The Success Architect

Jake Lewendal
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Entrepreneurship

Success doesn’t happen by accident — it’s designed, built, and reinforced brick-by-brick. On The Success Architect, builder and business strategist, Jake Lewendal brings a craftsman’s mindset to personal growth, wealth, and high-performance leadership. With raw honesty and practical frameworks, Jake breaks down the systems, habits, and decision-making principles that separate the overwhelmed from the unstoppable. From building multi-million-dollar companies to coaching ambitious people, Jake’s philosophy is simple: success is a structure, and every person can learn to build it. Each episode blends actionable strategy with real-world conversations featuring high-impact, career-driven entrepreneurs and operators who are building lives of purpose, discipline, and momentum. This is for the ones who build. The ones who take responsibility. The ones who know they’re meant for more — and are ready to architect a life of depth, strength, and true success.

  1. 1d ago

    Money Talk: Your Money Mindset

    In episode two of his money series, Jake Lewendal explores how our mindset around money shapes nearly everything else — how we live, work, invest, build businesses, and prepare for the future. Most of us swing between scarcity and abundance in how we relate to money, often without realizing it. In this episode, Jake breaks down how shifting toward a positive money mindset can change the trajectory of your decisions and outcomes. Money is a tool — and how we use it either propels us forward or holds us back. But the real work isn't just about how much you make, it's about what you choose to spend it on. That's where scarcity and abundance thinking actually take root. Tune in for a grounded look at rewiring the way you think about money.

  2. Aug 21

    Money Talk: How We Learn to Use, Spend, Save, and Invest Money

    Most of us never chose how we think about money. We inherited it. In this episode, Jake breaks down where our financial habits actually come from: the beliefs about spending, saving, and investing that got wired into us long before we ever earned a paycheck. Jake unpacks the concept of "money scripts," the unconscious rules formed by childhood experiences, family dynamics, and even one-off moments that quietly shape how we handle money as adults. Whether you're a saver, a spender, an avoider, or somewhere in between, this episode will help you spot the patterns running in the background and start making money decisions that are actually yours. In this episode: Where our core beliefs about money come fromWhy money scripts drive behavior more than logic doesHow past experiences (even ones we don't remember) shape spending and saving habitsThe first step to rewriting an unhelpful money story

  3. Aug 7

    Sarah Hurlburt: The Real Way to Budget for Growth

    Most business owners are mixing their personal and business finances without even realizing the damage it's doing. In this episode, I sit down with Sarah Hurlburt, a financial expert with over 25 years of experience as a Controller, Tax Advisor, and Auditor, to talk about what it actually takes to build a business budget that works. Sarah has spent her career helping small business owners get their financial house in order, across industries like restaurants, medical offices, construction, and professional services. We dig into why keeping your business and personal accounts separate isn't just good practice, it's foundational to understanding whether your business is actually profitable. We also talk about the financial blind spots that trip up even experienced owners, and the simple systems that make budgeting less overwhelming and more useful. If you've ever looked at your bank account and had no idea what your business actually made last month, this episode is for you.

  4. Aug 7

    The Growth Tax

    In this solo episode, Jake dives into the growth tax.  Growth always costs something — the question is whether you're paying it on purpose. In this episode, we dig into the "growth tax": the trade-offs every ambitious person and business inevitably makes. For businesses, it's the margin sacrificed for market share, the systems strained before they're rebuilt, the culture that shifts as headcount climbs. For individuals, it's the relationships stretched thin, the health put on hold, the identity that has to catch up with the title. Growth isn't free — but understanding the bill before it arrives changes everything about how you scale.

  5. Jul 31

    Before The Build: Allison Bryan of Physical Space

    Today's guest is Allison Bryan, AIA — founder and principal of Physical Space (formerly Open Studio Collective), an award-winning architecture and design practice that has quietly reshaped how the West thinks about place. Allison's projects have landed in The New York Times, Dwell, Forbes, Dezeen, and Archinect, and her portfolio spans everything from residential commissions to work for Nike, Kit, The Nature Conservancy, and Knot Springs. With more than 24 years leading international, award-winning work across architecture, interior architecture, and graphic design, Allison has built a career on a simple but disruptive belief: conventional design thinking stifles creativity. Physical Space exists to challenge that convention — to reimagine, question, and problem-solve in service of spaces that elevate human connection, not just square footage. Her path there wasn't conventional either. Allison started with an undergraduate degree in graphic design from Indiana University before earning her Master of Architecture from the University of Oregon — a combination that shows up in the way she approaches every project, blending visual storytelling with structural rigor. Today she's a licensed architect in Oregon, Montana, and Wyoming, a licensed contractor in Montana, a LEED-accredited professional, and — closer to home — an owner and developer on projects right here in Bozeman. In this conversation, Jake and Allison dig into what it actually means to lead a design practice that refuses to default to "the way it's always been done," how she's navigated the rebrand from Open Studio Collective to Physical Space, the throughline between commercial giants like Nike and the residential work that shapes everyday life, and what placemaking really requires when you're building for the West's most demanding — and fastest-changing — landscapes. It's a conversation about creativity as discipline, risk as a design principle, and what it takes to build spaces — and a career — that actually mean something.

  6. Jul 24

    Ask Jake: Lessons In Fatherhood

    Fatherhood comes with a manual nobody hands you - so this week, Jake writes a few pages of his own. He talks about the 2 a.m. moments that taught him more than any business book ever did, the quiet panic of realizing your kid is watching everything (not just listening), how becoming a dad rewired his definition of success, and the one piece of advice he ignored early on that he wishes someone had made him take seriously. This isn't a highlight reel. It's the version of fatherhood that happens after the photos are put away — messy, unscripted, and more rewarding than he expected. If you think you have to have it all figured out before you're "ready" to be a great dad, Jake's here to tell you: nobody does. You just start.

  7. Jul 17

    Ask Jake: Strength as a Strategy

    This week, Jake answers listener questions on training, discipline, and what it actually takes to stay in shape when you're building a business, running a household, and trying not to lose yourself in the process. He gets into how he structures his week around workouts instead of the other way around, what he does when motivation disappears (because it always does), the mindset shifts that made fitness a non-negotiable instead of a nice-to-have, and why he thinks physical discipline is the most underrated leadership skill there is. If you've ever felt like you have to choose between building something big and taking care of your body, this one's for you. Spoiler: you don't.

  8. Jul 10

    Marriage, Unfiltered: I Do, We Did, I Don't

    Today's episode is a different kind of conversation — instead of one guest, Jake sits down with three women who each bring a completely different vantage point on the same question: what is marriage, really? Joining him are his wife, Makenzie Lewendal, married to Jake for over a decade; Merrit Peterson, who's been married just over a year; and Lisa Walthers, who spent 15 years married before going through a divorce. Three women, three stages, three very different truths about what it means to build a life with someone. This isn't a conversation about relationship advice or five-step frameworks. It's about the real, unpolished experience of marriage at every stage — the excitement of the beginning, the grind and growth of the middle, and the honesty that comes from having lived through its ending. Makenzie brings the perspective of someone who's weathered a decade-plus of shared life, the compromises and reinvention that come with staying committed for the long haul. Merrit brings the freshness of a first year — still learning what marriage actually asks of you versus what you expected going in. And Lisa brings a perspective most people are afraid to talk about openly — what she learned looking back, and what she'd tell her younger self on her wedding day. In today's conversation, we get into all of it — what newlywed optimism gets right and wrong, what actually holds a marriage together after ten-plus years, what fifteen years and a divorce teaches you about love and commitment, and the questions most people are too polite or too scared to ask out loud. We talk perspective, we talk reality, and we talk love — in all its forms. This is a conversation full of honesty, contradiction, and hard-earned truth — three women, three chapters, one shared subject none of us ever stop trying to understand.

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About

Success doesn’t happen by accident — it’s designed, built, and reinforced brick-by-brick. On The Success Architect, builder and business strategist, Jake Lewendal brings a craftsman’s mindset to personal growth, wealth, and high-performance leadership. With raw honesty and practical frameworks, Jake breaks down the systems, habits, and decision-making principles that separate the overwhelmed from the unstoppable. From building multi-million-dollar companies to coaching ambitious people, Jake’s philosophy is simple: success is a structure, and every person can learn to build it. Each episode blends actionable strategy with real-world conversations featuring high-impact, career-driven entrepreneurs and operators who are building lives of purpose, discipline, and momentum. This is for the ones who build. The ones who take responsibility. The ones who know they’re meant for more — and are ready to architect a life of depth, strength, and true success.

Information

  • Creator
    Jake Lewendal
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    31
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 The Success Architect
  • Show Website
    The Success Architect