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.

Jamaica Slicer spent 15 years as a go-to-market practitioner before she and her co-founder Brian noticed the same frustrating pattern from opposite sides of the table. Early-stage startups desperately needed experienced go-to-market talent. Experienced go-to-market talent kept choosing established companies that could pay more. It was a cycle nobody could break from inside.

Their answer was Budburst, a go-to-market consulting cooperative that scales seasoned experts across multiple startups at once. They gave themselves three to six months to see if the idea had legs. They had their first client within a month. Three years later, three of their client companies have exited successfully, and every single client has come through word of mouth.

This conversation is a practical clinic for anyone leading through a messy growth period. Jamaica is direct about the traps: the founder who keeps attending every sales meeting because the knowledge lives only in their head, the leader who climbs into the ivory tower and stops operating, the sales team told to "go generate pipeline" with no targets and no playbook.

In this episode:

• The biggest go-to-market misconception, and why superior products get outsold every day
• Building a cooperative that works for people at every career stage, including one teammate who works five hours a week between fishing trips
• The first-year surprise nobody saw coming: how VC and private equity relationships became their entire growth engine, and the integrity lines they drew before it started
• Why documentation is the first system crack Jamaica looks for, and how a game of telephone breaks a growing sales team
• Building your own goals with metrics attached instead of waiting for someone to hand them to you
• How to hold a high standard without creating fear, silence, or burnout, including the 15-minute debrief her team runs after every important customer meeting
• The signals that tell you it's time to change rooms, not just change roles

Jamaica's answer to our title question: making more time. Her reason for it, including what scared her about the idea of retirement, is worth sitting with.

Find Jamaica Slicer on LinkedIn, and learn more about Budburst at https://budburst.io

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

Nick Marquart, Co-Founder & CTO of Infinity Labs: Scaling Trust in a High-Stakes World

When Nick Marquart told his eight-months-pregnant wife he was quitting his job to join a startup, he had no savings plan and no entrepreneurial preparation. Six years later, Infinity Labs has grown from seven people to more than ninety, and the son born a month after the company started is about to begin kindergarten.

In this conversation, Nick pulls back the curtain on a world most people misunderstand. Infinity Labs is a Dayton, Ohio software company working in defense modeling and simulation, cybersecurity for the things that were never meant to be connected to the internet, and research and development that borrows its best ideas from biology. As one of their chief scientists puts it: nature always wins.

But the heart of this episode is what happens to a company when it outgrows the room where everyone knows everything. Nick is refreshingly honest about the reorgs, the communication breakdown around fifty employees, and the moment he realized he had created a bottleneck by promoting too few leaders too fast. His analogy for it involves the Three Stooges and a doorway, and every leader who has scaled a team will wince in recognition.

In this episode:

• What people get wrong about government contracting, and why the reality looks nothing like the headlines
• Modeling and simulation explained in plain language, plus what it is like working inside two million lines of code with hundreds of stakeholders
• Winning a seat on the Forge contract, and the "cannot fail" pressure that came with it
• Why the hardest part of scaling was not compliance, but finding the next layer of leadership
• The traits that separate a great developer from a leader you can trust, including what Nick means by soft skills on top of the software
• How Aileron helped Infinity Labs formalize core values, and how those values now shape hiring, pricing, and which partnerships they walk away from
• Keeping trust intact through meaningful interactions, with a memorable counterexample from Office Space

Nick's answer to our title question: making more time with the kids.

Learn more about Nick and Infinity Labs at https://i-labs.tech or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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.

Episode 18: Abigail Church | HR That Builds Trust, Clarity, and Cohesiveness

In this episode of Making More, Billy Fischer sits down with Abigail Church, PHR, an HR business partner with GrowthLab, to talk about the people systems growing companies need before the cracks start showing.

Abigail works with startups and growing organizations to build the HR foundation that keeps teams compliant, aligned, and scalable. From handbooks and payroll setup to employee classification, compensation benchmarking, feedback systems, and performance improvement plans, her work sits at the intersection of compliance and culture.

This conversation reframes HR as leadership infrastructure, not paperwork. Abigail explains why “we’ll fix it later” often becomes expensive, why clarity builds trust, and why difficult feedback can be an act of care when it is handled with honesty, structure, and support.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Why early-stage companies need HR foundations before problems appear
• The hidden cost of misclassification, unclear pay bands, and incomplete documentation
• How GrowthLab helps companies build compliant, scalable people systems
• Why clarity is one of the most important trust-building tools in leadership
• How performance improvement plans can be collaborative, not punitive
• What healthy conflict and workplace cohesiveness actually look like
• Why leaders should stop pushing HR problems to “next quarter”

Abigail’s answer to the title question was clear: making more clarity and cohesiveness. In her view, clarity helps build cohesiveness, and cohesiveness helps individuals, teams, and businesses achieve their goals.

Learn more about GrowthLab:
www.growthlabfinancial.com

Connect with Abigail on LinkedIn:
Abigail Church, PHR: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abigail-church-phr

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

In this special episode of Making More, Billy Fischer is joined by three high school entrepreneurs — Prit Patel, Kishan Patel, and Nidhi Patel — the founding team behind Roots2Results.

While most students are focused on getting through the week, these three are building a real business and solving important problems. Their story starts with something personal: helping their families navigate complicated business paperwork, financial decisions, and legal language that can be difficult to interpret. That lived experience turned into a mission — create tools and services that make it easier for small business owners to understand what they’re signing, what they’re paying for, and what their next best step should be.

Along the way, we also talk about what they’ve learned through the student-run retail operation Highlander Outfitters, where they’ve managed inventory, marketing, sales, and operations — getting a crash course in real-world execution before graduation.

In this conversation, we cover:

• How Roots2Results started and what problem they’re solving
• Why legal and financial jargon creates real barriers for business owners
• Their subscription-based concept and how they’re thinking about pricing and value
• What they’ve learned from running Highlander Outfitters behind the scenes
• What it means to lead and build while still balancing school, friends, and extracurriculars

Making More (their answers):

• Kishan: making more time
• Prit: making more connections
• Nidhi: making more impact

Learn more:
Roots2Results feature: https://vace.uky.edu/news/roots2results
LinkedIn (company): https://www.linkedin.com/sales/company/109166927

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

In this episode of Making More, Billy Fischer sits down with Brage Garofalo for a powerful conversation about transition, identity, service, and the deep human need for belonging.

Brage has spent years supporting veterans, first responders, elite operators, and high performers as they navigate the difficult space between who they were, who they served with, and who they are becoming next. Drawing from her background in clinical research, her work in mental health, and her commitment to those moving through major life transitions, Brage brings a deeply compassionate perspective to what happens when structure fades and the uniform comes off.

Billy and Brage explore the loss of tribe many veterans experience after service, the emotional and intellectual side of transition, and why rebuilding community is just as important as building a resume or LinkedIn profile. They also discuss leadership lessons from military teams, the importance of psychological safety, and what business leaders can learn from people who have been trained to operate with trust, humility, loyalty, and mission focus.

The conversation also takes a memorable turn into open-water swimming, including Brage’s story of participating in the Frogman Swim under the Golden Gate Bridge, where a mysterious bump in the water became a vivid metaphor for fear, focus, and the instinct to keep moving forward.

At the heart of this episode is Brage’s answer to the title question: she wants to make more of a difference. Whether through supporting someone in transition, helping a veteran feel less alone, or simply leaving the world better than she found it, Brage reminds us that meaningful impact often begins with showing up for people when they need a tribe the most.

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