Action's Antidotes

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,

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,

Are you working full-time but dreaming of starting something new, like a business or passion project? Balancing a job with a new venture can be tough, and finding the right alignment to make it all work can feel overwhelming. How do you balance your time and energy to turn your ideas into a success? In this episode, we’re joined by Diamond Drip—a coach, speaker, and Human Design enthusiast who’s passionate about helping women break free from the “who do I think I am?” mindset. Diamond Drip empowers women to move past self-doubt and confidently step into their potential, making their big dreams a reality. Together, we dive into the struggles of balancing a new project alongside a full-time job. Diamond Drip shares why this balance can be so exhausting and offers practical strategies for managing dual roles. From time management to energy-boosting tips, this episode is packed with advice you can start using today. Tune in now to align your life, find your balance, and thrive in everything you do! --- 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. A lot of us are in a situation where we're trying to create something new in our lives, whether it be starting a business, starting any kind of endeavor, just do something different, and sometimes we end up struggling a little bit and one of the struggles that we oftentimes end up with is that our lives are not really in alignment. That's some of the challenges that we have where situations that I see a lot of people and, say, you have a full time job and you're also trying to start a business that can be really exhausting, it can be really hard to find time, in the same way I oftentimes find people starting businesses while not having a full-time job, not having a steady source of income, and having to struggle in a whole different way. And in some of those pursuits is where my guest today, Diamond Drip, a coach, speaker, and human design enthusiast who helps her clients overcome some of these challenges and find a life that's in alignment for them because not every person is the same and one of the things we're trying to move past is what I often refer to as the one-size-fits-all solution for life, the one-size-fits-all prescription for life. --- Diamond Drip, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen. It's so great to be here with you and our listeners today. Yeah, thank you for coming on and sharing some of these ideas with listeners because I think when it comes to starting up anything, and it doesn't have to be a business, it could even be just trying to do better at your current job, when it comes to trying up anything, people often talk about the practical stuff, like you need to do more of this, you need to learn this skill, you need to learn this industry. People might talk less frequently about some of the stuff that you specialize in, which is how to bring your life, your habits, and everything else into alignment with who you are, which starts with an understanding of who you are. So, tell us a little bit about what you do with your clients. Absolutely. I love that you brought in that piece too about people wanting to build up their skills, people wanting to learn these other things, and one of the things that I work with my clients on is making sure that the things that they're adding to that list of to-dos, those skills to add, those classes to take are actually things that light them up, not just because someone said they should do it. And so I have a really simple framework when it comes to how I support my clients. It's called the trust framework. And so the very first thing that we do is we tune in to their authentic self. So, every single one of us has a unique, energetic blueprint, you and I were talking about this a little bit the last time we met, and it is in that blueprint that we can recognize our in...

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,

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,

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,

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...

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.

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,

Perseverance and staying true to core values are essential elements for any business to become successful. But along the way, difficult obstacles and failures are unavoidable. How can we turn these challenges into stepping stones for growth and improvement? In this episode, I have Tim Shaffer, Co-Founder and CEO of SearchTires. We discuss the importance of supporting local brick-and-mortar businesses and the model he created to help consumers find the best local prices on car tires. Tim shares how he learned from early mistakes to build a simple, user-friendly platform that solves a real consumer need. Tune in, and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Overcoming Failure to Find Success with Tim Shaffer Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidotes in the mindset that keeps you settling for less. One of the things I’ve alluded to in some of my past episodes is this idea of four barriers to success and when I talk about these four barriers, there’s other versions of it, I generally think of awareness, action, persistence, and then, of course, dealing with some kind of a setback or dealing with some kind of a failure often, people oftentimes have to readjust. My guest today is Tim Shaffer, he’s the founder and CEO of SearchTires and has a really interesting story about kind of implementing all of that to go after a specific niche, a specific corner of our business world that he feels really passionate about. --- Tim, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Stephen. Look forward to it. Definitely. Now, let’s start out with SearchTires. So, first, obviously, when I talk about this awareness action and then persistence or sacrifice and then failure, the first thing is awareness and action so what made you decide that you wanted to start a business on your own and then what made you decide that searching for tire prices was going to be the objective of your business? I come from a tire background. I worked in corporate America for 15 years in that background. Late 2009, I was in Colorado and I’ll never forget it, I was in a hot tub and I was skiing and another guy behind me was talking about Kayak because Kayak just came out and how he found flights on Kayak or something or something, and I’m thinking I’m in the tire business, why don’t we have something where people can look online, agnostically, at all the prices and then pick the place they want to go to? And so that’s how I came up with, so that was the awareness that we really need a tool like this because it helps people save money and more and more as the prices go up. The average price of tires is $700 a set and we save people an average of $180 a set of tires. So, I wanted to implement that even back then, but then the next step you’re talking to is the big step. I have the idea, how do I go do it? Because you’re afraid. It’s like, holy moly, this is a great idea, how do I overcome the fear of coming out of corporate America, which is a lot of work, but the stability is there, compared to on your own, so I inevitably built this kind of out in the background while I was working, and, in 2012, I went out on my own and started to – started on this project, I should say. Yeah. So, one of the interesting things that people often talk about is niching in businesses and one of the areas where I see this manifest a lot is, of course, when people talk about their target audience and a target audience like, okay, I’m here to serve, you can use traditional demographics or, increasingly, people use psychographics, but your niching seems to be less about who you’re selling to in the sense of I’m looking for people that have this psychographic experience, the person that, I don’t know, goes golfing and watches certain programs on TV and more the micro niche within the human experience in that you didn’t go and try to tackle, say, all auto parts or all transportation or something huge. You stuck with tires.

When we think of CEOs of companies, our initial assumption is that they are very busy people with no time available for socializing. Sometimes, we even wonder how they manage to spend time with their families, friends, and hobbies. But what if I told you that if you want to be a CEO, there is a way to avoid that lifestyle and still have a life outside of this endeavor? In this episode, I have Dr. Jim Schleckser, founder of the CEO Project. We discuss how to achieve work-life balance and effective leadership. He emphasizes the Theory of Constraints, time delegation, schedule control, and workplace autonomy. Tune in and optimize your time now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Achieve More by Doing Less with Dr. Jim Schleckser Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Perhaps you’re out there thinking, “Okay, I want something more, maybe I wanna try to move up some levels at my organization or I wanna start something on my own and be the CEO of my own company,” but then you’re looking at other people who are high level CEOs or even other C-level and director-level executives and thinking, “I don’t wanna be this busy. I don’t want this lifestyle. I don’t want the lifestyle where I don’t have any time for my family, I don’t have any time for my hobbies, I don’t have any time to just relax and chill and enjoy myself,” and that can be a real daunting possibility here because you’re thinking yourself, “Okay, I still want to be in charge of my own destiny a little bit or I still want to be something more than just a cog in a machine so how do I get there without giving up my entire life and not having a life outside of this particular endeavor?” And that’s where my guest today, Jim Schleckser, who is the founder of The CEO Project, also a podcast host as well as a bestselling author who wrote the book Great CEOs Are Lazy comes into play here. --- Jim, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me, Stephen. I appreciate it. Well, thanks for hopping on because I’m sure this is on a lot of people’s minds, right? You know, an important person, whether it be rising to the top of the company you’re already a part of or starting your own company and once you get somewhere, you’re going to have a lot on your plate. What inspired you to start The CEO Project? A number of years ago, I was doing acquisitions. I worked for a corporate entity and one of our strategies for growth was to buy companies. And I remember these two founders that I was about to buy their company for, I think it was $6 million, I’m like, man, oh man, these guys are not as smart as me, they don’t work as hard, they’ve got four weeks of vacation every summer. I’m like, my gosh, I’m so much smarter than them, I go, wait a minute, I’m about to give them 6 million bucks and they get four weeks of vacation every year. I go, what’s wrong with this picture? And at that moment, I said, look, really, for the same level of talent, you get a very different, meaning better outcome in terms of lifestyle control, economic outcome, and so forth, by running your own business. And at that point, I said, okay, that is the path I’m on. That was a decade at least before I jumped out and started my own business. So you observed these guys start their own business and have way more autonomy over their lives and decided you want that. What did you experience when you first made that observation? Because you said there was some time of a gap between the two. Was there that similar anxiety of like, okay, how am I going to get there, that type of thing? I had a plan, maybe just there was another element that drove it. I was a member of CEO peer groups for a long time as I ran various companies so this is a mastermind group that helps you think through your problems. So I was a member of one and I saw that people that were founder, entrepreneurs and same profile, better time control,

Skills-based hiring and workforce diversity are important when it comes to performing workplaces. When we focus on hiring based on skills rather than just traditional qualifications, we open the door to a wider pool of talent. How can we make these practices more widespread in our workplaces? In this special episode, I’m joined by Maria Putnam of the DEI Leadership Institute and Stephanie Knight, the CEO of Colorado Inclusive Economy. We discussed the upcoming event on October 11 at the Hyatt Aurora, the 2024 Annual Summit. We talked about the event overview, partnerships, mission, and the progress and challenges in diversity, equity, and inclusion. Don’t miss the date—join us! See you there! --- Listen to the podcast here: 2024 Annual Summit: Collaboration of Colorado Inclusive Economy and DEI Leadership Institute with Maria Putnam and Stephanie Knight Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. As you probably know if you’ve listened to some of my other episodes, I’m based here in Denver, Colorado, and probably about half of my guests are in the area and I do like to promote events that are happening in person, especially events around the things that people around town are doing that they’re passionate about. As you know, Denver’s a city with a lot of passionate energy, a lot of people that are starting things up, a lot of people that are putting things together, a lot of people that are thinking through the world and how we can kind of even improve upon humanity, to get a little bit woo-woo and high level. One such event coming up in October, I believe in October 11th, is a partnership between Maria Putnam of the DEI Leadership Institute, who you probably already know from one of my earlier podcast episodes, and Stephanie Knight, the CEO of Colorado Inclusive Economy. --- Maria, Stephanie, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, glad to be on. Well, let’s, let’s start out by talking about the event in October 11th. What are you putting on? What you were exposing to everyone? And what would people expect if someone might be interested in such an event? Yeah, well, the event is going to be in October 11, as you said. We’re going to be hosting this event at the Hyatt Aurora and we are expecting to have 350 people from all the industries. So, this is a really good event to go and to meet leaders, actually, who are really proactive and working in diversity, equity, and inclusion. I would just echo what Maria said, it’s going to be a wonderful event. It is on the 11th, it’s 8 AM to noon, and so, again, it’s going to be two distinct tracks of learning with two separate sessions each and we have engaged wonderful subject matter experts to lead these sessions. They’re highly topical and things that are on people’s mind, like diversity and AI, again, healthcare, inclusion, and scarcity. We’re also going to talk about some legal things, not too deep, but talk about with everything that’s happening in our larger world around diversity, equity, inclusion, how can companies stay the course and stay safe legally so it’ll be a lot for everyone. So excited to host with the DEI Leadership Institute and combine audiences. So we’re really excited about it. And what type of audience are you specifically looking to reach in this event? Is this the CEOs? Is this other leaders, division heads, more kind of small business entrepreneurs? Is there anyone in particular you’re looking to reach more with a lot of the advice that you have for these companies? I will say all together, you just said business owners, CEOs, students, people who’s actually doing the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion at whatever capacity they are. Yeah. It’s open to the public. Colorado Inclusive Economy is a membership organization so we engage C-suite leadership and their teammates and what we...

In this digital age, there is a lot of technological change. Whether you're looking to sell, deciding who to market to, determining how to market, or considering technological advances and employment, all of these challenges can have technological solutions. So, what can you do with all this technology? In this episode, I have Ryan Pollyniak, Cloud Transformation Executive at Western Computer. We talk about cloud transformation, cloud computing, and data management. Ryan emphasizes how important it is to select the right technology solutions that can accommodate future growth and align with a long-term strategic roadmap. Additionally, we discuss the impact of AI on employment and its usefulness during the interview process. Listen and explore cloud transformation now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Revolutionizing Business with Cloud Transformation and AI with Ryan Pollyniak Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We live in an era where there’s a lot of technological change and a lot of technology to manage even without that change, and many of you out there are possibly looking at starting your own business and wondering, “What can I do with all this technology?” And it might even look daunting. It might even feel like another large task on top of everything else that you’re looking into, whether you’re looking into what product you want to sell, who you want to market to, how are you going to market, and what are you going to use. So, to help us sort through some of these technological solutions, technological advances, and technological change in employment, even, for those of you out there who are just looking at other employment options as well, I would like to introduce to you my guest today, Ryan Pollyniak, who is a Cloud Transformation Executive. --- Ryan, welcome to the program. Thanks, Stephen. Glad to be on. Well, thank you for joining and, first of all, take us through a day to day. What’s a normal activity for someone who’s a cloud transformation executive? As a lot of people are familiar with other types of executives but this particular one is very specific to our time, being that a lot of people are doing digital transformation and cloud transformations. Absolutely, and so if you ask my seven-year-old’s third grade class when she told them that I was a cloud transformation executive, they all think I’m a meteorologist now, which is not the case. Actually, working with companies, all different sizes of companies, small businesses all the way up to smaller enterprise level businesses, make that digital transformation, key buzzword you hear all the time, you just mentioned it, have their old, legacy, on-premise systems and siloed data into the modern cloud and there’s so many things that go along with that, from keeping your data secure to leveraging the future of AI and everything else. A lot of businesses are making that switch and then you’ve also got startups, of course, which are wanting to take the appropriate foundational steps as they create their initial business systems to make sure that they’re setting themselves up for the future. So, what I’m doing is typically strategizing with the leaders of these companies and pulling in teams of solution architects and project managers and consultants to kind of realize the vision that we set. So just to also orient our audience, in case anyone’s not familiar, like you mentioned, cloud is a term that makes people think of clouds in the air, and I think a lot of people when they put something on the cloud, even anything on their personal computers, probably think that their data just kind of floats around in the air the way the clouds do. So, what does the cloud actually mean? What is it? That’s a great question. There are several different iterations of that. In general, cloud is computing power servers that are not in the server on premise,

When we offer services, one way to connect with our audience is through social media. The challenge is that while we want to reach a large number of people, there are important factors to consider. But how can you truly stand out in the crowded social media landscape? In this episode, I have Wendy Pace, Founder and Owner of PACE Setting Media. We talk about the importance of making content for a specific audience, and marketing strategies for businesses. We also discuss the limitations of algorithmic content creation and how social media algorithms work for content visibility. Learn how to stand out online! --- Listen to the podcast here: Strategies to Get Noticed on Social Media with Wendy Pace Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a broader category of getting noticed. You produce a product, you produce a service, you produce an offering, even wanting to, say, get people together for some sort of a social endeavor. No matter what you’re trying to do, you have to find some way of getting noticed, and as you’re probably well aware of, over the last half a century and particularly even the last 20 years, the landscape of getting noticed has changed quite a bit, there’s a very different way of getting noticed now than it was during, say, the middle of the 20th century. There’s a lot of stuff that involves digital marketing and content creation that I’m here to talk with my guest today, Wendy Pace, the founder and owner of Pace Setting Media, about this endeavor and what getting noticed in the 21st century really looks like. --- Wendy, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Starting on the topic of getting noticed and how much that has changed, what’s the number one thing that someone needs to think about, let’s say someone just finished building their product or finished outlining their service, outlining their offering, what’s the number one thing someone should be thinking on right now as far as getting noticed? Okay, so they’ve developed a product or a service, they need to be thinking about who is this for? What does my audience look like and where is my audience at? A lot of people just throw stuff at the wall and hope that it sticks and that’s not exactly the way it works in social media.Share on X If you’ve noticed or paid any attention to your social media feeds, your view of the world has gotten narrower and narrower because of the algorithms. So you really have to have a keen understanding of who your audience is so that you can tell Facebook, you can tell Google, you can tell them, “This is my audience,” and you can get some of that knowing what your hashtag should be, knowing what the lifestyle of your audience is, there are other ways of getting around what Facebook used to, and back in the day, when I started, you could pick your household, right? You’d be like, “I want two-income, I want four kids, I want the dog, I want the cat, I want the white picket fence. I want it in this zip code,” and you could really kind of hand pick who got to see your stuff. Now, you have to be a lot more creative. You need to think about, okay, say it’s a car decaling or car mats, you make custom car mats. Well, you need to think about who’s that lifestyle? Who’s going to be that car person? What are the things they’re going to be interested in? What are the most common job titles they might have? Because you can’t pick all of them. And then what’s the income around base, what kind of generalized income would you be in? And that is where your key audience members are. So, first and foremost, figure out who you’re selling this service to, what do they do, what does their life look like, so that you can pick the right pain points to get into their feeds. And while we’re talking about who your audience is, who you’re selling to,

Decision making is a crucial part of our lives, affecting us regardless of whether we are pursuing our passions, thinking about business, or focusing on our personal lives. Many people believe that the outcome of our lives is the sum of all the decisions we make, which can be a bit overwhelming. How can we improve our decision-making skills to shape the lives we desire? In this episode, I have Greg Williams, VP of Strategy at Western Computer. Our talk revolves around decision-making in business. Greg emphasizes the importance of evaluating technology vendors and building strong relationships with customers. We also discuss the potential of AI to transform business operations and leverage it to attain work-life balance. Tune in to learn how these insights can enhance your business strategy! --- Listen to the podcast here: Leveraging AI for Smarter Decision Making in Business with Greg Williams Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a little bit of a broad topic, something that really affects all of our lives, regardless of whether or not you’re pursuing your passions, regardless of whether or not you’re even thinking about a business or a career at all, and that is decision making. There’s a lot of people out there saying that your life’s outcome is kind of a sum of all the decisions you make, which can get a little stressing to the mind, I would say, in that sense. To talk to us all about decision making, all the facets of decision making and how to make effective decisions that really, truly reflect who we are and what we want to see in the world in our lives, I would like to introduce you my guest today, Greg Williams, the VP of Strategy for Western Computer, --- Greg, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Stephen. It’s great to be here. Yeah. Thank you so much. And so, first of all, let’s get a little bit of your background. So, you’re a VP of Strategy, Western Computer, the name doesn’t necessarily clearly stay what it is, so what is it that you do as VP of Strategy? Yeah, so we’re an old company and I like to say that we don’t sell computers and we’re not really Western that much anymore but that’s our name and it has a good brand in the marketplace. We provide ERP and CRM solutions to small and mid-market companies. That’s what we do. We’re primarily a Microsoft partner so we implement the Microsoft Dynamics suite of products. For our customers, we support them long term. Last few years, it’s been their journey in digital transformation. And just so everyone knows what we’re talking about here, ERP and CRM, what are those two acronyms refer to? So ERP is the backbone software of the business, accounting, inventory control, sometimes ecommerce. It’s really the core system that you enter orders in and ship products out of or manage projects and that type of thing. Yeah. And CRM is, there’s two main companies out there, Microsoft and Salesforce, that do that for the most part and it’s for your front office. It’s your sales team, it’s your customer service team, it’s your field technicians, if you’re in a service business, the applications that they use, And in your role as VP of Strategy, are you mostly concerned with the strategy of your company and how to obtain and retain clients? Or are you mostly concerned with the strategy of the companies you work with, helping them pick which business solutions they want for their businesses? A little bit of both. I’m obviously very focused on our strategy but I do advise our clients quite a bit on what IT strategies they can take to optimize their investments in technology. Well, regardless of which side of your business, which side of this dichotomy you’re on, a big part of it is around this decision-making process. Do you have any general ideas or general piece of advice for anyone...

Aging is a natural part of life. As we get older, our physical body changes, our health, and our mind. But what actually happens to us as we age? What does it mean for us and for those we love? And how can we approach aging in a new way? In this episode, I have Dr. Corinne Auman, CEO and Founder of Choice Care Navigators. We discuss the negative views of aging and how we can refrain from it as a natural part of life. Dr. Corinne shares the challenges of retirement, particularly for the baby boomer generation. Tune in to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Embracing a Positive Mindset Towards Aging with Dr. Corinne Auman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about a topic that I have yet to really truly bring up or focus an episode around, which is aging. Now, we all know that aging is happening. Some people approach it quite differently than others. You’ve heard me talk a bit about the generations and the different generational experiences, but what happens to us as we get older? What does that mean? And what does it mean for the people that we love and care about as we get older? And also, how can we approach it a little bit differently? You probably know that I am a little bit skeptical or let’s say not fully on board with the traditional ways that we have viewed aging in the past and even treat it mostly today. To talk about this topic, I would like to introduce you to my guest for today, Corinne Auman, and she is the founder of Choice Care Navigators as well as the author of a book called Keenagers, which gives us a different new approach to aging. --- Corrine, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Oh, yeah, thank you for hopping on and talking about this important topic because, as we know, everyone out there is getting older, we all have ideas around aging, and we have a lot of different ideas. What are the ideas that you usually encounter, say, in today’s society about what it means to get older and what it means to have your loved ones get older? So I think we are in a pretty ageist society, in the sense that the messaging you typically get around getting older is don’t do it, which, of course, we can’t avoid, so we’ve got this thing that is happening to all of us all the time, we’re going to be older at the end of this podcast than we were at the beginning, and yet we get this messaging from our culture around us that is constantly anti-aging, negative viewpoints on it, prevent it, if at all possible, look as young as you possibly can, which, I mean, it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. People are making a lot of money off of your fear of growing older. So, I think that is the predominant view. When you get to actual like retirement years, people typically view those years in one of two ways. They either view it as kind of a time of earned relaxation where you do a lot of vacationing and you spend time with the grandkids, or they view it as a time of just inevitable decline, the end is nigh and there’s nothing we can do about it and it’s just all downhill from here. So, those are the typical kind of viewpoints you see about growing older. And I have to admit that I’ve kind of succumb to it a little bit. Mostly, it’s because I think that that’s what’s pushed by our society. I think about what happens when people grow from their 20s into the 30s and 40s and stuff like that and it’s pretty emphasized to me this loss, this loss of the adventure, this loss of the independence, whereas I’ve actually experienced a little bit of the things that you actually do gain, like I think people sometimes start to become more self-confident, they start to reduce their give-a-fucks, to be able to just like not freak out over small little things anymore. Is that messaging, is someone turning 30 today hearing just overwhelming negative commentary about where their li...

When starting a business, there are several key things to consider, like marketing strategies and financial planning. In the early stages, it's crucial to reach a wide audience to make your business known. What are some effective ways to make an impact and connect with potential clients? Join us in this episode with Nicole Grinnel, an entrepreneur, CEO, and podcast host. We discussed the benefits of guesting on podcasts, especially for early-stage businesses for growth and connection, as well as having an entrepreneurial mindset and remote work flexibility, such as virtual assistants. Tune in to gain valuable insights! --- Listen to the podcast here: Podcasting as a Business Growth Strategy with Nicole Grinnell Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’ve advocated quite a bit on this podcast about kind of embracing a new way of thinking and I think one of the things that we’ve often thought about in the past is that when someone is doing something similar to what you’re doing, you see them as a competitor, as someone that’s kind of possibly occupying your space. But there’s a saying that the market’s only saturated when you’re trying to be someone else and it’s not necessarily saturated with you. So, I’m always here to support other people on the same journey, and the journey I’m talking about today is showcasing the stories of people who start their businesses or showcasing the stories of people who follow their passions very much here. So, my guest today, Nicole Grinnell, is the host of Mic'd Up, another podcast, as well as a two-time business founder. --- Nicole, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me, Stephen. I’m excited to be here. Well, thank you so much for popping on. And let’s first start by talking about Mic'd Up. Now, your podcast has been around for quite some time, even longer than this one. Yeah. So we have, obviously, like our actual show, and then we really serve as a booking agency to get other people on podcasts, which is a way that we’ve actually grown multiple businesses and supported a lot of businesses in that effort and so we really want to do much like the purpose of your show is show other ways that businesses can grow through different avenues and what other people have done and that’s what Mic'd Up plans to do. Nice. And so I guess the first question I have for you about that is, if someone is starting a business or trying to get any of their initiatives noticed, and I want to be all inclusive, not every initiative is a business but want to get something noticed, how should someone be thinking about podcasts? I hear people have advocating, say, start your own podcast or try to be on other podcasts. What’s the best way for someone to think through a strategy as far as building their business that involves the podcasting medium? So, it’s funny because I always say there’s a time and place for either of those. It really depends on the stage you’re at in business. So, when you are just starting out and you’re really trying to build your name, build pipelines, build relationships, that’s a great time to be in a guesting space because, really, what happens is the show is all about you. So, I compare it to having someone over for dinner. What’s easier, being the guest or being the host? When you’re the guest, it’s all about you, they’re doing all the prep, the legwork, they’re promoting it, they’re all of this, that’s really what guesting can be. When you’re in the hosting space, that’s a great time for when you are a seasoned entrepreneur, a seasoned professional, business is running, you’ve got some great pipelines and now you’re kind of at that stage that you want to give back and you want to be able to naturally connect. That’s a great time to be a host. So it really depends on that scale that you’re in and what that looks like for you.

As human beings, we all encounter problems in our lives. Some may be traumatic, and it's just a fact of life. These experiences can make it hard to focus on our daily tasks, especially at work. How can we create a workplace culture that supports employees during these times? In this episode, I sit down with Tamara Fox, a coach and head of consulting at LOEB Leadership. We discussed the impact of trauma on both personal and professional life, and the need for workplaces to address employees’ trauma, and the future of their work. Tamara shared about the approaches to leadership development and the benefits of prioritizing employee’s mental health. Tune in to learn how we can build a more supportive workplace --- Listen to the podcast here: Prioritizing Employees’ Well-Being in the Workplace with Tamara Fox Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. On this particular podcast, I’ve talked quite a bit about our work culture and about how many things about our culture that we all encounter at work need some adjustment in our thinking. And one of the topics that I was recently introduced to at the Boulder Startup Week last month is the topic of what happens when one of your coworkers, one of your employees has a traumatic experience. Now, we’re all going to have traumatic experiences in life, it’s just a fact of life that something major is going to happen to you and something major is going to happen to you that’s going to cause you to maybe even focus on that particular aspect of your life a little bit more, even a little bit more than your work, and we need to find a way to, on a broader scale, allow people to be coworkers but also human beings. Today, my guest, Tamara Fox, is a coach and a consultant, and she was the speaker at this particular event on workforce trauma. --- Tamara, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you so much. So, I want to first start off talking about your particular story, your particular journey, when you talk about what made workplace culture something that really interested you and then what made specifically how people endure these traumas at workplaces something that you want to kind of lean into with your career. Yeah, absolutely. So I’m definitely one of those people that I took my own personal experiences and made it into something I’m actually passionate about and doing in the workforce today. And I always start my story back in 2011, when I was 19, I always age myself now when I do podcasts, I think that was 13 years ago, it was wild. But in 2011, I was 19 years old and I woke up and I was living in an apartment in Denver, Colorado, and I woke up to a masked man standing over my bed with a gun who raped me and actually physically assaulted me as well, like dislocated my arm, did a whole bunch of stuff to me that, you know, won’t go into details. I truly saw my life flash before my eyes, thought I was going to die, never see my family again. So that was 19 years old. Wow. Pretty life changing experience, that was the catapult into my experiences with personal trauma myself, like going through something traumatic. Pretty shortly after that, my dad had been battling with an opioid addiction, most of my childhood, it just didn’t really come to the surface or I wasn’t really aware of it at like more conscious level until after my trauma and I think my trauma actually catapulted him a little bit, made him a little bit worse, because when your family experience something like that, of course it has an impact on the family around them so his opioid addiction got to the point that he was verbally abusive, he was blacking out and not remembering things, and he was abusing opioids illegally. So then that happened and he became suicidal and his mental health was just awful. So that had an impact for me on a trauma perspective. Then, from 2016 to 2024, I had nine deaths,

Change is about becoming different in various parts of our lives triggered by our internal desires or external events. Through change, it helps us see new things and grow as a human being spiritually, mentally, and physically, which are all interconnected. How do these aspects of change come together to shape our life? Join us in this episode with Brian de Castro, founder of The Domestic Athlete. Our conversation focused on how we can maintain work-life balance, prioritize well-being, and explore creative projects. We also talked about how to align our passions to achieve fulfillment and avoid burnout through intentional management. Brian shared the benefits of exercise, mindfulness, creativity, and self-awareness. Listen to this episode and start transforming your life today! --- Listen to the podcast here: Achieving Work-Life Balance and Fulfillment with Brian de Castro Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We all reach that point in life where we want to make some kind of a change and there’s so many different catalysts for change. Probably, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’ve heard several episodes with people who have had events such as health scares or even just getting laid off from a job perpetuating a new way of thinking, a new line of, “Okay, what change do I wanna make? What do I think through what do I really want?” However, there are so many components to it. There’s obviously the mental stuff, some of the spiritual stuff that’s been on in the last few episodes, but I’ve also covered on some episodes the physical aspect of it and it all kind of, in a way, goes together. And here to discuss how that goes together, I have the founder of The Domestic Athlete, Brian DeCastro. --- Brian, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation. Definitely. I want to start by orienting our audience here. So what is The Domestic Athlete all about? Yeah, good question. Back in 2016, I was actually working, I was on my probably 15th, 16th year working in the same organization. For the last, say, nine years, I was actually employed managing the entire fitness department that consisted of 40 trainers, 20 staff, multimillion-dollar department, there’s a lot of moving parts. It was a very exciting position. We went through a $50 million expansion at the time and we cut the ribbon and then, after that, it was kind of like, “Now what?” Yeah. Ironically, the universe responded and they were actually phasing out people in sort of that middle management position as well. My position got phased out. I drove off the lot with a big smile on my face. I can move on to the next thing but also not with the risk of, you know, I had a family and everything so responsibility and all that stuff. When I started The Domestic Athlete within a month of leaving the club, my passion was in working with regular folks in the grind, day to day, parents, professionals perhaps with families that are trying to keep all the balls up in the air that also need the life force, the inspiration, the excitement. They still want that. You don’t want to wait ’til you’re retired to actually start living your life so how do we keep it all together and keep our life force but also manage all those moving parts, the dance class, the hockey practice, all that stuff, and then paying your bills and then you also have a marriage or relationship or something, right? So there’s so many different things going on. So Domestic Athlete is basically people like you and I operating in the sport of life, like I like to call it, so what do you need to operate at your best?Share on X Oh, wow. A lot to unpack there. Maybe let’s start with a little bit about your story because you said that you spent 16 years working with the same company, overseeing personal trainers and stuff like that.

We are all trying to build the life we really want, balancing what we are doing with the lifestyle we dream of. However, are we truly making a life that matches our deepest values? How can we be sure our path fits our real goals? In this episode, we have Molly Lou Hollows, founder of Strategy Sculptors. Her business focuses on both the practical stuff we need to build and understanding our true selves, so what we create aligns with the life we genuinely desire. Today, we will explore what human design strategy is for business consultant clients. Molli shares what Unified Field Theory and Morphogenetic Field is and how it actually attracts opportunities and experiences by just being themselves with purpose. Join us and align with your true self! --- Listen to the podcast here: Human Designed Strategy for Personal and Professional Fulfillment with Molli Lou Hollows Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’ve been doing a bunch of these podcast interviews and I’ve witnessed a whole bunch of different motivations, a whole bunch of different reasons why we all build our businesses and/or passion projects of any kind. Some of it’s based on certain specific circumstances and others based on something that we’re called to do, but at the core of everything that we’re trying to do, the journey that we are all on right now, is trying to build the life that we really want. Then there’s kind of a juxtaposition, a meetup of the physical thing that we’re building, what we’re actually doing as well as the lifestyle we’re trying to achieve, whether it be escaping something we don’t want or whether it be feeling really in touch with having our lives be in alignment with who we truly are. My guest today, Molli Lou, is the founder of Strategy Sculptors, and her business actually works at that intersection of physical, tangible thing we need to build as well as understanding who we are at a course that what we’re building actually matches the life that we really truly want. --- Molli, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen. Yeah. I’m excited to be here. Super awesome. Oh, that’s amazing. Now, first of all, let’s get a point in time out. How long have you been at it with Strategy Sculptors? Well, in 2020, that’s when I really started my full-time entrepreneurial journey. I think a lot of us did. We were all home so we all were questioning things and really looking at ourselves in a different way. We were all at home and so I really started to be like, okay, I’ve always wanted to do this. So I dove into it and I started going to school for hypnotherapy. I already had gone through and was a certified breakthrough coach, specifically, and I just felt like I needed something more tangible to use than coaching just for me. Coaching is great but I have always felt like I was going towards a framework that I was creating on my own, that I was going to enter the framework eventually.Share on X I ended up working towards other things. I felt limited, actually, by the hypnotherapy. I wanted to use it as a tool but I wanted to be able to make it scalable so that I could make as much income as I wanted and I wanted it to be more flexible because the one on one, it gets old. I didn’t want to trade my hours for dollars. I wanted that to be, for sure, part of the solution, part of my entrepreneurial journey was to find that, and I ended up working with a lot of entrepreneurs to begin with, and I realized maybe I just loved entrepreneurship and then it was kind of this delicate balance of finding a way to have both, to have both entrepreneurship and spirituality merge. And then I ended up where I am now, where, finally, I’ve figured it out. Coming into 2020 when you started rethinking a lot of things, what were you doing? Did you have a full-time normal job? Were you just trading your dollars for hours through this hypnotherapy coaching or was there somethi...