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Christy Setzer, President of New Heights Communications, shows leaders how to build a high-EQ business through flexible work, manageable client loads, and culture-fit hiring. After years in politics and strategic communications, Christy built a consistently profitable firm where emotional intelligence supports workplace culture and attentive client service.  In this conversation, Christy introduces The High-EQ Business Framework—Hybrid/Flexible Work, Work-Life Balance, Fewer Clients/Advisor, Bring Your Whole Self, and Hire Culture Fits. She explains why emotional intelligence matters in a client-facing business, how limiting each advisor’s client load creates room for deeper strategy and thought partnership, and why growing firms must build systems that keep pace with revenue and headcount. Christy also shares reaching audiences through podcasts, Reddit, and Substack, as well as how online conversations can influence AI-generated answers.  — Build a High-EQ Business with Christy Setzer  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here, and my guest today on the Management Blueprint is Christy Setzer, the President of New Heights Communications, a strategic communications and public relations firm supporting labor unions, progressive advocacy, women’s groups, and others seeking to change the world for the better. Prior to starting New Heights in 2010, Christy served as a national spokesperson for the presidential campaigns of Vice President Al Gore, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, Senator Christopher J. Dodd, as well as numerous state and local races. Christy, welcome to the show.  Thank you so much for having me.  Well, it’s awesome to have you, and I don’t know. We’ve had over 350 episodes. I don’t recall having anyone similar to your profile. I mean, we may have had a couple of PR people, but definitely not who have been running campaigns and stuff like that. So that’s super exciting, and now you have a successful business on the back of your experience. But before we dive in, I’d like to ask you, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your practice?   Yeah. You know, it’s definitely changed over the years. When I started this business, it was not out of some great desire to start a big business or anything more. And I find that this is actually often true, that there’s a bit of a gender divide. I find that a lot of times when men are starting businesses, especially from politics, it is because, you know, look, we’re going to change the world.  We’re going to make a lot of money. You know, they have these sort of big dreams about it. And a lot of times, I think with women, it’s more like they don’t feel like they’re being used well in their current spaces. They feel like they’re sort of being overlooked, and look, maybe I would just have more success if I went out on my own or did something else in a sort of non-traditional path. And that was the case for me too. It started rather early. I was, at a young age, in my 20s, given pretty big jobs of, you know, the Iowa Press Secretary for Al Gore, for the sitting vice president, et cetera.  I had a lot of really good experiences. But by the time I was in my late 20s, I started noticing that men who were my same age and had my same level of experience were getting tapped for much bigger things, and none of my female friends were. And so that sort of planted a bit of a seed. And by the time I was in my early 30s, I had a job in-house working for the Service Employees Union. So a two-million-member labor organization. And I really enjoyed the job, but ultimately, it was sort of a big, somewhat bureaucratic organization where, again, I just didn’t really feel like I had a ton of agency over how high my ceiling was.  So when I left and started New Heights, it really was just more of an idea of, well, maybe I can kind of create a higher ceiling for myself than what’s been set for me. Over the years, that’s very much changed. And now, I mean, it’s really grown past my wildest expectations for myself. I mean, at one point I thought that the biggest possible dream that I had for my business was maybe one day we’ll hit a million dollars in revenue a year, and maybe we’ll have a team of like, I don’t know, 10 people. And we’ve hit multiples of that, many multiples of that.  So now the goal is, sure, you know, you keep moving the bar for yourself in terms of the money and the headcount and things like that, but really it’s about, can we have a bigger voice in the conversation? I run a political business. Can we really move the needle for our clients in order to change things and change the world for the better, in our view?  That’s very broad, you know, change the world for the better. Why is this important for you?  For some reason, it always has been. I am someone that was interested in politics even in high school. In college, I ran our College Democrats group and our College Women’s group, and I was always on student council. And that was just always something that was kind of interesting and important to me. My parents both sort of gave back in a one-on-one way. My mother was a teacher. She was a public school math teacher for many years. My father was a police officer.  But I really was drawn to the idea that in politics and policy and legislation, you can make change on a broader, more systemic level. And you can not just change one heart and mind, but you can potentially change millions. So that was kind of what drew me to it.  Okay. I like it. Change a million lives. That’s very inspirational. It’s probably practical too for you because you are on big platforms, big national networks. So let’s talk about your business, and specifically, this podcast is exploring frameworks that people discover and use. And the idea is that business owners who listen to this podcast, they might get inspired by your framework and they implement some version of it in their business. So what’s a framework that you could share in three to five steps with the audience?  Yeah. I mean, honestly, the big one for me has been and continues to be just create a business that's a place where you would want to work. Share on X So for many years, we were all remote, and that’s because we were small. It was myself and a few other people. But even before COVID, we became hybrid. There was a year in which we went from four people at the start of the year to eight people at the end of the year. And so I thought, okay, we should actually be meeting in person.  But I didn’t want to be in the office 100% of the time, and so we were in the office three days a week, work from where you wanted two days a week. So that was always important to me, was sort of that kind of hybrid piece. Now we’re actually all remote again, but we’ve kind of gone back and forth. And the idea there was that, you know, I thought sometimes I do my best work when we’re all together, and sometimes I do my best work just being able to be head down by myself, no distractions. So that was one thing.  Two, the work-life-balance piece was always really important to me too. I mean, some of which is, you know, as I said, illustrated in the fact that we were always either hybrid or all remote. But one of the ways that that plays out now is with a lot of PR firms, and most of the people on my team come from other, sometimes really big firms. They would have seven, eight, nine clients at a time, and what happens is that you can’t really go very deep with the clients. We do a lot of media relations, so you can get them that press hit and then move on to the next client. But you don’t really get to learn their why.  You don’t really get to learn what is driving the client and be able to give them more top-level advice. So it's not just a good move for my team's work-life balance that they only have, on average, about four clients. It's also good for our clients too Share on X They know that our people are not burned out. They know that they’re getting real attention. And again, all of this is about sort of like, create the business that you would want to work at.  And then sort of one final piece of that, I would say, is we really bring our whole selves to the office. Because we’re mostly remote, we do get together in person maybe once a month or so for lunch, happy hours, that kind of thing. But in the meantime, and again, it being a remote environment, we’re really into each other’s, like, showing pictures of our kids and our pets, and we have a book club and all of those kinds of things.  Which I feel like, if you’re not able to bring your full self to work, if you don’t actually enjoy spending eight hours a day with these people, what are you doing, right? So I’m hiring people for culture reasons, and I mean, I’m obviously hiring people who have a very experienced background in exactly what we’re looking for. But I’m also looking for a culture fit too, which is, is somebody going to really just add to our culture as well as just produce good work? Do you find that men are also as receptive to that part of the culture as women?  That is a great question. I think PR in general tends to be pretty female-dominated, and at times my business has been pretty 50/50 in terms of male/female. Right now, we’re almost all women. And I do wonder sometimes, yes, if that is, when I’m talking about the way that I’m describing this business, which is, again, we’re very successful, we’re very profitable, et cetera, and we’ve been consistently profitable. But I’m not leading with something that is a cutthroat approach.  We have targets for things like, again, our profitability or new business, that sort of thing. They’re not “If you don’t hit this, you’re out.” That’s just, I think, not how people produce their best work. And I do wonder if that is gendered. Or even,

https://youtu.be/KI18Wt307FA David Goldberg, CEO and Voice Director of Edge Studio, helps leaders cure their speaking blind spots by improving their words, speaking patterns, and nonverbal presence. Driven by a lifelong passion for the sound and nuance of language, David has recorded voice actors, celebrities, politicians, and media personalities while helping people communicate with greater credibility and authority. In this conversation, David introduces The Speak with POWER Framework—Purge Hedges, Omit Fillers, Words That Empower, Express Positively, and Regulate Rhythm. He explains how removing uncertain language, replacing filler words with pauses, choosing empowering sentences, and framing messages positively can improve how others receive and respond to our ideas. David also discusses prosody, nonverbal communication, the six-second pause, and the growing value of authentic human voices in the age of AI. He shares how Edge Studio adapted from analog music recording to digital voice production and how Prosody Center helps people strengthen their interviews, presentations, pitches, and everyday conversations. — Cure Your Speaking Blind Spots with David Goldberg  Good day, dear listeners. It’s Steve Preda here with Management Blueprint. And today my guest is David Goldberg, the CEO and Voice Director of Edge Studio, an international voiceover casting and recording facility, advising, educating, and recording voice actors, celebrities, politicians, and media personalities. David is the author of five books, one with Tony Robbins, and the producer and engineer of 150 albums, including for Deep Purple. David, welcome to the show.  Steve, it is fabulous to be here. Thanks.  It’s great to have you, and I’m very curious about your personal why and how you are manifesting it in your business.  My personal why.  Yes.  Because I absolutely have a passion for words, the sound of words, the nuance of words. Share on X It’s really fascinating. Different languages, different accents, different dialects. For some reason, it’s been in my head since I was born.  That’s very interesting. Well, you certainly have followed your calling. And so tell me about how you got to record albums for people like Deep Purple. How did you get there?  Yeah. I’m a musician, and one of my earliest childhood memories was my mom being really mad at me because she would take piano lessons, and she would struggle to learn a song, and then the piano instructor would leave, and I would sit down and play it. And my mom used to say, “Why? Why can you just do it?” She couldn’t do it, and I just sat down and played. So I played piano, went to school for music as a pianist, and somewhere in college I realized it’s just not fun. I played a lot. I was on a good career path, perhaps, but it just wasn’t fun, and I got into rock bands instead.  And then, Steve, to show my age, in college I found a four-track cassette recorder. And I didn’t know what a four-track meant. Maybe some of the people who are listening don’t even know what a cassette is, but it’s an old recording device. It sounds archaic, but it was on tape, analog tape. And it was the coolest thing because I realized, oh my goodness, I could overdub myself. I could play piano or keyboards, as I had moved on to. I’m also a drummer, so I was able to add drums on top of the keyboards, and I could build my own songs, and that was cool.  And I realized that my passion, by far, more so than playing and playing in rock bands, was recording rock bands. And so I began recording my own band, and that went well, and then a bigger band, and I worked my way up.  Wow. This is fascinating. Actually, Paul McCartney has a YouTube video when he does that, and I didn’t know it was a thing. And he basically records every instrument, and then he plays it all together in front of an audience, a live audience in his studio, and this is fascinating. So David, this is a podcast of frameworks. It’s called Management Blueprint.  And I wonder, what is a framework that you have developed in your business that is helping you to serve your customers better or to understand things or to have and develop an insight or to innovate? Something that can be explained in three to five steps, and the audience members might get inspired by it and implement something in their business as a result.  Yeah. We have one framework which is so key to us. And is it okay, Steve, if I just give a little brief bit of context here?  Yeah, please.  It’s very weird, but for some reason, most of the world doesn’t think about how we speak. My kids, they went through grade school. They took reading, they took writing, but they didn’t take speaking. Yet speaking is equally as important. In business, it’s equally as important to how we look, right? Or how a company looks, how a brand looks. Companies allocate so many resources to making sure that they look amazing. Their logos, they do focus groups on their logos, what color, what font.  They make sure their website looks nice. They make sure the newsletters look nice. Everything should look nice, and it should. You always want to show attention to detail. But the corporations don’t allocate the same resources to make sure that their people speak well. So customer service representatives and sales and all these people on the phone, even leaders within the organization who lead team meetings, people who give pitches and presentations, leaders who give boardroom meetings and keynotes and toasts. There’s just not enough thought, or sometimes even no thought, on how they speak, which is really weird. It doesn’t make sense to me.  About two years ago, our older son was beginning to interview with college recruiters, and I said to him one day, I said, “Dude, did the guidance counselor at your school help you with interview training skills?” He said, “No.” And it all hit me at that point. I thought, “This is really weird.” So our public school has like 1,000-plus kids, four guidance counselors. It’s such a big school. There’s money in the town for school, for decent education. It’s a really good school, but they don’t teach kids how to interview well.  I’m sure everyone listening out there knows that some people interview really well and some people don’t. Now, to go back in time, my music studio did great, and then I ran it for about 18 to 19 years. I worked with bigger bands and finally top national, international bands, things that still play on the radio. I got to play with lots of bands, drums sometimes, piano, keyboards. And when my older son was born, I realized I want to change lifestyles because the lifestyle in the music world was just crazy. The drug scene was absurd. Oh my goodness, and I’m clean. I always was clean. I loved the work. I never fit with the people.  And so 19 years ago, when my older son was born, I changed my studio from recording music to recording voice. I went from recording music to recording radio commercial soundtracks and soundtracks for documentaries and audiobooks and cartoon soundtracks, and I have five studios now that do that in New York City. Now jumping back in time. So two years ago, my son is interviewing with college recruiters. I thought, “This is really weird. I need to teach my son how to interview because there are little things that you can do with your voice, things that I’ve learned in all of these years of voice recording that could apply to interviewing.” And so I gave him five or six little techniques.  Okay, like just take a second before you answer a question. It shows that you’re credible. It shows that you’re grounded. It gives your brain a moment to kind of catch itself, to organize the next thought. It doesn’t sound like you’re stepping on anyone’s toes. It really gives you so much more authority when you take a second to respond. And I gave my son five or six things, and we worked on it, and he got into every single college. And I know it’s not because of his grades.  His grades were good, but his interview skills are top-notch. And so I began applying these for, or offering training for interviews through my business. Now my business is predominantly voiceover, but now I started offering training for interviewing people who are going through a midlife crisis and changing careers or job promotions. And through that, we developed the framework. And for about two years now, we’ve focused on one framework. It’s three steps. I’ve learned that I know, I don’t believe, but I know that most of us in this world are missing three things when we communicate.  When we communicate, whether it’s interviewing or giving a customer sales pitch, we don’t think about strategizing or optimizing our words. We say whichever words just come out. We have our go-to words. So we have to optimize our words, number one. Number two, we should really think a lot about our speaking patterns, our pacing, our phrasing, the rhythm of our voice, the tone, the timbre, the emotion in our voice. All of the things that allow us to communicate differently, more effectively, yet we don’t learn those things. So that’s the second thing. And the third thing are the nonverbals, the things that come along with when you speak. Those things are critical. And if you look at those three steps, essentially what it’s saying is that if you think about which words you say, how you say them, and what you look like when you say them, you really come across so much more credibly, so much more in control. Steve, it is outstanding. When you focus on those three things, it is easy to make great first impressions. Share on X It is easy to get buy-in, as my son did when he interviewed. It is easy to get great receptivity.  Ultimately, truly, you shape the way you come across. You shape the way people respond to you. And that’s the cool

https://youtu.be/oIGvtm47c2c Mimi Banks, Founder and CEO of MB Social, helps beauty brands create digestible & resonant content while building social media communities where every customer feels heard. Drawing on 15 years at L’Oréal USA and her experience leading social media for Lancôme, Mimi built a fully distributed agency around warmth, attention, honesty, and genuine community engagement. In this conversation, Mimi introduces The User-Generated Content Framework—Make It Look Real, Don’t Over-Produce, Use the Product Sensibly, Ensure Light & Sound Works, and Keep the Product Up Close. She explains how brands can create user-generated content that feels relatable while maintaining professional quality. Mimi also discusses using AI to extend limited creative assets without creating fake influencers, growing through social listening and the question “How can I help?”, and keeping humans involved in community management. She shares why brands must listen before engaging on Reddit and how MB Social and Med Creator 101 help beauty brands and healthcare professionals strengthen their social media presence. — Create Digestible & Resonant Content with Mimi Banks  Good day. Steve Preda here, and my guest today on the Management Blueprint, Mimi Banks, the Founder and CEO of MB Social, a leading full-service social media agency specializing in beauty, with a strong focus on skincare. MB Social is based in LA but has a fully distributed workforce, and it partners with top-tier brands and experts. Mimi spent 15 years at L’Oréal USA in New York and Paris, where she led social media for Lancôme. So Mimi, welcome to the show.  Thank you for having me.  I think you’re the first beauty entrepreneur on this show, so—  Oh, really? Wow.  It’s pretty special. 360 episodes in, great to have you here.  Wow. Thank you for having me. I’m excited to represent the beauty industry today.  That’s right. You also have a company name which is similar to my former company name. Yours is MB Social. We were MB Partners.  Oh, I love it.  Yeah. I love it. It kind of resonates with that. So jumping in, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it at MB Social?  So just to get straight to the point, my why comes down to one belief. Everyone wants to feel heard. I learned that pioneering community management benchmark at L’Oréal long before community management was even a job title, and I built MB Social entirely on it. Behind every comment, every DM, every tagged post is a real person who wants to be heard, who deserves a real response. Share on X   Wow.  And then, so how do I manifest that? I manifest it every day by treating our clients and their audiences in a way I’d want to be treated, with warmth, attention, and honesty. So it’s why our community managers do what they do. They learn the inside jokes. They learn the regulars, and this is actually also how I run MB Social. We listen, and we care.  Love it.  That’s our operating system.  That’s a pretty robust one, I must say. I like to think of a company as it’s a group of people dedicated to a mission. And if you engage and energize and inspire and care for these people, then you can’t go too much wrong.  That’s true.  Yeah. So tell me about how you came with this idea that you wanted to… I mean, you had a great career working for the greatest brands in beauty. What prompted you to strike out on your own, or strike out on your own?  So essentially, at age 30-something, I was given the opportunity to lead social media for the Lancôme brand. Just started it. And I found that, again, at age 30-something, I fell in love with this job. I had been working for a long time, still passionate about working for L’Oréal, but I hadn’t found my why, and then it clicked for me. I fell in love. I saw that I was good at it.  But what happened was, even after two years winning awards, doing all of the things, being the first, getting cited in the greatest publications, or exceeding my goals, there was nowhere to go. I was too early, and this was in 2014. So I did what many entrepreneurs do, and I followed my belief. I got offered a job to work at a startup that was all about user-generated content, which was absolutely amazing.  And there I took the leap for six months. People thought I was crazy, but I went based on my belief and my hunch, and the rest is history. I then started off my path with saying, “How can I help?” And that’s been the motto that we’ve had for the past 12 years at MB Social.  So this startup that you joined was MB Social, or?  No. So the startup I joined was a startup called Preen.Me. It was a community of creators. They created user-generated content for beauty brands. So I was really passionate about user-generated content, again, in 2014, so it was amazing. And a friend of mine who used to work at L’Oréal worked there.  And so I left my job that was in a corporate environment, worked out of an apartment in another country, and went there for six months. Learned about business development, learned about brand partnerships, learned about startup life. So really, I took the leap, and it was a leap of faith.  So tell me about user-generated content. What’s special about user-generated content?  So user-generated content means it’s actually content created by consumers. So you, me, any person that is not a professional at a brand, let’s say. But sometimes you can actually work for a brand. But it’s essentially content that appears that any kind of person would take it. And what I was fascinated about in social media, social media is about getting that digestible content that resonates. And so any brand or business would love to get that kind of content where it looks like an average person created it, not that it’s so heavily branded. Because as you know, in marketing, the best kind of marketing is through somebody else, not from a brand. Share on X   And so what I started to see was this is a really interesting new way of creating content where there are people out there who are professionals at creating content for brands that makes it look like a real person. And so that’s really what it was. It was this community of people who were excellent at creating beauty content. And then what we did is said, “Oh, brands should be able to use this.” But again, this was in 2014 when brands weren’t doing that.  Brands didn’t really understand the idea behind hiring what now is creators, and there’s a huge creator economy. It’s billions and billions of dollars. So they were kind of too early for it, and now it’s really an important part of the ecosystem. But again, that’s 12 years later.  So when you say “user-generated content,” it’s not people commenting on posts, but it’s creators who are using the product.  And generating. Correct.  Creators who use the product, film themselves, capture photo or video of them using the product in a way that makes it look like a consumer would.  Huh. Okay, that’s fascinating. So as you know, this podcast is all about blueprints, and I wonder if there is a framework around this, how you create that user-generated content that feels authentic, that resonates with people, with everyday people who would be consuming that content. Is there a recipe for that? Do you have one?  A recipe for that, for user-generated content, first of all, for using it, you have to make sure it looks actual and real, not overly produced, and using it in a way that would make sense that someone would use it. For example, if we’re talking about a beauty product, showing the product, making sure it’s up close, clear, then using it in a setting that looks real, but making sure that your lighting, your sound, everything is easy to understand. So those are like the three parts that we look at.  And then when you work with brands, you look at a little bit more details. You look at the quality, you look at the gestures, you look at the music, you look at a lot of different criteria once you’re at the brand level. But when you’re creating user-generated content, what you want to look at is, is the product visible? Does it look like in its natural setting? And is it very up close so that I can see it? Those would be the three things.  So I actually noted down six things.  Oh, you did? Well, those are my simplified. Okay, great.  So you said looks real.  Yes.  Which may be the same as natural setting, but looks real. Not overly produced.  Yes.  Which is the same as looks real. Or is it?  I would say no. Two different things because it can look real, but overly produced means there’s too much lighting, too much editing versus authentic.  Okay. Use the product sensibly.  Yes.  That was three. And then a natural setting. Maybe that’s—  That’s kind of the looks real also. So where would you use your skincare, making sure that it’s in the real place where you would actually use it.  And then light and sound works. Yes. —is what I wrote down. Correct. Yes.  And up close.  Yes.  So that’s actually five. That’s great.  Okay, five. Those are great. Thank you for that. Thank you for the recap.  Thank you. That’s amazing. So what happens in the AI world with this approach? Does AI have a place in this? Is it creating noise that needs to be overcome? Both? Neither? What is the AI impact?  AI can help in a few ways. The first thing it can help you expedite your tasks that you repeat over and over again. So anything that you find yourself repeating, AI is a great place to help you, whether it's to summarize, whether it's to analyze and recap. Share on X Those we find tremendously helpful. We use AI to tell us what’s going on in the ecosystem, whether it’s trends, whether it’s looking at articles, benchmarking, and then quickly translating to how we can

https://youtu.be/COQT4g-johk Doug Kremer, CEO of TerraMax, Inc., helps growers discover how to Make Your Crops Bigger, Healthier & Cheaper through scientifically validated microbial products for seeds, crops, lawns, and turf. Driven by scientific curiosity and a desire to reduce agriculture’s reliance on chemical inputs, Doug has spent more than 40 years exploring how beneficial bacteria can improve nutrient efficiency, promote plant growth, and support more environmentally responsible production. In this conversation, Doug introduces The Crop Nutrition Framework—Proper Nutrient Addition, Pathogenic Control, Irrigation, Soil Health, and Soil Tilth. He explains why microbial products should complement conventional fertilizers rather than immediately replace them, how soil structure affects water drainage and oxygen transfer, and why field trials are essential for proving microbial performance. Doug also discusses expanding TerraMax beyond its science-led roots, communicating its value more effectively, and reaching growers through stronger sales and distribution networks. — Make Your Crops Bigger, Healthier & Cheaper with Doug Kremer  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Doug Kremer, the CEO of TerraMax, Inc., an agricultural manufacturer applying bacteria to produce powders and liquids for seeds, crops, lawns, and turf to naturally promote plant growth. Doug, welcome to the show.  Thank you very much, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here and meet you.  Yeah, I’m very excited because you are running an agricultural production company, which is kind of a unique animal on this show. So I’d love to dig in more. But let me start with my favorite question. What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in TerraMax, Inc.? First off, I found that to be a very interesting question. My background is more technical, genetic engineering, et cetera. I got into microbes. Literally, it was a fascinating subject to me, partly because most of what we’ve learned was, at the time, 30 years ago, academia, and there was very little successful use of microbes generally, other than other types of products that may not have performed up to the standards that people have gotten used to with chemistries, right? So I’ve been in science for 40-plus years.  I looked at that as an opportunity. So there is a piece of the committed or should-be-committed individual who said, “I think I can do this better.” So the why was really, if we’re going to complain about the impact of chemistries, yet we don’t develop products that can supplant them in the marketplace, that’s on us. You don’t cross your fingers and hope that nature is going to fool people. That’s why we do field trials, that’s why we do these things, but the onus is on us to develop those.  So I took that seriously and, like I said, as a challenge. And in the first two years of our company’s life, that’s what I was working on. It was a very small group back then. And so it was taking seriously what we’re doing, and that may sound funny to people, and I’m sure there are people that will disagree, but sending those products through their paces, or the bacteria in some instances. So scientifically generating the data was a big part of what I’ve done and what we’ve done. I really need to, these days, talk much more in plural. We’re still a very small company.  We’ve been around for 28-plus years, but we’re 29 people. And only a portion of that, a small portion of that, about five people, is dedicated to the research end. But we were lacking a lot of the data we needed in showing the responses. So I hate to get technical right away on this, but things like N-15 work, which is proving that the nitrogen in a plant came from your bacteria. That’s something that was really important to me. Quantifying nitrogen from microbes, while there has been a ton of work on it, is still very prey to the environmental conditions. So there’s always room for improvement, is I think what that comes down to.  Yeah. But the why, to be—I ramble, and I apologize—but the why was really the personal inquisitiveness to go after these questions, and can we make them? And I could share data with you or anyone who is interested, basically, on what that path has described to us. And I’m happy to tell you we have been fairly successful at the science portion of this. We’re still not where I would like to see us in a business sense. But I believe we’re well-known for our approach using the rigors of science where it’s applicable. Because believe me, when you go out in nature, there’s a lot of variables that you didn’t think about in terms of the expression that these things could have. But in a nutshell, it was a great challenge.  Yeah. No, I love it. I mean, it sounds like it’s a very visionary approach. You realize that we are… I mean, I’m interpreting it, reinterpreting. The way I hear this is that we are spoiling the environment with chemistry, and how can we use biology to achieve the same aims that we are achieving with chemistry in a less harmful way? Is that what you’re trying to do? Yes, that is a very good interpretation. I have my own stilted viewpoints that the efforts to rely exclusively on BNF—biological nitrogen fixation is what BNF stands for. But for eons, nature has selected these things as slow-moving. Whereas with the hybrids of today, we’re spoiled in that we had the pricing allowed us to put luxury amounts on. And in fact, in phosphorus, for example, we were taught that you can build a phosphorus bank in your soils, which you can if you want to waste that money.  So a more on-time type of delivery system is something that we aim for, not to deplete soils, but to use soils and make the delivery more efficient and lower, okay? So there is a lot of misconception about what microbes can do, I think. And I think we can get closer in terms of turfgrass, so lawns, municipal fields, that sort of thing. That system might be a system that we can plug into and provide more of the nitrogen via microbes. But in our row crop agriculture, the corn and soybean, for example, the way corn is and the hybrids that are made, the use rates go up, right? So we’re not in some quaint old system of the farmer goes out and hoses his acreage. We’re in massive acreage in planting and harvesting.  Same is true, in my opinion, for how we treat these things. We’ve gotten spoiled by that use of chemistry, but now when the price crunch is on, that’s when farmers, producers are looking, “How do I save a buck? How do I do that?” That’s pretty much the description. There are always people out there willing to tell you that they can provide everything the plant needs. My voice is we can supplant, we can, as an adjunct, add to that picture. But in terms of our corn crop, we still have a lot of work to do. Okay,  Doug, so I just want to slow it down so that our audience, who may not be technicians of your field—definitely they are not—they also follow. Yeah. And they can relate it to themselves and their businesses. So my understanding is that it’s not just that it’s better for the ecology, the way you use the microbes as opposed to chemicals, but it’s also more cost-effective than what these artificial fertilizers can do? Yes. And that is largely our message, that people come in with the, “I’m looking for something to replace my applied nitrogen.” And my personal advice to them is integrate the system, learn how it works, learn how it’s an additive product, if you will, not a replacement product. And I could cite some chapter and verse, but people who know the marketplace, there are companies that have tried to tell you that if you work the soil microbiome, then you don’t need fertilizer, and I don’t believe that’s true. You do need fertilizer. But the more we can reduce that reliance on… BNF is an opportunity for, what a fancy term, de novo synthesis.  So the synthesis of nitrogen from the air, the nitrogen in the air, N₂ gas, is a very energy-intensive operation. Phosphorus and potassium have to be delivered. A microbe doesn’t synthesize those two. We’ll just stay on the NPK, if you will, the major nutrients that are used. But the same thing may be true for some of the micros, micronutrients as well. So it becomes more of a nutrient use efficiency question, which is a buzz phrase in agriculture. It’s not about just having it, it’s about how well you are integrating those into your system.  So, Doug, if I wanted to understand big picture what it takes to cultivate crops healthy and efficiently, what are the three to five things that a farmer would have to keep in mind when they want to increase the crop yield and the crop health? What are the five main elements, let’s say, maximum five main elements, that will take care of 80% of the result that they’re seeking?  Proper addition of the right nutrients. So whether that, for us, that would be an integration of systems. That’s got to be one of the top ones. Pathogen control, and we’ve done a few things in biocontrol. We have something teed up for going into the EPA, but that’s what makes this question really difficult. The regulatory apparatus is not necessarily in sync with the production apparatus. And there’s a certain way you follow and you do that. So nutrition is up there.  Some of this you don’t have control over. Water, right? Why people irrigate. But the climate, especially focused on water, is a definite control agent. Look at the irrigation and some of the problems with climate change. That’s introducing another variable to farmers. Soil health is definitely in there. Understanding how the microbiome is integrated into that soil tilth question, I believe tilth and health are pretty much linked in the soil. So you’re

https://youtu.be/0tIqsoczeVM Bradley Kugler, Founder and CEO of DirectMail2.0, helps marketers uncover 15 Ways to Boost Your Direct Mail by combining physical campaigns with digital tracking, targeting, and attribution technologies. Driven by a desire to help others, Bradley shares the experience and lessons he has gained from building businesses, navigating disruption, and reinventing his career. His goal is to help marketers achieve stronger results while ensuring that traditional direct mail remains relevant in a digital-first world. In this conversation, Bradley introduces The Direct Mail Edge Framework—Tactile Makes Memorable, Use for $1000+ Offerings, No Privacy Regulations, and Access Multiple Readers. He explains why direct mail is most effective when customer value justifies the cost, how a physical piece can reach multiple household members, and why less mailbox competition makes mail more memorable than digital advertising. Bradley also discusses combining direct mail with email, social media, programmatic advertising, QR codes, and call tracking to create eight to twelve impressions per target. He shares how his AI platform analyzes more than 80,000 campaigns, 2.1 billion mail pieces, and 18 creative attributes to predict engagement and improve campaigns before they are mailed. — 15 Ways to Boost Your Direct Mail with Brad Kugler  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with Management Blueprint. And my guest today is Bradley Kugler, the Founder and CEO of DirectMail2.0, an omnichannel marketing system designed to seamlessly track direct mail campaigns and enhance overall results by integrating 15 digital technologies in one user-friendly platform. Brad, welcome to the show.  Steve, thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here and spread the word on something that is old that is new again.  Well, I’ve been a big fan of direct mail for my entrepreneurial life, and I’m very curious about the state of the art and whether it’s still alive and in what areas it’s still alive and whether it’s thriving, so we can dive into that. But before we go there, I want to ask my favorite question. What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business?  I would say my personal why, I always like helping other people. I get the most satisfaction about taking the experience, wisdom, and knowledge I’ve gained over the years, as I’m not a young man anymore. Tried a lot of things. A lot of things haven’t worked. And I’m able to impart this, and I really love to share and help other people, which is the main reason I do this podcast. I feel that I do have some valuable things to share, and I’m very proud of what I’ve done and my family and my children. And if I can help one person, even if I have to talk to 10,000, then I feel it was worth it. Share on X   I love it. I mean, ultimately, that’s what’s behind the best advice that people have, and I’ve heard a lot, is helping other people and how do you contribute to human flourishing, as Eric Kreitz says in his latest book. So let’s talk about direct mail because I built my first business on the back of direct mail. I was part of Dan Kennedy’s subscribers of his newsletter, and then he was a big copywriter.  You probably heard of him. I copied some of his techniques and that of some other copywriters, and it worked really well. And when I moved here, it kind of stopped working, and I thought this was because I was doing something wrong, which probably was the case. So tell me about the state of direct mail and how it works and how it has changed over the past 10 years or so.   Absolutely, and if you don’t mind, I’m going to just tell a quick story of how I arrived here. For 23 years, me and my brother and my father had a business distributing packaged media. Packaged media is DVDs, CDs, VHS, things that nobody uses anymore. One of our most successful marketing actions is we would send postcards of black-and-white 1930s disasters, ships turning over in a harbor, a train crash, a plane crash, and we would send these things to video stores and companies as a kind of an impingement-type photograph and tell them, “We’re here to solve your problems. If you had a disaster with inventory or managing your inventory, this is what we’re here to do.”  And it worked phenomenally for almost two decades. All right? It stopped working. It stopped working because there were less and less video stores, and people weren’t selling packaged media. It wasn’t for the fact that the marketing stopped working. The market changed, and we were facing impending doom. There was no way around it, and that isn’t really what triggered me, “I want to get in the direct mail business.” It wasn’t. It was the thought of knowing that I’m in a business that’s disrupted by technology. Everything was going streaming. Packaged media was no longer to be, and there was nothing I could do about it.  So I spent about a year researching. I never finished college, so I read all of the latest business books that MBAs read on their studies, and I sort of brought myself up to speed, and I came upon something. Number one, I wanted to be a disruptor and not a disruptee. I want to be on the other side of this technology curve. Share on X I want to find something that is in danger, and I want to do something with it. That was number one. The other issue was the revenue model. I wanted a recurring revenue model, like everybody does, okay? So I was able to, through my connections, a very good family friend had a printing business that specialized in direct mail, who we had used for years, and she always asked, “Why aren’t you doing your postcards anymore?” I’m like, “Ah, they don’t work.” “Ah, nonsense.”  Obviously, I realized the industry, what didn’t work. The things are, direct mail is expensive, and if not done right, you can have a bad result, and it’s much more painful. Sending 5,000 postcards or letters is much more expensive than sending half a million emails, so this is what’s happened to this industry. So this friend of mine in the direct mail business said, “Hey, we have this little burgeoning idea of technology. We want to spin it off and sell it to other direct mail producers.” Took me almost a couple weeks to understand it because I didn’t really know anything about direct mail other than I used it, and I didn’t know anything about digital marketing or the technology behind direct mail.  So I forced myself to get over that hump as a 50-year-old man with three kids in college facing a new career, and I did that, and here we are seven, eight, nine years later and still growing. We have two other brands, and it’s all focused around technology that improves the chances of success with direct mail. That’s the overall story. We can get into the details as you ask for them.  Yeah, so what I’m curious about is how has this industry changed? So what is it about direct mail that worked really well in the past that doesn’t work anymore? And what is the area that perhaps was neglected in the past and evolved to be more successful right now?  So that’s a good and more difficult question than it appears to be. I’m sure you remember us being the same age some 20, 30, 40 years ago, our mailboxes were full in the United States of advertisements, a stack of them. As the digital revolution in marketing came upon, direct mail has waned. There were cheaper ways to get quicker attribution and more verified results. Direct mail was expensive, it wasn’t trackable, it wasn’t attributable, it was hard to measure the success. So as digital marketing was going like this, direct mail was going like this.  That’s not to say there aren’t still millions and millions of pieces going a day, but it had its pressures. As digital marketing became almost a background noise, everybody in the United States gets 10,000 digital messages a day. All right? How many messages do you get in your mailbox? Two? Maybe three? So it's now become a point that it's less crowded, which is bringing new interest to it. Share on X Still very expensive, more expensive than ever, but you can now do things like you can track the arrival, you can have QR codes, text-back numbers, call tracking numbers to see the number of calls.  You have identity resolution pixels you can put on the website to see if the person got the mail, went to the website, and then you can identify the address they live at and match back. You can also use digital programmatic marketing to target the homes or the people going into certain businesses by geography, by drawing polygons around digital programmatic marketing. So we offer all of these as partners, our 15 technologies, so that now direct mail is as attributable as an email click or a digital ad click. So this is how it’s evolved over the last 10 or 15 years.  That’s fascinating. Yeah, that’s very deep. I like the 15 digital approaches. That’s probably not something we can cover on this podcast, but it’s something maybe the listeners can explore after the show. So let’s switch gears here a little bit because this podcast is all about frameworks, business frameworks. So what’s the right framework for direct mail? If someone wants to use direct mail for their marketing, what should they be thinking about? What are three to five things that if they nail, they’re going to have a successful campaign? I’m probably oversimplifying.  Great question. Great question. And I’ll put it to you this way. The ROI has to be commensurate with the spend. All right? So if you are literally spending $1 per target and you’re mailing to 5,000 or 10,000 people, that’s an expensive campaign to hit somebody one time, right? Now, if you’re going to send 10,000 emails, they’re a fraction of a penny each. So you’re having to sort of fit this type of marketing into

https://youtu.be/WqR_N4qFZbE Randy Perkins, CEO and Co-Founder of FreightPro.ai, is helping commercial transportation move From “Fill-the-Seat” to Trust-Based Recruiting by connecting quality drivers with quality carriers. Driven by a desire to support underrepresented people, Randy built FreightPro.ai to give drivers a stronger voice, help carriers create safer workplaces, and raise standards across the transportation industry. In this conversation, Randy introduces The Aligned Driver Recruiting Framework—Build Driver and Carrier Profiles, Validate with Research & Questions, Match Driver and Environment, Build Trust Through Human Touch, and Refine Continually. He explains why effective recruiting requires understanding a driver’s experience, endorsements, safety record, home-time needs, personality, and ability to handle specific routes and working conditions. Randy also discusses using AI and FMCSA data to evaluate 25 qualification measures, reduce recruiting noise, and identify stronger matches without replacing human judgment. He shares why trust and consistency drive growth, how FreightPro.ai combines blue-collar industry knowledge with technology, and his vision for connecting fragmented transportation data into one secure network. — From “Fill-the-Seat” to Trust-Based Recruiting with Randy Perkins  Good day. Steve Preda with The Management Blueprint. And my guest today is Randy Perkins, the CEO and co-founder at FreightPro.ai, building a platform centered on commercial driver recruiting, retention, and workforce alignment for carriers, 3PLs, and transportation companies. Randy, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here, Steve. Thanks so much for having me.  Well, absolutely. I’m curious about this business that you’re in. We talked a little bit about the podcast recording that I’m always thinking about what these drivers’ lives are like, and you see that there are all those stickers in the back of trucks that they try to recruit drivers. So it’s going to be a tricky business, and you’re in the middle of it. So we’re going to talk about this. But before we start on this, I’m curious about what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in FreightPro.ai?  My personal why. That’s a touchy subject. It’s a good subject, but it’s touchy. I got a soft spot for individuals that need others. I grew up in a less-than-ideal environment, and I wish that I had more individuals that would’ve helped me out. So growing up my whole life, I knew I wanted to contribute something in regard to giving back to somebody that needed it. Share on X I started off coaching with children, doing things of that nature, have my own children. It’s a blessing. And then also got into logistics.  Through getting into logistics, I worked at ITS. We were a great brokerage there. They were one of the best in class. Man, it was phenomenal. My exposure in that realm of logistics, which is broker-to-carrier and broker-to-shipper, shined light on a layer deeper, which was the driver-to-carrier. And it struck me similarly to children, where it was a class that is underrepresented and means so much to the industry, right? Where the futures of drivers are just as important.  And I don’t know of an industry where you can have somebody that has the potential to make upwards of six figures plus and not have to have a resume or have any sort of consistent tenure at any one job, where you don’t have to have professionalism to back it. And that’s driven, I think, partly in context to the stereotypes that have been driven over the years. Drivers for the longest time were classified as unintellectual, right? Didn’t have an education. They got classified as roughnecks, brutes.  The reality is they are roughnecks to a certain extent because they have to be, because that environment is critical. It is extremely dangerous. And yeah, so to a certain extent, but that’s in a positive way, not in a negative. But for a long time, those stereotypes that were landed have stuck, and there’s been a stigma. And drivers have essentially turned into a recurring revolving door of employment, where they’re tossed to the curb during slow times and they’re brought on real quick, and it’s a knee-jerk reaction.  And how do you expect to have any sort of quality on the road and safety if the carriers and drivers don’t take it seriously to work amongst themselves? And that was what kicked open the door for me when I was at ITS, and I was like, “Man, you hear carriers talking about their drivers and drivers talking about their carriers, and I’m going, “Man, how come there’s not just a mutual agreement where everybody worked together collaboratively?” And I knew that I couldn’t accomplish that at ITS, so I broke off and started FreightPro. And the whole mission of FreightPro was to raise the standard of the industry, and we’re starting off by working diligently on engaging drivers via human contact as well as through our technology, and pairing up those quality drivers that we identify with quality carriers that we identify, doing the same thing in the other direction.  We're increasing our overall values. We're increasing our overall compliances and metrics to get in. Share on X Every day that goes, we’re strengthening ourselves. And in the next year or so, we plan to be something that is a force outside of just recruiting. There’s plenty of other things that we can go into there, but that’s the reason I broke away, was because I noticed, similar to when I was working with kids, was drivers needed somebody to represent them, and same with carriers. This goes both directions, and both of them are underrepresented. And sorry, I get passionate about it because it’s a—so like I said, it’s an odd industry that’s in its own silo.  And unless there’s an economic hit, the general public doesn’t realize how detrimental it can be having an unsafe driver on the road until your family’s the one that’s in an accident on the road. And they don’t realize how severe it can be and the lack of guardrails that have been in place and the lack of enforcement throughout the years, and we want to fix that. This is just the means to get there. And when you start talking about that, it kind of elevates the conversation much more than just a recruiting platform. We want to really change the industry.  Well, that’s very interesting. So this podcast is a blueprint podcast. It’s all about business frameworks. I wonder what the framework is in your business that you look at. And it could be something to do with how to recruit drivers. It could be how do you improve the relationship between driver and carrier. It’s how to market to them. It’s how to serve them. I don’t know what it is, but is there a framework that helps you understand this dynamic better and helps you serve your drivers better?  I would say there’s not one single framework. The industry is intertwined with so many other realms that you can’t just say it’s one framework. What I will say is that over the years, working at my previous employers, I got insights into fleets, into drivers, into brokerages, into shippers and receivers, into compliance demands, into managing assets. You name it, I was exposed to it. And through that, you develop your own unique framework that we’ve established that allows you to develop an established relationship with drivers that’s based off of something more than just a monetary figure, but because we care. It’s the reason we’re implementing a social media platform here in the next few weeks. There’s going to be another vertical for that because we want drivers to come to a place that they want to go to.  That’s not just when they’re needed, right? So we're working on developing strong relationships with drivers, and that's through showing them that we care, not just through the jobs, not just through social media, but also legislation. Share on X We want to have an advocacy group. We want to have drivers that are there to represent what needs to be done when more funding for parking is needed. How cool would it be to have our platform be able to come out and say, “Drivers, speak on our behalf. Here’s a petition. Fill out an electronic petition. Let’s get this thing going,” and have another backing in logistics that helps push things to the finish line. That’s not just going to stand there passively and let things go by. That’s really, on the driver side, a huge benefit that we’re going to have in the near future, is the network of drivers that we have, the ones that are of quality.  We want to have them back us in more than just, “Let’s go get a job.” But it’s, “We love that company,” right? “They represent us. They give us things that other companies don’t, and more importantly, they hear us.” And then we do the same framework on the carrier side. The ones that are quality, the industry right now is not as scary for them. There’s been actually a lot of upside for the quality carriers in the industry, the ones that take the time and due diligence to recruit correctly and to treat their drivers well and actually pay layover and detention. And those are the same guys that we want in our corner on the other side. We don’t want to have over-compliance either. We don’t want to have any one government ruling things more than they need to or overrule or overstep, but we need to have stronger foundations.  And the carriers right now that are already of quality are already doing that for the most part. They already make sure that their drivers are quality when they’re interviewing them in the process. It’s not fill out an electronic application and three hours later come hop in a cab. It’s let’s do our due diligence of work, and we want those two to partner up through a relationship. So that’s what w

https://youtu.be/dNEb8GCeA-k Debbie Howard, CEO of Senior Living SMART, helps senior living operators build a sense of belonging while guiding older adults and their families through complex, emotional decisions. After working at the community, regional, divisional, and national levels, Debbie founded the agency to make senior living easier to understand, more transparent, and more centered on the consumer. Her mission is to help prospects become the heroes of their own stories while giving operators the strategy, technology, analytics, and resources required to grow. In this conversation, Debbie introduces The 3W Senior Living Growth Framework—Whether (move or not yet), Where (brands, amenities, reputation), and When (degree of urgency). She explains how senior living marketers can map consumer questions, content, and channels to each decision stage while addressing both emotional and informational needs. Debbie also discusses creating an always-on nurturing system with no dead ends between marketing and sales, measuring each channel’s contribution across a 28-to-42-touchpoint journey, and prioritizing long-term revenue over short-term occupancy. She shares how proprietary products such as marketing certification, transparent pricing, virtual tours, and predictive move-in modeling can create better consumer experiences and more scalable agency growth. — Build a Sense of Belonging with Debbie Howard  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and today my guest is Debbie Howard, the CEO of Senior Living SMART, an agency with a strategic focus on innovative marketing and sales enhancement, propelling the growth of occupancy rates through targeted strategies of senior living homes, I presume. Debbie, welcome to the show.  Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me.  Well, that’s super exciting to have you because I don’t remember having anyone running senior living homes or a business regarding to that. So my first question will probably resonate with you. What is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in Senior Living SMART?  Yeah. So before starting the company, I kind of grew up in senior living, senior housing. And just so listeners know, like, what does that mean? It really means anything in the spectrum of aging, from 55-plus kind of luxury living to retirement, active adult, and then some of the needs-based care, like assisted living and memory care, or a continuum of care, which is typically nonprofit. That would be, you know, CCRCs or, like, continuing care retirement communities or life plan communities.  And so it’s a big business. And we are an aging population, and the business is booming and doing very well. But I grew up in a time when people didn’t understand what senior living was. They only kind of knew their home and the home. And nobody ever wanted to go to the home. And so then came an industry that no one really had a lot of knowledge about, which was beautiful, luxury, private-pay lifestyle plus healthcare, which was not a nursing home and provided more support than home care could. And so it was a new market. It was something that was kind of a blue ocean at the time, so we were selling a concept that nobody really understood.   I started working at the community level, helping families make the best decision for themselves or their loved one. Share on X And then I was at the regional level, the divisional vice president level, and the national VP of sales and marketing for one of the top five publicly traded companies in the industry. And it just always bothered me that nobody was really interested in making things easy for the consumer, for the prospect. The brands were focused on themselves and telling their story rather than making the prospect the hero of the story.  And it was more outbound marketing. It was more secret keeping. Like, “We’re not going to really tell you anything. We’re going to force you to call or come in because we know everything about this industry that you don’t understand.” And people were in an emotional state, right? There’s a lot going on. It’s a big deal to move into one of these communities, and nobody kind of walked alongside the prospect and really helped guide them, and we thought we could do better.  So we started Senior Living SMART. SMART’s an acronym for Strategy, Marketing Automation, Analytics, Resources, and Technology. Strategy because a lot of operators have tactics but not strategy. Marketing because at the point 14 years ago when we started the company, digital marketing was just coming out, so they had a lot of traditional marketing, but they were really confused and wary of digital. There was no marketing automation.  Analytics, because they either had no data or they didn’t understand the numbers and information they had. Resources, because they didn’t know where to go for what. What’s the best CRM? Where do I get floor plans? Nobody understood. We’d worked with everybody at the national level, so we knew all of the resources. And then technology, because 14 years ago, they were really behind on technology and still using spreadsheets and sticky notes. And we thought if we could help them just be smarter, that we could help them be more successful and scale, but we could also create a better experience for consumers. Share on X   So it sounds like you have, like, a complete franchise model that you can license to people, so they don’t actually have to buy a franchise, and you can provide this information to them and they can grow their practices.  Well, I would say that most of our clients do have a franchise model. So they are mostly third-party management companies. So the REITs and private equity tend to own the real estate, and then they hire third-party management companies, and then the management companies contract for us. So some clients might have five locations. Some have 60. Some have close to 100. And so when you get to that scale, it really becomes very much of a franchise model.  Very interesting. So basically, you provide a fully outsourced marketing and sales enhancement approach, including technology, consulting, and even execution?  Yeah, everything. Some clients have us do everything, and some of the larger companies have us kind of work within a specific skill set where we might be a complement to some other partners. But I would say most of our clients work with us as an agency of record because they get the full package, right? They get the right tech stack. They get the right strategy. They get turnkey but customizable tools and resources that they might not be able to find on their own.  And we also create a lot of proprietary products that we’re bringing to the market because we see gaps and needs in that. And as you know, marketing agencies are very human-driven. It’s a lot of labor, and it’s hard to find margin. So we needed to really add products to our mix as well.  Okay, so that just triggered another question that I’d like to ask you, but I’m going to defer it later. This is about the human versus technology question.  Yeah.  What I’d like to ask you now is about your favorite framework. So this is a podcast of frameworks, business frameworks. And I wonder if there is something, whether it’s the SMART acronym—and you already discussed this—but is there something that you figured out along the way of running this company, building this company, that helps the senior living businesses have a better conception of how they’re going to grow themselves and what are those elements that they need to figure out along the way, or some other framework that you find useful?  Yeah. So I have a couple that I think might be helpful. One is we look at stages of decision, and we are creating marketing programs to attract consumers, so prospects. Share on X And there are two different audiences. There’s the adult child, who is often leading the charge to get more help for a loved one, and then there are seniors and solo agers that are researching on their own. And so it’s really complex. It’s a very emotional decision. There’s a lot of stakeholders and decision-makers that are trying to get to the same place, but they take different paths to get there, and different things resonate with them. So one of the things we look at are the stages of decision because it could be that the older adult’s in one stage and the adult child is in another stage, and you have to meet both of them kind of where they are simultaneously, which is very complex. So we break it down in a couple ways. Number one is to look at where they are in terms of the three Ws. So the three Ws for us are the Whether, the Where, and When. Share on X People spend about 70% of their time in the Whether stage of senior living decision-making: whether I need independent living or assisted living, whether there’s dementia and I might need dementia care, whether I should live near this child or that child, whether I need to sell my home, whether I can get a veteran’s benefit, whether I can afford it, whether I want to move now or whether I want to move after the holidays.  There’s, like, all of these Whether decisions, and multiple stakeholders are going through these Whether decisions, pros and cons, weighing choices, and they have to kind of get through that. And mostly they want to remain independent during that. They expect to be able to get all of that information with a lot of transparency because they’re not really ready to talk to sales. Then they get into the Where stage. Okay, well, there’s lots of different senior living community options. In most markets, you’ve got multiple brands that kind of all say the same thing. They all have the best care, and they’re all beautiful, and they all have wonderful dining and transportation.  And so trying to find that differentiator is confusing for

https://youtu.be/vZe016EjE-c Jay Berkowitz, Founder and CEO of Ten Golden Rules, helps law firms implement the Law Firm Success Formula to attract qualified prospects, convert more opportunities, and build five-star operations. Driven by a strong desire to win, Jay applies his competitive nature to helping clients rank higher, sign more cases, earn stronger reviews, and generate valuable referrals. In this conversation, Jay introduces The AI Visibility Optimization Framework—Collect Prospect FAQs, Publish Answers Regularly, Become an Expert on Reddit & Quora, and Blog on Customer-Generated Topics. He explains how businesses can identify real customer questions from sales calls, intake conversations, and AI-generated transcripts, then answer them through videos, blogs, FAQs, and social content. Jay also discusses optimizing websites and Google Business Profiles, responding quickly and empathetically to inquiries, and delivering five-star service that generates reviews and referrals. He shares how referrals, conference speaking, webinars, podcasts, and high-value content drive agency growth and how EOS helped him develop leaders as the company expanded. — Implement the Law Firm Success Formula with Jay Berkowitz  Good day. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Jay Berkowitz, the Founder and CEO of Ten Golden Rules, a two-time Inc. 5000 digital marketing agency that helps law firms generate more qualified leads and clients. Jay, welcome to the show.  Thank you so much. Great to be here, Steve.  So we already talked a little bit about it, but I was really curious about why you focus on law firms. There are so many marketing agencies out there, but I’ve never seen anyone that focused on such a narrow niche. And then I’m going to link it to my favorite question. So what is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in your Ten Golden Rules agency? And maybe there’s a connection to law firms as well?  Well, I’ll start with my personal Why, and my personal Why is I really like to win. And I’ve done the StrengthsFinder and different psychology tests, and I’m in the top—whatever—one or five percentile of people who are competitive. And so I was competitive in sports, but I really want to do well in business, and I want my clients to do well. Like, I really, really hate it if my client’s not right at the top of Google and if my client’s not growing in more new cases signed every month.  So that seems to be a really great fit for the business I’m in, which is helping clients with growth strategies, part of which is the marketing piece, getting new traffic to their website. Part of it is conversion, so we do a lot of work with our clients on getting a higher percentage of the folks who do show up to call, to click, to fill out a form. And then we work with their intake teams on converting those opportunities. And the final piece we work with them is really running a five-star operation—meaning that they’re getting more five-star Google reviews and getting more referrals from past clients and referral partners. So we do a lot of work in those three pieces of the business to help law firms grow, and I really want them to win because when they win, I win. Selfishly.  No, I love it. I love it. So are you like an outsourced marketing department and marketing-sales department for these law firms? How do you see yourselves? What is the role that you fulfill?  Yeah, I mean, we are a consulting agency. So first and foremost, we’re going to help them strategically figure out where to focus. And we have a fully functioning digital marketing agency, so we do websites and SEO and Local Services Ads and pay-per-click and social media and video and lots of AI. And then as a part of our consulting practice, we help with intake consulting that I mentioned before and five-star operations. And a big part of that is just finding the right partners because we’ll do high-level intake coaching and point out if they’re not answering the phone, if they’re not putting the right people on the phone, and then we’ll connect them with one of the top intake coaches in the legal industry.  If their back end is a little rough and needs some help, there’s a number of partners. Like, for example, there’s a really great software called Case Status we recommend to all of our clients. And imagine Case Status is an app. So, like, when we all order an Uber or order food, we get updates. “Hey, your driver’s been selected. Your driver will be here in 10 minutes. Your driver’s waiting outside. Do you want to have a conversation with your driver? What temperature do you want?”  And so there’s a great app called Case Status, which can manage the case in an app format that consumers are really used to. “Hey, we got your MRI booked, and here’s the location, and here’s the time. Don’t forget your MRI is tomorrow at 8:00 A.M. Here’s the location. If you can’t make the MRI, click here. Hey, we got your MRI. We forwarded it to the next surgeon,” in a case of a car accident. So using that software helps our firms get five-star Google ratings and lots more referrals, and that’s just one small piece of the pie.  So within the niche of law firms, is this even a narrower niche of injury law firms that you work with?  Yeah, it’s funny because when, as a business person, you go from working on 200 SIC codes and you pick one, “I’m only going to work with lawyers,” everybody always asks, like, “Which niche within the niche are you?” But by the nature of our business, 50% or 60% is personal injury, just because those guys are really invested in marketing. They spend a lot of time and money on it, and we’ve built a little reputation.  But we also have estate firms and family lawyers, criminal attorneys, sex abuse lawyers, securities attorneys. So I always say 50% is personal injury and 50% is everybody else who deals with consumers. Because for the most part, the B2B lawyers, they’re not going to spend a lot on marketing. But we have done some beautiful websites for them.  Very interesting. I have kind of a tangential question, but you may be able to help me answer it because I’m obviously wondering about it. I always see these billboards with the injury law firms promoting themselves, and I get if someone gets in a car accident and there’s a billboard above them, then it’s going to be an obvious thing for them to call, but it probably doesn’t happen that often. So how are these billboards so good for lawyers, or is it just a myth and they’re just wasting their money on it?  No. I think the math is pretty compelling, and the average personal injury firm will make between $10,000 and $20,000 on average on cases. Then there will be one or two or three, what they call whales, every year. So a terrible incident where, like, a FedEx truck or a commercial vehicle hits a family and there’s serious injuries or death involved, and it’s a multimillion-dollar case.  So the lawyers make a third of all the revenue that comes in on those cases, and they do a lot of work and they have a lot of expenses too. But when there’s millions of dollars at stake for just one case, these guys can afford the TV advertising, the billboard advertising, and the digital marketing that they do with us.  So it’s not just a billboard. Yeah. Billboard is just a visible one. It’s basically the general idea that they do a lot of advertising because being top of mind is important.  Yeah, for sure. And if, God forbid, someone you knew had an accident, you’d start noticing that every second ad on TV is also personal injury.  Yeah. Yeah. That’s true. That’s true. So let’s talk about frameworks because that’s what this podcast is about. Business blueprints or concepts that you have developed, you observed, something that helps you make sense or streamline the ideas that you deal with in your business. Anything that comes to mind, something that can be explained in three to five steps?  Yes. Well, I touched on it a little bit a minute ago, and we call it our Law Firm Success Formula. And the first part is attract, the second part is convert, and the third part is five-star operations. But I’ll spend a couple more minutes on it. So the attract piece is, first and foremost, you’ve got to have your website dialed in. You have to have a contemporary website. If your website’s more than five years old, it just sends a subtle, even subconscious message to folks that you’re not current, and the design times change over time.  And also, Google’s functionality is going to change, or the functionality of your website, as it’s friendly to Google, particularly your mobile website, if it’s five years old, is not going to be the current best practice. And Google’s going to come and test your mobile website, and they’re going to send negative ratings back to the algorithm, and you’re going to show up less in the searches. Equally important is your Google Business Profile. And that’s your Google Maps address. And that has to be up-to-date and optimized and constantly updated with new content and blogs and videos and information and photos from your location because I always say that you don’t own your Google Maps, you lease it from Google, but it’s a second and very powerful web presence that a firm can have.  So we do a lot of work on the websites, on the Google Maps, and there’s a whole SEO protocol around local SEO that surrounds the Google Maps listing and how you’re listed on your website and how you’re linked to by local businesses and the Chamber of Commerce and business associations and bar associations. And then the next piece is getting your message out there and optimizing for the AI. And so the AI today that’s important in my part of the business is the SEO AI, or a lot of us are calling it

https://youtu.be/lrnG7ydEErk Saul Marquez, Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, helps medtech and healthtech companies get closer to revenue through healthcare-focused marketing strategy and execution. Driven by a desire to be a source of love and inspiration, Saul supports healthcare innovators whose work helps people live healthier, longer lives. He believes companies improving healthcare deserve to succeed and should not have to navigate growth alone. In this conversation, Saul shares his Leverage the 3 Forms of Marketing Framework—Owned (podcast, books, content), Earned (Stages, Testimonials), and Paid (Drive Traffic to What Converts). He explains why companies need a clear strategy and strong owned assets before pursuing earned exposure, and why paid marketing should amplify a funnel that already converts. Saul also discusses growing through primary research, thought leadership, podcasting, and conferences rather than relying on cold outreach. He shares why marketing metrics must connect to pipeline and revenue, and how sales blockers, opportunities, and needs can guide the creation of campaigns and sales enablement assets. —   Get Closer to Revenue with Saul Marquez Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Saul Marquez, the Founder and CEO of Outcomes Rocket, a healthcare-exclusive marketing strategy and full-service marketing execution firm that helps medtech and healthtech companies accelerate their growth. Saul, welcome to the show.  Steve, such a pleasure to be here with you and your listeners. Thank you for the opportunity.  Well, I really have to get my A-game today because I rarely find a podcaster who’s recorded more episodes than I have. You beat that by a multiple of five or six. So definitely, I have to be on my best performance. But my first question is always the same, at least recently. What is your personal “Why,” and how are you manifesting it in your business?  My personal Why. I did some thinking. This was probably about 20 years ago. I did this program. I’ve always been very reflective, and I’m a big journaler. I love to write my thoughts. And I had the chance to, about 20 years ago, do a program called Date With Destiny. It’s a Tony Robbins program. It was a game changer for me. Five days with people that want to just crush it in life—personal, professional, financial, right? Like, they just want to do the best.  And so I had these five days to myself to really look inside, journal, question. And during that session, he has what he calls your primary question. You sort of look inside and you ask and you think about, like, what are those words, the stories that you tell yourself? And the primary question is that question that drives your life. And I was able to uncover that my primary question is, “I want to be a source of love and inspiration to myself and others.” And so I’m driven by love. I’m driven by inspiration. And so that’s my primary question and my primary Why. And then, when you think about it professionally, Steve, I’m very driven by mission.  So because of that, I started my career in medical devices around the same time that I actually did the seminar. And I’m driven by being able to help people live better lives and increase health span, not just lifespan. And that’s why the work that we do focuses around leaders innovating in the healthcare space. So very driven by those things.  But these are very noble ideas. And I mean, who wouldn’t want to live better, live longer? That’s an obvious need from everyone, really. And it’s a great thing if you can create an impact in that realm, that then you are creating something very valuable.  You are, Steve. And the data point here that I’ll share to pair the purposefulness, the data point, because we’re very data-driven as a business, and I’m a data geek, is that healthcare is essentially 18% of U.S. GDP, which represents $4.8 trillion annually. It’s larger than the German economy, and that’s just the U.S. alone. So whenever anybody says, “Oh, your niche is healthcare,” I say, “Well, I mean, my economy that I’m focused on is healthcare.” It’s huge.  Of course. Yeah.  Yeah.  Yeah. And probably, I mean, we can get into whether that’s not an overinflated number. Is it really that proportionate value? But if you think about it, the biggest resource is humans, then spending 18% of GDP on the biggest resource is not much.  It definitely isn’t. And then if you sort of zoom out and you take a look at globally, GDP focused on healthcare, it’s definitely higher than most first-world countries. And the outcomes aren’t commensurate to the investment. So the opportunity to improve access, affordability, better outcomes is a huge opportunity. And I'm in awe, and I have major respect for all the entrepreneurs and business leaders in this space that are looking to improve those metrics for us in healthcare, and that's why we love to stand behind them. Share on X   The stats are real. 50% of businesses fail within five years, and something above 80% fail within 10 years. And we believe at Outcomes Rocket that if you’re in the business of helping people live healthier, longer lives, you deserve to succeed, and we want to be behind you. And so that’s why we do what we do. The people doing the work, it’s hard, and they can’t do it alone.  Yeah. Love it. Just as an aside, whatever happened to this initiative of Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos that they announced some years ago that they would reform the—  Yeah.  Healthcare?  Haven?  Yeah. I don’t know what it was called.  Yeah, Haven. So yeah, it was Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and JPMorgan. And it didn’t work. And it shows you that, like, even when the best of the best try to go do something about it, it doesn’t work. It’s hard. It’s hard work. Yeah. It’s hard work.  I bet it’s very hard. So hopefully AI will fix it. Let’s hope. What do you think about that?  That’s a great one, man. Like, AI definitely is not fixing it. However, properly deployed AI in solutions such as ambient scribing that helps physicians spend time with patients and no longer have to do what they call pajama time. Pajama time is the time that they spend at home after hours logging things into the medical record. Like, if you’re able to give a physician time back from not having to do that, and actually time back to look at you in the eyes when you’re in the waiting room, that’s awesome use of AI.  The use of AI in the elimination of waste is also beautiful. So I think as a tool, for sure, there’s huge promise in the use of AI for healthcare. Hell, in robotics, man. Like, I was just at a conference, Steve. I was in Miami. Where do you live, by the way?  I’m in Virginia.  Oh, you’re in Virginia? Cool. I’m in San Diego, where I’m literally at the SRS, so that’s the Society of Robotic Surgery. And I’m in the room, and there was a surgeon in Virginia, actually, and a surgeon in California, and the robots were operating on. It wasn’t a person. It was actually just like a simulation, but it was like a cadaver type of thing. And with AI, spatial AI, and the use of technology, these surgeons are operating in two different states on one person.  Remotely?  Yeah, remotely, and it’s working great through robotics. So all of this stuff, man, is coming together. Yesterday, I had a conversation with an entrepreneur in the materials and 3D printing space. She’s been in it for years, and just chatting with her was inspiring because what they could do now as far as custom-built plates for craniomaxillofacial or foot and ankle, they could literally print this stuff overnight on sheets, whereas it used to take months.  Like, we’re moving fast, and the innovations that are available. She called it patient matching, like the N of one. I mean, what’s possible today for a fraction of the cost than it used to be back then is just inspiring. And it’s happening right before us. So it’s a really great, great time to be alive.  And to stay alive.  And to stay alive. Exactly. Well said, my friend. Well said. Hey, you have to tell me about Summit OS and Fable, man. Like, I love what you have back there.  Well, I’ll tell you all about Summit OS on your podcast, but on this podcast, we talk about you. That’s fair. That’s fair.  I like that. I like that.  So let’s talk about frameworks because this podcast is a podcast of frameworks.  I love frameworks.  And I saw that you have the Discover, Define, Deliver, or something like that. But I’m looking for something more unique. Yeah. So something that maybe that’s more insightful or more unique or more you that you could share with the audience, which still can be explained in four to five steps or elements maximum to which give people an insight as to how to do things better.  Absolutely. So I think you and I are brothers from another mother, Steve, because I just love frameworks as well. So the 3D approach is easy, as you mentioned, right? But it is our approach and how we reproducibly bring about a program from start to finish for a client: Discover, Define, Deliver.  Underneath that, that is the hood to another framework, which when you start to deliver, the framework is essentially a four-part framework that starts with strategy, then it’s owned, earned, and paid, okay? And so those are the types of marketing that you could do. And you mentioned at the beginning we’re a marketing strategy and full-service execution agency, which essentially means we’re a revenue partner, we’re a commercialization partner.  So when you go to market with your value and your value proposition, it all starts with strategy. Strategy is so key. And one of the key quotes that we always share, Steve, is that, “Tactics are the noise you hear

https://youtu.be/rBR5_jK8fIA Dan Salganik, Founder and CEO of VisualFizz, helps established B2B companies plug all the holes in your marketing through integrated, outcome-focused strategies. Driven by a desire for freedom, travel, and creative expression, Dan built a fully remote agency that allows him to explore the world while helping clients create distinctive campaigns, strengthen their marketing capabilities, and generate long-term customer value. In this conversation, Dan introduces The Growth System 4 Tracks Framework—Brand & Digital Foundations, Staff Augmentation, Transformation, Transition & Expansion, and RevOps Growth Inflection. He explains how companies can select and combine these tracks to strengthen their foundations, expand internal capabilities, support acquisitions and geographic growth, and align marketing with sales. Dan also discusses growing through quality rather than speed, building larger client relationships through trust, and shifting VisualFizz from commoditized services toward solutions focused on business outcomes. He shares how identifying small gaps across the customer journey can improve efficiency, strengthen retention, and create sustainable revenue growth. — Plug All the Holes in Your Marketing with Dan Salganik  Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Dan Salganik, the Founder and CEO of VisualFizz, a company that empowers industry-leading brands to maximize their potential with effective marketing strategies and custom-tailored campaigns. Dan, welcome to the show.  Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. I really appreciate it.  It’s great to have you, and I’d like to learn about your personal ‘Why’ and how you’re manifesting it in VisualFizz.  Wow, that’s a big question to start with. I’ll start with my kind of goal for a little bit of freedom, which is funny because the more you grow, the less freedom you have. But for many years, I started VisualFizz because of a need to travel and to have freedom to do what I want. I’m a very expressive person, and after working at a number of agencies and finding things they do wrong, and also being a big traveler, I actually decided to launch VisualFizz almost 10 years ago, which is crazy to me.  And ultimately, we’ve seen this company grow quite a bit in that time. But I built it out to have the ability to travel, to do the things I want, to build a team, to build also campaigns that are fun and they’re unique and build customer value. So you started with a great question, and there’s so many reasons why—my kind of personal philosophies and why I manage and run and grow VisualFizz—but I think travel, freedom, and the ability to see creative campaigns at scale are just a few of them.  So I saw on your website that one of your goals is to travel at least 100 days a year. So is this business travel? Is this personal? Is this a combination?  I’d say almost no business travel counts, right? Because then you’re just doing business. I love business, but that’s totally separate. It’s personal travel. Basically, every single year, yeah, for almost 10 years, I have spent about a little less than a third of the year traveling, and some years a lot more. And so, being a remote company—and pre-COVID we were remote—we’ve built this style and methodology and processes, everything around being a fully remote company or an organization. And so, yeah, I do 30-day trips. I do two-week trips. I do two-, three-month trips.  But for me, it's always very important that work doesn't slow down. But you're going to regret working your whole life. Share on X I like the phrase, “You don’t die with your money.” It doesn’t come with you, but what you do have is experiences that you can remember and memories and everything—photos and things like that. And you’re not going to want to cherish your photo when you’re at a nursing home of you working in front of a computer. It’s going to be you with friends and family, enjoying the world and eating well and drinking well and seeing sights and exploring history and things like that.  Yeah. My dad, he was a doctor. He worked very hard all his life, and he always told us when we were kids that he was going to retire at 60 and travel around the world with my mom. And then when he was 60 years old, he had this opportunity to run this hospital, and one thing led to another, and he turned 70, and then he no longer wanted to travel.  And he literally said, “Oh, I wish we traveled more while we were young because now I don’t want to travel.” So that kind of resonates with me, what you say. It’s great that you have this awareness and you make it happen. So when you travel, do you run your business remotely?  100%. My business runs with my laptop, and if I’m lucky, I have a second monitor with me. Actually, nowadays I travel with a second monitor even on a flight, if I have to take a flight.But I have a second monitor with me. I have my laptop. My business comes with me. That’s number one.  So I might switch my hours a little bit. I might change things around, but I’ve got a great team. I delegate. It’s interesting because in the early days, it was hard to travel because we didn’t have a lot of clients, so we didn’t have a lot of money. Still don’t have a lot of money, but we didn’t have nearly as much when I started the company. Nowadays, we’re a growing business, and it’s great. So finally—it’s the whole dilemma. It’s like we’re finally growing. We’ve got a real business. I can pay myself a real wage.  But you can’t leave the business for too long because then you have other issues. But it’s a good balance between the two, and I always do bring my laptop no matter where I go. You never know what happens. But if I’m truly taking time off, which is very, very hard, I give my wife my cellphone. I either don’t take my laptop or I put my laptop away in the safe, and I don’t touch technology. Because honestly, it’s very easy to get distracted.  It is super easy to get distracted. So let’s talk about frameworks because this is what the podcast is about. So tell me a framework that you have developed or you picked up somewhere that allows you to do something better than other people, whether it’s more effective, whether it’s bigger impact, whether it’s more organized, whether it’s generating an insight that can be explained in three to five steps.  I love that. Actually, this is really great timing because we just built a brand-new framework, and I just soft-launched it to the world. We had a big event last week, and it’s called the Growth System. And it’s for our soft launch called VF3, VisualFizz 3.0. We’ve scaled up. This is kind of our software reboot. There's four tracks. It's a track system, so it's similar to a framework, and they're driven by the following. Share on X Let me actually backtrack a little bit.  It’s developed for mid-market and enterprise B2B companies, especially companies that have been around for a long time, hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, but have something that’s broken or maybe needs improvement, et cetera. And so they come to us, and instead of saying, “Oh, I think you need SEO. I think you need paid search,” it’s solutions-focused, not services. The services come after. And there’s four tracks that are built off of. Each track can take three months, six months, 12 months, two years, et cetera. It just depends on the business.  The first one being the brand and the digital foundation. Many of my clients come from boring industries, my favorite. They need to rebuild. They came in understanding there’s private equity money, there’s new competition coming up, this, that, and the other. It’s a new brand, rebrand, or brand infrastructure, and then web infrastructure, all focused on sales. So everything here is focused on RevOps, sales, et cetera.  The second one, track, is staff augmentation, capability accelerator. It’s helping brands that are really great at something and really not great at another thing, or have a very expensive team internally where they feel that they can outsource to an agency for a large discounted price, for lack of a better word to put it. An example is we took over the tech arm of one of our clients, saved them about 50% in their budget, doubled their capacity, have a full team, 100% uptime, things like that.  The third, the one that I'm probably most excited about, is transformation, transition, and expansion which is all about mergers and acquisitions, national expansion, franchising, scaling locations, things of that nature Share on X and how to ensure that those are done accordingly, kind of symbiotically, consolidated properly. And the way I put it is, you’re spending $50 million or whatever you’re spending to buy a company, spend half a percent or a percent of that purchase value on the marketing, on the consolidation of brands, on sales materials, HR communication, kind of that side as it pertains to marketing.  And the final one is RevOps, growth inflection. We come in, we look through the CRM, we work with the sales teams, we audit the sales teams, we do interviews with the sales teams, and we make sure that marketing and sales are not oil and water. We combine them, we develop everything, we focus on lifetime customer value, post-sales transactions, and really driven towards long-term growth and revenue, basically generation. So a little bit longer than the few sentences you asked me for, so I apologize. But this is the future framework that VisualFizz will be built upon and scale upon for the future. Share on X Like, we’re just launching this as we speak. My website’s in progress right now.  Yeah. I love it. So the big picture is that you fix the foundations, then you give them people who can actually execu

https://youtu.be/0U9tQ5D2MCk Parry Headrick, Founder of Crackle PR, is helping B2B technology companies offer LLM-digestible messages through earned media, human-centered writing, and strategic communication. Driven by the belief that where people start does not determine where they finish, Parry has built an empathetic, senior-led agency that works exclusively with good companies and empowers its people to share their expertise openly.  In this conversation, Parry introduces The LinkedIn Cheat-code Framework: Post every day, Tap into news stories, Weave in audience impact, and No-CTA. He explains how consistently sharing valuable ideas and expecting nothing in return helped him build an audience, generate most of his leads through LinkedIn, and shorten the sales cycle from three months to one week. Parry also discusses how LinkedIn thought leadership creates a virtuous cycle of earned media and LLM citations, why websites and PR content must be readable by both humans and machines, and how a senior-led agency can scale without sacrificing quality. He also shares why human writers will become more valuable as AI-generated content creates a growing sea of sameness. — Offer LLM-Digestible Messages with Parry Headrick  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and my guest today is Parry Headrick, the Founder of Crackle PR, a B2B tech public relations agency that works with good companies only. Crackle PR is a senior-led B2B tech PR agency built for the LLM era, where earned media is no longer just a brand builder, it is the vital infrastructure that feeds foundation models. Parry, welcome to the show.  It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.  Well, it’s great to have you, and you are all about LLMs and how to get through the AI filters, which is relevant for all of us. But before we jump in, I’d like to ask you my $64,000 question. What is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in Crackle PR?  Yeah, that’s a good question. And I haven’t really been asked that question in that way before, but if I had to nail the answer, it would be this. So I started out with humble beginnings. My family didn’t have any money really to speak of. We wore secondhand clothes. It was the typical scratching and clawing our way up story. And I had a difficult childhood with divorces and everything, and I ended up getting kicked out of high school. Seventh grade was the last grade I actually completed. I was kicked out of two different schools three different times.  And the last time I was dismissed, I was told by the principal that I would have a long life working at McDonald’s. It was a real dagger that he put in my heart as he showed me the door. And I just thought at that point that didn’t seem like something that someone in power should say to someone who had none. And that kind of informed everything that I’ve done since, including being a reporter where I covered stories trying to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, all the way into how I’ve tried to create an agency that is predicated on doing it with empathy.  And we have an ironclad no-assh*les policy. I hope you don’t mind the swear there. That means internally and externally. We won’t work for jerks, and we won’t tolerate brilliant jerks that work with us because that tends to be very cancerous for an organization. So that’s the Why, is where you start doesn't really dictate where you finish, and I'm determined to prove that that's the case. Share on X   Yeah. I love it. And that’s one of the benefits of being in business for yourself. You can select your own clients. You don’t have to accept the ones that you don’t like. But few people actually put a stake in the ground and actually declare it, right? It’s harder to do it than to just make some compromises.  Yeah.  So tell me about Crackle PR. I really like the name of Crackle PR. I kind of sense what it might mean, but why don’t you explain how you came up with this?  Well, good question. I like these layups you’re giving me here. So I started Crackle during the pandemic, actually, when most of us were staring at the walls of our home thinking, “What the heck is going on?” There were riots in the streets. People couldn’t go anywhere, and it was really this sort of just dark malaise that covered the world. And it was that time that I thought, “What if I were to start a PR agency that is the antithesis of the large ones that I had built?”  So prior to Crackle, I had built a couple of the largest privately held tech PR agencies in North America. The models at these large agencies, as you probably know, are very hierarchical, where you trot out the Parrys of the world and the VPs, and then the model demands that you have most of the work done by juniors because that’s how you make the money. And I thought, what if we just, instead of trying to get big at all costs, what if we instead had a very prescriptive model where, instead of paying for offices in Manhattan and San Francisco, what if we just put that money into our talent and had a senior team that did the work, and we didn’t have a whole bunch of overhead? Wouldn’t that be cool?  And what if we also, as I just mentioned, don’t work with any jerks, and we work just with companies that are good people doing good stuff? And that was the true north for the company to start. And so we’ve been very fortunate in the intervening years. We now have 15 full-time employees, another five consultants. We’re hiring prescriptively and slowly. We don’t want to grow for the sake of growth. And we have clients all the way from seed rounds of funding to publicly traded companies. We really run the gamut. It's a B2B tech PR shop primarily. Share on X   But I always thought that the bad people need more PR than the good people.  Well, they may, but we’re not here to put lipstick on pigs. I had somebody that told me in my life one time that you don’t get into the mud with the pigs because the pig will love it, but you’ll both get dirty. And that’s not a game I’m looking to play. So I didn’t actually answer the question about Crackle itself. So the idea was that during that dark, dark time—COVID, riots, craziness everywhere. We wanted to represent a bit of goodness in the world. So I just pictured the world being this heap of ashes Share on X and under those ashes was a little spark, a little crackle of life, a little ember of goodness that was going to come out of all this. And that was really the impetus for the name, and it’s really guided the true north of the company.  Love it. That’s really fun. And your hat looks good, too.  You see the little spark, the little crackle right there?  I see it. Yeah. It’s like a Christmas cracker. So, okay, this podcast is called Management Blueprint because we are looking for, or I’m looking for, frameworks that people came up with, that they stumbled upon, which other listeners might apply to their business. So what’s a framework that you could share with us which can be explained in three to five steps that helps you get an insight or communicate better or organize better, something that helps you be more effective?  Yeah. So this may not be a big surprise. Some of your listeners may follow me on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my cheat code. When I first started this business, I went to LinkedIn with my full self. Share on X Determined to tell everyone the good, the bad, the ugly about the industry that I’m in, which is public relations. And a surprising thing happened. At the time, there weren’t a lot of people kind of being truth tellers in their respective industries. But I stuck to that same framework, speaking truth to power, which goes back to my Why.  An interesting thing happened, which is I tended to get a bunch of followers really quickly, and they would DM me saying, “Finally, someone’s just saying it like it really is in the industry. Finally, someone is lifting back the curtain. Finally, finally, finally.” And so I just doubled down on that approach. And so fast-forward to today, I have 82,000 followers on LinkedIn. The majority of my business comes in through DMs on LinkedIn from them having read my posts, my thoughts.  And by the time they actually come to me, they already have a good sense for my ethos, how I think, how I operate, that I work with good companies only. They know me. So the vetting process is 75% of the way done by the time they ever reach out. So that’s the cheat code. I’ve shortened the sales cycle from my old world being three months down to a week. If we have a phone call, we put together a quick proposal, and then it’s done because they are already looking to hire me when they reach out. So that’s the framework, that’s the cheat code, that’s the hack, and it’s applicable to just about any industry.  Okay. So I love it. So let’s break it down. So how do you create this effect where people pick up the phone or DM you and within a week sign you up? What is the process?  Yeah. So the process is just I post literally every day of my life. Maybe weekends I’ll take a break, it depends. But every work weekday I am posting. It is not a nice-to-have, it is a mission-critical function of Crackle PR. I would say up until recently, about 90% of my leads came in through my commentary and writing and posting on LinkedIn.  And it's really me just sharing everything that I know, including commenting on the news of the day tapping into the zeitgeist about issues that are happening from a public relations standpoint, and sharing real-time thought leadership across my… Share on X And so it’s not a simple process of, like, I do A and then B. It’s really more like, what’s happening today? What’s a story that I should tell and comment on today? And then how is that going to positively im

https://youtu.be/1xVHNhjP1AY Denis O’Shea, Founder of Mobile Mentor, helps organizations pursue a clear goal to simplify your tech environment while strengthening security and empowering employees to remain productive. Driven by the joy of learning and intellectual adventure, Denis left a 15-year career at Nokia to build a company that learns about emerging technologies, translates them into business outcomes, and mentors customers through change. In this conversation, Denis introduces The Tech Stack Streamlining Framework: Understand Current Tech Stack, Assess Capacity for Change, Benchmark to Peers, Build the Roadmap, and Deliver Simplified Tech Stack. He explains how immersing his team in a customer’s environment, asking thoughtful questions, and benchmarking the organization against its peers can reveal a clear path toward a simpler technology stack. Denis also discusses Mobile Mentor’s fast-growing mentoring service, how its Microsoft partnership transformed the business, the challenge of finding technology professionals who are natural mentors, and why people must remain responsible for the quality and accuracy of everything they produce with AI. — Simplify Your Tech Environment with Denis O’Shea  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, Management Blueprint Podcast. And today my guest is Denis O’Shea, the Founder of Mobile Mentor, a technology service provider helping thousands of clients find and maintain the right balance, securing devices, protecting data, and empowering people to be productive. Mobile Mentor is also a five-time Microsoft award winner. So Denis, welcome back to the show.  Thank you, Steve. Thank you for having me back. And I have to say, you look fantastic. You’re aging gracefully, and I hope I’m doing the same.  Well, unfortunately, my barber is on vacation, so I couldn’t visit him last week. But it’s great to have you back on the show, and we couldn’t agree whether it was two or four years ago that you were here. Anyhow, it’s great to have you back, and I’ve got some questions for you that I’m curious about. And first and foremost, the question is, what is your personal Why, and how are you manifesting it in your Mobile Mentor business?  My personal Why is probably learning. And I think the reason I went into business in the first place was to learn and grow as an individual. It certainly wasn’t money. I expect money as an outcome from the process, but I didn’t go into it for money. It was really to learn, and the trigger for me was I did an executive education program in Switzerland. I was living there for a few years, and that blew my mind. That just exploded my mind when I started learning all about mergers, acquisitions, turnarounds, management buyouts, all these different ways of growing a business that were nonlinear.  And that motivated me to go on and do an MBA, and that then motivated me to leave my employer, who was a great company. I was working for Nokia for 15 years. They were amazing, but I decided to leave them and go out and embrace all this nonlinear stuff and found a company from scratch. And one day I thought maybe I’ll do a spin-out, or maybe I’ll do an acquisition, and I’ll do all these different things. And it was purely for the joy of learning and the intellectual adventure. So I think that’s my Why. It’s learning.  Yeah. Well, learning is great, and it’s a big driver of businesses when they are able to learn, especially in today’s age. So tell me a little bit about how Mobile Mentor is reflecting this way of learning. Is it a learning organization, and in what way is it?  Oh, that’s an interesting question, Steve. I would hope we are a learning organization. Something I’ve been saying to my kids and my staff for years is, “We’re a learning species. We can learn anything we put our minds to.” And so I would hope we are a learning organization. And the word “mentor” plays a huge part in not just our brand, but how we work. So we’re a technology service company. We’re always unpacking the latest technology and helping customers figure out what to do with it and how to extract value from it.  So I would hope that we’re good at learning what the technology can do and then translating that into outcomes for customers and helping people unlock the full potential of the technology they’ve just purchased. And when we started 22 years ago, we were focused on mobile devices. That’s why the company’s called Mobile Mentor. Nowadays, it’s mainly AI and security and all that. And by the way, we’re going through a rebrand. The company’s just going to be called Mentor going forward. Just Mentor. So that we can work with all technology, so we remove any association with that small device where we started 22 years ago. So I think we are very good at learning, internalizing the new technology, and then translating that into business outcomes for our customers.  Yeah.  That’s what I feel like our core skill is.  Yeah. And I love this concept of mentoring because essentially it’s not about teaching people, it’s about helping people discover how to be great. And if you can do that, that’s amazing. So that brings me to the next question, which is about frameworks. So this, as you know, this podcast is about frameworks, and what I’m curious about is, what’s a framework that has helped you grow this company, build this company, or help your clients or mentor your clients? Maybe it’s a mentoring framework. Maybe it’s a technology framework. So something that comes to mind that can be explained in three to five steps to our listeners.  Sure. We have a really strong framework at the front end of our sales process. It’s an assessment and roadmap we do for customers. And it’s something that’s on our website. It has a price point, so it’s got a value, but we choose to give it away for free when we get a strong, well-qualified opportunity, or when we have a channel partner bring us a strong lead. We will use this assessment and roadmap process to build a vision for the customer. And the way we do it, we’ve got a good framework for this.  We go through an assessment. So we tell the customer, “We’re going to have a look at your environment holistically and get a really good understanding of the technology stack you have today, all the different technologies you’re using, and also get a good understanding of your organization’s capability and capacity for change, and how you embrace change, how you make change happen. “And we’re going to show you how you compare to a whole bunch of other organizations.” I think we’ve done 174, 175 of these in the last maybe three years. And so we show the customer how they compare to others in their industry and also against others roughly their same size. And then, most importantly, we build out a roadmap, and we show them, “Here’s how you can potentially go from where you are today with today’s technology stack,” which is usually very busy, it’s usually a long list of technologies, “to a much simpler technology stack in the future if they’re willing to consolidate on one or two platforms and do all the possible integrations, automations, and simplifications so that they’re extracting much more value from one or two platforms, like Microsoft, than having a whole colorful mix of different technology vendors.”  So we’ll say, “Here’s a journey you could go on,” and then we describe it in vivid detail, showing all the different parts and how they would go passwordless, how they would automate setting up new employees and all the technology they need, how they would automate all their patching and security, how they would embrace AI into their operations, how they would use AI for productivity improvements, and kind of show this technology journey. That process, or that framework, of doing an assessment, and it covers 120 different topics. So we do the assessment, the comparison, the roadmap.  We find that to be extremely powerful because customers will look at that, and they’ll look at the destination and say, “Right. We want to be there. We want to get that outcome,” and then they’re buying off us. We’re not selling to them. They’re basically saying, “Okay. We want to get there. How do we do it? Help us. How can you come in and help us do it?” So the narrative flips from us being a sales organization to then being a mentor and helping the customer figure out how to get there.  And of course, we want to sell services, and we want to sell long-term contracts to say, “Yes, we can take you from here to there, and it’s a three-year engagement to do all those changes.” So that’s what we want. But the customer is buying it off us because they’ve bought into the destination.  Yeah. And that’s the modern buyer’s journey, right? They research you. Before even they come to you, they want to listen to you because you might have something for them. So I love this framework. So what I noted down was step number one, understand the technology stack that they have. Step number two, assess their ability to manage change or to handle change.  Yeah.  Then you benchmark them to others in their industry or in their peer group. Then you build the roadmap, and then you show them the simplified end state, the simplified tech stack.  Correct. Correct. And then we give them options around how we can help them to get there. Usually, there’s three options. And we say, “Well, what style of engagement works best for you? How would you like us to work with you?” And then it becomes a very comfortable, easy sales process from there, and it becomes easy because we’ve done all the listening.  So when we do the assessment and we cover 120 topics, we do 60 questions in 60 minutes. So it’s two one-hour sessions. And we call it our “friendly interrogation.”

https://youtu.be/35oNXqlEVf4 Dave Goyal, Founder and CEO of Think AI Corporation, is driven to Turn Disabilities into Unique Abilities by using technology to empower disabled entrepreneurs and help businesses unlock the value of their data. After contracting polio as an infant, Dave transformed physical limitations and early adversity into a passion for solving business problems, building companies, and giving back to society. Through Think AI, he helps manufacturing and healthcare leaders use data and AI to generate real-time insights, improve productivity, reduce costs, and create new opportunities for growth. In this conversation, Dave introduces The 3G AI Augmentation Framework—Gap: Where are we losing time, quality, ability, or capacity? Grow: Apply AI to augment people and improve that work. Glow: Institutionalize the solution so humans and AI collaborate effectively. Dave also shares how his private second brain and AI executive agents save him up to 80 hours per month, why human control and security must remain central to AI adoption, and how authority, trust, people, customers, and culture drive business growth. He also discusses his book, Real-Time Business Intelligence Mastery, and his vision for creating a venture studio for disabled entrepreneurs. — Turn Disabilities into Unique Abilities with Dave Goyal  Good day. Steve Preda here with The Management Blueprint. And today my guest is Dave Goyal, the founder and CEO of Think AI Corporation, which helps CTOs and CIOs in manufacturing and healthcare turn siloed data into real-time insights and automation, creating reduced downtime, increased efficiency, and going from weeks to days in project launches. Dave, welcome to the show.  Thank you for having me, Steve.  Well, I’m really curious to learn about you and your company, Think AI Corporation, but first I’d like to ask you about your personal why and how you are manifesting it in your business.  So thank you again, Steve. I’m really excited to be on your show. I’m in the data and AI business, and really tech innovation, for the last 30 years. In this particular company, Think AI, I have a partner, Manish Bhardia, and we both have been working very actively with Microsoft partners, the Microsoft ecosystem, and implementing data and AI solutions for midsize companies and manufacturing companies. You went on why, which is amazing.  My why: I’m a disabled entrepreneur. I have this hunger for building businesses. I’ve built nine businesses. We can talk about it later. And five of them were miserable failures in my books. Not all of them were that miserable, as I say. But five of them were failures, and I learned a lot from them. And I’m really motivated now to expand it further, to give back to small businesses.  We’ve been working with midsize and enterprise clients, but to midsize companies, and then motivate—I have a 15-year-old kid—so motivate young people and also small businesses to make use of the power of their own data and use and consume AI on a day-to-day basis. That’s my why.  Wow. So, to learn the power of their own data and use AI, why is this important to you?  The main reason is I am passionate about technology. Everybody is good at something. I am really good at solving business problems using technology. Being a disabled entrepreneur, I did not have a lot of luxury initially, even walking. Eventually, I started using braces, started going to different countries. So the passion became really the source of energy and motivation, and that passion is now going to a level where I want to motivate people like me who are disabled entrepreneurs and want to go into this kind of business. So my real passion is technology and giving back to society using technology, to sum it up.  Wow. So you mentioned this disabled entrepreneur. I’ve never heard this term. I mean, you talk about minority entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs, you know, veteran entrepreneurs, and actually the government recognizes these categories, but I never heard about disabled entrepreneurs. So would you mind sharing a little bit about what happened to you and how you got into this entrepreneurship?  Sure, yeah. And that’s really good, by the way. I don’t see anybody else using that term but me, so probably I should keep it with me as a copyright term. Just joking on it. But having said that, every disability brings some kind of ability. That’s why sometimes they call it differently abled. When you have these abilities, you don’t know the source or the channels to use them. So, for example, blind people, they may have a lot of great listening power. That’s why they are into music most of the time.  Sometimes they have amazing reasoning and critical-thinking power, but they don’t know how to channel it, so they fight on a day-to-day basis with these issues. Bringing it back to me, I have polio. When I was six months old, I got hit by the polio virus. Initially, for a few years, I had to just lie down on the bed, had a lot of physical therapy. Then I was able to get up and sit, at least. Then my father was carrying me to school, and I could see the kids were going out and playing. I got beaten up because of that, too, because kids don’t understand. No fault of theirs that I’m not throwing the ball at them and they are playing.  And so that brought a lot of negativity in me. Eventually, my grandfather and my father helped me get over that, and I started channeling that into building businesses. So I started teaching music. I learned music through some of my friends. I started teaching music during my college days and started making money. And I had a blind friend, and he needed money because he was abandoned by his parents, so I had to help him out. I started making some money. I was doing well with my family, so I could just pay everything back to him. So that seed got planted there, and I didn’t know what to do back then, right?  Still a 14-, 15-year-old kid or a teenager, in this case. So I started getting into that mindset of, how about I build businesses for me and then start helping out the community? I’m still not there yet. I’m going towards helping that community. But I want to identify disability in three ways, not just physical. So those three are physical, but the bigger one is mental. A lot of people are really mentally blocked, and you see people, you know, “Oh, I can’t change anything in my life.” People die by suic*de. Kids get into depression. This is a form of disability, by all means.  I don’t think education, parents, and community are doing so much about that other than having a cliché thing that, “I was a victim of depression, so I’m doing that,” just to show off. But really, to help out the community in a methodical manner, that doesn’t exist. Second, physical disability, like I said, given by God sometimes, like war veterans and others, then you feel really limited. So what to do with that? And I come into that category, so I know that really well. Third is financial disability. So a lot of financial disability is in the mind, too. I’ve heard a phrase called, “You don’t die by hunger; you really die by indigestion.”  So you would find ways and means to make money even if you’re a completely disabled person. So I don’t think finance is an issue in general. So these three areas, to me, are the real disability areas. I’m obviously only working on one today, which is physical disability: how to identify the potential of people who can create something different within that limitation and then make a change in the world. So that’s the motivation. That’s my Life 2.0, where I’m moving now. Love it. Love it. So how did you have time to build nine businesses?  I started it in 1993, ’94, I believe, or ’95, I think. And they’re one at a time. Today I have about three. I sold one. And yeah, I did not have time. One of the big challenges when I built these three in the last six, seven, eight years, the biggest challenge I faced is I do not have time for working with customers, which I love to do—talking and listening to their business problems, solving those problems. I end up doing a lot of operational work.  Post-2020, and it’s a very blunt thing to say, people got lazy. They want to change jobs, make more money, do moonlighting, do multiple things, but not work hard like we did back in the days. And that kind of pushed all of us small businesses to do a lot more management of resources, especially human resources, in a distributed environment. I have teams in India, the Philippines, Canada. So that became a bigger challenge. But having said that, AI came as a savior. In the last 18 months, AI has changed quite a lot.  And if you don’t go into a debate of whether AI is good or bad, or you’re a skeptic or an enthusiast, AI can really help you if you really put together how it can help you. It should not replace you, but it should give you an additional helping arm. In my business, I started deploying C-suite. So I still have a VP of operations. My business partner is into sales. But then I started filling in other functions, like a fractional CFO, as an example. My fractional CFO is monitoring my top line and bottom line. I call him Felix. I have to give names to AI agents.  So Felix is actually looking on a weekly basis at what invoices are billed, if we have vendors or employees, what we need to pay, where our expenses are going, what’s the monthly or maybe six-month cash flow run. Are we within limits? Do we have borderline cash availability so that we can survive? So it started to do a lot of things. But not only that, because we are feeding our own data, our own mind, I have built my own second brain. It started to read off of that and started giving me insights that a human would not give me. And even if I hire a fractional CFO, he will only hear what I have to say,

https://youtu.be/1ixNS0eJX-0 Carlos Corredor, Co-Founder and CEO of Condor Digital Marketing, is driven by a passion for interpreting data and helping marketing leaders Generate and Measure Your Pipeline with greater accuracy. ith a background in sports analytics and journalism, Carlos helps B2B companies identify which marketing activities generate qualified leads, clients, and revenue so they can invest confidently in what works.  In this conversation, Carlos introduces The Condor Pipeline Generation Framework—Understand Current Pipeline Generation, Map the Process, Move Budgets to Their Highest and Best Use, Fix Measurement Gaps, and Rinse and Repeat. He explains why marketers should begin with clients and revenue instead of clicks and impressions, how the Pipeline X-Ray exposes attribution gaps, and why budgets should move toward channels with proven returns. Carlos also discusses using BANT to diagnose conversion problems and why client champions, paid media, and events drive growth in high-ticket B2B markets. — Generate and Measure Your Pipeline with Carlos Corredor  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and today my guest is Carlos Corredor, Co-Founder and CEO of Condor Digital Marketing, a pipeline generation and measurement firm. Carlos, welcome to the show.  Hey, Steve. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.  It’s exciting to have you and to learn about your secrets of how you generate a measurable pipeline. But before we get into it, I’m curious: What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it through your company?  Yeah. So I’ve always been passionate about sports and the data behind sports, and I actually worked in sports data analysis and journalism. But ultimately, I’ve been passionate about interpreting data to have an advantage, whether that’s playing tennis or doing analysis for baseball teams. And then I eventually started working in marketing, doing sports websites, and I saw the opportunity. In marketing in general, especially with digital, to use data to your advantage. So I would say that’s really what I’m passionate about in terms of my professional life and why I enjoy what I do so much and why I get up in the morning and I really look forward to the day and even to Monday. Because obviously, it’s not all fun. But ultimately, I think it comes from that passion of liking what you’re doing, and the time flies when you work and you like what you do and you see that you’re good at what you’re doing and it’s making an impact. So I would say that’s why.  And have you always been a data person? Are you analytical and like to look at the numbers behind things?  Yeah, yeah. It started with sports. That’s where I realized that I had, let’s say, that passion at the beginning and ultimately that skill. With baseball at the beginning, it was reading the back of baseball cards and then fantasy baseball in high school, and then actually working in that. In kind of like sabermetrics and Moneyball-type analysis in college.  Because I saw, just like it happens in marketing, how back in the old days, even professionals, they were using the wrong type of data or a very antiquated way of looking at things. So it’s like understanding really what has an impact and what is responsible for outcomes. That’s, I think, the part that I’ve always thought was what’s important and what I had a knack for, a talent to do that better than others. So that’s why I went deep into that.  Okay. So how do you do that? So this podcast is a podcast of frameworks. So I wonder if you have a framework of how to create pipeline generation based on data, and perhaps you can share a simplified version of that with our listeners, something that can be explained in three to five steps.  Yeah, definitely. And I’ll give you first the kind of like the philosophy or the mental model, and then I’ll give you those steps because one comes from the other. So in marketing, with all of the data that’s available, especially today, a lot of people start at the bottom. At clicks, impressions, and then they try to build a bottoms-up report to then prove what’s generating leads and clients and revenue. But that is always inexact, takes forever.  What I propose is doing it the opposite: a top-down approach where you start with clients and revenue, and then start figuring out where those leads in your pipeline or clients and the closed revenue is coming from. And you will know all of that at the beginning. So that’s, I think, how it starts, that framework. So the first step of the framework is to understand, which sounds really basic, but you’d be surprised today how many marketing leaders, marketing VPs, CMOs of especially mid-market, definitely smaller mid-market, and even some enterprise companies, don’t have that data readily available to understand how much pipeline did we, as a marketing department, generate, let’s say, last year. So that’s, I think, the first step, is understanding that. It’s asking your team for a report that says that. Now your team’s going to come back and say they won’t know the full picture. Maybe they know 10%, maybe they know 90%. But they’re going to show you something. So then is the second step. You’re going to start adjusting your investments to what you’re seeing there, and at the same time, you’re going to start fixing the dark holes or what you can’t see.  And then simply step number three is rinse and repeat every, let’s say, quarter at the beginning. And obviously, there’s nuances of how exactly you should adjust and what exactly you can fix. But ultimately, that would be the three-step approach that you asked about.  That’s fascinating. So the understand piece is understanding your pipeline or how you’re generating the pipeline? What is it? Understanding what?  Yeah. So actually we have a name for that first step. We call it the Pipeline X-Ray. So let’s say you start a new job as a CMO of a new company. Or simply you’ve been in the job for a while and you’re listening to this and you say, “Okay, actually, I’ve never thought about it that way.  Let’s sit tomorrow with my team and ask the question: How many qualified leads and closed clients have we, as marketing, generated so far this year and, let’s say, last year?” That is understanding that. Now, I’ll tell you, I’d be very surprised if the marketing person or the marketing team or the leader has that data in a way that they can say with 100% certainty what the answer is. In terms of, “We’ve closed these four clients, and we’ve had 72 qualified leads.  And out of the 72, 50 have come from our paid search campaigns, 10 have come from events, and then the others have come from organic.” In an ideal world, that’s the type of answer that you want. But in the real world, again, very rarely do you have that clear understanding right then and there. So that’s when step number two becomes, okay, let’s close the gaps to be able to have an understanding.  Okay. So essentially, when you say adjust and fix, then are you talking about adjusting and fixing the process of generating clients, or actually mapping the gaps in the pipeline first?  Yeah, so that’s a great question. The adjust, I mean move budget around. Not necessarily increase budget. You have to prove what’s working. And obviously, if you don’t have the full picture and understanding, you cannot just go to your CEO and say, “I need more budget.” So with the same budget that you have, what can you pause and move around towards the things that step number one told you with certainty are working. So if, let’s say, out of the 50 qualified leads that you generated, you saw that half of them came from your paid search campaigns, then you say, “Oh, okay.” And then you don’t see anything, let’s say, for conferences, and now you’re going to 10 conferences a year and you’re spending a million dollars on conferences, and you’re only spending $200,000 a year on your paid media spend. Then you say, “You know what? I’m going to stop. I’m going to pause. We’re not going to go to these two conferences this year, and I’m going to move those $200,000, and we’re going to double our spend in Google Ads,” for example. That’s what I mean with the adjust piece. It could be the opposite. It could be pause paid search and then be more aggressive on our conference strategy. It could be, let’s start a paid social campaign, whether that’s LinkedIn or programmatic ads, or let’s be more aggressive on our PR because right now our leads have come from interviews that our subject matter experts have done in certain types of podcasts or YouTube channels.  But that’s what step number one is. But adjust is move budget around. Put your stocks where the returns are positive and where you can expect a better return almost immediately, or at least in the next upcoming months. And then the fix is particularly around the measurement gaps. The fix is what you can’t see, right, on step number one. Step number one is understanding. And a report with all of that. When the person that does the reporting for you came back, or when you did it yourself or whatever, probably a lot of leads are like, “Ah, now it says direct traffic. What is that?” Obviously, they didn’t just come and wake up one day and say, “Oh, I’m just going to go to condoragency.com.” No, they heard you somewhere, but you’re still not sure. You won the client, you know you won the client, the client’s paying you money, but you’re not sure. So maybe, okay, what needs to improve in our measurement framework.  Usually, you can start with your CRM, your HubSpot, Salesforce, for instance, or whatever you use. There’s some web analytics that might need to happen. You need to connect your advertis

https://youtu.be/B9j1nlRifHM Alex Fernandez, CEO of Synergy Orthopedic Specialists, is driven by a mission to help physicians Build a Multi-Site Medical Practice that creates wealth, equity, and independence beyond their personal labor. By bringing independent physicians together, building scalable organizations, and expanding access to integrated services, Alex helps doctors operate as entrepreneurs while delivering a more convenient and cost-effective patient experience. In this conversation, Alex introduces The Multi-Site Scaling Framework—Visualize Your Target EBITDA, Align With Your Partners, Remove Yourself From the Center, Build Systems, and Build Margin Around Your Core Business. He explains why starting with the desired enterprise value creates a clearer path for growth, why alignment must be a gate for every partnership or acquisition, and how strong systems allow a business to operate without depending on its founder. Alex also shares how vertical integration, company culture, geographic expansion, and AI-assisted processes can improve profitability while preserving independent medical care. — Build a Multi-Site Medical Practice with Alex Fernandez  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and welcome Alejandro “Alex” Fernandez, the CEO of Synergy Orthopedic Specialists, a team of surgeons and specialists that believes in providing patients with an integrated approach to musculoskeletal—I’m glad I could pronounce this—medical care through 15 locations throughout San Diego. Alex, welcome to the show.  Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. I’ve enjoyed your show, and I’m happy to be here.  Well, I’m always interested when I meet with medical provider companies or CEOs who have been doctors, because I grew up in a family of two doctors, and so I was exposed to some of the challenges of being a doctor and running a hospital. So that’s going to be interesting. So my favorite question that I ask recently to all our founders is, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your practice and in your business?  Yeah, for sure. And so my why, as you put it, comes from where I started. I actually don’t come from a family of physicians. I started not where I ended up. I’m a son of Cuban immigrants. My parents fled Castro in the ’60s, and I was born in Puerto Rico. Later on, my family took a lot of our family in the Mariel boatlift in 1981 and took hundreds of people out of Cuba. But in reality, the concept or the reality is that my parents didn’t have a lot of money. They had some connections, but they believed that I should have a college education.  But I had to work my way through eight years of college to get my bachelor’s. So I landed in healthcare as an accident. It was a small medical practice. I was basically doing front desk and medical records, and then later on learned how to do the billing, all by hand at that time. There were no electronic medical records. And I started basically at the front desk, and I watched something that I never really forgot, which is, you have these brilliant physicians, people that can diagnose patients and help them and cure them, but when it came to business, they were never taught anything about business.  So this is where I believe I have generated value over the years: basically, built companies that actually create wealth, and the wealth for the physicians in particular. Share on X I think physicians are very entrepreneurial. At least that’s the idea to begin with, is, “I’m going to go into the practice of medicine and have my own business.” But somewhere along the line, the business becomes almost like an ATM machine. It’s no different than any other entrepreneur that starts a business. They are the business. Without them, if they go away for a couple of days, the business doesn’t make any money, and they don’t really know how to do that. So what I’ve done over the years is I have gotten smaller groups of physicians to come together, form larger organizations, larger groups, and eventually built larger private businesses that can have EBITDA, equity earnings that can basically provide some additional wealth.  Particularly, I try to help them think of themselves as capitalists, not as day laborers. Because in reality, in most businesses, and particularly physicians, they’re cranking the wheel, and the more they produce, the more they work, the more they earn. But in some cases, they don’t understand how to get away from that. How to earn from all the other things that they control. Because physicians do control 80% of the spend in healthcare but earn probably no more than 5% of it.  Wow. That is shocking. So they’re not using the leverage properly, probably.  Yeah. Sometimes they know it’s there, but physicians in general are risk-averse. Just starting their own business is hard enough. Then having to figure out how to capitalize from all the levers that they have, that’s completely different. And they’re no different than, I would say, lawyers or accountants that start a small business. At some point in time, you have to figure out, how do you make the business big enough that it operates and works without you?  Yeah, I love that. I love that. And what makes you feel strongly for physicians?  Well, particularly independent physicians, I think it’s a dying breed. Years ago, I would hear the stories of my parents where they’d say, “Hey, we took you to the pediatrician,” and my dad would be friends with the OB-GYN that took care of my mom and the pediatrician. And I remember them naming them by first name or even meeting them at the social club. But nowadays, it’s very transactional. It’s very fast. There’s no connection.  So I think that’s why there’s been this whole surgence of concierge physicians where you pay extra. Because in truth, in order to make a living, the business of healthcare is compressed by downward pressures from the government and from other institutions that say, “We’re going to pay you less, but you have to have a significant amount of compliance, and you have to spend more money on this, and you have to do that.” And then at the same time, the cost of living goes up.  The employees need to make more money. Your rent goes up. The supplies continue to increase. So you have the static or lower reimbursement from the different payers, whether it’s Medicare, the government, or private institutions, and then an increase of expenses happening. That’s very strange to any business. In any other business, you say, “Well, if my costs go up, I increase my prices, and then maybe my margins are a little bit less, but I still have a significant margin.” In healthcare, you almost have to just work more in order to generate more revenue, and the expenses hopefully will increment a little bit more, but your earnings will be the same or less. So it’s a very tough situation for an independent physician.  That’s why more and more, especially physicians coming out of training, look for jobs with health systems, with the Kaisers of the world or the different large institutions in the United States, so that way they can go ahead and just go to work and take care of patients and not worry about the business of healthcare.  Yeah. But then these big hospitals turn into bureaucracies, and then they still have to worry about that in a different way.  And that’s personally the second part to that question you asked me. That’s why I like working with physicians and not necessarily with health systems. I’ve never held a job with a hospital. Not that I haven’t wanted to. It’s just, I think the nature of the bureaucracy of a health system creates some things that I’m not personally interested in.  Yeah. Well, I can see that. So Alex, this is a podcast of frameworks, as you know. So what’s a framework that has helped you build your business, maybe generate an insight, understand situations, maybe influence these physicians to come together in your roll-ups? Whatever framework you developed, could you share something with our listeners?  Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Most owners in a business—and I’ll talk in generic terms. I’ll try to make sure I don’t use any slang for healthcare—but most businesses build their business for income. They want to make income for their families, for themselves. They want to be able to take care of the people that they’re with. But they don’t really think about it from a perspective of, “Let me build a business that can multiply.” Maybe they want to, but in a lot of areas, it’s just hard for them.  I actually grew up in the bridal business. My parents had bridal stores. They basically did wedding packages, and that’s the business that I grew up in. Every summer, I would go and do the cash register or help rent tuxedos and things like that, or do filing and bookkeeping. So that’s where my entrepreneurial spirit comes from. It’s my parents. But I always saw them where maybe they built one or a couple stores, two, three stores, and they would kind of stop there. But I think I learned a lot from my dad in particular around multi-site operations in a retail industry, and I took that back into the healthcare business.  So one of the first things I think that a business owner has to do is they have to underwrite their own exit first. Share on X They have to think of growth and particularly of the value of the business if they were ever going to sell it. Figure out what your EBITDA or enterprise value is going to be, and then go from there. Then make the alignments first, but don’t make it the goal. Most people chase the volume, the customers, more locations, more deals, spend years fixing what they bolted on in order to flip it, but they don’t really take the time to align it. So I think the client, the partners