Business Roundtable

When a great employee leaves, most leaders assume it was about pay. Larry Salazar has the data to argue otherwise. The single largest contributor to the financial stress that drives turnover is housing, and almost no employer is doing anything about it. Larry is the President and co-founder of NestSTEPS, a platform that turns home ownership into an employee benefit. In this conversation with David...

When revenue slows, almost every company reaches for the same lever: more leads, more marketing, more pressure on sales. Ellen Smolko says that is usually the wrong move. Most revenue problems are structural, and more activity does not fix them. It just exposes the gaps. Ellen is the founder of Foresight Performance and the Marketing Medic. In this conversation with David Carr she unpacks revenue...

For thirty years, getting found meant ranking on Google. That era is ending. People now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to recommend a business, and those tools only surface a few names. If yours is not one of them, your next customer never sees you. Solomon Thimothy is the founder of Clickx, co-founder and CEO of OneIMS, and a USA Today and Wall Street Journal best-selling author who has spen...

Everyone celebrates the startup that raises a huge round and grows at all costs. Bryan Clayton built the opposite. He took GreenPal, the Uber for lawn care, past 10 million dollars a year with zero venture capital, and he argues that raising too much money before you have it figured out is more likely to kill you than save you. Bryan is the CEO and cofounder of GreenPal. Before it he built a lands...

How much money do you actually need? Most people answer with a number. Dr. Nicholas Michels says that is backwards. Don't start with a dollar amount. Start with the life you want, then let the money serve it. Nick is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER professional, founder of Michels Family Financial, and author of Rich by Choice. In this conversation with David Carr he gets honest about why so many pe...

Your business is growing. That does not mean it is stable. For a lot of founders, growth quietly hides the problems that will break the company later, and you do not see it until it snaps. Tracy Holland is a founder, investor, and operator who took HatchBeauty Brands from zero to 100 million dollars, then built a live selling business to 27 million in two years and sold it. She now buys distressed...

Most owners buy the AI tool, skip the strategy, and wonder why nothing improves. Jason Alexander, CEO of Chief AI, explains why AI is a people and process problem, not a tool problem. Hand someone a guitar, and you still hear no music until you teach them to play. Jason has lived the operator side of this. Over 20 years, he built and scaled a staffing and consulting business to roughly 100 million...

You can have the right strategy, the right team, and the right systems. But if you are running on empty, none of it performs the way it should. And most leaders already know what they should do. They just do not do it. Jalene Szuba is the founder of Happiness Anchor, a nationally board certified health and wellness coach, TEDx speaker, and Tulane University wellness consultant. In this conversatio...

Most business owners think PR is about getting featured. More placements, more visibility, more attention. Ronica Cleary says that is exactly where it goes wrong. Visibility without a strategy behind it is not a win. It is just noise. Ronica is the founder and CEO of Cleary Strategies and a former White House correspondent who spent years in newsrooms before building her agency. In this conversati...

What do you do when your world turns to ashes? In one season, Elaine Lankford faced a yearlong attack on her character, lost her father, and watched her husband get a cancer diagnosis. Then, on a mission trip, she heard God whisper, "Go home and raise up my daughters." That whisper became She Steps Forward. Elaine is the founder of She Steps Forward Coaching and the nonprofit She Steps Forward Int...

Most owners think they have a people problem, a time problem, or a strategy problem. Usually, it's none of those — the business is just built to keep everything flowing back to you. Carol Schultz, Founder & CEO of Vertical Elevation, has spent 30 years as a recruiter and executive coach, helping CEOs stop being "hostages" to their own companies. In this conversation, she unpacks founder's synd...

You are moving fast on AI. Your team is experimenting. You are deploying tools. But you have not asked the critical questions that will determine whether you are building competitive advantage or exposing your business, your people, and your customers to serious risk. Jill Stover Heinze has spent her career helping organizations think through complex technology decisions. When generative AI hit th...

You built your career on accumulating knowledge, protecting your territory, and holding onto status. That strategy made sense in the old world. In the AI era, it is making you invisible. Nikki Barua has spent 25 years leading large-scale transformation at Fortune 500 companies and building high-growth businesses as a serial entrepreneur. What she has watched happen in real time is a fundamental sh...

Most business owners believe they need to get bigger to be successful. Chip Higgins believes the opposite and forty years of banking experience backs him up. Chip Higgins spent four decades in banking, working directly with thousands of small business owners. What he observed was that size had almost nothing to do with success. Some of the most impressive businesses he worked with were small. What...

Your business is demanding everything you have. Your body is paying the price. And by the time you realize how much damage you've done, it may be too late to avoid the crash. Bryan Hardy nearly died at eighteen from a ruptured appendix and spent his twenties rebuilding his health from the ground up. What he learned in that process — and what he has spent the last decade helping other high-performi...

Most leaders believe they are credible. Most have never actually tested that assumption — and the gap between how they see themselves and how others experience them is costing them trust, influence, and opportunity. Mitchell Levy has spent decades in Silicon Valley coaching executives, writing 65 books, founding 20 companies, and interviewing hundreds of thought leaders to answer one deceptively s...

Most leaders think they know what's happening inside their organization. Most are wrong and the gap between what they believe and what's actually true is where talent exits, projects stall, and money quietly disappears. Polly Watt and Mike Vos are the co-founders of WattNext.ai and the creators of ViVo Pulse, an AI-powered organizational diagnostic tool that interviews your entire team in the time...

Most business owners have goals. Very few have a plan. And according to Marc Daniels, that difference is costing them everything. Marc L. Daniels has spent over 45 years building, turning around, and scaling companies across 16 countries. He helped grow Diligent from a two-customer startup to a $941 million acquisition. He turned a bankrupt company into $80 million in revenue. He has seen every ve...

Is your business working for you, or have you become its most underpaid employee? Alan Franks has spent 15 years working with business owners who are successful by every external measure and quietly trapped. Trapped by time, by decisions only they can make, by a financial life that's been entirely reinvested back into the machine they built. As a Certified Financial Planner and founder of the Busi...

Your team isn't the problem. The system around them is — and most business owners never see it until it's already costing them clients, cash, and good people. Thanos Diacakis has spent 25 years inside software teams at companies like Uber, scaling from zero to 2M+ monthly trips. What he found everywhere, from scrappy startups to global organizations, is the same pattern repeating: smart teams trap...

Why does so much marketing activity fail to generate real revenue? In this episode of the Business Roundtable Podcast, host David Carr sits down with Stephanie Curtis, founder of Pace Creative and an experienced fractional Chief Marketing Officer, to unpack why many businesses struggle to see ROI from marketing — and how performance-driven strategy changes everything. Stephanie brings nearly two d...

What if fear isn’t holding you back—but quietly shaping every decision you make as a leader? In this episode of the Business Roundtable Podcast, David Carr sits down with Jacqueline Wales, creator of the Fear Intelligence™ framework, to explore how fear operates beneath the surface of leadership, communication, and business growth. Most leaders assume their challenges are rooted in strategy, execu...

Choosing the wrong ERP system can cost your business millions. In this episode of the Business Roundtable Podcast, David Carr sits down with Danny Kaplan, founder of SMC Data Systems, to unpack what most companies get wrong when selecting enterprise resource planning software — and how to avoid expensive implementation failures. Danny founded SMC Data Systems in 1980 and has helped thousands of mi...

Why do so many companies invest in marketing tools and still get ignored? In this episode of the Business Roundtable Podcast, host David Carr, founder of Steward Your Business, sits down with Ben Baker, strategic communications expert and founder of Your Brand Marketing, to unpack why most outreach fails today — and it is rarely about the tools being used. It is about the alignment, or lack of it,...

In a world full of noise, how do you actually stand out? In this episode of the Business Roundtable Podcast, host David Carr, founder of Steward Your Business, sits down with JoJo LaRicci, video strategist, super connector, and media veteran with over six decades of experience, to explore what it really takes to get seen, heard, and remembered in business and in life.  JoJo shares her remarkable j...