Podcasts about kpi

You're tracking revenue, margins, and performance—but ignoring the metrics that are actually running the show.In this episode of The Obedient Rebel Podcast, we unpack the internal leadership KPIs every executive feels but rarely names:• Internal pressure• Self-trust• Joy• PresenceThese aren't “soft” metrics.They're the difference between sustainable success and silent burnout.If leadership feels heavier than it should—This episode will put language to what your system already knows.

No matter what position, no matter how many years someone's been in their position, every team member likes to know that they're doing a good job. Tiff and Kristy talk about why defining duties and responsibilities—and then measuring metrics against those duties and responsibilities—is so critical to "winning" at your job. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: The Dental A Team (00:00) Hello Dental A Team listeners. I am so excited to be here with you today I know I see that every single time but I hope you guys know how much I truly love podcasting it is a time away from like we'll call it work I feel like podcasting just isn't work for us and we love Speaking to you guys. love getting all this information out there for you and we love our time together So you guys afford us that and today I have an all-time fave I actually I know this is gonna make you blush but   I get some pretty incredible feedback. Kristy, I have Kristy here with us today. I get some pretty incredible feedback from a lot of our clients and a lot of listeners on the podcasts that we do together. So Kristy, I am here today in your presence and it just makes me feel so good. And I'm here to pick that brilliant brain. So thank you for showing up, bringing it and giving me, we've got an ample amount of time this afternoon together. So thank you, Kristy.   The Dental A Team (00:54) Yeah.   I always have fun when I'm here with you. You know that. It's just so natural that we can rip off each other. And ⁓ I don't know, you do a good job at picking my brain and pulling it out. So it's always fun. look forward to our time together.   The Dental A Team (01:09) Thank you.   Thank you. Thank you, Kristy. You guys should know something about Kristy. She is an incredible consultant and I know that this is our time that I get to kind of share and spread some light and joy on our consulting team. And Kristy, I think it's imperative for the world to know that, gosh, you have just an amazing list of clients who are really seeing some impressive results recently. We're into the new year. We're like,   Now when this releases two months into the new year, which is freaking wild, but that's fine. But so many of your clients saw so many successes last year and in those successes we're seeing systems development and within those systems development, really seeing goals being pushed, being reached, being surpassed. You've got some clients that I know you were looking at the goals that they were setting for themselves and you were like, yes, and that's one of my favorite Kristy-isms. Yes, and, yes, and.   I think you can do more. So you like are pushing them outside of their comfort zones and really projecting for them things that I don't think that a lot of your clients even see possible. I just think it's really cool. And today we're talking really about how accountability is gonna help reduce stress within the practice. And I say all of these things that you're doing really well for your clients right now, Kristy, because it takes so much accountability to be able to perform those pieces without   an overload of stress. You can grow and not have accountability. You can spin your wheels and cycle in the negative or however you want to say it. But when that accountability piece is also attached to the things that you're implementing, I think that's really where you see the true results. And that's where we've gotten some incredible feedback that Kristy is amazing. And ⁓ you've taught them so many skills that they can then take them themselves.   and carry it on. And I think it's really cool. It's just really valuable what you've been able to implement for practices. So my question, my first question to you, my first brain pick is why do you find it so important to uphold the accountability levels that you hold for your clients and that you train them to hold for their teams by proxy? Why is that so important to you and so valuable in the coaching that you do?   The Dental A Team (03:31) Yeah, I love that question because even us in what we do, we want to know if we're winning or not. Right. And so every team member, doesn't matter what job you're doing. You want to know if you're doing a good job and if you're winning. And if we don't have KPIs to measure or clarity in our roles, we're just, we're going day by day by default, you know, and we could have a success, but like you said, it's   How do we repeat it if we don't even know what we're looking for? So number one is defining those duties and understanding what am I responsible for and how do I know if I'm winning or   The Dental A Team (04:15) Yeah, I love that. you said a couple of things there that I keyed in on, but you said duplicate. So making it repeatable and making it so that that system can be driven by anyone. like anyone can do it, it can be duplicated and you can take a same or similar system and copy and paste it into a different department or a different goal. And I totally agree. Now, when you have something that's duplicatable, it's just kind of   I don't want to say on autopilot, but it feels more on autopilot because you're not having to put quite so much like thought process on everything, you know? It is kind of on autopilot. When you're able to do that, how does that, what level of accountability does that require? I guess is the question. Like we've got to, we can have all the systems in the world and the clarity and the job roles, we think we have the clarity and we hand it to them and then we walk away.   what's the next step? We've got the clarity, we've got the job descriptions. What does the accountability look like for those things and why is it so important to the overall stress of the team?   The Dental A Team (05:23) Yeah, again, in everything we do, it's either by default or by intention, right? And I'd rather be intentional. So using those duties and then following up. I'm a firm believer of performance reviews outside of wage reviews. Can they tie together? 100 % they can tie together. But I also feel as leaders in the practice, we have a responsibility to grow our people, not just grow our practice, but grow our people, right?   And so having those conversations to measure against their duties and the KPIs, not a feeling, I feel like I did a good job, right? ⁓ Having those to measure against, lets them know, they know before they even come in that they're winning or not. And it also gives us the opportunity to coach them up, right? If they're not winning or, you know, what's getting in the way of it, or really it could be an opportunity to coach them and train them.   And it doesn't necessarily mean us as leaders have to be the one to do it, but we can provide resources and we can get commitments around it so that we can measure, again, we don't have to hit perfection, but are we trending in a growth pattern? And the more that we grow our people, the more that our practice grows, you know?   The Dental A Team (06:43) Yeah,   yeah, that makes sense. So you're tying that accountability measurement, that accountability piece is less micromanaging and oversight and like, are you doing the thing but it's tied into the results being driven. So if we're tracking the KPIs, we're tracking the results that we're desiring and we're seeing, are we on track, off track? Are we growing? Are we declining? That's the accountability measurement and then inspiring our team to want to win within that.   that provides that feedback system, I guess, that loop back where they're like, hey, I'm seeing a downtrend. Maybe they're at a point now where they're inclined to speak up and ask for help or they see something that needs to be adjusted or switched and so they're doing it on their own rather than that micromanaged ⁓ over the shoulder accountability. Because I do think, Kristy, that a lot of times the definition of the word accountability can be   It's like ASAP, like when can you come ASAP? That could mean anything. Your ASAP versus my ASAP is who knows what that means. So that accountability piece, I think we all have our own definition or our own variation of defining it, but your version here is really looking at the results driving it and then constantly coming back to it. So I love that. are you having your doctors and your practices?   look at those results and talk about them because there's the one piece to assume that we're all adults and we're all going to look at them, we're all going to fill them in, we're all going to come to our leadership when we need help. But then that's where I get the phone calls from the doctors that's like, I thought I employed adults and they're not doing the thing. And they're well, we get busy too. So it doesn't always happen that way. So when are you suggesting or having your doctors and your practices really look at those results to bring that fold of accountability measurement into it?   At the one-on-ones for sure, is there anything else that you're adding in there?   The Dental A Team (08:42) Yeah, for sure. think that truly there's daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly metrics, and they can be broken out. ⁓ Yes, one-on-ones are specific to them, but it's also a team sport, right? And so, again, I think I encourage everybody to be doing meetings.   If in a perfect world, I'd love them weekly and they're strategic to work on the business, not just in the business and in the ones that are doing it with intention and having those meetings and dialing in on those metrics. And, you know, they can tell if they're winning or not. It gives you the strategy to be able to course correct sooner than later. And it lets everybody know where they are and we can be support to each other. So to your question,   I don't think it's cut and dry, but I do think there's daily, weekly, monthly numbers that we should be having a pulse on. I don't want to wait till November to know I'm $100,000 behind for the year. It gets a little harder to chunk down. So ⁓ the other thing that you said, Tiff, too, is when you were saying accountability, I think that word in and of itself tends to have a negative connotation.   The Dental A Team (09:48) Yeah. Yeah.   The Dental A Team (10:01) I want to challenge our members and people listening to see it as a positive thing. Like literally it's your time to invest in your people. I literally just got off the phone with one that, and it's funny because our admin team, it's usually where it falls. It's like, hey, I need you to credential this doctor. Okay, I don't even know how to do that. whose doctors don't even know how to do it. So how is that team member going to know how to do it? Right?   Where do I start? And in fact, the doctor doesn't know how to do it. So sometimes it's, we can't just leave them out on an island and expect them to win. And if we check in early, we can provide resources. Again, I don't, a doctor, maybe they don't need to know how to do it, but can they guide them?   and give them the resource. And in doing that, look how much more valuable they've just made that team member.   The Dental A Team (10:55) I think you're spot on there. just that statement there of the team member, like I can picture is we want to talk about how accountability reduces the stress. And that's that scenario you just gave. I can picture the office manager being like, yeah, okay, I'll figure it out. And then all that does is add this underlying unknown stress in the back of her mind or his mind. They're thinking, I got to figure this out. I got to make this work. I got to   I gotta do it, but I've got all these other things first. And then dot comes in and is like, hey, did you do that? And they're like, no, like, right? And now we're stressed and we're freaking out. And it's like, there's that unknown space that we don't always know what we don't know. So we don't always know the questions to ask, but just really having that feedback system of accountability within the results, I think is the key there.   The Dental A Team (11:45) you one of the things we fail at as leaders is painting that clarity. Again, even if I asked you to do that, did you give me a timeframe? Because you might've wanted it done yesterday. I'm thinking, I could do it in the next month, you know?   The Dental A Team (12:00) Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is what I do, right? I'm like, yep, got it, it's on my list. But I've got 60 other things that are also on my list that if I'm not given a prioritization, I'm gonna prioritize it myself, right? And that's, it's gonna fall where it falls. And then you come back and you say, where's that thing? I'm like, well, it's on the back end of my list, because what does it trump? So what does it go above that I can replace?   it with, know, whatever. So you're spot on there. I love that, that it all loops together because in the beginning you said, then you just said to you like painting that clarity. And I always tell practices, and I know you do too, when you're building out the job descriptions and the org charts, you need one to three key metrics of results. What are the one to three things that this position is after? We want, you know, a schedule full to daily production goal. That's our schedulers goal.   So all of those little pieces that get us there, we don't tackle those until we're not reaching goal. So if we're not reaching that big overarching metric, that's when we say, okay, what system is broken? But I think, Kristy, what tends to happen is that people are like, no, accountability causes stress. Like Tiff, Kristy, you're crazy. The accountability causes stress because we're micromanaging the systems.   that get us to the result rather than holding the accountability lever to the result.   The Dental A Team (13:31) I agree with you 100 % and truly looking at the person as a human and how can I develop this within them, right? I don't think anybody walks in on any given day thinking how can I make this day horrible, right? They want to please their leaders and it's just sometimes they don't understand how. They don't really have the clarity on how and more so they don't know what   The Dental A Team (13:39) Yeah.   bright.   The Dental A Team (14:00) what winning looks like.   The Dental A Team (14:02) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, I think you're spot on there and you're making me think that clarity piece,   clarity piece and knowing how to make someone happy, right? How do I thrive in this position and make my doctor or my manager, whomever my lead, happy also ties back to when accountability is only held in the negative. It's very easy to start to feel like   you're not, you can't win. There's no positive being brought to light. So it's it's celebrating when cause for celebrating and it's tackling system when cause for tackling systems and never tackling the person. Unless it's a personality, personnel issue that's separate, but when it comes to accountability results and driving the practice, it's more about celebrating and tackling as you need to and not only tackling, which in the dental industry,   The Dental A Team (14:43) You got   The Dental A Team (14:58) Our jobs, I tell practices all the time, patients come here so we can tell them what's wrong with their teeth. They don't come here so we can say, my gosh, that's the best smile I've seen all day. Like we want to say that, right? But when we see that good smell, we're like, you're all good, nothing here, right? That's not a celebration. We're just like, no problems. See you later. And we tend to do that in our KPI meetings too, where it's like, cool, you're good, you're good, you're good. you're not good, let's focus on you today. And it's like, well, shoot, when do I win?   I think you keyed on something really big there. I think deducting all of those pieces that you mentioned today, Kristy, it feels like the stress is typically going to be seen in more of an emotional capacity than in a physical can-do capacity. So it's in a mental capacity that turns into an emotional capacity that brings on the stress of the world and really just keying in on how to remove the emotion.   from it, bring in the black and white and celebrate those pieces.   The Dental A Team (16:02) I agree with you 100%. And I think it's why we always are speaking to right people, right seat, right? And I always joke when I tell my clients this, I almost think it should be right seat, right people instead of, you know what I mean? Yeah. yeah, spot on.   The Dental A Team (16:14) Yeah. Yeah, no, that's fair.   I love it. If you were to pick two or three things that a practice could do today that might be not like, I don't wanna say surface level, because I don't think it's surface level, but maybe not digging deep and uprooting a whole system. But what are some things that they could implement today or they could take a look at flushing out if they were to try to reduce stress today in their practice?   The Dental A Team (16:44) Yeah, I truly, I think the first thing would be, there one or two metrics that aren't where you want them? Let's pull out that system or identify what duties or what things do we do every day that contribute to that number and then pull out those systems and figure out it. It can be process or it can be people, meaning   Maybe as a person, I change the recipe, right? I always tell people, you change the chocolate chip recipe for a cup of salt, when it called for cup of sugar, you don't get to say the recipe doesn't work, right? So pull it back out. Let's look at it. Is the recipe, we tailored it and it's not working? Let's just get back to it. know, recommit, recommit as a team or an individual and then remeasure. Is it working? Right? So,   The Dental A Team (17:22) That's fair.   Yeah. Yeah.   The Dental A Team (17:38) That would be my thing and get energized behind it.   The Dental A Team (17:42) I love it. Well, thank you. It amazed me. actually just last night I altered I altered a recipe. I make these biscuit things for Brody and I was like, I'll do a gluten free flour because then I can have some too. And I really like bell peppers. So I'm gonna take the bell peppers out. But I didn't change the amount of flour. So they are real dry, you know, and Brody this morning was like, maybe you need a new recipe. And I was like, well, no, it was.   because I didn't have enough wet ingredients because I didn't put the bell peppers in there and to it I didn't reduce the flour so it's just funny that you said that because Brody was ready to throw out the recipe and find a whole new recipe but it wasn't the recipe it was me so I appreciate that you say that at home today. ⁓   The Dental A Team (18:22) You   I think   the with that though, you know, the ironic-ness that you just said that my son has celiac. So in the very beginning, we were learning to cook different. It's funny how you have to transition. I would encourage you to use applesauce in your... It puts it back to nobody's trying to make the day difficult. We're all trying to do our best and, you know, celebrate your people. Try to recognize the wins.   The Dental A Team (18:28) Yeah.   Yeah.   ⁓ smart! Yes, I do forget about that.   The Dental A Team (18:55) and the areas that aren't improving, address them as needed.   The Dental A Team (19:00) Yeah,   I love that. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for the tip. Everybody has a gluten-free flour tip now as well. We're here for all of the things. Awesome, Kristy, thank you. And I hope you guys can see some spaces in your practice where you can dial in the accountability. I don't wanna say ramp up the accountability. I think it just needs to be dialed in and it just needs to be in alignment with what your goals are.   The Dental A Team (19:05) Right   The Dental A Team (19:27) And if your goals are to have a stress-free practice, it doesn't mean you remove the accountability. It just means that you find the alignment of the accountability to sit with your goals. take a look. You guys, think you know, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com is where to send questions. We are here for it. And a lot of those questions, just so you know, if they are tailored to specific things like this, they get sent to the consultant team and we are the ones that are providing the answers for them to respond to you guys. So you have us at your fingertips, just like our clients do if you are a client.   Reach out to your consultant, she's there to help you. We love what we do. you guys, drop a five star review below. We love hearing what you love. And you know what, when you use that applesauce, let us know how that goes too. So, Kristy, thank you so much for your time today. And with that, you guys, it's a wrap. We'll catch you next time.  

#307 Most business owners track revenue. Some track expenses. Very few track the numbers that actually determine freedom and long-term wealth. In this episode, I break down the Top 3 KPIs almost no one is tracking and why ignoring them keeps smart, hardworking owners stuck. KPI #1: Taxes We talk about: The real difference between Schedule C and K-1 income Why "not paying taxes" usually means one of two things: You don't actually have profit Or you're kicking the can down the road in a way that will eventually cost you How taxes are not the enemy but a signal of real progress If you want to build wealth, taxes are part of the deal. KPI #2: Your Sales P&L Most people look at revenue. Very few look at what it costs them in time and energy to create that revenue. We cover: How much time you're really spending on sales and marketing Why "being busy" is not the same as being effective How to think about sales like an investment KPI #3: Personal KPIs That Actually Matter This is the one almost everyone ignores. We talk about tracking: Time with your kids Nights home Weekends off Vacations taken Mental bandwidth and margin Because what's the point of a profitable business if it costs you the life you were trying to build? Bonus KPI: Net Worth Revenue is noisy. Profit is helpful. Net worth tells the truth. I share why tracking net worth changes how you make decisions and keeps you focused on the long game. If you want a business that supports your life instead of consuming it, this episode will hit home.

If you're a physician with at least 5 years of experience looking for a flexible, non-clinical, part-time medical-legal consulting role… ...Dr. Armin Feldman's Medical Legal Coaching program will guarantee to add $100K in additional income within 12 months without doing any expert witness work. Any doctor in any specialty can do this work. And if you don't reach that number, he'll work with you for free until you do, guaranteed. How can he make such a bold claim? It's simple, he gets results…  Dr. David exceeded his clinical income without sacrificing time in his full-time position. Dr. Anke retired from her practice while generating the same monthly consulting income.  And Dr. Elliott added meaningful consulting work without lowering his clinical income or job satisfaction. So, if you're a physician with 5+ years of experience and you want to find out exactly how to add $100K in additional consulting income in just 12 months, go to arminfeldman.com.                                                          =============== Get the FREE GUIDE to 10 Nonclinical Careers at nonclinicalphysicians.com/freeguide. Get a list of 70 nontraditional jobs at nonclinicalphysicians.com/70jobs.                                                                                                 =============== Emergency physician–turned–medspa owner Dr. Lisa Jenks explains how she went from the ER to founding Genesis Med Spa in 2007, growing it from four treatment rooms to a highly profitable practice that a private equity group ultimately acquired. Drawing on 17 years of ownership, she walks through what she would do differently if she were starting again today and why careful planning at the beginning determines whether a medspa becomes a sellable asset later. She focuses on practical decisions that matter most: negotiating the lease and build-out,  choosing services that don't require expensive devices,  hiring lean part-time staff,  defining a clear niche,  and thinking like a small-business owner rather than just a clinician.  From there, she moves into strategies for growth and profitability, including high-ROI services, KPI tracking, inventory control, staff involvement in cost savings, and preparing systems and numbers that make your medspa attractive to future buyers. You'll find links mentioned in the episode at nonclinicalphysicians.com/start-a-medspa/

Most leaders want results — but few build the environment that produces them consistently.   On this episode of The Abundance Mindset, Vinney Chopra explains why high-performing real estate teams aren't built by micromanaging results, but by teaching people how to think, rehearse, and improve together.   What stands out is the emphasis on practice — not pressure. Leasing success doesn't come from hope. It comes from preparation, repetition, and recognition.  

Some Sunday thoughts and an offer from Bill.Sponsorship InformationThank you to ⁠⁠⁠Trata⁠⁠⁠ for sponsoring the show.If you're listening to this podcast, you'll like Trata. Trata is buyside to buyside conversations on individual stocks. Trata makes finding a bull or bear on any stock as easy as clicking two buttons. Over 125 funds globally contribute that collectively cover 2000+ tickers. Trata raised over $3mm coming out of Y Combinator. Before you would track 13Fs, now you can understand what funds are actually thinking. You can join as a lurker or you can join as a contributor and Trata will pay you hundreds of dollars per call. For a free trial, go to ⁠⁠⁠trytrata.com/brew⁠⁠⁠ OG Sponsor Shoutout!Thank you to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for sponsoring the show. DISCOUNT INFO: If you use the affiliate link ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fiscal.ai/brew⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, you will automatically get 2 weeks of Fiscal Pro for Free and if you find that you want to upgrade, my link will get you 15% off any paid plans. About ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is the complete modern data terminal for global equities.The ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ platform combines a powerful user experience with all the financial data capabilities that professional investors need. Users get up to 20 years of historical financials for all stocks globally that they can easily chart, compare, or export into their own models. And unlike legacy data terminals where it can take hours or even days, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠'s data is updated within minutes of earnings reports. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ also tracks all the company-specific Segment & KPI data so you don't have to. Like to track Amazon's Cloud Revenue? They've got it.How about Spotify's premium subscribers? Or Google's quarterly paid clicks?They've got all of it.

Will Thomson returns! In this episode he has the audacity to suggest oil might be a smarter place to fish than gold. He also discusses copper as a theme. Bill likes Will. You should listen to Will. Will is a solid dude. Sponsorship InformationThank you to ⁠⁠Trata⁠⁠ for sponsoring the show.If you're listening to this podcast, you'll like Trata. Trata is buyside to buyside conversations on individual stocks. Trata makes finding a bull or bear on any stock as easy as clicking two buttons. Over 125 funds globally contribute that collectively cover 2000+ tickers. Trata raised over $3mm coming out of Y Combinator. Before you would track 13Fs, now you can understand what funds are actually thinking. You can join as a lurker or you can join as a contributor and Trata will pay you hundreds of dollars per call. For a free trial, go to ⁠⁠trytrata.com/brew⁠⁠ OG Sponsor Shoutout!Thank you to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for sponsoring the show. DISCOUNT INFO: If you use the affiliate link ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠fiscal.ai/brew⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, you will automatically get 2 weeks of Fiscal Pro for Free and if you find that you want to upgrade, my link will get you 15% off any paid plans. About ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ is the complete modern data terminal for global equities.The ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ platform combines a powerful user experience with all the financial data capabilities that professional investors need. Users get up to 20 years of historical financials for all stocks globally that they can easily chart, compare, or export into their own models. And unlike legacy data terminals where it can take hours or even days, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠'s data is updated within minutes of earnings reports. ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Fiscal.ai⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ also tracks all the company-specific Segment & KPI data so you don't have to. Like to track Amazon's Cloud Revenue? They've got it.How about Spotify's premium subscribers? Or Google's quarterly paid clicks?They've got all of it.

Reinvention takes the spotlight in this episode. CEO host Porschia and guest Scott Mason discuss why holding onto “safe” jobs can backfire in today's shifting market, and how intentional change can align your work with who you are. You'll receive clear steps on how to listen to that inner call, choose courageously, and take action for a career change.They share a practical definition of reinvention: moving from a KPI-driven identity to purpose-driven impact. Scott reveals how mindset and personal narrative shape your decisions, using story archetypes to uncover unhelpful beliefs about money, status, and failure. Then, he lays out your first actionable steps, starting this week.Real reinvention unfolds over months, not days. Prepare for a 3–6 month journey of discovery, messaging, and launch. You'll also discover why charisma is crucial during transition, helping you attract support, communicate your value clearly, and build forward momentum.Click here for full show notes and to learn more: https://www.fly-highcoaching.com/reinventionCheck out the master class Career 911: Solving the Top 5 Challenges Executives and Professionals Have: https://fly-high-coaching.thinkific.com/courses/Career%20911%20Master%20Class!

Host Kevin Gormley talks to special guest Alex Whelan, a CIMA‑qualified tutor with extensive industry experience, who provides deep insights into the Sumtrix pre‑seen case for February OCS resit candidates. Alex breaks down Sumtrix's business model, financial structure, sustainability themes, costing methods, budgeting issues, and potential exam‑relevant risks. The conversation also includes a full walkthrough of all six CIMA Core Activities (A–F) and expert exam‑technique guidance, including planning, subheadings, KPIs, and referencing attachments. Kevin also introduces the updated 2026 direction of the Finance Leadership Podcast, which will now focus heavily on supporting Operational Case Study (OCS) candidates. KEY POINTS Overview of our podcast direction for 2026 Deep case analysis of Sumtrix (ski manufacturer: freestyle, touring, custom) Financial highlights, revenue channels, and operational structure Sustainability misalignment (importing North American materials) Key red flags: seasonality, inventory buildup, rising overheads Detailed breakdown of Core Activities A–F Exam techniques: planning time, subheadings, KPI construction, use of attachments Resources on the CGMA Hub for resit candidates Thanks for listening. It takes just a couple of minutes to share your feedback.  ABOUT US. The CGMA Finance Leadership Programme (FLP) is the online pathway to the prestigious Chartered Institute of Management Accountants' Professional Qualification. Find out more about the FLP at https://enroll.cgma.org/ Get in touch with show host Kevin Gormley via LinkedIn. Your comments welcomed at podcast@aicpa-cima.com This is a podcast from AICPA & CIMA, together as the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. To enjoy more conversations from our global community of accounting and finance professionals, explore our network of free shows here.

This week on Sinica, I speak with Afra Wang, a writer working between London and the Bay Area, currently a fellow with Gov.AI. We're talking today about her recent WIRED piece on what might be China's most influential science fiction project you've never heard of: The Morning Star of Lingao (Língáo Qǐmíng 临高启明), a sprawling, crowdsourced novel about time travelers who bootstrap an industrial revolution in Ming Dynasty Hainan. More than a thought experiment in alternate history, it's the ur-text of China's "Industrial Party" (gōngyè dǎng 工业党) — the loose intellectual movement that sees engineering capability as the true source of national power. We discuss what the novel reveals about how China thinks about failure, modernity, and salvation, and why, just as Americans are waking up to China's industrial might, the worldview that helped produce it may already be losing its grip.5:27 – Being a cultural in-betweener: code-switching across moral and epistemic registers 10:25 – Double consciousness and converging aesthetic standards 12:05 – "The greatest Chinese science fiction" — an ironic title for a poorly written cult classic 14:18 – Bridging STEM and humanities: the KPI-coded language of tech optimization 16:08 – China's post-Industrial Party moment: from "try hard" to "lie flat" 17:01 – How widely known is Lingao? A cult Bible for China's techno-elite 19:11 – From crypto bros to DAO experiments: how Afra discovered the novel 21:25 – The canonical timeline: compiling chaos into collaborative fiction 23:06 – Guancha.cn (guānchá zhě wǎng 观察者网) and the Industrial Party's media ecosystem 26:05 – The Sentimental Party (Qínghuái Dǎng 情怀党): China's lost civic space 29:01 – The Wenzhou high-speed rail crash: the debate that defined the Industrial Party 33:19 – Controlled spoilers: colonizing Australia, the Maid Revolution, and tech trees 41:06 – Competence as salvation: obsessive attention to getting the details right 44:18 – The Needham question and the joy of transformation: from Robinson Crusoe to Primitive Technology 47:25 – "Never again": inherited historical vulnerability and the memory of chaos 49:20 – Wang Xiaodong, "China Is Unhappy," and the crystallization of Industrial Party ideology 51:33 – Gender and Lingao: a pre-feminist artifact and the rational case for equality 56:16 – Dan Wang's Breakneck and the "engineering state" framework 59:25 – New Quality Productive Forces (xīn zhì shēngchǎnlì 新质生产力): Industrial Party logic in CCP policy 1:03:43 – The reckoning: why Industrial Party intellectuals are losing their innocence 1:07:49 – What Lingao tells us about China today: the invisible infrastructure beneath the hot showerPaying it forward: The volunteer translators of The Morning Star of Lingao (English translation and GitHub resources)Xīn Xīn Rén Lèi / Pixel Perfect podcast (https://pixelperfect.typlog.io/) and the Bǎihuā (百花) podcasting community Recommendations:Afra: China Through European Eyes: 800 Years of Cultural and Intellectual Encounter, edited by Kerry Brown; The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet by Yi-Ling Liu Kaiser: Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim AnsarySee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Kiera is here with a gift to make your practice even better: The three most common mistakes dental practices make, and guidance on how to get out of them. Is your practice making one of these mistakes? Delegating tasks without ownership Avoiding hard conversations Flying blind on your numbers Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: The Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera and today is one of my favorite topics of all time. It's how to avoid the pitfalls because I feel like these are costly mistakes that dental practice owners make. We make these costly pitfalls. We go into them. We don't know about them. And you guys, if you know me, I have a mantra and I say, don't lose money. I hate losing money. It's one of my biggest pet peeves and I don't want you to lose money. So I'm excited to talk about it. I hope you guys are excited because...   The reality is like so many people talk about like, success leaves clues and it does, but so does failure. And I I talk about this a lot when I present and when I speak and I say like success and failure are truly not radically different. They're not, they're like small little things. It's like successful practices are consistent. Successful practices put systems in, successful practices look at their KPIs, successful practices have team meetings that are effective. Successful practices have CEO time.   Successful practices have delegation and ownership. Successful practices ⁓ follow through. They look at their case acceptance. They make their re-care calls. They do their reactivation. They do different verbiage. Like that's what they do. Failure practices don't stay consistent. They always have an excuse. They're always blaming. ⁓ They don't check their case acceptance. They don't track their KPIs. They don't look at their numbers. They don't take CEO time. Like these are just little steps. And like with my fingers, if you're just listening, I'm like,   almost like scallops, like if we've got a middle point, success is I checked my KPIs, failure is I didn't check my KPIs. And while that's not like a huge move, it is moving you points away to where you end up either closer to success or closer to failure. And so I think when we realize this, these are the ones, like, how can I help you guys avoid these costs and mistakes? How can I like motivate and inspire you and like, not just motivate, but genuinely change you?   So that way it's not this I like, well, shoot, we're on failure row. Shoot, like, I don't really know about this. Like, I just want to talk about three of the most common mistakes that people make and how do you correct course because you're going to make mistakes. But like if I'm doing the scallops again, successful offices realize like we didn't do the KPIs. So we're going to start doing the KPIs and we don't miss those. We're going to hold the meetings and we don't miss those.   they course correct before they end up in the failure or the success bucket. They're course correcting constantly. And so this is just like where I'm at coaching hundreds and thousands of offices, team members galore, our team, like literally, I feel so blessed that we get to serve so many offices. I just saw like this really awesome highlight reel of all these doctors that came in person and I was watching it with Jason and I look over and Jason's just the sweetest thing. He's tearing up and he said, Kiera.   I knew when you started Dental A Team, it was going to be like, he's like, I never imagined it being what it is today. He said, but all those people's lives, including all of you listening to the podcasts, all of those lives that we've been able to change because of Dental A Team Gosh, that is just such a blessing. It's such a beautiful thing. And I just want to say thank you. Like, thank you for being here. Thank you for being a part of the offices. Thank you for being a part of my Dental A Team podcast family. Thank you for just showing up. Thank you for changing lives through dentistry. Thank you for giving people a gift of confidence. Like,   And for me to be able to give you a gift to make your practice even better, that's what I'm here for. That's what Dental A Team's about. So like we're here to help you recognize patterns. We're here to help you avoid burnout. We're here to help you make small changes before they become giant snowballs. And I think like my thought process has always been I'm here to positively impact the world of dentistry in the greatest way possible. We're here to share this podcast message with every single office out there. We're here to help offices realize like running a successful practice.   does not have to be hard. It can actually be easy. And let's give you the tools, the tips, the resources, all of that to make your life a grand success. So if that sounds great to you, we'll rock on. So step number one, mistake number one that's very costly is delegating tasks without ownership. So like so many offices, hear them like, Kiera, I listened to the podcast and we implemented it, but like it just didn't work out. And I'm like, yeah, cause you delegated it and you didn't have the structure, didn't have the ownership, you didn't have the accountability, you didn't have the metrics. Like, okay.   One of the doctors called this doctor out and they said, this doctor is a walking cheat, like cheat code. Go talk to him, go ask him what he does because he's been able to take his practice for massive success, which is true. When I met them, were doing about 1.5. Now we're clearing five. We're going to be crushing six to seven. And I just like, gosh, the giddiness in me for this office. Like they deserve the sun, the moon, the stars. Like you name it.   They're just such good humans. And so when I think about this, like we're talking, this is a practice that went from like 1.5, 2 million up to this six, $7 million practice now, something I've noticed. And like I said, this doctor is a walking cheat code. They, when we go in and we're like, okay, we're going to roll out this new process. So we're going to do a new process on how we do case acceptance, or we're going do new process on how we do cancellations. They don't just go to the team and be like, all right guys, we're going to do cancellations. They are like, we're going to build an SOP.   we're gonna have a team training, we're gonna have a metric, we're gonna do it for these four weeks. And they don't take a long time to execute on that. So it's like, perfect, we're gonna have this done in the next three weeks. But they execute, it's rolled out, it's like, it's very, very thorough. And this is a practice of a very large team and they all do it consistently. And when something gets off, they just go right back to the SOP, they update the SOP, where was it missed? What do we need to do? Let's do a team training on it. But I will say I've coached hundreds of offices and this is one office that I watch   constantly that is able to delegate, have ownership and be able to have a full team move and stay hyper accountable. So this is just like, you've got to have ownership. You've got to have SOPs. You've got to roll it out to the team, make sure everybody's aware. And then we've got to have the metrics and the check-ins to make sure something's not off. And if it is off, we follow through on it. So people know that when we roll out new processes, they're here to stick. They're not just like a flash in the pan of like, I heard it on a podcast. Let's try it out.   No, it's very, very, very thorough. So a quick check for you is like, go back and look at the last three things that you delegated. Did you assign them? Did you own them? And did you have follow up on it?   crickets. Yeah, yeah, because you did it. Darn it. But you're going to do it in the future. Or maybe you did. And I'm high fiving you. But most of the time, people don't. And this is so costly because then you can't ever be free. You think you're moving. You're taking one step forward, but you're actually taking like 500 steps backwards because nothing's actually getting delegated. Nothing's actually moving forward. And you're only relying on your A plus star players that are building all these ownership accountability pieces. And people are like, but I want everybody to be that way. And I'm like, human nature is not. Tell me how you're doing on your New Year's.   resolutions, probably not great because human nature by default doesn't stay accountable. Why do think I'm in business? because people, they know what they need to do. People are like, Kiera, I pay you to tell me like what to do that you do on the podcast. And it's like, yeah, because human nature is not follow through. Why do I pay a gym trainer? I've got all the resources, I got all the tools. I need somebody to literally hold me accountable to make me show up to work out. So look at the last three tasks. Did you delegate them? Was their ownership?   Did you follow up on them? Did they have a metric? If not, it up, fix that and start to delegate with ownership and accountability. So mistake number two, are you guys ready for this? It's avoiding hard conversations. ⁓ man, that's a crowd drop off. This is so real though, because we don't have like Patrick Lanziani has the five dysfunctions of a team. And if you and your team have not read this, I highly recommend it's a very easy fable. Have it as like some like,   evening reading. It's so fast, it's so easy and it's very, very great. And I think it's a reread. So if you've listened to it in the past or you read it, maybe do a reread. ⁓ But when we don't have trust and vulnerability and then we don't have healthy debate, AKA hard conversations, what happens is like little small issues become cracks and cracks aren't bad. But if cracks stay there, they actually break and then it becomes toxic and then it arose the entire team. So in leadership, we've got to have, let's like,   I coached his office. guys might know him. He's incredible. ⁓ They've got a lot of offices. think I did seven office visits ⁓ in three days. We were hauling booty. And I love this doctor because he pays for me to come in to coach his teams, to teach them how to have uncomfortable conversations, to remind them like this is why we're here. And the more we have just a few of these and we get away from the fear of discomfort.   and wanting to keep the peace, which is actually artificial harmony, we like care, we align and we move forward. And we use the sports analogy on this of, can you just imagine like pick your favorite sports team, basketball, baseball, soccer, I don't care what it is. Can you imagine for one second, like we'll just use basketball for instance, or football. Like if the quarterback or the point guard goes in, like let's do football, because they get thrashed. Like if that quarterback gets thrashed because his defensive line is not protecting for him.   or no one's open because they didn't follow the play, can you just imagine if that quarterback runs off the field and is like, hey coach, could you tell the defensive line to cover for me next time? Like absolutely not. Or if that quarterback is just like, I'm just so angry with my defensive line. Like they didn't block for me. Like, no, can you imagine? Like, no, they call it out. Like you got a freaking block for me. Like we need to win this game. I need this to happen. And they do it in real time because everybody on the team,   is committed to winning and they call each other in real time of their blind spots. Like my brother said, I'll play basketball. I played tennis. You got to call it in the moment. Like my dad is like, you got to call it in real time. You got to say, Hey, I need you to block. I need you to box out for me. I need you to like throw the ball. Like I'm here. Like I need you guys to get open, whatever it is. But like, if we can get a little bit better, that that's our culture rather than a, we sit here pretending to be perfect, but ultimately hating each other.   and hate's probably a strong word, but creating gaps. And so what I encourage is we normalize uncomfortable conversations. We normalize and encourage it. We push on peer to peer accountability. We have each other instead of it being up to the coach, AKA office manager or doctor, to each other, peer to peer, to where we talk about it. We wanna get the W, we wanna win. And so helping your team realize that this is going to be the best way for us to win is to have these hard conversations.   And it's not, I say it's not confrontation. It's just a conversation. Like let's take that hard out of there, but let's say what needs to happen. And so I would say, doctors, one of the worst things you can do to your great players is to tolerate the poor performance of a lower player. ⁓ Because they're watching you. They're watching to see standards are not what you say. They're what you tolerate. And so when you're A plus players are watching, like, well, doctor is going to do this constantly or doctors are not going to care about that. Now team members, can rise up and you can take care of things too.   Doctors, we've also got to make sure that we're encouraging and we're having the hard conversations too. I don't think you know how much I do not enjoy hard conversations, but I know as a leader, as a boss, as a CEO, as a consultant, I have got to have the hard conversations and I'm going to keep having them. They're not easy, but they are my responsibility and I'm going to show up as a good team member because actually that's better than living in artificial harmony. It's so much better. So there's a great quote.   If you want it, your success and happiness, that's my add on your success and happiness are directly proportional to the number of uncomfortable conversations you're willing to have. So if you want to grow, if you want to rise, how many of you look at your KPIs or your numbers like, gosh, freaking schedule is not full. Like, oh, like our profitability, like, but I go to my team meetings and I'm like, great job guys, you're doing great. Why don't we call it out? Hey, profitability is not where it needs to be.   What are our solutions to get it to where it needs to be? I'm not being a jerk. I'm not sitting here sizzling. Hey, our schedule is not up to goal. What are we doing to get that fixed? Let's have a conversation. Let's fix it. Let's normalize that. That's calling out in real time. Hey, our schedule is not to goal. Like what's our solution? How are we going to get there? It's like it's a huddle. It's a genuine huddle. Think about sports players. Like they get together. Like you need to block. I need you to call that person. I need you to do this. You guys need to call that all the hygienists. If you've got downtime, call seven patients, whatever it is. That's how we get the W.   something rude, let's normalize that we are a team. We call each other out. We celebrate when we win. Also like on the flip, like let's go to basketball, let's go to football. When they score a touchdown, the whole team that was just calling each other out of like, I need you to block, I need you to do this. They also go to the end zone and they freaking celebrate. They lift each other up, they're high-fiving. It's both. So let's make sure that we're calling each other out and normalizing that. And we're also celebrating and normalizing that as well. So this is something of, I would just encourage you to have   one honest conversation, and also I'd recommend in your next team meeting, let's have this if that's a standard, put it up in the break room. We normalize hard conversations. We encourage hard conversations. We are a company that does not sit in artificial harmony. Whatever it is, plaster that, build that into your culture. This is something you've got to like, if you guys could see, I'm like boxing out, like I'm pushing the defense. Like you've got to push this through all the way for you guys to get this to be that and to avoid that costly mistake.   All right, mistake number three. This one should come as a no brainer. You guys know I love numbers and numbers love me. It's flying blind on your numbers. So I think that production feeds the ego, profit feeds the family. So when I look at this, so many doctors are like, well, Kiera, I know you say that the numbers are there, but I don't have any money. And I'm like, yes, but making haphazard, crazy decisions because you're not looking at your numbers and you're not using them as a roadmap, you're just   flying by the seat your pants. And so when you look at this, you've got to know like, here's just a, guess, I guess to help you see like, am I flying blind on my numbers or do I maybe know my numbers? Question number one, what's your breakeven number? Now that's twofold. What's the breakeven number on the practice and what's the breakeven number paying you? Two questions, okay? My question is, what is your overhead on your supplies? What percent, what is your current overhead?   What is your debt services taken out of your overhead? What is your EBITDA? What is your net profit? AKA cashflow. Of that profit, are you saving your taxes? Hmm, something to think about. Fascinating, right? That's how you know. And if you can't answer those questions right now.   I know you're probably flying a little blind. Maybe you even just have like a eye patch on. That's okay. Maybe you're only half blind, not all the way blind. Or maybe you're like, Kiera, I'm walking in the dark. I don't even know any of that. don't even know where to find the PNL. It's fine. Wherever you are, you've got to get this dialed. Like I am a sticky broken record. haven't talked to her. Oh man, I'm so excited. She's going to get on podcast with me. And last year we were chatting and she was like, Kiera, like we were debating. Is she going to join consulting? Is she not going to join consulting? And she's like,   I have got to get profitable. And I said, all right, rock on, challenge accepted. We are going to get you profitable. I have been a broken record with this poor doctor for an entire year. It's production, profit, production, profit, production, profit, production, profit. Head down, produce, make sure your team's collecting and make sure we're profitable. That is what we've done all year long. And guess what? Come the end of the year, she's like, Kiera, I have so much money, I got to pay taxes on it. Like we did it.   and she did it in 11 months. So production, profit, production, profit. If you're producing, but you're not collecting and you're not looking at your numbers, you're not going to be profitable. If you're not planning for taxes and you're not saving for taxes, you're not gonna be profitable. If you don't know what your breakeven is on the practice and then what the breakeven is and what it needs to produce with you in there, you can't project this out and you can't forecast it and we can't figure out what your daily goal needs to be. And then you're just producing for the sake of producing for your ego.   Who was that a rank? Could you tell us there? If you like that email me Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. I might rap it. You guys, I used to have a rapper name Skittlez with a Z so I could wrap with Eminem. Tell Eminem I'd love to wrap with him. I've never gotten that far, but you know, Skittlez, Skittlez and Eminem. I don't know why I just told you that. Email me Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. If you think I should be Skittlez and rap it out. I'd love to hear from you. I genuinely love a good pen pal. So write me. But you've got to know your numbers. You have to.   non-negotiable. And this is, think, where accountability as a coach comes into play. I force our clients with our consultants to know their numbers. We call it the yes model. You've got to have your vision. That's the Y. E stands for earnings. You've got to be profitable, non-negotiable, otherwise go be an associate. And S stands for systems and team development. If we know the vision, when we look at the numbers, it's going to tell us the systems and team development we need to do, period. Period. That's the formula. That's all it is. So if you're flying blind on your numbers, like, ugh.   Guys, I'm scratching my head over here. This is stress. If you ever see me fluff my hair, it means I'm stressed, okay? My team has told me they're like, Kiera, what you do is it's a little like side fluff. And right now it's both hands fluff. Like I'm stressed out for you because I used to fly blind on numbers. So many clients flying by on non-numbers. They don't look at it. They've got multi-practices and they don't break it down. You guys, these are costly pitfalls. So remember, go back to the success and failure. They're not radically different. It's failure to look at the numbers.   It's failure to say like, I don't care if you don't know numbers or not, I don't know numbers either. But guess what? Kiera freaking loves numbers and numbers freaking love Kiera. That is how this works. It is, I'm going to force myself to learn this. You guys, on my goal board, I'm not joking you. I should like take pictures of this so you guys can see it. In my bedroom, Jason and I made this like joint goal board. If you guys wanna get your spouse involved in your life, cause you feel like you're just driving and growing without them.   Joint goal board between the two of us has been amazing and it sits in our bedroom. It's not pretty It was built on Canva. It cost me eight bucks. It took us a Sunday to do it together But I literally have this like sign and it says tax expert ahead. I Did not know taxes. I was getting burned every single year I was crying every single December and I was like I am never doing this again I'm going to become a freaking tax expert. I started reading books on it. I called up the CPAs. I started researching it I was like, okay, it's just a formula. Yes, of course. They're like all these ways I can reduce it   But at the end of the day, it's really just a very simple formula. Whatever my profit is, whatever my tax bracket is, I know, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, this is a very simplified version. CPAs don't come after me right now. It's just truly like, if I can take that, I'm always gonna have a slush and I'm not gonna cry. And I figured it out. And for you, I want you to take it on like, you're gonna learn taxes. You're going to be profitable. I want your goal for 2026, 2027, 2028, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, forever that you are profitable always.   I have a mantra and I say, Kiera Dent does not lose money. And I want you to be the same way. Always profitability, profitability, profitability, get the production, get the profitability. We got to, and again, the way we increase profit, increase production, increase collections, decrease costs. Those are the three levers. So look at the numbers, get your team bought in. This is a costly mistake that I don't want you to make. So commit that by Friday, you will have a KPI scorecard in place, or you're going to call Dental A Team.   TheDentalATeam.com go on over, email me, hello, book a call, whatever it is, I will help you out, but you are going to learn your numbers. There's no more excuses. It's not that hard. I promise you, our fee will offset the amount of money you are going to make. Most of our clients are like a two to one, eight to one, 10 to one ratio, meaning we are making that much more money. So a 10 to 30 % increase in production, 30 % would be a three to one ratio. Like you guys, it's insanity what we're able to do for offices. I love it. We usually pay for ourselves in the first couple of months.   So it's 100 % worth it. Know your numbers. You just knowing your numbers and tracking and measuring will make you more profitable. So don't be the person that has these costs and mistakes. You gotta take ownership. Like bottom line, the way we had this, mistake number one, delegating tasks and not having ownership. So think back to that. We gotta delegate like that office I told you about. Again, this is a $7 million practice. You wanna be like a $7 million? Do the things today to be the $7 million practice.   You've got to have the hard conversations, normalize that, have that be a part of your culture. And number three is you've got to freaking know those numbers. I love numbers, numbers love me. And if you're not great at this, that's why I've got the podcast. That's why we're here. Reach out, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. Do not do this alone. Do not spend another minute struggling through these costly pitfalls. You don't deserve it. Your team doesn't deserve it. Your patients don't deserve it. So reach out, it's time. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. But please commit to yourself that you're going to do this.   You're not failing. You're not clear over the failure bucket. You're just a few little shifts away from it. And again, remember success and failure are not radically different. They're just small little micro steps. You can quickly make those back and get closer to where you actually want to be. It's not huge. It's not hard. It's not all these crazy things. It's small incremental changes that are going to radically change your life. So make the call, make the changes, commit. You're worth it. You deserve it. And as always, I'm cheering you on forever and ever.   I'm here on your team. I'm here in your corner. I'm here in your air pod. Wherever I'm at, just know I'm rooting for you. You deserve it. Let's do this together. Let's have you do this on your own, whatever it's going to be, but commit to not having these costly mistakes be your mistakes. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.  

Braden Dennis is the 30-year-old founder and CEO of Fiscal AI, who scaled an AI-powered financial research platform from a frustration-driven side project to a venture-backed company serving over 150,000 users with institutional-grade data analytics that democratizes investment research previously accessible only through expensive platforms like Bloomberg and FactSet.Episode Sponsor: Fiscal AI is a modern data terminal that gives investors instant access to twenty years of financials, earnings transcripts, and extensive segment and KPI data—use my link for a two-week free trial plus 15% off: https://fiscal.ai/talkingbillions/3:00 - Braden shares his middle-class Toronto upbringing and early realization that he was a "math kid," choosing engineering for maximum career optionality while observing that family members who invested aggressively, not those who simply earned the most, achieved the greatest financial success.6:00 - The crucial insight: capitalism isn't zero-sum, and asset ownership is the key to benefiting from the system. Braden emphasizes that the barrier to owning assets is lower than ever, yet many feel cheated by not participating.9:00 - The origin story of Fiscal AI: Built as a side project while working at a venture capital firm, Braden needed better tools for portfolio monitoring. After two years of development and hitting 1,000 users, he made the leap to full-time entrepreneurship despite pushback from friends and family.15:00 - The "aha moment": Seeing Nvidia's revenue growth in real-time data visualization changed everything. "I could just watch the revenue go up, and I was like, okay, this thing is clearly a buy," demonstrating the power of visual data interaction.30:00 - Why Fiscal AI exists: Traditional financial terminals cost $20,000-$30,000 annually and use outdated 1980s interfaces. Fiscal AI brings institutional-grade data to everyone at accessible price points with modern design.45:00 - The AI transformation57:00 - Powerful example: Booking.com vs. Airbnb revenue recovery post-COVID reveals how narratives differ from data reality - most would assume Airbnb recovered faster, but data shows otherwise.1:04:00 - On success: Braden battles his forward-focused personality, measuring success by building a sustainable business where shareholders and employees (all equity holders) achieve exceptional outcomes, not just the founder.1:07:00 - Major announcement: Fiscal AI now offers 10 years of historical data on their free plan, more than any competitor, removing barriers for investors at every level.Podcast Program – Disclosure StatementBlue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm's employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Sandesh Patnam, Managing Partner at Premji Invest, breaks down how long duration capital changes the way you evaluate companies, founders, and moats. We talk about what most growth investors miss, why product strength still matters, and how to separate real AI businesses from thin wrappers in a noisy market.Premji Invest is a captive, evergreen fund built to grow an endowment that supports major education work, which gives the team flexibility on time horizon and partnership style. Sandesh shares how that shows up in diligence, how they think about backing contrarian founders, and why the best companies in this AI era may still be ahead of us.Key TakeawaysFocus on the long arc, not quarter by quarter optics, founders make better decisions when they are not trapped in short term metricsIn growth investing, TAM models and KPI spreadsheets can distract from the core question, does the product have real strength and an expanding roadmapEnduring outcomes often come from backing a contrarian view early, then helping it move from contrarian to consensus over timeEvergreen capital changes behavior, you can slow down, build relationships, and partner across private and public markets instead of treating IPO as the finish lineIn AI, separate the stack into data center, foundation models, and applications, then look for defensibility like vertical depth, data moats, and compounding usage valueTimestamped highlights00:38 Premji Invest explained, evergreen structure, one LP, and why public markets can be part of the journey, not the exit04:47 Two common growth investor lenses and what gets missed when product and roadmap do not lead the thesis08:48 Partnership mindset, building trust, and being the first call when things get hard12:48 The contrarian to consensus path, what creates alpha, and how to support founders through the lonely middle19:54 Why rushing decisions is a trap, and how flexibility changes when and how you can partner with a company20:55 AI investing framework, three layers, what looks frothy, what can endure, and where moats still exist26:48 The cost of intelligence is collapsing, why this may still be the early internet moment, and what that implies for the next waveA line that stuck with me“We want to be the first port of call when the seas are turbulent.”Practical moves you can stealPressure test the roadmap, ask when product two ships, what adjacency comes next, and what tradeoffs change at scaleWhen evaluating AI apps, demand a defensibility story beyond the model, look for proprietary data, vertical workflow depth, and value that improves with usageTreat speed as a risk factor, if you cannot complete your churn cycle of doubt and validation, step back rather than force certaintyCall to ActionIf you liked this one, follow the show and share it with a founder, operator, or investor who is building in AI right now. For more conversations at the intersection of tech, business, and execution, subscribe and connect with me on LinkedIn.

Tiff and Monica provide exclusive, step-by-step insight into creating hiring ads that both grasp your specific practice's strengths and needs, and attract those rockstar team members you've been looking for. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: The Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. We are back today. I think we used to call it Consultant Takeover and now it's just literally a podcast, but it's my consulting team. And gosh, I love these days. You guys get to hear me just brag about the consultant team and the Dental A Team in general. And I have one of my faves. All these women are some of my favorite human beings in life. we got to recently, we were able to spend some really good quality time together and really just.   Honestly, it was just fun. Like it wasn't even one-on-one, like getting to know each other. It was just really getting to know each other by proxy of having fun together. And if no one here listening knows, fun is one of our core values. And that is one of the core values. I don't even know. You may know this, but it was one of the core values that Kiera and I have had literally since day one. That was one that has never changed. Fun has always been there. We did have it really high. used to be our number one core value. And then we realized like,   it was setting a weird precedent. So it's not quite as high anymore, but fun is massive for us. And we really, truly believe if you're not having fun, what are you even doing? I think there's oftentimes in life that things are not necessarily quote unquote fun, but there should be some air of sprinkles on top that can make life a little bit more fun in the end. So Monica, you make podcasting fun, your way of thinking. I like following.   Monica (00:59) Yeah.   The Dental A Team (01:22) your thought process. really, it is really fun for me to follow the thought process, especially because I tend to think I'm pretty good at knowing where someone's going or what they're doing, what their intent is. Like I'm usually pretty good at keying into it, but sometimes you catch me and I'm like, dang, I love how your brain works. So I love it because you make me think a little bit harder, like a little...   more intentional, I like the word intentional. You make me think a little more intentional than I do on my day to day. So thank you for being here today, Monica, and shedding your brilliance on the Dental A Team, listeners and team. How are you this morning? It's a Monday morning for us and we're just at it bright and early. How are you?   Monica (02:09) I'm doing great, Tiff. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. You know, I think one of the things that attracted me and I was really curious about the Dental A Team was that core value of having fun because, you know, we just kind of get a little serious and boring as we become adults. And I'm like, gosh, I don't ever remember thinking like, my gosh, this work should be fun. Sometimes it is fun, but should it be fun?   And I was so curious about that. to be honest, I think I shared this. I struggled a little bit with adding the fun factor in, you know, when I think about work and in my day. And I'm so glad that I decided to join the Dental A Team because that is my core value. Every day that I wake up, I'm like, I'm going to make this so fun today. What's going to be fun about my day? And I think fun is just a mindset.   Right? Because you can do hard things. You can have hard conversations. You can have a hard day and still look for the fun and still make it fun. ⁓ So thank you. Thanks for inviting me today. This is one of my, I guess, new hobbies, newfound passions is podcasting, unscripted podcasting, ⁓ going with it. Right. And just seeing what our brains kind of like come up with. So.   The Dental A Team (03:31) Yep.   Monica (03:35) just so you all know, this is unscripted. This is ⁓ just real time and I love it. I love the authenticity of it, right? Because this is where great ideas are born with no agenda. it's, you you and I have like this really great kind of cadence and engagement. One thought leads to another. And sometimes I have to stop myself because I can see myself going down and, you know, a rabbit hole and just, you know, and so we'll...   We'll keep it short and sweet and impactful.   The Dental A Team (04:07) Awesome. I love that. Thank you. And I'm glad that you, I'm actually glad that you mentioned that I do. I do think it's important for listeners to know, like this is literally off the cuff. Uh, 99.9 % of it, have a topic and we like brainstorm for a quick minute, but really we have no idea what's going to come out of these podcasts until it's done. So it is a really magical experience. And I like it that way because I think that, like you said, there's, there's more ideas that are born in that kind of a mindset and it does, it keeps it fun.   Monica (04:12) Thank   Yeah.   Yeah.   The Dental A Team (04:36) Monica, been actually, it's been really fun. From my seat, I get to see the evolution of consulting and the evolution of ⁓ your position at the, at the company. And it's, was, it was been really cool. And I think for the listeners to know the Monica that you see today has always been here, but she was more reserved. And I think that comes from, it's fair. It's fair. comes from just, like you said, the older we get, more.   we lose that like the Santa Claus effect. Like we lose that magic and the sparkles and reality sets in and we get, my boyfriend likes to call himself a realist. He's a pessimist a lot of times, but he calls himself a realist, which is fair. But we do become this like realist mindset when we're just like factual and we're like checking off the lists and we're so diligent and we tend not to laugh as much as we wanted to before. for us fun just means that   We enjoy what we're doing. We bring an element of fun to our consulting. So when we work with you guys, like we're having fun. We're enjoying what we're doing. We're laughing. We're making light of the situations that we can. And we're making massive changes with easy implementations that totally just change the game for you guys. And that to us is so much fun for us to sit back and see. We can make a millimeter tweak on something that feels so massive in your world.   and then it all falls into place. And it's just really cool. think of like the implants, know, they're tweaking, tweaking, tweaking and torquing. And you can go a millimeter too far or be a millimeter too short or be like spot on. And that's what I think of like that, that implant torque. We're not making massive adjustments, but we're making massive impacts and implant changes someone's life, but it's minimal adjustments.   Monica (06:25) Yeah.   Yeah, I think ⁓ just to add to what you said, it's really important to take some time to see through the childlike eyes, right? With awe and wonder. ⁓ think it's also important not to confuse fun with playtime, right? Because work is serious stuff, what we do, right? We can have fun and get the job done and have those really impactful days ⁓ because it is a serious   The Dental A Team (06:45) Yes.   Yes.   Monica (06:58) business, right? ⁓ And fun doesn't equal playtime. And I remember a client of mine saying, well, you know, it's all you guys sound to like fun. And I'm like, yeah, because work should be fun. What you're doing is amazing. You are helping people achieve their goals, their wellness goals, the smiles that they've wanted, maybe relieving someone out of pain and, you know, shame and everything that goes around, you know, dentistry.   The Dental A Team (07:23) Yeah.   Monica (07:28) And you're impacting, you know, your team's lives and your community's lives and your own life. And it should be fun. You should see the beauty of that, right? ⁓ So it's not all fun and games, guys. It is serious stuff. When we say fun, that means live life, you know, with joy and wonder and childlike lenses. So ⁓ if you, I think if you approach, you know, the day with that mindset,   everything is lighter, everything is ⁓ easier, right? There's a place to things and there's just, you you're operating from a heart space versus your mental space, you know?   The Dental A Team (08:08) I agree. Yeah,   I agree. I agree. And I understand that everybody's going to have a core value of fun and that's okay, too. You don't have to. You truly don't have to. And you don't have to come in in the same mindset as we do. Just know that's how we operate. And when you work with us, that's what you're getting. You're getting that fun mindset of how can we make small changes that make massive impacts. And one of those spaces, I've actually watched you, make some pretty massive impacts with a client of yours. So this is   Monica (08:17) Yeah.   The Dental A Team (08:36) This is a good topic that came up for us. We get our topics from our list and I thought this was a great one for Monica actually because you have been working with a client recently. This is on hiring and building hiring ads and I know you've got at least one and you've got multiple that are hiring, but you've got one that you've worked like literally hand in hand as though you're part of their, you are part of their team, but if your boots on the ground, part of their team because of their capacity and the type of hiring that they're doing.   We've done this with a lot of clients, especially when they're hiring like office managers, because the office manager would do the hiring, right? So when they don't, which is the situation you're in now where they don't technically have like a dedicated office manager ⁓ with enough space in their world to do the hiring, even down to writing the ads and let's face it, the dentist CEOs, it's not your forte, first of all, most of the time, and you don't have time for it either. So building that out and Monica, have...   the reason that it's applicable is you have had fun doing this with them. And there's been challenges too, but I think you've made some massive strides with them in this aspect. And the first space that you started was really learning the team, learning the practice, and writing ads that attracted the right type of people. And now you guys are in the interview process, but Monica.   From the lens of consultant working with this practice or other practices you've done as well, how do you advise them and how do you help craft those ads to speak to their needs? And everyone's so different, right? So how do you do that and what suggestions do you think people could take away from today to do that on their own as well?   Monica (10:18) Yeah, that's a great question, Tiff. And you're right, I've had a fun time ⁓ kind of wrapping my arms around this one client that does need it. I think one really important factor is like, remember who you are. Why are you great? When we are in a space of lack,   whether we're lacking appropriate team members or we're not, you know, doing what we want to do. We're not doing the dentistry that we want. We're not where we should be. ⁓ I think we go down this rabbit hole of like, and almost inertia kicks in, you know? So let's reframe that mindset. Why are you great? Why did you start this? You know, how do you measure success? So I always say great leaders at   ask great questions. ⁓ Ask yourself those questions. Why am I great? What's different about me? Do I want to be different? And if so, what makes me different? What do I do differently than my colleagues in the area? And identify who you are. What's your persona? What do patients say about you? Go to your reviews, pull up your Google reviews, do a little kind of investigative work, a self-discovery.   about your practice. What are your Google reviews? What are patients saying about you? What do you want to be known for?   The Dental A Team (11:52) Yeah, I love that. actually, Simon Sinek, I listen him a lot and he speaks about your why, right? Finding your why. And he says often, if you're trying to figure out what is your special gift, like what is your talent? What is it that you're here? What is your purpose? He says, ask your friends. Ask your friends why they are friends with you. What is it about you that your friends...   Monica (12:16) I love that.   The Dental A Team (12:19) stick around for or that they lean on you for. And I think Monica, that makes me think of the Google reviews. Like ask your patients, like why do your patients come back? Why does your team who you have currently, why are they your team? What are they speaking about you? And I think that can go twofold, right? Cause you're gonna find out some things that you may not have, that might not be super fun. It might not feel really good to hear some of the things, but those are areas that fantastic. Let's pull that into a KPI.   How can we improve that? But you're gonna hear so many things as to why people love you, why they love your practice, why you. so I love that self-discovery start. I think it's really, really massive.   Monica (12:55) Yes.   Yeah, you're absolutely right. You're gonna hear some things that you may not want to hear, but I would say approach this exercise with the mindset of gratitude. Be grateful for the feedback. Be grateful for the positive feedback and be grateful for the not so positive feedback. That's a little harder to swallow, you know? ⁓ Don't attach yourself to the outcome. Attach yourself to the process of, right? And so even when you don't have a good   The Dental A Team (13:03) Yeah.   Monica (13:29) ⁓ you know, less than favorable outcome or response or feedback. would say, thank you. Thank you for sharing that because this is how I'm going to get better. That's not how I want to be perceived. Right. Would you mind sharing more? Would you mind if I asked further questions? Right. Get curious and be grateful, grateful that people are willing to step out and be honest. Right. ⁓ it takes courage. It takes courage for that. so I always say don't.   attach yourself to the outcome, but the process of. You can learn a lot about yourself in that process and your practice. I think Google reviews are really important because it's your patient's perception of their experience, not of you per se. And it may not be your reality, but it's their reality, right? So it allows us an opportunity to dig deeper and learn more, right?   Opportunity, gratitude, what's your story? I would say start with those things, those three things, right? One of the other things that I like to do is I like to see what's out there. What are other ads that are posted in my area? What are the competitors looking for? What are they saying about their practice, right? And I put on my hat of I'm looking for a job and I am a rock star.   ⁓ whatever it is, office manager, treatment coordinator. I'm a Rockstar treatment coordinator and I am looking for my next home. What ad calls my attention? Which one am I going to click on? What ads am I scrolling through? Right? Because if you want Rockstar employees, you have to have a Rockstar ad. Right? And so if your ad is ⁓   The Dental A Team (15:17) Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.   Monica (15:24) the same as the other ads, ⁓ it's gonna be about the money. So who are you? Why should a Rockstar treatment coordinator come work for you? Start with your story. What are the qualities that you're looking for? What are the qualities that you have as a practice ⁓ to offer this Rockstar candidate? So start there, who are you?   The Dental A Team (15:49) I love that.   Monica (15:54) Why should I come work for you versus come work for me, right? Flip the framework of how you're posting your ad and how you're crafting your ad.   The Dental A Team (16:02) Yeah,   yeah, I love that because it makes me think of, you know, back in the day when I was in office and writing ads, it was like, I'm putting up like, five, six, seven sentences that's like, this is what we're hiring for. I need a treatment coordinator. Like, this is what you're going to get paid and people apply and we'd get thousands of applications, you know, and it's just, it's different now because I think people are looking for a place they want to have fun. They want to enjoy their job. They want to really work for a place that they feel   Monica (16:13) Yes.   The Dental A Team (16:30) seen valued heard and they want to know what that place is before they walk in and so rather than the old model of This is what we're you know, these are all of the things we're looking for ⁓ As far as the job. I think the new model is this is who we are. This is our vision These are our core values We're looking for somebody who aligns with that and this is the job that they're gonna do and I think it's flipped so much in the last five years Realistically almost six years now, right?   that we just have to think differently and we have to speak differently.   Monica (17:01) Yeah, and social media has also changed the game, right? mean, people can get an insight of your culture and who you are just by following your page, your Instagram page or your Facebook page or going on your website. But I truly believe social media and like those quick clicks, Instagram, Facebook are the persona of your practice, right? And so you gotta make sure that that's aligned with   The Dental A Team (17:06) Absolutely.   Monica (17:29) with the ad that you're posting and the reality of a day-to-day in your practice, right? And so social media can be so impactful, like Google reviews, whatever social media you use, a lot of people have TikToks, they have other things that I don't participate in because it can get overwhelming, you know? But social media is powerful. mean, you use that as your platform, your patience.   The Dental A Team (17:51) I can.   Monica (17:57) You best believe that people are going and checking your reviews and your space, your social media space, because they want to know. They want to know, is this truly who they say they are? Because we have choices, right? And let's be honest, our phone is glued to our fingertips 24 seven, even if we don't want to, it is. And there's power in that, right? So those platforms give a visual.   The Dental A Team (18:19) Yeah.   Monica (18:27) ⁓ to anyone basically. I mean, it's a world of referral nowadays, right? So I think use that to your advantage.   The Dental A Team (18:35) Mm-hmm.   Yeah, I do. I do too. I think earlier, I don't remember if it was this one or a different recording that we did, but you were speaking about, I think it was this one, being authentic. We're off the cuff here. And so being authentic in your ad and being authentic in your social presence. So what are people on the outside seeing of you is really, really huge because if you're saying you're someone and it   Monica (18:48) Yeah.   The Dental A Team (19:08) doesn't line up for you, first and foremost, the powers that you believe in are not gonna send you the people. They're not gonna come if it's not in alignment with who you are. But also, those who do come are gonna see that really easily, very quickly, and honestly, the ads usually, if we were to write an ad, if Monica wrote an ad, just blanket, wrote an ad, said, hey, five practices, you guys all use this ad. It might work for one of them because it may align closely   for one of them, but I think something you did, Monica, with this specific practice and the ones that you've worked with is you learned the practice. You actually, like you said, you put that hat on and you learned the demographics of the area and the demographics of other practices hiring, but you also learned that practice. You scoured their website, you talked to the team members, you asked them really hard questions, you scoured their reviews, you literally did your due diligence to learn who they are so that as you helped them   create the actual ad, it was speaking to them. And that authenticity really shines through. So if your social media is portraying someone that you're not, you're gonna hate it, you're gonna feel really icky, it's not gonna translate, and it's gonna make hiring really, really hard. So I think, these pieces, this introspection, this really knowing, this asking the questions, the hard questions, the easy questions, whatever you wanna call them, asking those questions and learning who you want to hire.   who you are and who you want to attract are gonna be massive pieces and really what highlights a good ad.   Monica (20:45) Yeah, I agree. And you're absolutely right. I I did a little bit of ⁓ of digging more than I than I normally would because I really want them to have the person that they deserve. And listen, sometimes we're not where we want to be. Right. So your reality right now may not be your desired space. And dream a big dream. OK, like create that that your ad can can be your future self.   The Dental A Team (20:53) Yeah.   Monica (21:14) But you need the right person to create that dream with you. So maybe you're not where you want to be or how you vision your office, but you want to get there and you're attracting, you want to attract the team members that will help you get there to that space. allow yourself to dream a big dream, be your biggest fan. I always say that, be your biggest fan, right? Fan your own flame.   The Dental A Team (21:20) Absolutely.   Monica (21:42) It takes, there's nobody else to motivate you but you. Motivation is from within, right? So yes, we have mentors and coaches and listening to them, they help us kind of reignite that flame that we all have, our internal flame, but you've got to be able to fan that flame. mean, if it's dim, you got to give it some air and some oxygen, right? And what gives us oxygen? It's all the feel good stuff.   What are my patients saying about me? Right. So one of the things that I did, cause it was, it was difficult for this client to kind of say like, gosh, what am I really great at? You know? And I'm like, well, let's go see what your patients are saying. And we pulled up some amazing reviews and here we thought like, nobody's asking for reviews. No one's giving us reviews. Well, guess what? There was some amazing reviews and I read them, you know, we, we went through the process of like, I went through the most recent ones.   The Dental A Team (22:14) Mm-hmm.   Monica (22:38) And I read this, not just one, but one that really sticks out. And I got to tell you, like, by the end of that, ⁓ reading that Google review, the doctor was sitting taller. eyes were like, there was sparkles in his eyes and, you know, his chest was out. I'm like, this is the kind of stuff that you need to be sharing on your social media stories. This is what people need to hear. He's like, wow, that's amazing. I said,   The Dental A Team (22:49) No.   Monica (23:06) print these every single day and read them to your team. Read them to yourself out loud. It feels good to know what others are seeing. We're our hardest critics sometimes. And we're not necessarily seeing the good stuff, because we're focused on all the other things that we haven't done and accomplished, but our patients see us through a different lens. And it feels great.   The Dental A Team (23:21) Yeah.   Mm-hmm. Yeah.   Monica (23:34) to be reminded of why you are who you are, why you have this amazing practice. you know, there's just so many things that we overlook because we're so focused on the things that we didn't do. Focus on the things that you did do great. What did I accomplish this year? If you change one life, guess what? That's amazing. You know, if you focus on changing one life at a time, at the end of the year, it's a trickling effect. I mean, you're...   The Dental A Team (23:57) Yeah, I agree.   Monica (24:05) your bowl is going to be or your cup is going to be overflowing. A thousand percent.   The Dental A Team (24:08) Mm-hmm.   Yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree. love the, ⁓ I focus on making, if I can make one person smile today, that, you know, I just want to make one person smile today. So I love this. Thank you, Monica. I knew it being so fresh, you're still in the process of helping them hire for this position, but I know it's been really, really close to your heart and you've been very intentional on getting them the results that they need and they need this hire to push for the results. I...   Monica (24:30) Yeah.   The Dental A Team (24:38) I've enjoyed watching you work with them and I know they've enjoyed working with you and will continue to enjoy working with you. You'll be hands on with them here this week. So I'm super excited for this. And Monica, think some of the pieces I've pulled out, we want those, know, actual pieces for you guys. And I think do the digging, do your research, figure out why people are referring you. Why do people want to come to you? What makes you special and different? And cultivate your ad around that plus   who it is that you want to hire and be super clear on what the position actually is. And front office reception is really hard to explain. So be super clear on what that position is, what will they actually be doing? What are your expectations so that somebody coming in can say, yes, I can do that. And Monica, thank you so much for your time. Thank you for everything you've poured into the clients that you have. But specifically today, we're talking about this one client and everything you poured into them.   Monica (25:18) Yes.   The Dental A Team (25:36) I know because I've chatted with them, I've talked with them, I know how much they appreciate it and how much they need your love and your support and your guidance. So thank you for everything you do for all of us every single day.   Monica (25:49) Thanks, Tiff. Likewise, thanks for your leadership, for your invitation, for this space where we can brainstorm and share our wisdom and ideas and impact the world of dentistry.   The Dental A Team (26:02) Yeah, in the greatest way as possible, right? I love it. That's our mission, everyone, just so you know. Thank you, Monica. And guys, I love podcasting. know that, Monica. She's a big podcast fan now. We're podcaster fan, which I appreciate and I love. So let us know what you think. Five star review below, but also Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. If you have further questions, if you need help, if you need guidance, or you're really not sure how to dig in and figure this out, please just...   Monica (26:03) Hahaha   The Dental A Team (26:29) Reach out, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. We're here. A lot of those emails, most of those emails actually do get forwarded to the consultant team. So we are the ones that you're gonna be hearing from. Thanks so much and we'll catch you guys next time.   Monica (26:42) Thanks everyone.  

Episode Overview In this episode of the John Kitchens Coach Podcast, John Kitchens sits down with Jay Kinder to break down the $300 ad strategy that consistently produces 2–3 real estate deals every single month—without chasing referrals, overpaying portals, or riding the income rollercoaster. This isn't a hype-filled conversation about "running ads." It's a behind-the-scenes look at how predictable deal flow actually works when you understand conversations, constraints, and customer acquisition cost. John and Jay walk through why most agents fail with ads, how a small, disciplined budget can outperform massive spend, and why the real goal isn't leads—it's controlled, repeatable conversations. If you're tired of inconsistent closings, referral fees eating your margins, or guessing where your next deal is coming from, this episode gives you a simple framework to take control. Key Topics Covered The $300 Ad Strategy Explained Why small, consistent ad spend beats large, inconsistent budgets How $300/month can outperform thousands in referral fees The real objective of ads: conversations, not clicks or leads Why predictability matters more than scale early on Why Most Agents Fail With Ads The mistake agents make after 7–10 days of "no results" Why agents blame platforms instead of fixing the constraint The danger of not understanding message-to-market match Why most agents quit before ads have time to compound Conversations Per Day = Deals Per Month Why conversations are the only KPI that matters How many conversations it actually takes to close 2–3 deals Increasing conversations per hour through automation and AI Why lead count is a vanity metric Customer Acquisition Cost (The Math Nobody Teaches) Breaking down referral fees vs. paid ads Why paying $3–5K per deal kills long-term growth Understanding real cost per closing Why controlling CAC gives you leverage and freedom The Theory of Constraints Applied to Lead Gen Identifying your biggest bottleneck ("Herbie") Why fixing the wrong problem keeps you stuck How to build throughput instead of chaos Why lead gen, conversion, and fulfillment must stay balanced Why Consistency Beats Hustle How inconsistent closings destroy cash flow Why fulfillment kills lead gen without systems Designing a business that runs even when you're busy The shift from "agent" to CEO thinking Resources & Mentions The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt – Theory of Constraints Dan Kennedy – Direct response marketing fundamentals Gary Halbert – Message-to-market match Alex Hormozi – Constraint-based growth principles CoachKitchens.ai – AI-powered real estate business assistant John Kitchens Executive Coaching → JohnKitchens.coach Final Takeaway If you can't predict your next 2–3 deals, your business isn't a business—it's a gamble. This episode proves you don't need massive budgets, portals, or referral fees to win. You need clarity, discipline, and control over your conversations. Stop guessing. Stop overpaying. Build a simple system that works every month. "The goal isn't more leads—it's predictable conversations that turn into predictable closings." – John Kitchens ess to answer it honestly—determines your next level. Connect with Us: Instagram: @johnkitchenscoach LinkedIn: @johnkitchenscoach Facebook: @johnkitchenscoach If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to subscribe and leave a review. Stay tuned for more insights and strategies from the top minds. See you next time!

We argue that SEO isn't dying; bad SEO is. Fundamentals still drive wins while LLMs change how answers surface, making complete, original content and smart strategy more valuable than ever.• fundamentals over fads as LLMs shift discovery• why pages beyond top ten fuel LLM citations• customer journey, CRO, PR, and dev fluency as real leverage• global markets with lower competition and faster output• enterprise constraints, silos, and when to say no• partnerships over one‑stop shops to deliver depth• personalization pitfalls in tracking and sane KPI alignment• future of agents, multimodal search, and offline attentionGuest Contact Information: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kresimir-corlukaWebsite: canonical.hrSummit: croatiaseosummit.comMore from EWR and Matthew:Leave us a review wherever you listen: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Amazon PodcastFree SEO Consultation: www.ewrdigital.com/discovery-callWith over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online. Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability. Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you'll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve. Find more episodes here: youtube.com/@BestSEOPodcastbestseopodcast.combestseopodcast.buzzsprout.comFollow us on:Facebook: @bestseopodcastInstagram: @thebestseopodcastTiktok: @bestseopodcastLinkedIn: @bestseopodcastConnect With Matthew Bertram: Website: www.matthewbertram.comInstagram: @matt_bertram_liveLinkedIn: @mattbertramlivePowered by: ewrdigital.comSupport the show

Find me on Substack.Gautam Baid, CFA, is the founder and managing partner of Stellar Wealth Partners India Fund and internationally bestselling author of The Joys of Compounding, who has dedicated over two decades to mastering patient, quality-focused value investing.Episode Sponsor: Fiscal AI is a modern data terminal that gives investors instant access to twenty years of financials, earnings transcripts, and extensive segment and KPI data—use my link for a two-week free trial plus 15% off: https://fiscal.ai/talkingbillions/3:00 - Gautam introduces his six-pillar compounding framework beyond finance: positive thoughts, good health, good habits, wealth, knowledge, and goodwill, explaining how achieving financial independence in 2018 crystallized his understanding that "in life you get what you compound for on a daily basis."8:00 - Deep dive into compounding positive thoughts through avoiding negative emotions and toxic people while associating with high-quality minds, celebrating small wins to create momentum toward long-term goals.12:00 - Health habits discussion: consume less sugar and junk food, exercise 3-4 times weekly for one hour, sleep 7-8 hours daily—fundamentals that aren't sexy but "just work" when implemented consistently.15:00 - Mathematical equation for wealth: addition (monthly savings) + subtraction (eliminate greed/biases) + division (asset allocation) + multiplication (time horizon) = exponential compounding power.20:00 - Pattern recognition in investing develops through building a "large mental database of businesses and industries through years and decades" allowing identification of opportunities in any market condition.25:00 - Compounding goodwill principle from Guy Spear and Moneesh Pabrai: being genuinely helpful without expectations creates competitive advantage, especially in money management where nice people are rare.42:00 - India investment opportunity: demographic dividend with median age of 29, rising disposable incomes, strong domestic consumption, and companies expanding to overseas markets at 50-100% higher margins.52:00 - Corporate governance revolution in India: promoters now realize good governance earns 25-30x P/E multiples versus 5-6x for poor governance—"it pays to be honest" creates 5x more wealth for insiders.55:00 - Investment journal advice: $10 journal purchased in 2014 became "one of the best value investments" by documenting decisions, tracking mistakes, and archiving market panic commentary for pattern recognition during future corrections.Podcast Program – Disclosure StatementBlue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm's employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Struggling with business coaching that isn't delivering results? This episode reveals data-driven success patterns from real private practice counsellors, psychologists and social workers building profitable businesses. Dr Brooklyn Storm shares 12-month analysis of Practice Momentum™ participants, comparing therapists who achieved rapid results with those who struggled. Discover why implementation matters more than strategy, how employee mindset sabotages business growth, and the "hockey stick" pattern that separates successful practitioners from struggling ones. Learn about the critical role of business systems, KPI tracking, and mindset shifts in building a sustainable private practice. Whether you're working with a business coach or going solo, these evidence-based insights help mental health professionals overcome common obstacles like overwhelm, scattered focus, and the dangerous loop of starting but never finishing. Perfect for women counsellors, psychologists and social workers wanting time freedom, financial security and a thriving practice. Want to know where YOU are on the therapist → business owner spectrum? Take my free 3-minute assessment: https://brooklynstorme.com Your private practice doesn't have to be this hard. But it does require thinking like a business owner, not an employee. Let's sort this out together. FAQs Q: Can a business coach guarantee results for my private practice? A: No ethical business coach can guarantee results. Success depends on client implementation, mindset shifts, and consistent action over time—similar to how therapists can't guarantee client outcomes. Q: How long does it take to see results from business coaching? A: Most successful private practice practitioners see measurable progress within 90 days, with significant results accumulating over 12 months through consistent implementation and engagement. Q: Why isn't my business coaching working? A: Common reasons include: not following the full implementation plan, going off-plan too early, employee mindset blocking business decisions, avoiding KPI tracking, starting but not finishing projects, and expecting immediate results. Q: What's the difference between employee mindset and business owner mindset? A: Employee mindset believes hard work equals results and waits for direction. Business owner mindset understands strategic action matters more than effort, makes data-driven decisions, and takes responsibility for outcomes. Q: How do successful therapists build profitable private practices? A: Successful practitioners maintain consistent engagement, follow business plans with flexibility, install systems early, track KPIs quarterly, ask for guidance before implementing, and shift their identity to include business owner alongside therapist. Q: What is the hockey stick pattern in business coaching? A: The hockey stick describes getting excited about a strategy, hitting overwhelm when implementation gets complex, quitting before completion, then starting something new—creating a loop that prevents progress. Q: Why do therapists struggle with business activities? A: Therapist identity emphasises compassion, non-judgment, and giving—which can conflict with necessary business actions like raising fees, charging for cancellations, and marketing. Integration of both identities is key.

Laurent Kretz reçoit David Sandier, CCO Sales & Marketing chez Pierre & Vacances. On parle d'abord d'un grand virage. La marque, longtemps liée à l'immobilier, a décidé après le Covid de tourner la page. Elle se concentre désormais sur l'exploitation de résidences de vacances en France et en Europe. Mieux accueillir, mieux vendre, mieux comprendre ses clients.La conversation part ensuite sur une question centrale : comment on vend des vacances aujourd'hui. Entre la demande de flexibilité, les paniers élevés, le paiement en plusieurs fois, les avis clients et la concurrence de Booking ou Airbnb, tout se joue dans les détails. On parle aussi de ce qui a changé durablement dans nos façons de réserver : des séjours plus courts, souvent plus tardifs, mais aussi des clients qui réservent très tôt. 00:00:00 - Introduction de l'épisode 00:02:40 - Parcours de l'invité 00:08:05 - Mettre le client au centre00:11:34 - Data, avis clients & analyse sémantique00:20:04 - Passage à l'échelle & transformation tech00:25:20 - KPI business & revenue management00:29:00 - Évolution des usages & des séjours00:41:02 - Distribution, canaux & connaissance client00:56:01 - Fidélisation, personnalisation & perspectivesEt quelques dernières infos à vous partager :Suivez Le Panier sur Instagram @lepanier.podcast !Inscrivez- vous à la newsletter sur lepanier.io pour cartonner en e-comm !Écoutez les épisodes sur Apple Podcasts, Spotify ou encore Podcast Addict Hébergé par Audiomeans. Visitez audiomeans.fr/politique-de-confidentialite pour plus d'informations.

Send us a textJohn Gamba is Entrepreneur in Residence at Catalyst @ Penn GSE, where he mentors education entrepreneurs and leads the Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan Competition. Over 17 years, the competition has awarded $2M to ventures that have gone on to raise more than $200M in follow-on funding, with a strong focus on equity and research-to-practice impact.

In the latest episode of The Fleet Success Show, Marc Canton, former fleet manager and RTA's VP of Product & Consulting, and Tony Yankovich, former fleet asset manager and RTA's Fleet Consulting Group Director, talk about a major shift happening in the fleet industry: the renewed drive for education, training, and clear paths for career advancement. For the growing number of people attending industry conferences, to mechanics wondering how to move up the ladder to become shop supervisors, today's fleet professionals aren't waiting around to get promoted. They're taking the initiative to go hunting for the knowledge they know they need in order to grow. Marc and Tony dive into:Why the technician-to-manager pipeline is broken, and how we can start to rebuild it. How younger fleet pros don't just want growth, training, and mentorship. They expect it. The frustrating lack of formal degrees and higher education options for fleet professionals.Real examples of fleets turning to external training and coaching options (like NAFA and RTA Connect) to fill the education gap.What needs to happen to keep fleet falling apart as Boomers continue to retireIf you're a fleet leader working hard to retain your team, a tech dreaming of taking the next step in your career, or anyone in between, this episode is the one for you. Get tactical insights and ideas on how the industry needs to evolve in order to survive. Speaker BiosMarc CantonVP of Product & Consulting, RTA FleetMarc brings strategic vision and operational depth to every conversation. With decades in the industry, he helps fleets modernize through smart technology, KPI alignment, and better leadership development.Tony YankovichFleet Consultant, RTATony has been in the fleet industry for over 35 years—26 of them as a full-time consultant. His insight into right-sizing, workforce development, and operational analysis has helped dozens of fleets transform. Looking to take the first step in your fleet career journey? Start by requesting your free copy of The Fleet Success Playbook. Written by fleet professionals for fleet professionals, the Playbook breaks down the four key pillars of fleet success, and gives you the tools you need to build a truly great fleet. Request your free (yes, really, free!) copy here: https://rtafleet.com/resources/fleet-success-playbook?utm_source=simplecast&utm_medium=footer_notes&utm_campaign=episode_212 Control fleet chaos with RTA Fleet360, proven software designed by fleet managers for fleet managers: https://rtafleet.com/book-a-demo?utm_source=simplecast&utm_medium=footer_notes&utm_campaign=episode_212

In this episode of Run the Numbers, CJ sits down with Ken Stillwell, CFO and COO of Pegasystems, to explore the realities of leading from the second seat. Ken shares hard-earned lessons from guiding Pega through the shift from term licenses to ARR and ACV, including how to rework sales compensation without losing trust or momentum. They discuss the limits of KPI obsession, the importance of directional clarity over false precision, and why private equity often drives sharper execution than public markets—and how to apply that discipline while still playing the long game.—SPONSORS:Tabs is an AI-native revenue platform that unifies billing, collections, and revenue recognition for companies running usage-based or complex contracts. By bringing together ERP, CRM, and real product usage data into a single system of record, Tabs eliminates manual reconciliations and speeds up close and cash collection. Companies like Cortex, Statsig, and Cursor trust Tabs to scale revenue efficiently. Learn more at https://www.tabs.com/runAbacum is a modern FP&A platform built by former CFOs to replace slow, consultant-heavy planning tools. With self-service integrations and AI-powered workflows for forecasting, variance analysis, and scenario modeling, Abacum helps finance teams scale without becoming software admins. Trusted by teams at Strava, Replit, and JG Wentworth—learn more at https://www.abacum.aiBrex is an intelligent finance platform that combines corporate cards, built-in expense management, and AI agents to eliminate manual finance work. By automating expense reviews and reconciliations, Brex gives CFOs more time for the high-impact work that drives growth. Join 35,000+ companies like Anthropic, Coinbase, and DoorDash at https://www.brex.com/metricsMetronome is real-time billing built for modern software companies. Metronome turns raw usage events into accurate invoices, gives customers bills they actually understand, and keeps finance, product, and engineering perfectly in sync. That's why category-defining companies like OpenAI and Anthropic trust Metronome to power usage-based pricing and enterprise contracts at scale. Focus on your product — not your billing. Learn more and get started at https://www.metronome.comRightRev is an automated revenue recognition platform built for modern pricing models like usage-based pricing, bundles, and mid-cycle upgrades. RightRev lets companies scale monetization without slowing down close or compliance. For RevRec that keeps growth moving, visit https://www.rightrev.comRillet is an AI-native ERP built for modern finance teams that want to close faster without fighting legacy systems. Designed to support complex revenue recognition, multi-entity operations, and real-time reporting, Rillet helps teams achieve a true zero-day close—with some customers closing in hours, not days. If you're scaling on an ERP that wasn't built in the 90s, book a demo at https://www.rillet.com/cj—LINKS:Ken on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ken-stillwell-83a499a/Pegasystems: https://www.pega.com/CJ on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/Mostly metrics: https://www.mostlymetrics.com—RELATED EPISODES:How Finance Becomes a GTM Partner, Not a Bottleneck | Chris Brubakerhttps://youtu.be/T2YjdoiJtFA—TIMESTAMPS:00:00:00 Preview and Intro00:02:57 Sponsors — Tabs | Abacum | Brex00:07:26 The Strategic Value of Being Number Two00:08:46 Earnings Calls, Messaging, and Real-Time Judgment00:10:41 Using Feedback to Sharpen Executive Communication00:11:38 CFOs as Storytellers & Message Repetition00:12:31 Managing Up: Reading the Room00:13:59 Learning the Hard Way: Misreading Dynamics00:15:18 Confidence, Aggression, and Early CFO Mistakes00:15:58 Sponsors — Metronome | RightRev | Rillet00:19:45 When to Email vs Pick Up the Phone00:22:48 Tailoring Communication to Different Functions00:23:23 Audience-Specific Messaging: “Why Me?”00:25:24 Values vs Behaviors in Leadership00:28:13 Why Big Changes Need Anchoring00:31:14 Moving Pega to the Cloud00:32:43 Rewiring Sales Comp for ARR & ACV00:34:56 Sales Credibility Breakdowns with Customers00:36:20 Economics vs Trust in Sales Teams00:37:48 Balancing Field Feedback with Company Goals00:39:17 De-Emphasizing New Logos to Fix the Sales Model00:41:12 The Danger of Over-Obsessing on KPIs00:42:51 Public vs Private: Incentives and Operating Discipline00:45:57 Why Companies Go Private: Motivation Over Patience00:47:29 The Shrinking Public Markets00:47:57 Private vs Public CFO Mindsets00:49:39 Meeting Investors Where They Are00:50:16 A Risky Decision That Paid Off: Going All-In on the Cloud00:51:29 Long-Ass Lightning Round00:53:24 Ken's Finance Tech Stack & Craziest Expense00:54:39 Credits#RunTheNumbersPodcast #CFOLeadership #ExecutiveCommunication #SalesStrategy #PublicVsPrivate This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cjgustafson.substack.com

Kiera takes listeners through specific actions the most successful dentistry minds have incorporated into their day-to-day to stay elevated. She touches on: Planning out an ideal week Reviewing these numbers weekly Fostering problem-solvers And more! Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript:   The Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera and I hope that you guys are having an amazing day today. I hope you're loving dentistry. I hope you're loving your opportunities. I hope that you are remembering that we have one life and I hope that you're making it the absolute best life you can. There's a song that I recently heard called Time's a Ticken and it's like, so call your mom, love your babies, talk to your friends and...   I just think about it and another thing I saw were like, if your mom and dad are still able to call you, how blessed are we? And I know some people have strained relationships, but I think as much love that we can give and as much as we can foster great relationships in our lives and realize how much goodness we have, I think that's an amazing space for us. just hopefully you know how much I love and appreciate you and how much I'm rooting for you, whether I know you personally or whether...   you are someone in our Dental A Team family, or if you are in our podcast family, or if you're new to this, just know I'm rooting for you. Even if I don't know you personally, ⁓ you're doing better than you think you are today. Guys, it's going to be fun. I want to talk about CEO habits for next level, like what top practice leaders are doing and just some tips for you. As we're rolling into a 2026, I love looking at habits and not necessarily fads, but habits. And so what do things do? And I believe that habits, not just hustle,   are going to help you with success. ⁓ So many times it's like, well, what made the success successful? And it's like really consistency on doing the best things and the highest priority things consistently. And so giving a couple of three core habits that I think growth-minded leaders, practice owners have versus overwhelmed operators. And so really being able to give you that guidance and at Dental A Team we're obsessed with helping dentists become CEOs of their practices and having amazing teams thrive around them and.   ⁓ Giving you guys all of that today is really what it is and we want you guys to feel clarity, confidence and consistency. And I know sometimes when you're in the whirlwind of the day-to-day business, it can feel very hard to have this. But I will say, if you can build these as a building blocks, the noise can lessen. I'm not gonna promise it will go away, but it can definitely lessen and doing it over time. Just like with front office team members were like, I just don't have time, Kiera. And we're like, great, let's put in a power hour. And they're like, it's never enough time.   You're right. Today is not enough time, but if you do one hour a week blocked with no interruptions and you work on the highest level things, I've watched teams over and over and over again, be like, I actually don't need this hour anymore. And we get our recare calls done and we get our unscheduled treatment calls done and we block that and we do it. And office managers, they block that time and billers block the time to do insurance verification. It does not need to be a lot of time, but it does need to be consistent. So with that, you guys, this is going to be something that's a   a habit, ⁓ daily and weekly habits that you can create that you can really just put into your life now. So number one is, this sounds so silly and I do this often, it's creating and committing to an ideal week. ⁓ And so that's being able to have a rhythm and not reaction. so what I noticed and it's crazy because as my company evolves, my life and my business and my schedule needs to evolve as well.   When the business was smaller, I used to be able to run back to back to back to back meetings. There wasn't as much strategy that I needed to think about. There weren't as many hard decisions. There weren't as many like complex decisions that I used to be able to run a week like back to back to back. And then I realized like, I can't run like that anymore. I need to have like on time and off time, on time, off time. And then there's presenting like podcasts. Like you try to put meetings on a podcast day. You guys, am in podcast is creative land and I'm on presenting mode. And I'm like here hanging out with you guys and having a good time.   don't put meetings where I'm trying to like figure out a budget that is such a different mind than a creative mind. And so really being able to block this where we have it and color coding your calendar. What I really do believe is as a CEO of a practice, you're going to have clinician time, right? You're going to have being a dentist. Then you're going to have leader time where you're developing your leaders. And then you're going to have visionary CEO time. And if you can block this in there and you don't have to have it perfect. So do I have   leader time where I'm like developing my leaders and I'm spending time figuring out leadership pieces for them and investing in my leaders and coaching my leaders. Do I have that blocked in there? And then do I have this deep work visionary CEO time where I'm reviewing the financials and I'm answering questions from my office manager and doctors sometimes they even recommend you have another block of am I getting like all the busy work like the labs and the clin checks and the cases and looking at all the scheduling coming up. Do I have time to work on that? And   blocking this and it sounds like, gosh, there's so much and there is, this is why you feel overwhelmed and you feel radical. So having my doctor dentists in time, my leadership development time, my CEO time, and then if you need any other time, great. I also put in my personal time. So am I working out and taking care of my body? And we did this with our mastermind group where I learned a thing called rapid planning method from Tony Robbins and I really enjoyed it. And then I took it of course, ended Kiera spin to it.   But what I really loved is Tony actually had us rename our categories. So instead of saying workout time, it's my honoring my body time. And that was so much more fulfilling for me. And I also have buckets in there that are color coded of date time. Like I call it mine and Jason's forever love story. And what do I put into my calendar that's blocked specifically for that? And what's lovely is when you have colors around it, ⁓ you can actually make it to where you then are working on those specific areas.   and you're able to see them very, very easily. So when we look at this, I think about my colors and my favorite color is pink. So I always have my Kiera section where I'm honoring myself. It's in pink in my calendar. When I'm working on Dental A Team and I used to like call it just Dental A Team. Now it's my passion project and it's blue. Honoring my body is orange. I needed that like vibrant orange, like getting excited about it. And I have that in there.   my leadership visionary time, that's going to be a different color. For me, that's more of this like blue turquoise color. It's more serene, it's calm. So whatever that is for you, just having those color coordinated things and like I popped into my RPM planner. So I have my ⁓ ROASIS ⁓ is our home. And so working on my home, wealth, genius, fun, that's curious thing. And I always make sure I have fun built into my calendar. But I think like you can make it as complex or as simple as you want, but I would really recommend we've got our dentist time.   our leader time, so maybe that's like our give back time or our development time or our like my first team time and then my visionary, my exciting time. What does that look like and really blocking that in your calendar? And so then we audit our week at the end of the week and I remember I was taught like many times like the most productive thing is to go back and look where did I win my week? Where did I like lose the week and what do need to change for this? And   Even me going into a new year, actually have a new EA joining me pretty soon. So that's thrill. If any of you had a personal assistant EA that's been with you for a long time and you're getting a new one, let's ⁓ just say it's a thrill. And I'm really excited for Marissa to join as Shelbi's getting ready to have some life changes. And I'm so, so, so excited for her. ⁓ And going through that and being able to experience it, I realized I needed a different calendar.   What I've been doing is not going to get me to where I need to go. And so we've been working on it and I like built it. You guys, I like to like really mass and like if I'm in podcast mode, I'm in podcast mode. And if I'm in coaching call mode, I'm in coaching call mode. And if I'm in business mode, I'm in business mode. ⁓ but I realized what I was doing is I was business mode. I was coaching call AKA dentists thing that I was in heavy meetings and then I was in podcasting. And I think sometimes when we run that heavy, it's very hard to have like downtime. And so for you looking, you're working as a dentist all four days.   So could we block maybe Wednesday mornings where you have a catch up time or do we have a CEO day where it's a Friday and you actually have that block for four hours and you work on that. I have a dentist, he works Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursdays are always off and he works Friday. And I'm like, that is the weirdest schedule. He's like, Keira, I love it. I get all my admin stuff done when people are still there. I have time to think that's when I'm gonna work on my decisions. And then I go in and have a great Friday where I've got nothing on me and I produce my highest amount. And this doctor is a very high producing doctor but he's very regimented in how he does it.   And that's how he's been operating for the last like 30 years. So when you implement this and you commit, so I'm like, okay, let's break it down. guys know I like to make it easy. I like to make it tactical for you. You got to block these areas. What am I done to seeing? When am I leading? And when am I thinking about the greater big like CEOing of the company? And if I'm only going to do one, I'm going to block a two hour block every single week to work on high level of the business. Just like I recommended for our leaders blocking one hour minimum per week of deep work time.   and doing it at your prime optimal time. For me, it's early mornings. I operate so good from like 6 a.m. lately, it's been like 3 a.m. until about 11 and then like I'm out. I don't want to be thinking heavy. I don't like hard things. That's my operating. Just like I run on protein, Jason runs on carbs. Like it's just operating in how we function, but really making sure you do that. Again, this is a habit. It's a discipline. It's reviewing it. And I had a doctor who was really high level. We coached together for about a year and he said, Kiera, coaching with you was one of the most impactful years of my life.   because you taught me to prioritize my calendar, to review my calendar, to work on my family relationships, to work on my leadership, to delegate, to see what things were in my calendar that I could delegate. And this person has grown and added multi-multi-practices and I'm so proud of him. But truly, this is going to be your best thing. So action on this of getting this habit into place is block two hours as your CEO time, no operations, no calls. You are just fully focused on the business and commit to doing that.   for the next four months. Whoa, four months, can you imagine? Just try it. Test it out, tell me, Kiera, I'm trying the experiment. Email me, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. I'm committed to it and I want you to not break that promise to yourself. You hold it strong. I had a doctor who did this. She put a like sign on her door and she said, do not interrupt me at all. Now you have to hold this strong because if someone's like, hey doc, I just have a quick question. Nope, right now is my time and I need you to respect my time. I'll be available at this time.   You call that one or two times and your team will not interrupt you again because they know you are dead serious on this. So review it. Now you're already doing that. I want you to take it one level further and I want you to add in your date time, your workout time, something that you are also adding in that needs to be blocked. And I want you to ramp it up one more. Okay, that's number one habit. Number two habit is reviewing your KPIs and your financials every single week. And you're making decisions based on data, not on feeling. So we all know that what we measure improves, right? All of that is there.   So what it is is KPIs, you gotta be looking at those, whether you're using dental Intel, we recommend Addit. Practice by numbers, I don't care. All of our clients do get Addit. So if you're like, hey, I'm thinking about consulting, but I'm not sure about cost or guess what, we cover that cost for you and it's free for you and we also have other perks for you. So ⁓ definitely cost savings that way. And we help you build a scorecard and a dashboard and we teach your team to look at this. But you as a CEO of your practice, this is how you become a CEO. CEOs make decisions based on numbers and metrics, not on feeling and gut.   but you have to take time to review the data to sift through the data. We have an amazing CRO on our team that's a chief revenue officer. didn't even know that was a position. And I have been begging our marketing team to go through our podcast data to figure out what did the listeners want? have, guys, oh my gosh, we're moving into, think our, we started in 2019. So this year, seven years on the pod, guys. I cannot believe that. Lucky seven over here. But thinking about it, I was like, go look at the data. want to,   not just what Kiera feels and what I think you guys, are 1,100 episodes in by now. Like we should be able to have great data of what you guys want. And you're gonna hear a change this year because we actually went through Paul kudos to him. He went through and he looked at all the data and he said, all right, Kiera, here are the episodes doing well here. The episodes not doing well. Here are the things that listeners want. Here's how we need to revamp it. And I was so proud of him and so grateful because now we're building content based on what the data is telling us. But you know how long that took him? It took him like three months to go through it all, sift through it all. And for you,   You've got data, you've got case acceptance data, you've got new patient call conversion data, you've got our billing, our AR data, you've got diagnosis of doctors, we've got hygiene period data. That is the stuff you need to be looking at to see how are we doing? You've got how long is it to our next appointment? We see how far out are we booking our new patients? We see how far out are we booking our six month appointments? Are we staying at six months? How much money are we losing? A doctor had me come in and I looked and saw it, you're booking your patients eight months out. It was about a million dollars worth of revenue that they were leaving on the table.   just by not having enough hygiene available. That is gold if you will take the time. So this is another step that we're gonna add in. So you've already got your CEO block. You can add this into it where we commit to reviewing our KPIs and our PNLs every single week and making adjustments to that. Now work in tandem with your office manager. Office managers, should be doing this as well. Every single week, where are we off and what do we need to do next? Every week. And we train our teams to use numbers, not feelings. And this is how we're going to lead.   So team members should be looking at the numbers. They should know their department. Are we on track? Are we off track? We have scorecards every single week. All of our departments are reporting. Where are we on? Where are we off of? Where do we need to pivot? We need lead measures and we need lag measures. We need to make sure we're looking at both of those. And you literally start looking at this. And I just told you like people who do this, I have an office and she was like, Garo, we need to increase. I want to increase it. And I was like, we are profit and production. That's all we're looking at, period. I cut out all the noise.   Profit production, what are the levers that are hitting that? How are we diagnosing? How are we block scheduling? How is our case acceptance? How are our new patients and how are we filling the schedule? Profit production, that's all we're hitting. And guess what? That doctor is the most profitable they have ever been. But it was because we had them laser focus. We focus on these numbers every single week. And this doctor was doing it, but they weren't optimizing and making decisions on where they really needed to go and focus on the most important thing. And I think even though you might look at the KPIs and data, are you focusing on the most important things that are gonna drive and move your practice forward?   So I want you profit and production are the number two that I go after. One and two, you've got to look at those two always. And then you use the other ones to boost those two up. And if you're struggling with that, hi, I'm Kiera. We work at Dental A Team. We're a consulting company committed to making you financially free, blissfully happy in your practice and getting the best life you want. So reach out, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com Okay, so let's have it number two. Habit number three is developing your people to solve problems instead of you always solving them. So.   This is something where it's like, what's leadership versus what's firefighting. And you guys, I'm not perfect at this. I do a lot of firefighting. I do a lot of problem solving for teams. And I'm like, my gosh, I'll just give you the answer. But the goal is we need to fix it. And we need to start asking the question. So I'm like, hey, here's a problem. Instead of being like, here's the answer. Then we train them that we're the person that they come to. Hey, what do you think is a solution? You can roll it out. It's a three solution company. If you've got a problem, you bring me three solutions, one of which does not cost money. We have one-on-ones that focus on development, not just updates.   I need to develop you as a leader. I need to work with you. I need to grow you. Where are we at? This is the things we need. Like, let's work through this. Is this really the best use of our time? Is this really the best KPI for us to be tracking? Is this really how we're gonna lead? You focusing and developing your leaders and coaching them, you don't wait for things to break. So like, let's look at the KPIs. All these, you can tell build upon each other. Let's look at the KPIs. Let's look at what you guys are needing. And then let's coach to that. But truly,   If you will coach your team, there's a practice that I have known for gosh, seven years. The doctors are working in there one day a week and their office manager is running the organization and they have leaders. They have people that are following up on issues. They have the team solving their own problems. They're a solution oriented organization rather than a problem like centric like, Hey, here's your problem. Go fix it. If you need a good book, ⁓ gosh, it's the monkey book. The one minute manager meets the monkey.   It's like a good little fable of don't let people put the monkey, like their monkey on your back and leave it. Another friend described it as a fridge with a magnet and like someone was like, here's this problem, here's this problem. We're like Post-it notes, right? Like they just put it all on you. Tiff and I did a video a long time ago where it's like Post-it notes all over you and you're just drowning in Post-it notes. Well, that's like draining your energy too. And if we can teach our team to solve problems and this is a habit, this is going to be, ⁓ this is going to be something that you work through.   So just letting you know, like, this is where it's at. This is how we do it. These are three habits for you. So how do we take action on this one of developing it is you're going to have monthly coaching one-on-one with each of your leaders and figuring out their gaps of where they need to grow and giving honest feedback to them. ⁓ There's some great things of, you guys know we run on EOS and we absolutely love EOS and there's quarterly conversations that you can have. it's like, how are they on core values? How are they on their position? How are they rating themselves?   ⁓ We are having the conversations and we're being direct with them and we're giving mutual reflection on things and how are we doing on our quarterly pieces and how's our team doing and what are the moving forward actions that we're doing and having these as consistent monthly and quarterly check-ins with our team, but growing them into leaders is going to be critical and pivotal for your team. So these are three, you guys, three quick habits that you can implement now.   If you need to read the book Atomic Habits, how do I stack things? How do I make this easy? Like, okay, I need to block CEO time. So CEO time sounds like C, I'm gonna C on Thursdays or C on Fridays. Like, I don't know, C, maybe at C2, I'm trying to think of like an alliteration for you. I need my CEO time, my power time. There's no P in the alphabet, in the Monday, Tuesday, So maybe it's like top time on Tuesday or Thursday. I'm gonna do my top time Tuesday or Thursday or like Focus Friday.   There you go, there's some alliterations for you, but I'm gonna block this and I'm gonna block my calendar. Then I'm also gonna commit to KPIs or numbers. So winning Wednesdays, that's when I'm always gonna look at my numbers. Or magic Mondays, I'm gonna look at my numbers. Or money Mondays, there you go. Money Mondays, I'm gonna look at my KPIs and I'm gonna make decisions and me and my OM are gonna meet on that. And then I'm going to have leaders that are solution oriented. So we roll that as a culture thing and I'm gonna set it to where once a month I meet with all of my leaders now.   Maybe we work on weekly in the future, ⁓ but I'm gonna make sure that I'm meeting with them once a month and that's where I'm putting my most important time. And I could add that as CEO time, that's fine, because you are working on leadership at that part, but you're gonna commit to one, two or three of these habits and you're gonna hold strong for at least four months and let me know how your life looks. Now, if you're like me, I have to have a gym trainer, otherwise I don't work out. I got all the workouts, I got all the things, I hear it, I see it, I see it on Instagram, I see how to make the good food.   But unless I have it booked, scheduled, and someone's holding me accountable to it, I don't do it. So if you're that person, hi, I'm Kiera. We have the Dental A Team and this is what I'm obsessed with. Second to sending you a carrier pigeon, we make sure that you stay accountable to this. Let's help you do that. Reach out Hello@TheDentalATeam.com because you deserve to be the CEO and sometimes just being redirected and getting a new habit and a new operating system is going to get you to where you want to be. So reach out Hello@TheDentalATeam.com and commit to this. I want you guys to act like the CEO of your practice.   and start with these three habits this week. Reach out, we're here to help. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.  

Before you spend another dollar on marketing, look at this first: your phones. Most practices assume their staff has it handled because calls are coming in and the team feels busy, but missed calls and poor phone systems could be costing you more new patients than you realize.In this episode, the DPH coaches explain how to audit your phone systems, reduce missed calls, and get more new patients on the schedule. You'll get ideas for simple workflows and automation tools that keep calls from slipping through the cracks.Topics discussed:The most overlooked KPI in most practicesHow to use phone trees, auto-attendant, and automatic textsPhone training and the nine most common call scenariosWhy you should prioritize new patients and emergenciesKPI benchmarks and what every practice should trackHow to create a culture where phones are prioritizedWhy practices always need new patientsThis episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com  SET UP A CONSULTATION WITH GARY @ LEGALLY MINE CLICK HERE  Get Free DPH Trainings,  Download the App and Join our Community!  CLICK HERETake Control of Your Practice and Your Life We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams. Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.

Summary  Curtis sits down again with Dave Menz—now fully branded as The Laundromat Millionaire—to get the real 2026 update: what's changed, what's working, and why laundromats are still one of the strongest small-business plays in America. Dave breaks down how the industry shifted from "nobody talks about it" to a legitimate, modern, scalable asset class—driven by better operators, better systems, and a wave of mainstream attention. What you'll learn What's changed for Dave since your first interview (platform growth, book, content, community) Why "collaboration over scarcity" is becoming the new standard in the laundromat world How modern laundromats are being built and operated differently than the old-school model The shift from "no info" to "too much info" — and how owners filter hype from truth The business "levels" (zombie mats → plain Jane → modernized) and how value is created Why scaling is easier now (tools, systems, vendors, and operational playbooks) Why laundromats got mainstream attention (essential business, recession resistance, COVID ripple effects) What still makes laundromats a strong cash-flow asset class today — and where the opportunity still is The real reason owners struggle: weak KPI tracking, messy books, and cash chaos Curtis's "Wealth Without Leaks" angle: plug the money leaks so scaling creates real wealth   Episode Highlights 00:00:13 - Laundromat: The Best Small Business 00:01:14 - Elevating the Laundromat Industry 00:03:04 - Sharing Secrets for Industry Growth 00:05:08 - Transformation Through Networking 00:07:00 - Building Wealth and New Ventures 00:09:56 - Launching the Laundromat Millionaire Show 00:12:00 - Industry's Digital Evolution 00:18:10 - Tech and Investment in Modern Laundromats 00:24:24 - Ultimate Shift: Full-Service Laundries 00:30:30 - Scaling Through Multiple Revenue Streams 00:39:13 - Serving a Broader Customer Base 00:43:40 - Measuring Employee and Customer Satisfaction 00:51:55 - The Pitfalls of Buying Laundromats 00:58:15 - Future Expansion and Coaching 01:04:24 - Servitude as a Form of Capitalism   Episode resources: Take the Next Step with Curtis May: Business Owners: Assess Your Challenges with Cash Flow → https://curtis-73no5r8j.scoreapp.com Private Banking Readiness Assessment → https://curtis-qljorw8q.scoreapp.com How Ready Are You to Be Your Own Bank? → https://curtis-hzw1jezd.scoreapp.com   Keywords Practical Wealth Show   Curtis May   Laundromat Millionaire   Small Business   Queens City Laundry   Cincinnati   Elevate Industry   Networking   Collaboration   Best Practices   Wealth Building   Technology in Laundromats   Laundromat Millionaire: The Grit to Elevate an Industry   AI in Laundromats   Public Speaking   Book Publication   Industry Networking   Laundry Chain Scaling   Laundromat Operations   Servitude Mindset   Business Optimization   Wash-Dry-Fold Business   Commercial Accounts   Investing in Laundromats   Essential Industries   Recession Resistant   Private Equity in Laundromats   Business Valuation   Expansion Opportunities   Investment Strategies   Business Coaching   Financial Strategy   Infinite Banking   Velocity of Money   Multiple Revenue Streams   Customer Service   Employee Satisfaction   Revenue Growth   Positive Reviews   Podcasting   Content Creation   Media Presence   Global Influence   Community Service   Full-service Laundry Center   Pickup and Delivery Innovation   Operational Efficiency   Customer Retention   Strategic Partnerships   Professional Development   Industry Trends   Podcast Advertising   Market Research  

What if your sales motion created real partnerships instead of fragile price wins? That's the thread we pull with Hans, CEO of Odyssey Logistics, as he maps a journey from Danish directness and early Maersk rotations to leading a global multimodal platform through a roll-up-to-one-brand transformation. The conversation is practical, candid, and loaded with moves you can copy tomorrow—whether you're running a desk or running a P&L.We start with the foundation: a value proposition built on facts, not slogans. Hans explains how probing, silence, and quarterly KPI reviews expose true customer pain, unlock share of wallet, and make relationships stick at multiple levels, including the C-suite. He shares why he spends heavy time in the field, what onsite town halls surface that email never will, and how a consistent cadence—global Q&A, divisional sessions, defined values—turns culture from posters into behavior.Then we dig into Odyssey's shift from 16+ legacy brands to One Odyssey. Hans breaks down the integration playbook: centralizing shared services, standardizing procurement, and rebranding fast without crushing entrepreneurial spirit. He's frank about PE carve-outs, IT risk, and why overcommunication beats overpromising during ownership changes. On growth, we get specific: three levers—share of wallet, new logos, and cross-sell—powered by a cross-trained sales force and subject matter experts. Multimodal strategy is the differentiator, with intermodal often beating truckload on cost and CO2 when planned well.Technology underpins the whole plan. A data lake fuels route optimization, predictive analytics, and automated bidding, while better systems lift both customer outcomes and employee satisfaction. Odyssey's rebranded brokerage in Atlanta becomes the easy entry point—truckload and LTL open the door to deeper multimodal solutions. Hans closes with career advice that never expires: choose training over titles, learn every job, stay humble, and remember the team is smarter than any one of us.If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a colleague who sells on price, and leave a quick review so more people can find conversations that move logistics forward.Follow The Freight Pod and host Andrew Silver on LinkedIn.Thanks to our sponsors:Stuut Technologies: Your AI coworker that collects your cash automatically.https://www.stuut.ai/Cloneops.ai: Not just AI. Industry-born AI.https://www.cloneops.ai/Rapido Solutions Group: Nearshore solutions for logistics companies.https://www.gorapido.com/GenLogs: Freight Intelligence on every carrier, shipper, and asset via a nationwide sensor networkhttps://www.genlogs.io/

Speed in Golf: How to Add Distance Safely (and Make It Transfer to the Course)A lot of golfers come into winter with the same goal: hit it farther next season. In this episode, Michael Falk and Jason Tipton break down why speed matters in today's game, what separates swinging harder from swinging faster, and how to build real distance gains that actually hold up on the course.You'll learn why ball speed is the KPI (not just clubhead speed), how center contact and efficient sequencing can unlock speed without extra effort, and why speed training needs a plan—both technically (setup, sequencing, ground forces) and physically (strength, power, rotational capacity). They also cover where overspeed tools fit, what typically goes wrong when golfers chase speed without feedback, and how to create a training blueprint that improves distance without losing your scoring skills.What You'll LearnWhy distance is such a performance advantage (and where the “too much speed” line can show up)Ball speed vs. clubhead speed — and why strike + launch conditions often beat max effortCommon mistakes golfers make when they start speed trainingThe technical foundations that create speed: setup, sequencing, and ground force timingPractical tools/drills that help golfers learn to create speed efficientlyThe physical drivers of speed: strength, power, and rotational explosivenessHow mobility fits in (important, but not the main driver for everyone)A blueprint approach to gaining 10–15+ yards with less wasted effortWhat goes wrong when speed training is unbalanced (and how to avoid it)Timestamps00:00 Introduction and Episode Overview01:15 The Importance of Speed in Golf (tour trends, scoring advantage, distance thresholds)06:14 Physical Fitness and Speed Training (better athlete = more potential speed, aging + maintaining speed)08:21 Common Mistakes in Speed Training (“swinging harder” vs “swinging faster,” dispersion early on, ball speed focus)15:44 Technical Aspects of Building Speed (setup/grip, kinematic sequence, ground-up movement, face/path issues when forcing speed)20:49 Innovative Training Tools for Golf (force pedal, constraints, continuous swings for balance and sequencing)21:24 Balancing Swing Sequencing and Speed Training (overspeed as a tool—not the tool; efficiency before effort)22:14 The Role of Physical Fitness in Golf Performance (why gym work supports speed development)22:49 Key Drivers of Club Head Speed (vertical impulse, upper-body explosiveness, rotational power)23:42 Importance of Flexibility and Mobility (helpful for some, but not the primary driver in most research)26:24 Creating a Personalized Training Blueprint (screening + player-specific plan; gym frequency; adding overspeed strategically; tracking)32:58 Common Pitfalls in Speed Training (open face/face control, losing wedges/scoring, overuse issues, poor warm-up/recovery)37:59 Recap and Future Plans (assess → efficiency → build capacity → add speed → track; upcoming episodes)Resources MentionedJason Tipton (Skillest): online assessment + lessons https://skillest.com/coach/jason-tiptonKinetic Sports Medicine & Performance: golf assessment https://kineticsmp.com/golf

Welcome to another episode of Building the Premier Accounting Firm with Universal Accounting Center. Today, Roger sits down with Shady Abboud, to discuss his unique path into accounting, blending entrepreneurial experience with finance expertise. Shady highlights the distinction between bookkeeping and CFO advisory services, emphasizing the strategic role of a CFO in business growth and decision-making for SMBs. Learn how a niche in e-commerce can boost success. In This Episode: 00:00 Welcome Shady 01:31 Shady's Entrepreneurial Journey to Accounting 05:36 The Strategic Accountant's Perspective 10:09 Bookkeeping vs. CFO Advisory Services 13:50 When a Business Needs a CFO 17:46 Key Performance Indicators for Businesses 20:21 The Value of CFO Client Relationships 23:07 Managing Bookkeeping and Advisory Businesses 27:06 The Niche Advantage: E-commerce Accounting 31:00 Empathy in Client Relationships 35:42 The Bookkeeping Business Experience 39:48 Gratitude and Supporting Entrepreneurs 42:14 Closing Thoughts: Specialization and Mindset 47:00 Podcast Wrap-up and Resources Key Takeaways: Understand your business owner clients' goals beyond just numbers for better financial advice. Differentiate bookkeeping as compliance-focused and CFO advisory as forward-looking strategic analysis. Recognize signs a business needs a CFO, especially during periods of rapid growth, contraction, or strategic pivots. Prioritize gross profit margin as a core KPI to assess business efficiency and impact of external factors like inflation. Cultivate empathy and build trusting relationships with clients to foster open communication and address challenges effectively. Featured Quotes: "My strongest suit was always accounting and finance. So I decided to go into that route exclusively and I really enjoyed it." — Shady Abboud "The CFO or the fractional CFO is the CEO's best friend because he's having a conversation with the business owner that no one else is having." — Shady Abboud "We are more than just a provider. We are their partner. And sometimes one of the most important pieces in their business." — Shady Abboud Behind the Story: Shady offers a look into his evolution from a corporate role to launching and selling two businesses, including a restaurant. This hands-on experience of "wearing all the hats" gave him a rare perspective that traditional accountants often lack. He discovered his knack for finance and his ability to translate complex financial concepts into understandable insights for business owners, leading him to establish his own accounting and advisory firms. His story highlights the personal and professional shifts that paved his way to becoming a strategic financial partner. Conclusion: Thank you for joining us for another episode of Building the Premier Accounting Firm with Roger Knecht. For more information on how you can establish your own accounting firm and take control of your time and income, call 435-344-2060 or schedule an appointment to connect with Roger's team here. Sponsors: Universal Accounting Center Helping accounting professionals confidently and competently offer quality accounting services to get paid what they are worth.   Offers: Connect the Shady on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shadyabboud/  https://unloop.com/    Get a FREE copy of these books all accounting professionals should use to work on their business and become profitable.  These are a must-have addition to every accountant's library to provide quality CFO & Advisory services as a Profit & Growth Expert today: "Red to BLACK in 30 days – A small business accountant's guide to QUICK turnarounds" – This is a how-to guide on how to turn around a struggling business into a more sustainable model. Each chapter focuses on a crucial aspect of the turnaround process - from cash flow management to strategies for improving revenue. This book will teach you everything you need to become a turnaround expert for small businesses. "in the BLACK, nine principles to make your business profitable" – Nine Principles to Make Your Business Profitable – Discover what you need to know to run the premier accounting firm and get paid what you are worth in this book, by the same author as Red to Black – CPA Allen B. Bostrom. Bostrom teaches the three major functions of business (marketing, production and accounting) as well as strategies for maximizing profitability for your clients by creating actionable plans to implement the nine principles. "Your Strategic Accountant" - Understand the 3 Core Accounting Services (CAS - Client Accounting Services) you should offer as you run your business. Help your clients understand which numbers they need to know to make more informed business decisions. "Your Profit & Growth Expert" - Your business is an asset. You should know its value and understand how to maximize it. Beginning with the end in mind helps you work ON your business to build a company you can leave so that it can continue to exist in your absence or build wealth as you retire and enjoy the time, freedom, and life you want and deserve. Follow the Turnkey Business plan for accounting professionals.  This is the proven process to start and build the premier accounting firm in your area.  After more than 40 years we've identified the best practices of successful accountants and this is a presentation we are happy to share.     Also learn the best practices to automate and nurture your lead generation process allowing you to get the bookkeeping, accounting and tax clients you deserve.  GO HERE to see this presentation and learn what you can do today to identify and engage with your ideal clients.   Check it out and see what you can do to be in business for yourself but not by yourself with Universal Accounting Center.   It's here you can become a:   Professional Bookkeeper, PB Professional Tax Preparer, PTP Profit & Growth Expert, PGE   Next, join a group of like-minded professionals within the accounting community.  Register to attend GrowCon and Stay up-to-date on current topics and trends and see what you can do to also give back, participating in relevant conversations as they relate to offering quality accounting services and building your bookkeeping, accounting & tax business.   The Accounting & Bookkeeping Tips Facebook Group The Universal Accounting Fanpage Topical Newsletters: Universal Accounting Success The Universal Newsletter   Lastly, get your Business Score to see what you can do to work ON your business and have the Premier Accounting Firm. Join over 70,000 business owners and get your score on the 8 Factors That Drive Your Company's Value.   For Additional FREE Resources for accounting professionals check out this collection HERE!   Be sure to join us for GrowCon, the LIVE event for accounting professionals to work ON their business. This is a conference you don't want to miss.   Remember this, Accounting Success IS Universal. Listen to our next episode and be sure to subscribe.   Also, let us know what you think of the podcast and please share any suggestions you may have.  We look forward to your input: Podcast Feedback   For more information on how you can apply these principles to start and build your accounting, bookkeeping & tax business please visit us at www.universalaccountingschool.com or call us at 8012653777  

The 80/20 Principle of Running a Cash-Based PT Clinic In this episode of the PT Entrepreneur Podcast, Dr. Danny Matta breaks down the 80/20 principle for cash-based clinic owners and simplifies what you should track if you want to grow past yourself. Instead of obsessing over dozens of metrics, Danny argues there are three "dollar productive" KPIs that drive almost all clinic growth. He also explains why provider schedules either snowball fast or stall for a year and how to shorten that ramp from 12+ months to around six months with the right focus. In This Episode, You'll Learn: How Claire can save staff clinicians hours each week and translate that time into meaningful revenue What the 80/20 principle means inside a cash-based clinic The concept of "dollar productive activities" and why it matters The three KPIs Danny thinks drive the majority of clinic growth Why the owner should usually handle discovery calls during growth phases Benchmarks for conversion rates at different stages of scale Why recurring services are the "sneaky" variable that stabilizes schedules How to get a new provider productive faster so clinic growth compounds Claire: Turn Saved Time Into Revenue Without Burning Out Your Team Danny opens with a simple math breakdown clinic owners can understand quickly. Time is valuable, for you and for your staff clinicians. PT Biz has found that Claire, their AI scribe, saves staff clinicians about six hours per week on average. Even if you only reclaim half of that time and convert it into patient care, that is roughly three additional one-hour visits per week per clinician. Example Danny gives: 3 extra visits per week $200 average visit rate $600 more per week per clinician Roughly $30,000 per year in additional revenue per clinician The point is not to overload your team. The point is to use technology to remove the documentation burden so you can increase capacity without increasing burnout. Try Claire free for 7 days: https://meetclaire.ai The 80/20 Principle in a Cash Practice The 80/20 principle is the idea that 20% of your actions lead to 80% of your results. Danny applies this directly to clinic growth. When your clinic is small, it is easy to get busy doing "everything" and tracking a long list of numbers. The problem is most of those activities do not move the business. Instead, Danny recommends narrowing your focus to the most "dollar productive" activities. In other words, the actions and metrics that actually drive revenue and schedule utilization. The Goal: Get a Provider Productive Fast Danny frames the big objective clearly. You want to get your own schedule full enough to hire someone. Then you want any provider you hire to get productive as fast as possible. In PT Biz's world, once a provider reaches roughly 80 to 90 visits per month, it tends to snowball into 100+ pretty quickly. But getting to that point can take some clinics over a year. If you can shorten that ramp to six months, your growth compounds. In a year, you might be able to hire two people instead of one, because each provider becomes profitable faster. The Three Dollar-Productive KPIs Danny says there are three key metrics that drive the majority of growth in a cash-based clinic. Each one represents a drop-off point that can either accelerate growth or quietly crush it. 1) New Patient Volume and Discovery Call Conversion Many owners only track "how many evals we have." Danny says you need to go one step back and track conversion from lead to evaluation. There is often a major drop-off between someone becoming a lead and actually booking an evaluation. This is usually happening on discovery calls. Benchmarks Danny shares: During growth, aim for 8 to 10 new patients per provider per month Once stable, new patient volume can drop closer to 5 per month Discovery call to eval conversion should be 70%+ He also makes a strong recommendation: during growth phases, the owner should handle discovery calls. Why? In many clinics, admins convert around 45% to 50%. Owners often convert 80% to 90% because they carry authority and can handle objections better. Danny gives an example: 20 discovery calls at 50% conversion = 10 evals 20 discovery calls at 80% conversion = 16 evals That gap can be the difference between a provider staying empty and a provider getting busy quickly. He also points out that owners sometimes resist this because it feels like a step backward, but the time requirement is smaller than most people assume. If you have 20 calls at 20 minutes each, that is under 10 hours per month and it can dramatically impact growth. 2) Evaluation to Plan of Care Conversion The second KPI is how many evaluations convert into a plan of care. When people do not commit to a plan of care, Danny says many still come back a few times, often around three visits, until symptoms improve and then they disappear. That creates unpredictable revenue and inconsistent schedules. Plan-of-care conversion makes volume and revenue more predictable. Benchmarks Danny shares: Owner: 70% conversion from eval to plan of care Staff providers: 60% conversion is a strong benchmark at scale He emphasizes that this requires quality control and training. Staff clinicians need to be comfortable with diagnosis, prognosis, and presenting a clear plan. Otherwise close rates drift and schedules stall. 3) Recurring Services After Plan of Care Danny calls this the sneaky variable that people forget, but it can make the biggest difference in schedule stability. Hiring a clinician is usually a net negative for the business at first. You are paying salary, taxes, and benefits while they are still ramping up. What stabilizes and compounds a provider schedule is recurring volume. The goal is that roughly 40% of plan-of-care patients transition into some type of recurring service after discharge. Why this matters: Recurring visits fill a predictable chunk of the schedule New patient volume no longer has to carry the whole load Providers get to work with people they enjoy long term It is mentally easier than constant evaluations Danny also explains why this is often hard for staff clinicians. They may feel uncomfortable "selling" ongoing support because they never did it in insurance clinics They may not know what to do clinically once a plan of care ends So this requires two things: education on the clinical delivery of recurring services and training on how to present it confidently. Put It Together: How to Grow Faster Without Tracking Everything Danny's bigger point is that clinic owners often get lost in too many tasks and too many numbers. If you simplify down to these three KPIs and train your team around them, your odds of building provider schedules faster go up dramatically: Discovery call conversion (lead to eval) Eval to plan-of-care conversion Plan-of-care to recurring conversion When those are strong, growth compounds. You hire faster, providers get productive faster, and you get to choose what you want the clinic to become instead of being stuck trying to "just get busy." Resources Mentioned Try Claire free for 7 days: https://meetclaire.ai Talk with a PT Biz advisor: https://vip.physicaltherapybiz.com/discovery-call Join the free Part Time to Full Time 5-Day Challenge: https://physicaltherapybiz.com/challenge

In Episode 202 of the Model FA Podcast, David DeCelle sits down with Arnulf Hsu, CEO & Founder of GReminders, to break down what "end-to-end meeting management" actually looks like for financial advisors—from automated scheduling and reminders, to pre-meeting briefs, AI note-taking, workflows, and post-meeting follow-ups. Arnulf shares his journey as a serial SaaS entrepreneur and explains why wealth management became the ideal vertical for automation—especially as "note takers" became table stakes. You'll also hear what advisors struggle with most (change management + compliance), why deep native integrations matter, and where AI meeting tech is going next (document intelligence, KPI insights, and profitability analytics). What You'll Learn 00:00 – Intro + guest welcome (Street Cred connection) 02:05 – Arnulf's background: enterprise SaaS exits + why wealth tech 06:40 – Why wealth management is "ripe" for innovation 09:10 – Why GReminders picked wealth as a vertical (focus + integrations) 13:10 – What GReminders does: end-to-end meeting management 18:40 – Automated scheduling + team meetings (ops time-saver) 23:10 – Pre-meeting briefs + pulling context across systems 28:10 – AI note-taker + action items + draft follow-up emails 33:40 – Adoption: change management + why back-office AI wins 39:10 – Compliance, security, and archiving/journaling expectations 44:05 – Roadmap: document intelligence + more native integrations 49:10 – KPI/profitability analytics + coaching advisors to improve 55:20 – Final takeaways + where to learn more If review season scheduling is crushing your team, or your meeting prep and follow-up are inconsistent, this episode is a blueprint for how advisors are gaining back months of capacity. Connect with Arnuff: Website: https://www.greminders.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnulfhsu/ About the Model FA Podcast The Model FA podcast is a show for fiduciary financial advisors. In each episode, our host David DeCelle sits down with industry experts, strategic thinkers, and advisors to explore what it takes  to build a successful practice — and have an abundant life in the process. We believe in continuous learning, tactical advice, and strategies that work — no "gotchas" or BS. Join us to hear stories from successful financial advisors, get actionable ideas from experts, and re-discover your drive to build the practice of your dreams.  Did you like this conversation? Then leave us a rating and a review in whatever podcast player you use. We would love your feedback, and your ratings help us reach more advisors with ideas for growing their practices, attracting great clients, and achieving a better quality of life. While you are there, feel free to share your ideas about future podcast guests or topics you'd love to see covered.  Our Team: President of Model FA, David DeCelle If you like this podcast, you will love our community! Join the Model FA Community on Facebook to connect with like-minded advisors and share the day-to-day challenges and wins of running a growing financial services firm.    

Make your startup investor-ready with fractional CFO Armine Alajian in this episode of Zero to CEO. Discover the financial foundations every startup needs to attract funding, pass due diligence, and scale with confidence. Armine shares how clean books, KPI tracking, and smart forecasting can help founders avoid costly mistakes and secure better deals from investors.

Send us a textNicole Jarbo is the CEO of 4.0 Schools, one of the nation's leading platforms for early-stage education founders. A former KIPP teacher, Teach For America Corps member, and fintech founder, Nicole brings deep experience across classrooms, startups, philanthropy, and systems-level education change. She is also the host of the award-winning podcast Pitch Playground.

Send us a textDora Palfi is the Co-founder and CEO of imagi, an edtech company reimagining computer science education through creative coding and AI. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Dora has a background in neuroscience, human-computer interaction, and technology, and is a passionate advocate for equitable access to future-ready skills.Special note: Free access to the Lovable × imagi collaboration has been extended through March 31, giving educators and students more time to explore professional AI tools in real classroom settings.

Business turnaround strategies expert Micah Logan reveals his proven framework for transforming struggling companies into thriving enterprises. Forbes contributor shares how to diagnose financial problems, restructure operations, and build sustainable revenue streams. You'll learn: the STUPID framework identifying six fatal mistakes that kill companies, the TURNAROUND method for immediate recovery, ETA tactics transforming teams into revenue assets, and KPI systems creating predictable income. Perfect for business owners with 2-10 years of operation struggling to scale beyond six figures. Micah shares coaching insights from micro- Listen now to turn your struggling business around.

Matt O'Connor is the Co-founder of Legion, a platform for compliant and merit-based public token offering that enables teams to select investors based on criteria such as onchain history, social clout, and developer contributions. He is the former lead algorithmic engineer for Bridgewater Associates; tokenomics researcher for the Stacks Foundation (SEC qualified 2019 ICO); and token economics lead for Status (2017 ICO). His open source book, Tokenomics for Builders, has been positively reviewed by founders and VCs from Monad, Placeholder, Tensor, AllianceDAO, Galaxy Digital, and more. In this conversation, we discuss:- ICOs, IDOs, launchpads, private SAFT rounds - Merit-based, compliant token offerings - Why IPO access has deteriorated for retail investors - How Legion differs from AngelList, Carta, Republic, or SeedInvest - The convergence of IPOs ICOs - Companies with equity holders and token holders - Tokenomics 101 - Common mistakes when designing tokenomics - KPI based vesting for founders LegionX: @legiondotccWebsite: legion.ccLinkedIn: Legion | Merit-based FundraisingMatt O'ConnorX: @matty_LinkedIn: Matt O'Connor---------------------------------------------------------------------------------This episode is brought to you by PrimeXBT.PrimeXBT offers a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders that demand highly reliable market data and performance. Traders of all experience levels can easily design and customize layouts and widgets to best fit their trading style. PrimeXBT is always offering innovative products and professional trading conditions to all customers.  PrimeXBT is running an exclusive promotion for listeners of the podcast. After making your first deposit, 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions. Code: CRYPTONEWS50 This promotion is available for a month after activation. Click the link below: PrimeXBT x CRYPTONEWS50FollowApple PodcastsSpotifyAmazon MusicRSS FeedSee All

From building internal AI labs to becoming CTO of Brex, James Reggio has helped lead one of the most disciplined AI transformations inside a real financial institution where compliance, auditability, and customer trust actually matter. We sat down with Reggio to unpack Brex's three-pillar AI strategy (corporate, operational, and product AI) [https://www.brex.com/journal/brex-ai-native-operations], how SOP-driven agents beat overengineered RL in ops, why Brex lets employees “build their own AI stack” instead of picking winners [https://www.conductorone.com/customers/brex/], and how a small, founder-heavy AI team is shipping production agents to 40,000+ companies. Reggio also goes deep on Brex's multi-agent “network” architecture, evals for multi-turn systems, agentic coding's second-order effects on codebase understanding, and why the future of finance software looks less like dashboards and more like executive assistants coordinating specialist agents behind the scenes. We discuss: Brex's three-pillar AI strategy: corporate AI for 10x employee workflows, operational AI for cost and compliance leverage, and product AI that lets customers justify Brex as part of their AI strategy to the board Why SOP-driven agents beat overengineered RL in finance ops, and how breaking work into auditable, repeatable steps unlocked faster automation in KYC, underwriting, fraud, and disputes Building an internal AI platform early: LLM gateways, prompt/version management, evals, cost observability, and why platform work quietly became the force multiplier behind everything else Multi-agent “networks” vs single-agent tools: why Brex's EA-style assistant coordinates specialist agents (policy, travel, reimbursements) through multi-turn conversations instead of one-shot tool calls The audit agent pattern: separating detection, judgment, and follow-up into different agents to reduce false negatives without overwhelming finance teams Centralized AI teams without resentment: how Brex avoided “AI envy” by tying work to business impact and letting anyone transfer in if they cared deeply enough Letting employees build their own AI stack: ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini, Cursor vs Windsurf, and why Brex refuses to pick winners in fast-moving tool races Measuring adoption without vanity metrics: why “% of code written by AI” is the wrong KPI and what second-order effects (slop, drift, code ownership) actually matter Evals in the real world: regression tests from ops QA, LLM-as-judge for multi-turn agents, and why integration-style evals break faster than you expect Teaching AI fluency at scale: the user → advocate → builder → native framework, ops-led training, spot bonuses, and avoiding fear-based adoption Re-interviewing the entire engineering org: using agentic coding interviews internally to force hands-on skill upgrades without formal performance scoring Headcount in the age of agents: why Brex grew the business without growing engineering, and why AI amplifies bad architecture as fast as good decisions The future of finance software: why dashboards fade, assistants take over, and agent-to-agent collaboration becomes the real UI — James Reggio X: https://x.com/jamesreggio LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jamesreggio/ Where to find Latent Space X: https://x.com/latentspacepod Substack: https://www.latent.space/ Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:24 From Mobile Engineer to CTO: The Founder's Path 00:03:00 Quitters Welcome: Building a Founder-Friendly Culture 00:05:13 The AI Team Structure: 10-Person Startup Within Brex 00:11:55 Building the Brex Agent Platform: Multi-Agent Networks 00:13:45 Tech Stack Decisions: TypeScript, Mastra, and MCP 00:24:32 Operational AI: Automating Underwriting, KYC, and Fraud 00:16:40 The Brex Assistant: Executive Assistant for Every Employee 00:40:26 Evaluation Strategy: From Simple SOPs to Multi-Turn Evals 00:37:11 Agentic Coding Adoption: Cursor, Windsurf, and the Engineering Interview 00:58:51 AI Fluency Levels: From User to Native 01:09:14 The Audit Agent Network: Finance Team Agents in Action 01:03:33 The Future of Engineering Headcount and AI Leverage

Kathy Baldwin, three-time best-selling author of the Unlearn the Crap series and creator of the Unlearn the Crap & Level Up podcast, a raw, intelligent, and unfiltered show that helps people strip away the conditioning, stories, and self-sabotaging patterns that keep them small.Through her company, Finally, Kathy helps podcasters, coaches, and entrepreneurs automate the back end of their content creation so they can focus on the conversations that actually matter. From transcripts and show notes to social media clips, email marketing, and KPI tracking, she's built a done-with-you system that bridges mindset and mechanics, message and machine.Now, Kathy's journey from breaking free of corporate burnout to building two synergistic brands demonstrates how clarity and systems can transform both personal power and business scalability.And while she continues to help purpose-driven creators unlearn control, trust systems, and expand their impact without losing their soul, she's proving that true freedom comes from alignment, not exhaustion.Here's where to find more:https://finallypodcastautomation.comhttps://unlearnthecrap.com - on the podcast page on the bottom is the guest onboarding. I would love to host you as well.https://kathybaldwin.me/links________________________________________________Welcome to The Unforget Yourself Show where we use the power of woo and the proof of science to help you identify your blind spots, and get over your own bullshit so that you can do the fucking thing you ACTUALLY want to do!We're Mark and Katie, the founders of Unforget Yourself and the creators of the Unforget Yourself System and on this podcast, we're here to share REAL conversations about what goes on inside the heart and minds of those brave and crazy enough to start their own business. From the accidental entrepreneur to the laser-focused CEO, we find out how they got to where they are today, not by hearing the go-to story of their success, but talking about how we all have our own BS to deal with and it's through facing ourselves that we find a way to do the fucking thing.Along the way, we hope to show you that YOU are the most important asset in your business (and your life - duh!). Being a business owner is tough! With vulnerability and humor, we get to the real story behind their success and show you that you're not alone._____________________Find all our links to all the things like the socials, how to work with us and how to apply to be on the podcast here: https://linktr.ee/unforgetyourself

Defining ARR is getting harder—not easier—as SaaS, AI, usage-based pricing, and hybrid business models evolve. In episode #345 of SaaS Metrics School, Ben Murray breaks down the five critical questions every ARR definition must answer to hold up with Boards, investors, and during due diligence. Drawing on extensive research into how public tech companies disclose ARR in press releases and SEC filings, Ben explains why ARR is not “dead” but why vague or inconsistent ARR definitions undermine credibility, comparability, and company valuation. This episode provides a practical framework to help SaaS leaders, CFOs, and founders clearly define ARR in a way that supports accurate metrics, financial modeling, and investor trust. Resources Mentioned Blog post on ARR definitions and disclosure best practices: https://www.thesaascfo.com/cfos-guide-to-disclosing-headline-arr-numbers/ Ben's SaaS Metrics training: https://www.thesaasacademy.com/the-saas-metrics-foundation You'll Learn The five questions every ARR definition must answer to be investor-ready Which revenue types belong in ARR—and which should be excluded The difference between revenue-based, contract-based, and hybrid ARR calculations How public SaaS and AI companies annualize subscription and usage-based revenue Common approaches for handling variable, consumption, and usage revenue in ARR Why vague ARR definitions create confusion in fundraising and due diligence Why It Matters Clear ARR definitions improve credibility with investors and business leaders Poorly defined ARR can negatively impact company valuation Consistent ARR logic enables better KPI tracking and benchmarking Transparent ARR disclosures reduce friction during fundraising and M&A Accurate ARR supports stronger financial strategy and forecasting Well-defined revenue categories improve accounting and financial systems

How I Would Start My Private Practice: with $1,000What would it actually look like to launch a solo private practice with just $1,000? In this episode, Julie Herres kicks off a practical three-part series walking you through exactly how she would build a private practice from the ground up—starting with a shoestring budget. Julie shares candid insights, must-have tools, and where not to spend your cash, all while keeping things approachable (and a little bit fun).  What You'll Learn:How to Prioritize Your $1,000Which foundational steps are absolutely necessary, and what can wait until later DIY Strategies to Stretch Your BudgetCommon Pitfalls to AvoidResources and LinksPrivate Practice Startup Course: https://www.greenoakaccounting.com/startup12Paperwork Packages:Private Practice Startup Paperwork Base: https://www.privatepracticestartup.com/private-practice-paperwork-basePrivate Practice Startup paperwork: https://the-private-practice-startup.thrivecart.com/base-package-299/?affiliate=greenoakFree HIPAA add-on: https://www.privatepracticestartup.com//hipaa-form?affiliate=greenoakBe Your Own Biller:Membership: https://www.beyourownbiller.com/byob-membershipCourse: https://www.beyourownbiller.com/ LLC/PLLC: Typically $50–$100 (check your state's Secretary of State website)Domain Name:$15/year at the time of recordingvia Squarespace: https://www.squarespace.com/or Wix: https://www.wix.com/ Google Workspace (Email): $14/month at the time of recordingSign up: https://workspace.google.com/Google Workspace for Business: https://workspace.google.com/lp/business/ How to get a BAA from Google (for HIPAA): https://support.google.com/a/answer/3407054?hl=enEMR/EHR: $50–$100/month (compare options for features, ease, and integration)Miscellaneous Listings or Memberships: $0–$50/month (Psychology Today, TherapyDen, etc.)Wix Website: Core or Light plan

Send us a textJoin hosts Alex Sarlin and Ben Kornell as they kick off 2026 with a wide-ranging Week in EdTech conversation covering tech backlash, AI in education, market consolidation, consumer learning tools, and major voices shaping the future of teaching and learning.✨ Episode Highlights:[00:00:00] Growing tech backlash around screen time, phone bans, and distrust of edtech.[00:03:55] PowerSchool layoffs reflect private equity pressure and profitability focus.[00:06:30] Layoffs highlight the human cost for educators working in edtech.[00:09:04] Screen time skepticism reaches adult learning and professional assessments.[00:10:52] Big Tech ramps up AI competition as Meta, Amazon, and Apple reposition.[00:12:42] Consumer AI learning startups draw VC attention amid edtech valuation gaps.[00:13:58] Funding: Obo raises $16M Series A for AI-generated, multimodal courses.[00:17:16] UX, speed, and multimodality emerge as key edtech differentiators.[00:19:10] Speechify secures NYC schools deal, blending accessibility with consumer-grade UX.[00:21:08] Engagement-first consumer learning apps challenge traditional edtech models.Plus, special guests:[00:23:48] Eli Luberoff, Founder of Desmos Studio, on creative math tools and Desmos Professional.[00:50:28] Rebecca Winthrop, Senior Fellow and Director, Center for Universal Education at The Brookings Institution, on how AI risks currently outweigh benefits for students without better guardrails.

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

In this episode, host Josh interviews Simon Hammer, VP of Product at Vimbly Group, about acquiring and managing e-commerce brands. Simone shares a case study from the cocktail shaker market, illustrating how focusing solely on quantitative metrics led to missed opportunities. He emphasizes the importance of qualitative customer feedback, brand storytelling, and product-market fit to build lasting brands and avoid competing only on price. The discussion highlights key lessons for e-commerce leaders: assess market potential, listen to customers, and continuously test and iterate to stay competitive.Chapters:Introduction to Simone Hammer and Background (00:00:00)Josh introduces Simone Hammer, his background, and experience in e-commerce and investment banking.Approach to Brand Acquisition and Quantitative Analysis (00:00:55)Discussion on traditional quantitative methods for acquiring brands and the limitations of focusing solely on numbers.Case Study: Cocktail Shaker Brand and Market Dynamics (00:01:38)Simone shares a case study about their cocktail shaker brand, market share, and the impact of COVID-19.Competitor Analysis and Information Memorandum (00:03:08)Simone describes obtaining a competitor's information memorandum and insights into their strategies and market position.Market Changes and Increased Competition (00:04:07)Discussion on rising freight costs, increased competition, and the challenges faced in the cocktail shaker market.Brand Building vs. KPI Focus (00:05:05)Comparison between their KPI-driven approach and the competitor's focus on brand building and storytelling.Consequences of Ignoring Qualitative Feedback (00:06:59)Simone explains the negative outcomes of neglecting qualitative customer feedback and the resulting price competition.Importance of Qualitative Customer Insights (00:07:53)Emphasis on the value of qualitative data, customer feedback, and brand building for long-term business success.Lessons Learned and Industry Trends (00:09:01)Reflection on industry trends, the necessity of qualitative insights, and the risk of competing solely on price.Host Reflection and Question on Customer Feedback (00:10:04)Josh reflects on his own business practices and asks Simone what customer feedback they missed.Specific Customer Preferences Missed (00:10:53)Simone details specific customer preferences, such as the shine of the shaker and the appeal of the stand.In-Person vs. Online Customer Insights (00:11:55)Insights gained from in-person customer interactions versus online feedback and the importance of customer development.Three Key Takeaways for E-commerce Success (00:13:43)Josh summarizes three actionable takeaways: market opportunity, listening to customers, and continuous testing.Closing Remarks and Future Follow-Up (00:16:48)Josh thanks Simone and mentions the possibility of future episodes to check on progress.Links and Mentions:Tools and Websites  Helium 10Key Takeaways  Identifying Market Opportunities: 00:13:43Listening to Customers: 00:14:47Testing and Iterating: 00:15:49Transcript:Josh 00:00:00  Today, I'm excited to introduce you to Simon Hammer. Simon is the VP of Product at Vimbly Group, a New York City based firm that scales and invests in tech enabled businesses where he has worked for over ten years. He currently runs Vimbly Group's e-commerce business unit, as well as having his hands involved in a number of Vimbly Group's eight other business units. Prior to the Vimbly Group, Simon was a healthcare investment banker at a boutique investment bank in New York City, where he focused on raising capital and mid-market mergers and acquisitions involving biotech, healthcare, technology and healthcare service companies. He has a bachelor's degree from Cornell University, and I met Simon at the Billion Dollar Seller Summit earlier this year. And Simon, I'm excited to welcome you to the podcast. Welcome.Simon 00:00:50  Thanks, Josh. Really appreciate that. Nice intro. Thanks for having me.Josh 00:00:55  As you look to acquire other brands, and I love that you kind of were an acquire or aggregator before the aggregator theme became pop became popular. So you're not on the the bandwagon there.Josh 00:01:08  You can be like, no, we were doing this long, a long time ago. You know, I think that that's really interesting, Simon. I think you've taken this approach that's actually a little bit different than I think the typical answer is, right, because I've listened to a bunch of other people that talk about acquiring businesses. And I'm looking at these specific numbers and, you know, I'm trying to draw conclusions and, you know, kind of look at 2020 and what happened during Covid and say, okay, this was an artificial bump and it's all very quantitative, right?Simon 00:01:38  All the quantitative stuff that you're talking about like looking historical, it's a given. Right. We always do that. We've always done it. And for the longest time, that's all we did. And, you know, one of our brands right now is going through a major shift in that it, for such a long time survived on three products. Basically, there's a whole, you know, there's more skews, but there's basically more Asians.Simon 00:02:02  But there's there's effectively three basins. One of those. basically a shell of itself now. And part of the reason why is because, you know, actually, if you'll divulge me for a second. So, pre-COVID and even through the first, you know, a couple years of Covid and depending on where you want to, you know, start and stop it, I guess. or, you know, where the beginning till now is, I guess. But first couple of years of it, it was doing incredibly well, right? It was something like anywhere between 25 and 35%, or it accounted for 25 to 35% of our gross margin. That gross margin, including everything from landed costs, three PL costs, FBA costs, advertising, marketing returns, all that stuff. Just not just not like overhead and, and software, things like that nature. But but gross profit. Right. And so it was a large part of our business. this one product and you know, during the beginning of Covid, I got my hands on a competitor, one of our biggest direct competitors.Simon 00:03:08  Their information memorandum, which is basically like their, this deck. it's like 50 pages of their business because they're trying to sell their business. Okay. And through like, you know, like, you know, my partner Sam, he has just a ton of connections in the entrepreneur space, a ton of connections with these brokers. And so we get a lot of deals right across a lot of different industries. and so we just happen to get our direct competitors information memorandum. Right. So this gave us everything about their business, right? We knew the numbers. We knew. we knew, who their suppliers were, right? What their strategy was, what their projections were like. You know, you name it, we knew it. And, I mean, we were like, we could look on helium ten and know that we were dominating. But then we saw the real numbers. We were, you know, we were dominant player in the market. and then all of a sudden, right, like during Covid, you start seeing freight costs go up.Simon 00:04:07  You start seeing, a lot of sellers into the space. The cocktail shaker space is kind of the space that we're playing in for one of our brands. and this is where the the set, you know, was established. and, you know, was this, you know, what's called roughly like 30% of the business. it had basically, started having rank weed, right? The ran...

What if "thriving" isn't a soft concept—but a measurable performance advantage? In this episode, Peter Winick sits down with Jon Rosemberg, Founding Partner of Anther and author of "A Guide to Thriving: The Science Behind Breaking Old Patterns, Reclaiming Your Agency, and Finding Meaning", to break down what thriving really is, what it is not, and why leaders should care right now. Jon draws a sharp line between thriving and "success." Success can be the big house, the title, the milestones. Thriving is different. It's a state where you're calm, connected to others, and able to create. It's when you can access the best of your thinking and show up as yourself—not as a reactive version of yourself. They explore the practical business implications. Jon frames thriving as the condition that makes proactive leadership possible. Less reactivity. More intentionality. Better decisions. He also positions "flow" as a subset of thriving—useful, but not the whole story. Then the conversation gets strategic. Jon introduces agency as the lever that moves people from survival mode to thriving: the capacity to make intentional choices. And he connects it directly to strategy. Real strategy is not doing everything. It's making clear choices—and just as importantly, choosing what you will not do. For leaders building teams, Jon highlights the shift from productive value to relational value. Your job stops being "do the work." Your job becomes "enable others to do their best work." When teams are thriving, performance rises. When organizations treat well-being as a KPI, it becomes a competitive advantage—not a perk. Finally, Jon reframes thriving as a spiral, not a finish line. Markets change. Crises hit. AI reshapes work. The goal isn't to "arrive" at thriving. The goal is to build the capacity to return to it faster—and lead through uncertainty with more clarity, nuance, and adaptability. Three Key Takeaways: • Thriving has a precise definition. It's not "success" or status; it's being calm, connected, and creative—able to access better thinking and show up authentically. • Agency is the lever. Moving from survival mode to thriving starts with the capacity to make intentional choices—and that maps directly to strategy in business. • Thriving changes performance at the team level. Leaders shift from their own productivity to relational value—enabling others to do their best work—which increases team performance. If Jon's episode got you focused on thriving through agency, go next to Episode 156 with Linda Henman for the "now what?" Linda is all about making tough, high-stakes decisions—fast and well—so you can turn intentional choice into real strategy. Together, they pair thriving as the mindset with decision-making as the skill that makes it real.

Kiera joins Jill Simonds, founder of Savvy Strategic Partners, to talk about all things leadership mindset, including what to do when you feel trapped by your business (Kiera gets personal on this one!), the ebb and flow of motivation, psychology of ownership, and a ton, ton more. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript:   The Dental A Team (00:01) Hello, Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera And today it's a special podcast. I was so lucky to be featured on a podcast with Savvy. They are actually a fractional company and we have hired them to get different team members on our team and their founder, Jill Simonds and I got on the podcast and talked about all things from founder mindset to guilt of being an owner to how we stay trapped in businesses. And I just felt that this is such a   poignant and pertinent podcast for all of you. So I hope you all enjoy this episode. I hope you learn a lot. And as always, thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.   The Dental A Team (00:37) Welcome everyone to vision untethered conversations with inspirational leaders. My name is Jill Simonds, founder of Savvy Strategic Partners. We are a dedicated leadership team of fractional executives. I am so thrilled to introduce my special guest today, Kiera Dent, the dynamic founder of the Dental A Team, a consulting firm dedicated to helping dental practices simplify operations, strengthen leadership and elevate patient care.   With her unique background as both a dental clinician and business owner, brings a powerful blend of insight and business strategy to every practice she partners with. Her and her team have worked with hundreds of practices nationwide to build systems that reduce stress, increase efficiency, and foster long-term success. Kiera, I'm so excited to have you here. Thank you, Jill. Thank you. I'm so excited and honored to be here.   It's fun. love what you're doing out there. I love these kinds of conversations and wow, it's always fun to sit back and hear your own bio. So thanks. It feels, feels a good way to kick off the podcast. Let's hope I deliver up to that, but truly just honored to be here. Super excited and just love what you're doing for all the founders out there like myself. Just helping us get to that executive level that we need when we maybe aren't quite large enough to bring on all these amazing players full time into our company. So just super jazz and excited to be here with you today.   Yeah, me too. I'm excited to get into it. I don't actually think I know your full story and inspiration behind Dental A Team and your purpose and passion. So let's start there. What inspired your journey and how does your purpose align with the unique challenges that you face in scaling a business today? Yeah, well,   Dentistry was never meant to be in my blood. I just happened to be in high school and saw a really fast path to wearing scrubs. thought I can be a dental assistant or I can be a nurse. I don't want to learn the whole body. That's disgusting. Mouth, I could probably handle. So that's honestly what kicked this off. So was in high school. It was a random career. And then everybody kind of teases me because my last name is Dent. It's not a stage name. And I make the joke that's real life. I just had to get three fiancees to get that last name.   That was really what got me into it. I love dentistry. It turned out to be a perfect career for me. And so I did it in high school and then I went to college and college. I actually did an undergrad in marriage and family therapy. I was planning to be a therapist and I remember being, I was interviewing in Oklahoma for grad school and I remember sitting in the interview and I was thinking like, I wonder how that like filling's going. I wonder how that crown prep's going.   And I thought, gosh, this is going to be such a weird world. Like I am trying to like pitch myself to this future college. but I'm thinking about how much fun I had back in the office and how my patients were doing. And so I got a full ride scholarship and I decided to put it on pause. went to, pharmacy school with my husband. and we went out there and we decided we'll put this on pause. We'll see if we can both get into the same school.   But I just realized my heart, my soul, my passion is in dentistry. I'd been a dental assistant, a treatment coordinator, a scheduler, a biller, an office manager, all the pieces. And so when we went to pharmacy school, decided, you know what, I'm going to call around to all of his schools and I'm going to see if we can get a spouse discount if I work at the college. Because some schools, and man, pharmacy school was not for the faint of heart. So I called around and luckily Arizona, they did and Jason got accepted to it. So I was like, all right, sights are on.   I've always been a little hustler. I'm like, sites are on, I'm to get a job at this college. And I just felt truly, truly blessed. So many people tried to get jobs there. All my friends were trying to get jobs there. And I randomly was talking to this lady in the pool at our complex and she says she has nothing to do with me getting the job there. But I fully believe that Laura had a lot of, a lot of strings behind the scenes to get me the job at Midwestern in Arizona. So I a discount on the tuition, which was great.   Um, but I was able to then work at the dental college and that truly is what kicked off this Dental A Team consulting company because I worked at the college for three years, got the, got the discount. And then while my husband was doing his residency, one of the students actually asked me to come and start a practice with her in Colorado. And I thought, Oh my gosh, like good thing I said no to the marriage and family therapy. Like let's go from dental assistant to practice owner three years. Like, let's do this. So   actually helped start a practice in Colorado. ⁓ took our first office from 500,000 to 2.4 million in nine months, opened a second location and I was like hooked on this adrenaline junkie of business ownership. But at the same time, just like we were drinking from a fire hose. My marriage was almost in shambles. I was in shambles. Like I'm 5'8". I was 98 pounds. I was not sleeping. I was up at 2 a.m. staying like up till 10 p.m. Like just it was an exhausting road.   drain, everything was falling apart. And so when I split from that partnership, ⁓ I sat there and I remember just sitting, I didn't know what to do. Like I'd lost my marriage practically. I'd lost my identity. I was like on death row in lots of different facets. And I remember just thinking like, I don't even know who Kiera Dent is anymore. And so I sat there and I was like, well,   I'm going to start a consulting company. Like I love dentistry. If I could help her, I could probably help more people. And I think that this is the fuel of founders where when we're at rock bottom, we've got to have something that builds us into our next version. And that's what Dental A Team was for me. So Dental A Team, say, was built from like the ashes of my life. Like it feels like the Phoenix rising for me. And so I started a company. Like I just, I didn't even know what I was doing. Had no background in it.   And I went and consulted my friend and I was like, I just need to practice on you. I don't even know what I'm doing. And we took his practice and we grew it tremendously. He then introduced me to a consultant overnight. had 50 clients. I started like just making things up as I went. And it was really like an overnight success, but I went from like rookie don't know what I'm doing to this. I know that I can help practices and I want to serve. And I've got all these dentists that are just like these little babies that are going to get.   ripped apart in the industry, there's gotta be a way. And so it's always said, like I always said, I wanted to positively impact the wealth of dentistry in the greatest way possible. And that's what I've said since day one, that's how it is. And now I realize that life is my passion, dentistry is my platform, but changing people's lives, helping them live their best lives. And it's wild that we're even talking Jill, because what you do for me and my business is what I do for dentists. And so it's this weird annoyance to me that I'm like, I can be a miracle grow.   and I can grow dental practices and it can be so fun. But yeah, I have no idea how to do that in a corporate world. And so learning it and evolving, and that's actually how you and I even got together was I needed someone but not a consultant. I was like, listen, I know what consultants do. I am a consultant. Like I need, I need someone with me. So that's how we got here and that's how my passion's been. I don't get to wear scrubs. That's the only bummer. Like the whole story started with scrubs and now you like wear clothes.   ⁓ You can make some really stylish scrubs as part of the entire. I would love to, but I do joke. like, took my marriage and found my therapy background, tethered it with my passion of dentistry and created a company from like just true passion and love. man, it's just been a, I think it's good. We don't know the end from the beginning. So many people want to know that. I don't think knowing what I know now I would have ever started, but I think I needed that as a person.   to build, execute. And I think that that's how founders are. We're just meant to build, we're meant to create, we're to be these creators. And so to build something that's just been magical and changed so many lives, like, gosh, the joy it's brought me has been like a hundredfold beyond anything I could have imagined. ⁓ beautiful story. And yeah, quite funny too, the path ⁓ and steps that you took to get here, but wait a listen. mean, just listen to your intuition.   And it sounds like you have some of those key core memories along the way of like your thought process sitting in scenarios where you're like, wait, is this me? Is this even what I want? And acting on it and taking that initiative and to where it's got you. That's a beautiful story. Thank you. Yeah. Can you share a specific experience from this where you have felt trapped by your business? Every day,   What strategies have you implemented or are you to create space for true growth and scalability? Yes. This is such a good and I hope like listeners, they're probably like, I don't know. I just hope that what I share is making you not feel alone. I think is probably the biggest piece because I hear this from dentists. I'm like, I know I'm not alone and I joined a bunch of groups for it. But ⁓ I say that Dental A Team is a dragon that never sleeps. Like this thing just is a crying baby of   breathing dragon that just never ever stops. And I think that there have been times, so especially last year, last year was like my rock bottom. So technically we're eight years into the company, but like I was partnered with that other guy for five, for four years. So I feel like I'm like five years in on my own trying to do this, even though I know it's like just had a funny path. But last year I hit rock bottom.   Like I went cold turkey. I checked out of work. I remember just being like, I am sick. Like not physically sick, but mentally, emotionally, spiritually, like I'm apathetic to life. Like things just need to shut down. and I'm sure a lot of founders get to this level where you just, you're doing everything. Like the whole company is riding on you and you are so rad that you built this company, but it's outgrown you and you don't know how to shed that and to build and to create and to evolve. And so my, ⁓   And I think it was, I feel like I tell myself lies all the times, which I'm sure most people can relate to of, okay, care, just push through like three more months and we're going to be better. Like three more months, we got to hire three. So you're always in this like, okay, it's going to get better at three months. And then you're like, well, shoot, like this person didn't work out. So I got to keep doing sales or, this didn't work out. So I've got to keep doing this aspect of the business. that could be a me that could be not me, but last year my strategy was like completely checked out of life. I,   came back from a conference, I was so exhausted, so burnout that I just called my executive team and said, all right, you guys have it. Like, I don't want to hear from anybody. Like I put all the things like, here's a lawyer, here's the CPA here. Of course, I'm not just going to let this thing fail, but I needed a complete shut off reset and I slept for 17 hours a day for an entire month. Like it was every day just exhausted. felt numb. felt like I lost like,   The way to best describe it is I felt like I was watching a movie in color that went black and white and that was my life. Like there was no color, there was no emotion. There was no, I feel like I lost feeling to life. And I think that was just coping mechanism to get through. We did a lot of therapy, like lots of different pieces. And I realized like, okay, we got to take care of Kiera first and then we have to get to these spaces. So when you say like, do you ever feel trapped by your business? Yes. Cause it's like, what do you do?   This is a company that's a consulting company built on Kiera. That's Kiera Dent. That's her face. Like, how do you even sell this type of a B2B business to somebody? So I did meet with people. did find two potential buyers. I was like, I need a way out. I need to figure out how do I get rid of this crying baby? Like it's got to just stop, like make the crying stop. ⁓ And then that's where we actually pulled in a traction coach. So Rick, we hired Rick. I was like,   I need someone who's outside of this company who can see it that can also be the motivating voice for my team and help them see like, Kiera can't keep carrying all this. So I will say like Rick was a huge blessing. He came from a great network of people and then the leadership team. was like, we had to have a complete reset of everything's not on Kiera's plate, but I don't think it was all leadership team. think that there's a lot of pieces of Kiera perfection that my ego.   needed to feel important and to be able to let that go. Things aren't going to be perfect, Jill. I still stress like my, I have a little bracelet on that says trust and flow. And that's this year's theme of like, here, you got to trust people and you've got to go with the flow more than trying to curate and force because that's always going to be the hardest path. So, and then we obviously hired you. We hired Jenna who's been a phenomenal fractional. we brought on a CRO.   who's helping in the sales and marketing department. But I also think that businesses when they hit a certain level, they finally have the cash to be able to hire the expertise that you need to bring on. But before that, I was so cash flow scared that I think I maybe held on to profitability too hard rather than hiring help sooner that could have probably prevented it getting that low. So now it's like mandatory, I go to the gym.   three times a week, non-negotiable. have sets time, like we shut off from work every single day at five o'clock. My husband has alarm that goes off and like, we don't talk work. We hot tub every night. Like, I don't think I realized the mental bandwidth that being a founder, operator, doer requires to recharge. And now I'm just like really pro like, no, no, no guys, I don't care what goes on. Like if these things don't happen, I'll fall apart. And that's just, I don't show up the best for anybody on the team. So.   Yes, I still feel trapped. I still wish that some days I could quit my own job. But I think the fact that you can't quit is also a really beautiful blessing because it forces innovation and creation. ⁓ So well said. the help and the support and leaning on others in your circle, finding your people who you can trust.   That's the first step for sure. You're not alone. And the second we realized that, I mean, this it's lonely. It's lonely at the top. And even with a dynamic team, nobody else wears the pressure, the weight, the risk involved like you have to, you know, but knowing that you're not alone and you have a team that you can lean on, the more you can lean into that, grow that, expand that.   It's a give and take and an ebb and flow for sure. It's not linear, but. Yeah. You made me think about my brother-in-law has a very, very, very successful high end builds these beautiful custom homes in Utah. Like one of the top builders he's been on Netflix. Like he just has this very, very incredible company. And I remember when my husband, got married where ⁓ my husband's eight years younger than him. I was like, he's always so grumpy. Like this man is so angry all the time.   And then I realized he's a business owner and he's at the spot that I'm at right now. And I'm like, I am always just like in this space of anger and frustration. And he's actually been this really randomly. He was the one I didn't like. I like, had like clashes when we first got married. I feel like I understand him on an entirely different level now. And I'm like, I get it. Like, I see, I see why you were the way you were. Like it makes so much more sense to me, but he told me, he said, Kiera, the day you become free is the day that you stopped caring so much about.   Like in the day you realize that nobody can take anything from you. Like that is such a freeing moment. So if you do get sued or if you have a teammate that like writes, like last year it was like, we got reviews galore and it's crazy. You can't take those down because if you are a CEO executive, you are no longer a human and that doesn't matter. And I think just like the bullets, we had like a pending lawsuit. We had people writing awful things about me. Like it just felt like it was just this tumultuous tumbleweed.   But I think you go through that and you do build that. I don't want to say it's a calloused soul because for me, feel like becoming angry or bitter is never going to serve. think it's an internal knowing that you have the confidence and the certainty in yourself that no matter what bullets come your way, you are capable of solving anything and everything that comes. I think when you can... Yeah.   navigate enough storms to have that confidence. I think there is so much more freedom in there. And I just think about him, he's so much happier, but he's like, I'm not reliant on anybody for my happiness. No one can take anything away from me. And I'm not dependent on anybody for like this success. And I think that's a, it's a certainty. It's not an air of ego. And I think it could be possibly taken that way. It's an air of confidence and certainty within you that I think then the highs and lows are not as turbulent. And I think that that was   similar to what we were saying, it just becomes a, I think, an evolution of you as a person. And I think that that's ultimately why we all become business owners is for that evolution of soul that we are seeking, that maybe we don't want to go through the process to get there. But on the other side, it's a beautiful version of yourself that's far grander, far more beautiful, far stronger, far more confident than you ever could have imagined yourself being. Yeah. Well said.   That freedom point too is it's almost like a stance of serenity too, because, and if you know, you know, the serenity prayer, it's, is the, the acknowledgement of what we can or cannot control what is outside of us. And when we finally let go of people's perception, what they're going to, what they even think, right? We cannot.   even control as good as of work as we can put forward and as best as we can show up. We can't control others perceptions of us, what they're going to say, what they're going to do with that. And so that level of understanding and acceptance and wisdom to know this is mine, this isn't mine and let go of everything that we carry that, you know, we think we have some control over.   letting that go is ultimate freedom, I think, when we can see, be in that confidence and in a state of serenity. Yeah, the more you let go of that and just lean into what's within our realm and our controllables is the best you can do. And we show up better. Absolutely. That's the trust and flow mindset mantra for this year of   Yeah, there is no pain in change. There's pain in the like resistance to it. And so like you said, it's a surrendering. It's a surrendering of   I think just acknowledging that this is life, this is who you are, this is what you can control. And I never thought that you could really come back from being so low. But you hear it, like you see people, like you hear media talk about it. But I think business owners, someone said once, business is such a spiritual journey. And I was like, how? I don't get it, ⁓ but I do get it.   It's such a spiritual journey. It's such an evolution of soul. It's a surrendering. It's a give. It's a take. It's a beautiful blessing. It's a call. There's so much beauty in it. then I think like, turn it into a puzzle, turn it into a game, turn it into like, how can we make this into more fun? So I started just adding more fun too. was like, why do I need to always be the gladiator? Why don't we just have like a good time and like giggle about all these things?   But I think that that's truly an evolution of you as a person too. I don't think that that is not an overnight sensation. Anyone who tells you it is like, good luck. think that that is, that's a crafted, it's an evolution and it's a beautiful surrender like you said, and grace for yourself and for others. But I feel like the person you become through it is there's so much empathy, there's so much love, there's so much compassion for others that I don't think you get there any other way.   Yeah, that's so true. Having it for ourselves first is so much harder than having that for others. So the compassion and care and giving love of ourselves and acceptance, that's the only way to give it outside of ourselves. So good. What are what are some common psychological barriers either for you or that you see show up? You work with a ton of business owners in very specific industry, too. So   What are some of those barriers you see that prevent owners from stepping back and not being so tethered, you know, to their business? What contributes to that? What are some of the psychological factors, beliefs maybe that we carry that keep us stuck? Yes. And you're right. Like I've coached hundreds and thousands of offices. That's where it's so like.   so aggravating to me to be like, Jill, need help. Like I know how to do this for someone else, but I don't want to do it for my own. I think that there's beliefs of because you're a business owner, you have to know it all. I know that that's like a big one of there's humility, but at the same time you're like, well, I'm in this, I have to figure it out. I think one of my psychological ones that I know dentists have as well is in B2B when you are the service provider, it's,   It's a psychological belief of if you are the product and you step back, how does your business continue? And it's odd because as random as it is, I was able to give up consulting much faster and delegate that, which is shocking to me. think about it often, like you give that up, but you don't give up sales and marketing and reputation. Like it's fascinating to me that I'm like the biggest portion of it and like dentists, they'll hire an associate dentist. But to me, I think those are possibly easier skillsets because I   I have that skillset that I know I can look for it and I can train that and can evolve it versus like sales and marketing in different places. Like, I don't know if I'm trying to figure it out. How am I supposed to coach this up? So I think those keep us stuck. I think there's a, I think there's a, I don't know. I don't know what it is. I feel like it's societal. But I think I'm with this like asking for help or I don't know. Is this weird? Like for me,   I feel like I'm a very highly high capable human. Like we were talking the other day and it was, on client escalations, like it's either the CEO, the salesperson or the consultant, whoever knows them best. I was like, cool. I'm a trifecta. Like no wonder I'm good at this. Like I'm the CEO, I am the salesperson and I am a consultant that I think that there's sometimes this like this weird, because I'm so high functioning and so capable that I should be able to do this and I should be able to continue carrying all these pieces.   Why am I tired? Like get it together girl. And just like, keep moving on. I think that keeps you so bound in. And then truly when I even say that out loud, I'm like, it's just your ego screaming at you, wanting you to feel important. And if you step back at all, I know what I think about stepping back. A lot of my team is the same age as me too. And I sometimes feel very awkward about like, so I'm going to have a CEO lifestyle and not be eight to five with you guys because the business never stops crying.   But it's as weird. Like sometimes I also think I'm tethered and a lot of my doctors are because like same age, same demographic, same, like you feel so similar and so close that it's almost like, why are you better than them? It's so awkward. hate it. Like you can even see I'm like playing with my hair more than I should be like, that's the stress of like, I know what I need to be doing, but I feel like I need to be sitting at the table with them every day and in the trenches with them, but they're not sitting up on the, on the hill looking down the line.   but you feel like you've got to do both. it's this weird, like I said, I don't know if it's societal, I don't know if it's female, I don't know if it's ego. I think it's probably a combination of all, but those are psychological traps. And when I see it in a client, I'm like, all right, great, you need to delegate and we need to like take these things off your plate. But I think when you're a founder living through it or the business owner, I think sometimes it's very hard to even see that ego showing up around you or see where you should let go of things.   And then I think it's a lack of trust. Like I've delegated some of these things out. We've hired, like we have paid, last year was a $300,000 oops. And I hired really great people, but like it just didn't pan. So I think that there's also that like, well, how much do you want to throw at this problem to make it go away versus just continuing to carry the torch? So it's like this ball and chain you get out of it and you get back in it. It's like this weird, awkward relationship with yourself and your business that I think is slightly toxic.   but also very addicting, which is probably why it's so toxic on certain levels. So those are mine. I know that was like a very jumbled thought, but those I think are some of the psychological ones that I've seen personally and professionally that keep people very tethered. But I will say, I like boil it down, it's always ego. Always that keeps us tied in because who are we if we don't have all this busyness badge? think that that feels like a deep hollow dark hole for me anytime I think about it.   So I know that I haven't quite grown enough to see that there's a path out. But I think is also maturity and letting go of the ego. Absolutely. Well, and it's so common. It's really what would I kind of boil down oftentimes to founders guilt, owners guilt, right? You're the hero in a lot of situations or can come in and swoop in and help and   There's an identity crisis piece of it to that ego that's like, well, if I'm not doing all these, if I'm not still holding this, who am I for one? And maybe, maybe internally we have this perception of, and you know, we've, we've grown or we've healed in ways that we know, no, I like, I know I am worthy and valued and valuable outside of what I contribute here. But like, what about what everyone else thinks? Then it's this perception of.   Well, if I'm not doing all these things, what does my team think of me? And are they going to think I'm just off on an island somewhere slacking off when I don't deserve that? Or right, like all these, these guilt trips that founders often carry because we can do all these things. So there's, there's no excuse why we shouldn't or couldn't if we can, therefore we should do them. Right. So we just continue to hold and carry that.   but yeah, guilt, ego, those are definitely some, some key pointers that we see a lot. So, as you said, Jill, it just made me think about like, but why, like, where does this stem from? Because we all feel it like I do. And then I'm like, what, does it matter? So then you justify and you rationalize and you hang out in this other Island. And then it's like, I'm going on vacation because I worked like 50,000 hours. And it's like, there comes a line where I think that that   that serenity, that like, I remember there was a day I had to Google, what does a CEO do? Like, I didn't even know. I was like, what do you, like, what do you, if I'm not doing all the things, like, what am I even supposed to do? But I think when you can, when you realize that your company needs a captain, the company needs somebody looking down the line, you start to shift and change and realize that you've got to start shedding off a lot of these things.   and I think you, you feel the guilt and do it anyway, I think has been my mantra to, don't think it will ever be easy. I think you feel the guilt and do it anyway. For sure. Because that guilt is typically self-inflicted for the most part. If you have the right team around you and in the business that care about and are aligned with the division that you've crafted, that you've put forth, they need that from you.   just as much, right? You stepping away, you coming and showing up refreshed, aware, whole, right? Those fragmented pieces of us when we're scrambling to try to just uphold and keep all the plates up in the air is not the best version of ourselves. And so when we realize that too, and the more the team can even vocalize like, yes, like we need this of you and look at   look at all the places that a visionary needs to show up looking down the line, what's ahead, looking outward and not down and in is that pulls the rest of the energy and the rest of that, you know, that perspective for the rest of the team to see that more and more clearly if that's where your focus is. So you're doing them a favor, you're doing a service. ⁓   Cause every, yeah, every successful business needs someone charting that vision. And that is where your eyes are focused. That is where your pull is going toward that. That is what grows the I think that because it feels like it's just this like vision that's not tangible, I think for me at least, and for other people that often can keep us tethered into the company because it doesn't, there's no way to put on a KPI scorecard that I did my visioning.   for the day. It's like, do I even know that I'm showing up and having that as a checklist? But I think when you really are solid in it and you watch a team who has a vision versus a team who doesn't have a vision, you see the intangible, like it's a subconscious push. It's the wind behind the sails. You can see a sail, can't see the wind, but the wind is ultimately what makes it go. And I think when visionaries realize that you are an invisible, very tangible, intangible part,   I think it becomes much more clear of like, no, I need the white noise space. Like I need these things because ultimately it's my job. And I've got to be able to show up as that wind to push this boat in the direction it needs to truly go. I love that. I'm going to use that analogy. That's so well put. That's a good one. Well, to finalize the conversation today, what steps would you suggest to founders struggling to   let go, delegate, while also maintaining alignment with their vision.   That's a great question, Jill. I feel like such an Oreo. I've got a white side of me and it's a black and white in me. Because I'm like, what would I tell my clients? I would tell clients, the way you are able to step back is we set these pieces and we do all this. And then I'm like, well, let's speak from Kiera's perspective of, I've done this. This is where I'm at.   to step back and what I also watched. So I think they do actually go like, I'm like, okay, I'm not an Oreo. Like I've got both parts of the cookie on. Like I brought it together for everybody here. I think both sides, my side and client side would be, I think having a vision for yourself. When I got crystal clear of where I really wanted to go personally and professionally in the next one, three, 10 years, like I grabbed a big sticky pad. It was written out and I stick it in front of me every single day. So I'm looking at that.   that became a lot more clear. My decisions became much cleaner. So I think it would even tie to the book. Like 10 X is easier than two X when you have this big audacious vision, the path becomes so much cleaner and easier than when you're trying to just do a two X move. So I would say for visionaries who feel stuck, that is ultimately where you're at. If I get your 10 X vision, where is that going? Clean up the paths and stay laser focused on that. And then get your team rally behind it.   They get excited. They get the joy behind it. And I think like, even when I say that, I'm like, the 10X path is just so much easier. It's so much cleaner. It's so much more freeing. And then I think like, again, it's hard, but do it anyway. Right now it's a stripping down of letting go of clients for me. And I feel like such an awkward identity. I'm like, if I'm not a consultant, am I going to lose my edge? And it's like, but I'm so clear on the 10X, the 10 year vision.   that that part has to sheath off in order for me to progress and to grow. And I think when you are aligned, also be really careful not to lose that vision. I lost my leg last year. Like it was still there, but I buried it. think keeping that radiant, keeping that vibrant, keeping that like for me, it's a post-it note on the wall, like a giant one. Like this is where I'm headed. This is where the boat's going. This is where the wind needs to push me and the company. I think that that can help you stay true to you.   It can say true and it makes all the other decisions so much easier because then it's a yes or a no. And if you can get that black and white crystal clear and then truly trust and empower your team, that to me is like, I recognize it's a let go of control. It's a surrender like we discussed earlier and belief in your team that they're going to crush it. And if these aren't the right people, right seat, you're going to find them, you're going to grow, you're going to evolve. But the 10X vision is a non-negotiable.   But it's a 10X vision that makes you happy, fulfilled and not like exhausted, out at the end of the finish line. I think I used to feel it was a muscle through rather than a joyous journey. That 10X vision needs to be joyous journey. And who am I at the vibrant self at the end of it? I'm not going to muscle through anymore. I'm going to gracefully navigate. So I've got energy for me, energy for team, energy for family. because I think if we're not thriving in our businesses, we might as well just go get a job from someone else.   You don't want to have a worse job with you as the boss than you would somewhere else. So hopefully that, but I think it's just crystal clear on where you're enjoy that. ⁓ Kiera, thank you so much for your insights, your wisdom and sharing your heart. just truly and authentically it's beautiful. Thank you, Jill. Appreciate being here. Really, really appreciate what you're doing too. Well, thank you so much.   If anyone wants to learn more about you, Dental A Team and expertise of your team, where's the best place to find you and information or get connected? Yeah. We have a podcast, the Dental A Team podcast. So come on over. We'd love to have you there. Tips for teams and for owners. And then also Hello@TheDentalATeam.com or online, like social, we're on Instagram. Dental A Team would be great. But yeah, love to just share, inspire, help.   because I believe like all of us succeeding together is what this journey is about, but succeeding and being fulfilled. It's not, life should be fun. Owning a business should be fun. It does not need to be hard. So let's make it easy and fun together. ⁓ I love that. Well, thank you everyone for listening. Kiera, thank you again for being here and we'll see everyone next time.

Gabe Lullo is the CEO of Alleyoop, a sales development agency working with industry giants such as ZoomInfo, Salesloft, and Adobe.   He has trained over 8,000 salespeople across diverse businesses and, during his tenure in Alleyoop, he has personally hired and managed more than 1,500 BDRs.   With over two decades of experience in sales, marketing, and executive recruitment, his strategies have significantly driven Alleyoop's growth and shaped its corporate culture.   Beyond his career accomplishments, Gabe graduated from the Barney School of Business at the University of Hartford, and his leadership ethos is rooted in cultivating environments that prioritize both professional development and individual success.   Socials: linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lullo/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gabelullo/ Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL61t3M6geW84XNxsfKI5iARqa6_M9MuSy   Episode Summary:   In this episode, host Lyndsay Dowd talks with Gabe Lullo, the CEO of AlleyOOP, a sales-as-a-service company that specializes in helping businesses scale through effective outreach. Gabe shares his unique journey from recruiting to running a company that makes over 11 million cold calls a year.   The conversation dives deep into the realities of building high-performing revenue teams that last. Gabe and Lindsay discuss the difficult but necessary decision to fire toxic top performers to protect company culture. They also explore how to keep Sales Development Representatives (SDRs) motivated in a grueling role, the critical importance of a "video-on" culture for remote teams, and why LinkedIn is no longer optional for modern executives.   Key Takeaways:   - Culture Over Revenue - Mindset is 50% of Success - Video is Essential for Remote Trust - LinkedIn is a Must-Have   Episode Chapters:   00:00:00 – Intro to Gabe Lullo and AlleyOOP 00:02:17 – Gabe's background: From fundraising at 11 years old to recruiting 00:06:00 – The three pillars of success: People, Process, and Technology 00:07:40 – Why you should fire your toxic top performer 00:10:14 – Culture as a KPI and the "shadowing" interview process 00:13:19 – What is AlleyOOP? (The "unsung hero" of sales) 00:18:18 – The SDR Mindset and daily "Power Up" videos 00:21:26 – Why a "camera on" culture matters in remote work 00:24:05 – What inspires Gabe and his legacy 00:26:43 – Why leaders and employees must be on LinkedIn 00:31:26 – Where to find Gabe and his podcast, Do Hard Things

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are a powerful tool. They provide concrete numbers for your practice, showing what's working well, but also clear-cut areas for improvement. Tiff and Kristy break down how and where to use KPIs, plus interpretation, growth factors, and more. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: The Dental A Team (00:00) Hello Dental A Team listeners. I am back here with one of your favorites I know she's one of your favorites because we get some massive kudos and massive reviews and feedback on Miss Kristy and I've got her here today to pick her brain on a couple of different Topics and this one we are diving right in you guys I'm super excited for this topic and for what's to come Kristy you work really really really hard with your clients on   finding the metrics that are actually going to push their needle. And something that I think you key in very easily on is that missing, I said earlier, like a puzzle piece. And you're able to see the picture, the big picture, and then narrow it down into pieces that are going to move ⁓ incrementally, right? We always look for the things that are gonna, a small change that can make a massive difference. And you're really good at keying into those pieces. Now,   Earlier we were recording a podcast and we talking about this massive growth that a platinum client of yours had experienced this year. We're recording this in 2025. It'll release in 2026. So this year they had experienced this incredible growth. And we talked about some of the systems that they had used, handoffs and block scheduling and financial menus, all of the different things that you guys were able to implement lasers, kind of all the things.   DAT Kristy (01:02) Thank   The Dental A Team (01:16) But when it comes to, we can implement things and this I think is what happens when practices come to us. The practices come to us, Kristy, and they say, teach me systems, right? I need systems. We're like, gosh, you have systems. You just don't know if the systems are working or not, right? You wouldn't have gotten this far. You wouldn't be calling down on a team if there were no systems. So we just have to key in on the systems that you have and figure out why, if they are working or not and if they're not, why they're not working. Now, Kristy.   DAT Kristy (01:30) Thank   The Dental A Team (01:45) The word KPI or the acronym KPI, key performance indicators, I think can be daunting and confusing, very confusing. So help us to simplify today. How do you go about choosing the right KPIs? And what are some of your favorite overarching KPIs for practices to use?   DAT Kristy (02:06) Yeah. I love that you say that Tiff, because KPIs, you know me, I do love the numbers because the numbers don't lie, right? And they start to tell a story. They don't tell this whole story, but it lets us see what's working well and be able to celebrate with our teams, you know, what is going good. And it also lets us ⁓ dive into maybe areas where there's opportunity for sure.   And I always like to say there's lead and lag measures. And so I like to look at both, you know, to your point, probably my top ones, obviously everybody knows production, collection. ⁓ And I also like to say, don't get hung up just on percentages. Also look at the numbers too, right? It's both. And then also case acceptance.   dollars diagnosed, dollars accepted, and your percentage accepted. ⁓ And to that point, your re-care and even new patient numbers too.   The Dental A Team (03:14) I totally agree with you. I'd   love that you said don't pay attention just to the percentage. I think both are equally as important. And I think what you mean by that, I can surmise, is we'll take diagnosis for an example, something we talked about in the other podcast we recorded for your Platinum client was that they were able to increase their case acceptance, but you started tracking and looking at what their diagnosis amount was. So if we strictly look at, and I love this one because   I love when practices come in and they make it really easy for us and they're like, gosh, I have a really high case acceptance. have 87 % case acceptance, but my schedule isn't full. I'm not hitting production goals. And we're like, heck yeah, slam dunk, this one's easy. We're not diagnosing enough. So I think that's the differentiating space that you're talking about, the percentage versus the dollar amount, because we can have really high case acceptance of a small dollar amount. So if we're not looking at both of those simultaneously and seeing   are we diagnosing enough dollars to get to the production and collections that we want and then also getting the case acceptance? Is that what you're meaning there by that KPI? And how would you separate those KPIs for someone tracking them that's trying to maybe get to that next level of production?   DAT Kristy (04:29) Yeah, absolutely. That is exactly what I'm talking about because again, that percentage we can celebrate all day long. But if my goal is $100,000 a month and I'm getting 80 % case acceptance of $50,000 a month, obviously that's not enough to reach our goal. definitely looking at dollars diagnosed being at least three times what we want our goal to be. ⁓   we know we're more likely gonna hit our goal. Then we can start working on the percentage and capturing more of the percentage. But it's funny that you say that Tiff, because just the other day I was pointing out to a doctor, I'm like, look at this month, you had 46 % case acceptance, but this month you had 21%. But look at the dollar amount. I'd rather take that dollar amount all day long in the 21 % month than the 46 % month. So again,   The Dental A Team (05:24) Yeah.   DAT Kristy (05:25) then we can start focusing in on how do we capture more of it as long as we're diagnosing enough to get there.   The Dental A Team (05:33) Totally. And what do you use as your marker for the amount of ⁓ diagnosis that they need? So how much production should a practice be diagnosing per doctor in order to hit their goals?   DAT Kristy (05:44) Yeah, depending on what their goal is per month based on their overhead of the practice and you know other factors for growth, we want them to be diagnosing three times at least what that monthly dollar amount is that we want to hit.   The Dental A Team (06:01) Yeah, I totally agree. And that gives you the flexibility of case acceptance, right? So if we're diagnosing three times, because when we look at case acceptance also, there's two different, there's multiple KPIs within KPIs. And you guys, this is why it gets so daunting. And it can be overwhelming to try to find quote unquote, the right KPIs. Like just find KPIs, just start tracking KPIs, just start tracking key performance indicators, and then get more granular as you see, okay, great, this leads to the next one, because you're gonna try to capture too much.   and you're gonna get overwhelmed with the choices. I say that because case acceptance, just case acceptance alone has two variations of KPI. There's a one-to-one, did they schedule or not, right? So if they scheduled a filling but they had a crown diagnosed as well and they only scheduled the filling, that's 100 % because they scheduled something. Or our preferred method, a dollar for dollar.   If they were treatment planned $1,000 and they only scheduled $500, that's a 50 % case acceptance. So thank goodness I picked easy numbers this time. I'm usually really hard on myself there. But that's how the KPIs within that KPI work. So if you're at a 35 % case acceptance, but you're diagnosing three times the amount of your goal or four times and maybe you're a cosmetically driven practice, so your case acceptance is lower than a general.   DAT Kristy (07:02) You   The Dental A Team (07:22) bread and butter, then your case acceptance against your diagnosed is going to work to help fill that schedule. So I think that's a beautiful place to start, that diagnosis plus case acceptance, those go hand in hand. And then Kristy, I always go down, I kind of see it going, so you see the diagnosis, like how much are we diagnosing? Are we diagnosing enough? What percentage of that diagnosis are we getting accepted?   and do we have enough new patients to continue to support that diagnosis? You might see one month you have great stellar diagnosis because you had a massive amount of new patients, but that new patient number isn't consistent. So then next month your new patients drop, well so does your diagnosis, and your case acceptance probably does, because you're not feeling so hot either. You're like, what the heck is going on? You're spiraling, so is your case acceptance. So they all follow each other. So I kind of see that like.   diagnosis, case acceptance, then new patients. And on average, Kristy, what would you say a good KPI number for new patients is per full-time doctor?   DAT Kristy (08:28) Yeah, I say anywhere between 25 and 35 per full-time doctor for sure is a healthy metric.   The Dental A Team (08:35) Yeah, I totally agree, totally agree. And what other KPIs would you say, so think diagnosis, case acceptance, new patients, those are really, really easy to track numbers and those are definitely indicators of everything else. What are some other key performance indicators that you typically have offices start out with?   DAT Kristy (08:38) Thank   Yeah. The other one is your reappointment rate and even taking a look at how many patients are going inactive because surprise, surprise docs, a lot of times we're really happy about that new patient number, but then we see, there's equally that amount going out the back door because we haven't worked re-care. And so again, we can be very strategic and focus on the re-care. We can look at the patients that have outstanding treatment because like you said, Tiff,   it definitely directly affects the doctor's schedule when we're not getting those patients back in that have outstanding treatment. So that is one that I definitely would recommend looking at.   The Dental A Team (09:32) Absolutely.   Yeah, and that one, Kristy, I love your appointment, right? Because it gets the team involved too. It's very easy for the doctor, the owner, the office manager to think that all of these KPIs need to land on you and that you need to be the one tracking them. But those kind of smaller variable KPIs really get the team involved. And to that point as well, do think, I think doctors knowing their diagnosis is massive, but I treatment coordinators should be the ones that are tracking and reporting on that metric. And this is where   DAT Kristy (09:41) Mm-hmm.   The Dental A Team (10:06) know, practices come in and they're like, I need to track these KPIs. And they're like, Kristy, can't fill out the scorecard. We're like, cool, you shouldn't be, that's okay. So taking that, you know, to back up, we use a scorecard with all of our clients that tracks a ton of metrics that are indicators of making your goal or not. And so what we like to do, Kristy, I know you do this really well too. ⁓ Also, I like to split it between what makes sense. So I like the person who is being held accountable to the result.   to be the one that's tracking that measurable and filling it in. And then we're all coming together and talking about the results, but we're really looking at, if I'm a treatment coordinator, I'm tracking the treatment case acceptance, which simultaneously tracks our diagnosed amount. So I'm tracking the diagnosis and the case acceptance. If I'm a scheduling coordinator, I'm tracking open hours and new patients, right? And probably attrition.   which is the patients going out. And Kristy, to your point, I actually had a practice the other day that was like, Tiff, we're doing really great on new patients, but my active patient count isn't changing enough to show those new patients. And I was like, that's your attrition. That's where they're going out the other side. And Kristy, that's where that reappointment rate comes in to play, right? And that reappointment rate then can go to a scheduling coordinator as well, but also can go to hygiene. And I know a lot of people,   DAT Kristy (11:29) Thank you.   The Dental A Team (11:31) struggle getting KPIs that are for the team. I think those are those areas. So I love that. What else do you dive into kind of on like a more granular space that can get that team involved that can help doctors and office managers see that it's not all on them?   DAT Kristy (11:42) Yeah.   ⁓ 100%. ⁓ Another area of metric. Well, let me go back to the reappointment rate. I think sometimes again, just like I was telling you on numbers and percentage, again, even in that, sometimes talking, hey, we saw 100 patients last week and eight didn't get reappointed. That's eight hours of hygiene in six months from now. And I don't know about you, but if I'm working full time, I don't want to cut a day out of my schedule. So sometimes   The Dental A Team (12:07) Yeah.   DAT Kristy (12:16) putting it in that perspective can make a huge difference. And ⁓ Tiff, another area that I love looking at is the AR. AR for patient AR and also insurance metrics and formulating ⁓ goals around that, know, what's healthy. And ideally we don't have more than one, one and a half times our monthly production sitting out there in AR.   The Dental A Team (12:25) Yeah.   Yeah, I love that point. That is a massive, massive space. so, Kristy, to take all of these things together, really, we're looking at are your KPIs actually driving your growth? So how would you kind of decipher within some of these KPIs we've talked about how the practices could see, are they actually driving my growth?   DAT Kristy (13:04) Yeah, looking over the year to year ⁓ metrics and tracking it for where they want to be. And one of the things that I think we're really good at, Tif, is doing the projections for the year and reverse engineering it. So then we have a guideline, if you will, to work toward not just the big year goal, but quarterly and monthly. And so same thing with my teams. I'm always looking at   You know, the month view, the week view and the day view. Chunk it down, make it easier. And again, if there's a gap, usually when you're looking at it in a week view, there's not much of ⁓ a change. It's usually doing one more thing, right? Adding one more thing to our schedule can make a huge difference.   The Dental A Team (13:53) Yeah, I totally agree. And Kristy, if a practice is going from, let's talk about the practice we spoke of already today. They're going from 2.8 ish to over 3 million. What were some good KPIs that you chose for that practice specifically to increase that production goal that year?   DAT Kristy (14:11) Yeah, capturing more case acceptance, for sure. Dollars. How can we capture more at one time? And again, I think the biggest thing TIFF to recognize is behind every one of those metrics is a system. And really, I look at it twofold. If the metric isn't where we want it, let's pull out the systems that we know can directly contribute to it. And I look at it like a recipe.   Probably a lot of people this time of year are baking, but I'll use the analogy and I do it with my clients. If we have a chocolate chip recipe, let's pull out the recipe. Are we still following it to a T? ⁓ And if not, why not? Maybe it's we substituted a cup of sugar for a cup of salt and we just need to get back to the real recipe. Or if we followed it to a T, maybe we need to find a new recipe and we'll develop it together to get the results we want.   The Dental A Team (15:11) Yeah, I love that. love that. in essence, we're tracking the question, are your KPIs actually driving your growth? We don't know until we start tracking them and then looking at this isn't changing or this isn't exactly where I wanted it to be. So let's look at what got us there. And I think we do fail to do that. Sometimes we just say, you know, this is how we've always done it. Well, my AR is out of control.   This is how I've always done it. Eventually it will find its way back down is not the case. So we've got to look at what we're doing. What's that recipe and do we need to add a little brown sugar, you know, sprinkles onto our chocolate chip cookies? Like what does that need to look like in order to make the change to get the result that we want to get the better cookies? Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. Well,   DAT Kristy (15:44) you   You got it. You nailed it.   The Dental A Team (15:57) Honestly, you guys, we can talk about KPIs for 16 hours because there's so many different KPIs that can be brought up within a dental practice and really truly you've got to look at what's going to work best for you and for your team. What is the result that you're looking for? Like Kristy said, what's that end goal? And then reverse engineer it. So if you're looking for production, looking for collections, like what is it that gets you the production and the collection? What are those systems underneath it? That's how you're gonna figure out the right KPIs.   I'm a firm believer that there's really not a wrong KPI. There's just more KPIs. so if you're halfway through the year, a quarter through the year, and you're like, gosh, actually, I need to add this. Cool, add it, change it. It doesn't matter just because whatever you choose here in January does not mean that that's for the whole year. It just means this is what's getting us there right now, and it's going to turn into more. ⁓ Kristy, you are phenomenal. Thank you so much for today.   Thank you for the work that you put in with your clients on these types of things and everything else that you do. And I love these nuggets. Thank you. Just thank you so much, Kristy. I know that the listeners are really appreciating this today.   DAT Kristy (17:05) Absolutely, my pleasure.   The Dental A Team (17:08) Amazing. And guys, go listen again. Reach out. If you are a client of ours, ask your consultant if you guys aren't talking about KPIs, if we're not using that word specifically, and you're like, hey, what are we tracking here? We're tracking and we're probably just not using that word specifically. So ask your consultant. Ask where you're at. Ask if you need to shift anything. And if you're not a client yet, then reach out. Hello@TheDentalATeam.com. We are happy to give you some ideas to take a look at what you've got going on and really   let you know what we could do for you or what you can do even without us to increase from where you're at now to where you want to go. So reach out, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com and we will catch you guys next time. Thank you.

David Stever is the former CEO and CMO of beloved ice cream brand Ben & Jerry's. David started with the company back in the early 80's, working as a tour guide at their factory in Waterbury, Vermont. Over time, David ascended within Ben & Jerry's, helping to grow the then start-up into an iconic, multinational corporation. Over the course of his decades-long career there, David led marketing initiatives, drove massive brand growth, expanded global market share, and helped facilitate reinvention and product innovation, all while keeping Ben & Jerry's social mission front and center. He joins Roy to discuss his journey from tour guide to C-Suite, the many learnings he took from founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, the profound effect of pursuing a triple bottom line, and much more.        Highlights from our conversation include: David's initial interest in the ice cream industry and how it evolved into his career (1:32)Working with Ben and Jerry in the early days (3:50)Leadership lessons learned through periods of massive growth and scaling (6:13)David's strengths and keys to success as Ben & Jerry's CMO (8:48)What surprised him the most when he transitioned from CMO to CEO (13:48)What it means to do “business as unusual” (15:29)The influence of Ben & Jerry's blend of activism and commerce on his leadership (18:12)How David defines Ben & Jerry's unique culture and how he helped sustain it through the years and through acquisition (20:26)Successful hiring throughout Ben & Jerry's different phases (22:48)Qualities David sought in his top leadership team (27:40)What he believes is often overlooked when assessing prospective talent (28:47)David's next chapter and what he's most excited about in looking ahead (31:00)Visit HowIHire.com for transcripts and more on this episode.Follow Roy Notowitz and Noto Group Executive Search on LinkedIn for updates and featured career opportunities.Subscribe to How I Hire:AppleSpotifyAmazon

Sangeet Paul Choudhary is the bestselling co-author of Platform Revolution, founder of Platformation Labs, senior fellow at UC Berkeley, and author of Reshuffle, exploring how AI fundamentally reorganizes value creation architecture.Episode Sponsor: Fiscal AI is a modern data terminal that gives investors instant access to twenty years of financials, earnings transcripts, and extensive segment and KPI data—use my link for a two-week free trial plus 15% off: https://fiscal.ai/talkingbillions/3:00 - Sangeet describes growing up in an industrial town where everyone's father worked at the steel plant, creating a homogeneous, "straight-jacketed" environment. Digital technologies opened new career possibilities beyond this rigid path.5:45 - The Intelligence Distraction: Sangeet challenges the dominant narrative of AI benchmarked by intelligence metrics. "AI is not an alternative to human thought. It could be an alternative to human-performed knowledge work, but it's not an alternative to human thought."8:30 - The GPS metaphor: AI's real impact comes from reorganizing systems, not raw intelligence. Like GPS restructures traffic flow by coordinating unconnected drivers, AI reorganizes economic activity by creating shared representations of complex spaces.15:00 - Travel industry transformation: Dreaming on Instagram, planning on Google Flights, booking through fragmented systems. AI could create unified representations connecting desire to action seamlessly.28:00 - Piracy as market research: "Piracy is a form of market research showing unmet demand." When illegal activity fills gaps, it reveals where legitimate systems fail to serve users.35:00 - Platform economics: Network effects create winner-take-all dynamics. Once critical mass is achieved, platforms become nearly impossible to displace.42:00 - Solution vs. execution: Professional services charging for billing hours face commoditization. The future belongs to those charging for outcomes and results, not execution time.48:00 - Orica example: Mining explosives company stopped selling products, started selling blast outcomes. Shifted from commodity provider to results-aligned partner, capturing more value and developing superior expertise.52:00 - Don't need AI strategy, need strategy for AI world: "What is our strategy given the conditions that AI creates?" AI dissolves industry boundaries by making previously siloed knowledge accessible across sectors.54:30 - Value migration: Ask where value sat before, where it moves with AI, then position to capture that shifted value.Podcast Program – Disclosure StatementBlue Infinitas Capital, LLC is a registered investment adviser and the opinions expressed by the Firm's employees and podcast guests on this show are their own and do not reflect the opinions of Blue Infinitas Capital, LLC. All statements and opinions expressed are based upon information considered reliable although it should not be relied upon as such. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.Information presented is for educational purposes only and does not intend to make an offer or solicitation for the sale or purchase of any specific securities, investments, or investment strategies. Investments involve risk and unless otherwise stated, are not guaranteed.

Travis Timmons shares with host Andrew Stotz how a decade of frustration running his physical therapy practice turned into joy once he discovered Deming's philosophy and embraced systems thinking. Through PDSA cycles, clearer processes, and genuine team involvement, he transformed Fitness Matters from chaotic growth to a scalable organization getting stellar outcomes. His story shows how small businesses can create stability, joy in work, and remarkable results by improving the system rather than pushing harder.   TRANSCRIPT   0:00:02.1 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today I'm here with featured guest Travis Timmons. Travis, are you ready to tell us about your Deming journey?   0:00:19.7 Travis Timmons: Hey Andrew, thanks for having me. And yeah, very excited to share our journey and how impactful it's been on both our company, but also me personally and my family. So, super excited to kind of share where we started before Deming and where we're at today. So I'll just dive right in if that sounds like a good...   0:00:39.9 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And I think just for the audience here, I'll just mention that Travis is physical therapist, founder and president of Fitness Matters in Columbus, Ohio, going on his 27th year of business. And you know, you and I have had some discussions. You've had a lot of great things that you've written and we've gone through and I think it's really an exciting story, particularly for a small mid sized business owner who's just frustrated as hell that things aren't going the way that they want. And I think your frustration a long time ago was a driving force. So I'm excited for you to share your story. So yeah, take it away.   0:01:22.6 Travis Timmons: Yeah, very excited. Yeah, 2000 is when we started, January 2000. So coming up on 27 years, as you mentioned, do physical therapy and wellness. And the first 10 years I was in business, pretty good at being a physical therapist. Started my own business and had no idea how to run a business. I knew a lot about physical therapy, but just kind of shooting from the hip in regard to business. Spent about a decade struggling, frustrated. We were growing, but growing slowly, growing chaotically. No process, it was just a, it was a heavy burden, to be honest with you. We were growing, but it was kind of Herculean effort on my part.   0:02:10.1 Andrew Stotz: I'm just curious how you were feeling at that time. Like there's gotta be a better way or this is the way business is and I just gotta muscle through this or how were you feeling at the time?   0:02:21.0 Travis Timmons: I was feeling frustrated and isolated. Didn't quite know where to turn. Yeah, I guess that's how, and just a burden. Didn't want to let the team down, I did not want the business to fail. I knew we had something different to offer. Just really had no idea how to scale that in a professional way. And along the journey was very fortunate to have a client who had a very successful business, took me under his wing. Ray Crook is his name. Started mentoring me and as luck would have it, he was familiar with Dr. Deming and a very long story short, after several meetings with him over time, some mentoring, I'd read the book along the way, the E-Myth Revisited and had some learnings from that book that really jumped out at me and came to the conclusion, both with reading that book and some feedback from Ray of basically, hey, it's time to grow up and turn this into a real business. If you're going to do this, let's do it right. And at that, around that time he introduced me to Kelly Allen with the Deming Institute. And you know, so we were 10 years into some chaos, had really no process, just would try stuff, see if it stuck or didn't.   0:03:43.5 Travis Timmons: If that didn't work, didn't really have any way to measure if stuff was working well. So really just a lot of chaos. And became introduced to Deming through Kelly Allen about 10 to 11 years into our journey and man, was that a breath of fresh air in terms of like having a direction to go in. After a few meetings with Kelly, him getting a better understanding of what was important to me, I think him just really understanding that I was serious about wanting to turn our organization into a large, professionally run and well run organization that would have a positive impact on people's lives, both team members and clients. I think he kind of, I think that we were so bad off he took pity on me to begin with, just to be honest with you, and he was like, man, this guy needs a lot of help. He could do some good in the world with what the services they have to offer. But if he doesn't figure out how to run a business professionally, they're never going to scale.   0:04:44.0 Andrew Stotz: And it's interesting that you reached out. I mean, there's a lot of people that are stuck in that situation and they really don't, either they don't reach out or they're afraid to reach out or you know, maybe they think there's no solution or nobody's going to help me. And you know, certainly when you're small, you also don't have huge budgets to hire people to come in and fix your business. You know, I'm just curious, like what drove you to even reach out?   0:05:09.8 Travis Timmons: I think I was fortunate enough to, A, have the mentor with Ray. And then secondly, have always been a believer in you got to check your ego at the door and know that you don't know everything. I think I've seen Business owners that are afraid to admit they don't know everything and so they keep things insulated and that just doesn't get you anywhere.   0:05:35.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah.   0:05:36.3 Travis Timmons: So I just was fortunate kind of how I was raised as arrogance isn't a good thing, so check your ego at the door and learn from, learn from people smarter than you. And so I kind of took that fully at heart and like, all right, I have no idea how to run a business. I need to learn how to do that from really smart people. Read a lot of business books over the years, but the Deming philosophy, when I was introduced to that at the two and a half day seminar, went to that. I got to the Deming two and a half day in, I think that was 2013. So I was 13 years into the entire journey by the time I had met with Kelly, done some learning. And then at a time where the Deming two and a half day was offered in Ohio to where I could get to it, to your point earlier, budget plays into things for small businesses. So I was able to drive to that one and that two and a half day seminar just opened my eyes up to things that I knew in my heart but had no idea how to make that happen.   0:06:46.2 Travis Timmons: And what I mean by that, Andrew, is one of the key things I took away from that first two and a half day is Deming's belief that roughly 96% of issues within an organization are not people issues, but they're process and system issues. And that aligned with my worldview of if you hire good people, which we did, they show up every day wanting to do a good job as long as they have a good system and process to work within something that's professionally put together. So that was takeaway number one that really resonated with me. And the person responsible for said system is me. There's no passing the buck as the owner. And that resonated with me. It's a big responsibility to own a business in terms of the people and clients you're responsible for. And there's no passing the buck. You're responsible for the system at the end of the day.   0:07:42.3 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. I remember when I was 24 attending Deming seminar, when I was working for Pepsi, and it was a little bit different situation than yours. I could see, though, the same thing resonated with me. I could see that people were hemmed in by the system. And even though many people in the factory had really good intentions and they wanted to do a better job, they literally couldn't because they didn't have the tools or the budget or the this or the that. And a lot of times it's easy for senior management, particularly in a big company, to say figure it out, your job is to figure it out. But that only goes so far and there's eventually a point of exasperation for people working in a company that, like, I just, there's a limit here and I'm not going to kill myself trying to do something that I can't change. And so it just, I was coming from a very different perspective as an employee in a huge company versus you at a perspective of, this is my company, I set the rules.   0:08:46.5 Travis Timmons: Yeah, can do whatever we want. And you mentioned something there. It reminds me of a quote from that first two and a half day, and it still sticks with me a decade and a half later. Almost a lot of businesses complain about the term. We have a lot of dead wood in terms of employees. And the quote, I remember Kelly sharing this, it's like, well, did you hire dead wood? Because if you did, that's on you. Or did you hire live wood and kill it and that's on you from your standpoint of, from a system. And I'm like, man, 100% true. And I hired, I had good people on our team, but we didn't have good processes to keep from killing that live wood I would say. So, yeah. And to your point on budget, yeah, I had and still do have quite a bit different budget than Pepsi. Right. So one of the other things that jumped out at me early on that made Deming very approachable and something I could engage with very easily as a small business owner was the concept of PDSAs, the Plan-Do-Study-Act.   0:09:58.5 Travis Timmons: That was a game changer for us because I was like, all right, I don't have to hire a big business consultant. We don't have to hire or pay for a bunch of software. There's very simple things we can do via the Plan, Do Study Act PDSA method that we can create systems or improve upon systems and those little experimental ways and not have to bet the farm. You know, you see a lot of businesses that try to go through these huge transformative activities, bring in a new software to fix all their problems. Things that are very expensive with no real way of understanding what their aim is, what their theory is, or even if it'll work. So, yeah, your comment on budget there, I think, is what makes Deming so approachable for any size organization, but the budget's really not a limit from the PDSA standpoint. So those were some of my key takeaways very early on on my first two and a half day Deming, it was an eye opener and just really resonated with how, how I saw the world in terms of from a human level. Just had zero idea as a physical therapist with no business training on how to implement and run a professional organization.   0:11:13.8 Travis Timmons: So as things evolved, kind of went from the kind of the term chaos to process. So after that two and a half day, I went back to our team, which was small at the time. I think we had, we were a very small company at the time. I think we had 10 employees, nine or 10 team members at the time and just presented to them like, hey, this is going to be how we run our organization. There's this thing I heard about this guy called Dr. Deming. Some of it's going to seem a little odd, but this is how we're going to do things. And just started out early on, like just with PDSA, educated them on what that meant and we're all going to work on things together. So immediately it started enforcing a culture of improvement and collaboration and voice. Rather than Travis just coming up with random ideas, we worked on them together, made the system visible and then put some experiments in place. I talked to them about operational definition. That was a new term to me and gave them some examples. We wanted every client to have a good visit with us.   0:12:29.2 Travis Timmons: What in the heck does a good visit mean? Right. We didn't have an operational definition of that, so we created an operational definition of this is a good visit at Fitness Matters. So those were some fun things early on.   0:12:42.3 Andrew Stotz: I'm curious. There's two things, the first one is for someone that really doesn't know anything about PDSA, the Plan, Do, Study, Act process or cycle. Could you give an example either of one that you did early on or one that you think is the best illustration of the application of PDSA so people can understand what you're saying, because I know it's a big part of what one of the, let's say, tools that you've used in your process.   0:13:10.1 Travis Timmons: Yeah, one of the early on ones we did that was fun to do with the team because it changed our pricing model for our private pay team. Quick example, like we do personal training and Pilates muscle activation technique. Traditionally in that world, people buy those visits one at a time or you'll buy a package of 10 or 20 at a time at a discounted rate, volume, volume pricing, right. So we had that, we had 10 pack and 20 pack of personal training. We had a 10 pack and 20 pack of Pilates, same for muscle activation technique. And we had clients that would do sometimes all three of those services, but for them to be able to optimize their discount, they had to buy a 20 pack of Pilates, a 20 pack of personal training, and then the same with muscle activation technique. So after learning some things with Dr. Deming at the two and a half day that Kelly presented at, it's like we got to be easier to do business with. Be easy to do business with and how can we do that? So our PDSA was how can we change our pricing model on the private pay services to be easier to do business with and optimize how clients can move in our system freely.   0:14:25.9 Travis Timmons: So part of the concept of PDSA is you trial it, you put your whole theory together of what you think will be true. How are you going to study it? How long are you going to try it? So we had four clients that we knew well, that we told them, we're trying this new pricing model. Would you be willing to experiment on this with us? So we didn't roll it out company wide. We just tried it with a small segment, and we called it Fitness Matters Dollars and the do the Fitness Matters Dollars package. Then the client could use that discounted bundle of money for any of our services. So the discount applied to any of the services they did rather than having to buy a bunch of different packages. So the beauty of it is you can try it small. Had we gotten it wrong, we could have thrown it out and only five clients would have experienced the error. And they knew they were part of an experiment and they were happy to help us improve. It was a big win. That was 12 years ago. That's still how we do our pricing today.   0:15:29.1 Travis Timmons: It makes it very easy for clients to optimize their health within our system and not have to spend a bunch of money with us and have a lot of monetary resistance moving about our system. So that's one example that comes to mind.   0:15:41.4 Andrew Stotz: That's a good one. And I think if you think about, let's say an accountant may say, well, but wait a minute, the cost of three different services is different and that's the idea of how do we simplify this for the client, and that's interesting. Now, did you write it down, did you go to a Whiteboard. How did you actually go through that process?   0:16:02.9 Travis Timmons: Oh, that's 13 years ago. You're testing my...   0:16:06.5 Andrew Stotz: Oh, well, you can think about a current one, too.   0:16:09.6 Travis Timmons: 12 years ago. Yeah. When we're doing a current one, we'll get together as a team. Like, we're having our annual team off-site the end of January. And we'll come up, we try to come away with three, maybe four PDSAs as a team, and we'll write it up on the whiteboard. What's the problem we're trying to solve? Another key quote I've learned from Kelly Allen over the years is "the problem named, is the problem solved." So we want to make sure we're naming the right problem first. What really is the problem? So we talk about that through our entire company so that I'm getting feedback from all pieces of the system and then we'll map it out. Sometimes we'll do fishbone charts to look where in the process are we trying to do an experiment? And then there's the PDSA kind of chart that we'll use for bigger ones so we can study it. What's our aim? What's our theory? What do we think is going to happen with this experiment? How long are we going to study it, and what's our expected outcome? So part of the PDSA magic, as you know, is what are you trying to accomplish by what method, in what time frame, and what do you think is going to happen so you can go back and test your theory after you've studied it? So, yeah, sometimes we, if it's something bigger system-wide, we put it down on paper. We have a PDF that's fillable for each new PDSA.   0:17:35.5 Andrew Stotz: And for some people listening, they may think, well, I mean, isn't that what business does? I mean like owner comes up with an idea and says, yeah, I think we could try this and see what happens. Right. And ultimately everybody's kind of poking in the dark in business. We're not given a manual nobody really knows what we're doing. What's the difference between the way that you are poking in the dark, trying to hey, let's try this, let's try that compared to the PDSA.   0:18:08.5 Travis Timmons: I don't think I learned that till my second Deming two and a half day. So the second time I went, I took some senior team members with me so we could get more eyes around what in the world is this Deming person, who is Dr. Deming? What's this System of Profound Knowledge? To answer your question, I think the realization I had that I didn't have before, kind of going down the Deming journey is I didn't view our business as an entire system. I lacked that awareness of system view versus pieces and parts view. Pre-Deming, there's a problem over here and you go chase that fire and then another problem pop up over here, and to your point like there's lots of books out there on how to solve problems or you know, you hear like there's books out there on ownership thinking. And you know, it's like, well, do you have a culture and a system and by what method do you give people the ability to have that ownership thinking? Yeah, I think that's was the big aha of looking at the entire system. Whereas previously I was looking at it in silos and only trying to solve problems when a fire arose rather than system operationally efficient, trying to get efficient and optimizing the entire system. So that was probably one of the big aha's for me. Didn't happen day one. But as I got to understand Deming more, the system view of how it all has to be working together for optimization just changes your lens totally.   0:19:51.5 Andrew Stotz: So you've talked about PDSA, you've talked about operational definitions, you've talked about systems thinking, three core principles. One last thing on PDSA is like, I wonder what percent of the total value of doing PDSA comes from doing PDSA. In other words, the actual part of forcing yourself to get people in a room to discuss what's the problem, the Fishbone diagram, think about what's our aim, what's our theory, what's our hypothesis? Let's write that down. How are we going to study that? How we know if our hypothesis was true and you know, that type of thing. And sometimes I, after listening to you, I was thinking it, I suspect that a large amount of the final benefit you get from a PDSA is really front end loaded in all the work that you do to set it up.   0:20:48.3 Travis Timmons: Yeah, yeah. Going back to your comment earlier Andrew, on when you were at Pepsi, if I heard you correctly, you didn't really have the ability to share voice or to have an impact on the system. I think you're spot on, the PDSA itself, a couple things, number one as a small business owner, you got to check your ego at the door. Your team sees stuff happening that you don't have visibility on and they're probably going to have better ideas on how to fix it than you might if you're removed from it a step or two. And then the culture of like, oh, Travis is going to listen to my ideas. I find value in that. And then when we implement a change, like nobody likes change. Right? But when you've worked on it collectively as a team and you're ready to move forward with it, that's a game changer. You're not pushing a string at that point. Everybody's leaning in because they understand they're part of the solution and you're allowing that. Where a lot of businesses are top down, command and control, that doesn't usually work very well. So yeah, I think you're spot on, Andrew.   0:22:02.5 Travis Timmons: I think that so much happens with the PDSA process from a culture and team involvement. And if you don't have that, you're going to have a hard time retaining team members, in my opinion.   0:22:16.9 Andrew Stotz: So you look like a pretty relaxed guy compared to probably what you were like many years ago when this all was going on. Maybe take us through. Okay, so you're implementing these things and what's happening, what changes are happening, what transformation is going on with you and with your organization?   0:22:36.9 Travis Timmons: Yeah, so it's a multi-year process that we went through. Still a lot of work, you know, it's not like, hey, this just solves every problem. It just changes all the lenses you look through and you have a by what method path. Here's how we are going to think about our business. So that got rid of a lot of confusion for me. I knew how we were going to go from this size business to my, we had a BHAG, Big Hairy Audacious Goal from Good to Great. We wanted to have four facilities. At the time I went through Deming, we had one. We wanted to have four facilities or more to see if we could replicate our high level of care, team member engagement, all those things. So we were working, I was working just as many hours then. It just was not frustrating, it was exciting. It was a lot of collaboration that was energizing and everything as we scaled got easier. I was not going to be able to scale our business with what I was doing because had I scaled it, the headaches would have just been out of control. The loss of revenue, like there would have just been so much inefficiency on our organization.   0:24:00.4 Travis Timmons: So I would say for that next from 2013 through 2018, we got really locked in. So we spent about, I was a little conservative at the time. I was also in Army National Guard, so had a trip across the pond and just wasn't quite at a point where I could financially roll the dice and start multiplying locations and stuff like that. But around 2018, 2019, we got to the point where the team knew Deming well. I felt like we put a lot of systems, processes in place that were replicatable and I'm like, all right, here comes a real big PDSA. We're going to go get another clinic, we're going to go do another location, and we're going to test it. So that was a big PDSA. A lot of the ones we had done up to that were small. At some point you got to go a little bigger. And we were very confident in our model. So we acquired a practice in our town and like, hey, 80% of what they do is what we do, 20% is not Deming and service lines and stuff like that. So our theory, our PDSA, was can we acquire and put Fitness Matters, culture and process in place and grow?   0:25:26.3 Travis Timmons: And we did. We were very successful with that. I had team member retention with that. You know, a lot of times when you buy out another business kind of, people head for the doors, including the owner. That owner is still working with us six years later, then we started growing. It's like, all right, here we go. We can do another one. We can do another one. Put leadership in place at each location that understand Deming. We have our processes written down. We have operational definitions written down. People know what PDSA is. If they're new to our team, it takes them about six months to figure out what all these acronyms mean. So now we're going quicker since, you know, since in the last four years, as an example, we've tripled our physical therapy volume and doubled our private pay wellness volume. And in the service line, that's fairly fast growth. Probably not fast in the IT world, but in the service line growth in a very competitive market with how physical therapy and referrals work. There aren't many private practices left out there because it's so competitive where we're thriving.   0:26:41.4 Andrew Stotz: It seems like a hard business. It seems like a hard business to scale because there's this personal aspect, there's this interaction. You know, think about the exact opposite. I don't know, let's say Instagram or whatever. There's zero personal interaction. It can scale to billions. What are the constraints to growth that you feel in your business.   0:27:03.3 Travis Timmons: So constraints are reimbursement from health insurance, referrals from physicians, because health care is consolidating. So a health care system buys up smaller organizations, physicians, and then they have physical therapy within those systems and then they're highly encouraged to refer their physical therapy in-house. So that's a big challenge for us. So we don't, we're not owned by physicians. So we have to, we have to be the best at what we do for physicians and clients to want to choose us. So one of the things Dr. Deming really big on at quality, right. You have to continually have a system that has improving quality as you grow. And the way we grow is we have our outcomes. So how well a patient does at the end of a plan of care is roughly 35% higher than national average. We're 35% above the competition because of our processes, our system, our clients, how we look at integrating our clients from the first visit, the first phone call, follow-on visits, the entire, again, thinking back to that system conversation. And I think a lot of businesses, if they haven't been exposed to Deming, they miss that very critical piece of, if your sales isn't aligned with your implementation, isn't aligned with your billing process, anywhere along that service line, going through that fishbone, if it's all not good, like we could give excellent physical therapy care, but if we have a horrible billing system, we lose clients, end of story. If we have a horrible process of answering the phone to schedule evaluations, we're out of business.   0:29:00.0 Travis Timmons: Could have the best physical therapists in the world. So, yeah, that's what it's allowed us to do from a scaling and fun standpoint. And kind of now almost 27 years in we're at a point where, one of the litmus tests I had, like, if we do this well, if we really are all-in on Deming and it's system process definitions and we have it mapped out, this should run without Travis. And I see a lot of business owners are the choke point. Like they want to be the problem solver for everything. Everything has to flow through them, slow stuff down. You're not getting all of the information from your team that could solve problems so much quicker. So one of my litmus tests early on was like, if this really works well, the business should run without me present certainly for weeks and weeks at a time. And we're there. So that's why I look Relaxed now. I didn't look this relaxed a decade ago. So, it's fun, it's fun.   0:30:11.5 Andrew Stotz: I was looking for my Out of the Crisis book, but I went online and I wanted to highlight two of the 14 points because it's something that you mentioned about improving your process and all of that. And the first one is the first point and you know, it's the first point for a reason. And number one is "create constancy of purpose towards improvement of product and service with the aim to become competitive and stay in business and provide jobs." And number five is "improve constantly and forever, the system of production and service to improve quality and productivity and thus constantly decrease costs." So how do you embody that in your business, this, because when I first read the "constancy of purpose," I originally thought it meant pick your direction and stay constant with that. But then I started to realize, no, no, it's about how are we improving our product and service.   0:31:18.9 Travis Timmons: Yeah. So if you're not evolving with, technology is everywhere. Right. So if you're not paying attention to that within how it impacts your business and constantly trying to optimize how technology interfaces with your business, you're in trouble. So, like, we're right now getting ready to, I'd say once a year we do something fairly large within technology. Next year we're going to probably be changing our documentation software because there's a newer one out there that instead of having four different softwares we have to interface with, there'll be one. So that cuts down on rework, that cuts down on learning time for a new team member. There's less resistance for clients to understand how scheduling and billing work. So I don't know if I'm answering your question, Andrew, but I think from a standpoint of, I think it was Jack Welch I heard say years ago in an interview, "there's two ways a business is going. You're either growing or you're dying." And that resonated with me, there's no sitting still because if you do, you're going to get run over. So that's always looking through, can we make it easier to schedule?   0:32:40.0 Travis Timmons: Like right now we don't offer online scheduling for physical therapy. We will in 2026. And if we don't figure that out, it could be a reason that we would eventually go out of business. So I just looked through that mindset. There's always somebody coming after you.   0:32:58.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, yeah, that's...   0:33:00.3 Travis Timmons: Complacency doesn't work.   0:33:01.3 Andrew Stotz: I like to think about when I was young and I took a break and I stood still. I was standing on the flat ground, no problem. But now with my 87 year old mother, if she goes one day, two days, three days without movement, she's going backwards and it's harder to catch back up. And I start to realize she's operating on a plane that has been slanted against her. And eventually the slant will win against all of us. But in the world of business if you think, well it's not about growing or dying, well, there's someone out there trying to take your business by providing a better product or service. And that's just the reality that actually is invigorating to know that, and as Dr. Deming said to have a great competitor is such a valuable thing. If you're just poking around and you're doing okay in market you're probably not going to improve as much. So that the focus on improvement is something that I just find really fascinating. There's another question that I have which is these days, way I look at like the job of leadership is that it's like imagine a very strong magnet ahead of you and you're constantly pulled to that magnet.   0:34:37.7 Andrew Stotz: That magnet is the average, the consensus what everybody's doing. And you can't help but feel that force. And if you don't realize that you're being affected by that force, you're just being pulled into it. And what I mean by that is if you say, well, what if we tried something different, a different way of doing something and then you go to customers, no, sorry, your competitor does this. If you don't do that, I'm not going to give you the business. And so you're naturally drawn towards the center or towards consensus, but what you're doing is trying to pull your business and yourself and your thinking and your team away from that and saying there's a different way. And how hard is that?   0:35:24.4 Travis Timmons: It's hard. You have to have a different lens. Comment earlier, the problem named is the problem solved. One of the things, I love that analogy. I've never heard it described that way. In physical therapy it's very common for a physical therapist to have two or three patients scheduled at the same time because the problem that was named by most organizations is poor arrival rate. And if you have holes in your schedule you're not getting paid. So they look at that as a revenue loss. So to answer your question, that's where our industry is. Like you got a double, triple book or you're going to have lower revenue. Well, what that does is it increases, in my opinion, increases the likelihood that people are not going to come because they're going to have a bad experience, they're going to have poor outcomes. Physicians are going to stop referring because their patients aren't getting better. So problem named is the problem solved? And we pulled, I like that magnet. I'm going to use that one. But pulled away and said, no, if we provide one on one care at a very high level and the entire system works well for the patient, they're going to show up, they're going to continue to show up.   0:36:49.0 Travis Timmons: They're going to be happy to pay for the service we're offering because it's going to be exceptional. And because they show up, they're going to get better. And because they get better, they're going to go tell their doctor and then more doctors are going to refer to us. And that's thinking much differently. So that gets to the problem name, problem solved. Or using your magnet example, we are like, physicians come and talk to us all the time. They're like, are you really only seeing the patients one-on-one? Are you really doing that? Because nobody else says they can do that. It's like, yes, we are. That's exactly how we're doing it. And that's why you're here talking to us right now. Because it's so much different. You can't, there's some things that are just immeasurable. Like Dr. Deming talks about that quite a bit. We don't have to market, we don't spend... I shouldn't say, we don't have to market. We don't spend nearly the amount of money on marketing that our competitors do because we have physicians saying, hey, what's different over there? That's invisible. Right? That's invisible.   0:37:56.9 Andrew Stotz: And they weren't saying that in the beginning, but over the time they got that...   0:38:01.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah, yeah. It's a process, but you know, like the flywheel. We use that flywheel example. And now it's like, we're having a hard time hiring enough team members to keep up with the growth. One of the other thing's, "joy in work." Dr. Deming talks about joy in work a lot. And that's to your question earlier about continual improvement and jobs. So we exist, there's a lot of burnout in healthcare. You can't hardly open a business article.   0:38:37.7 Andrew Stotz: Seems paradoxical.   0:38:40.4 Travis Timmons: But it's because two and three patients at a time burdened with administrative stuff. So we also exist because, man, it's so fun when you have a team member join you from one of those other organizations and we've had eight new team members we've hired since July. And I have what I call a fresh eyes lunch with them a month in. And every one of them has said, my spouse can't believe how much happier and more enjoyable I am to be around. If that doesn't motivate you to want to continue to grow, I don't know what does. So that's the joy in work piece that Dr. Deming talked about a lot.   0:39:24.6 Andrew Stotz: And let's now talk about one other thing, which is I was just talking, I gave a speech last night in Bangkok to some business owners and then we had a dinner out and I was explaining to them that like, there's a disease that's come from America, not from Wuhan, China, in this case. It's come America, it's spread all across Thailand. And you really have to be careful with this disease. It's a deadly disease. And I said, and particularly Thailand, where there's harmony. People enjoy working together. They want a fun environment, they want to make friends at work. It's a little, it's very different from a US work environment where it's like, go there, deliver, go home, separate lives. That's not the way Thai people see work. And the disease is, the disease of individual KPIs and saying everybody, by optimizing each individual, we are optimizing the whole. And I'm trying to get them to realize like, there's another way. And I'm curious I'm sure if you're getting people from the bigger institutions and stuff, they're being KPI'd to death. And how do you, how do you manage the idea that I don't want to optimize the individual, I want to optimize the whole system, but yet I also want employees to know they gotta do a good job. So how do you manage that?   0:41:03.2 Travis Timmons: It's hard when somebody comes, because you're right, there's a lot of PTSD. I've got an example from today. So we turned on, within our system, there's a net promoter score that can be sent out to patients automatically after their first couple visits with us. And we turn it off and on from time to time just to get the voice of the customer, right. I think Dr. Deming talks about the voice of the customer and who all. So it's like, hey, we haven't done that in a while. We're going to turn it back on. And there were several therapists that were like, wait a minute, you're scoring me? And then if I get a low score, I'm in trouble. So we have to spend a lot of time educating the team on some of that old head trash. It's like, no, this is to study the system and where we can improve either improving our operational definition, whatever it is, give the team member tools on how to handle a difficult client. But to your point, you have, people's brains are so wired in the way you just described. So part of it is we, we let them know up front, like, here's why we don't have employee of the month at Fitness Matters.   0:42:15.4 Travis Timmons: Here's why we don't have the parking lot for employee of the month at Fitness. Like, all of those rewards, how all of the negative unintended consequences that can go along with that. Like even giving an individual an award in a group setting. Like, we had a team who's one of my clinic directors, the business she came from before, they had like a WWE, like the heavyweight wrestling, big champion belt. They had one of those. And each week somebody would give the belt to whoever they thought was the best employee that week. And she didn't get it for like two months in a row. And she was crushed. She's like, people don't like me. So it's fun to talk about the negative unintended consequences of the individual reward, the individual competitions. We could talk for an hour about motivating via monetary motivation. That's probably a whole nother podcast. But to answer your question, we have to make it very known why we don't do those things. Because as much as people hate some of that stuff, they also expect it. Yeah, why don't, why don't we have employee of the month? You mean I'm not going to get in trouble if I get a low net promoter score from one patient?   0:43:34.3 Travis Timmons: It's like, no, we know we hire good people. We know you do your best job every day. They could be upset because their billing didn't go correctly. So we just need to know. So I don't know if that answers your question, but it's a big thing because you do have to still track KPIs or you're out of business. Like, you do have to know what's going on within your system to measure it. It's just that concept of we all are responsible for the output of the system and the system has to produce exceptional results.   0:44:06.7 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, yeah.   0:44:07.9 Travis Timmons: And we have to have a weight by what method. We have to have a system to create whether you're doing plumbing, electrical work. Like if you're going to scale a business, you have to have a repeatable product that can scale.   0:44:23.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. And one of the answers to that too is if you believe 94% of the problems come from the system, then even when an employee is identified as having a bad net promoter score, then the question is, does the 94% apply in that situation? Well, generally yes. And so let's dig in. I have some people that ask me like my, one of the guys last night at this event works for a bank and they have put KPIs into everything. And he was saying, I just can't escape. But another guy was like, well, I have my own business and I can do what I want. I've implemented KPIs, but what should I do? I said the first step in disentangling yourself from this individual KPI situation is just to disconnect compensation to the KPI. So just right there, there's still incentive for the employee to do something bad for the organization to do their best. But when you remove that compensation aspect, you've really taken away a huge part of the incentive. So even if you have to keep KPIs, take away the tie to compensation and then they say, well, that's the whole reason why we're supposed to do it is have the tie to compensation.   0:45:44.5 Andrew Stotz: And I said, yes, it's a little bit of a circular references cannot be resolved.   0:45:49.7 Travis Timmons: Right. Yeah. And I think we even give examples to the team as much as we can around why we don't do those type of things. Here's what would happen. And most people have worked in organizations when you point it out to them. So again, Dr. Deming talks about making the system visible. Point it out to them. If I bonused you like you see this, this used to be a thing at car dealerships. When you're buying a car, hey, you're going to get a call to rate your experience with me. If you don't give me a 10, it's going to impact my pay. And you're like, what? So we talk about that like hey, the net promoter score. If we did the same thing here and bonused you on every 10, then you're going to be bothering your patients to fill that survey out. Or if you're afraid they're going to give you low score, you're not going to, you're going to encourage them not to do it. And then me as the owner, I'm not going to hear about system breakdowns. So to answer your, I think it's an important thing that a lot of businesses like number one, don't tie compensation to your KPIs.   0:46:58.3 Travis Timmons: Like just, it's an output of the system and then explaining it to them and giving examples over time because their brains even though they hated it, like we don't do performance reviews, annual performance review. And people hate them. And I still get asked like hey, when are you doing my annual performance review? It's like do you want to do one? Well no.   0:47:21.2 Andrew Stotz: Yeah. We dropped performance appraisals in 2016 in my coffee business here in Thailand and we never looked back. We didn't come up with any particular stunning replacement. We just knew it was bad and we were willing to just walk away from what was bad. I want to wrap up and just get into the... What are the, let's talk about kind of extrinsic versus intrinsic. There's some external factors that we can say this Deming implementation provided these benefits to our company and then there's this internal or intrinsic benefits that you're getting. Maybe you can go through some of those benefits of where you're at now, what you're able to do now and we'll close it on that note of kind of what's the hope for somebody that's stuck in the situation. They're the entrepreneurial seizure, they're the technician, they're great at physical therapy, they start their physical therapy business and they're just scaling chaos basically. Tell us about, give us hope.   0:48:37.8 Travis Timmons: Yeah, no, happy to, the reason I have had the opportunity to speak in a lot of different settings about Dr. Deming and the reason I do it is because it's brought so much joy to me personally and to a ever growing team. It's having a positive impact on lives and the more I can do that, that gets to the intrinsic motivation. So the joy in work, there's a lot of bad organizations out there that just suck the life out of people. So that's my intrinsic motivation at this stage of the game of if Fitness Matters is bigger, so more jobs, there's more people having a positive experience in life and our outcomes being 35% higher, our community is getting healthier. So that's the intrinsic motivation at this stage. It's fun. I know again, we're not perfect. So continuous improvement to our conversation earlier. But the intrinsic motivation is the busier Fitness Matters gets, the busier Fitness Matters gets because of high outcomes and it's positive experience for more people in life. Extrinsically, I guess that gets to community outcomes. So that's intrinsic and extrinsic. You know, extrinsically, if you get this figured out, it's very easy to scale a business.   0:50:06.0 Andrew Stotz: And tell us about your scale, where are you at or where are your averages versus national averages? You know, what have you accomplished that's driving that external factors, let's call it.   0:50:19.4 Travis Timmons: Yeah. So a couple things. One, externally, a practice like ours nationally on average is growing at 9% to 10%. We're currently clipping along at 25% to 30%. So you know, that flywheel effect and chaos is no longer there. So we have process, so it's easier to scale. The other extrinsic piece is because of our outcomes and continuing scale, we're able to negotiate better rates with our insurance companies to reinforce our strong desire to keep one-on-one care model. So Deming talks about who all is part of your system. So insurance companies are part of our system and we don't have a lot of control over them. But because our data is so powerful externally, we have been able to negotiate higher rates than most of our competitors because our data speaks for itself.   0:51:23.2 Andrew Stotz: Faster growth, the ability to negotiate better terms because you're delivering better product and service generally means higher profit margins.   0:51:34.2 Travis Timmons: Yes.   0:51:34.6 Andrew Stotz: Fast growth with higher profit margins generally means you're generating more cash and you're no longer in cash crisis all the time and you have resources to decide, okay, now we want to expand or we want to invest or whatever.   0:51:50.9 Travis Timmons: Right.   0:51:51.4 Andrew Stotz: Is that...   0:51:51.9 Travis Timmons: Yeah, the cash crunch was real those first 10 years. So yeah, to your point, when you get to the other side of that and process is a big part of that so you're having a whole counting process, but yeah, you get to that size. But yeah, the intrinsic piece, one of the reasons I talk about Deming as much as I can. I've got two sons that are in college. My hope is there's more companies in the world today than there were 10 years ago that know about Deming, because that means there's a higher likelihood that my boys will work at a Deming company. And just seeing what a lot of companies do to people, we as owners have a big responsibility, I feel, we have a big responsibility to have a positive impact on our employees. And you're, as an owner, are responsible for that, in my opinion. And if you get it right, man, is it fun to look in the mirror or sit down with a team member or their spouse and be proud of, be proud of what you built. That's at the end of the day, the intrinsic motivation.   0:52:57.9 Travis Timmons: If you can be proud of what your product is and proud of the impact you're having on your team to where you're not sucking the life out of them, but actually intrinsically motivating them. There's not much else you can accomplish in business that was worth more than that, in my opinion.   0:53:18.5 Andrew Stotz: Yeah, wonderful. That's a great way to end it. What's the likelihood that our children are going to be working in a Deming company? Well, that's the whole reason why we are here talking about it. So, Travis, I want to say on behalf of everyone at the Deming Institute, I want to thank you for this discussion and of course, for listeners out there and viewers, remember to go to deming.org to continue your journey. This is your host, Andrew Stotz. I'll leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Dr. Deming, and I believe it's probably one of Travis's too people are entitled to joy in work.   0:53:56.0 Travis Timmons: Love it. Love it. Thank you, Andrew.   0:53:58.0 Andrew Stotz: Yep.

What if the key to building generational wealth isn't just what you invest in, but how you run your business? As we kick off the second week of 2026, many of us are still looking at our goals and wondering if we have the "right" plan. Gary Harper, CEO of Sharper Business Solutions and creator of the RISE Business Framework, shares his incredible journey—from a troubled youth and corporate executive to losing it all in the 2008 crash and battling a life-threatening illness. Through these trials, Gary discovered that business success isn't just about profit; it's about a vision-driven life rooted in purpose, accountability, and the "three Ps": Passion, Product, and Profit.In the first half of the interview, Gary and Corwyn dive deep into the spiritual and mental foundations of a successful entrepreneur. Gary opens up about his "rock bottom" moments and explains why most people fail because they are chasing someone else's vision rather than their own.Don't miss Part 2, where Gary dives into overcoming fear, finding your true calling through his three pillars of purpose, and mastering the oxygen mask principle—why you can't lead others until you lead yourself.Key Takeaways:0:16 – Why building generational wealth goes beyond investments and starts with running your business strategically.4:41 – Gary's early journey in real estate and lessons from starting out with minimal resources.6:44 – Lessons from financial setbacks, bankruptcy, and staying true to integrity in business.9:47 – How vision creates purpose, purpose creates passion, and passion drives success.11:47 – The power of self-accountability and its role in achieving both personal and business goals.15:11 – Gary's KPI framework: Key Purpose Indicator → Profit Indicators → Performance → Process, and how it translates from health goals to business success.17:59 – How to define your purpose and financial freedom mark to guide business decisions and personal growth.Connect with Gary:Website: https://sharperbusiness.com/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/official_garyharper/Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/gary.harperiiLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-harper-37148967/Connect with Corwyn:Contact Number: 843-619-3005Instagram:⁠ https://www.instagram.com/exitstrategiesradioshow/⁠FB Page:⁠ https://www.facebook.com/exitstrategiessc/⁠Youtube:⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxoSuynJd5c4qQ_eDXLJaZA⁠Website:⁠ https://www.exitstrategiesradioshow.com⁠Linkedin:⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmelette/⁠Shoutout to our Sponsor: Country Boy HomesYou served your country with pride. Now it's time someone serves you. At Country Boy Homes, we believe every veteran deserves a safe, beautiful and affordable place to call home.We proudly offer VA loan friendly, manufactured and modular homes built with integrity, quality and your family and mine. Whether you're retiring to the peaceful low country or starting fresh with your family, we're here to build the future you've earned. Give us a call today, 843-574-8979.Country Boy Homes, Built to Honor, Built to Last.