What if every hard-earned lesson in your business came with a simple mandate: how dare you do nothing with what's been given to you?

In this episode, Bill Sherman talks with serial entrepreneur and systems strategist Apple Levy, author of "The Apple Effect". Apple has spent decades in construction, manufacturing, home flipping, and retail. She combines operational grit with financial discipline to help entrepreneurs stop firefighting and start scaling with intention. Her core belief is simple and provocative: if you know something that works, you have a duty to share it.

Apple walks through how she turned years of wins and failures into a repeatable framework for growth. She explains why she began capturing notes, call recordings, and data from every client, and how that archive became The Apple Effect—a practical playbook for owners running businesses from $1M to $40M in revenue. The book distills what actually moves margin, cash flow, and culture, and she uses it as the backbone for her firm, Obsidian Thorne, when helping companies scale.

You'll hear the real problems that keep owners up at night. Not just cash flow and margin, but rework that kills profit, weak follow-up on sales, and the emotional landmine of hiring family you can't hold accountable. Apple shows how to move from "leading by personality" to "leading by systems," so the process becomes the bad cop—not you. That shift frees leaders to exit someday, build a legacy, or simply step out of daily chaos.

Apple and Bill also explore the mindset required to grow. Apple challenges entrepreneurs to ask, "How badly do I want this?" and to accept that scaling may mean dismantling what no longer serves the business—including long-standing people, habits, and assumptions. She shares how she applies her own advice inside Obsidian Thorne, using automation, hiring a business development lead early, and treating every pain point in her firm as data she can use to better serve clients.

Finally, Apple looks ahead. She talks about taking her message to bigger stages—through construction trade shows like Build Expo, her growing calendar of workshops, and future events she plans to host herself. She's already filling the next scratch pad with insights for future books and building a team of people who share her attitude: hungry, accountable, and obsessed with helping entrepreneurs go from $1M to $10M and beyond.

If you're an owner who's tired of firefighting, wrestling with family in the business, or worried about what you're leaving to the next generation, this conversation—and The Apple Effect—offers both a wake-up call and a roadmap.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Systemize your expertise. Turning real-world lessons into a documented framework is the foundation for scaling any business.

• Measure what matters. KPIs and process discipline reduce rework, protect margin, and move the company out of constant firefighting.

• Use your book as a strategic tool. A well-structured book can double as a thought leadership platform and an operating guide for clients and teams.

If this episode has you thinking about systems, scale, and getting out of firefighting, the next step is to focus on your leaders. Pair this conversation with the episode "Scaling Leadership: Making Coaching Accessible at Every Level" with Kristin Lytle and you'll see the other side of the equation: how to build repeatable, scalable ways to grow people, not just processes.

Both episodes explore how to move from one-off heroics to structured, repeatable solutions—whether that's tightening operations and KPIs, or creating blended coaching and learning programs that reach leaders at every level. Listen to them together and you'll walk away with a more complete roadmap: how to systemize the business and build a culture of high integrity, accountability, and leadership growth across the organization.

What if innovation wasn't reserved for a handful of "geniuses" in hoodies and turtlenecks? What if every person in your organization could solve real problems in bold new ways?

Today's episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, I'm joined by Richard Braden to explore how to democratize innovation inside the enterprise. We dig into his practical framework from "Innovation-ish: How Anyone Can Create Breakthrough Solutions to Real Problems in the Real World" which was co-authored with Tessa Forshaw to challenge the myth of the lone genius. Innovation stops being a mysterious black box and becomes a repeatable, teachable capability across the business.

Rich explains why most organizations over-invest in "innovation theater" and under-invest in mindset. Instead of obsessing over yet another step-by-step process, he focuses on the mental shifts that actually drive breakthrough thinking. From "shopping" vs. "buying" mindsets to the difference between learning, iterating, and executing, you'll get language you can use with your teams tomorrow.

We also unpack Rich's hybrid model for innovation: part consulting, part capability-building. You'll hear how a global quick-service restaurant brand redesigned its supply chain using cross-functional teams—everyone from restaurant crew to executives—working on real projects over nine months. The result? Tangible business outcomes and an enduring lift in problem-solving capability, long after the external experts left.

Rich shows that innovation isn't just about moonshots. It's about orbit shots, cloud shots, roof shots, and jump shots—small, targeted changes that add up to massive impact. Imagine your finance team "innovating" the expense-report process so it's fast, accurate, and painless. That may not land you on the cover of a magazine, but it can unlock time, energy, and engagement across the organization.

If you're tired of one-off workshops, "innovation labs" off in a corner, or expensive programs that don't stick, this conversation with Rich Braden offers a better path. You'll learn how to embed innovation in day-to-day work, build your own obsolescence into client engagements, and turn innovation from a slogan into a core competency.

Three Key Takeaways:

• Innovation is a teachable skill. It's not the domain of lone geniuses; with the right mindsets and language, you can help people across the organization solve real problems in new ways.

• Mindset beats methodology. Most organizations over-index on processes and "innovation theater," but sustainable breakthroughs come from shifting how people think, learn, and experiment in their day-to-day work.

• Capability-building must be tied to real work. The most effective innovation programs blend consulting with hands-on projects, so teams deliver tangible business outcomes and build enduring problem-solving muscles at the same time.

If this conversation on democratizing innovation resonated with you, your next listen should be the episode with Michele Zanini. In that one, we take the same core ideas—moving beyond "innovation theater," distributing problem-solving across the organization, and building real capability instead of one-off programs—and apply them to dismantling bureaucracy and unleashing talent at scale.

Listen to both episodes together and you'll get a powerful one-two punch: a practical framework for everyday innovation, plus a blueprint for removing the structural and cultural barriers that keep your people from using it. If you're serious about making innovation everyone's job—not just a select few in a lab—queue up the Michele Zanini episode next.