Independence by Design™

Dr. Sabrina Starling is the founder of Tap the Potential and the author of The Four Week Vacation. This is her second time on the show. We got into what $10,000/hour work actually means for the owner and for every person on their team.

Watch on YouTube

We talked about how AI is accelerating the opportunity to delegate. How A-players are 900 to 1,200% more productive than average performer...

Most owners plan their transition around money. Pete Walker thinks that's why so many of them end up with regret.

Watch on YouTube

Pete grew up on a 100-acre potato farm in a community of 90 people in Prince Edward Island. When his dad shut the farm down, 15 neighbors lost their seasonal jobs, local businesses lost a customer, and the tax base shrank. That story is now playing out across ...

Most owners plan their transition around money. Pete Walker thinks that's why so many of them end up with regret. 
 
Watch on YouTube

Pete grew up on a 100-acre potato farm in a community of 90 people in Prince Edward Island. When his dad shut the farm down, 15 neighbors lost their seasonal jobs, local businesses lost a customer, and the tax base shrank. That story is now playing out across...

Steve Moss has spent his career figuring out why senior executive hires blow up. It almost never has to do with whether they can do the job. 

Watch on YouTube

If you are thinking about hiring your first real C-suite leader, or you have already been burned by one who didn't work out, this conversation is going to hit close to home. Steve runs Executive Springboard. He matches new executive...

Here's something I keep running into. My clients need leaders. Not bodies. Not fractional band-aids. Real people who can think, decide, and own results. And every time I ask where they're looking, it's the same answer: recruiters who send resumes written by AI for roles described by AI. Nobody is talking to anybody.

Watch on YouTube

Meg Gold has been on both sides of this. She spent thirt...

How do you grow your leadership team when you can't afford a full C-suite, your best people are buried in tactical work, and you have no idea whether they can actually think strategically? Cyndi runs The Metis Group and has spent 30 years turning fuzzy leadership development into something tangible and measurable.

Watch on YouTube

In our first conversation, she walked us through her Job S...

Matt Curry built Curry's Auto Service from $103,000 and 13 credit cards into a 10-location, $18 million auto repair chain — then sold to a private equity firm and watched them burn it to the ground within six months. After a year of "now what?", Matt realized he could've had the freedom he wanted without ever selling. So he started over. In 2017, he and his wife Judy launched Craftsman A...

If you’ve ever wondered why private equity–backed companies often look more disciplined, more focused, and ultimately more valuable than most owner-led businesses, this episode pulls back the curtain on the operating system behind it—and shows you how to apply the same structure without giving up control.

Watch on YouTube

Nick Bradley (27+ and $5B in acquisitions) breaks down the private ...

“Most companies don’t have a revenue engine; they have a collection of tactics.” - Kim Clark 

Watch on YouTube
 
This episode is about helping owners understand why revenue feels so frustrating and chaotic—and what actually has to exist for it to become predictable. Kim Clark walks through what a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) really does, not as a title, but as an owner-level responsibility f...

John Abrams is a founder who didn’t set out to build an employee-owned company—he redesigned ownership after realizing the traditional model no longer matched how he wanted to lead or live.

Watch on YouTube

John and I talk about what happens when owners realize they’ve built a business that depends too much on them—and how that dependence quietly shapes behavior, trust, and decision-making...

Part 1: The Economic Backdrop (Alan Beaulieu & Kim Clark)

Watch on YouTube

Alan, Kim, and I unpack why political pressure on the Federal Reserve isn’t a headline issue — it’s a business planning issue. When monetary policy becomes reactive rather than methodical, uncertainty creeps into borrowing, hiring, investing, and ultimately into whether owners freeze or move forward.

This part of...

This conversation with Bill Cowan is a full arc—from career operator to business owner to successful exit to peer group chair—and it surfaces the real lessons most owners only learn the hard way.

Watch on YouTube

Bill shares what it was like to spend six years searching for the right business, why anxiety pushed him into compromises he wouldn’t make again, and how owning a company fundame...

This conversation with Tom Shipley goes far beyond “growth” or “M&A tactics.” It’s about understanding the real game of ownership — how value is actually created, how capital really works, and why most owners unknowingly trap themselves by optimizing the wrong things. 

Watch on YouTube

We start by reframing business as a finite game of time, energy, and capital. Tom shares how his bac...

Matt is the founder of MarketBeat, a financial media company he’s built quietly over 19 years into a ~$50M/year business with around 20 employees — and what makes this episode special isn’t just the scale, it’s how he’s designed the business and his life around it. We talked about focus, attention, hiring, valuation discipline, resisting hype cycles, and why keeping the business can ofte...

Most owner-operators have a complicated relationship with their bank — part dependence, part frustration, and very little transparency. I’ve lived that reality myself, and I know how powerless it can feel when decisions are made “behind the curtain.” 

Watch on YouTube

In this episode, I sat down with my longtime friend and commercial banker, Luke Maupin, to pull that curtain back. We walk...

Most owners don’t wake up wanting to sell their business. They wake up tired, overloaded, and unsure how much longer they can keep doing everything themselves. In this conversation, John Bartlett and I start by unpacking that reality — the moment when success on paper doesn’t feel like freedom, and selling starts to feel like the only option. 

Watch on YouTube

From there, we zoom out and ...

Most owners make decisions in the dark. Sales over here, payroll over there, cash flow somewhere in the background — and no clear way to see how it all fits together.

Watch on YouTube

In this episode, I break down the 5-year, three-statement model I use with clients to finally show how revenue, margins, OpEx, working capital, cash flow, and valuation all connect. It's the system that turn...

You hear the hype about AI every day, but when you try to use it, it feels like a toy rather than a tool that can actually help you reclaim your time.

Watch on YouTube

In this episode, I’m cutting through that noise with Tyler LaFleur, a former nurse and functional medicine practitioner turned Fractional COO. I brought Tyler on because he doesn’t look at business through the lens of "grow...

In this episode, I sit down with Greg Meredith, founder of Simply Strategic, to distinguish the crucial difference between having a strategic plan and actually possessing a strategy. We dive deep into Greg’s "9 Keystones" Simply Strategic framework, exploring how companies can identify their unique "Winning Position" on the battlefield of business. Greg explains why true strategy require...