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From PhD to Practice: Research, Resilience, and Real-World Impact In this Faculty Take Five episode, Associate Dean Amy Sickel talks with Dr. Rhonda Bohs, adjunct faculty at Walden University, about what it really takes to earn and apply a PhD in psychology. Dr. Bohs traces her early passion for the field, the unexpected demands of graduate school, and how those experiences shaped her commitment to mentoring students. Drawing on a 30-year career in behavioral health spanning community-based research, grant writing, and consulting, she shows how doctoral skills extend well beyond academia.
Take 5 with Steven Travers | 06.04.26 We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Steven Travers, co-host Harper LeBel, special guest Jim Saia, and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Poh Ling Yeow has been part of our lives for two decades. As a TV chef, a gourmet stall owner, a celebrity in the jungle, and a cookbook author. Poh is a painter and has even popped up an actor, describing herself as having a greed for life experience.Poh is currently hosting and judging on the latest series of Masterchef, and this week she's Taking 5. Fall into the stories and songs that have shaped who Poh has become.Poh's song choices:The Bee Gees - How Deep Is Your LoveJohnny Mathis & Deniece Williams - Without Us (Theme from Family Ties)Sade - Like a TattooA Tribe Called Quest - Electric RelaxationJóhann Jóhannsson - A Sparrow Alighted Upon Our Shoulder00:30 Introduction to Poh Ling Yeow01:10 Poh's love of being a DJ03:14 The Bee Gees - 'How Deep Is Your Love'05:45 Growing up and being unsupervised12:40 Johnny Mathis & Deniece Williams - 'Without Us'14:07 Wanting to be a popular American teen21:10 Sade - 'Like a Tattoo'24:13 Reconstructing how you see the world after religion29:11 A Tribe Called Quest - 'Electric Relaxation'31:03 The ending of a shared history34:23 Masterchef as contestant and host37:58 Jóhann Jóhannsson - 'A Sparrow Alighted Upon Our Shoulder'Show NotesWatch Poh on Masterchef: https://10.com.au/masterchefWatch Zan on Race Around the World: https://iview.abc.net.au/show/race-around-the-world
What can Walt Disney World teach us about connecting with students? A lot, actually. In this episode, we explore the Take Five strategy from Lee Cockerell's Creating Magic, spontaneous, intentional moments that cost nothing yet mean everything to the person on the receiving end. I walk through practical Take Five ideas for every grade level. Whether you're a preservice teacher, a veteran in the classroom, or a coach working with educators, this episode will have you walking in tomorrow asking: Who in this room needs me to take five today?ohSShow notes can be found here - https://www.sfecich.com/post/the-disney-secret-that-every-teacher-should-use
2026 marks 20 years since Hot Chip released The Warning. Their second album leapt from the quiet, reflective electro of their debut and catapulted us all onto the dancefloor.To mark the occasion, we share an episode from 2020 when Joe Goddard and Al Doyle dropped in to Take 5. Their theme? Jubilant songs. Their vibes? Pure joy. From classic to modern gold to deep cuts, settle in with some "heaters" as Hot Chip Take 5!Hot Chip's song choices:Prince – Starfish and CoffeeFever Ray – To The Moon and BackTeyana Taylor – Hurry {Feat. Kanye West}Double Exposure – Everyman (Has to Carry His Own Weight)Hot Chocolate – I Just Love What You're Doing (Kon Edit)00:06 Hot Chip introduction and anniversary of The Warning01:08 Using sampels to create joy04:10 Prince – 'Starfish and Coffee'06:22 Innocence and joy in music07:18 Fever Ray – 'To The Moon and Back'09:27 20 years of Hot Chip19:07 Teyana Taylor – 'Hurry {Feat. Kanye West}'20:49 Freedom and joy21:34 Double Exposure – 'Everyman (Has to Carry His Own Weight)'23:53 Hot Chip on stage joy29:45 Hot Chocolate – 'I Just Love What You're Doing (Kon Edit)'31:45 Next week's guest!
Take 5 with Steven Travers 05.21.26 We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Steven Travers, special guest Jon Zuber, and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Duff has a look at the defenders in today's edition of Top 5 - Take 5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Controversial adaptation of Orwell fable
Duff has a look at the midfielders in today's edition of Top 5 - Take 5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This month, Gotye's breakthrough album Like Drawing Blood, turns 20. It was the record that took him from bedroom producer to Hottest 100 favourite, showcasing his incredible talent at sewing sounds. The man behind Gotye, Wally De Backer, has been keeping a low profile for a while. But back in 2007, after a huge year following this album's release, he joined Zan Rowe to Take 5. This is one of the very first episodes of Take 5, and the first time it's ever appeared on the podcast.So jump in the time machine and travel back to this mid 2000's moment. It was before Gotye released his worldwide smash "Somebody That I Used to Know", Homebake Festival still existed, MySpace was king, and Wally was at a precipice; head spinning from a wild year but with no idea of what was ahead.His theme? His top 5 moments of the last 12 months. His songs, all Australian. Gotye's song choices:Josh Pyke - Fill You In Karnivool - Shutterspeed Faux Pas - For The Trees Emily Ulman - Upping The AnteThe Presets - Are You The One?00:17 Gotye introduction and 20th Anniversary of 'Like Drawing Blood'02:30 The songs that soundtracked Gotye's 2006 breakthrough02:58 Josh Pyke -'Fill You In'04:55 Gotye and his love of heavy and progressive music06:08 Karnivool 'Shutterspeed'07:52 Bringing Gotye's songs to live with a band11:59 Drummers who sing14:28 Faux Pas - 'For The Trees'17:24 Buying your first iPod18:39 Emily Ulman - 'Upping The Ante'20:30 What Gotye was about to embark on in 200724:15 The Presets - 'Are You The One?'26:13 Next weeks guests!
Take 5 with Steven Travers 05.14.26 We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Steven Travers, special guest John Lobertini, and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Duff has a look at the forwards in today's edition of Top 5 - Take 5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Live Animation mystery murder solve by bright sheep
Duff has a look at the midfielders in today's edition of Top 5 - Take 5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
This week marks the 20th anniversary of Tool's huge album 10,000 Days. Back in 2013, Tool were in the country playing massive shows when drummer Danny Carey and bass player Justin Chancellor came into the triple j studios to Take 5 with Zan Rowe.As we mark the anniversary of Tool's chart topping album, let's time travel back to a Take 5 classic.The theme? Unexpected finds in their music library. The outcome? Unexpected joy from one of music's heaviest bands.It's Tool time! Tool's song choices:Deftones - Digital BathTrans Am - Space DockSophia - If A Change Is Gonna ComeMeshuggah - The Demon's Name Is SurveillanceTV On The Radio - Halfway Home00:08 Tool anniversary introduction01:03 Deftones, Chi and ages.01:35 Deftones - 'Digital Bath'03:10 Organic technology and Trans Am04:11 Trans Am - 'Space Dock'04:28 Downtime for Tool06:57 Sophia - 'If A Change Is Gonna Come'08:43 Inspiration in other heavy bands10:14 Meshuggah - 'The Demon's Name Is Surveillance'11:40 Surprising music choices for Tool and Neil Diamond14:45 TV On The Radio -'Halfway Home'16:52 Next weeks guest!
Take 5 with Steven Travers 05.07.26 We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Steven Travers and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
We get a phone call from Mike'l Severe!
Duff has a look at the Defenders in today's edition of Top 5 - Take 5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Duff has a look at the forwards in today's edition of Top 5 - Take 5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Duff has a look at the midfielders in today's edition of Top 5 - Take 5. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In the fifteen years since Emma Louise wowed us with her debut single 'Jungle', she's shown all sides of herself, singing her story with vulnerability and reflection.Last year, Emma released the collaborative album Dumb with producer Flume. But it's been 8 years since her last solo album, the daring and romantic Lilac Everything. This week, she returns with Sunshine for Happiness, an album that was actually recorded in 2019. Emma Louise joined Zan to talk more about the changes in her life between recording and release and to share her song selections in the theme of 'Before and After'.Emma Louise's song choices:Paul Simon – Still Crazy After All These YearsNick Drake – Pink MoonBruno Mars – Versace on the FloorDijon – The DressAlice Coltrane – Govinda Jai Jai00:51 Introduction to Emma Louise05:27 The theme of Before and After10:15 Paul Simon - 'Still Crazy After All These Years'11:30 Mexico holiday and Nick Drake14:35 Nick Drake - 'Pink Moon'15:45 New album and longlining for things21:55 How a pricey ride home led to discovering Bruno Mars25:26 Bruno Mars - 'Versace on the Floor'27:02 Sneak peak of Djion29:33 Djion - 'The Dress'30:45 Suffering, redemption and recognising the good times37:15 Alice Coltrane – 'Govinda Jai Jai'38:20 Wrap-up and next weeks guestShow notes:If you need someone to talk to, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.Edited by Craig Schuftan.
Take 5 with Steven Travers 4.30.26 We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Steven Travers and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Ahoy Mateys! We're unwrapping some chocolatey goodness from the MATES archive for this week's pantry pick: Take 5. Join the MATES Club for even more snacking: https://realm.supportingcast.fm/matesclub Watch MATES on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MikeAndTomEatSnacks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
A. J. reflects on hitting the five year mark of the New England Take and the state of local media in New Hampshire, followed by a deep dive into the US Department of Justice indicting the Southern Poverty Law Center for funding the very organizations it is allegedly fighting! Fox News, “DOJ says Southern Poverty Law Center funneled $3M+ to white supremacist and extremist groups like the KKK”: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doj-says-southern-poverty-law-center-funneled-3m-white-supremacist-extremist-groups-like-kkk NY Post, “Georgia Teacher of the Year finalist sues district after being removed from classroom over Charlie Kirk post”: https://nypost.com/2025/10/25/us-news/michelle-mickens-sues-georgia-school-district-over-charlie-kirk-fallout/ Support the show by joining our Substack at https://newenglandtake.com and email A. J. at aj@newenglandtake.com
35 years ago, we met a band called Smashing Pumpkins. Rising in the wave of American grunge, the Chicago band were led by the iconic voice of Billy Corgan and would rise and rise like all their contemporaries, over the coming years. If you know anything about music history, you know the story of the Pumpkins is a tumultuous one. But Billy has continued through it all. Back in 2012, Billy was in Australia to play Splendour in the Grass with the latest incarnation of Smashing Pumpkins. With a new album under their belt, he was in a buoyant mood and up for an epic conversation when he joined Zan to Take 5Billy is always good chat, but if you've ever wondered about the music that made him, this conversation is a dream. So settle in, don your flanny, and discover the songs that make Billy Corgan feel good.Billy Corgan's song choices:Yes - And You and IUFO - Love to LoveNeil Young - Ambulance BluesDavid Bowie - Space OddityLou Reed - Berlin00:23 Introduction to Billy Corgan01:43 Creating music during difficult times04:25 1972 and guitar supergroup Yes05:50 Yes - 'And You and I'07:38 When Billy discovered music11:43 British Hard Rock inspirations13:08 UFO - 'Love to Love'14:30 Moving away from mainstream needs15:23 Neil Young - 'Ambulance Blues'16:40 Sad music making you feel better18:50 The definitive anthem of alienation19:24 David Bowie - 'Space Oddity'20:40 Technology and disconnection 28:10 Lou Reed - 'Berlin'29:47 Next weeks guest
Take 5 with Steven Travers 4.23.26 We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Harper LeBel, co-host Steven Travers, and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Alexei Toliopoulos is a lifelong cinephile. Known for his excellent podcasts including The Last Video Store, he's a writer, comedian, filmmaker and loves talking about the movies that made us who we are today. The way he speaks about cinema invites everyone into the conversation. But what are the songs that soundtrack his life? And why?Dig into a joyful convo that will have you curating a playlist of songs and movies, for your weekend.Alexei Toliopoulos' song choices:Stewart Copeland - Don't Box Me In George Dalaras - Mi Mou Thimonis Matia MouMikis Theodorakis - Theme from Serpico Buena Vista Social Club - Dos GardeniasGrace Jones - La Vie En Rose00:26 Alexei Toliopoulos introduction01:38 When did Alexei fall in love with movies?05:29 Francis Ford Coppola deep cuts13:54 Stewart Copeland - 'Don't Box Me In'15:40 Coming of Age and George Dalaras 21:40 George Dalaras - 'Mi Mou Thimonis Matia Mou'24:05 Mikis and the hero of Greek music 30:02 Mikis Theodorakis - 'Theme from Serpico'31:15 Seeing the world through cinema 36:41 Buena Vista Social Club - 'Dos Gardenias'37:36 How cinema helped Alexei with communication45:20 Grace Jones - 'La Vie En Rose'47:32 Show notes and next weeks guest!Check out Alexei's podcast and live show details, via his Instagram.
Interview with Bruce Jenkins | Take 5 with Steven Travers We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Harper LeBel, co-host Steven Travers, and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Take 5 with Steven Travers 4.9.26 We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Steven Travers, and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Thirty years ago the world met Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. Their debut album Revival introduced us to two incredible storytellers, singers and guitarists, and in the three decades since they've swept us away in song.It's long been on my bucket list to have them Take 5, and finally here it is. When thinking on a theme, I landed on time. Time, and their ruminations on time, have always swirled in their songs. They love old-time music, and take their time in getting your own songs right. How they responded to the theme, is one for the ages.Settle in for a deep, insightful, and intoxicating conversation with two of music's best.Gillian Welch and David Rawlings' song choices:Robert Johnson - Love in Vain The Stanley Brothers - Rank StrangersTownes Van Zandt - Pancho and Lefty (Live at the Old Quarter)The Carter Family & Johnny Cash - Will the Circle Be UnbrokenJohn Prine - Angel From Montgomery 00:55 Gillian Welch and David Rawlings introduction01:52 Three decades since the release of 'Revival'08:44 Choosing Robert Johnson12:32 Robert Johnson - 'Love in Vain'13:22 O Brother Where Art Thou18:07 Working with The Stanley Brothers17:59 The Stanley Brothers - 'Rank Strangers'26:13 Raw versions of songs28:10 Townes Van Zandt - 'Pancho and Lefty (Live at the Old Quarter)'32:35 Recording things as live34:32 The Carter Family & Johnny Cash - 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken'40:37 Gillian and David finding their harmony44:33 Hope for something better48:48 John Prine - 'Angel From Montgomery'51:33 Show notes and next weeks guest!
Are you ready for some incredible stories? Take 5 always gifts us with some cracking yarns, but this week's episode takes the cake. In fact, I've had more responses to Ed Le Brocq's Take 5 than any other, in ages.Ed used to be Eddie Ayers, a legendary ABC Classic FM broadcaster who has shared his life of adventure with us over the past two decades. Ed is a cellist, viola, and violin player, and has gifted his talents to others; teaching school kids in Afghanistan, and playing for Uyghurs in the remote deserts of China.We'll get to those stories soon… but this might give you a sense of why I asked Ed to Take 5. Across four books, Ed has shared his stories of travel and self-discovery with us, and music has always been at his centre. From Joni Mitchell to shredding violas to Ry Cooder, this is an extraordinary conversation about the power of love, self-belief, adventure and of course, music. Ed Le Brocq's song choices:Joni Mitchell – A Case of YouMaria Theresia von Paradis – SicilienneElton John – Your SongPaul Hindemith - Viola Sonata, Op. 25, No. 1: IV. Rasendes ZeitmassRy Cooder and V. M. Bhatt – Isa Lei00:33 Ed Le Brocq introduction01:52 Having a restless spirit04:55 Memories of the seventies and Joni Mitchell07:21 Joni Mitchell - 'A Case of You'07:55 Ed's love of the Cello14:30 Travelling the world with music17:59 Maria Theresia von Paradis – 'Sicilienne'18:50 Interpreting music in your way20:20 Listening to music as a musician28:10 Elton John - 'Your Song'29:10 Music as the universal language32:30 Classic music with an edge35:42 Paul Hindemith - 'Viola Sonata, Op. 25, No. 1: IV. Rasendes Zeitmass'36:45 Classic FM audience and shredding42:30 Depression and "the cover of grey silt"44:08 Ry Cooder and V. M. Bhatt – 'Isa Lei'44:06 Show notes and next weeks guests!Show notes:If you need someone to talk to, call Lifeline on 13 11 14
Interview with Derrick White | Take 5 with Steven Travers We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Harper LeBel, co-host Steven Travers, and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Today's episode of The Rizzuto Show funny podcast starts like any normal day—until it very quickly becomes an international legal drama starring one of our own idiots.Rafe is trying to get into Canada. Simple goal, right? Nope. Turns out Canada has rules, memories, and apparently zero chill when it comes to past mistakes. But instead of giving up like a reasonable adult, Rafe does what anyone on a funny podcast would do—he calls in reinforcements. Enter Mark LaForce, an immigration lawyer so confident he basically says, “Relax, I got this,” within five minutes.And just like that, we're off the rails.Now the plan involves:A tribal invitation from the Blackfoot NationFBI fingerprinting (casual)And somehow… possibly getting a recommendation letter from Wayne GretzkyYes. That Wayne Gretzky. The hockey legend. The guy who apparently might be the golden ticket into Canada if he vouches for you. No pressure, Rafe.Meanwhile, the rest of the show continues doing what we do best—spiraling into nonsense. We hype up the absolutely wild finale of Neighbors (which includes things we legally cannot unsee), debate the largest animal we could beat in a fight (confidence wildly outweighs ability), and jump into a round of “Take Five” that proves once again that game shows are only fun when they completely fall apart.There are miracle guesses, suspicious teamwork, and one moment where the Hamburglar becomes the most important figure in modern broadcasting. It's everything you expect from a funny podcast—fast, ridiculous, and somehow held together just enough to keep going.So whether you're here for comedy, chaos, or to see if Rafe actually makes it across the border without being detained, this episode delivers.Spoiler: We're still not sure if he's getting in—but if Gretzky answers the call, anything's possible.Follow The Rizzuto Show → linktr.ee/rizzshow for more from your favorite daily comedy show.Connect with The Rizzuto Show Comedy Podcast online → 1057thepoint.com/RizzShow.Hear The Rizz Show daily on the radio at 105.7 The Point | Hubbard Radio in St. Louis, MO.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Where do you begin with Tim Rogers? For more than 30 years he has been the soundtrack to our lives. As frontman for You Am I, an acclaimed solo artist and keen collaborator, an actor, author and once even a Double J broadcaster.He's made a living in more ways than one, and his approach to living has shifted over the years. A long time coming, I invited Tim to Take 5 and explore this idea of a living; what makes a good life, and what it means to be alive. And he didn't disappoint.Tim Rogers' song choices:Magic Dirt – IceJake Thackray – The BullJoni Mitchell – Just Like This TrainNRBQ – I Want You Bad Martha Wainwright & Linda Thompson – Or Nothing At All00:39 Tim Rogers introduction 01:30 Memories of watching Magic Dirt on Rage 04:21 Magic Dirt — 'Ice'07:45 Making a living as an artist & mowing lawns10:31 Jake Thackray explainer15:00 Jake Thackray— 'The Bull'21:41 Tim's later in life love of Joni Mitchell26:07 Joni Mitchell — 'Just Like This Train'32:08 Rewriting and revisiting your own songs33:55 NRBQ explainer & Tim's obsession36:27 NRBQ — 'I Want You Bad'39:05 You Am I ‘Hourly Daily' anniversary and going pop46:30 Linda Thompson explainer & inspiring songwriting53:41 Martha Wainwright & Linda Thompson — 'Or Nothing At All'55:20 Conclusion + next week's guest!Show NotesTo see Tim perform live, check out his tour dates here: https://tim-rogers.com.au/
Interview with Rocky Shone | Take 5 with Steven Travers We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Harper LeBel, co-host Steven Travers, and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Comedian Lizzy Hoo has been everywhere the past few years. When she's not doing stand up, she's popping up on Have You Been Paying Attention?, and hosting her own podcast The Lizzy Hoo Show.Lizzy has made travel shows, and is even the voice of an airline. She's one of those people who says YES to life. She also has also got a razor sharp wit, and more than a few adventurous tales which is why I invited her to Take 5. I didn't realise it'd become a beautiful lesson in how to live.Lizzy Hoo's song choices:Arctic Monkeys — 'Dancing Shoes'Journey — 'Don't Stop Believin'The Lemons — 'Monad'Snoop Dogg — 'Who Am I (What's My Name)?'Camille — 'Ta Douleur'00:34 Lizzy Hoo introduction and Take 5 prep02:40 Music's role in Lizzy's life 04:53 North America adventures in a $500 car09:23 Arctic Monkeys — 'Dancing Shoes'10:45 The Hoo's as a family13:30 Karaoke in Japan ski towns16:40 Journey — 'Don't Stop Believin'18:13 Music and comedy in Lizzys world19:50 Moving to Mongolia 26:30 The Lemons — 'Monad'29:13 Lizzy's many careers & falling into comedy37:48 Snoop Dogg — 'Who Am I (What's My Name)?'39:50 Lizzy's life update and having broad shoulders43:06 Turning travel into career 48:10 Camille — 'Ta Douleur'49:50 Conclusion + next week's guest!Show NotesTo see Lizzy perform live on her national tour, check out her dates here: https://www.lizzyhoo.com/
Interview with Kenny Clayton | Take 5 with Steven Travers We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Harper LeBel, co-host Steven Travers, and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Brendan talks about three games he played for the first time recently, and one game he revisited. Join us, won't you?Bonsai (2023)Crystallo (2018)Rise of Augustus (2013)Take 5! (1998) revisitedWhat games have you been playing? Share your plays over on boardgamegeek in guild #3269.
Sophie Ellis-Bextor knows how to fill a dancefloor. Across 8 albums, and a double indemnity hit in "Murder on the Dancefloor", she's made a name for herself as a pop-disco queen. When she's not on stage or in a recording studio, Sophie is throwing a kitchen disco, hosting her Spinning Plates podcast, and publishing books.Sophie's latest album Perimenopop takes stock of where she is today. The lessons learned, the way love evolves, and the place she finds herself. It's through-line is liberation, so I asked her to choose her favourite songs of freedom.Sophie Ellis-Bextor's song choices:Sylvester — 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)'Madonna — 'Express Yourself'George Michael — 'Freedom 90'Sigrid — 'Mine Right Now'Prince & the Revolution — 'Let's Go Crazy'00:34 Sophie Ellis-Bextor's Musical Journey02:15 Making new music 25 years after debut04:55 Disco escapism and the queer community support09:23 Sylvester – 'You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)'06:23 Indie rock beginnings and Groovejet 15:40 Obsession with Madonna and pleasure13:39 Madonna – 'Express Yourself'19:08 Is it better for women in pop music now?22:37 Loving completely and opening for George Michael 26:32 George Michael – 'Freedom! '90'27:18 Writing new album and mid life29:09 Sigrid – 'Mine Right Now'29:50 Going through Murder on the Dancefloor resurgence 34:06 The drama of Prince 35:25 Prince & the Revolution – 'Let's Go Crazy'38:11 Conclusion, Susan Rogers Prince story + next week's guest!Show NotesCheck out the Take 5 episode with Prince's sound engineer Susan Rogers!
Interview with Jeff Cirillo | Take 5 with Steven Travers We are broadcasting live from Atlanta, GA, with host Steven Travers, special guest Jeff Cirillo, and producer Logan Landers. We are 100 Yards of Football. Live from Atlanta, Georgia. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
https://youtu.be/_A__xfP6HBM Laurie Barkman, strategic growth advisor, former $100M CEO, M&A expert, and author of The Business Transition Handbook, helps construction, architecture, and engineering firms build scalable, sustainable businesses that create time, freedom, and long-term value. Having experienced a major acquisition firsthand and led companies through significant growth and change, Laurie now focuses on helping mature business owners navigate the complex journey of building enterprise value and preparing for future transitions. We explore Laurie's BUILT Method—Blueprint, Unlock, Integrate, Lead, Transition—a strategic framework designed to help founders of established businesses scale beyond owner dependency and prepare for successful leadership or ownership transitions. Laurie explains how aligning the owner's personal vision with the company's future strategy creates clarity, why measuring enterprise value can unlock new growth decisions, and how proactive transition planning helps entrepreneurs avoid the identity crisis that often follows a business exit. — Take 5 Steps to Transitioning Your Business with Laurie Barkman Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS Group, and today my guest is Laurie Barkman, a strategic growth advisor, former a hundred-million-dollar CEO and M&A expert who’s helping construction and engineering companies build scalable, sustainable businesses that creates time, freedom, and value. Laurie is also the author of the Business Transition Handbook. Laurie, welcome to the show. Steve, thank you so much. I’m so excited to be with you today. Yeah, it’s great to have you. And you have a really interesting niche with the business transition and helping construction or architecture engineering firms. So what brought you to this point? What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your practice? My personal why has been evolving over the years through my career. I think I was always an entrepreneur at heart. I had orbited entrepreneurial companies, like startups, in a big company. I was always the maverick. I was trying to be an intrapreneur and ultimately found myself in a position of finding a way to help business owners in the back part of their journey. While I love startups, I have found that my niche is in working with mature companies—so companies that are over five to seven years old—and helping entrepreneurs in the tough decisions.Share on X It’s the tough decisions that they really wrestle with, feel alone, and I’ve been in executive shoes, right? I’ve been lived that world. I’m living in the entrepreneurial world right now, but again, in this mature space where we think about life differently, we think about transitions differently, and I’ve just kind of embraced that idea, especially as a Gen Xer, of how to help other Gen Xers in that in-between. So is there like a personal reason why you are attracted to this whole idea of the transition? I’ve lived a lot of transitions, especially in the corporate world, going through an acquisition about 10 years ago, I was an outside hire at a third-generation company, and they said, “We’re looking to hire you not for the next three years, but for the next 20,” which was really exciting, but it ended up being three. And the reason why is because a little Bluebird, who wasn’t so little, a global company who was very in acquisitive, I was interested in this business, third-generation company. It was over a billion in revenue. My business unit was about 10% of the total. So again, sizable business unit, and myself and the other executives had to work really, really hard to keep our foot on the gas pedal, making sure that the deal, if we were, was going to go through that we helped make it go through—which we did. It was out of the blue. The company was not on the market. But I saw firsthand the innovation, the growth, and the transition over the three generations of the stories of how it went from one to the next was just so fascinating to me. So when I ultimately was part of the integration team, I left the business. The short answer was that I was just there for three years. And so after that I really saw an opportunity to help other entrepreneurs on their journey. So this notion of that we’re going to grow, we’re going to innovate, and then eventually we’re going to transition—maybe it’s a family business, maybe it’s founder-led. Nonetheless, we want to create value, we want to have good handoffs, and I saw things were working well.Share on X As I mentioned, I joined at the point of the third generation. Then it was up to the corporate gods take it from there. And so I thought about ways to add value and work with inspired entrepreneurs who envision a future legacy for themselves, the people they love, the communities they serveShare on X but they’re just stuck. They feel stuck in some way. They’re kind of on their path. They’re not at the end of the path. They’re on it, and they need that support. That’s really what’s been motivating me and driving me for the last seven plus years. Yeah. That’s a wonderful journey, and it’s a very wordy thing because these entrepreneurs, they build a company, and then they don’t know how to allow it to grow up. And you basically are there and help them with the empty nesting and the pre-empty nesting, getting them into good courage. That’s also very important. So one of the ways you, I understand you do this is you call it the BUILT Method, which is kind of neat because you work with construction, engineering, architecture firms. So what is the BUILD Method is about, and how does it help people? Yeah, the BUILD Method is definitely an acknowledgement that we are in a physical world, and I appreciate you making that connection.Share on X And it’s not lost on our audience, hopefully. It’s such an important space. We really, in a time of AI and such dramatic change, the built environment of architecture, engineering, design companies that are envisioning their futures. There’s like any industry, there’s a lot of changes. And so this is a blueprint, if you will. That’s the “B,” right? It’s a blueprint for what is your vision and what is the firm model, what should it be in the future? It’s really that roadmap of future growth. The “U” is an unlocked. So many of us feel stuck. Maybe we’re stuck in the day-to-day because we have owner-dependent businesses. Maybe we feel stuck because our revenues are plateaued or declining. And we see ourselves as a bottleneck. Maybe we’re a bottleneck for a variety of reasons, which I’m sure we could talk about. The “I” is all about integration. And so, what do we need to do to document our systems and put things in place so that we don’t have risks in terms of not only owner dependency, but any other employees where there could be gaps should someone leave the organization or have some other untimely departure? The “L” is lead, and lead is not used lightly. Lead is really with clarity and not with chaos. And for owner-dependent businesses, people that have companies that can’t thrive without them, this tends to be a real challenge that they want to lead from the front, but they’re not. And they're so in the weeds in the business, they can't see the forest for the trees. They're not working on the business. So really helping my clients find that clarity is so important.Share on X And then the “T”, last but not least, stands for transition. It’s probably my favorite word at this point. And it’s not just transition or change for any sake. It’s good to have that confidence and to be in control, to be in the driver’s seat, and to be proactive about change. It’s why I wrote the book, The Business Transition Handbook. It’s really encouraging entrepreneurs to not think about an exit as a point in time and a finite point in time. It’s why I do talk about exit and I do talk about exit planning, but my recognition is that this is a finite action, and a transition is a journey. It's a path, and that's why my business is named Business Transition Sherpa, because I am with you on your journey. So the BUILT Method is really all about these different aspects and helping entrepreneurs on their journey.Share on X STEVE PREDA: Yeah. This is very cool. And there is a lifecycle to business, and there’s a lifecycle to an entrepreneur as well. And hopefully the business’s lifecycle is much longer than the entrepreneur’s. So someone is going to take it on, and you want to create a great legacy and a great business. So your way of the blueprint or your version of blueprint is different. Is it like what people call mission, vision, values kind of thing or there’s more to it? I think it does start with that. I mean, those are so fundamental, and my overall approach with strategic transition planning is the acknowledgement that there’s different aspects of the planning that we need to do as business owners, and one of those aspects is a blueprint for the business. And the business fundamentals of where do we want to be in five to seven years or ten years. Another part of that, which is a dovetail, is where does the owner want to be? What’s their personal future vision? And we start to intertwine those things, especially in this age and life stage. I work a lot with, as I mentioned, Gen Xers, and so we are in the mid-fifties of our lives, and statistically speaking, we’re about five to seven years away from a significant life transition. A lot of the Gen Xers, especially business owners I work with, are saying, “I’m looking ahead. I see what the baby boomers have done, and I don’t want to do it their way. I want to do it differently. I’m not going to die at my desk, and I want other things out of my life. My business has provided this and that for me, which has been valuable, but I’m ready for something different. I just don’t know what it is.” So we integrate in this blueprint. Their vision is not just for the business, but it's for themselves as well. And it's a big reason why I work directly one-on-one with the owners, founders.Share on X You and I have talked offline about the role of management team. It’s so important for me. It’s really, really important to give that private time and private space for the owner because these are such important questions that will influence the direction of many lives. And if we’re unwavering, it feels a little uncertain, and we don’t want to necessarily showcase that uncertainty to our teams. So the blueprint part of this is a bit of ideation as well. A big part of what we do is we work on what their future vision is, and it takes into account this age and life stage component of what we’ve been talking about. Yeah. That’s really interesting because maybe you find that as well, that sometimes the vision—the individual vision of the entrepreneur and the company’s vision gets confused. And the entrepreneur may not realizing that their vision may be to transition out of the company, but that’s not going to be the vision for the company because the company for them to be able to transition, has to have a much longer view and people have to believe in it, so that even with the founder, they’re going to be successful. So that is an interesting conundrum that I vision for with an entrepreneur like that. Do you find that to be the case? It is a conundrum. I think it’s just a lonely place in our heads and for owners and founders who have a lot on their shoulders. “Heavy is the head that wears the crown,” right? It’s a saying that means so much. I think that people want to explore options. They don’t want to lock in on something and put all their eggs in that one basket. I have found that owners who create options for eventual transition are better positioned than folks who have placed bets. I could tell you so many stories, Steve. So for example, especially in our engineering, architecture, and design-type of audience, owners sometimes are placing bets on their internal management to buy them out over time. I had one gentleman call me—I’d say he’s a baby boomer. He had a wonderful number two, had been grooming the number two for eventual. What he had envisioned in his mind was of to sell the business to him, and not only did the number two not want that; he resigned. And it felt like such a betrayal. He was so upset. I had talked to him months after this happened, and he was still upset about it. He felt like it was a starting over in a lot of ways for his own exit plan, which it was. And so we try to prevent against that. Yeah, there's a lot of things that we can do to try to figure out if we have the right people in the right seats. And that's important.Share on X I know you spent a lot of time on this as well, working with management to say, “Do we have the right people in the right seats?” And we do assessments, and those are great. Those are skills and strengths, and we should do that. But what I have found is that we don’t do that when it comes to ownership, especially if we think that the owner is inside the company. And we can talk about it—I’ve created an assessment for that because it’s a high-level way to just get your head around. Do people on my team have an ownership mentality or not? We’re not recruiting for that. We’re recruiting for the skills and strengths that we need for that time. And when we’re growing people over a long period of time, you can imagine how that becomes even more of a problem because if we assume they’re an owner, they have a owner mindset, and they don’t—and they’re more cash—oriented versus equity—oriented and other things—that puts us in a trap. Yeah. I think it’s a big trap. I read it somewhere, I know where I read it from. Dan Kennedy, who’s like a small business guru—he was big in the 2000s—and he once said that the worst number in business is one. It’s one salesperson; it’s one successor who will have to come through. I think this is a big mistake of business owners that they try to clone themselves because they think that if they just find one person who is going to be as good as me, and all my problems are solved. Whether you call it an integrator who is going to come in and run the show and I can just be up there and vision and dream about stuff, I think it’s a huge mistake. I much prefer the idea of creating mini-CEOs in your business who can really strategically own their functions. So anyhow, yeah, this is a big problem. But I’d like to move on to the next letter in the acronym, which is “U”. I really love this word: “unlock.” It’s very inspiring. Unlock—how do you unlock? How do you figure out how to open up the floodgates of opportunity or whatever you mean by unlock? I think part of it is a diagnostic around where is the business today and what are some of the things that we’ve set as goals for enterprise value. What is enterprise value? Are we measuring it? Most often we’re not, and the one big unlock is just this recognition that we have set KPIs for our business, which are great, and we’re using them with our teams, and we’re operationalizing those. Love it. Awesome. Keep that going. But what a business owner is not measuring most often is the enterprise value. And if we are measuring that, we might make different choices in how we’re investing our resources if our objective is to increase that value. So we might say, “Well, what is enterprise value?” Okay. So we need to understand that. And then, what is it in measurement terms—either through a professional like myself who can help us understand and not just talking to your buddies at the golf club or what you think your business might be worth? And if we can really get some data around that. You know, I love my analytical entrepreneurs, which is one of the reasons I love this space. They're analytical people, and they like the numbers, and they want to have some structure around it. So that's what we do, is we start with the baselining.Share on X Where is the business today? And let’s set some targets. We look at, “Well, what’s best in class in that particular industry?” So again, the AEC industry, we have some benchmarks around that. And then we have to understand, “Well, what are some of the value drivers?” One big, big value driver, of course, is going to be financial performance. So what’s beyond that? And what are these hidden things that we don’t know that can be detracting value? And so if we dig into those things, it’s like an unlock. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. My best example of that in this conversation is enterprise value. Once you know where your enterprise value is today, you can’t unsee that. And you also can’t unsee the desire for many people, which is, “Oh wow, what if I could increase that?” Then we’re talking about millions of dollars of value at some point in the future. So aligning that with our exercise we talked about earlier, which is our age and life-stage exercise around exit timeline. It’s so powerful because now we can set some targets that are meaningful to our communities, our employees, our stakeholders, and ourselves, and aligning the personal, the business, and the financial towards this overall picture. It’s a major unlock. And do you find that—what is the level of transparency you see that these business owners allow for their team to see? So would they actually show them that this is our profitability, these are our margins, gross profit, this is our overhead, this is our net profit, this is how we calculate enterprise value, and here is how you can help me improve it. Is this how it goes or it’s more everyone is just focusing on a couple of KPIs that are within their program? It’s an evolution. I think a lot of times in the beginning, we keep it a little close because we’re trying to understand it ourselves. And for firms that have developed a cost-of-goods-sold model, a gross profit, they’re already measuring that. Maybe they’re doing that by lines of business. That is really powerful. I have one client in the engineering space that just put that in. And they doubled revenue last year, by the way. So they’re a high-growth company in the engineering space, which is so exciting. They’re doing about $10 million in revenue, and they just put that in for the different lines of business. And how it’s helping them is it’s giving them a year-over-year perspective, which is good. They can see where they’re investing, and they can also see payback opportunities where there’s an intersection with the team. I think is on the business side for growth levers. When we talk about value drivers, and we'll just pick one that's quite common beyond financial numbers, it's our ability to drive recurring revenue, subscription models, and different flavors of…Share on X So for this particular client, we’ve been working on developing a recurring revenue program for them, and we’re at the starting line, but what’s going to be so exciting, I think, not only in terms of their core business growth that they’re seeing, but once we get that recurring revenue program up and running, it’s going to be material. Once the revenues are large enough, of course, it’s going to be material on their enterprise value. And so the dovetail is, well, yeah, he’s not going to launch the subscription revenue business by himself. He needs others to help him do that. But the idea for it and the vision for it and then the unlock right, comes from this type of exploration. Yeah. Wow. That’s great. And it is definitely a challenge that construction companies often struggle with. How do I do a project-based company primarily? How do I drive recurring revenue, subscription models? That would probably deserve its own podcast, this whole topic or maybe a podcast series. Maybe I’ll talk about it another time. I still like us to cover the last letter in the acronym: the transition. Because that’s where I see a lot of people who have sold their business. I was an investment banker in my past life, and I don’t know how many times we saw the business, and the owner was so excited that they basically neutralized the risk, and then they had this big pile of cash, and they bought the boat and they bought the car and the house. And six months later, the boat was collecting water in the marina. You know, they showed the car off to everyone, and it was no longer exciting, but it was very expensive, and they didn’t know where to store it, kind of thing. And then they were getting bored, and they were kind of disappointed because their identity got ahead. How do you deal with it? How do you help people with the identity issue and this whole thinking about transition the right way? You nailed it. That identity is a really big part of why many business owners feel lonely and a bit depressed one year after a sale. There’s many reasons why that could happen. I think the statistics are a little bit over the place, but I do believe that identity is a big part of it. And so if we are working on this together, an example with one of my clients is I gave them a book to read because I got an inkling of what he was interested in, which is themes around justice. And he’s seeking ways to have an impact in his community that are truly outside the business for lots of reasons. But he just innately wants this type of involvement, and we are going through an exploration of what that could look like. He’s in a good place with his business. We're continuing to grow it, and we're working on his growth and enterprise value growth and things like that.Share on X But this sort of sits on this in a parallel path, and it will intersect at some point because we all are human. We have an age and life stage to us, and how he’s envisioning spending his time over the next 10 years. He wants to continue to have a path forward. But we’ve created a space for when we meet, we’re meeting one-on-one, we create that space to really talk about how does he want to spend his time outside the business. And note the timeline here. He’s about 10 years away. And to his credit, he’s saying, “Yeah, I want to start doing something now.” And if that’s how we can think about it, Steve. I think it’s really important. It’s almost like this giant on-ramp. We’re not going to just sell our business and then, all of a sudden we’re going to go have this amazing thing that we’re going to create tomorrow, right? It just takes time. And another way to think about it is like a portfolio—a portfolio of how you look at your identity, how you feel about yourself, and how you spend your time—and has to align. Really, it can align with your core values, it can align with how you want to spend time with people you love. So I have one client, engineering company owner, who is very committed to the church that they support, and he spends a lot of time and a lot of resources. It’s very clear on the company’s website how the company has a policy of donating proceeds from profits to this entity. So it’s well known, and it’s just part of their culture. And in developing his 10-year view, this is part and parcel of it. It’s involving his family members; it’s involving the company. It’s helped fueling a decision around their transition path. They’ve considered lots of different options: Should they sell to a third party? Should they become an ESOP? And the dovetail, I think, for many, is to figure out what is that right fit based on what’s important to you. What’s going to give you that feeling of that completeness and balance that you’re seeking? Wow, that’s amazing. You have people who are thinking about that 10-years out. That is impressive. I’ve never seen that. If a business owner thinks 3-years out about that, it’s already much better than average. So you obviously are inculcating them with the right kind of ideas. So tell me about your business. So let’s switch gears here a little bit. I mean, you ran this a hundred million dollar business for three years, and it got sold; it got integrated. So I’m sure that you had some big challenges there. What is it that you would consider the hardest decision you ever had to make in your business? Yeah, I think in today’s world, I can try to put my coaching hat on for this answer. I’m trying to build a practice that is creating value for others. And so one big thing is to make sure that I’m doing that now with my client relationships and how we measure things. I’m confident that we are doing that, but inherently, if we have one voice, how do we reach many? And I think a lot of companies… it’s like, “Oh, that’s a marketing question.” Yes. And right, it is a marketing question. There’s a lot of things that are dynamically changing in our world. How do we reach the people that we want to reach? How do we share a message? So that is no matter what business you have, I think we can all sort of empathize with that. So I do feel like that is changing a lot. So the challenge is, how do I meet people where they are, right? I think podcasting has been a great vehicle. We’re doing more of that. We’re going to be doing more in-person things as well. I do think that we’re very much in a powerful digital age, and the more digital tools we’re putting in front of us and the more digital time we’re spending. My hypothesis, Steve, is that the value of the interaction—the one-on-one as well as group—is not lost on anybody. That it’s going to be even, probably even more important. And especially as things, and if you’re reading some of these AI articles about potential impact in our economy, there’s going to be a lot of need for us to come together, and lean on each other’s shoulders, and be good, solid resources for one another in times of dramatic change. I fully agree with you. I have that feeling as well that there’s so much alienation that is being caused by the digital stuff, and AI in particular, that people are replacing conversations with chatGPT conversations. I think people will just realize that this is all unreal, or we don’t know whether it’s real or not real. And there’s so much noise because everyone is creating all these posts with AI, and you know what is a real voice here? You won’t know unless you meet the person in person and then you hear their own voice and provided they’re not a robot because that can also happen that you have humanoid robots, but let’s not go that far. So I do agree, and I think that your personal recommendations are going to be even more powerful in the future because you don’t know what is real and what is fake. People also starve. We sit in front of our Zoom screens, and it’s not the same as meeting someone in person. There is a different quality to it, and we are going to starve for it. I was just thinking this morning that I looked at my calendar, and I’m just coming out of my season of spending days with my entrepreneur clients, and it’s over. And next couple months, it’s going to be pretty quiet. I’m going to be in my office, and I’m dreading having to sit here on my own. So I’m thinking about, “Okay, I have to get out there. I have to meet people.” So I’m recording video on this one. Last question. Well, penultimate question to you is, what do you think is the most important question that an entrepreneur should be asking themselves? I’m going to come back to kind of this AI conversation. I think every CEO needs to be using ai. And I think every CEO needs to be considering how their teams can use it and not put your head in sand. I think there’s a lot of impact, positive impact that can be had by just some basic productivity improvements, which is kind of how 95% of AI is being used today. There’s nothing wrong with that. And then from there can lead us to coming up with ways to enhance our business. I have one client that’s using it for proposal development. It’s been a dramatic improvement in quality and time, and that’s just one case study example, but there’s so many others. Following’s. Okay. You don’t have to be a leader. And just being recognizing that AI is going to touch so many aspects of our business and personal lives. And then the other thing is like, don’t stop hiring people because of AI either. There’s a lot of doomsday articles coming out now about the economy and impact of AI. There may be some scary truth to some of those things. And then I’m seeing articles from folks saying, “Look, AI shouldn’t take over your entire business. You’re still going to need smart people. You just want to give them the tools.” As an example, there’s a friend of mine who runs a digital marketing agency, and you might think, “Oh, that’s the kind of business that’s shrinking.” Well, they’re over 200 people, and they’re using AI in very efficient and effective ways. So it’s not a recipe to just dial back your human capital. It’s a recipe to do the unlock and do the think about how you can best use this information to create a scalable practice. Yeah, I think so. Also, this has been seen in history that since the Industrial Revolution, everyone was afraid of losing jobs. And the more technology there is, the more ideas there are for further services, the more demand there is because all the value is being created, and we want to spend that value on more stuff, right? And yeah, I agree that AI is just raising the bar. So every company has to now be AI-empowered and do a lot more. We can’t just deliver what we were delivering a year ago. We have to deliver more, which means that those people who are AI-enabled, they’ll just have to raise their standard. Yeah, I agree with you. So if people would like to learn more about let’s say they have an AEC-type of company—architectural, engineering, construction. Did I get it right? Yes. And they are thinking about the future and the transition and build the blueprint for a great company that has more enterprise value, et cetera, or they read your book and they realize that this is exactly what they need. How can they find you and how can they connect to you? Well, my website’s probably a great place to go, which is btsherpa.com. And if people are interested in that succession assessment that I mentioned earlier, just put slash succession—so btsherpa.com/succession—and you’ll get access to the assessment. You can take it multiple times for different people in mind as well. And so my book is on there, my podcast, and I really do hope that people follow up with me. If you have any questions at all about anything we talked about today. Fantastic. So do check out Laurie Barkman via btsherpa.com/succession if you want to read the materials and download stuff. Thank you, Laurie, for sharing all your great ideas and insights. If you enjoyed the conversation, then stay tuned because every week I bring an exciting entrepreneur, thought leader to the show who will share with you about frameworks about growing your business and making it more valuable. So thanks, Laurie, for coming, and thanks for listening. Important Links: Laurie's LinkedIn Laurie's website
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https://youtu.be/knpxJ7KATsU Joshua McMahon, President of McMahon Custom Homes and a business coach, is driven by a purpose he discovered the hard way: money wasn't his ‘Why.' His real ‘Why' is lifting others—helping people find clarity around their purpose, unlock their potential, and gain traction toward it. We explore Josh's journey from C-suite construction leadership and integrator roles to building his own company as an “evolved visionary.” Josh shares his Satisfaction Pyramid, explaining how customer experience is created upstream through brand awareness, team support, trade partner support, and training, which together produce the outcome every builder (and business) is chasing: customer satisfaction. Along the way, he breaks down why the construction industry struggles with talent, how coaching becomes a competitive advantage, and why McMahon Custom Homes wins through transparency, collaboration, and guiding clients to align budget with what truly matters. — Take 5 Steps to Satisfy Customers with Josh McMahon Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder of the Summit OS group and the host of Management Blueprint. And my guest today is Joshua McMahon, the president of McMahon Custom Homes and a business coach. Although I don’t know how much time you have for that these days, josh. Welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. We go a long way back, so it’s an honor to be a business owner and now be on your show. Well, yeah, you are a business owner. In your previous, recent life, you was an integrator, a COO of a business. So you’ve been running construction businesses and have been C-level in other construction businesses, where we also collaborated. So we have been tracking each other’s journey, for sure. So, Josh, let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal ‘Why’, and how are you manifesting it in your business? Yeah. I think this is always a great question. And the real truth of this question, Steve, is that I didn’t know what it was for so long. I thought my personal ‘Why’ was just to make more money. And every time I made more money, I was just more miserable. I was never happy. So my ‘Why’ was never money. I really think my ‘Why’ is all about lifting others. And what I mean by that is I have this ability to extract other people's 'Why' and their purpose from them, help them better see that, get clarity around it and then help them get traction to go attack that 'Why'.Share on X And that’s really my ‘Why’, is to help other, lift other people to really achieve their greatness. So I get a lot of energy and joy from boosting others, and watching that untapped potential really take off. That is fabulous. And I can see that, as a business coach, that's really very appealing to people when you can do that. How does it manifest in your construction business? You have these Custom Homes construction business, how does that help you there? And this is where it was really born. So in the C-suite and as I grew in my business, the one part that you have to do is you have to know how to recruit. At least, I had to know how to recruit. And in order to recruit, you have to find the right talent at the right price. And what I was really looking for was that potential. I was looking for the right attitude—the right hunger. I was looking for those right pieces that I could make you a construction individual. I could make you a great construction manager, but I couldn’t fix those other things. And so when I could tap into that and take and help somebody see the vision of what I could do and what our company could help you do in your career, that’s where I was able to really take and 10X my recruiting ability, but also to really tap into that untapped talent that’s out there. Because, Steve, we have a hard time finding talent in the construction industry. Well, the talent’s out there. What’s making it hard is that we don’t recognize that talent, and we’re saying, you’ve got to be this perfect candidate. You've got to fit all these marks. You've got to check all the boxes.And I’m saying, no. I just need you to check a few boxes. I'm going to help you see how you can really fit into this organization and how we can help you thrive. So that's where my ability to see that in them, help them see that in themselves, and then help them tie it to our vision as a company. That's where it really gets a lot of fun.Share on X Yeah. It’s so interesting that it’s not just about doing the job, but it’s about being emotionally invested in doing the job. And how do you get your people emotionally invested? You have to find the motivation that they have inherently that you can tap into, and then you have to make your business attractive so that it inspires them, so that they feel excited to work with you there. That’s exactly what you’re trying to do. It’s like you’re not trying to fool anybody on anything, but to think people just get excited to come do work, or just do the job, or just collect the paycheck. If that’s your motivation, that’s the type of candidate you’re going to get. Then what type of culture do you have? So if you flip that and you say, “Hey, we want to help you transform who you are, transform your career for the better, and it’s going to help us get to our vision. Well, Steve, that sounds like a win-win scenario to me. And that’s a really appealing piece. And that’s a thriving culture. Yeah, culture eats strategy for breakfast, as Peter Drucker said. And especially in the age of AI, it's probably even more important, isn't it, that you have a great culture, because AI can copy everything, but it won't be able to copy your culture. No, that's exactly right. I think AI is a great tool. It’s really going to help us magnify and improve our businesses. But if your culture is broken, AI is just going to magnify the brokenness of your culture, and then AI’s going to tell your people how to go find another job. That is probably true. I haven’t thought about that. So you developed this framework, we are a podcast of frameworks. I’m always looking for the framework and and you talked about this Satisfaction Pyramid framework. Yeah. Is this also something that helps create that culture? Tell me a little bit about this pyramid and how did you come up with it and what does it do? Yeah, it’s an interesting thing, right? So you understand Maslow's hierarchy of needs. These are the things you need for survival and for happiness. And I've said, look, in home building, we've always talked about customer experience and customer satisfaction. We want people to be happy. And I'm saying, well, I don't know what that means. I don't know—if I hit my schedule, if I hit my budget, if I do everything on time, but they're still not happy—so what exactly am I missing? What's the missing link? And kind of tying the hierarchy of needs to this triangle of customer satisfaction or happiness, I found that there are some really key fundamental pieces that we've got to lock into place to really get to the customer satisfaction and customer experience that we're seeking. For me, I think brand awareness is first. If your brand awareness is out there and it's really strong, people are going to gravitate towards it organically.Share on X That’s going to decrease your SEO spend, you decrease your marketing, decrease your turnover for people, because people want to be part of that. The interesting story on brands — and I don't know how true it is, I meant to look it up before this — but I saw something on social media about Tommy Hilfiger. And before he launched his clothing brand, he didn't have anything, but his brand was so far out in front of himself that people thought this was this great designer, and he hadn't designed anything. And it was all tied to that piece of brand. So if your brand is strong enough, you can do incredible things. So I think brand is super important. Yeah. Let me just interject here. So probably 20 years ago, I was working with a company, and it was actually in the construction space. It was in the environmental construction space. And this company had an amazing brand. So the founder was a great thought leader, and he was blogging and talking in forums. And I really thought that this company's got to be a $50 million company. I mean, they're so powerful. And then they invited me to their board as a board member. I said, “Wow, this is such an honor.” This big company. And it turned out it was just a $5 million company. But the brand was so powerful that they looked much bigger. Yeah. And that statement, that’s an appealing thing. So if you think of yourself as a high level achiever, an A-player, and you are gravitating to that brand, that’s what it’s going to do. You're going to bring in the right people, and then if you've got the right culture and the right other pieces, you're going to stick around with that company.Share on X So a $5 million company can look like a $50 million company and be really attractive to people that are interested in that type of world. Yeah. Super important. Love that story. The second thing for me is team support. This is where I really saw in my career as I grew. I can tell you, my first construction job at the construction management level, my VP of construction told me, and this is 20 plus years ago, I haven't forgotten it — he said, “My leadership style is to give you just enough rope to hang yourself.” And to this day, I have no idea what the heck that means. But what he did show me was he wasn’t going to support me. He wasn’t going to encourage me. He wasn’t going to help me grow. He was basically going to let me swim in the deep end. And if I made it, great. And if I didn’t, no problem — there's another guy behind me. And that’s the mentality of the construction industry. And what I said was, we do a great job of spending money for our sales team. Sales team needs training, we’ll spend the money on training. If the executives need training, we’ll spend the money on training. But who’s training the middle managers? Who’s training the young men and women coming into the industry? Who’s training the people who don’t have the experience? There’s a big myth in that world. So I think from an internal standpoint — and mind you, coaching is a buzzword right now, just as leadership is — not everybody's a coach, and not everybody's a leader, and that's okay. But if you do have somebody who can coach on your team, and you can coach your team up internally, it’s a very big value add. And so for me, my coaching ability has been a real value add for people that I've recruited, for people I've had on my team, and people I've really invested in and helped grow.Share on X And quick story on coaching. I interviewed this young candidate, I mean, really good-looking kid. He had tons of talent, education, everything he needed, but no construction experience. Still, he had all the right soft skills. And it came down between our company and one of the big national builders. And typically, you’d go to the national builders, more money, more upside, more advantages. And he asked me, the last question he asked me, he said, “Why would I come work for you guys versus this other company?” I said, “Because they don't have me.” I said, I’m not saying this is an arrogant thing to say. I’m saying that I’m going to pour everything from me into you and help take you to where you want to go. You won’t get that anywhere else. Because when we’re done after three years, you can go anywhere you want. And that young man is currently making almost as much as I was making as a C-suite employee, and he’s out in the field running projects. And that’s only like a three or five year period. Like that’s incredible growth, but it’s because of the investment we made in him. Yeah. There's this saying — I think it's Zig Ziglar — that people don't invest in their people, they don't coach their people, because they're afraid that they’re going to go away to the competition. And then Zig Ziglar asks, “Okay, but isn't there a greater risk that you don’t coach them and and they stay?” Yes. This is always the thing. And I think a lot of people have a scarcity mindset where they’re so afraid of, if I pour into you, you’re going to go and you’re going to take it somewhere else. What I say is, I’m okay with that. Because when you go somewhere else, you're going to say, “Josh McMahon built me up. He gave me the foundation for my career. He put me in the position I’m in today. I have what I have because of my start. You should go there and get the training from him. There’s no sham e in that because, again, we go back to point number one: brand. That’s tight. That’s my brand out in front of our company that adds value to our company. So I started my career at KPMG, and one of the ideas they had was this pyramid structure — up or out. But the idea was to take care of the people that even when they leave, they become ambassadors for you on the client side. And then they’re going to convince the client to hire KPMG to be their auditor. And I really like this. It’s so special, right? Because what you, I mean, Steve, you think about this, we worked together two or three years ago. We still stayed in touch. Even though there’s no financial gain, we still help each other where we can because I want the best for you, as you want the best for me. And that’s what you’re really looking for. Yeah, that’s true. And the thing about coaching is you have the double benefit, because the company benefits because it has motivated employees who are performing at the higher level than when they came in, and at a higher level than where you hired them, frankly. Correct. And then they are building a career. So they are building a career equity for themselves. And actually that’s why you get a better ROI on these people, because they have more career equity, they have more skill level than what you have to pay them because you are growing them. That’s exactly right. You’re building into those individuals that generational wealth that most of us are seeking, or think is out of reach. It's there. We just need somebody to believe in us, and that’s really that piece. The third thing for me, especially in construction, it’s the trade partners. And when I think about it, as a general contractor, look—I'm wearing a collared shirt. You're not going to see me on the job site swinging a hammer. I’m out there with the building plans. I’m verifying things. I'm scheduling. I'm doing more management-level work. That means my trade partners are carrying the lion’s share of the work that actually goes into place. And as a construction company, we don’t make money unless work goes in place. So I have to do the same thing I'm doing with my internal staff with my trade partners. I have to build them up. I have to elevate them. I have to put them in a position to win.Share on X And this is very basic—schedule accurately. Treat them like people. Treat them with respect. When you go on the job, support them. Listen to their feedback. So if they’re sharing something that’s not working, listen to it with an open mind. And maybe we can do something different, or we can explain why we can't do something different, so they have a better understanding of the ‘Why’ behind what we’re doing. Yeah. So the trade partners is my next big pillar. And it’s harder to manage trade partners. I mean, I’m not in the construction, but it’s going to be harder because they are part-time with you. They have other commitments that they have to observe. They don’t wear your brand. They are being paid by someone else who may have a different corporate culture than your company has. And you have to bring them in part-time and make them as good as your standard. Yes. The hard thing is you have to share with them your vision first. This is who we are. This is what we stand for. Share with them your core values. And then build them up and show them that they’re truly a partner in this. Most of us don’t treat them like partners. We treat them like subcontractors. We treat them like they're inferior individuals—less than me. And I think they can work for you part-time and do that. And you’re absolutely right. But if we treat them like people, we build them up, they’ll be there. Because I want to treat them in a way where, hey, you might be a great plumber, but you’re a terrible business person, and I can maybe help you better understand. I say this because I'm working with a young plumber who's bidding things, and he’s just all over the place. And I'm saying, “Hey, how did you come to this number?” “Well, I just know I need to make X dollars.” And I'm like, “Well, how do you know how much money you need to make? What's your break-even number? What's your overhead burden?” Starting to help him better understand how to break down the P&L, how to charge the right margin on the job so that you’re getting work as consistently as you want, but most importantly, so you can grow your business and continue to support my business as it grows too.Share on X Yeah, you want to create stability for them as well. And if you treat subcontractor well, then they’re going to prioritize you, won't they? So they have other customers that may not treat them as well. You’re going to get the most of the energy from them if you treat them well. And that’s also a huge benefit for your business. There’s nothing lost in that, right? Again, you’ve got brand ambassadors out there talking about, one, this guy builds a great house. He treats everybody great. You made the right choice buying with with McMahon Custom Homes. Because, Steve, if you’ve ever been on a job site, the trades will tell people what they feel, whether it’s good or bad. Yeah. So you are getting it no matter what. Yeah. You go and you look at the construction site and ask around, and then you will get exactly the kind of general contractor you may be dealing with. Yes. I mean, absolutely. We love to talk, and so you want people talking about good things and talking up your business and what’s happening in the field, and that’s extremely valuable. Okay, so step number one, brand awareness. We talked about that. Then supporting the team. Yes. So that they feel that they are growing and they are recognized as individuals, that you care about them. Yeah. Then the same goes with the trade partners. You support them even though they’re not your employees. Yes. What’s step four? Yeah. Step four is training. Okay. And training, I think of training in terms of systems that you’re putting in place. Constant, never-ending improvement on those systems. Systems are not static, so training is a nonstop thing that we've got to continue investing in and keep helping to grow our team. So constant process improvement. Having KPIs in place, or metrics in place. And the reason for those metrics is simply where do we need to focus our attention? What levers do we need to pull? And then I go back to the training. So then we train up on metrics that maybe aren’t working the way that we want them to, or we’re not getting the result that we want to get out of them. That’s where the training really comes into place. And if we don't have that training in-house, what stuff outside of the company can we get them into? What type of training do they need to level them up? Because as I think about training, Steve, most of us think you’ve got to fit every box, you’ve got to be the perfect candidate. But you and I both know that I’m good at three out of the five things, and you’re good at two out of the five things. So we make a damn good team together. And that’s okay, and we need to better learn how to cross-train each other, level one another up, and then find those right tools.Share on X Absolutely. Okay, so what’s the final piece of the flywheel? Yeah. Well, I feel like if you're doing all these things, brand awareness, team support, trade partner support, and the right training, and you're doing this continuous basis, you're going to have customer satisfaction.Share on X That’s exactly what you want. You’re going to create that customer experience because look, at the end of the day, we’re only here because of the customer. If the customer’s not interested in buying my product, I don’t have a business. And so all of these pieces drive that customer experience. That’s what continues driving who I am. One thing I’m really focused on with customer satisfaction and experience is having good specifications written down. I think yes, we’re a custom home builder, but I have minimum standards that I want to achieve. So I have the minimum standards. Now, if your budget says, “Hey, we can't quite reach that level,” well, we can certainly reduce our standard. And when I say reduce our standard, I don’t mean cut a corner. I mean change from, say, a Kohler faucet down to a Delta faucet. It’s still a great faucet. It’s still a great brand. Maybe just not the same brand that I would use at this level of home. Or we can go the complete opposite direction and elevate that standard. But just having that set in place, so that if I say, “Steve, this home's going to cost you $1.2 million,” and you're like, “Oh, great. Well, the other builder's $1.3 million, so you've got a better price,” okay, great. But what goes into the price? What are you getting for the price? So if I have those minimum standards baked in, I can tell you, This is what you're going to get for $1.2 million. Now we can go in and customize it and make it your home. Having clear expectations. How important are clear expectations even in our coaching business, right? And it’s not just clear expectations from me to you, it’s clear expectations from you to me. I need to understand what your expectations are. I need to know that I can achieve your expectations. And I think that if I believe I can’t, I need to be honest and say, look, I’m not the right builder for you. I’m not the right business for you. But here are.. Or maybe your expectations are not realistic. Sometimes, for the budget you have, you need to make some trade-offs. Maybe you can have this man cave, but you'll have to cut back on the kitchen, and you’ll have to discuss it with your wife. And that’s really key. So the thing that I love about being a custom builder is that my focus is on collaboration.Share on X If you say, “Hey Josh, the budget comes in at $1.2 million, but I really want to be at $1 million,” okay, great Steve. I’m here to collaborate with you and show you ways we can tweak things, pull this down, and future-proof your home. Because I want you to have the home that you want, and in two years you can probably afford that additional $200,000. I don't want to put you in a place where you can easily plug and play that versus oh, now I got to rip out all these walls. I got to redo this. It's not $200,000—it could be $300,000. So that’s where we can collaborate and really find the right pieces to put you in the best position. That’s very interesting. This whole framework, the culture that you build here. Is this something that connects this whole framework, this idea that you have, how you’re projecting the culture out into the customer service? Is this why you started the McMahon Custom Homes? It truly is. Well, two parts, Steve. One, I’m an entrepreneur at heart and I have fought this my entire life, and I’ve always thought there was something wrong with me. Why can’t I just get on board? Why can’t I just drink the Kool-Aid? Why can’t I just get in line? And two or three years I go into a company, I do great things, I start rebuilding things, and then I start to get that itch. And then I’m like, okay, I need to go somewhere else. And for a long time I thought it was, well, I’m just moving to a new company to make more money, which was true. I was making more money, but then I wasn’t happy. Again, it was never tied to the money, so it was really just that entrepreneur need. But the second piece was, I've noticed for ten years—a decade—that our industry is in need of a massive transformation. The antiquated way of doing business and how we do things. I think the builder suites and the stuff that we have at our disposal is really good, but it’s not what everybody’s looking for. But I couldn’t tell you, the owner, Hey, we’ve got to scrap this. We need to do this. Because ultimately, even as the integrator, my job is to bring your vision to life. And if this is part of your vision, then I need to bring this to life. And so I started to realize with my entrepreneur spirit and my own ideas, I needed to start developing my own home building business to start bringing some of that to life, to really satisfy who I am and do the things that I wanted.Share on X Yeah, this is so important because, as entrepreneurs, we have this frustration. We are somewhere and things are not going as well as you would like. And we don’t get to tell the boss how to do things because they have their own ideas and their own set ways, and then they just get irritated by all those ideas and they feel like we are just being disgruntled employees, and this frustration eats away at you. And at some point you say, okay, what the heck? I'm just going to rip the Band‑Aid off and try to figure it out, right? It’s very true. I mean, it’s funny now looking back on it because there were so many times where I just didn’t understand. I was like, “What the heck is the matter with me?” But you’re exactly right — you’re going to bang your head against the wall, and not everybody’s cut out to be an entrepreneur, right? I mean, it sounds really great being self-employed, doing your own thing, making your own hours. It sounds great. But I tell you something, Josh, not everyone is cut out to be an employee either. No doubt, Steve. So true. So it’s the other side of the coin. I think many of us become entrepreneurs because we basically eliminate all the viable alternatives. Yeah. Burn all the boats, right? Yeah. I think there’s so much value in this. The second time we really got introduced and got to work together, you introduced me to the book Second in Command by Cameron Herold. I’m a Cameron Herold fan in the Second in Command book, and I read that book and I said, “Man, this is me. I can do this.” I love being more in the shadows, helping a visionary grow their business, and doing all that stuff. What happened was, I started to really enjoy being out there, networking, putting myself out, and getting in front of people. And I was like, well, I’m a visionary. I can see what’s going on in the future. And I think I was more of a visionary than the person who said he was a visionary. So it was really like, then we’re clashing heads on which vision are we chasing. And I’m like, I got to get outta here because I’m steering you away from what you want to do, and that’s not fair to you. I think there are two major types of visionaries. There are the born visionaries, and then there are the evolved visionaries. So you have the born visionary who is a visionary because they are just not able to execute, but they can come up with all the big ideas. And if they find people who can execute for them, they're in luck, and they might build a company. And then you have the evolved visionary who starts out doing the work, grinding, figuring things out, teaching themselves discipline and work ethic. And then they start to manage people because they’re doing it better, so they get more responsibility, and then they become an integrator or operator. And at some point, they want to come out of the cocoon and do it themselves. And maybe you’re that version of it, the evolved visionary. You summed that up perfectly because that's exactly how this whole thing transpired. Love it. So tell me about, what makes McMahon Custom Homes unique? Beyond the culture—is it the culture that makes you unique, or is there something else? From the eyes of the customer, what makes you unique? I don’t know that it’s our culture that makes us unique. I think what really makes us unique is our process—how we do things. We start everything with an initial consultation, just myself meeting with the homebuyers. Typically, it's a virtual meeting where I want to learn more about your project. I’m interested in what you want to build, what your expectations are, what your non-negotiables are, and I just really explore everything under the sun about your project. Then I'm going to ask the dreaded question: what's your ideal budget? Most—or a lot of—people say, “You know what, I don't want to give the budget. So I'll say, “Okay, what budget number scares you?” Because as a custom home builder, I’m going to help you design the home that you want for the price that you want. But I’m going to also share with you if it’s not possible. If you have a home design that's more than what your budget is, I'm going to share that with you in real time, as soon as I can. So I'm very transparent. And I learned this from working in my past, where we wouldn't share those numbers with clients. We had a client where we were a million dollars over their ideal budget. It was six to eight months of working with them and about $25,000 in actual costs. I don't need to tell you—the homeowner was not pleased, and the homeowner did not pay that bill. So that was a major lost opportunity in the build, but also the opportunity cost and how much time we spent on it. I learned from that and said, “Hey, I don't want to do that. I don't need every buyer to be a yes. If I'm a good fit for you, and I'm a good builder for you, great—let's go.Share on X I want to build your house. I’m excited about building homes for people. But I don't need to build everybody's house, because for some people, it's just not the right fit. So for me, I'm your guide in this process. And that's what I really pride myself in. You want to build a home, I’m going to guide you through this process, help you with each step of the way. Help you with the county side, the field side. I’m here to guide you through that whole thing. We really work towards your budget, your ideal budget. We build it out. We’re very transparent. A lot of clarity on what we’re doing, where we can collaborate, where we can maybe say, Hey, instead of $80,000 tile package, we can get a $45,000 tile package. Because we’re really looking for what’s your vision for it. Yeah. What do you want to see? How do you want to feel? And we can help you pull that together. Yeah, I think that’s very interesting, because I can see that there is value being created when you have an empathetic CEO who runs the business. You, in that case, who really gets to feel what the lifestyle of the individual is, what their vision is. You help them paint the picture so that you see it as well, and then you measure each element in proportion to their desires. Because maybe they want something like a really flashy countertop in the kitchen, but they really don’t care about what the deck is going to look like. Maybe it’s a stup*d example. And when someone buys, I don’t know, a standard home, then you are going to pay for stuff that you really don’t care about, and you are not going to get the stuff that uniquely is important to you. And with that approach that you’re doing, you are measuring everything to the right degree, and it’s going to be a perfectly balanced meal for the customer. That’s a great way of looking at it. That’s exactly right. And the deck versus man cave or versus this, that’s exactly the right way to look at it. A deck is a great add-on. It can be done anytime in the build. It can be done anytime. It's a minimal barrier to entry. Well, something on the inside of the house, the kitchen, the showstopper kitchen, that’s a different story, right? Because now you're impacting your life. You’re changing things. If we understand that the kitchen is a really prime target, then we want to make sure we commit enough money to that area. We want to make sure we commit enough design hours to that area. And maybe other areas are like, “Hey, minimum standard's great with us.” Perfect. Done. Yeah. We only sleep in the bedroom, we don’t do anything else. Exactly. Great point. Which is a problem in itself. Anyhow, if someone would like to learn more and maybe learn your ideas—maybe they want to be coached by you, or they want to learn about McMahon Custom Homes, what it takes to align with your vision—and particularly if they're in Central Virginia where you work, where should they reach out and where can they find you? Yeah, so several different places. McMahonCustomHomesLLC.com is our website, so you can certainly find us there. We have an active Instagram account, McMahon Custom Homes. I have an active Facebook account, again, McMahon Custom Homes. I do have a LinkedIn account, McMahon Custom Homes, LLC. Also for myself, my wife and I host a bi-monthly podcast. We took a year hiatus, and we just started again in 2026. Our podcast is not on McMahon Custom Homes, but it's really about the construction industry, different things that you experience, and really just giving back and trying to help others learn from maybe stuff that we did or things that we’re experiencing. My wife is a designer. I'm the home builder, so you kind of get a good mixed bag. And that's Feed Me Your Construction Content, if you're ever interested in tuning into that. Yeah. And if you would like to see what a collaboration between Josh and his wife looks like, then check out his website, McMahon Custom Homes. You can check out his house, or their house, that they built together. And it’s a beautiful house. Yeah. Thank you. It's a good place to start. Josh, loved it. I loved your content. Really interesting how you created the Satisfaction Pyramid in construction. I think that parallel applies to other businesses as well. Obviously, the elements are slightly different, but brand awareness, supporting the team, supporting your partners, training your people, pouring into them, and then creating that customer satisfaction are important in any industry. So thank you. If you enjoyed listening to this show, make sure you follow us on LinkedIn and on YouTube. And stay tuned, because every week I bring an exciting entrepreneur or thought leader on this show. Thank you for coming, Josh, and thanks for listening. Important Links: Josh's LinkedIn McMahon Custom Homes website McMahon Custom Homes LinkedIn
Do you enjoy your science fiction with humor, while still delivering big ideas, hard-SF concepts, action, and genuine heart?In this episode, I (Jim) dive into We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor, the first book in the wildly popular Bobiverse series. This is smart, funny, binge-worthy science fiction that asks huge questions about identity, AI, and what it really means to be human… even when you're technically a self-replicating space probe.After wanting to expand my sci-fi reading and hearing many of you recommend this series, a two-for-one Audible sale finally pushed this book to the top of my TBR. And let me tell you, I had so much fun that I immediately committed to reading the rest of the series in order. Time to binge, baby.In this spoiler-lite review, I talk about:• Why Bob Johansson is such a wildly relatable protagonist• How the clone/replication premise actually works• The balance of hard science and accessible storytelling• The humor, heart, and hopeful tone of the story• Who this book is perfect for — and who it might NOT work for• And why this is such a great entry point into modern science fictionIf you've been curious about the Bobiverse, or if you're looking for a sci-fi read that's both clever and incredibly fun, this might be exactly what you're looking for.⸻
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