want the money to help grow their company. What if I just help you grow your company?  So I ask for an equal seat at the table, and in exchange, I’ll install what I know and go grow it. I’m essentially doing that over and over. My time is spent on high-level decisions, systems, processes, automation, and marketing.  Yeah. Love it. You know, I always wondered about marketing agencies. If they really know how to grow sales, why are they not doing it for themselves, and why are they offering it to others? It sounds like you are drinking your own Kool-Aid, and you are using your own product.  Yeah. Definitely. We practice what we preach. I see some companies doing that because there’s also an abundance mindset. If I can do it for me, and I can do it for someone else, let me just create another revenue stream and do it for both of us.  Okay. That makes sense. This podcast is all about frameworks. I wonder, what is a framework that you have created or discovered that helps you be effective in what you do, and that you could share with the audience so they might also find a way to leverage it in their business?  I guess it depends on many things. From team building, it may be doing a DiSC Assessment and Kolbe tests to make sure we place each person in a situation where they thrive. Sometimes when things aren’t working, maybe the owner, the manager, or the person needs to look in the mirror and say, “This is my fault, not the employee’s fault.” “I didn’t set them up for success.” “I’m trying to stick a round peg into a square hole.” “I’m trying to put them in a position that they may not thrive in, and they’re not programmed to naturally do.”  So we’ll sometimes do these assessments, whether it’s a personality clash or a personality type, and make sure we place them in a role where they’ll thrive. So that could be a framework. Setting the employee up for success. Once we do have an employee, the better the plan, the better the outcome. So try to productize and systemize everything we do. If we have a blueprint people need to follow, then I can spend more of my time not finding specific talent and skills, but finding people who can follow instructions.  Because if we have the blueprint, and this is what you need to do, then I can get a lower-wage worker who doesn’t have a specialized skill. That specialized skill will be developed because I’m handing you the blueprint of what you need to execute.  So that’s the three-step framework. Set employees up for success by delegating tasks that fit their personality. Then productize and systemize. Then find people who can implement. To what extent does that work in the AI age? Are these people who just execute tasks according to instructions still solving the problems, or is that no longer working because of the fast pace of change?  It depends on what the activity is, but generally, and more often, it’s human enhancement, not human replacement. So instead of saying, “Let’s just say I have a web developer, and I get more business, so I need to hire a second web developer, web designer, programmer, then a third one, then a fourth one.” The new version today is: keep the one you have, and instead of hiring another human, 10x their productivity with an AI-driven solution.  Allow them to do more with less. Allow them to duplicate their activities so they focus on their revenue-generating activities, on the decisions and activities that AI cannot do, as of yet. That’s how we turn an A-player into an A-plus player. That’s how we turn a B-player into an A-player. That prevents me from having to hire people I don’t want working for me, which are C-players.  Isn’t there a risk that when you have too few players, even if they are A-plus, there’s too much dependence on a single person? Well, I mean, we’ll hire more than one. I have a seven-person leadership team. I have two main managers. I have a department head and then an associate, so there’s always some level of duplication. Then you have an AI layer in between that. So between all of that, yes, if someone gets struck by lightning or someone is sick, the ship needs to keep sailing. We can’t shut down the business.  Love it. What is driving growth in your business?  Relationships. SEO. Ranking in LLMs. Google AI Overviews. ChatGPT. I’d say those are the main pillars that are cre

  7. Aug 7

    353: Turn on the Lights for Others with Jay Larson

    https://youtu.be/Hbw3xtIiJRQ Jay Larson, Executive Coach, Facilitator, Sales Leader, and Founder of Lights On Coaching & Consulting, is driven by a mission to Turn on the Lights for Others by helping individuals unlock their potential through coaching, leadership development, and transformative experiences. By combining executive coaching, experiential learning, and decades of leadership expertise, Jay empowers leaders to build trust, embrace vulnerability, and create lasting personal and professional growth. In this conversation, Jay introduces The How to Gain Trust Framework—Be Present, Be Curious, Be Vulnerable, and Judge Not. He explains why authentic coaching begins with deep presence and genuine curiosity, how vulnerability creates psychological safety for meaningful conversations, and why withholding judgment helps leaders build trust and accountability. Jay also shares how challenging experiences, executive peer groups, and coaching conversations help leaders overcome isolation, gain confidence, and achieve breakthrough moments that transform both their businesses and their lives. — Turn on the Lights for Others with Jay Larson  Good day, listeners. The Management Blueprint podcast is here, and my guest today is Jay Larson, an experienced executive coach, facilitator, and sales leader with over 20 years of impact across industries. Jay has guided more than 400 individuals through transformative coaching, backed by 40 years of expertise in assessments, success profiles, and competency frameworks. He helped launch and leads a thriving nonprofit that’s touched over 500 lives through experiential learning and outdoor recovery programs. Welcome to the show, Jay.  Oh, thank you, Steve. Thanks for having me.  Well, you have a fascinating background and have helped a lot of people, which is obviously the biggest thing. So what would you say is your personal “Why” that you are manifesting through your practice?  Well, I think my personal “Why” is really turning the lights on for others. That solidified for me probably five or ten years ago. As I realized, through the work I was doing with Korn Ferry, the work with clients, and the work with the people who reported to me, it was never really about the money. I did like winning—winning sales and things like that. That’s always nice. But it was really more about the impact we were making. Were we making an impact? That sort of thing. So I realized pretty quickly, through my coaching training, that my “Why” was about turning the lights on, having those “aha” moments, personal growth, and seeing that happen with others and myself. That’s fascinating. So when you work with experiential learning and outdoor recovery programs, tell me a little bit about those. How do those help?  So I help lead. I’m the president of the board. A friend of mine and I got together probably 10 or 12 years ago. He had built a little nonprofit called Wild Hearts Adventures, and the basic idea was that his son was in recovery. Any time they went to the mountains or did anything outdoors—climbing, canoeing, fishing, anything like that—his son would come alive. They would connect on a different level than they normally would during that obviously trying time for a parent-child relationship, with all kinds of tough love, easy love, and all that kind of stuff.  So he noticed that connection. He wanted to take it bigger. We talked. I’d done a ton of outdoor stuff in my past, and my kids had recently grown up and were leaving home and things like that. So I had time to focus on that. We take people on all kinds of different outdoor excursions, and it really is about connection through adventure. That's what we're trying to drive—that connection. Helping people know they're cared about. Helping them know they can be their authentic selves without judgment. And that they can do really hard things. Share on X   That’s interesting. I have a friend who was also on this podcast some time ago, and he also does a lot of mountaineering, but he does it with CEOs. He goes one-on-one with a CEO, and they climb for two or three days. Obviously, there’s lots of conversation going on. What is the driver of the impact in these environments? What makes people come closer together?  Yeah, it’s interesting. What makes them come together is that sense of adventure, that sense of the unknown, and their willingness to challenge themselves. We’re very open up front with folks who join that this is going to be difficult. Most of them have never camped overnight. We’re taking them to the Rocky Mountains and getting to the top of some very, very high places.  You wouldn’t believe it once you walk to the base of those mountains and look at them. You’re like, “There’s no way we’re going to the top of that.” So that fear and all of that… I find the impact on them—the reason they come—is their willingness to be challenged. The impact is not only the connection of the team, which is important because a lot of folks, certainly in recovery and otherwise, can feel quite lonely. What they’ve done is their fault. They have to recover from it. They have to do some heavy lifting and white-knuckling. This is more about the team helping.  We're all going to carry each other's stuff as we go up. We're going to hear from each other and talk with one another while we're up there. Share on X Then seeing them at the top of the mountain, when they reach 14,000-plus feet and they’ve put in the work to get there, they realize—to a person—that they can do very hard things. Their recovery, the next step in their career—whoever we’ve taken up there—it’s always, “If I can do this, then I’m pretty sure I can face that.” Great metaphor.  Yeah. It is a great metaphor. I wonder what empowers them to actually accomplish it, because climbing a 15,000-foot mountain without being fit is no easy feat. Especially if they’re not used to having to be resilient. What empowers them to actually do it? How do they not give up? Is it the peer pressure? What is it?  Yeah, no, we’ve had people that go up and turn back. We do have it. We leave it up to them. We’re not going to force anybody to go up there. We’re not back there shouting at them or anything like that. Now, we do a lot of encouraging. They’ll say, “I’m too tired. I can’t keep going. There’s no way.” It’s like, “Listen, let’s just take a rest, then one more foot in front of the other. You can do this. I’ve done this.  I was in worse shape when I did my first one than you are now. You can do this. Come on. Just keep going. Just keep going.” So lots of encouragement, lots of coaching along the way. Very, very few people do these fourteeners. A lot of people do them, but relative to the population, very few do. So they look at this as a very, very daunting thing. What I know, having done it numerous times now, is that it’s all about how fast you want to get to the top.  It’s not whether you can get to the top. You can get there, barring an injury. It’s just that you might have to take more breaks. You might have to rest more often. You might have to go slower. You might have to swallow your pride. A lot of things like that. But if you’re willing, we’ll get you there. Yeah. It’s interesting. When my grandfather was probably 79 years old, just one year before he passed away, we somehow convinced him to climb a little mountain. I mean, it’s not a big one, but maybe 1,000 feet. Okay. He was walking with a stick, and it was very steep. He made it up there, and then there was a beautiful inner lake that became visible.  He was so happy that he did it, and he was so grateful that we kind of twisted his arm a little bit to make this trip. It completely recharged him. He was an accomplished person. He was 80. He wasn’t in great shape. He’d had a couple of heart attacks beforehand, and it was a big emotional moment for him.  Yeah. There’s a sense of accomplishment. There’s something you prove to yourself when you do that. I remember reading The Comfort Crisis. I don’t totally remember the author’s name, but it’s called The Comfort Crisis. We’re not doing hard things as often. We have a lot of the hard things done for us. It used to be that you had to build your own house, or grow your own food, or lift heavy things on the farm over certain distances, or they didn’t get moved.  Now everything’s prepared in the store. We lift the heaviness of a 12-ounce can or a grocery bag. Those are the heavy things we lift. When we set our minds to doing something very, very difficult that we don’t think we can do, we grow something in ourselves. I know it’s not just psychological or emotional. There’s a physical nature to it as well.  The mental and physical parts, the way you grow your brain and change your brain when you’re doing those things. It’s not all just, “Yay, I proved it to myself.” You come down from the mountain a different person than you were when you went up. Slightly, and sometimes massively.  Yeah. I remember when I ran my first marathon, I felt a little bit like that. A wall came down, and I felt more invincible in some ways.  Yeah. Like, “There’s nothing I can’t do.” I had a particular gentleman who went on one of the first trips we did. He had been in the gangs. He was actually an enforcer for one of the gangs. So a pretty tough dude. He’d done a lot of things. He’d lost his children, lost his marriage, all kinds of things. He’d been in prison. He’d had a tough run and made a lot of bad choices, to be honest. He went on this thinking, “I’ll do what I can. What I want to do.” That sort of thing.  He had a pretty good attitude. But at the same time, when you get up on summit day and it’s 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning, and we’re waking him up and getting him going, people ar

  8. Aug 5

    352: Zero-Spend Marketing Engine with Victor Penev

    https://youtu.be/90smCXY7mHY Victor Penev, Founder and CEO of Edamam LLC, is on a mission to help people make healthier food choices by organizing the world’s food knowledge, while building a Zero-Spend Marketing Engine that fuels sustainable growth through a proprietary semantic food database. By combining food science, nutrition expertise, and AI-powered technology, Victor has built Edamam into a trusted food intelligence platform that enables businesses to develop innovative health, wellness, and nutrition applications while making reliable food data accessible at scale. In this conversation, Victor introduces The Democratic Decisions Framework—No Pre-Judgement, Freedom to Speak Up, Intellectual Environment, Robust Discussion, and Work Towards Consensus. He explains why removing preconceived opinions encourages better ideas, how open dialogue and diverse perspectives lead to stronger decisions, and why working toward consensus builds lasting commitment across teams. Victor also shares how partnerships, referrals, and search authority fueled Edamam’s sustainable growth, and why proprietary data and continuous human refinement remain the company’s competitive advantage in the age of AI. — Zero-Spend Marketing Engine with Victor Penev  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. Today, my guest is Victor Penev, the Founder and CEO of Edamam LLC. Edamam is helping people eat better by making daily food choices simple and easy, eventually organizing all the food knowledge in the world. To that end, the company has built a proprietary semantic food knowledge base and is creating, on top of it, a range of consumer and business applications to solve real-world, everyday problems. Wow. Victor, welcome to the show.  Thank you. Good to be here. I’m very excited.  So I was shocked to learn that you’ve got 900,000 foods in the system and 2.3 million recipes. I mean, I don’t know who is even able to create so many recipes. So how did that whole thing come about? How did you come up with this idea? Are you a foodie?  I am a foodie. Yeah, that’s kind of the origin story. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I’ve done a few startups. I had a successful exit about 15 years ago. A friend of mine and I built Bulgaria’s largest internet company. Then I started looking for what to do next. I was actually going to start a news organization, but then I realized one day, on a beach in Thailand, that I think about food five hours a day, and I cook every day.  So I might as well do something around food that helps people. I married my passion for food with my passion for technology and built a company. Share on X The problem we set out to solve back then is still a very valid problem. People need the right information, just in time, to make the right food choices. The data is always inconsistent, incomplete, and lacking. So we set out to organize the world’s food knowledge so we can help people make the right food choices.  Wow, this is fascinating. So what is your personal ‘Why’ that you’re manifesting in this business?  So, in terms of philosophy—and my philosophy changes. Everybody’s personal philosophy changes over time. But where I am right now, I think there are a couple of things that really matter if you want to live what one would call the good life—a meaningful life. One is to be really present in the moment. You know, be here now. The other is to help people. I think my business falls into… Share on X For us, the measure of success is not revenue or profit.  It’s how many people we ultimately reach through our data. It’s worth noting that we’re a business-to-business company, so we don’t reach people directly. But we have partnerships with companies like Nestlé, Microsoft, Amazon, and Food Network. Through those partnerships, we think we reach at least a billion people. For us, that’s the real measure of success.  Helping everybody eat better and live longer, healthier lives. My vision is that everybody can live to 120 without chronic illness or mental conditions. A big part of that is food. So we're trying to help people. That's my 'Why'. Share on X   Yeah, I love it. Obviously, eating healthy is a big thing. You know, garbage in, garbage out. This is fascinating. Do you find that certain cultures have better eating habits than others? And what drives it?  I think history and geography, to some extent. Everybody knows about the Mediterranean diet. And it’s not only the countries around the Mediterranean. Vietnamese and Japanese cuisine are Mediterranean in the composition of the food. A lot of it comes from being close to water, living in a certain climate, and having a huge variety of fruits, vegetables, and fish. But I think the biggest change over the last hundred years hasn’t been culture. It’s been technology—quote-unquote—and the processing of food so it’s shelf-stable, can be shipped, and sold at a lower price.  I think that’s the biggest problem. It’s changing eating habits everywhere in the world. It’s very well known in the United States and, to some extent, in Western Europe. But even places like Japan are starting to eat a lot more processed food. Mexico is starting to eat a lot more processed food. This is more technology-driven than anything else. If I had to say one thing that would help people, it would be this: Go back to your roots. Get food directly from the soil. Cook it at home. It's a question of time and effort, but if you value your health, that's one of the best investments you… Share on X   Yeah, as we’re getting busier and busier, the opportunity cost of cooking our own meals is becoming higher. And that’s the real problem.  It is a problem. I mean, it’s a question of priority. I cook every day. I’m very busy, but for me, it’s an important enough thing. Food, apart from nourishment and nutrition, is also a very social thing. People connect through food and spend time together, and that’s another thing that correlates very well with longevity and a well-lived life. So there’s a lot more to be said about having good food.  Yeah, I think Woody Allen said in one of his movies that eating together is the second sexiest thing to do, or something like that.  Yeah, there you go. I’m not going to ask what the first one is.  Yeah. That’s awesome. So let’s talk about frameworks. This podcast is all about frameworks. What’s a framework that you’ve discovered along the way that helps you think about your business, create outcomes in your business, help other people be productive, or whatever it is that’s driving results in your business?  A couple of things come to mind. I’ll start with the non-obvious one. Some people speak about it, but I’ve practiced it, and I think going slow gets you further. You know, the hare and the tortoise. I am definitely against growth for growth’s sake. That drives a lot of decisions: who you raise money from, how you run your business, and so on. Over the years—and I’ve been an entrepreneur for probably close to 40 years—I’ve discovered that every successful product has its timing and its soul.  You just have to let it come to fruition. Sometimes that means slowing down instead of rushing forward. For me, being deliberate about the end goal without having time constraints is a framework that’s always helped me. It’s not for everyone. Definitely not for the modern world, where VC money is trying to get you to grow very fast, and everybody competes based on how fast their revenue or customer base has grown.  But I find that this does not lead to lasting results in terms of impacting humanity and having a meaningful life—both for yourself and for everybody in the company. So that’s one framework. The other, which is also very simple, though not too many people execute it, is just: treat people like people. This means there’s no hierarchy in my company. I’m super proud to say that in my last company, I never had an employee leave. And that was over 15 years.  It’s because I treat people as people. Going back to the Latin origin of the word companion, companio, which means “to break bread together.” We are a band of people breaking bread together on a journey. That’s how it works. That means doing things that are not intuitive in business. For example, having no advance notice requirement for vacations. If you want to take a vacation, take it now. Giving responsibility to people and treating them well. Those are the two frameworks that I think have helped me. In addition, making decisions democratically, which is a very contentious thing in business. Okay.  So how do you do that?  There is always, ultimately, an arbiter, which is oftentimes me or some kind of board. But that means having a robust discussion around a topic without preconceived notions of what the end decision or result should be. Creating a culture where everybody can speak up, argue, and tell you they disagree with you. Having that freedom creates an intellectual environment where people really debate. Share on X   At the end, more often than not, the obvious decision emerges. It takes a long time, but the reality is that once a decision is made, everybody has bought into it, and it’s usually the right decision. So I don’t make wrong turns. Now, there are times when it’s a coin flip. There are two equally good—or equally bad—options, and somebody has to make the call. Then it falls to me. But for the most part, it’s democratic decision-making.  So how do you cultivate that? How do you foster it? How do you make sure people contribute to it?  I’ve had the luxury of starting a company from scratch. It’s a lot easier to do when you start from scratch because you establish the culture with the first hire. It’s a lot harder to change a culture and instill new values. For me, it's been

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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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