Business Roundtable
Welcome to the Business Roundtable Podcast, hosted by David Carr of Steward Your Business. This engaging and informative podcast series is dedicated to helping business owners, and entrepreneurs navigate the complexities of running a successful enterprise. Each episode features David Carr and a roster of industry experts, including regular contributors like Curtis Cochran, who bring their wealth of experience in mergers and acquisitions, organizational health, and team building.Dive into discussions that cover a broad range of topics essential to business growth and sustainability. From strategic planning and preparation to understanding the cycles of business ownership, the podcast provides invaluable...
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Impact Shift: How to Pivot with Purpose and Build a Lasting Legacy | Rahul Prasad (BRP 20260126)
What does it really mean to build a lasting legacy and can you begin shaping it while you are still living it? In this episode of the Business Roundtable Podcast, David Carr sits down with physicist, philanthropist, and author Raul Brazad to explore how leaders can pivot with intention and create meaningful impact beyond professional success.<br /><br />After a distinguished career as a senior physicist working on long-horizon nuclear fusion projects, Raul began asking a deeper question: What change can I make that I can actually see in my lifetime? That question led him from the national laboratory to...
Solving a Capacity Problem, Not a Trend
Most founders think they have a hiring problem. Pranav Dalal says it is usually a capacity problem, and that distinction changes everything about how you scale.<br /><br />Pranav is the founder and CEO of Office Beacon, a global outsourcing and remote staffing firm he has built over 25 years into a company of more than 5,500 employees across six countries. He started right after the dot com crash wiped out his first career, and the lessons from those early years still run the business today: never undervalue yourself, and never price yourself out of the market either.<br /><br />With David...
The Second Profile Behind Every "Yes"
Most leaders think a confident "yes" in a meeting means the deal, the buy-in, or the hard conversation is settled. Jake Stahl says that's exactly when people start quietly disappearing.<br /><br />Jake built NeuroStrategy after 15+ years of training sales teams, including leading a region to over $65 million in annual sales, and noticing that good pitches still failed to land. His discovery: everyone has a second, hidden profile that's actually making the decision, and it rarely matches the polite one sitting across the table.<br /><br />In this conversation, Jake and David get into:<br />Why a live "yes" often...
AI Won't Fix a Broken Culture, It Amplifies It
Everyone is racing to adopt AI. Almost no one is asking the harder question: what kind of leader are you becoming as AI gets more powerful? Technology will not fix a broken culture or poor leadership. It amplifies whatever is already there.<br /><br />In this conversation, David Carr sits down with two guests who think about this differently. Christopher Skinner, founder of Stealth Dog Labs, works at the intersection of AI, cognition, and leadership. Chris Wessling, The Process Dude, helps leaders escape the day to day by building systems that scale.<br /><br />Christopher explains why AI is running...
What Employees Really Want Isn't a Raise
When a great employee leaves, most leaders assume it was about pay. Larry Salazar has the data to argue otherwise. The single largest contributor to the financial stress that drives turnover is housing, and almost no employer is doing anything about it.<br /><br />Larry is the President and co-founder of NestSTEPS, a platform that turns home ownership into an employee benefit. In this conversation with David Carr he makes the business case: replacing an employee costs 50 to 200 percent of their salary, housing eats roughly a third of household spending, and financially stressed employees lose about 9 percent of their work...
Your Revenue Problem Isn't a Leads Problem
When revenue slows, almost every company reaches for the same lever: more leads, more marketing, more pressure on sales. Ellen Smolko says that is usually the wrong move. Most revenue problems are structural, and more activity does not fix them. It just exposes the gaps.<br /><br />Ellen is the founder of Foresight Performance and the Marketing Medic. In this conversation with David Carr she unpacks revenue friction, the term she coined for anything that quietly slows a company's growth, and her rule: diagnose before you do.<br /><br />She shows how founders misdiagnose a slowdown, blaming the pipeline, then...
AI Changed Search. Show Up or Disappear.
For thirty years, getting found meant ranking on Google. That era is ending. People now ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude to recommend a business, and those tools only surface a few names. If yours is not one of them, your next customer never sees you.<br /><br />Solomon Thimothy is the founder of Clickx, co-founder and CEO of OneIMS, and a USA Today and Wall Street Journal best-selling author who has spent two decades helping companies grow. In this conversation with David Carr he makes a blunt case: the founder's voice is now the growth strategy, and you cannot outsource...
He Built a $10M Company With Zero Venture Capital
Everyone celebrates the startup that raises a huge round and grows at all costs. Bryan Clayton built the opposite. He took GreenPal, the Uber for lawn care, past 10 million dollars a year with zero venture capital, and he argues that raising too much money before you have it figured out is more likely to kill you than save you.<br /><br />Bryan is the CEO and cofounder of GreenPal. Before it he built a landscaping company to 8 figures and 150 employees and sold it. In this conversation with David Carr he is candid about what bootstrapping really demands, from cutting his...
You Don't Need a Number, You Need a Life
How much money do you actually need? Most people answer with a number. Dr. Nicholas Michels says that is backwards. Don't start with a dollar amount. Start with the life you want, then let the money serve it.<br /><br />Nick is a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER professional, founder of Michels Family Financial, and author of Rich by Choice. In this conversation with David Carr he gets honest about why so many people are outwardly successful and inwardly stressed, and how to close that gap.<br /><br />He has lived both sides. He grew up comfortable until his family went, almost...
Your Business Is 3 Decisions From Bankruptcy
Your business is growing. That does not mean it is stable. For a lot of founders, growth quietly hides the problems that will break the company later, and you do not see it until it snaps.<br /><br />Tracy Holland is a founder, investor, and operator who took HatchBeauty Brands from zero to 100 million dollars, then built a live selling business to 27 million in two years and sold it. She now buys distressed companies and rebuilds them, and she has worked with more than three thousand entrepreneurs.<br /><br />In this conversation with David Carr she names founderitis and its...
