In this recap, Erik distills the key leadership insights from his conversation with Dr. Ian Beaty, highlighting the gap between technical skill and leadership ability. He reflects on the all-too-common failure point: we promote people because they’re good at something, not because they’ve been trained to lead. Erik explores how this creates a cycle of unprepared leaders who are under-equipped and over-pressured—and why humility and rebellion are often the antidote.

🎯 Top Insights from the Interview

• Success ≠ Leadership Readiness: Being great at a skill doesn’t automatically translate into being great at leading others who do that skill.
• Training Is the Missing Piece: The military models this well—every promotion requires training. In contrast, most companies offer none.
• Rebellion Is a Leadership Virtue: Being a good leader often means being willing to challenge the system, not just follow it.
• Pressure Creates Ego: Newly promoted leaders often feel the need to have all the answers. This squashes collaboration and curiosity.
• Humility Fuels Growth: Ian’s unique journey—from enlisted mechanic to doctorate-holder—underscores how humility is the bridge between mistakes and mastery.

🧩 The Personal Layer

Erik relates deeply to the challenge of being promoted without preparation. He reflects on how easy it is to assume a title grants wisdom, and how hard it is to ask for help without feeling like a fraud. The conversation brought him back to key moments in his own leadership where he struggled with ego, pressure, and the desire to appear competent. That rawness created a resonance with Ian’s story—and a deeper respect for the discipline of leadership.

🧰 From Insight to Action

• Audit Your Promotions: Look at who you’ve elevated recently—did you train them to lead, or just hope they’d figure it out?
• Normalize Reps, Not Just Results: Like the military or pro sports, leadership should involve practice and feedback, not just real-time performance.
• Celebrate the Rebels: Identify the respectful disruptors on your team and find ways to empower, not suppress, their insights.
• Build Humility Habits: Create spaces for leaders to say “I don’t know” without losing credibility.
• Design Your Own Development Path: Don’t wait for your organization—seek the reps, feedback, and frameworks you need.

🗣️ Notable Quotes

🔗 Links & Resources

• Visit Dr. Ian’s Website www.ianbeaty.com
• Connect with Dr. Ian on LinkedIn

Erik sits down with Dr. Ian Beaty—Major in the Oregon Army National Guard, military recruiter-turned-educational liaison, and founder of Maven Speaks. With 24 years of service and a doctorate in education, Ian’s insight cuts through the noise on what real leadership looks like, why bad leadership is so common, and how he’s bridging bureaucratic silos between the military and the education system. This conversation is a sharp, thoughtful look at systems, trust, and the future of developing people.

👤 About the Guest

Dr. Ian Beaty is a decorated military officer, organizational strategist, and the founder of Maven Speaks—a leadership and engagement consultancy. From generator mechanic to infantry officer to recruiting commander, Ian now serves as the Oregon National Guard’s first-ever educational liaison, a role he designed and pitched himself. With a master’s in organizational management and a doctorate in education, Ian blends field experience with academic rigor to shape better leaders and more connected systems.

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• How Ian built his own role to fix a gap in military recruitment
• Why adding value, not pitching, is the key to meaningful engagement
• The tension between long-term relationship-building and short-term quotas
• What makes veterans so uniquely qualified for leadership roles post-service
• How the military trains leadership differently—and what corporations can learn
• The pivotal moment Ian decided to study leadership after encountering a bad leader
• Why rebel thinkers are crucial for systems growth
• A candid breakdown of why most managers fail: no training and poor role fit

💡 Key Takeaways

• Leadership is a skill that must be trained, not assumed. Promotion without preparation leads to poor outcomes.
• Systemic gaps require entrepreneurial courage. Ian’s story is a blueprint for building roles that solve overlooked problems.
• Recruitment is more about trust and value than tactics. Meaningful relationships beat transactional checkboxes.
• Military leadership prepares people exceptionally well for civilian roles. Through succession training, pressure-tested accountability, and values-based culture.
• Being a disruptor isn’t a bug—it’s a leadership feature. Rebels with the right intent challenge broken systems for the better.

❓ Questions That Mattered

• “How did you convince your superior to hire you for a job that didn’t exist?”
• “Why do so many leaders get promoted without being trained to lead?”
• “How do you lead with empathy without becoming a pushover?”
• “What can civilian organizations learn from the military’s leadership pipeline?”
• “Why is practicing leadership like practicing free throws?”

🗣️ Notable Quotes

🔗 Links & Resources

• Visit Dr. Ian’s Website www.ianbeaty.com
• Connect with Dr. Ian on LinkedIn

In this reflective follow-up to his interview with Amanda Bedell, Erik gets honest about the uncomfortable truths business owners face when it comes to profit. Most of us think we’re “doing okay” because revenue is coming in—but Amanda forces a deeper look.

What stuck with Erik most wasn’t just Amanda’s strategic brilliance—it was how she translated financial complexity into real leadership decisions. She didn’t just talk P&Ls or pricing formulas. She talked about leadership responsibility, team clarity, and what it really takes to build something that lasts.

🎯 Top Insights from the Interview

• Profit isn’t passive—it’s a leadership choice. Amanda reframes profitability from a reporting outcome into a strategic driver, deeply embedded in your decisions.
• Most businesses are built on broken math. Pricing errors often happen because owners don’t fully calculate true unit economics—including overhead.
• You can’t outsource clarity. Bookkeepers, CPAs, and accountants are helpful—but they rarely help you lead a profitable business.
• Marketing changes the math. Your pricing isn’t just constrained by your costs and competitors—it can be elevated by how you position what you offer.
• Execution must go beyond strategy. Erik points out the crucial missing link: How do you lead your people to deliver on premium positioning?

🧩 The Personal Layer

Erik shares a behind-the-scenes window into how Amanda’s workshop challenged and shifted his own assumptions around pricing. He opens up about his own frustrations with the esoteric language of profit from financial professionals—and contrasts that with Amanda’s refreshingly direct, actionable style.

One standout reflection? The story of KFC’s pricing experiment: when they raised prices instead of lowering them, they sold more—not because of the product, but because of how pricing signaled value. That single story sparked a bigger idea about what it really means to lead with intention around price—and what most of us miss by pricing to fit in.

🧰 From Insight to Action

• Audit your pricing story. Not just the math—but how it connects to your marketing, your team’s ability to explain it, and the customer’s experience of it.
• Use price as a positioning tool. Where are you playing small because you’ve only considered the market’s ceiling—not your offering’s potential?
• Bring your team into the strategy. Great ideas in the office don’t matter if your frontline can’t deliver the promise (red carpet → red flags without clarity).
• Reflect on pricing as leadership. Erik challenges listeners to consider: Am I leading through my numbers—or hiding behind them?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

In this episode, Erik sits down with Amanda Bedell, a no-BS profit strategist with a story that flips the script on what most entrepreneurs think running a “successful” business looks like. Amanda unpacks the painful lessons from building a $2M+ bakery—with zero profit—and how that failure catalyzed her mission to help founders build profitable, sellable businesses. The conversation gets tactical and emotional, strategic and human—offering a masterclass in real business truth-telling.

👤 About the Guest

Amanda Bedell is a profit coach and strategic advisor to entrepreneurs. After building and selling a multi-million-dollar bakery that lacked profit, Amanda made it her mission to help founders escape the "broke but busy" trap. Through her advisory work, she helps companies dial in their pricing, understand their unit economics, and turn passion-driven ventures into cash-positive, strategically-sound businesses.

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• The distinction between profit theory and profit practice—and why both matter.
• Why most business owners get pricing wrong—and how to fix it.
• The tactical tools Amanda uses to calculate pricing that actually covers overhead.
• The difference between markup and margin—and how misunderstanding this sinks businesses.
• The human side of profit: how shame, emotion, and identity tie into your P&L.
• Why strategic marketing isn't “fluff”—it’s core to profit design.

💡 Key Takeaways

• Profit isn’t automatic—it's designed. Most entrepreneurs think selling equals success, but Amanda reveals how easy it is to run a multi-million-dollar business into the ground without strategic pricing.
• If your unit economics are broken, you don’t have a business. It doesn’t matter how passionate you are or how great your product is.
• Pricing is emotional and mathematical. If you avoid the math because it feels hard or makes you uncomfortable, your business will suffer.
• Branding influences price elasticity. Smart strategic positioning can increase what the market will bear—if you deliver on the promise.
• Hard truth is kindness. Amanda’s approach isn’t soft—but it’s the leadership most business owners actually need.

❓ Questions That Mattered

• How do you set prices when the market doesn’t “feel” ready for the numbers you need?
• What do you do when you realize your dream business is failing financially?
• How can branding and marketing reframe customer expectations—and profit margins?
• How do you navigate the emotional wreckage that comes from business failure?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

🔗 Links & Resources

• BCC Business Consulting: https://bccbusinessconsulting.com
• Follow Amanda on Instagram: @amandabedell

In this mid-year solo riff, Erik dismantles the anxiety and avoidance that plague performance reviews. Instead of dreading the annual ritual, Erik lays out a practical, human-first framework that transforms reviews into accountability-driving, career-shaping conversations. Whether you're leading five or fifty, this episode offers a process that helps your people grow and helps you lead with confidence, clarity, and calm.

❓The Big Question

How do we turn performance reviews from a dreaded chore into a powerful tool for growth and accountability?

💡 Key Takeaways

• The real purpose of a review is to drive change, not just check boxes.
• Setting expectations upfront makes everything smoother—for both leader and team member.
• Self-assessment first: letting the employee go first reveals more than you'd expect.
• Share the benchmark criteria in advance. Transparency builds trust and better conversations.
• Get commitments in writing and ask how your team wants to be held accountable.

🧠 Concepts, Curves, and Frameworks

• The Review Reframe: Shift the goal from evaluation to transformation.
• Ownership Sequence: Let them self-assess → you respond → they commit → you align on accountability.
• Expectation Anchoring: Outline what’s coming—timeline, process, structure—to reduce anxiety.
• Surprise-Free Zone: Reviews should document what’s already been said, not deliver shocks.
• The Follow-Through Gap: Without documentation and accountability requests, nothing sticks.

🔁 Real-Life Reflections

• Erik shares how he went from dreading reviews to blocking off two hours and loving the clarity it brought.
• He recalls coaching teams of 16 slippery sales reps and learning to build the review muscle to regain confidence.
• Points out the trap of leaders who “save it all” for the review, realizing ongoing feedback beats stockpiling.

🧰 Put This Into Practice

1. Send your review framework early and let them self-score.
2. Script your review intro to clarify purpose, structure, and expectations.
3. In the review, let them speak first and build on their reflections.
4. Ask: “What are you going to do differently?” and listen for specifics (who, what, when, where, how).
5. Follow up: Have them email their commitments and tell you how to hold them accountable.

🗣️ Favorite Quotes

Coming off the conversation with Justin Coats, Erik reflects on what stood out most — not just in what was said, but in the tone of how it was said. Justin’s outlook on AI is refreshingly optimistic, and not in a techno-utopian way. His confidence stems from deep proximity to the tools, but also from the pattern recognition of someone who’s rebuilt himself multiple times.

This reaction is Erik’s way of pulling that thread further: What if Justin’s not just right — what if he's early? And what if we’ve been dramatically overvaluing busywork while underestimating what we're actually capable of?

🎯 Top Insights from the Interview

• Disruption is already here. Industries like marketing are being gutted. Legal, sales, and creative are next. If you feel safe, it might just mean you're early.
• You’re probably doing less meaningful work than you think. Erik revisits his own sales leadership role and admits — most of his 50-hour weeks only contained ~10 hours of real value.
• The “race to the bottom” isn’t inevitable. Companies won’t all optimize for cost. Many will reinvest efficiency gains into higher-margin or more meaningful work — and that opens new lanes.
• This is an invitation to create. Whether you’re laid off or leveraged, the tools are there. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rethink what you want to build.
• AI won't replace you — but it might replace your inertia. Those who embrace the tools early will create massive leverage. Those who wait for a forcing function may be too late.

🧩 The Personal Layer

There’s a vulnerability in this episode — Erik names his fear. Not just as a professional, but as a father, husband, and friend. He acknowledges the real human cost of change and the worry for people he cares about. But he also offers a hard truth: maybe the stuff we’re clinging to wasn’t that meaningful in the first place.

He also shares a deep resonance with Justin Coats’s view that humans are wildly capable — and that what we really need now isn’t more motivation, it’s better attention to what matters.

🧰 From Insight to Action

• Audit your week. How many hours are you doing real work? What could be handed off to AI or automated systems?
• Practice noticing problems. Get less numb. Pay attention to the inefficiencies in your world — those are potential business ideas.
• Try one tool. Whether it’s Replit, ChatGPT, or Claude — spend an hour creating something small. Not researching. Building.
• Stop waiting for permission. AI has leveled the playing field. If you have a bias for action, you’re ahead of 95% of people.
• Talk to your people. If you lead a team or have peers you care about, initiate this conversation. Don’t wait for the crisis to come.

🗣️ Notable Quotes

🔗 Links & Resources

• neesh.ai – Justin's company
• Check out Justin’s LinkedIn for more info about his upcoming event: AI in the West

Erik sits down with AI implementer, systems thinker, and neesh.ai founder Justin Coats for a future-forward conversation that spans war zones to workflow. From wrenching helicopters in the Marines to designing AI frameworks for SMBs, Justin's journey is anything but linear — and that’s exactly why his perspective hits so hard. Together, they explore the human side of exponential tech, the slow pace of adoption, and what it really means to lead in a world that’s changing faster than we can comprehend.

👤 About the Guest

Justin Coats is the founder of neesh.ai, a company helping individuals and organizations level up their AI literacy and integrate intelligent systems into their operations. A U.S. Marine veteran turned Amazon entrepreneur turned AI advocate, Justin’s credibility comes not just from what he knows — but from how he builds. He's hosted AI conferences, worked one-on-one with late adopters and early tech execs alike, and is committed to ushering humanity into the new era of AI-enabled work.

🧭 Conversation Highlights

• Justin’s path from military mechanic to entrepreneur to AI systems builder
• The “aha” moment when ChatGPT transformed an hour of brainstorming into a full marketing plan
• Why step 1–8 of most tasks should be handed to AI and why 9 & 10 belong to us
• The danger of confusing comfort with alignment and why this era is forcing people to reevaluate their lives
• AI as a leveler: why for the first time in history, tech might actually democratize opportunity
• What kids will grow up understanding that adults currently can’t fathom

💡 Key Takeaways

• AI is the great reset — everyone is starting at square one, and those who learn how to wield it early will set the pace for others.
• The future belongs to the generalist — people who can creatively think, spot opportunities, and wield tools.
• You don’t need to dream bigger, you need to start smaller — identifying annoying, overlooked problems can be a goldmine when paired with AI.
• The 80% trap is real — most human energy is spent on rote tasks; AI can unlock the time and space for higher-level thinking.
• We are the gap generation — caught between analog mindsets and AI-native futures, our job is to bridge the chaos into clarity.

❓ Questions That Mattered

• What’s actually happening under the hood of these “language models” and why does it matter?
• How long will humans remain “in the loop”?
• Is this tech a forcing function or just an opportunity most people will ignore?

🗣️ Notable Quotes

🔗 Links & Resources

• neesh.ai – Justin's company
• Check out Justin’s LinkedIn for more info about his upcoming event: AI in the West

This solo debrief is as much a mirror as it is a microphone. Erik reflects on his conversation with Brendan Burns—coach, hedge fund founder, and a pivotal influence in his own journey—and uses it to explore the uncomfortable but critical tension between external success and internal clarity. What happens when even the best in the game can’t quite articulate their mission? What does that say about the rest of us?

🎯 Top Insights from the Interview

• Even Experts Miss Their Own Blind Spots: Despite all of Brendan’s skills, templates, and success, the clarity of mission and fear-handling frameworks still felt elusive. That’s not a failure—it’s reality.
• Plumber with a Leaky Sink Syndrome: Just because you help others with mission, vision, and values doesn’t mean you’ve nailed your own. And that’s okay, but it’s worth naming.
• Company vs. Life Alignment: The need for clarity hits harder in business, because leadership demands communication. But in life, ambiguity often goes unnoticed until it doesn't.
• The “Life Fund” Concept Is More Than a Thought Experiment: Pairing wealth management with intentional personal development could redefine how high performers grow—and how coaching reaches them.
• Hindsight Strategy Is Still Strategy: Sometimes, we only realize how smart a move was after the fact. Brendan’s investor-coaching overlap might be just that.

🧩 The Personal Layer

Erik doesn’t hold back here. He admits he hasn’t articulated a clear mission for his business, even as he coaches others through that very process. He opens up about his hesitancy to engage in a deep personal retreat, not out of fear of cost, but of disruption. And he shares how parenting, personal frameworks, and upcoming growth decisions are surfacing new questions. This is Erik, not just the coach or strategist, but the human navigating ambiguity in real time.

🧰 From Insight to Action

• Revisit Your Mission: Whether you’re a founder or solopreneur, if you haven’t done the work to articulate your mission and values, now is the time. Especially if you’re adding people soon.
• Name the Fear (Without Needing to Solve It Yet): If there’s something you’re avoiding (a conversation, a coach, a retreat), naming it clearly is the first courageous act.
• Look Back for Origin Stories: What skills from your past—degrees, roles, hobbies—still shape how you think and lead today? There’s wisdom in the rearview mirror.
• Design Your Own “Life Fund”: Whether you’re wealthy or not, think about investing equally in your financial health and your personal growth.
• Success Doesn’t Answer the Big Questions: Achieving your goals won’t automatically clarify your purpose. Do that work on purpose.

🗣️ Notable Quotes

🔗 Links & Resources

• Brian’s Coaching Website
• Listen to Brian’s Podcast
• Connect with Brian on Instagram