Todd Krause owns The Cleaning Authority in Fishers, on the northeast side of Indianapolis. He came to it from a career in institutional finance. His job ended on March 6, 2020, and ten days later he found a cleaning company for sale almost in his backyard.

The financials were solid. Then he got inside. There were thirty-two to thirty-four employees on paper, and on a good day twenty-two showed up. Every morning started with the managers telling each team what they'd done wrong the day before. Cleaner turnover was north of 200 percent a year, and the company was losing about 60 percent of its customers annually.

He told the managers to stop, and he tied bonuses directly to customer feedback. Mrs. Smith says the team did a good job, and a known amount lands on the next paycheck. She leaves a review and there's another. The crews didn't believe any of it until the first couple of teams got paid. The culture changed within weeks.

Other owners tell him that sounds expensive. Todd is a CPA, so he has the number. He says it cut operating expenses by more than eight percent, which he puts at $320,000 a year in profit on $4 million in revenue. He has since been named Franchisee of the Year by the International Franchise Association, and again by The Cleaning Authority.

It didn't start with the cleaning company. His father hauled milk for dairy farmers in Wisconsin, and in winter he'd shovel snow off their roofs so the sheds wouldn't collapse. You can hear where Todd got it.

Find Todd at silversunconsulting.com. His email and cell number are on the About page.

Hosted by Ashley DePiano, Duct Tape Marketing certified fractional CMO.

New episode every week.

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Dave Daley runs BrightSide Restoration in San Diego. He built four companies in four different industries and crashed one to the ground.

The one that crashed was a burger joint. Four hundred burgers at the soft opening, a line around the building, the mayor and the fire chief in the room, and a general manager frozen solid. Tickets were taking an hour. He fired the manager that same day and it still ended in personal bankruptcy. His own diagnosis: he stopped following the business plan that had already worked three times.

He's 60 now and scaling the restoration company through a private equity lens, which means answering one question. Does the business run without you? Most owners can't. Dave's view is blunter than that. They never built a business at all. They bought a job that carries all the liability and pays them last.

We also got into the two years that rearranged how he sees all of it. The bankruptcy, then his father's diagnosis, then a question he asked him in a hospital room a month before his 92nd birthday.

Find Dave at brightsiderest.com and on Instagram at @davedaley.

Hosted by Ashley DePiano, Duct Tape Marketing certified fractional CMO.

New episode every Monday.

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Mario Lanzarotti runs the Sovereign Advisor Group out of Cape Town. He was born in Germany to an Italian father, and his parents ran an Italian restaurant for nearly thirty years. They worked until one in the morning and there was nobody to watch him, so he spent his childhood evenings asleep in the storage room on top of the supplies. Mostly pizza dough.

He moved to New York in 2015 and talked his way from intern to co-founder of a custom shoe company. Then he spent five years running its operations badly enough to become the thing holding it back. Redoing work his team had already finished. Getting pulled back into client accounts. And telling himself, the whole time, that he didn't have time to build the systems that would have given him time.

It ended with a panic attack in the middle of his own influencer event. He walked out, sat down in Bryant Park, and called his girlfriend in Germany.

He sold the business in 2019. Since then he's worked with more than two thousand founders across fifteen countries, on two things at once. The operating standards and acquisition systems a business actually needs. And the reason the founder never gets around to building them.

He's also my advisor, which I should probably admit up front. He made me do the calendar exercise you'll hear in this episode. I didn't like the number.

Find Mario on LinkedIn, where he posts Monday to Friday. His site is mariolanzarotti.com, and you can apply there for a free diagnostic session or join the Founders Room, a weekly session he runs for founders.

Hosted by Ashley DePiano, Duct Tape Marketing certified fractional CMO.

New episode every week.

Want to be a guest? connectidcrm.com/handshake-podcast