Podcasts about OPEX

There are two great forces reshaping the world of energy today. The AI boom and the wave of investment in new data centres have sent power producers scrambling for generation capacity to meet soaring electricity demand. At the same time, the severe disruption to shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz has put security of supply at the top of every importer's agenda. In this special episode, recorded at Wood Mackenzie's Gas, LNG and the Future of Energy Conference in London, host Ed Crooks speaks with three guests about what these twin pressures mean for gas. They discuss demand for gas for power, the sources of supply that could provide energy security in volatile times, and plans for tackling the increased greenhouse gas emissions that could result from increased consumption.First, Ed sits down with Neal Kalita, senior director of global energy management at NTT Global Data Centers, one of the world's largest data center developers. Neal explains why "speed to power" is a priority, and why gas plays such a key role in providing the reliable 24/7 firm capacity hyperscaler clients require.Relying on gas as a key component of the power generation mix means managing a complex set of issues around supply security, demand management and long-term investment. Neal explains how NTT thinks about commodity risk, the trade-offs involved in power supply agreements, and why on-site gas generation may be not just a bridge solution but long-term infrastructure for the electricity system. He highlights the key drivers that are changing the data centre industry, including rising GPU power density, AI-driven volatility in load, and climate-related grid reliability concerns. He also discusses NTT's participation in a demand response programme run by Voltus, which helped stabilise the grid when Winter Storm Fern hit Virginia in January.Next, Ed hears from Keith Shoemaker, Chief Commercial Officer at Coastal Bend, which is developing a new LNG liquefaction project at Corpus Christi, Texas. Coastal Bend is aiming to have the first project in the US to integrate carbon capture and sequestration into its design. Combined with the procurement of upstream gas with low methane leakage and flaring, that should make for the lowest carbon-intensity LNG in the world, Keith says. Crucially, the project can match competitor prices without charging a green premium. The US 45Q tax credit will cover the operational spending (Opex) for the transport and sequestration of the carbon, and costs will be kept down by using brownfield maritime infrastructure that is already in place. Regulation will still be essential in creating a market for lower-emissions LNG. Keith sets out an idea for making that work in the EU: linking the new Methane Emissions Regulation with the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism to create an "avoided carbon" currency that LNG importers could use to offset CBAM fees on other products such as cement, steel and fertiliser. That way, the methane regulation would change from a stick to a carrot for the LNG industry.Kristy Kramer, Head of LNG at Wood Mackenzie, closes the episode by assessing how the three trends of AI demand, energy security and decarbonisation fit together. She discusses the big question: has the conflict on the Middle East changed the world completely, forever. It may play out like the Covid pandemic. Huge changes were predicted, and although there were some permanent impacts, in other areas the world has gone back to the way it was before. Politics will change from week to week, or even from hour to hour, but geology and economics don't, and over time the fundamentals will reassert themselves. Kristy and Ed reflect on what that means for the future of energy. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Rob Freund is an ecommerce and advertising lawyer at Robert Freund Law. Follow and connect with him on X at https://x.com/RobertFreundLaw.FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREWX: https://x.com/andrewjfarisEmail: podcast@ajfgrowth.comWork With AJF Growth: https://ajfgrowth.comMORE STAFFINGRecruit, onboard, and train incredible virtual professionals in the Philippines with my friends at More Staffing by visiting https://morestaffing.co/af.MOVE SUPPLY CHAINReduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting, AI, and offshore talent by visiting https://movesupplychain.com/.

Sarah Davis is the Founder, President and Chief Creative Officer at Fashionphile. Follow and connect with her on LinkedIn at ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahclarkdavis/⁠ and on X at ⁠https://x.com/Sarahdavis⁠.FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREWX: ⁠https://x.com/andrewjfaris⁠Email: ⁠podcast@ajfgrowth.com⁠Work With AJF Growth: ⁠https://ajfgrowth.com⁠MOVE SUPPLY CHAINReduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting, AI, and offshore talent by visiting ⁠https://movesupplychain.com/⁠.INTELLIGEMSIntelligems brings A/B testing to business decisions beyond copy and design. Test your pricing, shipping charges, free shipping thresholds, offers, SaaS tools, and more by clicking here: ⁠https://bit.ly/42DcmFl⁠. Get 20% off the first 3 months with code FARIS20.

Wybrałeś platformę e-Commerce, która na papierze była tańsza - a po roku okazało się, że to kosztowna pomyłka? Ten odcinek jest dla Ciebie.W tym odcinku E-commerce Pro rozkładam na czynniki pierwsze TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), czyli całkowity koszt posiadania technologii e-Commerce. To liczba, o której agencje wdrożeniowe wolą nie mówić - a która potrafi zamienić wycenę na 400 tysięcy w realny wydatek rzędu 3 milionów w ciągu trzech lat.Pokażę Ci, dlaczego porównywanie ofert wyłącznie po koszcie wdrożenia (CAPEX) to jeden z najkosztowniejszych błędów w wyborze platformy - i co naprawdę powinno znaleźć się w rzetelnym TCO.W tym odcinku:➡️ Czym różni się CAPEX od OPEX i dlaczego firmy "zapominają" o tym drugim➡️ Pułapka tańszej oferty: kiedy PrestaShop za 200 tys. wychodzi drożej niż Magento za 300 tys.➡️ Dlaczego SaaS często wygrywa w TCO (i kiedy prowizje od sprzedaży wywracają cały rachunek)➡️ Co konkretnie powinno znaleźć się w TCO: licencje, serwery, SLA, aktualizacje, koszt rozwoju ➡️ Jak wyestymować koszt aktualizacji i dlaczego warto poprosić o wycenę całego backlogu, nie tylko MVP➡️ Dlaczego trzyletni horyzont to optymalna perspektywa do liczenia kosztów➡️ Czerwona flaga: co zrobić, gdy agencja nie chce albo nie potrafi podać Ci tych danychJeśli odpowiadasz w firmie za wybór technologii lub agencji wdrożeniowej, ten odcinek pomoże Ci podjąć decyzję na podstawie pełnych danych - a nie tylko atrakcyjnej kwoty na pierwszej stronie oferty.▶️▶️▶️ Link do konsultacji: https://satisfly.co/pl/bezplatna-konsultacja/ ◀️◀️◀️

The numbers will tell you what to scale — if you'll actually listen to them. In this episode, David Richter breaks down exactly which financial numbers every real estate investor and entrepreneur should be tracking, why most business owners are solving the wrong problems, and how getting clear on just three simple numbers can make you more financially savvy than 90% of entrepreneurs out there.From cash KPIs to marketing ROI to payroll ratios, this episode gives you a practical, no-fluff framework for using your financial data to make smarter decisions — and stop fighting fires you're accidentally setting yourself.Timeline Highlights[0:26] Why most people hate tracking numbers — and why that's costing them[1:08] How your business numbers tell the story of your business like a storybook[2:24] The three numbers every entrepreneur should track first: make, spend, and keep[2:58] How Profit First helps you see all three numbers clearly with the right accounts[3:17] The Golden Trio explained: profit, owner's comp, and owner's tax[4:31] Why knowing these three numbers puts you ahead of 90% of entrepreneurs[4:50] KPI #1: marketing return on investment — the 3–5x rule of thumb[5:45] How your CRM and QuickBooks work together to track marketing ROI by channel[6:40] Why you should be reevaluating every marketing channel every quarter[7:22] Why problem solvers in business are often solving the wrong problems[7:45] If you're constantly fighting fires in your business, you're the arsonist[8:02] KPI #2: payroll as a percentage of gross profit — and the 25–35% rule[8:42] The personal story: how a 65–75% payroll ratio helped take down a 25-person real estate business[9:18] KPI #3: your monthly nut — knowing your full out-the-door expenses every month[9:34] How Simple CFO's expense analysis has helped clients save anywhere from $1K to $50K per month[10:22] When to bring in a fractional CFO to help with marketing, payroll, and expense analysisKey TakeawaysStart with three numbers: what you make, what you spend, and what you keep.The Profit First accounts — income, OpEx, and the Golden Trio — make those three numbers visible at all times.Every marketing channel should be returning at least 3–5x what you're putting in.Payroll should never exceed 25–35% of gross profit — when it creeps past that, red flags follow.Know your monthly nut — the full out-the-door cost of running your business every single month.If you're constantly fighting fires, you're likely solving the wrong problems because you're not looking at the numbers.Financial data doesn't just tell you where to cut — it tells you where to double down.Links & ResourcesBook a free discovery call to build the financial systems your business needs: profitrei.comClosingThanks for spending time with me today. If this episode gave you clarity or a new perspective on which numbers to track and how to use them, be sure to like, subscribe, and comment below. If you're ready to apply what we talked about today with real guidance and accountability, visit profitrei.com to schedule a free discovery call and create your path to financial clarity and freedom.

In 2026, Asia Pacific's travel boom is reshaping airport strategy. While January saw a slight demand dip due to Lunar New Year shifting to February, IATA confirms a 5.2% global seat capacity expansion by March, signalling robust growth. This surge, with passenger numbers projected to double by 2043, forces airports to modernise aggressively. But as with many industry sectors turning to transforming to capture unpredictable market opportunities, a cornerstone of any transformation is being to tap the data that exists at their fingertips. Cxociety Research discourse with the C-suite community suggests that central to achieving any lasting transformation is achieving a unified, data-driven operation. In the case of the travel industry, it is moving away from siloed airside, terminal, and landside management. COOs are adopting AI for predictive disruption management and embedding energy optimisation to cut OPEX by up to 15%. The modern airport is no longer a transit hub but an intelligent, seamless, and ecosystem.In this PodChats for FutureCOO, we are joined by Philippe Arsonneau, Senior Vice President of Infrastructure Segment, Schneider Electric, who will help us make the case for unified, data-driven operations.1.       Given that many airports currently run airside, terminal, and landside operations separately, what is our roadmap to intelligently unify these functions for complete situational awareness?2.       With AI able to analyse millions of signals simultaneously, how can we best deploy it to predict disruptions and reduce delays, thereby improving passenger flow during peak travel seasons?3.       How can we leverage AI-embedded energy management across all our buildings and assets to achieve up to 15% OPEX reduction while shrinking our carbon footprint?4.       What new revenue opportunities can AI and data analytics unlock for our airport retailers, and how do we integrate these with passenger movement data?5.       With passenger numbers forecast to double by 2043, how will our current infrastructure and technology scaling plans accommodate this long-term growth without compromising service?6.       What interdependency models must we develop between airlines, ground handlers, and retailers to manage the growing complexities and traveller volumes smoothly?7.       No discussion around modernisation and transformation can continue without addressing the security aspects of an operation. As airport modernise, how do we balance the need for seamless digital travel experiences (biometrics, wayfinding) with robust cybersecurity and passenger privacy?8.       Based on IATA's January 2026 load factor of 83.9% for Asia Pacific, what key performance indicators should we track to continuously optimise both operational efficiency and passenger satisfaction throughout the terminal?9.       What is your advice for airport operators striving to transform and modernising their operations in 2026?

The Great Talent Redistribution: Where is Talent Actually Going in 2026 and beyond?  Is the start-up compensation model broken? How about big Big Tech? How about non-tech small & medium businesses? What is happening to talent, going forward? This and many other topics in this episode of Tech Deciphered. Navigation: Intro The Broken Contract? The Great Unbundling The Three (?) Destinations Alternative Cap Tables, Alternative Compensation Models Investor Landscape Fragmentation Operator Playbook and Predictions Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Nuno Goncalves Pedro Introduction Welcome to episode 77 of Tech Deciphered. This episode will focus on the great talent redistribution. Where’s talent actually going in 2026 and beyond? The Silicon Valley deal of the last 30 years, very low salary, stock options, you will either sell for a ton of money or IPO, and everyone gets rich, is seemingly broken. Or is it really? The dominant narrative says the tech middle class is dying. We disagree. There is obviously a lot of stuff going on whereby big tech is partially barbelling. There’s a superstar concentration on the top. There’s a bit of a seemingly allowing of the belly. We’ll come back to that. We don’t quite believe that is totally true. There’s a collapse at entry level. The belly is migrating into three, potentially even more, very different destinations: AI native startups, human-verified premium businesses, and the read the industrialized middle of the S&P 500 and SMB world. Each has its own cap table, each will have its own compensation model, and each will have its own investor profile. In some ways, this is the third episode in our Reset trilogy. We started with episode 75 on the SaaS-apocalypse. We talked about the great private capital reset in episode 76, and now we talk about talent redistributions. Bertrand, exciting times, not always positive times.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s exciting times because it’s a time of change. Of course, we have the doomsayers. If you listen to Dario Amodei of Anthropic, every white-collar job on Earth is going to disappear. I think I strongly disagree, and I suppose you too as well, we strongly disagree. It’s going to be more of a redistribution. If you look at the history of technology, this is what always happened. We forget how many jobs have disappeared over the past 150 years. We move from a time of 150 years ago. People were mostly in agriculture. Then you had a lot of weird jobs that disappeared from people transporting water to people bringing ice from the pools to people doing the job of computers. People forget that computer was a title given to human beings. We’re doing calculations. Then, of course, secretory jobs in the ’80s, ’90s, where suddenly anyone can type using a word processor, the rise of Excel, that sort of stuff. Many things have changed. Some jobs have indeed disappeared. Some jobs have totally transformed. Where you do these jobs have changed. I think we are at a similar stage where, thanks to AI, and I would say for now, or at least the rise of AI coding, there is a dramatic change happening. I don’t think it means that people will be without a job. It just means, from my perspective, that jobs are changing. You are not just doing a lowly coding level task that actually indeed could be replaced, but you are going to have more of builder type of mindset, a product manager type of mindset going forward. We also expect that the distribution of jobs, depending on the type of business, will be quite different.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro The Broken Contract? Maybe let’s reset a little bit to the broken contract, or if it’s really a broken contract. There’s been this image in technology and tech that basically you get paid very little to work in tech. You get a bunch of stock options. The earlier you are in the company, the higher the level of stock option grants you get. Then you make a ton of money at some point because the company will either sell or IPO, and that’s heard of it. Obviously, there’s a lot of movements happening right now that are changing how these dynamics work. The first part is obviously AI, and in some ways, AI is shrinking companies. It’s not unheard of that companies with as little as four or five people reach 50 million in ARR. There’s companies with one person that have gotten bought for hundreds of millions of dollars or billion of dollars. Obviously, things are moving very, very fast, and therefore, there isn’t a large employee cap table. How would you share the upside? Would you actually give a couple of percentage points to an early employee rather than your 0.2-0.5% kind of thing for early employees? The second part is a little bit the other side of the table, which is the IPO market is seemingly in a drought. There’s not much happening in IPOs. Maybe 2026, at some point, there will be an unlock, but right now, it’s seemingly difficult to get your upside. Even if you’re an employee, you have to wait a long time. The median time of IPO has climbed over 10, 11 years, the longest in over a decade. Basically, not only you have to wait a long time as if there is an IPO drought, like we might be going through right now, when do I actually get my cash back? Unless the company gets bought, maybe there are secondary transactions along the way, maybe there’s something else. But obviously there’s a little bit of a reduction and lowering of the upside seemingly for this contract and for this place. The easy conclusion that I think many are taking is, because of all of this and all the layoffs that are happening, even in big tech, that serve the tech middle class is dying, that basically AI screwing the workers, et cetera, there’s also a lot of discussion that even it might be affecting the entry-level jobs as well. Everyone coming out of undergrad right now can’t get a job, et cetera. There’s this doomsday scenario that you’re alluding to that everything is changing. We have a slightly different perspective. We think there’s a realignment of market. In layoffs, there was a lot of layoffs that were warranted. Big tech, in particular, had actually hoarded a lot of engineering capacity over the last decade or so. There’s a little bit of a realignment that needed to happen in any case. When everyone’s saying, “Well, AI is compressing everything,” well, it’s compressing right now, but we don’t think actually it’s going to compress over time. You’ll still need engineering and science talent to come on board for you to be able to scale up. It’s not like AI is going to take care of everything and teams are going to be five people for companies that are worth a trillion dollars. That’s not happening. Today’s thesis, I think a little bit of this doomsday scenario needs to be seen with a more nuanced lens. I think that’s how we’re framing today’s episode, that there’s a bit of a nuance, there are some extremes happening. We’re going to talk about those extremes, but ultimately, it’s not quite as simple as saying that the tech middle class is disappearing in early jobs are going to be a thing of the past.   Bertrand Schmitt At the same time, what you started with is true. I mean, that 50 million ARR company, just five people. At a bigger scale, that’s exactly the matrix for Anthropic. They have reached a stage where they are at a range of 12 million ARR per staff per employee. It’s metrics that are definitely never seen before. I don’t think any company raised to this level. Best in class, best run companies, one, two million per employees. I mean, that was your target if you can make it. We are definitely in a different game. But I think what matters at the end of the day, and that’s what we’re arguing, is that you have to see the big pictures. Yes, some positions might disappear inside some companies, but some other positions will be created in other companies. Usually, what people do is keep talking about the jobs who disappear and not looking at the bigger picture of jobs that are being created as well. What is true, and I think you alluded to that, is that the big tech the past 10, 15 years had some strategy of hoarding talent in a war where having the best talented people will make the difference in numbers, will make the difference between winning or losing. The Google of the world, the Microsoft of the world, the Amazon of the world, they were hoarding talent. They would try to make sure that they might not have such needs in talented number of people. But if they have the talent, it means their competitors didn’t have the talent. It means that the startup trying to reach scale couldn’t pay the giant salaries that the Google of the world were paying. There was definitely some hoarding. But it went so far in the 2020, 2021, that I think since then there has been a coming back to normal. There is also now in 2026, the recognition that it’s not true anymore. Yes, talent can be very valuable, but there is now a bigger and bigger gap between the extremely talented versus the rest that are merely talented because of AI. AI is able to replace at scale your software engineers, your software managers. I would say it’s quite new. I don’t think it was true a year ago. We’re really talking about a recent dramatic change in what can be achieved thanks to AI. We can see most of the big AI companies are moving to coding. It was started by Anthropic as a trend, OpenAI has followed through. Obviously, the Cursor of the world existed before, but they were not as successful. All the Chinese open-source models are moving very fast to coding optimization the past few weeks. It’s quite an incredible change. I think there is that dramatic change, recognition that coding can be done differently. As a result, we are going to see change in the distribution of jobs. I think it will start from the top because we see the news of the big Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and others who used to hold talented software developers to a change in realization that no, we actually need to invest in AI. We need to invest in compute because compute is going to do the job of most of these people. Therefore, we can’t pay for both at the same time, even us with all our money, we cannot. Wall Street is not going to let us do that. They start by removing a lot of position. I think we see that accelerating, quite frankly. We have only seen the beginning, but in the next 2 years, we see a dramatic shift. But I think my position, I guess yours, and you know as well, is that there will be a lot more opportunities created as well, probably by also entities.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro The Great Unbundling Yeah, there will be more opportunities created. The hoarding is just taken also a little bit of a different view. To your point, there’s hoarding of resources, compute, et cetera. But there’s also hoarding of top talent. We are seeing people getting paid, packages all in that could run up to 100 million, in some cases even over 100 million over several years. This is unheard of. I mean, an officer of Meta would make, I don’t know, maybe 20, 25 million a year. It’s like now there are people that are on the top end of AI researchers that are getting paid around that amount just to join some of these companies. There’s a little bit of a different hoarding. It’s very selective hoarding of certain talent. We’ve seen some acqui-hires. We’ve talked about it in previous episodes that are just literally about getting one or two people specifically to come on board. Alexander Wang, again, going to Meta to lead their intelligence labs there. I feel, I don’t know what you feel, but I feel this is a transition moment where there is overpaying for certain talent on the top of the market. At some point, this will stabilize. You can’t keep paying people 100 million over 4 years or something like that across the board. To your point, a lot of this is actually going to scale up quickly also on the AI side. There’s a little bit of a different hoarding happening on the top end, not just the resources, but also of people, which seems to give further this notion of barbell, that there’s two extremes, the haves and have-nots, the super-duper talented people that get paid a ton of money, tens of millions of dollars a year at the very least. Then the emptying of the middle where there’s a ton of tech layoffs going on in some ways, the belly, as they would call it, is being expelled. The middle market, the managers are being fired because there’s nothing to manage. There’s a lot of positions going away. In some cases, you might keep some of the more junior talent, but with a little bit of experience. But even the talent coming out of colleges is not getting hired either. It’s a little bit of a weird thing where there’s hoarding at the top, there’s an emptying of the belly, the middle, and then the early, early, early is also not getting recruited. It’s like what gives? How is this going to look in the future? I agree fully with you, Bertrand, that there’s a migration of this talent, not only to other companies, but also to other jobs. There will be new jobs that will emerge out of this. The DevOps, dev tools market didn’t exist until maybe 20 years ago at scale, and it got created. In some ways, we’re seeing there will be new markets, there will be new roles and new jobs that will be created around engineering teams going forward. We can’t anticipate all of them. But basically, the emptying of the belly is true as it’s happening right now. The low hiring on the early and the top end, getting tons of money. We think this is a transition to something else. There’s the hoarding of engineering in general is coming to an end at momentum. Now it’s time to rightsize teams, to get the right at the table, et cetera, and start figuring out what works and what doesn’t work. We’ve already had some horror stories coming out even from Amazon where they were breaking systems with their use of AI tools, and I’m sure it’s happening across the board. I’m on a board of a company and been tremendously affected by Meta and its algorithms, where basically because of advertising, there have been people served with ads for this specific company where the ad doesn’t match the company, so basic stuff like that. It’s been actually very, very difficult because in some ways, the company goes back to Meta. It’s like, “Hey, dudes, you guys are serving ads that are not even our ads with our copyright and stuff. How does this work?” They’re like, “Oh, it’s AI.” It’s like, “Well, it’s AI but can you give me my money back?” They’re like, “No, we won’t give you money back.” This creates huge issues for companies, for example, that are very dependent on advertising, which obviously there’s a lot of industries that are. They’re actually in production systems at scale. Meta is, I think now, the largest digital advertising in the world. I think they outgrew Google in one of the last quarters. Basically, this has a tremendous effect that systems that are in production at scale are getting inputs and changes driven by AI tooling, and somehow nobody can say what the hell is happening. Again, there will be a reckoning, there will be a redistribution, there will be a rightsizing of teams and an adequacy of teams going forward. I personally think this is a transition period.   Bertrand Schmitt I think we are moving from hoarding or software engineering to hoarding the top of the top scientists in AI and hoarding of GPUs, GPUs/data center. For me, it was quite interesting to see the deal of Cursor with xAI, where basically they couldn’t get access to computing resources to run their model. But xAI had, I forgot the exact numbers, but close to half a million GPUs that no one, I mean, “no one was using” because their services are not so successful yet in terms of AI chatbot and the like. Basically, suddenly they are like, “You know what? We control access to resource.” But the new resource is, again, a mix of extremely talented AI engineering or AI scientists versus GPUs/data center. There is this race of controlling boss and everything else is going to be collateral damage. Some examples, I think, are quite interesting. You talk about some example of Amazon, even some production issues. I remember reading a quick post-mortem of one of the issues, and the conclusion was it was AI, definitely part of the issue. But the other part of the issue was AI used by junior engineers. For me, it’s interesting. It shows that actually junior plus AI is actually a danger zone. That’s why many companies are going to be way more careful. “Why do we need the junior people if they are just playing with fire?” I think we go back to that situation of barbell, as you call it. The top talents are extremely valuable because they know how a production system works. They are here to develop better AI systems. But the junior guys playing with fires, yeah, maybe it’s cute in startups, but in a big time production environment, a different story.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro There will be a barbell with top-end talent super-mega paid and then mid-level talent that is individual contributors still doing a lot of great work, et cetera. Along the way, a lot of emptying of entry, a lot of emptying of the middle. Where does the talent go? The Three (?) Destinations I think we could say there’s three destinations for this talent. Maybe there’s four, maybe there’s more. Three that we can immediately identify. One is the AI native startup piece, where we have smaller teams that potentially get to a lot of revenue or top line over time, and where the Series Seed is the primary round, where we’re seeing Series Seed being raised of tens of millions of dollars, actually even hundreds of millions of dollars in Series Seed. In some ways, the stars there can get incredible compensations in terms of stock. They will stay for private and selling in secondaries later down the road because there’s so much capital at the table. Actually, in some ways, salaries are very high as well in some of these companies. It’s not like you’re trading off anything. You can get paid a lot of money. If your company at Series Seed for 10 or 15 employees has raised 50-$100 million, you can pay great salaries. In some ways, this is the extreme destination. The AI native startups that can make it is the extreme destination. Now, there aren’t a ton of AI native startups that can raise 50-100 million to 400 million in Series Seed, just to be clear. There’s a handful of hot deals in that space, but that’s one clear destination for top-end talent going through that. In that market, I think that’s one of the destinations. The second one is more what we would call the human-verified premium. It’s more of a play of companies that has still the need of human in the loop, either in terms of development, also in terms of activity, either because go-to markets are very intensive, and so therefore you need to have sales forces, partnership teams, et cetera. Or on the engineering side, it needs to have a lot of customization, integration. Companies are not just going to the, “Oh, you can come in and just apply your AI tooling and somehow magically the systems all work.” there needs to be quite a lot of and work and high touch work in getting stuff done. A significant part of that market, I’m not sure, is super VC investible. Maybe it’s a hybrid of private equity in VC, more PE style in many cases. It’s a PE-hold, sell to someone else market. As we’ve discussed in a previous episode on the SaaS-apocalypse, that hasn’t quite worked out for PEs. Question marks on how that human-verified premium market is going to evolve. But obviously, there’s a lot of work still to be done there, even on the engineering and science side. That’s the second potential destination. Then the third more aggressive destination is the reindustrialized middle companies that have a lot of specificity in going after small and medium businesses, local or regional affectations like ERPs or CRMs for specific markets, et cetera. Those are the three natural destinations. I would add the fourth, which is big tech. I mean, big tech doesn’t magically disappear, and I don’t think it fits neatly into any of these three markets. In some ways, big tech is now looking at the extreme for top talent a little bit like the AI native startup because they can pay. They can pay the 100 million every four years, et cetera. I do think it will typify taxonomically into a fourth type emerging, where, as we discussed, you’ll have top-end individual contributor talent. You’ll have the absolute top-end of the market because they can get paid. Then you’ll start having the emergence of earlier talent that is highly capable, et cetera. That will go back to a bit of a normal distribution in terms of talent on big tech. For me, those are the four destinations that I would put at the table.   Bertrand Schmitt For me, big tech moving to big tech, I’m not sure if it’s really a destination. I mean, yes, in some ways it’s a reshuffle between the big tech companies. They are definitely all fighting in some ways for some of the same people. I can see that dramatic shift where big tech has to remove a lot of positions in order to replace by AI. Again, I think at this stage, it’s mostly driven by AI coding. We are still at the beginning because this is brand-new phenomenon that AI coding is so successful at its task. I don’t think it was true even 6 months ago. Some companies, take Anthropic, take OpenAI, are definitely there or close to be there in terms of no more writing of a single line of code by a human, zero. This is, again, 6, 12 months ago. Not true. But now it’s true in a few top companies. Take OpenClaw as well, most successful GitHub project of all time, not a single line written by its author. It would have been impossible. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of line of code in a few months. It’s impossible to achieve that manually. If you look at the other big tech companies, the Google of the world, the Meta of the world, the Microsoft of the world, they are absolutely not there yet. They are going to be there because they have no choice. It’s you either go fast there or you die. You are not going to be able to survive competitors that are shipping 10, 50, 100 times faster than you are shipping. It’s a life and death situation. All the big tech companies are going to move, and mark my word, in the next 2 years from 10, 20% of AI-written code to 100%. During that transition, the next 2 years max, if you don’t do it in 2 years, you are going to die. Your stock price is going to crash. Then, of course, you will have to make changes. You will have to invest more in GPUs. You will have to invest less in your standard typical software engineer employees. Like you, I’m very optimistic that there are new buckets. AI-native startups definitely will be there. It will be transformational. Human-verified premium, very interesting category. In a way, it will be businesses that are inevitably less scalable through AI, and there is definitely a spot from there. I think the biggest would be the reindustrialized middle SMBs. Most of S&P 500 type of business are going to dramatically offer new software opportunities, new opportunity story to talented software employees because they will need to implement AI in everything they do. They will do it. They will need people who have software engineering knowledge in order to implement these systems. For them, what’s changing dramatically really is that thanks to much cheaper cost as thanks to AI coding, a lot of software projects that they couldn’t afford to do, that they couldn’t imagine doing by themselves, they are able to do it. They will invest in a lot more software capabilities than ever before. That will be a big game changer. And software, very tuned to their business model. There might be less buying of your traditional off-the-shelf SAF software and a lot more investment in a highly custom software by their own team, assisted with AI. I think that would be the part that is most transformed by all of this in a positive way.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Alternative Cap Tables, Alternative Compensation Models This will lead to a very fundamental shift, right back to the broken contract. What does the new contract look like? It looks like alternative cap tables depending on which bucket are you transitioning into. If you’re going into your AI-native bucket, and you’re a top-end talent, you’re like, “Dude, I’m worth 100 million over 4 years, so just compensate me accordingly with a mix of options in the company plus my salary.” If you’re top 1%, you can probably get away with salaries that you’d get anyway at mid-level from 300K, 400K and above, and you can get actually a lot of options already in the company. A lot of this is happening right now. There’s a premium for AI, we know that. There’s a premium for AI at the top end of AI researching, in particular on companies that are doing hardcore research on staff AI engineers, so companies that require actual AI engineering. There is a premium that is significant. It could be as high as 18% over non-AI peers, and it widens actually with seniority, shockingly enough. This is more of an average than anything else. Now, for me, and it’s for debate, but the perspective is this extreme comp will need to compress at some point. There will still be the haves and have-nots paid much better than the have-nots, so to speak, but there will be a compression. The variance can’t be the variance we’re seeing today for absolute top-end talent. That said, there will be variants. We know that big tech for over a decade, decade and a half, for example, in the Bay Area, has been paying a lot of money for director and above levels that used to be the VPs, so a million, a million and a half a year, all in compensations. It’s not unheard of that this will actually increase after this stage. That said, I do think that the compensation extreme that we’re in will get diluted down the middle. It will actually come down at some point. It’s part of where we are today. As we know, it is still a bubble.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah, it’s an interesting point. I think it’s possible. At the same time, that compression coming 2, 3, 5 years. At the same time, we have examples where there is no such compression. Take the top sports players in the world, golfing, basketball, NBA players. There has not really been any compression at all. For me, it’s interesting. If you look at the big tech companies, each being one of this top NBA team, why would such compression happen? As long as they are competing against each other and generating plenty of cash, I think there will be some fair question. We will see. I don’t have a strong opinion, but for me, it’s not a total given.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro For me, the shocking thing is the faster AI becomes better, the more that compression will happen, because at some point, it’s like, why do you need the top talent as well? I don’t know. It feels like you’re trying to evolve a system that’s there to replace you. It’s like, “Okay, I’m getting paid 100 million over the next 4 years”, and then you develop something that’s so good that replaces you. Thank you. That’s cool.   Bertrand Schmitt That’s a total possibility, yes, because we are in that very unusual market where the game is to only replace yourself and people like yourself. At some point, it is a possibility, I guess this one. Right now, we’re talking about replacing your “average software talent”. In 2 years, could we absolutely replace the absolute best top experts in the world? Probably. I think it’s just that at some point we’ll be reaching the stage where we strictly have no control anymore on our AI systems because no human is able to challenge and understand what’s produced. It’s not just a question of scale anymore. We’re talking about a gap in IQ, basically.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Exactly. It will happen at some point in history. We don’t know exactly when. For the second bucket, the human-verified premium bucket, it’s difficult to see how an HVAC company or an HVAC roll-up of scale or a regional health care platform or high touch go-to-market, B2B, SaaS play, et cetera, for a vertical will compete. At the same end, they have to compete and they will compete. There will be more and more jobs, we believe, for engineering talent in these companies. They’ll have to be more and more AI-enabled themselves. The cash salaries will have to be competitive within the local markets, not necessarily with Silicon Valley. There will be potentially profit sharing and revenue sharing and actual dividends played at the table. The model there on the cap table needs to change a little bit, needs to be probably propped up more on salary and on some way of doing profit sharing or actually having dividends paid to employees and figuring out employee to equity in a more aggressive manner. This is the market that probably was already very attacked, so to speak, or let’s say, occupied by private equity firms. There are still obviously part of that model that would work well. There needs to be a fundamental shift, certainly on the quantum of salary compensation, dividend compensation, profit sharing, and all of that. Then last but not the least, obviously, we had the bucket around basically the reindustrialization of the middle, so everything else, which will take most of the belly that we were talking about. This is probably a poor analogy, the belly fat. It’s not belly fat, it’s people that were doing their jobs that now are getting disrupted. In some ways, that bucket will absorb a lot of that belly, will absorb a lot of talent. The small and medium businesses that Bertrand was saying will need to crucially become more AI, software-enabled by themselves, even with some core stuff and underpinnings that actually might not even require AI in terms of infrastructure platforms. There, you need to get properly paid. Again, how many people do you need in your engineering team if you’re a small business? Probably not a lot. It’s maybe you need one or two people and that’s it. They’ll need to be very nicely paid because they’re running the stuff in the rails. This is probably a market that over time, as AI gets more and more competent, will also be disrupted, but let’s not talk about the disruption to the disruption because otherwise, we’ll stay here the whole day, but certainly a market that has a lot of potential to shift and to absorb a lot of the moments that we’re seeing in terms of layoffs happening in the US in particular.   Bertrand Schmitt This category was a category that historically could not compete with Silicon Valley salaries, could not attract the most talented engineers. It’s not a category that didn’t want to bring these people on board. It’s a category that just couldn’t afford to bring this talent on board, typically. I think it would be a dramatic shift for them when suddenly there are opportunities to hire these people. There is an opportunity to hire them at maybe more reasonable prices from this company’s perspective. You talk about small companies, the great thing is that there are millions of small companies at some point. I think things could be truly transformational. Of course, some of these engineers, software engineers, might decide to become entrepreneurs on their own. Solo entrepreneurs, small businesses, build their own, easier to build their own product to market so to serve other companies. I think there will be quite dramatic changes because not all companies will be disrupted by AI as much, but not every company will benefit from improving processes, improving software through AI. At least early on, you will need this human touch to make it work inside a business. Interestingly enough, I was hearing that some companies like IBM were hiring more younger people to do the work of going to the client, understand their needs, propose implementation plans. That forward deployed engineer, those positions, I think there will be more and more available.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Investor Landscape Fragmentation What happens to investor into the landscape? We already had an episode, the previous one, Episode 76, where we talked quite a lot about the big capital reset on the private equity and private reset, including venture capital. Just maybe to summarize, how does it align with the buckets that we’ve just been discussing? I think the AI-native bucket clearly is going to be the key bucket. There, we’re going to see two movements. One movement, which is the mega funds, as we discussed in the last episode, are no longer just VC funds. They’re really mostly multi-asset private equity funds, maybe even private equity hedge funds in some cases. Those funds will be all over the high-growth AI-native companies and will be pouring money into companies that are scaling really, really quickly. The early stage, so to speak, VCs, the actual VCs that will stay in the market will be the guys probably identifying the next big wave of AI-native companies. We’ve discussed that as well in the last episode, some research that we did at Chamaeleon that I shared in episode 76. We’ll see that as emerging. What happens to the second bucket, the bucket around human premium, human in the loop? Likely we’ll have more and more private equity capital going into it and the large-scale VC guys, the Thrives of the world, they’ve just announced Thrive Holdings, and others going after those markets as well. It’s trying to converge into the private equity market, which aligns with the point we made in the previous episode that the VC mega funds are no longer VC, that they are private equity, multi-asset class. They’re going after a bunch of things. There’s a conversion happening from VC into private equity. It was going to happen anyway because the private equity guys were coming into VC as well and the hedge funds were coming to VC as well. There’s a convergence in the middle of very, very large funds and large assets under management happening to go after some of these opportunities, certainly in Bucket B. Then this Bucket C, so to speak, the bucket of reindustrialization, as Bertrand was saying, very well, likely will be self-funded for a significant period of time. Will self-fund with their own cash flow. Doesn’t need to have a ton of capital intensity. Maybe you need one or two engineers to do stuff, but that’s it. You don’t need tons of capital. You didn’t need in the past, you won’t need it today. Not sure there’s going to be a fundamental shift to that market.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes, I certainly, overall, agree with you. That last pocket, probably little change to the capital and capital structure. Again, I see that as the biggest opportunity for a lot of people who might be less needed by big tech and also top tech companies. What is sure for the first category, the high native startups? I would say more overall in the VC ecosystem, there is no space left for SaaS anymore. I think SaaS, as we used to know it, is dead in some ways in the sense that new pure SaaS software startup are definitely out. Existing ones that are critical to run your infrastructure, the Salesforce of the world, I think they’re in a decent spot. Actually, interestingly, they changed their pricing model to now sell to AI agents, not just per seat. There is a change in pricing there. But this day and age of funding a pure SaaS software startup through VC money, no way. VC money going to AI-native startups, AI-focused startups, to biotech, to deep tech, to defense tech, yes. SaaS as a fundable category early on, I think it’s over.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I’m a bit more nuanced as we shared in The SaaS Apocalypse episode. We can call it whatever we call. It’s applied AI is the new SaaS thing. Horizontal applied AI is the new horizontal SaaS or vertical applied AI is the new vertical SaaS. I agree in common with your point that very specific point solutions around SaaS will be disrupted by nature with all the easy stuff you can do today with AI. It will take a while. This is not something that’s going to happen this year. It’s going to happen over the next years. Maybe interesting to also talk about the exit markets. I think the IPO market, as we’ve also discussed in the past, there is, in my view, going to be a reopening of the IPO market, I think this year, probably later in the year, third or fourth quarter. The median time to IPO actually is going to be really weird because there’s going to be potentially some companies in the current landscape, bubble or no bubble, that are going to IPO, the OpenAIs of the world, Anthropics of the world, et cetera. There will be more and more aggression, I think, on M&A. Big tech has already shown it, that they want to buy into markets. Large non-tech companies have also started doing acquisitions in space. To prop up their IT teams, their engineering teams with this world that we’ve also discussed in previous episodes that I’m going to own my own engineering stack for now. As we see, that normally doesn’t withstand the test of time. At some point it will get unbundled and served by someone else. Then finally, the secondary market is very hot right now. Obviously, there’s heavy discounting on some areas, high premiums on others. The exit market, strangely enough, is going to be propped up, in my opinion, over the next year to 2 years, dramatically. Then we’ll see if there’s a big reckoning around the bubble that we are clearly in or not, if it’s a soft landing or hard landing. Definitely, there’s going to be a lot of exit paths over the next year to 2 years.   Bertrand Schmitt Concerning the “bubble”, I have two perspectives on this. One is it’s a bubble in the sense that money is going to a lot of players and some players are going to blow it up. There will be a concentration of players at the end, like it usually happens. If you look at, for instance, long time ago, the railway revolution, there was that intense influx of capital. At the end of the day, there was a dramatic change in transportation in the US and a complete railway system put in place. Yes, some investors lost money, some companies went bankrupt, but the transformation was fully real. There were a lot of top leaders at the end of this revolution. The change after that only happened, we guess, post-World War II, with the construction of the highway system and the rise of airlines and plane transportation overall. Here I feel it’s similar in the sense that, yes, there is a lot of money going in. Some players are going to blow it. They will misuse the money in different ways, but that’s part of dynamic allocation of capital. Of course, you make mistakes. That’s what happens. At the same time, I feel it’s a similar level in the sense of this is a dramatic change in the US infrastructure. This buildup of AI data centers filled with GPUs, integrated at scale with some of the best software in the world and running it, supported by a dramatic shift in energy infrastructure. This is for me similar to the Railroad Revolution. Some players might not own the data center they build because they didn’t manage well their debt, they didn’t manage to run proper software. You know what? They will get acquired by somebody else. I think we are at this level of fundamental transformation. The fact that in a matter of maybe 2 years, the move from 0% of code written by AI to 100 % written by AI is an insane dramatic shift. Just to be clear, when you move from manually coded to AI coded, we’re talking about a 100X difference in terms of speed at similar, if not better level of quality. The shift is dramatic, and on top of it, you don’t pay salaries anymore to achieve that. You pay CapEx, and with GPUs and OpEx with electricity. It’s a very big shift, positive shift in business model. New unions, no management over it, AI working 24/7. Personally, I think for me, bubble has a bad connotation in the sense of it was all for a waste. I don’t think it’s all for a waste. I think we are witnessing a dramatic revolution of our lifetimes, quite frankly, bigger than SaaS, bigger than mobile. From my perspective, it’s exciting times.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Operator Playbook and Predictions Let’s move to if you are this person, what would you do in the future? Let’s start with two extremes and go from there. One is you’re non-tech, so you’re not an engineer, et cetera. You’re trying to figure out, how do I scale my activity? Maybe physical labor is where I want to go. It’s not, “Go west” anymore. Definitely not necessarily go west. You should go to, I guess, the states that have no sales tax with very cheap energy because that’s where the data centers are being built if you want to be in that market. Obviously, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done: HVAC, electricity work, et cetera. Don’t go west. Go low sales taxes, low cost of energy. That’s likely where the data centers are being built. You probably can just follow. There’s, I’m sure, some way for you to follow where the data centers are being built, but that’s next, I think on that extreme of the table. The other extreme of the table, let’s say you are super ambitious, maybe you’re no longer an engineer, but you’re a product manager in your prompt engineering. You could do prompt engineering all day long. You’re 28, 29-year-old superstar. What do you go and do? Likely either you start your own thing, start your own company because you’re so good at prompt engineering, you probably can do a lot of the code yourself, particularly if you have an engineering background, or you go and join very early an AI-native startup that you think has the chance of going through the roof, and you take a pretty good salary early on, a ton of upside on the company because guess what? Companies like that need product managers. They need people to figure out UX, UI. It’s not going to be, at least for now, yet AI figuring that out for you. Those are two extremes, just to give two of the extremes, like engineering, product management persona, and physical labor at the other extreme, non-tech, et cetera.   Bertrand Schmitt In some ways, every software engineering job is going to become the equivalent of a software engineering manager or a product manager, because suddenly you don’t have to do the coding anymore. You’re managing AI that is coding for you. Either you start to have some manager hat, but we saw the humans, so it’s a very different type of manager, obviously, or you are going to be really an empowered product manager. You’re skipping the middleman. You’re skipping the traditional engineering organization because your engineering organization is AI running and doing the work for you. I still believe that it requires some serious skills. I don’t believe in the vibe coder type of value proposition. I don’t believe in the prompt engineer becoming suddenly super incredible, able to manage that. I still think it requires some serious chops to do the best from all of this and to do it in a safe and sane way. It’s very easy to have poor taste, make mistakes. I don’t know you, but keep reading these stories on the heads of companies who lost everything because of the AI agents. That deleted stuff in production, and they had no backups or the backups weren’t deleted as well. Crazy situation. You cannot run companies like this if you let your agents running wild. You could argue it’s the early days. I would argue it that that issues would be there for a while. You need to have some engineering discipline at core in the company running the business to make sure things don’t go sideways because it would be easy for things to go sideways.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I totally agree. If you’re thinking, Oh, should my kid go into science and engineering and computer science, et cetera? Absolutely, still, because of everything that Bertrand just said. You need to understand actually what code does and what technology does and what all of that does. That’s still a skill of the future. It’s not a skill of the past. In some ways, it’s still a skill of the future very much. Maybe let’s try two more extremes. Around the same level, the person that decided to do an AI native company bootstrapped initially, having difficulty raising a mega round, but could probably get away with raising a 2-3 million seed round, et cetera. Is that still viable? The answer is yes. There’s tremendous capital efficiency right now happening in the market still, 10 plus higher than if you were doing a SaaS company, and you were a founder in 2019 or something like that. That capital efficiency is going to reverberate. You can run a tighter team, smaller team. Actually, you don’t need that many salaries. If you’re a decent engineer as a founder or if you understand enough as a product manager to just generate that code, you can do a lot of stuff yourself, can bring in maybe one or two technical elements to the team early on as you would have done if you were bootstrapped anyway. There’s obviously a path for that. The other extreme is you’re in big tech, you’re level five, individual contributor, making a ton of money, or you were a manager, and you’re now out of a job, where do you go? You can go to a big company that is non-tech, S&P 500 company that’s non-tech, something like that. You join the company, you’ll probably get paid pretty well, maybe not as high as you were paid in big tech. There’s some stock at the table, but guess what? You’ll have probably more work-life balance than you ever did. That’s the trade-off. You’ll have a better job. On the upside, you can transform the company. You can help and be part of transforming a company from non-AI to AI-first or AI-enabled in the future, whatever BS that will look like in terms of the argumentation to the board. You can actually create tremendous productivity enhancements in a big non-tech company if you come with that background. Again, you’ll have certainly a better work-life balance, so not a bad deal, to be honest.   Bertrand Schmitt Also, to be clear, I talk a lot about AI coding because it’s truly transformational. You could argue that it’s going to be self-improving. We are in the situation of a self-improving AI that keeps improving itself thanks to automated coding. It’s a dramatic, virtuous loop. Obviously, AI is also going to improve everything else. It’s going to improve your marketing, it’s going to improve your search process, it’s going to improve your DNA. Improvements will be everywhere. It’s just that right now we are at a point in the quote-unquote revolution where there is one clear piece of the puzzle that is moving faster than the rest.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Bertrand, the senior executives at non-tech don’t know anything about that. It could be just a great prompt engineer. That’s the only job you do. “I’m the chief marketing officer. I have someone below me that’s doing the whole work.” Nobody knows. Nobody’s the wiser, I guess. I’m being facetious, but not fully.   Bertrand Schmitt Yeah. There would be a transition period where what you described happen. I want to say, going back to AI coding, I think that the part of AI that as of today has reached a stage of limited AGI. We have reached, from my perspective, a limited type of AGI for coding. If you take coding as a discipline today, I think we reach AGI. If you go beyond coding, that’s true. If we are talking about coding, leveraging the latest LLMs: OPUS 4.7, ChatGPT 5.5, combined with Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode for harness, I think we’ve reached AGI in the context of coding. I’m not sure everyone fully realize that and the consequence of that. I think the rest is going to come as well. We are going to see that category by category, usually categories that are more scientific in nature, where you can replicate, where you can test easily, where you can create clear success. Metrics will be the “easiest” to follow in that direction of self-improvement. I just want to highlight that this part is truly transformational, the root cause of everything we’re talking about today. At the same time, it’s coming beyond coding.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro I think it is true. There are a couple of markets where that might not hold true, which is maybe the final path. If you’re thinking of starting your own business in plumbing and in HVAC maintenance and installation, this is a pretty good time for the reasons we already said before. There’s a lot of buildup of data centers and all that stuff, but also for other reasons, because it’s an activity that won’t be disrupted by AI yet. You need them embodied AI. You need physicality to AI to do stuff like actually fixing pipes.   Bertrand Schmitt Until Optimus replace you.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Yeah, but if we’re 3, 4 years out in terms of a lot of these optimizations that we’re talking about at the software layer, we’re 10 years plus out on embodied AI, right?   Bertrand Schmitt Oh, yeah, it’s 10 years.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro We’ll probably be optimistic as we speak. That’s a nice business. I’m thinking of starting to go into that market. If you guys are interested in listening to this, just reach out to me. What’s the angle? I think there’s a lot of stuff you can do in the buildup of some of these businesses, plumbing, HVAC, all sorts of maintenance. There are markets that are just totally messed up. Handyman market in the US is totally messed up. There’s a bunch of companies out there that try to go after it with marketplaces and stuff. I honestly just start something from scratch, a small business, and go from there.   Bertrand Schmitt Yes. They’re an interesting middle. Think about accounting firms, consulting firms. I think they are not as easy to replace, but at the same time, there is no way on what they do is not going to be dramatically changed with AI. I don’t know if it’s 50, 80, 90% of the job, but this is changing quite dramatically, would be my expectation in the coming few years. Conclusion Thanks for listening episode 77 of Tech Deciphered about that great talent redistribution. As you heard it from us, we believe there is a dramatic change in play, enabled by AI coding, and that ultimately a lot of the big tech companies are changing their employee distribution, way more focused on the top talents and bringing more GPUs. As a result, we will see a change in their staffing. Some of this change will benefit AI-focused startups, but probably more likely will benefit the bigger SMBs, the S&P 500 companies of the world that will finally be able to bring inside and afford some of the talent that were in some ways trapped by the top 5, 10, 20 software companies of the world. Thank you, Nuno.   Nuno Goncalves Pedro Thank you, Bertrand

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When a client's motivation dips, nothing else survives the fall. Compliance drops. Consistency disappears. Effort fades. And without those three things, results become impossible — which circles right back to episode one's core fear: the client who isn't getting results.But here's what doesn't work: yelling louder. Making the program harder. Wondering why a fully employed adult with a family, a mortgage, and a calendar full of obligations isn't matching the energy you bring to the gym floor every day. We can't force motivation. What we can do is get curious, get empathetic, and get strategic.Big THANK YOU to our sponsors:- CoachRX - Hands down, the best platform for coaches. From building your intake & assessment processes to individual program design, invoicing and education, CoachRX has you covered. Get your first 30 days FREE - Try CoachRX- Performance Supplements - go to www.performance-supp.com & use the code smarterstrength at checkout to save 15% on your entire order (I'm a big fan of their Krea-Grow - everything you need to support high quality training sessions!)- AbMat - go to www.abmat.com & use the code drdavid at checkout to save 10% of your entire order (get a Zercher Pad - your elbows will thank you!)THE SOLUTION: THE THREE C'SDr. David Skolnik introduces a practical three-part framework for coaches dealing with unmotivated clients.Capacity — Before you adjust the program, adjust your lens. What does this client's life actually allow right now? Work stress, family obligations, sleep quality, caregiving responsibilities — all of it affects how much a person can bring to their training. Their capacity this month may look nothing like it did six months ago, and that's not failure. That's life. Your job is to meet them where they are.Clarity — Are you and your client still on the same page about what they're working toward — and does the current plan reflect that? Goals shift. Life changes fast. A well-designed 12-week block can become completely misaligned with a client's reality by week six. Rebuild the communication. Reclarify the target. Make sure the plan still makes sense for the person standing in front of you today.Core Values — Motivation comes and goes. Discipline fluctuates. But core values — the one or two fundamental qualities a person anchors their identity to — do not change. David draws on Brené Brown's Dare to Lead and the OPEX coaching method to make the case: when training is connected to a client's core values (health, accountability, integrity, service, freedom), it stops being optional. It becomes part of who they are.THE QUESTION THAT CHANGES EVERYTHINGEvery coach has been there: a client who says they want results but isn't doing the work. The instinct is to push. To confront. To ask "why aren't you trying harder?" David challenges coaches to reframe entirely — and ask instead: what is making this feel hard? That one shift lowers defensiveness, opens conversation, and gets directly to the root of the capacity, clarity, or values disconnect driving the motivation problem.RESOURCES Core Values List — Use it yourself first, then share it with clients.Dare to Lead by Brené Brown — Referenced for its framework on identifying and living by core values.CoachRx — The coaching platform David uses and recommends. Listeners get a 30-day free trial using the link in the show notes. Manage client programs, billing, goal setting, habit tracking, and communication all in one place.NEXT WEEK — EPISODE 3Clients who don't value coaching as much as they should — and what coaches are supposed to do about it.Want more content? Follow Dr. David on Instagram: @dr.davidskolnik.dpt

Join Mike Morgan of OPEX as we explore the evolving landscape of warehouse automation. In this episode, we discuss how AI and robotics are reshaping logistics, offering insights into the future of supply chains. Whether you're a logistics professional or a tech enthusiast, this conversation provides a thoughtful look at the innovations driving change in the industry. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Warehouse operators are under pressure to grow without expanding their footprint. In this episode of The New Warehouse Podcast, Kevin Lawton speaks with John Sauer of OPEX live from MODEX 2026. The conversation explores how OPEX is approaching scalable warehouse automation through flexible goods-to-person systems, faster deployment timelines, and new automation capabilities inside existing facilities. The discussion highlights the ways warehouses are balancing throughput, storage density, labor reduction, and flexibility in today's landscape.Learn more about our sponsor Dexory's Storage Health here. Follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube.Support the show

Ezra Firestone is the CEO of Boom! Beauty, Overtone, and Zipify, and the founder of Smart Marketer. Learn more from his content and courses at https://smartmarketer.com/.FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREWX: https://x.com/andrewjfarisEmail: podcast@ajfgrowth.comWork With AJF Growth: https://ajfgrowth.comMOVE SUPPLY CHAINReduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting, AI, and offshore talent by visiting https://movesupplychain.com/.INTELLIGEMSIntelligems brings A/B testing to business decisions beyond copy and design. Test your pricing, shipping charges, free shipping thresholds, offers, SaaS tools, and more by clicking here: https://bit.ly/42DcmFl. Get 20% off the first 3 months with code FARIS20.

Pre-show: Project Hail Mary Reconcilable Differences #286: Ain’t Nothin’ Gonna Break My Stride Setlist Bandcamp Luke Bloom — Bad D. H. T. — Listen to Your Heart Apocalyptica Vitamin String Quartet Johnny Cash — Hurt Follow-up: CapEx vs. OpEx (via Andrew Leahey) Bloomberg “Hot lot” (via Anonymous & Matt Jones) Ultra/Neo/etc Is the “iPhone Ultra” the 20th anniversary iPhone? (via Janne Ojaniemi) Did we forget about “Studio”? (via Karan J) What’s the ∆ between an iMac Neo and a Studio Display? (via Zoran Nešić) Time Machine …with lots of small files (via Jon Wilson & Andrew Hathaway) Asimov …with spinning disks (via Ben Mattison & Carlos Pereira) …period (via David Fokkema) lsof Apple agrees to pay iPhone owners $250M for fumbling AI Siri Apple is flirting with Intel and Samsung Apple’s Newsroom post about US manufacturing Apple and Intel have reached an agreement? (Apple News+ link) Ask ATP: How do we actually move files around our Macs? (via Brandon Whichard) Yoink MD5 Do we use a profile/theme for Terminal windows? (via Chris Harper) Prompt 3 Do we use any other IDEs? (also via Chris Harper) LSP Intelephense Post-show: .nofollow Apple developer forum post Symlink .nosync, .noindex, .nobackup Hopper MJ Tsai Apple open-source Swift SE-0529: Add FilePath to the Standard Library Safe Path Handling: Why Secure Filesystem Operations Are Harder Than You Think Members-only ATP Overtime: Non-developers building apps Ben Dansby Sponsored by: Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code atp. Zapier: Put AI to work across your company—for real. Quince: Elevated essentials and staples that last. Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!

Have you ever considered how a single server can support countless applications and workloads at once? In this episode, hosts Lois Houston and Nikita Abraham explore the sophisticated technologies that make this possible in modern cloud data centers. They discuss the roles of hypervisors, virtual machines, and containers, explaining how these innovations enable efficient resource sharing, robust security, and greater flexibility for organizations.   Cloud Tech Jumpstart: https://mylearn.oracle.com/ou/course/cloud-tech-jumpstart/152992 Oracle University Learning Community: https://education.oracle.com/ou-community LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/showcase/oracle-university/ X: https://x.com/Oracle_Edu   Special thanks to Arijit Ghosh, Anna Hulkower, Radhika Banka, and the OU Studio Team for helping us create this episode.   ----------------------------------------------------   Episode Transcript:   00:00 Hi there! We're hitting rewind for the next few weeks and bringing back some of our most popular episodes. So, sit back and enjoy these highlights from our archive. 00:12 Welcome to the Oracle University Podcast, the first stop on your cloud journey. During this series of informative podcasts, we'll bring you foundational training on the most popular Oracle technologies. Let's get started! 00:38 Lois: Hello and welcome to the Oracle University Podcast! I'm Lois Houston, Director of Innovation Programs with Oracle University, and with me is Nikita Abraham, Team Lead: Editorial Services. Nikita: Hi everyone! For the last two weeks, we've been talking about different aspects of cloud data centers. In this episode, Orlando Gentil, Principal OCI Instructor at Oracle University, joins us once again to discuss how virtualization, through hypervisors, virtual machines, and containers, has transformed data centers. 01:11 Lois: That's right, Niki. We'll begin with a quick look at the history of virtualization and why it became so widely adopted. Orlando, what can you tell us about that?  Orlando: To truly grasp the power of virtualization, it's helpful to understand its journey from its humble beginnings with mainframes to its pivotal role in today's cloud computing landscape. It might surprise you, but virtualization isn't a new concept. Its roots go back to the 1960s with mainframes. In those early days, the primary goal was to isolate workloads on a single powerful mainframe, allowing different applications to run without interfering with each other. As we moved into the 1990s, the challenge shifted to underutilized physical servers. Organizations often had numerous dedicated servers, each running a single application, leading to significant waste of computing resources. This led to the emergence of virtualization as we know it today, primarily from the 1990s to the 2000s. The core idea here was to run multiple isolated operating systems on a single physical server. This innovation dramatically improved the resource utilization and laid the technical foundation for cloud computing, enabling the scalable and flexible environments we rely on today. 02:39 Nikita: Interesting. So, from an economic standpoint, what pushed traditional data centers to change and opened the door to virtualization? Orlando: In the past, running applications often meant running them on dedicated physical servers. This led to a few significant challenges. First, more hardware purchases. Every new application, every new project often required its own dedicated server. This meant constantly buying new physical hardware, which quickly escalated capital expenditure. Secondly, and hand-in-hand with more servers came higher power and cooling costs. Each physical server consumed power and generated heat, necessitating significant investment in electricity and cooling infrastructure. The more servers, the higher these operational expenses became. And finally, a major problem was unused capacity. Despite investing heavily in these physical servers, it was common for them to run well below their full capacity. Applications typically didn't need 100% of server's resources all the time. This meant we were wasting valuable compute power, memory, and storage, effectively wasting resources and diminishing the return of investment from those expensive hardware purchases. These economic pressures became a powerful incentive to find more efficient ways to utilize data center resources, setting the stage for technologies like virtualization. 04:18 Lois: I guess we can assume virtualization emerged as a financial game-changer. So, what kind of economic efficiencies did virtualization bring to the table? Orlando: From a CapEx or capital expenditure perspective, companies spent less on servers and data center expansion. From an OpEx or operational expenditure perspective, fewer machines meant lower electricity, cooling, and maintenance costs. It also sped up provisioning. Spinning a new VM took minutes, not days or weeks. That improved agility and reduced the operational workload on IT teams. It also created a more scalable, cost-efficient foundation which made virtualization not just a technical improvement, but a financial turning point for data centers. This economic efficiency is exactly what cloud providers like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure are built on, using virtualization to deliver scalable pay as you go infrastructure.  05:22 Nikita: Ok, Orlando. Let's get into the core components of virtualization. To start, what exactly is a hypervisor? Orlando: A hypervisor is a piece of software, firmware, or hardware that creates and runs virtual machines, also known as VMs. Its core function is to allow multiple virtual machines to run concurrently on a single physical host server. It acts as virtualization layer, abstracting the physical hardware resources like CPU, memory, and storage, and allocating them to each virtual machine as needed, ensuring they can operate independently and securely. 06:02 Lois: And are there types of hypervisors? Orlando: There are two primary types of hypervisors. The type 1 hypervisors, often called bare metal hypervisors, run directly on the host server's hardware. This means they interact directly with the physical resources offering high performance and security. Examples include VMware ESXi, Oracle VM Server, and KVM on Linux. They are commonly used in enterprise data centers and cloud environments. In contrast, type 2 hypervisors, also known as hosted hypervisors, run on top of an existing operating system like Windows or macOS. They act as an application within that operating system. Popular examples include VirtualBox, VMware Workstation, and Parallels. These are typically used for personal computing or development purposes, where you might run multiple operating systems on your laptop or desktop. 07:08 Nikita: We've spoken about the foundation provided by hypervisors. So, can we now talk about the virtual entities they manage: virtual machines? What exactly is a virtual machine and what are its fundamental characteristics? Orlando: A virtual machine is essentially a software-based virtual computer system that runs on a physical host computer. The magic happens with the hypervisor. The hypervisor's job is to create and manage these virtual environments, abstracting the physical hardware so that multiple VMs can share the same underlying resources without interfering with each other. Each VM operates like a completely independent computer with its own operating system and applications.  07:53 Lois: What are the benefits of this? Orlando: Each VM is isolated from the others. If one VM crashes or encounters an issue, it doesn't affect the other VMs running on the same physical host. This greatly enhances stability and security. A powerful feature is the ability to run different operating systems side-by-side on the very same physical host. You could have a Windows VM, a Linux VM, and even other specialized OS, all operating simultaneously. Consolidate workloads directly addresses the unused capacity problem. Instead of one application per physical server, you can now run multiple workloads, each in its own VM on a single powerful physical server. This dramatically improves hardware utilization, reducing the need of constant new hardware purchases and lowering power and cooling costs. And by consolidating workloads, virtualization makes it possible for cloud providers to dynamically create and manage vast pools of computing resources. This allows users to quickly provision and scale virtual servers on demand, tapping into these shared pools of CPU, memory, and storage as needed, rather than being tied to a single physical machine. 09:25 Do you want to boost your data management skills for free? The Oracle Data Platform Foundations Associate Learning Path covers everything from Autonomous Database to modern data architectures like lakehouse and mesh—and prepares you for the certification. Get started today by visiting mylearn.oracle.com. 09:50 Nikita: Welcome back! Orlando, let's move on to containers. Many see them as a lighter, more agile way to build and run applications. What's your take? Orlando: A container packages an application in all its dependencies, like libraries and other binaries, into a single, lightweight executable unit. Unlike a VM, a container shares the host operating system's kernel, running on top of the container runtime process. This architectural difference provides several key advantages. Containers are incredibly portable. They can be taken virtually anywhere, from a developer's laptop to a cloud environment, and run consistently, eliminating it works on my machine issues. Because containers share the host OS kernel, they don't need to bundle a full operating system themselves. This results in significantly smaller footprints and less administration overhead compared to VMs. They are faster to start. Without the need to boot a full operating system, containers can start up in seconds, or even milliseconds, providing rapid deployment and scaling capabilities. 11:08 Nikita: Ok. Throughout our conversation, you've spoken about the various advantages of virtualization but let's consolidate them now.  Orlando: From a security standpoint, virtualization offers several crucial benefits. Each VM operates in its own isolated sandbox. This means if one VM experiences a security breach, the impact is generally contained to that single virtual machine, significantly limiting the spread of potential threats across your infrastructure. Containers also provide some isolation. Virtualization allows for rapid recovery. This is invaluable for disaster recovery or undoing changes after a security incident. You can implement separate firewalls, access rules, and network configuration for each VM. This granular control reduces the overall exposure and attack surface across your virtualized environments, making it harder for malicious actors to move laterally. Beyond security, virtualization also brings significant advantages in terms of operational and agility benefits for IT management. Virtualization dramatically improves operational efficiency and agility. Things are faster. With virtualization, you can provision new servers or containers in minutes rather than days or weeks. This speed allows for quicker deployment of applications and services. It becomes much simpler to deploy consistent environment using templates and preconfigured VM images or containers. This reduces errors and ensures uniformity across your infrastructure. It's more scalable. Virtualization makes your infrastructure far more scalable. You can reshape VMs and containers to meet changing demands, ensuring your resources align precisely with your needs. These operational benefits directly contribute to the power of cloud computing, especially when we consider virtualization's role in enabling cloud and scalability. Virtualization is the very backbone of modern cloud computing, fundamentally enabling its scalability. It allows multiple virtual machines to run on a single physical server, maximizing hardware utilization, which is essential for cloud providers. This capability is core of infrastructure as a service offerings, where users can provision virtualized compute resources on demand. Virtualization makes services globally scalable. Resources can be easily deployed and managed across different geographic regions to meet worldwide demand. Finally, it provides elasticity, meaning resources can be automatically scaled up or down in response to fluctuating workloads, ensuring optimal performance and cost efficiency. 14:18 Lois: That's amazing. Thank you, Orlando, for joining us once again.  Nikita: Yeah, and remember, if you want to learn more about the topics we covered today, go to mylearn.oracle.com and search for the Cloud Tech Jumpstart course.  Lois: Well, that's all we have for today. Until next time, this is Lois Houston… Nikita: And Nikita Abraham, signing off! 14:37 That's all for this episode of the Oracle University Podcast. If you enjoyed listening, please click Subscribe to get all the latest episodes. We'd also love it if you would take a moment to rate and review us on your podcast app. See you again on the next episode of the Oracle University Podcast.

Brent Kochuba of SpotGamma joins Jack Forehand for the May 2026 OPEX Effect to break down what options positioning is saying after a massive AI and semiconductor-led market rally. They discuss SPX call volume, zero DTE options, dealer gamma, VIX expiration, NVIDIA earnings, oil risk, AI CapEx, and why options flows may help explain both the market's recent melt-up and the potential for a volatility shift after OPEX.Guest LinksBrent Kochuba on Xhttps://x.com/spotgammaSpotGammahttps://spotgamma.com/Topics CoveredWhy the market has ignored oil shocks and geopolitical risk while AI earnings dominate investor attentionHow AI CapEx, semiconductors and mega-cap tech have driven a powerful melt-up in stocksWhy options volume and zero DTE trading are increasingly important for all investorsHow dealer hedging, delta and gamma can affect stock market movesWhy options expiration can create short-term turning points in markets and volatilityWhat the May OPEX setup says about call-heavy positioning in the S&P 500Why single-stock options activity in NVIDIA, Tesla, Apple, Amazon and AI-related names mattersHow record SPX call volume is being driven by short-dated options flowsWhy Brent is watching VIX expiration, NVIDIA earnings and May 19 to May 20 for volatility expansionWhat oil, VIX, correlation and dispersion are signaling about market riskTimestamps00:00 Intro: SPX call volume, call-heavy positioning and transient options flows00:57 Are we in melt-up mode?05:29 AI, UFOs and how fast market narratives are changing09:00 Why options flows matter more for everyday investors13:39 Could SpaceX become the next huge options market?16:00 How dealer hedging, delta and gamma move through the market20:44 Why OPEX can become a turning point for stocks and volatility23:22 Why May OPEX is so call heavy28:07 The market rally into May expiration33:00 AI rebranding, meme behavior and downside headline risk36:07 Reviewing last month's oil and volatility setup40:17 How the war flipped market leadership back to tech44:13 Dealer gamma support in the S&P 50049:19 Single-stock gamma in NVIDIA, Tesla, Apple and Amazon51:06 Record SPX call volume and the role of zero DTE54:55 Semiconductor, AI and memory call volume57:50 From bearish positioning to peak-bull dispersion59:22 Oil, the S&P 500 and changing correlations01:03:06 COR1M, dispersion risk and when Brent considers hedging01:04:57 Brent's key takeaways for May OPEX and volatility expansion

Part 1:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4W7c7VShr4&pp=0gcJCd8KAYcqIYzvFOLLOW UP WITH ANDREWX: https://x.com/andrewjfarisEmail: podcast@ajfgrowth.comWork With AJF Growth: https://ajfgrowth.comMOVE SUPPLY CHAINReduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting, AI, and offshore talent by visiting https://movesupplychain.com/.ECOM EXPERTSGet Shopify dev work that's reliable, affordable, and drives real conversion increases for your store with AJF Growth's preferred dev partner at https://ecomexperts.io/.

Grace Khanuja of Novaspace investigates how satellite operators embracing virtual ground systems aren't simply trying to reduce their hardware footprints but also to integrate with telecom networks, maximize capacity and move customers to an OpEx model to compete with megaconstellations such as Starlink. Novaspace laid out the business case for virtual ground in a February white paper, even comparing the financial models for a virtualized versus traditional hardware-based systems over five years.

This week, Marc sits down with Steve Shakespeare to unpack the evolution of distribution, the rise of Strategic Growth Solutions, and how Arrow is redefining what a modern channel partnership looks like.  A sharp, honest conversation about transformation, vendor expectations, and the future of value in the channel.  They cover: Why traditional distribution alone isn't enough anymore  How Arrow because the sales and marketing engine for Broadcom & Citrix The real impact of the Broadcom shake-up on partners  Why resellers must shift from "products" to "solutions" The rise of MSP models and OPEX-led buying  What agility really looks like inside a distributor  Steve's 35-year Intel journey and why he finally left  A brilliant episode for anyone in distribution, vendor leadership, or building the next era of channel growth. 

Send us Fan MailLEARN THE CAPITAL RAISING STRATEGIES AND FRAMEWORKS used by alternative asset professionals: https://go.fundraisecapital.co/applyDOWNLOAD The Complete Playbook on How To Start a Fund: https://go.fundraisecapital.co/how-to-start-a-fundIn this episode of Making Billions, Ryan Miller explains why a fund is a scaling vehicle, not a launching vehicle, emphasizing that the $100 million equity floor is the minimum threshold for operational viability. For fund managers and high-net-worth investors, understanding the math behind management fees and unavoidable OPEX is the first step in avoiding the common "10-year trap" that kills most emerging managers.How do you launch a fund without going broke?Build the $100M Floor: Only launch a blind-pool fund when you have enough equity to cover the $250k+ in annual operating costs.Use SPVs to Scale: Prove your track record through deal-by-deal vehicles before committing to the complexity of a full fund structure.Sequence Trust First: Establish your brand through content and consistent returns so that LPs are ready to commit before you pay for formation.[THE HOST]: Ryan Miller is a fund manager, capital strategist, and former CFO turned angel investor in technology and energy. He is the founder of Fund Raise Capital and Aequor Capital Partners, and has mentored over 1,000 fund managers across private equity, private credit, venture capital, real estate, and alternative assets globally.Subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTOe79EXLDsROQ0zSupport the showDISCLAIMER: This podcast is for entertainment and general informational purposes only — not legal, financial, tax, or investment advice. Nothing herein constitutes a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any security or investment product. Past performance does not indicate future results. Always consult qualified legal, financial, and tax professionals before making any investment decision. NAME NOTICE: "Making Billions with Ryan Miller" reflects the profile and aspirations of guests featured — it is not a promise, projection, guarantee, or representation of any financial result, income, or outcome for any listener, viewer, or reader. Most individuals who consume this content do not raise any particular amount of capital, and many achieve no financial result whatsoever. "Fund Raise Capital" is a brand identifier only — it is not a promise, guarantee, or representation that any member, subscriber, or listener will raise capital, attract investors, or achieve any financial or professional outcome. This show does not constitute a business opportunity, franchise, investment program, or offer of any product or service of any kind. No part of this show should be construed as a solicitation for investment in any way. Guest views are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the show or host. Host and/or guests may hold positions in assets discussed. This episode may contain paid sponsorships, advertisements, or endorsements. Sponsored content is identified where...

Who Buys the First Data Center Water Company? And When Does the Repricing Start? Data center water treatment is a $1.1 billion market growing nearly 15% per year, with 60% of spending recurring - generating an "infinite money glitch" for the righty designed water tech companies. So, strategic buyers, private equity sponsors, and VC-backed platforms are racing to consolidate water tech expertise. Meanwhile, hyperscalers spending $50 billion a year on infrastructure have made zero water acquisitions... for how long?

FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/andrewjfaris⁠ Email: ⁠podcast@ajfgrowth.com⁠Work With AJF Growth: ⁠https://ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠INTELLIGEMSIntelligems brings A/B testing to business decisions beyond copy and design. Test your pricing, shipping charges, free shipping thresholds, offers, SaaS tools, and more by clicking here: ⁠https://bit.ly/42DcmFl⁠. Get 20% off the first 3 months with code FARIS20.MOVE SUPPLY CHAINReduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting, AI, and offshore talent by visiting movesupplychain.com⁠.

Nicole Johnson Murphy, CEO of ECO TLP, and Gordon Jackson join to discuss concrete floating wind foundations, production-line construction, and markets from Hawaii to Japan. Sign up now for Uptime Tech News, our weekly newsletter on all things wind technology. This episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn more about Weather Guard’s StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS retrofit. Follow the show on YouTube, Linkedin and visit Weather Guard on the web. And subscribe to Rosemary’s “Engineering with Rosie” YouTube channel here. Have a question we can answer on the show? Email us! Welcome to Uptime Spotlight, shining Light on Wind. Energy’s brightest innovators. This is the progress powering tomorrow. Allen Hall: Offshore wind obviously is a big deal right now. There’s a lot of, countries looking at it and investigating it, doing it, but not really at scale yet. And this is where ECO TLP comes in and. Nicole, let’s just start there with a background. What problem were you trying to solve when you started ECO TLP? Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah, so, we were designing for, a site off of Hawaii in 2011, for the HECO RFP. And so we were designing for 300 meter water depth from the beginning. so we were always trying to find a way to work with the ports, with the vessel, with the infrastructure that was existing off Hawaii. And with, and that worked with Jones Act vessels. So we were always trying to meet that [00:01:00] requirement with, and meet the cost, try to, we saw there were much tighter margins in offshore wind than in oil and gas, for example, at that water depth. So we’re trying to find something that was cost effective.  Allen Hall: Next question, obviously is what makes those deep water foundations so difficult? Gordon Jackson: It’s the water depth, primarily, you need to put foundations down in, extremely deep water. and they’re gonna be pretty flexible. so you’re trying to control the amount of motion that you get at the surface through your, your deep water, facility. it’s really. Really that challenge, and, the weight of components through the water depth, likes of chain would be completely impossible. in 300 meters of water. you need to use something that’s a little bit lighter. Yeah, to mow you to the, to the seabed. Allen Hall: [00:02:00] Because it does seem a little odd just not to make the foundations taller, basically. More steel drive it down in, we know that process, we understand that process. It works offshore, near shore in a, lot of locations. But once you get to what depth as it becomes financially or engineering wise, impossible.  Gordon Jackson: For offshore wind, fixed, structures in, maybe a hundred meters of water are gonna be. Economic. they’ll be costly compared to what’s been done now because, of all the extra structure you need for the, for the deeper water. But, I think you’ll see, a crossover between fixed and floating, around the, 70 to a hundred meter water mark. that’s sort the range. Allen Hall: And that leads to the next question, which is. It’s all financial, right? At some point, the numbers [00:03:00] don’t work. If the cost of foundations don’t come down, especially in fixed bottom offshore or floating offshore, we lose a lot of offshore wind resource. Nicole can you gimme a scale at what we’re missing if we don’t get to a more economical solution for floating offshore? Nicole Johnson-Murphy: So we’ve estimated for our market for, a very deep water market. So we now actually have a solution that goes across all water depths. So we’re starting with, this, gravity based structure now with, and, Gordon’s team has been really involved in that, development. And then now we can take that same slip form, concrete cylinder. Format and take it across all the water depths. so we basically can hit every water depth now for a very low cost. It’s a very simple, just, local, regionally designed and built, system. We, crowdsource the labor and the inputs. and so we [00:04:00] try to, and we also try to give the procurement team of our clients their, an ability to do their job and, be able to bid out aspects of our design, across. Different vendors. So you always wanna give, in construction, you always wanna give, the procurement team a job to do so they can actually get that price, keep that price down on the installation.  Allen Hall: Yeah, that’s a unique look that ECO TLP is putting to this problem. Which is moving away from steel, which is expensive obviously, and it’s difficult to transport at times to a more localized solution, which is concrete. And thinking about the problem a little bit differently, does that open up a number of doors then in terms of the countries that can get involved in, floating or near shore, wind projects, but just because you’re driving the cost down?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Absolutely. And I’ll let Gordon speak to that.. He’s worked. His whole career in offshore concrete. But I think it’s, I think it’s a, great, it’s the only way we would do it. We actually have shipyards in our companies, our partners own [00:05:00] shipyards, and we, just would never probably ex try to create this many units across the world and scale and steel. We’d only do concrete.  Gordon Jackson: Yeah. My first concrete project broke the mold of how you do, construction of concrete offshore structures. it was entirely built within a dry dock and, After we’d gone on and delivered that project, that was in the late eighties. I spent the next 10 years, working on projects all around the world, looking at doing the same sort of thing in different countries. because you only needed, 10, 12 meters of water, at the shore and you could, build a structure and get it out there in the water. It really opened up the market for offshore concrete structures that, that, first project that we did.  Allen Hall: So using that first project as leverage and knowledge of how to do these things, how much advantage [00:06:00] does concrete give you over steel? Gordon Jackson: It’s difficult to say because it bends country to country. And, quite often you’re competing against, steel built in some, very low cost fabrication countries. so if you’re in a high cost, high labor cost country, I worked in Australia, and the labor cost there was extremely high. So concrete wasn’t particularly cheap, but the overall solutions that we came up with, were cheap. Allen Hall: So does that involve basically like slip forms or how are you, thinking about that problem? Because it’s a huge engineering task and you only learn. By doing it on some level because all great plans, always run into trouble as soon as you try to implement them. So you took all that previous knowledge and then applied it to this problem, and now you have, basically [00:07:00]trimmed or, slimmed, the design down into, you have a, very economical model, even in more uneconomical economies because of labor laws and cost of labor and access and those kind of things. What does that look like now? And what’s your thought process on, Hey, this is what it’s gonna look like? Can we get, quayside how do we do this and how do we keep this thing simple? Gordon Jackson: The key thing is we’re looking at, a production line approach, which has been, it’s tried and tested for, for marine, concrete construction, construction of quay walls and and the we’re using exactly that same system. We’ve just been tried and tested to create a production line of, ECO TLP units or ECO GBS units where we’re building, onshore and where we’re going from station to station, doing a task at each station. [00:08:00] So it’s exactly like a production line, that you’re be familiar with and, you load out the completed structure onto a barge, and then you. Submerge that barge and your structure floats off and that’s, the real key to getting the, the economy from the concrete basis.  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah, and I’ll say that the OpEX is really something we focus a lot on because it’s not just what you’re doing on the CapEx and the development and the port, it’s actually that 30 year lifetime maintenance. And this is a, when you, we fully submerge our floater, which is basically inert in the ocean. It’s, very eco-friendly with the ocean. There’s no paint, there’s no, maintenance on the floater over the lifespan. You’re, monitoring those, the moorings and the, weight of any marine, buildup on those moorings and things like that. But generally it’s a very low maintenance solution and it’s very heavy and a comfortable car [00:09:00] ride for the turbine. It really has slow motions. it’s, almost like a, a high skyscraper in the water. you’re just the top of that skyscraper is moving a little bit. But you’re, you’re really giving it that comfortable, slow ride over its lifetime. It’s not hitting a lot of turbulence, like a different type of floater.  Allen Hall: Yeah. It is a different concept, really, right? That you have this mass at the bottom and you have this mass at the top, which is the, cell on the wind turbine. And if you can design it just right, everything dampens becomes stable. Even in turbulent water. How long did it take you to figure out that aspect of the design? Because it does seem like a lot of projects hit a, an end point right there because the motion of the turbine is not good for the lifetime of the turbine.  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: We, look at it as a, kind of hybrid spar, TLP so, the original design came from my late father who was, who had designed Ekofisk for Phillips [00:10:00] petroleum in the early. Late sixties, And, so he’d come from oil and gas and he’d come from that concrete, construction background. And, he is very comfortable with it. And I think, Gordon, that’s part of why I like working with Gordon ’cause Gordon has that same, long-term view on, these construction principles. And I think that, what we saw though is the margins are so different from oil and gas, and so you have to have almost a poor man’s TLP is what we would call it because it’s. It’s gotta be a very simple version of a TLP that can roll out in mass quantities. And, as coming up with a company that, business plan, you’d wanna be able to really scale the business. And so we had to come up with something that you can make. In different parts of the world at the same time, you’re not tied to one shipyard or one construction. Allen Hall: Even in terms of ship usage, you’re going to reduce the size of the ship considerably. You’re not using big dedicated ships that are really [00:11:00]expensive to operate or to keep in the area, even just to have them there as a lot of money. You’re thinking about, a different design in terms of. Simple ships that you can find locally. How much does that really lower the cost of deployment?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Quite a lot actually. it depends on, so the other, there’s this other, aspect of installing the wind turbine on the foundation. So we have this fixed to fixed platform concept where you come further, a little bit further offshore and, give you that, draft depth that we need. And then we have a fixed platform that just stays in place and, we bring the turbines to it and, float them out. It’s all a self floating unit, whether it’s the GBS that, Gordon’s been working with us and or the ECO TLP. So we’re really independent of those large vessels. for the most part, we’re, really try and then you, once you install the turbine, you can tow the entire unit out with two tugs. Two to three tugs.  Allen Hall: That’s remarkable. So essentially because you [00:12:00] used a basic henry Ford type process to, to create these foundations and to think about the problem differently. Not only can you deploy it, easier than a lot of things we’re doing right now on top of it, it works over a variety of depths and I think that’s a the hard thing for people to grasp because when we talk about offshore particularly start getting off the continental shelves here, you’re talking about. More than a hundred meters typically of water. But you also have a, the gravity based system and the TLP system are all interconnected into the basic philosophy. can you explain like the, backbone of how that engineering works? Gordon Jackson: It’s essentially, it’s, we’re using the same structural form in both, fixed and floating. It’s basically, it’s two cylinders, one inside the other. A little bit of structure, which joins the two cylinders together. that’s it.  Allen Hall: Gordon, you make it sound so simple, but the, [00:13:00]engineering is complicated to get to that point. And once you get to that level of, oh, that design actually works in a variety of depths, that opens up your customer base quite a bit. Have you had inquiries from nearshore people? Or fixed bottom people thinking whoa, I could actually save myself a bunch of time and money, which is the real limiting factor on offshore wind at the moment. Are you starting to see some momentum there that, operators, developers are starting to rethink this problem and not just do what they did last week? Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Absolutely. one of the ways we came about the g you know, taking the ECO TLP and transforming it to the ECO GBS was, recommended by a client, was, that was their ask actions. That’s always the best way to start a product development cycle because, somebody’s interested. and I think, and part of the reason I found Gordon to work with early on in our, the life of our company is, his background in, in GBS development. He did, he developed the Gravitas GBS [00:14:00] 10 years ago. So I think we, we got lucky that our, civil structural engineering partner with ARUP was, already really comfortable with, looking at this. So I think that’s, part of, you always want the clients to be interested, before you start investing. You don’t wanna design a product that’s in your head or your, in your company lunchroom without a real ask for it.  Allen Hall: And I, think also you have a, once you have the engineering pretty well done and. Obviously do now you’re trying to touch a number of countries and every culture has its own way of, one of the construction business to do it slightly differently. South Korea does it different than Scotland, for example. You are working across cultures and trying to make the same design. apply to all those different areas. Are, have you learned [00:15:00] some things from that? Is it, are you able to basically set the same assembly line in every place? or are there different, kinds of concrete, different kinds of access, different kinds of ports that you have to deal with? What are those variables there that, that change the way you do business? Gordon Jackson: All the characteristics, ports are, obviously different. Really you just need space. And access to reasonably deep water from, that, from that space. And, it can get surprisingly difficult to find that, certainly in the UK and, in Northern Europe, people wanna build marines and, waterfront living, rather than having, an industrial facility, on the doorsteps. In, developed countries it can be hard to find that space. But, in some, parts of the world, there’s lots of [00:16:00] space, available. some good port facilities that can be utilized. and then it’s just in, in all civil engineering works, you go to do the job, you go wherever the job is, you mobilize there. You put in the systems, and equipment that you need to build, a structure, and then normally you go away at the end of the job, you hand it over to the client. you know what, what, would be good here is if we could set up some regional centers where you’ve done the, investment in the yard, and then you can, you can amortize those costs of development over a number of projects. Then you should start to see, real, real good cost savings.  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Just one thing, our footprint of our, cylinders is about a third of the footprint of a semi-sub, for example. [00:17:00] So, our footprint on the land port is very small.  Allen Hall: I think that makes sense because if you watch the fixed bottom projects, particularly in the United States. The first thing they had to do is rebuild the ports. The ports weren’t set for the scale and so they needed to expand the ports. That means you have to acquire land, you’ve gotta develop it. There’s a lot of processes involved. ’cause you’re talking about city, state, and federal government being involved. Obviously federal in the United States is a problem. so just getting the port developed was a huge process for fixed bottom. You’re thinking about that differently though, because the reduced amount of space, the, you don’t have to be in a huge industrial area, but all obviously it would be nice, but you do run against that problem. Are you thinking, when you talk about regional centers, are you thinking kind of Mediterranean, west Coast, us, Australia, one in Japan? How do you think about that problem? Because [00:18:00] once you get a site established, it does seem like because of the, how fast you can move these things around that it’ll become a pretty good job center for a lot of people. Nicole Johnson-Murphy: Yeah. There’s a long-term maintenance, crew that needs to be developed while we build these. Yeah, I think, it’s been a moving target of what’s really gonna develop in offshore wind. It’s like Lucy and Charlie Brown with football. I think we, constantly try to, get lined up to, to kick football and then it falls. It’s more of the developers I, I feel for on that ’cause they’re these investing tremendous amount of money for these, development sites. We are open to any, we’ve been, we’ve looked at, some developers are looking at steel production and concrete production, two different reports servicing. An array and we’re really flexible. It doesn’t, matter. When we first started on that Hawaii project, we were gonna do floating barges to slipform. [00:19:00]And we talked about that with ARUP. Some still this floating dock idea and submerging that dock. And it’s just a matter of finding the right, a large enough, dock for that type of, so then you’re not even using the land base port. You’re learn, you’re using just to. Maybe a 400 foot frontage on the, along the port. Allen Hall: That’s amazingly small, right? Because if you look at some of these ports right now that are doing, fixed bottom offshore, they’re massive, they’re huge sites. You’re talking about something roughly a 10th of the scale to get the same end result, which is turbines in the water. Nicole Johnson-Murphy: For our part of it. We still, you still have the components and those are, that’s a, it’s another logistical challenge, and so I understand why the ports are. Looking at a lot more lay down space and things, maybe at a certain point these components are so large that they just stay on a vessel and they, and we take them off of a vessel directly and load them in. Allen Hall: Yeah, I think that’s one of the considerations [00:20:00] is do you really tie it to land in, terms of needing a, massive amount of space, acres of space, thousands of square meters of space. Do you need that or is this, or can you do it much more efficiently because that overhead adds up over time. Not only are you trying to save on, the ships and the, especially the dedicated ships, you’re also looking at smaller footprints on shore and doing it a lot more economically. What does that future look like now, because it does seem like we’re at a precipice where floating wind is no longer just being discussed. In theory, it’s, going to be implemented. What are those next steps here for ECO TLP?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: So next week we’re headed to Tokyo, to Japan for the wind expo. And, ARUP is also presenting at the Asia Wind Offshore Show. I think we’re, we’re, good to learn. There’s just so much to learn about each culture, and I think this is something that, Gordon and I’ve talked about in terms of these international [00:21:00] projects, you’ve, gotta understand your culture that you’re moving into and you’ve gotta understand how to mediate across those different companies that come in. Our company has seven different. Countries represented in our team. So right now, so, we’re, a US company, but we’re barely, we’re just by name, but I think most of our team members are not in the us and that’s international collaboration is something, I, really, loved working on it. And I think, so when we go to Japan next week, it’s really mainly just to learn. we don’t. We have a lot to learn about Japan, and that’s what’s fun about each of these regions.  Gordon Jackson: And that’s where we can help because, we’ve got a presence in Japan. We’ve been doing offshore wind in Japan, so we’re there, to help eight to ECO TLP with our, those little contacts and h do business, in Japan and things like that.[00:22:00] We have a big international network, so you know, it can help. Some, in some areas, open some doors and, forge some, some friendships between, count companies.  Allen Hall: Gordon you did a big project out in Perth, Australia, which is a difficult place, Australia is a very difficult place to manufacture things. What are some of the lessons learned and what was that process like?  Gordon Jackson: So he had a, client, a very small client who was prepared to. Seed responsibility for delivering his project to a, team, an alliance team. And he just, interviewed a number of teams and, we were lucky enough to be selected, as the team to deliver their project. There was no tendering, it was just done on, how the, client felt about the, individuals that he met. And that, that was [00:23:00] very new to me. And, the whole project was delivered, by companies from the uk, from Australia, from Singapore, from be Netherlands, the Marine, the marine, vessels. A lot of ’em are coming from, from, Northern Europe, even though you’re in Australia. And, every company wants to do things differently and they all want to look after their interests, but the big thing about this alliance project was that, you were focused on one particular project and we were, we were coached and, facilitated, and trained to, to throw away our, our company affiliations and work together. And, to collaborate together. And, [00:24:00] we’re all working towards the, end goal of delivering a particular product. And I think that’s, I think it’s got a lot of, lot of potential to be used in the offshore wind sector. This, was, an oil platform that we were gonna build on the, the northwest shelf of Australia, which happened to be built in concrete, because the client. The client came to us with a notion of, doing something in concrete, which we, took his idea, decided we could do something a little bit cheaper and more straightforward and, went on to deliver it. We were given the opportunity to deliver it. And, yeah, I, it was my best project. it was a tremendous experience for all the companies involved. And everyone made money so everyone’s happy.  Allen Hall: That is difficult, right? You do see on these offshore projects, people coming from around the world to [00:25:00] work on this one big effort, a lot of money, and at times, thousands of people involved. Companies stu stumble there, obviously because you’re trying to tie cultures, you’re trying to tie companies together, but at the end of the day, you have to get this project done. Are, there some top level lessons learned from that of, how to bridge those differences?  Gordon Jackson: I did another project, this was a steel project, where we had a US oil company. And, The successful contractor was Hyundai in Korea. And they said to, me over the course of the project, we always lose money with, with American oil companies. Why are we doing business with them? And it, all came down to the, the approach to the [00:26:00] contract. Hyundai used to working in a more collaborative way with our clients. Whereas, this project, this is what the contract says, this is what you’ve taken on to do, there’s no negotiation, you’ll do it and that’s how much money you’re getting. And, but they find that very difficult. And, it was at the time when they were opening up their business more internationally. And I think it was a big learning experience for them. Yeah I think a lot of the offshore wind tried to follow the same path and, yeah, I think more collaborative working is to be encouraged for me. More talking to each other and negotiating rather than, imposing.  Allen Hall: Where should developers go to find out more about ECO TLP? [00:27:00] Because you have a gravity based system. You got the tension leg platform, there’s a lot inside of the company. What’s the first stop? Should they visit your website? Should they connect with you on LinkedIn? Where do they go?  Nicole Johnson-Murphy: The LinkedIn where website is great.  Allen Hall: So go visit ECO TLP. It’s ecotlp.com. Nicole and Gordon, this has been a great discussion. I’ve learned a lot. It’s very exciting because I think you’re on the precipice of something great. So thank you for joining me today. Gordon Jackson: Thank you. Thank you.

Subscribe to the OPEX Effect on Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the OPEX Effect on Apple PodcastsThis episode of The Opex Effect breaks down why markets have remained surprisingly resilient despite geopolitical chaos, an oil shock, and extreme headline risk. Brent Kochuba joins Jack Forehand to analyze what's really driving the market beneath the surface—from options flows and gamma positioning to the collapse in volatility and what it signals for the next move.They explore how the options market is shaping price action in ways most investors miss, why the VIX collapsed despite elevated risk, and what positioning tells us about the path forward as we head into earnings and the next major options expiration.Topics covered:Why markets have stayed near highs despite war, oil spikes, and macro uncertaintyThe “taco trade” and why investors expect bad news to reverse quicklyHow options flows and dealer hedging are influencing stock pricesWhy call options are historically cheap heading into earningsThe mechanics of gamma, delta hedging, and market maker positioningWhy options expiration (OpEx) can act as a turning point for marketsThe divergence between oil prices and equity volatilityWhat the collapse in the VIX reveals about investor positioningThe role of zero-DTE options in reinforcing short-term market rangesKey resistance levels forming from call selling and what they mean for upsideTimestamps:00:00 Why markets aren't reacting to geopolitical chaos04:18 The “taco trade” and shifting market expectations07:30 How options flows influence stock market movements11:10 Why OpEx can drive market turning points13:05 Volatility compression and the gamma-volatility relationship15:30 How large options positioning shapes market behavior18:05 Why positioning has shifted toward calls20:00 Why this OpEx may be less impactful than prior ones22:00 Market positioning into earnings and key drivers ahead24:10 Using gamma maps to identify support and resistance27:00 Revisiting the JP Morgan collar trade and March lows30:00 Correlation spikes and the oil-volatility relationship33:00 Why oil has stopped driving equity volatility34:30 The breakdown between oil and VIX correlation36:00 Why volatility may reprice higher after OpEx37:05 The oil curve and expectations for a short-term shock39:40 One of the largest VIX collapses ever41:00 How options positioning drove the volatility unwind43:00 Why selling volatility has become a dominant strategy45:00 The feedback loop between rising markets and falling volatilityFor more information on SpotGamma and Brent's work:https://spotgamma.comFollow Brent on Twitter:https://twitter.com/spotgamma

Warehouse automation provider OPEX Corporation recently announced a technology partnership with Peltier to offer a first-of-its-kind, multi-temperature zone, multi-deep cold storage solution for automated fulfillment systems. Designed to maximize operational savings via labor, space and energy, the system allows grocery and ecommerce to enhance cold chain operations without freezer infrastructure. To learn more about how this technology is disrupting temperature-controlled logistics and its potential future applications, Monty McVaugh, who leads product management for the warehouse automation business line at OPEX and Hanson Li, co-founder and CEO of Peltier, joins From the Cold Corner. 

Recorded live from the Bitcoin for Corporations X Space, our panelists dive deep into the rapidly evolving landscape of digital credit and corporate bitcoin treasuries. Explore how forward-thinking companies are moving beyond simple "HODLing" to integrate Bitcoin into their core operational and financial strategies.Hunter Albright: Chief Revenue Officer at SALT Lending, a pioneer in Bitcoin-backed loans and digital credit solutions since 2016.Garry Krugljakow: CEO of Aifinyo, the first major Bitcoin treasury company in the German-speaking region, focusing on B2B financial services.Scott Ellam: Founder and CEO of XCE (Connecting Excellence Group), a UK-based executive recruitment firm that has successfully integrated a Bitcoin treasury into a high-growth service business.In this episode, you'll learn:The Shift to Digital Credit: Why Bitcoin is becoming the preferred collateral for a new generation of corporate loans and financial products.The "Hybrid" Business Model: How companies like Aifinyo and XCE use traditional cash-flowing operations to supercharge their Bitcoin accumulation.Hyper-Normalization: Why the integration of Bitcoin into "boring" industries like recruitment and invoicing is the key to mass corporate adoption.Treasury Resilience: How SMEs can leverage SALT's lending services to access liquidity for OpEx and CapEx without ever selling their underlying Bitcoin.Chapters:00:00 – Introductions: Meeting the Leaders of Digital Credit05:30 – Insights from Strategy World: What's Next for Corporate BTC?12:15 – Hunter Albright on the Evolution of Bitcoin Lending22:40 – Garry Krugljakow: Navigating the European Institutional Landscape35:10 – Scott Ellam: Building a Bitcoin-Aligned Operating Business48:25 – The Road to Vegas: Bitcoin for Corporations 2026Connect with our guests on X:Hunter Albright: @SALTlendingGarry Krugljakow: @aifinyoScott Ellam: @XCE_GroupFollow Bitcoin for Corporations:Stay updated on the latest in corporate Bitcoin strategy, research, and upcoming events in Las Vegas by following @BitcoinForCorps.

Podcast: PrOTect It All (LS 27 · TOP 10% what is this?)Episode: OT Cybersecurity That Works: Budgets, Soft Skills & AI Reality for Stronger DefensePub date: 2026-03-30Get Podcast Transcript →powered by Listen411 - fast audio-to-text and summarizationStrong OT cybersecurity programs aren't built on tools alone, they're built on strategy, communication, and smart investment. In this episode of Protect It All, host Aaron Crow is joined by cybersecurity expert Don C. Weber for a candid, real-world discussion on what it actually takes to build and sustain effective security programs across IT and OT environments. From CapEx vs OpEx decisions to the growing role of AI in both attack and defense, this conversation cuts through the noise and focuses on what drives real outcomes: understanding business workflows, aligning with leadership, and developing the soft skills needed to turn strategy into action. You'll learn: Why budgeting (CapEx vs OpEx) directly impacts security success The underrated power of soft skills in driving security programs How to connect cybersecurity efforts to business value and operations The role of pen testing and assessments in improving maturity Where AI adds value and where it introduces new risk How training and process understanding strengthen long-term resilience Whether you're building a new security program or scaling an existing one, this episode delivers practical, experience-driven insights to help you make smarter decisions and drive real impact. Tune in to learn how to align strategy, people, and investment for stronger OT cybersecurity only on Protect It All. Key Moments:  05:49 Technical skills and security requirements 09:10 Understanding data workflows 12:29 Building a vulnerability management program 13:26 Understanding organizational decision history 17:44 Budgeting challenges with CAPEX and OPEX 21:36 Steps in a security assessment 24:17 Starting a cybersecurity program 28:02 Prioritizing remote access security 31:21 Discussing AI's impact on cybersecurity 32:55 Using AI in cybersecurity 38:07 AI simplifying complex knowledge 40:35 AI tools making data queries easier 45:02 Detecting and responding faster 46:05 Networking and shared experiences About the guest:  Don C. Weber is a visionary cybersecurity leader who helps defenders safely prove security where it matters most in industrial operations. He is a SANS Principal Instructor, Founder of Cutaway Security, co-author of SANS ICS613: ICS/OT Penetration Testing & Assessments, and he also teaches SANS ICS410: ICS/SCADA Security Essentials to SANS student around the world. He brings years of field work into creating step-by-step labs and planning methods teams can use right away. How to connect Don:  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cutaway/  Cutaway Security: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cutaway-security-llc  CutSec Github: https://github.com/cutaway-security  CutSec GasPot HMI Lab: https://github.com/cutaway-security/gaspot-hmi-lab  SANS ICS ICS613 ICS/OT Penetration Testing and Assessments: https://www.sans.org/cyber-security-courses/ics-ot-penetration-testing-assessments Connect With Aaron Crow: Website: www.corvosec.com  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaronccrow Learn more about PrOTect IT All: Email: info@protectitall.co  Website: https://protectitall.co/  X: https://twitter.com/protectitall  YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@PrOTectITAll  FaceBook:  https://facebook.com/protectitallpodcast To be a guest or suggest a guest/episode, please email us at info@protectitall.co Please leave us a review on Apple/Spotify Podcasts: Apple   - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/protect-it-all/id1727211124 Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/1Vvi0euj3rE8xObK0yvYi4The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Aaron Crow, which is the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Listen Notes, Inc.

Lara Guevara is the CEO of Move Supply Chain, a supply chain agency based in the Philippines that serves DTC brands. Get her video content at https://youtube.com/@supplychainlara. Get her "Unboxed Weekly" newsletter at https://unboxedweekly.beehiiv.com/subscribe. Schedule a call with Move at https://movesupplychain.com. FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/andrewjfaris⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠podcast@ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Work with Andrew: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MOVE SUPPLY CHAINReduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting, AI, and offshore talent by visiting ⁠https://morestaffing.co/af⁠.

Quick question before we get started... which Easter candy are you most looking forward to this year? Whatever your answer is, we're going to use it. Because today we're building a financial Easter basket and matching some of your favorite candies to the products and tools that belong in a solid retirement plan. Important Links: Website: http://www.yourplanningpros.com Call: 844-707-7381   ----more---- Transcript:  Speaker 1  00:00 Quick question before we get started, which Easter candy are you most looking forward to? Yeah, that's my opener for the podcast this week, because we're going to talk about financial Easter baskets. So we're going to talk about candy and what they might say about you here this week on plan with the tax man. You   Speaker 1  00:35 everybody. Welcome into the podcast. This is plan with the tax man with Tony Morrow from tax Doctor Inc, at your planning pros.com that's where you can find them, online. Your planning pros.com, and Tony, we're gonna talk candy, because you and I are in our 50s and we love candy, but it don't love us as much anymore.   Tony Mauro  00:53 That's right. And I grew up eating candy and all these things, although my favorite Easter candy is not on there.   Speaker 1  01:00 Okay, we'll add that. Get to that at the end. Yeah, we'll add that in. So what are we going to do here? Is, I want to give you some, some, you know, Easter candy in lieu of the, you know, the end of the month here and Easter upon us. And we'll do a little financial Easter basket, and let you kind of give me some sort of, we'll do some sort of an analogy. I'll set you up with something, and I'll let you kind of talk about it, so we'll have a little bit of fun. So, are you a jelly bean kind of guy? Easter time? Do you like some jelly beans? You know? I like the kind of, what I would call those artisan jelly beans that they now have come out with, you know? So I do like them. But we always used to get just to run the mill stuff. Oh, yeah. Like, like, you know, I don't know Apple Cinnamon, or, you know, I don't know pumpkin spice or something, yes, although they probably do make a pumpkin spice Jelly Bean. And people are probably like, no pumpkins for October, not for, you know, April, but so, all right, the Jelly Bean, so, lots of colors, lots of combinations, right? And so maybe you're, maybe the analogy here is the 401 k right? Maybe, maybe some combinations, or some, some different things, some variety, potentially, yeah.   Tony Mauro  02:08 I think the biggest thing for, you know, the anchor of most retirement plans is either, you know, 401 K Sep, simple, you know, you name it as the anchor for what you're trying to do as you get toward the end.   Speaker 1  02:23 True and jelly beans are probably a good staple, a good anchor in the basket, if you will.   Tony Mauro  02:27 Yeah, you know, good anchor in the basket, you know. And you find them in every basket. If you don't have this, you know, you need to be starting it. Most employers are offering something these days, and you need to get started. I can't. We're in the midst of tax season, and I'll say this as a public service announcement, I and I've been doing taxes for 30 years. Is I always when I'm reviewing a return, look at somebody's w2 and look in box 12 and see what they're contributing or not contributing to their retirement plan. And many times I see the box check that they the company offers one, I see nothing being contributed, or I see a little bit, which is better than nothing, yeah, but you got to get it going, because it's one of the best deals on the street. It's usually some free money in there. And I think you need to start those early, the use time and compounding and everything else, so that you've got this anchor for when you you know, are at the end,   Speaker 1  03:22 yeah, I don't know why. I just got hit with it. You're talking about, you know, out there on the street, I'm thinking jelly beans in the street. And also I'm like, could you imagine a funny little world where we're out there dealing jelly beans on the corner? Hey, man, right, I got some, I got some pinks. I got some yellows. I got some of those, those terrible black ones. They're those are never very good. I'm not a big fan of, maybe it's just the, maybe it's just the, like black liquors, not very good   Tony Mauro  03:47 to me. I never did like the black ones. But I think, though, to your point, with the different colors, once you start contributing to one of these, then you need to have some diversification. Most, most retirement plans will offer you, you know, an array of different choices, which is, you know, probably behooves you to work with your advisor and come up with a strategy as to what those choices should be.   Speaker 1  04:09 Now, the Jelly Bean choices in the 401 k are, it's not crazy assortment of colors, right? So, like an IRA, you're going to have a lot more to choose from, you know, because you're kind of stuck with whatever they you know, the company goes within those 401 K options. So some people, Tony, often think about, hey, look, from a workplace plan, get that match, get that free money. But then maybe let's do some contributing to an individual account or something we set up so we have more control or more options. How do you feel about that strategy as well?   Tony Mauro  04:39 I like that strategy a lot. Well, that's what we generally will say, is, is somebody comes in, we tell them to start with their 401, K, get that company match. You could certainly continue to max that out if you want. Yeah, absolutely. And then one. Once you get to that point, then you've got to turn to outside. It might be a Roth, might be a traditional something like that. But yeah, if at least get the match. And then if you want more control, total control, then you have to go to an IRA or Roth. The only, the only drawback is, is you are limited on your contribution. So if you want to do more, you got to stay in that retirement plan with some of that. But yeah, they're all three are good ideas.   Speaker 1  05:17 Okay, all right, so moving on here with our Easter basket analogy, things you might find on the Easter basket and the candy, and then how that, you know, might correlate to something. Let's talk about peeps that teach the nasty. And if you like peeps, don't yell at me yet. I'm gonna give you I'm gonna do pros and cons here. But, you know, look, when you're a kid, man, they're colorful, they're fluffy. They're marshmallowy. A lot of kids like peeps, right? They're just kind of fun. You're kind of play with them. You stretch them out a little bit, you chomp on them. They're sticky on your fingers. But as you get a little older, I don't know, they're kind of nasty, right? And they're kind of a pain a little bit. But, you know, some people grow up and they still really love them. And this, to me, is got to be life insurance, right? Because it's kind of like when you're younger, you kind of dig it, right? And then you get older, you think, why do I like this? Or why do I do I even need this anymore?   Tony Mauro  06:08 Yeah, and, and just like peeps, and I don't like peeps anymore. I used to like them, right? Just like you life insurance generally, when we start talking about planning, is not very well, I would say, understood number one or used. So it's not everybody's first choice, that's for sure. And when we start talking to them about it, you know, everybody you know is going to die. And when you're younger, obviously, you know, especially today, term insurance is peanuts to get and protect your family. My son, who's 30, you know, got a new daughter. And, you know, home, and, you know, start accumulating debt, because they're just getting started, it's important that they have coverage. Yeah, for the family, in case one of them, you know, goes down. And yes, you can get some coverage through your employer, which obviously you want to take advantage of that. But it generally is not near enough to what you need, especially as you are younger now, as we age, we get in their 50s, like me, and I'm looking at my life insurance, and as some of this kind of is set to expire in the next five or 10 years, I don't need this much anymore, because I'm, you know, I'm closer to the end, all my bills are paid off, you know, it's in my other financial You know, situation is intact. So you may not need that. Now, some people say, Well, you know what, I don't care if I don't need it. I want it. I want to know if i i think a perfect scenario is I'm at retirement. This is me talking personally. I know that if I pass away, I can, I can, while I'm living, enjoy some of my money I've worked so hard for and I know that, okay, my son, if I'm going to pass money on to him, is gonna be taken care of through life insurance. And some people like, like, like, that angle as well,   Speaker 1  07:49 just like peeps, right? I mean, in some people love it, and it's not everyone. Some it's not everyone's first choice sometimes, right? So, but it could be a useful tool, right? As far as the life insurance thing, right, to pass on that wealth. So at least consider the conversation, have a chat and discuss it, because, again, life insurance is one of those pieces of the retirement strategy that, you know, it's, it's, there's some more wiggle room in there, but there it could be, or life insurance products in general, there could be some aspects of those tools that can be beneficial. So again, talk with your financial professional about that. And of course, Tony's here to help if you've got those questions as well. All right, inside the financial Easter basket, diving back in. Here we go. Here, robin's eggs. Okay, now, we didn't get these often, but occasionally we did. We get these interesting little candy, right? Kind of a divisive candy. Some love them. Some can't stand them. Kind of like peeps, really hard shell the speckled colors, right? Designed to look like a robin's egg. Some people just, my mom just used to use them for decorating. She'd be like, yeah, don't, you guys don't eat those, right? But maybe this is an emergency fund. Maybe this is kind of the analogy there, right? Where some people kind of feel like, you know, they don't really necessarily need it, and other advisors are like, it's a mandatory, you know, pillar of the retirement strategy?   Tony Mauro  09:01 Yeah, and I'm of the camp of, it's a required pillar of the strategy, because, and I think everybody should have one. You know, we tell our individual clients the goal is three to six months of income that you kind of hear that out on the streets in our business, with our business clients, we do accounting for, we're constantly harping on them for cash flow purposes is that you need to have 10% of your gross in your operating or OPEX account, yeah, generally at all times. And it's if it's not there yet. It's a goal. You work towards it. But everybody needs to have it. Because what happens when you have this emergency funding, whether you're individual or business, is it prevents small problems from becoming large problems. And in both cases, you know, on the individual side, you could lose your job, at least you've got a cushion till you find something else in business, you know, a product section or big client leaves, you've got a cushion until you build it back up. So I. Think you really take a big risk by not having one. And I think, as financial advisors, you know, we're trying to mitigate your risks, and so we, you work with me, you'll hear us harping on that that doesn't have to be go into the poor house until you get it built up. No, we're not saying that. But, you know, we want, we want a little bit of money going into that until we reach our goal. Yeah, it's very important.   Speaker 1  10:22 Yeah, you know, this is a little cheesy, but, I mean, it's kind of fun, right? So we're talking about this robin's egg thing, right? And some people, like, I said, just use them for decorating. You don't really eat them and emergency fun, right? You know, whether you love the idea or not, like the idea is that you hope that it just sits there and looks pretty. It's an account you never really have to crack into. Sorry, it   Tony Mauro  10:45 does work. And you know, I've had an emergency fund for, gosh, probably 24 or five years now, and it sat there. And I really it's at the point where I'm not, I'm not adding anymore, but I'm kind of starting to look at it and saying, Well, I wonder if I never use that, I get to retirement, right? Maybe I'll take it out and use it for a vacation fund or do something with it. But, yeah, you hope you never use it along   Speaker 1  11:06 the way. But that's a great point, though, Tony, because there is that argument, switch of the emergency fund once you are retired and you're not doing that, replacing, you know, expenses. Should you lose your job? What do you do? You even need an emergency fund when you are fully retired because you're just pulling, you know, you know, the money from the accounts and the strategy that you set up. So what do you do with that emergency fund that's, that's a great point. It is, you know, I mean, for me, I'm not going to exhaust it, because I still like to have, you know, and everybody's different, a little bit of that cushion. And, you know, just for in case something happens, right? Roof, Roof flies off, and insurance only pays a certain portion, or whatever,   Tony Mauro  11:43 right, you know, just so we've got it. Not that I couldn't take it out of, you know, my retirement income, but Right, right? I want that to be a certain level, but I, you know, the excess. I certainly plan on doing something else with it, for sure. And yes, so it's kind of a little bit of incentive that, man, all these years just sitting there, hopefully I'll, you know, I can have a chance to use some of that.   Speaker 1  12:02 Yeah, well, and of course, that's always brings back the debate too, of how much is sitting there. Let's make sure it's not being too much do this. It's being too lazy, because you're not going to get that much from the bank. So again, just kind of managing the the robin's egg, aka emergency fund, isn't something important to do. And forgive me my for my cheesy puns there. But all right, let's do one more. Then. I want you to tell me your favorite Easter candy. We're gonna do the classic chocolate bunny almost always in a basket, right, in some form or fashion, right? So, and it's the financial plan, right? It's got to be the, you know, it's the, the main staple.   Tony Mauro  12:36 Yeah, it's the main staple, because it wraps up everything we've just kind of talked about, you know, in the basket. And, you know, I think everybody needs a plan, whether you know or not, you're trying to go at it on your own or paying somebody to help you with it, yeah, I definitely think that a detailed plan that's a working, living document that changes all the time. Yeah, make it your own. You got to be your own, right? Yeah, it's got to be your own. It's got, you know, you've got to have it. That's where an advisor comes in. So you can help customize it, let them kind of keep track of you know, and coach you through you know where you're at along the journey, and making sure that you know it's going to be what your future. You know what you want for your future and what you think is your future at age 30 might be way different by the time you get to 40 and 50, and so you want to be able to change that plan. That's why I say it's always a working document. And you know, just as you go, so that you understand, you know your financial well being at all times, even if you've got assistance coming, you know, from an advisor. I've actually read a few articles lately that actually paying an advisor adds X amount of percentages over time to people's returns. And it's not by, you know, getting them better investments. It's, you know, that's not it. It's really just coaching them and keeping them invested when things are bad, not doing, you know, crazily, what I would call not your best financial decisions, uh, talking them out of some things and allows, you know, their money to work harder and longer for them. So, yeah, interesting. Behavioral management is what we're talking about, yeah, as we're talking about more than investment management, because you literally don't need us for that. There's so many options, right? And we don't have any secret sauce? I mean, you know, yes, there's some strategies and things, but it's really, it's the   Speaker 1  14:24 experience though, right? It's the it's the accumulated experience, same. I mean, it's coaching. I mean, it really is coaching. It is right? I mean, you know, I mean, after a number of years, you know, does the professional athlete still really need you know someone to tell them how, you know, did Tom Brady or Peyton Manning, need, you know, someone to coach them on how to throw the ball. No, right? They know what they're doing, but they were still coaching there to talk to them about, hey, this is this play you ran, you you kind of went off script a little bit. And here's, you know, here's probably what you didn't see and why it went, you know, belly up, you know, or whatever the case is, right? So, you know, coaching is still an important facet to. To anything and, you know, just like your chocolate bunny and your financial plan, like you said, having it being, you know, customized and built to your own, whether you eat the ears first or eat the feet first, or whatever your approach is to eat your chocolate bunny, you know, your financial strategy, you know, same thing, manageable bites, right? Is how you want to handle it, and working with an advisor who helps you, kind of, you know, dissect that and work on all the moving parts, because it's also Tony how they interrelate to each other. Like you said, there's a lot of tools out there now, but having the experience to understand that when you pull this lever, it affects six more things down the way, is also an important thing that's different in retirement than it isn't just the accumulation phase.   Tony Mauro  15:38 Yeah, it is. And I think with with an advisor. There's so much propensity today, with so much information in our fingertips, to that we're just going to do everything ourself. And then you start getting a little more, earning a little more, a little more money. It's like, I just want to pay somebody else to do this, because I don't want to take every minute of my time to say I'm going to research this and this and this. And it takes, it takes forever. You can't be an expert on everything. And so, like I tell all my business owners, and what I try to do my own business is anything that I'm not good at, I farm out and hire out, because I don't want to be an expert in that. Could I Yes, but yeah, I don't want to do that anymore.   Speaker 1  16:17 And life is, life is complicated. There's so much stuff now, and yes, and unfortunately, getting quality people to help you with things. I mean, you know, I own a bit of land. I might, you know, I've got six acres here that my house is on. And every time I try to get a contractor with something, if you kind of feel like, you know, you're not getting good service, and then you wind up, I'll just learn how to do it myself, and I'll just handle it myself. You know, the old adage, if I want anything done, you want something done, right? You have to do it yourself. Do it yourself. Do it yourself. But I think there's a few areas where, if you haven't spent the time on it to understand it and learn it, you got to be careful, right? Because you're asking for to maybe get hurt, and certainly financially speaking, I don't want to make those mistakes when I'm 55 and having issues, or 60 or 65 and got some health issues, and, you know, I don't want to, I don't have the time, or maybe the physical, you know, or mental capacity to go deal with fixing those mistakes, right? So turning to a professional in that regard makes a lot of sense. And I can build my own house at 65 right? Because I don't know enough about house building.   Tony Mauro  17:16 So no, I tell people, you know, this isn't a dress rehearsal. We only got one shot at this, right? And you know, we're not getting out of here alive. So we, you know, especially in the financial planning area, you don't have a lot of second chances, maybe a few,   Speaker 1  17:29 but maybe a few, right? But they get thinner and thinner quickly. So yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, down to it. What's your favorite candy? My favorite Easter candy I could eat a whole bag of is actually, it's just really a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, but they shape them in eggs. You know, it looks like an egg, yeah? And, I mean, that could be the chocolate bunny equivalent. I think, because they don't, don't, they make a chocolate bunny as well. That's a Reese's. I think they do, yeah, they may, now, yeah.   Tony Mauro  17:53 And I may, I may have, what a nice, big one, because I do like chocolate   Speaker 1  17:58 peanut butter, yes, yeah. Reese's have become a staple, I would say for sure. And it could be the Reese's Pieces too, Reese's Pieces. And sometimes Reese's Pieces replaces the jelly beans in the in the bag for the color and different things. So whatever your candy is, though, right? You know, good Easter basket has a little bit of everything. And that is my analogy to, you know, just retirement strategy. You know, your retirement Easter basket, if you will, should have a little bit of everything, right? We talked about diversification Tony. It's portfolio diversification, it's tax diversification, it's maybe insurance products diversification, right? So there's a lot of pieces you can be diversified in.   Tony Mauro  18:35 There is, and I think, you know, you just want to make sure that, I would say your goal is to make sure that you're well diversified, and that you are covering all the aspects of planning, maybe not just one or two, just like you would with a good Easter basket. You got a bunch of candy in there. You don't want just one of just the Reese's. You want a little everything, especially as a kid. That's right, the more you had, the better.   Speaker 1  18:59 That's right. You want that basket stocked, and so should your retirement strategy be as well as gonna do it this week, hopefully you had a little fun with us along the way, and maybe enjoy just a little bit of Easter candy. As I joked earlier, when we get older, it's like, Man, I'd love to have some more of this, but I just don't know that my stomach will allow me to anymore, or my waistline, but whatever your case is, have a Happy Easter, and we will see you next time here on plan with the tax man. Don't forget to subscribe to us on Apple Spotify, or whatever podcasting app you enjoy using, find all the information you need to talk with Tony or to subscribe to the show or just whatever at your planning pros.com. That's your planning pros.com. And we'll see you next time. Thank you, my friend.   Tony Mauro  19:40 All right, thanks. We'll see you next time.   Securities offered through Avantax Investment Services SM, member FINRA, SIPC. Investment advisory services offered through Avantax Advisory Services. Insurance services offered through an Avantax affiliated insurance agency. Investment strategies discussed in this episode may not be suitable for all investors. Please consult with a financial professional.

Subscribe to the OPEX Effect on Spotify⁠⁠Subscribe to the OPEX Effect on Apple PodcastsThis episode breaks down the growing tension beneath the surface of today's markets, where volatility signals, options positioning, and macro risks like war and inflation are increasingly misaligned. Brent Kochuba and Jack Forehand explain why markets appear calm despite heavy hedging, and what that disconnect could mean for a potential volatility spike and downside move ahead.Brent Kochuba on Twitterhttps://twitter.com/SpotGammaSpotGamma Websitehttps://spotgamma.comTopics covered in this episode• Why volatility looks elevated beneath the surface even as markets remain relatively calm• The growing gap between implied volatility VIX and realized volatility and what it signals• How options expiration OPEX can create turning points in both price and volatility• Why current positioning is unusually put-heavy and what that means for downside risk• The role of market makers and hedging flows in driving market moves• How geopolitical risks like the Iran conflict are changing options behavior and hedging demand• Why correlation is spiking and what it says about investors moving from stock picking to asset allocation• The breakdown of traditional diversification including the 60/40 portfolio• How credit markets and liquidity risks could amplify equity volatility• The impact of zero DTE options and why traders are shifting to longer-duration hedges• The significance of the JP Morgan collar trade and key levels to watch into month-end• Why volatility spikes often follow periods of suppressed market movement• The potential for a sharp upside rally if geopolitical risks suddenly resolve• How options positioning can help both traders and long-term investors with timing decisionsTimestamps00:00 Volatility premium vs low market movement disconnect01:00 Why markets feel calm despite rising risks05:20 Explosion in options volume and impact of Monday Wednesday Friday expirations07:00 How market maker hedging flows drive price movements08:40 Dynamic hedging and why options impact evolves over time09:20 Why OPEX can trigger market turning points10:30 VIX expiration effects and short-term volatility suppression13:00 Negative gamma and how it amplifies market volatility14:10 Why hedging demand remains high despite OPEX clearing16:00 Jump risk scenario and potential VIX spike to 4017:10 Shift from zero DTE trading to longer-term hedging18:00 Put-heavy positioning across equities and indices20:40 Size and significance of the current OPEX event22:20 VIX spike dynamics around expiration23:40 JP Morgan collar trade and key SPX levels25:00 Why OPEX often marks short-term market lows or highs28:30 Review of prior OPEX signals and market setup30:00 Rising correlation and shift to asset allocation mindset32:00 Dispersion breakdown and implications for equities34:00 Software sector volatility and AI disruption narrative36:30 Using options signals for better timing decisions39:00 Correlation spike and risk-off behavior across markets41:30 Why investors are avoiding calls and piling into puts44:30 Cross-asset correlation breakdown and bond hedge failure48:00 Credit market risks and spillover into equities49:00 Extreme VIX vs realized volatility spread50:50 Why realized volatility remains unusually low52:30 Oil, inflation, and macro feedback loops

Re-releasing a DAT listener favorite! Chris Sands and Brent Saunier are on the podcast to talk about the hottest topics in the dental accounting world. Founding partners of Pro-Fi 20/20, these dental CPAs chat with Kiera about how to reduce overhead and expand the number of patients coming in, expense metrics from the hundreds of offices Pro-Fi works with, a tax rule you NEED to live by, what to stay away from financially with your business, and a ton more. Pro-Fi 20/20 is an accounting business that the Dental A-Team recommend. This episode is a goldmine of information from two fellows who know what they're talking about — especially with regard to the dental industry. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera. And today we are bringing you something so special. I am so excited because this is one of our most popular episodes from the archives. Whether you're hearing this for the first time or catching it again, I am so excited because it's jam packed with a ton of takeaways that you can start using right now in your practice. We have released thousands, literally thousands of episodes. And I wanted to start bringing a few of these amazing episodes back for you. So I hope you enjoy. And as always, thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time.   on the Dental A Team podcast.   speaker-0 (00:31) today I wanted to bring on two special guests. These are actually CPA in the CPA world. Believe it or not, Dental A Team actually consults this company. So we definitely love them. They went a step above most CPA companies and they really wanted to get to know the ins and outs of the dental world. So I'm super jazzed to bring them on and to just have them dive into some of the hot topics in the accounting world. ⁓ two people that I trust and recommend heavily. ⁓ I   They are one of my top three CPA firms that I refer and recommend constantly. So I'm excited to welcome Chris and Brent from Pro-Fi. How are you gentlemen today?   speaker-1 (01:06) Awesome, Kiera. Thanks so much for having us. We're excited to be with you.   speaker-0 (01:10) Yeah, absolutely. Brent, how are you doing today?   speaker-2 (01:12) I am doing great. I appreciate the invite. I'm looking forward to this 30 minutes with you.   speaker-0 (01:17) Yeah, absolutely. Well, who knows? We'll see how long this ends up going, guys. Brent, can't put a time on us. It could be dangerous zone.   speaker-1 (01:24) You're lucky he said he's doing great because we're in the heat of extended tax season, so he's kind of in the trenches. Lucky he's in a good mood.   speaker-0 (01:32) I know Tiffany has been trying to get back out to you guys to see you and Beth you heard this awesome rock star in the company She keeps saying like tiff. It's like extended tax time or it's this or it's that deadline I'm like, my gosh, you guys just have I think you're secretly adrenaline junkies of CPAs even though you don't come across that way But I think you love it cuz tax season I feel is just like adrenaline rush like trying to get to the deadline. I just can't imagine that stress like   Every quarter every year you just hit it. So props to you guys. That's not my world but super jazz to have you guys on here. ⁓ so Chris let's dive in I know there's some things so we're gonna kind of hit on overhead we're gonna talk about some taxing some Some things to be aware of i'm just so excited because this is a world I don't know and I do purposely bring really really talented and educated cpas and financial advisors onto the podcast because I'm we have a three-fold approach in our company. It's focusing on   Money and finances making sure your business is profitable you as a person and as an individual and then systems and teams top to bottom So I am big I think as a business owner. I wasn't profitable when I first started. I didn't know how to look at my numbers I didn't even know what the heck over influence. I was like googling how to figure it out So i'm just jazzing you guys are here. So Chris kind of take us away I know you had some great topics for today and i'm excited to just   Rift a little bit with you, dive into these things, things that are really tangible for our practices now, especially where you guys work with hundreds of offices across the nation. Lots of good data to be pulling out for our practices listening.   speaker-1 (03:04) Sure, well, ⁓ Kiera, I think that there's a lot of discussion around, does the DSO world seem to do a better job with overhead than the private practice world? I think a lot of private practice doctors are wondering that, they're frustrated or how do I get my overhead down? And a lot of times, I think when you focus on expenses, you tend to attract expenses. And in our world of accounting, I will often tell doctors that, ⁓   Accounting cannot make you money, it cannot generate revenue. The expenses part is the easy part for us that we can work on trying to reduce some things, but you either have a revenue problem or an expense problem. And in most cases it's actually, you creating enough revenue on your fixed expenses? And most of dentistry doesn't understand how simple that is to scale the dental business model when you look at it from a high level.   You scale a business and reduce overhead with doctor production. Okay. And so that means you need enough patients to see the practice that I worked in from my experience was 40 to 60 new patients a month per doctor, per full-time doctor. And it means you need to be reinvesting enough into marketing. And I'll talk about that, that expense or reinvestment of marketing in a minute to get those new patients. And you need to be.   monitoring the phones that get answered properly and there's conversion rate of those inbound calls to appointments scheduled. And then the real job is case acceptance. Okay, and so here I am in an accounting firm coming on your podcast and I bet you didn't think I was gonna like be talking about case acceptance.   speaker-0 (04:46) was like, wonder we didn't talk about all your time. I'm just kidding.   speaker-1 (04:49) So, know, dentistry is really the product that's being delivered. And if you're ethically diagnosing the need and creating the treatment plan, your job is to help the patient understand the urgency and necessity of fixing the problem and paying you to do that work. So your job isn't really the dentistry itself, it's case acceptance.   And your first task is to become great at case acceptance yourself as a practicing clinician. But then the real task as the owner is to be able to teach other doctors to become good at it. So I think, you know, the only the only variable overhead that the dental business model has is paying doctors a percentage of the dental collections that they create. And then you have labs and you have supplies.   associated with the dentistry that's delivered. those expenses are variable. They track with the amount of dentistry that gets done. Everything else is fixed overhead when you really think about it. Marketing is fixed and it only changes based on your choosing. Your team expenses are fixed and they only change when you hire or fire. Your rent and facility costs are fixed. Your equipment costs are fixed and only changed by your choosing. And the various required admin costs, they're all pretty much fixed. They only change by your choosing.   So if you can create more doctor generated collections with the same team and fixed expenses, your profit margin goes up, your percentage overhead, your percentage overhead to collections ratio goes down. Okay. And so I guess we see most private practice or single, should certainly say single location, solo doctor practices. We see them failing at this because they choose not to reinvest enough.   back into the business, into that marketing for new patients. They're not monitoring the phones. They're not training their team. They're not training their doctors on case acceptance. And they're too closely focused on just the clinical delivery of the dentistry. Don't get me wrong, that's required, but that's not what makes you successful or financially successful. So I can give you ⁓ some generic ranges for expenses, but the real thing is that   You know, the real way to scale a business is to generate more revenue on the same overhead. That's kind of the definition.   speaker-0 (07:20) And isn't that basically then probably the DSO model because they have lower fixed costs per se. They've figured out how to have centralized billing, centralized call center, centralized. So many things centralized that they don't need all these different things. So solo practices, if I'm understanding correctly, they've got all the costs associated, but they only have X number of revenue where when you start to add in those multiples of practices,   That's where your fixed costs, it's going, yes, of course your fixed costs will increase a bit, but I mean, I do know our fixed costs did not go up that much more when I added our second practice to it because I already have my base of fixed costs there and then we're just able to add more revenue. Is that kind of what you're saying? Am I understanding?   speaker-1 (08:01) Yeah,   I mean, you know, that, part about centralizing is, know, when you, when you do have multiple locations, I would say three or more, then you can consolidate the amount of team that's working the front desk into one location. Instead of needing three to five team members at the front desk in every office, you may only need three to five team members for all three offices. You're having one of the best things by the way, as kind of an aside, one of the best things that private practices can do as they grow is to get those phones off the front desk. You know, let.   speaker-0 (08:20) Right, right.   I agree.   speaker-1 (08:30) You know, like there needs to be, that needs to be in a totally separate admin space. But, ⁓ you know, I get asked that question a lot. Like my overhead is 65 % and how can I afford to hire another associate doctor and pay them 30 or 35 %? Well, you know, that doctor is going to create new collections. That's the point. It's not to give them your patients. It's to grow the number of patients coming in that, that you as one doctor maybe are stressed.   and you hire the next doctor and you've got to continue to invest in the marketing to keep your job as the owner is keep the chairs full, right? As long as the chairs are full, if that associate doctor is ethically diagnosing like you are, if you guys have a ⁓ clinical standard of care in your practice, if you guys talk about how you treatment plan and your treatment planning the same way, that's all required. But here's the real test. You know, how do they connect with people? How do they, how do they,   establish a relationship, establish trust and get them to move forward with that treatment. So I think dentists hate to use this word in dentistry, but the job is kind of sales. You know, if you believe in your product of dentistry to solve this need and like, again, if you diagnose decay and they don't get rid of it, you failed. I could go on a tangent on that, but the new doctor will bring new collections and you might have to hire at most, you know, an additional   speaker-0 (09:46) Yeah.   speaker-1 (09:55) Assistant or two and that would be a new fixed overhead. You would increase your fixed over it slightly But other than that the doctor covers all their costs with their their percentage pay the labs that are associated with it that the supplies are associated with it and You should net somewhere in the ballpark of 40 to 50 percent on the new collections they create and that that just adds to your profit Because all the other fixed overhead stays the same   speaker-0 (10:19) So I think there's a few things on there of like, I just, think it's a matter of realizing a lot of people bring on associates though, because they're tired, they want more free time. They don't want to be working as much. And I think it's important to clarify that if that's your model, that's totally fine. Everybody knows on the deadline team, I am not somebody who judges. I think everybody has their own personal path.   And so whatever jives with you and resonates with you. So if you're wanting to bring on an associate to have more free time, to not have to produce as much, fantastic, but realize that that overhead might not trickle down because now you're kind of replacing your cost with an associate that you're paying. And some doctors I know don't take as much pay as they would pay an associate per se, which to me, I think is a somewhat failed model. I'm really big on prepping and preparing for that associate, paying yourself as if you were an associate. So you know, these costs before you bring on an associate.   ⁓ but I really think it's important to note that because like you're saying that overhead will go down as long as the doctors are producing. And as long you're able to bring on that other doctor and have them produce, cause they should cover themselves. I definitely agree with that. ⁓ also I'm sure people are saying, yeah, but Chris, like in order to bring on another associate, I'm going to have to build out ops. That's a huge cost and expense. So I am curious, what have you guys found in Brent? You might have some answers to this Chris, you might. ⁓ but if an office is having to say, build out two more ops.   in their practice to be able to bring on an associate, how long does it usually take when you're doing build outs for that cost to be recouped and start being more profitable? Because oftentimes I do think that that gets into the problem with a lot of doctors is they're constantly building more to bring on these other doctors. So they're always adding more and more expenses. Like when do they ever break even? So what have you guys seen with build outs and different things like that of that break even point? How long should they plan for it to not be as profitable?   speaker-1 (12:09) Okay, I'm gonna give you a lot of answers on this. So number one, we use a metric called revenue per chair. So, you know, every, you   speaker-0 (12:17) What   do recommend? What do you guys recommend per chair?   speaker-1 (12:19) So yeah, everyone has a space and you have only a fixed number of spaces or operatories you can have in it. And there's only a fixed amount of time and days and hours and a number of doctors that you have. And revenue per chair capacity, we see a range between 25,000 to 40,000 per chair per month. And it does not matter when you do this. This is just, take collections and divide it by the number of chairs you have. ⁓   This does not matter how many chairs are for hygiene or how many chairs are for dentistry. That's your choice. Actually, you know, there are models where every chair can do everything and the patient never, but the 25 to 40,000 at 35,000 of revenue per chair, you're running fairly efficiently and you're going to need to be planning to expand. You're going to start to run out of space. So that's our metric first and foremost. And so if somebody tells us, well,   speaker-0 (12:53) Sure.   speaker-1 (13:09) I've got four chairs right now, but I have space for seven. I haven't built out the other three. I tell them, you don't need to build out the other three until you're approaching that $35,000 a month of revenue per chair. Question you asked, how much does it cost and when do you recoup that? So in my experience, typically it's around $25,000 per ⁓ operatory to equip it, assuming it's already plumbed. ⁓   after you just take that number and say, so let's say you were equipping a few operatories, so $50,000, you ⁓ essentially, your cost of the doctor plus the lab and supplies should max out at 50%. Okay, now they have to be producing. So until you get them, they've produced over $100,000. All right, let me do it per chair.   They need to do over $50,000 per chair for you to get your costs back. After that, you're in the money.   speaker-0 (14:09) which I think is also smart because I don't know. think dentists kind of err on two different sides. Sometimes they're too slow to actually build out. They are so cost conscious and so concerned about that build up, about the cost of the chair, about all the other things that they're missing, that that one chair is going to generate several thousands of dollars of revenue. I've had a few doctors where I'll say, sure, no problem. We'll do a deal. I will happily pay for that one chair and you pay me all.   the revenue that comes through from that chair for the next three months. That's all I ask is three months. and I know I'm going to come out way ahead of you because it will generate and it will produce, especially in high producing practices. So I think so often people are just so scared to do those build-outs because they see the cost or they do the flip side where they believe like, if we build it, they will come and they're overly aggressive and they don't have necessarily the patient base or the doctors in play to be able to accommodate that. So   I love, I need to agree. It's either cut costs or increase your revenue. Like that's really overhead.   speaker-1 (15:12) One more way to think about it is, you know, if they have patients that are having to wait so many weeks or months to schedule out to come in. if you can calculate your collections divided by the number of patients seen for any given time, for year to date or for a full year, you can get your average revenue per patient. Okay. And if you know your average revenue per patient, you know how many either new patients or how many more patients you need to fill that chair to cover the cost.   Okay. So if your average revenue per patient was, you know, $1,500 per patient, um, and the cost of that chair is 25,000, just take 25,000 divided by 1500. And that'll tell you how many patients have to be seen in that chair before you pay for that chair. Sure. You're to be in the money, you know, it's in terms of the construction. That's another basically upfront, one time fixed costs that you're going to cover. And then all the future revenue that it's going to generate. So.   Maybe if you like, think before we end this topic on overhead, I'll give you kind some of our expense metric. ⁓   speaker-0 (16:18) Sure, yeah, absolutely.   Well, hang on, before you go into expense metrics, I want to bring up one piece that I think often gets missed, because you're saying like we're in the money. But I also want to bring up something that I really love to point out, and that is return on emotion. Some people don't want to bring on an associate. Yes, like as a business model, you can be more financially successful with an associate. Yes, you can, having more chairs, more build out, more practices. ⁓ But I also want to point out there is a return on emotion. There are sometimes   Bigger headaches, they're also sometimes less headaches with bigger organizations. I personally love to consult larger practices. The pettiness, the cattiness, the smaller drama is way less in larger practices or multiple locations. So like that drastically drops down. They figured it out. They're dialed into systems. But at the same time, I think it's important for people to assess that return on emotion. You might have a dreamy life. You might be doing exactly what you want and sure you could produce more.   But if you're off work at say two or three o'clock every day and you work two or three days a week and you're shelling and seven fifty to a million in profit, not a bad lifestyle. So I think it's also important to assess like what you ultimately want and what your return on emotion is before just saying like, I'm going to build because this is the way to do it. I think if you're looking at your practices as a business model, which I personally think a lot of us should look at it that way, ⁓ just to see what you what you ultimately want, what's your end game. And that's also where I love financial advisors of   Like what is your total term? Like where do you want to get? Does it make sense to grow? Does it make sense to stay where I'm at? ⁓ I think oftentimes we, we forget that return on emotion and how that is. We always think of like return on investment, but what does that return on emotion too? So just want to put a plug of like, I think everyone's on their own path, their own journey. Definitely agree. There are lots of ways that you can be insanely profitable and having multiple practices is a great, great, great business play. And you're able to help more practices. I'm all in favor.   You're gonna have multiple locations. Make sure you're doing awesome dentistry because sure, it can be very lucrative. Just be ethical because I think that plays out long-term. So Chris, with that, what are some of the metrics you guys look at? Because I agree, I love to hear people's metrics. I think we're pretty closely aligned with you guys on metrics, which is another reason I really love working with you guys and your clients.   speaker-1 (18:32) So I think if you ⁓ were to survey the Academy of dental CPAs and all of their, what you see them put out statistically, they're gonna tell you the metric of one to 2 % for marketing. When you go and you immerse yourself in the DSO world and their conferences and get to know what they're doing, you're gonna see more of an average of six to 8 % reinvestment into marketing. DSOs have a harder time with retention. They have more patients going out the back door. Private practices.   degraded retention, but they don't often invite enough people to the party. So we don't go by the one to 2 % number. think that's an area where people try to, they're trying to keep costs down. You know, your business is the greatest asset that you own that provides the greatest return and you have the most control over. So you should be reinvesting in it more than you reinvest in the stock market or anything else. So our metric for marketing is three to 8%. Private practices, like to see at least three to five.   I mean, excuse me, in GP practices, in specialty practices, especially like orthodontics, needs to be on the higher end. Team expenses between 20 to 30%. We certainly try to keep that under 30%. Team expense does not include doctors. Okay. So that's all of your, all of your, uh, your, your entire team, including a hygienist as well, but not doctors, uh, dental supplies somewhere five to nine, five to 10 % labs.   speaker-0 (19:36) Yes, absolutely.   speaker-1 (19:58) four to 7%. So again, those dental supplies and labs really should not be greater than roughly 15 % total. Rent and facilities, five to 9%. What does that mean? So if you have a high percentage in your rent and facility costs, if your rent facility is let's say nine, 10, 11%, that means you're probably not maximizing the space and getting the collections that is possible there. Again, using that revenue per chair metric.   When you're on the lower end, if you have 4 to 5 % rent of facility, means you're running very efficiently. You're probably going to be running out of space and need to expand or potentially relocate or get another location. And then there's general administrative costs somewhere in the range of 4 to 10%, depending on the practice type and what additional folks they have.   speaker-0 (20:48) Cool.   speaker-1 (20:50) That's it on everything.   speaker-0 (20:51) No, I love it so much because I think so often people don't look at their P &Ls and they don't even know what they should be targeting for. It's just like, well, do I have money left over or do I not? And then I don't know. like all of that combined should equal about 50 % there. Is that correct? Those are 50 % and then doctor pays 30 % to give a 20 % profit margin. And then you subtract debt services from that. that kind of your guys' model? That's what I've heard. It's what I typically recommend.   speaker-1 (21:18) Roughly. mean, yeah. You know, I, the most ideal is that I think when the average doctor starts to work with us, their profit margin is in the twenties, the 20 % range. our goal is to get them into the forties. Okay. And everyone does chase this like 50 % number, but I will tell you that eventually if you have to scale again, if you have to reinvest, that's the part like you're, drive yourself nuts. Would you rather have, you know, 50 % of 1 million or do you rather have 40 % of 3 million? Right.   You know, and that's that. So it's not always just about that overhead percentage. Uh, it is about if you choose to scale and you're, you're buying, you're reinvesting some of your, your overhead percentage, you're reinvesting some of your money to buy back your time. Like you said earlier, okay. Um, whether that's on multiple doctors or not, you know, being a slave to the chair is difficult and high risk to you as a business owner. It's one of the riskiest business models there is.   speaker-0 (22:12) Right.   I think that that's such a good point.   But guys, you don't know, can, Pro-Fi is fantastic. You can reach out to them, have them help you with your PNLs. Also your current CPAs, you can get a chart of accounts and give them these percentages and say, this is where I want it to be. Help me get there, give me some information because a lot of CPAs are not dental specific and they might not know these industry standards. And I agree with you. I also think it's important to think of growth years and also profit years. Some years you are definitely massively.   reinvesting into the practice and you might not be sitting at as high of an overhead, but you're doing it with the intent. Like when I bring on new team members, when you bring on new doctors, your overhead is going to go down. It should go down because you are investing and you're growing, but you need those people. This year on Dental A Team is a growth year. I am heavily bringing on new team members. My overhead is not as great as it has been in the past years. But if I, like you said, chase that X number of overhead and never invest in that growth,   I can't get to the next level of where I wanna go. So I thought that was really, really helpful. Thank you for that, Chris. And I know now we wanna spin over to Brent. Brent's been hanging out silently over there of some tax things. And I do love that you guys ying and yang on practice metrics because that's what we're all about. And then the tax world that I'm like, here's the thing. Here's my take on taxes. I am so grateful to live in a country where I get to pay taxes to have my own business. Like I truly think that is a massive blessing of the country we live in.   With that said, I also think it's my responsibility as a business owner to be as savvy as I can on taxes and not overpay on taxes because I'm just dumb and I'm not actually looking at strategy using smart people beyond myself to do it. So Brent, I'm so jazzed. Talk to us kind of about some tax things that you've been thinking of that your clients are dealing with.   speaker-2 (24:00) Yeah, absolutely. So I remember a few early evening calls with you and you're calling and saying help.   speaker-0 (24:06) It was in December last year, like literally right before the end of the year. And I was like, Brent, I owe so much dang money in taxes. Any ideas? It's fine, guys. It's fine.   speaker-2 (24:19) One of the foundations of Pro-Fi that we built it on is education. So we are very big believers in educating our clients to understand, first and foremost, how do you even generate taxes? So the number of conversations we have with dentists that just don't have a basic understanding is really astounding to me. So we first take an approach of, you have to understand how do you generate income tax? You generate income tax by the salary or W-2 you take.   and profit. The key thing here is it does not matter if you take a dollar of that profit out of the business, you still owe tax on the profit. So here, when you're looking at your P &L, let's say a doctor has a half a million dollars of profit and they choose not to take it home and leave it in the business, they will still pay tax on half a million dollars. I had a call today, the exact conversation is like, why didn't take any of the money home?   speaker-0 (25:18) It doesn't matter. were profitable brother, sister, like rock on. Happy day for you.   speaker-2 (25:23) You know, as Chris was alluding to, if you choose to reinvest in the practice, do marketing or other items like that that are deductible, that will obviously reduce your burden. The second thing, the second biggest mistake is don't underestimate your effective tax rate. So Chris and I have, we call it, I guess the golden rule or the 40 % tax rule. And that is geared towards over-preparing a business owner when it comes time to send in those quarterly estimates.   And I'll come back to that one in a minute, but the 40 % tax rule, if you have a pen, I would write that down because that is a rule to live by. And also ask your CPA advisor, whoever they are, whether it's us or your other another CPA, ask them before you make the decisions. So I got a call yesterday from a doctor in South Carolina. He's like, hey, I want to buy a machine that's going to cost me $85,000. My equipment rep said I'd get a 40 % tax deduction.   Just about that much.   speaker-0 (26:23) That was a clever salesperson.   speaker-2 (26:26) Yeah, they all do it. We love equipping reps. No badging equipment reps. But understanding, depending upon your entity type, whether or not you will be able to deduct that in the current year is a huge thing that you have to understand. Chris and I have seen so many doctors over the years that have come to us after the fact. And I think we've done a great job of educating, hey, I bought this equipment, it's $100,000.   When we do the tax return, it's like, you're not involved deducted. They're like, why not? The equipment reps that I could. So just make call your advisor before you do it. That's the best thing you can do for yourself.   speaker-0 (27:02) Well, and I, to that point, I just say like, you should have experts on your board as a business owner, people that you genuinely trust for taxes. And like you said, ask them, ask your rep about the best products and what they're seeing of results within the patient's mouth. Cause that's where they're experts. But I'm just going to put a massive plug, like, gosh, the number of dollars I have spent personally, because I didn't ask,   If we can save anybody even a couple of grand, like you're welcome. You're welcome. Just ask, ask before you do it.   speaker-2 (27:36) Right, absolutely. Then I kind of look at what are some things that you can do to make sure you're not blindsided by that tax surprise? ⁓ One thing we do is we always recommend in your business, you have to run multiple bank accounts. And one of those bank accounts is a tax savings account. Your business should fund and pay for your personal tax bill. So think about like ⁓ grandmother's cash envelope system.   create different buckets in the business, move the money out of your OpEx account because, know, like for me, if I have 20 bucks, $20 in cash in my pocket, I'm going to spend it. But if I put it away in the bucket where it's intended, it'll be there when I need it.   speaker-1 (28:18) My bucket, right?   speaker-0 (28:19) Yes, you can just send them my way this year Chris. It's fine Brent. It's fine I'll take him but Brent I want to speak so highly to that because ⁓ It really does help. I will also put a plug of like have really good financial planners and tax planners with you because I am actually really really good at saving money for taxes What I really get frustrated with is when it comes to December and I have been saving and I have been putting that away ⁓   And then they're like, Kiera, you owe an extra X amount. And I'm like, what the heck? I've even saved this. So that's where I also think it's really pro to have really good CPAs that are that actually no tax. So I am curious. You guys tell me the truth, because I don't know how this works. I'm not a CPA, but I swear every year I get a call December 1st and it's like almost a double what I've already saved for the whole year. And I'm a saver. Like I don't spend a dime in my business.   speaker-1 (29:14) call you get all year long, Kiera.   speaker-0 (29:16) It's not well, I have a monthly call with them and we even plan for taxes, but this year my quarterly taxes It's okay guys. I'm interviewing new cpas. It's okay. my cpn doesn't listen to the podcast I don't think if so, it's great. We've had a good run for several years But like that's where I get a surprise. Is it common? Should you be getting a surprise call on december 1st? If you've got good tax people, and you've been planning and preparing and putting money aside all year long is that   speaker-1 (29:41) As you answer this question for her and I would go over safe harbor estimates, but Kiera to set you up for what Brent's going to say. What happens is somebody tells you a number and you kind of start to operate like a zombie and you're like, okay, I put that number away, put it away and you did it. And you're like, okay, I put the number where you told me, but at the same time you're trying to grow your business.   speaker-0 (30:06) To that point though Chris I'm gonna like back on this because I think I'm actually a really smart business owner But every freaking year this happens. I'm trying to fix this and hopefully someone   speaker-1 (30:15) I think it has to do with your growth.   speaker-0 (30:18) I   overestimated what my growth would be this year. So I said I was going to be double what I was last year and we're coming in at about a 70 % growth of what I was last year. So I gave my CPA a 30 % extra window to project on me and we're still coming up a hundred, I'll say a different number, but I'm coming up more than I had saved.   almost three times as much as they had saved for me. cause I get burned every single year. So I'm like a squirrel with nuts and I put away for tax savings in my company because I never know what I'm going to owe. And it scares me. So with that said, I agree with growth. If you can, if you can project where you're going to go and you're having consistent quarterly meetings with your CPA, is it common to still have a massive like uptick in December? I would ask.   speaker-1 (31:04) No, it's not.   So look, to keep it simple, like, you know, I'm kind of talking on the managerial accounting side of things and Brent's talking on the tax side of things. If you're meeting with that accountant and you look at that bottom line profit, okay, you owe 40 % of that profit, whether you took it home or not. And then if you made any estimated tax payments, you can subtract those tax payments from that 40%. Okay. ⁓ And then you can apply some deductions and maybe bring the number down.   speaker-0 (31:24) Agreed.   I'm asking for a friend hashtag myself right now I mean I get better every year around taxes because I hate the surprise and I think most people do but I also wanted to point out I'm like I think I'm pretty savvy with business I talked to a ton of CPAs like this isn't like my first day running a business So and I'm happy to hear and with that 40 % So here's another thing that I've also which maybe I'm just dumb Maybe I'm just coming around the block to this so you guys can tell me ⁓ but it's 40 % of the profit correct like   And that profit also includes my W-2 as a business owner. So I've got to like...   speaker-1 (32:10) That profit is after your W-2. Hopefully your W-2, you have normal withholdings. Sure. you're like zero or one, you can kind of pretty much say, hopefully the federal and state taxes are all withheld from that for you. Right. have to worry about it. Okay. It's the profit that's left over after your W-2 and all the other expenses of the business you have 40 % on. So Brent, tell her about what happens at the beginning of the year.   When we talk, they those first estimates. think everybody starts to like, they get glued to the estimates and they never update them.   speaker-2 (32:41) Yeah, so a couple things. So, Kiera,   speaker-0 (32:45) Call   you in December, Brent. We're going to have this conversation in year two.   speaker-2 (32:49) Maybe we should start in January for next.   speaker-0 (32:51) I like that strategy is much better. I'm like I've even I started my tax meetings in July this year guys Like this is how much I'm paranoid and I'm like they're just shelling a ton on me again And I'm like how does it happen every year? I don't I don't understand so   speaker-2 (33:05) Here's a trend I noticed over the last four years. you know, there was in 2017, there was the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which changed the tax code. also changed. There's also been changes to the payroll tax tables. So I would take UW2, look at your federal tax withheld and divide that by your taxable wages in box one. More than likely, it's going to be in the 10 to 12 % range.   If you were in the 40 % tax bracket, you're already 30 % short on your taxes. Let's say you pay yourself $100,000. If you're 30 % short, that's a five digit dollar. So that's where I'd first start. And that is very, very, very common. You will not see any withholding in a W-2 being over 25 % unless you manually requested that from the payroll company.   speaker-0 (33:39) Right.   speaker-2 (34:01) bonuses or automatically taxed at 25%, but your regular payroll is probably in the 10 to 12 % range. So that's one reason it's happened. What Crystal's talking about, so let's say that we prepare your return in April. So let's say your 2020 return and every accountant will do what's called a safe harbor tax estimate, which basically says your estimates will be 110 % of your prior year tax.   speaker-1 (34:30) The IRS wants you to put 10 % more than last year away, like pay them in advance. They like you to do it quarterly because collecting money once a year is a bad business model.   speaker-0 (34:40) And it's a bad business model.   speaker-2 (34:42) So like Chris said, when a client gets those estimates, and let's say they're $25,000 a quarter, they are fixed on $25,000 a quarter. So what we do is with all of our clients in June and early July, we actually run tax projections or mock tax returns the upcoming year. We pull their year to date profit, we get all their deductions and we project out if that original safe harbor estimate has changed.   Then we do it again in November and early December to make sure that you're still on track and also looking for additional ⁓ tax strategies. But to answer your question from earlier, should you be surprised with a big number? No, not if you're doing proper planning.   speaker-0 (35:30) with like a little variance, but I just want to point that out because I think so many business owners get scared of taxes and this year, don't worry guys, it's on my vision board by the age of 36. I will be a tax expert. I look at it every single night. I have no desire to be a CPA, but I really think it's important as business owners to educate yourself on taxes and like you said to plan and to save for it because otherwise it's just this always surprise bill that creates stress. For me as a business owner, I know often I just feel like   I don't dare spend money because I'm gonna get hit with this big unknown. And so I'm like this girl, I literally have four tax savings accounts in my business right now. And they're in like four different business accounts, so my CPA can't see them all. Because I'm like, you come to me every year with this huge surprise and every year it's like double what I thought you were gonna say. And like I'm grateful to be very successful in what we do. However, I don't think business owners should be surprised, especially if you have a good CPA. So I just wanted to like find out like, that normal?   I feel like I'm on the anomaly, but good to know on that.   speaker-1 (36:33) Tax surprises cause cash flow problems.   speaker-2 (36:39) So Kiera, let me quantify that one of   speaker-0 (36:41) Guys,   don't worry. Everyone on the podcast, this is a Cura therapy session. You're welcome to be attending this. So we're glad.   speaker-2 (36:48) So can there be a tax surprise? Yes. The reason the tax price might happen is if you told your CPA, hey, I'm going to be doing these improvements and they're going to be done by December 31st. If in December you tell them, well, it didn't work out and I'm not going to have all these expenses. And yes, you're going to, you're going to get a surprise because you didn't, your plan didn't follow through. The other thing is talking about the separate tax account in the business. It's,   speaker-0 (37:12) That's fair.   speaker-2 (37:18) Absolutely recommended, but the most important part is you cannot spend it on anything but your tax bill. You cannot not rob Peter to pay Paul. That is probably the biggest mistake you could make is saying, well, I'll take it now. I have eight months to put it back in.   speaker-0 (37:34) That's like that makes my heart stop. I feel so stressed for people and also for anyone who wants to know like you I wish you could see the zoom right now with me Brent and Chris You know these guys love what we're talking about because Brent is literally getting like so excited and so animated talking about this So that's just when you know people are good at what they do I get so geek I'll geek out on dentistry and systems and like how we can help you and they're jazzing about some some tax benefits here So I agree. I think that if you aren't doing that, I also like the thought of 40 %   Do you guys recommend, because I know another piece to it, which I realized this year was like charitable contributions. I'm LDS. And so having charitable contributions, 10 % is something that I was like, that was funny. We didn't prepare for that. So that's like another check that I wasn't planning. And then also like SEP and 401ks. Do you guys have anything that you recommend for that of having a tax savings fund, but also building up those other funds and those payments that you'll be making to reduce your tax bill? Yes.   but those are also pretty big expenses, depending upon how your business does every year. How do you guys manage or navigate that? Or should I just be saving more? Because again, I'm like building these funds up to this, I've got four accounts, because I stress out about it.   speaker-2 (38:44) So Chris, I'm gonna let you take that one on the cashflow. It's really cashflow planning.   speaker-1 (38:48) Yeah, a lot of questions in there.   speaker-0 (38:50) Cool, like I said, this is why I podcast guys, because I can ask my own personal questions.   speaker-1 (38:57) In terms of okay, should you be doing okay. what do you want me to start a chair charitable chair?   speaker-0 (39:03) Just   like I think that a lot of people might get quote-unquote surprised at the end of the year because not only do we have a tax bill to pay, we have charitable contributions that we're paying. We also have 7401Ks. Like there are quite a few other funds that need to be paid out again to reduce our tax bills to help us. But those are also cashflow that you need to have on hand as a business owner to be able to front that money. So I've been also thinking that could be why other people feel like it's a surprise at the end of the year, just all lumped into taxes when it is just other pieces to help reduce that tax bill for you.   speaker-1 (39:33) if   something is important to you, then it needs a separate bank account. if charitable giving is important to you, I think you should have a separate bank account so you can visually see that you've got it ready to pay. And in order to make it tax deductible, it does need to be a 501C3. can't just be any random, say, it's... Right? So ⁓ when it comes to all of the retirement accounts, mean, ⁓ 401Ks and IRAs and simple IRAs and all of that,   speaker-0 (39:51) about last year.   speaker-1 (40:02) Roth, that's like the smallest fraction. That's like the, you know, the entry level league of the tax code in terms of savings. And it's, it's really kind of the stuff that the masses can do. I certainly think it's important to save and save for retirement. think when you're a business owner and let me say this, mean, upfront, I'm a contrarian. I think when you're a business owner, you have to be a contrarian and know that not everything applies to you the same way as everyone else. Sure. I, my bias is I have a much.   stronger tendency to say, you know, spend the money in your business or put the, I should say, invest, reinvest the money in your business for growth, because it's going, there's an asset value to that, to that business. need to learn what that is and what you one day can exit it for. And it creates, gives you the most, you know, income. ⁓ If you put money into a 401k or you put money into marketing in your business, you get the same tax deduction. So that's a question. If you're looking for like year end stuff, you know,   You could put the money into the, into the retirement plan, or you could prepay some expenses for next year. ⁓ You lot of people, think don't trust their business, which is weird because it's the thing you have the most control over, but they don't trust their own business. Typically it's cause they're not really great at managing their own cashflow and having discipline. And so they're, they're hesitant to invest the money in the business. And they'd rather go roll the dice and put it in the stock market. And at the time of this podcast recording, let me tell you.   We are in a recession. It has already begun. Everything is very high. Stock market's high. Real estate is high. Your business is one of the safest places to put your money right now. It provides you an inflation hedge, okay? And it creates revenue. ⁓ And it's tax deductions. I'm a big believer in putting the money into your business or getting another business. I think Brent can talk about, know, people ask us like, what are some of the largest   speaker-0 (41:47) Right.   speaker-1 (41:56) deductions you can play in. Like what, are the bigger things you can do outside of a 401k? Tax deductions. Generally speaking, the tax code rewards you for doing things that improve our economy. And that's primarily investing in businesses, you know, adding another location, employing people and commercial real estate, commercial real estate is a big one. Again, commercial real estate's really high right now. It may not be the perfect time to be buying or building. Cause all of the costs are really high.   save that cash, even if you have to pay some taxes, save the cash for liquidity for the tough times. when this recession happens, most practice owners are going to stop investing in their business, they're to stop marketing. And you got to do the opposite. That is the time where you can do all of that at its lowest cost. that's when millionaires are really made is during recession. So I'm going on a tangent now. You got me passionate   speaker-0 (42:50) No,   I like it. I like hearing it because I like thinking of other things. think so often you said it really well of business owners want to contract. They want to not reinvest in themselves. It's like, well, like let's put it in the stock market because that's what I heard that we should do. But I really do love that mindset. And that's why I love podcasting. That's why I love talking to different people. This is why I bring you guys on here because I purposely, intentionally bring different ways of thinking out there. You've got to make your own decisions.   But I'm a big like when people are zigging, I want to zag. So right now real estate's hot. Commercial's hot. The stock market's hot. Like I literally am sitting here just thinking like, here, just sit on some cash. Like, like you said, I might have to pay more taxes on it, but sit on that cash because you know, it's going to drop. And during that time, that's when you do the exact opposite of what everyone else is doing. So I really love that advice. And I think it's wise and it's prudent. I also love what you said, Brent, of having the 40%.   A lot of people say do 30%, but agreed a lot of dentists do tip into that 40 % tax bracket. And I would much rather over prepare than under prepare. Chris, to your point, I really love also having the buckets for like we said, charitable contributions, if you're going to do ⁓ 401ks, but I really, agree with you too. I think reinvest in your business. Look to see, I do end of year spending. I look to see what I could reinvest in, what things are gonna propel us the most. I look at marketing, I look at website rebuilds, I look at.   Different softwares that are going to propel us forward different ways to make our our practice more efficient What things are really going to invest in our company and our team? To make it and then I just do fun things like, know trips places I definitely don't get much ROI on that except for emotional ROI, but I know I know this is a longer podcast guys I really hope and I also hope team members listening realize that this is not just for business owners. I think that this is also   Individual tax prepping make sure you are preparing look for ways that you can reinvest in yourself What things could you prepare for what things can you build out? Do you have separate savings accounts for different things that you're going to maybe you don't have to save for taxes But guess what maybe one day you will be a business owner So teach yourself the discipline to save now to look for reinvestment. I also think is super valuable. So I want   speaker-1 (45:05) team members, for those team members, what side hustle can you create? What side of business can you create? know, and what, what commercial or what even residential property, rental property could you create to give yourself rental income? And there are deductions that come along with that. But if all you do is just do your day to day job, whether you own a business or don't own a business, you're not going to save anything in taxes, nothing significant. got it. You got to create some value in the world out there.   speaker-0 (45:29) Agreed. say deliver the biggest and best value. So you guys teased me. So I want to wrap up our podcast with some things to not be doing. You guys have kind of like a hit list right now of some things, some tips that a lot of us might be doing that are cracking down. I know I have been privy to some of these things as well. So take us away. We'll wrap this up with just some, some of that hit list of what not to do. ⁓ and   you know, as we get in there, thank you guys for sharing all that you have. Thank you for doing a personal session with me already. So I'm excited for the hit list now.   speaker-2 (46:01) So I would say the biggest one that I've seen is the fascination that doctors have with crypto.   speaker-1 (46:01) Go ahead, Brent.   speaker-0 (46:12) Brent, it's because we're bored. We don't know what else to do with ourselves, so we're like, why not throw a little into crypto?   speaker-2 (46:17) Here's the problem. So I have about a half a dozen doctors over last six months. They called me and said, Hey, I put $200,000 into the crypto market, Bitcoin. And I'm like, really? Where did you, where did you write the check from for that investment from the practice? Here's the problem. If that practice is an S corporation and they invest that money in crypto and they hit it big, they could potentially blow up their IRS S corp election.   and the IRS will take it away from you. So if you're gonna do investments, do not write the check from your practice. You can take the money home as a distribution, then put it into crypto, but do not do it through your business.   speaker-0 (47:01) This is a moment where I just had like a, I'm like, good. I'm glad I did that at least right. even knowing. Why is that?   speaker-1 (47:03) Sorry.   So that one, I mean, that one can cause some serious damage. ⁓ But the other ones that I think nobody wants to hear when they're listening to this, and I get in all these battles on social media, Facebook groups and all that. But the two things that come up over and over and over again that everybody's kind of cheating on and they're going to get busted on is number one, paying employees and especially dentists and hygienists, paying them as 1099 contractors.   This is going to get you in trouble not only with the IRS, but with the Department of Labor. And there are some significant penalties. There is a black and white 20 question checklist that the IRS provides. You can Google that. You can find it directly on the IRS website. And it goes through a checklist of yes or no questions to determine if you qualify to be a 1099 independent contractor or if you fit the requirements of a W-2. And to simplify it,   The main thing is the element of control who controls the schedule, who tells you which patients you're seeing and when who's providing all the materials and the tools and equipment. And 99 % of the time, anyone in dentistry falls under the category of an employee. Pretty much have to be a specialist that owns their own separate practice already coming in part time in order for you to 10 99 them. And if you're 10 99ing them, you're 10 and you have to do it to their business. The other thing that doesn't work is when, you know, they're like,   Oh, I'm an individual doctor. I'll just set up an S corp and you can 1099 my escort. The IRS is not stupid. Again, they're they're looking at what are your what is your role within that that place that you're receiving the income from the revenue from. So anyway, everybody hates that. But I'm telling you, I   speaker-0 (48:58) I   don't think it's a, it's not a good place to play with fire. Um, I have a really, really, really awesome unemployment lawyer, um, and employment lawyer. He represents Uber Lyft Red Bull. He's in, um, San Francisco. If you guys need him, he's amazing. Reach out to us. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. Um, but he told me he said, Kiera Uber and Lyft, which I personally think I'm no lawyer guys. I'm not there. Uber and Lyft to me are the epitome of 10 99 contractors.   but they are, ⁓ they're coming down, they're cracking down on it. And ⁓ I have heard that it is no longer just a small offense. It's a pretty big offense if you misclassify. To me, really, I'm a risky person, but I believe in being smart and also paying people the way they should be paid. As much as it's not fun, we transitioned our whole company and I just think play that one safe because labor laws are not something to ever mess with, in my opinion.   speaker-1 (49:51) Yep. And you know, the government has shelled out a lot of money through this pandemic and they've got to collect it and get it back. And they're going to get that back from small business owners. And, ⁓ you know, our, our dependent care systems of Medicare and social security are very fragile right now. And that's the one thing they do not want you to screw with. And so they collect that money through W2 payroll. They're going to, they're going to force more and more than everybody's W2, especially in the occupation of dentistry. Second thing is the cars. Okay. Everybody wants to run their cars through the business.   You might be allowed to run a car through your business. It depends on what type of business you're in. If you're in real estate and you're showing houses and you're driving your clients around, you can probably write your car off through your business. But in dentistry, you're going to sit across the table from an auditor and they're going to say, what does a car have to do with the business of dentistry? The IRS tax code says that your business expenses must be ordinary and necessary to the business for them to be deductible.   What does the car have to do with the business of dentistry? How is a vehicle ⁓ justified as 100 % business use as a necessary use in order to do dentistry?   speaker-0 (51:00) What if it's a wrapped vehicle that's marketing?   speaker-1 (51:03) That's different. there are very specific guidelines in the IRS tax code about what is marketing for a vehicle. must be fully wrapped. It can't just be magnets. It can't just be stickers. But it has to be significant that's used for marketing. What we find is not a lot of doctors want to wrap their test up.   speaker-0 (51:23) Because they're ticked off with the patient that Ruekinaal didn't go super well and they're cutting people off on their drive home and you don't really want your flashy business to be that car.   speaker-1 (51:31) Right. I mean, and to make it legitimate, mean, the car has to be legally registered in the business name. It has to be covered under business insurance, not your personal insurance. The loan has to be under the business name, not your personal name. And there's a, you know, most people are not doing that. They're doing, they're buying it personally. They're just making the payment out of their, out of their business. And they think that they can deduct the whole thing. And this is not true. There's even greater scrutiny if the business tries to buy, if the dental business tries to buy a vehicle.   and depreciate it, take it as 100 % use. So I know people hate to hear that, but I would just caution everyone listening, stay away from 1099 and cars in your business. But everyone's.   speaker-2 (52:12) doing   it!   speaker-0 (52:13) I heard a really great quote one day and they said Kiera everything's deductible until you get audited and I was like That's really good advice. I appreciate that. So guys, ⁓ Chris and Brent. Thank you guys for coming on the podcast Thank you for being people that I can call Brent. Thank you for being my December, you know midnight hour friend I loved last year. You said care. There's really not much we can do. Maybe we should have done this in January. So ⁓   But truly, I just appreciate you guys helping so many doctors. know you help a lot of our clients. Shout out to those clients that we mutually work together. I love working with CPA companies. I think we're a good peanut butter and jelly together. We help grow the practice, make them more profitable. You guys make sure that their books are in line. Give us the guiding stars of what levers to turn to help the practices. You take care of the taxes. So it's a really good yin and yang and   I hope all of you listening today found a lot of value. Team members, look at this for yourselves. Get the side hustle. I hope this spurred some, some topics, some conversation. Team members, can also help your practices reduce that tax bill. look for ways that you can spend end of year, just different things. So I definitely think team members have a lot of play in this as well. So Chris and Brent, thank you guys so much. It's super fun. If people want to connect with you, ⁓ maybe they're done with their CPA. Maybe they just want to find out if.   There might be another option out there. How can they connect with you? I know you guys specialize in DSOs, larger group practices, but also the solo practices as well. How can people connect if they're interested?   speaker-1 (53:40) Sure, so check us out online at our website, Profi2020.com. That's P-R-O-F-I-2-0-2-0.com. ⁓   speaker-0 (53:47) You did   that because 2020 was such a great year that you guys want to remember. ⁓   speaker-1 (53:53) That marketing plan went out the window. It was 20-20 clarity to give you clarity on your finance.   speaker-0 (53:54) No.   I   just thought I'd throw it out there. So no one will forget Pro-Fi 2020. 2020 was most memorable year guys. Don't forget it. They don't want to forget it ever.   speaker-1 (54:07) We have tons of free videos, a lot of great content on there. Check us out on our YouTube channel, all social media, know, at Profi2020. We're very easy to find. ⁓ But we're managerial accountants. It's way different than financial accountants out there. Make sure you look up that difference and know what you're asking for. ⁓ And we always do free consultations for anyone who would like it.   speaker-0 (54:29) Awesome. Well, Chris and Brent, thank you again so much, guys. Go check them out, Profi2020. Chris and Brent, they are the owners of the organization. So super grateful for you guys coming on here.   Kiera Dent (54:38) I hope you all loved today's episode as much as I did. It is crazy to think that this many episodes have been released since we started the Dental A Team Podcast. And I started looking to say, my goodness, our listeners need to be reminded of some of the things they may have learned a year ago or two years ago or five years ago, because so many things in our practices weren't relevant back then when we heard them, but they are relevant today. And I would be doing you a huge disservice if I didn't re-release some of these episodes for you to remember, to refine.   to optimize and really truly if you ever need a topic or you're like, my gosh, I wonder if the Dental A Team has anything like this, go onto our website, TheDentalATeam.com, click on our podcast tab and you can literally search any topic. So whether it's overhead or hiring or firing or team morale or engagement or case acceptance or hygiene   onboarding or whatever it is, we have so many episodes for you. And so I am going to intentionally be   re-releasing some of the top best episodes for you, pulling back some of the ones that I needed to remember, some of the things that I feel for you to really, really relearn right now and to re-remember, or if it's the first time, welcome. I'm so happy you're listening to it, but I hope you truly enjoyed today's episode. I hope that you share this with somebody. I hope that you go and implement today because we only have one day. We only get today. And so making today the best that it possibly can be. If we can help you in any way, shape or form, reach out Hello@TheDentalATeam.com.   And as always, thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.

FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/andrewjfaris⁠⁠⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠podcast@ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠Work with Andrew: ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MOVE SUPPLY CHAINReduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting, AI, and offshore talent by visiting ⁠⁠https://morestaffing.co/af⁠⁠.RICHPANELCut your support costs by 30% and reduce tickets by 30%—guaranteed—with Richpanel's AI-first Customer Service Platform that will reduce costs, improve agent productivity & delight customers at http://www.richpanel.com/partners/ajf?utm_source=spotify.

In this episode host Mark Doherty sits down with Sam Andras, 3rd Act Architecture to explore what Schedule 3 federal oversight means for commercial cultivation facilities—and how growers can get ahead of the transition. From GMP-ready layouts, one-way flow, and choosing the right systems, to data-driven design for indoor operations, Sam breaks down how smart planning protects crops, avoids costly mistakes, and keeps facility operations running smoothly.The conversation also covers the evolution of cultivation facility design, including precise plant metrics, vetted technology, and why things can go wrong—and how an experienced architect helps check the right boxes early. Add in CAPEX vs. OPEX, energy efficiency, and designing for people, and you've got a playbook to survive and thrive under Schedule 3.

“I actually call myself – lovingly – the angel of death because I was not an angel investor. Yeah, I destroyed businesses and, in the process, wiped myself out financially.” – Mike Michalowicz I believe that the message in Mike Michalowicz' book, Profit First is both elegantly simple and powerful I've adopted most of these strategies over the past 6 months and my business has already become more profitable, and my cash-flow management is clearer and smoother than ever before. This interview of Mike is going to follow two parallel paths.  As a financial advisor YOU are a business owner AND you probably serve a lot of business owner clients. This interview will give you ideas to bring more value to your clients, and at the same time help you reflect on the profitability of your own business. Bill and Mike discuss: Profit First Mentality: Mike shared his personal story of financial reset, revealing how shifting your approach to “profit first” can change everything. Instead of waiting for profit at year-end, set it aside from every transaction – just like you pay yourself first in personal finance. Behavioral Hacks for Profitability: Discover the “small plates” strategy. Just as smaller dinner plates lead to smaller portions, breaking your income into dedicated accounts (profit, owner's compensation, taxes, OpEx) naturally guides prudent spending. Why Most Business Owners Struggle: Did you know 83% of small businesses are living paycheck to paycheck? The traditional formula – sales minus expenses equals profit – actually sets most up for failure. With Profit First, sales minus profit equals expenses, forcing you to run your business sustainably. Debt & Profit: Think you need to pay off debt before saving profit? Think again – profit is the muscle you need to build to sustainably pay down debt over time. Owner's Compensation vs. Profit: Mike Michalowicz clarified the crucial distinction: Owner's compensation is your salary for running the business. Profit is a bonus for taking the risk. Don't confuse or commingle these! Holistic Advising: Advisors, there's a massive opportunity in linking business and personal finances for your clients. Don't leave the business side to the accountant – address both for true financial independence. Commitment Devices: ! This is Powerful ! Setting up systems (like hiding your profit in a different bank account) creates “commitment devices” – behavioral nudges that help you stick to your plan, just like leaving your gym shoes on the toilet lid to get moving in the morning. Whether you're a solo advisor, own a small business, or even part of a larger firm, Profit First adapts. The sooner you start, the greater the impact.

 In this episode of the ARC Advisory Group's Digital Transformation podcast, Craig Resnick of ARC speaks with Manishi Tiwari, Senior Director of EcoStruxure Power & Process Programs at Schneider Electric, about the accelerating convergence of electrical power management and process automation. The discussion explores the mega trends reshaping industrial operations—including process electrification, renewable energy integration, grid resilience, AI-driven demand, and digitalization—and why siloed power and process systems are no longer viable. Drawing on real-world examples, digital twin technology, and lifecycle integration from design through operations, the conversation highlights how unified architectures enable better decision-making, improved resilience, lower CapEx and OpEx, and faster progress toward sustainability and net-zero goals. Would you like to be a guest on our growing podcast?Do you have an intriguing or thought provoking topic you'd like to discuss on our podcast? Please contact Our Producer Tom Cabot at: Tcabot@Arcweb.comView all the episodes here: https://thedigitaltransformationpodcast.buzzsprout.com

In boardrooms across the world, the tone of executive conversations has shifted. Where once the dominant themes were growth, expansion and digital transformation, today the language is more cautious: resilience, cost control, supply risk, and operational visibility. The global economy is entering one of those periods where volatility becomes the defining feature rather than the exception. Inflationary pressure, supply chain disruption, energy shocks, and geopolitical fragmentation have created an environment in which corporate leaders are being asked to do something extremely difficult: spend less, but operate smarter. For many organisations, the largest opportunity to accomplish this goal sits in a place that historically received far less executive attention than product, finance, marketing or sales – procurement. Procurement has traditionally been viewed as an operational function tasked with negotiating prices and managing supplier relationships. But that perception is increasingly outdated. In an era defined by supply chain fragility and cost scrutiny, procurement is rapidly emerging as one of the most strategic levers available to the modern enterprise. And at the heart of that transformation lies a new generation of source-to-pay procurement platforms that promise something executives have long struggled to achieve: real-time control over how money actually leaves the business. When companies experience economic headwinds, the first instinct is usually to freeze hiring or cut discretionary spending. While those actions may deliver short-term relief, they rarely address the deeper structural problem – a lack of visibility into where capital and operational expenditure are truly going. Many large organisations still rely on fragmented purchasing systems, spreadsheets, email approvals and manual invoice processing. The result is predictable: hidden spending, duplicated suppliers, inconsistent contract compliance and a procurement function that struggles to provide accurate insight into enterprise wide expenditure. Source-to-pay technology is designed to eliminate that opacity. A modern source-to-pay platform integrates every stage of the procurement lifecycle into a single digital workflow, beginning with supplier discovery and strategic sourcing and continuing through contracting, purchasing, invoicing and payment. Instead of procurement existing as a patchwork of disconnected processes, the entire spend ecosystem becomes structured, trackable and measurable. This shift is particularly powerful when it comes to capital expenditure. Capex decisions often involve large, multi-departmental investments, infrastructure upgrades, manufacturing equipment, technology deployments that can stretch across months or even years. Without centralised visibility, organisations frequently underestimate the long-term financial impact of these commitments or fail to capture economies of scale when negotiating with suppliers. Source-to-pay systems introduce discipline into these decisions by standardising approval processes, linking procurement activity directly to financial planning, and capturing every data point associated with the investment. Executives are no longer forced to rely on retrospective reporting to understand capital allocation. Instead, they can evaluate spending patterns as they emerge, allowing finance leaders to align procurement activity more closely with strategic priorities. Operational expenditure presents a different but equally challenging problem. OpEx tends to accumulate gradually through thousands of small purchasing decisions made across departments. Software subscriptions, consulting engagements, marketing services, office equipment, logistics contracts, individually these costs may appear modest, but collectively they can represent a significant portion of an organisation's annual budget. The challenge is not simply the magnitude of the spend but the fragmentation of the data surrounding it. In many compan...

What if the biggest crisis in construction isn't AI adoption, it's that we hand over $100M assets with no instruction manual?In this episode of KP Unpacked, KP Reddy sits down with David Niewiadomski, former Turner Construction executive turned Shadow Ventures operator, to answer a haunting question: if your building could talk, what would it say? The answer isn't pretty. "You don't do scheduled maintenance. You didn't check the caulk joints before the warranty expired. You take me for granted." Dave spent 17 years in the contractor trenches, pre-con, estimating, project management, and walked away to solve the data handoff problem that makes every asset transfer feel like buying a car with no owner's manual.The conversation weaves between tactical AI workflows (how to automate bid leveling in two weeks, why Claude told KP he was "out of his depth" and should call Barry) and systemic industry failures. Why do cars come with organized manuals regardless of manufacturer, but $100M buildings get handed over with incomplete data scattered across expired Procore servers? Why don't architects visit existing hospitals before designing new ones? Why do facilities teams get involved after walls are already placed? And why, when KP's uncle kept every oil change receipt in a three-ring binder to maximize car resale value, don't we track building maintenance the same way?Key topics covered:Why IT departments are the #1 barrier to AI adoption, not capability, cost, or interest, just permissionsHow Dave would automate bid leveling in two weeks using Claude Cowork if corporate let him tinkerWhy pre-con departments are perfect AI targets: small teams, high expertise, Excel-heavy workflowsThe moment Claude told KP to escalate to Barry because he was out of his depth—and what that means for mentoring juniorsIf your building could talk: "40% of my caulk joints are cracking and my exterior warranty just expired"Why cars have consistent owner's manuals but $100M buildings don't, the automotive vs. construction data gapHow organized building data determines which deals asset managers skip during due diligenceThe CapEx vs. OpEx disconnect: design teams optimize construction cost, ignore 20-year maintenance nightmaresWhy facilities teams review drawings after decisions are locked and walls are already placedThe hospital prototype problem: architects don't visit 50 existing hospitals to learn what breaks and what costs too muchWhy grocery store GMs kept selling corporate-spec'd deli coolers on eBay, and corporate couldn't update specs fast enoughHow technology creates deflation everywhere (Blockbuster to Netflix, $20 CDs to Spotify), except constructionWhy RFIs and change orders eat 10-20% of contract value, and AI's first impact will be waste reduction, not bid pricesWhether contractors will pass 30-40% AI cost savings to owners (answer: no, they'll pocket it until competition forces pricing down)Why mid-sized GCs will adopt AI faster than Turner, fewer people, less federal red tape, more agilityThe union robotics challenge: layout robots worked in NYC, but full automation requires labor negotiationWhy institutional knowledge walks out the door with employee turnover, and Procore data disappears when subscriptions endThe three-ring binder standard: why we track car maintenance for resale value but not $100M building systemsIf you're an owner frustrated by incomplete building handoffs, a contractor wondering where AI automation starts, or a facilities manager tired of inheriting broken systems with zero documentation, this episode will make you realize the problem isn't innovation, it's that we never solved basic organization.Listen now.BuildingWorks & Brookwood Sponsors

Live from Morgan Stanley's TMT conference, our panel break down where AI is already delivering real returns—and where rapid advances are raising new risks.Read more insights from Morgan Stanley.----- Transcript -----Michelle Weaver: Welcome to Thoughts on the Market. I'm Michelle Weaver, U.S. Thematic and Equity Strategist here at Morgan Stanley.Today we've got a special episode on AI adoption. And this is a first in a two-part conversation live from our Technology, Media and Telecom conference.It's Thursday, March 5th at 11am in San Francisco.We're really excited to be here with all of you taping live. And we've got on stage with me. Stephen Byrd, he's our Global Head of Thematic and Sustainability Research; Josh Baer, Software Analyst; and Lindsay Tyler, TMT Credit Research Analyst.So, Stephen, I want to start with you, pretty broad, pretty high level. We recently published our fifth AI Mapping Survey that identifies how different companies are exposed to the broad AI theme. Can you just share with us some insights from that piece and how stocks are performing with this AI exposure?Stephen Byrd: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, we've been doing this survey now, thanks to you, Michelle, and your excellent work, for quite a while. And every six months it is pretty telling to see the progression.I would say a few things that got my attention from our most recent mapping was the number of companies that are quantifying the adoption benefits continues to go up quite a bit. And to me that feels like that's going to be table stakes very soon as in every industry you see two or three companies that are really laying out quite specifically what they expect to be able to do with AI and lay out the math. I think that really is going to pull all the other companies to follow suit. So, we're seeing that in a big way.We do see adopters, with real tangible benefits performing well. But a new thing that we're seeing now, of course, in the market is concerns that in some cases adoption can lead to dramatic deflation, disruption, et cetera. That's coming up as well. So, we're seeing greater concerns around disruption as well.But broadly, I'd say a proliferation of adoption, that that universe of companies continues to grow, increases in quantification of the benefits. So, that is good. What's really surprised me though, is the narrative among investors has so quickly moved from those benefits which we've talked about into flipping that to toggle all negative, which I know some of our analysts have to deal with every day. The mapping work suggests significant benefits. But the market is fast forwarding to very powerful AI that is very disruptive in deflation. And that's been a surprise to me.Michelle Weaver: Mm-hmm. Josh, I want to bring software into this. Your team has been arguing that AI is actually good for software. And it's really something that you need that application layer to then enable other companies to adopt AI. Can you tell us a little bit about how much GenAI could add to the broader enterprise software market? And how are you thinking about monetization these days?Josh Baer: Of course. I think the best starting place is a reminder that AI is software, and so we see software as a TAM expander. And in many ways, even though this is extremely exciting innovation, it's following past innovation trends where first you see value accrue and market cap accrue to semiconductors, and then hardware and devices, and then eventually software and services. And we do think that that absolutely will occur just given [$]3 trillion in infrastructure investment into data centers and GPUs.There's got to be an application layer that brings all of these productivity and efficiency gains to enterprises and advanced capabilities to consumers as well. And so we see AI more as an evolution for software than a revolution. An evolution of capabilities and expansion of capabilities. LLMs and diffusion engines absolutely unlocked all of these new features of what software can do. But incumbents will play a key role in this unlock.And our CIO surveys really support that. Quarterly we ask chief information officers about their spending intentions, and these application vendors who we cover in the public markets are increasingly selected as vendors that companies will go to, to help deploy and apply AI and LLM technologies.So, to answer your question, we estimate GenAI could unlock [$]400 billion in incremental TAM for software; for enterprise software by 2028. And this is based on looking at the type of work able to be automated, the labor costs associated with that work, the scope of automation, and then thinking about how much of that value is captured typically by software vendors.Michelle Weaver: And you have a bit of a different lens on AI adoption. So, what are some of the ways you're hearing software customers using these AI tools and anything interesting that popped up at the conference?Josh Baer: To echo what Stephen laid out, I mean, all of our software companies are using AI internally, both to drive efficiencies, but also to move faster. So thinking about product. Innovation, you know, the incumbents are able to use all of the same coding tools and, you know, …Michelle Weaver: Mm-hmm.Josh Bear: … products geared to developers to move faster and more efficiently on R&D. So, they're doing more. From a sales and marketing perspective, a G&A perspective, every area of OpEx, our software companies are in a great position to deploy the AI tools internally.I think more important[ly], speaking to this TAM and expanded opportunity, is our companies have skews that they're monetizing. It might be a separate suite that incorporates advanced AI functionality. It might be a standalone offering, or it might be embedded into the core platform because the essence of software is AI and it, you know, leading to better retention rates and acceleration from here.Michelle Weaver: Mm-hmm. And Stephen, going back to you on the state of play for AI, we had the AI labs here and we heard a lot about the developments and what's to come. So, what's your view on the trajectory for LLM advancements and what are some of the key signposts or catalysts you're watching here?Stephen Byrd: Yeah, this is for me, maybe the most important takeaway of the conference – is this continued non-linear improvement of LLMs, which we've been writing about for quite some time. And just to give you an example, we think many of the labs have achieved a step change up in terms of the compute that they have, in some cases 10 x the amount of compute to train their LLMs. And that [if] the scaling laws hold – and we see every sign that they will – a 10x increase in compute used to train the models results in about a doubling of the model capabilities.Now just let that sink in for a moment. Let's just think about that. A doubling from here in a relatively short period of time is difficult to predict. It's obviously very significant and I think several of the LLM execs at our event sounded to me extremely bullish on what that will be. A lot of that I think will be evident in greater agentic capabilities.But also, I'd say greater creativity. It was about three weeks ago, three of the best physics minds in the world worked with an LLM to achieve a true breakthrough in physics – solving a problem that had never been solved before. A couple of days ago, a math team did the same thing. And so, what we're seeing is sort of these breakthrough capabilities in creativity. This morning I thought Sam speaking to, you know, incredible increases in what these models can do – which also brings risk. You know, I think it was interesting he spoke to, you know, the risk of misalignment, the risk of what these models are doing.But for me, that's the single biggest thing that I'm thinking about, and that's going to be evident in the next several months.Michelle Weaver: Mm-hmm.Stephen Byrd: So, you know, on the positive side, it leads to greater benefits from AI adoption. And to Josh's point that, you know – more and more the economy can be addressed by AI, I do get concerned about the risk that that kind of step change will create greater concerns about disruption and deflation.That causes me to think a lot about that dynamic. Interestingly, we think the Chinese labs will not be able to keep pace just for one reason, which is compute. We think the Chinese labs have everything else they need. They have the talent, the infrastructure. They certainly have the energy, power. But they don't have the chips.If what we laid out with the American models turns out to be true, I could see a chain reaction where the Chinese government pushes the Trump administration for full transfer of the best technology to China. And China could use their rare earth trade position to ensure that. So, that's sort of the chain reaction I've been thinking about.Michelle Weaver: Mm-hmm. So, let's think about then bottlenecks in the U.S. Power is still one of the main bottlenecks. We had several of the solutions providers here at the conference. So, what are you thinking in terms of the size of the power bottleneck in the U.S. and how are we going to fix that?Stephen Byrd: Yeah, absolutely. I am bullish on the companies that can de-bottleneck power, not just in the U.S., a few other places. Let's go through the math in terms of the problem we face and then the solution.So, we have this very cool – it is cool if you're a nerd – power model that starts in the chip level up, from our semiconductor teams. And from that, we build a global power demand model for data centers. We then apply that to the U.S.Through 2028 we need about 74 gigawatts of data centers, both AI and non-AI to be built in the United States. I don't think we'll be able to achieve that for lots of reasons. But starting from that 74, we have sort of 10 gigs that have been recently built or are under construction. We have 15 gigs of incremental grid access, but after those two, we have to go to unconventional solutions, meaning typically off-grid solutions, over 40 gigawatts of unconventional solutions.So that will be repurposing Bitcoin sites, which could be sort of 10 to 15 gigawatts. That'll be big. Renewable energy, fuel cells will be part of the solution. Gas turbines will be a big part of the solution. Co-locating at a few nuclear plants. I'm less bullish than I used to be on that. But when we net all that out, we think the U.S. is likely to be 10 to 20 percent short of the data center capacity that will need to be in.It's not just a power grid access issue, though, that's a big one. Labor is now showing up as a huge issue. Many of the companies I speak to trying to develop data centers struggle with availability of labor. Electricians being one very tangible example. In the U.S. we need hundreds of thousands of additional electricians.So, for any of your children, like mine, thinking about careers, you know, you'd be surprised [at] the amount of money that people are making in the infrastructure business that does feel like it's a labor shift that's going to have to happen, but it's going to take years. So, in that context, we had a number of the Bitcoin companies at our event here. And the economics of turning a Bitcoin site into hosting a data center are extremely attractive. I mean, extremely attractive.To give you a sense of that. Before this opportunity presented itself to these Bitcoin players, those stocks tended to trade at an enterprise value per watt of about $1 to $2 a watt. Then we started to see these deals in which the Bitcoin players build a data center and lease them to hyperscalers. Those deals – depends a lot on the deal but – have created between $10 and $18 a watt of value. Let me repeat that. 10 to 18 – relative to where these stocks were at 1 to 2.Now many of these stocks have rerated, but not all of them. And there's still quite a bit of upside. And what we've noticed is the economics that the hyperscalers are paying are trending up and up and up. Because of this power shortage that we're dealing with. So, a lot of exciting opportunities are still in the power space.Michelle Weaver: Great. Well, I think that's a good place to wrap this first part of our conversation around AI adoption and the state of play. We'll be back again tomorrow with Part Two, looking at financing and risks.To our panelists, thank you for talking with me. And to our audience, thanks for listening. If you enjoy Thoughts on the Market, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share the podcast with a friend or colleague today.

FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/andrewjfaris⁠⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠⁠podcast@ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠Work with Andrew: ⁠⁠⁠https://ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠INTELLIGEMSIntelligems brings A/B testing to business decisions beyond copy and design. Test your pricing, shipping charges, free shipping thresholds, offers, SaaS tools, and more by clicking here: ⁠https://bit.ly/42DcmFl⁠. Get 20% off the first 3 months with code FARIS20.MOVE SUPPLY CHAINReduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting, AI, and offshore talent by visiting ⁠https://morestaffing.co/af⁠.

In this episode, Alan Dunne and Cem Karsan explore a market that appears calm on the surface yet increasingly unstable underneath. As indices move sideways, they discuss how options flows and structured products are reshaping market behavior, driving rotation rather than direction. From the weakening of former leaders to the rise of defensives, the conversation turns to what these shifts may signal about a broader topping process. They also examine the growing influence of AI narratives, political incentives, and global tensions, not as isolated shocks but as forces building pressure within the system. The result is a discussion about how markets evolve when structure, policy, and sentiment begin to move out of sync.-----50 YEARS OF TREND FOLLOWING BOOK AND BEHIND-THE-SCENES VIDEO FOR ACCREDITED INVESTORS - CLICK HERE-----Follow Niels on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube or via the TTU website.IT's TRUE ? – most CIO's read 50+ books each year – get your FREE copy of the Ultimate Guide to the Best Investment Books ever written here.And you can get a free copy of my latest book “Ten Reasons to Add Trend Following to Your Portfolio” here.Learn more about the Trend Barometer here.Send your questions to info@toptradersunplugged.comAnd please share this episode with a like-minded friend and leave an honest Rating & Review on iTunes or Spotify so more people can discover the podcast.Follow Alan on Twitter.Follow Cem on X.Episode TimeStamps:00:00 Intro to the Systematic Investor Series00:23 Performance check: CTAs strong, trend tailwinds03:13 Range-bound indices, but big dispersion and rotation03:45 Why options pin the index: dealer flows and vol compression05:42 Dispersion mechanics: idiosyncratic risk, falling correlation07:32 Rotation as a topping process: leaders fade, defensives rise09:54 OPEX and quarterly expiries: why timing windows matter11:56 The March support effect, then weaker flows into April17:02 AI narrative shock: anxiety, backlash, and policy consequences22:32 Populism versus deflation stories: why inflation returns32:43 Gold outlook: secular bull, but expect two-sided volatility45:45 Rates as “tectonic plates”: vol compressed now, release later50:23 Midterms, incentives, and the fight for control57:42 Liquidity loop: markets stop rising, collateral stops expandingCopyright © 2025 – CMC AG – All Rights Reserved----PLUS: Whenever you're ready... here are 3 ways I can help you in your investment Journey:1. eBooks that cover key topics that you need to know about In my eBooks, I put together some key discoveries and things I have learnt during the more than 3 decades I have worked in the Trend Following industry, which I hope you will find useful. Click Here2. Daily Trend Barometer and Market Score One of the things I'm really proud of, is the fact that I have managed to published the Trend Barometer and Market Score each day for more than a decade...as these tools are really good at describing the environment for trend following managers as well as giving insights into the general positioning of a trend following strategy! Click Here3. Other Resources that can help youAnd if you are hungry for more useful resources from the trend following world...check out some precious resources that I have found over the years to be really valuable. Click HerePrivacy PolicyDisclaimer

In this episode, Jeff Mains sits down with Barbara Wittmann, a 25-year veteran of IT transformation who has pioneered the concept of "human infrastructure" - the invisible framework of trust, clarity, and collaboration that determines whether technology projects succeed or fail. Barbara shares her journey from mountain biking and logistics to SAP consulting, and how she discovered that most technology failures are actually people problems in disguise. She introduces her four-pillar model for preventing costly project detours, explains why people development should be a permanent IT budget line item (not a one-time HR initiative), and reveals how AI is raising the bar on what humans need to do best. The conversation explores psychological safety, shared mental models, limiting beliefs, and why wisdom drawn from indigenous cultures can help modern SaaS leaders build more resilient organizations.Key Takeaways[4:56] - Technology problems are almost always people problems - software can't fix misalignment, confusion, or teams that weren't brought along for the change[8:35] - Human infrastructure is the framework where departments work seamlessly together, end-to-end processes are understood, and people have artifacts to help them navigate complexity[10:14] - Shared mental models are critical - creating a high-level map of systems, data elements, and functions helps everyone align on what changes will impact[12:20] - People development should be an OPEX line item in IT budgets, not a one-time HR initiative - we upgrade servers continuously but treat people upgrades as "one and done"[16:15] - Empowering the middle layer of organizations can save about 20% on consulting spend because in-house people already have the knowledge[20:20] - The four-pillar model: Understand the problem → Condense it → Create a solution → Get people excited about it (most teams skip understanding the problem)[22:32] - The dual ecosystem approach: Train people in a cross-industry environment where they can practice without fear, then bring learnings back to their organization[25:53] - Once 25% of your middle layer adopts a new mindset, you see behavioral shifts ripple throughout the entire organization[29:00] - Indigenous wisdom teaches that everything is connected (ecosystems) and everything works in cycles - nature isn't "on" all the time[34:27] - Limiting beliefs often sound like "I can't do that, I've never done that before" - when your instant reaction is "no," pause and get curious about why[37:17] - AI should be seen as a coworker, not a competitor - the key is training our uniquely human aspects: emotional intelligence, sense-making, and asking better questions[39:38] - First step to building human infrastructure: Create psychological safety where people can voice concerns, and reconnect with your company's core mission and valuesTweetable Quotes"Most teams learn the hard way: Technology rarely fails because of the tools. It fails because the people aren't aligned to use them." - Barbara Wittmann"If your company is not really talking to each other as it is, a software is not gonna fix the issue." - Barbara Wittmann"We are upgrading servers all along, but with people upgrades, we look at it in a very old fashioned way. It's a one and done kind of thing." - Barbara Wittmann"AI models are evolving at the speed of light, and we are not upgrading our humans. What can go wrong?"- Barbara Wittmann"Your execution layer cannot delegate complexity anymore because they need to deal with it inevitably."...

Host Justin Lake interviews Carlos Linares, founder and CEO of FoodOpsIQ and Third Wish Food Services, about using AI and technology to empower frontline food-service teams. Carlos explains his global experience, the idea of "virtual OPEX," and how voice-enabled generative AI can augment workers in kitchens and service roles. They cover practical change management: designing with operations, running pilots, building trust, measuring baselines and KPIs, and keeping solutions simple to increase adoption. Carlos shares a smart-kitchen example that cut costs, improved safety and sustainability, and boosted staff engagement. The episode highlights a people-first approach to digital transformation, arguing that AI should elevate frontline workers and the guest experience rather than simply replace jobs. YouTube: https://youtu.be/HYIWYAOryDo Carlos' LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clinaresb/ Find more episodes of Frontline Innovators at https://www.skyllful.com/podcast

Matt Slykhuis is the CEO of Modern Fuel. Get 20% off a Modern Fuel writing implement with the code FARIS20.FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/andrewjfaris⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠podcast@ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠Work with Andrew: ⁠⁠https://ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠MORE STAFFINGRecruit, onboard, and train incredible virtual professionals in the Philippines with my friends at More Staffing by visiting ⁠https://morestaffing.co/af⁠. MOVE SUPPLY CHAINReduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting, AI, and offshore talent by visiting ⁠https://morestaffing.co/af⁠.

Corrosion rarely announces itself as a "big water problem." It shows up as leaching at the tap, residual loss in the field, premature equipment replacement, and the slow, expensive erosion of decision-quality.  Pat Rosenstiel (CEO) and Wolf Merker (chemist/Chief Science Officer) of Great Water Tech lay out a system-wide view of corrosion control—starting with what changed in Flint from a technical standpoint and moving into why many utilities still struggle to meet expectations when standards and risk assumptions shift.  System-wide corrosion control starts with chemistry and consequences  A source-water change can shift corrosivity fast. If corrosion control does not adjust proactively, the downstream effects show in metal release and public exposure. Wolf stresses the distinction between the technical problem and the political challenges, then points to corrosion control as a solvable technical matter when it is treated as a system condition—not a single asset issue.  Why "phosphate-only" isn't the end of the story  Trace frames what most operators recognize: many municipalities use phosphate inhibitors to form a tenacious film and reduce corrosion. Wolf argues phosphates are "a little bit of old news" in practice and explains the approach Great Water Tech discusses with their German partners—using phosphates and silicates together in the right amounts to create a tighter separation between water and metal.  Barriers, biology, and the disinfection tradeoff  Wolf breaks corrosion drivers into three sources: chemical, biological, and electrochemical (dissimilar metal corrosion). He also ties corrosion to cascading operational decisions—especially disinfectant strategy. If residual loss pushes a system from chlorine to chloramine, Wolf warns that corrosivity can increase dramatically, and that corrosion can amplify the formation of disinfection byproducts as chlorine reacts with what is in the water.  What industrial water treaters should listen for  Pat connects the same barrier logic to industrial priorities—CapEx, OpEx, and lifecycle extension in closed systems (cooling towers, closed chilled loops, boilers). Wolf clarifies that closed systems require different product "flavors," while keeping the core concept consistent: the combined silicate/phosphate approach remains the best path he is aware of.  Listen to the full conversation above. Explore related episodes below. Stay engaged, keep learning, and continue scaling up your knowledge!    Timestamps    02:20 - Trace sets the tone for the episode: decision-quality improves when you "rethink the way that you think you know things," especially around tests and procedures   08:20 - Words of Water with James McDonald  11:00 - Upcoming Events for Water Treatment Professionals   18:22 - Interview with Pat Rosenstiel, CEO of Great Water Tech & Wolf Merker, Chief Science Officer of Great Water Tech  23:00 - Flint technical breakdown  27:30 - Corrosion control options  32:20 - Scale vs. Corrosion   43:40 – Algae Control Pivot    Connect with Pat Rosenstiel  Website: Great Water Tech | Water Treatment Solutions  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pat-rosenstiel-a148952/   Great Water Tech LLC: Overview | LinkedIn     Connect with Wolf Merker  Website: Great Water Tech | Water Treatment Solutions  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wolf-merker-a1b95284/    Great Water Tech LLC: Overview | LinkedIn    Guest Resources Mentioned   NSF/ANSI/CAN 60 — Drinking Water Treatment Chemicals: Health Effect   NSF — Drinking Water Treatment Chemicals Certification (NSF/ANSI/CAN 60) (how certification works)   ANSI Webstore listing (official standard access/purchase)  EPA — Lead and Copper Rule (regulation hub)  EPA — Lead and Copper Rule Improvements (LCRI) (final rule page)  EPA fact sheet — Tap Monitoring Requirements (LCRI) (sampling protocol changes)  Great Water Tech  Folmar (Great Water Tech) — corrosion inhibitor (phosphate + silicate blend)  Algae Armor (Great Water Tech) — nutrient-binding tool for ponds/lakes  EPA Distribution System Toolbox — Pigging fact sheet (PDF) (removing biofilm/scale/sediment from mains)  U.S. Bureau of Reclamation report page (chlorine vs chloramine impacts incl. corrosion/leaching discussion)  AWWA Opflow article (main cleaning techniques incl. pigging): AWWA's utility-facing perspective on cleaning options  Silicate corrosion inhibitors  Historical context for silicate–phosphate combinations    Scaling UP! H2O Resources Mentioned  AWT (Association of Water Technologies)   AWT Technical Training (March 2026)  Scaling UP! H2O Academy video courses  Submit a Show Idea  The Rising Tide Mastermind  Ep 422 Inside the Association of Water Technologies with John Caloritis Hach Water Analysis Handbook      Words of Water with James McDonald Today's definition is the smallest functional unit of a cooling tower that contains its own heat exchange section, fan or air-moving system, water distribution system, and drift eliminators.    2026 Events for Water Professionals  Check out our Scaling UP! H2O Events Calendar where we've listed every event Water Treaters should be aware of by clicking HERE.   

FOLLOW UP WITH ANDREW X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/andrewjfaris⁠⁠ Email: ⁠⁠podcast@ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠Work with Andrew: ⁠⁠https://ajfgrowth.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠RICHPANELCut your support costs by 30% and reduce tickets by 30%—guaranteed—with Richpanel's AI-first Customer Service Platform that will reduce costs, improve agent productivity & delight customers at ⁠⁠http://www.richpanel.com/partners/ajf?utm_source=spotify⁠⁠.MOVE SUPPLY CHAINReduce your OpEx and create more leverage in your company with financial forecasting, AI, and offshore talent by visiting ⁠https://morestaffing.co/af⁠.

Read the blog postOperational Excellence rarely fails because of a lack of ideas. More often, it breaks down when strategy, daily work, and improvement efforts operate in silos.In this episode, Mark Graban explores what it really means to take a unified approach to OpEx—one that connects strategy deployment, process discipline, employee-driven improvement, and leader-led initiatives into a single, coherent system.You'll hear how organizations move beyond disconnected spreadsheets, emails, and project tools to create visibility, alignment, and learning across all levels of the organization. Mark also discusses how platforms like KaiNexus support this work—not by replacing leadership or Lean thinking, but by strengthening the management system that makes continuous improvement sustainable.This conversation is especially relevant for leaders trying to:Bring strategy to life at the frontlineBalance top-down direction with bottom-up improvementCreate visibility without micromanagementTurn Operational Excellence into how the business actually runs

Parable is building an end-to-end intelligence platform that quantifies how organizations spend their collective time—the foundation for measuring real AI impact. With a thousand data connectors ingesting activity and log data across the enterprise software stack, Parable constructs proprietary knowledge graphs that size opportunities and measure outcomes in hard dollars, not adoption metrics. In this episode of BUILDERS, I sat down with Adam Schwartz, Co-Founder & CEO of Parable, to explore why 95% of CFOs see no AI ROI, how his decade running profitable businesses under resource constraints shaped his focus on inputs over outcomes, and why 2026 requires moving AI from CapEx experimentation to measured OpEx. Topics Discussed: Why the 95% CFO stat on AI ROI matters as an arbiter of truth, despite backlash Building knowledge graphs from activity data to quantify collective time allocation across hundreds of people The fundamental problem: enterprises lack quantitative frameworks for operational efficiency pre-AI Running parallel ICP experiments to achieve sales-market fit before product-market fit Why Parable has never lost a POC once leaders see quantitative baselines Market dynamics creating false signals—unprecedented curiosity without buying intent The demarcation between companies treating AI as product work versus those waiting for vendor solutions Why AI transformation demands century-old management structures to be questioned GTM Lessons For B2B Founders: Engineer disqualification in momentum markets: Market-wide AI enthusiasm creates pipeline illusion. Prospects will engage indefinitely for education without purchase intent. Adam's framework: "How do we get people to say no to us and not drag us along... They want to keep talking because they want to learn and they want to know what's going on and they are genuinely interested." In enterprise sales during category shifts, build explicit qualification gates that force prospects to reveal resource commitment or disqualify. Extended evaluation cycles feel like traction but destroy unit economics. Use go-to-market as ICP discovery mechanism: Adam intentionally pursued multiple customer segments simultaneously—different company sizes and AI maturity stages—to let data reveal fit rather than rely on hypothesis. His memo to the team: "We're going to go after these three, you know, many different sizes of companies in order for us to decide like, who we like best." The key insight: get to problem-market fit and sales-market fit validation before optimizing product-market fit. This inverts conventional wisdom but works when TAM is massive and the bottleneck is identifying who feels pain acutely enough to buy now. Qualify on organizational structure, not verbal commitment: Every enterprise claims AI is strategic. Adam's hard filter: "Who in the organization is responsible for AI transformation? And if you don't have a one person answer to that question, you're not serious." Serious buyers have a named owner reporting to C-suite with dedicated budget and team. Buying Gemini, Glean, or other point solutions isn't a seriousness KPI—it's often passive consumption of AI as a byproduct of existing software relationships. Look for companies doing five-year work-backs on industry transformation and cascading effects on their operating model. Target post-experimentation, pre-scale buyers: Adam discovered the sweet spot isn't companies beginning their AI journey—it's those who've deployed initial programs and now need to prove value. "The market of people that have started to build AI into their operating model or into their strategy in like a coherent way, there's a team, there's an owner, there's budget... those are the people that we really want to be talking to." These buyers understand the problem viscerally because they're living it. They do product work daily—talking to stakeholders, generating use cases, building briefs, triaging roadmaps. They need your solution to professionalize what they're already attempting manually. Build measurement into your category narrative: The AI tooling market has over-indexed on soft efficiency claims that won't survive renewal cycles. Adam's warning: "There is too much hand waving around soft efficiency gains... you're going to have to renew and you need NRR and I don't think it's going to be that usage of the tool internally by employees and adoption is going to be enough." The last decade over-rotated to "everything drives revenue" due to VC pressure. This decade requires precision: does your product save time, reduce headcount needs, or accelerate revenue? Quantify it. Partner with measurement platforms if needed. Adam's insight on Calendly is instructive—it clearly saves time, but most buyers can't quantify how much, which weakens renewal economics. // Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe. www.GlobalTalent.co // Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM

What if school business operations were designed for sustainability — not constant reaction?In this episode of School Business Insider, host John Brucato is joined by Stephen Morales of the Institute for School Business Leadership and leaders from ASBO New York to discuss the launch of the Operational Excellence (OpEx) Pilot Program in New York State.They explore what OpEx is, how data from ASBO New York's State of the Profession Survey shaped the initiative, and how districts can use OpEx principles to strengthen systems, improve workflows, and build long-term capacity.The conversation also highlights district-level application, including how Briarcliff Manor UFSD is engaging in OpEx work, and walks listeners through what to expect as the pilot program launches.Contact School Business Insider: Check us out on social media: LinkedIn Twitter (X) Website: https://asbointl.org/SBI Email: podcast@asbointl.org Make sure to like, subscribe and share for more great insider episodes!Disclaimer:The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed are the speaker's own and do not represent the views, thoughts, and opinions of the Association of School Business Officials International. The material and information presented here is for general information purposes only. The "ASBO International" name and all forms and abbreviations are the property of its owner and its use does not imply endorsement of or opposition to any specific organization, product, or service. The presence of any advertising does not endorse, or imply endorsement of, any products or services by ASBO International.ASBO International is a 501(c)3 nonprofit, nonpartisan organization and does not participate or intervene in any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for elective public office. The sharing of news or information concerning public policy issues or political campaigns and candidates are not, and should not be construed as, endorsements by ASBO Internatio...

In this episode of Tech Talks Daily, I'm joined by Stuart Thompson, President of ABB's Electrification Service Division, to explore the intersection of industrial sustainability, energy security, and cutting-edge technology.   As industries face growing energy demands and climate targets, Stuart explains how companies can modernize their infrastructure to drive efficiency, reduce carbon footprints, and stay ahead of the energy curve.   Navigating the Industrial Sustainability Challenge   We start by addressing the urgent need for industries to rethink their energy and carbon strategies. Stuart highlights the significant role of construction and manufacturing in global energy-related emissions, stressing that many businesses are still behind on their 2030 sustainability targets.   We dive into the emerging shift from capital expenditure (CapEx) to operational expenditure (OpEx) models, such as predictive maintenance, to maximize value from existing assets.   Asset Modernization   Stuart explains how asset modernization—upgrading intelligent components like switchgear within existing infrastructure—can dramatically improve efficiency and reduce carbon without the need for costly, full-scale replacements.   He also shares examples, including Intel's semiconductor upgrades and Jadal Steel's success in Oman, demonstrating how targeted upgrades can meet sustainability goals while boosting productivity.   Smarter Energy Management with AI and AR   We explore how AI and augmented reality (AR) are transforming service delivery and operational intelligence. Stuart discusses how AI-powered predictive maintenance helps companies anticipate failures and optimize energy management, while AR facilitates remote assistance for faster issue resolution.   He also touches on how these technologies contribute to energy savings and carbon reduction by automating service reports and enabling real-time visibility into asset performance.   BESS as a Service: Solving the Energy Security Trilemma One of the key innovations Stuart highlights is ABB's Battery Energy Storage as a Service (BESSaaS), a solution designed to solve the "energy trilemma" of security, cost, and sustainability.   With on-site battery storage and AI-driven energy trading, businesses can bypass slow grid connections, ensure energy security, and even turn their energy storage into a profit center. This model is already making waves in industries ranging from data centers to manufacturing.   A Glimpse into the Future: ABB's Investment in Asset Management Tech   As we look to the future, Stuart reveals ABB's upcoming investment in asset management technology, set to be announced globally in early December 2025. This exciting move will have a significant impact on major customers like the London Underground and Saudi Electric Commission, further cementing ABB's role as a leader in energy innovation.   Don't miss this episode, where we discuss the latest trends in industrial sustainability, energy security, and technology's pivotal role in shaping a greener, more efficient future.   Useful Links Connect with Stuart on Linkedin Learn more about ABB Tech Talks Daily is sponsored by Denodo

As we begin to wrap up the year, we return to the crude markets. What has been oil's journey in the latter half of 2025? What has all this meant for trader performances after a challenging first half? What is the outlook for 2026 in prices and volatility? Our guest is Homayoun Falakshahi. He leads crude analytics at Kpler, the data and analytics firm for the commodity markets.

If you're doing deals but still feel broke, this episode is your wake-up call. CFO and Profit First for Real Estate Investing author David Richter breaks down the exact system hundreds of investors use to finally keep their money, build stability, retire their W-2, and stop living deal to deal. Hosted by Brent Bowers of Wholesaling Inc, this episode gives you the simplest way to set up Profit First—even if you're brand new, working a 9–5, or doing your first deal.Learn how to structure your bank accounts, protect your profit, cut unnecessary expenses, and build long-term financial freedom without needing to scale to 100 deals. For more land opportunities, join The Landsharks Program.---------Show notes:(0:40) Beginning of today's episode(2:00) The three numbers every investor must know(6:00) David's story(10:10) The envelope method(11:32) Opening 2 accounts in OPEX(17:33) Implementing the Profit First System(29:09) Creating a fun account(35:00) What's working on today's market----------Resources:Profit First Real Estate InvestingThe Secret Life of Real EstateQuickbooksSimple CFORich Dad Poor DadOPEXMailchimpActive CampaignPydriveLand Sharks Data Talk to People  To speak with Brent or one of our other expert coaches call (281) 835-4201 or schedule your free discovery call here to learn about our mentorship programs and become part of the TribeGo to Wholesalingincgroup.com to become part of one of the fastest growing Facebook communities in the Wholesaling space. Get all of your burning Wholesaling questions answered, gain access to JV partnerships, and connect with other "success minded" Rhinos in the community.It's 100% free to join. The opportunities in this community are endless, what are you waiting for?