Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur | Start and Grow Your Own Business

Are you a leader, or just in a leadership role? In this powerful episode, we sit down with Army veteran and brand strategist LaToshia Ngu to dismantle the myth of the "natural-born leader." LaToshia shares her journey from the military to entrepreneurship, revealing how her experiences taught her that true leadership is a learned skill rooted in listening, adapting, and empowering others. This episode is a must-listen for any entrepreneur who wants to build a thriving company culture, whether you're a solopreneur or leading a growing team. LaToshia breaks down complex leadership challenges into simple, actionable steps, showing you how to fix bottlenecks, build trust, and ultimately create a business that leaves a legacy.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 The "Stop, Look, Listen" Framework: A simple yet powerful method to effectively assess and lead in any new business situation or role.
• 💪 How to Build a Culture of Accountability: Learn why creating a safe space for mistakes is the fastest way to foster innovation and growth.
• 🔑 Why Admitting "You Are the Problem" is Your Greatest Strength: Discover how radical accountability can unlock solutions to your biggest business challenges.
• 📈 Practical Strategies for Leading Remote Teams: Learn how to keep your team aligned and motivated by focusing on a crystal-clear mission, vision, and values.
• 🌱 How Solopreneurs Can Build Leadership Skills from Day One: Get ahead of the curve by developing crucial leadership habits before you even make your first hire.
• 🏆 How to Define Success on Your Own Terms: Escape the comparison trap and build a business that truly aligns with your personal and professional goals.

📝 About LaToshia Ngu

LaToshia Ngu is the founder of LoveBug Branding, where she helps growing businesses build leaders, not bottlenecks. As an 8-year Army veteran, wife, and homeschooling mother, she brings a unique and powerful perspective to the world of brand strategy and organizational development. LaToshia’s zone of genius is making complicated problems simple, with a special knack for identifying where teams are stuck and providing the clarity needed to move forward. Her approach is grounded in real-world experience, proving that great leadership isn’t about having all the answers, but about knowing how to listen, learn, and empower your people.

🎯 LaToshia’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Define success for yourself."

In a world filled with noise telling you what you should be doing, LaToshia’s most powerful advice is to create your own definition of success and get tunnel vision on achieving it.

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “Being in a leadership role does not make you a leader.” – LaToshia Ngu
• “Sometimes the leader, you are the problem, and it's hard to see that. But when you see that you're the problem, you have to be willing and able and acceptable to change things for the betterment of your company and the people under you.” – LaToshia Ngu
• “You can wake up in the morning, and sometimes success for me is simply, I wrote a new copy. Whoo! Well, got that done. That was success for me for that day.” – LaToshia Ngu

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Implement the "Stop, Look, and Listen" practice this week. Before making your next big decision, pause to observe the situation, look at what’s working (and what's not), and intentionally listen to feedback from your team or customers.
• ✅ Define what success means for YOU. Write down 3-5 metrics for success that have nothing to do with what you see online (e.g., freedom of time, impact on one client, learning a new skill).
• ✅ Review your company's mission, vision, and values. Ask yourself: Are these clear? Does my team (or do my clients) understand them? Are my daily actions aligned with them?
• ✅ Practice proactive encouragement. This week, publicly praise a team member, collaborator, or even a client for a specific achievement using your primary communication channel.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.lovebugbranding.com
• Connect with LaToshia on LinkedIn
• Follow LoveBug Branding on LinkedIn
• Follow LoveBug Branding on Instagram
• Follow LoveBug Branding on Facebook

In this game-changing episode, Leila Kaneda, a former professional musician turned AI expert, reveals how to harness artificial intelligence with purpose and intention. She shares her incredible journey from music to machine learning and explains why your unique, non-linear background is your greatest asset in business. This episode is a masterclass for any entrepreneur feeling overwhelmed by the AI hype. You'll learn how to move beyond generic tools like ChatGPT, avoid common pitfalls that damage your brand, and implement AI in a way that saves you time and cognitive energy without losing the human touch. Leila's "teach you to fish" philosophy is designed to empower you to build and maintain your own AI-driven solutions, making this a must-listen for founders who want to innovate sustainably.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 How to leverage your non-linear career path as a unique superpower in your business.
• 🧠 The critical mindset shift required to move from AI user to AI innovator and open the "floodgates" of ideas.
• 🤖 A step-by-step breakdown of how to intentionally integrate AI into your social media workflow to save time without sacrificing brand authenticity.
• 💰 Why the most effective AI strategy isn't about replacing humans, but about augmenting their skills to achieve 100x results.
• 🛠️ How to identify the right places to insert AI into your business for maximum ROI and where to avoid it.
• 🤝 Why you should seek consultants who empower you to be independent, not lock you into expensive long-term retainers.
• 🎉 The power of "playing" with AI on personal projects to rewire your brain and spark game-changing business ideas.

📝 About Leila Kaneda

Leila Kaneda is the founder of Kaneda Consulting, an AI education and strategic consulting firm. With a Master's in AI and Machine Learning and a background as a professional musician, Leila brings a uniquely creative and human-centered approach to the world of technology. She specializes in cutting through the hype and fear around AI, teaching entrepreneurs how to leverage this powerful technology in ways that align with their values. Her mission is to empower business owners with the knowledge to implement and maintain their own AI solutions, fostering true independence and innovation.

🎯 Leila’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Always figure out what you want to do and why, and make sure that whatever that is, is something that you are excited about and really care about. And then once you have that identified, do everything in your power to make that happen."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• "AI at its core is really a tool... behind all of these things, no matter what it looks like, it's just an algorithm. And the more that we can remember that, the more we can take that step back and say, okay, intentionally, what am I trying to do with my business?" – Leila Kaneda
• "When you're in the field of AI... it's a mindset shift more than anything... And so once you learn enough to shift your mind, it's like the floodgates open." – Leila Kaneda
• "If what you're trying to do is as important to you as you think it is, it'll be equally as important and infectious to the rest of the world. That's what we can do to make a difference." – Leila Kaneda

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Audit Your Workflow Intentionally: Pick one repetitive task in your business (like social media content creation) and map out your current process. Identify where AI can assist with research or drafting, not replace your final, human touch.
• ✅ Schedule "AI Playtime": Dedicate one hour this week to using an AI tool for a fun, non-business project. Build a trivia game, plan a dream vacation, or write a song. The goal is to learn the tool's capabilities in a low-pressure environment.
• ✅ Define Your Core Mission: Before you invest in any new technology, write down the core mission of your business and what excites you most about it. Ensure any tool you adopt serves that mission directly.
• ✅ Empower, Don't Depend: When hiring a consultant or expert, ask them how they plan to transfer their knowledge to you and your team. Prioritize partners who aim to make themselves obsolete.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.kaneda-consulting.com
• Connect with Leila on LinkedIn
• Follow Kaneda Consulting on LinkedIn
• Follow Kaneda Consulting on Instagram
• Follow Kaneda Consulting on TikTok
• Follow Kaneda Consulting on Facebook
• Follow Kaneda Consulting on YouTube

In a world saturated with forgettable digital ads, how do you create a brand experience that people talk about for weeks? Alejandro Guzman of Azul Marketing reveals how he combines behavioral economics, world-class creativity, and the power of gamification to craft truly memorable moments for brands like Coca-Cola. This episode is a masterclass in thinking differently, showing how your unique curiosities—from video games to psychology—can become your greatest business assets. Tune in to learn how to surprise and delight your audience, leverage AI as a creative superpower, and design marketing that makes a lasting impact.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• The Gamification Goldmine: Learn how to apply game mechanics to real-world business scenarios (like turning a corporate convention into a viral trading card game) to drive unprecedented engagement and connection.
• AI as Your Creative Exoskeleton: Discover why AI isn't a threat but an incredible tool that augments your abilities, allowing you to prototype, brainstorm, and execute ambitious ideas faster than ever before.
• The Power of Being a Generalist: Understand why exploring diverse interests (like Roger Federer did with multiple sports) can give you a broader toolkit and a more innovative approach to problem-solving than hyper-focused specialists.
• Reverse-Engineer Your Marketing: Learn how to start with the end-user's psychology and work backward to craft messages and experiences that resonate deeply and drive action.
• Escaping "Hedonic Adaptation": Get strategies to combat the natural tendency for audiences to get bored, and learn how to consistently create surprising, memorable moments that stand out.
• Marketing Beyond the Screen: Hear a powerful case for why experiential, in-person marketing creates a stickiness and a human connection that digital ads simply can't replicate.

📝 About Alejandro Guzman

Alejandro Guzman is a creative force with over 18 years of experience working with world-class brands and agencies. As the founder of Azul Marketing, he specializes in creative direction, graphic design, and crafting unique engagement tools. With a Master's in Sustainable Design and a deep curiosity for human behavior and gamification, Alejandro brings a refreshingly different perspective to marketing, transforming standard corporate events and campaigns into unforgettable, immersive experiences.

🎯 Alejandro’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Go work through your ideas, be creative, soak yourself with multiple things... the more concepts you have to you, the more creative you can be."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• "AI is just an augmentator of our capacities. So if you're a creative person, AI is just like having an exoskeleton in the space. You have superpowers." – Alejandro Guzman
• "You can spend the dollar and having nobody remember what you did the next minute or spend the same dollar and having somebody talking about it to their friends in a week... the second dollar is very well spent." – Alejandro Guzman
• "I cannot be creative in a world that I don't know. So the same thing applies for everything. You need to go and test and taste all the foods, taste all the flavors so you can be the best chef ever." – Alejandro Guzman

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Brainstorm a "Gamification" Element for Your Business: Identify one customer touchpoint (e.g., onboarding, a live event, a loyalty program) and think of one way you could introduce a game-like mechanic to make it more engaging.
• Use AI for a "What If" Scenario: Spend 30 minutes with an AI tool like ChatGPT or Midjourney to prototype a wild idea you've had. Ask it to generate concepts, visuals, or copy to see how it can accelerate your creative process.
• Schedule "Curiosity Time": Block 1-2 hours on your calendar this week to learn about a topic completely unrelated to your work. Watch a documentary, read a book, or listen to a podcast from a different field.
• Map Your Customer Experience: Think about a recent brand interaction you had that was truly memorable. What made it special? Now, analyze your own customer journey and identify one opportunity to surprise and delight them.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.azulmarketing.co
• Connect with Alejandro on LinkedIn
• Follow Azul Marketing NA on LinkedIn

As November kicks off and we enter the month of giving thanks, who’s the one person you’ve been forgetting to thank? Your entrepreneurial journey will be filled with people: friends and family, clients, partners, and even a few internet trolls. But only one person will be there for every up, every down, every moment of self-doubt, and every crazy idea. In this Solo Sunday episode, Brian turns a viral social media post into a powerful reminder that you are that person. Drawing on his conversations with thousands of entrepreneurs, he shares why the happiest and most successful founders are always on their own side, and why your high standards can coexist with being gentle, gracious, and kind to yourself.

✨ Why This Matters for You

Being your own biggest champion is a game-changer for entrepreneurs because:

• You’re the only person who will experience every moment of your journey.
• Not everyone will celebrate your wins, so you need to know how to celebrate them yourself.
• Your highest standards don’t have to come at the expense of your self-belief.
• Self-kindness gives you a steadier foundation for handling losses, setbacks, and self-doubt.
• Happiness is the most important metric of all, and it starts with being on your own side.

📝 Key Takeaways

• You’re the Only Constant. Parents, kids, partners, and friends can’t be there for your entire life. You’re the only person who’s there for all of it.
• Be the Person You Want in Your Corner. Give yourself what you’d want from someone else: celebration during the highs and encouragement during the lows.
• High Standards and Self-Kindness Must Coexist. You can hold yourself accountable and still be your biggest cheerleader. Be gracious with yourself as you pursue your goals.
• Your Wins Reveal Who’s Really with You. It’s easy for people to show up during your lows, but your highs can put their own lives under the microscope. Don’t rely on everyone else to celebrate your success.
• Self-Belief Takes Practice. Being your own champion doesn’t happen by mistake. You build that belief through how you respond to each win and each loss.

🚀 Put It Into Action

This week, practice being on your own side:

• Carve out some time to reconnect with why you believe in yourself and why you started this journey.
• Pick one recent win and allow yourself to truly celebrate it.
• Think back on a recent loss and tell yourself what you’d want to hear from someone in your corner: “We are doing our best, we are learning, and we are moving forward.”
• Make a list of the things you’re thankful to yourself for, including the effort and energy you’ve put into your entrepreneurial journey.

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode
• Connect with Brian on Instagram @imetbrian
• Share this episode with a fellow entrepreneur who needs a reminder to be kinder to themselves

In this special Collab Week episode of Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, 10 founders come together to answer one deeply personal question:

Tell us about a decision or mistake that haunted you, and how you finally put that ghost to rest.

The ghosts in this episode include a strategy deck that walked out the door, funding turned down at the finish line, a six-figure funnel kept running out of attachment, and friendships that made hard calls even harder. It’s a wide-ranging, refreshingly honest episode, and it’s a reminder that the mistake itself rarely haunts us for long. What haunts us is a lesson we haven’t put into practice yet.

For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur still replaying a decision they wish they could take back, this episode is proof that you’re not alone. Every founder carries a few ghosts, and the ones who grow are the ones who turn those ghosts into guardrails, boundaries, and better instincts.

✨ What You’ll Take Away

In this episode, you’ll take away:

• How the “first big check” can cost you far more than it pays
• Why how you treat the people building your business deserves as much attention as any strategy decision
• How to walk away from a growth path that’s out of alignment, even with funding on the table
• Why years of industry expertise don’t automatically make you good at pricing your own work
• How to stay generous without letting people build on you instead of with you
• Why turning off the marketing isn’t the same as killing your first business
• Why every founder’s ghost can become the foundation for how they lead next

🎙️ Meet the Collab Week Contributors

Renée Holder — Janus Management Group

Renée Holder is the Founder, President, and Principal Consultant of Janus Management Group, a New York-based firm specializing in organizational change management strategy, training, and transformation support. A certified change management professional with more than 20 years of experience, Renée helps organizations and their people navigate technology, HR, and ERP transformations, including large-scale systems like SAP, with confidence and success.

Connect with Renée:

https://www.janusmanagementgroup.com/

William McCumber — Rowan Elder Productions & Applied Erudition

William McCumber is the founder of two ed-tech companies, Rowan Elder Productions and Applied Erudition. Rowan Elder is an async faculty development program that upskills professors to build studio-quality online lectures that feel more like YouTube than a lecturer reading slides at the front of the room. Applied Erudition is a platform that measures real capability rather than seat time.

Connect with William:

https://www.rowanelder.com/

https://appliederudition.com/

Sara Reece — Workmind

Sara Reece is the CEO and Co-Founder of Workmind, where she helps organizations use practical, operations-first automation to eliminate friction and grow without increasing headcount at the same pace. For the last seven years, she has designed and implemented automation with organizations ranging from nonprofits and small businesses to franchise systems and Fortune 500 enterprises. Her unconventional career spans journalism, television broadcasting, environmental research, and technology, and she is the author of The Practical Path to Operational Automation.

Connect with Sara:

https://workmind.cloud/

https://www.saralreece.com/

Drew Mehta — ThinkFraction

After more than 20 years in corporate, Drew Mehta founded ThinkFraction to help owner-operated businesses integrate AI into their everyday workflows and processes in a practical, hype-free way. He helps owner-operators grow revenue, lower costs, and improve quality by fixing leaks in their back-end workflows. ThinkFraction pairs advisory with hands-on implementation and education, and Drew teaches clients how AI fits into their business while learning the entrepreneurial ropes himself.

Connect with Drew:

https://thinkfraction.xyz/

Janice Kephart — ZipID

Janice Kephart is a lawyer, identity expert, and the founder of ZipID. She drafted the federal identity theft criminal statute for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, served on the 9/11 Commission, helped architect both REAL ID and the nation’s biometric border entry-exit system, and later developed biometric workflows at MorphoTrak (now Idemia). ZipID brings real biometric identity verification to the Form I-9 process so employers can meet federal requirements with confidence, and Janice is now building ZipID’s ID Fraud Forensic Dashboard for banks, credit unions, casinos, and any business that needs to know an ID is legitimate.

Connect with Janice:

https://www.zipidapp.com/

Anne Gillaspie — Fix & Form

Anne Gillaspie is a global keynote speaker, truth disruptor, and creator of SHARE YOUR FEAR™, a movement that makes fear less scary and truth easier to tell. A 12-year entrepreneur, she is the CEO and founder of Denver-based Fix & Form Branding Firm, host of the top-ranked OnlyFounders podcast, and a brand therapist to founders and executives. Through storytelling, unexpected dance, and radically human experiences, Anne challenges audiences to stop performing and start telling the truth about who they are.

Connect with Anne:

https://theannegillaspie.com/

https://fixandform.com/

Heather Waisanen — Coastal Maverick

Heather Waisanen is the founder of Coastal Maverick, a woman-owned boutique out-of-home advertising agency in Jacksonville, Florida, that helps brands nationwide with advertising strategy, media planning and buying, negotiation, and campaign execution. With more than a decade of experience across the client, agency, and media owner sides of the industry, she launched Coastal Maverick after being laid off from her role as a senior media planner. Now in her fourth year of entrepreneurship, Heather was recognized as a JAX Chamber Small Business Leader of the Year and is a member of the inaugural 2026 Visionaries 200 class.

Connect with Heather:

https://www.coastalmaverick.com/

Kacy Webster — Profit Quiver

Kacy Webster is a Business Transformation Strategist and Certified AI Consultant with 30+ years of executive leadership across higher education, workforce development, and enterprise transformation. Through Profit Quiver and The PrecisionX System, she partners with mid-market manufacturers, B2B leadership teams, colleges, and workforce organizations to adopt AI in a way their people can actually trust. Her framework, the 12 Domains of Human-First AI Adoption, gives leaders a structured path to transformation that starts with culture, alignment, and readiness before technology.

Connect with Kacy:

https://www.profitquiver.com/

Erik Berglund — The Language of Leadership & Loominary

Erik Berglund is the founder of The Language of Leadership and Loominary, and host of the I Have Some Questions podcast. His companies help people practice difficult conversations before they have to have them in real life. The Language of Leadership offers a framework for leadership communication, and Loominary builds custom skill simulation systems that give businesses a way to reinforce those skills across their teams.

Connect with Erik:

https://www.languageofleadership.io/

https://www.loominary.io

Jane Alexander — Emma Advisor

Jane Alexander is the founder and CEO of Emma Advisor, an AI platform that helps students and families navigate the path from high school to college with more clarity, strategy, and confidence. Her own path was unconventional: she was homeschooled in rural Idaho, started at community college, transferred to a private university, completed graduate work at Harvard, and spent more than a decade advising leaders at over 200 colleges and universities. She built Emma Advisor so that opportunity doesn’t depend on social capital, connections, or the ability to hire expensive consultants.

Connect with Jane:

https://emmaadvisor.ai/

In a world grappling with the rise of AI, how do we protect the invaluable human skills of critical thinking, creativity, and authenticity? Jordan Wolff, a former educator turned founder, is tackling this challenge head-on. In this episode, Jordan shares his journey from the classroom to launching Typed by Hand, an EdTech company designed to champion authentic student work, not police it. This isn't just a conversation about education; it's a masterclass in building a purpose-driven, bootstrapped, and globally-distributed company. For any entrepreneur passionate about solving real-world problems, Jordan’s story provides a powerful blueprint for turning deep industry expertise into a thriving business that values humanity over automation.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🌍 How to successfully build and manage a global team by leaning into trust, delegation, and a shared mission.
• 👨‍🏫 Why the skills honed as a teacher—managing chaos, wearing multiple hats, and staying calm under pressure—are a secret weapon for entrepreneurs.
• 🤝 How to build customer relationships based on partnership and trust, rather than an adversarial "policing" model.
• 💪 The strategic advantages of bootstrapping your startup to maintain your mission and avoid the pressures of VC funding that can dilute your vision.
• ❤️ Why embedding "pride" and "humanity" into your product can be a powerful differentiator in an increasingly automated world.
• 🎯 How to leverage your deep industry experience to identify and solve a critical problem that others overlook.

📝 About Jordan Wolff

Jordan Wolff is the CEO and founder of Typed by Hand, an education technology company focused on protecting authentic student writing in the age of AI. Before launching his company, Jordan spent over a decade as an ELA teacher, school leader, and consultant across the United States and internationally. His hands-on experience in the classroom shaped his powerful belief that the future of integrity isn't about policing students, but about empowering them to take pride in their own work. Jordan brings a unique and essential perspective, blending the heart of an educator with the strategic mind of a global entrepreneur.

🎯 Jordan’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Keep calm and cool." In entrepreneurship, you are constantly putting out fires. A teacher’s ability to calmly manage a chaotic classroom—whether it's kids fighting or a mouse in the corner—is the same skill set needed to navigate the daily challenges of a startup.

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “It's not always the outcome. It's also the process, the beautifully ugly process that we have to value and, you know, what it means to be human.” – Jordan Wolff
• “Teachers, I mean, these are intelligent human beings that studied how to teach other human beings. They know when someone is a fake.” – Jordan Wolff
• “I think we all need to take a second to breathe. We need to embrace moments of reflection and relaxing and, you know, appreciate ourselves.” – Jordan Wolff

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Identify a problem in your own industry that you understand better than anyone else. Your insider knowledge is your greatest competitive advantage.
• ✅ When building a remote team, make your company’s mission the central pillar of your culture to keep everyone aligned and motivated across time zones.
• ✅ Instead of trying to "catch" customers or users doing something wrong, build systems that encourage and reward authenticity and trust.
• ✅ Before seeking outside funding, explore bootstrapping to prove your concept and retain full control over your company's direction and values.
• ✅ Acknowledge your ability to handle pressure. The next time you face a "fire" in your business, channel the calm composure of a seasoned teacher.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.typedbyhand.com
• Try Typed by Me for free
• Connect with Jordan on LinkedIn
• Follow Typed by Hand on LinkedIn
• Follow Typed by Hand on Facebook
• Follow Typed by Hand on Instagram

Rayne Chapman, a creative director turned tech founder, joins the show to share how she transformed a personal frustration—the lack of a good way to save online inspiration—into a thriving business called Neat. This episode is a masterclass in building a product with deep intentionality, driven by genuine user needs rather than just adding features for the sake of it. For any entrepreneur or wantrepreneur, this conversation is packed with insights on how to leverage your unique background, use customer feedback to build a better product, and embrace the often-scary but magical process of building a company from the ground up.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 How to turn your own professional frustration into a scalable business idea.
• 🗣️ Simple, effective strategies for gathering user feedback that actually shapes your product roadmap (hint: it's not just NPS scores).
• 🤖 Why AI is a powerful augmentation tool for creativity and productivity, not a replacement for human vision.
• 🧠 The power of cross-industry inspiration (like a bullet train inspired by a bird) to solve complex business problems.
• 🎨 How to build a brand that empowers your users' unique vision instead of imposing your own aesthetic.
• 🧘‍♀️ Why embracing the "process" over instant gratification is the key to building a sustainable and impactful business.

📝 About Rayne Chapman

Rayne Chapman is the Founder and CEO of Neat, an innovative platform for saving and organizing creative inspiration. With a rich background as an agency art director and creative director at places like Meta, she experienced firsthand the problem of wrangling inspiration from endless online sources. Rayne brings a unique, creative-first perspective to the world of tech entrepreneurship, focusing on building tools that are intentional, user-centric, and designed to enhance human creativity.

🎯 Rayne’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

Don't underestimate the power of the process; the magic is in the day-to-day journey of building, not just in reaching the destination.

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “Building something that actually helps people and is really intentional, I think, is kind of that human superpower we want to hold on to.” – Rayne Chapman
• “I actually think the magic is in the process... the inspiration is where you start, but like the happy accident or the things or the challenges along the way are what that's going to make that end product feel really unique and ownable to you.” – Rayne Chapman
• “You can find inspiration that's completely unrelated to something that you're doing and it can help you solve a problem.” – Rayne Chapman

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Start your own inspiration board today. Use a tool like Neat to save ideas from different sources—websites, images, links—and see what new connections you can make.
• ✅ Actively seek user feedback. Instead of a generic survey, send a personal email or text to a few key users and ask, "What's one thing that would make this more useful for you?"
• ✅ Look for inspiration outside your industry. Spend 30 minutes this week exploring a topic completely unrelated to your business (like nature, architecture, or sports) and see what ideas it sparks.
• ✅ Experiment with an AI tool to augment a task you dislike. Use something like Gamma AI for presentations or another tool to help with note-taking, and see how it can free up your time for more creative work.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://neatinspo.com
• Connect with Rayne on LinkedIn
• Follow Neat Inspo on LinkedIn

In a world buzzing with AI advancements, Masumi Nakamura is focused on the one thing technology often overlooks: the people. After 25 years as a top engineering leader at giants like Cisco and PayPal, Masumi realized the biggest challenges weren't in the code, but in the complex human dynamics of a team. In this episode, he introduces askMyu, his private AI assistant designed to navigate the "people side" of work. This isn't about replacing jobs; it's about enhancing our most human skills. For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur building a team, this episode is a masterclass in leveraging AI to foster better communication, navigate career growth, and solve the interpersonal issues that truly define a company's success, all while prioritizing individual privacy.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• Why the most critical business challenges are often human-related, not technical, and how AI can help bridge the gap.
• How to build a company culture where technology enhances human skills like decision-making and relationship-building, rather than replacing them.
• The crucial role of privacy and end-to-end encryption when integrating AI tools into your team's workflow to build trust.
• How an AI assistant can gather context from emails, calendars, and messages to help you prepare for meetings and understand team dynamics.
• A forward-thinking perspective on how AI will increase the importance of human interaction and systemic thinking in the workplace.
• Actionable insights on how to guide your team through the AI revolution by focusing on addition and augmentation, not fear and subtraction.

📝 About Masumi Nakamura

Masumi Nakamura is the co-founder and CEO of askMyu, a private AI assistant for the people side of work. With a storied 25-year career as an engineer and engineering leader, Masumi has been at the forefront of innovation at companies like Cisco, PayPal, and Mercari US, where he served as VP of Engineering. He discovered that across every team, the engineering was the easy part; the human element was the real challenge. This insight, combined with his experience mentoring founders at Techstars, led him to build a tool that helps professionals navigate their careers and relationships at work.

🎯 Masumi’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"No matter what, it's about the people. If you fundamentally think about what a company is, at the end of the day, it's a grouping of people and resources to get some goal done... The more you understand your relationships, the more you build on it, the better you will be."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “The engineering, the building, that's the easy stuff. It was the people side that often is the issue.” – Masumi Nakamura
• “You end up having to pay a lot more attention to what's not said as well as what is said.” – Masumi Nakamura
• “The bigger troubling thing that's actually happening is the amount of load is increasing on the person... what humans need to do elevates up. You need to have a better sense of system thinking. You're going to have to interact with more people, actually.” – Masumi Nakamura

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Audit your own "people problems." Identify where communication breakdowns or relationship friction are holding your business back.
• ✅ When evaluating AI tools, make privacy your top priority. Ensure any new technology protects individual data and builds trust within your team.
• ✅ Shift your focus from automating tasks to augmenting human capabilities. Use AI to free up time for strategic thinking, creativity, and relationship-building.
• ✅ Encourage your team to develop elevated skills like systems thinking, complex decision-making, and interpersonal communication—these are the skills that will be amplified, not replaced, by AI.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.askmyu.com
• Connect with Masumi on LinkedIn
• Follow askMyu on LinkedIn

Mark McSweeney, a 30-year veteran of the association and nonprofit world, shares powerful insights on governance, strategy, and leadership that apply to any business. He reveals the universal patterns of success he's observed across countless organizations and breaks down why even the most unique businesses face similar challenges. This episode is a masterclass in strategic thinking, teaching you how to get out of the "weeds," facilitate better conversations, and ask the kind of questions that lead to breakthrough solutions. Tune in to learn how to shift from a tactical operator to a visionary leader in your own venture.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 Why "nonprofit is a tax status, not a business strategy" and how to apply this mindset to your own company's growth.
• 🧠 The critical difference between governance and management, and how to adopt a "nose in, fingers out" approach to leadership.
• ❓ A powerful framework for asking "one level higher" to ensure you're solving the right problems, not just the most immediate ones.
• 🤝 The art of facilitation and how to lead your team, clients, and partners to better solutions by asking questions instead of giving answers.
• 📈 How to intentionally carve out time for strategic thinking and escape the "weedy" operational mindset that holds so many entrepreneurs back.
• 💡 The surprising power of associations and why joining one could be the secret to your professional and business growth.
• 🎯 How the E-Myth principle of "technician vs. owner" applies to every stage of the entrepreneurial journey.

📝 About Mark McSweeney

Mark McSweeney is a governance strategist, facilitator, and the founder of Envisioned Future. With over 30 years of experience in the association and nonprofit sectors, including serving as an association CEO at just 27, he brings a unique perspective on leadership. Mark specializes in helping boards and leadership teams think strategically, navigate change, and make better decisions about their future. His genius lies in asking the questions that help leaders get out of their own way and see their challenges from a higher, more impactful vantage point.

🎯 Mark’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

Before you rush into finding a better answer, make sure you're asking a better question. His advice is to "always ask one level higher" to shift your perspective from immediate problem-solving to true strategic thinking.

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “Nonprofit is a tax status, not a business strategy.” – Mark McSweeney
• “Sometimes the very things that made us successful can also get in the way of where we need to go next.” – Mark McSweeney
• “Before you rush into a better answer, make sure you're asking a better question.” – Mark McSweeney

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Schedule dedicated "strategic thinking" time each week. Get out of your usual environment to force your brain out of its operational rut.
• ✅ The next time your team faces a problem, stop them and ask, "What's the bigger question behind the question we're trying to answer?"
• ✅ Practice a "nose in, fingers out" leadership style. Understand what's happening in your business without micromanaging the day-to-day operations.
• ✅ Research and identify a professional association in your industry. Explore joining to tap into a community of peers for networking and growth.
• ✅ Re-evaluate your business model with the mindset that you are a business first, regardless of your mission or tax status.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://envisionedfuture.co
• Connect with Mark on LinkedIn
• Follow Envisioned Future LLC on LinkedIn

Every entrepreneur loves the superhero story: the founder who swoops in at midnight to fix the crashed server, write the perfect sales copy, and hold the whole business together. But what if that superhero is actually trapped in a cage built from their own competence? In this special Solo Sunday, Brian is unplugged and spending time with his family, so two AI hosts take over the feed. Nobody on Brian’s team prompted or directed them. They chose to turn the microphone around and dissect Brian’s own book, OPERATE: Escape the Finisher’s Trap and Build a Business That Runs Without You. They cover the stories behind it, including a Christmas Eve drive through a snowstorm to fix a client’s email server, a roast beef shop owner asking “what’s next?”, and a dorm room TV playing Google Analytics 24/7. They also break down all seven pillars of the OPERATE Framework, which helps you stop being the bottleneck and build a business that runs beautifully without you.

✨ Why This Matters for You
The OPERATE Framework is a game-changer for entrepreneurs because:

• It names the “operator ceiling,” the point where your own ability to get things done is what stops your business from growing.
• It moves you from finisher to architect, so you design the systems others use to finish the work.
• It ends the feast-or-famine cycle by making visibility a constant current instead of a light switch.
• It shows how automation can protect the human touch instead of replacing it.
• It gives you practical tools for handing over real decisions to your team, including decision thresholds and the 4 D’s.

📝 Key Takeaways

• Be the Architect, Not the Finisher. A founder is like a rocket’s booster stage: essential to get off the ground, but dead weight if it never detaches. Your highest value is designing the systems, not finishing every task.
• Become a Lighthouse, Not a Lifeboat. Good work doesn’t market itself. Brian’s Outreach Equation is Message × Medium × Motion, and motion is what keeps your message going out while you sleep or deliver client work.
• Pipelines Are Relationship Journeys. Capture, nurture, convert. Automation doesn’t replace empathy. It makes sure empathy happens consistently, which is how Brian earned a “your timing is spooky” reply from a prospect.
• Delivery Runs on Clarity, Cadence, and Capacity. Hustle hides broken systems. Retention then runs on Experience, Engagement, and Evolution, and continuity offers give clients a systematized bridge to their next level.
• Leverage Beats Efficiency. Efficiency gets today’s tasks done. Leverage changes what you’re capable of for the next decade. Brian’s AI teammates, Micaela and Andrew, handle the mechanical work so the humans can do the meaningful work.
• Respect the Empathy Line. Never automate hiring decisions, creative reviews, apologies, or gratitude. Automation handles the movement of data, not the meaning of the relationship.
• Track All Three Layers of Telemetry. Operational (the daily pulse), performance (the scoreboard), and personal (your energy, sleep, and team morale). Don’t track vanity metrics.
• Mistakes Are Tuition. Use Brian’s enablement trifecta of Empowerment, Education, and Environment, and follow the 4 D’s: Document → Delegate → Develop → Disappear (then distribute decisions). Set decision thresholds, like the Ritz-Carlton’s $2,000 rule, scaled to your business.

🚀 Put It Into Action
This week, don’t try to build all seven pillars at once. Pick one friction point and build one system:

• Block off one hour in your calendar.
• Name the single biggest bottleneck in your business. Is it a leaky pipeline, feast-or-famine outreach, or a team that waits on you for every decision?
• Write down every step you take to handle that bottleneck manually.
• Turn that document into a system. Automate the data movement, delegate the execution, or set a decision threshold (e.g., “If it costs under $200 to fix, you have the authority to decide”).
• Then ask yourself the episode’s closing question: when your business no longer needs you to be the hero, what will you do with your life?

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode
• Grab your copy of OPERATE: Escape the Finisher’s Trap and Build a Business That Runs Without You
• Connect with Brian on Instagram @imetbrian
• Share this episode with a fellow entrepreneur who’s stuck being the hero of their own business

In this special Collab Week episode of Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, 8 founders come together to answer one deceptively powerful question:

Think back to a flop or failure you’ve had in your business. How did it end up feeding something that worked?

This episode covers ad campaigns that flopped, teams scaled too fast, AI projects that got ahead of the technology, a contractor who never delivered, an expo full of the wrong audience, a deal lost on the two-yard line, and a lot more. Together, the answers show that the failure itself rarely matters most. What matters is what you do with it next.

For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur still stinging from something that didn’t work, or wondering whether you’re “failing too much,” this episode is a reminder that every founder you admire has a story like yours. You’ll hear how each one turned a setback into better data, sharper focus, new skills, and a stronger business.

✨ What You’ll Take Away

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How scaling your team before you understand your operations can almost sink your business
• Why setting expectations up front matters most when you’re selling AI
• How a failed contractor relationship can push you to build skills you never planned to learn
• Why asking the right questions saves you time and money
• What “the deal dies in maybes” means for founders still building their sales muscle
• Why saying no to the wrong opportunities makes room for the right ones

🎙️ Meet the Collab Week Contributors

Sara Reece — Workmind

Sara Reece is the CEO and Co-Founder of Workmind, where she helps organizations use practical, operations-first automation to remove friction and grow without increasing headcount at the same pace. Over the last seven years, she has designed and implemented automation for nonprofits, small businesses, franchise systems, and Fortune 500 enterprises, drawing on a career that spans journalism, television broadcasting, environmental research, and technology. Sara is the author of The Practical Path to Operational Automation and speaks regularly on practical automation, AI, leadership, and sustainable growth.

Connect with Sara:

Website: https://workmind.cloud/

Jaimz Hodge — Cart Catalyst

Jaimz Hodge is the owner of Cart Catalyst, a Missoula, Montana agency that helps Shopify brands convert more customers by removing the hidden friction in their buying experience. From the first ad click to checkout, Jaimz and his team improve both the website and the Google Ads behind it so ecommerce businesses can scale to the next level.

Connect with Jaimz:

Website: https://www.cartcatalyst.com/

Julie Silvestri — Inside Out Box

Julie Silvestri is the founder and CEO of Inside Out Box, which builds custom software and AI tools, starting with how a company’s data is designed and organized. After studying theoretical math at Harvard, Julie spent more than a decade at startups in finance and edtech, where she managed cross-national software development teams. For more than four years, Inside Out Box has served a broad range of mid-sized companies.

Connect with Julie:

Website: https://www.insideoutbox.com/

Jane Alexander — Emma Advisor

Jane Alexander is the founder and CEO of Emma Advisor, an AI platform that helps families get from high school to college with more clarity, strategy, and confidence. Homeschooled in rural Idaho, Jane went from community college to a private university and later did graduate work at Harvard, then spent more than a decade advising leaders at over 200 colleges and universities. She built Emma Advisor on the belief that opportunity shouldn’t depend on connections or expensive consultants.

Connect with Jane:

Website: https://emmaadvisor.ai/

Felix Vicknair — United Business Works

Felix Vicknair is an executive business advisor and the founder of United Business Works, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He provides cost optimization services that help small businesses, nonprofits, and healthcare practices reduce expenses and run leaner, both locally and across the US.

Connect with Felix:

Website: https://unitedbusinessworks.com/

Kacy Webster — Profit Quiver

Kacy Webster is a Business Transformation Strategist, Certified AI Consultant, and the founder of Profit Quiver, based in Minburn, Iowa. With more than 30 years of executive leadership in higher education, workforce development, and enterprise transformation, she helps colleges, nonprofits, and organizations adopt AI in ways their people can trust. Her framework, the 12 Domains of Human-First AI Adoption, gives leaders a structured path to transformation that starts with culture, alignment, and readiness rather than the technology itself.

Connect with Kacy:

Website: https://www.profitquiver.com/

Drew Mehta — ThinkFraction

Drew Mehta is the founder of ThinkFraction, which helps owner-operated businesses build practical AI into their everyday workflows to grow revenue, lower costs, and improve quality. After more than 20 years in corporate, much of it in product management, Drew now combines advisory, implementation, and education to fix the leaks in his clients’ back-end operations, and he’s open about learning the entrepreneurial journey as he goes.

Connect with Drew:

Website: https://thinkfraction.xyz/

Heather Waisanen — Coastal Maverick

Heather Waisanen is the founder of Coastal Maverick, a woman-owned boutique out-of-home advertising agency in Jacksonville, Florida that helps brands nationwide with strategy, media planning, buying, negotiation, and campaign execution. After being laid off from her role as a senior media planner, she launched the agency, drawing on more than a decade of experience across the client, agency, and media owner sides of the industry. Now in her fourth year in business, Heather was named a JAX Chamber Small Business Leader of the Year and is a member of the inaugural 2026 Visionaries 200 class.

Connect with Heather:

Website: https://www.coastalmaverick.com/

Nils Olsen, a former Airborne Infantry Officer, is rewriting the rules of defense technology with his AI-powered startup, Six Tango. In this episode, Nils shares his incredible journey from the front lines to founder, revealing how he took a problem he experienced firsthand in the military and turned it into a groundbreaking business. He unpacks the "Moneyball for the military" strategy, showing how data can uncover hidden opportunities in any industry. This episode is a must-listen for any entrepreneur who wants to build a lean, mission-driven company, leverage AI to do more with less, and find the courage to take the leap into a venture they truly believe in.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 How to translate skills from a non-business background (like the military) into a powerful founder's toolkit for leadership, planning, and execution.
• 🤖 Why AI is a game-changer for solo founders and small teams, allowing you to build a functional MVP in days and automate operations from the start.
• 📊 The "Moneyball" Mindset: How to identify and build the data layer in your industry to uncover overlooked drivers of performance and create a massive competitive advantage.
• 🎯 How to build a truly user-centric product by getting "in the trenches" with your customers to solve the problems they actually have, not the ones you assume they do.
• 👨‍👩‍👧 The Founder-Parent Playbook: Actionable strategies for structuring your time to build a high-growth startup while remaining a present and engaged parent.
• 💡 The crucial difference between "deliberate preparation" and "general preparation," and why you need to invest in both to seize unforeseen opportunities.
• 💪 Why anchoring your business in a personal mission makes the entrepreneurial journey easier, especially when facing the inevitable risk of failure.

📝 About Nils Olsen

Nils Olsen is the founder and CEO of Six Tango, an innovative company building AI-powered mission planning software for frontline military leaders. Before launching his venture, Nils served for nine years as an Airborne Infantry Officer in the U.S. Army, where he experienced firsthand the technology gaps he is now working to solve. His unique perspective as both the end-user and the founder gives him a powerful advantage in the defense tech space, allowing him to build a product that is not just technologically advanced, but deeply practical and designed for the people who need it most.

🎯 Nils’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

“Identify something that you care about, identify something you're willing to fight for, someone you're willing to fight for, and then spend your time doing that because I think that's going to be time well spent.”

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “No plan survives first contact. No, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” – Nils Olsen
• “If I fail, I'm failing in pursuit of trying to deliver for people I care about and a product that I completely believe in.” – Nils Olsen
• “We're trying to build something that comes out of the box...when they open it, they say, 'this is exactly how I would have designed it myself.'" – Nils Olsen

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Identify a problem you wish was solved for you in a previous career; this is often the most powerful source for a business idea.
• ✅ Experiment with AI code assistants to build a rapid MVP of your idea, even if you don't have a technical background.
• ✅ Block out non-negotiable personal or family time on your calendar first, then build your work schedule around those "glass balls."
• ✅ Establish a "battle rhythm" for your week with dedicated blocks for deep work, calls, and strategic planning to maintain focus and momentum.
• ✅ Go talk to your potential users. Get "wet and dirty" to understand their real-world pain points before you write a single line of code.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://sixtango.ai
• Connect with Nils on LinkedIn
• Follow Six Tango on LinkedIn

Overwhelmed by a daily flood of 100+ emails, Curtis Boortz decided to solve his own problem by building a custom AI tool. That tool evolved into ForthWrite, an AI platform that drafts emails in your authentic voice, directly within your inbox. In this episode, Curtis shares his incredible journey from finance professional to solo tech founder, revealing how he transformed a personal pain point into a scalable SaaS business. This episode is a masterclass for any entrepreneur looking to leverage AI not just as a chatbot, but as a deeply integrated tool to save time, enhance client communication, and free yourself up to do the work that truly matters.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 How to turn a personal business frustration into a sellable software product.
• 🤖 The step-by-step process for training AI to write in your unique voice, moving beyond generic, cookie-cutter responses.
• workflow integration, and why the best AI tools are the ones you don't have to think about using.
• 💡 How to strategically target a niche industry (like finance or accounting) by building solutions for their biggest compliance and efficiency challenges.
• 🤝 Why AI is the ultimate co-founder for solopreneurs, helping with everything from business strategy to product development.
• 🧠 The critical difference between simply using AI (like ChatGPT) and truly implementing AI workflows to automate and scale your operations.
• 💰 How to augment your team with AI to free up human capital for high-value tasks, rather than replacing them.

📝 About Curtis Boortz

Curtis Boortz is the founder of ForthWrite, an AI email tool, and an AI implementation consultant. With a background in SMB lending, Curtis experienced firsthand how client emails could consume the entire workday. Instead of accepting the status quo, he taught himself how to build an AI solution that drafted emails in his own voice, which became the foundation for Fourthrite. Today, he helps professionals and firms integrate AI into their core operations, proving that the future of business isn't about replacing humans, but augmenting them with intelligent, personalized technology.

🎯 Curtis’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"AI looks complicated on the surface, but it's really not as complicated as you think if you start to just spend time with the tools. Get in there, start using it, get your hands dirty, and see what you can do."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “AI automation, I don't believe should replace employees. I think it should augment them, free them up to do more important tasks.” – Curtis Boortz
• “I didn't want to do the tab switching that eats more time than you think, that distracts your focus more than you think. ForthWrite lives directly in the inbox.” – Curtis Boortz
• “If it wasn't for AI, I probably wouldn't be here today. AI has made the entire journey from the start to where I am now possible.” – Curtis Boortz

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Audit your inbox. Identify the top 3-5 types of emails you write repeatedly and use them as a starting point to create a "voice profile" for an AI tool.
• ✅ Instead of just copying and pasting into ChatGPT, explore an AI tool that integrates directly into your existing software (email, CRM, project management).
• ✅ Challenge an AI with a business idea. Go to a tool like Claude and ask it for critical feedback on a strategy, encouraging it to be less agreeable and more analytical.
• ✅ Dedicate 30 minutes this week to "get your hands dirty." Pick one manual, repetitive task in your business and research how an AI tool could automate it.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.forthwrite.ai
• Connect with Curtis on LinkedIn
• Follow ForthWrite on LinkedIn
• Follow Curtis on Instagram

Are you tired of feeling like your team is constantly distracted, solving the same problems over and over? In this powerful episode, former C-suite executive Rachel Honoway reveals how to break the cycle of "creative avoidance" and rewire your organization for true alignment and explosive growth. She shares why most leadership teams aren't nearly as aligned as they think and provides a simple exercise to expose the gaps immediately. For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur who wants their team to move faster, make better decisions, and execute without constant hand-holding, this conversation is a masterclass in getting to the root of what truly matters. Rachel’s experience as a CEO, CMO, and certified ‘Why’ coach provides a unique framework for building a business that wins on purpose, not just price or speed.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• How to Stop Chasing Symptoms & Solve the Real Problem: Learn to identify and address the root cause of recurring issues (like employee attendance) instead of getting distracted by surface-level fixes.
• The Ultimate 2-Minute Alignment Test: Discover a simple exercise to instantly gauge if your leadership team is actually on the same page about company goals—or just thinks they are.
• Using Marketing Psychology for Internal Leadership: Understand how to apply the principles of a sales funnel to communicate with your team, manage up, and get buy-in for your most important initiatives.
• Why Authenticity is Your Greatest Competitive Advantage in the AI Era: Rachel explains why speed and low cost are becoming commodities and how building a brand on authentic trust is the only sustainable way to win.
• Unlock Your ‘Why’ Beyond the Buzzword: Move past the surface-level "purpose" to uncover the deep-seated drivers for you and your team, creating unshakeable motivation and clarity.
• The Power of Proactive Internal Communication: Learn why you need to communicate with your team consistently—not just during big wins or major crises—to build a unified, mission-driven culture.

📝 About Rachel Honoway

Rachel Honoway is a "recovering corporate executive" who spent 25 years in the business world, with over half of that time in the C-suite as a CEO, CMO, and CPO. Having lived the constant tug-of-war between supporting her team and driving business growth, she now helps leaders rewire how their organizations make decisions. Through her advisory firm, Delta Catalyst Lab, she works with executives to align on purpose, set clear priorities, and empower their teams to stop escalating problems and start executing on what matters most.

🎯 Rachel’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"You have to know who you are and what you want... If I said to anybody right now, 'What do you really want?' they struggle with the answer to that question. So I would say that you need to figure out the answer to that question... and then figure out how you're going to get it."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “People get so distracted by the downstream impacts, by the symptoms, that you miss what's really happening. Why are we here? What are we really trying to do here? And if you can stop and solve for that, then everything else just falls into place.” – Rachel Honoway
• “With AI, all of those things are commodities. Everybody can go fast. Everybody can produce more... You're not going to win on those things anymore. What you're going to win on is why your customers are going to buy from the people they want to buy from... and the companies that they trust.” – Rachel Honoway
• “Discovering your actual why and getting the words for it... is one of those things that when you see it, you can't unsee it. So all of a sudden, that clarity comes and everything else starts to just get a little bit more in focus.” – Rachel Honoway

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Run the Alignment Test: This week, gather your leadership team (even if it's just you and a co-founder) and have everyone silently write down the top 3 company goals for the quarter. Compare notes and see where the gaps are.
• Start an Internal Communication Rhythm: Don't wait for a crisis or a huge announcement. Set up a simple weekly email, Slack update, or short video to share what’s on your mind as a leader and reinforce the company’s purpose.
• Question Your "Urgent" Problems: The next time a painful, recurring issue lands on your desk, stop and ask: "What is the real reason this keeps happening?" Focus on the root cause, not the immediate symptom.
• Ask Yourself "The Question": Set aside 30 minutes of uninterrupted time to answer Rachel’s prompt: "What do I really want?" Write it down and be brutally honest with yourself.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: http://www.deltacatalystlab.com
• Connect with Rachel on LinkedIn
• Follow Delta Catalyst Lab on LinkedIn

Feeling stuck, burned out, or hitting the same revenue wall year after year? This episode is your permission slip to stop searching for the next "perfect" strategy. We sit down with Shervon Laurice, a licensed psychotherapist and transformational coach who reveals why your biggest business breakthroughs have nothing to do with your marketing plan or sales funnel. She explains that real, sustainable growth comes from developing your inner world—regulating your nervous system, consciously shaping your identity, and building the capacity to hold the discomfort that comes with expansion. For wantrepreneurs and entrepreneurs tired of the hustle, this conversation is a masterclass in building a business that feels aligned, expansive, and truly successful from the inside out.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• The Entrepreneurial Mindset Shift: Discover the critical difference between being an employee in your own business versus being a true entrepreneur who works on the business.
• Break Through Your Plateaus: Learn why simply changing your strategy isn't enough when you're stuck, and how to use Shervon's "pause and regulate" method to diagnose the real root of the problem.
• Beyond Awareness: Understand why awareness alone isn’t enough for change and how to move from intellectual understanding to embodied action that actually drives results.
• Nervous System as a Business Tool: Learn how to regulate your nervous system to build capacity for more success, handle risk, and make decisions from a place of clarity instead of fear.
• Identity as Your Foundation: Uncover how your current identity—shaped by family, community, and past experiences—might be holding your business back and how to consciously build a new one.
• Become Irreplaceable in the Age of AI: Get a powerful framework for shifting your perspective on disruptive technologies, focusing on where your human expertise provides irreplaceable value.

📝 About Shervon Laurice

Shervon Laurice is a licensed psychotherapist, transformational coach, and psycho-spiritual guide with over 23 years of experience helping people create profound change. She is the founder of Restore Tranquility, a psychotherapy practice, hosts The Expansion Room podcast, and created ELEVATE, her 90-day coaching experience for soul-led entrepreneurs. Shervon’s unique power lies in her ability to merge deep therapeutic knowledge with practical coaching, guiding leaders to understand that real change lives in the body, not just the mind. She helps founders stop working against themselves and start building from a place of true alignment and inner power.

🎯 Shervon’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Develop your inner world... Entrepreneurship is a spiritual practice."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “You can be an employee in your own business because you still have employee mindset, or you can be an entrepreneur who works on your business and looks at expansion always as your option.” – Shervon Laurice
• “Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. And so you've really got to build a foundation so that you can move forward consciously.” – Shervon Laurice
• “Most of us are moving through our businesses dysregulated and we don't even know it.” – Shervon Laurice

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Conduct an Identity Audit: Ask yourself, "Who am I being in my business right now?" and "Is this the identity of the person who can achieve my biggest goals?" If not, start defining who you need to become.
• Practice the Pause: The next time you feel stuck or hit a wall, resist the urge to immediately find a new strategy. Instead, take time to sit with the discomfort and ask what it's trying to teach you about your inner state.
• Identify Your Nervous System Triggers: Pay attention to what situations in your business cause you to feel fear, anxiety, or shutdown. Awareness is the first step to learning how to regulate through them.
• Reframe Your Value: In the face of changes like AI, shift your focus from what you do to how you think. Your judgment, historical context, and ability to be the "bridge" are skills that cannot be automated.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://restoretranquility.org
• Personal website: https://shervonlaurice.com/assessment
• Connect with Shervon on LinkedIn
• Follow Restore Tranquility, LLC on LinkedIn
• Check out The Expansion Room Podcast

As Q4 kicks into high gear, the pressure is on to launch new products, create flashy promos, and find new customers to finish the year strong. But what if your biggest opportunities aren't in what’s new, but in what’s old? In this Solo Sunday episode, Brian shares his all-time favorite, most effective, and deceptively simple strategy for generating massive momentum: the reactivation campaign. Forget overcomplicating things. Brian breaks down why reaching out to past prospects—even the ones who ghosted you or said no—is the single most powerful move you can make right now. This is the exact tactic he uses across all his businesses and with his clients to turn forgotten conversations into closed deals.

✨ Why This Matters for You

The reactivation campaign is a game-changer for entrepreneurs because:

• It’s a low-cost, high-return strategy that doesn't require a big ad budget.
• It leverages your most valuable asset: the list of people who already know you exist.
• It reframes rejection. A "no" is rarely permanent; it's usually just "not now."
• It simplifies your marketing by focusing on warm leads instead of constantly chasing cold ones.
• It generates quick wins and tangible results, building the momentum you need to crush your end-of-year goals.

📝 Key Takeaways

• Reactivate > Chase. Your old leads, proposals, and conversations are a goldmine. The easiest path to revenue is often through reconnecting, not just prospecting.
• "No" Often Means "Not Now." Don't be afraid to follow up with people who rejected you, went with someone else, or ghosted you. Circumstances change, and your check-in might be perfectly timed.
• Conversation Before Conversion. The goal of a reactivation email isn't to make a hard sale. It’s simply to restart the conversation, see where they are, and understand their current needs.
• Systemize Your Past. Go through your emails, calendar, and CRMs to build a master list of every prospect you didn't get to work with. AI tools can make this process faster than ever.
• Simplicity Wins. In business, it’s often the boring, fundamental actions that produce the best results. Stop overcomplicating your strategy and focus on what works.

🚀 Put It Into Action

This week, schedule your own reactivation campaign:

• Block off one hour in your calendar.
• Go through your sent emails, old proposals, and calendar invites from the past 1-2 years.
• Create a simple list of at least 10 people who showed interest but never moved forward.
• Draft a short, non-salesy email checking in. Ask how their year has been and if they ever solved the problem you originally discussed. Send it and see what conversations bubble up.

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode
• Connect with Brian on Instagram @imetbrian
• Share this episode with a fellow entrepreneur who needs a simple, powerful way to boost their Q4 revenue

In this special Collab Week episode of Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, eight founders come together to answer one deeply honest question:

Take us back to a lean season in your business. How did you get through it, and how do you prepare differently now?

Some are in a lean season right now. Some are still learning from their first one. Others have watched their busy seasons and slow seasons flip on them. It’s a wide-ranging episode about relationships, pipelines, cash, self-care, and why the best time to prepare for a lean season is before you’re in one.

For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur wondering what to do when the pipeline goes quiet, or bracing for the next slow stretch, this episode is for you. You’ll walk away with practical ways to stay steady, stay visible, and keep building when business isn’t moving at the pace you want.

✨ What You’ll Take Away

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why lean seasons can be financial, human, or about impact, and how self-care keeps you steady through all of them
• Why doing more is the wrong instinct when cash gets tight, and how to decide what to cut before you have to
• How to build relationships before you need them and use slow periods to reconnect and strengthen your processes
• How to map your clients’ seasonal patterns so you can ramp up new channels before your own slow stretch
• Why a single point of dependency is risky, and how low overhead buys you time to adapt
• How to treat building the business as the work, even when the calendar is empty (or too full)

🎙️ Meet the Collab Week Contributors

Kacy Webster — Profit Quiver

Kacy Webster is a Business Transformation Strategist and Certified AI Consultant who helps leaders aim precisely at what matters most: people first, then technology. With 30+ years of executive leadership across higher education, workforce development, and enterprise transformation, she has held senior roles including Regional Market President, Campus Academic Dean, and Senior Director of Market Strategy & Insights for a nationally recognized assessment organization. Through Profit Quiver and The PrecisionX System, Kacy partners with leadership teams using her 12 Domains of Human-First AI Adoption, a framework that starts with culture, alignment, and readiness, not just technology.

Connect with Kacy: https://www.profitquiver.com/

Drew Dorenfest — Client Magnet CRM

Drew Dorenfest is a marketing expert who has worked with global brands such as Netflix, Apple, Warner Bros., and the NFL as a video editor. Today, through Client Magnet CRM, he helps small business owners get found online with SEO, GEO, and automation. That means more clients, more 5-star reviews, and more sales without having to create social content nonstop.

Connect with Drew: https://clientmagnetcrm.com/

Anne Gillaspie — Fix & Form

Anne Gillaspie is a global keynote speaker, truth disruptor, and creator of SHARE YOUR FEAR™, a movement making fear less scary and truth easier to tell. A 12-year entrepreneur, CEO and founder of Fix & Form Branding Firm, and host of the top-ranked OnlyFounders podcast, she’s also a brand therapist to founders and executives. Through provocative storytelling, unexpected dance, and radically human experiences, Anne helps audiences stop performing who they think they should be and start telling the truth about who they actually are.

Connect with Anne:

• https://theannegillaspie.com/
• https://fixandform.com/

Rami Akeela — Nera Systems

Rami Akeela is the founder of Nera Systems, a confidential AI company that helps enterprises use AI on their most sensitive data. With 20+ years at the intersection of hardware, software, and cryptography and PhDs in electrical and computer engineering, Rami is a deep-tech builder with a record of solving problems before the market knows it has them. He previously founded DZK, the first company to build zero-knowledge proof systems.

Connect with Rami: https://nera.systems/

Heather Waisanen — Coastal Maverick

Heather Waisanen is the founder of Coastal Maverick, a woman-owned, boutique out-of-home advertising agency helping brands stand out beyond the screen. With more than a decade of experience across the client, agency, and media owner sides of advertising, she launched Coastal Maverick after being laid off from her role as a senior media planner. Now in her fourth year of entrepreneurship, Heather leads nationwide campaigns while staying deeply involved in Jacksonville’s business community. She’s a JAX Chamber Small Business Leader of the Year and a member of the inaugural 2026 Visionaries 200 class.

Connect with Heather: https://www.coastalmaverick.com/

Drew Mehta — ThinkFraction

After 20+ years in corporate, Drew Mehta founded ThinkFraction to help owner-operated businesses fix the leaks in their back-end workflows and bring AI into their day-to-day in a practical way. His approach pairs advisory with implementation and education, with no hype, to grow revenue, lower costs, and improve quality. He’s also learning to be an entrepreneur himself, and he’s in his first full year of running his own business.

Connect with Drew:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhroovmehta/
• Website: ThinkFraction.xyz

Sara Reece — Workmind

Sara Reece is the CEO and Co-Founder of Workmind, where she helps organizations use practical, operations-first automation to eliminate friction and grow without adding headcount at the same pace. Over the last seven years, she has designed and implemented automation with organizations ranging from nonprofits and small businesses to franchise systems and Fortune 500 enterprises. Her career has spanned journalism, television broadcasting, environmental research, and technology. Sara is the author of The Practical Path to Operational Automation and has appeared on Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, It Starts with Joy LIVE, and Level 10 Leadership. She has also presented at The Business Show Miami and Akerman’s Global Franchising Summit in Denver.

Connect with Sara:

• https://workmind.cloud/
• https://www.saralreece.com/

Mike Gross — Michael J. Gross LLC

Mike Gross is a trainer, training provider, consultant, and auditor who helps organizations make sense of ISO standards and apply them in a practical way. With over 35 years of experience, including steady growth into executive leadership roles, he focuses on building understanding through training first, then supporting organizations as they refine and improve their systems. He started Michael J. Gross LLC and Management System Certification Training Solutions about seven years ago after finishing his corporate career. As a committed solopreneur, his approach is straightforward: build on what already works, keep it practical, and leave people more capable than when he started.

Connect with Mike: https://mj-gross.com/

Ever frantically searched for your keys, wallet, or even your luggage at the airport? Daniel Daoura, the founder and CEO of Pebblebee, transformed that universal feeling of anxiety into a global tech company. Drawing on over a decade of experience developing tracking systems for military assets at Boeing, Daniel applied his deep expertise to solve an everyday problem. This episode is a masterclass in turning specialized knowledge into a consumer-focused brand, navigating the complexities of hardware manufacturing, and having the perseverance to build something truly innovative. You'll learn how Daniel led Pebblebee to become the first company to create a universal tracker that works seamlessly with both Apple and Google, and how his personal mission for his family's safety is now pushing the industry into its next frontier: personal safety devices.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 How to translate high-level enterprise or military-grade experience into a scalable consumer product.
• 🤝 The art of navigating partnerships with tech giants like Apple and Google to create a universally compatible product.
• 💡 Why your most personal pain points (like losing your keys or worrying about your family's safety) are often your most powerful business ideas.
• 📈 How to strategically expand your product line into new verticals that align with your core mission of providing value and peace of mind.
• 🧠 The founder's discipline: learning when to say "no" to good ideas to maintain focus and execute on the great ones.
• 🔋 How being the first to innovate with features like rechargeability can create a massive competitive advantage in a crowded market.
• 🌍 The gritty reality of building a global hardware company, from managing manufacturing and certifications to providing world-class customer support.

📝 About Daniel Daoura

Daniel Daoura is the Founder and CEO of Pebblebee, a visionary leader in the trackables and personal safety industry. His journey began with a focus on predicting satellite communication traffic for military asset tracking systems, which led him to a decade-long career at Boeing leading teams developing global tracking technology. Inspired by a personal moment of losing his keys, Daniel leveraged his immense experience to create Pebblebee, helping people track what matters most. With over 40 patents to his name, Daniel brings a unique perspective shaped by his technical genius, his personal experiences growing up in Beirut, and his dedication as a father.

🎯 Daniel’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Perseverance. Don't give up. When you believe in something, just continue to find ways to solve that challenge."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• "What excites me is adding value in this economy and creating products that people really use and feel that is adding peace of mind to them." – Daniel Daoura
• "A good idea is only the beginning, and especially in our space, since we do hardware. I mean, it requires patience, capital, certifications, and manufacturing." – Daniel Daoura
• "Part of being a father—my daughter just started college... I want her to have a simple way to, you know, feel safe... That's why safety became a thing for Pebblebee." – Daniel Daoura

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Solve Your Own Problem: Look at the daily frustrations and anxieties in your own life. Your most authentic and powerful business idea might be hidden there.
• ✅ Create Universal Value: Don't force your customers into one ecosystem. If you can, build products that offer flexibility and value to everyone, like Pebblebee did with Apple and Google compatibility.
• ✅ Reinvest in Innovation: Adopt a mindset of sustainable growth. Use profits to fuel R&D and stay ahead of the curve, rather than just maximizing cash reserves.
• ✅ Let Your Mission Guide Expansion: When considering a new product or service, ask if it truly aligns with your company's core mission. For Pebblebee, moving from tracking items to personal safety was a natural extension of providing "peace of mind."
• ✅ Don't Underestimate Perseverance: The next time you hit a wall, remember Daniel's advice. Give it time, break the problem down, and just keep taking the next step forward.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://pebblebee.com
• Connect with Daniel on LinkedIn
• Follow Pebblebee on LinkedIn

In this episode, Brian sits down with Micah Alexander, the 22-year-old co-founder of Junior Innovators, a company revolutionizing entrepreneurship education in K-12 schools. Micah shares his powerful journey from launching teenage businesses like snow shoveling and t-shirt companies to building a national education venture that teaches students to do business, not just study it. This episode is a masterclass in the "ready, fire, aim" philosophy, emphasizing that the best way to learn entrepreneurship is by getting in the weeds, creating value, and embracing failure as a critical learning tool. For any wantrepreneur feeling stuck in the planning phase, Micah’s story and insights are the ultimate permission slip to stop waiting and start doing.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 Why "Ready, Fire, Aim" is a more effective startup strategy than endless planning and analysis.
• 💡 How to find a scalable business idea by focusing on solving one small problem, not trying to build a billion-dollar company from day one.
• 💰 The truth about startup capital: why creating value for a customer is the only thing you need to get started, even with $0.
• 🧠 How to reframe failure as a learning opportunity that is just as valuable (if not more so) than early success.
• 🗣️ The simple yet powerful strategy of talking to people to conduct real-world market research without even realizing it.
• 🔥 Why high school (or any early stage) is the perfect low-risk environment to experiment, fail, and build entrepreneurial muscle.
• 📈 The difference between learning business theory and actually doing business—and why the latter is the only path to real growth.

📝 About Micah Alexander

Micah Alexander is the co-founder of Junior Innovators, an education company dedicated to bringing hands-on entrepreneurship curriculum to K-12 schools. A serial entrepreneur since he was 16, Micah experienced firsthand the gap between academic business classes and the real-world action required to build a venture. Alongside his co-founder Logan, he bootstrapped Junior Innovators while still in college to give students the chance to fail, learn, and succeed by building real companies. His unique perspective as a young founder working with the next generation of innovators provides a fresh and urgent take on what it truly means to be an entrepreneur.

🎯 Micah’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Just try something. You can't come up with an idea unless you have a problem to solve... Entrepreneurship is one of those things that is for everybody and anyone can go out and try to create value for someone else."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “A lot of entrepreneurs, especially, think of a business idea as being this big thing. And they need all this funding to get started. Like you don't. You need to figure out a way to create value for someone.” – Micah Alexander
• “If a student can clearly articulate why their business failed… that's just as good as someone who made $500 their first time. That is the same level of learning.” – Micah Alexander
• “There are so many businesses that have solutions to nobody's problem. And a problem is the first thing that you have to figure out when you're trying to come up with a business idea.” – Micah Alexander

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Identify one problem in your immediate community or circle of friends this week. Don't think about the solution yet—just define the problem.
• Talk to five people who experience this problem. Ask them questions to understand it at its core. This is your first step in market research.
• Take one small, tangible step on your business idea today. Don't wait for permission. This could be creating a landing page, making one sales call, or designing a simple prototype.
• Look back at a past "failure" in your career or business journey. Write down three specific lessons you learned from it that you still apply today.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://junior-innovators.org
• Connect with Micah on LinkedIn
• Follow Junior Innovators LLC on LinkedIn

In this episode, Brian sits down with Matt Justice, a career finance expert turned AI founder who is revolutionizing how SaaS companies interact with their own numbers. Matt shares his journey from feeling the intense frustration of data wrangling in corporate finance to founding SMPL.ai, a platform that gives teams their time back and empowers them with true financial intelligence. This isn't just a talk about spreadsheets and compliance; it's a masterclass in shifting your mindset to see finance as a strategic tool for making faster, smarter decisions. For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur tired of flying blind, Matt’s story and insights will show you how to connect the dots in your data, build a business founded on personal experience, and leverage AI to scale as a solo founder.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• Financial Truth vs. Financial Intelligence: Understand the crucial difference and why your business needs both to survive and thrive.
• Connecting the Silos: Discover how to use AI to integrate your pipeline, bookings, revenue, and cash flow for a single, reliable source of truth.
• The Power of Timely Data: Learn why having perfect information too late is useless (the "Titanic" principle) and how to get real-time insights for your business.
• A Solo Founder’s MVP Strategy: Hear how Matt built a proof-of-concept in just a few days and used a "pre-dinner barbecue" to get brutally honest early feedback.
• Milestones Over Timelines: Why focusing on achieving the next critical milestone is more effective than getting bogged down by rigid, long-term projections.
• The Unbeatable Motivator: Learn how to ground your business idea in your own blood, sweat, and tears to create a vision so clear that motivation is never a question.
• AI as Your Co-founder: See practical examples of how a solo founder uses AI as an extension of his team to manage everything from customer support to coding.

📝 About Matt Justice

Matt Justice is the founder of SMPL.ai, an AI-powered financial intelligence platform for growing SaaS companies. With a deep career spanning FP&A, accounting, and strategic finance, he has spent years in the trenches building the data systems and reporting infrastructure that finance teams rely on. Matt turned his professional frustration with disconnected systems and manual data wrangling into a powerful mission: to give finance professionals their time back and empower them to make better, faster decisions. His firsthand experience makes him a uniquely insightful guest on solving real-world business problems with technology.

🎯 Matt’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"When you go out and you start this, make sure that it's something founded in your experience and your beliefs...and then I think motivation never becomes a topic again."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• "The Titanic had perfect information, it was just late." – Matt Justice
• "The more you can stay down, it just means you're learning... the more lessons you can learn now, I guess the longer you stay in the highs." – Matt Justice
• "I never thought in a million years creating a software platform was going to be the easy part." – Matt Justice

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Audit Your Data's Timeliness: Ask yourself if your financial reports are helping you make decisions for next month or if they're just a history lesson. Identify the biggest bottleneck in getting timely information.
• ✅ Reconnect With Your "Why": Write down the personal frustration or experience that led you to start (or want to start) your business. Use this as your north star for all future decisions.
• ✅ Identify Your Next Milestone: Forget the 5-year plan for a moment. What is the single most important milestone you need to hit to move your business forward? Focus all your energy there.
• ✅ Delegate One Task to AI: Find one repetitive, time-consuming task in your day (writing email drafts, summarizing notes, troubleshooting code) and find an AI tool to handle it. Start building your "extra pair of arms."

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.smpl-ai.com
• Connect with Matt on LinkedIn
• Follow SMPL.ai on LinkedIn

What if you could condense weeks of expert-level analysis into just a few minutes? Former McKinsey Partner Raman Julka is doing exactly that. In this episode, he breaks down his journey from advising global corporations to building two AI-native companies, ValueChaser.ai and Chance-Me.ai, with a radically lean team. This conversation is a masterclass in how AI is shattering the traditional barriers to entry in business. You’ll learn why your human judgment, not coding skills, is your most valuable asset and how to leverage your unique expertise to build a scalable business in this new economic landscape.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 How to transform weeks of expert analysis into minutes of automated work using AI, freeing up your time for high-value strategic decisions.
• 🤖 Why your human judgment and industry experience are becoming your most critical assets in an AI-driven world.
• 💰 The new economics of entrepreneurship: Learn how to build an enterprise-grade business with a lean team and minimal coding knowledge.
• 📈 Why distribution and credibility are the new "moats" for your business when technology is no longer a barrier to entry.
• 🧠 How to leverage your existing domain expertise to build a scalable, AI-native product that solves a real-world problem.
• 🎯 The seismic shift from "brand name" to "guaranteed impact" and how you can compete with established giants as a small service provider.
• 🛠️ How to operate like a "human + AI" team to massively accelerate your path from idea to market.

📝 About Raman Julka

Raman Julka is an entrepreneur and former McKinsey partner who spent 13 years advising major companies on technology and large-scale transformations. He left his corporate career to pursue a powerful hypothesis: that AI could turn complex, expert-driven work into scalable, accessible products. As the founder and CEO of ValueChaser.ai and Chance-Me.ai, Raman is proving that very small teams can now build businesses that previously required large organizations, offering a unique perspective that blends high-level corporate strategy with scrappy, hands-on startup execution.

🎯 Raman’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Perfection is the enemy of getting it done."

📢 Memorable Quotes

•  “For me, AI replaces the part that's repeatable, that's actually mundane, and it allows you to apply the human element in a much longer time frame in a much more effective way.” – Raman Julka
• “As it becomes easier to build many businesses and ideas, what really differentiates is the distribution.” – Raman Julka
• “How can I build a $100 million ARR business without requiring 100 additional people?” – Raman Julka

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Identify the most mundane, repeatable tasks in your business this week and explore AI tools to automate them.
• ✅ Stop waiting for your idea to be perfect. Launch a minimum viable product (MVP) to a small group of pilot users this month to gather crucial feedback.
• ✅ Re-evaluate your business's "moat." If it's just your technology, start building your distribution channels and personal brand credibility now.
• ✅ Practice working with AI. Instead of just asking for answers, learn to provide deep context and use your expertise to guide AI tools toward superior outputs.

🔗 Links & Resources

• ValueChaser.ai website: http://valuechaser.ai/
• Chance-Me.ai website: http://Chance-Me.ai
• Connect with Raman on LinkedIn
• Follow ValueChaser.ai on LinkedIn

Ever have one of those days where the motivation just isn't there? You know you should work on your business, but you're tired, uninspired, or just don't feel like it. In this raw and personal Solo Sunday episode, Brian pulls back the curtain on the single most important trait for entrepreneurial success: just keep doing it. Recorded at 11:30 PM on his birthday, this episode isn't about theory; it's a real-time example of what it takes to show up when everything in you wants to quit. If you’ve ever waited for the “right time” or the “right feeling” to take action, this episode is the jolt of reality you need to build unstoppable momentum.

✨ Why This Matters for You

This isn't just about pushing through tiredness; it's about building an identity as someone who follows through. For entrepreneurs, this mindset is everything:

• It proves that discipline, not motivation, is the engine of your business.
• It helps you break the cycle of procrastination and waiting for perfect conditions.
• It builds trust with yourself, proving that when you make a commitment, you will honor it.
• It’s how you build real momentum, where small, consistent actions compound into massive results over time.

📝 Key Takeaways

• Consistency > Intensity. Showing up every day, even when it's not your best work, beats waiting for a perfect day that never comes.
• Stop Negotiating With Yourself. Once you decide to do something, the debate is over. Brian shares how he adopted the Kobe Bryant mindset of refusing to negotiate with his own commitments.
• Action Creates Motivation. Don't wait to feel inspired. The act of starting is what generates energy and clarity, not the other way around.
• Redefine "Just Do It." It's not just about doing it; it's about doing it despite the excuses, the tiredness, the fear, and the self-doubt.
• Show Up for Your Future Self. Every time you push through resistance, you're giving a gift to the future version of you who will benefit from that consistency.
• Your "Best" Is Situational. Give your best for that specific moment. It doesn't have to be your all-time best performance, but it has to be your best effort right now.

🚀 Put It Into Action

This week, honor the contract you made with yourself:

• Identify the #1 task you've been avoiding because you "don't feel like it."
• Set a timer for just 15 minutes and start. No negotiations, no overthinking.
• The goal isn't to finish it perfectly, but simply to prove to yourself that you are the kind of person who shows up, no matter what.

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode
• Connect with Brian on Instagram @imetbrian
• Share this episode with a fellow entrepreneur who needs to hear this message today

In this special Collab Week episode of Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, six founders come together to answer one deeply personal question:

What's one thing you faked… until you made it?

You'll hear from Sheri Roder of Get UnStuck HQ, Bill McCumber of Rowan Elder, Wendy Votroubek of Integrity Legal Nurse Consulting, Sara Reece of Workmind, Patricia Ballivian of Altura Strategies, and Jane Alexander of Emma Advisor. Each of them talks about a moment when they had to show up before they felt ready.

For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur wondering whether they really belong in the room, this episode will help. You'll hear how six founders moved from feeling like impostors to feeling like themselves, and why the "faking" part was never really pretending.

✨ What You'll Take Away

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why acting with confidence before you feel confident is how real confidence gets built
• How to choose the kind of leader you want to be without turning into someone else
• Why nearly everyone in the room feels the same impostor syndrome you do
• How asking for help and investing in yourself can close skill gaps faster than faking it
• Why being publicly visible is part of the job when you lead a company
• How to stop borrowing someone else's version of leadership and own the one you've earned
• What changes once you have real customers and can say your title with conviction

🎙️ Meet the Collab Week Contributors

Sheri Roder — Get UnStuck HQ

Sheri Roder is the founder of Get UnStuck HQ, a career and leadership coaching and advising practice for accomplished professionals at an inflection point. She spent more than 40 years in corporate life, including leading a department in London for the first time. Then she stepped away to build a practice around the work she loved most: helping people make decisions they've been circling for months, see options they couldn't see before, and trust their own judgment again. Today she helps clients turn messy, complicated situations into something they can act on.

Connect with Sheri: https://www.getunstuckhq.com/

William "Bill" McCumber — Rowan Elder

Bill McCumber is the founder of two ed-tech companies, Rowan Elder Productions and Applied Erudition. Rowan Elder is an async faculty development program that teaches professors to build studio-quality online lectures that feel more like YouTube than a stale slideshow. Applied Erudition is a platform that measures real capability rather than seat time.

Connect with Bill:

https://www.rowanelder.com/home

https://appliederudition.com/

Wendy Votroubek — Integrity Legal Nurse Consulting

Wendy Votroubek, RN, BSN, MPH, LNC, founded Integrity Legal Nurse Consulting in 2010. She leads a team of more than 20 legal nurses who translate complex medical data into legal strategy for civil and criminal defense attorneys nationwide. She is in the fifth decade of her nursing career and has written three nursing textbooks, including The Path to Legal Nurse Consulting. She taught at the University of Portland School of Nursing from 2011 to 2021 and now speaks on personal injury, medical malpractice, and criminal defense matters.

Connect with Wendy: https://legalnursepdx.com/

Sara Reece — Workmind

Sara Reece is the CEO and Co-Founder of Workmind, which helps growing organizations use practical, operations-first automation to remove friction and grow without adding headcount at the same pace. Over the last seven years she has implemented automation for nonprofits, small businesses, franchise systems, and Fortune 500 enterprises. Before that, her career ran through journalism, TV broadcasting, environmental research, and tech. She is the author of The Practical Path to Operational Automation and speaks regularly on automation, AI, and sustainable growth.

Connect with Sara:

https://workmind.cloud/

https://www.saralreece.com/

Patricia Ballivian — Altura Strategies

Patricia Ballivian is the founder of Altura Strategies, where she helps founders bring clarity and structure to the messy realities of scaling. She is originally from Bolivia and built her career across luxury retail and startups, working where strategy, people, systems, and customer experience meet. She has always been the person searching for the real source of friction, and that instinct became the foundation of Altura's systems-forward, people-centered approach to turning growing pains into sustainable growth.

Connect with Patricia: https://www.alturastrategies.net/

Jane Alexander — Emma Advisor

Jane Alexander is the founder and CEO of Emma Advisor, an AI platform that helps families get from high school to college with more clarity, strategy, and confidence. Her own path was unconventional: she was homeschooled in rural Idaho, went the community college route, and later did graduate work at Harvard. She then spent more than a decade advising leaders at over 200 colleges and universities. Emma Advisor grew from her belief that opportunity shouldn't depend on social capital or expensive consultants.

Connect with Jane: https://emmaadvisor.ai/

Are you so focused on growth that you're accidentally breaking the very things that made your business special? In this episode, we sit down with Jeri Larsen, a former C-suite executive turned founder of Manage for Good. Jeri reveals why the traditional, siloed approach to people, operations, and growth is a recipe for disaster during scale. She provides a masterclass on how to navigate the painful but necessary "inflection points" of growth by building a solid foundation first. This episode is a must-listen for any founder who wants to scale intentionally, keep their best people, and create a high-performing organization without losing its heart and soul.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• How to spot the critical "inflection points" in your business and make the leap without crashing.
• The high-stakes decision between promoting an internal star vs. hiring an external expert (and the framework to get it right).
• Why building your operational infrastructure before you need it is the key to catching, not chasing, growth.
• A powerful daily leadership practice to ensure you show up as the intentional, empowering leader your team needs.
• How to stop "squeezing more blood out of the turnip" and adopt an abundance mindset that creates loyal teams and happy clients.
• The secret to using an objective, third-party perspective to see and solve problems you're too close to notice.

📝 About Jeri Larsen

Jeri Larsen is the CEO of Manage for Good, a management consulting firm dedicated to helping companies scale without chaos. With a powerhouse career as a Chief Operating Officer, Chief Customer Officer, and Chief People Officer across SaaS, Fortune 500 consulting, and more, Jeri has seen it all. Her unique expertise lies at the intersection of people, operations, and growth, where she helps leaders build organizations that perform exceptionally well without sacrificing the culture that makes them great. She is the author of the new book, Manage for Good: Signals of Impact, a playbook for identifying and fixing the hidden red flags in any business.

🎯 Jeri’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Figure out if you're the problem and figure out how to fix it, because so often we are only in our own way."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “As companies grow and scale, there's such a tendency to squeeze more blood out of the turnip… Instead, we're not thinking, ‘If I'm growing, I want loyal, incredible people who enjoy their day-to-day work.’” – Jeri Larsen
• “It is that moment where I need to jump off the cliff, but I'm scared. That's the moment you have to jump.” – Jeri Larsen
• “As the leader, my job is to get out of their way and just give them everything that they need to be empowered.” – Jeri Larsen

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Start your day with intention. Before diving into work, decide what kind of leader you need to be for your team today.
• ✅ Audit your next key hire. Are you hiring for potential and cultural fit, or just for a resume with past experience? Think through the long-term impact on your team.
• ✅ "War game" your operations. Ask your team: "If our biggest dream client signed tomorrow, what parts of our process would immediately break?" Start fixing those gaps now.
• ✅ Get an outside perspective this week. Ask a trusted mentor or peer to look at a persistent problem in your business. Listen to what they see that you don't.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.manageforgood.com
• Get the book on Amazon: Manage for Good: Signals of Impact
• Connect with Jeri on LinkedIn
• Follow Manage for Good on LinkedIn

Ever felt like your corporate experience puts you in a box? Think again. This episode features Ali Benslimane, a tech veteran from Google and Stripe who channeled his experience into solving a deeply human problem: the bureaucratic nightmare of moving to another country. Ali shares how he and his co-founder built Aelos, a company that combines high-tech efficiency with a high-touch concierge service to help Americans relocate to France. This episode is a masterclass in leveraging your background in unexpected ways, using technology to enhance human connection, and the critical importance of sweating the small details to build unbreakable customer trust.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• How to turn personal pain points (like moving countries) into a scalable, mission-driven business idea.
• Why your corporate background is a superpower, not a limitation, for starting your own venture.
• The 3-part "executive filter" every founder needs for making product decisions: simplicity, sweating the details, and speed.
• How to use AI to enhance the human touch and build trust, not replace it, creating a superior customer experience.
• The power of doing "unscalable" things (like sending handwritten notes) to build a loyal customer base that becomes your biggest advocate.
• How to overcome "wantrepreneur" paralysis by taking small, incremental steps that build unstoppable momentum.
• Why talking to 150+ potential customers before you build is your greatest competitive advantage.

📝 About Ali Benslimane

Ali Benslimane is the co-founder and CEO of Aelos, a company dedicated to helping Americans relocate to and retire in France with confidence and ease. Before becoming a founder, Ali spent over a decade building and scaling international operations at tech giants like Google and Stripe, where he worked on the game-changing Stripe Atlas product. Having personally lived in five different countries, Ali combines his deep expertise in global systems with a first-hand understanding of the challenges of building a life across borders, making him uniquely equipped to solve this complex problem.

🎯 Ali’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

The biggest struggle for wantrepreneurs is just getting started. The best way to overcome this is by taking small, incremental "baby steps" that demystify the process and build confidence until you're hooked on the feeling of creating value and getting customers.

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “I think business is all about execution ultimately. I think ideas are cheap. We all had ideas and we see someone do them and we're like, oh my God, I had this amazing idea… It could have been me. Yes, it could have been you, but no, that person did it.” – Ali Benslimane
• “Every hour spent talking to a customer is essentially a chance for you to refine your product, your value proposition.” – Ali Benslimane
• “The way we see it is technology and AI enables humans to do things much faster. And to focus on things that they do best... [like building] that relationship of trust.” – Ali Benslimane

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ This weekend, take one "baby step": talk to two potential customers or use an AI tool to create a mock-up of your business idea.
• ✅ Review your own business's customer experience. Are you "sweating the details" and removing all friction, right down to making sure your website's copyright year is current?
• ✅ Identify one repetitive, low-value task in your workflow that could be automated, freeing you up to focus on building deeper customer relationships.
• ✅ Brainstorm one "unscalable" thing you can do for your next 5 customers to create a memorable, human experience (e.g., a handwritten note, a personal video message).

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.aelos.net
• Connect with Ali on LinkedIn
• Follow Aelos on LinkedIn

Are you making marketing decisions based on gut feelings and chasing "good ideas" that never seem to move the needle? In this episode, growth strategist Izzy Sapien breaks down why this intuition-driven approach is the very thing keeping so many businesses stuck in the $2-5 million "no man's land." She reveals the critical shift from relying on grit to implementing disciplined, data-informed frameworks that create real momentum. This episode is a masterclass for any founder feeling the pressure of tight cash flow, showing you how to tie marketing directly to your P&L, make better strategic decisions, and build a profitable, scalable brand without burning through your budget.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🧠 Why the "gut feelings" that got you to your first $2M will prevent you from scaling further, and when to switch to a data-driven framework.
• Momentum vs. Movement: Learn the critical difference between being busy and making strategic forward progress that makes your business unstoppable.
• 💡 How to tell the difference between a "good idea" and a "right now idea" to avoid wasting time and money on strategies that won't deliver results.
• 💰 The simple formula that connects marketing directly to revenue (Traffic x AOV x Conversion Rate x LTV) and how to manage it for profitability.
• 💧 Why neglecting top-of-funnel marketing is like letting your well run dry, and how to invest in awareness even when cash flow is tight.
• 🗣️ The power of predictive questions to unlock breakthrough growth ideas within your own team and move past feeling "war-torn" by financial pressure.

📝 About Izzy Sapien

Izzy Sapien is a growth strategist and fractional Head of Growth with over a decade of experience helping beauty, wellness, and supplement brands scale. After founding and growing her own successful agency, she now specializes in guiding founder-led, cash-flow-pressured companies through the challenging $2-5 million growth stage. Izzy masterfully combines marketing strategy with financial acumen and founder psychology, helping leadership teams move from chaotic, intuition-driven tactics to disciplined, data-informed decision-making that fuels sustainable and profitable growth.

🎯 Izzy’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Gut feelings are for moments when you lack evidence or experience."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “A lot of brands get stuck at this $2 to $5 million mark... It's because a lot of the decisions and way that we make decisions up to the $2 million mark depends on things like grit and gut feelings.” – Izzy Sapien
• “There are plenty of strategies that are perfect on the outside—great strategies—but they're not right now strategies.” – Izzy Sapien
• "I'm not a big believer that people are the reason that a company fails. I'm always a believer that decision-making is at least one of the front runners for it." – Izzy Sapien

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Audit your decision-making process. Are your marketing plans built on evidence and data, or are they a series of reactive gut feelings?
• ✅ Protect your top-of-funnel budget. Dedicate a healthy portion of your marketing spend to awareness, even if it doesn't have immediate ROI, to prevent your customer pipeline from drying up.
• ✅ Focus on your customer journey. It's cheaper to nurture existing customers than to acquire new ones. Invest in your email marketing and automation to maximize Lifetime Value (LTV).
• ✅ When evaluating a new idea, ask "Why here, why now?" to determine if it's a "good idea" or a "right now idea" that aligns with your current resources and goals.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.izzysapien.com
• Inquire as a brand at https://www.chiral-marketing.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/izzysellscpg/
• Connect with Izzy on LinkedIn
• Follow Chiral Performance Marketing on LinkedIn

In this episode, Brian sits down with Drew Alexander Forde, the world-renowned musician known as "That Viola Kid" who has masterfully blended artistic excellence with sharp entrepreneurial instincts. Drew shares his incredible journey from playing viola in NYC subways to performing with legends like Adele and Kanye West, and how those experiences forged his business mindset. This isn't just a story about music; it's a masterclass in turning a passion into a multi-faceted career, building a personal brand, and creating a tech solution (DTLA) to solve the biggest pain points in your industry. For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur, especially those in creative fields, this episode is a powerful lesson in valuing your work, building systems, and dropping the "starving artist" mentality for good.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• How to build a powerful personal brand by sharing your process and journey, even before you have a product to sell.
• The subway busking mindset: how to find the audience with a problem you can solve and focus entirely on serving them.
• Why creative labor must be quantified and valued, and how to shift your mindset from "artist" to "business owner."
• The strategy of scratching your own itch: how Drew identified the administrative pains of freelance musicians and built a tech company (DTLA) to solve them.
• How to use "loading screen" moments (like commutes) for intentional strategic thinking to grow your business and diversify your income.
• Why developing a non-negotiable work ethic in your core skill allows you to handle the unpredictable challenges of business with ease.
• The "compound interest" effect of consistent practice and how it applies to building both skills and business expertise over time.

📝 About Drew Alexander Forde

Drew Alexander Forde, known online as "That Viola Kid," is a Juilliard-trained violist who has transformed his classical music career into a modern entrepreneurial empire. He has performed and recorded with some of the biggest names in music, including Adele, Kendrick Lamar, Alicia Keys, and Kanye West. Refusing to be just a performer, Drew embraced social media to build a massive personal brand and co-founded two businesses: Whole Soul, a hip-hop and R&B string quartet, and DTLA, a software company designed to eliminate administrative and financial headaches for freelance musicians. Drew is a shining example of how to merge world-class talent with a savvy business mind.

🎯 Drew’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Don't be afraid of pain... It does not matter how slow you go as long as you do not stop."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• "The role as an entrepreneur is to find the people who have the problems that you can solve and then quickly and deeply try to solve those problems." – Drew Alexander Forde
• "Creative labor is real. It must be measured, it must be quantified because at the end of the day you only have 24 hours on the planet." – Drew Alexander Forde
• "If I get sick and I can't move my arms anymore... I lose all of my income. And to me, that scenario was unacceptable. So when I would sit in the subways or I would sit in the car and I would think about that possibility, it would drive me to read more books." – Drew Alexander Forde

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Identify your industry's biggest "painful administrative problem" and brainstorm a simple tool or system to solve it, just as Drew did for musicians with DTLA.
• Start building your personal brand today by documenting your process. You don't need a finished product to start providing value and owning your audience's attention.
• Audit your "loading screen" time (commutes, waiting in line) and dedicate it to intentional thinking about your business goals and strategy.
• Stop accepting the "starving artist" narrative. Start tracking your time and quantifying the value of your skills to confidently charge what you're worth.
• Reframe a past rejection or failure. Instead of a verdict on your ability, view it as a necessary step that pushed you toward a more authentic and successful path.

🔗 Links & Resources

• DTLA website: https://getdtla.com/
• Whole Soul Music website: https://www.wholesoulmusic.com
• That Viola Kid website: https://thatviolakid.com
• Connect with Drew on LinkedIn
• Follow DTLA on LinkedIn
• Follow Whole Soul on Instagram

We spend countless hours perfecting our "welcome mat" — our onboarding sequences, sales calls, and initial client experience. But what happens when a client is on their way out? In this Solo Sunday episode, Brian pulls back the curtain on a strategy he’s never heard anyone else discuss in nearly 20 years of entrepreneurship: the offboarding plan. He argues that the way you handle the end of a client relationship is the ultimate test of your integrity and the most powerful, overlooked opportunity to build a legendary reputation. Brian shares his exact framework for ensuring clients feel cared for and set up for success long after they’ve stopped paying, proving that genuine care extends far beyond the transaction.

✨ Why This Matters for You

Mastering the offboarding process is a game-changer for your business:

• It’s how you turn a client who is leaving into a lifelong advocate for your brand.
• It’s the ultimate proof that your promise to "care about their success" isn't just sales-speak.
• It differentiates you from 99% of businesses who disappear the moment an engagement ends.
• It protects the hard work you've already done and ensures the client can continue to build on the results you delivered.
• It often leads to unexpected referrals and glowing reviews, not because you asked, but because you earned them.

📝 Key Takeaways

• Care Beyond the Check. True care is shown not when a client is paying you, but when they’re on their way out. Your actions at the end of the relationship define your character.
• Serve, Don't Sell. An effective offboarding plan is 100% about serving the departing client and 0% self-serving. Don't do it for the review; do it because it's the right thing to do.
• Document and Deliver a Roadmap. Don't let your hard work go to waste. Provide a final report that outlines the value delivered, identifies open loops, and gives a clear path forward for their continued success.
• Fill the Gaps You're Leaving. Proactively advise your former client on how to replace your services, whether through tools, technology, or new hires. This shows you're committed to their success, with or without you.
• Be the Exception. In a world where most businesses forget a client the minute they leave, you have a massive opportunity to be unforgettable by showing care far beyond the end of an engagement.

🚀 Put It Into Action

This week, sit down and create your V1 offboarding plan. Ask yourself:

• If my best client left tomorrow, what would I do to ensure they succeed without me?
• What information would they need to continue the momentum we built together?
• How can I create a final "success package" that includes a summary of our work, a roadmap for what’s next, and recommendations for filling the gaps?
• Start drafting a template for this process so you’re prepared to deliver exceptional value, even at the end of a relationship.

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode
• Connect with me on Instagram @imetbrian
• Share this episode with a fellow entrepreneur who wants to build a business that people remember for all the right reasons

In this special Collab Week episode of Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, eight founders come together to answer one deeply personal question:

Have you ever been afraid to give something up, only for it to turn out to be a great decision?

You'll hear from Sheri Roder, Nicholas Cook, Brandon Pankey, David Beltran, John Lunsford, Raamon Newman, Drew Mehta, and Zeyno Dodd, as they each open up about the identity, title, plan, or old way of doing things they were scared to release — and what it gave them in return.

✨ What You'll Take Away

In this episode, you'll learn how to:

• Separate your identity from your job title before a big leap
• Use fear-setting to make a scary decision calculated, not reckless
• Let go of "I can do it all" to make room for your team
• Hold onto a long-term goal through years of doubt
• Choose between two good ideas by asking which excites you most
• Trust that letting an identity end opens the door to what's next
• Ease into change gradually instead of waiting for the perfect leap
• Drop the "perfect" plan and let your team step up when it counts

🎙️ Meet the Collab Week Contributors

Sheri Roder — Get UnStuck HQ

Sheri is the founder of Get UnStuck HQ, a career and leadership coaching practice built around her Stuck Spectrum framework, helping people navigate tough career decisions and creative ruts after her own 20-plus year corporate career.
 Websitei: https://getunstuckhq.com/

Nicholas Cook — Money 101 Academy

Nicholas is the founder of Money 101 Academy and owner of Prime Land Properties, helping people buy land for a homesite, camping, or investment. He also writes at The Place Blog, and recently made the leap from a W-2 job into running his own business full-time.
 Website: https://money101academy.com/

Brandon Pankey — Blue Pine Works

Brandon is the founder and owner of Blue Pine Works, an arboriculture and land stewardship company in East Central Minnesota. He and his wife Kay lead the company. He's learned to let go of doing everything himself so his team and clients can share the load.
 Website: https://bluepineworks.com/

David Beltran — Accord Intelligence

David is founder and CEO of Accord Intelligence. Ten years into his IT career, he refused to give up on becoming an architect despite being told repeatedly he wasn't a fit — a pursuit that opened the door to IBM and, later, to building Accord's AI decision-governance layer.
 Website: https://www.accordintelligence.ai/

John Lunsford — Tethral

John is the founder and CEO of Tethral, an engineer and anthropologist with a PhD studying how technology gets adopted. He formerly led AI and personal safety at Uber before letting go of a second viable business idea to focus fully on Tethral.
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-lunsford/

Raamon Newman — New Mavericks

Raamon is co-founder of New Mavericks, a CEO leadership development partnership he started 25 years ago as a full-time meditating monk. His path ran from competitive running to monastic life to leadership consulting, letting go of each identity to make room for the next.
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raamonnewman/

Drew Mehta — ThinkFraction

Drew is the founder of ThinkFraction, helping owner-operators fix leaks in their back-end workflows. After 20 years in corporate, he was terrified to give up its safety — so instead of a leap, he took a "leisurely stroll" into entrepreneurship, still finding out if it pays off.
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhroovmehta/

Zeyno Dodd — AlgiSense

Zeyno is co-founder of AlgiSense, developing AI-driven EEG digital biomarkers to objectively measure pain. Across 25-plus years in healthcare, cybersecurity, and applied AI, she's learned to let go of her own "perfect" blueprint and trust her team to solve problems together in real time.
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zeynoaygendodd/

In this powerhouse episode, we sit down with Jaime Pesquera, the CEO and co-founder of the Madrid-based startup accelerator, Jupiter Base. Jaime breaks down the new rules for building a successful business in the age of AI, revealing how founders can create a protective "moat" around their ideas to thrive against fast-moving competition. This conversation is a masterclass for any entrepreneur feeling overwhelmed by the pace of technology. You'll learn how to leverage AI as a growth accelerator, cultivate the founder traits that truly matter to investors, and build the resilience needed to turn inevitable obstacles into massive opportunities.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• How to Build an Unbeatable Business "Moat": Learn what a business moat is in today's tech landscape and how to build one to protect your startup from giant competitors like OpenAI.
• The Three Founder Traits That Guarantee Growth: Discover the essential qualities investors look for—willpower, diligence, and risk-taking—and how to cultivate them in your own entrepreneurial journey.
• AI-Native Acceleration: Understand how to strategically integrate AI not to replace human thinking, but to complement it, keep your team focused, and accelerate your path to market.
• The Power of a Niche: Hear Jaime's take on why conquering a specific, unexplored niche is the most effective strategy for building a foothold and scaling your business.
• Leveraging Behavioral Science for Peak Performance: Get a glimpse into how top accelerators use behavioral science to help founders manage stress, stay resilient, and perform at their absolute best.
• Why Your "Failures" Are Your Biggest Wins: Learn to reframe failure as a critical part of the journey that builds character and often leads to even better outcomes than you originally planned.

📝 About Jaime Pesquera

Jaime Pesquera is the CEO and co-founder of Jupiter Base, a pre-seed startup accelerator in Madrid focused on building the next generation of global companies. With a unique background that blends psychology, law (JD), and business (MBA), Jaime brings a multi-disciplinary approach to company building. He has helped raise over $30 million in startup capital, managed $100+ million in transactions, and possesses a deep technical knowledge, having coded since he was nine years old. This diverse expertise gives him a rare ability to see the market from every angle—legal, financial, technical, and human.

🎯 Jaime’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Do not be afraid of putting in a lot of hours into a specific project and then it becoming a failure... the journey is sometimes much more important than where you arrive."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “If you don't have that willpower, it's going to be very tough to build anything long-term. A startup is many times a 10+ year commitment.” – Jaime Pesquera
• "Diligence is the mother of good fortune. You generate your own luck, you create your own luck." – Jaime Pesquera
• “The journey is sometimes much more important than where you arrive. Because sometimes where you arrive isn't where you planned, and it could be even much better than what you ever imagined.” – Jaime Pesquera

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Define Your Moat: Take 30 minutes this week to clearly define your business's primary competitive advantage (your "moat"). Is it distribution, IP, data, or something else?
• Use a Sounding Board: Ask a trusted friend, mentor, or your partner to help you identify your "zone of genius." As Jaime shared, it's often hard to see our own greatest strengths.
• Identify One AI Enhancement: Find one area of your business where AI can complement your team's thinking to accelerate growth—whether it's customer insight analysis, content creation, or product development.
• Reframe a Past "Failure": Look back at a project or idea that didn't work out. Write down three valuable lessons or skills you gained from the experience.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://jupiterbase.co/
• Connect with Jaime on LinkedIn
• Follow Jupiter Base on LinkedIn

Tired of feeling like success has to be a constant, grinding hustle? This episode is your antidote to entrepreneurial burnout. Kelly Csiszar, a former top-performing enterprise sales rep turned executive mindset coach, reveals why more strategies and tactics often fail to produce the results we want. She explains that the real breakthroughs happen when we look inward to understand and rewire the subconscious patterns that drive our behavior. For entrepreneurs and wantrepreneurs, this conversation is a masterclass in building a business that feels as good as it looks, achieving massive goals with ease, and transforming self-sabotage into sustainable success.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🧠 Why "more strategy" is often the wrong answer for breaking through plateaus and how to focus on your internal operating system instead.
• 🚀 How to make personal transformation feel fun and easy, rather than like a painful, dramatic overhaul of your life.
• 🧘 The secret to making peace and ambition coexist, allowing you to build your empire without sacrificing your well-being.
• 🔍 How to use pattern recognition as your entrepreneurial superpower to overcome procrastination, perfectionism, and people-pleasing.
• 💰 A framework for building the internal safety and security required to handle sales rejection and fearlessly put yourself and your business out there.
• 🔑 The single most powerful question you can ask yourself to uncover the root cause of any problem holding you back in your business.

📝 About Kelly Csiszar

Kelly Csiszar is an executive mindset coach and the founder of SoulShyft, a private coaching practice for high achievers. After a decade in the trenches of enterprise sales, she experienced firsthand how ambition can lead to incredible results but also burnout, anxiety, and perfectionism. Kelly transitioned into coaching to help others break free from these limiting patterns. Her work combines deep pattern recognition with neuroscience-based modalities to help entrepreneurs build unshakable self-trust, make bolder decisions, and create success that is both meaningful and sustainable.

🎯 Kelly’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

When you feel stuck, ask yourself one simple but profound question: "What is the secondary gain I'm getting from having this problem in my life?"

📢 Memorable Quotes

•  “We think that success has to be hard and that's a societal program that was built into us. Now it takes a lot of work, I'm not gonna lie, but it doesn't have to be hard work. It can be fun.” – Kelly Csiszar
• “Being an entrepreneur is a total soul-led, self-led journey that allows you to become the best version of yourself. You start to get excited about all the triggers and all of the problems that arise because you start to look at them differently.” – Kelly Csiszar
• “You have to have a slingshot. You kind of have to take a step back in order to go forward.” – Kelly Csiszar

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ The next time you feel stuck on a problem, ask yourself, "What am I gaining from this problem still being here?" and write down whatever comes to mind without judgment.
• ✅ Instead of just consuming another business book or podcast, schedule 15 minutes this week for intentional reflection. Look for a recurring story or emotional trigger in your professional life.
• ✅ Reframe your approach to a difficult task on your to-do list. Instead of thinking "This is going to be hard," ask yourself, "How can I make this fun or approach it with ease?"
• ✅ Identify one area where you feel fear in your business (e.g., sales, visibility). Instead of forcing action, get curious about the underlying pattern (e.g., perfectionism, fear of rejection) that's causing the fear.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.soulshyft.com/
• Substack: https://substack.com/@soulshyft
• Connect with Kelly on LinkedIn
• Follow SoulShfyt on LinkedIn
• Follow SoulShfyt on Instagram

In an era where AI can make or break a business decision, how can you be sure you're getting the truth? Vanja Todorovic, a 25-year financial services veteran, faced this exact problem when AI gave him disastrous advice for his new venture. This experience led him to create MelMat, a patent-pending AI research platform designed to sift through AI "hallucinations" and deliver factually-grounded answers. This episode is a must-listen for any entrepreneur who relies on AI for market research, content creation, or critical decision-making. Vanja breaks down how his background in high-stakes mortgage compliance, where being wrong had severe consequences, shaped his unique approach to building a tool that prioritizes accuracy over a single, potentially flawed answer.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• How to turn a costly mistake (like getting bad pricing advice from AI) into a game-changing, patent-pending business.
• The powerful strategy of cross-referencing multiple AI models to uncover factual blind spots and find the real truth.
• Why your "non-tech" background is actually your greatest asset in building a unique and defensible technology company.
• The "multidimensional founder" mindset for successfully running multiple businesses by finding surprising intersection points between them.
• How to leverage the immigrant entrepreneur’s superpower of adaptability to pivot and thrive in a rapidly changing market.
• A framework for building a business where accuracy and trust are the core value proposition, not just features.

📝 About Vanja Todorovic

Vanja Todorovic is the founder of MelMat, a multi-engine AI research platform built to solve the problem of AI misinformation. With a 25-year career in financial services, including as a VP of Mortgage Compliance at Wells Fargo, Vanja understands the real-world consequences of relying on incorrect information. He combines this deep industry experience with executive leadership training and advanced AI education from MIT and Johns Hopkins. As an immigrant, multi-founder, and parent to twins, Vanja brings a uniquely resilient and multidimensional perspective to entrepreneurship, proving that a diverse background is a powerful advantage in building innovative solutions.

🎯 Vanja’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Try to be a sponge, try to absorb as much information as possible while still staying true to yourself... The only people that are the biggest obstacle in your way is usually yourself. So try to remove yourself from that, try to be your own biggest fan and supporter."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “When an AI doesn't have the answer, it's going to sound, it's going to look like, it's going to smell like, it's going to taste like the right answer. But it's not going to be one.” – Vanja Todorovic
• “The constraints I placed on myself throughout my life were self-imposed and that I'm able to do so much more.” – Vanja Todorovic
• "You nurture that business from the ground up and you're there to see it go through these different stages in life as your kids are, right? So you see that growth and you know you contributed to it.” – Vanja Todorovic

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Before making a key business decision based on AI research, run your query through multiple different LLMs to spot inconsistencies.
• Audit your own skill set and identify how your unique experiences—even those outside your industry—can become a competitive advantage.
• Instead of putting all your passions on the back burner, look for ways they can intersect and inform your primary business.
• When you receive advice (from a mentor, a podcast, or AI), always ask, "How does this fit me?" before blindly implementing it.
• Practice being your own biggest fan this week. When you face a setback, consciously reframe your internal monologue from criticism to encouragement.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://melmat.ai/
• Connect with Vanja on LinkedIn
• Follow MelMat on LinkedIn

Alexander Torrenegra is an entrepreneur who doesn't just build businesses; he reinvents entire industries. In this episode, he shares the incredible journey of co-founding Voice123 with his wife, bootstrapping it into the world's first major voiceover marketplace, and how that experience laid the groundwork for his current venture, Torre.ai—an AI-powered platform set to automate and humanize recruitment globally. This episode is a masterclass for entrepreneurs on how to spot broken systems, ask the right questions to innovate, and strategically choose between bootstrapping and fundraising. Alexander, also a shark on Shark Tank Colombia and Mexico, offers a raw, unfiltered look at the persistence required to build something meaningful and why your 'why' is the ultimate competitive advantage.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 How to identify a broken, non-meritocratic industry and build a digital solution from the ground up.
• 🧠 The powerful innovation framework: Ask yourself, "If this industry were invented today, how would it look?"
• 💰 Why you should focus on creating immense value for users before perfecting your monetization strategy.
• 🤝 The unfiltered truth about fundraising vs. bootstrapping from a founder who has successfully done both (and invests as a Shark).
• 🤖 How AI is shifting the job market and creating a "human touch economy" where skills like sales and entertainment are more valuable than ever.
• 🌱 The critical difference between entrepreneurship as a goal versus a catalyst for solving a problem you're passionate about.
• 📈 Practical advice on leveraging crowdfunding and a strong investor network to accelerate growth for ambitious, network-based businesses.

📝 About Alexander Torrenegra

Alexander Torrenegra is a Colombian-American serial entrepreneur, investor, and the founder and CEO of Torre.ai. Alongside his wife Tania, he co-founded Voice123, the first and largest global voiceover marketplace which they bootstrapped to massive success before selling it in 2021. Known for his unique ability to identify and solve systemic industry problems, Alexander has been named an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35 and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader. His experience as both a scrappy bootstrapper and a venture-backed founder, combined with his role as a shark on Shark Tank Colombia and Mexico, gives him a uniquely insightful perspective on the entire entrepreneurial journey.

🎯 Alexander’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Do not try to pursue entrepreneurship for the sake of entrepreneurship. Think that entrepreneurship is a catalyst. Is not a goal."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “If for any problem, for any challenge, for any product, for any solution, ask the question, if X were invented today, how would it look?” – Alexander Torrenegra
• “The best source of capital is always going to be your clients paying for your product. There is no better money than actually getting money from having created value to your users.” – Alexander Torrenegra
• “Persistence comes easier, much, much easier when you are pursuing a deep why, when you are trying to solve a problem that you're really passionate about.” – Alexander Torrenegra
• “Getting a VC on the cap table is more difficult to get rid of... than it is to get a divorce from your significant other.” – Alexander Torrenegra

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Apply the "If X were invented today" framework to a process or system in your own business or industry this week. What would you build from scratch?
• ✅ Before you chase funding, evaluate your business model. Can you make your customers your primary source of capital by delivering undeniable value?
• ✅ Define your personal "why." Write down the core problem you are passionate about solving and keep it visible to stay motivated during tough times.
• ✅ Audit your current tasks. Identify which activities require a "human touch" (like sales or client relationships) and which can be streamlined with AI and automation.
• ✅ Stop romanticizing fundraising. Be brutally honest about whether raising capital will truly accelerate your mission or just add unnecessary pressure and complexity.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: http://torre.ai/
• Personal website: https://www.torrenegra.com/en
• Connect with Alexander on LinkedIn
• Follow Alexander on X
• Follow Alexander on Instagram
• Follow Torre.ai on LinkedIn

Ever see someone crushing it with a specific marketing strategy—like Facebook ads, a Shopify store, or podcast interviews—and immediately think, "I need to do that too!"? If so, this Solo Sunday episode is a must-listen. Brian breaks down one of the most common and dangerous mental traps for entrepreneurs: assuming other people's results can predict your own.

Using a powerful behind-the-scenes story from the podcast—where one guest made over $100,000 from their appearance while others made $0—Brian reveals why asking "what results have others gotten?" is the wrong question entirely. Instead, he shares a much smarter approach that trains you to look for patterns, learn from contrast, and make strategic decisions that dramatically increase your own chances of success, no matter what channel you choose.

✨ Why This Matters for You

This mindset shift is critical for building a sustainable business:

• It stops you from wasting time and money chasing shiny object strategies that worked for someone else.
• It protects you from the false sense of security that comes from cherry-picked success stories.
• You’ll learn to deconstruct what actually makes a strategy work, instead of just copying surface-level tactics.
• It empowers you to make smarter, more intentional decisions based on patterns, not just possibilities.
• You’ll learn to identify what’s required for success and honestly assess if you’re willing and able to do the work.

📝 Key Takeaways

• Results Aren't Transferable. Just because someone else generated $100k from a strategy doesn’t mean you will. Their results are a product of their unique approach, messaging, and follow-through.
• The Wrong Question. Stop asking, "What results did others get?" This question is flawed because success and failure exist for every single business strategy.
• The Right Question. Start asking, "What are the common patterns, strategies, and mindsets of those who succeeded versus those who failed?"
• Learn from the Contrast. The most valuable insights come from understanding the difference between what works and what doesn't. Actively study both successes and failures to find the real lessons.
• Strategy Over Channel. The marketing channel itself isn't the magic bullet. Success comes from the intentionality, value, and strategic plan you bring to that channel.

🚀 Put It Into Action

This week, pick one strategy you're considering for your business (e.g., starting a YouTube channel, running Google Ads, guesting on podcasts).

• Instead of just looking for success stories, actively search for examples of people for whom it didn't work.
• Identify the patterns. What did the successful people do consistently? (e.g., clear call to action, consistent promotion, high-value content).
• What were the common themes among those who failed? (e.g., inconsistency, poor messaging, no plan).
• Based on these patterns, what do you need to commit to in order to put yourself in the "success" category?

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode
• Connect with me on Instagram @imetbrian
• Share this episode with a fellow entrepreneur who needs to stop comparing and start strategizing

In this special Collab Week episode of Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, seven founders come together to answer one deceptively powerful question:

What's something you started or learned long ago that's finally paying off?

You'll hear from Shawn Sundsvold of GoldBear Media, Nate Hebbert of SelfWare Consulting, Raamon Newman of New Mavericks, Rami Akeela of Nera Systems, David Beltran of Accord Intelligence, Brandon Pankey of Blue Pine Works, Zeyno Dodd of AlgiSense, and Drew Mehta of ThinkFraction, as they each trace a skill, habit, or hard lesson from years ago straight into the business they're running today.

✨ What You'll Take Away

In this episode, you'll learn how to:

• Spot when an old passion is quietly becoming a business asset
• Prioritize real recovery, not just harder training
• Stay in a "niche" you love, even when nobody else sees the value yet
• Trust hands-on problem-solving even when it doesn't match the manual
• Build a go-getter mindset early that compounds over years
• Use pattern recognition across industries when you're stuck
• Say yes more often in the early stages of entrepreneurship

🎙️ Meet the Collab Week Contributors

Shawn Sundsvold — GoldBear Media

Shawn is Co-Founder and COO of GoldBear Media, a marketing agency in Westminster, Maryland. After sitting in nearly every seat in business and recovering from a serious 2019 spinal surgery, he helped his wife Kelly grow GoldBear Media into a full-time business by 2022, focused on marketing, branding, and online presence for small and medium businesses.
 Website: https://goldbear.media/

Nate Hebbert — SelfWare Consulting

Nate Hebbert is an entrepreneur and software engineer who previously worked for 3M, KPMG, and Domo—where he developed custom Java code for Fortune 500 clients. When burnout threatened to ruin his career, he became obsessed with solving one problem: how to escape the cycle of burnout. Now, Nate is the founder of SelfWare Consulting—an organization that empowers tech companies to beat burnout without pressing pause.

Website: https://selfwareconsulting.com/

Raamon Newman — New Mavericks

Raamon is co-founder of New Mavericks, a CEO leadership development partnership he started 25 years ago as a full-time meditating monk. He works with founder-CEOs worldwide to raise their leadership consciousness for clear, healthy decision-making, and is co-author of "The Science of Protection."
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raamonnewman/

Rami Akeela — Nera Systems

Rami is the founder of Nera Systems, a confidential AI company helping enterprises use AI on their most sensitive data. With 20+ years across hardware, software, and cryptography and PhDs in electrical and computer engineering, he previously founded DZK, the first zero-knowledge proof systems company.
 Website: https://nera.systems/

David Beltran — Accord Intelligence

David is founder and CEO of Accord Intelligence. After nearly three decades in enterprise IT, including 14 years at IBM in cybersecurity and governance, he built Accord's decision layer, helping organizations trust, govern, and stay accountable for AI-driven decisions.
 Website: https://www.accordintelligence.ai/

Brandon Pankey — Blue Pine Works

Brandon is the founder and owner of Blue Pine Works, an arboriculture and land stewardship company in East Central Minnesota. He and his wife Kay lead the company.
 Website: https://bluepineworks.com/

Zeyno Dodd — AlgiSense

Zeyno is co-founder of AlgiSense, developing AI-driven EEG digital biomarkers to objectively measure pain. With 25+ years across healthcare, cybersecurity, and applied AI, her work spans government modernization and privacy-focused health platforms, rooted in a passion for ethical AI.
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zeynoaygendodd/

Drew Mehta — ThinkFraction

Drew is the founder of ThinkFraction, helping owner-operators grow revenue by fixing leaks in their back-end workflows and teaching them how AI fits into their business — all while learning to be an entrepreneur himself after 20+ years in corporate.
 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhroovmehta/

Everyone is talking about adopting AI, but how do you do it without losing control, breaking the bank, or compromising your company’s data? In this episode, Brian sits down with Jake Tao, a seasoned entrepreneur and former engineering leader at giants like Amazon and Shopify. Jake breaks down the complex world of enterprise AI into simple, actionable strategies. He reveals why being locked into a single AI model is a mistake and how to create a secure, cost-effective AI environment tailored to your business needs. This episode is a masterclass for any entrepreneur who wants to move beyond the AI hype and start implementing it intelligently to gain a real competitive advantage.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• How to create a secure AI “control plane” for your business, ensuring compliance, privacy, and control over your data.
• The vendor-neutral strategy: Why you shouldn't get locked into one AI provider (like ChatGPT or Claude) and how to choose the best model for any given task.
• The "start small" roadmap for AI adoption that proves value quickly and gets your whole team excited.
• How to translate abstract AI concepts like "tokens" into tangible cost controls and budget management for your business.
• Why building a visual dashboard is key to understanding and managing your team's AI usage and expenses in real-time.
• How to turn a lifelong passion for technology into multiple successful entrepreneurial ventures.

📝 About Jake Tao

Jake Tao is the founder and CEO of Syrovex, the company behind OwlVigil, an enterprise AI control plane. With over 15 years of engineering and leadership experience from tech giants like Amazon, Shopify, Capital One, and Oracle, Jake has deep expertise in large-scale infrastructure and AI. He’s a lifelong entrepreneur who started his first business in middle school, sold it to pay for college, and has since launched multiple successful ventures, including an online community for international students that is still active with over 270,000 users. Jake brings a unique blend of high-level enterprise knowledge and a scrappy founder’s mindset to the world of AI.

🎯 Jake’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"You need to find a real problem that you can help to resolve and start with small and test early and you can improve based on the real feedback."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• "You don't have to have the whole business figured out in the beginning. So you need to be a real person, you need to solve the real problem." – Jake Tao
• "The problem for the enterprise is like, hey, okay, this is something I use personally, but how can I leverage the whole AI system... for my business?" – Jake Tao
• "I see the next decade of my life is like building something and helping people and growing." – Jake Tao

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Audit your current workflows for a small, repetitive task that could be improved with AI. Use that as your pilot project to see the benefits firsthand.
• Instead of defaulting to a single AI platform, challenge your team to consider which model is best suited for a specific business task (e.g., creative writing vs. data analysis).
• Implement a data privacy pre-check. Before your team inputs sensitive information into any AI tool, establish a clear process for filtering out private company or customer data.
• If you're building an AI-powered tool, consider how you can provide a dashboard or reporting system to help your users understand its usage, cost, and ROI.
• Take Jake’s advice: identify a real problem you personally understand, define the smallest possible first step to solve it, and get feedback immediately.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://syrovex.com/
• Personal website: https://jaketao.com
• Connect with Jake on LinkedIn
• Follow Syrovex on LinkedIn

In a world where AI is making the hiring process feel more broken and impersonal than ever, how can entrepreneurs build teams based on trust and true capability? This episode features Josie Zhang, the founder and CEO of Griting.ai, who is pioneering a new approach. Josie breaks down how AI, when used correctly, can actually build a more trustworthy bridge between companies and talent. She reveals her framework for identifying real human potential beyond the resume, moving past biases to see what candidates are truly capable of. For any entrepreneur looking to build a high-performing team or ethically leverage AI, this conversation provides a groundbreaking and human-centric roadmap.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• 🚀 How to use AI to remove hiring bias and focus on a candidate's true capabilities, not just their resume.
• 🤖 The critical importance of the "human-in-the-loop" model to ensure AI enhances, rather than replaces, human judgment and connection.
• 🧠 A deep dive into a 5-dimensional talent framework (Passion, Mental Coordination, Execution, Communication, Consistency) to evaluate talent in a more holistic way.
• 🤝 Why building a "trust signal" is the most crucial element in hiring and how AI can be used to verify skills and authenticity on both sides of the table.
• ⚙️ Practical examples of how to use AI agents to automate repetitive, "dirty work" so you can focus on high-value tasks like strategy and human connection.
• 💡 How to shift your mindset from AI as a replacement threat to AI as a powerful tool for amplifying human curiosity and passion.
• 📈 Why consistency and resilience are the most valuable traits for entrepreneurs and employees in the rapidly changing AI landscape.

📝 About Josie Zhang

Josie Zhang is the founder and CEO of Griting.ai, an AI talent intelligence company focused on building trust between talent development and employment. Currently a PhD student in AI at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering, her work explores multi-agent systems and human-AI cognition. Josie brings a unique and brilliant perspective that bridges the gap between deep academic research and the practical, real-world challenges of building a business and hiring the right people in the age of AI.

🎯 Josie’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

Find a problem you are so passionate about that you would work on it even if no one was watching, paying you, or managing you. That is your true north.

📢 Memorable Quotes

• "The algorithm led us to want more efficiency, but the hiring matching process is not just like the efficiency. It's really like truly two sides can see each other in the right timing.” – Josie Zhang
• "We believe each individual has a unique talent. We are not doing the ranking or the sourcing heavily to let the people like the competition. No, we believe we create opportunity for everyone.” – Josie Zhang
• "Even though AI is really important, human at present is more important… We still need to be, want to be at present and want to gather with each other and want to talk with a really, really real person.” – Josie Zhang

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• ✅ Audit your current hiring process. Are you screening for keywords on a resume or are you creating opportunities to see a candidate's real capabilities in action?
• ✅ Identify one repetitive, low-value task in your daily workflow. Research how an AI agent could automate it to free up your time for more strategic work.
• ✅ Define a passion project you’d work on for free. Dedicate a few hours a week to exploring it with AI tools to see what new insights you can uncover.
• ✅ When implementing any AI tool, consciously build in a "human-in-the-loop" checkpoint to review its output, check for bias, and add your own critical judgment.
• ✅ Focus on building genuine, human-to-human connections. In a world of AI agents, being present and authentic is a competitive advantage.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://griting.ai
• Connect with Josie on LinkedIn
• Follow Griting.ai on LinkedIn

In this episode, Brian sits down with Noah McCloud, the founder of OptiGold PMO, who masterfully translates complex corporate project management principles into actionable strategies for entrepreneurs. Noah shares his journey from managing $600M+ portfolios to taking the leap and building his own business from the ground up. He reveals why most business failures aren't technical but human, rooted in our resistance to change and lack of trust. This episode is a masterclass in mindset, resilience, and the art of delivering visible results quickly to build momentum and prove your value. If you're struggling to manage competing priorities or need the motivation to finally make your own entrepreneurial leap, this conversation is for you.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• The "Human First" Principle: Discover why project failures are almost always human, not technical, and how to build the trust and buy-in needed to drive any initiative forward.
• Deliver Value, Fast: Learn the strategy of delivering something visible and valuable quickly to earn your mandate, whether with clients, stakeholders, or your own team.
• Ditch Reporting Theater: Shift your updates from "scope, schedule, cost" to conversations about trade-offs and strategic decisions that actually move the needle.
• The Entrepreneurial Leap Mindset: Understand the power of the "Try, Fail, Iterate, Get Better" cycle and why embracing rejection is a prerequisite for success.
• From Corporate Expert to Founder: Hear the real story of transitioning from a high-level corporate career to starting from scratch, and why you should spend less time planning and more time testing.
• Leverage Modern Tools, Maintain Human Connection: Learn how to use AI and modern software to accelerate your operational tasks without losing the authentic connection that truly builds a business.

📝 About Noah McCloud

Noah McCloud is the founder and principal advisor of OptiGold PMO, where he builds and rescues project management offices for complex organizations. With over 20 years of experience, he has managed portfolios exceeding $600 million and led massive global technology initiatives. Noah’s core belief is that successful project management is built on human connection and trust, not just processes and tools. He took the leap into entrepreneurship to build something meaningful for his family, bringing his wealth of enterprise-level experience to the business world with a focus on agility and rapid value delivery.

🎯 Noah’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Don't quit. Don't give up on yourself. Remember why you started down the path... Find your why and why you want to do this. And, that first day that you step out, write that why down."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• "Everything that you're trying to do to get to where you want to be in entrepreneurship is behind the things you're avoiding." – Noah McCloud
• "You wanna fall in love with the journey and the process to step out on your own because it's not something that's gonna happen overnight." – Noah McCloud
• "Try, fail, iterate, and get better. And people will notice that. People will notice that and they'll want to work with you because you're giving it your all and really, improving every day." – Noah McCloud

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Write Down Your "Why": Take 15 minutes today to write down exactly why you started (or want to start) your business. Keep it somewhere you can see it daily.
• Identify One "Quick Win": Look at your current projects or client work. Find one small, visible result you can deliver this week to build trust and momentum.
• Test, Don't Over-Plan: If you have a business idea, spend less time on the perfect business plan and more time getting feedback from the market. Take one small step to test your idea this week.
• Reframe a Project Update: In your next client or team meeting, consciously shift the conversation away from a simple status report and towards strategic decisions and trade-offs.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://optigoldpmo.com
• Connect with Noah on LinkedIn
• Follow OptiGold PMO on LinkedIn

Tired of the daily "what's for dinner?" struggle and the mental gymnastics of healthy eating? Sushmitha Kanukurthi, a data scientist with over 20 years of experience at companies like Meta, turned this universal problem into her mission. She founded Nuven, a health-tech platform that acts as your personal AI kitchen assistant. This episode is a masterclass in leveraging deep professional expertise to build a unique, data-driven solution in a crowded market. For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur, Sushmitha’s story is packed with invaluable lessons on listening to user feedback, the power of pivoting, and why being married to the problem—not your initial solution—is the ultimate key to success.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• Leverage Your Unique Expertise: Discover how Sushmitha’s 20-year career in data science gave her a unique edge in identifying signals and building a tech solution for the food industry.
• Solve the Mental Load: Learn how to identify and solve the "mental load" for your customers to create an indispensable product they'll use daily.
• The Power of the Pivot: Understand when to listen to the "buts" from your users and have the courage to pivot away from your original idea to build something truly valuable.
• Win in a Crowded Market: Find out how focusing on a niche (culturally relevant food) and a unique value proposition (end-to-end kitchen management) can help you stand out.
• AI with a Purpose: See how to integrate AI intentionally to solve core user problems, rather than just using it as a buzzword.
• Build a Real Feedback Loop: Learn how to create a direct line to your users and use their insights to drive every product iteration.

📝 About Sushmitha Kanukurthi

Sushmitha Kanukurthi is a 20-year veteran of data science and analytics who has pivoted her extensive expertise into the world of health tech. She is the founder of Nuven, an AI-powered platform designed to make healthy home cooking simple, personalized, and culturally relevant. After becoming a mother and growing concerned about the food system, Sushmitha combined her professional skills with her personal passion to solve the daily mental load of meal planning for families. Her data-driven approach offers a unique perspective on building a consumer-facing product that truly listens to and evolves with its users.

🎯 Sush’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Don't be married to the solution, be married to the problem."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• "When you see the signal across the board and you see that there is no real solution to this problem yet... now is the time for me to take a plunge." – Sushmitha Kanukurthi
• "When you give people culturally relevant foods, foods that are familiar to them, that they grew up eating and help them figure out how to make that healthier. That's what will make it sustainable for them." – Sushmitha Kanukurthi
• "I was very married to the solution I was building... every time I talk to the user, I would get feedback that, hey, you know what, this is great, but... by the fifth or sixth time, I was like, okay, these buts seem to be never-ending, so we gotta figure out a way to nip this in the bud." – Sushmitha Kanukurthi

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Listen for the "Buts": When gathering user feedback, pay close attention to qualified praise ("it's great, but..."). Consistent "buts" are a clear signal that a pivot or iteration is needed.
• Audit Your Professional Skills: Identify the unique skills from your career (like data analysis, marketing, or project management) and consider how they can be your unfair advantage in a new venture.
• Start Marketing Yourself: Even without a budget, embrace the role of a marketer. Start building a social media presence for your brand and enjoy the process of connecting with your audience.
• Focus on a Niche: Don't try to be everything to everyone. Find a specific, underserved angle (like cultural relevance in food) to build a loyal early-adopter base.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://www.gonuven.com/
• Connect with Sushmitha on LinkedIn
• Follow Nuven on LinkedIn

Ever feel like the evidence is stacked against you? A failed proposal, a critical email, or even that voice of self-doubt in your own head can feel like proof that you’re on the wrong track. In this Solo Sunday episode, Brian Lofrumento dives into a controversial but essential trait for every founder: delusion. He argues that in a world overflowing with evidence that you’ll fail, the only way to succeed is to be delusional enough to believe you will win anyway. Brian breaks down why this mindset is critical, how the most successful founders use it to their advantage, and why you need to stop looking for criticism and start looking for reasons to believe.

✨ Why This Matters for You

Embracing a healthy dose of delusion is a game-changer for entrepreneurs:

• It’s your shield against the constant negativity and criticism that can paralyze your progress.
• It empowers you to keep moving forward when the data, the feedback, and the circumstances all scream "stop."
• It helps you understand that your belief in your success is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• It frees you from the trap of constantly seeking validation and allows you to build based on your vision.
• It’s the fuel that gets you over the mountain of obstacles to the other side where your supporters are waiting.

📝 Key Takeaways

• Delusion is a Prerequisite for Success. It’s the ability to believe in your vision despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
• Negative Evidence is Everywhere. From failed pitches to your own self-doubt, reasons to quit will always be abundant. The key is to consciously ignore them.
• Your Belief Determines Your Reality. As Henry Ford said, "Whether you think you can, or you think you can't – you're right." You have to choose to believe you can.
• Beware of Over-Seeking Criticism. If you ask for negative feedback, you will always get it. Successful founders protect their delusional mindset by surrounding themselves with believers, not just critics.
• Find Your "Green Team" Evidence. For every piece of "red team" evidence that says you'll fail, there's "green team" evidence that says you'll succeed. Your job is to find and focus on the green.
• The Market Will Test You. The world will provide plenty of criticism and negative feedback on its own. You don’t need to go searching for more of it.

🚀 Put It Into Action

This week, conduct a "Green Team" audit of your own business:

• Identify one area where you've been focused on the negative evidence (e.g., low conversion rates, a critical comment).
• Now, actively search for three pieces of "green team" evidence in that same area. This could be a single positive customer review, one successful sale, or even just your own unwavering belief in the product.
• Write them down and make them your focus for the week. Choose to be delusional and act as if that green evidence is the only thing that matters.

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode
• Connect with Brian on Instagram @imetbrian
• Share this episode with a fellow entrepreneur who needs permission to be a little more delusional

In this special Collab Week episode of Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, 13 founders come together to answer one deceptively powerful question:

Tell us about something you picked up during your school years that had nothing to do with the actual coursework, but has helped you in day-to-day as a business owner.

From a nightly outfit ritual that taught preparedness, to a rugby final that taught the difference between the right action and the right outcome, to a boss's two-word correction that reframed an entire philosophy of customer service, this is a wide-ranging episode that's a reminder that the most useful business lessons rarely show up on a syllabus.

For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur who's ever wondered whether their "unrelated" hobbies, jobs, or offbeat professors actually mattered, this episode is proof they did — and a nudge to go looking for the lesson hiding in whatever felt like a distraction at the time.

✨ What You'll Take Away

In this episode, you'll learn how to:

• How sourcing advice from total outsiders gives you unbiased market intel
• Why knowing when you're being told something wrong matters more than ever in the AI era
• How getting comfortable around smarter people builds stronger partnerships
• Why arguing both sides of an idea (respectfully) leads to better decisions
• How choosing the right action over the desired outcome protects your progress
• Why choosing the pain of discipline beats the pain of regret, every time
• Why realistic workloads (not cramming) make you a better manager and leader

🎙️ Meet the Collab Week Contributors

Patricia Ballivian — Altura Strategies
Founder of Altura Strategies, helping founders bring clarity and structure to the messy realities of scaling.
Website: https://www.alturastrategies.net/

Drew Mehta — ThinkFraction
20+ years in corporate; now helps owner-operators grow revenue by fixing back-end workflow leaks and applying AI the right way.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhroovmehta/

John Lunsford — Tethral
Engineer, anthropologist, and PhD in tech adoption; formerly led AI and personal safety at Uber, now founder/CEO of Tethral.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-lunsford/

Arjun Bidesi — Orcana.AI
Co-founder/CEO of Orcana.AI, closing the gap between operating plans and actual performance with AI-driven insights.
Website: https://www.orcana.ai/

Stephen Custer — Dry Humor Marketing
Owner of Dry Humor Marketing, pairing serious strategy and data with authentic storytelling that gets people to act.
Website: https://www.dryhumormarketing.com/

David Beltran — Accord Intelligence
Founder/CEO of Accord Intelligence, building the decision layer that keeps humans accountable for AI-driven decisions.
Website: https://www.accordintelligence.ai/

Zeyno Dodd — AlgiSense
Co-founder of AlgiSense, developing AI-driven EEG biomarkers to objectively measure pain.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zeynoaygendodd/

Raamon Newman — New Mavericks
Co-founder of New Mavericks, a CEO leadership development partnership; co-author of The Science of Protection.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raamonnewman/

Mike Gross — Michael J. Gross, LLC
Trainer, consultant, and auditor helping organizations apply ISO standards practically, with 35+ years of experience.
Website: https://mj-gross.com/

Nicholas Cook — Money 101 Academy
Founder of Money 101 Academy and owner of Prime Land Properties; also writes at The Place Blog.
Website: https://money101academy.com/

Erik Berglund — Loominary
Founder of Loominary, building skill simulation systems for practicing business's hardest conversations.
Website: https://www.loominary.io/

Nate Hebbert — SelfWare Consulting
Founder of SelfWare Consulting, helping small business owners beat burnout without pressing pause.
Website: https://selfwareconsulting.com/

Brandon Pankey — Blue Pine Works
Founder and owner of Blue Pine Works, an arboriculture and land stewardship company in East Central Minnesota.
Website: https://bluepineworks.com/

Tired of wrestling with clunky spreadsheets or paying a fortune for software that doesn't quite fit your business? James Edgell, a former technology leader at giants like McDonald's, IBM, and Deloitte, is here to show you a better way. He shares how his new venture, SoftExit Studio, is using AI to make custom business software accessible and affordable for everyone. This episode is a masterclass in leveraging technology to solve real-world business problems without a team of developers or a venture capital budget. James breaks down how any entrepreneur can now build the exact tools they need to scale, automate, and finally get out of "spreadsheet hell."

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

•  🔧 How to escape "spreadsheet chaos" and the growth plateau it causes for so many small businesses.
•  🤖 Why AI-driven configuration (not code generation) is the key to building stable, bug-free custom applications quickly and affordably.
•  🚀 The single most powerful (and boring) concept James learned in big business that you can apply to scale your small business.
•  💰 How to build powerful, custom tools like CRMs and inventory systems without paying for expensive AI tokens or hosting fees.
•  📈 A framework for identifying the hidden gaps in your operations that are perfect candidates for a custom software solution.
•  🤝 How to use AI as your "brutally honest" co-founder to pressure-test ideas and build a rock-solid business plan.
•  🛠️ Why bootstrapping a powerful tech-enabled business is more achievable now than ever before.

📝 About James Edgell

James Edgell is a seasoned technology executive, entrepreneur, and the founder of SoftExit. With a high-impact career spanning roles at IBM, Motorola, and McDonald's, he was a key leader behind the digital platforms that served millions of customers, including the McDonald's mobile app. James has a unique talent for transforming complex business challenges into practical, scalable technology solutions. Now, he's on a mission to empower small and mid-sized businesses with SoftExit Studio, an AI-enabled platform that makes custom software a reality for entrepreneurs everywhere.

🎯 James’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

“This is the most exciting time for entrepreneurs… AI can be your co-founder. I mean, you finally have somebody you can bounce ideas off of that knows everything… Get out there and try it and do it… This is the time where bootstrapping actually makes sense.”

📢 Memorable Quotes

•  “I learned something that was incredibly boring, incredibly powerful, and it's called process. And it is absolutely amazing.” – James Edgell
• “A lot of companies… end up dropping back to spreadsheets. And then when they start to grow, that kind of plateaus their success because now they're in all these spreadsheets up to their neck and none of them work together.” – James Edgell
• “We're going to provide a great service to a lot of companies at an affordable price for our entire existence.” – James Edgell

💡 Actionable Takeaways

•  ✅ Audit Your Spreadsheets: Identify the one spreadsheet in your business that is the most complicated, error-prone, or critical to your operations. This is your first opportunity for a custom solution.
•  ✅ Think Like a Change Agent: Step back and work on your business. Ask yourself: "If I could build any tool to solve my biggest daily frustration, what would it do?"
•  ✅ Use AI to Challenge Your Business: Go to your favorite AI chatbot and prompt it with: "Be brutally honest and attack the weaknesses in this business idea..." See what you uncover.
•  ✅ Explore No-Code First: Before assuming custom software is too expensive or complicated, explore an affordable platform like SoftExit. You might be surprised by how quickly you can solve a major business problem.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: http://www.softexit.com/
• Connect with James on LinkedIn
• Follow SoftExit on LinkedIn
• Follow SoftExit on Facebook

Tired of hearing about AI as a novelty? This episode cuts through the noise. Serial entrepreneur Marty Reed joins the show to reveal how to implement AI with a founder’s mindset, focusing on one thing: a tangible return on investment. He explains why simply chatting with an LLM is the lowest bar and shares how to build custom AI agents that automate complex workflows, multiply your team's productivity, and directly impact your P&L. For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur feeling overwhelmed by AI, Marty provides a clear, strategic playbook for leveraging this technology to build a more efficient, scalable, and profitable business. This isn't about AI for AI's sake; it's about making AI work for you.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• Beyond the Chatbot: How to move from basic AI prompts to building "agentic tooling" that automates repetitive, time-consuming tasks across your business.
• The 5X Productivity Formula: Learn how AI can analyze thousands of data points (like customer emails) to create automated workflows that make your team five times more productive.
• The Founder’s ROI Playbook: Discover how to identify the highest-impact areas for AI implementation and calculate the financial return before you invest a single dollar.
• Context is King: Understand why giving AI access to your unique data (emails, meeting transcripts) is the secret to making it an invaluable, personalized executive assistant.
• Human Capital Multiplier: Reframe your thinking from AI as a job "displacer" to a powerful "multiplier" that frees up your team for high-value strategic work.
• Winning Over the Skeptics: Learn the strategy for turning AI naysayers on your team into your biggest advocates and drivers of adoption.
• From Two Weeks to 20 Minutes: Hear a real-world example of how AI condensed a complex, two-week reporting process into a 20-minute automated task.

📝 About Marty Reed

Marty Reed is the managing partner of Apex AI Advisors and a seasoned serial entrepreneur who has founded seven companies and successfully exited four. With a deep background in finance and operations, Marty approaches technology from a business-first perspective. His last venture, an edtech company called Aranda Solutions, deployed statewide data systems in 35 states and 7 countries. Marty’s unique expertise lies in his ability to look past the AI hype and pinpoint exactly where it can deliver measurable ROI, making him an invaluable guide for founders looking to build smarter, more efficient companies.

🎯 Marty’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"I don't know where we're going and I know exactly how to get there."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “Adoption is ROI, period. And as long as you have adoption, ROI will follow.” – Marty Reed
• “[AI is] a really smart executive assistant that has no idea what you do or how you do it... How do we leverage this tool... to really have impact on our business?” – Marty Reed
• “This is all about multiplying, right? All about multiplying capital, all about multiplying human capital. And how do you leverage those really, really smart people?” – Marty Reed

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Audit Your Workflow: Identify one repetitive, time-consuming task you do daily or weekly. This is your first target for AI automation.
• Give Your AI Context: Instead of re-explaining your business in every prompt, connect your AI tool to your emails or meeting transcripts to create a personalized assistant that understands you.
• Calculate the ROI First: Before building a complex AI solution, ask yourself: "If this task was automated, how many hours would it save my team per month?" and "What is that time worth?"
• Convert a Naysayer: Find a skeptical team member and offer to build a simple automation that solves one of their biggest daily frustrations. Their success will drive wider adoption.
• Schedule Your Learning: Create a recurring task in your calendar to spend 15 minutes testing the latest AI models with a baseline question to see how they’re improving.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://apexblueprint.ai
• Connect with Marty on LinkedIn

In an era where AI tools like ChatGPT are making it easier than ever for students to cheat, how can we ensure real learning is still happening? This episode dives deep with Kevin Doshi and Patrick Roscio, the co-founders of Scholera, an AI-native platform designed to solve the biggest problems plaguing education today. They share their incredible journey from identifying a critical issue in academia—partly from their own experiences—to building a sophisticated tech solution from the ground up. This isn't just a story about EdTech; it's a masterclass in how to tackle a complex societal issue, find a co-founder with a shared vision on LinkedIn, and navigate the challenges of selling a disruptive product to a traditional industry. For any entrepreneur looking to solve a meaningful problem, this conversation is packed with insights on product development, market positioning, and the relentless drive required to build something that matters.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• How to spot a massive business opportunity by analyzing the unintended consequences of new technology (like AI in classrooms).
• The framework for turning a personal pain point into a scalable, tech-driven business idea.
• Why building a "memory layer" for your platform can create a deep, analytical moat that competitors can't easily replicate.
• Strategies for navigating a long sales cycle in a traditional industry like education by finding internal change agents and running pilot programs.
• How to leverage your co-founder's unique perspective to build a more robust and well-rounded product.
• The art of filtering feedback—knowing when to listen to criticism and when to block out the negative energy to stay focused on your vision.
• Why solving the core problem is more important than ever, especially when AI makes the "building" part of a tech business easier.

📝 About Kevin Doshi & Patrick Roscio

Kevin Doshi and Patrick Roscio are the innovative co-founders of Scholera, an AI-native learning platform for universities. Kevin, who grew up learning the fundamentals of customer relationships in his father’s stationery store in Mumbai, brought his computer science expertise from Stevens Institute of Technology to conceptualize Scholera. Patrick, also an engineer from Stevens, was inspired to tackle the AI cheating problem after seeing his own reliance on AI tools as a student and recognizing the skills gap it created in the professional world. Together, their shared vision and complementary experiences led them to build a platform that addresses the core issues of modern education head-on.

🎯 Kevin’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Startups are not just about making money. It's really about trying to solve a problem which maybe you faced… go out there and trying to solve that problem… fail 100 times. But I guess you need just that one time you need to succeed."

🎯 Patrick’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"You can't listen to people who are trying to put you down... you can't let negative energy and you can't let negative people turn you away from something that's gonna be great."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• "With AI now, the building part has become really very easy now... We now really have to try to solve the problem because the problem-solving part needs to be easier and spot on." – Kevin Doshi
• "You need one happy customer which will lead you to maybe 100 or 1,000 happy customers." – Kevin Doshi
• "It's not just about getting to the final answer, it's really about the journey, which we all know is where the learning really happens." – Patrick Roscio
• "For anybody that's going to put you down or any bad thing that happens along your journey to success, you have to take it in stride. Just keep plugging away at the problem and eventually you'll get there." – Patrick Roscio

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Identify a new technology trend in your industry and ask: "What is the biggest unintended problem this creates?" This is often where the most valuable business opportunities are hiding.
• If you're looking for a co-founder, optimize your LinkedIn profile and start engaging with people in your target industry. A single, well-crafted message can lead to a game-changing partnership.
• Instead of thinking about how to ban or fight a disruptive force (like AI), brainstorm how you can build a tool that harnesses its power for a positive outcome.
• This week, reach out to five potential customers and ask them about their biggest challenges—don't pitch them, just listen. Use this research to validate or refine your business idea, just as Kevin did with university professors.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://scholera-inc.com/
• Connect with Kevin on LinkedIn
• Connect with Patrick on LinkedIn
• Follow Scholera on LinkedIn

Felix Vicknair, an executive business advisor with 25 years of experience in supply chain and operational excellence, joins the show to demystify how small businesses can leverage the strategies of global corporations. He explains why focusing solely on revenue growth is a mistake and reveals the hidden opportunities for profit and efficiency that most entrepreneurs overlook in their day-to-day operations. This episode is a masterclass for any founder who feels overwhelmed and is looking for a structured way to lower costs, improve results, and build a more resilient business. Felix breaks down complex concepts like Lean Six Sigma and process standardization into simple, actionable steps you can apply immediately, regardless of your company's size.

💡 What You'll Take Away For YOUR Business

• How to adopt a "big business" mindset to find hidden profits and efficiencies in your small business.
• The secret to consistent, high-quality results by standardizing your core processes (and why "asking Joe" is a recipe for disaster).
• Why balancing revenue growth with expense control is crucial for long-term stability and profitability.
• How to use data and AI as a strategic tool without falling into the trap of blindly following numbers.
• The framework for identifying which tasks to automate or simplify so your team can focus on high-value activities.
• Why you don't need an in-house engineering team to achieve operational excellence.
• How to overcome personal limitations (like being an introvert) to become the leader your business needs.

📝 About Felix Vicknair

Felix Vicknair is an executive business advisor and the founder of United Business Works. With a background as an industrial engineer and over 25 years of experience in supply chain consulting for large global corporations, he has a unique talent for identifying operational inefficiencies. Felix is now on a mission to bring those same high-impact solutions—from cost reduction and process optimization to automation—to small businesses and nonprofits that are ready to scale. His hands-on approach helps entrepreneurs stop reinventing the wheel and start building more profitable, efficient, and sustainable companies.

🎯 Felix’s BEST Piece of Advice for Wantrepreneurs and Entrepreneurs

"Nobody has all the answers."

📢 Memorable Quotes

• “If you're not actively thinking about ways to drive change, to take advantage of how things are moving in markets and in the world, you're falling behind.” – Felix Vicknair
• “Data tells a story that it's not emotionally bound to how an operation performed on any given day. It doesn't have biases towards feelings or just experiences in the way that sometimes people do.” – Felix Vicknair

💡 Actionable Takeaways

• Document one core process this week. It could be how you onboard a new client or fulfill an order. The goal is to get it out of someone’s head and onto paper to create consistency.
• Conduct a "tech bloat" audit. Review all your software subscriptions and cancel any licenses or tools you are no longer using.
• Identify one person in your network you can ask for feedback on a current business challenge. Schedule a 15-minute call with them.
• Look at your daily tasks and identify one repetitive, low-value activity that could be simplified or automated.

🔗 Links & Resources

• Website: https://unitedbusinessworks.com/
• Connect with Felix on LinkedIn
• Follow United Business Works on LinkedIn

Are you stuck in the "idea phase," convinced that your success hinges on creating something brand new that the world has never seen? In this Solo Sunday episode, Brian Lofrumento breaks down a critical pattern he’s observed that separates wantrepreneurs from successful entrepreneurs: the obsession with novelty. He reveals why experienced founders don't look for new ideas, but instead focus on what's already proven to work. Drawing on powerful stories—including the man who invented AstroTurf too early and Russell Brunson’s warning about pioneers—Brian explains why your energy is better spent on execution, not invention. This episode is a must-listen if you're ready to get out of the brainstorming phase and into building a real, profitable business.

✨ Why This Matters for You

This mindset shift can save you years of frustration and wasted effort:

• It frees you from the immense pressure of having to invent the "next big thing."
• It gives you a clear roadmap to follow by modeling what's already successful in the marketplace.
• It helps you avoid the costly trap of trying to educate a market on a brand-new concept.
• It shifts your focus from the "idea" to the three things that actually drive success: marketing, sales, and delivery.

📝 Key Takeaways

• Proven > New. Wantrepreneurs believe their success is tied to a revolutionary idea. Entrepreneurs know success comes from leveraging proven models.
• Execution is Everything. A simple idea with brilliant marketing, sales, and delivery will always beat a brilliant idea with poor execution.
• Pioneers Get the Arrows. As Brian shares, the first to market is often the one who fails, paving the way for others to learn from their mistakes and succeed.
• Don't Reinvent the Wheel. There's a reason established business models work—the market is already spending money there. Your job is to step in and serve that market, maybe just a little bit better.
• Innovation Happens Within Lanes. True, sustainable innovation isn't about creating a whole new industry; it's about improving on what already exists within a proven market.

🚀 Put It Into Action

This week, stop brainstorming and start analyzing:

• Pick an industry you're passionate about.
• Instead of trying to come up with a "new" idea, find 3-5 businesses that are already crushing it in that space.
• Study them. What are they selling? How are they marketing? Who are their customers?
• Ask yourself one simple question: "What is the one thing I could do just a little bit better than them?" That’s your starting point.

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode
• Connect with Brian on Instagram @imetbrian
• Share this episode with a fellow entrepreneur who is stuck trying to find the "perfect" new idea

In this special collab episode of Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur, 16 founders come together to answer one deceptively powerful question:

What does "hard work" mean to you, and how is it different from when you started your business?

It's a wide-ranging episode about what hard work really means once volume stops being the measure — from swapping busyness for stillness, to learning to make the ask, to discovering that AI has moved the hard part from typing to thinking. Across all seventeen answers, one thread holds: hard work stopped being about how much these founders could carry, and started being about what they have the discipline to put down.

For any wantrepreneur or entrepreneur who still measures their effort in hours logged, meetings taken, or how exhausted they feel at the end of the day, this episode is a reset. Seventeen founders, across wildly different industries, arrived at strikingly similar conclusions: hard work isn't disappearing as they grow — it's relocating, from the doing to the deciding, from the hours to the judgment behind them.

🎙️ Meet the Collab Week Contributors

Lisa Larson — Mindful Corporate Mastery

After 25+ years in corporate tech, Lisa founded Mindful Corporate Mastery to help high-performing professionals manage stress and decisions differently than she once did.

Website: https://www.mindfulcorporatemastery.com/

Nate Hebbert — SelfWare Consulting

A former software engineer at 3M, KPMG, and Domo, Nate now runs SelfWare Consulting, helping tech companies and small business owners beat burnout without pausing growth.

Website: https://selfwareconsulting.com/

Shawn Sundsvold — GoldBear Media

Shawn co-founded GoldBear Media with his wife Kelly in 2020, helping small and medium businesses get more out of social media and email marketing.

Website: https://goldbear.media/

Erik Berglund — Loominary

Erik founded The Language of Leadership and Loominary, building skill simulation systems that let people practice their business's hardest conversations.

Website: https://www.loominary.io/

Sheri Roder — Get UnStuck HQ

After 40+ years in corporate life, Sheri launched Get UnStuck HQ, a coaching practice that helps clients turn a messy, complicated choice into a decision they can act on.

Website: https://www.getunstuckhq.com/

Brandon Pankey — Blue Pine Works

Brandon is the founder and owner of Blue Pine Works, an arboriculture and land stewardship company. He and his wife Kay lead the company in East Central Minnesota.

Website: https://bluepineworks.com/

Kevin Kertes — advanceMEN Coaching

A former 30-year music industry executive, Kevin now runs advanceMEN Coaching, helping capable men confront postponed decisions and move forward with confidence.

Website: https://www.advancemencoaching.com/

Brandon Katz — DreamLever

Brandon is founder and CEO of DreamLever, an AI system that learns a business from its own meetings and drives the right work forward, after 4 years as Chief of Staff at Fine Fettle.

Website: https://www.dreamlever.ai/

Raamon Newman — New Mavericks

Raamon co-founded New Mavericks 25 years ago as a full-time meditating monk, and now leads CEO development work with founders scaling companies into the billions.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raamonnewman/

Patricia Ballivian — Altura Strategies

Originally from Bolivia, Patricia founded Altura Strategies to help growing businesses align their operations, systems, and people.

Website: https://www.alturastrategies.net/

Sara Reece — Workmind

Sara is CEO and co-founder of Workmind, helping organizations use operations-first automation to eliminate friction and grow without adding headcount.

Website: https://workmind.cloud/partners/

Mike Gross — Michael J. Gross, LLC

With 35+ years of experience, Mike runs Michael J. Gross, LLC, providing practical ISO training and consulting built on what already works.

Website: https://mj-gross.com/

Stephen Custer — Dry Humor Marketing

Stephen built Dry Humor Marketing as a one-man show helping businesses tell their story through video, photography, and web design, before hiring his first contractor last November.

Website: https://www.dryhumormarketing.com/

Drew Mehta — ThinkFraction

After 20+ years in corporate, Drew founded ThinkFraction to help owner-operators fix the leaks in their back-end workflows and put AI to work the right way.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhroovmehta/

Rami Akeela — Nera Systems

With 20+ years in hardware, software, and cryptography, Rami founded Nera Systems, a confidential AI company helping enterprises use AI on their most sensitive data.

Website: https://nera.systems/

David Beltran — Accord Intelligence

After 14 years at IBM in cybersecurity and identity, David founded Accord Intelligence, building the decision layer that helps organizations govern and trust their AI.

Website: https://www.accordintelligence.ai/

What if the biggest obstacle to your business's growth isn't your strategy, your marketing, or your team… but you? In the powerful finale to this week’s special solo series, Brian reveals the fifth and final question he uses to spark his biggest inflection points of growth: "Who and what do I need to become?" This isn't just about goal-setting; it's about identity-shifting. Brian unpacks why the skills, habits, and mindset that brought you to this point are rarely the ones that will get you to the next, and why true, sustainable growth in your business starts with your own personal evolution. Get ready for the most challenging—and most rewarding—question of the entire series.

✨ Why This Matters for You

Embracing this question is the key to breaking through your current ceiling:

• It forces you to move beyond tactics and focus on the fundamental driver of your success: you.
• It’s the antidote to stagnation. If your business feels stuck, this question reveals the personal changes needed to get it moving again.
• It transforms how you show up in sales, leadership, and even during setbacks, building resilience and confidence.
• It helps you intentionally design your future self instead of letting circumstances dictate who you become.

📝 Key Takeaways

• What Got You Here Won't Get You There. The central theme of entrepreneurship is change. To level up your business, you must be willing to evolve and become a new version of yourself.
• Your Business Is a Reflection of You. Your company’s growth is directly tied to your personal development. As you grow, so will your business.
• The Five Core Growth Questions. This episode culminates a series built on powerful inquiry. The full set includes: 
  • Where is my universe expanding? (Episode 1560) 
  • What can I do now that my future self will thank me for? (Episode 1561)
  • What if I could only work 4 hours per week? (Episode 1562)
  • What would I be doing if I was less patient? (Episode 1563)
  • Who and what do I need to become? (This episode)
• Action Over Consumption. These questions aren't just for listening. The real value comes from disconnecting, sitting with a pen and paper, and doing the deep work to find your own answers.

🚀 Put It Into Action

This week, schedule your own "Executive Time" to answer the final question:

1. Find a quiet space, like a coffee shop. Leave your laptop behind and put your phone on "Do Not Disturb."
2. Take out a notebook and write this question at the top of the page: "To achieve my biggest goals for next year, who and what do I need to become?"
3. Brainstorm freely. Think about the skills you need to learn, the habits you need to break, the mindset you need to adopt, and the leader you need to be.
4. Circle one thing you can start working on today to begin that transformation.

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode.
• Loved the solo series? Drop Brian a personal email at hello@imetbrian.com and let him know what you thought.
• Connect with Brian on Instagram @imetbrian.
• Share this episode with a founder who is ready for their next level of growth.

📣 Special Thanks and Shout Out to Our Team and Guests!

A huge shout-out to Laura from the podcast team for all her incredible work behind the scenes! She has been coordinating with past guests to create some very special collaborative episodes. Get excited and make sure you’re subscribed, because the first one drops tomorrow, and you won’t want to miss it

We’re often told that patience is a virtue in entrepreneurship. But what if it’s actually holding you back? What if the key to your next breakthrough lies in being… less patient? In this solo episode, Brian flips the script on conventional wisdom. After spending the week discussing long-term thinking, he introduces a powerful contrarian question that forces you to create urgency and take immediate action. He explores how a healthy dose of impatience can be the antidote to tinkering, perfectionism, and waiting for the “right time.” This isn't about being reckless; it's about manufacturing the urgency needed to turn your ambitious goals into today's reality.

✨ Why This Matters for You

Injecting a little impatience into your strategy can radically change your results:

• It stops you from endlessly tweaking websites and logos and forces you to focus on what matters: getting clients and generating revenue.
• It creates the self-imposed deadlines and urgency that are often missing when you’re your own boss.
• It’s the fastest way to cut through the noise and identify the most direct path to your goals.
• It helps you break out of the "someday" mindset and shifts you into an action-oriented state now.
• It reveals hidden opportunities for quick wins that build the momentum needed for the long game.

📝 Key Takeaways

• Urgency is Self-Imposed. As an entrepreneur, no one is going to force deadlines upon you. If you’re serious about growth, you must learn to create your own sense of urgency.
• Action Over Academia. Being less patient moves you from theoretical planning (designing funnels, perfecting copy) to practical action (making sales calls, shipping the product).
• Contrast Creates Clarity. True growth comes from balancing the long-term vision with short-term, aggressive action. You need both patience and impatience in your toolkit.
• Patience Can Be a Trap. Too much patience, with no sense of urgency, quickly becomes stagnation. It’s an excuse to avoid taking the bold actions required for success.
• Manipulate Your Time Horizon. Just like world-class athletes seem to slow down time, you can manipulate your time horizon. Asking "What if I was less patient?" shrinks the timeline and forces you to focus on the essential moves.

🚀 Put It Into Action

This week, pick one area of your business where you’ve been “patiently” waiting for progress. Then ask yourself Brian’s question:

• What would this look like if I was LESS patient?
• What’s the most direct, immediate action I could take to get a result this week instead of next month or next quarter?
• Stop tinkering and start doing. Whether it’s reaching out to 10 potential clients or launching the imperfect version of your offer, take one “impatient” step today.

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode
• Connect with Brian on Instagram @imetbrian
• Share this episode with a fellow entrepreneur who needs a dose of urgency to get unstuck

Ever feel like you’re drowning in a sea of tasks, busy all day but not making real progress? In this special Solo Sunday episode, Brian shares a powerful, game-changing question he's been asking himself for nearly 20 years: "What if I could only work 4 hours per week?"

Inspired by Tim Ferriss's classic book, The 4-Hour Workweek, Brian reveals how his biggest takeaway wasn't about passive income, but about the incredible power of constraints. He breaks down why limiting your time forces you to ruthlessly prioritize, spark creativity, and focus only on the activities that create the biggest impact. This isn’t about working less; it’s about thinking more strategically to achieve more.

✨ Why This Matters for You

Embracing constraints is a superpower for entrepreneurs who feel overwhelmed:

• It’s the ultimate antidote to "busywork," forcing you to distinguish between motion and progress.
• It sharpens your focus on high-leverage activities that truly move the needle.
• It unlocks creative problem-solving and innovation by forcing you to find better, faster ways to get things done.
• It eliminates the procrastination of "dilly-dallying" on things like logos and websites when you should be focused on revenue-generating actions.

📝 Key Takeaways

• Constraints Breed Creativity. Just like artists who limit their medium to create masterpieces, entrepreneurs can use time constraints to produce their most innovative work and solutions.
• Prioritize Ruthlessly. When you only have 4 hours, only the most essential, impactful tasks make the cut. It forces you to find your 80/20.
• Clarity Through Limitation. This question isn't about actually working 4 hours; it's a thought experiment to gain clarity on what truly matters for growth.
• Action Over Perfection. With limited time, you don't have the luxury of overthinking. You're forced to act on the most important things, even if imperfectly.
• Constraints Drive Growth. By stripping away the non-essential, you create space and focus for the actions that lead to real, tangible expansion in your business.

🚀 Put It Into Action

This week, take this question seriously. Don’t just listen to it—sit with it.

Block out 30 minutes, grab a pen and paper, and answer: If I could only work 4 hours on my business next week, how would I spend those 4 hours?

• What tasks absolutely must be done?
• What would you immediately stop doing?
• Be honest with yourself. The answer will reveal your true priorities and what you should be focusing on right now.

🔗 Stay Connected

• Subscribe to the show so you never miss an episode in this special solo series
• Connect with Brian on Instagram @imetbrian
• Share this episode with a fellow entrepreneur who needs to stop being busy and start being effective.