No BS Mastery Podcast

Being great at what you do is no longer enough to make you stand out. In a world drowning in noise, competition, and AI-generated sameness, your prospects need a reason to notice you, remember you, trust you, and ultimately choose you. David Newman calls that market eminence. It combines visibility, resonance, and brand preference so that you become more than one of many qualified options. You bec...

Gross. Pushy. Slimy. A sweaty guy in a cheap blazer.  That’s what came back when Pia asked a room full of business owners how selling makes them feel. And here’s the problem: sales is the lifeblood of your business. If the most important thing you do is the thing you dread most, that’s going to cost you. In this episode, Pia digs into why selling feels so icky, and it’s not what you think. It’s no...

About 10 years ago, I created a more affordable way for people to work with me. We were selling $20,000 branding projects, and plenty of people told me they wanted our help but couldn’t afford us. So I created a DIY program that taught the same process for somewhere between $500 and $1,000. I assumed it would be easy to sell. It wasn’t. After more than a year of investing time, money, and energy i...

You can have all the right strategies, but if your fears, beliefs, and stories keep you from actually using them, they aren’t going to grow your business.   That’s why Stacey Brass-Russell describes herself as a transformational coach. She helps people understand that creating a different result requires change, and human beings are wired to resist change even when we desperately want the outcome...

Most people assume that a $15,000 project is automatically better than an $8,000 project. But a higher price does not necessarily mean more profit. In fact, it often means the opposite. Years ago, I worked with someone named Sean who was trying to sell more of his $15,000 full-service projects and fewer of his $8,000 packages. When we ran the numbers, he discovered that the $8,000 package was twic...

Early in her career, Lieve Hendren spent her days working with consulting executives in high-pressure environments and her nights performing as an opera singer. She began using the performance psychology techniques she learned onstage to help herself and her teams handle stressful meetings, improve their work, and perform at a higher level. But that constant pressure eventually took a toll on her...

You're booked out for months. You're closing good clients. From the outside, it looks like you've made it. So why are you still stressed about money, still wondering where the next client comes from, still white-knuckling it? In this episode, Pia goes back to the year her business brought in almost $250,000 and still landed her $40,000 in credit card debt, and explains why that paradox shows up fo...

If you’ve been feeling cognitively overloaded by AI, social media, and the relentless pace of everything right now, this episode is for you. Sara Connell’s new book, The Download: Train Your Brain. Unlock Your Genius. Create Miracles , explores how we can move beyond the mental noise and get into a state where clarity, creativity, and innovative ideas can actually find us. In this conversation, Sa...

If you know you’re capable of great work but still struggle to start tasks, stay organized, or follow through consistently, it can be easy to wonder what’s wrong with you. For people with ADHD, that gap between potential and output can create years of shame and self-criticism. Rebecca Tolbert explains why ADHD is better understood as a dysregulation of executive functioning and why it can look com...

Maybe you’re pricing by the hour, writing free proposals that go nowhere, or juggling so many projects that none of them ever get your full attention. Maybe clients disappear in the middle of a project and return weeks later expecting you to drop everything. Or maybe you’re making decent revenue, but you’re still constantly working and never feel like you’re getting ahead. It’s tempting to believe...

When Chanaya Hancock joined No BS Mastery, she had projects that seemed to last forever and no predictable way to bring in new clients. Most of her business came through referrals, which meant work arrived when it arrived, and she had very little control over the flow. She was also deeply skeptical about joining a group program. Chanaya didn’t consider herself a community person, disliked social m...

When Shauna Matkovich joined No BS Mastery, she had already narrowed down what she wanted to do and who she wanted to help. But she was still taking on lots of different projects and struggling to turn her large network, speaking, podcast, and mailing list into the kind of work she actually wanted. Shauna also has one of the most challenging sales environments of anyone I’ve worked with. She opera...

When Marc Scheff joined No BS Mastery, his business was going, but it wasn’t predictable. He had one-on-one coaching clients, an artist community, and a retreat in the works, but he couldn’t clearly explain where his next clients were going to come from. Marc had tried going hard on social media, making educational videos, funny videos, and all kinds of different content. Some of it worked, but no...

When Wes Wheless joined No BS Mastery, his pipeline had slowed down; he had turned most of his attention toward writing his book, and he was wondering whether he had already exhausted all the warm leads in his network. He had successfully sold two-week sprints, but believed he had hit a $3,000 price ceiling. He was also spending a lot of time on free sales calls that went nowhere. Then, during the...

When Caitlin Lang first joined No BS Mastery nearly three years ago, a long-term retainer had ended, the market had changed, and she had gone months without work. She was ready to try something different, even if niching down and changing her entire way of working felt scary. Caitlin decided to focus exclusively on branding and websites for women coaches, consultants, and solopreneurs. Once she co...

Tam Smith started her business in 2020, but every couple of years, she found herself running into the same problem: saying yes to everything, spreading herself too thin, and working all the time. She realized she had been chasing someone else’s definition of success. Instead of building the biggest team or the loudest business, Tam wanted something small, tight, profitable, and sustainable. She wa...

Karen Taylor knew why she wanted to build her business. What she didn’t have was the structure to turn that purpose into something real. She had taken the courses, joined the communities, and gathered plenty of information. But she still felt stuck—and wondered whether she had waited too long to make it work. In this conversation, Karen shares how she went from feeling like she had an “expensive s...

Beverly Cornell started her business because she wanted freedom. Instead, she eventually found herself overworked, saying yes to everything, and letting her clients design the business for her. In this conversation, Beverly shares the journey from that version of her business to the one she has today. One that is built around her strengths, her personality, her visibility, and a whole lot more int...

All summer, I’ve been talking about one idea: that simplicity and focus are not optional. Simplicity and focus are the harder, but better, choice and the fastest path to a profitable, sustainable expert business. And they only get more relevant as your business grows. If you want a business where you are not constantly feeling behind and overwhelmed, and where your success isn’t just in your botto...

We live in a world with more business advice than ever before. Books, podcasts, courses, newsletters, social media. There's no shortage of information! So why do so many smart business owners still feel stuck? In this episode, I argue that the problem usually isn't a lack of information. It's that we're often solving the wrong problem. We all filter advice through our own experiences, insecurities...

We hear so much about content marketing these days that it's easy to believe it's the only path to growing an expert business.  But every time I ask a room full of business owners where their clients actually come from, the answer is almost always the same: referrals and personal connections. I believe we've become too focused on creating content and not focused enough on building relationships. D...

Everything we knew about getting found on search engines has been upended by AI. It’s no longer enough to have a great SEO strategy to help people find you online. ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity –– they need to see you too. Implementing GEO (generative engine optimization) is essential for getting your business surfaced and recommended by AI tools.  Can you optimize being found by AI and still keep y...

The experts I know who are the most profitable, the most referable, and the most confident in their work have all done this. They picked a focus, they got really good at it, and they stuck with it long enough for it to compound and build a reputation on it. That’s it. That’s the secret sauce. Today I want to talk about what that actually looks like in practice by sharing an example from my own bus...

“I just want to get it right the first time.” I cannot tell you how many times someone has reached out to me for branding services when they don’t even have a business yet. They don’t want to make mistakes. They want everything to be perfect right out of the gate. And, yeah, don’t we all? It’s hard and scary to put something out there that you don’t feel is finished or tested. It can feel like set...

Successful business owners have to do the same things over and over, tweaking and refining as they go, until they have a clear, repeatable process that works. Issue is most entrepreneurs aren’t really wired to do the same things over and over again. We tend to be novelty seekers and risk takers, people who chase ideas and get inspired by new possibilities. So if you find yourself jumping from idea...