Independence by Design™

Watch on YouTube You have a strategic plan. It's in a deck somewhere. Your team nodded at it in January, and by March everyone was quietly back to running their own version of the company. That gap between a plan on paper and a company actually aligned behind one is why I'm pulling this conversation back to the front of the feed. We just crossed 500 episodes, and Kim and I are mid-stream teaching...

Watch on YouTube In our 500th episode, and the closest thing iBD has to an origin story on record. Kim Clark, iBD's Chief Revenue Officer and co-host, turned the interview around and asked Ryan how this whole thing got started. The real answer: Ryan started the podcast back in 2016 as a backup plan — if the business he was building didn't work out, at least enough people would know him that he cou...

Watch on YouTube Your pipeline is full and your revenue still feels like a coin flip. Some quarters you hit, some you miss, and you're still the only person in the building who can reliably close a deal. That's not a sales problem. It's a blueprint problem. Kim and I are kicking off Module 5, Predictable Revenue, and the first move isn't a CRM or an ad budget. It's the revenue architecture underne...

Watch on YouTube You wrote a number down. Double the revenue in five years, or a valuation somebody floated at your peer group. It's on the whiteboard, and underneath it you know nothing connects today's financials to that number. That gap is the whole episode. Kim and I get into Milestone 12, the five-year forecast, and the first thing we throw out is the idea that a revenue goal is a target. A r...

Watch on YouTube Your P&L says you made money. Your checking account says otherwise, and nobody can tell you why. Kim and I build the annual budget that predicts your actual cash, a year out.  Most owners don't start thinking about next year's budget until it's almost next year. That's the problem. By the time you sit down to build one, the months of groundwork that make it real never happened...

Watch on YouTube Every dollar your business makes, you have to place. Reinvest it, pull it out, or move it somewhere that holds its value. And that decision sits on a base layer most owners never see. The same three-statement math that runs your company runs the whole world, with one difference. Governments can print. That worked for 50 years because the US forced the world to buy oil in dollars,...

Watch on YouTube You've got one person you can't afford to lose, running an outcome you know you can't hit alone. They've started asking about the upside, and your gut says give them a piece of the company. Then you remember what real equity costs. A K-1 every April. A cap table. Permission required to sell your own business.  Kim and I get into phantom stock: real money tied to real valuation gro...

Watch on YouTube You're paying highly paid people to take problems off your plate. Instead they're handing you back monkeys, drama, and a deal you end up pricing yourself. Sales and Operations are at war over what got sold and what can actually be delivered. Finance is caught in the middle. You're the referee. You're not bad at this. The comp plan is. Each leader gets paid on their own win, so win...

Watch on YouTube This is the kickoff of a multi-episode arc on Module 8 (Executive Compensation) of the iBD Ownership OS. Kim Clark, iBD's CRO and business partner, runs the interview; she spent years designing sales and revenue comp at ITR Economics before joining iBD. Module 8 is Ryan's territory, so the format flips: Kim asks, Ryan teaches the system. The next two episodes go deeper on short-te...

Watch on YouTube Most owners stare at the same gross profit number every month and feel good about it, and the chart underneath it is telling a completely different story. Revenue is up. Gross profit dollars are up. You feel good for about ten seconds. Then you notice the gross margin percentage is creeping the wrong way and you don't know if it matters. Your CPA does taxes. Your banker manages th...

Watch on YouTube "I want the seller to level with me. I don't want to be his priest or pastor, but I want honesty, and I don't want any surprises down the road." - Bud Martin,     Bud Martin once watched a son kill his parents' deal by telling every buyer tour the company would never make it without him. I told Bud I was 27 when we sold our family business — and I knew I could have done the same t...

This interview is about why the old playbook of waiting for certainty is dead, and what owners need to do instead. Alex Chausovsky walks through how supply chain shocks, inflation, and a broken global system are hitting real P&Ls right now — input costs moving, margins under pressure, and customers who may or may not have the money to keep buying. Kim Clark and I then turn it into the owner's...

My protein powder went from $62 to $122. The company's response was a mass email that started with "we understand your frustration." That is exactly how most businesses handle price increases. No plan. No segmentation. Just a surprise and an apology nobody asked for.   Watch on YouTube Kim Clark and I sat down to talk about pricing. Not theory. The real conversation that happens when your input co...

Dr. Sabrina Starling is the founder of Tap the Potential and the author of The Four Week Vacation. This is her second time on the show. We got into what $10,000/hour work actually means for the owner and for every person on their team. Watch on YouTube We talked about how AI is accelerating the opportunity to delegate. How A-players are 900 to 1,200% more productive than average performers. Why de...

Most owners plan their transition around money. Pete Walker thinks that's why so many of them end up with regret. Watch on YouTube Episode Summary: Your pricing strategy is probably a B+. Your team's ability to hold the line is a C-. That gap is where the real money lives. I brought Casey Brown back for a third time because one of my clients just went through her program and watched his entire sal...

Most owners plan their transition around money. Pete Walker thinks that's why so many of them end up with regret.    Watch on YouTube Pete grew up on a 100-acre potato farm in a community of 90 people in Prince Edward Island. When his dad shut the farm down, 15 neighbors lost their seasonal jobs, local businesses lost a customer, and the tax base shrank. That story is now playing out across thousa...

Steve Moss has spent his career figuring out why senior executive hires blow up. It almost never has to do with whether they can do the job.  Watch on YouTube If you are thinking about hiring your first real C-suite leader, or you have already been burned by one who didn't work out, this conversation is going to hit close to home. Steve runs Executive Springboard. He matches new executives with me...

Here's something I keep running into. My clients need leaders. Not bodies. Not fractional band-aids. Real people who can think, decide, and own results. And every time I ask where they're looking, it's the same answer: recruiters who send resumes written by AI for roles described by AI. Nobody is talking to anybody. Watch on YouTube Meg Gold has been on both sides of this. She spent thirteen years...

How do you grow your leadership team when you can't afford a full C-suite, your best people are buried in tactical work, and you have no idea whether they can actually think strategically? Cyndi runs The Metis Group and has spent 30 years turning fuzzy leadership development into something tangible and measurable. Watch on YouTube In our first conversation, she walked us through her Job Scorecard,...

Matt Curry built Curry's Auto Service from $103,000 and 13 credit cards into a 10-location, $18 million auto repair chain — then sold to a private equity firm and watched them burn it to the ground within six months. After a year of "now what?", Matt realized he could've had the freedom he wanted without ever selling. So he started over. In 2017, he and his wife Judy launched Craftsman Auto Care,...

If you’ve ever wondered why private equity–backed companies often look more disciplined, more focused, and ultimately more valuable than most owner-led businesses, this episode pulls back the curtain on the operating system behind it—and shows you how to apply the same structure without giving up control. Watch on YouTube Nick Bradley (27+ and $5B in acquisitions) breaks down the private equity go...

“Most companies don’t have a revenue engine; they have a collection of tactics.” - Kim Clark  Watch on YouTube   This episode is about helping owners understand why revenue feels so frustrating and chaotic—and what actually has to exist for it to become predictable. Kim Clark walks through what a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) really does, not as a title, but as an owner-level responsibility for desi...

John Abrams is a founder who didn’t set out to build an employee-owned company—he redesigned ownership after realizing the traditional model no longer matched how he wanted to lead or live. Watch on YouTube John and I talk about what happens when owners realize they’ve built a business that depends too much on them—and how that dependence quietly shapes behavior, trust, and decision-making. We don...

Part 1: The Economic Backdrop (Alan Beaulieu & Kim Clark) Watch on YouTube Alan, Kim, and I unpack why political pressure on the Federal Reserve isn’t a headline issue — it’s a business planning issue. When monetary policy becomes reactive rather than methodical, uncertainty creeps into borrowing, hiring, investing, and ultimately into whether owners freeze or move forward. This part of the co...

This conversation with Bill Cowan is a full arc—from career operator to business owner to successful exit to peer group chair—and it surfaces the real lessons most owners only learn the hard way. Watch on YouTube Bill shares what it was like to spend six years searching for the right business, why anxiety pushed him into compromises he wouldn’t make again, and how owning a company fundamentally ch...