The Dirt

Cofounder and CTO of SCOUT, Sergio Gallucci joins Jim Barnish in this episode to talk about all things space and sustainability along his rocket-fueled entrepreneurial journey. He teaches us what sustainability in space means and how that can be valuable in other industries, while also building a company culture of excellence, and how data can better inform your strategy. 3 Key Takeaways Sustainab...

Longtime entrepreneur and scaling coach George Morris joins Jim Barnish on this episode to discuss what it takes to build teams of A players who will scale and grow your business. As a founder you likely have some employees who helped you in the startup stage, but will they grow with you beyond that stage? How do you separate the A players and build around them? As you scale, you will have to defi...

Product-market fit. How do you get there? Do you have the right team? The right timing? The right product? Samantha Citro Alexander, cofounder of bitewell, joins Jim Barnish on this episode to answer those questions. With lots of product iteration and pivots, Samantha’s company created a sub-category in an established market (preventative health) where they are seeing incredible results by creatin...

Brenden Kumarasamy, founder and CEO of MasterTalk, joins Jim Barnish on this episode to discuss how you can become a master communicator. He breaks down key areas of communication into actionable steps and why they are invaluable to you as a founder. These include leveraging your strengths (e.g. introverts are generally better at communication because they listen more and talk less), how to be bul...

Patrick Brown, founder and CEO of Unity Communications, joins Jim Barnish on this episode to discuss building teams and the people behind them. He shares his own journey of leaving the corporate job and the ‘dirt’ he’s gathered while growing his company from just himself to 300+ people. How do you find the right talent to hire in a young startup when you don’t have the cash or benefits to compete...

Ascenditt cofounder Mason Dorner joins Jim Barnish on this episode to talk through the adversity he’s overcome, both personally and in business. He'll outline how to avoid costly sales and marketing mistakes, and weaponizing hard times to drive growth. With a background in marketing, Mason went from sports to Disney before leaving the corporate world for a tech startup. Over the span of 4 yea...

Twelve years of entrepreneurship while building a family as a new wife and mom is Katie Merrill's founder's journey. Hear her story as she walks host Jim Barnish through the challenges she has faced and continues to learn from. As a go-getter with a strong operations background, Katie was hyper focused on the day-to-day grind, but learned over time that she had to get out of her own way....

Dan Clark, CEO of Brain.fm, joins Jim Barnish on this episode to deep dive into operations and what it takes to align teams to the same objectives. At Brain.fm they combine everyone’s love of music with neuroscience, their goal: helping you hit your flow state faster to achieve more.  Your objectives as the founder or the business may not be the same as your employees, because everyone has differe...

What is culture? What does it look like in your company? A lot of shifts in business occurred over the last two years since the start of the pandemic, particularly in remote work and how employees interact with their jobs. How has remote work impacted your culture? Has it magnified the problems or the solutions for your business? Through 18 years of entrepreneurship, including highs and many lows,...

Entrepreneurship is a long, rough road. You’ll experience highs, but also a lot of lows. How do you develop the resilience and grit necessary to press forward? Liza Marie Garcia joins Jim Barnish on this episode, bringing her insight as a former tech founder and currently COO of NOW Publishing. They discuss the importance of having faith in something greater than yourself, ignoring naysayers who w...

Are your customers happy? When they interact with your brand, is it a positive or negative experience? Do you have the metrics to fully answer those questions? Anuj Bhalla brings years of expertise in customer service and analytics to this episode, showing why you need data to track when things go right and when they go wrong.  Data is key to better understanding your customers and product, and pa...

There is so much legal red tape and waiting around for attorneys to approve or clarify documents in business. Is it possible to speed up the process and meet those demands more efficiently? Charles Brecque founded Legislate to do exactly that. Developing new technology in the legal tech space, his company’s contract software manages contract data at scale. With a background in machine learning and...

Robotics and education fanatic, Jacob Hanchar, joins Jim Barnish on this episode of The Dirt. Jacob shares how his view of “micromanagement” has changed to a positive one in the last few years. His experience says: there is a time and a place for more micromanagement in business. Oftentimes in the early stages of a business, you must have a more hands-on approach because delegation may get you in...

When Tauruseer entered the software security market, they targeted large enterprise companies. But when that failed, they went back to the drawing board. With lots of self-reflection and input from channel partners, founder Jeremy Vaughan identified those distractions that stunted his company’s growth. Jeremy’s journey began from a deeply personal experience with his daughter when her diabetes dev...

Has the growth of your company stalled, leaving you feeling stuck? With decades of experience as a founder in Silicon Valley, and now teaching at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, guest Dr. Lori Kendall walks Jim Barnish through the three dimensions of addressing the challenges of early and growth stage companies. From clearly seeing the market you’re playing in, to identifyi...

Bootstrapping his way from just a desk and a single account to a large successful call center in Costa Rica, Founder and CEO Richard Blank joins Jim Barnish on this episode to share his insight on effective communication strategies, investing in his teams, and the power of positive escalation.  With a track record for successful sales and training programs, Richard walks us through his key communi...

When GoGig started, it was a two-sided, anonymized talent-matching marketplace with challenges scaling and meeting the market need. A forced pivot at the height of COVID moved them into a software as a service (SaaS) model solving one side of that marketplace. Despite the new challenges ahead, it was the best decision they ever made.  During the COVID pandemic, GoGig’s travel-heavy customer base w...

As CFO Alliance’s Brooke Evans points out, be conscientious of your cashflow  because of the state of the economy right now . Prepare for changes that could happen tomorrow by having a strategy around your cash flow forecast today. Having your exit strategy top of mind allows you to be ready if/when an exit opportunity presents itself. .  The finance function of a business is not one-size-fits-all...

Are you a talent-centric organization? Is your team honestly aligned on the same vision? Leadership coach Carol Schultz joins Jim Barnish on today’s episode to talk through those tough questions. Taken from her newly-released book Powered By People , they dive into the three hallmarks of what it takes to find and keep top talent. Building an effective talent strategy requires a unified vision that...

The digital economy is leaving retail (everyday) investors in the dust, but that doesn’t have to be you. Join host Jim Barnish and entrepreneur Richard Smith as they discuss what drives the financial markets, and how you can build your own wealth instead of someone else's. Learn about the pitfalls of human behavior in investing as it shapes how we act when we see a market falling vs. a market...

The quest for success is why you became a founder. But getting there is a whole different story. On this episode, CongruentX’s CEO, Chuck Ingram, joins Jim Barnish to discuss their frameworks for success by helping others succeed, and grow in their own businesses. Revenue Operations (RevOps) is one of those key frameworks, allowing businesses to align individual teams (sales, marketing, etc.) with...

Our guests, thought leaders, clients, partners, and all-around good humans, have taken us on their incredible journey through their dirt: the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between. So many of them called out some of the outstanding results they have had in overcoming obstacles in partnership with Orchid Black, which is always fantastic to hear about their team's extraordinary wor...

The best athletes in the world directly link their performance to their personal growth. Why don’t we all think about our lives like this? For Jim Barnish, changing his perspective with the help of a mentor transformed his work as a founder, a transformation that surfaced as he focused on his personal development. This resulted in heightened business growth and strategy. Today, Jim invites that me...

Jim Barnish invites Bill Lederer to The Dirt, extraordinary founder and CEO in the MAdTech space that fuses marketing, advertising, and technology. They discuss the transformations iSocrates has made from consulting to managed services to software-as-a-service (SaaS). Building a successful business depends on many factors that may change over time. What you need in a startup is likely not what you...

As a founder, how do you maximize the value of your company before exiting? What are the ingredients needed to reach “extreme valuation” and build a sustainable business? World-renowned strategist and author Mark Parrott joins Jim Barnish on The Dirt to share his insights on growing companies which he has compiled through an analysis of 1000+ private companies. Executives need to shift their viewp...