Brian Franz: Legacy Starts Today, Not at the End

Brian Franz describes Envision3 as a manufacturer of your marketing ideas, which is a better description than "printer" once you hear what actually moves through the building. Direct mail, folding carton packaging, RV and automotive catalogs, pharmaceutical inserts, influencer kits assembled by hand. He calls the moment a client finally understands what is possible the light bulb moment, and chasing it is clearly the best part of his job.

His father and uncle started the company. When Brian graduated from John Brown University in Arkansas, his dad invited him to come work there, and Brian's first instinct was to say no, because he did not want a handout. He came anyway, on the condition that he would earn it, and he started in production learning the trade the way an apprentice would. Thirteen years later he is Vice President and still says print is one of the hardest industries to learn, because there are too many special cases to write them all down.

This conversation ranges widely. Brian explains why a press that prints both sides in one pass effectively doubles a plant's capacity, how the company keeps any single customer under seven percent of revenue so that no one client can shake the business, and why he believes AI will shift print workers from being the author of a process to being its editor. He also talks about the part of his life that has nothing to do with paper, including a capped lifestyle and a giving commitment that only moves one direction.

In this episode:

• Why Brian calls Envision3 a custom bakery, and what that explains about pricing, changeovers, and why the cheap online option is cheap
• The blue flecks in a batch of paper that only appeared when someone touched it with a particular alcohol-based marker, and what solving that kind of mystery says about craftsmanship
• How a family-owned company chooses acquisitions in an industry being consolidated by private equity, and why one customer at forty percent of revenue is a reason to walk away
• The myths keeping a generation out of manufacturing, and what he wishes high schools and colleges would show students
• Sixteen months of building a personal brand on LinkedIn, started when his son was born, and why the relationships have mattered more than the reach
• Nourish International, forty dollars a month, and the twelve-year-old boy the size of a five-year-old who changed how Brian thinks about generosity
• Forty minutes at midday, seven days a week, and the night it became a run with a stroller instead

Brian's answer to our title question: making more of a legacy. Not the end-of-life kind, but the kind that starts today.

Learn more at https://www.envision-3.com and connect with Brian Franz on LinkedIn. To support the work he discussed in Nicaragua, look up Nourish International at https://nourishintl.org/.

Making More: The Podcast is hosted by Billy Fischer. New episodes every other week. If this conversation was useful to you, please follow the show and share it with a leader who needs it.

Find Billy on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bigeyedfisch/ or visit his website, billyfischer.focalpointcoaching.com.

Erin Mitchell: The Worst Marketing Client She Ever Had Was Herself

Erin Mitchell was leading a marketing team at CVS Health when the company laid off one percent of its workforce in a single day. One percent was five thousand people, and she was one of them. She had always known she wanted to be an entrepreneur. That morning she had to decide whether she actually meant it.

Three years later she is a fractional CMO with a client roster she chose on purpose, a seat on the Forbes Coaches Council, and a brand she is in the middle of rebuilding. In this episode she shares the rebrand from BETotal Solutions to Grow Giants before it was public, including where the name came from, which was in the shower, and what it took to admit that the business she had built was drifting somewhere she did not want to go.

Erin is unusually candid about the parts most consultants smooth over. She was applying for jobs and chasing clients at the same time and getting nowhere, because they required two different mindsets and two different sets of materials. She built her first website with none of the discipline she sells to clients, and she says if she had seen it as a consultant she would have asked who exactly it was talking to. She has invested zero dollars in her own marketing for three years while telling clients to spend five percent of revenue on theirs.

In this episode:

• The difference between "we need marketing" and "we need a growth system," and why she says the biggest part of her job is saying no
• The same-day appointment campaign she delayed because both physicians went on vacation, and why a campaign is a promise to a community
• Diagnosing the real bottleneck, including the client whose entire problem was that nobody was answering the phone
• How to build a roadmap that survives contact with a business that cannot stop to plan
• Why marketing gets cut first in a down economy, and what a century of research says about the companies that protect it anyway
• Bridging the classroom and the workplace for graduate students at the University of Illinois Gies College of Business, and what Gen Z is teaching her about the future of work
• Coaching her own daughter in the pool, coming down too hard after a disappointing meet, the apology that followed, and the state title that came after

Erin's answer to our title question: Making More Giants.

Connect with Erin Mitchell on LinkedIn to follow the Grow Giants launch.

Find Billy on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bigeyedfisch/ or visit his website, billyfischer.focalpointcoaching.com.

Chris Umar Carter grew up on a farm in Jamaica, feeding pigs and chickens before dawn, where a trip to Kentucky Fried Chicken was a fourteen-mile drive and a genuine treat. He arrived in the United States at twelve years old and learned something quickly: when everything around you is new, you stop talking and you start watching. Middle school was brutal. There were days he locked himself in the bathroom at lunch.

Four decades later, he has been a project controller in Brussels, an auditor who inherited a predecessor's ledgers written entirely in French with no Google Translate and three weeks to close the year, a CFO, and for the last fifteen years a cybersecurity leader. He was doing fractional executive work long before anyone called it that.

This conversation covers a lot of ground, but it keeps returning to one idea. Umar's father told him never to rise after the sun. His mother told him to do it right or not at all, and never wait to be told. Those farm rules became a 4:20 AM ritual of mantras, prayer, and hours in the gym, and they became a leadership philosophy that he states plainly: stop trying to impress people and start becoming useful, because useful people become trusted, trusted people become leaders, and leaders create opportunities.

In this episode:

• Why a finance leader sees cyber risk differently, and his framing that numbers tell you what happened while relationships tell you why
• Whether AI is hype or the next industrial revolution, and how to keep your independent thinking from atrophying along the way
• What Brussels and Germany taught him about patience, observation, and the fact that his way is not always the right way
• The trap of performative leadership, and why character is who you are when no one is measuring your performance
• A year out from cancer surgery, and how the question changed from how much can I accomplish to what will matter
• Why success that is not shared eventually becomes empty
• The one thing he hopes his college-bound son carries with him

Umar's answer to our title question: making more trust. His goal is to leave behind more of it than he found.

Connect with Umar on LinkedIn, where he runs a 30 for 30: thirty people, thirty minutes each, thirty days of coaching and mock interviews for job seekers.

Find Billy on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/bigeyedfisch/ or visit his website, billyfischer.focalpointcoaching.com.