Scaling With People

Send us Fan Mail If your marketing isn't generating qualified leads, the problem probably isn't your budget—it's your strategy. In this episode, Lauren Schafer shares why so many businesses waste money on marketing that never converts and what founders should do instead. From Google Ads and landing pages to LinkedIn, AI search, and employee advocacy, you'll learn practical stra...

Send us Fan Mail Trust is one of the most important assets in a growing company—and one of the easiest to damage without realizing it. This week, we sit down with Patrick Farran , founder of Ad Lucem Group, former SAS Institute consulting leader, and former Notre Dame MBA faculty member, to unpack what trust actually means inside a scaling organization and why it often becomes the hidden bottlenec...

Send us Fan Mail Charisma gets too much credit and clarity gets ignored. We sit down with executive coach and leadership development expert Marissa McCourry to unpack what actually creates influence when the stakes are high: knowing which lever to pull, and doing it consistently when things feel fast, messy, and uncertain. We walk through Marissa’s “seven levers” framework, built from academic res...

Send us Fan Mail Most founders spend too much time asking how to raise capital and not enough time asking whether they should raise at all. In this episode, I sit down with Isabelle Tashima from Volition Capital to unpack one of the most misunderstood topics in startup growth: growth equity. We break down what growth equity actually is, how it differs from private equity and venture capital, and w...

Send us Fan Mail Most founders don't realize they've become the biggest constraint on their company's growth until every decision, problem, and customer issue starts flowing back to them. In this episode, we sit down with CEO mentor Rajesh Nagjee to unpack the founder bottleneck—the hidden leadership trap that slows growth, overwhelms teams, and makes scaling feel harder with every...

Send us Fan Mail Most companies are approaching AI the wrong way. They buy new tools, experiment with prompts, and expect breakthrough results. Then they wonder why productivity barely moves and expensive AI initiatives quietly stall. In this episode, Ghazenfer Mansoor, CEO of Technology Rivers and author of Beyond the Download , explains why successful AI adoption has less to do with the latest t...

Send us Fan Mail Most companies don’t break because growth is happening too slowly. They break because the systems, roles, and leadership habits underneath the growth can’t handle the pressure. In this episode, we sit down with Brian Hinton to unpack what actually happens inside companies when scaling starts creating chaos instead of momentum. We talk about the hidden operational cracks that show...

Send us Fan Mail Most branded podcasts fail before episode one. Not because the audio is bad, but because there’s no strategy behind it. In this episode, we sit down with Roger Nairn, co-founder and CEO of Jar Podcast Solutions, whose team has built podcasts for brands like Amazon, Lululemon, RBC, Deloitte, and Wharton School. We break down what separates a strategic branded podcast from expensive...

Send us Fan Mail Most founders think they need more leads. What they actually need is more certainty. Premium buyers don’t choose the loudest brand. They choose the clearest one. And when your positioning, messaging, or offer structure creates confusion, high-ticket sales stall fast. In this episode, we sit down with Esther Stewart, founder of CottnOwl Agency, who transitioned from Fortune 500 fin...

Send us Fan Mail If you think revenue is your problem, you’re already behind. This is what happens to most companies: the pipeline finally clicks, deals start closing, and then everything behind the scenes begins to crack. Delivery slips. Hiring lags. Systems break under the weight of “success.” In this episode, we sit down with enterprise sales leader Ali Manki to unpack what actually drives scal...

Send us Fan Mail Founder-led growth works… until it doesn’t. Pipeline gets unpredictable. Hiring slows down. And suddenly, everything depends on the founder — their relationships, their credibility, their time. That’s not scale. That’s a bottleneck. In this episode, we break down what’s really happening when companies hit that wall with Tim Padgett of Pepper Group, who has spent decades helping mi...

Send us Fan Mail The fastest way to stall a growing company isn’t bad strategy. It’s treating people like “soft stuff” and trusting the numbers to tell the whole story. In this episode, David Miller breaks down what actually compounds in small business growth—and why most founders avoid it. We get into the uncomfortable truth behind energy, trust, and culture, and how ignoring them quietly slows e...

Send us Fan Mail You can build a great company and still leave millions on the table when it’s time to sell. In this episode, I sit down with Gregory Kovsky, President and CEO of International Businesas Associates, who has personally closed 300+ transactions. We break down what actually drives valuation, how deals really happen, and the quiet mistakes founders don’t realize they’re making until of...

Send us Fan Mail Most founders think AI will make their company faster. It will. But if your systems are messy, your workflows are unclear, and your team is running on workarounds, AI won’t fix that. It will amplify it . In this episode, we sit down with Karen Zeigler , CEO of HumanScore , to break down what actually happens when companies try to automate broken operations and why “faster” quickly...

Send us Fan Mail Your leadership can be strong and still go unnoticed if you don’t know how to position it. That’s the battlefield we step into with Joe Frankie III, a former U.S. Army commander turned executive advisor who’s helped hundreds of executives, veterans, and students build a bridge to their next role. We talk about what separates leaders who quietly stall from leaders who compound trus...

Send us Fan Mail If marketing feels like a never-ending list of things to do while sales still feels harder than it should, this is why. Most founders don’t have a marketing problem—they have a focus problem. In this episode, we break down how small, focused marketing teams consistently outperform bloated departments by staying close to the buyer and prioritizing impact over activity. You’ll learn...

Send us Fan Mail Ping pong tables do not build trust and wellness stipends do not fix a broken culture. We get real about the messy intersection of employee benefits, wellness, culture, and retention, and why the “perks” playbook fails when it is copied from companies with totally different people, pay realities, and business goals. I sit down with Oksana Lukash, a seasoned chief people officer an...

Send us Fan Mail Growth doesn’t stall because you need “more sales.” It stalls because your systems are fuzzy, your budget isn’t built for a ramp, and your hires are sized for the wrong game. We sit down with Adnan Eddie Bin Mahfouz—former CEO of a five‑company group and author of The Art of Business Development in the Age of AI—to map a cleaner path from chaos to compounding growth, especially fo...

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Send us Fan Mail Growth gets noisy when speed outruns structure. We invited Matt Granados, CEO of Life Pulse, to show how to turn that noise into a rhythm teams can sustain. Instead of glorifying grind, Matt reframes productivity as alignment: purpose tied to goals, people equipped with simple systems, and performance measured by outcomes, not seat time. The result is a path from high output at a...

Send us Fan Mail Compliance doesn’t have to slow you down. We sat with immigration attorney and founder Matthew Hellrung to map out how smart teams turn visas, I‑9s, and global mobility into a talent advantage while staying out of audit crosshairs. If you’re recruiting engineers, data scientists, or AI specialists, the numbers are clear: a huge share of the best graduates need sponsorship. We walk...

Send us Fan Mail Growth isn’t a mystery; it’s a system. We sit down with award-winning fractional CMO and bestselling author Kathryn Strachan to unpack the moves that turn scattered marketing efforts into a commercial engine that compounds. From the mindset shift that frees founders from bottlenecking their teams to the exact sequence for building demand and then layering sales, Kathryn shares a c...

Send us Fan Mail Markets aren’t just noisy; they’re rewiring in real time. We sit down with global investment researcher Daniel Nikic to decode what founders should actually track, how to turn headlines into decisions, and why the most resilient companies pick problems that will matter for the next five to ten years. If you’ve felt overwhelmed by AI hype, shifting supply chains, and choppy investo...

Send us Fan Mail Want to stop pushing people and start pulling results? We brought in Tara Landes, a certified Cialdini influence trainer who’s advised 300+ leaders, to unpack why most managers overestimate their people skills—and what to do differently when the stakes are high. From the moment you hear the 15.5% lift that a single authority sentence can create, you’ll see why intros, handoffs, an...

Send us Fan Mail What if the difference between stalling at $8M and exiting at $55M wasn’t luck, but a set of repeatable choices about people, process, and stage-fit hiring? That’s the jump Ryan Hogan made, and we unpack exactly how he did it—from the hard lessons of a viral zombie race that crashed to the systems and recruiting moves that helped Hunt A Killer scale fast without losing its soul. W...