Beyond the Bottom Line

43 Episodes

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Why Small Businesses Stall: Zo Patoli on Broken Systems and an AI Operating System (R)

2026-10-2745:08

At 17, Zo Patoli’s dropshipping stores were making real money, until a payment processor froze the accounts and left him and his brother about $150,000 in the hole. What he did next is how he went from scrappy to serious. In this episode, Miguel Alexander Centeno sits down with Zo, co-founder of Leapify and Lead Origin, who has spent the last decade building companies across e-commerce, services, healthcare, and now AI. He started at 13 with his first e-commerce business, selling designer-sty...

From Onboarding Specialist to Operations Manager: Renee’s Four Years at the Firm

2026-10-2029:43

Four years ago, Renee Sobaram joined the firm as an onboarding specialist, before it had a standard process for bringing in new clients. She built one, then grew into the client success manager role for accounting and tax, and the firm’s NPS scores climbed from sevens to eights to nines. In this Under the Hood episode, Miguel Alexander Centeno talks with Renee as she steps into her new role as operations manager, overseeing the firm’s departments. They cover how the firm tracks client feedbac...

Can Your Business Run Without You? Christine McDannell on What Buyers Look For (R)

2026-10-1343:25

A buyer prices a business off its profit. That means every personal expense and every dollar of unrecorded cash changes what the owner gets paid. In this episode, Miguel Alexander Centeno sits down with Christine McDannell, founder of Magnolia Firm, a boutique M&A brokerage for digital businesses, and author of Get Acquired: Seven Steps to Your Most Lucrative Exit. She has exited 10 of her own startups, from a cleaning company in San Diego to a wellness spa, and now guides founders from v...

Minisode: Fraud Traps: Catching Fake Leads With a Hidden Cowboy Prompt

2026-10-0614:12

The team has no room for more work, and business owners are more ready than ever to switch firms or finally look at the R&D tax credit. That is the contradiction of the weeks between the September 15 and October 15 deadlines. Miguel Alexander Centeno sits down with Ashton Chanana to talk about how he balances sales against team capacity during the busiest stretch of the year, including a recent client whose books turned out to be a mess. They also get into a lead that looked perfect and w...

Find Your Niche and Dominate It: Building Happy Path with Noah Borts

2026-09-2943:13

Testing the Untestable: Building Happy Path with Noah Bortz Long before he was automating enterprise software testing, Noah Borts was selling herbal cigarettes in high school, building a catering-scheduling platform that launched three months before COVID, and learning, the hard way, what it means to find a problem that's actually big enough to build a company around. On this episode of Beyond the Bottom Line, Miguel sits down with Noah, co-founder of Happy Path, an AI-powered platform that a...

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