Podcasts about Operator

Tait Duryea and Ryan Gibson break down one of the most important but often misunderstood parts of real estate investing: the capital stack. They explain how senior debt, mezzanine debt, preferred equity, and common equity shape risk, returns, and who gets paid first. For pilots and high-income professionals evaluating passive income opportunities, this episode offers a practical framework for understanding leverage, deal structure, DSCR, private credit, and why projected returns do not tell the whole story.Show notes:(0:00) Intro(1:10) Ways investors get paid(3:08) Capital stack basics(4:11) Debt drives real estate risk(7:32) All-cash versus leveraged deals(10:31) Common equity explained(18:50) Preferred equity position(21:10) Checking debt ahead(27:39) Rescue capital versus healthy deals(35:36) Operator view on structure(42:05) DSCR and cash flow cushion(57:18) OutroRelated Episode: #2 - Invest Passively in DST and Opportunity Zones with Brandon BruckmanIf you're interested in participating, the latest institutional-quality self-storage portfolio is available for investment now at: https://turbinecap.investnext.com/portal/offerings/8449/houston-storage/ — You've found the number one resource for financial education for aviators! Please consider leaving a rating and sharing this podcast with your colleagues in the aviation community, as it can serve as a valuable resource for all those involved in the industry.Remember to subscribe for more insights at PassiveIncomePilots.com! https://passiveincomepilots.com/ Join our growing community on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/passivepilotsCheck us out on Instagram @PassiveIncomePilots: https://www.instagram.com/passiveincomepilots/Follow us on X @IncomePilots: https://twitter.com/IncomePilotsGet our updates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/passive-income-pilots/Do you have questions or want to discuss this episode? Contact us at ask@passiveincomepilots.com See you at the next one!*Legal Disclaimer*The content of this podcast is provided solely for educational and informational purposes. The views and opinions expressed are those of the hosts, Tait Duryea and Ryan Gibson, and do not reflect those of any organization they are associated with, including Turbine Capital or Spartan Investment Group. The opinions of our guests are their own and should not be construed as financial advice. This podcast does not offer tax, legal, or investment advice. Listeners are advised to consult with their own legal or financial counsel and to conduct their own due diligence before making any financial decisions.

Growth should feel like momentum. For most nonprofit leaders between $1M and $3M, it feels like barely surviving — because the organization was built for a prior stage and never structurally redesigned for the current one. Brooke Richie-Babbage calls this the Design Deficit: the measurable gap between an organization's structural capacity and what its next stage of growth actually requires. In this episode, Brooke walks through why this gap exists, why resourceful leaders unintentionally mask it, and what it takes to close it. She introduces the Stability Flywheel — three architectural pillars (Capital Engine, Capacity Matrix, Clarity Compass) that must work together for an organization to sustain growth. Listeners will learn how to diagnose which pillar is stalling their flywheel, what institution-building actually requires, and how to shift from holding the organization together personally to designing one that holds itself.What You'll Learn:The Design Deficit and why it's predictable, not personal — why organizations built at $400K buckle at $1.5M and how to recognize the structural strain before it becomes a crisis.The three pillars of the Stability Flywheel — Capital Engine, Capacity Matrix, and Clarity Compass — and the specific signals that indicate which one is stalling your organization's growth.How to shift from operator to architect — the practical difference between holding an organization together and designing one that can hold itself, including the single reframe that changes every decision about hiring, systems, and CEO time.Key Takeaways:The Design Deficit is a predictable stage, not a leadership failure. When a nonprofit grows past its original structural design, leaders experience strain that feels personal — but the real cause is an architecture that was never updated for the current stage. This happens because the same resourcefulness that built the organization actively masks the infrastructure gaps beneath it.An organization that is growing is not the same as an organization built to sustain growth. Most nonprofits between $1M and $3M function because of the people in them, not the design beneath them. At this stage, nonprofit leaders must transition from operating inside the machine to redesigning it — the Operator-to-Architect shift.The Stability Flywheel stalls at the weakest pillar — and strengthening the other two won't fix it. Capital, Capacity, and Clarity reinforce each other when all three work. When one breaks, the others compensate — and the leader absorbs the difference personally. The most effective approach is to identify the weakest pillar and start there.Want to work together? Apply for the Next Level Nonprofit Mastermind, a high-touch coaching and training accelerator for established organizations with $1M+ budgets that are ready to design for impact sustained at scale.  Budget under $1M? Join Elevate and get proven step-by-step playbooks + coaching support to build each of the core elements of your nonprofit's operating system - strategic clarity, a fundraising engine, a high-performance team, and an active and engaged board!   Connect with me!LinkedInInstagramYouTube

2026 UPDATES make this case even crazier. If you thought the Netflix documentary was the end... You NEED to listen to this episode.The story of Jennifer Pan and the labyrinth that she built around her life is so complex and diabolical that it takes over an hour just to scratch the surface!The Operator walks you through the entire crazy case, PLUS new information for 2026 that is only weeks old, that continues to change the face of this case.Be sure to check out the three interrogation videos of Jennifer Pan, too. They've been COMPLETELY REMASTERED so you can see and hear every detail.FACEBOOK https://www.facebook.com/groups/911callsX https://x.com/911CallsPodcastINSTAGRAM https://www.instagram.com/911callspodcastYOUTUBE https://www.youtube.com/@911CallsPodcastTIKTOK https://www.tiktok.com/@911callspodcastPATREON https://patreon.com/1159media====Unlimited Access, Early, Ad-free for $5For $5, supporters get everything we have to offer - every podcast, live backdoor access to watch us record, video episodes, uncut episodes, all of our PLUS podcasts, early and ad-free, and more. Support 11:59 Media's vision to build our great creators. Visit ⁠11:59 Media on Patreon⁠ ⁠https://patreon.com/1159media⁠ to sign up now. Start your support, and access everything you've been missing.

This conversation originally aired December 6, 2022.Dr. Michael Platt is a Professor of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Marketing at the University of Pennsylvania and holds joint appointments at the Perelman School of Medicine, the School of Arts and Sciences, and the Wharton School. He is the founder of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative and the author of The Leader's Brain.Preston and Michael work through the neuroscience underneath three questions: Why do emotional interventions sometimes produce learning, and sometimes just produce resentment? What does it actually mean to have a "social brain," and what happens to it when you cut people off from each other? And what are the neurological precursors to the thing teams call flow?Listen to learn the marble metaphor for habit and development, the default mode network as a muscle that atrophies without boredom, the role of synchrony in what rowers call "swing," and a standing challenge to the introverts in the audience (go talk to your neighbors).Michael's closing recommendations are three things most likely to keep your brain and your team's brains healthy under pressure.

On this Zero Limits Podcast Matty Morris chats with Jason Hiscox State Emergency Service Vertical Rescue Operator.Jason grew up in Coffs Harbour — a self-described ratbag who needed a magistrate's wake-up call to turn his life around after multiple criminal convictions.His son Nate was born in 2012 and changed he's prospective everything. Jason joined the NSW SES, became a Vertical Rescue and Road Crash Rescue Instructor, rose to Deputy Rescue Officer, and spent over a decade responding to some of the most confronting jobs emergency services will ever see — including leading flood boat crews through the 2017 Lismore floods, earning the National Emergency Medal.On February 28, 2015, he drove home from a training exercise to find three ambulances in his driveway. His son Nate, two weeks from his third birthday, had drowned in the family pool. Three months later, Jason was back in training completing Swift Water Rescue.He kept showing up. In uniform, and as a father.Send us a text however note we cannot reply through these means. Please message the instagram or email if you are wanting a response. Support the showWebsite - www.zerolimitspodcast.comInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/zero.limits.podcast/?hl=enHost - Matty Morris www.instagram.com/matty.m.morrisFor the new Zero Limits Pre workout and creatine supplements head to link belowZero Limits Supplements - www.zerolimitssupplements.comSponsorsInstagram - @gatorzaustraliawww.gatorzaustralia.com15% Discount Code - ZERO15(former/current military & first responders 20% discount to order please email orders@gatorzaustralia.com.auInstagram - @3zeroscoffee3 Zeros Coffee - www.3zeroscoffee.com.au10% Discount Code - 3ZLimitsInstagram - @getsome_auGetSome Jocko Fuel - www.getsome.com.au10% Discount Code - ZEROLIMITS

What does it actually take to build a thriving HYROX program inside your gym — and turn it into a serious revenue engine? In this episode of Future of Fitness, host Eric Malzone sits down with David Magida, Global Head of Training at HYROX, to unpack everything gym owners and operators need to know about getting into the fastest-growing fitness sport in the world. David shares how he went from running a boutique gym in DC — nearly losing it all during COVID — to overseeing a global affiliate network of nearly 16,000 gyms. From the electric energy of a 40,000-athlete HYROX event in London, to the step-by-step framework for launching a HYROX program (whether you're crawling, walking, or sprinting), David breaks down the real business case: premium add-on memberships, ads that outperform at 3-to-1, 50% of gym revenue tied to HYROX, and a community so tight your members become your best salespeople. If you're a gym owner sitting on the fence about HYROX, this is the episode that will get you off it.

Terance Frazier sits down with Philip Teresi as the City of Fresno moves to take over Granite Park. Frazier shares details about how the city has fallen short on their initial agreement and how much of his own money he has put into the park. Per a Judge ruling, The City of Fresno was granted immediate possession of Granite Park in Central Fresno. The City terminated its lease with Central Valley Community Sports Foundation in 2025 and filed eviction proceedings to remove CVCSF as the Operator. Please Like, Comment and Follow 'Philip Teresi on KMJ' on all platforms: --- Philip Teresi on KMJ is available on the KMJNOW app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever else you listen to podcasts. -- Philip Teresi on KMJ Weekdays 2-6 PM Pacific on News/Talk 580 AM & 105.9 FM KMJ | Website | Facebook | Instagram | X | Podcast | Amazon | - Everything KMJ KMJNOW App | Podcasts | Facebook | X | Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Terance Frazier sits down with Philip Teresi as the City of Fresno moves to take over Granite Park. Frazier shares details about how the city has fallen short on their initial agreement and how much of his own money he has put into the park. Per a Judge ruling, The City of Fresno was granted immediate possession of Granite Park in Central Fresno. The City terminated its lease with Central Valley Community Sports Foundation in 2025 and filed eviction proceedings to remove CVCSF as the Operator. Please Like, Comment and Follow 'Philip Teresi on KMJ' on all platforms: --- Philip Teresi on KMJ is available on the KMJNOW app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever else you listen to podcasts. -- Philip Teresi on KMJ Weekdays 2-6 PM Pacific on News/Talk 580 AM & 105.9 FM KMJ | Website | Facebook | Instagram | X | Podcast | Amazon | - Everything KMJ KMJNOW App | Podcasts | Facebook | X | Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In episode 188 of 'On the Whorizon' SWCEO founder and host ‪MelRoseMichaels‬ gets honest about a mistake that cost her at least $5,000 and likely far more once you factor in the years she let it sit on her to-do list untouched. This is not a story about something going wrong. It is a story about a strategy she already knew about, already believed in, and kept pushing off anyway. And what happened when she finally stopped.This episode is for the creator who knows how to make money but cannot seem to break through to the next level. MelRose breaks down why plateaus happen, what the real bottleneck usually is, and how thinking like an operator instead of just a creator changes everything about how you make decisions in your business. She walks through the decision filter she developed after that $5,000 lesson, the one variable testing method that makes growth actually measurable, and why the opportunity you need is almost always the task sitting at the bottom of your to-do list.

George Wright III interviews Lane Martin, founder of Modern PurAir, about scaling a “boring but essential” indoor air quality service business through systems, technology, and franchising. Martin shares how he grew up in duct cleaning, bought into the family business in 1992, sold it in 1996, returned in 2001 after losing money in a furniture venture, and began scaling by hiring technicians despite initial resistance. Inspired by 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, he learned franchising lessons directly from Brian Scudamore and built a roadmap to expand. Modern PurAir now has 38 territories and 22 franchises across Canada with over $20M in system sales and is expanding into the U.S. They emphasize documenting everything with Loom/Scribe/Trainual, delegating to an 80% standard, and tracking KPIs like same-store sales growth and profitability guided by a three-year vivid vision.00:29 Meet Lane Martin01:35 From Duct Truck to Franchise03:07 Scaling Across North America04:21 Hiring First Tech Breakthrough05:50 Franchise Spark from Got Junk07:45 Operator to Visionary Shift09:20 Systems Beat Talent10:59 Documenting SOPs with Loom13:58 Delegation and the 80 Percent Rule18:12 KPIs and Vivid Vision Focus22:43 Boring Business Opportunities25:12 Indoor Air Quality Future and US Expansion27:36 Franchise Due Diligence AdviceThanks for listening, and Please Share this Episode with someone. It would really help us to grow our show and share these valuable tips and strategies with others. Have a great day.George Wright III“It's Never Too Late to Start Living the Life You Were Meant to Live”FREE Daily Mastermind Resources:CONNECT with George & Access Tons of ResourcesGet access to Proven Strategies and Time-Test Principles for Success. Plus, download and access tons of FREE resources and online events by joining our Exclusive Community of Entrepreneurs, Business Owners, and High Achievers like YOU.Join FREE at DailyMastermind.comFollow me on social media Facebook | Instagram | Linkedin | TikTok | YoutubeGrow Your Authority and Personal Brand with a FREE Interview in a Top Global Magazine HERE.ABOUT GUESTLANE MARTIN is the Co-founder of Modern PURAIR®, one of North America's fastest-growing Indoor Air Quality (IAQ)companies and franchise systems. From its headquarters in Kelowna, BC, he has helped grow the business from a local service operation into a multi-location brand, expanding across Canada and into the U.S., with franchise locations in markets as small as 50,000 people, achieving over $1M CAD in annual revenue. A second-generation entrepreneur, Lane grew up in the industry and has spent over two decades building businessesfocused on service, systems, and long-term growth. Under his leadership, Modern PURAIR® has evolved into a scalablefranchise model and a category leader in indoor air quality - an often overlooked but increasingly essential part of bothhealth and home maintenance. Today, Lane is passionate about mentoring entrepreneurs to recognize the power of “boring but essential” businesses -those that quietly solve real problems, create meaningful impact, and generate predictable, recurring revenue. He is alsoactive in supporting children in need through his work with the PURKIDS® Foundation. Lane lives in Kelowna with his wifeand children, embracing the Okanagan Valley lifestyle and its outdoor pursuits whenever possible.Under Lane's leadership, Modern PURAIR® has earned numerous accolades, including Chamber of Commerce Business ofthe Year (2009), Small Business of the Year (2021) and Finalist for Medium Business of the Year (2022).Website: https://modernpurair.com/● LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lane-martin-7377a114/● YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@modernpurair6889● Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lanemartin/● Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/purairguy● X (Twitter): https://x.com/ModernPURAI

A local farmer is building a sustainable food business while selling natural meats and connecting consumers with products from other local farms as well. Scott Hasselmann - Owner and Operator of Hasselmann Family Farm in Marengo joins Rob Hart on the WBBM Noon Business Hour to discuss.

U.S. investment fund Warburg Pincus LLC plans to acquire real estate firm J.S.B. Co., Japan's leading operator of rental housing for university students and students from abroad, it was learned Friday.

Robert Dow buys and sells raw land across Texas and Oklahoma — mostly sight unseen, almost entirely through direct mail. It's a lean operation built on a simple idea: take infrastructure you already have and point it at a new market. In this conversation, we get into his direct mail philosophy (why novelty beats clever copywriting, why your letter should be about the reader and not you), how he thinks about capital structure and tax efficiency, and his take on AI — that it's a powerful tool but not a durable moat. The edge still comes from domain expertise and knowing immediately which option is worth keeping. We also get into personal finance: a self-directed Roth IRA structure that's quietly been one of his best investments, and why most founders shouldn't be doing private deals. Guest: Robert Dow, founder of Remarkable Land Sponsor: [wayfront.com/tmba](wayfront.com/tmba) Thanks to this week's sponsor Wayfront — the AI-ready operating system for productized agencies. One client portal. One team dashboard. All your data, AI-accessible. TMBA listeners get an extra free month on top of the trial at wayfront.com/tmba. Links: Dan Kennedy — The Ultimate Sales Letter Seth Godin — Purple Cow Seth Godin — Linchpin Al Ries & Jack Trout — The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing Al Ries — Focus John Ruhlin — Giftology Donald Miller — Building a StoryBrand Aaron Ross — Predictable Revenue Chris Voss — Never Split the Difference Robert Cialdini — Influence Alex Hormozi — $100M Offers Jack Carr — The Terminal List Andy Weir — Project Hail Mary Andy Weir — The Martian Cormac McCarthy — The Road Business Resources Upcoming DC Events

Website: https://www.aiaiholdings.com/ NASDAQ: AIAI

When a regulator asks what the downside is of adding one more testing requirement, what is the downside? Just a little more safe. Just in case. Especially when adding one more item to an already exhaustive testing panel. That logic is how licensed cannabis markets end up buried under compliance layers copied from other states, calibrated to someone else's problems. It is also exactly how two adjacent markets with nearly identical consumer bases, Ohio and Michigan, ended up with completely different market structures.  What they do not share is regulatory philosophy. When one state watches another add a rule and asks itself whether it should do the same, the answer it lands on shapes the entire cost structure of every licensed operator inside its borders. Ohio learned to ask the follow-up question. Most states never do. Ohio closed the intoxicating hemp loophole on March 20th, ahead of the federal government, and those shops are starting to close. The next unlock may already be here: THC beverages reaching the customers who will never walk into a dispensary, sold at the restaurant down the street. This week we sit down with Caroline Henry, VP of Government and Regulatory Affairs at Buckeye Relief. The regulator FOMO problem Ohio vs. Michigan: two markets, one lesson THC beverages as the dispensary gateway     Chapters 00:00 The Disconnect in Cannabis Perception 03:12 Navigating Stigma and Misconceptions 05:48 Regulatory Challenges and Industry Standards 08:55 Building Relationships with Regulators 11:54 Small Wins in Regulatory Negotiations 15:02 The Impact of Over-Regulation 17:48 Child-Resistant Packaging and Its Irony 25:38 Navigating Regulatory Challenges in the Cannabis Industry 26:00 The Role of Beverages in Reducing Stigma 30:37 Learning from Michigan: Ohio's Cannabis Strategy 39:31 Focusing on Ohio: The Case for Local Expertise 44:00 The Realities of Working in the Cannabis Industry   Guest Links www.buckeyerelief.com www.amplifydispensary.com Our Links: Bryan Fields on Twitter The Dime on Twitter Extraction Teams: Want to cut costs and get more out of every run? Unlock hidden revenue by extracting more from the same input—with Newton Insights. At Eighth Revolution (8th Rev), we provide services from capital to cannabinoid and everything in between in the cannabinoid industry. The Dime is a top 5% most shared  global podcast The Dime is a top 10 Cannabis Podcast  The Dime has a New Website. Shhhh its not finished.

Pet food looks like a food category, but it behaves like a trust category and nobody understands that better than Michael Meyer.  Rose Hamilton, CEO of Compass Rose Ventures and co-host of The Story of a Brand Show, sits down with Michael for an operator masterclass that goes far beyond pet food into the deeper mechanics of how premium consumer brands get built, scaled, and sustained.  With experience across Wellness Pet Food, Plum Organics, Restoration Hardware, I and Love and You, and Just Food for Dogs, Michael brings a rare pattern recognition that every founder, operator, and investor needs to hear. * Pet food is a trust category, not a food category. The dog or cat either eats it or doesn't. The pet parent either feels reassured or doesn't. Repeat purchase is the only real trust metric that matters, and building toward it requires discipline most brands skip. * Cats are the most underbuilt opportunity in premium pets. All the innovation went to dogs. Cat parents were always emotionally invested; the category just never gave them enough ways to express it. That is changing now, and it has to be intentional to work. * The Bobby Flay lesson every founder needs. Celebrity partnerships only work when they make the product promise more believable. Made by Nacho added depth to an existing thesis. It was not motion for motion's sake. * Distribution is not demand. Awareness is not trust. Getting on shelf is not the win. Turning and staying on shelf is the business. Scaling before your system is ready does not create growth, it creates expensive complexity. * Don't rush it. Michael's sharpest advice for founders under pressure to scale: take a breath, think it through, then come back. Speed without clarity is one of the most costly mistakes a growing brand can make. Join us in listening to this episode for one of the most practically useful operator conversations the show has ever produced. Rose and Michael cover category signals, acquisition lessons, channel strategy, celebrity partnerships, and the discipline required to scale without breaking what you built.  Whether you are a founder, an operator, or an investor, this one will sharpen how you think about building consumer brands that last.  For more on I and Love and You visit: https://iandloveandyou.com/ If you enjoyed this episode, please leave The Story of a Brand Show a rating and review.  Plus, don't forget to follow us on Apple and Spotify.  Your support helps us bring you more content like this!

In this special "After Hours" episode, hosts Damien Greathead and Penny Breslin sit down with Steven Ladd — recovering engineer, serial entrepreneur, and small business advisor — to explore what it really means to serve small business owners beyond the debits and credits.Steven shares his journey from engineer to entrepreneur to advisor, and how working with small businesses during COVID revealed a hard truth: most owners don't have a financial foundation — and most advisors don't know how to connect with them on a human level.In this episode, you'll hear about:Why speaking plain English (not EBITDA) changes everythingThe "Lemonade Stand" model for helping owners understand their own businessWhat the Catalyst program looks like in practice — and what real value delivery looks like in the first 90 daysThe difference between a compliance mindset and a true advisory relationshipWhy the best advisors ask great questions rather than have all the answersWhether you're an accountant looking to move into advisory, or a bookkeeper ready to offer more value, this conversation will give you the confidence and framework to take that next step.0:00 – Introduction & Welcome 0:22 – About the "After Hours" format 0:54 – Recap of previous episode: Defining Advisory Services 1:51 – Penny introduces Steven Ladd 4:17 – Steven's background: Engineer → Entrepreneur → Advisor 5:09 – Working with small businesses through COVID 8:28 – How Steven describes what he does: "Love and Systems" 10:40 – Why jargon (like EBITDA) gets in the way 16:35 – What the Catalyst program looks like in practice 17:10 – The "Lemonade Stand" model for business clarity 24:15 – After the Catalyst: bookkeeping options & the fork in the road 29:13 – Empowering owners to become the Operator 31:15 – How big is Steven's company? (The answer may surprise you) 32:44 – A client success story: from skeptic to $250K loan 35:46 – Wrap-up & connect with Steven on LinkedIn

Welcome to another episode of The Collision Vision, driven by Autobody News!   I'm Cole Strandberg, and today I'm joined by David Black, chief operating officer of Body by Cochran and an industry veteran who has worked nearly every side of this business: independent owner, consolidator leadership, and now a dealer-owned MSO. We trace Dave's road from a "grunt kid" in his dad's West Virginia shop to helping grow Body by Cochran from five separate dealer body shops into a 13-location, roughly $80-million MSO. We get into the operational rebuild behind that growth including a collision-only parts warehouse that cut parts cycle time from 11.5 days to 1.3 — why the business now runs like an independent while keeping its dealer backing, his approach to brand specialization and developing the next generation of technicians, and the legacy he hopes to leave the industry.   Let's get into it.

Today, Steve speaks with Dustin Dobbyn, an internationally recognized security expert, Marine Corps veteran, former SWAT operator, and the CEO of a fast-growing private security and executive protection firm. The two discuss management under pressure, the value of training and preparation, and awareness of supply chain risk. Dustin also makes the case for agility and flexibility in the workplace.  Key Takeaways: Physical security and cybersecurity are no longer separate arenas and organizations must realize all forms of security impact one another.  Intelligence is your greatest friend when building organizational resilience.  Work schedule flexibility can significantly improve productivity.  Tune in to hear more about: Securing all levels of your supply chain (8:15) A skill that veterans can bring to the cybersecurity industry (14:05) Dustin's resilience roadmap for the next five years (18:02) Standout Quotes: “If you think you know it all, it's time to get out of the business.” - Dustin Dobbyn “So we're seeing, especially in the corporate world for corporate security, a lot of people working remote on a flex schedule, and we're seeing a lot more productivity because of it. For leadership out there who's listening, absolutely just take that into consideration, as sometimes people work better at certain times of the day based on their schedule. And if you can get them in an environment where they're less stressed, you're going to get better work output out of them.” - Dustin Dobbyn “Knowledge is power. Intelligence is what's going to keep you safe because if you have the intelligence, you're aware of what's going on, and you can prepare for worst-case scenarios.” - Dustin Dobbyn Read the transcript of this episodeSubscribe to the ISF Podcast wherever you listen to podcastsConnect with us on LinkedIn and TwitterFrom the Information Security Forum, the leading authority on cyber, information security, and risk management.

Stuck on the entrepreneurial roller coaster where sales spike, operations crash, and you're still working 80-hour weeks? In this episode, Jason Swenk breaks down the stages from operator to owner and shows how to build a business that can finally run without you.Jason Swenk is a prominent digital agency coach, keynote speaker, and author of Operator to Owner. After launching a digital agency in 1999 and scaling it into a multimillion-dollar firm serving brands like AT&T, Hitachi, and LegalZoom, he successfully sold the company in 2011. Drawing from his experience, Jason founded Agency Mastery and created the "Founder Evolution Framework," a five-stage roadmap designed to help seven- and eight-figure founders transition from hands-on operators to true owners. Today, he also hosts the Smart Agency Masterclass Podcast, helping entrepreneurs build scalable agencies that run seamlessly without them.Connect with Jason Swenk:Website: https://operatortoownerevolution.com/ Instagram: instagram.com/jswenk YouTube: youtube.com/jasonswenk TurnKey Podcast Productions Important Links:Guest to Gold Video Series: www.TurnkeyPodcast.com/gold The Ultimate Podcast Launch Formula- www.TurnkeyPodcast.com/UPLFplusFREE workshop on how to "Be A Great Guest."Free E-Book 5 Ways to Make Money Podcasting at www.Turnkeypodcast.com/gift Ready to earn 6-figures with your podcast? See if you've got what it takes at TurnkeyPodcast.com/quizSales Training for Podcasters: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sales-training-for-podcasters/id1540644376Nice Guys on Business: http://www.niceguysonbusiness.com/subscribe/The Turnkey Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/turnkey-podcast/id1485077152

Red Apple Media Owner & Operator John Catsimatidis joins Sid live in-studio for his weekly Monday morning appearance to recap Friday evening's TALKERS Magazine 2026 National Talk Media Industry Conference at Hofstra University, where both John & Sid were featured as guest speakers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Watch the full episode on our YouTube channel: youtube.com/@mreapodcastWhat if growth is not the thing that creates freedom?Liz Landry has spent 16 years as a MAPS coach, completed more than 35,000 coaching calls, and helped some of the top real estate agents in the industry solve one of the biggest problems in business: people.Today, Liz joins us to unpack the path from operator to owner. She breaks down the four levels of leverage, from doing it all yourself to building leaders who can build leaders. We talk about why task leverage can trap us, how to hand off outcomes instead of chores, and why the best leaders stop being the answer machine.Liz also gives us simple language we can use right away with our team. When someone brings us a question, we do not need to fix it. We can help them think. We can ask for possible solutions. We can connect each task to the bigger vision. And over time, we can build a business where people own results, not just check boxes.This is a bold, clear conversation for any real estate agent who wants freedom inside their business, not freedom from it.Resources:Interest List for Operator to Owner: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Running a Business That Doesn't Run You by Liz Landry: fromoperatortoownerbook.com Order the Millionaire Real Estate Agent Playbook | Volume 3Connect with Jason:LinkedinProduced by NOVAThis podcast is for general informational purposes only. The views, thoughts, and opinions of the guest represent those of the guest and not  Keller Williams Realty, LLC and its affiliates, and should not be construed as financial, economic, legal, tax, or other advice. This podcast is provided without any warranty, or guarantee of its accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or results from using the information.WARNING! You must comply with the TCPA and any other federal, state or local laws, including for B2B calls and texts. Never call or text a number on any Do Not Call list, and do not use an autodialer or artificial voice or prerecorded messages without proper consent. Contact your attorney to ensure your compliance.

Get my new book: https://bronsonequity.com/fireyourselfDownload my new special report - How to Use Inflation to Your Advantage - www.bronsonequity.com/inflationJoin host Bronson Hill for this special webinar replay from The 2026 Passive Investors Summit on the Mailbox Money Show. In this expert panel, Bronson is joined by four seasoned operators and investors sharing real talk on navigating the current multifamily market, capital deployment, due diligence, cash flow strategies, and emerging opportunities amid economic shifts.Panelists:Tyson Cobb (Timberview Capital) – orthopedic surgeon turned investor, focused on building physician networks and strong deal flow.Param Baladandapani (Generational Wealth MD) – retired radiologist and mentor helping physicians achieve financial freedom through real estate.Mike Morawski – 30-year real estate veteran with a focus on southeast multifamily and market cycle timing.Aleksey Chernobelskiy (GP LP Match) – founder connecting LPs with high-quality GPs and providing deal flow transparency.The panel discusses everything from vetting operators and conservative underwriting to AI applications in real estate, tax strategies, and why disciplined, long-term investors are well-positioned for the next cycle.TIMESTAMPS0:43 - Episode Overview | Wealth Forum2:01 - Host and Panelist Introductions3:48 - Current Market Overview: Threats, Opportunities, and LP Capital Trends5:01 - Panelist Backgrounds10:00 - Investor Psychology, Market Cycles, and Recovering from Losses15:54 - Deal Diligence and Vetting Lessons from Recent Years21:33 - Poll Results and Wire Fraud Warning22:36 - Bronson's Deal Evaluation Framework (Market > Operator > Deal)23:44 - Importance of Cash Flow in Today's Market28:34 - Broader Opportunities, Risks, and Geopolitical Factors (Oil, Baby Boomers, Senior Housing)32:33 - AI's Impact on Real Estate, Jobs, and Investor Tools41:41 - Personal Investments Outside Core Business (Precious Metals, Crypto, Asset Allocation)46:50 - Q&A: Spotting Operators with Realistic Projections51:42 - Lightning Round: Is This Like 2008 in Multifamily?52:01 - Panelist Contact Info and Closing RemarksConnect with the Guests:Tyson CobbWebsite: timberviewcapital.comMobile: 563-209-8488Email: tyson@timberviewcapital.comParam BaladandapaniWebsite: gwcapital.comPassive Investment Due Diligence Resource: gwcapital.com/guideMike MorawskiLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mikemorawski2Instagram: @mike.morawski.54Email: mike@mikemorawski.comAleksey ChernobelskiyWebsite: gplpmatch.comEmail: aleksey@gplpmatch.com#MultifamilyInvesting#PassiveIncome#RealEstateDueDiligence#CashFlowStrategies#WealthBuilding

Gerard and Laurent have the pleasure of welcoming Fintan Slye, CEO of NESO — Great Britain's National Energy System Operator.  In a lively and wide-ranging discussion, we explored NESO's governance and its critical role across the British energy system: from real-time system operation — balancing supply and demand every second — to whole-system planning, market design, and transmission network operation.  We covered an extraordinary breadth of topics: balancing costs, electricity prices for consumers, energy security, and the challenge of delivering Power 2030 in a system increasingly reliant on renewables. We discussed batteries, the evolution of balancing markets, the explosive growth of datacenters, and the ever-growing grid connection queue — and, above all, how to keep the entire system stable and efficient through this transformation.  One of the most fascinating parts of the conversation focused on datacenters. NESO is currently facing more than 100GW of connection requests, while Fintan estimates that only 8–12GW are likely to materialise. He shared the three key criteria NESO uses to prioritise and filter applications — a crucial issue as electricity demand enters a new era.  Fintan is also a strong advocate for interconnectors. We discussed the strategic value of the current fleet and the long-term vision for expanding connections through the North Sea Islands and potentially even towards Canada.  Throughout the conversation, one message came across clearly: there is a highly competent team at the helm of the GB energy system, and the grid will continue to improve through investment, innovation, and digitisation.  Fintan embodies the calm confidence you want from the person helping run one of the most complex energy systems in the world. The ultimate “cool” operator.   NESO operates today's electricity system and designs tomorrow's energy system to deliver reliable, clean and affordable energy for Great Britain. Find out more here: https://www.neso.energy/    

True situational awareness isn't just about looking around; it's about understanding the subtle shifts in the atmosphere around you. Using his first intense jungle deployment as a backdrop, Clark Impastato details how sensory overload can paralyze an untrained mind. Learn how elite special operations forces manage fear, filter out noise, and maintain razor-sharp focus under extreme duress.

Thanks to their courage, quick thinking and flawless teamwork, Alachua County Fire-Rescue Driver Operator Steve Toth and Firefighter Jake Levine saved a citizen's life. Hear their story, as we salute SKY Valor honorees throughout the month of June.

AI is making it possible to build richer versions of the files knowledge workers send every day: decks, memos, spreadsheets, reports, proposals, training materials, and more. This has gotten even easier this week with the release of OpenAI's "Sites" feature in Codex. In this practical Operator's episode, NLW walks through 10+ examples of work outputs that are often better as living, shareable, updateable, interactive links than static documents.Sign up for AI Executive Catchup: ⁠⁠⁠https://aiexecutivecatchup.com/⁠⁠⁠Brought to you by:KPMG – Research from KPMG and the University of Texas at Austin shows the highest-impact AI users treat AI like a reasoning partner — and those skills can be taught at scale. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠kpmg.com/us/Sophisticated⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Bolt - Claim a free month of Bolt Pro - ⁠⁠https://bolt.new/partner/aidb/⁠⁠Outsystems - Stop wondering how AI will change your business and start building the agents that will lead it - http://outsystems.com/Scrunch - The AI customer experience platform - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://scrunch.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Zenflow Work - Agents for knowledge work - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://zenflow.free/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Blitzy - Want to accelerate enterprise software development velocity by 5x? ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://blitzy.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠AssemblyAI - The best way to build Voice AI apps - ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.assemblyai.com/brief⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Robots & Pencils - Cloud-native AI solutions that power results ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://robotsandpencils.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://pod.link/1680633614⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Our Newsletter is BACK: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Interested in sponsoring the show? sponsors@aidailybrief.ai

Send us Fan MailSend us Fan MailIn this enlightening episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, we sit down with Alexis Sikorsky, an accomplished author and strategic advisor who has successfully navigated the complex world of scaling and exiting businesses. With a rich entrepreneurial background that began in his teenage years, Alexis shares his journey from founding a banking software company in Switzerland to achieving a nine-figure exit with private equity.Listeners will gain valuable insights as Alexis discusses the common pitfalls founders face when preparing for an exit, emphasizing the importance of understanding the private equity landscape and the misconceptions that often cloud a founder's judgment. He reflects on his own experiences and the lessons learned during his transition from operator to advisor, revealing the critical steps entrepreneurs should take to position themselves for success.Throughout the conversation, Alexis introduces his APEX methodology, designed to help business owners assess their companies effectively and plan for growth. He highlights the significance of recognizing when a founder is stuck in operator mode and offers practical advice on how to shift towards a more strategic CEO mindset.As Alexis prepares to release his second book, he shares his vision for helping others navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship and exit strategies. This episode is a must-listen for founders and entrepreneurs seeking to build wealth and freedom while avoiding common mistakes.What You'll Learn in This Episode:- The journey from entrepreneur to strategic advisor- Key misconceptions about private equity and exit strategies- The APEX methodology for assessing business growth- Signs that indicate a founder is stuck in operator mode- The psychological impact of exiting a business and preparing for the next chapterFor more information on Alexis Sikorsky and his work, connect with him on LinkedIn and check out his books available on Amazon.Support the show

Dan interviews John Karsant, founder of Level Up Leads, a 73-person outsourced SDR agency doing about $6.5M/year revenue, built while living abroad (Argentina, now Barcelona). John shares how he found remote work early via Craigslist, then spun out a list-building service that nearly failed due to one-off sales before pivoting into full appointment setting—eventually cold calling, which raised value, doubled average sale while keeping churn steady, and enabled $15K–$20K/month packages. He explains why radical honesty wins deals, how a strong ops leader and an in-house client dashboard improved transparency, and which metrics matter most (dial-to-connect, meetings booked, show rate, and pipeline movement). In this episode: John discusses hiring ahead of the curve How he compensates reps based on client retention The decline of email outreach John's inbound engine that drives 80–90% of leads Practical AI uses for role play training, transcript analysis, playbooks, and script generation The value of an experienced CEO coach John's approach to investing and family life Thanks to this week's sponsor Wayfront — the AI-ready operating system for productized agencies. One client portal. One team dashboard. All your data, AI-accessible. TMBA listeners get an extra free month on top of the trial at wayfront.com/tmba. Links: Level Up Leads More Business Resources Upcoming DC Events

In this episode, we're continuing the conversation from Episode 268 and breaking down what it really means to move from store operator to store owner. If your business still feels heavy—even after years of growth—you're likely operating in "jobby mode" without realizing it. I walk through why growth often feels like more weight instead of more freedom, how the milestone mindset keeps retailers stuck, and what actually needs to shift for your business to run without everything routing through you. This episode will help you identify where you are right now and what needs to change to move into true business mode. For show notes, including links to the documentary and resources I mentioned in this episode, visit SavvyShopkeeper.com/Episode276  Kathy Cruz is an Independent Retail Coach who helps store owners work smarter, profit more, and grow their brick and mortar businesses. Connect with Kathy and learn more here: Website: Savvy ShopkeeperInstagram: @savvyshopkeeperMastermind Group: Master Shopkeepers  

In this episode of Green Side Up, Jordan and Jason sit down with Zack Pitchford, owner of Wilcox Nursery & Landscape in Largo, Florida, to unpack his unconventional journey from high school nursery hand to retail nursery owner and landscape leader. Zack walks through his early days in environmental horticulture at UF, sweating it out on Jordan's maintenance crews, his eye‑opening internship at Valley Crest, and the multiple times he launched (and quit) Pitchford Design & Landscape before ultimately acquiring the historic Wilcox Nursery. He shares how he navigated the numbers, financing, and risk of buying a land-heavy business, rebuilt the team and hierarchy from the inside, and grew both the retail and services divisions. The conversation dives into leadership development, promoting from within, marketing strategy (Google Ads, SEO, email, and video content), and what he's seeing in today's softer design/install market. Zack also breaks down his water-conscious irrigation approach and lawn philosophy, talks about the rise of native plant demand and fine gardening maintenance, and reflects on building a business that can run without him while still serving his community and family. Connect with Zack:

Points of Interest 00:00 – 02:12 – Jason Swenk's Agency Journey: Jason shares how he accidentally started an agency in 1999, grew it to more than 100 employees, sold it after 11 years, and eventually transitioned into coaching agency owners worldwide. 02:12 – 06:22 – Designing a Lifestyle Business: Jason explains how agency owners often aspire to more freedom and flexibility, sharing how he structures his own workweek and prioritizes experiences outside of work. 06:23 – 10:14 – Escaping the Operator Trap: Jason introduces an exercise that helps founders identify the tasks they dislike and begin designing their business around their strengths instead of remaining stuck in daily operations. 10:15 – 13:19 – The Manager Stage and Delegation Challenges: The conversation explores why many founders struggle after hiring employees and how poor delegation often creates more work rather than less. 13:20 – 16:50 – Building Trust and Better Decision-Making: Jason explains the 1-3-1 framework for problem solving and discusses how leaders can develop trust while allowing team members to learn through small mistakes. 16:51 – 19:41 – The CEO Identity Shift: The discussion focuses on how founders must evolve their role as the business grows, moving from execution toward vision, coaching, and strategic leadership. 19:42 – 22:17 – Becoming an Architect: Jason outlines the Architect stage, where leaders create systems, processes, and frameworks that allow teams to operate independently without constant oversight. 22:18 – 24:09 – AI as a Founder Knowledge System: The conversation explores how agency owners can use AI to capture expertise, document decision-making processes, and reduce dependency on the founder. 24:10 – 27:31 – Avoiding the Rubber Band Effect: Jason explains how founders often sabotage growth by reverting to old habits and stepping back into roles their team is capable of handling. 27:32 – 30:31 – The Difference Between CEO and Owner: The discussion examines the Owner stage, where the business no longer relies on the founder for day-to-day decisions and leadership functions. 30:32 – 34:30 – Growing Leaders Within the Organization: Jason shares insights on helping employees develop their own careers while recognizing that not everyone wants to move into leadership positions. 34:31 – 41:02 – Building a Business Around Your Goals: The episode concludes with Jason discussing his book, Operator to Owner, and emphasizing that agency owners should intentionally design businesses that align with their desired lifestyle and ambitions. Show Notes Agency Mastery Website Operator to Owner book details Smart Agency Masterclass Podcast The Seth Godin Episode Upcoming Events Epic Friday Jason Swenk on LinkedIn Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Dive into the fascinating world of arbitrage betting, risk management, and innovation in the gambling industry through expert insights. Sergi Mykhailenko, Chief Product Officer at Odds Market and Betburger, shares the latest trends, technological shifts, and future prospects shaping this dynamic sector. In conversation with hosts Fintan Costello and Jon Bruford, we get into evolution, risk management, prediction markets, and punters – and of course, much more. Things we talk about, but in a list: Sergi explains arbitrage as exploiting discrepancies between sportsbooks, highlighting how they use automated systems to identify thousands of opportunities every second.The discussion covers how sportsbooks' risk management is evolving with AI and data, shortening average account lifespans due to increased technological sophistication.The industry is shifting towards crypto-based platforms with minimal KYC, creating new opportunities and risks for sharp bettors.Prediction markets are seen as a significant frontier, especially with crypto integration and regulatory arbitrage in various countries.Sergi emphasizes the importance of volume and diversification for sharp players, and how bookmakers attempt to detect and restrict successful arbitrageurs.The conversation also touches on the future of in-play arbitrage, the role of data-driven decision making, and how regulation shapes market opportunities.Choice quotes: "I think I may have found the world's easiest job. It's basically hot and sunny in Las Vegas for three hundred and sixty days of the year." Bruford"The rise of crypto and prediction markets is fundamentally shifting risk management – they are lowering barriers and increasing speed." Sergii Mykhailenko"Arbitrage is a vital part of the stock market or part of efficient markets because it gets to the true price quicker." Fintan CostelloChapters and all that, but add 30 seconds or so because of all the razzamatazz: 00:00 - Introduction to the podcast and hosts' recent Vegas trip04:24 - Sergii's background and his role at Odds Market and Betburger06:24 - The importance of arbitrage and sports betting tools09:54 - How Betburger helps bettors find arbitrage opportunities14:22 - Handling situation when outcomes include draws and overtime17:13 - Industry evolution and risk management advancements19:47 - The transition from gambling expertise to IT-driven risk management23:43 - Prediction markets, meme coins, and regulatory challenges30:42 - Shifts in crypto betting due to KYC and ease of access35:21 - Risks and trust issues for bettors in crypto sportsbooks40:43 - Operator behaviours around player limits and risk strategies52:39 - The upcoming World Cup and sports arbitrage opportunitiesResources & Links:Sergii on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/sergey-mykhailenko/As ever, we thank all of our sponsors for their vibrant and excellent support that makes all of this… magic… possible.Optimove, who turn customer data into something special, with tools that make businesses just plain work better. Optimove, your support helps us to keep creating content for an industry that probably thinks we disappeared years ago.Then of course there is Clarion Gaming, no hang on World Gaming, providers of the magnificent ICE expo and iGB Live! in London. There is simply nobody better at what they do.And the new-ish members of the family, the excellent Gaming Laboratories International. GLI is a world-class Testing, Inspections and Certification company committed to delivering the highest quality land-based, lottery, and iGaming testing and assessment services, working in more than 710 jurisdictions.For more information, visit gaminglabs.com.The Gambling Files podcast delves into the business side of the betting world. Each week, join Jon Bruford and Fintan Costello as they discuss current hot topics with world-leading gambling experts.Website: https://www.thegamblingfiles.com/Subscribe on Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3A57jkRSubscribe on Spotify: https://spoti.fi/4cs6ReF Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheGamblingFilesPodcast Fintan Costello on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fintancostello/ Jon Bruford on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jon-bruford-84346636/ Follow the podcast on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-gambling-files-podcast/ Sponsorship enquiries: https://www.thegamblingfiles.com/contact/ Get our newsletter: https://thegamblingfilestldr.substack.com/

Nicole Pence Becker is the Owner and Operator of Pence Media Group   Listen to Circle City Success Podcast episode 233 where you'll hear Nicole tell us about...   ● How growing up in Columbus, IN gave her the initiative to go out make an impact and create her own opportunities early in life ● Her brand and reputation helped land her own news show which she got to produce and create and why she went to work for her father as the Communications Director on his campaign ● Why she started Pence Media Group with a model to recruit extremely qualified women and has grown to a team of 24 women today   Circle City Success Podcast Sponsors ● T&W Corporation Design & Build: https://twdesignbuild.com/ ● Eclipse Staffing and Security: https://www.eclipsestaffing.com/ ● The Barrel Bar Indy: https://www.instagram.com/thebar ● St Elmo Steakhouse: https://www.stelmos.com/ ● D&E Printing: https://www.dandeprinting.com/   Connect with Circle City Success Podcast hosts: ● Connect with Jason: https://lnkd.in/dS82puKp ● Connect with Drew: https://lnkd.in/d-VtF9Hb ● Connect with Matt Hadley: linkedin.com/in/matthadleyindy ● Connect with Matt Carroll: https://lnkd.in/dkv7VmDx

Erik Brooks is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Ethos Capital, a middle-market private equity firm built to bring seasoned C-Suite operators into every aspect of the investment process. Erik's experience prior to founding Ethos in 2019 spanned privatizations in Eastern Europe, value investing at Baupost, and twenty years at Abry Partners. Our conversation covers Erik's path to private equity, lessons learned about risk, the importance of betting on people, and the evolution in his thinking that led to forming Ethos. We then cover Ethos' focus on durable business models, one-deal-a-year cadence, operating system to evaluate and improve companies, and an investment example that brings it all to life. Learn More Follow Ted on Twitter at @tseides or LinkedIn Subscribe to the mailing list Access Transcript with Premium Membership   Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠)

John Catsimatidis, Red Apple Media Owner & Operator, joins Sid live in-studio for his weekly Monday morning appearance to recap yesterday's Israel Day Parade in NYC, before he speaks on the current state of the economy and addresses protesters and New Jersey State Police clashing again last night near Delaney Hall despite a 9 p.m. curfew imposed by Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For MindTrip Podcast 116, label head Pfirter introduces Franco Rossi, an Argentine producer originally from Córdoba and currently based in Barcelona, Spain. Rossi's signature sound sits at the exact intersection of deep, hypnotic techno and careful sound design, a style shaped over years of hard work across the South American and European underground circuits. Following the success of his debut Cenit EP on MindTrip last year, he returns to the imprint this summer for his second release. This exclusive podcast mix highlights that signature progression, bookended by his own unreleased cuts while seamlessly weaving in heavy-hitting tracks from cutting-edge labels like Semantica, Mord, Nachtstrom Schallplatten, and MindTrip itself. This is MindTrip! 01.Franco Rossi - intro id 02.Andre Luki - Flying Simulator [ANTISTAGE Records] 03.BRALLE - slings & arrows [Adversarial Machines] 04.Bernardo hangar - Munin [Analog Solutions] 05.DSNGDMANN - simple shape (Mist gasp remix) [Airsound Records] 06.Dave wincent - obsess [Nachtstrom Schallplatten] 07.Drop-E - Remanent Magnetism [Semantica] 08.Franco Rossi - Keiko [MindTrip] 09.Franco Rossi - Varuna [MindTrip] 10.Arjun Vagale & Oxygeno - Zero Gravity [Semantica] 11.KOLPOS - Bipolar / mindtrip 12.Marc Faenger - Circuit [Nachtstrom Schallplatten] 13.Marc Faenger - Corridor [Incense] 14.Nemesis - self reproach [MindTrip] 15.Obscur & Variable - with in context [Sigma5] 16.olmo - famine (stndrd remix) [Ucker records] 17.Operator (uk) - running from the man [Mord] 18.Franco Rossi - ID outro Follow MindTrip: www.mindtripmusic.com www.facebook.com/MindTripRec www.instagram.com/mindtrip_music Follow Franco Rossi: https://soundcloud.com/francorossimusic https://www.instagram.com/francorossi____/?hl=es-la https://www.facebook.com/francorossimusic https://xelimarecords.bandcamp.com/

In this solo episode of Million Dollar Flip Flops, Rodric breaks down one of the most painful realities in business growth:

Is 2026 the year you finally run paid ads? Something shifted at DC Mexico this year — more founders than ever are seriously considering paid ads as their next acquisition channel. Between AI making creative cheaper to produce and competitive research easier to do, the barriers are lower than they've been. Max Sinclair has run a paid ads agency for eight years. In this episode he breaks down what actually works for founders spending under $30K a year — how to start, what to expect, and whether it's even worth it for your business. Plus: how Max used AI to turn his agency's internal tools into a product, and what that transition looks like in practice. Guest: Max Sinclair — Snowball Creations & SaaS Ads Studio Sponsor: wayfront.com/tmba Thanks to this week's sponsor Wayfront — the AI-ready operating system for productized agencies. One client portal. One team dashboard. All your data, AI-accessible. TMBA listeners get an extra free month on top of the trial at wayfront.com/tmba. Links: Business Resources Upcoming DC Events

Former Google and TikTok product executive Gabe Nicolau joins Deacon to discuss modernizing Church communications and navigating his "crossing the Rubicon" moment leaving big tech for Catholic TV. Nicolau shares how integrating faith into secular spaces frees professionals from toxic compartmentalization, and why transitioning to ministry requires trading corporate self-promotion for a deep commitment to radical humility.

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast, Vijay Damojipurapu sits down with PV Bóccasam, advisor to private equity firms and veteran operator across enterprise software, venture-backed startups, and category-defining companies, to explore a radically different way of thinking about go-to-market.PV argues that go-to-market is not about sales motions, pipeline generation, or even positioning frameworks—it's about one thing: reducing buyer anxiety and lowering the perceived risk of change.Drawing from decades of experience building and scaling enterprise software companies across identity governance, GRC, enterprise risk management, and private equity-backed transformations, PV shares how the best GTM leaders think less about “selling” and more about helping customers justify, adopt, and communicate measurable value internally.They dive into:Why GTM should focus on reducing customer risk, not maximizing seller activity.The difference between customer convictions and customer incentives—and why both matter.Why measurable proof is the only reliable way to break buyer inertia.How enterprise software companies should rethink value delivery in the AI era.Why AI should reduce operational uncertainty—not create more chaos.The evolution from product-led to sales-led to partner-led GTM motions.Why “platform” messaging fails for most enterprise SaaS companies.How modern AI-native SaaS products are becoming systems of orchestration, not systems of record.The importance of helping customers retell your value proposition internally.Why enterprise GTM leaders must become the clearest thinkers during periods of uncertainty.How private equity firms should approach AI adoption through organizational redesign, not just cost-cutting.And why long-term impact matters more than short-term velocity in building a career and a company.PV's central insight is simple but powerful:Customers don't buy software—they buy reduced uncertainty, measurable outcomes, and confidence in the future state.This episode is a deep philosophical and operational masterclass on enterprise go-to-market strategy, AI adoption, organizational design, and what it truly means to build trust at scale.Connect with Vijay Damojipurapu on LinkedInConnect with PV Boccasam on LinkedInBrought to you by: stratyve.com

Change management is the reason most manufacturing improvement projects quietly stall, even when the technical work is sound and the tools are right.Vlad Romanov and Dave Griffith unpack their own change management war stories from across two decades in industrial automation. Vlad frames change management as understanding risk to the business and to every stakeholder, then putting the process in place that lets the organization absorb that risk. Technical feasibility is the easy half of any project. Getting humans to consistently work the new way is the half that wins or loses the budget.Vlad joined Procter & Gamble at a site rated four on P&G's Integrated Work Systems maturity scale, the highest in North America at the time. Every loss event triggered a structured root cause analysis cascade. Operator, mechanic, operations engineer, and only then the engineering department. He later moved to Kraft Heinz, which had purchased the same IWS toolkit from P&G. The tools were on the shelf. The site rating was effectively zero. He had spent his early career learning to use the tools without having to deploy them, and that gap is where most transformation programs die.Dave's lens is more political. Change management starts with one question engineers rarely ask. What is in it for the person you are asking to change? He tells the Joe story, a lead operator with more than 35 years on the floor who interrupted a connected workforce rollout meeting to point out that his team had cycled through every methodology fad of the last two decades. None had stuck. Dave's team asked what hurt the most. Joe kept training new operators who left for a dollar an hour more down the street. The fix was QR codes on equipment linked to procedures Joe recorded once. Joe went from skeptic to evangelist in one session. Find the operator with the deepest tenure, solve their pain, and let them carry the change.The episode is also honest about what well intentioned incentives do when they miss the mark. Vlad walks through an RCA rollout where management offered a fifty dollar gift card to whoever submitted the most reports each week. The team got a stack of paper. None of it shortened downtime. When real process change goes through a plant, throughput typically drops twenty to thirty percent for weeks or months. That cost has to be visible to leadership before the project starts.Two practical heuristics close the episode. As a systems integrator deploying MES and SCADA across food and beverage plants, Vlad could often predict success within the first demo by how the room reacted. Continuous improvement teams leaned in. Whiteboard sites pushed back. Dave reinforces that change has to start at the top. If the executive sponsor blows off steering meetings, the floor reads that signal. Change management is a habit, not a project, and habits are built small. Pick one workflow, prove it works, and let the next one earn its slot.Timestamps0:00 Introduction and Automate trade show preview1:30 Booth commitments: Siemens, Horner, and Tigoor6:00 Dave's Automate session and 4IR booth duty8:10 Predictions for Automate: physical AI, cobots, and the AI conversation13:10 Defining change management in manufacturing22:30 From P&G IWS to Kraft Heinz: tools versus deployment maturity28:30 What is in it for the person you are asking to change35:30 The RCA cascade at P&G compared to no process elsewhere42:30 The fifty dollar gift card incentive that backfired46:00 The Joe story: QR codes solving real operator pain58:30 Reading change management success in the first meeting1:07:00 Start small: the closing takeawayAbout Your HostsVladimir Romanov is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and the founder of Joltek, an independent manufacturing and industrial automation consulting firm specializing in modernization strategy, digital transformation, and workforce development. Joltek works with manufacturers and investors to de-risk modernization and build the internal capability to sustain results.Connect with Vlad: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vladromanov/Want to go deeper? Vlad and the team at Joltek have covered related topics here:Lean Six Sigma: https://www.joltek.com/blog/lean-six-sigma7 Different Root Cause Analysis Techniques in Manufacturing: https://www.joltek.com/blog/7-different-root-cause-analysis-techniques-manufacturingDave Griffith is a co-host of The Manufacturing Hub Podcast and founder of Capelin Solutions, an industrial automation firm helping manufacturers adopt smart manufacturing technology. He brings 15 years of experience in industrial automation and digital transformation.Connect with Dave: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davegriffith23/Subscribe to Manufacturing Hub: https://www.manufacturinghub.liveLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/manufacturing-hub-networkYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ManufacturingHub

Send us Fan MailI left the previous interview on a cliff hanger. I wanted you all to not only come back to hear the circumstances surrounding Jay's shooting, but I believe the bumps in the road of his career can speak to so many of us who choose to be a first responder. It's easy to glamorize and gloss over the highlights, but I'm overwhelmed and honored that so many guests have walked through the door and been completely authentic and real. I believe my Squad of listeners would detect anything less than real truth. It's a standard we should all aspire to and I'm so grateful for everyone brave enough to come on the show and share without holding back.It takes courage to do the job, and it takes courage to know when to call it and move on. I can respect and appreciate everyone I know who has served honorably...but know when enough is enough.Please tune in, turn it up and enjoy the show. Jay is a great guest, I'm excited to share the rest of his career here...Come see me on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/choir.practice.94 or on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/cp_sfaf/

Seth Gerber is the co-owner of MIDA Restaurant Group in Boston and a hospitality professor at Boston University. As a restaurateur, operator, and educator, he's built a career focused on neighborhood restaurants, mentorship, and challenging the way the hospitality industry views itself. Watch now to learn how Seth Gerber saved a struggling restaurant, scaled MIDA, and is reframing hospitality careers. Sponsored by: • TOAST - All-In-1 Restaurant POS: https://bit.ly/3vpeVsc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most small businesses can't be sold, even when they're profitable. The reason is that they were built around the owner instead of built for value. In this episode of CEO Numbers Network, I share a real client story about a business owner who came to me ready to sell and found out her business had no resale value. She had been minimizing profit for years to lower her taxes and running personal expenses through the company, and the strategies that felt smart while she was building it were the exact things blocking her exit. I walk through the 7-step framework I use with my CFO clients to shift from operating a business to owning an asset that can run without you. You will learn what makes a business valuable to a buyer, why tax-minimization strategies can backfire when it's time to sell, how to standardize your offers, how to build recurring revenue, and how clean financials drive the kind of value that gives you options 3 to 5 years from now. If you have ever wondered why your profitable business still feels like a trap, or how to position your company so you have the option to sell, scale, or step back, this episode will show you exactly where to start.

How is AI transforming accessibility for indie authors — and why should you care even if you consider yourself able-bodied? What happens when the tools designed to help people with disabilities end up making everyone's creative business better? Jeff Adams, accessibility expert and romance author, explores how AI is opening doors that were previously closed. In the intro, Spotify Audiobook Innovations; The Economics of Convention Life [The Indy Author]; Friction in your Author Business [Self-Publishing with ALLi]. Today's show is sponsored by Draft2Digital, self-publishing with support, where you can get free formatting, free distribution to multiple stores, and a host of other benefits. Just go to www.draft2digital.com to get started. This show is also supported by my Patrons. Join my Community at Patreon.com/thecreativepenn Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below. Show Notes How ending a long-running podcast made space for more writing — and how to know when it's time to let go of a good thing What accessibility really means for indie authors and why your digital content might be excluding part of your audience How AI agents like Claude Cowork are removing physical and cognitive barriers for authors with disabilities, chronic pain, or limited energy The culture of shame around AI use in the writing community and why blanket anti-AI statements can be ableist Practical tools including NotebookLM, ElevenReader, and ChatGPT for marketing copy, metadata management, and multimodal research Exciting futures in personalised reading, real-time translation, and AI browser agents that could change how everyone interacts online You can find Jeff at JeffAdamsWrites.com. Jeff also now has a SubStack at contentforeveryone.substack.com Transcript of the interview with Jeff Adams Jo: Jeff Adams is the author of YA thrillers and gay romance, and the co-author of Content for Everyone, a practical guide for creative entrepreneurs to produce accessible and usable web content. Welcome back to the show, Jeff. Jeff: Thanks so much, Jo. It's good to be back. Jo: It is. You were last on the show in March 2023, so over three years ago now. Give us a bit of an update on your writing and publishing business and what it looks like at the moment. Jeff: Sure. I think the biggest thing that happened is that my husband Will, who is also a writer, we ended the Big Gay Fiction Podcast at the end of 2024, after 470-something episodes. It was basically time to do that. So we both focused on writing from that point. In 2025 we had some of our biggest successes in getting writing out into the world. I refound my groove—my difficulty in writing went away finally. We talked a little bit about that back in 2023 too. Will started a new pen name and started producing again, and it was really good to be able to move in that direction. Jo: Was this the hockey romance that really hit at the right time? Jeff: You know, I wish I could have capitalised more on Heated Rivalry when it came out, but I did get hockey books out, and I think I did get to ride that wave a little bit there too. Jo: Yes, and if people don't know about that, that was a super popular streaming series. Was that based on a book? Jeff: It was, yes. Rachel Reid was the author of that book and that series that then Jacob Tierney optioned and made into what fairly turned into a global phenomenon at the end of 2025. Jo: Yes, absolutely. Although I particularly liked Red, White and Royal Blue. That was the one I liked. Not so much into hockey. But anyway, I just wanted to ask you about the Big Gay Fiction Podcast. As you say, you did hundreds of episodes over many years. You and I met over podcasting. You've had lots of connections with people. You ended it, and I know you struggled with ending it, but it sounds like it went really well for you. So maybe you could talk a bit about— How do you know when it's time to end something—a good thing rather than something bad? Does that make more space for writing, essentially? Jeff: It absolutely did make more space for writing for both of us, in particular for me because I have a day job. I balance everything on the creative side with the day job. Will and I had been talking about it for over a year. It just was like, it's really time. After nine years, getting to that 470 mark, we thought about trying to get to 10 years and we thought about, if not 10, then getting to 500 and ending on a milestone. As we looked at everything in our creative business, it was like, this is fun, we enjoy it, but we're not getting as much out of it as we might be if we were actually also writing books, which we also really want to do. It became a time thing and what was the best use of the time. We absolutely miss it occasionally. The whole Heated Rivalry thing, I would've loved to have had episodes to talk about that on, but in the long run, it was worth it. Jo: I mean, one of the things with a podcast, particularly around fiction, was that it was a marketing angle for your fiction. This show is a marketing angle mainly for my nonfiction. So what did you replace the podcast with, in terms of book marketing? Jeff: It was really stepped-up email marketing. I'd always had a list. Will started a list, of course, as he started his new pen name. So it was really turning on that, focusing on that, getting some email marketing with a Bargain Booksy and a Fussy Librarian and a BookBub occasionally to do that work. To be honest, even though we covered things in our genre that if you like what we're talking about, you should like our books, there was never as much of a connection there as you'd want there to be. Even from that book marketing angle, these other things that we can do, it's also a better spend of the money to get those types of promos than it was to continue running the show. Jo: Yes, that is interesting. I mean, obviously I think about podcasting a lot since I have this one, and I put Books and Travel on a hiatus and that was meant to help my fiction and definitely didn't help my fiction sales. But I want to bring it back again because I love doing it. Do you have this hankering sometimes? Do you think you'd ever do the podcast again? Because you are also quite into all the technical stuff and all that. Jeff: It's possible. I've toyed with the idea of doing a short accessibility podcast geared towards creatives, tilting to the same audience that Content for Everyone does. Then I come back and look at the time—is my time better served writing new fiction or perhaps starting a Substack, which I also toy with the idea of, for accessibility stuff? So it bounces around in my head to do another show, but I haven't really decided to jump on that yet. Jo: Yes, and I think that waiting is really good. As you say, you quit a big thing and you don't have to rush to fill it again. I love that you guys are writing more books. So I wanted us to talk about that up front because I know people who listen to this show—I encourage people to start podcasts if you want to, but equally it can take a lot of time. So that's fantastic. Now, you mentioned accessibility, and I feel like the word can be quite difficult for people. So let's just start with a definition. What is accessibility? Why do you care and why should we care? Jeff: So accessibility is really about making sure that whatever the thing is, whether it's something out in the physical world or in the online world, that everybody has access to it. Access to the information, access to getting into a building or being able to cross the street appropriately, whatever that is—that the accessibility of the thing is high. So that regardless of who is approaching it, they can interact with whatever the thing is. If we put that into the digital world, it's about making sure that text on a screen can be perceived by anybody, whether they're trying to read it visually or if they're trying to read it through a screen reader or through a braille monitor. Whatever that is, they need to be able to interact with it, get the information they need, do all the functions of whatever it is on the screen. Check out on Amazon, check out at their favourite e-commerce place, be able to get the products in their cart, check out, et cetera. For creatives, it's about the things that we do: the websites that we build for ourselves, the e-commerce platforms that we use, our email marketing, our social media posts. Making all of that as accessible as we can so that we're not perhaps missing a part of our audience or our prospective audience from being able to engage with our work and in turn, hopefully, buy our books and enjoy our books and become a fan. This became important to me because of my day job. I hadn't really considered this—like, I think most people don't—until I started working at UsableNet. It's going to be 15 years I've been at that company come this autumn, and I really started to see the impacts because UsableNet is all about accessibility on the digital front. I really started to learn, being a project manager for them, what all of that meant and how it impacted people who couldn't buy something online, couldn't book a hotel room, couldn't book an airline ticket. It just really became something I got passionate about. I ended up writing the book because I realised that nobody talks to creatives about this. Nobody tells the independent author what they should do to help make their digital stuff accessible so that they don't miss people. I never expected my day job to interact with my creative side so much, but this certainly has over the last few years. Jo: I mean, has it got better? Like we said, you were on here three years ago. We did talk about some of the things around EPUB formats and taking off DRM and what we need to do on our websites—labelling images, for example, and that kind of thing. Do you think accessibility has gotten better? Jeff: I think the awareness of it has improved, both within the creative community and in the broader web ecosphere, that the awareness is better. There's so much knowledge that needs to go into creating something that is accessible. Sometimes there's so much that you have to think about with colours and alt tags on images and all the little bits and pieces, if it doesn't really come to muscle memory, it's easy for it to fall off. There's a survey that's done by WebAIM every year about the top one million homepages out in the universe, and they surveyed those for just the things that an automated scan can detect, which is a small portion of overall accessibility, and the number of errors across that top million actually ticked up this year. Even though there's all these laws around the world—people get sued all the time in the US—the number of errors ticked up for the first time in a few years. So I think the awareness is up, but I think being able to take action on it and make the time to take action on it isn't where it needs to be. Jo: So last time you gave us all those tips. I'll refer people back to that and also to your book Content for Everyone, which has got loads of great stuff in. I wanted to talk to you for this show because I was sitting watching Claude Cowork—now I use Claude Code a lot more—but updating 140 titles on IngramSpark, where me clicking things and there's like 15 clicks per record on IngramSpark updates for pricing, is an absolute nightmare. I was watching the AI do the work and I realised this isn't just saving me time, it's actually saving my wrist and my arm from repetitive strain injury. That's when I thought about this accessibility thing. As you mentioned, for example being physically accessible into a building, say someone's in a wheelchair, they can't necessarily get into a building if there's no ramp. I was thinking that for many years, being an indie author, being a writer online, there's also been these physical barriers because there's a lot of plumbing and clicking for us. So I wondered, starting with an attitude around a shift in who this is opening up to— How is AI starting to help people with these accessibility issues? Jeff: Yes, there's so much opportunity around this. We should note, just to timestamp this, that we're talking on 14th April 2026, because who knows what will change, even in an hour from now. I think Cowork was one of the first things that we saw, and that's only been out since the very top of this year. Being able to do actual agentic tasks. Other things have sort of gotten there, but Cowork really opened it up. You mentioned the repetitive stress that you would've had clicking all of those forms on IngramSpark across 140 books. But there's that type of stress, chronic pain, cognitive drain for somebody who may have some cognitive disability and trying to work through that form. The cognitive energy just might drain out and maybe knock them out for several days after trying to get through that, or the tasks take them multiple days to do. Someone who has lower vision, someone who's trying to work through that form with a screen reader—all of that draws energy, draws focus. Now we've got something where, with plain language, we could say something like: here's all my pricing information, I've logged into IngramSpark, go update these books. Obviously the prompt's going to be a little more than that, but in broad terms, that's what we're going to tell it. Jo: Hmm. Jeff: And being able to have it go through and do the thing. If it gets stuck, have it come back and say, “Hey, I've got trouble with this. Please help me.” That can just free up so much of the drains that people can have—the things that can take them out of doing the part of the work that they need to do for an author business. They can go write the book through whatever process you're going to use to do that, rather than getting caught up in something like having to update all those books on IngramSpark. Jo: You mentioned writing the book there. I have this real sense of being an able-bodied indie author in terms of my computer use and my ability to write a whole book, a 70,000-word thriller that I write regularly. We're all special in some way, but I do have a reasonably normal brain where I can do this work without too much strain. It's hard work, but I can do it. I meet people who are now using AI to help them write, to help them organise their work—maybe someone has dyslexia or ADHD or cognitive issues or pain—there's just so many things that I take for granted that don't affect me. I hear from people who, at this point in time in the community, are almost shamed for using AI to write. So I wanted to bring this up to discuss it under the terms of accessibility. Do you have any thoughts on that? Jeff: I have real difficulty with people who will say anything in the broad range of, “I don't need to use this thing, and therefore you should not either.” Which is adjacent to indie anti-AI speak that there is out there. Certainly we're living right now at probably the highest point that it's ever been, where more and more there's a sentiment towards not using AI for whatever the reason is. I totally respect that people can have concerns about the environment and about energy use and water use, et cetera. Not to mention all the other things that are on the more difficult side of AI. To shame someone who may not be able to put their story out there without the use of that AI, whichever one they're using, or to shame them because they're using AI to run part of their business—updating IngramSpark, doing other things like that—I think it can come down to there being some ableism there. Ther is some privilege behind that too, where they're just like, “I don't need this, and you shouldn't have it either.” I want to give people just a sliver of an idea of what this can mean for someone who is disabled and what AI can unlock for them. There is a person on LinkedIn that I follow whose name is Hannah Desmond. She's an ADHD coach and a former software developer, and very recently she posted this on LinkedIn. This is a paraphrase of what she said, but: having something that can meet you where you are and help you bridge that gap is what I think I have found so helpful about using AI. Here's what I keep coming back to. Without that support, I wasn't more motivated or more capable. I was just stuck. That's the bit that gets lost. We've been taught that struggling is how you know you're doing it properly. So when something reduces the struggle, it can feel wrong—even when it's the thing that actually makes the work possible. Because there's a difference between avoiding thinking and being able to think at all. I think that rounds it up. She's talking about her time as a software developer, but you can apply that to any realm of AI when we're thinking about trying to shame someone for why they may be using it. We may not know that they have a disability because we don't always share that part of ourselves. So I really feel strongly about that and how we are in this culture of shame. Jo: Yes. It drives me up the wall, actually. But I will also say: you don't have to have a disability or accessibility issues in order to use AI in whatever way you personally decide is okay—talking to the listeners now. I think Orna Ross from the Alliance of Independent Authors says it well, which is you should have your own AI policy. So you personally decide where your lines are, how it helps you, what you want to keep for you, and what you want help with. I was also thinking in terms of accessibility around money. Again, for many of us, professional cover design, professional editing, professional human-level translation, these are things that are pretty pricey for many people. So again, this makes it more accessible. One of the reasons we got into the indie way and being indie authors was to try and remove the barriers to entry to people who have been excluded from the environment of publishing. So, yes, it is really hard to talk about this, and yet that's why I wanted to talk about it, because— There's so many variables for each individual and there's no situation that's the same, really, is there? Jeff: No, not at all. The things that I may need to do my work in the most efficient way possible is different from the way that you're going to work, is different than the way my husband's going to work, is different than every other person and the way that they're going to work. Which is why any kind of blanket statement about “I don't need something and therefore you shouldn't need it either” can just be so problematic, because we have no idea what someone else is going through. Either it's a permanent part of their lives or maybe it's something that is happening temporarily with them where they might need to leverage other tools. Jo: Yes. Talking about that temporary, I think I really got the first sense of this when I had COVID the first time, which was really bad. I remember I was so sick, the only thing I could do was listen to an audiobook. I couldn't think, I couldn't read. It was really probably months of not having my brain back. Then the other thing that's happened as I age, as women age, is menopause kicks in and the brain fog is a real thing. I've heard from other people too who've said having Claude or whoever, an AI tool, to help with the brain fog is so important because otherwise I just wouldn't be able to gather my thoughts. Again, as you said— Even if we don't need these things now, it's quite likely we're going to need them at some point, given ageing, given the potential for injury and disease. I mean, we don't escape this alive, do we? Jeff: Yes, that's a great point because unless we're extremely lucky as individuals, we're all likely to have some sort of a disability in our lives at some point. I know for me, as I age and my eyes get more and more tired after being in front of a screen all day for work, and then whatever creative stuff I do in the afternoon on a book—when it comes near bedtime and I do want to read, I probably want to do that with an audiobook, much more audio, especially for any long reading project. That can also be like, if I have a long document or a long article to read, I am likely to give it to ElevenReader, let it load itself up, and then listen to it, because I take the information in better than trying to follow words across a screen. Jo: Yes. Jonathan, my husband, now also listens to a lot of academic papers on ElevenReader. Most of us will know it as where we publish some audiobooks from ElevenLabs, or you can also publish other things there. So it is super useful to think about what we can do with ElevenReader. Another thing that I found really useful recently is NotebookLM. On NotebookLM, there is a free tier. You can put various things in there and then create a custom audio. So this is something I've been doing as part of research. You can put in, say, 10 YouTube videos or some PDFs or your book or whatever, and then you can create a custom audio. Then I'll go for a walk and I'll listen to the custom audio, and then I'll go back and look at the detail of what it was. It gives me the framework of whatever I'm thinking about on a broader level, and then I can come back to the details. So again, it's this multimodal approach that can help us manage our energy, I guess. Jeff: And it's all about the managing of the energy, I think, too. That is a great way to think about the accessibility of it all. You mentioned a great use there for NotebookLM. That could also be putting your book in there and having it help you build a world bible or something like that. Or building marketing materials off of that. There's a lot of things now that NotebookLM can do in terms of helping you create FAQs maybe for a newsletter or for your website, and building video stuff off of the material that it has. So there's a lot of options there, and ever-growing options that can be useful for someone to manage any number of the things that they may need in their creative business. Jo: Yes. In fact, talking about Claude, there are a lot of Claude plugins now, skills and integrations. Shopify just released a Claude plugin and many of us now have Shopify stores. I have a lot of products with a lot of different variations and the metadata. There's so much metadata. And again, I'm just so pleased now that I can work with Cowork and get it to actually update directly into Shopify. In fact, coming back, you mentioned updating alt tags earlier. That's something again that AI could help you update—the back list of your alt tags on a website. I've now got my Cowork doing EPUBs so I could finally update all my EPUBs with back matter and all of this kind of thing. So I feel like perhaps we could go beyond accessibility to talk about amplification. All the things that we didn't do because it was too tiring and we just couldn't be bothered, or it would just be way too much work, that now it's opened up as a possibility because of these tools. Jeff: Absolutely. I mean, you look at a backlist as large as yours and the things that you're now able to do. I didn't know that Claude had a Shopify plugin. So the abilities that we have now to maybe do things in the business that we hadn't before. One of the things I've been working with Claude on is rewriting my website and creating a more proper website for Will. I'm really making sure that it is not only SEO prepared but also GEO prepared, with all the metadata and all the backend code schema that it needs so that LLMs can find me, can understand what I do, can understand the books, branch out to the other areas that it needs to. Doing that through WordPress would've been so much more difficult, even with Claude, that to be able to rewrite the site in a way that is going to let me manage it better so that I will do it on a more consistent basis. Whatever that thing is, we're now able to do these things. That could be updating keywords in Amazon or making sure we're aligned across all of the sales platforms that we might be on and things like that, that Claude can do and do well. Jo: Yes, I think marketing is just the killer app really for people, isn't it? I think most authors do not enjoy marketing. I find Claude better for creative work, for strategic work, for doing work through Cowork or Code, but— ChatGPT with marketing copy is very, very good. So I've actually been using that as we record this. I've got a Kickstarter launching next week, so I've been getting it to do ad copy and social media copy and all that kind of thing. This is stuff when you have to produce—give me 20 taglines, give me 20 hooks, give me another 20 and another 20. I mean, we just cannot do it as humans, right? Jeff: Yes, I have found GPT wildly helpful. I mentioned trying to get Bargain Booksy and Fussy Librarian promos. Jo: Mm. Jeff: And you have to give it the marketing hook, and it can't just be the blurb that's on Amazon—it's got to be something fresh, and they each have slightly different requirements. Having GPT—here's the blurb, give me a dozen different options—and then I may take pieces of all of them and create one of my own. But it reworks that much faster than my brain was ever going to try to find the right thing I want to give to Bargain Booksy. Jo: Yes, you are right. Or it says write this in 300 characters or less. Jeff: Yes. Jo: I do exactly the same. That kind of transformative work can be really good. In fact, there was somebody I know who has been rampantly anti-AI for years and then said, “Would this help me? I have to do a synopsis for an agent, so I've got this 100,000-word book and it needs to be a 10-page synopsis. How would I do that with AI?” So I was encouraging her to take each chapter and ask it to summarise the chapter, and of course read through it and everything. But I mean, doing a synopsis once you've actually written a book—that can be super useful. So I think what we're saying is— There are levels of need in terms of both the author and the audience. Then there are levels of your personal use from one end of the spectrum to the other in terms of how far you want to go in every area of the business. And in that way, it's just different for everyone. Jeff: Yes, and I think getting to that mindset shift that we were talking about a little bit—it can be so easy to dip your toes in. That one author came to you and said, “Do you think it could do this?” And I think that's the beginning exploratory area for perhaps anyone. People are going to hear us talk about this and it might inspire them to go try something that we've talked about. But these things, whether it's Claude or GPT or Gemini or whichever one it is, you can come to it and say, “I'm an author, I have X, Y, Z going on in my life”—whether that's a disability, whether that's a time constraint because you have a day job and maybe you have kids and a family that need your attention—”I have these time constraints, I want to do X, Y, and Z in my business. How can you help me with that?” It's going to tell you what it can do to help you with that. I would even say, if you have the ability to have multiples of these, you could ask the same question to GPT and Claude, and they're going to give you similar answers in some instances, but they may also have different ones because of the abilities that the different platforms have around these things as well. That can help you make that mindset shift of, “Well, now I see that it can do that. Could it also do this?” And then ask it if it could do that. Because I know for me, Jo, I've taken so much from you and your journey with Cowork that it's like, “Oh, she did that. I wonder if I could do this.” And all of that piles on top of itself. Then eventually I think your brain starts to think on its own, “Oh, I have to do this task. Can Claude maybe do this for me? Let's go find out.” Jo: Yes, and if it couldn't do it for you yesterday, you never know, it might be able to do it tomorrow. Jeff: Right? Because I haven't tested yet its new ability to actually use your computer. Jo: Mm. Jeff: And I'm curious what that might open up. Because one of the things that I've seen that I wish it would do is be able to take the EPUB that's on my drive and actually put it into a platform I'm trying to upload to. Cowork on its own hasn't been able to cross that barrier, but I wonder if with computer use added to that, if it could. Like, “here's the EPUB, upload that over there,” be able to pick it from the file picker, essentially. Jo: Yes. I think, well, a little tip for everyone: I wouldn't give access to your entire file system to the AI. Jeff: That's a good point too. Jo: Yes. I have a Claude folder in my drive and it only has access there. So if you put files in that drive, it might be able to do that. But I know what you mean. I have been using it to help me publish things in German on KDP. Now I can use the browser, so you can actually do that. In terms of uploading the actual file, I know what you mean. These things will change. As we record this, again middle of April, we are almost about to get the next models being Mythos, which might be Claude 4.7 Opus, or also ChatGPT has a new model coming, and these models are getting very powerful. With every shift they can do more things. So as you say, the very first thing to do is ask it, “I want to do this—what are my options?” And some of them, for example, doing an AI-narrated audiobook, ChatGPT and Claude don't do that. You want ElevenLabs or one of the other services for that, but they can tell you what your options are. So that's one thing, but I wondered if you have any thoughts on the gaps that you are seeing. You mentioned one there around file uploads, but— What do you hope might come and some of the things that might be exciting if they arrive? Because you never know, they might be here already. Jeff: There's certainly some movement in some areas. One of the things I'll share is, in March I was at the 2026 CSUN Assistive Technology Conference—CSUN is California State University, Northridge—and they've run this conference for some 40 years now. One of the sessions I went to was from Tara Maisel—I hope I'm pronouncing her last name right. She's a senior project manager in books accessibility at Amazon, and she was doing a session specifically on readability. She had all kinds of statistics and information about what goes into making something readable. One of the things she talked about with AI was the future of personalised reading. If you think about the Kindle app, for example, there's a lot of settings you can make there—font size, colours, brightness, text spacing. There's a lot of tools in there. She was pointing out that potentially readers don't even know what they actually need for the optimised visual reading experience. She sees a world where AI can perhaps do an analysis of your reading behaviour and then help you find the optimal settings. Maybe even multiple optimal settings for, say, if you were reading in a room that had daylight versus at bedtime, and the ways you might shift it. I was almost thinking of this like when you're at the optometrist and they're like, “Which lens is better—this one or that one?” Jo: Oh, sometimes that is very hard. Jeff: Yes. It's that AI could step you through that a little bit to help you find that optimal reading experience in that moment. And then it might even notice, potentially, if you're changing something in the way that you're moving through a page, that it might flag to say, “Hey, do we need to adjust something?” Some other areas that I think are really exciting, for everyone and perhaps particularly for people who are disabled and needing the support of some assistive technology, is what we're seeing in the browsers. OpenAI's Operator has been out for quite a while now, since sometime I think autumn of last year. Perplexity Comet has been around even longer. Then we've got browser extensions from Gemini and Claude that are available, that can let you just type natural language. You know, “Please go find for me jeans in this size that are on sale on this website. Find me the best price for blue jeans on this site and this size,” and it'll just go do it. Which can certainly speed things up for people in the disabled community to find things quickly, to spend time navigating less, and maybe ending up with the AI coming back and saying, “I found these five things. Which one would you like me to buy for you?” Or, “I found this one thing that you do need and it's waiting for you in your shopping cart.” The ability for that on the horizon is an amazing jump from an accessibility point of view. But really it's one of those things that accessibility will then help everyone because we can all just shop that way, if we choose to. These are early days for these browsers and these extensions. The other side of it comes back to basic web accessibility too, because I've seen these types of activities not work so well on a site that may not actually be accessible on its own. A great example is something I ran into with Claude Cowork about a month ago. I was testing to see if it could help me navigate and get things uploaded together for a site where I wanted to upload books, knowing again that it's not going to upload the actual file, but it could fill in the metadata from my master database of metadata stuff. There were areas on the site that it actually couldn't hit the button, because the site itself was also not functional to a screen reader. So there are gaps there. It's early days, but I really see that as an interesting future that'll really help people with disabilities—but again, help everybody too, just manage time better. Jo: I know exactly what you mean there. I've done some collaborative work with Claude Code when it's like, “I can't click the button,” and I'm like, well, I'll click the button—you fill in everything else. Jeff: Exactly. Jo: It's actually quite a funny situation. But goodness, coming back to IngramSpark again—these things need APIs. We need better functions. It's funny because I think a lot of traditional publishers have these APIs or backend upload things that you can do. I'm like, well, we need to get to that with these systems. But I think things will change. Another thing that I think has also shifted is the use of voice. Voice for dictation—it used to be with dictation that you would have to say “comma,” “open quote,” “new line,” and all of that. And you'd also have to make sense. Whereas now I feel like you can just dictate a whole load of things to these AIs and then say, “Tidy that up,” and they will do a lot more than the old situation. So I think voice will also help. Also automatic translation. I don't know if you know this about X, and if you're on X anymore, but just this week they've made it multi-language. So I can read tweets by people who've posted in another language in English. I can read something from Korean or read something that someone French has posted and it gets translated. It has made a huge difference to the content I'm seeing, which is fascinating because I don't think we've ever had this kind of automatic “everything is translated into your language” situation. It's really got me thinking about how [automatic translation] might work for eBooks or other things if the rights are there. I don't know. Have you seen stuff like that? Jeff: There's so much available now with voice and the ability to not have to speak all the other stuff that went with it—comma, full stop, next line. It was a little mind-bending sometimes, trying to think about quote marks and all that stuff. And now it's so good. Different platforms do it to different degrees of ability. Even being able to speak your prompts into the very platforms themselves without having to type all of it. Chronic pain comes to mind, any kind of mobility thing—all the typing would be a drain or maybe even impossible. So the voice ability is so powerful there and unlocks more things. At the same time, those translation abilities—I believe AirPods now have the ability, if you've got the right stuff on your phone, that you could be talking to somebody, they may speak back to you in a language you don't speak, but your AirPods will give it to you in your language. Jo: Hmm. Jeff: Google has, I believe, a live captioning app that you can use. I think there's even a split screen—I don't know if that's available now or something in their future—where you could put the phone on the table and tell it who's looking at what side of the screen, and it'll put the language that I need on my side and the language the other person needs on the other. So there continues to be such a shift in how we're being able to translate stuff that really opens up communication and can open up our books to so many more people. I'm very interested to see—I haven't pulled the trigger on this yet—but how Amazon's auto-translation rolls out and how that's received in terms of the accessibility around our books and being able to put it in someone's hands who doesn't speak—I think it's only English to other languages right now—but who doesn't speak the language it was written in but wants to read that book. We could never, as indies, or really even big five publishers, wouldn't have the money to create custom translations everywhere. But if the AI can help do that and spread those books around so that everybody could have the story they want to read, I think that's such a win for the reading audience. Jo: Yes, I think it's so exciting to think what might be coming, and that's what I want to stay on the side of on the AI discussion. There's enough negativity out there and you can get that information somewhere else, but for me I want us to stay on the positive side of how this helps both the author and the reader. And hopefully the community, to create more and read more and enjoy being human more. Right? Because I find that I do get out more and listen to stuff, or I'm out walking instead of at my desk, and I mean, that's what it's about. I'm pretty excited about the future. How about you? Jeff: I am. I think there are, quite honestly, some scary things that could be out there in the future. I mean, there's been a lot of talk about what Mythos is capable of. But on the other side of it, there are all these advances. I also look back at Google and AlphaFold and what DeepMind was able to do there for science. There's more of that stuff out there, and individually for each of us, spending a little bit of time—and I do have to say, I think you need to spend time on a paid plan because the free stuff doesn't give you the idea of what these platforms are actually capable of. So if you only drop in, even briefly, to experiment on one of the $20-a-month plans and give it your situation, ask it what it can do for you, I think you'll see where, on a personal level, AI will help you unlock some things. It can help you move some things to the next level in your business that for whatever reason you haven't been able to do. You don't have to use it for everything. You may decide that it's still not for you for whatever reason, and that's fine. But I think there's so much to explore here and to let your curiosity run for a little bit to see what's possible and what you might unlock with it. Jo: Brilliant. So where can people find you and your books and everything you do online? Jeff: So pretty much everything lives at JeffAdamsWrites.com. Jo: Well, thanks so much for your time, Jeff. That was great. Jeff: I loved it, Jo. Thanks for having me..The post Accessibility And AI: How New Tools Are Opening Doors For Indie Authors With Jeff Adams first appeared on The Creative Penn.

Dan and Ian are joined by Jeff Picaro of meetwingman.com to recap lessons from the DC Mexico event and share five trends for 2026 in bootstrapped, location-independent businesses. In this episode: • Why organic traffic is rebounding and how legacy publishers can compound results via Google, LLMs, and AI repurposing • Why companies with strong SOPs and systems are translating fastest to AI-enabled workflows and higher margins (especially agencies) • How org charts may shift from pyramids to circular, data-centered “hive mind” models with new technical and client-facing roles • Why many founders who started with AI-driven layoffs are rehiring as capacity and demand expand • Why bootstrappers should consider going upmarket, raising contract value, and pursuing bigger customers and deals. Thanks to this week's sponsor Wayfront — the AI-ready operating system for productized agencies. One client portal. One team dashboard. All your data, AI-accessible. TMBA listeners get an extra free month on top of the trial at wayfront.com/tmba. Resources mentioned: Jeff Picaro E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber Work the System by Sam Carpenter The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss Jack Dorsey's blog post on the circular org chart (published during Block layoffs) Supabase GitHub More Business Resources Upcoming DC Events Tropical MBA is a podcast for entrepreneurs building location-independent businesses. Subscribe for weekly episodes on business, money, and the entrepreneurial lifestyle. Hang out exclusively with 7+ figure founders in DC BLACK https://dynamitecircle.com/dc-black CHAPTERS: (00:00:00) Welcome and Guest Intro (00:00:59) Why Events Spark Growth (00:02:45) Trend 1 Organic Returns (00:07:25) Trend 2 Systems Win (00:13:02) Trend 3 Org Charts Shift (00:17:22) Sponsor Wayfront Break (00:18:48) Trend 4 Layoffs to Hiring (00:25:54) Trend 5 Go Upmarket (00:32:23) Wrap Up and Takeaways (00:34:46) Outro and Resources CONNECT: Dan Andrews is the co-founder of Dynamite Circle, author of Before the Exit, host of the Tropical MBA podcast, and an entrepreneur who has successfully launched and scaled multiple 7-figure businesses. Email Dan@tropicalmba.com PLAYLIST: The $10K Projects You Never Do (AI Just Changed That) How to Build a 6-Figure Digital Business with Claude Code We Got Claude-Pilled