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Would you like to work with better clients, make more money, and build a business that gives you true freedom?
Have you struggled with the loneliness that comes with working long hours and solving the dozens of complex problems you face as an entrepreneur?
Do you ever feel like the most valuable business secrets are shared behind closed doors—where only insiders have access?
Welcome to The Inside BS Show—your daily invitation to step behind the velvet rope and into the room where real business leaders talk strategy, success, and scale.
These are your people. They've been where you are, and they've gone where you want to go. But most importantly, they feel your pain and can help it go away.
If you're an entrepreneur, CEO of a private company, or leader of a professional firm, this show is your secret weapon.
Each day, we break down the business growth strategies that insiders use to win—revenue generation, building influence, succession planning, hiring top talent, navigating legal minefields, and crafting an exit strategy that maximizes value.
But this isn’t just a podcast—it’s a community. We don’t just talk at you; we bring you into the conversation.
Your hosts, attorney/entrepreneur Nicola Gelormino (Nicki G) and author/consultant Dave Lorenzo (The Godfather of Growth), give you an exclusive front-row seat to the insights, strategies, and behind-the-scenes conversations that drive business success.
A new episode drops daily at 6 AM—because insiders start their day ahead of the game.
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What are you waiting for? Join us ON THE INSIDE.
Welcome to the Inside BS Show. Today's conversation is all about CEO mindset. What do I mean by that? You as the leader of your business have to make tough decisions.
When a problem gets to you, it's already gone through the most senior people in your company. The people who had the best minds for making decisions have already been baffled and bamboozled by this problem. And that's why it's come to you.
The bigger your company gets, the more you'll find that these problems will often include tension between two of your executives who have very different and very focused and specific backgrounds. I want you to get out a sheet of paper right now and I want you to write three columns. Column number one is strategy.
Column number two in the middle is operations. And column number three on the right is risk. All of the disciplines in your business fall into one of these three columns.
Sales and marketing, for example, falls into strategy. The manufacturing of your product or the delivery of your service, that falls into operations. And then legal advice, finance and accounting, that will fall into risk.
So when you turn to a strategy person for advice, they're going to be focused on the future. They're going to be focused on growth. They're going to be focused on opportunities.
If you turn to an operations person for advice, they're going to be focused on making it happen. They're going to be focused on the present. They're going to be focused on what's going on in the business in order to satisfy the customer that you have in front of you.
And if you turn to one of the risk folks, it's going to always be about cutting costs or reducing exposure or eliminating things that drag the business down. So strategy is always going to be future focused. Operations is always going to be present focus.
And then risk is always going to be focused on exposure and what could happen and reducing it. You as the CEO are going to need to make all three of these areas work in harmony. Notice I didn't say balance.
When a problem comes to you as the CEO, your choice may be between risk and opportunity in the future. Your choice may be between risk and serving a client need in the present. Your choice may be between risk and both operational needs now for today and the needs of the business in the future.
If you listened to only one person, you wouldn't be able to make a good decision for the company. You have to weigh risk with present and risk with future, present needs with future needs and all across the board. So how do you as a CEO make these decisions? I like to have my clients list out everything that could possibly happen in each of these three areas related to each decision.
So how does this decision face, how does this decision affect our future and the strategy we have in place? How does this decision affect today and our ability to deliver for our clients? And what risks does this decision pose to our current state, to our future state? And how do we mitigate or limit those risks? Those are the questions I encourage my CEO clients to ask themselves when they're making big decisions. So give me a real world scenario. Okay, real world scenario.
We have a marketing budget of $50,000 and someone has come to us and they say, the TV show that airs and that is gonna hit your exact demographic that buys your products, they suddenly have an opening for somebody who is in your business. But that total ad buy is going to be about $100,000 you're going to run the ads and we project you will get a five times return on your investment. So if you invest 100,000, we project you'll get 500,000 back.
But that projection is based on the demographics and the psychographics of the people in the industry and it's based on the return that a client who is similar to you has received. Do you want to invest $100,000? So in the strategy column, this will potentially fulfill your marketing goals, your business growth goals for the whole year. In the day to day operations column, well, if we get a five times return on our investment, could we handle all of those orders? Well, we could handle all those orders, but if we got a five X return on investment, that would be pushing the upper limits with our current equipment, anything more than that and we'll have to buy new equipment.
From a risk perspective, do we have the $100,000? We budgeted 50, do we have an extra 50 we can get from somewhere else? And if we take that 50 from somewhere else, what are we going to short? What is going to be slighted by us removing that money from the other area? So where we would get the extra 50? Well, we were going to purchase a new vehicle. Instead, can we extend the life of the old vehicle for another year? Yes, but it's a risk. Then from a legal standpoint, what contracts do we have to sign and what are we committing to in order to do this advertising? And what assurances do we have that the advertising is going to work? So those are the three things in each of the three areas and you as a CEO have to weigh the risk of delaying the purchase of a new vehicle to advertise with a result that's not potentially guaranteed.
You also have to balance in that the fact that if it does push a five times return on investment, that'll be the maximum your production capacity has. If it goes over that, you might have some dissatisfied clients and customers and you might have to figure out a way to expand capacity, which would be a good problem to have. But that's an example of a decision that involves each of the three disciplines that the CEO has to make.
If you ask the head of sales to make that, the head of sales would say, sure, do it. The five X return on investment, even if we only get a one X return on our investment, we're still going to blow away our goals for the year. If you ask the operations person, they would say, you can do it, but you maybe only invest half because I don't want to push our capacity too much.
If you ask the risk people, they'd be like a budget's a budget. If you don't have the money in the budget, you can't steal from one place to make money in another. Each one of those individual siloed areas and the individual leaders would have their own specific opinion.
And we have to assume that their opinion would benefit their work group. You as the CEO have to take a step back and make a decision that is a holistic decision for the company, and may put one or more of those areas in an uncomfortable position in the short term for the long-term gain of the company or the organization. This CEO mindset is critical.
And what I've seen over the years in big companies is that when a CEO comes up through the ranks of sales and marketing, they tend to have a bias for strategy. When a CEO comes up through the ranks of operations, they tend to have a bias for operations, for the day-to-day workings of the company. When a CEO comes up through the ranks of finance and accounting or legal, they tend to have a bias away from risk.
And they need to be pushed in the areas where, and challenged in the areas where they normally do not have a propensity to gravitate toward. I want you to think about this conversation, and I want you to create your own industry-specific, company-specific case study, and determine when you might be challenged from a strategy, from an operations, and from a risk perspective. This has been your CEO mindset.
I am Dave Lorenzo, the Godfather of Growth, and I'll be back here with you tomorrow for another edition of our show.