Management Blueprint | Steve Preda

https://youtu.be/z5cb9rT6N4Q Tish Squillaro, CEO and Founder of CANDOR Management Consulting and author of HeadTrash: Cleaning Out the Junk That Stands Between You and Success, is driven by a belief that solutions exist simply because we can create them. A lifelong problem solver and serial entrepreneur, Tish helps leaders identify the internal obstacles that prevent clear thinking, strong decisions, and consistent execution. We explore Tish’s journey from founding the first-ever dog daycare business in 1997 to building a career in human capital consulting and leadership development. Along the way, she uncovered a recurring leadership challenge: people often know exactly what to do—but don’t do it. That insight led to HeadTrash and the Mental Headspace Framework, a practical system for understanding and managing the emotions that silently sabotage performance. Tish explains how everyday emotions are not inherently negative, but become destructive when they cross the line and begin to manage us. She walks through the **seven HeadTrash emotions—control, insecurity, arrogance, paranoia, anger, fear, and guilt—**and shows how leaders can recognize when emotions cloud judgment, stall decisions, and create chaos inside organizations. The episode also explores how HeadTrash shows up in entrepreneurs as shiny-object syndrome and non-listening, and how leaders can manage emotional reactions in themselves and others without suppressing or “fixing” them. — Important Links: Tish’s LinkedIn Tish’s website Tish’s email tish@candor-consulting.com

https://youtu.be/5rB45BEXQLU Edward Francis, executive coach, IBM alumnus, and doctorate holder in Management Consulting, is driven by four lifelong commitments—family, faith, the city of Atlanta, and experiential learning. That fourth commitment fuels his mission: helping leaders bridge the gap between theoretical competency and real-world performance through outcome-based, measurable coaching. We explore Edward’s distinctive EMF Coaching Framework, which integrates authenticity, mindfulness, equanimity, and neuroplasticity to help leaders develop soft skills for next-level leadership. Edward explains why authenticity protects your future self, how mindfulness deepens connection and listening, why fulfillment (equanimity) must replace “I don’t know,” and how managing the brain—rather than letting it run the show—creates space for vision and innovation. Edward also shares how he teaches passion for the future, why it can be acquired through practice, and how he measures intangible soft-skill growth with precision. For leaders seeking transformation, Edward describes what “serious coaching for serious clients” truly looks like. — 4 Ways to Expand Your Vision with Edward Francis Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS Group, and the host of this podcast. And my guest today is Edward Francis, a seasoned coach who provides soft skills for next-level leading with an outcome-based and measured approach. He’s an IBM alumni and holds a doctorate in Management Consulting, so he knows a lot. Edward, welcome to the show. Thank you, Steve. Glad I could be here. Yeah. Great to have you. I always ask our guests because I think it’s very important that we have a mission, a purpose in life. Because if we lean into it, then we are going to get a lot better results. So what is your personal ‘Why’, and what are you doing to manifest it? Good question, Steve. I like that. Well, my personal ‘Why’ are my commitments, and I have four of them. Oh. And those commitments are me, they make me who I am. The fourth commitment is why we are here today talking, but I’ll take a minute and touch on the first three because I think they’re worth touching on briefly. The first commitment, and not necessarily in order, is family. I’m a father, uncle, godfather, caretaker for a dog and cat — family. My second commitment of the four is faith. And obviously, I could talk a lot about that, but I won’t. But that is a big commitment that makes me who I am. The third commitment is actually to the city of Atlanta, because that’s where I am and where I have served throughout the years several boards of directors — the large ones that we all know about, some for profit, some not for profit, and some of the smaller ones that we haven’t heard about. I'm at that stage now where I end up doing on boards and doing things that nobody else wants to do, but I think it's very important.Share on X And so typically I’m raising money for this or helping to promote that, or the kinds of things that are very important. But they’re not the big boards, but I’ve served on all of them throughout the years. Done a lot with the arts community, the leadership community, the city government, some politics, but primarily community activism. But the fourth commitment, which makes me who I am and why I’m here, is to experiential learning. And that is that gap between competency and how it plays out in the real world—the bridge. Not just understanding the competency of business or the competency of consulting, but how does it really play out in the real world? I have a passion for that. And that bridge can be coaching, leadership development, mentoring, and so it is experiential learning.Share on X When I was with IBM, people would inherently come to me, especially young people. I think it’s this white hair, Steve, I don’t know. They’d come to me and we’d be talking about this and that. And I began to enjoy those sessions, but found that they really were important for the person coming as well as me, because I learned a lot as well. And then when I went on to study my doctorate and my MBA, I studied experiential learning, where I began to do research on soft skills. So what are soft skills? Earning trust. Can you teach someone how to earn trust? I prove that you can. Passion for the future. Can you teach passion for the future? Can that learn? Is that an acquired skill? Is that an acquired competency? Yes, it is. So experiential learning, I have a passion that comes into my coaching, which is why I coach at a business school, at a major university. And I have clients, private clients as well. Those are my ‘Whys’. And because that’s who I am. I am those commitments. Yeah, that’s fascinating. So let’s talk about some of the things that you do, because I find it very interesting. But I’d like to start with the framework that you developed, which is a unique coaching framework. I’ve not seen anything like that before, and I think you call it the EMF coaching framework after your name. And it involves authenticity, mindfulness, equanimity, and neuroplasticity. Can you explain what this is, how you discovered it, why it’s important, and how do you apply it? Well, my research brought it to the forefront, but my clients have really discovered it for me. When I work with a client, I take them where they are. Typically, it’s someone with a set of outcomes that they’d like to achieve, or outcomes that they want to develop. Sometimes we don’t know outcomes change, and I also have the ability to measure their outcomes, which is fairly unique. I mean, I give them measurements. People say they want measurements, but I can do them and do them well. But the framework is a way of communicating blocks that we build on, and blocks for active listening on my part. So what is the authenticity? How do you use authenticity in coaching? To make sure that you are aware of it, to help you measure your authenticity, to make you value your authenticity, to get you to focus on it as an important element of what you want to do and who you are, so that at the end of your career, or when you’re changing careers because you have one behind you, you can look back on it and feel good about it. And you’re not some sad old guy or sad old lady who wishing you had paid attention to your authenticity. Because what happens when you have that sadness, you end up impacting the people that love you the most. Your wife, your children, grandchildren. So you want to protect this period of time by making sure you pay attention to authenticity. And so we spend a good bit of time working on it, identifying, but more than anything else, letting you know how important it is. And of course, authenticity, I mean, we grow, we bend, we assimilate the cultures, but there’s still an authenticity that you want to measure, promote, and understand. I attempt to drive home that meaning, but more than anything else, I listen to what's important to you about authenticity, it's about listening.Share on X I have more questions than I have answers, but I do have some good questions. And where does authenticity fit, and how do you rate your authenticity, and what does authenticity matter to you are important questions. Okay. So there’s a lot there. We won’t be able to completely unpack authenticity. Maybe that’s what you do with your client so we don’t have to do it on this call. But let’s switch to the next one, which is mindfulness. So is it about meditation? What does it mean? Well, mindfulness is all over the place, right? We hear it all the time. It’s almost cache. I mean, it’s all over the place. But in coaching and in my building blocks, we want to examine the benefit to you as my client in achieving your outcomes. The benefit of just understanding and listening rather than making an impression.Share on X You want to listen rather than try to impress. Your listening skills, finding out where someone is before you engage with them. The idea of being mindful of the moment of where are they. So being present with the person? Not only present, but giving a lead to listening. What does that mean? It’s hard to hear them if you are talking. And this type of mindfulness, you want to make sure that you are being more listening than you are trying to impress or engage from your perspective. That type of mindfulness in that moment and in each moment. So we spend a good bit of time understanding that level of engagement, and if that engagement is even authentic to you, but the benefits of that. Can you give an example? Sure. You go to someone and you want them to help you with something, not necessarily small talk, but find out where they are at that moment, where they are mentally, where they are socially, how’s their day? It’s more than small talk before you engage because you’ll find that them even hearing you, if you show that you care about where they are, their level of listening can be increased. So an example is finding out where the person is before you engage with them. Okay. So let’s switch gears and let’s talk about equanimity, because that’s something I don’t hear people talk about. Mindfulness is a common topic—maybe not your brand of it—but what’s equanimity, and how do you use it in coaching? Sure. Equanimity means a lot of things, but when we talk about coaching in the framework, we’re really talking about fulfillment. Equanimity can mean how you handle stress or how you handle disturbances.Share on X But equanimity in coaching can mean fulfillment, your pursuit of a fulfillment what is it that you really, really, really want? And are you clear on distinguishing that from that tools to get there? The classic one is money, Steve. We all know people with lots of money, and there’s a question even in their mind, if they are really fulfilled. So, an equanimity is understanding fulfillment and that pursuit of fulfillment, and it can change.Share on X When you get to our age, “I don’t know” is not a good

https://youtu.be/ivElg53993A Ian Leaman, Summit OS® Guide, former investment banker, senior finance executive, and investor, is driven by a mission to help entrepreneurs build, scale, and successfully exit their businesses by applying the hard-won lessons he’s learned from more than 100 exit journeys. We learn about Ian’s path from growing up around small family businesses in the UK, to training with Deloitte, advising entrepreneurs through hundreds of M&A processes, co-founding a SPAC, and ultimately relocating to the United States to embrace a more optimistic and opportunity-driven business culture. Ian explains his Can-Do Framework, a mindset blueprint inspired by the contrast between European “can’t-do” thinking and America’s bold, frontier-style optimism. He also breaks down how Summit OS® empowers owners to achieve “private equity–level growth without giving up private equity,” and why the 45-Day Execution Momentum plan creates faster change than a typical 100-day private equity program. Ian closes with a gripping case study illustrating how leadership blind spots and misaligned incentives can devastate exit outcomes. — 313: How to Break Ceilings in America with Ian Leaman Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS® Group and host of the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today here is Ian Leaman, who is a Summit OS® Guide, a former investment banker with over 100 exits under his belt. He’s also a senior finance executive and an investor. So Ian, welcome to the show. Hi, Steve. It’s great to see you, and thank you for having me on.  Absolutely. And we go way back, and one of your international board positions I think I’m sharing with you, but I’m not going to go into that because it’s long in the past. What I like to explore is what you’re doing now, why you’re doing it, and some things about why you moved to the States. I mean, both of us moved to the States since we were on this particular board for different reasons. And I’d like to explore your framework, which is very intriguing. So let’s start with your ‘Why’. So what is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business life?  What I’m doing right now, Steve actually squares the circle. It brings us back together as working colleagues. You mentioned that we worked previously on an international board. Today we’re working together as Summit OS Guides. How did I get here, and how does this relate to my ‘Why’? Well, my business journey started really in my youth, where my parents had small businesses. And so the conversations over the evening dinner table were all about the trials and tribulations, the successes, failures, challenges, et cetera, of running a small business. So that got into my blood very early. That translated through a career in finance, where I qualified originally as an accountant with Deloitte in the UK, and then progressed into the transaction side of finance, helping entrepreneurs grow and exit their businesses. As you said, having come through more than a hundred successful exits, but many  more which didn’t cross that finish line.  I really became interested in the differences between those who succeeded and those who didn't, what they were doing in their businesses, which made them attractive prospects from an M&A point of view and made their processes successful ones.Share on X And eventually, I came to reunite with you when you’d started your Summit OS® Initiative and understand that we can bring our respective experience, whether it’s as a CEO of a previously exited business or as an advisor to many which have done that, we can bring that experience to there. And how that translates into my personal ‘Why’ is I get huge satisfaction out of being involved in and assisting the process of entrepreneurs building and exiting their business. And I find huge satisfaction in a successful outcome there. So my personal ‘Why’ is to work with entrepreneurs who are building their businesses to help them do so better, faster, more successfully, and, if relevant — which isn’t in all cases — take them across that exit finish line to a conclusion of that particular part of their business journey. Yeah. I totally relate to this, and I often felt guilty even when we sold the company, and I felt like we could have gotten more for it if the company was improved, and there were some low-hanging fruits that we could have helped fix in a short order. And then we can do it now, and that’s very fulfilling. That’s right. I mean, there are many war stories, if you like, from that phase of my working life that illustrate very well the point you just made. For example, on the positive side, I can recall a conversation with an entrepreneur. I met him for the first time at his place of work. It was a distributor of electronic components, so they bought in bulk, stocked, broke into small pieces, and sold and distributed at a good margin, electronic components. They had a big warehouse. He and I had an initial discussion and he was quite an impressive guy. I remember in his very austere functional office, and he said, would you like to look around? I said, yeah, of course. I’d love to. So we walked together from the upper level where his office was down a stairway into the warehouse. And just as we got to the foot of the stairway, we encountered one of the warehousemen. His name was Jim, and he said, the owner said, Hey, good morning Jim. How’s it going today? And Jim said, 81%. Why did Jim say 81%? I asked myself, I left it at that moment, but they were both very satisfied with Jim’s answer. When we returned from the visit to the office, I said, so what’s 81%? He said, well, that’s Jim’s metric. Jim has to measure a certain number of things he’s doing and relate them to that day, and he was well within his range of target, and that’s how this guy ran his business. All that translated into a very successful exit at a multiple one or two points above the regular for a distributor in that sector. Because he was growing fast, he was doing it really well, and he built a business which was somewhat independent of him.  That’s great. And just a quick reference to the LinkedIn post that you put up yesterday, where you mentioned that a lot of people who are trading time for money and working 55 or more hours is basically a leading indicator that they’re not going to build a self-managing business, they’re not going to scale, they’re going to burn out. So it’s great if someone has good KPIs to make sure that they know where they are and where they’re moving towards where they want to be. Okay, so let’s switch gears here. And you have a really intriguing story of how you made it to America and particularly to LA. So what was your calculus, and how did you end up there? I’d been working successfully as an M&A advisor — as you had, Steve — working with entrepreneurs on that journey. And a lot of that was about the growth of their companies, about building them somewhat before they actually made the exit, often through acquisition or financing. And one day I got a phone call from a friend who was a headhunter who joked with me when he got on the call: “Ian, don’t put the call down. I’m going to talk to you about a new role, which is not doing what you’re doing.” I guess his call landed at a particular moment when I was restless for a change, and he described a role as the third co-founder of a startup to be newly listed on the London Stock Exchange as blank check company, often known as a SPAC in the US. Long story short, I was a good fit for the team of two entrepreneurs who had built previous businesses, financed, acquired, IPO’d, and then sold. We got together and set out on a path of acquiring businesses in the US, even though the listing was in the UK, in the oil and gas services sector. That experience was amazing. It put me on the front line as a principal, doing many of the things I'd seen done secondhand and getting my hands into the weeds of operations much more than I had previously. And these were great learning experiencesShare on X but what became most valuable over time was the experience I got working in the US and finally appreciating the fundamental contrast in business ethos between a European starting point — can’t do — and a US starting point — can do. And that framework, that basic business framework of can-do US against can’t-do Europe, really set me on the path that I then pursued. When that job came to an end and my wife and I were deciding what next, we decided to vote with our feet, relocate to the US — now 12 years ago — with three teenagers and a dog in tow, and rebuild our careers over here. That’s awesome. And that’s very similar to what we did in many ways. So tell me about this Can-Do framework. So how do you break it down? How do you make it more tangible? What differentiates an American entrepreneur or American businessperson — or just a general person — and European or UK in terms of their outlook on business or life? Okay, so it’s all about positivity. And that manifests itself with just really at the start of any conversation about anything within business, whether it’s a small change to an existing business or perhaps something at the opposite end of the scale, a big new opportunity that hasn’t previously presented itself. It’s all about the positivity. Americans will enthusiastically embrace change, generally — in my experience — without the cynicism overtaking them. Americans have just as much valid experience of what can go wrong as you build and change businesses as Europeans, but instead they choose to parlay that experience and those learnings into positive aspects of change rather than cynical aspects of resistance to change. So, for example, in America, if as a businessperson you hit some failures and those failures result in a failed business or a personal bankruptcy, those things are not regarded as necessarily negatives, which can impede your progress in the future

https://youtu.be/jtNEdTVPrwE Corinne Gavlinski, high-impact leadership and team development coach and creator of the Executive Table Read (XTR) method, is on a mission to help leaders improve communication, understand their people, and drive stronger team performance by transforming how leaders read, interpret, and utilize the strengths of their teams.  We explore Corinne’s Executive Table Read framework: table read the script, understand the actors, get how to utilize them, and optimize team performance—a method that helps executives gain clarity, reduce friction, and build alignment inside leadership teams. Corinne shares why many leadership issues stem from misunderstanding roles, how actor awareness reshapes collaboration, and why structured team conversations are essential for building healthy, high-performing executive groups. — Match Your Client’s Intensity with Corinne Gavlinski Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder and CEO of the Summit OS® Group, and I have as my guest, Corinne Gavlinski today, who is a high-impact leadership and team development coach and the creator of the Executive Table Read, or XTR process.  Corinne, welcome to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Pleasure to be here. Well, it’s exciting to have you here and to learn about your wonderful framework. But first thing first — tell me about your personal “Why,” and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice and business? Yes, I’d be happy to. If I’m honest, Steve, I’ve enjoyed and led an accomplished career, much like my colleagues, and the clients that I have. And I realized far too late in that great career that I was paying attention to the wrong things. And I wasn’t being intentional about the legacy that I really wanted to leave from a leadership perspective. And that only came on the heels of a pretty big identity jolt, which was losing both of my parents in succession. And so today, I work with leaders who care about their legacy, who care about their people, and have pressures on them to perform that perhaps distract them from that intention.Share on X And so I teach that which I, too, had to learn. And I work with executive leaders to do just that.  I like it. This is very noble. So what is your legacy that you are pursuing?  I hope my legacy is that I grew others. And as I said, I’m not sure I did that my whole career. In fact, I’m darn sure I did not. It took me a long time to realize that my own growth would be enhanced and amplified by me allowing others to grow that were on my team. And so if I had to say a legacy that I hope I leave, it’s that I left others with a strong sense of self, that I helped them develop new skills, and that they grew in areas that they hadn’t even dreamed possible, perhaps. Love it. Well, I mean, that’s the beauty of coaching — that if you are able to amplify whatever you learned and pay it forward multiple times, it can have a big impact on people get there 20 years earlier, 30 years earlier, then imagine how much they can achieve in that time.  That’s right.  I love it. That’s great. So tell me about this process that you developed — the Executive Table Read. It sounds like very Hollywood-ish.  Yes.  It’s very interesting. What is it?  I put my money where my mouth is. I’m not only a coach, but I hire my own coaches. And this was born out of a working session that I did with one of my coaches, and I was interested in doing something that started with the team. And I wanted to reorient leaders to that focus on their team and not just on the self.Share on X Much like a director in a movie or a sitcom might do, they often will get actors around the table to do a table read. And I thought, what a fun play on words if I can get corporate leaders to do a similar exercise whereby they are learning about people around their table in a new way, so that they can understand how to optimize those individuals that are on the team, perform at perhaps a higher level, and agree together what behaviors will make them successful. And so from that was born the Executive Table Read, and it’s a series of activities that, in under 45 days, will arm a leader and his or her team with data, custom analysis, and real performance measures that they can both take on a day one and 90 days later to ensure that they are being accountable to what they said was most important. Yeah, that’s fascinating. So it’s an exercise where, as a leader, you can learn about other people, and then you can get them to commit to goals and to objectives, and then you follow up with them. So is this a repeatable process, or is this a one-off thing?  It takes an evolution. I think there’s an initial Executive Table Read, whereby we go through a three-step process of collecting data, analyzing and sharing that data out with the team, determining behaviors that are important, as I say, and then measuring those behaviors. And there’s a roadmap that leader receives to then take action with his or her team. What comes after that is, customarily, some work with that leader one-on-one. It may result in an evolution of working with that team again. It’s kind of the XTR 2.0, if you will. I’ve done work with teams, particularly sales teams, where we’ve taken the initial Executive Table Read and then taken an aspect of that and gone into a second event with them to do some team development around the aspect that they felt was important to go a little deeper on. So it can evolve, but it is meant to be an initial snapshot in its original form that then can be built upon in a custom way.  Yeah, I like it. And I think a lot of leaders and even coaches miss the opportunity to really analyze the personalities that are around the table.  Yeah.  When they start working with them, they can fail to exploit the opportunity to improve them and improve the communication, knowing the different communication styles and approaches between people. And a dysfunctional team is going to be much, much slower to the momentum.  Yes. That’s right. I think leaders do a very good job of understanding how their team members fit into the roles in which they're assignedShare on X where they may not do as good a job. And I say that because I did not do as good a job in really understanding how those individuals think. How they inherently behave during times of when they’re not under duress and stress. And when you do, you get a better sense for the capabilities on your team. And moreover, where there may be friction points on your team that might not have been obvious before, but have a reason behind them. And then you can go about addressing that. So you can go about optimizing the talents on your team because you now understand how people think, process information, and innately or inherently behave, and you may have uncovered that if you have team members who are extremely different from one another, you can see where that friction could occur and mitigate any conflict as a result. So it’s a powerful tool when layered with some custom analysis because you get some real insight that maybe you didn’t have the time or the energy to do yourself. So when you do this analysis, do you then use it as a group and facilitate the resolution, or is it a one-on-one tool?  We do. We do. We do both actually, Steve. So an individual will receive a bit of coaching one-on-one as well as the team. So we start with some insight around individual thinking styles and behaviors, and helping that person to understand who they are. And then we, as a team, meet and debrief the results of the analysis and talk a little bit about how that helps the team to be successful, where might friction occur? How can those talents be better utilized, and based on the behaviors identified in the team, what are the most necessary for their specific discipline, whether that’s sales or an executive team, for example, there are differences in what they might want to pursue. And so it’s a little bit of both, but it’s predominantly geared around the team and the team working together to solve some of these questions.  Is it always productive to have the team, let’s say there’s an inherent conflict in the team. Is it always productive to solve it in a team setting, or sometimes it’s better to solve it in a one-to-two settings, or one-on-one setting? I’ve not encountered anything such a conflict that it required individual time and attention beyond what we were able to do in the format that I typically do it in. What has happened is that there's been an opportunity for me to work with that leader one-on-one subsequently, to help that leader to better work with his peopleShare on X so that those conflicts don’t arise or they get headed off at the pass if you will, before they even start to show themselves. And that’s been very effective because a leader then can understand, what some techniques might be to help those individuals both lean into what is so good about their behavior and see what might be a blindside for them. Yeah, that’s super interesting. So if someone doesn’t do that, is this what you call lazy leadership?  Yes, a bit. I talk about lazy leadership because again, I believe I was lazy in my career. There were times when I was very centered on self and my own achievement and was a bit lazy about the things that were most important. And so lazy leadership, when we talk about that, is all about not someone lacking leadership prowess or not lacking the ability to lead a group of people, but instead being very distracted. Today’s environment is so pressurized. The political stakes are very high. There’s board demands, private equity demands. The CEO demands perhaps, and leaders have a lot to contend with. It’s very easy to take their eye off the ball of the actions that they want to take. And it’s very seldom that they have quiet space to be able to think about the legacy that they’re leaving or building. So lazy leadership is all about intentionality or the lack thereof. And when I talk about

https://youtu.be/NUdn7G2_y4Y Tim Rexius, Serial Entrepreneur and Founder of Omaha Protein Popcorn, shares how he helps people reach their personal greatness through health, fitness, and nutrition. We explore Tim’s journey from homelessness to multiple successful ventures, the strategies behind Omaha Protein Popcorn, and how purpose-driven leadership creates long-term impact.Tim introduces his Entrepreneur Creation Framework—Identify Them, Give Them a Voice, Coach & Mentor, Secure Financing, Let’em Do It Their Way—a system that turns talented employees into entrepreneurs, scales businesses, and drives innovation across industries. — How to Turn Employees into Partners with Tim Rexius Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the host of the Management Blueprint Podcast and the founder of the Summit OS® Group with the Summit OS® Business Operating System. And today I have an exciting entrepreneur on the show. When do I not have exciting entrepreneurs on the show? I always do,  but this is probably next level. So Timothy Rexius, he’s a serial entrepreneur, including the owner of the world-famous Omaha Protein Popcorn, which is launching in like four countries a month. He was Entrepreneur of the year, and he’s creating companies left, right, and center. So without further ado, let me introduce Tim Rexius. Tim, welcome to the show.  Thank you so much for having me. I’m honored to be here.  Well, it’s exciting to have you here, and we’ll have a good conversation talking about your special sauces. So let’s first start with your ‘Why’, your personal ‘Why’. What is driving you, and how are you manifesting it in your entrepreneurial ventures?  My ‘Why’ is, especially when it comes to the fields I’m in, all the companies I own are around health, fitness, and nutrition, and helping people find their own personal piece of greatness is an honorable trait. I wake up every day knowing I get to help people, and that for me is everything. You’ve seen the power of helping someone look and feel their best and what that can do to change them.Share on X And the fact that I get to be part of that is amazing. For me, it still gives me chills up my spine all these years later and that I get to be part of that story. It’s my ‘Why’. I’ve seen the power of helping somebody lose a hundred pounds. I’ve seen what that can do. And helping somebody overcome a death, a financial reversal, a divorce, or whatever it might be. And I get to be part of that story page, and that’s just awesome.  Yeah, that’s great. Shouldn’t all leaders think that way? Because this is what leaders do, right? We help people become the best version of themselves, be more than they imagined they could be,  and that’s highly empowering. Tell me about Omaha Protein Popcorn, and also tell me about how you’re launching all these businesses. Maybe that’s going to be your framework that you’re going to discuss because you are creating entrepreneurs. But let’s first start with the story of how you created yourself as an entrepreneur,  and then how you stumbled upon this protein popcorn concept. I’ll give you the quick and ugly version. I started in nutrition back in high school and into college. Loved it. I got the chance. I was really poor when I was 19, 20. I mean, most people are, but I was really poor. I was sleeping in my car, homeless for a while. And I was like, “Okay, what do I have?”  Well, I’ve got the ability to talk. I can talk like nobody’s business, like I can sell, so it looks like I’m selling myself. Something easy to do in the Midwest here in the United States in the summer is mow lawns. So I started my first business, Poor College Kids Lawn Service, and just started hustling door to door, and got myself out of my homeless situation, and loved it, as far as the money. And I loved being on my own. Wasn’t a big fan of mow and lawns, but I could do it. So I loved the nutrition, and it was in college, and college really didn’t prepare me for the entrepreneurial journey. I didn’t have family money. It was on my own. And it didn’t really prepare me for finding alternative financing measures or how do I start a business. So I worked in corporate America for six and a half, seven years. When I was 29, I was just young enough and dumb enough to go for broke. I quit my really good paying job, and start my first nutrition store in Omaha, Nebraska, called Rexius Nutrition. Named it after myself, brought in the whole mom-and-pop feel back to what I thought was an over-corporatized industry. And one store led to two stores, led to three stores, and I met my amazing wife. And within a year of meeting her, we went from one state to five states. And now we have franchises operating in five, and it just worked out really well. And it was still the highlight of the retail store experience, and we just had a different experience there. And at the same time as we’re scaling that business. I’m sorry, Tim, how is Rexius Nutrition different from other nutrition stores? What was so attractive that you could spread like wildfire?  None of my staff knows what I make on anything. Their job isn’t to know what I make on anything. My job as an owner is to know where the pluses and minuses are. My job as an owner is to know where the gross and net profits are. My staff’s job is to make happy customers. That’s it. And I think that in nutrition, it really got turned into high moving, high sales, high pressure, talking into the most expensive stuff. And realizing when it comes to health and wellness, it’s each person is their own individual storybook. There is no cookie-cutter. There is no one-plan-fits-all. It doesn’t exist. So if you have a bunch of 18- to 19-year-old kids selling products they don’t understand for the highest commission they can get to people of different walks of life, you’re not going to have a lot of success other than a moral standpoint. I felt it morally. I thought it was wrong, but from a business standpoint, it didn’t make sense. Because you’re not creating customers for a lifetime, you’re creating a one-time transaction. And I thought, okay, if I focus on the person and solving their problem, I create a 20, 30, 40, 50 year repetitive business cycle. And the only job I’ going to do every day is add one more person to that cycle. And all of a sudden you can grow an empire. And I’m doing it morally sound. I’m doing it based on your health. If you come in with a list from a trainer of the 20 items they want you to take, and I start asking you questions about your health, your medications, like where are you at? Like your lifestyle. I start asking all the questions. I’m like, hey, you don’t need these 20 things, you need these 2. Yeah, I’m not going to make as much money today, but now that person trusts me for the next three or four decades to the point that they’re bringing in their network, their family, their neighbors, their kids, everybody. And that's how you grow a health business is by looking out for the constituents' health and their end goal more than mine.Share on X And all I need to do, if I do that once, is I need to do it a couple hundred more times. And so we are results-driven, not profit-driven. And so most of my staff never knew what I made on anything until they got into the management side. And then I’m like, okay, well, you’ve shown talent here. You’ve shown the drive. You’re doing a great job. Let me show you how the math of this all works. And I explained to them, it’s very tempting to push the high-dollar item. I get it. But that’s the check for today. I want to check tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. Okay. I love that.  That’s how I did it. That’s how I built the structure of it. And so how we built the franchising structure of it was the same thing. Once I had a great manager and they understood it. Okay, cool, you need to be an owner. I’ve taught you, I’ve trained you, you know how to do this. You’re talented. I mean, if you’re really talented, you’re not going to stay working for me. Let me make you an owner. Let me show you the fun of being an entrepreneur and being underneath our cloud of expertise that we have. We can help you, and boom, store after store. And it’s always been kind of true and I got to be for other people what I needed at that younger age that I didn’t have. And that’s also part of my ‘Why’. I can create better, more well-equipped business owners who deserve the opportunity versus just the rich kids who had family that had money to help them start.Share on X And so it’s another ‘Why’ for me.  Tim, what does it take for someone to turn into a successful franchisee? So when you see a talented individual who does a good job for you, how do you know that this person is cut out for being a franchisor, for being an entrepreneur?  Well, I look at every person that I employ from top to bottom. It doesn’t matter what stage life they’re in, what position they’re in. As a future either business partner interview or a franchisee interview. I’m going to see what you’re made of, and as you progress up the ladder in whatever organization I own, I’m going to start challenging you with budgets. I’m going to start challenging you with running an event and see how you do. Like knowing that I’m here to help them and I don’t micromanage. I give them an opportunity. I let them figure out where they’re going to screw up. I let them figure out where their talents are and where they need help. Are they egotistical? Are they going to ask me for help or not? And I get to see those things, and I get to kind of nurture that process and help them become more well-rounded in their entrepreneurial capabilities so that all of a sudden, like, and I'm a good judge of talent.Share on X I’ve done this a long time. I’ll tell them like, hey, it’s go time. And they know what that means. And if we’re having that conversation, that means they have shown me that drive to do more than what they’re getting paid for. And when they have that, I’m e

https://youtu.be/l5fLRKRgpQc Alana Dobbins, Executive Director of the Business Owner Success Alliance (BOSA) and Business Development Specialist at W.G. Nielsen & Co., shares how servant leadership and active listening help advisors and entrepreneurs make smarter, faster, and more aligned business decisions. Alana introduces the 5-Step Listening Framework she developed through her extensive experience in investment banking and business development: Mandate, Plan, Team, Execution, and Self-Awareness. This framework helps leaders build trust, uncover risks, and strengthen alignment between vision and execution. She also discusses BOSA, an upcoming mentorship platform connecting business owners with trusted advisors through short, video-based guidance — creating an accessible way to get sound advice at the right time. From building chemistry with clients to balancing empathy with accountability, Alana shares how genuine listening and mentorship drive growth and confidence in the world of M&A. — 5 Steps to Better Listening with Alana Dobbins Good day, dear listener. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast.  I’m the founder of the Summit OS Group, which developed the Summit OS Business Operating System. And today my guest is Alana Dobbins, the executive Director of the Business Owner Success Alliance and The Business development specialist at W.G. Nielsen and Company and Mid-Market Investment Bank in Denver, Colorado. Alana, welcome to the show.  Hi, Steve. It’s such a pleasure to see you again. I enjoy every time I get to share a conversation with you.  Yes, you’re referring to me being a guest on your podcast, which I very much enjoyed, and I’m sure this one is even gonna be better than that one. So let’s get into it. And, you know, I’m very interested in what drives people, and I always ask on this podcast, what is your personal why and what are you doing to manifest it in your professional life?  I love that question. I’ve seen you ask that on the podcast I’ve watched yours. Gosh, everything is different when you get older and over the years you realize what is important to you, and I wanna live a good life. And I don’t wanna walk by somebody that needs help and not help them. I don’t wanna over promise and under deliver like I have in the past. So I think that would be my why, and manifesting that in my career, it's every day we're serving business owners every single day in some capacity we're showing upShare on X and we’re utilizing skill that we’ve built over my 25 year career, your wonderfully distinguished career, but we bring that to the table. So I think manifesting living a good life is to really utilize everything that I’ve honed and I’ve developed, and that can be put to make someone else’s life better.  Yeah, it is so true. And when I was younger, even not that much younger, even a few years ago, like 10 years ago, I wasn’t really aware of this whole idea of why it’s important to think about who you are serving and how we are helping people, but it’s really a huge tool to empower ourselves to do our best work. And also to be able to have a long-term perspective, which helps iron out some of those rollercoasters that we all face. So yeah. You love your servant philosophy. You have developed an organization called the Business Owner Success Alliance. So what made you want to be involved with this organization and what is the mission of this organization? What I’ve seen and witnessed over my career are the business owners who are in growth mode, the business owners who are looking to exit the business owners who are leaning on others for sound advice, to make business decisions. And I’ve been very fortunate to have been exposed to this environment since I was 19. I was very fortunate for that and in seeing so many different types of business owners. The mission around BOSA is to bring together advisors and mentors that have sound advice that can very easily address something that might change the trajectory of a business owner's decision and having that advice at the right time along with it…Share on X We wanted to bring that in a way that was digestible. Connections can be made on BOSA where if an advisor and a business owner want to establish some sort of ongoing relationship, that’s completely up to them. But we wanted to bring an opportunity to have a business owner pop a question out and get a response, a 15, 22-second video response from someone that has valuable advice that can possibly help them make that decision at that moment so they can position themselves to do the best they can do in leading their companies.  Wow, okay, so this is a unique format. It sounds like, that you’re not bringing the peer groups together live, but it’s more about communicating through asynchronous video. And giving them a platform where they can look at other questions that have been posed and review other content as short video snippets that they can easily digest and go, ‘Oh, I need more information on that. Maybe I’ll reach out to that advisor’. But having that video library of other things, business owners in their realm, so questions that mom and pop business owners have are going to be different than established businesses in growth mode. So we have a dynamic way of allowing the person that owns the company in growth mode to see relevant contact and vice versa for the other stages of growth.  I love it. This is very interesting. And how many members are there in this alliance?  So we haven’t launched our platform yet. We are taking pre-registration via our website, and so we have quite a list of business owners and we’re building up our business advisors. When we want to launch, we want it to really add the value that we’ve built it for. So, we’re looking for additional mentors and advisors. We have quite a few business owners who are waiting. So we’re in the process. So if you’re a business advisor with an excellent career that you think you might be able to donate a little bit of your time. Mentors that are leaders in various different spaces, that’s what we’re looking for.  It’s so important. I actually was asked to do a keynote last week and there were only very short time, I only have 20 minutes and I picked three topics. One of the topics was mentorship and how important it is and actually looked through my life and I realized that I used a lot of mentorship, but I also missed out on a lot of mentorship. And I think the better mentors you find, the faster we can grow our businesses. So I allowed this initiative. I think this is very smart and very useful.  We’ve been exposed to so many in our careers. I know you and I have talked offline and so many in our careers have taken the time to lift us up and help us through things and, and teach us. So this is an— it’s giving back, but it’s also allowing an avenue where the newest and greatest tools, you know, forget AI. I love AI. But this is one-on-one real advice from experienced people.  Yeah. And the couple of things there I’d like to mention. So, you know, AI is very useful. It really helps with productivity, but a couple of things AI cannot do. So AI is not always able to filter information. It can create a lot of information, which is sometimes overwhelming. But you need wisdom, not just information, and you need to filter this. And mentors are able to bring that wisdom to the table. Mentors can also give you validation sometimes, you know, because as entrepreneurs we don’t just need good advice. Sometimes we need someone who actually gives us some encouragement so that we are doing good work, even though we are struggling. And the third thing is accountability. So again, it’s not possible to be accountable to a machine, right? But it is to a human being. So AI, ChatGPT is not replacing mentors. For sure.  Well, and when you mention all of those, it’s, you know, the failures that we learn the most from. I don’t think AI can draw from its failure in business. You know, there’s going to be triggers in our mentors and our business advisors history that something that triggers something that they failed on, that they had to really learn the hard way. And, helping business owners avoid that. That’s our mission really.  And really, you are not gonna learn big things without failing big, I believe, because that is the forcing function to push you to be creative, find a solution, and then it could be a unique solution, which then gives you a competitive edge. So it is huge and mentors can help with that. Alright, so obviously the reason you are putting this together, because you are, and I experienced this when I was on your podcast and you were asking the questions. You’re a really good listener.  Thank you.  And I think that’s why you have utilized a five step listening framework that you talked about in, on the pre-call to this interview. I’d love you to share it with our listeners what those five steps are and how do you go about, you know, actively listening with this framework.  And you know, when we talk about framework, we all make whatever we’re doing specific to our world, our universe who we’re helping. And as an investment banker and someone that’s been doing mergers and acquisitions for a very long time, I've found that this process of listening, it not only applies to my industry, but every single person that is running a business that has a specific job, it's helped me immensely for years and years.Share on X I wasn’t the best listener. And when you come, everyone says, well, know your audience. Know your audience. It’s not just about knowing who you’re talking to, it’s about understanding what you’re trying to get. What is the mandate of this conversation? Why am I here? So the first part of active listening for me is really taking a minute and going, okay, what am I looking to get out of this conversation? But what are they expecting? In this conversation that I could bring to the table that they’re expecting me to bring

https://youtu.be/76GQZb8nj_Q Pál Jalsovszky, founder of Jalsovszky Law Firm — Hungary’s fastest-growing commercial law firm — shares how he built a top-tier legal practice by challenging tradition and creating a firm that reflects his values of professionalism, creativity, and clarity. We explore Pál’s journey from international firms to founding his own, and how his Straightforward Legal Advice Framework—being Practical, Specific, and Risk-Weighted—reshaped the client–lawyer relationship. Instead of theoretical opinions, Pál believes lawyers must take responsibility, quantify risk, and give actionable answers that empower clients to decide with confidence. He also discusses building a culture of collaboration, training lawyers to think like business partners, and how AI will transform the legal profession—from due diligence and analysis to redefining what young lawyers should focus on next. — Give Helpful Legal Advice with Pál Jalsovszky Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Pal Jalsovszky, the owner of the Jálsovszky Law Firm in Budapest, Hungary, which is the fastest growing commercial law firm there, with a special focus on tax and the mergers and acquisition law. Pal, welcome to the show. Thank you. Nice to speak to you.  Yes. We go way back with Polly, 20 years probably. We were one of your first clients when you started the law firm in 2005 and we’ve worked together on many ideas and I, we met recently and I thought that would be a great guest on our podcast, sharing your journey of how you built up this very successful market leading law firm in Budapest. But before we go there, I like to ask my favorite question, what is your personal why and how are you manifesting it in your practice upon it?  Well, to tell you honestly, I didn’t have a personal why for quite a long time because if we just go back to my history, I worked for international law firms and 10 years ago I made the decision to separate from the international law firms and start up my own venture. It was an incidental decision at that time, and it was not a well thought and well elaborated, decision and step. I can tell you the story. The story is quite short that  I worked for Linklaters and I was working for the legal industry for seven years and eight years, mainly in the tax department, and I still believe that I need some more improvement in tax, so I wanted to go to an international advisor firm. And then I started my interviews and one of them was very positive to me. And we finalized the deal or this early we said that, okay, I would start working with them. So I was just leaving Linklaters, and, I believe that I would join that firm but there was a turning point when that firm started with the new head of a department who didn’t want to increase the number of employees. And then from one day to another, they said that they are not able to offer me a job. It was actually 20 years ago. And then, from one day to another, I quit a law firm and I didn’t have a new job. So it was just a decision what to do with myself. I start my own career. So it was not a very, well thought and well elaborated decision to start my career. So I didn’t have ‘why’ at that time. So I was just going with the flow. I was giving advice, I was trying to attract clients, and it came up that I’m valuable and I was needed by the client. So I just had one more client and one more employee, one more colleague. So I broadened my spectrum. I broadened my expertise. So when I started my law firm, I didn’t have any such type of a goal or specific vision. But since then, so I’ve been doing this firm for 20 years now. So in the meantime, such type of wise and such type of impact or answers have in fact elaborated in my life and in my way of thinking. And now just starting, so preparing for this discussion, I just put together all the things that I have in the back of my mind that really just may be the idea or the drive  to come to this point. And one was actually to be the law firm that on one hand is professional, but which is also out of box, which is actually reflect my own personality, which is on one hand, services clients in the highest professional manner. On the other hand,  a law firm that is creative, that is exceptional, that is unique, that is actually the corporate myself.Share on X So how I behave, how I work, how I think, how I manage my own personal life, which is not definitely the mainstream, which is a bit unique, a bit out of the box way of thinking. So one hand to create a law firm on my image. Yeah.  The other is to build a community, because a law firm is a bunch of people and the most important asset of a law firm are the people. And, it was so lovely to see that I started to hire people under my own methodology. I wouldn’t say that I have a very good sense of creating personal relationships and in my private life I had some problems with that, but it turned out to be that I had quite a good sense of feeling to select those people around me who fit together each other and who can work in a combined manner and who can cooperate efficiently and who can create a society, can create  a common workshop. And creating a set of people, just the community became a very important part of my goal and my achievement. And then third came the market impact so that it’s not only an impact that I can create for 20-30, and now we are 60 people, but we can create something for the society, for the community, for the country, for professional community so that to create something which can also add something in a bigger manner.Share on X Either university students, we started our academy three years ago, which targets university students, providing them with practical knowledge and practical expertise, and also with the legal community. And also making a footprint, making a type of a brand, an image on how to run a law firm in the modern time, in the 21st century and how to a bit, adopt a new manner in old fashioned and very traditional industry.  Yeah, yeah. No, I love it. And, when we first met, it was actually an interesting story because the building where we met turned out to be located on a plot of land, which was owned by my great-grandfather. So that was kind of a very interesting realization. But what really struck me when we first met was that you were a really good listener and you were very thoughtful how you gave advice and you had some really good out of the box ideas at the time. It was the tech structuring for an M and A transaction. And I was very impressed with your creativity there. And then we started working together on different projects and I remember you were hiring some people who were kind of picking things up and tell, and really following the style that you introduced. So what I’d like you talk more about at this point is your process. So, how is your approach different and what is it that you do differently? And you talk about being, providing straightforward legal advice. Maybe you can call it the straightforward legal advice framework. So what does that framework look like and what are the elements.  So if you speak to lawyers in many countries and also for Hungary, lawyers tend to avoid giving you a straight answer. So in most of the cases, you receive an ambiguous answer from a lawyer telling to you that if you see from this angle you can get to this result. Come and other angle you can get to another result. And then nothing is black and white. Everything is great. And, I don’t believe that it helps the client in any way. I’m sure that you need to give a comprehensive answer to the client, so not just saying yes or no, but I believe that when you give advice, the advice is that what the client should do. So you need to assume the responsibility of providing clear guidance to the clients that in a certain situation where he should go. And, in doing so, it’s not only your gut feeling or your internal belief that you’ll need to take into account, but also the perception of the client because a certain advice is valid for one client, but it’s not valid for another client. I believe that there’s an art in that when you understand the problem of the client, you have the legal reasoning behind, you come to an understanding of what are the risks what are the circumstances, what are the legal aspect of a certain case, and then you dare to go to the client. Tell him that in your situation, I would do this, or I advise you to this, or I would advise you to do that. And, this is very rarely done in the legal profession. And most of the lawyers, they believe that this is an excessive responsibility. That if you say something to the client, then you assume bigger responsibility. If you just described the social situation and leave it to the client what to do, I don’t believe this is the case, especially if you tell the client that he or she should go probably to this direction, but okay, it has this type of, or this amount of risk, you do not just propose the client to take one road or one direction, but also tell him that, if he just opts for this decision that, what consequences it can have. Whether those consequences, they are deep, they are risky or they are negligible. Actually, I’m not only a lawyer but also an economist. And I have a very good mathematical background. And, what I just elaborated is to giving the percentage to the client that what is the percentage of the risk, or what is the percentage of the negative outcome, which is very rarely done by lawyers. Lawyers tend to say it is a significant risk or low risk or medium risk. So they tend to use certain words or certain objectives, which I hate because this really just a type of direction which can be open to many interpretation I like to give percentages. Sorry, I stop you. So how would you describe the right kind of advice? What are the elements to it? You know, this podcast, we are always trying to break

https://youtu.be/Da2JjKuwqiI Adam Joseph, entrepreneur, 5-time PE-funded CEO, two-time Fortune 100 executive, and Summit OS Guide™, shares how developing people through ownership, mentorship, and trust drives leadership growth and organizational success. We explore Adam’s journey from first-time founder to leading multiple private equity–backed companies, and how his Leadership Growth Framework—Identify Talent, Launch Careers, Mentor, and Allow Them Room to Fail—has helped him build empowered, high-performing teams. Adam explains why potential matters more than experience, why CEOs must coach forward instead of managing backward, and how giving people space to fail builds resilience and confidence. He also discusses the “Burn the Boats” mindset—what it means to go all in as a leader—and shares how to balance ambition with purpose, family, and fulfillment. — 4 Secrets to Growing Leaders with Adam Joseph  Good day. Dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast, and my guest today is Adam Joseph, who’s an entrepreneur, a five time private equity funded CEO. A two time Fortune 100 executive and the Summit OS Guide. Adam, welcome to the show,  Steve. Thank you. It’s been a long wait. I’m thrilled to be a part of blueprint. It’s good to have you here on the show and, you know, let’s dig in. I always ask guests about their personal why and how they manifest it in their professional life, in their business, in the practice. So what is yours?  So, I know this sounds cliche, but you know me a little bit, so I think you can validate that. I really try to live life to its fullest when it comes to my career. I love to fill my days with people that share my passion for building. When I come home, I wanna be with people I love, and when I have time off, I want to enjoy the adrenaline sports that give me energy, whether it’s skiing or biking or hiking. Or climbing, whether it’s with other experts or newcomers who wanna learn. For me, that’s what energizes me. And I have found in my career that it’s possible to do this in business as well. I can remember as a young entrepreneur, building my first company, trying to get my very small team to be as productive as possible and to work as hard as possible. And part of the magic with that was to get the most out of them. I bought two cheap hockey goals at a Costco, and every day at lunch we play a little roller blade hockey. Not only did it make them more fit, but they, we really got to know one another and, and enjoy one another aside from sling and code. And I, not only rewarded them with a little bit of fitness, but we were fortunate to get a trade sale just a few years later.  Wow.  I truly believe in all things you need to savor the journey, not grind to the finish line. It’s true in a bike race, it’s true over dinner, and it’s certainly true with a business. Yeah, I like to say also that it’s so hard to make a business successful if you don’t at least enjoy the ride and you don’t have fun along the way.  Absolutely. I mean, and there was absolutely times in my business career where it was nearly impossible for me to come up with that right balance and it impacted my family, it impacted my personal wellbeing. I would argue that many of the management skills I developed as an operator were so that I could make the time to recover that balance between work and everything else.  So what does it take to create the time? What does it take to have this balanced life as a top executive? It’s not something that CEOs brag about, that they are having balanced lives. Well. A lot of it is being part of or building a great team. To me, the best thing you can do is have people that you know and trust, that you can not only delegate things to, but know that they'll be done as well or better than you can.Share on X ‘Cause quite honestly, particularly as a growth stage, CEO, a lot of your time is spent either doing other people’s jobs that you may not do nearly as well as they do or worrying about how well they’re doing it and, and sometimes sticking your nose in places where it’s just not helpful and oftentimes counterproductive. So what does it take to be at a team, such a team around you? How, how do you attract these people?  Great question. So important and rewarding. One of the things I’m most proud of in my career, you know, are some of the people that I brought along the way and certainly appreciate others doing the same for me, the first piece, and again, this is one of the parts I also really enjoy, is identifying talent.Share on X If you’re in a bigger company, finding people in the organization, if you’re not looking in your network, your friend’s network, right? Good people stand out and I strongly advise to select for potential, what they could be, not their performance in their last job. I assure you, your top seller does not often make the best chief sales officer, I’ve made that mistake.  Sorry Adam. So how do you know who has potential? How does it show up?  So some of it is just, you know, understanding what drives them, understand how they interact with you, how they interact with others that, you know, get, oftentimes you’re finding out about them because of a reputation, because of something they’ve done. Peel under the covers, understand, you know, where they want to go with this, how they got these skills, et cetera, and so forth. And in many cases, it’s giving them a test drive, taking people that have never managed anyone in their lives and saying, today you’re not gonna manage people. You’re gonna manage a project, a blueprint, what have you. And maybe that becomes a business and you get to read it or lead it, or maybe it doesn’t. That the main thing to me, whether you’re developing a leader or an individual contributor, is work with them on an idea that they can own with plenty of wiggle room for them to grow and innovate within that idea, right? The concept of a business within a business or an entrepreneur, working for an entrepreneur makes absolute sense and really gets you to exploit the best of that person, the things that they're passionate about.Share on X  I like what you said about ownership. You  mentioned, you used the word ownership. You’re looking for people who are willing to own their function. What do you mean exactly by owning their function?  Owning their function. So again, it begins with you as their leader, giving them lots of rope saying, we have a problem. Right? We’re trying to, I can look at my, think back to my experience with Dan Grom at Concur. Dan was a star collections manager at Concur. He was collecting millions of dollars from some stingy CFOs who didn’t want to pay us. He came to me and said, I want to be part of your customer success organization. I wanna touch customers on the positive side not take their money after they’re already onboarded. So we came up with some ideas on things he could help me with on a fledgling business that was auditing customer expense reports. I said, Dan, figure out a way to do this less expensively and more effectively than we do today. It took months and months just to come up with the scheme, eventually resulting in us creating a thousand person global operation that Dan, who managed, you know, five collection agents when he joined me, was overseeing and generating over a hundred million in revenue. We applied his ability to connect with people. The idea that we could automate a service that we were previously doing with people to create a business that represented roughly 10% of our company’s revenue before we sold it.  Okay. So, that’s ownership. He had an idea and you let him run with it. And he created a business within the business, kind of an entrepreneur type of situation. So, when you identify the talent, what’s the next step? What do you need to do with the talent that you identified? You give them ownership. What’s the next step?  Oftentimes, when, before giving them ownership, getting them hired means really enticing them, right? And leveraging, you know, their own entrepreneurial spirit. For me, as a grower, right, and someone who’s building businesses, having someone with that passion is important and convincing them. That joining our team, being part of a, a bigger function and taking on a meaningful role is something they really wanna do. You know, once I bring them on board, once we give them that challenge, it certainly requires a great deal of investment in them. Training, mentoring, et cetera and so forth. You know, when it comes to mentoring, my guidance is really think about coaching people forwards, not backwards. Spending a lot of time on the things they should, or could or would’ve done isn’t gonna help them scale, you know, instead provide a framework that allows them to make mistakes. I mean, let’s face it, we’re not surgeons or nuclear scientists. So if a mistake is made, no one’s going to die. But oftentimes, that leader or potential leader learns more from making that mistake and getting collective feedback on how they could have handled it differently than watching someone else do it or telling them how to do it.Share on X Yeah, yeah. Just an aside, so I just got off the call with a client. And he told me that he was very frustrated because one of his team members made a $50,000 mistake. And I said, okay, and what did you do? He said, the first thing I did was I called that person and I told her that her job is safe. This is not gonna count against her, and we are going to figure out how to solve this. And just don’t panic. Do your job and you’ll figure this out. So I think this is super important. Even Jack Welch tells a story when he blew up a factory and then he got a promotion afterwards.  No, I think that’s great. All right. As an entrepreneur, you gotta be in it for the long haul. Right? And bumps will happen, mistakes will be made, and great ideas will evolve over time. But having people with the spirit and the confidence that you’re

https://youtu.be/7Gq4_nY3n_Q Tinsley Galyean, CEO of Curious Learning, is on a mission to eradicate illiteracy worldwide by helping people reframe how they think, learn, and lead through curiosity. We explore Tinsley’s journey from the MIT Media Lab to co-founding Curious Learning, a non-profit transforming education for children in over 200 countries. He introduces his Eliminate Limiting Beliefs Framework, which guides leaders to let go of defensiveness, open up to curiosity, ask questions to understand, and create awareness of their assumptions. Tinsley explains how curiosity dissolves barriers to change, why awareness precedes transformation, and how these principles can drive both personal growth and global literacy. He also shares stories of communities teaching themselves to read and offers a surprising belief that 90% of leaders would disagree with—challenging traditional notions of control and leadership. — Squash Limiting Beliefs in 4 Steps with Tinsley Galyean Good day, dear followers of the Management Blueprint Podcast. My name is Steve Preda. I’m the host and my guest today is Tinsley Galyean, the CEO of Curious Learning, a nonprofit that is working to eradicate illiteracy around the word. And Tinsley received an Emmy nomination for his work on the Discovery Channel and has recently authored Reframe: How Curiosity and Literacy Can Define Us. So please, welcome Tinsley Galyean to our show.  Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me here.  Yeah. It’s great to have you and you have a really inspiring nonprofit.  Thank you.  Normally, I don’t have  nonprofits on the show, but yours was an exception because I really like what you’re trying to achieve here. So let’s start with my favorite question, which is, what is your personal why and how are you manifesting it with Curious Learning?  That’s always a good question. Thank you. I’ll take a quick moment to do a little bit of background to lead up to that because I think like most people, my personal why has evolved over time. So I, my background is in computer science, electrical engineering, as well as design and media. I ended up doing my PhD work at the MIT media lab in the early nineties. Then was in the world of technology and media, mostly kids, space, and often had an educational component for a couple decades as a result of that. And then shifted my work more towards kind of nonprofit philanthropic work and was asked to work with the Dalai Lama to start the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. From there, asked to come back to MIT and teach and start to get involved in research projects. One of those research projects was asking whether children could learn to read if the only resource they had was a tablet with some curated apps on it and left to their own devices. This kind of skunks work research project was done in remote Ethiopia and gave kids that had no access to school and no one in the village that were literate that access to these tablets and left them alone for a year. And after a year, they were roughly at the same place. They would’ve been in a well-resourced US kindergarten, which was an astonishing realization. And I was kind of at the right time, at the right place with the right history and the right skills to say, you know, what does this mean? Can we replicate this? Can we scale it? What could the impact be globally if we could make it a reality? And you know, that kind of became the birth of Curious Learning, you know, in terms of getting back to your real question, which is the personal why during that journey I came to believe and understand that a big part of what we're doing as humans in our lifetime is learning and growing.Share on X That’s one of the most rewarding things we can do, and when we can do it for ourselves and we can promote that and encourage that in others, that that’s at the core of our being. I’ve come to a place where I’m working on an entity that not only allows me to personally grow and learn from the process of working on this kind of global stage. But also help my, all the people within my organization learn and grow during their careers and their process and their connections. And we have people throughout the world working with us. And then I also use that as a  platform for helping as many children in the world learn and grow as well. So I can’t think of a kind of better way to feel like I’m doing the work of the greater good. Yeah. That’s amazing. So how is, how can you achieve that, these kids with a tablet that they even know what to do with it and keep it charged? I mean, you see people who are highly educated, forget to charge their mobile phones. I wonder how can you get this who come from very disadvantaged backgrounds to actually be organized enough to even do this? And I think there’s a distinction between kids, and adults too. Right? You know, when we handed out the devices in those first remote villages and we replicated this experiment in a number of places around the world, we don’t even tell the kids how to turn them on. We just give them. And then, you know, if they ask what they should do, we said, you figure it out. And it usually takes about four minutes at a maximum before some kids figured out how to turn it on. And it usually is not more than 20 minutes before every kid has it turned on, and they’re sharing and collaborating and talking to each other and working. It’s, there’s this innate curiosity that when you facilitate it and enable it. Just kind of takes over. And there is something magic about the touchscreen. The touchscreen is unlike a traditional computer interface where you have a keyboard and you have to know your letters. This, the touchscreen is something you really can’t engage with as a pre literate person. So that kind of innate person curiosity is part of the magic that makes it happen. Yeah, that I mean, curiosity is such a huge motivator of people and it’s a huge, huge driver of progress. So this is amazing. So tell me a little bit about Curious Learning as it is in the name of your company as well, and how do you help people grow in a broader terms, maybe in a, you know, 30,000 view. What is blocking people from growing in general, and how do you help them get envelope?  Yeah. So, I talk about this a lot in the book and we can kind of touch on the high levels of it here and there’s a lot more depth in the book, but a big part of what we’ve kind of discovered over our journey over these last 10 years is that we all have beliefs that we hold about how things should work and how things should operate. And that’s certainly true in the educational system around the world, right? Those beliefs can be very helpful for us. They can frame how we act and what we do and help us make decisions about whether something is appropriate or good to engage with or not.Share on X But when we hang on to those beliefs past the time, past, what I would call their expiration date, which is a date when that belief no longer or is inhibiting us from seeing some new possibilities, I tend to refer to them at that point in time as a limiting belief. So one of the things we try to encourage an organization, whether we’re talking to each other within the organization or talking to prospective partners, is to identify those moments when we feel like the conversation is starting to get shut down and kind of dive into it to better understand what’s at play there and what’s going on. And it’s often what we would call a limiting belief. And we have a kind of framework for doing that.  Okay. So that leads us to the theme of our podcast, which is frameworks that any entrepreneur or business leader can apply to their own business and their own situation. So what is the framework here? What is the framework for alleviating limiting beliefs?  Okay, so I’ll give you the high level one, the starting point. There’s a lot more depth in the book and there are a lot of examples, kind of global examples too that are very helpful to see in here as you go through it. But the general premise is that anytime you’re in a conversation with a prospective customer or a client, even somebody within your own organization, you can usually feel into that moment when there’s some resistance. Where either resistance in yourself or in the other person you’re talking to or both and you bumped up against something where people wanna kind of shut down that conversation and often they say something that does feel like it’s an end of the conversation and you know, it’s at those moments we tend to, we have to kind of fight our internal nature to just kind of say, it’s over. Let’s move on. Right. And the question is how do we do two primary things. One is that if there’s any kind of resistance or defensiveness that builds up in ourselves from that having happened, let go of that, make a conscious effort to let go of that in turn. On the other side of that coin is curiosity that we were just talking about, which is get very curious about what’s behind this without judgment, you know, start asking questions. Now questions like, tell me more about what you’re, what you’re thinking, or what kind of experience are you drawing upon that made you think that way or feel that way? And as you ask these questions, you can start to get down to what is the belief that person is holding or even for yourself, what belief you’re holding that’s creating that resistance. Can you give an example?  Well, I’ll give you an example from our World of Curious Learning. We’ll be in a conversation with, say, a Ministry of Education in an African country, and they’ll put forward the idea of using mobile devices to help the kids learn to read. They’ll be like, you know, that’s, that’s not possible. We’re not interested in it. Right. And there’s, we will start probing. Okay, so what’s behind that? What do you, you know, why do you think that’s not possible? We have a lot of evidence that this is possible. We have a number

https://youtu.be/GAHLR_NnQz8 Bill Ryan, Founder of Ryan Consulting, helps organizations maximize their investment in technology and people by ensuring they work together efficiently and effectively, regardless of location. We explore Bill’s journey from technologist to consultant and his mission to connect people “over time and distance” by giving them what they need at the time of need. Bill introduces his Culture of Curiosity Framework, a leadership model designed to foster innovation, engagement, and problem-solving inside organizations. The framework emphasizes being willing to say “I don’t know”, making it safe to ask “why”, encouraging employees to figure out solutions, and provoking thoughtful conversation that sparks collaboration. Bill also shares why curiosity is the foundation of leadership, how leaders can model vulnerability to build trust, and why he views learning and development not as an expense but as a strategic investment in long-term performance and retention. — Create a Culture of Curiosity with Bill Ryan Good day. Dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Bill Ryan, the founder of Ryan Consulting, helping organizations maximize their investment in technology and people by ensuring they work together efficiently, effectively, regardless of location. Bill, welcome to the show. Thanks, Steve. Glad to be here.  Well, I’m excited to have you and, to hear about your personal why and how you are manifesting it in your practice and activities.  I love that question. You told me you were gonna ask it. It made me think for a little bit and it took me back to like my very, very beginning part of my, of my career and it was all about how to use technology to send the message across time and distance. And I think that’s my fascination is my focus has really been centered on how to connect people over time and distance to the things that they need to support their performance at the time of need. And it’s kind of guided me through the various levels of technology of the various boxes we needed, the various places we stored information. But the way I kind of manifested is that it's all about centered on the person and making sure we meet their need at the time of need so that they can be successful.Share on X  That’s fascinating because ultimately you have to meet your clients where they are, and you can’t just put them in a box or put them on a cookie cutter framework and just hope that it’ll do the job you need to figure out what they need and how you adjust to that. Now, this is a good segue because you developed a framework called Strategy On A Page. It’s really a five step process and you call it SOAP. And other than the acronym I’m trying to still figure out what the connection of SOAP and this process is. Maybe you can enlighten me and also tell me about this process that you have come up with.  Well, and I wanna be clear, I didn’t invent this somewhere earlier in my career. I ran across this idea of a strategy on a page, and it was really, and it stuck with me, it has stuck with me through all of my years about how we as, as leaders, can convey our strategy to both our stakeholders, but also our leaders in a clear and succinct manner. So at the end of a process that I’ll talk about in just a minute, is this one pager, a strategy on a page. But to collect it, I have found kind of takes five key steps. And the first part really is about talking to the people in the organization and at all levels. And you said something just a moment ago that I think is so important because where I focus this idea of this soap results in is that it’s not a cookie cutter. So you have to really go talk to the people at all organizations, the part-timers, the hourly employees, the front office, the back office, the middle managers, supervisors, leaders, executives. But you have to really go talk to them and ask ’em a lot of questions ’cause they’re living the work. And then the second step is you listen. You know, poll questions. I’m a big fan of the five why’s. There’s a book on that, and I just gave the entire premise away. You ask why five times and you’ll get probably the good basic root cause of a problem, but you listen to the people and you kind of start to see themes. You can start to synthesize what they’re saying, what they’re living, what they’re experiencing. And more importantly, the things that they can see that would help them do their jobs better so that they’re successful. And after that, you kind of pull all that together. You go talk to leadership, but you frame it in the language of their people. I have found more success when I quote the people by using their words. I don’t, you know, put it, you know, I don’t put Joe Smith under the tray, under the truck right away, but I use that words and, and I wanna be very specific to leaders can understand and help kind of create that bridge of the context of the worker and their work back to the leader. So that they can kind of see it and you frame it in their own words and then you kind of help connect the dots. You help them understand that strategy has to be linked back to the tactical applications. So you bring focus into what will help make the organization move forward. You kind of help them identify the needs versus the wants.Share on X And you kind of help them go through the steps that says, you know, good, fast and cheap. What can you do with the resources you have, with the people you have, with the money you have, with the time you have? And then help them identify the things that they can either revise, replace, or remove.  And that I think is a key part because that’s when the plan kind of gels together. You know, we’re not adding something new to workplace because too many idea, too many times. I know in my career we had, oh, the next great idea, well, we just had one two years ago and we had another one and we’ve never taken them away. So part of this strategy that I do is to help the leadership understand that you know, your workers only can do so many things. So let's take this now that we've kind of helped connect all these dots. And go from a plan towards how we can people…Share on X  Identifying the things that they have to measure, the things that matter to the operations, so those metrics that really matter, being clear what can be done, and then kind of being clear about what can be done to the entire community. So communication’s really important here. You know, you might come up with 10 things that people have identified as like, these are really important, but you’ve also found out you’ve only got good, fast, cheap, you know, people, time, money, that you really can only do three or four of them to do them well. Okay, so, let me just zoom out here because sure there’s a lot in there and I’m afraid, I mean, I find it challenging to keep up and maybe the listeners who do something else motor loans or drive their cars, they will also find it. So the first thing that I’m really trying to grasp or,  grasping here, or maybe it’s, it’s talking to me, is this idea of crowdsourcing solutions from the people in the organization. So as a consultant, you know, sometimes we are guilty of coming in and we have preconceived ideas and we think we can fix things and, we just, you know, wanna be the smart, smartest person in the room or whatever it is. And then we just, you know, vomit ideas. But the level of buy-in into our ideas is gonna be a lot lower than level by in the ideas and the people inside the organizations, and then the other thing that struck me was that you talk about the language that the people are using on the front lines and feed that language back in and creating the context of the work worker or the lower level employee in the organization and synthesize, use the word, synthesize it back to the leadership so that they understand it may be in their own language. What those people are saying in their language. So are these critical components of this, this whole process that you crowdsource the ideas and then you synthesize it and transmit it to leadership and basically help to bridge the communication divide between them, help them figure out the strategy. Is this, how you see it as well?  Absolutely. I think the best thing I can, I can bring into an organization sometimes is the willingness to ask questions that some people aren’t. But I think the people within an organization, you know, the majority of the time, a high majority of the time, already have ideas on how to do things better, faster, cheaper, safer. If you just ask them. And I think, yeah, I’m willing to go ask, you know, Mike, I’m driven by curiosity. You know, those, those people are highly skilled. Ask ’em, they’re experts.  Yeah, no,  that’s definitely, and you know, it, it takes some level of humility to ask questions and not lead with answers, but lead with questions and let other people take the credit for the ideas. And that’s often in short supply and. Plus you bring,the objective, they are outsider as well, right?  So you are, you can ask those dumb questions that the inside people would don’t dare ask because of, you know, they might feel being shamed for them. Okay. So you basically connected that. So I think some of the things you mentioned her was talk to the people, listen and synthesize,  give the feedback, help connect the dots and craft a plan. So what does it take to help connect the dots? Is there like an, an approach that you take or some, is it just your experience of several decades of doing this? You kind of do this intuitively or is there a madness to the method or method to the madness, rather, how to connect these dots. You know, I got 25 years plus of doing this, so there was a little bit of, I have done this a few times, but a lot of times it’s the partnership that I have created with the people in that organization about getting their understanding of what it makes to the stra

https://youtu.be/dQWQko3fGZ8 Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, has devoted his career to helping people grow their businesses by turning contacts into lasting, valuable relationships. We explore Jon’s journey from creating GoldMine, one of the first successful CRMs, to founding Nimble, a relationship-focused CRM that brings contact management back to its roots. Jon shares his personal “Why” — to grow his soul by helping others grow theirs — and explains why relationships, not technology, are the real key to business success. He introduces his signature frameworks: the Five F’s of Relationships (Family, Friends, Food, Fun, and Fellowship) for building authentic connections, the Five E’s of Brand-Building (Educate, Enchant, Engage, Embrace, and Empower) for expanding influence, and the Three P’s (Passion, Plan, Purpose) for achieving personal and professional goals. Jon also describes how Kanban-style workflows and selective automation enable entrepreneurs and teams to manage contacts at scale without losing the human touch. — Build Nimble Relationships with Jon Ferrara Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is John Ferrara, the CEO of Nimble, a pioneering relationship focused CRM company. John has dedicated his career to helping people grow their businesses by turning contacts into lasting valuable relationships. John, welcome to the show.  Thank you, Steve. I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for inviting me for this conversation. Hopefully the listeners are going to be able to take away nuggets that will help them achieve their dreams.  Well, definitely you have a really interesting framework and topic, and business that works on that and in that area. So let’s get to it. But before we start talking about your business, I’d like to ask, what is your personal why and how are you manifesting it through your work at Nimble and Beyond? Steve, I think my personal why is that I am on this planet to grow my soul in the brief period of time that I’m here. And I believe that the best way to grow your soul is by helping others grow theirs. The analogy I like to use is I found that I got better at chess the more people I taught how to play chess. Yeah. I mean, that’s the best way of learning– teaching others.  Yeah. And I think, it’s the best way of growing is growing others. Okay. Well, I couldn’t agree more. It’s the way to multiply yourself or your knowledge in others. That’s definitely a good way to grow.  Yeah. And my summary is the more people you outgrow, the more you will grow.  I mean, it’s the old what was this business?  Zig Ziglar? Zig Ziglar. You know, if you have enough people to get what they want, then you’re gonna get what you want.  It really is the basics, like life is about the basics. It’s not that complicated.  That is true. So tell me a little bit about your work in CRM and then you founded Goldmine, one of the first successful CRMs, and then you are now running Nimble. So what was the lessons from building Goldmine and what inspired you to then move on to Nimble and create something, a next generation CRM.  From my perspective as helping to pioneer contact management– call it Outlook and CRM, call it Salesforce, is at the heart of all that are contacts– their relationships, and that’s why CRM stands for ‘customer relationship management’, and it grew out of the contact management market. You really have to know the past in order to understand the present, and you could actually predict the future if you have a good handle on all of these things.Share on X And contact management started with The Rolodex. As we became civilized into these larger cities, and more and more people were engaging with each other, we had to manage our contacts. And so the Rolodex was the initial step at managing that, and that evolved into what I call the six by nine index card system, which you put a date on a card on the last call and you make a note,  and you file it on the recall date. And then that evolved into the Daytimer, which was a leather based contact tool that had your to-dos and calendars in it. And that’s where I came into this, I was in sales and they basically told me to go get ’em and I had no tools to do it. And I think the best products come from your own need ’cause you’re past about it and you understand the problem. And my problem was not just that I wanted to be better at selling to my prospects and customers, but more than that,  because I recognized that in my sales cycle I was doing enterprise sales to large corporations, but at the same time building relationships with distributors and resellers to try to access customers at their customers at scale. I found that I didn’t work in a vacuum. I worked as part of a larger team, and everybody in that team was touching the customer, and I wanted to run a wire through all of our Daytimers so everybody was on one page, so that no matter who picked up the phone, you knew who you were talking to. ‘What happened? Who did it? What’s gonna happen? Who’s gonna do it?’ That way, you’re all on one page. It’s kind of like when you call American Express, they know who you are, they know what happened and they know what needs to happen. And this didn’t exist in corporate America at that time in 1986, 87, 88. And I wanted to do more than that. I wanted not just a team contact platform, which is the basis of shared contacts with shared history and pending. But I wanted to be able to automate the sales process in order to do not just pipeline management, managing a sales pipeline, which we used to do in spreadsheets, but to be able to do some automation because we all know what we should do, but we don’t do it, ’cause we’re human. We’re too busy, we forget, right? And it’s the follow up and follow through. It takes 22 touches before somebody’s in a buying cycle, and most people give up to the first to third touch. Why? It’s a lot of work to call people up and send them emails and, and manage all those workflows and processes. So I trademarked automated processes and that was the basis of email marketing. And so my history in conduct management, CRM Salesforce automation and email marketing is– I was in the infancy of it and I created it to solve my own problems, but it turned out that millions of people had the same problem.Share on X  Okay. So that is fascinating. Now, a lot of people have misgivings about CRMs because they feel like it’s overwhelming or they don’t have a good overview of what the information is in it, and then you have to update, and the automation makes a lot of sense, if you can update it with automation, but ultimately, how does one use a CRM to build relationships? So what, what does it take? Is it just reaching out and sending email automations or  it’s something more than that.  It’s way more than that, Steve and I like to reduce that to know technology. Let’s just go to the basics. How I used to teach people before there was technology. Do you see my walls, Steve? If you look closely at my walls, you could see the books I read, the degree, the school I went to, the records I collect, the knickknacks, the photographs, all these things give you a clue into who I am. And I, and relationships are built on what I call the five F’s of life– family, friend, food, fun, and fellowship. These are the commonalities of life that build the deeper connections that stay across time. It takes 60% of your energy to get a car up to speed, to get a rocket into orbit, or to initiate a relationship. It takes very little to keep it going. And when trouble hits the road– tariffs, price changes, supply chain issues, your prospects and customers will stay with you. If you've built a relationship, you've done what you said you're going, you've said what you're gonna do and done what you said you're gonna do.Share on X The basics of business. And all this happens by that initial connection where you’ve done your homework, you know who the person is, what their business is about, how you might add value, and you’ve broken the ice with sharing some commonalities to get them. To build the trust and intimacy about your commonalities. You went to the school, you’re from this place. You like that band, whatever it is that gets them to open up to you about their business issues, which as a professional, you could then solve. In today’s world it is overwhelming to be able to do that at the scale of the relationships that we’re building. And so we need a way to organize the contacts. So let’s forget about CRM. I don’t like acronyms, and I don’t like tools that are designed to command and control you, and that’s what CRM has become. When I pioneered CRM, it was about relationships. It was about contacts, it was called contact management. And those things were adopted individually by sales people ’cause they saw the value in it for their engagement and relationships. CRM happened after management saw all those sales people running around with those contact managers and they wanted to command and control the database and to track what the sales reps were doing. And Siebel was sort of evolved and then Salesforce, and that’s why CRM failed is because people don’t use it. It’s not built for them. It’s built for management and it really doesn’t help them. And today, if you buy a CRM, it’s not enough for the sales person. They have to go out and buy ZoomInfo to enrich the leads with data about people and companies. You have to buy Outreach IO to automate the process of scraping leads from LinkedIn and basically putting ’em on sequences to qualify them. And you have to buy a sales navigator to be able to manage your LinkedIn contacts and it’s overwhelming. And so I think that many people, most people don’t use a CRM. There’s 225 million global businesses. Less than 1% use any CRM because CRM isn’t built for relationships anymore. It’s built for command and control and reporting, and that’s what I’m trying to do is brin

https://youtu.be/x9I054pknWM Sri Kaza, serial CEO (most recently of BriteCap Financial) and author of Un-Convention: A Small Business Strategy Guide, joins me to share how unconventional thinking and the Trust Equation Framework can transform client relationships and small-business strategy. Sri explains how he discovered entrepreneurship through his own career, from Y2K programmer to global sales executive to CEO, and why developing people is at the heart of his personal “Why.” We explore Sri’s memorable experience selling software in Japan—where karaoke, izakayas, and takoyaki roulette taught him more about trust than any sales manual—and how David Maister’s Trust Equation Framework — credibility × reliability × intimacy ÷ self-interest — later helped him make sense of it. Sri also unpacks the principles behind his book Un-Convention: why small businesses can leverage their proximity to customers, nimbleness, and purpose to outperform bigger competitors, and how to avoid “empty-calorie” expansion by focusing on the right customers. — Drink Yourself to Trust with Sri Kaza Good day. Dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast, and my guest today is Sri Kaza, a serial CEO, most recently of a FinTech company called Bright Cap Financial. But importantly, he is the author of Unconvention: A Small Business Strategy Guide. Sri, welcome to the show.  Thanks for having me, Steve. Appreciate the opportunity to chat.  You have a very fascinating story. So let’s dive in. But let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal why and what are you doing to manifest it in your businesses and in your practice?  So, you know, my personal why is I love developing people and getting the most out of myself and helping them get the most out of themselves and it’s kind of led me to down the path of writing this book and getting out and working with small businesses because, you know, entrepreneurs are a fantastic, I’d say, lever for me to help somebody kind of build something or get the most got to themselves. To me, giving back in this way is something that’s just, feels almost natural, feels like something that I can really feel good about and do more of. Okay, so why are entrepreneurs so close to your heart?  Well, you know, I didn’t realize it until much later in my career, but I, you know, I learned that I’m kind of an entrepreneur myself, you know, looking backwards. It’s pretty easy to tell that, but I wouldn’t have known, or I wouldn’t have thought about it that way, you know, growing up and when I look around and look at the people I’ve mentored or worked with today, I get most inspired by the people who find ideas and kind of make the most out of them when they put ’em into entrepreneurship.  Well, awesome. So you have been running different companies. I mean, you, you talked before and I learned that you traveled around the world as a sales executive and, and CEO. So what’s the most memorable story from your international travels that you could share with us?  When I was really young, I’d started my career as an engineer. I started out as a, I thought I’d be a chemical engineer. It turned out I was gonna be a programmer because it was around the time of Y2K and every business in the world wanted to kind a rewrite their software to do something different, get out of the big Y2K bug. I flipped that early career being a programmer into sales. When I learned that, you know, an important piece of selling software was to get somebody credible in the room who could explain how the software or the technology worked. I did so well that my superior said, ‘Hey, why don’t you, why don’t you go out to Japan? We’re about to have a product in Japan and we need somebody there to help us sell that product.’ So, of course, you know, at 20, I don’t know, 22, 23, I really didn’t know much about anything. Of course, I thought I could do whatever they asked and I’m perfectly capable. What? Learn a foreign language and live in another country for a few years and, and sell millions of dollars of software to people I don’t know. Sure. Why not? Right? Of course I can do that. So, you know, the stories from there and I’ve gotten probably more than we could possibly share in the time that we have. But then the source from there. One of the first things that started to sink in is I got immediate credibility showing up because I was a foreigner. And at the time, and I don’t know that this is true anymore, but at the time when I showed up coming in from the US, coming from California all of the people I interacted with, you must know a lot about technology because you’re an American and that’s where all of this, you know, you’re from the San Francisco. That’s where all this technology stuff is happening. And you know, maybe I knew a little bit more than the folks around me, but it’s not like I was some genius or it’s not like half of what I was saying was stuff I had I hadn’t learned like days earlier. But nonetheless, yeah, I could really talk to people and, you know, hung on every word about what our technology could do. But what was wild was we got there and the software that was on its way still wasn’t ready. So for folks who don’t know back then in like the year 2000, 2001 computer languages, mostly all the code that was written for American companies, it would share language itself, the English language in single byte characters. So you’ve got 256 bytes that you could, or different combinations of bits and, you know, bits to get to a byte. That means 256 different letters, capital letters, lowercase letters, period, all that wonderful stuff in Japan. You couldn’t represent characters that way. You needed a double byte, right? You need two different bytes, so way more accommodations of possibilities. And just like pre Y2K, there was these issues where, oh wait, the calendar dates for the century weren’t there. Here, the data structures weren’t there for just common language translation. My engineering team at the company I was at was working hard to kind of put that in place, but it took six months to a year to kind of sell some of this expensive software, these big enterprises. So they said, get out there, sell it, and by the time you’re done selling it, we’ll have it ready. So, I’m out there and I’m meeting people doing some, you know, conversations with businesses and mostly I’m showing them slides ’cause there’s no software to show.  Right, right. And half of the meetings didn’t even have slides, just, you know, talked. But what I really found interesting was most of the time I’m interacting with my potential prospects. We weren’t in meeting rooms, we weren’t having meeting discussions on what the software did or anything about their plans for how they might use the software. We were sitting in bars or izakayas or karaoke places, drinking, and the thing that really stuck with me was it took me almost six months to get the first big deal done, right? We drank with these guys twice a month, maybe three times a month. And slowly progressing through their organization, like getting to the next level of decision making. The next level as a super maker, you could tell you were seeing success when the drinking party started to get bigger, like we’d go drinking, we wouldn’t even have a meeting. The next day we’d go drinking again. Okay. We’d have a meeting, you know, three weeks later, four weeks later, we’d go drinking. But now there’d be a new guy, more senior guy who joined. And you’d slowly like, oh, we’re getting there deeper into like the real decision maker. We’re navigating the organization. But really, quite honestly, it was just a lot of drinking. Fun stuff, fun stories. We’d go around and the first time I’d had something called Takoyaki which is this little grilled dough ball with octopus inside, tasty Japanese treat. But a fun game they’ll play when they’re out drinking is they’ll order Takoyaki roulette, which is a Takoyaki balls all look the same. One of ’em has a big chunk of wasabi in there, so when you bite into it, woo yellow wasabi. So, I remember going out, you know, eating with them and you know, we get this order. I’m looking at the table saying, oh, that looks good. Let me grab one, eat it. Great. Everyone’s staring at me and I’m like, did I commit like a faux pa? Did I go too fast? Eh, it seems like I’m okay. I’m okay. And then they all watch me and they watch me eat it and I’m like, huh, this is interesting. And then I, you know, I finish it. Then of course the next couple of guys grab some and then one of ’em like spits it out and like, gross and everybody’s laughing and I’m like, what? Why are you laughing at this guy? He didn’t like it. But I, you know, this whole time I’m going out to meet these guys and all they really want to do is ask me about what my life is like in California, what I think of Japan, what I think of Japanese girls, like nothing to do with work. And just like, you know, goofing off six months in. Right? Finally, what our biggest, biggest meeting comes up and we get the meeting, it’s in like a week or two, and everybody in the office is celebrating because the Japanese partner I was working with realized that actually, because we have that meeting with the boss man who actually is gonna make the decision, the deal’s already done. And I’m thinking to myself, you know, I still haven’t demoed any of the software. We still don’t know like what’s the pricing? What’s this? And the partner I was working with explained to me is, look, this is about relationships, this is about having a relationship with the companies where they really know how to work with each other, where they, they trusted to kind of bring the right software in this whole six months of these interactions, it wasn’t about trying to convince them that your software is good, right? Because the software is good. It’s about convincing them that the partnership is good. And so to me, that really sunk

https://youtu.be/70wPvPbdvwg Patrick Seaton, President and Owner of Innovative Management Tools and creator of the Change OS™ Framework, helps leaders and organizations proactively navigate change with clarity and structure. Drawing on decades as a corporate manager facing growth, chaos, and constant change, Patrick built tools to give leaders a roadmap for facilitating change instead of simply reacting to it. We explore Patrick’s journey from survival-mode middle manager to building 28 frameworks for change facilitation, culminating in Change OS™. Patrick explains why traditional “change management” became a messy junk drawer of tactics, and how the Change OS™ Framework reframes it into seven clear steps. In this conversation he walks us through four of them—Change Management, Change Preparation, Change Enablement, and Change Readiness—showing how proactive preparation of people, skills, and motivation creates far better outcomes than simply “dealing with it.” Patrick also shares why people don’t actually resist change—they resist being changed—how to create internal champions who spread buy-in, and why slowing down up front helps organizations go faster later. — Don’t Change People with Patrick Seaton Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Patrick Seaton, the president and owner of Innovative Management Tools and the creator of Change OS. Patrick, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, Steve. It’s great to be here. Well, I’m into different OS’s, Summit OS, Strategy OS, all that stuff. And when I saw that you created Change OS, I was super excited and interested. as to what this is. So, we’re going to get into it, but let me first ask you, what is your personal “Why” and how are you manifesting it in your business? My personal “Why” really starts back many years ago, even decades, when I was in corporate as a middle manager. And we had lots of growth, lots of change, lots of chaos, and nobody was really helping us. And so, I started my company to create tools to help facilitate change. And it became really my “Why,” because too many people within a company are struggling with how do we drive the change, navigate the changes. And that became my passion to say, you know what, I want to help people, give them a roadmap, if you will, and tools that they need so that they can do what they do best,Share on X which is their job, and not worry about how am I going to get the change. So it started off as survival, turned into 28 frameworks, and then turned into the Change OS. So it’s had a lot of history. Yeah, that’s fascinating. Let me ask you a stupid question. Why is change management even a thing? Why is it important? Well, change management itself is the term that came out 70 years ago. And unfortunately, over those 70 years, everything and anything that has to do with change, we’ve kind of thrown into the same bucket as change management. And that was the impetus for creating the Change OS because that drawer, that junk drawer called change management, has gotten way too messy and unorganized. So change management is a piece of the Change OS, but thinking about it from a level up, it's important for us to go into changes with some sort of roadmap, blueprint, steps, because there are many people involved.Share on X Everyone has different responsibilities, and we have to keep it organized so that we can keep it moving.  Change management in the traditional sense has just a few who really understand it. And the rest of us are just kind of, well, I guess they’ll tell us what to do. So, change management is important. My question is really, why is change such a big deal for companies? I mean, life is all about change. I mean, as an entrepreneur, as a coach, I mean, all I see is everything is changing all the time. The change is happening faster and faster. So even handling it as a separate category is kind of anachronistic in my mind. Is this the opposite state of affairs that like stability is the normal thing and then change is kind of the unusual thing when you have to change something, otherwise you can keep everything as it was? Maybe I’m missing something. No, you’re right. Change is happening faster and faster. And there are statistics showing that just in the last five years, from a company change, departmental change, things are happening faster and faster. The change is always there. But what we’ve done more so in the past is that we react to the change as opposed to proactively navigating the change.  So we’re just trying to deal with it. Something comes up, triggers the change. Yes, there are those strategic changes that we need to make, but a lot of the changes that companies go through is not because of their doing, it’s an outside factor. So we are reacting to it, but even in the reaction, we don’t really have that how are we now proactively going to handle the change? Instead, we just, well, we’re going to deal with it.  Well, dealing with it is not really the best way, especially when you think about the different altitudes within a company.Share on X So is this a big thing, big company thing? No. Oh, no. Or even for small companies too? No, even solopreneurs. I mean, we deal with change all the time. because we have to continually adjust and pivot and move as a company is small and growing, and you’re getting new staff in, new products, new markets, all of that is change. Okay. So let’s talk about change. Let’s talk about Change OS. So this podcast is Management Blueprint and it’s all about business frameworks. Now the Change OS, as I understand, it’s got seven parts to it. So that’s maybe too much for us to absorb on this podcast. But can you tell me the first three or four steps of Change OS and what it does and how it came about and how to use it? Sure. So as I said, I, after 30 years in change and saying, it’s just not really organized because it’s too big. There’s too much in the bucket. So I stepped back and I said, let’s think, let me think about the life cycle of change. and what it goes through and separate the milestones, if you will, into how a company can navigate that change. There is a flow to the seven formulas, but the first one is actually what I call Change Management. So I retained the title, but I defined or redefined what really is Change Management. And Change Management is asking ourselves, what do we want to do? Why do we want to do it?  And who will be the person responsible for championing this? That’s it. That’s the management side. We have to understand that piece. So what, why, and who? What, why, and who? Whereas before it was everything. Now it’s just what, why, and who. After that, the next formula is Change Preparation. So we’ve got this good idea. We need to do this. We want to do this. We’re thinking about doing this. The next stop on the train is, okay, how prepared are we today if we decide to move forward? Let’s take an inventory. Let’s think about it.  What are we missing? Let’s not just go running down the road, not considering what we’re going to need to have and then later stop and have to backtrack and regroup. So let’s spend a little bit of time thinking about. Are we really prepared for this? And if we’re prepared enough, let’s go. If we’re not, maybe we should spend a little bit of time filling some gaps so that we are more prepared before we launch into it and think about the different pieces. So we know what, why, and who. We’re prepared. We want to move forward. So can you give an example? What does the preparation look like? Well, so preparation is, let’s think about the vision and direction, is that really nailed down? What will be the processes and procedures that people will need to, across the company, who’s ever involved in this change, what will they need to have as the processes and procedures? Who are the people and resources we’re going to need in order to carry this out? What are the training and skills that those people will need to have? What is the motivation for the people while we’re doing this? And then do we have action plans? And when you don’t have any one of those elements present or thought through, there is a predictable outcome on the backside. So, for example, if you go into it and it’s really not everything’s in place, but the people are really not clear in the vision and direction because it hasn’t really been nailed down and communicated, the result is you’re going to have confusion when people start going because they’re just going they’re going to make up their own vision and direction. Yeah, that makes sense. If people don’t have the training and skills, they’ll be frustrated because they’re struggling to do the work that’s needed to be done. So there is a predictable outcome for each element if it’s not there. And unfortunately, we run into, we launch projects, initiatives, where we haven’t thought through multiple. So we’re in a, somewhere down the line, a confused state of frustration with anxiety, and we’re not moving forward.  And people go, oh my gosh, this change is just so complicated. Not really. Let’s just start plugging the holes and then we can move forward. Okay, so we plug the holes, we identified, we prepared ourselves, we have the processes, the people, resources, the training, motivation, we know why we’re doing it, what we’re doing, with whom, what’s the next step? What is step three? The next step is what I call Change Enablement. And that is where the people come in, the people side. Who are the change agents? The change champions, the change managers, the change specialists, whatever they’re called. And they could be called supervisors, managers, individual employees. But who are the people that we’re going to need to bring into this initiative in order to take it forward into the organization? Because senior management will define the what, why, and who, and they’re usually a sponsor. They’ll say, yes, okay, we’re ready. Let’s

What fuels a business? It all starts with the dream. In this episode, we look at lessons from the legendary Michael E. Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, who first championed the idea that entrepreneurs must cultivate their dream before anything else. From there, we explore why emotion is the spiritual energy behind every great business, movement, or mission. Without it, even brilliant ideas and top teams fall flat. With it, you attract missionaries instead of mercenaries—people who believe in your vision and help you build something that lasts. Defining a higher purpose is an overlooked advantage. Bring that spiritual dimension into your company and your people can put a small dent in the universe. — Bring in the Spiritual Dimension Hi everyone. Today I want to share something really special. I recently had the honor on interviewing the great Michael Gerber, yes, the author of The E-Myth Revisited on my podcast. Now, Michael is close to 89 years old, but let me tell you, he’s still sharp as a samurai’s blade. During our conversation, Michael emphasized just how important it is for every entrepreneur to cultivate their dream. Because the dream, it fuels your passion for the business. And once it’s alive, it becomes the energy behind everything else. Your role as a thinker, a storyteller, a leader, a designer, a builder, a launcher, and ultimately a grower. It really hit me. All of this is about tapping into one thing, emotion. Think about it. You can have brilliant ideas, unique assets, and a team of full of A-players. But without emotion, nothing happens. Emotion is the fuel in the tank of your business. And doesn’t that sound familiar? Every great religion, every movement, every political ideology in history, what did they all do? They tapped into the spiritual power of emotion to rally people. So why would it be any different in a business? Here’s the real question. Do you want mercenaries or missionaries helping you to grow your business? If it’s the latter, then you need a mission that excites you and inspires your people. The good news? Every company already has a seed of a great mission inside it. At Summit OS®, we call this the Company Why™. And here’s the thing: it’s not about inventing it—it’s about unearthing it, polishing it, and sharing it boldly. Let me give you a few powerful examples. “Liberate people from unhealthy and unpleasant tasks”. That’s the ‘Why’ of Combi Packaging Systems. A maker of packaging machines that help people not have to climb high ladders or work in dusty and steamy places. “Facilitate people’s independence and self-determination”. That’s the ‘Why’ of RackN that manages physical server parks. “Transform people to help fulfill their potential and enjoy a better social life”. That’s the ‘Why’ of Eos Rejuvenation, a facial plastic surgery in Los Angeles. And finally, “Help entrepreneurs reach their Ideal Lives while creating a positive impact”. That’s our very own ‘Why’ at Summit OS Group. Defining a higher purpose is the number one missed opportunity for business owners, and yet it’s one of the most powerful ways to create excitement, pride, attract top talent, and spark creativity in your business. So don’t forget to bring that spiritual dimension into your company because when you do, your people will begin to put a small dent in the universe. If you’d like to dive deeper, check out SummitOS.co for more videos on this concept. And until next time, keep growing.

https://youtu.be/JgJaZ9-fg-E Steven Wilson, CEO of Parallel 42 Coaching & Consulting, Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and Six Sigma Black Belt, helps leaders unlock potential by applying Patrick Lencioni’s Working Genius Framework to transform teams and organizations. His mission is to guide people and businesses to be better at who they are, what they do, and how they serve others. We explore Steven’s journey from Lean Six Sigma process expert to leadership coach and how the Working Genius Framework helps individuals identify whether they’re in the right seat, boosts productivity by focusing 80% on natural strengths and 20% on personality, and increases team collaboration. Steven explains how the six types of genius align with the phases of any project and how leaders can recognize where people are most engaged to build resilient, high-performing teams.He also shares why organizational “health” often matters more than “smarts,” how hungry, humble, and smart behaviors strengthen culture, and how servant leadership creates accountability, trust, and long-term success. — Build a Genius Team with Steven Wilson Good day, dear listeners. It’s Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Steven Wilson, a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, a Six Sigma Black Belt, and the CEO of Parallel 42 Coaching and Consulting. Steven, I hope I didn’t butcher this. Welcome to the show. No, not at all. I appreciate the opportunity, Steve. Good to be on. Okay, I had to focus on the Parallel 42 because I know another company called Parallel37 here in Richmond, Virginia. And yeah, I just didn’t want to confuse. But anyhow, exciting to have you here and I’m excited about your “Why,” to hear your “Why” and how you manifested it in your coaching practice. Yeah, well, again, appreciate the opportunity and my “Why” really comes from, and I really, I think I discovered this even more so in working with Patrick Lencioni and some of his programs. The “Why” is I really enjoy helping individuals or helping organizations. One of my downfalls, we can always talk about how strengths can become weaknesses. There’s a bright side and a dark side to our strengths. And so, when I happen to hear somebody say, hey, I’d like to do X, I’m generally all in and I’m asking, how can I help? And so that’s really the foundation or the basis behind why I wanted to begin and do what I do is looking for opportunities. How can I help individuals become better at who they are, what they do, and how can I do the same thing within organizations? Yeah, that’s great. Organizations are made up of people and when you help organizations, you help people and then organizations also serve other people, so there’s the multiplier effect. That’s exciting. And I’m excited about you being a kind of a Patrick Lencioni expert because I love Patrick Lencioni’s stuff as well. I think he’s got really good insight in the human element and the human dynamic in companies. So let’s talk a little bit about that. So how did you get to choose Patrick Lencioni’s portfolio of products and tools to work with? Yeah, and I’ve always been a fan of Lencioni and his work. And for those of you that might be familiar, and those that are truly experts of Patrick Lencioni, you may challenge my expert status, but so I appreciate that, Steve. But what I found about them is that they are so down to earth. Their advice. Because there’s many things that are not new under the sun. And Lencioni has taken these concepts and these ideas and all of these things and his practice as an organizational and an industry leader. And he dials into the people. He dials into the people side of things because I think, again, he looks at it from a, yes, a technical, a very high level, but then he’s able to communicate these things in a very applicable way.  And that’s why Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Ideal Team Player, Working Genius, all of those things resonate with me so much. Because even in my work with Lean Six Sigma, I like to focus on the people side of change, the people side of improvement.Share on X Matter of fact, just on LinkedIn today, I saw somebody had made a post that one of their leaders early on after college said, hey, yes, the technical skill set is critical, but you can’t lose sight of the people. And that’s the reality because technical things can be taught. People things, we really have to work with those individuals. And if we’ve got the right people, wow, we can do amazing things. And so I like to work with individuals that recognize their need for change, their need for development, and just help them along that journey. And when we talk about Parallel 42, the name of it comes from, I’m from Iowa, many know it as a flyover state. It confused us with Ohio and Idaho, but we’re right on the parallel, 42 is where we’re located. But then also parallel in the sense that we come alongside, we’re gonna work alongside and walk alongside with our individuals and the organizations. And then we also have parallel paths where I work with profit, nonprofit, faith-based organizations as well. And so in parallel and in working with those organizations, but the emphasis is people. Yeah. And people are really important. I mean, this is all what companies are. They are a group of people committed to a cause, and if you get them to be invested, not just mentally and technically, but emotionally into your cause and work for your company, and you can bring the best out of them, then you’re gonna go a long way. And one of the things I like that Lencioni talks about is this distinction between healthy and smart. So, most companies who are in business for any length of time, they’re smart enough. They’re 80% smart, 90%. You can tweak the dial a little bit, but the healthy, there’s so much upside for most companies to create a more cohesive team and the more healthy, drama-free team that care about the purpose of the company. There’s a huge opportunity there. Right, because when drama increases, productivity goes down, accountability goes down. And so the more things that you can do to eliminate that drama, reduce it at least, the better off the organization is as a whole. Absolutely, absolutely. So let’s talk about Working Genius. This is a book that Lencioni came out with probably two or three years ago, and it turned into a program, and a lot of coaches teach it. I also have taught it to my clients, but I don’t profess, I’m not certified. I don’t want to say it loudly because my clients might listen to this, but I didn’t do a stellar job on it. I think the product was so good that it was easy to do an adequate job. Yes. So tell me a little bit about, and our audience, about the Working Genius framework and what it does. Yeah. So I love tying in Working Genius with some of other, Lencioni’s other works that we talked about, The Ideal Team Player, we’re looking at then also Five Dysfunctions of a Team. And I think what really kind of transpires here is The Ideal Team Player speaks to having the right people.Share on X As you mentioned, hungry, humble, and smart. So Ideal Team Player focuses on that component, having the right people. Working Genius helps us identify that right seat piece. Right people, right seat, and then Five Dysfunctions of a Team, that’s all about right behaviors. And so what I do is I’ll do this trifecta where I’ll include all three of those disciplines in working with individuals and organizations, but specifically, Working Genius is one that I have most recently been working with and working with organizations. And Working Genius came out of, as many times things come out of, frustration of Patrick himself. Why do I feel frustrated at the end of my day? What is it that I do? And why am I frustrating others with what I do? And all of these things there. So Working Genius, the framework, and we talk about it, there’s many different assessment types. There’s Myers-Briggs, DISC. I always like to say, Myers-Briggs, Briggs and Stratton, Braxton Hicks, the mothers in the crowd generally get that joke there. But what’s different about Working Genius is that it’s 80% productivity, 20% personality. So it focuses on how we work and how we work together and how we work best. So if we can dial into the strength and the power of Working Genius and the assessment and the results and get a full understanding of it, we’re going to become a more productive organization. And so Working Genius, it stems from that there are six geniuses and they go Wonder, and it spells out WIDGET if you need it to write something down there, but Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanize, Enablement, and Tenacity. So those are the six. So the framework works and says that we have two geniuses, those things that just really fill our cup. So I’ll use the example of a Yeti. Generally, I have a Yeti sitting around here, but I don’t. A Yeti cup, we pour coffee into that, and it’s going to stay hot for a very long time. So, our energy is gonna be high. So that’s where we want our individuals, our team, ourselves, operating the majority of the time. Because when we're high energy, when we're enjoying what we're doing, we're generally going to produce greater work and have a greater impact upon the organization.Share on X I’ll skip to the end. On the end, we have the frustrations. So that’s that coffee in a paper cup. Those are the things that the minute we begin doing them, they suck the life out of us. As you mentioned, I’m a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and part of that is data and statistics. When I have to sit down and do data and statistics, it just sucks the life out of me. What I think is a half an hour has only been five minutes. So, it doesn’t mean that we don’t have that skill set. It just means that we don’t get energy from doing it. And those are our frustrations. So we’ll have two frustrations. And then in the middle, we have what’s called the working competencies. And the working comp

https://youtu.be/PniriBnM0mo Legacy may not be the number 1 driver for most business owners—but it’s close. Right after financial security, wealth creation, and personal freedom. In this video, we explore why building a successful business is one of the most powerful, controllable, and lasting ways to make an impact that lives on long after you’re gone. You’ll hear real examples of entrepreneurs who started late and still changed the world—like Colonel Sanders, Arianna Huffington, and Ray Kroc—and discover why business can be a greater legacy-builder than sports, politics, or entertainment. We’ll also look at how great businesses multiply impact—helping employees, customers, and entire communities—while setting you up to attract A-players and create something that stands the test of time. If you’re ready to grow your company faster, with less risk and cost, tune in—and remember: it’s never too late to start building your legacy. — What Will Be Your Legacy? What will be your legacy? “Legacy” isn’t the most important driver for most business owners to grow their business—but it’s damn close. Right behind financial security, wealth creation, and achieving personal freedom. I’ve always believed that building a successful business is the most straightforward way to create a legacy that lives on well after you’re gone. Sure, you can do it in other ways through athletic achievement, becoming a rock or movie star, writing bestselling books, or achieving top political office. But creating a business often requires fewer sacrifices of youth, health, and integrity. It’s also far more controllable. Making it big as an athlete is usually decided in childhood. It’s mostly a function of parenting an environment. Becoming a rock star or a movie star also hinges on youth, inborn talent, or early desire. Again, largely environment-driven. Becoming a famous author is exceedingly rare and often takes writing dozens of books before one gets recognized, let alone achieves name recognition. Political careers are mostly self-created, but it can be a long road to breaking free of party whips and agendas—if that ever happens. Turning politics into a lasting positive legacy is even rarer. No more than a handful of examples emerged each century, if that. Now compare all of these to building a business legacy. Business success is rarely threatened by injuries, addictions, or character assassinations. You can start at nearly any age. Martha Stewart was a model, caterer, and author before launching her media company in her fifties. Ray Kroc, a milkshake machine salesman, saw potential in the McDonald’s burger stand and launched a franchise model at age 52. John Pemberton, a Civil War veteran and pharmacist, created the original formula for Coca-Cola at the age of 55 while seeking an alternative to morphine. Arianna Huffington, after a successful career as an author and commentator at age 55, launched The Huffington Post in 2005, which became a leading digital news platform. Colonel Harland Sanders, after a series of jobs and running a gas station restaurant, began franchising his fried chicken recipe at age 65, using his first Social Security check to fund the idea. And you can build quietly sneaking up on competitors until it’s too late for them to catch up. The best part? A great business is an impact multiplier. You can help your employees, their families, and all the customers who benefit from your superior products and services. If you own a viable business, you have a massive opportunity to grow it and make it highly profitable so you can attract and retain A-players and build a lasting pyramid for yourself. The heroes of our age are business entrepreneurs who change the world around us. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Next, and CEO of Pixar. Revolutionized personal computing, digital animation, digital music, and cracked the code on tablet computing and smartphones. Sam Mond, CEO of OpenAI is shaping the future of AI safety and access, aiming to democratize tools that augment productivity and intelligence for all. Manny Perkins, founder of Combo Made Design, simple and Inclusive, empowering millions of small businesses, nonprofits. And educators who communicate professionally, often for free. Voki founder of 23 and Me, disrupted traditional healthcare by giving people access to their DNA data leading to personalized health insights and preventative care. Voyance Sled creator of the Ocean Cleanup is a young entrepreneur that can follow the world’s most visible environmental crisis, removing plastic from oceans and rivers with scalable technology. So what are you doing to create a lasting impact? Are you pulling on all levers, including hiring a leadership team coach who can help you get there faster, with less risk and less cost? Well, check out our guide page on Summit OS for ideas. Remember Colonel Sanders — it’s not too late for you to build a legacy that lasts. Keep growing.

https://youtu.be/ySHMeFn4kPA Andy Hite, Founder of Scaling Minds Coaching & Consulting, is on a mission to help leaders navigate complexity, align their teams, and drive meaningful results by transforming both self-leadership and organizational leadership. We explore Andy’s Six Shifts Leadership Operating System: Trust, Candor, Ownership, Empowerment, Alignment, and Leadership—a framework that turns groups of executives into high-performing, strategically aligned leadership teams. Andy shares why self-leadership is the starting point for culture change, how to move from hub-and-spoke decision-making to empowered departmental ownership, and why peer accountability and “The Gym of Life” are essential for lasting leadership growth. — Take Your People to the Gym of Life with Andy Hite Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Andy Hite, the founder of Scaling Minds Coaching and Consulting, helping leaders navigate complexity, align their teams, and drive meaningful results. Andy, welcome to the show. Hey, Steve. Thanks for having me. I’m excited for the conversation. Yeah, you’ve got a great story. You’ve got a great business. And let’s get into it with my favorite question, which is, what is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your business? Yeah, I love that question. Because most people can answer what is your “Why.” They might reach for something, but I love the follow-up. What are you actually doing to manifest it? Because that’s the part that a lot of people don’t always consider. I have a personal and a professional “Why.” My personal “Why,” I really landed on seven, eight years ago. My personal “Why” is to show my children that they can do and be and achieve anything they want. My kids are now 19, twin daughters, by the way. And as most parents do when they’re younger, as they’re growing up, we tell them these things. Hey, you can do anything, you could be anything, you can create anything. But I was confronted maybe eight years ago with walking the walk, not just talking the talk. I had a corporate gig and the thought and idea of starting this business was there. And for a while, I kind of put blinders on because truthfully, as many of your listeners can imagine, I’m sure you can imagine as well, leaving something that’s steady and secure to start over in your forties is really, really scary, and most people, I talked to a lot of people, entrepreneurs, they’re like, I can’t do it. I have a family of obligations, I have bills. And I was confronted with that. I’ve been telling my kids this forever, am I living it? Am I actually going after the things that I want? And so I didn’t want my words to be hollow. So I started walking the walk. I left that work and I started this business. And every day, as entrepreneurs know, can be a struggle as we’re building. And so it’s really just showing them, hey, if you're willing to put in the work, you can create anything. You can be anything.Share on X So that’s a long-winded answer, Steve, of what my personal “Why” is and how I get up every morning thinking about, don’t be a hypocrite, go do the work and show them. I tell this to my kids as well, that the biggest thing about being a father is that, or any parent, is that there’s nowhere to hide. So, you really have to evoke, otherwise you are a hypocrite and it’s not always easy. You have to really do the right thing, not just pretend you’re doing the right thing because they’re gonna see it. Yeah, well, and I didn’t want my words to just be for them or hollow. So I was forced to kind of walk the walk and thank God I did. Yeah. Okay, well, I’m sure that there is another motivation behind this. It’s not just the show for the kids. You’ve got to love what you’re doing. So, tell me a little bit about what you do and specifically you develop the leadership operating system called Six Shifts. I’m very curious for you to talk about that and to share with our audience what it’s about. Sure, happy to. Just in terms of what we do, I started out as an executive coach, typically just working with CEOs, senior leaders. My passion is leadership. So, I am on a mission to educate folks the difference between management, getting things done, moving things down the line, and leadership, which is more transformational. How do we take this thing and grow it into a bigger, better thing, something different? And so I really then started working with leadership teams, which is the bulk of what I do now. Working with leadership teams, helping them coalesce as a team and working together. I kind of think of the work that we do like a leadership team mechanic. How do we tighten this, fix this, replace this so that we’re a high performing machine and not just a group of five, six men and women together to move the thing along. And so that’s the work we do. We work with leadership teams in small to mid-cap organizations all across the country. Yeah, that’s lovely. So why did you feel like you wanted to develop an operating system for leadership? Well, a lot of it stemmed from me trying to organize my thoughts. In working with teams, it became clear where the obstacles were and where the misalignments were. And so we would often work on those elements, but in the beginning had no real system to help teams move through. And also no real system for me to help once we get here. And then where do we go? So, it was just sort of born organically from the work that we were doing and what we were seeing teams struggle with. I just sort of codified all those thoughts and put it into something that I frankly can understand and clients can understand so that they can see oh we’re gonna start here and then hopefully we’ll end here. Yeah, okay. So, it’s basically you productized the system so what are the Six Shifts? So, the Six Shifts are starting with trust. This isn’t really unique to me, Patrick Lencioni, Brene Brown, many of the bigger thought leaders in the leadership world are all in agreement that trust is the foundation for all teamwork.Share on X And we’re not talking necessarily just transactional trust. Do I trust that you’re gonna show up on time or do I trust that if I loan you trust that you’re going to show up on time? Or do I trust that if I loan you something, you’re going to return it? Really more, frankly, vulnerability based trust as Lencioni talks about if we can, as Lencioni says, strip down emotionally buck naked in front of our peers and colleagues, they tend to trust us, they lean on us, they allow us to be candid with them and have really good productive conversation without it being personal or without conflict being something that gets in our way. In fact, good conflict helps to build us and the team and the products and services that we deliver. And so we start the first shift in building trust in the team so that we can stack the remaining five shifts on top of that. Shall I just move through them? Do you want to talk to anything about them? You’re talking about trust. So, Lencioni has a pyramid and trust is the bottom. So, I guess that’s the first gear. That’s the first gear. Oh, I like the gear. Maybe we’ll just move with the sort of car metaphor. The second is without trust, we can’t really have handed, open, truthful conversations. So the second shift is candor. How do we say the thing that is real in the moment to the person that can do something about it with care and respect so that we can move our team and what we’re up to along. So, when we have trust, folks allow us to be much more candid so the thing that are unsaid or that we soften can really be true in the moment. I was just working with a team two days ago in Austin and been working with them for over two years. And we’re still finding where when we’re in leadership team meetings, people are holding back. And if we hold back, we’re missing opportunity. And the thing that takes the hit are the results that really matter. Execution stalls, trust, and those things become diminished. It costs human energy. So we really want to build the trust so that we can have the real, honest, candid conversations that need to happen to move the organization and the team along.Share on X That’s shift two. Once candor reveals what is real, and the next shift is ownership. Then we decide what to do with it. Ownership is like accountability, showing up saying, understanding what we’re doing, how we’re doing it, and what am I responsible for? What are you responsible for? So that nothing stalls. Ownership is also helping your peers hold their ownership. It’s so interesting as I was talking to this team in Austin and many that I work with, it was clear as we were talking about candor that we got into like feedback. And what I learned is feedback only came from the top, from the CEO to each department. And what I tried to help them see is, that in and of itself creates silos because there’s very little collaboration between departments. And it also has the CEO become a bottleneck because everything moves through them and from them. And what I try and help folks see is we should have horizontal leadership where we are also leading our peers and sometimes that means holding them accountable and that’s okay. Having tough conversations and giving them feedback and that’s okay. But that’s not the norm in most teams. When we talk about ownership, it’s owning who we are and our role in the team. And sometimes that means having tough conversations horizontally, not just upwards to our boss or down to our direct reports. Yeah. So what this brings to mind for me is two ideas. One is peer accountability. I call it peer accountability. Where people are holding each other accountable. The second one is lateral leadership. I don’t know if that’s the right expression. Yep, I say horizontal, but that’s exactly the same thing. I think there’s a book called Lateral Leadership, something like that. And the idea here is

https://youtu.be/avv30Z0wD9Q Josh Tarbutton, Entrepreneurial Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of Bravo Team Engineering Design and Fabrication, is on a mission to restore the dignity of engineers and unleash their creative potential through intentional culture and agile structure. We explore Josh’s journey from soldier and professor to engineering leader, and his Engagement Success Framework, which includes: Scoping/Visioning, Customer Communication, Resourcing, and Solution. Josh explains how this structured process allows Bravo Team to align deeply with client goals, unlock team creativity, and deliver complex, high-impact innovations with confidence. We also discuss how “grooming” a project helps avoid costly misalignments, how AI and Agile methods are transforming the engineering workflow, and why design for sustainability and accessibility will define the next frontier of innovation. — Unleash the Power of Engineers with Josh Tarbutton Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Josh Tarbutton, former professor, soldier, and currently the Entrepreneurial Chairman and Chief Innovation Officer of Bravo Team Engineering Design and Fabrication. Josh, welcome to the show. Steve, glad to be here, thank you. Well, I’m excited to have this conversation because your kind of firm has not been represented on the show for the last 300 episodes. So, we’re definitely gonna have some new insights and the new perspectives. We’ve never had an engineering consulting firm, I believe. And you also have a very inspiring “Why” of why you’re doing this. So let’s start with this. And would you share your personal “Why” and how you are manifesting it in Bravo Team? Yes. So why Bravo Team or why do this? So I think there’s the truth that if you want to create new things, you got to imagine them and put yourself in a position to create.Share on X And I think as engineers, we have that unique opportunity and in many of our careers to be the tip of the spear for creativity in our organizations. And, for me personally, seeing how soldiers are trained in the army, seeing how engineers are matriculated in academia and seeing the career paths that they end up with, I really feel like there’s a little bit of a mismatch in the market between what the engineer is really capable of and what they’re actually able to produce in an organization. And I would say that to the extent that there’s a blockage between the creative capacity of the engineer and the value that they could deliver, I feel like I kind of want to help that. And so what is that? Well, part of it has to do with like just the dignity of the engineer and how we understand the value contribution. And so part of my “Why” is I actually believe that if we actually have intentional conversations and we change some of the ways that we do things that we can get, we can allow people to be much more creative and we can have bigger budgets because we’re reducing waste in other areas and really make a dramatic impact into the way that we do design work. Okay, so that is fascinating. And you mentioned the dignity of engineering. So, what is happening with the dignity of engineering? Why it needs to be restored? So fundamentally, dignity is, I think, mostly just about respect. And I think, sometimes, when two people are having a conversation, our assumptions that we bring into the conversation can really take away from what the other person is saying. And I think that happens a lot in engineering, where the engineer is doing their best to try to communicate what needs to be communicated. And yet, there’s a little bit that’s lost in translation. So, then the engineer comes across as being a resistive or adding some restriction or creating problems or trying to slow things down. When in reality, I’d say almost all the time, these individuals are trying to help and reduce risk and increase the customer experience. And so there’s a little bit of this conflict between, I think, just in translation, between doing the design and development work the right way and then landing it in the marketplace. And we don’t really prepare engineers very well for the economics of manufacturing, design, production. And we don’t really always prepare leaders very well for what engineers are capable of and what they can do. And we certainly don’t create cultures, in my opinion, that foster engineers’ best work. And so I think we have a little bit of a problem culturally where the engineer is really kind of set to the side in a lot of industries. And I’ve seen this across the board. And I think we have an opportunity in the marketplace to just really unlock their power. And it’s really what it’s all about. So, restoring the dignity of the engineers, really more about like unleashing their power for the organization, their creative power.Share on X I love that, unleashing the power of the engineer. So what does it take to unleash that power? How do you create a culture where engineers thrive and they can be creative and they can communicate better and play a bigger role in company? I think it comes down to the culture, really, the culture that we build around development and innovation. I think the reason that it’s hard is because when a company decides to invest in new product offerings or the future or creating something, there’s often substantial risk. And so that pressure is often the financial pressure, the market pressure, hitting the timelines often, that business risk, it lands squarely on the development team. And yet, the development team is trying to create something from nothing. And so, there’s tremendous opportunity for people basically to attack each other. They feel afraid, they feel vulnerable. If the timeline or the budget is jeopardized. And so, this whole activity, if it’s not fostered in the right culture can blow up in people’s faces. And often, it is a source of friction. And I think we haven’t done a great job of resolving that. But I think, primarily, the way you resolve it is is basically if you can understand what the creative and innovative process is fundamentally, and then basically nurture that process while people do development, then I think it'll go a long way to making…Share on X So, it sounds like it’s a combination of culture and structure, how you unleash the power of the engineers. Do I get this right? Yeah, you can’t have one without the other. So that’s a great segway because I’d like you to talk about this structure that you have developed, that Bravo Team, that helps you maximize the performance of your engineers and make them feel that they are self-actualizing as well. So would you walk us through this, I think it’s four stages, four stage process, maybe you call it the Engagement Success Framework or something like that. What does that look like for you guys? Yes, we try to follow the design process and it’s a pretty typical service business arrangement. And I think, I’ll just pause there. Being a service business is a little bit unique because you’re constantly trying to optimize. You need really skilled individuals that you wanna meet their needs and retain. And then you have organizations that have business needs that those skilled individuals can meet. Those resources get sucked up really quickly. And as I say, every great engineer has a full time job. I mean, every great engineer is fully engaged, they’re not waiting around for work, they’re already busy. And so, how do you scale a business? How do you grow business? How do you execute on work in a service business? It’s highly dependent on the individual knowledge of that person. And so, what we have to do is be very careful when we bring the work into the business. So that’s pretty much the first step is getting that alignment, doing the scoping with the customer. Often, we get the lead is generated. Most of the time, the customer needs a technical innovation, and so we have to map that into the knowledge that the team has. We have over 50 people here, over 30 engineers. We have various education levels, various experience. We have 22 mechanical engineers and then 8 computer and electrical engineers. And so we’ve got to map that work properly onto them, the timing and all that is really important. So this first step of the process, we try to spend a lot of time on and groom the work, map it to the right team. And then we start to go through the design process at a very high level to try to capture the concepts what the customer can expect. And then we move towards that alignment, finally getting a scope and a budget. And if we’re all on board, the customer’s on board, we kick off the project, we assign the resources and try to meet the timeline and budget, and then do the post delivery and make sure the customer’s gotten everything that they need and go from there. Yeah, that’s fascinating. When you say groom the project, I haven’t heard this word being used a long time. In my investment banking business, we used grooming. That was the idea of how you prepare a company for sale. You kind of groom it, you fine tune all the various elements, but kind of the word maybe has gotten a negative connotation and not been used. I love it that you are using this in this context. So can you explain? Yeah, absolutely. It actually comes out of Agile and I’m a certified Scrum Master. So I went and took the training from Jeff Sutherland and it comes this idea of grooming the backlog is taking a look at all of the incoming tasks in a very agile approach. And based upon what you’re learning dynamically on a day-to-day basis, you want to rhythmically go back at intervals and look at the incoming tasks and groom that work so that it is mostly seamlessly integrated into the schedule. And so, there’s this complex activity of looking forward and then renegotiating tasks and that whole process in an Agile, which is more from the software recently, that’s called backlog

https://youtu.be/w1ZbzfSrdFk Michael Viane, Executive Coach, Strategic Advisor, and Keynote Speaker, is driven by a mission to help people overcome challenges and find the clarity to act. His Marathon Mindset Framework includes Purpose, Preparation, Pace, and Perseverance—four guiding principles that help individuals and teams sustain momentum and avoid burnout in pursuit of long-term goals. We dive into Michael’s journey from a 30-year corporate career to coaching, inspired by a desire to live with purpose and help others do the same. He explains how leaders can use the Marathon Mindset to navigate overwhelm, maintain strategic focus, and build resilience. Michael also shares the concept of DMAs (Difference-Making Actions)—intentional, goal-aligned tasks that counter reactive busyness and drive daily progress. — Make a Difference Each Day with Mike Viane Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Michael Viane, Executive Coach, Strategic Advisor, and Keynote Speaker, empowering individuals, teams, and organizations to overcome challenges and find the clarity to take action. Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you, Steve. Thank you for that nice introduction. I copied it from your LinkedIn page, so it wasn’t my creation, but I think it’s a good one. So as an introduction, by way of introduction, Michael, why don’t you share what is your personal “Why” with our audience? I will give you a rather lengthy answer on it. My “Why” started after 30 years in corporate America of having the recognition that I was waking up each day without any passion for what I was doing, without any sense of fulfillment at the end of my day. And the recognition that I needed to find the courage to move forward and do something that I deserved. And that was to have passion and fulfillment in my everyday life, to want to wake up in the morning and do things. And I had the very obvious and rewarding recognition that my greatest accomplishments in my career were always in coaching and mentoring people on my team to be greater organizational contributors, to be future leaders. And when I said this to people, they said, let me introduce you to somebody. And I met a coach. I met a business coach who explained to me what he does. And then I was introduced to Focal Point Business Coaching. And at Focal Point, we have the idea that we are a pebble in the pond, and that when we help one person and we drop that pebble into the pond, we see the ripple effect go out. My “Why” is literally to help others, to teach others, and make even the smallest of difference in their lives and in their business worldShare on X so that it creates that pebble in the pond ripple effect and it affects and makes people who work for this business owner, their lives better, their family lives better, the community stronger. This is my goal, this is my “Why,” this is my passion. Okay, love it. To be the pebble in the pond and create the ripple effect, that is awesome. And definitely coaching can create that, especially when you coach executives who then coach their direct reports and their family life gets better. Let’s talk about how you do that and one of the things that you talked about earlier when we chatted really struck a chord with me when you talked about the marathon mindset. It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. And how do marathonists think about the race and how they pace themselves? So, what is the Marathon Mindset and what are the four Ps of the Marathon Mindset? Yeah, and this was actually the topic of our Focal Point conference this year. The Marathon Mindset and the four Ps. The four Ps are Purpose to begin with. And we just talked about this and “Why.” Our “Why.” So we talk about our purpose. then we talk about Preparation. Preparation is our process, our ability to plan, our ability to practice, to set goals, to have a mental readiness, and to figure out our process that gets us through, whether it’s a specific project or an overall, let’s from an entrepreneurial sense, the preparation for starting and growing our own business. The third P is Pace. I’ve been talking a lot about pace lately, and I’ll come back in a minute because pace is so important. Our business, our project, whatever it is, it’s not a sprint. It’s a marathon. And to avoid burnout and overwhelm, we have to be very, very aware of pace. I’ll come back and talk a little bit more about that. And then Perseverance is the fourth P. And there are going to be setbacks, there are going to be adversity, whether we’re starting our own business, trying to grow our own business, or even something as simple as trying to complete a meaningful project. There are going to be obstacles and setbacks and we have to persevere and have the mindset to be able to overcome those obstacles. It's a wonderful mindset, this Marathon Mindset, that can teach us how to think about not only how to be a key executive or be a business owner.Share on X It can also teach us how to have bigger and better relationships in our lives, how to be a better husband, how to be a better father. All of these things I try to implement in my life, but this overall mindset is the recognition that it’s a journey. I’m looking behind you right now and I see one business’s journey. And that is exactly what we’re talking about. It’s not a business’s sprint. It’s a business’s journey and how they got from where they were to where they wanted to be. Okay, that’s very fascinating. So purpose, preparation, peace and perseverance. So how do you implement that Marathon Mindset? How do you build that Marathon Mindset for your clients? What does it take? So it takes diving into each one of these in a very big way. I always try to start with purpose. And I thought it was great that you started our conversation today with Mike, what’s your “Why?” I find that most people don’t want to work with me because of what I do, but why I do it. So let’s take that and apply it to our own businesses. What is your purpose? There’s a line that I believe I heard from Rob Dial on one of his podcasts and he said, if your “Why” is strong enough, it will reveal your how. So when we talk about how to do something and that comes into preparation. How are we going to accomplish this? How are we going to build your business? How are we going to grow your business? How are we going to conceive and start your business from ground zero? If your “Why” is strong enough, your how will reveal itself. I love that idea because if we are all driven by that “Why,” that how just tends to come in naturally. But one of the four Ps that I’ve really been honing in on lately, and it just seems to be a real topic right now with what everyone’s going on in their lives and in their businesses, is pace. Pace is very, very important. And here was something that I keep referring to our conference, but it was a very powerful conference, that I heard. And there was a panel of coaches up front, but they had all run marathons. And one of the questions was, what do you do when you hit that wall at mile 20? Because we’ve all heard about that wall that marathon runners hit. And one of the coaches said, if I think about the finish line, when I hit that wall, I quit. What I do is I focus 100 feet in front of me and I run that 100 feet. When I get to the end of that 100 feet, I do it again and again and again until I regain a rhythm so that I can continue moving forward towards my ultimate goal of finishing this. Where this comes in and applies to our lives and our businesses is that so many times we become overwhelmed, we spin out of control in stress and anxiety because the uncertainty of how we’re going to create our business, grow our business, finish this marathon, or even simply finish a project that we’re in, the uncertainty overwhelms us and we quit. And I love that line when she said, if I think of the finish line at mile 20, I quit. We have to shrink our focus. It could be 100 feet at a time, it could be many different goals that we’re setting, but we come up with small wins through strategy and tactics to get through a smaller period of time so that we can continue to move forward.Share on X And I just find so many people right now are becoming a little bit overwhelmed with whatever it is in their life or their business. And this is a way to slow down. This is a way to keep focus and keep moving forward. There’s a book I recently read, Steve, and it aligned perfectly with this Marathon Mindset. Rich Diviney just wrote a book called Masters of Uncertainty and he talks about this very concept, but he reframes it and calls it moving your horizon. And he talks about that our brains when we go into any situation, our brains scan for three things, duration, pathway and outcome. So how long is this going to take? What’s the pathway in and out of this situation? And what does it look like on the other side? And if we can’t answer one or more of those questions, that uncertainty starts to overwhelm us and we buy down uncertainty by moving our horizon and shrinking it down. He used another marathon example. He’s a Navy SEAL and he would talked about their training and they have to carry the boat above their head and they go for three hours on the beach with these boats on their head and if that hour one you start thinking about how am I going to get through hour two and three, you will quit. He would start to shrink his horizon and say, I want to get to the end of that sandbar. When I get there, I will reward myself for getting there. And then I will set pace and do it all over again until I can recreate a rhythm where I can move forward and finish. I love this concept for everybody right now. My son went to his first year of college away last year and there was uncertainty in his mind for sure about how he was going to get through a full year away from home and with all of these academic and social pressures that were going to be on

https://youtu.be/FB11MbVTtlo Andrew Jernigan, CEO of Insured Nomads, is on a mission to redefine insurance for the globally distributed workforce. His Globally Distributed Company OS includes communication, documentation, education, and integration—core pillars that help companies effectively manage international remote teams. We learn about Andrew’s journey from banking and global living to founding Insured Nomads—a company providing health, travel, and risk coverage for digital nomads, remote teams, and expats. Andrew shares how cultural nuance, asynchronous collaboration, and documentation help build trust and cohesion in a fully remote environment. We also explore how comprehensive global health insurance differs from standard travel insurance, what digital nomads often overlook, and why benefits like mental health access, cybersecurity, and global lounge access are becoming essential for the international workforce. — Mine Gold in Your People with Andrew Jernigan Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Andrew Jernigan, CEO of Insured Nomads, providing frictionless travel and health insurance for globally distributed teams, expatriates, digital nomads, remote workers, travelers, world schoolers for a successful international lifestyle. Andrew, welcome to the show. Well, thank you, Steve. And hi, everyone. I’m glad you’re tuning in. This is going to be a fun episode. Yeah, it is going to be fun. I’m super excited about what you have up your sleeves about how you built this business, because this really a post-COVID type remotely operated business that you have, and it’s a global business. You have like an interesting background. You lived in Amsterdam for several years. You’re married to a Brazilian woman. I lived in Ghana, worked in England, Thailand, Emirates. Running a cross-border team is something I’ve been part of for a couple of decades now. So this is a valuable conversation for the way the world works today and the future of work as well. Yeah, so basically you are the target market of your company, maybe, that you call the Insured Nomads. So tell me, what is your “Why,” your personal “Why,” that inspired you to start Insured Nomads in the first place? I’ve lived the lifestyle, I’ve had the plans and then fast forward a few years, I brokered over 26 of the international companies in our space and realized, took me back to my banking days back out of university, where I was building online banking and a lot of the FinTech components many years ago. And I realized, wow, insurance needs that kind of change. Healthcare, financing of healthcare needs reform. And so brought together some leaders in the industry and said, let’s do it differently. Took off to build Insured Nomads for health insurance and short term travel insurance that meets today’s standards. And this was before the pandemic was declared. I was working from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. And my co-founders were oceans apart. And this was birthed and soon after pandemic was declared, and the trigger effect of that, of realizing, okay, flexible, hybrid, remote first, digital first, etc. Work dynamics have affected the world.Share on X Yeah. So basically, you fell into this. So you had this international background, then suddenly the Zoom revolution came and it made it possible, or somehow people’s paradigm shifted and suddenly it was totally okay to meet on Zoom. If you can meet on Zoom, then you can meet with anyone in the world on Zoom, basically, and then suddenly the world becomes your oyster because you can hire people anywhere in the world. So how did that evolve and how do you put the blocks together? Was it hard to start to build a culture with more people? Well, prior to this, we go back in time, we had ICQ, we had AOL Instant Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, etc. and others in other cultures and regions of the world. Then all of a sudden, Skype was born and Skype was acquired by Microsoft and recently killed since they had Teams. The technology has shifted even though we’ve used forms of it over the last 15 to 25 years. So, companies have used BPOs, they’ve outsourced to other countries, and now that has migrated to outsourcing of task to people and spread around the world to say, okay, don’t just do task or project, be full-time as a contractor with us. Or be full-time as an employee, even though we don’t have an entity there, we’ll just send you money every month and then realize compliance is needed. So, let’s use an Employer of Record or a Professional Employment Organization (PEO) to pay payroll and local taxes. And then you have banking and payroll element, payment transfers that have to evolve cross border. And then you’ve got language issues, communication issues of, oh, I didn’t know when I said that it was interpreted as this. English of your region versus English of my region. Interesting. Then emotional intelligence of having bad bosses always compared to having to have a trust culture in a remote distributed format. You have an emotional educational opportunity to bring people into the type of behavior that’s expected, communication that’s expected through a distributed team rather than a local culture. Okay, that’s very interesting. So let’s dissect this a little bit. Yes. You have developed kind of a framework around this, which you may call Globally Distributed Operating System (OS). So what does that look like? What are the elements of it to build an operating system that can make you effectively manage a global company with virtual employees? There are some key components. As I go back on what I was saying a few minutes ago, communication is one of the four foundational elements.Share on X That word is too generic because there’s nonverbal communication. You have your camera on, all of a sudden there’s visual communication, but does laughter mean the same thing in their culture as yours? Does seriousness versus a smile during a business meeting have the same expectation? So, communication is really learning behavioral interpretations. And so having a core of communication for a globally distributed operating system, you actually to have understanding and empathy and relationship, but yet, you’re not going out and sitting at a dinner table with that person. You’re not in person often. So how do you do it? It truly takes, I think, several elements of trust, empathy, listening, and then understanding.Share on X And a lot of that, I think, is learned and taught so that in each team and department, people actually see beyond the first layer. They hear beyond the first layer of what’s typed in Slack, in Teams, and emails. And that’s very gradual. That’s not an instant. Do you have a training program around this so that you kick some people? It’s under development. Yes, it’s a process. Because even though people have worked remotely before, often they’re working remotely or from home and commuting in every once a month or once a week, they may be working from an unhealthy environment. So still, with a globally distributed, cross-border international team, there’s that communication element, then documentation is key. Because if you don’t have processes and scope of work and just your culture written, it takes many times for us to hear something. And then if we’re hearing it through our own filters. So where do you document all that? Is there like a central repository where you keep this thing? Yes. Have people read it? There is. So online central repository, wiki area. And I think that’s key because onboarding, you can give people, you can send people documents, but something that’s constantly being updated that it’s like, okay, this was added, but the education of it, of going deeper than what’s in print, because words, whether spoken or printed or published, have many layers. A picture paints a thousand words, but a thousand words have ten thousand meanings.Share on X That just, I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but I process as I speak through these things. And so we can have your vision and values written in 20 words, a list of four values and a vision of 16 words. But each one of those needs to be unfolded as the dominoes fall with all the layers of depth that are necessary. So education through every time there’s an all hands call, a community call, there’s reiteration of those, the mission, the vision, the values so that examples are given, that it becomes multi-dimensional. Then the fourth element here is integration. Because when it’s spoken and heard, when it’s read and processed a bit more, is through the illustrations of how these things are applied that people can then integrate. So you’ve got communication, documentation, education, and then integration, those four components. Okay. We can’t integrate them into our behavior unless we truly understand them. Yeah, and the reinforcement and then the integration. In my mind, the integration piece is how you integrate your core values, your vision, your strategy into every fabric of the company. So every tactic, the office, you have an office, but you have a virtual office, perhaps you have maybe a metaverse office, I don’t know. Some people have that, the team name, how people dress, how the Zoom background they use, this can all be integrated into every element. Yes, for example, if you’re trying to integrate the element of a sense of urgency into people’s behavior, we can say, okay, make sure and approach a new opportunity with a sense of urgency. But if we don’t document and say, that means replying within six to 24 hours, ideally within six hours max, have that documented and then educate of, okay, that’s what we mean by this. Not an email saying, hey, I got it, an auto responder, but a solution. And then the integration is seeing it happen, seeing it drop into the CRM with, and seeing that, okay, it’s actually, the behavior has been applied and correctl