Gregory Kovsky is the President and CEO of International Business Associates (IBA), the Pacific Northwest’s oldest and largest business brokerage firm. With 32 years of M&A experience and more than 300 business sales facilitated, Gregory is one of the most seasoned intermediaries in the country. In this episode, he walks business owners through everything they need to know before putting their company on the market — from defining exit objectives to structuring a deal that protects their employees, customers, and legacy.

Topics covered in this episode:

• How to define your exit objectives before you engage a broker or test the market
• Why clean financials are the single most important factor in achieving maximum valuation
• The most common mistakes family business owners make that kill deals before they close
• How deal structures work — including seller notes, earn-outs, escrow holdbacks, and retained equity
• Why realistic timelines (6–12 months to sell, plus a transition period of up to 3 years) matter for planning
• How to build a winning transaction team: M&A intermediary, attorney, CPA, and wealth advisor

Whether you’re planning your exit now or years from now, this conversation will sharpen your thinking. Visit ibainc.com to book a free consultation with Gregory’s team.

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Mark Myers is the founder of Tax Wise Partners, a former Marine Corps sergeant, and a tax saving architect who has helped 500+ high-income earners and business owners permanently cut their annual tax bills by 30–60%. In this episode, Mark reveals why roughly 90% of businesses overpay taxes every year — and exactly what to do about it.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Why compliance-focused CPAs leave significant tax savings on the table
• How to treat your tax liability as a profit center, not a fixed cost
• Solar investments that generate $1.50 in tax savings for every dollar spent
• Charitable donation strategies that cost less than the deduction they produce
• How to structure a business sale to legally eliminate or defer capital gains
• Why working with a strategic tax partner benefits — not threatens — your existing CPA

If you are ready to stop bracing for impact at tax time and start planning offensively, visit taxwisepartners.com to book a free consultation with Mark and his team.

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David Farrell is a 25-year sales veteran and leader at Salesloft, an AI-powered revenue platform that helps sales teams build pipeline, close deals, and predict renewals. In this episode, David joins host John Golden to cut through the hype around artificial intelligence in sales and offer a grounded, practical view of where AI delivers real value — and where human judgment remains irreplaceable.

Topics covered in this episode:

• The three-legged stool framework for diagnosing any sales performance problem
• Why 78% of buyers complete most of their journey before engaging a salesperson — and what that means for your team
• How AI reduces pre-call research from five hours to fifteen minutes and what reps should do with that time
• The build-versus-buy decision facing enterprise organizations considering homegrown AI agents
• What the Salesloft and Clary merger means for unified revenue workflows
• Why smaller, nimble sales teams now hold a competitive advantage in the AI era

David brings sharp insight from decades in the field and shares a clear-eyed take on how sales organizations can adopt AI strategically rather than reactively. Connect with David and the Salesloft team at salesloft.com.

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Sid Bharath is the founder of Refound, an AI consultancy that helps mid-market companies become genuinely AI native. With a background spanning top-tier consulting, startup growth, and early-stage language model experimentation, Sid works hands-on with leadership teams to audit workflows, identify high-impact use cases, and deploy phased AI adoption strategies that deliver measurable results. In this episode, he joins John Golden to cut through the AI hype and explain exactly why so many company-wide initiatives fall flat — and what a successful transformation actually looks like.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Why AI initiatives fail due to change management gaps, not technology failures
• The unbundling approach: how to break down and rebuild processes around AI
• Why does overlaying AI on a broken workflow just accelerate the problems
• The orchestrator mindset shift — letting AI act while you direct
• How to handle messy, uncleaned data without stalling your rollout
• Why AI transformation must be owned at the C-suite level to succeed

If your company is investing in AI or planning to do so, Sid’s practical framework will help you avoid the most common and costly mistakes. Visit refoundai.com to learn more and book a free AI audit consultation.

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Richard Broo is a project management turnaround specialist and founder of True North PMP Consulting, with more than four decades of experience helping Fortune 500 companies and mid-market organizations recover projects that are bleeding budget, sliding on timelines, or losing leadership alignment. In this episode, Richard breaks down the invisible forces that cause most projects to fail quietly — long before anyone at the top realizes what is happening.

Topics covered in this episode:

• Why project failures almost always trace back to a specific three-way intersection of planning, execution, and people discipline
• How scope creep accumulates undetected, and what a proper scope statement must include to stop it
• Why assumptions and constraints function as “invisible assassins” that undermine even well-planned projects
• The hidden financial and emotional costs of executive sponsors who disengage mid-project
• The structured triage and root-cause corrective action process Richard uses to close critical bottlenecks within 60 days
• What small and mid-sized businesses can learn from General Electric’s project discipline model

If your organization is juggling multiple initiatives or struggling to keep a key project on track, Richard’s frameworks will give you a clear, actionable path forward. Visit truenorthpmpconsulting.com to book a free consultation.

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Shabnum Bi is the Founder and Director of Early Nurture Preschool in Birmingham — an Ofsted Outstanding setting that has attracted international delegates, earned a place in the Montessori International Awards finals, and brought Shabnum to a World Leaders Summit at the University of Oxford. In this episode, Shabnum shares how she rebuilt her early years’ setup from scratch after a forced liquidation, and why refusing to scale is her most deliberate business decision.

In this episode, Shabnum covers:

• How to balance daily hands-on leadership with a growing public profile and media presence
• Why she caps enrolment at 30 children — and how that ceiling creates competitive advantage
• The lessons from losing a 20-year business with half a day’s notice and launching again four weeks later
• How deep community roots translate into trust, referrals, and resilience
• Teaching three-year-olds lifelong skills: civic awareness, emotional regulation, and global empathy
• What international collaboration — from South Korea to the USA — looks like inside a small Birmingham preschool

Ready to transform how your community thinks about early education? Visit www.earlynurturepreschool.co.uk to learn more about Shabnum’s approach.

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Lisa Pagotto is the Founder & CEO of Crooked Compass, a multi-seven-figure immersive adventure travel company specializing in small group expeditions to the world’s most remote and extraordinary destinations. In this episode, she joins John Golden to share the leadership lessons forged in the aftermath of a Shark Tank episode that nearly cost her everything — and the pandemic pivot that rebuilt it stronger.

Topics covered:

• How chasing investor prestige caused her to lose sight of her founding purpose
• The moment a collapsed deal sent Crooked Compass into administration
• Rebuilding from first principles: the three pillars that guided her recovery
• Launching Crooked Compass by Air as a COVID pivot — using a pilot’s license she earned during lockdown
• Why alignment, radical transparency, and deep destination expertise drive her leadership today
• The community investment model that earns her access to the world’s most restricted travel destinations

Whether you’re navigating a business crisis or looking to sharpen your leadership philosophy, Lisa’s story is a masterclass in purposeful resilience. Explore her two adventure travel brands at crooked-compass.com.

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Sridhar Ravilla is a fractional transformation executive and author with more than 25 years of senior leadership experience at AT&T and Tech Mahindra, where he led enterprise-scale programmes spanning cloud, AI, and digital modernisation. He joins John Golden to diagnose a pattern he has seen across industries: well-funded, well-led transformations that collapse not at the strategy stage, but in the moments right after strategy is approved.

In this episode, Sridhar and John cover:

• Why accountability diffuses into committees and dashboards the moment a transformation moves from planning to execution
• How green dashboards hide unresolved trade-offs and what leaders should be asking instead
• The deferral committee trap — and why “let’s get more data” is a risk-relocation strategy in disguise
• Why AI delivers 270 degrees of visibility and what fills the critical remaining 90 degrees
• The resignation test: the single question every large-scale transformation needs to answer before launch
• How to structure named ownership so that the right person — not the AI, not the committee — carries the outcome

If accountability in transformation is something you wrestle with, Sridhar’s frameworks are immediately applicable. Connect with him directly at linkedin.com/in/sridharravilla/.

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