Podcasts about firms

On this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different, we talk about how the consulting and research industry is facing a reckoning. Gartner, once a $42 billion empire built on telling companies which technologies to buy, has shed more than $30 billion in market value. Trading around $155 per share after peaking at $551 in November 2020, Gartner represents something far bigger than one company’s misfortune. It is a warning signal to every knowledge worker and consulting firm that the traditional model of acquiring and reselling existing knowledge is being quietly dismantled by artificial intelligence. The Pirate Street Journal recently broke down this shift through a category design lens, and the conclusions are both uncomfortable and urgent for anyone whose career is built around advice, analysis, or strategic guidance. You're listening to Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different. We are the real dialogue podcast for people with a different mind. So get your mind in a different place, and hey ho, let's go.   When AI Gives Away What Consultants Used to Sell For decades, consulting firms like Gartner monetized a simple formula: gather knowledge, package it into reports and subscriptions, and charge companies handsomely for access. A $100,000 research subscription felt justified when getting that knowledge required significant time and access. That equation has fundamentally changed. The moment a business leader can ask an AI which CRM platform or security stack to buy and receive a well-reasoned, sourced answer in seconds for free, the traditional research subscription starts looking like a fax machine. As strategy thinker Roger Martin has noted, true strategy represents only about 3% of what large consulting firms actually produce. The remaining 97% is largely benchmarking, gap analysis, and best practices work, exactly the kind of structured, retrospective analysis that AI now handles effortlessly.   The Only Consulting Work AI Cannot Replace What separates truly valuable strategic advice from commoditized knowledge is judgment. Courage. Wisdom. The ability to make a call when the spreadsheet offers no clear answer and the outcome remains genuinely uncertain. These are the qualities that have always driven the most important strategic wins, and they are precisely what AI cannot replicate or monetize anytime soon. Consider how often the best strategic decisions required someone to say “I believe this is the right direction” without proof. Timing a market entry too early, betting on a consumer behavior before it becomes mainstream, or designing an entirely new category rather than competing within an existing one all demand human conviction. The consultants who have consistently done this well rarely stay in advisory roles for long. They move into the arena, become entrepreneurs, or deploy their own capital because genuine foresight commands far greater economics than a consulting retainer.   What This Means for Knowledge Workers and the Consulting Profession Gartner’s market cap decline is not simply a story about one company failing to adapt. It is a broader signal to every knowledge worker that the value of their value has shifted. Technology does not take jobs outright. It relocates where value gets created. The professionals who repackage existing knowledge are seeing that value erode fast. The professionals who can create genuinely new knowledge, new frameworks, new categories, new experiences, are seeing their value rise. This distinction matters enormously for how consultants should think about their own positioning. Firms that continue to offer benchmarking, retrospective market summaries, and structured best practices comparisons are directly competing with AI at a game AI will eventually win. The consultants who build practices around future-oriented, judgment-heavy, courageous strategic work are the ones whose services will remain irreplaceable, and whose market caps, whether literal or metaphorical, will reflect a world that still believes in their future. To hear more from the Pirate Street Journal, download and listen to this episode. You can also read more Pirate Street Journal entries in the Category Pirates newsletter.   We hope you enjoyed this episode of Christopher Lochhead: Follow Your Different™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and subscribe on Apple Podcast / Spotify!  

Andy Kvesic left the job every lawyer wants to build something the profession had never seen. As CEO of Aprio Legal, he traded a general counsel role at a thriving family office for the harder, riskier work of acquiring a Phoenix law firm and redesigning how professional services actually work. The result is a historic combination: the first time two Alternative Business Structure firms have merged, bringing together a corporate law firm and a national accounting and advisory firm backed by private equity. Attorneys, accountants, wealth planners, and business advisors now serve the same clients under one roof. The idea came from watching entrepreneurs waste time and energy bouncing between disconnected professionals who never coordinated with each other. Arizona's 2021 rule change allowing non-lawyer law firm ownership gave Kvesic the opening to try something different. His merger with Aprio wasn't a calculated exit. It was the recognition that both firms were solving the same problem from opposite ends: Aprio's professionals were constantly referring clients out for legal work, and Kvesic's attorneys were constantly referring clients out for tax and accounting. Neither could fully serve their clients alone. Building the integrated platform also forced a reckoning with how differently law firms and accounting firms run their businesses. After two decades working almost exclusively with other lawyers, Kvesic found Aprio's infrastructure to be a genuine upgrade: multi-year planning, pipeline visibility, real margin analysis. For an industry that largely runs on a cash-in, cash-out model aimed at maximizing year-end partner distributions, the difference is significant. The legal profession is changing whether it wants to or not. The more interesting question Kvesic raises is whether the people inside it will have the courage to lead that change rather than resist it.   Episode Breakdown: 00:00 From General Counsel to Law Firm Owner: Andy Kvesic's Career Path 02:51 The Vision Behind Raddock's Law and the ABS Model 09:03 How Aprio Legal Became the First ABS-to-ABS Merger 14:57 Cultural Differences Between Lawyers and Accountants 24:33 How Accounting Firm Discipline Is Changing Law Firm Operations 29:35 Growth Strategy and the Integrated Legal Accounting Platform 37:52 ABS Advice and the Future of the Legal Profession   Connect with Andy Kvesic: Connect with Andy on LinkedIn   Andy Kvesic - CEO, Aprio Legal | Partner    Connect with Howard Rosenberg: Connect with Howard on LinkedIn  Howard's Company web profile   Connect with Chris Batz: Connect with Chris on LinkedIn  Follow Columbus Street on LinkedIn Columbus Street Website  MergerWatch Website Podcast production and show notes provided by HiveCast.fm  

Wall Street built entire neighborhoods just to rent them. August Biniaz breaks down how and why it works.August Biniaz, Chief Investment Officer at CPI Capital, returns to break down build-to-rent (BTR): how the asset class started after the 2008 crash, why institutions like Blackstone pivoted from buying scattered homes to building purpose-built rental communities, and what that means for individual investors today.August also pulls back the curtain on how CPI Capital operates at scale, including the AI tool that cut their deal-screening time by 90 percent, and shares his read on where interest rates and the broader economy are headed going into the rest of 2026.Key topics covered:How Blackstone's Invitation Homes buying spree of 75,000 homes gave birth to BTRWhat life inside a BTR community actually looks like (HOA, amenities, maintenance)Why BTR attracts "tenants by choice" and produces lower turnover than traditional apartmentsHow CPI Capital uses Slack, Asana, HubSpot, and AI to run a private equity real estate firmThe 10-year treasury, the war in Iran, and what August thinks happens to rates nextAugust Biniaz is the Chief Investment Officer of CPI Capital, a private equity real estate firm focused on US multifamily and build-to-rent assets with investors in both Canada and the United States.Learn more at https://cpicapital.comWork With RealDealCrewIf you're already closing deals but your intake, follow-up, or visibility feels inconsistent, here are two ways to go deeper:Take the Deal Intake AssessmentSee how resilient your current operation actually is.→ https://assessment.realdealcrew.comBook a Fit CallIf you want to explore what a fully system-driven deal flow looks like, let's talk.→ https://realdealcrew.com/bookLIKE • SHARE • JOIN • REVIEWWebsiteApple PodcastsYouTubeYouTube MusicSpotifyAmazon MusicFacebookTwitterInstagram

In today's Tech3 from Moneycontrol, a major Moneycontrol scoop gets officially confirmed as Sarvam raises $234 million and enters the unicorn club at a $1.5 billion valuation. We unpack why Anthropic's recent restrictions have reignited the sovereign AI debate and what it means for India's AI ambitions. We also look at venture capital's renewed interest in consumer startups, why IT firms are rethinking AI strategies after the Anthropic episode, and Razorpay's confidential IPO filing as India's startup listing pipeline continues to gather momentum.

Japanese companies are introducing new products to help consumers cope with an expected heat wave this summer as the Japan Meteorological Agency predicts that average temperatures will be above normal across the country from June to August.

AP correspondent Julie Walker reports China opposes US move to list top firms as military companies.

China has voiced strong opposition after the US Defense Department added certain Chinese entities to its military companies list. The Chinese commerce ministry says the US move overstretches the concept of national security.

Vendors supplying AI-driven technologies are experiencing sustained margin pressure from high operational costs and underwhelming business-level returns, leading to the rapid creation of new product categories that are pushed into the MSP channel. Companies such as Atomic Work, Silverfort, and Guards are releasing governance tools for managing AI agents, while Connect Secure is offering patch management products targeted at MSPs. These launches are not indicators of competitive differentiation, but of structural cost challenges being passed from vendors to their partners.   Business media reports and internal industry data reveal that while individual productivity from AI implementations increases—for example, by accelerating engineer output—the promised business-level gains in productivity, revenue, and profit have not materialized to the extent vendors projected. According to analysis cited by Dave Sobel, high operational costs are forcing large firms like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Uber to restrict or cap AI usage internally, reflecting an industry-wide retreat from premium pricing models due to an unclear return on investment at the organizational level.   Additional developments reinforce this margin-driven shift. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has mandated 72-hour patching of high-risk vulnerabilities, underscoring heightened compliance requirements. Simultaneously, vendors are accelerating the rollout of governance, identity, and patch velocity tools. However, a study analyzing over 13,000 US MSPs found that those surpassing $1 million in revenue are distinguished by market positioning, online visibility, and business maturity, not by the breadth or novelty of their toolsets.   For operators, the implication is clear: stacking up new vendor products is now a baseline requirement rather than a path to competitive advantage. Firms that rely solely on vendor frameworks and toolsets risk absorbing more complexity without improving margin or differentiation. Practical separation will come from owning the "judgment layer"—defining, governing, and pricing how AI functions within client environments—rather than reselling tools. Positioning, documented governance, and clear operational standards will be more defensible than investing exclusively in vendor-driven offerings. 00:00 Manufactured Urgency  03:58 The Cost Confession 06:09 Out-Buy vs. Out-Position 08:35 Why Do We Care?    Supported by:  Nerdio  Sign up for the SMB Online Conference:  www.smbonlineconference.com

Terrell Turner sits down with Lisa Simpson of the AICPA, who leads the organization's Transforming Your Business Model initiative, live from Bridging the Gap 2025 on Episode 272 of The Unique CPA. Lisa makes a compelling case that the old model, with its long, billable hours where firms carry too many of the wrong clients, is not only unsustainable, but actively unnecessary. Firms that have right-sized their client base are almost universally earning more the following year, not less, because they can finally deliver the kind of advisory value clients will actually pay for. She traces how the pandemic's visible toll on practitioners sparked a broader reckoning inside the AICPA, and how that translated into concrete tools, peer stories, and low-cost resources now available to firms of every size. Lisa also touches on the cultural inertia that slows change down, and why technology is making that resistance increasingly hard to justify. Get the full show notes and more resources at TheUniqueCPA.com

The following article of the Trade & Investment industry is: 'JETRO Survey: Tariffs and USMCA Weigh on Japanese Firms in Mexico' by Neysa Criollo, Deputy Director for Projects and Institutional Relations, Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO).

With the Co-Authors of The Greater Game and Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach and John Bowen of CEG Insights Louis Diamond speaks with Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach® and John Bowen of CEG Insights about founder dependency, enterprise value, and the architecture behind scalable businesses. In Summary Many advisory firms grow successfully while remaining highly dependent on their founders. Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that the difference between a successful practice and a valuable enterprise comes down to architecture. Louis sits down with the co-authors of The Greater Game to discuss founder dependency, enterprise value, intellectual property, and why some businesses scale beyond their owners while others do not. The conversation offers advisors a framework for thinking differently about growth, succession, and long-term optionality. The Storyline Many advisors spend their careers helping clients build valuable businesses. Far fewer stop to ask whether their own firms are being built the same way. That tension sits at the center of Louis Diamond's conversation with Dan Sullivan, co-founder of Strategic Coach®, and John Bowen, founder of CEG Elevate Group and CEG Insights. Their new book, The Greater Game, challenges a common assumption about growth: that bigger businesses are simply the result of working harder, adding more clients, or improving existing systems. Instead, they argue that enterprise value is created through architecture—the deliberate design of a business that can scale, transfer, and thrive without its founder at the center. The discussion introduces a framework for understanding why some entrepreneurs remain trapped in optimization while others build enterprises that compound in value over time. Along the way, Dan and John explore founder dependency, intellectual property, succession planning, strategic partnerships, and the role advisors can play in helping entrepreneurial clients navigate each stage of growth. For advisors, the framework creates an important mirror. The same forces that limit enterprise value for entrepreneurial clients often exist inside advisory firms themselves. The result is a conversation that extends well beyond business growth and into questions of optionality, transferability, and what ultimately makes a firm valuable. Topics Covered Enterprise Value Creation Founder Dependency Risk Business Architecture vs. Optimization Intellectual Property & Scalability Strategic Partnerships & Leverage Succession Planning & Optionality Legacy, Impact & the “Greater Game” Mindset > Download a transcript of this episode… Listen and Learn Highlights for Advisors What is The Greater Game—and why does it matter to advisors? (17:57) Dan and John introduce the framework behind their new book and explain why advisors should think about it both for entrepreneurial clients and for their own businesses. Why do only a small percentage of entrepreneurs create exponential enterprise value? (22:24) The discussion explores the difference between “architects” and “optimizers” and why most business owners remain focused on improving what exists rather than designing what comes next. Why is founder dependency such a significant valuation risk? (35:00) John explains how businesses that depend on a single individual often struggle to scale, transfer, or command premium valuations. How does expertise become intellectual property—and why does that matter? (35:00) The transition from expertise to transferable systems may be the most important bridge in the entire framework, creating leverage that extends beyond the founder. What prevents many advisors from fully serving entrepreneurial clients? (18:00) The conversation examines why most advisors are well-equipped for traditional planning needs but less prepared for the governance, succession, and enterprise-value challenges entrepreneurs eventually face. What does the next game look like after you've already “won”? (50:00) Dan and John discuss why many successful entrepreneurs and advisors eventually shift their focus from accumulation to significance, impact, and legacy. What's the single most important move an entrepreneur can make? (52:30) Dan shares the concept of Unique Ability® and explains why simplifying around your highest-value strengths often creates the greatest multiplier effect. Key Takeaways Enterprise value is created through architecture, not effort. Many successful businesses continue to grow while remaining highly dependent on their founders. The firms that command premium valuations are often built differently from the start. Founder dependency acts as a hidden valuation discount. The more a business depends on one person, the more difficult it becomes to scale, transfer, or sell at a premium. Intellectual property is often the bridge between a practice and an enterprise. When expertise becomes codified, transferable, and repeatable, value begins to exist independently of the founder. Advisors and entrepreneurs often face the same challenge. The same founder-dependency issues advisors help clients solve frequently exist within their own firms. Strategic partnerships create leverage that expertise alone cannot. Many of the most successful entrepreneurs grow through collaboration, ecosystems, and coordinated expertise rather than attempting to solve every challenge themselves. Most advisors are trained to solve early-stage problems. Entrepreneurial clients eventually require guidance around succession, governance, scalability, and enterprise value—areas that extend beyond traditional planning. The next stage of growth is often not about growth at all. For many successful entrepreneurs, the question eventually shifts from accumulation to significance, impact, and the legacy they want their business to create. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JY5xOB8GTQY Quotable Moments “The exit multiple is downstream of the architecture.” “The difference between a three-times and a fifteen-times multiple is often whether the business depends on the founder.” “You have to simplify in order to multiply.” “We're not talking about a 10x game anymore. We're talking about a 100x game.”     FAQs Why do some advisory firms command higher valuation multiples than others? Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that valuation is often determined long before a transaction occurs. Firms that reduce founder dependency, codify intellectual property, and build transferable systems typically command higher multiples than those built around a single rainmaker. What is founder dependency and how does it impact enterprise value? Founder dependency occurs when clients, revenue, and decision-making remain concentrated around one individual. While those businesses can be highly successful, advisors find they are often more difficult to scale, transfer, or sell. What is the difference between an architect and an optimizer? An optimizer focuses on improving an existing business model. An architect builds systems, intellectual property, and structures designed to create leverage, scalability, and long-term enterprise value. What does Dan Sullivan mean when he says “100x is easier than 2x”? The concept challenges entrepreneurs to stop thinking incrementally. Rather than working harder within the current model, transformational growth often comes from redesigning the model itself through better leverage, collaboration, and systems. How can advisors better serve entrepreneurial clients? Many entrepreneurial clients eventually need guidance beyond investment management, including succession planning, governance, intellectual property strategy, and enterprise value creation. Understanding where a client sits in their business journey can help advisors provide more relevant advice and coordination. What is the expertise trap and why does it matter for advisory firms? The expertise trap occurs when critical knowledge, relationships, and processes remain inside the founder's head. Until that expertise becomes transferable and repeatable, enterprise value often remains limited regardless of growth. Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that valuation is often determined long before a transaction occurs. Firms that reduce founder dependency, codify intellectual property, and build transferable systems typically command higher multiples than those built around a single rainmaker. Founder dependency occurs when clients, revenue, and decision-making remain concentrated around one individual. While those businesses can be highly successful, advisors find they are often more difficult to scale, transfer, or sell. An optimizer focuses on improving an existing business model. An architect builds systems, intellectual property, and structures designed to create leverage, scalability, and long-term enterprise value. The concept challenges entrepreneurs to stop thinking incrementally. Rather than working harder within the current model, transformational growth often comes from redesigning the model itself through better leverage, collaboration, and systems. Many entrepreneurial clients eventually need guidance beyond investment management, including succession planning, governance, intellectual property strategy, and enterprise value creation. Understanding where a client sits in their business journey can help advisors provide more relevant advice and coordination. The expertise trap occurs when critical knowledge, relationships, and processes remain inside the founder's head. Until that expertise becomes transferable and repeatable, enterprise value often remains limited regardless of growth. Related Resources The Greater Game by Dan Sullivan and John Bowen Strategic Coach® CEG Elevate Group The Greater Game Dashboard Diamond Consultants Advisor Transition Report Dan Sullivan The world's foremost expert on entrepreneurship in action, Dan Sullivan has spent the past five decades empowering business owners to reach their full potential in both their professional and personal lives. His strong belief in and commitment to the power of the entrepreneur is evident in all areas of his company, Strategic Coach®, and its successful membership community. Dan is married to Babs Smith, his partner in business and in life. They jointly own and operate The Strategic Coach Inc., with offices in Toronto, Chicago, and the UK Dan and Babs reside in Toronto. John Bowen John J. Bowen Jr. is the founder and CEO of CEG Elevate Group, the holding company that includes CEG Worldwide and CEG Insights. Through these companies, he helps elite financial advisors serve fewer, wealthier clients exceptionally well while building more valuable and scalable businesses. Before founding CEG, John spent 26 years as a financial advisor and built a $2 billion wealth management business. That firsthand experience grounds CEG’s work today across advisor coaching, enterprise programs, empirical research through CEG Insights, and practical frameworks for advisors who want to move beyond practice growth to enduring enterprise value. John is the author of 21 books on wealth management, entrepreneurship, and success. His newest book, The Greater Game: Your 100x Blueprint for Exponential Growth, Freedom, and Legacy, co-authored with Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach, will be published by Hay House Business in May 2026. Today, John and the CEG team work with leading advisors and enterprise firms — including some of the largest advisor organizations in the United States — to help advisors deepen relationships with affluent clients, build scalable practices, and design lives of greater significance. NOTE: The views and opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Diamond Consultants. Neither Diamond Consultants nor the guests on this podcast are compensated in any way for their participation. View the transcript of this episode… Architecting 100x Growth: A “How-To” From Legends Dan Sullivan and John Bowen A conversation with Louis Diamond and Co-Authors of The Greater Game, Dan Sullivan of Strategic Coach and John Bowen of CEG Insights.      Louis Diamond: Welcome to the latest episode of our podcast series for financial advisors. Today’s episode is Architecting 100x Growth: A “How-To” From Legends Dan Sullivan and John Bowen, a conversation with the industry’s top coaches and co-authors of The Greater Game. I’m Louis Diamond, and this is the Diamond Podcast for Financial Advisors. Mindy Diamond: At Diamond Consultants, we help elite advisors identify the right environment for their businesses to thrive, whether that’s at a wirehouse, boutique, or independent firm. With nearly three decades of experience, we’ve guided thousands of advisors and represented more than a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets transitioned. And each year, one in four advisors managing a billion dollars or more who change firms are our clients. Our process is education-driven and based on building relationships, starting as your strategic partner well before you’re even thinking of a move. To schedule a confidential conversation, call us at 908-879-1002. Wondering why advisors change firms and where they’re headed? Are transition deals going up or down? Those very questions and more inspired us to create our annual Advisor Transition Report. It’s the award-winning data-driven resource designed for advisors that connects the dots between the motivations around movement and the firm’s appetite for top talent. Arm yourself with the knowledge you need to make smart decisions. Download your copy at diamond-consultants.com/transitionreport. Louis Diamond: Most entrepreneurs and many advisors spend years optimizing for growth without realizing they’re building a business that still depends entirely on them. Revenue and complexity grow; enterprise value, transferability, and freedom often lag far behind. Dan Sullivan and John Bowen argue that the issue isn’t effort or intelligence; it’s architecture. No doubt these are familiar names in the wealth management industry, but just to set the stage, Dan is the co-founder of Strategic Coach, and John is the founder of CEG Elevate Group and CEG Insights. Together, they spent decades coaching and studying high-performing entrepreneurs and advisory firms. Their latest book, one they joined forces on, The Greater Game, lays out a very different framework for thinking about growth, one built around scalability, transferrable value, and long-term leverage rather than incremental optimization. What makes this conversation especially relevant for advisors is that the framework cuts both ways. It applies to the entrepreneurial clients that advisors serve, as well as to the advisory firms themselves. And in many cases, the same founder dependency and expertise trap that limits a client’s enterprise value is quietly limiting the advisor’s business too. We talk about the difference between operators and architects, why 100 times growth can actually be easier than two times growth, where businesses tend to stall as they scale and how advisors can start thinking differently about their own firms, particularly when it comes to enterprise value, succession, and long-term optionality. It’s rare access to a conversation with two of our industry’s legends whose advice and counsel has not only helped to transform the business lives of many of our listeners, but also my own. So let’s get to it. Dan and John, thank you both for joining us today. Dan Sullivan: Thank you, Lou. It’s a real pleasure. John Bowen: I’ve had the privilege of joining you before, but never with my co-author, Dan Sullivan, and I’m excited to share what we’re doing because I think it can make a big impact in our advisor industry. Louis Diamond: No doubt about it. Yeah, this has been an interview I’ve been very excited to host. So let’s jump right in. Dan Sullivan, I think you are a man that needs little introduction. So many advisors in the industry are fans or clients of your firm, Strategic Coach, but for those who aren’t as familiar or need a refresh, can you just give some quick context into why you started Strategic Coach and what the company does today? Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, it goes back to 1974. I was a copywriter at BBDO, the Canadian branch of BBDO, big global advertising agency. It still is. But I’ve been sort of a lifetime coach. I remember once when my mother finally caught up with what I was doing in life and I was describing what I was doing, she says, “Well, you were doing that when you were a child. You were talking to adults and you were asking adults about their experiences.” And I said, “Yeah, I could do this when I was eight or nine years old, but it took me a long time to get a business model wrapped around it.” But I jumped out in 1974 and started coaching anybody, but it actually turned out that entrepreneurs were the best people to coach because they would write a check on the spot and they would make a decision on the spot and I needed cashflow and I did it. So I’ve been personally, as a Strategic Coach, which was named by someone else. You’re just out there trying to get cashflow to pay for the rent. So I started in ’74, and I was lucky and it really relates to your target audience, Lou. Right off the bat, I got what are called top-of-the-table life insurance agents. And that was really, really great because life insurance agents are purely a conceptual business. So someone can get a new idea at breakfast and they can have a new business by dinnertime just because they can change their mindset. And that moved on. And I did that for 15 years, just one-on-one, 1970s, 1980s. And then, I’d had enough experience that we turned it into a workshop program in 1989. We’ve been at it ever since. So I was at a talk. Joe Polish is a great friend of ours, Joe Polish with Genius Network. And he had a speaker there, and he says, “You’re one of the original gangsters, aren’t you? You’re one of the first people.” And I said, “I don’t know if I’m the original, but I think I’m the only surviving one.” So it’s 52 years that I’ve been doing what I’m doing. And I had the good fortune to meet John in around 2009. John, was that the year? 2009? John Bowen: Yeah, in the little economic downturn that everybody knows about here. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. And John had a great coaching program and we had a great coaching program. And over the years, we’ve talked a lot about what makes a entrepreneur exponential in their thinking. And finally, about two years ago, we decided, let’s write a book about this. And that’s the new book, which is called The Greater Game. That’s where this all started. It’s just been a great pleasure because we sync very well. Louis Diamond: Amazing. And Dan, I think a lot of people likely know you either from Strategic Coach. I know I’m personally a big fan of two of your books and I know of others, The Gap and The Gain and Who Not How. We’re going to talk about your new book, but I think it’d just be helpful. Can you talk about the key premise of some of your prior books, The Gap and The Gain and Who Not How? Dan Sullivan: As a result of my membership, I’m a member in other groups. And so Joe Polish of Genius Network fame, he’s been in my program for 28 years, and I’ve been in his program for 15 years. And there was a writer who was in one of the first Genius Network workshops, and he approached me. And I created a lot of books, but I create small books and they’re self-published. I do a book a quarter. I’m 82 in about three weeks. So when I was 70, I said, “I’m going to give myself a 25-year project. I’ll write 100 books in 100 quarters.” And this is quarter number 47, and I’m writing my 47th book. But they’re little books. They’re 60, 70 pages. They’re one-idea books. And Ben Hardy, who was, at that time, the number one writer on Medium, which is a blogging type medium, he approached me, and he said, “I know you don’t write big books and you don’t have publisher books. But,” he said, “if you ever did,” he said, “I’d like to collaborate.” And that was a great good fortune on my part. So we produced three books in five years. The first book was Who Not How. Who Not How basically says when you have a goal, the biggest problem with the goal, you’re excited about the goal, but you’re not excited about doing it. So you find “Whos” who help you and you build teamwork around it. And that was a big seller. And then, we had another concept which was called The Gap and The Gain that entrepreneurs, depending on how they measure their progress, can be perpetually unhappy or they can be perpetually motivated. And it all depends on how they measure their progress, how they measure their goal setting and their goal achievement. And then the third book, which has really turned out to be the big one, up until this book, this book will be bigger. It’s called 10x Is Easier Than 2x. So hence, Coach, everybody has a 10x game plan. Whatever number they want to choose, revenues, personal net worth, whatever, you have a framework of 10x, which is sometime in the future, but you use that future framework for deciding what you’re going to do today that will end up as a 10x result. I thought that was going to be our formula for the rest of my life until I met John. And then John is a great AI practitioner. And I began to realize that that 10x is now becoming 100x for really top-notch entrepreneurs, but the 10x is easier than 2x. And we just crossed the million mark with the three books, which is really good. And it’s great for lead… we’re having people show up and they’ve really bought into what Strategic Coach is. We have a good size company. We’re not a small company. We have 120 team members. We’re in five centers: Los Angeles, Vancouver, Chicago, Toronto and London, England. But it’s been really great because we’ve really grown with technological change and it’s basically, we teach people how to think about their thinking. And Lou, you were in for three years, both in-person and virtual. So you know what the starting structure of it is, but I’m in love with entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are crucial characters on the planet, but mostly they operate alone and what we’ve done is create a community for them. Louis Diamond: Fantastic. Thank you, Dan. And John, I think perfect segue to you, because I know you’ve spent your career serving and helping entrepreneurs as well, mostly within financial services or within wealth management. And you’ve been very kind to share some of your amazing research on advisors serving entrepreneurial clients in the past. But for anyone who’s missed those episodes, similar question for you, can you share what your companies do? CEG Elevate, CEG Insights, your new research, and then we’ll dive into your exciting new book. John Bowen: Thank you, Louis. And Dan and I are very excited about just entrepreneurs in general. Dan is, because he’s working with them directly. The best clients for financial advisors are entrepreneurs, largely, if you’re going to go high net worth, ultra-high net worth. So we have a company, CEG Elevate, which is our parent company. Two of the companies that are really interesting for this podcast is CEG Insights and this is our research arm. And we’ll study about 20,000 high net worth, ultra-high net worth clients this year in depth and 6,000 up to 7,000 we’ll do just of entrepreneurs. And this is in the partnership. Lou, I invited you up to… We were skiing two years ago in Park City and you couldn’t join us. But Dan and I made a deal to do a 25-year partnership studying entrepreneurship, one for Strategic Coach and his coaching clients, but really the opportunity for financial advisors. And it’s probably just as well because I came down, and I think, Dan, you were 80 at the time and I was 69. I’m 70 now. And I was skiing with a whole bunch of 40-year-olds, and they’re all going, “You guys are way too optimistic.” And Dan and I are just getting started on this. And the other company that’s applicable is CEG Worldwide, where we have the privilege of coaching and training some of the top financial advisors, those aspiring, and also working with the enterprises to really help move up market and do this great experience. Louis Diamond: Fantastic. Dan, question for you. What was the core problem you and John were trying to solve in your new book, The Greater Game? What is it that existing frameworks weren’t touching? And then John, I’ll have a follow-up question for you after that. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. Well, by the very nature of what we do, we’re not going for wannabes. We’re not going for entrepreneurs who hope to be really successful someday. We’re engaging with and we’re registering into both of our communities, people who, they’re already great. They’re already doing so many things right, but they’re kind of doing it unconsciously. They just have a unique ability for growth. They have a unique ability for networking and expansion, but the very, very core is they’ve done it on their own. And they’ve done it out of intuition and they’ve done it out of ambition and motivation. But their biggest problem is that they’re really lonely. I’m in my sixth decade now of coaching entrepreneurs, and people say, “Well, what’s the number one problem that entrepreneurs face?” And I said, “Loneliness.” They can’t explain themselves to the family they grew up with. They can’t explain themselves with their lifetime friends. They have thoughts about how they’re operating. And they take enormous pride in their ability to transform difficulties into breakthroughs, but they don’t have anybody to talk to. So what we’ve created is a community where when you walk in the room, everybody in that room immediately understands you. Everybody immediately applauds what you’ve done. Everybody is inspired by you. So my framework is I call, “What you’ve done on your own, you’re great. You’re a winner already, but who do you talk to?” You have to hide a lot of your success because they just won’t understand what it is that actually motivates you. And the beauty of the partnership with John is the vast majority of our clients are in 70 or 80 different industries, so they’re not peculiar. We start off with financial services, especially life insurance. But what I notice is that all the difficulty they get into life is they’re trying to communicate with people who don’t understand them. And what we’re saying is, “Stage one, you did it on your own, you’re great by any standard whatsoever. You check all the boxes for being a successful person, but you don’t really have any way to actually check out how other people are doing this.” And so we’ve created a community, and John has created a community where people, immediately, there’s understanding. And not only that, but there’s opportunity because they’re unique in their own ways. Every one of our entrepreneurs has created a very, very unique pattern of success that if they were with 10 other people, they could learn from this. If they were with 30 other people, they would learn even more. So that’s what we’ve done. So stage two is now joining a community where everybody gets you. Louis Diamond: Interesting. And that’s the premise of the book. We don’t want to have people not buy it, but what is the greater game? What’s the game that folks are playing and pursuing and how do you make it greater? Dan Sullivan: I tell you, what I’ve always been lacking, I’m sort of intuitive like most entrepreneurs are. We’ve done about 300 times growth since we started the program. But it’s intuitive. I don’t have any research to back this up. I’m low on fact finder. I find, generally speaking, the best facts are just the facts that I make up, but at a certain point, you’d like to have some actual research to back me up. So I’ve gone as far as I can go with our company without real research. Then John comes into the picture, and now we got some real research. And I will say this, this is generally true. It’s not just a problem with me that I don’t have research. I find that entrepreneurism is one of the least researched subjects on the planet. And John comes along and he’s done all the backfill for how entrepreneurs actually perform and I’ve got research to prove it. Louis Diamond: Perfect. Yeah, John, question for you. So what is The Greater Game? And then, how do you think it relates to what financial advisors have been missing? John Bowen: One of the things that we as financial advisors all want to work with people who have already won. And there’s no better group than entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs. If we look at people with 25 million or more of investible assets across all households in the US, 90% are entrepreneurs. And at the 5 to 25 million of investible assets, it’s three out of four. So at CEG Worldwide, we’ve always wanted to really understand advisors. And we said we’ll partner with Dan and his passion with entrepreneurs, we’ll go ahead and study them so that we can bring insights on how we can better serve them. And the very first thing we want to do is understand, yeah, there’s very different stages that we see of entrepreneurs and we talk about the whole concept of The Greater Game. And the idea here is we wanted to identify… And I’ll share some PowerPoint slides. I know a lot of us are listening and I just want to walk through this, but Louis will have it in show notes, his team will. We really saw four areas. The first one was level one, stage one was foundation for freedom. They had ambition, the vision, but they really needed security. And Dan calls this, and I love this term, “cash confidence.” But it’s really using a financial advisor to have security. And one of the things, the last time I was on with you, Louis, we talked about there’s 59.2% of entrepreneurs who want to switch advisors because they don’t believe they have that security. And that’s kind of the foundation. And this is why you’re never going to read a more friendly financial advisor book for entrepreneurs than this because in our coaching program, we’re developing workshops and so on to bring this message out. And then the second level is where now we saw… and there were four levels. Dan and I identified 5.4% of these entrepreneurs that were just killing it and they were going through all four levels. The second level was energy for expansion. They were very motivated, they were excited about getting up and really the intellectual property, and Dan’s been one of the big leaders in this, is so much of what we know… And as I go through this too, I want every one of the advisors to think about it’s not only your entrepreneurial clients, this is for you too, is having this intellectual property, getting it out of your head so that your business is not founder-dependent or personality-dependent. You’ve got this enterprise. And then, the third level where it really took off was collaboration and multiplication. And Dan talked about the power of community and this is so big. And for advisors, the community is often working with other professionals, the accountants, the attorneys, the investment bankers. Matter of fact, when we survey, we found that 40% of the people with 25 million or more that they invest with an advisor came through an investment banker. So creating that community, teamwork, having the right team and then autonomy. Can you step away from your practice? The entrepreneurs step away 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, making that independence, moving from the founder-dependent to the enterprise. And the last level was exponential. And this is all along the way, the AI opportunities to accelerate this and augment this is really real, but the agency where the blue ocean, creating new markets, then getting the commitment and courage. And at each of these levels, we saw different entrepreneurs just really taking off. And one of the things that’s so important, Louis, for what we’re talking about today is advisors all are ready to treat stage one, the foundation for freedom, but they don’t really understand the other stages, and that’s really what entrepreneurs want. So if you want to work in this market, it’s very important for you to understand what you can do to help. The difference is often for an entrepreneur, a three to five multiplier versus 15, the level one or stage one to stage four. And this is where it gets really exciting. Louis Diamond: This would be a question for John. You found, and he’s mentioned it, that only 5.4% of entrepreneurs operate as architects versus optimizers. Can you explain the difference between those two personas? John Bowen: Well, I’m going to set up the research and let Dan really bring it home. But Dan and I came up with this framework, The Greater Game and the 10 Multipliers, and we’ve got that and we’re putting it in order and we wanted to really confirm. And everything we do is empirical research. So we reached out to 1,000 very successful entrepreneurs, 1,016. And it became very clear that the 5.4% of them were actually executing on all these levels and they were just distancing everyone else. And what we came up with, and Dan mentioned it earlier, that his book, 10x Is Easier Than 2x, but we said, what we’re seeing… and we’ve got a whole bunch, I think it’s 26 stories in the book of entrepreneurs, we’re seeing so many people blow this out that 100x is easier than 2x, and it forces a whole different mindset where if you’re optimizing, you’re kind of looking incrementally. But when you step back as an architect, big picture, wow, huge opportunity, both for entrepreneurs and advisors that are entrepreneurs to make a real big difference. This is something you’ve really coached to and had the privilege of working with thousands of entrepreneurs helping them on that journey. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. One of the things that was confusing for me, Lou, when I first started coaching, because everybody who came in to coach, you remember when you came into your first Chicago workshop, that everybody in the room was motivated. I’m not a motivational speaker. I don’t have to motivate the entrepreneurs who are in Coach. They’re already motivated. The problem is the focus of their ambition and focus. And what we discovered was that there were two types that showed up. I didn’t really understand it, but they’re what I call status-oriented entrepreneurs. And what they are when they were a kid, they didn’t have anything. Their family wasn’t at the top of the pole. When they were born, they grew up in a certain community, but there were certain people who lived in the right part of town and they had really big houses and everything about their lifestyle was way above everybody else in the lifestyle. And they saw the lack of what they had, because of the way they were born, that they were going to match it. But the matching was based in not only what the big home looks like. They’ve got other homes, they’ve got vacation homes. They belong to clubs. There’s clubs for the winners, and the losers aren’t part of those clubs, golf courses and boating clubs and everything else. And what I noticed was their motivation was simply to get to that point where they had the same sort of status. And they’re interesting for a while, but once they’ve gotten to that level of status, they’re not interesting anymore. They go on cruise control at that point and they just want to stay within that framework. But the really interesting entrepreneurs, and we really highlight them in the book, it’s just about growth. So when they get to one level, they say, “That’s great. Okay, now I’ve got a new baseline and now I want to grow even further.” And we have one story, very, very interesting. When he came into my Chicago workshop, I met him and he said, “I’ve got a big engineering company.” This is Paul VanDuyne. He’s out of the Quad City area of Iowa. And he says, “My ambition for your program is for three years, I’m just going to plan my retirement.” And I said, “Well, we’ve got some thoughts about that.” So I said, “Just do your first workshop and we’ll talk about it 90 days from now.” And he came back and he had an entirely different game plan, and he’s grown basically 250 times in his last 13 years. He’s completely transformed the industry that he’s in and he had this growth. So what we’re looking for in The Greater Game, we’re looking for those entrepreneurs who are already successful, but they don’t see any stopping point. They’ll grow to one level and then they say, “Okay, that’s the new baseline. Now I grow to another level.” Meanwhile, three years ago, what happened is the world got a new capability called AI. AI, you’re not talking 10x. If you use it properly… a lot of people are in the very early stages here, but we can see the ones who are applying it for growth. John has set up an entire research structure just to measure the people, and what are the people who are just motivated by growth? They don’t see any stopping point. They don’t see any retirement age. They’re just growing. They’re in better health now than they were when they started their ambition. One of the great breakthroughs we’re having now is the impact of AI on physical fitness and health right now. And so you have 70-year-olds now who are way more ambitious at 70 than they were at 50. So we think a whole new world is being created in front of us, but there isn’t the research to measure what the real winners of this new game are actually doing. And The Greater Game is a lot of Strategic Coach thinking tools, but it’s also the phenomenal research that John is doing, and we’re measuring exactly what are these people who just constantly grow, what are they actually doing? John Bowen: Louis, if I can jump in, I want to go back to Paul just for a second because he was going to do something classical, and Dan is also my coach and I was going to do something similar. Paul told Dan that he was going to retire at 65, and his wife. And he were going to open up a little mom-and-pop coffee shop. And the reason so many of the entrepreneurs are caught in the 2x optimization is they’re grinding it out. They’re working harder to be more successful and the desire to do that isn’t very high. That’s why you retire. On the other hand, what we found, the ones working on 100x are building platforms and ecosystems. They’re architected. And as we were writing the book, CEG grew by 58%. I’m going to give a lot of credit to the book, because as Dan and I were working on the processes, I wanted to walk all the talks. This is where the world is changing. I want everybody to think as a financial advisor, you’re being served twice, one with The Greater Game, they don’t care about a few basis points on returns. That’s table stakes. So much of the level one is taking care of the investment side, mitigating taxes, taking care of the areas, protecting the assets, some charitable planning, maybe shoot in some succession planning. I can tell you only 6% of the entrepreneurs actually feel they’re getting that from you, but that’s only level one. If you can help them from each of the stages, stage one through four, and help them create that vision, they’re going to love you to death. Because many of them want to continue in this path and create tremendous value, bigger impact, not creating legacies in the sense of enduring legacies, but active legacies. Last year, my wife and I set up a private foundation. I called it The Greater Game Foundation. I just love this so much, the difference that you can make, and I want to do it while I’m living, not while I’m gone type of thing. I think that’s one Dan and I very much share. Louis Diamond: Awesome. You wrote the book 10x Is Easier Than 2x, but now you’re claiming 100x is easier than 2x. How can that be the case? Dan Sullivan: The interesting thing, one of my points of proof on the original idea, the 10x Mind Expander, I use a lot of what the entrepreneurs have already done to prove the future. In other words, I said… You’ll remember the exercise, Lou. And I said, “I want you to pick your best number.” Everybody’s got a best number. It’s revenue, it’s net worth, whatever. And I said, “I just want you to multiply by 10.” And immediately there’s this reaction. He says, “You know how hard it was to get to just where I am 10 times?” And I said, “Well, you’ve already done 10 times. You’ve probably done 10 times twice. So let’s go back to the beginning. When were you 1/10 of where you are right now?” And they can nail it. They can tell you the year, they can tell you the month when they were 1/10 of where they were. And I said, “Let’s write the actual structure that got you from 1/10 to where you are right now.” And there’s five stages, and usually it’s an event, it’s a new relationship and all of a sudden they get a big check. And we measure, as entrepreneurs, size of check is a good scorecard. When you’re first starting, you got a $10,000 check, that was the biggest check. But about five years later, you get a $100,000 check, and all of a sudden it seems strange at breakfast, but by dinner you’ve normalized the idea, “Well, I know what it’s like to get a much bigger check, a 10 times check.” And so I have them create five growth stages that took them from where they were 1/10 to where they are right now, and I said, “Now let’s go back and talk about doing 10 times more.” And what they recognize, 80% who’ve got them 10 times the first time is going to be the same. It’s relationship, it’s having a great team, it’s having a simple approach that always works and it’s about the kind end customer. It’s not about them. It’s about who is it that you’re being a hero to in the marketplace. Because the truth is people don’t want to have a lot of relationships as they grow. They’d like to have one relationship to grow. They’d like to have an advisor who’s growing with them. But then John introduced me to the whole world of AI and I said, “We’re not talking 10 times anymore. We’re talking 100 times.” I said, “If you apply this new form of thinking, because it is an entirely new form of thinking, to what you’re doing right now, you can see that 10 times is going to happen just by doing three or four things where you’re eliminating waste, you’re eliminating things that just don’t work anymore, changing relationships, changing teamwork, changing collaborations in the marketplace.” But meanwhile, this new world of thinking is making you healthier. It’s making you more fit. So where before you thought you wouldn’t have the energy at 70, you now have more energy at 70 than you had at 50. So you’re the only one who says when it’s going to stop. I’m 82 in three weeks. We’re having this… I’m 82 and I’m way more ambitious at 82 than I was at 52. And the world is, because the world outside in terms of technological capability and access is way, way bigger in my 82nd year than it was in my 52nd year, and I love the growth. I have to tell you that the greatest point where AI is going to have the impact is going to be making money. The big titans, the Metas, the Googles, the Nvidias, what do they have in common? It’s about the money and where AI is being applied most is how you do new things with money. So that’s where the 100 times now comes from. I’ve normalized it. I said, “We’re not talking a 10x game anymore. We’re talking 100x game.” But the number on the scoreboard isn’t the issue. The scoreboard is, are you actually having fun? Louis Diamond: Yeah, we call it living your best business life. That’s our major barometer in charge. John, I don’t know if you could pull up your slides again, but I want to talk about the bridge between stage two in your pyramid to stage three. So that’s from expertise into scalable property. Can you explain how this relates to a financial advisor or an independent business owner and why this concept is so important for the valuation of a business? John Bowen: The book, it’s written for entrepreneurs, but I wanted to create some bridges while we’re together with Louis on really what’s going on for financial advisors and how you can help them. So if they’re at our stage one, Dan and my stage one of The Greater Game, and they want to go to two, they’re kind of dreaming oftentimes, and we want to help them begin creating the architectural structure. And as an advisor, this is really going to encourage everybody to read chapter two, The Greater Security. It talks about really the VFO, Virtual Family Office structure that they want, and you got to help them get financially solid, building personal wealth outside of the business, tax, estate, insurance, business structure. That’s what we all do today. Then though, if they want to move from level two to three, what we find over and over again, advisors are not equipped to do this, because what we’re taking is that founder where everything’s in its head, we’re now helping them move from just having that expertise to having scalable property. This is that codifying the process of building IP that’s transferable. And this is where the real valuation changes. Now, I’m not asking financial advisors to be the IP experts, but what the entrepreneurs want is they want somebody to help them curate and then coordinate between each of these levels. We go from three to four that the founder is indispensable, oftentimes at three. Now we want the team there to be invincible. And it’s not just the individual team as Dan was talking about. It’s the community. The collaboration is where this really takes off. The noise of AI is making it harder to market, but by partnering, particularly as financial advisors, we can very quickly have groups. One of the reasons why I’m collaborating with Dan, I want to help our financial advisors to work with entrepreneurs. Dan wants that research. So this is the natural collaboration. But they’re interested here in governance, self-managing teams. One of the things that Strategic Coach is brilliant at, the pre-transaction they want. And what we find so often is the indispensable discount. So many businesses sell, if they sell at all, they’re selling for three to five times multiplier, not advisory, but traditional businesses. Well, if you can make it to four, all of a sudden you’re now talking to 10 to 15 times multipliers. And think of it as if I’m a buyer and I’ve been involved in 50-some transactions, what happens is if the business is the guy, the gal, they’re the business, then you’re buying a very expensive job type thing. So let’s just keep a simple one. They’re having a couple million dollars of EBITDA. And let’s say the high range of that, five times EBITDA is $10 million. Well, the difference at 15 times two million is 30. Now, a few basis points I don’t really care about. I really care about capturing that difference. And because there’s a machine working without, I can buy that machine and generate that cash flow and it’s also taking advantage of the vision. And then when we get to level four, this is where most advisors make the biggest mistake is, “I’ve won. I’m at level four. I’ve got tremendous wealth.” Okay, but I’m now looking at significance. And I do want to go, “It’s not enduring legacy I’m looking for. I’m looking for active legacy. I’m looking for family governance.” Do I want to continue to build it like Dan and I’m doing at 70? I’m building the business so I can continue doing it as long as I want to do it. At the same time, and I love the impact we have and I know you do too, Louis, for the impact you have. Why not build the platform that’s going to allow you to do that as long as you want to do that? And if you don’t want to do it, let’s create the most value to transfer. When you start having conversations like that with families, entrepreneur families, it just changes, and very few advisors can do that. And that’s what we’re finding. We have a coaching company, training company, we train those things. They’re winning, quite honestly, almost 100% of the time because entrepreneurs didn’t know that was available to them. Louis Diamond: Interesting. It seems like the difference between stage two in your pyramid, to leap to stage three or four, that seems like a pretty massive pivot point for valuation for building a scalable business, having a self-managing company, et cetera. Do you find or have you seen that advisors or entrepreneurs that are in stage two themselves, they kind of pattern-match when they’re working with their own clients and kind of manage their own clients into stage two, or is it not really connected? John Bowen: I think that once you get the bigger picture and see the greater game, you can help your clients. That is a very small percentage. Remember, it was only 5.4 of when we surveyed successful entrepreneurs were actually playing the greater game, all four levels, the 10 greater multipliers. So I think what we tend to do is we get stuck on what we can do. And all the training is for level one for financial advisors. We don’t know how to guide them through the other levels. And really, the big difference from two to three, Dan and I’ve talked about this a lot, and I think Dan’s one of the biggest champions of this, is collaboration, putting together strategic partnerships. It could be with your competitors. This is for entrepreneurs, competitors, it could be various vendor partnerships. But the ability to open up markets that way when you have now put together in level two your IP, value creation’s huge. For advisors, it’s putting together partnerships with centers of influence. When we survey top financial advisors, 70% of their best clients came through COI, Centers of Influence with accountants, attorneys, investment bankers, and so on. Well, let’s do it on purpose, be successful on purpose. Louis Diamond: Dan, question for you. In all your experience working with successful financial advisors, insurance producers, probably any entrepreneur, what do you feel are the most common things that folks do unintentionally to really hurt their enterprise value even long before, or if ever, they decide to sell their business? Dan Sullivan: Yeah, I think the biggest thing is they stay entirely within their industry. One of the first questions that we ask our entrepreneurs when they come into the program and where you see it most is in the professions: lawyers, accountants, engineers, architects. I’ll say, “Well, what is it that you are?” And they’ll say, “Well, I’m a lawyer. I’m a tax lawyer.” And I said, “Are you a tax lawyer or are you an entrepreneur who has a specialty in tax law?” Okay. It makes a big difference, because if you see yourself as a tax lawyer, then you’re saying that you’re a better paid factory worker. You’re a manual laborer. But if you’re an entrepreneur, it’s a fairly recent idea in human history. There’s always been entrepreneurs, but it wasn’t until about the beginning of the 1800s that you start seeing this really different class of people in the marketplace, who, it didn’t matter how they were born, they were taking advantage of some new multiplier technology. Steam power being a great example. Around 1800, steam power came on. And anybody who had a bright vision for themselves and had the wherewithal to figure out what needs could be satisfied with a new technology, all of a sudden they became rich. They became rich. And it was very disruptive, because up until then it was based on aristocracy and you were born into wealth or you were born into poverty. There was no crossover. So what we’re saying is anybody who comes into Strategic Coach, I said, “I’m not going to tell you anything about your particular industry.” I said, “You know all the best practice people in your industry and they have workshops and they have conferences and you go to them, but they don’t know how to be entrepreneurs. You know how to create a really well-paying job, but you haven’t created a company.” A company is a totally different realm and I would say the vast majority of entrepreneurs, 95% of entrepreneurs haven’t really created a company. They’ve just created a really well-paying job which requires their presence and their attendance. I said, “You don’t get any payout for your company. If you’re the company, you need to have a structure.” I’ll give you an example. We started the company in 1989, and we’re about 270 times what our first year revenues were, and that was a great year. I was very happy for the first year, but we’re about 270 times. Along the way, what I did is I created other coaches so it wasn’t just Dan, the coach. So we have 16 other coaches. And I’ll give you a little example. In 1994, that year our company did 144 workshop days, 36 per quarter. One coach: me. Last year we did 600 workshop days and I did 12. 588 were done by other coaches. And our coaches are great. They’re clients who have coaching instincts and they do it. So about four years ago, I met one of our clients who’s an M&A specialist, and I laid out all the facts just in conversation, “This is our revenues. We have no debt. It’s repeatable income, around 70% is repeatable for one year.” I put the whole structure together. And I said, “So right off the top, I don’t have any relatives on staff.” The first thing they look for, “Any relatives working for you?” And he gave me a number. It was a big number. It was probably four times revenue for that year. He said, “We got a lot of structures.” Then something happened in the marketplace, and this is a great breakthrough that the US Patent Office sometime in the last 10 years recognized that up until about 10 years ago, to get a patent, you had to have a technological component for what you were doing. Sometime in the last 10 years, the patent bureaus decided that the internet is the technological component. So they’ve introduced education and entertainment as patentable processes. So in the last three years, we’ve gotten 82 patents. 82 patents. And these are our thinking tools, Lifetime Extender, Free Focus and Buffer Days. You know the routine that you learn in the first three days, and we’ve got 82 of them. We’re averaging about 25. I get a new patent about every two weeks. So I saw this M&A specialist, and I said, “This has happened in the last three years.” And he said, “Immediately it doubles the valuation of your company.” So what John’s saying here, as you go through the four stages, more and more you get paid for your creativity, retail, you get paid for your retail. But if you structure it, you record it, you package it, it is even greater than what you got paid for your creativity. Louis Diamond: Super interesting personal anecdote, and I appreciate you sharing that because that definitely did drive the point home for me. I see the applicability to probably any industry, but especially to any financial advisor. Dan Sullivan: Oh, yeah. Louis Diamond: The best RIA firms, the best advisors, they pretty much all start off with a cult of personality founder who’s the rainmaker. And then the practices that really grow and scale and are valuable are more platforms. That’s what private equity wants to invest in. And those are the firms that get the higher multiples. Dan Sullivan: Yeah. So the big thing is there’s a really, really great IP lawyer. He’s in our program and he’s made the breakthrough, and he’s the first IP lawyer that doesn’t charge by the hour. He charges by the patent. If the IP lawyer charges by the hour, it’s a very slow patent. If he charges by the patent, it’s a very fast patent. But the big thing, he showed a slide that in just big corporations, 1980, you took big corp, Fortune 500, the S&P 500, more than 80% of their valuation was tangible. It was property, it was real estate, it was fleets, it was equipment. Last year, more than 80% were intangibles. It was your ideas, intellectual. If you look at Elon Musk, it’s all intellectual capital. If you look at Meta, you look at anything, it’s intellectual. It’s not tangibles. So we’ve entered into that new world and AI has introduced us to that new world. It’s new processes, new structures, new approaches and it’s really interesting. It’s hard for entrepreneurs to get their idea that your creativity is actually property. Louis Diamond: It sounds like the ultimate challenge for anyone listening is translate your process, your ideas, the stuff that you’re doing by instinct as you both had said, and turn it into something patentable or something repeatable that another advisor, another executive, another owner can pick up and deploy and scale. John Bowen: We share the process in chapter four. It’s the fourth greater multiplier. And we actually share Caldwell, the attorney that Dan’s talking about, his story and the value creation. He’s now the major player in that space. And this is where we as advisors, we’re given a twofer, Dan and Louis, is that you can help your clients, but you can do this yourself too. You’ve been involved in a number of large transactions. The difference, I had a $2 billion advisory practice I sold in ’98, and we sold for 16 times earnings. And a big part of it, we were in that blue ocean. We had agents that we created and strategic process that would run without me, and it did type thing. And it continued to grow and went for about 10 fold what I sold for a number of years later. This is something that’s very real. Louis Diamond: Absolutely. I got two more questions for you guys because I know you’re both busy. For an advisor who feels like they’ve won the growth game, they grow 10, 15, 20% per year, they’re charged up, they’re on the Barron’s list, the Forbes list, they’re hitting their AUM milestones, they built an amazing team, they have a family member in the business. They have everything that anyone could want. What does the next game look like for them? What’s the next frontier once you’ve achieved all those things that from the outside looking in, seems like you have it all? What’s the next game to play? John Bowen: Well, we’re going to both say The Greater Game, but the- Dan Sullivan: Well, tell them about the dashboard, John, because the book is just part of the deal here. It gives you the landscape. There’s a great tool that comes with the book. So tell them about the dashboard. John Bowen: Really what we wanted to do is to create kind of a community just around the book. Dan and I and team built a dashboard. We were very creative on naming, thegreatergamedashboard.com. You can go in and we’re now studying every month over 500 successful entrepreneurs. We have that data in here. You’ll be able to see how you compare at each of these stages, the four stages, the 10 multipliers. And you’re going to get specific recommendations. This is for entrepreneurs. But again, you should do it. If you’re a financial advisor, you have an equity ownership, you should definitely be doing it as well. And one of the things that we see over and over again, and Louis, you probably see this a lot in the conversations. They have advisors who have already won. They don’t know what the next game is. And it’s easy to check out at that point. It’s easy to frustrate the next generation of leaders and so on. If you take the time to really see what the opportunities are and architect to realize that vision, you can create, whether it’s selling the practice, creating tremendous value there or designing a role for yourself, maybe it’s executive chairman type for that business that you can guide it with the vision and what you’ve brought and strategy. But bring that team up. That’s going to create so much value, so much impact and you can design it for the life that you want. And that’s where I get very excited. Louis Diamond: I can hear the passion in your voice. Dan, let’s finish with you. Given all of your experience working with entrepreneurs, advisors, business owners, et cetera, what’s the one move that you’ve seen the most successful entrepreneurs in your orbit make that’s changed the trajectory of their firms and their life more than anything else? Dan Sullivan: I’ll answer it in a little roundabout way. Periodically, I have a thinking tool. I said, “If everything was taken away from you as an entrepreneur and they moved you 1,000 miles away, what’s the one thing that you would take with you? It has to be portable. So what is the most portable thing that you have that you would start over again with the greatest value that you had created previously? What would it be? And then you would rebuild what you’ve already created, but you would do it much faster. What would be the one thing?” It’s an interesting thought. But in our concept, it’s called unique ability, that there’s something about you, as an individual, that first of all gave you enough confidence to become an entrepreneur because it’s risky. It’s a risky proposition. It’s guessing and betting and it’s risky business and it’s unique ability. So the starting point for all growth in Strategic Coach is that there’s something about you that’s absolutely unique. You don’t have any competitors on this and it has two qualities. One is that you’re so good at it, you don’t take it seriously. You’ve done this since you were a child and it just comes to you naturally and you don’t see the significance of it. When you’re in Coach, you start seeing the significance of it. And the second thing is you just absolutely love doing it. It’s what you love doing most of all. It comes to you naturally. You don’t even have to think about it. And then you begin to realize that anything else you’re doing as the founder and the owner of your company, probably somebody else can do. So you’re doing 20 things, but really you should be doing three things. The other 17 things still need to be done but not by you. And that’s the breakthrough. You have to simplify in order to multiply. Louis Diamond: I absolutely love that. I know when I was in Coach, that was my biggest takeaway or realization was figuring out what my unique ability was because I think the two components,

Colleen Joyce, CEO of Lawyer.com, returns to the show to talk about the Lawyer Growth Summit, happening July 15–17 at the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas.This one's a little different from the usual playbook. Colleen and her team built LGS around a simple principle: nobody sells from the stage. After learning the hard way with post-COVID boot camps (and 100% churn), they rebuilt the event around peer learning, tangible action items, and the kind of "tell me how you actually did that" conversations that happen in the hallway and at the bar.We get into:Why brand is now the top of the marketing funnel — and how the biggest-name firms are growing social followings into six figures and pulling referrals from social aloneThe new world of AI SEO, featuring Justia CEO Tim Stanley sharing directory and search expertiseHow LGS is built for any growth-minded firm (with a heavy personal injury crowd), not just one practice areaThe experience side: a vendor lounge with no hard sells, high-end food and bev, and fun evening events (including a luxury retail store buyout with champagne and prizes)Bonus for staying through Friday the 17th: the Backstreet Boys at The SphereTickets, agenda, and speakers are all at lawyergrowthsummit.com. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Major Japanese financial institutions, including Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group Inc., will participate in a strategic collaboration between NEC Corp. and U.S. startup Anthropic, it was learned Thursday.

Convenience store operator Seven-Eleven Japan Co. said Thursday that it will establish a new company on retail media business jointly with two advertising firms.

Joel Kotkin Joel Kotkin examines AI's economic impact, noting that AI companies operate with small staffs and high capital. This trend leads to significant growth for firms but widespread layoffs for well-educated professionals in other industries.1945

Bob Zimmerman Bob Zimmerman ranks VAST as the leader in the private space station race. Unlike government-dependent firms, VAST innovates independently, recently securing contracts with France and the Czech Republic for future orbital missions.

You don't land a million-dollar trucking case by waiting for one to show up. The firms signing catastrophic injury cases don't rely on luck—they build systems that attract big cases. In this solo episode, Chris Dreyer explains why quantity creates quality, how trial experience drives elite referrals, and what firms can do today to move beyond a steady diet of soft-tissue cases. If you're tired of blending in with the background noise and want a true marketing partner who embodies excellence, check out Rankings.io. On this episode, you'll learn: The real reason top trial lawyers get the referrals everyone else wants. How low-value cases can become training grounds for future rainmakers. Why "we don't advertise" is usually a myth. What to do right now if you want bigger cases showing up in your pipeline tomorrow. If you like what you hear, hit Subscribe. We do this every week. Buy tickets for PIMCON 2026: https://hubs.li/Q04bf9vT0  Subscribe to our newsletter:  newsletter.rankings.io Get Social! Personal Injury Mastermind (PIM) powered by Rankings.io is on Instagram | YouTube | TikTok

Welcome back to the Building the Premier Accounting Firm podcast. In today's episode, host Roger Knecht and his guest Yogi Goel, cofounder of Maxima, discuss AI's transformative impact on accounting, moving from transactional tasks to strategic advisory roles. They share insights on leveraging AI as a specialized employee to boost efficiency, client delivery, and firm profitability. This episode offers a clear vision for accounting professionals to adopt AI effectively. In This Episode: 00:00 Yogi Gyal's Journey to Accounting 02:37 Why Start Maxima AI? 06:21 AI in Accounting: Real vs. Hype 09:25 AI as an Employee: An Analogy 14:17 The Evolving Accounting Firm with AI 19:32 Maintaining Client Trust with AI 23:36 AI's Impact on Accounting Workflow 26:54 AI Adoption: The Future of Firms 30:48 Maxima vs. Generic AI Platforms 36:17 Freedom, Gratitude, and Family Values 40:19 Closing Thoughts and Resources Key Takeaways: Learn why AI is a tool, not a replacement, for accounting professionals. Understand the specific accounting tasks where AI excels and where human judgment remains vital. Discover how AI can free up time for advisory services and deeper client engagement. Explore the benefits of specialized AI agents in accounting compared to general AI models. Prepare your firm for future growth and increased profitability through AI adoption. Featured Quotes: "Accounting was one thing which – as the language of business – allowed me to interpret and compare businesses across [different industries]." — Yogi Goel "AI is a tool which is out there to help humans be better, not dominate humans." — Yogi Goel "The one who adopts AI at the center, in a balanced way, will have better client delivery in terms of time and accuracy, and more revenue and better margins." — Yogi Goel Conclusion: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Building the Premier Accounting Firm with Roger Knecht. For more information on how you can establish your own accounting firm and take control of your time and income, call 435-344-2060 or schedule an appointment to connect with Roger's team here.   Sponsors: Universal Accounting Center Helping accounting professionals confidently and competently offer quality accounting services to get paid what they are worth.   Offers: Get a demo of Maxima here: https://www.maxima.ai/book-a-demo   Special Offers for our Podcast Listeners, CLICK HERE to take advantage of them today! Remember this, Accounting Success IS Universal. Be sure to listen to our next episode and subscribe.   Also, let us know what you think of the podcast and please share any suggestions you may have.  We look forward to your input: Podcast Feedback   For more information on how you can apply these principles to start and build your bookkeeping, accounting, & tax business, please visit us at www.universalaccountingschool.com or call us at 801-265-3777.  And know that if it's about accounting, it's Universal.

Ivy Slater is the CEO of Slater Success, a boutique coaching and consulting firm working at the intersection of strategic growth and succession planning. Before becoming a coach and advisor, she built and sold a seven-figure business in New York City and has spent nearly two decades since working with leadership teams on the strategy, structure, and leadership development required for sustainable growth, with a particular focus on the legal sector. Ivy has guided companies through the leadership and cultural dynamics that shape whether growth, transition, or acquisition actually succeeds. Ivy is a TEDx speaker, host of the Her Success Story podcast, and author of The Best of the Best: Lead Boldly, Scale Rapidly, Create Your Legacy. WHAT'S COVERED IN THIS EPISODE ABOUT SUCCESSION PLANNING AND LAW FIRM GROWTH Law firm leaders who avoid succession planning rarely think of it as avoidance. The conversation feels like it belongs later, closer to retirement, or after the next growth milestone gets hit. So firms keep running on the assumption that the people at the top will always be there, and the planning that would actually protect the firm never quite makes it onto the agenda. Ivy Slater argues that succession planning and strategic planning are the same conversation and that separating them produces short-term thinking at best. Firms that integrate succession into their growth strategy from the start are building something solid, something that can function and grow without depending on any one person to hold it together. That shift starts with how leaders think about succession itself, not as an exit, but as the foundation of a legacy. In this episode of The Lawyer's Edge podcast, Elise Holtzman talks with Ivy Slater of Slater Success about why succession planning belongs inside the growth strategy, how to develop the next generation of leaders and rainmakers, what the numbers in your firm are actually telling you, and how to reframe succession from an end-of-career conversation into a strategy for long-term growth. 2:34 - Why firms treat strategic planning and succession planning as separate conversations 3:13 - Why separating succession from strategy produces short-term thinking 5:45 - The ego and fear that make succession planning feel threatening 9:14 - Succession planning means developing leaders, not just identifying successors 9:49 - How to know your people's strengths and develop them intentionally 13:39 - How Ivy's own business transition became a model for succession done right 17:54 - What firm leaders should actually be tracking 19:46 - Start every conversation with a success by focusing on what's working 23:43 - Reframing succession from exit planning to legacy building 27:28 - The real cost of waiting and what firms lose when they put this off 31:09 - Thinking 5 to 10 years forward and building a firm that lasts 35:58 - Why firm leaders need to read the storybook of numbers Mentioned In From Why Succession Planning Is a Growth Strategy, Not a Retirement Issue Slater Success | Her Success Story Podcast The Best of the Best: Lead Boldly, Scale Rapidly, Create Your Legacy Ivy Slater on LinkedIn Rocket Fuel by Gino Wickman   Get connected with the coaching team: hello@thelawyersedge.com The Lawyer's Edge SPONSOR FOR THIS EPISODE This episode is brought to you by the coaching team at The Lawyer's Edge, a training and coaching firm that has been focused exclusively on lawyers and law firms since 2008. Each member of the team is a trained, certified, and experienced professional coach—and either a former practicing attorney or a former law firm marketing and business development professional. Whatever your professional objectives, our coaches can help you achieve your goals more quickly, more easily, and with significantly less stress. To get connected with your coach, fill out our contact form.

Episode 148: This week, Kyle Van Pelt talks with Dan Johnson, Senior Managing Director and Head of Wealth Management Practice at F2 Strategy. Dan is an industry leader in portfolio management systems implementation, investment performance conversions, centralized portfolio management, and integrations with advisor-driven toolsets.  Dan talks with Kyle about scaling the wealth and asset management business without technology overload. From the pitfalls of shiny object syndrome in tech to the discipline required to scale, Dan discusses the real role of technology, not as a collection of tools, but as a strategic amplifier of a firm's value proposition. He also shares the powerful shift in the industry from "next best actions" to "next best experiences," where advisors use technology and data not just to optimize operations but to create meaningful, human-centered client relationships.  In this episode: (00:00) - Intro (01:13) - Dan's money moment (03:56) - Are RIAs just reinventing wirehouses?  (06:06) - The challenges of becoming the accidental CEO and CTO  (10:22) - Scaling through discipline and reducing tech bloat (14:18) - How to evaluate technology effectively  (19:40) - How AI is driving change in wealth management today (27:52) - Why data strategy is the foundation of AI  (31:38) - Dan's outlook about the future of the financial services industry (32:31) - Dan's Milemarker Minute Key Takeaways Stop trying to be great at everything. The best firms intentionally choose two to three areas where they'll be exceptional and accept being average everywhere else. Focus creates differentiation. The firms that scale well identify their true differentiators and build their tech stack around those.  "Interesting" doesn't build your business—"useful" does. It's easy to get caught in the hype of AI and emerging tech. But if it doesn't improve efficiency, increase margin, or drive revenue, it's just noise. There's a difference between being curious about AI and actually deploying it in a way that moves the needle.  The next frontier isn't efficiency, it's experience. AI is already proving its worth in the back office. The real opportunity now is using that freed-up capacity to create genuinely memorable client experiences. Think less "next best action" and more "next best experience."  Data is no longer optional. It's the foundation. AI is only as powerful as the data behind it. Firms that own, structure, and govern their data effectively will be the ones that actually unlock value from AI.   Quotes "Technology is meant to amplify your value proposition to your client." ~ Dan Johnson "You can't be exceptional at everything. Pick two or three areas where you're going to hang your hat, and they're going to be unique components when it comes to technology." ~ Dan Johnson "If you don't invest, take it seriously, and put together proper data structures, you're never going to get the AI." ~ Dan Johnson Links  Dan Johnson on LinkedIn F2 Strategy  Joshua Brown  Doug Fritz Dennis Moseley-Williams Unreasonable Hospitality Connect with our hosts Milemarker.co Kyle on LinkedIn Jud on LinkedIn Subscribe and stay in touch Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Produce game-changing content with Turncast Turncast helps your company grow by producing top-quality content and fostering transformative conversations. We specialize in content generation, podcasting, digital strategy, and audience growth for fintech and financial services companies. Learn more at Turncast.com.

June is one of the most important months for accounting firms — and one of the most wasted. Here's how to actually make the most of it.

Accounting Voices is a senior leadership platform hosted by Rob Brown that interprets the forces reshaping accounting firms across North America and beyond.This "AI Reality Inside Firms" series brings together influential accounting leaders to answer the same five structured questions about how AI is actually landing inside firms.No hype. No vendor narratives. Just honest leadership perspective from someone navigating AI from the inside.Today's special guest is Richard Lynch, Managing Principal at SikichThe five questions:Where is AI genuinely reshaping strategic direction for firms?What are firms still getting wrong about AI?Which AI-related leadership decisions will matter most over the next two years?Where is AI creating the greatest internal tension in firms?By 2027, what will separate leading firms from the rest?Five questions. One honest conversation. Part of a season that is building a definitive picture of AI reality inside accounting firms in 2026.Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XH-aZYSN_VUThank you to our Season Partners for making this series possible.Fieldguide is the AI-native platform for audit and advisory enabling human and AI collaboration to scale capacity, improve quality and transform how firms operate. fieldguide.ioInstead is the first AI agent that owns end-to-end tax from research, planning, filing, and defense all in one system. It replaces CCH, GoSystems, UltraTax, Lacerte, ProConnect, Drake and many more. instead.comKarbon is the global leader in AI-powered practice management software for accounting firms. Their research into how technology is reshaping firm performance is essential reading for anyone leading a firm in 2026. karbonhq.comDigits is the world's first AI-native accounting platform. It's accounting software that works for you to deliver real-time financials and automate the month-end close. digits.comFiled is the intelligent tax workspace for preparation and review automation and the only AI for prep, review and planning that runs inside your tax software especially made for high-volume firms. filed.comAccounting Voices is a senior sense-making platform for firm owners, managing partners and senior operators navigating the forces reshaping accounting firms. Host Rob Brown convenes structured conversations with leaders across the profession to interpret what AI, private equity, consolidation and leadership pressure mean in practice.This season, AI Reality Inside Firms, brings together senior accounting firm leaders answering the same five structured questions about how AI is actually landing inside firms, separating execution from narrative.Find all episodes on your preferred podcast platform or on the Accounting Voices YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/@accountingvoicesTo find out more or to explore season partnership opportunities, connect with Rob on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/therobbrown

Two hundred and fifty years after Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, the economy looks very different from the world he described.Firms are bigger. Production is more centralized. AI and automation are changing what companies can do at scale. And yet markets still matter, perhaps more than ever, in deciding which firms rise, which fall, and how innovation spreads.In this episode of Central Questions, Stefan Ingves speaks with Yueran Ma, Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, about the rise of large corporations, the changing role of capital and labor, and what Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Hayek can still teach us about today's economy.They discuss why the largest firms now account for a growing share of output and assets, why employment has not concentrated in the same way, what AI could mean for productivity and inequality, and why financial markets may be crucial for spreading the gains from capital more broadly.Guest: Yueran Ma, Professor of Finance, University of Chicago Booth School of BusinessHost: Stefan Ingves, former Governor of the Riksbank and Senior Fellow at Swedish House of FinanceTopics: Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Yueran Ma, Stefan Ingves, Central Questions, Swedish House of Finance, large firms, corporations, AI, automation, capital deepening, productivity, corporate finance, economic growth, financial markets, capitalism, Karl Marx, Hayek, visible hand, invisible hand, firm concentration, monetary policy, innovation, Chicago Booth

Bob Zimmerman dismisses NASA's sheltering orders on the ISS as an overreaction to routine Russian repair work on the Zvezda module. He details SpaceX's massive IPO, which aims to raise billions, and observes that private space station firms like Axiom and Vast continue to secure significant capital despite SpaceX's market dominance.1939

Unit4, a leader in enterprise cloud applications for people-centric organisations, has launched international research commissioned from Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) examining the transformation challenges facing professional services firms. With 60% saying their work volumes will escalate and/or become more complex in the next 12 months, there is an urgent need to modernise business processes. However, firms face significant challenges to retrieve time lost to fixing operational inefficiencies and errors, which are leading to project delivery delays and teams having to work overtime. One group of global respondents indicates a possible way forward, as 33% say they are running their businesses on modern, integrated, cloud-based platforms, and therefore spend less time correcting errors. Compared to global averages these leaders in adopting cloud-native technologies experience less errors in finance reporting (leading firms: 29%; global average: 37%), and budgeting and forecasting (leading firms: 28%; global average: 36%). Firms in the US are the most advanced (36%) in adopting cloud-based systems, compared to Germany (22%) which has the lowest adoption. Business and Professional Services firms are the most advanced (43%) in embracing the cloud ahead of IT Services (36%). "Professional services firms are facing possibly the biggest inflection point in a lifetime as technology disruption and volatile economic conditions encourage clients to reevaluate their use of consulting expertise," said Donna Dobson, Director Professional Services, Unit4. "PAC's research shows why modernisation of core processes is giving leading firms an advantage in terms of productivity and reduction of time lost on manual processes and error correction. As competition heats up, firms understand that limiting the impact on their workforce is crucial to retaining talent and delivering projects more efficiently." 30% of respondents internationally admit to frequent or regular delays in project delivery due to operational inefficiencies, which rises to 34% among IT Services companies compared to only 25% of Business and Professional Services firms. The Nordics has the highest percentage (34%) admitting regular interruptions to project delivery, compared to 26% in Canada. The state of IT infrastructures could indicate a possible cause, as 66% admit relying on fragmented application environments and 19% even rely on multiple systems requiring manual work and spreadsheets – a figure that rises to 30% in Germany. As a result, it is no surprise that many teams complain of having to work additional hours citing a number of reasons including: 68% – monthly or quarter-close bottlenecks 59% – inconsistent data models 55% – outdated technology 47% are being forced to spend time correcting timesheets while teams must work overtime in areas like accounts reconciliation (37%), project cost & profitability management (37%), and project timeline management (36%). More than a quarter (28%) of client-facing specialists spend more than 30% of the working week completing administrative tasks rather than focusing on their core work. IT Services firms struggle most with overtime with 40% regularly needing to work beyond core hours to complete tasks such as timesheet management, budgeting & forecasting and accounts reconciliation. This is concerning, given that IT Services respondents are also the most likely to say their workloads are going to increase and/or become more complex in the next 12 months. "Many professional services firms are being pushed by clients to transform commercial models to better serve their needs, but this is only possible if firms embrace modern cloud-based systems," said Nick Mayes, senior consultant, PAC. "This will give them the agile, scalable foundations to deliver process automation and adopt AI tools, but it will require investment to optimise and integrate existing workflows so that companies have a single view of company-wide information....

Kevin, Karl and Chief talk ballparks, CD rates, foreign labor, Bitcoin and labor numbers.

(13) Jack Burnham discusses how Nvidia chips reach the Chinese military through loopholes in export controls and subsidiaries. He notes bureaucratic confusion over the "AI diffusion rule" allowed Chinese firms to stockpile high-end hardware. Burnham recommends stricter Commerce Department guidance to prevent further military modernization.

Amol is back from his stint in the Celebrity Traitors castle. This week, while in town for the South by Southwest festival, Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry's drops by the Radical studio to talk about what took his ice cream company from a single store in rural America into a billion-dollar business. Ben Cohen argues that most corporations have trained people to believe profit and purpose are from separate worlds – while he says that a company's values should be as important to its mission as making money. Cohen makes the case that consumers are not just shoppers – they are citizens with wallets. He criticises companies that pay lip-service to that through short-term social media campaigns backing the trendy topic of the day, without embedding those values into their business model. But in an age when many companies are dropping their principles when the politics changes, can business really be a force for good – or does purpose melt away when profits are at stake? GET IN TOUCH * WhatsApp: 0330 123 9480 * Email: radical@bbc.co.uk Episodes of Radical with Amol Rajan are released every Thursday. Amol Rajan presents the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 and hosts University Challenge on BBC One. Before that, Amol was the BBC's media editor and the editor of The Independent newspaper. Radical with Amol Rajan is a Today Podcast. It was made by Tom Smithard and Oscar Pearson. Digital production was by Leona Gasper. Technical production was by Mike Regaard. The editor is Sam Bonham.

For decades, productivity and wages grew together. Then they didn't. Since the 1970s, workers across the developed world have become significantly more productive, yet their wages have largely stagnated. Where did the gains go, and what can policy actually do about it?In this episode, we examine the central argument of The Wage Standard, the new book by labor economist Arindrajit Dube. Dube argues that the decoupling of wages from productivity is not an inevitable consequence of technological change or globalization, but a political and institutional failure, one that can be reversed. We walk through the mechanisms behind wage stagnation, the role of market power in labor markets, and the policy levers Dube proposes to restore the link between work and prosperity.

In today's Tech3 from Moneycontrol, digital entertainment startup Kuku Technologies confidentially files for an IPO targeting a valuation of nearly $1.8 billion as microdramas and AI-led content creation fuel growth. We also look at Dhan's new investing app Millions and its push to attract Gen Z investors, the government's first empanelled list of AI vendors for public-sector projects, and Bengaluru-based quick commerce startup FirstClub raising $55 million to fund expansion. From IPOs and investing apps to AI policy and fresh funding, here are the biggest startup and tech stories of the day.

(5) Michael Toth examines Exxon Mobil's relocation to Texas, which was opposed by proxy firms ISS and Glass Lewis. Toth argues these advisory firms prioritize ideological ESG agendas over actual shareholder value and lack transparency regarding their motives.

You don't dominate a city because you buy more ads. You dominate because every part of your marketing machine compounds: brand awareness, reviews, SEO, referrals, local authority, and client experience. In this solocast, Chris Dreyer answers one of the biggest frustrations in personal injury law: why some firms seem impossible to beat while others stay invisible no matter how much they spend. If you're tired of blending in with the background noise and need a true marketing partner who demands excellence, check out Rankings.io. On this episode, you'll learn: How relevance, distance, and prominence determine map pack rankings. Why a weak review profile quietly sabotages your entire marketing funnel. The referral and community-building strategies that still outperform digital tactics. If you like what you hear, hit Subscribe. We do this every week. Buy tickets for PIMCON 2026: https://hubs.li/Q04bf9vT0  Subscribe to our newsletter:  newsletter.rankings.io Get Social! Personal Injury Mastermind (PIM) powered by Rankings.io is on Instagram | YouTube | TikTok

Which segments of our field will thrive in the near future and which ones will slowly lose relevance, and why? David wants creative entrepreneurs to continue being resilient and reinventing themselves every two years while keeping a watchful eye on constantly evolving industry practices and technologies (including AI).   Links "Most At-Risk Shops" by David C. Baker for punctuation.com

Most CRE firms say they're using AI. What they mean is someone has a ChatGPT tab open.   Michael Episcope, co-CEO of Origin Investments, has spent the last six months actually embedding it - across every division, inside a secure enterprise layer, with dedicated integration staff and monthly data audits by department. Here is what he found: Lead with the opportunity: Clean data is a competitive asset. Origin is already running real-time portfolio queries in divisions where data is properly structured. The firms that treat the data audit as a priority project - before the AI layer - are the ones that will have that capability first. Lead with the capability: Real-time portfolio intelligence, firm-wide, in under 90 days. Portfolio data, cash flow statements, fundraising figures - all available to leadership on demand. Division heads freed to focus on what they were hired to do. The threat is not the technology - it is the competitor. Episcope told his team directly: AI won't replace you, but someone who knows AI and knows your job will. Origin is already hiring roles that did not exist four years ago. Firms that are not building this now are not just standing still. They are operating a business model that is five years old while the firm down the street runs 50 miles an hour faster. Episcope puts the early-mover window at 18 months to two years. After that, this is table stakes, not differentiation.   *** At GowerCrowd, we are bringing the most advanced AI tools to our clients for capital formation - and across other operational verticals too (like acquisitions). If you'd like to learn more about how we can assist you too, please reach out.   Subscribe to my newsletter and get access to this transformational intel before anyone else:  https://gowercrowd.com/subscribe Email: adam@gowercrowd.com Call: 213-761-1000

If your firm is still waiting for the RFP to show up before getting serious about winning the work, you are already behind. Katie Cash chats with Noel Brady, Co-Founder and COO of ProjectMark, the CRM built specifically for the architecture, engineering, and construction industry. They talk about what it actually takes to build a firm that grows with intention. Noel challenges the deeply ingrained belief that winning work is about personal relationships alone and makes the case that sustainable growth requires systematizing those relationships so they become a firm-wide asset rather than a liability that leaves when a key person leaves. From pipeline conversion ratios to the go/no-go decisions firms get wrong, this episode is an honest guide to replacing gut instinct with clean, actionable data. Noel and Katie also dig into the cultural and behavioral shifts that distinguish firms that merely talk about being data-driven from those that actually do it. If your firm is ready to stop reacting and start leading, this episode is the place to start.•        AEC business development•        CRM for AEC firms•        architecture engineering construction marketing•        AEC firm growth strategy•        go/no-go decisions AEC•        pipeline conversion ratio•        data-driven AEC•        seller doer AEC•        project pursuit strategy•        RFP strategy architecture firmsConnect with Noel Brady, Co-Founder & COO, ProjectMarkLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/noel-brady-mscsi-mrics-aaaa4547/ProjectMark: https://www.projectmark.com/Connect with Katie:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/kacash/https://smartegies.com/ Rate, Review, & Follow on Apple Podcasts:We hope you're finding value in our AEC Marketing For Principals.  Your feedback is important to us and we'd love to hear from you. Here's how you can help.  Scroll to the bottom, rate our podcast with five stars, and select “Write a Review.”  Let us know what you found most helpful from this episode!  And if you haven't done so already, give the podcast a follow, and you'll be notified when new episodes come out.

The US struck Iran's Qeshm Island, which was then met with retaliatory Iranian strikes on US bases in Kuwait; explosions were also reported in Saudi Arabia, and air sirens were set off in the UAE. US CENTCOM said that the Iranian drone attacks were “successfully defeated.”US proposed new tariffs of at least 10% on imports from 60 trading partners following Section 301 investigation. Crude (Brent +2.7%) rebounds as US and Iran's flare-up ripples through the Middle East; yields follow the energy rise. US equity futures mixed, with NQ outperforming as MRVL (+9.3%) continues to surge. DXY moves higher amid geopols, JPY outperforms amid commentary by PM Takaichi and BoJ Ueda. Looking ahead, highlights include US ADP Employment Change (May), S&P PMI Final (May), ISM Services PMI (May), Factory Orders (Apr), Fed Beige Book, Speakers including ECB's Cipollone, Fed's Barr & Logan, Earnings from Broadcom & CrowdStrike.Read the full report covering Equities, Forex, Fixed Income, Commodites and more on Newsquawk

Accounting Voices is a senior leadership platform hosted by Rob Brown that interprets the forces reshaping accounting firms across North America and beyond.This "AI Reality Inside Firms" series brings together influential accounting leaders to answer the same five structured questions about how AI is actually landing inside firms.No hype. No vendor narratives. Just honest leadership perspective from someone navigating AI from the inside.Today's special guest is Randy Johnston, Founder at K2 Enterprises.The five questions:Where is AI genuinely reshaping strategic direction for firms?What are firms still getting wrong about AI?Which AI-related leadership decisions will matter most over the next two years?Where is AI creating the greatest internal tension in firms?By 2027, what will separate leading firms from the rest?Five questions. One honest conversation. Part of a season that is building a definitive picture of AI reality inside accounting firms in 2026.Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/TV-p6NI6GyoThank you to our Season Partners for making this series possible.Fieldguide is the AI-native platform for audit and advisory enabling human and AI collaboration to scale capacity, improve quality and transform how firms operate. fieldguide.ioInstead is the first AI agent that owns end-to-end tax from research, planning, filing, and defense all in one system. It replaces CCH, GoSystems, UltraTax, Lacerte, ProConnect, Drake and many more. instead.comKarbon is the global leader in AI-powered practice management software for accounting firms. Their research into how technology is reshaping firm performance is essential reading for anyone leading a firm in 2026. karbonhq.comDigits is the world's first AI-native accounting platform. It's accounting software that works for you to deliver real-time financials and automate the month-end close. digits.comFiled is the intelligent tax workspace for preparation and review automation and the only AI for prep, review and planning that runs inside your tax software especially made for high-volume firms. filed.comAccounting Voices is a senior sense-making platform for firm owners, managing partners and senior operators navigating the forces reshaping accounting firms. Host Rob Brown convenes structured conversations with leaders across the profession to interpret what AI, private equity, consolidation and leadership pressure mean in practice.This season, AI Reality Inside Firms, brings together senior accounting firm leaders answering the same five structured questions about how AI is actually landing inside firms, separating execution from narrative.Find all episodes on your preferred podcast platform or on the Accounting Voices YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/@accountingvoicesTo find out more or to explore season partnership opportunities, connect with Rob on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/therobbrown

In this week's episode of China Insider, Miles Yu covers remarks given by US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth at this year's Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, and what his statements reveal about the current objectives of US defense strategy in the Indo-Pacific. Next, Miles reviews China's decision to impose significant penalties on several brokerage firms over alleged trading infractions, and how this move fits into China's global economic coercion apparatus. Finally, Miles unpacks KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun's planned visit to the US, what we can expect from this tour, and the potential impact her visit may have on current cross-strait tensions. China Insider is a weekly podcast project from Hudson Institute's China Center, hosted by China Center Director and Senior Fellow, Dr. Miles Yu, who provides weekly news that mainstream American outlets often miss, as well as in-depth commentary and analysis on the China challenge and the free world's future. 

The conversation begins with a discussion on the record-setting market optimism and the caution required in such a scenario. It then transitions to the shutdown of Spirit Airlines and the impact on employees and customers. The focus then shifts to the warning signals from Goldman Sachs and the market's resilience, seasonal headwinds, and institutional restraint. Finally, the conversation concludes with a call to action for financial planning and portfolio analysis, emphasizing the need to assess personal financial goals and avoid complacency in the current market environment.TakeawaysRecord-setting market optimismWall Street warning signalsChapters00:00 Introduction and Market Optimism09:25 Spirit Airlines Shutdown28:20 Goldman Sachs Warning Signals43:33 Financial Planning and Portfolio Analysis

Episode 147: This week, Kyle Van Pelt talks with Patrick Kelly, Co-Founder and CEO of Signal Advisors. Patrick started his career as a financial advisor at Northwestern Mutual before becoming an independent advisor. Before Signal, Patrick founded RepPro, the first electronic application platform for fixed and fixed index annuities in the IMO business. Patrick talks with Kyle about the hidden economics behind high-growth advisory firms. He discusses why some of the fastest-growing advisors integrate insurance, annuities, and investment management into a cohesive strategy, and how pairing this with recurring revenue can unlock both growth and enterprise value. Patrick also explores how technology simplifies operations, improves visibility into marketing performance, and ultimately helps advisors make better business decisions and enhance client experiences. In this episode: (00:00) - Intro (02:02) - Patrick's money moment (05:06) - Where Signal Advisors fits in the modern advisor ecosystem  (07:11) - Why insurance technology still lags behind wealthtech (10:52) - The hidden limitations of basic data feeds  (15:12) - Rethinking the commission vs. fee-based debate  (17:10) - The evolution of fee-based annuities and advisor adoption  (19:47) - The real engine behind advisor growth and enterprise value (21:07) - How Signal Advisors survived its early cash flow challenges  (28:25) - Building a tech stack around advisor economics and visibility (34:01) - Why advisors work with so many carriers (36:14) - Patrick's vision for the future of Signal Advisors (40:35) - Why AI should improve experience before efficiency  (43:37) - Patrick's Milemarker Minute Key Takeaways Great advisors solve for human outcomes, not just portfolio performance. Clients are often seeking confidence, stability, income, or peace of mind—not simply maximum returns. The firms growing fastest understand how to align financial solutions with real human concerns. The divide between insurance and investments is disappearing. High-growth advisory firms increasingly integrate annuities, insurance, and investment management into a single client strategy instead of treating them as competing business lines. Enterprise value comes from scalable growth, not just recurring revenue. Predictable revenue matters, but the firms commanding premium valuations are the ones pairing recurring income with strong acquisition systems, marketing visibility, and operational leverage AI's biggest opportunity is improving the client experience. Efficiency matters, but the real long-term advantage comes from creating smoother, faster, and more personalized experiences for both advisors and clients. Efficiency is simply the downstream effect. Quotes "In a world where you don't differentiate on products, where you really differentiate is on your financial planning prowess and how you actually help individuals solve problems in their lives." ~ Patrick Kelly "If you're taking commissions, you're reducing the enterprise value of your business because people who buy businesses want recurring revenue." ~ Patrick Kelly "You shouldn't use AI to create efficiency. You should use AI to create a better user experience. Efficiency is a second-order effect of AI." ~ Patrick Kelly Links  Patrick Kelly on LinkedIn Signal Advisors Northwestern Mutual American Equity DTCC Michael Kitces Empire of the Summer Moon Connect with our hosts Milemarker.co Kyle on LinkedIn Jud on LinkedIn Subscribe and stay in touch Apple Podcasts Spotify YouTube Produce game-changing content with TurncastTurncast helps your company grow by producing top-quality content and fostering transformative conversations. We specialize in content generation, podcasting, digital strategy, and audience growth for fintech and financial services companies. Learn more at Turncast.com.

In this episode of the Personal Injury Marketing Minute, host Lindsey Busfield, Vice President and Partner at Optimize My Firm, delves into the evolving landscape of AI in the legal industry, focusing on its impact on SEO and marketing. Joined by Evan, Lindsey discusses how AI is not killing SEO but rather complementing it by requiring a broader digital footprint and content diversification. They explore the various applications of AI in law firms, from case management to marketing strategies, and address common misconceptions about AI’s role in SEO. Lindsey emphasizes the importance of quality content and backlinks, while cautioning against over-reliance on AI-generated content due to potential inaccuracies. The discussion provides actionable insights for law firms looking to leverage AI effectively, ensuring they remain competitive without falling into marketing traps. Key Timestamps: 00:01 – Introduction 00:10 – AI’s Impact on SEO 01:06 – Establishing Authority Online 02:02 – AI in Law Firms: Current Uses 03:03 – Zero Click Information and Its Implications 04:00 – Misunderstandings About AI and SEO 05:14 – AI’s Effect on Content Ranking 06:02 – Importance of Quality Content 07:03 – AI as a Marketing Advantage 08:29 – Risks of Over-Reliance on AI 09:39 – Balancing AI and Human Input 11:15 – Practical Steps for Using AI 12:19 – AI in Content Development and Operations See all episodes or subscribe to the Personal Injury Marketing Minute here: https://optimizemyfirm.com/podcasts/. What Meaningful Changes Has AI Brought To SEO In The Past Year? AI has significantly influenced SEO by emphasizing the importance of establishing authority and creating quality content. While some fear AI might make SEO obsolete, it’s actually enhancing it. Optimizing for AI means building a strong online presence through content, citation backlinks, and a robust digital footprint. This helps AI platforms and Google determine your credibility and relevance, ultimately improving SEO performance. How Are Law Firms Currently Using AI, And Where Does It Fall Short? Law firms are incorporating AI in multiple areas, including SEO, operations, and case management. AI has streamlined processes, improved communications, and assisted in managing legal cases. However, many lawyers are unsure how to fully leverage AI, particularly in marketing. AI tools like chatbots provide quick answers to legal questions, reducing website traffic, but these interactions rarely result in lost clients, as they often involve non-transactional users. What Are The Common Misconceptions About AI’s Role In SEO? A major misconception is that AI is replacing SEO when, in reality, it’s a subset of it. AI optimization involves expanding your digital footprint through content creation on various platforms, like LinkedIn and YouTube. While AI and traditional SEO seem different, they’re interconnected. If you’ve been practicing effective SEO for years, there’s no need for drastic changes—just an expansion of content reach. How Has Ai-generated Content Impacted Search Rankings? AI-generated content affects rankings based on a law firm’s digital footprint. Firms that rely solely on their own website content and backlinks might struggle with ranking in AI-driven searches. Expanding content across multiple platforms enhances visibility in both organic and AI search results, improving overall SEO performance. What Remains Crucial For SEO Despite AI Advancements? Content creation remains essential for SEO success. Google and other AI platforms prioritize connecting users with accurate and relevant information. Creating high-quality, relevant content, supported by citation backlinks, boosts credibility and search rankings. This approach has always been vital for SEO and is now even more critical in the age of AI. How Can AI Give Law Firms A Competitive Edge? AI can provide an advantage by featuring firms in search result snippets, offering free exposure. Being cited as a source in AI responses can drive referral traffic to your site, potentially converting visitors into clients. Although AI-driven referral traffic is minimal, it often results in high conversion rates, making it a valuable addition to a firm’s marketing strategy. Where Do Firms Make Mistakes By Overly Relying On AI? Firms often panic and overreact to AI trends, falling for marketing companies that push unnecessary AI optimization services. If a firm’s SEO strategy is already effective, drastic changes aren’t needed. The real danger lies in scams that promise AI-driven success, leading to wasted resources and energy. How Should Firms Balance Automation With Human Input In Their Content Strategy? Currently, using AI-generated content on legal websites is risky due to potential inaccuracies and future penalties. Human oversight is crucial to ensure content accuracy and reliability, as AI can sometimes produce misleading information. Firms should avoid relying solely on AI for content and instead use it for idea generation and operational efficiency. What Practical Steps Should Firms Take To Start Using AI Effectively? Firms can use AI to generate ideas for content creation, such as video topics or scripts, while ensuring content is tailored to their audience. AI can also assist in automating internal processes and generating marketing materials like images and video thumbnails. 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California is implementing changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known here as CalFresh, required under H.R. 1. And, the ACLU is joining some tech companies in objecting to a bill that would prevent social media platforms that use "addictive features" from allowing users under 16.

Plus: Chinese automaker BYD unveils autonomous-driving chip. And shares of space companies plummet following Thursday night's Blue Origin rocket explosion. Julie Chang hosts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Key Highlights from the Episode: 0:00 – Introduction 1:02 – Should I stay or should I go next year?   2:27 – Why Q4 is often the best time to transition   3:59 – How holidays and client schedules factor into timing   5:35 – Deferred comp considerations for advisors   10:23 – Why firms sweeten deals in Q4 to hit quotas   12:48 – The myth of the “perfect” time to move   14:42 – Leveraging holiday parties and events for client communication   17:08 – Why every advisor's timing decision is unique   23:12 – Emotional readiness vs. waiting too long   25:27 – Rip the Band-Aid off: once you decide, just go   27:09 – Risks of delaying and firm pushback   28:11 – How to connect with Frank & Stacey   Resources: Elite Consulting Partners | Financial Advisor Transitions: https://eliteconsultingpartners.com Elite Marketing Concepts | Marketing Services for Financial Advisors: https://elitemarketingconcepts.com Elite Advisor Successions | Advisor Mergers and Acquisitions: https://eliteadvisorsuccessions.com JEDI Database Solutions | Data Intelligence for Advisors: https://jedidatabasesolutions.com Listen to more Advisor Talk episodes: https://eliteconsultingpartners.com/podcasts/ Follow us on LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/company/eliteconsultingpartners

Most AEC firms treat PR like a nice-to-have, something you think about after you've won the work. Julia Bonner, founder and president of Pierce Public Relations, has spent her career proving that's exactly backwards. In this conversation with Bryce, Julia gets into what strategic communications actually looks like for firms in the built environment and why the firms investing in their story now are the ones winning the work later. Pierce PR is a certified woman-owned boutique agency working with some of the most recognized names in AEC, Wold Architects and Engineers, ESa, Reeves Young, BELL Construction. Julia started her career in New York City with a master's degree from NYU, built a practice around the built environment, and has become one of Nashville's most recognized business leaders in the process. She's not talking about press releases and award submissions. She's talking about what it takes to build a brand that actually moves a business forward. This episode is for firm leaders who know their work speaks for itself and are starting to realize that might not be enough. About Julia Bonner: Julia Bonner is the founder and president of Pierce Public Relations, a certified woman-owned boutique PR and marketing agency specializing in the AEC and professional services industries. Her clients include Wold Architects and Engineers, ESa, Reeves Young, and BELL Construction. A Nashville-based leader, Julia holds an M.S. in Public Relations and Corporate Communication from NYU and a B.S. in Journalism from the University of Tennessee. She is a recipient of the Nashville Business Journal's Most Admired CEO Award (2024), Women of Influence Award (2020), and 40 Under 40 Award (2017), and has been named to the Nashville Post's "In Charge" list four consecutive years (2022-2025). Website: https://pierce-pr.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliaebonner/ What We Cover: Introduction and Julia's path from NYU and New York City to building Pierce PR in Nashville What PR and strategic communications actually means for AEC firms — beyond press releases and award submissions Why most firms in the built environment wait too long to invest in their brand What the best communicators in AEC do differently than everyone else How Julia has grown Pierce PR to represent some of the most recognized names in the industry What it means to run a woman-owned boutique agency in a historically male-dominated space Julia's community leadership — ULI Nashville, Young Leaders Council, Nashville Film Festival — and why she invests there What she's learned about leadership from building her own firm Where to find Pierce PR and what working with them looks like Key Takeaways: PR is not reactive — the firms using it strategically are building relationships and reputation before they ever need them Most AEC firms undersell themselves not because they lack good stories, but because they're too close to their own work to see what's remarkable about it A boutique agency in a specialized industry can outperform a generalist firm every time — because deep industry knowledge changes everything about how you tell the story Community investment isn't separate from business building — it's how the best leaders create lasting influence Running a woman-owned business in AEC requires both credibility and persistence in equal measure  

End chaos in your firm—300+ peers use this framework. Free video here: https://www.businessofarchitecture.com/framework In this episode, Enoch Sears sits down with Joost Bende, President of PACIFIC 33 Architects, to talk about what hits hardest once the drawings are done. Joost shares what it feels like when work is flowing, then suddenly isn't—and how small choices can create a dip months later. If you've ever felt "feast or famine," this will feel familiar. You'll also hear how a healthcare-focused practice stays sharp, why relationships matter more than tactics, and what changes when you watch the business engine behind the design. Joost explains how stronger systems and clearer numbers can lower stress and create freedom away from the office—without losing traction. The moment that reveals whether your pipeline is real… or just hope Why "being busy" can still set you up for a surprise slump The shift that makes clients treat you like a strategic partner To learn more about Joost, visit his website: https://pacific33architects.com/

#851: Disney places high hopes on ‘The Mandalorian and Grogu' to bring back box office success to the franchise. Spotify shares soar after embracing AI music. The US will invest $2B in quantum computing. Stephen Colbert hosts his final show at ‘The Late Show.' And Eli Lilly says its new weight loss drug is the best in the biz.  Learn more at Linkedin.com/MBD Subscribe to Morning Brew Daily for more of the news you need to start your day. Share the show with a friend, and leave us a review on your favorite podcast app. Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.swap.fm/l/mbd-note⁠⁠⁠  Watch Morning Brew Daily Here:⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Plus: Anthropic is poised to turn its first quarterly profit. And Advanced Micro Devices plans to invest more than $10 billion in Taiwan's chip industry. Imani Moise hosts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jack Burnham focuses on China's history of unfulfilled trade promises regarding agricultural and energy products. Despite U.S. export controls, Chinese firms continue to acquire advanced Nvidia chips through illicit smuggling routes. (4/16)1966 CALIFORNIA