The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? When I’m in the market for thoughtful, intentional and sound advice, over the years I have turned to David Deutsch, a NYC investment banker, board member, investor, and founder of David N. Deutsch & Company. In this episode, David shares freely and openly how he approaches business, clients, relationships, and personal priorities. A few quotes prov...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Furnitureland South is a 52-year-young company, one location the size of a dozen or so Home Depot stores (1,300,000 square feet!) that became the world’s largest of its kind with a few powerful guideposts – namely selection, quality, price and service. And relationships. Jeff Harris is one of the owners and the CEO, talking about what fueled their grow...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Before founding a software company, Brett Goldberg was an importer and distributor of a very successful line of skincare products. Brett loves to build things that people use, and to dialog with them. Here our conversation ranges from key recommendations for vendors in today’s marketplace, to the importance of relationships, and the need to balance rep...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Darin Vilano grew up around small businesses and knows how to help them. After an early career with big corporations, he returned to his roots to create order from chaos, to help reinvent, to adjust pricing, customer acquisition and retention, and whatever else it takes to help. 8:38 “…a lot of these things are simple blocking and tackling…but when you...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? In this episode my guest Lynn Provenzano shares how she leans into and thrived in 4 distinctly different work environments in her career. Lynn shares what helped her to embrace the learning curve: flexibility to get out of our own way, focus on the “other”, listen to learn.    7:00 – “what helped me is being able to tap into the needs of those around m...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Starting and running a business is hard. Do you have family members in your business or are you considering asking family members to join? For some of us that’s been a great experience (see Ep. #11, where my wife and I talk about working together), for others, not so great. Joseph Cilio, owner and CEO of Alfresco Home shares his lifelong experience bei...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? If you care about culture in your business, Tim Metzner (serial entrepreneur, co-founder of Coterie and other successful start-ups) offers great insights on what it is, how you define it, and what it can bring to the table.    7:56 – “There is also culture debt. If you don’t get ahead of this, you will have a culture... you can either (be intentional a...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Interested in organizing principles to “focus the blur” of branding, marketing and strategy? This conversation with Ben Greenberg and Sebastien Hue – thinkers and doers, food truck laborer and foodies, co-founders of the BS LLC agency – offers insight on growth.   They love deeper questions, hate becoming commoditized, love being the liaison between le...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? How do you keep growing when both your product and your customers constantly shift? Since 2003, Gary Levine’s company has sold licensed art (with constant shifts in taste and trends) to manufacturers and to retailers (where store counts, store types, and the explosion of ecommerce have shifted the balance of power dramatically in recent years). His adv...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? “Community colleges have low self-esteem” – as a graduate of both a community college and an ivy-league university I can relate to that sentiment. Because community colleges serve an important role in supporting the American Dream, to aid continued upward mobility in our country, I asked Sarah Leggesse to share her insights about students and staff. Ho...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? My guest Steve Melink shares a powerful and very important story: highly knowledgeable about clean energy, he built a case why clean energy is critically important for humankind, wrote a book about it (Fusion Capitalism – Clean Energy Vision for Conservatives), has taken risks by building a purpose-driven business around a politically charged issue, an...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? As our life becomes more digital, we need to grow and learn new skills to keep up. Covid has accelerated that trend – not just Zoom calls and filesharing, but remote collaboration for all kinds of problem solving. My guest Jenna Gaidusek is an online interior designer who has decorated hundreds of rooms across the country all from her home office.   Sh...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? When an entrepreneur envisions boldly… risks… invites industry stars to participate… creates a first of its kind in the history of the world event… and invites you behind the scenes of its creation….and to its unveiling…you’ll want to listen. Gary Pettitt, CEO and Editor of Seasonal Living Magazine, the creative and entrepreneurial force behind this ex...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Adam Smith founded SoundPress, his digital marketing agency 20 years ago in 2000. Today his team serves Fortune 50 companies in the automotive industry and small/midsized clients. His insights into technology, branding, and how manufacturers or distributors can better market and sell consumer products online are built on a foundation of real-world succ...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Mark Haas talks about story structure and how to ‘flip the script’ – focus on the customer’s problem, not the product, not your company. The pattern in storytelling is (2:42): “hero goes on a journey, looking for a treasure…a dragon is in the way… along comes a mentor, helps to put a sword in your hand to defeat the dragon and helps you get the treasur...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Despite (relatively minor) audio challenges, this turned out to be a great episode. If you ever moved from big “settler” company to “pioneer” work in a start-up, you know the difference between the two; if you’re considering the move, listen to Leah Bailey who talks thru her experience starting a Cannabis grower and vertically integrated premium brand,...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Remember FiveFingers Shoes? Neither did most consumers a dozen years ago, until it became a B2B manufacturer’s amazing B2C success story. Michael Martin, who spent 20 years in consumer goods, as sales and sales operations manager then executive, shares with us how he became the Chief Storyteller for a component manufacturer and helped to build a 9-figu...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Spoiler alert: integrate or grow is a false choice, you can and should do both, walk and chew gum, integrate and grow. But too often poor integration between acquirer and acquired hurts revenue growth, certainly in the (too lengthy) short term. Steve Nunn shares his definition of integration, how to tackle integration – in stages, some successes and fa...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Paul Heagen has a talent for making the complex simple, and in our discussion about his latest book These Three Things we talk about Pride, Safety, and Love as a leader’s focal points to unleash passion, move people to be loyal to the business, and committed to extraordinary performance. All three are things we remember feeling (or missing) from an ear...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? After his first job as CPA at Arthur Anderson ended shortly after the Berlin Wall fell (fun story how that global event unleashed our guest’s entrepreneurial spirit at 1:01), Stu Seltzer became a licensing expert, first as executive at fashion house YSL, then in entertaining at Disney, and now as owner of licensing agency Seltzer Licensing Group and te...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? We started with the leadership analogy of orchestra musicians as cross-functional business team members, the conductor as its leader – but my guest Daniel Wachter connected dots from business culture to sounds and language (7:08), from change management to listening, from music to the Baroque painter Rubens’ delegation and painting ‘process’ (38:09 thr...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? “Never waste a good crisis” is an important reminder as we work through the COVID pandemic and prepare for post-pandemic life. Craig Todd shares five values that helped his company to thrive, and actions his team took to grow during COVID. Our conversation leads us to share other tools forged by other crises and how they can help our listeners – grit a...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? How does empathy unlock potential for growth? Cindy Tripp talks about seeing the world in the other’s shoes, building rapport and candor, letting go of judgment to allow curiosity to open new doors, inside teams and out in the market. Whether Cindy shares global company stories – like P&G learning from a small competitor in Peru – or her personal m...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ?  A life-long merchant with manufacturers and national retailers, Karin Jeske talks about the left/right brain approach to product development, “from spreadsheets to bed sheets, from color palettes to shipping pallets, from boardrooms to sample rooms.” There are plenty of product people that are either “all about the numbers” (and wrong) or “all about f...

Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ? Our 16- and 20-year-old daughters said to us “you guys should do a podcast about working together.” My wife Hilda Castillo Duenkelsbuehler is this episode’s star guest and we talked about our different working styles, the flexibility required to learn a new way to work, the willingness to re-frame, be open and curious, that “with different styles come...