21st Century Entrepreneurship
The 21st Century Entrepreneurship Podcast is a 4 x Gold-Award weekly show that features interviews with cutting-edge leaders and successful entrepreneurs. We talk about the fundamentals of starting and growing a business, achieving and maintaining success, as well as the difficulties of entrepreneurship and its future. Subscribe to the 21st Century Entrepreneurship Podcast and never miss an episode, so you can stay on top of the curve and gain the knowledge you need to succeed in today's competitive landscape.
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#517 Evan Marks: How Do You Decide Under Pressure?
<p>Evan Marks, Founder @ M1 Performance Group, is a former Wall Street hedge fund professional and mental performance coach, and we spoke about how high performers make better decisions under pressure instead of simply reacting. After 25 years on Wall Street, Evan now coaches traders, portfolio managers, CEOs, entrepreneurs and athletes, including NASCAR drivers, on what separates the best from the mediocre: “High performers know how to consciously respond,” while “the rest just react.”</p><p>His turning point came at 46, when he thought he had suffered a heart attack. Leaving Wall Street and starting his own company brought up fear, judgment...
#516 Irena O'Brien: Why Does Change Feel So Hard?
<p>Irena O'Brien is a cognitive neuroscientist and founder of the neuroscience school, and we spoke about how the brain shapes change, leadership, energy, and performance before we are even consciously aware of it. Her work helps coaches and helping professionals understand why “the brain's first job is survival” and why change often fails when we treat it only as mindset, motivation, or willpower.</p><p>Irena explains the brain as a prediction engine: it uses past experience to estimate whether something is safe, costly, or worth the energy. For entrepreneurs and leaders, that means hesitation, overthinking, procrastination, people pleasing, defe...
#515 Zack Tomlin: Why most business advice fails you?
<p>Zack Tomlin is a former founder who spent 12 years building and exiting a business, and we spoke about why most business advice doesn’t actually work for individual leaders. He’s also the author of Craft: The Expedition of Business, a book he repeatedly referenced throughout the conversation as a practical guide to mastering decision-making, leadership, and the craft of business. His core argument is simple: most advice is built for an “average business,” but “most businesses aren’t your average business” because they’re shaped by unique leaders, teams, and markets.</p><p>The turning point in his journey came fro...
#514 Guffy Wright: How to remove friction in big decisions?
<p>Guffy Wright is a risk advisor and sales leader at The Mahoney Group, working with entrepreneurs and large companies in scale mode. We spoke about how to make high-stakes decisions when millions are on the line. His work sits at the intersection of insurance, strategy, and human behavior—helping leaders think beyond price and into consequences, especially “on their worst day” and their best.</p><p>A turning point in his career came from repeatedly seeing deals stall even when the value was obvious. He realized the real blocker wasn’t logic—it was what he calls “emotional friction.” As he explains...
#513 Dave Munson: Why Are Vision, Numbers, and Growth Key?
<p>Dave Munson is the founder of a global leather goods company Saddleback Leather Co., and we spoke about how he built it from nothing, nearly lost it multiple times, and ultimately learned how to run a healthy, profitable business. His journey includes sleeping on the floor in Mexico, being stolen from “millions of dollars several times,” and almost going out of business—experiences that forced him to rethink everything about leadership and operations.</p><p>A major turning point came when a mentor who ran a $13 billion business simplified what “run your business by the numbers” actually means. Instead of complex...
#512 Alec Broadfoot: When does a CEO need a #2 leader?
<p>Alec Broadfoot is founder and CEO of VisionSpark and author of Hiring Your Right #2 Leader. We spoke about why most entrepreneurs fail to hire the right number two—and how to fix it using data instead of gut instinct. His turning point came after building a profitable company with great service but disastrous hiring results, where “we were actually firing about 7 out of 10 people.” Everything changed when he adopted structured assessments and flipped those results, proving that hiring isn’t intuition—it’s a system.</p><p>That realization led him to develop a method grounded in science, process, and pattern...
#511 Jon Ostenson: Build a Business Without an Idea?
<p>Jon Ostenson is a franchise consultant and former corporate executive, and we spoke about how people can enter business ownership without a “million-dollar idea” by leveraging franchising—especially beyond fast food. After years in corporate, he “always had the desire to build my own empire instead of someone else’s,” but lacked a clear starting point. His turning point came when he discovered non-food franchising and later led a franchise system, where he saw how ordinary people could succeed by following proven systems instead of reinventing everything from scratch.</p><p>His core approach is simple: franchising “shortcuts your path to succes...
#510 Dr. John Scott: How to Turn 6% R&D Into Revenue?
<p>Dr. John Scott is a former astrophysicist turned serial entrepreneur, and we spoke about why most innovation fails—and how to systematically flip those odds. After earning dual PhDs and spending over a decade in academia, he walked away from a tenured position after realizing that entrepreneurs “were having a lot more fun and satisfaction… than me writing equations on a blackboard.” That turning point led him to build and test a new model for creating companies—one designed not around ideas, but around real, validated demand.</p><p>At the core of his approach is a simple but rarely fol...
#509 Rob Braiman: Why do founders block growth past $5M?
<p>Rob Braiman is a serial entrepreneur who has built 10 companies and advised thousands of business owners, and we spoke about why most businesses plateau—and how to break through those ceilings. Over 30+ years, he’s seen the same pattern repeat: founders start strong, but growth stalls as they remain the bottleneck, “wearing too many hats” and keeping control instead of building real leadership structures.</p><p>His approach centers on four pillars: revenue generation, organizational design, process efficiency, and operational measurement. He explains that every business has “leakage in efficiency,” and that measurement isn’t about control but about empowerment—“i...
#508 Nate Amidon: How do teams stay aligned while scaling?
<p>Nate Amidon is a former United States Air Force officer, former C-17 pilot, and CEO of Form 100 Consulting, and we spoke about why many companies execute well at small scale but begin to fail once complexity increases. His core argument is simple: a great idea is not enough—“if you have a great business idea, but you can't execute on your great business idea, then it doesn't really matter.” Drawing directly from military operations, he explains why scaling a startup after funding often resembles running a joint mission: more teams, more moving parts, more chances for drift.</p><p>His me...
