Podcast
Business Roundtable
Hosted by David W. Carr · EN
Welcome to the Business Roundtable Podcast, hosted by David Carr of Steward Your Business. This engaging and informative podcast series is dedicated to helping business owners, and entrepreneurs navigate the complexities of running a successful enterprise. Each episode features David Carr and a roster of industry experts, including regular contributors like Curtis Cochran, who bring their wealth of experience in mergers and acquisitions, organizational health, and team building.
Dive into discussions that cover a broad range of topics essential to business growth and sustainability. From strategic planning and preparation to understanding the cycles of business ownership, the podcast provides invaluable insights into evaluating, enhancing, and exiting business ownership. Listeners can expect practical advice on scaling businesses, managing finances, and creating a culture that aligns with company goals.
What sets this podcast apart is its focus on actionable strategies combined with real-world experiences. The conversations often delve into the importance of providing more value than the dollars earned and the necessity of adaptability in a rapidly changing business landscape.
Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, the Business Roundtable Podcast is vital for staying ahead in today's competitive market. Join David Carr and his guests as they explore the art of making a business profitable but also enjoyable and sustainable. Tune in for your dose of inspiration, guidance, and tools to make 2024 and beyond a resounding success for your business ventures.
Become a podcast supporter at just $2 a month at https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.
Dive into discussions that cover a broad range of topics essential to business growth and sustainability. From strategic planning and preparation to understanding the cycles of business ownership, the podcast provides invaluable insights into evaluating, enhancing, and exiting business ownership. Listeners can expect practical advice on scaling businesses, managing finances, and creating a culture that aligns with company goals.
What sets this podcast apart is its focus on actionable strategies combined with real-world experiences. The conversations often delve into the importance of providing more value than the dollars earned and the necessity of adaptability in a rapidly changing business landscape.
Whether you're a budding entrepreneur or a seasoned business owner, the Business Roundtable Podcast is vital for staying ahead in today's competitive market. Join David Carr and his guests as they explore the art of making a business profitable but also enjoyable and sustainable. Tune in for your dose of inspiration, guidance, and tools to make 2024 and beyond a resounding success for your business ventures.
Become a podcast supporter at just $2 a month at https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.
12episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
Solving a Capacity Problem, Not a Trend
1w ago00:33:21Tap to summarizeMost founders think they have a hiring problem. Pranav Dalal says it is usually a capacity problem, and that distinction changes everything about how you scale.Pranav is the founder and CEO of Office Beacon, a global outsourcing and remote staffing firm he has built over 25 years into a company of more than 5,500 employees across six countries. He started right after the dot com crash wiped out his first career, and the lessons from those early years still run the business today: never undervalue yourself, and never price yourself out of the market either.With David Carr, Pranav gets candid about the difference between being a visionary and being a bottleneck, and how knowing which one you are changes how you lead. You will hear how a single remote virtual assistant can hand a founder back hours a day, how Pranav approaches AI as an opportunity instead of a threat, and why he still runs quarterly town halls to keep culture from becoming transactional.If you are a founder wondering whether your next move should be more headcount or more structure, start here.Connect with Pranav: Office Beacon: https://www.officebeacon.com Pranav Dalal on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pranavdalal/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.Connect with Steward Your Business:Book a Leadership Clarity Call: https://calendar.stewardyourbusiness.com/ccCall: +1 909.404.9865Website: https://stewardyourbusiness.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwcarrWatch more episodes and subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@steward_your_business
Transcribe →The Second Profile Behind Every "Yes"
1w ago00:41:38Tap to summarizeMost leaders think a confident "yes" in a meeting means the deal, the buy-in, or the hard conversation is settled. Jake Stahl says that's exactly when people start quietly disappearing.Jake built NeuroStrategy after 15+ years of training sales teams, including leading a region to over $65 million in annual sales, and noticing that good pitches still failed to land. His discovery: everyone has a second, hidden profile that's actually making the decision, and it rarely matches the polite one sitting across the table.In this conversation, Jake and David get into:Why a live "yes" often turns into a cold, unanswered emailWhat NeuroStrategy sees that DISC and Myers-Briggs assessments missA real story about reading someone's body language in real time, mid-conversationThe opioid addiction and two-year spiral that cost Jake his marriage, his home, and his career, and what rebuilding taught him about being seen, heard, and respectedWhy do people resist the memory your idea brings up, not the idea itselfJake is the creator of NeuroStrategy, founder of Orchestraight, and author of Own the Room: How to Communicate to Be Seen, Heard, and Respected.Connect with Jake:Website: https://orchestraight.org Book: Own the Room, How to Communicate to Be Seen, Heard, and Respected — https://a.co/d/05qViUIZPodcast: Own the Room with Jake StahlLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakestahl/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.Connect with Steward Your Business:Book a Leadership Clarity Call: https://calendar.stewardyourbusiness.com/ccCall: +1 909.404.9865Website: https://stewardyourbusiness.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwcarrWatch more episodes and subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@steward_your_business
Transcribe →AI Won't Fix a Broken Culture, It Amplifies It
3w ago01:03:18Tap to summarizeEveryone is racing to adopt AI. Almost no one is asking the harder question: what kind of leader are you becoming as AI gets more powerful? Technology will not fix a broken culture or poor leadership. It amplifies whatever is already there.In this conversation, David Carr sits down with two guests who think about this differently. Christopher Skinner, founder of Stealth Dog Labs, works at the intersection of AI, cognition, and leadership. Chris Wessling, The Process Dude, helps leaders escape the day to day by building systems that scale.Christopher explains why AI is running on the wrong specifications, why it was never designed to listen, and the three legs every healthy relationship needs: safety, challenge, and investment. Chris brings the process lens, if there is pain in a business, there is a process problem, and shares how one discovery conversation uncovered a 700,000 dollar fix hiding in a company's estimates. Then Christopher shows how the words a company uses can reveal where it is really heading, sometimes years before the numbers do.The takeaway: before you lean on AI, get an honest baseline of your culture, your communication, and your decision making. Then the tool can actually help.ConnectChristopher Skinner on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christopherjskinner/Stealth Dog Labs: https://www.stealthdog.comConnect with Chris Wessling, The Process Dude, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theprocessdude/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.Connect with Steward Your Business:Book a Leadership Clarity Call: https://calendar.stewardyourbusiness.com/ccCall: +1 909.404.9865Website: https://stewardyourbusiness.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwcarrWatch more episodes and subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@steward_your_business
Transcribe →What Employees Really Want Isn't a Raise
Jul 300:38:38Tap to summarizeWhen a great employee leaves, most leaders assume it was about pay. Larry Salazar has the data to argue otherwise. The single largest contributor to the financial stress that drives turnover is housing, and almost no employer is doing anything about it.Larry is the President and co-founder of NestSTEPS, a platform that turns home ownership into an employee benefit. In this conversation with David Carr he makes the business case: replacing an employee costs 50 to 200 percent of their salary, housing eats roughly a third of household spending, and financially stressed employees lose about 9 percent of their work time to money worries.He shares the personal story behind NestSTEPS, leaving a company he loved because he could not figure out how to buy his first home nearby, and what a national study revealed: 78 percent of employees would switch employers for a home ownership benefit, and 89 percent would stay even after receiving help. Then he walks through exactly how the program works, from a financial wellness platform to live workshops to an employer funded contribution at closing, and how smaller companies can offer it through a PEO.You will walk away rethinking what really keeps your best people, and what benefit could set your business apart.Connect with Larry Salazar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larrysalazar/NestSTEPS: https://www.neststepsbenefits.comSign up for Larry's newsletter: https://bit.ly/3OAGcp8Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.Connect with Steward Your Business:Book a Leadership Clarity Call: https://calendar.stewardyourbusiness.com/ccCall: +1 909.404.9865Website: https://stewardyourbusiness.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwcarrWatch more episodes and subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@steward_your_business
Transcribe →Your Revenue Problem Isn't a Leads Problem
Jul 100:47:46Tap to summarizeWhen revenue slows, almost every company reaches for the same lever: more leads, more marketing, more pressure on sales. Ellen Smolko says that is usually the wrong move. Most revenue problems are structural, and more activity does not fix them. It just exposes the gaps.Ellen is the founder of Foresight Performance and the Marketing Medic. In this conversation with David Carr she unpacks revenue friction, the term she coined for anything that quietly slows a company's growth, and her rule: diagnose before you do.She shows how founders misdiagnose a slowdown, blaming the pipeline, then sales, then marketing, then buying a new website, while the real issue goes untouched. She shares a pricing pushback story where the client actually wanted to pay more, and an accounting firm that was losing clients until it lost the suits, got relatable, and then raised its prices. Then she lays out her four pillar revenue alignment framework: positioning and buyer fit, productization, pricing strategy, and scalability.You will walk away knowing how to tell whether your revenue problem is really a leads problem, and what to look at instead.Connect with Ellen Smolko on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellen-smolko/Foresight Performance: https://foresightperformance.comFree Revenue Friction Diagnostic: https://marketingmedic.pro/diagnosticfsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.Connect with Steward Your Business:Book a Leadership Clarity Call: https://calendar.stewardyourbusiness.com/ccCall: +1 909.404.9865Website: https://stewardyourbusiness.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwcarrWatch more episodes and subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@steward_your_business
Transcribe →AI Changed Search. Show Up or Disappear.
Jun 2900:44:35Tap to summarizeFor thirty years, getting found meant ranking on Google. That era is ending. People now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to recommend a business, and those tools only surface a few names. If yours is not one of them, your next customer never sees you.Solomon Thimothy is the founder of Clickx, co-founder and CEO of OneIMS, and a USA Today and Wall Street Journal best-selling author who has spent two decades helping companies grow. In this conversation with David Carr he makes a blunt case: the founder's voice is now the growth strategy, and you cannot outsource it. If Oprah had outsourced her marketing, would Oprah be Oprah?He shows why AI tools only cite the sources they trust, third party media and podcasts, and how to build a footprint that makes you the answer when someone asks the machine who to hire. Then it gets strategic: why 10X thinking is easier than 2X, why the product with your best margin is often the one you market least, and how AI agents can follow up with every lead on autopilot.You will walk away knowing whether your business shows up where buying decisions are now made, and what to do about it.Connect with Solomon Thimothy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/solomonthimothyClickx: https://www.clickx.ioOneIMS: https://www.oneims.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.Connect with Steward Your Business:Book a Leadership Clarity Call: https://calendar.stewardyourbusiness.com/ccCall: +1 909.404.9865Website: https://stewardyourbusiness.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwcarrWatch more episodes and subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@steward_your_business
Transcribe →He Built a $10M Company With Zero Venture Capital
Jun 2600:40:40Tap to summarizeEveryone celebrates the startup that raises a huge round and grows at all costs. Bryan Clayton built the opposite. He took GreenPal, the Uber for lawn care, past 10 million dollars a year with zero venture capital, and he argues that raising too much money before you have it figured out is more likely to kill you than save you.Bryan is the CEO and cofounder of GreenPal. Before it he built a landscaping company to 8 figures and 150 employees and sold it. In this conversation with David Carr he is candid about what bootstrapping really demands, from cutting his own burn to under 4,000 dollars a month to getting belly to belly with his first hundred customers.He tells the story of the insight that saved the company. Coming from lawn care, he was sure customers only wanted the cheapest price. Then he talked to them and learned the real pain was the disappearing lawn guy. People wanted reliability, and would pay more for it. From there he gets practical: why scaling is a video game where you must play your level, how to find the one limiting factor holding you back, and how to build an antifragile business that improves when you step away.You will walk away rethinking what real, durable growth looks like.Connect with Bryan Clayton on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryan-clayton-a96b33214/GreenPal: https://www.yourgreenpal.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.Connect with Steward Your Business:Book a Leadership Clarity Call: https://calendar.stewardyourbusiness.com/ccCall: +1 909.404.9865Website: https://stewardyourbusiness.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwcarrWatch more episodes and subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@steward_your_business
Transcribe →You Don't Need a Number, You Need a Life
Jun 2400:46:21Tap to summarizeHow much money do you actually need? Most people answer with a number. Dr. Nicholas Michels says that is backwards. Don't start with a dollar amount. Start with the life you want, then let the money serve it.Nick is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER professional, founder of Michels Family Financial, and author of Rich by Choice. In this conversation with David Carr he gets honest about why so many people are outwardly successful and inwardly stressed, and how to close that gap.He has lived both sides. He grew up comfortable until his family went, almost overnight, from a stay at home mom of four to a single mom working three jobs. Years later he had built real wealth as a fast rising advisor and still felt his happiness lagging behind his bank account. The turning point was a hard conversation with his wife and the humility to seek mentors. From there he shares the comparison game and the rocking chair test, why happiness comes from the steps and not the destination, how to 10X your business through your unique ability, and a legacy lens that reframes what money is really for.You will walk away ready to design the life first and let the number follow.Connect with Dr. Nicholas Michels on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-e-michelsMichels Family Financial: https://michelsfamilyfinancial.comRich by Choice (free gift): https://richbychoicebook.comBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.Connect with Steward Your Business:Book a Leadership Clarity Call: https://calendar.stewardyourbusiness.com/ccCall: +1 909.404.9865Website: https://stewardyourbusiness.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwcarrWatch more episodes and subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@steward_your_business
Transcribe →Your Business Is 3 Decisions From Bankruptcy
Jun 2200:48:47Tap to summarizeYour business is growing. That does not mean it is stable. For a lot of founders, growth quietly hides the problems that will break the company later, and you do not see it until it snaps.Tracy Holland is a founder, investor, and operator who took HatchBeauty Brands from zero to 100 million dollars, then built a live selling business to 27 million in two years and sold it. She now buys distressed companies and rebuilds them, and she has worked with more than three thousand entrepreneurs.In this conversation with David Carr she names founderitis and its symptoms, lays out the three decisions that put a business near bankruptcy, and explains why revenue can climb while the company gets weaker. Then it gets practical: why most founders built a job instead of a business, how to move from operator to owner, and the one skill worth more than any technical talent, going deep into your customer's pain until you can describe it better than they can.You will walk away knowing what to look at first, and why if it is a money issue, it is not really an issue.Connect with Tracy Holland on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracyhollandTracy on Instagram: search Tracy M. HollandBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.Connect with Steward Your Business:Book a Leadership Clarity Call: https://calendar.stewardyourbusiness.com/ccCall: +1 909.404.9865Website: https://stewardyourbusiness.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwcarrWatch more episodes and subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@steward_your_business
Transcribe →Why Most Businesses Get AI Wrong
Jun 1900:38:23Tap to summarizeMost owners buy the AI tool, skip the strategy, and wonder why nothing improves. Jason Alexander, CEO of Chief AI, explains why AI is a people and process problem, not a tool problem.Hand someone a guitar, and you still hear no music until you teach them to play. Jason has lived the operator side of this. Over 20 years, he built and scaled a staffing and consulting business to roughly 100 million dollars before selling, and now he helps founders turn AI into practical, measurable results.In this conversation with David Carr, he breaks down the three-year success roadmap he uses to determine where AI actually belongs, why "assess, one quick win, then scale" beats chasing silver bullets, and how to make AI part of your culture rather than hiding it from clients. He also gives a straight answer on the fear everyone carries: AI is a force multiplier, not a layoff plan. Arm 100 people to produce 400, rather than cutting headcount to save payroll.If you are a founder or leader trying to make AI pay off without losing what makes your business human, start here.Connect with Jason:ChiefAI: https://chiefai.co Jason Alexander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonalexander Free AI Readiness Score: https://chiefai.co/ai-readiness-assessment/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/business-roundtable--6049255/support.Connect with Steward Your Business:Book a Leadership Clarity Call: https://calendar.stewardyourbusiness.com/ccCall: +1 909.404.9865Website: https://stewardyourbusiness.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwcarrWatch more episodes and subscribe on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@steward_your_business
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