Episodes

  • How Gift Cards can Drive Business Success with Larry Rubin

    How Gift Cards can Drive Business Success with Larry Rubin
    Nov 20 2024
    In order to grow our business, whether small or large, there are many initiatives to consider. It could be advertising. But one thing that can help you gain leverage, get exposure, and develop new clients is gift cards. How do we do it? In this episode, I talk with Larry Rubin, Founder of Swipe It. He shares his journey, including how he overcame significant debt and the importance of supporting small local businesses. We talked about how small business owners can utilize gift cards to generate revenue and build a customer base. Larry emphasizes the versatility of gift cards, which can be used as promotions, employee rewards, and for online sales. Grow your business with gift cards. Tune in now! --- Listen to the podcast here: How Gift Cards can Drive Business Success with Larry Rubin Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about gift cards and a little bit about the restaurant industry, specifically the manner in which restaurant industry uses these gift cards and what it says about what we might need to do in general to help level the playing field between smaller and larger businesses or give smaller businesses, give the person that’s just starting up their own business, whether it be a restaurant or any other kind of business, a chance to survive, a chance to really make it in this particular current state of affairs in the United States, or in any other country, for that matter, given that a lot of you out there listening are trying to build something, build something that you’re passionate about and really putting your all into it, but, sometimes, when you see these bigger corporations out there, it does feel like that the cards could be stacked against you. My guest today, Larry Rubin, is the gift card guru, the founder of SwipeIt, and he’s here to tell us a little bit about his initiative to help some of these smaller, locally owned restaurants take advantage of this tool that is much more readily and easily available to a lot of the bigger restaurant chains. --- Larry, welcome the program. Thank you for having me and excited to talk to you about hopefully leveling the playing field for these smaller guys. Yeah, so 100 percent because I remember when we first connected, it didn’t feel to me necessarily obvious that gift cards was one of the ways that the bigger, larger chains kind of stomp on their smaller competitors, but you’ve observed something very different when it comes to leveraging this tool. First thing I’m kind of curious about is what makes gift cards such a powerful tool for any restaurant to use in kind of generating sales and customer base? That’s part of our battle is going in and really educating the small business owner who, right now, they think of a gift card as a product that someone walks into my business, they purchase it, and they walk out. And that’s great for people who maybe are living or working within 15 or 20 minutes of your business. Gift cards can be utilized in many, many ways. It’s a huge revenue stream for restaurants and other merchants. It’s a great gift to give someone. I don’t know what clothes they wear, I don’t know what their activities are but I certainly know that this guy loves his chicken parm from this restaurant so I’m going to buy this gift card to his favorite restaurant. I know that you can always use it. And what we’re doing is helping the restaurants look at kind of outside the box. Great, we know that someone can walk in and purchase a gift card but do you have a website? Are you offering them online? Are you capturing last-minute gift giving by offering e-cards? All different ways to bring in revenue. And then we look at it in a different light as well and say, hey, it’s great for people to come in and pay you for gift cards but can we use these gift cards to bring in customers, run promotions,
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    38 mins
  • The Importance of Succession Planning with Lowell Mora

    The Importance of Succession Planning with Lowell Mora
    Nov 12 2024
    A lot of us want to have a successful and meaningful business. After many years in our business, we all want to ensure that the business we have worked hard to establish will carry on well if we retire. Succession planning is the key to ensuring a seamless transition and long-term success. But how? In this episode, I sit down with Lowell Mora, President of Impact CFO, who specializes in family- and privately-owned businesses. Lowell talks about the importance of planning for business transitions, especially as founders or business owners approach retirement, including finding suitable successors and maintaining business continuity. Tune in to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Align Your Life and Thrive with Diamond Drip Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about succession planning. We’ve talked quite a bit about the process of starting up a business on this particular podcast, about what challenge you face on the come up, but then, what happens when you’re getting ready to retire and you want to make sure that the business is going to be in good hands and you want to make sure that your own wealth is going to be in good hands. To discuss this topic, I would like to introduce you to my guest today, Lowell Mora, fractional CFO, who specializes in working with a lot of these family-owned businesses around such issues. --- Lowell, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you having me here today. Tell me a little bit about Impact CFO. Tell me a little about your story, what you do with your clients. At Impact CFO, I help primarily as a fractional CFO, which fractional means exactly as it sounds, I spend a portion of my time helping a business that may not be able to afford – it typically can’t afford a full time CFO. So my practice focuses primarily in on the family-owned business in the small to midmarket that is looking towards a transition, either to another family member or to an external exit to maximize the wealth of the family and the value of the business. Now, when you say businesses that can’t quite afford, say, a full-time CFO, what’s a general size? What number of employees is that typical – So the typical, most of us finance guys talk in dollars, but in employees, it’s typically employee levels of 25 to 100, 150. Again, it depends on the complexity of the business as well. So, in dollars, we typically talk somewhere around $5 million in sales, up to $50 million. Now, I’ve worked with smaller and I’ve worked with bigger but that’s the sweet spot. And so you’ve encountered a lot of these family-owned businesses that have gotten to this level. You said like $5, $25 million annually. I assume it means, right? So, what do you notice in some of these family-owned businesses that get to that level? Do you notice any kind of common thread in the type of people that you work with and the type of founders who are in the situation about who they are, what they’ve done to get to where they’re at? Yeah. Typically, in my practice, a lot of people out there is values based. So I look to work with people that share the same values as me, which are pretty basic, which is a high level of integrity, strong, hard work ethic.Share on X A lot of what I do is in the manufacturing, industrials, industrial products, industrial equipment. I also work with services, business services, and IT providers and things like that but, typically, it’s a business of an entrepreneur and they’re overwhelmingly, today in our world, they’re overwhelmingly male, and they’ve gotten to a point where they have a successful business and can support them but they don’t necessarily have a natural heir or successor. In a lot of cases, they don’t know what to do with that. And what typically happens, and it’s common,
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Carving Your Own Path in Nursing with Morgan Taylor

    Carving Your Own Path in Nursing with Morgan Taylor
    Oct 22 2024
    Starting a nursing career is both exciting and challenging, especially in the fast-paced world of healthcare. New nurses often struggle as they transition from school to real-world practice, navigating complex systems and high demands. How can we improve nursing education to better support them? In this episode, I speak with Morgan Taylor, Chief Nursing Officer at Archer Review. Morgan shares insights into the challenges new nurses face, the structural issues within nursing education, opportunities for innovation in healthcare, and ways to better align incentives in the field. Don’t miss out, listen now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Carving Your Own Path in Nursing with Morgan Taylor Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about the many different ways in which we can go about carving your own path because I think sometimes people think about any pursuit and they think about the most common manifestation of it and they think the most common manifestation of carving their own path as being something along the lines of either starting your own business or doing something really, really wild, like going and living off the grid somewhere in, I don’t know, Uganda, for the lack of a better place to think of, but there are plenty of different ways in which you can kind of discover where your path is going and discover how you can get to a place where you once again feel excited about the things that you once felt excited about. --- Today, my guest is Morgan Taylor and she is the chief nursing officer at Archer Review and chief nursing officer, I feel like a different C-blank-O title emerges every other week, so, yeah, Morgan, tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me on today. I’m excited to talk. Yeah, chief nursing officer, to me, sounds totally normal, because I grew up as a nurse at big hospitals that always had a chief nursing officer. But, of course, if you don’t work somewhere that has nurses, that’s going to sound a little funky to you, right? Yeah. And really how I got to where I am is kind of funky. It was not a straightforward path at all, not something I had planned out or set my sights on a decade ago. I started out as a bedside nurse at Duke University in the Raleigh-Durham area here in North Carolina. I started working in a – we called it the children’s resource unit. I went to all different pediatric areas of the hospital, spent a lot of time in the ICU, in the emergency department, and I loved it. I learned so much. It was a wonderful experience. And then COVID happened and things got a little dicey there. It was a big challenge, one that I’m proud to have played a part in, but what was most impactful for me and kind of what started me on this path where I ended up today now was I started seeing that the new nurses coming in to join us in this profession were very underprepared, and not to any fault of their own. They just didn’t have the experience that they needed to get prior to coming and working in a level one trauma center taking care of very, very ill patients. So that got my wheels turning. I started to think maybe there’s something I can do in kind of the education bubble, that’s something people talk about. I started kind of looking for ways to dip my toes in the water, so to speak, see what’s out there, and that was when I connected with the CEO, Karthik Koduru, of Archer Review. He was working on trying to put together a platform to really enable nursing education that was accessible and affordable and specifically targeted nurses getting ready to take their board exams. We call those exams the NCLEX and it’s that last test you have to take before you’re fully licensed, you’re out there on your own actually caring for patients. And we had really poor pass rates. They were anywhere from about 80 to 87 percent,
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    51 mins
  • Transforming Healthcare with Tech and Care with Whitney Isola

    Transforming Healthcare with Tech and Care with Whitney Isola
    Oct 15 2024
    Technology is revolutionizing healthcare, providing innovative ways to enhance patient care and streamline services. Digital tools like telemedicine and health platforms enable better access to information and personalized care. How can we use these advancements to build a more patient-focused healthcare system? In this episode, I have Whitney Isola, a registered dietitian and Co-Founder of Aqua Power. Whitney shares her journey from co-founding a healthcare startup to creating the review platform. She discusses the challenges of working in the healthcare industry and how to leverage technology and patient empowerment to improve care. Don’t miss this insightful conversation—tune in now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Transforming Healthcare with Tech and Care with Whitney Isola Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of my big concerns, and I think a big concern of a lot of people, is what we’re using our technology for. We’ve seen a recent advancement in technology and we’re seeing ongoing discussions about things like AI, machine learning, all these other things, and the question is what are we doing with it and I think we’ve seen a lot of cases where some of our technological advancements were used for purposes that did not necessarily have the best outcome on human health, human mental health, etc. I have in my head a list of the types of things that really are a good use of this technology because technology can do a lot of powerful things and my guest today, Whitney Isola, has some experience using our technology for some of these purposes that seem like they actually have the potential to improve the human experience as opposed to just bombard you with advertisements, like a lot of them try to do. So, Whitney is a registered dietitian as well as the cofounder of OncoPower, now the chief of staff at ArcherReview. --- Whitney. welcome to the program. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I’m excited. I’m excited too because this is a great thing to talk about. Now, let’s first start with your story because you’ve done a lot of different things, like where did it all begin? Have you always wanted to find innovative solutions for these human problems? Is this something that you’ve always been kind of interested in doing? Yes, there’s some sort of natural curiosities and problem solver that live within me. I will say I don’t think I can fully take credit for ever being like the visionary or the idea person, I’m definitely a little bit more of practical thinker and like kind of roadmap best course to get us there but I don’t always have that end state vision but I’m very good at listening to the on-the-ground feedback early and often so I would say that type of critical thinking and product planning is a little bit more of my wheelhouse and expertise. But, yeah, I mean, that said, I think I’ve always had this little bit of hunger for building something that didn’t exist before. I went into college and higher education kind of wanting a very traditional career in healthcare and realized about three-quarters in taking some business classes that I could think more broadly, almost a little too late or it felt too late education wise to make a change. I kind of had that more traditional early career experience in terms of working in a community hospital setting, multidisciplinary medical practice setting, and then health major, New York City health system setting, I kind of always kept the door open to taking on projects or ideas or working with people in terms of executing something new or creating something out of nothing. My first job outside of the hospital, so I guess my second job ever, was with a multidisciplinary medical practice where they didn’t have a dietitian and I pitched them that, “Hey, you have 22 providers but you don’t have one dietician, let’s add those services for your patient population,
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    50 mins
  • The Inner and Outer Game of Leadership with Chris Thyberg

    The Inner and Outer Game of Leadership with Chris Thyberg
    Oct 8 2024
    Leadership is more than just holding a title; it's about guiding, inspiring, and managing people effectively. Often, new leaders find themselves promoted into roles without the right tools to succeed. How can we better prepare ourselves to excel in leadership, both internally and externally? In this episode, I have Chris Thyberg, Founder of The Serving Way. Chris and I discuss the challenges of leadership, particularly when someone is promoted to a leadership role without the necessary training to manage and inspire effectively. We also explore the difference between the 'inner game' and 'outer game' of leadership. Elevate your leadership skills—listen now! --- Listen to the podcast here: The Inner and Outer Game of Leadership with Chris Thyberg Welcome to Action’s antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. How many of you out there have ever had a bad boss? And I say that because there’s kind of two different kinds of bad bosses in my view. There’s the person who’s just not able to tame their ego, that can be a little bit psychopathic, sociopathic, but then there’s a broader category of kind of more low-key bad bosses that kind of arise because, well, oftentimes, we promote people who are good at doing the day-to-day job, who are good at delivering the results but not necessarily the ones that are best suited or even training them on how to be a leader of people, which is an important caveat, and so when we look at that category of bad bosses, one thing I want to impress upon you is that it’s oftentimes not those people’s fault, they were never given the training to learn how best to inspire people, how best to manage people, how best to cultivate a positive and joyous work environment for the people working for them, all they know is how to do the day-to-day job and they did it well. To talk about this topic a little bit, I’d like to introduce you to my guest, Chris Thyberg, who is the founder of The Serving Way and a leadership coach. --- Chris, welcome to the program. Stephen, thank you so much for having me and what a great setup. I need you to write copy for my website, please. That was just on point. Well, my production team does produce a transcript of every episode so when this episode does drop in a few weeks, it’ll come in on the page on my website. It’s a delight to be with you. Let’s go. All right, well, that’s wonderful. So, Chris, it sounds like you’re observing the same phenomenon. We talked a little bit about how there are some people who are just psychopathic or haven’t tamed their ego but this broader category of people where they just weren’t set up to be good bosses, good managers, good leaders, because the training you get when you get promoted doesn’t really emphasize that. That’s exactly right, and as I joked with you on the pre-show, as long as that keeps happening out in the marketplace, I have employment for life. Every single client that I am working with is in that in-between space. I call it the growing edge, where more of what got them there is not going to take them where they need to go at this level of leadership. So, for example, the star individual performer with super high competencies, expertise, skills, experience, knowledge, what I call the outer game of leadership, great, great. And then they get that promotion, almost like the bridge too far, and they are on the other side of this thing and they say, “Oh my gosh, I just got a 360 performance review and everything I built my identity around that I got promoted for is now what my team tells me is killing us. What do I do?” And they come to me in that place of how on earth did I get set up for this failure and I said, “No worries. This is the human condition. You are fine.” You are at a growing edge, which means, and I truly believe this and every coach worth his or her salt must come from this point of view, this point of view is that, Stephen,
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Payment Processing Solutions for Businesses with Jeff Maine

    Payment Processing Solutions for Businesses with Jeff Maine
    Oct 1 2024
    There are many details that demand mental energy. You’re likely focused on starting something new and how to bring your vision to life, but smaller tasks—like choosing the right payment processor for your business—can become overwhelming. With so many options, how can we stay focused while navigating these essential but exhausting decisions? In this episode, I have Jeff Maine, founder and CEO of Pay Proudly, a payment processing company. Jeff discusses the payment processing industry and how his company aims to provide a better experience for businesses. He emphasizes building relationships with customers based on transparency and trust, offering personalized solutions tailored to each client's needs rather than competing solely on price. --- Listen to the podcast here: Payment Processing Solutions for Businesses with Jeff Maine Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Now, when it comes to a lot of the endeavors that we’re taking on, particularly starting businesses, there’s a lot to figure out and there’s a lot of things that we need to put mental energy into that we might not necessarily want to be thinking about because, likely, you’re thinking about what your passion is, you’re thinking about what you want to start, and thinking a bit about how you want to do it, but some of these nitty-gritty details, such as selecting a payment processor solution when there are so many out there, can be just a huge use of mental energy that you weren’t necessarily hoping to sign up for and I know how some of this decision fatigue around this and many other issues can cause people to lose their steam. So, today, I would like to introduce you to my guest, Jeff Maine, and he is the founder and CEO of a company that helps you figure out payment processing called Pay Proudly. --- Jeff, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me today, Stephen. Looking forward to talking about this fun subject of payment processing. Yeah, it’s just one of the many things that businesses need to think about. And so, to orient our audience here, what do payment processors do and why does nearly every business need a payment processor? The majority of businesses take the majority of their payments today through electronic payments so a lot of people go the Square routes. They go to big box shops, they go to their bank, sign up for credit card processing, but there’s a lot of small, independent sales organizations out there that have relationships with the big banks that this is what we focus on. This is our business. And so, obviously, when we were founding Pay Proudly, we – I’ve been in this business for 25 years and we’ve seen a lot of different things and I apologize to a lot of people for our industry. When I walk indoors, I apologize for a lot of what’s happened in our industry, and we can dive into some of that today, but there’s just a bad stigma around our industry. I tell people sometimes I feel like it’s that used car sales approach and there’s just a lot that goes on. And so one of the big differences that we’ve done in Pay Proudly is we want to know our customer and we want our customer to know us and we know we’re never going to grow as big as the big guys but we’re taking that extra step and the first part of our mission is all about clarity to our merchants. We really want them to understand payment processing and understand why they need to process or how they need to process and what kind of system they need to process on and really dive into it so that they feel more comfortable with making a decision that affects a big part of their business. So how we get paid is often overlooked but it shouldn’t be. So that’s what we’re doing. So what do most people do when they look for a payment processor? Say, the average person just starts a website where, I don’t know, just say you’re selling a basic service and needs to collect $100...
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    45 mins
  • Lead Generation for Remodeling Contractors with Brooks Burnette

    Lead Generation for Remodeling Contractors with Brooks Burnette
    Sep 24 2024
    Remodeling is different from other home service businesses. It’s a special industry that needs its own strategies and approach for creating a marketing plan. While other service businesses need a lot of leads, remodelers don’t. How can remodelers create an effective marketing plan without needing so many leads? In this episode, I have Brooks Burnette, Founder of Remodel Reach Marketing. His company specializes in serving residential remodeling contractors. Brooks shares his strategies for working with contractors, generating and converting leads, and building effective websites. He also emphasizes the importance of listening to and understanding clients' needs. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Lead Generation for Remodeling Contractors with Brooks Burnette Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about contracting, specifically remodeling contracting, but contracting in general is a kind of topic that’s gotten a little bit more attention lately. I know we just lived through a few decades where a lot of that type of work was looked down upon by some segments of the population, and now, amongst the new generation that’s seeing kind of a greater amount of security in that, there’s a renewed interest, as well as the clear impact that you see with your work right away as opposed to some of the jobs that a lot of people feel stuck in. But, of course, there’s a lot of considerations when contracting or starting any business that you need to get your business off the ground. An important one and a topic that I’ve covered before is also getting noticed, getting your business out there, getting it marketed. To talk about his business around remodeling contractors, how they get their digital marketing done, is the founder of Remodel Reach Marketing, Brooks Burnette. --- Brooks, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen, thanks for having me. I appreciate it, man. Oh, well, thank you so much. And I like to start a lot of my episodes by getting people oriented. So we know you’re talking about Remodel Reach Marketing so you’re obviously not the contractor yourself, you’re the one handling the marketing for the contractor. Right, exactly. So we’re a full-service digital marketing agency for remodeling contractors. Typically, that’s just residential. There’s not very many remodeling contractors who are solely commercial versus residential, most of them are residential and those are the guys that we like to talk we like to target. The commercial, they typically have their own client base and they go to the same people over and over, like in one industry, like restaurants or like hotels and things like that so they typically don’t need a lot of help. But the residential guys, they’re the ones that we really go after. Now, when you talk about the residential versus the commercial, can we think of this as kind of similar to the difference between a B2B and a B2C play, where the commercial contractors or commercial remodelers are doing B2B and B2B is going to have a very different method of marketing than B2C, the residential, where you’re talking about the individual person who’s looking to do a remodel in their home? Yes, yes, absolutely. So, one thing that we find is B2C, there’s a few different strategies that really work well for them with lead generation and SEO and all those things that you kind of mentioned a little bit earlier, and the B2B, it’s pretty much all about relationships and just building relationships with those other industries and getting their name recognized within those industries, going to shows for those industries, like restaurants, again, for example, and just really focusing in on those individuals rather than trying to build their brand like a residential contractor would have to do in their local area. Now, that makes sense.
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    42 mins
  • Bringing the Bible to Life Through Media with Craig Dehut

    Bringing the Bible to Life Through Media with Craig Dehut
    Sep 17 2024
    In today's digital age, the internet offers powerful platforms for sharing ideas and building connections. Whether through podcasts, social media , or online communities, these tools allow us to reach hearts and minds across the world. How can we use these platforms to make spiritual connections and conversations? In this episode, I have Craig Dehut, CEO and Co-Founder of Appian Media. He shares how he brings the Bible to the world, gathers support, and distinguishes between valuable input and distractions. He discusses his journey into biblical content creation and how the content is used to bring people together. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Bringing the Bible to Life Through Media with Craig Dehut Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about connecting people with the content in the Bible. Now, as you know, in this show, I’m not telling you what to believe in or telling you what to think or anything like that, but the Bible has a lot of content that people need to resonate with and I think almost everyone should have some sort of a grounding in something bigger than themselves. My guest today, Craig Dehut, he is the COO and co-founder of Appian Media and a documentary filmmaker. --- Craig, welcome to the program. Hey, thanks for having me. Well, let’s start a little bit with your story. Where did you originate? Were you always interested in creating content and creating stories and also documentary filmmaking? Yeah. So, it took a variety of forms, but growing up, I really was always interested in stories. For a while, it took the form of just writing stories. I wanted to be a cartoonist there for a while, so I was interested in drawing and illustrations. But, eventually, about 13, 14 years old, someone let our family borrow a camcorder and so myself and my siblings went out into the backyard and would create all kinds of ridiculous things and I just kind of fell in love with the medium and decided to go to film school, graduated from there back in 2007, and, originally, that was supposed to be kind of major motion pictures, I wanted to write and direct feature films, but my career kind of took the form of working at television news and other forms where I got to document real stories, actually shoot interviews and follow news stories of real things that are happening, and, eventually, kind of fell in love with that format, that form of storytelling, and was able to combine that with my love for scripture, my love for the Bible, and put those two things together. So, at some point, you decided to go out on your own, or not on your own but be the co-founder of your own company. What prompted that particular move? Sure. So back in 2015, I was working at a video production company at the time, but also had recently met my, who’s now my co-founder, Stuart Peck, another Christian creative who had moved to the Indianapolis area, and he and I were just shooting the breeze, meeting over coffee and talking shop, talking about the industry, and talking about the things that we wish were out there, especially when it came to like Bible videos. We were finding things that were hard to watch. Some of them were just kind of hard to watch. They were not keeping the attention of the kids that we had in our Bible classes. And it was actually Stuart who kind of pitched the idea originally, was like, “Hey, what would it take for us to take a group of us over there, over to the lands of the Bible, and produce the content for ourselves, something that’s biblically accurate but also professionally produced?” ’It’s got to be packaged well so that people will actually want to watch it and we wanted to make it freely available.Share on X And so we did that by creating a not-for-profit called Appian Media. And we were able to, through donations,
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    45 mins