Default Profitable

Brian Brosmer’s father-in-law heard the word “freelance,” got stuck on “free,” and figured Brian would never get paid again. It took a magazine spread on a Barnes & Noble shelf to settle it. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Brian Brosmer, owner of Brosmer Photographic, a Fishers photography, video and design studio that shoots for agencies, publications and businesses across the Indianapolis area. Brian got hooked in a high school yearbook darkroom, studied at Franklin College and Ball State, and worked catalog production in southern Indiana, where a road trip to Chicago showed him the earliest days of digital photography. He moved to Indianapolis, worked for agencies and magazines, and about fourteen years ago got tired of making everybody else money and went out on his own. He and Matt have known each other for twenty-plus years. His son Connor got married a month ago, and Brian says he’ll keep shooting until they nail the coffin shut. Brian and Matt get into the part of the business that wasn’t the creative work: the money conversation. Twenty-five dollar headshots, contracts so a client who skips payments can’t ask you to let it slide, and the day it hit him he was worth more than he’d been charging. He’s now passing that on to three creatives under thirty, including one who was proud of a job he’d lost money on. Brian’s advice was short. They need you more than you need them. Walk away. Matt runs his usual three questions, and Brian lands somewhere around one and a half, which keeps the tally at one guest with all three in a couple hundred episodes. They also cover how a favor for a Cathedral mom turned into the Produce Mom campaign with Indianapolis Fruit Company, why niching down is making a young remodeler more money, and why the hardest part of working for yourself is that it’s lonely. His advice for anyone thinking about it: try it, because if it doesn’t work you can go back, and find a support system before you need one. Learn more about Brian Brosmer and Brosmer Photographic at https://brosmerphotographic.com/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

Ian Illig’s first job out of college was a choice between a bank and a startup with no customers and no finished product. He picked the startup, joined as the first employee, and since he couldn’t code, his job became sales. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Ian Illig, co-founder of Stompbox, an Indianapolis sales consultancy that scales founders out of sales. For about a decade Ian was the first non-founding salesperson at early-stage companies, taking the baton from the founder and figuring out how to sell without them in every meeting. He kept watching founders hit the scale button, hire a salesperson, and lose all their momentum. So he and his partner started Stompbox to shorten that learning curve for other companies. Outside of work, Ian plays guitar and sings in the band GREGØRIAN, which he calls his anti-revenue-generating machine, and he has a baby on the way. Ian and Matt get into the stuff nobody warns you about when you start, like accounting, payroll, and categorizing transactions. They also cover why a founder’s title, credibility, and magnetism are cheat codes a new salesperson doesn’t get, and why buyers want the painkiller, not the vitamin. Ian learned that last one the hard way: his best client isn’t the founder who hasn’t tried a sales hire yet, it’s the one who’s tried and failed a few times. Matt runs his usual three questions, and Ian claims one, six months of savings, then admits he never actually checked. His advice for day one goes further than sending the email: make a list of thirty people, call them, and find your own way of asking for help. Matt’s version is shorter. Start selling. The market will fix you. Learn more about Ian Illig and Stompbox at https://stompbox.io/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

Jireh Gibson's first pitch was "I do marketing." People changed the subject as fast as they could. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Jireh Gibson, founder of Skyscraper Digital Marketing, a Fort Wayne agency that works on brand visibility for local service businesses doing one to ten million a year. Jireh has a master's in marketing and years in sales and customer service, and his last job was consulting for a full-service marketing agency. That ended in 2022 over unmet expectations on pay. What followed was two years of interviews, freelance work, and "we picked someone else," until he got fed up and opened his own shop in December 2024. He's married sixteen years, part of a blended family with seven adult kids and a pile of grandkids, and he says he wouldn't trade the daily hustle for anything he's seen on the other side. Learn more about Jireh Gibson and Skyscraper Digital Marketing at https://www.skyscraperdigitalmarketing.com/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

Calvin Ellison figured going independent would be a slam dunk. Six months in, he was calling his dad to borrow money. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Calvin Ellison, president of The Executive Impact Group, an Indianapolis executive coaching business built around peer groups, where CEOs and senior leaders meet on a regular basis and use each other as an advisory board. Calvin grew up in California, went to UC Davis, and worked his way east through Philly and Detroit before landing in Indy, with three Fortune 500 companies on the resume along the way. The last one was Xerox, where he taught sales training, and when he left in 1993 the business started as exactly that. Around 1999 it shifted to management development, and it's been leadership work ever since. He and Matt have known each other for twenty-some years, so this one has war stories in it. Wife, four kids, grandkids. Pretty busy. Matt usually asks every guest the same three questions. This time he skips them, because Calvin has spent close to thirty years inside other people's businesses and Matt wants what he's seen. Start with who belongs in a peer group. Not every CEO does. The ones who fit are green and growing no matter how long they've had the seat, and they've got the courage to hear feedback they'll never get inside their own company. Why they don't get it: a business starts with friends and family, then fills up with strangers who have a paycheck to protect, so problems go to a buddy instead of the boss and the leader ends up the last person to know how bad things are. It's worse in a second or third generation business, where the employees are still loyal to the founder and the new leader is building trust from scratch. Calvin's advice there is go slow to go fast. He tells the story of a next-generation leader whose rapid changes set off rumors that the company was about to sell, and how the group got him to hit pause and start over with the why instead of the what. Buy-in isn't a features-and-benefits pitch. It's modeling the way, saying it consistently, and saying it again after you're sure you already said it, until behavior changes. Calvin left corporate for freedom, not money, and says the first thing nobody tells you is that it's harder than it looks: the umbrella is gone, and revenue, the P&L, taxes, and your own sanity are all yours now. Ask what he'd tell himself the night before going out on his own and he's got it. Document the plan, put it away, come back and edit it. Everything sounds great in your head. Like game film the day after a win, the paper doesn't lie. Learn more about Calvin Ellison and The Executive Impact Group at https://eigcentral.com/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

George Powell hated his name until he looked it up. It means "farmer," and today he's planting affordable housing across Indiana. In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton talks with George Powell Jr., founder and CEO of Exponential Equity Group. It's a faith-driven Indianapolis real estate development firm that builds affordable housing alongside churches, nonprofits, CDCs and grassroots groups that have land and a vision but lack the capital or capacity to develop it. In this episode: 🏝️ Years at RCI in the vacation industry, and sensing a shift was coming 🏠 How his dad planted real estate in him early 📉 Founding the company in 2020 to fix a family portfolio in distress, and what happened when Dad wasn't ready for the fix 🧭 Asking "What lane am I supposed to be in?" and finding the answer through mentors in community development 🏗️ Growing from single-family investments to an affordable housing project in Anderson to multifamily 🙏 The building where he took lunch walks and dreamed up the company is now being torn down 🔗 Learn more about George Powell Jr. and Exponential Equity Group: https://www.exponentialequitygroup.com/ 🎧 Hear more Indianapolis business leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com, or subscribe to Default Profitable wherever you get your podcasts. #DefaultProfitable #AffordableHousing #IndianapolisBusiness