Making BIG Shifts

Growing a business doesn’t always mean becoming a better salesperson.

Sometimes it means becoming so good at serving people that they start doing the selling for you.

Paul Dorsey is a 35-year wealth management veteran, a Managing Director at Mariner, a U.S. Navy veteran, and the author of Ditch the Pitch. Over his career, he built a massive referral-driven practice around a simple philosophy: stop pitching, take care of people,...

Being louder doesn't make you more persuasive.

Robert Begley, communication strategist and author of Voices of Reason, joins me to break down what actually makes communication memorable.

We talk about clarity, confidence, authenticity, character, stage fright, presentation structure, and why some speakers influence a room while others are forgotten by the next day.

Robert also shares one presentation mistake almost everybody makes: en...

Why do good healthcare products still get stuck in endless meetings, delayed decisions, and deals that suddenly disappear?

Fred Sheffield has spent his career helping healthcare and health tech companies navigate that exact problem.

Fred is the Chief Growth Officer of Five Stones Growth, a go-to-market strategist, and author of Health Tech Giant Slayer. In this conversation, we break down how smaller healthcare companies can compete,...

Most entrepreneurs start businesses because they want freedom. Years later, many discover they’ve created the exact opposite.

In this episode, I sit down with Luke Mardigian, co-author of Exit Without Selling, to talk about owner dependence and why businesses can become completely reliant on their founder for decisions, relationships, knowledge, time, and revenue.

Luke shares how he went from working 70+ hours a week in his ins...

Most entrepreneurs spend years thinking about how to build a business.

Far fewer think seriously about what it takes to leave one.

Chris Slocumb built her agency over more than two decades before beginning a three-year exit journey that included roughly 50 buyer meetings, multiple letters of intent, several rounds of due diligence, and eventually a successful sale.

In this episode of Making BIG Shifts, Chris and Josh talk about the pa...

Most entrepreneurs start businesses because they want more freedom.

Then the company grows, the team grows, the responsibilities grow, and suddenly every important decision still comes back to the owner.

Dan Paulson calls it The Owner’s Trap.

Dan is an executive advisor and bestselling author of Escape the Owner’s Trap. In this conversation, we dig into how owners become the bottleneck, why delegation and training so often...

More AI. More data. More technology.

But does any of that automatically create more revenue?

Not even close.

I sat down with James Roth, CRO of ZoomInfo, for a wide-ranging conversation about what the next era of sales and marketing actually looks like.

James shares his unconventional path from college football and professional music to door-to-door sales and eventually the CRO seat at ZoomInfo. We talk about why leaders need enough co...

Entrepreneurs are constantly told to keep going.

But what happens when persistence becomes stubbornness?

Nuri Otus has built seven companies, experienced successful pivots, raised capital, shut down ideas that weren’t working, and is now building DUO, an AI-powered matchmaking platform.

In this conversation, we dig into how founders can recognize real market validation, why criticism can actually be incredibly valuable, how posi...

Referrals are fantastic, but they shouldn’t be your entire growth strategy.

I sit down with Craig Lowder, author of Smooth Selling Forever, to break down how businesses can create a more predictable pipeline by bringing sales and marketing together.

We talk target audiences, messaging, lead generation, sales processes, connector networks, and a really simple 4-quadrant outreach strategy any business owner can start using immedi...

Big results usually require big bets, but how do you know when to keep pushing, when to pivot, and when you’re just being stubborn?

Shawn Burcham went from labeling boxes at his kitchen table and selling chicken breading out of his garage to building a group of companies with operations reaching across the country.

In this episode, we get into failure, gritt (spelled that way on purpose), focus, risk, work ethic, hiring great p...

Businesses pour money into finding new customers, but some of the biggest growth opportunities may already be sitting inside the relationships we have.

I sit down with Jamie Shibley, CEO of The Expressory and author of Relationship First: Strategic Engagement, to talk about building a real relationship infrastructure around customers, prospects, referral partners, teams, and other people who influence your growth.

We talk about stayi...

Jermaine Ee spent years building companies, exploring new industries, and chasing the traditional definition of entrepreneurial success.

Then that definition stopped feeling meaningful.

In this episode of Making Big Shifts, Jermaine shares the personal and professional shift that led him to create HeirLight, an AI-powered estate planning platform built around clarity, family, and the things people care about most.

We talk about how pe...

AI knows a tremendous amount about copywriting. The real challenge is getting it to produce the right copy for the right audience.

In this episode, I talk with Tyler Cook, founder of Hyper Media Marketing and author of Persuasion by Design, about the psychology behind effective marketing and the guardrails AI needs to create persuasive messages.

Tyler explains how his background in door-to-door sales taught him to establish trust qui...

Live streaming is moving far beyond concerts, webinars, and basic social broadcasts.

In this episode, I talk with John Petrocelli, founder and CEO of Bulldog DM, about how live video is becoming a powerful tool for audience engagement, brand storytelling, commerce, and customer research.

John shares how working with Prince helped shape his view of direct-to-consumer content, why passive video is no longer enough, and what brands can ...

The harder you chase a sale, the more buyers tend to pull away.

Nancy Kay Coy, author of Stop Selling, Dammit!, joins Making BIG Shifts to explain why pressure, scripts, and aggressive closing tactics are becoming less effective with today’s informed and skeptical buyers.

Nancy breaks down the four emotional drivers behind purchasing decisions, the extra question every seller should ask before closing, and why deals often stall...

What if your business is actually stealing your freedom?

Josh Anderson sits down with entrepreneur Justin Lund to discuss the lessons he learned through addiction, recovery, entrepreneurship, and building systems that buy back your time.

They cover delegation, eliminating low-value work, the importance of having a North Star, and why your time may already be worth hundreds of dollars per hour.

If you're an entrepreneur feeling overwhe...

Most entrepreneurs are chasing more revenue, but Phil Calandra says that may be the trap.

After making his first million dollars, Phil found himself during the 2009 financial crisis with payroll due, his mom’s name at the top of the list, and only eight cents in his checking account.

That moment forced him to learn the difference between income, revenue, and real wealth.

In this episode, Josh talks with Phil Calandra, co-founder...

Are you building a valuable company, or have you simply created a demanding job for yourself?

Muriel Touati, founder of Exit 3D Studio, joins me to explain the structural problems that can make a business difficult or impossible to sell.

We dig into founder dependency, customer concentration, recurring revenue, customer churn, acquisition systems, and the marketing infrastructure buyers want to see.

Muriel also shares why she walked a...

Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier, walks through the real origin story of how a hackathon project in Missouri became a $200M+ automation platform powering thousands of integrations and hundreds of employees.

This episode covers the unfiltered startup journey:
• Building Zapier from a real personal frustration with software integration

• Why YC rejected them the first time, and what changed

• The second application that unlo...