Shows
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNever Give An AI Agent An Employee Login (Greg Wood)Greg Wood is the Founder & Group CEO of WrkFlws.Greg Wood started out as a swaps and derivatives attorney at Linklaters, where lawyers advise on a rule and hand it over to someone else. At Bridgewater Associates he led the Dodd-Frank implementation and was responsible for making the rule operate inside the firm, and he found he cared far more about that kind of work. He saw banks everywhere facing the same problem with advisors who stopped at the recommendation, so he left to build a firm that does the delivery work. Fifteen years...
2026-10-1220 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why Your Gala Barely Pays Off (Vasheti Quirós)Vasheti Quirós is the Founder of Well Balanced CEO.Vasheti Quirós began her career as an administrative assistant at Walt Disney World, where she realized she wanted to build programs for places that make families and children happy. That took her into the nonprofit world: at the Early Learning Coalition of Osceola County in Florida she managed state-funded early learning and pre-K program dollars, and after moving back to her home state of Washington she joined the Snohomish County Music Project as development director and was later promoted to executive director. There sh...
2026-10-1020 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why Your Employees Resist Change (Priya Bates)Priya Bates is the President of Inner Strength Communication.Priya Bates spent more than 20 years in-house leading communication for large organizations, including over seven years in corporate communications at HP Canada and nearly six years as Senior Director of Internal Communications at Loblaw Companies. She always wanted to be a consultant: she left HP for a one-year maternity leave contract at Loblaw hoping it would turn into consulting work, was hired instead to lead and grow the internal communications department, and asked for three years to be let go before she finally went out...
2026-10-1018 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastStop Measuring AI By Tool Adoption (Lisa Taylor)Lisa Taylor is the Founder and CEO of Challenge Factory.Lisa Taylor started her career in strategy consulting and went on to run a country-level business unit for Hewlett-Packard in Canada, leading a consulting practice of more than a hundred people. When she asked her team, whose average age was 48 and who had been with the company for 18 years, what they wanted to do next, none of them knew how they would figure it out, and most planned to stay put until the mortgage was paid off. In her early 30s she left corporate...
2026-10-1022 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is How AI Turns You Into A Passive Thinker (Tom Bryant)Tom Bryant is the Founder and Managing Director of TFB Consulting, an AI plus human strategist based in London.Tom Bryant has spent more than 25 years in tech transformation, learning and change. A Master's in HR led him into the people side of technology, first at Accenture on large global tech transformations, then as Global Head of Learning & Development at Colt Technology Services. Within three weeks of founding TFB Consulting in 2013, he got a call from the UK Cabinet Office asking him to come in as a Senior Advisor on digital skills across the...
2026-10-1021 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy Your Most Engaged Team Will Resist Change (Csaba Toth)Csaba Toth is the Founder of ICQ Global.Csaba Toth grew up between cultures and studied business psychology and international management. His first company in the UK grew into one of the biggest restaurant listings in the country, then turned into a joint venture that he lost, because what made sense on paper did not work between the people involved. That failure became the topic of his dissertation on Eastern and Western European joint ventures, and the research behind ICQ Global. Today ICQ Global measures the nine biomarkers within psychological safety, motivational drivers and...
2026-10-0919 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastAI Is Making Every Business Think The Same (Rob Mitchell)Rob Mitchell is the Co-Founder of Exhibit B Partners.Rob Mitchell started out in journalism and spent several years as a managing editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit, leading global thought leadership projects for blue-chip clients. He co-founded Longitude and led it as CEO from a startup to its acquisition by the Financial Times, running hundreds of engagements for multinational brands in finance, professional services and technology. He now runs Exhibit B Partners, which helps companies build and scale profitable thought leadership businesses. In this conversation, Rob explains why most companies get their positioning...
2026-10-0918 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why Sustainability Plans Never Leave The Boardroom (Pierluigi Zacheo)Pierluigi Zacheo is the Founder and Managing Director of MyStadium.Pierluigi Zacheo is an industrial engineer who founded MyStadium in London in 2011 to help sport and major events organisations manage their environmental and social impact. He saw a gap: quality and environmental management systems already existed, but the sport and events industry had no framework of its own, until the British standard for sustainable events, BS 8901, became ISO 20121 as part of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games legacy. Since then he has advised organisations including the NBA and Formula E, where a community dispute...
2026-10-0919 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastYour Leadership Team Only Thinks It Agrees (Jeremy Sturt)Jeremy Sturt is the Owner of Just Add Water.Jeremy Sturt started his career as a stage manager in London's West End, working on big musicals through the 80s and 90s for the likes of Cameron Mackintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber. In the mid-90s a global consulting firm asked him to challenge the thinking of its partner group, so he and a partner had 400 people at a time put on their own opera in an open-air amphitheatre built in the Algarve. Since 1995 he has designed and facilitated leadership development and employee engagement programmes...
2026-10-0920 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNever Let AI Build Your Financial Assumptions (Neethu Stephen)Neethu Stephen is the Founder of Evalua8.Neethu Stephen is a chartered accountant who runs Evalua8, an embedded finance team for founders and senior management at SaaS, fintech and agency businesses. She started out in audit, spent time in risk advisory at Ernst & Young and with Protiviti, then spent five years at Futurebooks, rising from business consultant to partner. After moving from Singapore to the UK she began contracting through her own company, which grew into Evalua8, now a team of about five across the UK and India, and she has also served as...
2026-10-0818 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Not About You (Caroline Berglund)Caroline Berglund is the Founder and Principal of Talk Talk, a Canadian firm that runs leadership workshops, team development, executive coaching and public speaking programs.Caroline first started Talk Talk about sixteen years ago, then spent roughly eight or nine years inside one of the big consulting houses, where she looked after their leadership practice and worked on their employee engagement survey. Six or seven years ago she resurrected Talk Talk, and some of her clients came with her. She has run workshops for 25 to 30 years, wrote a book studying 365 talks to put herself...
2026-10-0819 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastProject Managers Who Ignore AI Are Out Of The Game (Jean-François Tassé)Jean-François Tassé is a Partner and Vice-President of PlanAxion Solutions.Jean-François Tassé is a founding partner of PlanAxion Solutions, a consulting firm in business since 2015 that runs project management, solution architecture and business analysis on its clients' behalf, and over the last year has added an AI division to its projects. Before PlanAxion he spent almost eight years at IBM, first as a Managing Consultant and then as an Oracle EBS Solution Architect, after four years as a Senior Consultant at CGI. In this conversation, Jean-François explains how PlanAxion uses AI in bo...
2026-10-0826 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastOnly 20% Of Your Team Will Ever Innovate (Karen Tilstra)Karen Tilstra is the Founder and President of Creativity Effect, a consulting company that helps leaders and organizations build the mindset, skills, and culture of innovation.Karen holds a PhD in Innovation and Creative Problem Solving from Andrews University and an EdS in Educational Psychology from Chapman University. She spent over a decade co-founding and running the AdventHealth Innovation Lab, while also building innovation labs for a professional sports organization, higher education, healthcare, and government, and co-designing the nation's first undergraduate degree in innovation and social entrepreneurship at Rollins College. When COVID hit, Karen...
2026-10-0817 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastEvery Branding Dollar Is Wasted Without This (Mona Amodeo)Mona Amodeo, Ph.D., is the Founder and President of idgroup.Mona Amodeo started out teaching broadcast journalism at the University of West Florida and working with an international documentary unit. After being detained by the Panamanian Defense Force during the Noriega era on a documentary trip, she took her last university paycheck, rented space from a friend and started the agency that is now idgroup. For more than 35 years she has helped organizations build their brand from the inside out with her Branding from the Core approach, and she wrote the book Beyond...
2026-10-0825 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastAI Won't Replace You, But This Skill Will (Carla Taylor)Carla Taylor is the CEO and Founder of Bring Your Brilliance, an AI era workforce and leadership development firm helping organizations build the human skills that AI cannot replace.Carla began her career in corporate learning and development after earning a master's degree in instructional design, communications, and training technology, working first at Eli Lilly, the global pharmaceutical company where her own father had spent his career, before moving into an internal leadership consultant role at the roughly 5,500 employee Ascension St. Vincent hospital system. In the middle of the 2009 recession she launched her first...
2026-10-0723 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastMost Firms Chase Demand That Doesn't Exist (Roman Ponos)Roman Ponos is the President of Pope Solutions, an advisory firm that helps companies moving from the international market into the US federal and state-and-local (SLED) contracting space.Roman spent most of his career in international development, working for both for-profit contractors and nonprofits, mostly in partnership with USAID, the agency that closed its doors last year. He joined Pope Solutions as a partner a little over a year ago to build out the firm's business development practices, the same work he'd done for 15 years across the industry, and was promoted to President in...
2026-10-0719 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastAI Is A Tool, Not Your Competition (Courtney Young)Courtney Young is the President and CEO of ForeSight Communications, a public relations and marketing agency that helps government and industry authorities expand their reach, manage their brand, and guide change.Courtney got her start with an undergraduate degree in communications and two years in a biotech company's marketing department, a deliberate stop to learn how a business actually runs before going out on her own. At 23, an opportunity came along that replaced her salary, and she took it, asking her employer for a box and walking out to start what would become ForeSight...
2026-10-0719 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Should Face A Layoff Alone (Rafael-Cristian Rios)Rafael-Cristian Rios is the Founder of well transitioned.Rafael-Cristian Rios has spent 25 years in HR and learning and development, with roles at FedEx Office, DTCC and Google (through HCL Tech). Early in his career, as a teenager helping a startup grow, he hired and trained a team that became his friends, and two years later he was handed a list and asked to walk 90 of them, one by one, into the room where they would be laid off. Later he was laid off himself, more than once, and learned firsthand what it is like...
2026-10-0718 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Should Let AI Run Their Books Yet (Damian Connolly)Damian Connolly is the Founder and Managing Director of Sakura Business Solutions.Damian Connolly is a Fellow of the ACCA (FCCA) who has run Sakura Business Solutions since 2012, an accountancy practice for SMEs in the UK and Ireland that combines outsourced finance team services with business advisory, fractional CFO support and exit planning. Before Sakura he ran finance at Instant Access Group, where the business grew from around £5 million in turnover across two companies to eighteen companies in six jurisdictions, with new offices in Spain, Hong Kong and South Africa, and he took it t...
2026-10-0718 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastTraining Never Fixes What The Subconscious Is Running (Julian Sado)Julian Sado is the Founder of Pivot-2-Change, a behavioral coach and NLP practitioner who works with leaders and sales teams.Julian Sado's path into behavioral science runs through the streets of East Los Angeles, the music industry, where he worked as a talent agent, kickboxing, and then corporate sales. Mentored by Jim Rohn, who pointed him toward neuroscience and NLP, he now spends his days observing what people say versus what they actually mean, then running mastermind groups where leaders and sales teams discover for themselves how to change their behavior. In this...
2026-10-0723 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Who Drinks Their Own Kool-Aid Survives In Business (David Nolan)David Nolan is the Fractional CEO of The Proper Group.David built his career inside Marriott International before moving up to CEO roles at major destination organizations, including a nine-year push to help finance a $500 million convention center in Cleveland. He later transitioned from full-time executive roles into fractional work, founding The Proper Group to bring the hospitality philosophy he learned at Marriott, that taking care of employees is what takes care of customers, which is what takes care of the business, to small and mid-size companies across hospitality and beyond. In this conversation...
2026-10-0724 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastRevenue Is the Great Deodorant for Every Broken Company (Eddie Jimenez)Eddie Jimenez is the Founder and CEO of Primal Trust Consulting.Eddie Jimenez spent a decade at One Huddle building someone else's revenue function before folding several ventures into Primal Trust Consulting, a firm built to fix one problem founder-led companies keep misdiagnosing: they think they have a lead gen problem when they actually have a revenue infrastructure problem. In this conversation, Eddie explains why he starts every engagement by auditing the founder's mindset before touching the sales process, why "revenue is the great deodorant" that covers up everything else broken inside a company...
2026-10-0624 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNever Try To Convince A Customer To Buy (Scott Roy)Scott Roy is the CEO and Co-Founder of Whitten & Roy Partnership.Scott Roy has spent 40-plus years in sales, sales management, and now sales consulting, and for the last 18 years he's run Whitten & Roy Partnership, a firm that fixes selling, sales management, and customer service problems for organizations across the developed world and the global south alike. He's an international best-selling author of two books (one on consumer selling in emerging markets, one on B2B "Decision Intelligence Selling"), and the architect of the RACE formula (Attitude, Competence, Execution) that his firm uses to...
2026-10-0627 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNever Reveal Your Minimum Price In A Business Sale (Nedko Kolev)Nedko Kolev is a Founding Partner at Nextoria, where he leads sell-side M&A for founder-led SaaS, IT services, and e-commerce companies under roughly €100M in revenue. Before Nextoria he spent years at Shell, and today he focuses on founder-first exits and the negotiation work that goes with them.Nedko has sat across the table while deals worth a founder's life savings nearly fell apart after the ink was already drying. In this conversation he explains why a signed offer is not a closed deal, why the smartest move in a negotiation is sometimes to...
2026-10-0615 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why Most AI Sales Agents Fail (Michael Pedone)Michael Pedone is the Founder and CEO of SalesBuzz.com.Michael started as a full-cycle inside sales rep before building an SEO side business for his wife in 2002 that grew into his own company, sold five years later for a seven-figure exit to a Swedish buyer. After taking time off through the 2008 housing crash, he built SalesBuzz into one of the first successful online sales training companies, running live eight-week courses that could seat reps from ten different companies in a single cohort because the same four-quadrant process (opener, qualifying, presenting, closing) works no...
2026-10-0629 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastAI Will Lie To You About Your Taxes (Jamie Whelan)Jamie Whelan is the Client CFO and Business Tax Manager at Stryde, a UK fractional finance firm.Most founders think their finance function exists to reconcile the bank, pay the bills, and keep the taxman satisfied. Jamie Whelan says that's the view that keeps businesses stuck: a compliance-only finance seat is a resource drag, not a source of insight, and the trusted bookkeeper who's been reconciling the books for twenty years is often the wrong person to answer "how many months of cash do we have left." In this episode, Jamie breaks down the...
2026-10-0520 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Calls Their Accountant Until The Bomb Is On Fire (Elena Meskhi)Elena Meskhi is the founder and CEO of Elena Meskhi & Co., a London accountancy and tax advisory firm for business owners, and the author of Rewire Your Business for Success.Elena spent four years as an accounts manager at Bond Partners before taking a finance director role at an oil trading company. She quickly streamlined a finance department full of duplicated work so tightly that the job no longer needed a full-time director: she ran it in four or five hours a week, the company saved half a million on its annual finance spend...
2026-10-0519 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why Your Sales Team Always Arrives Too Late (Brian Shea)Brian Shea is the Principal of Lucrum Partners.Brian Shea spent years as an executive sales leader at well-known US companies, then worked inside two of the legacy sales training firms, Miller Heiman Group and Corporate Visions, where he got close to the research behind how B2B buying has changed. Nearly four years ago he started Lucrum Partners, a research-backed go-to-market strategy and sales performance firm that works with lower mid-market and mid-market growth firms, mostly in professional services. Lucrum built and trademarked Signal-Led GTM, an operating model that helps sales teams spot...
2026-10-0523 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastKnow Why Your Firm Exists (Dan Schmidt)Dan Schmidt is the founder and principal at EBCFO (The Emerging Business CFO), a fractional-CFO firm based in Colorado Springs that serves nonprofits and emerging businesses.Dan started in public accounting, spending his first seven years doing financial statement audits after earning an accounting degree and, from a stint in college, a degree in music. He kept getting pulled toward making accounting relevant and useful for decision makers rather than just technically correct, so about 15 years ago he left public accounting for consulting and launched what became EBCFO as a side project, eventually taking...
2026-10-0125 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe Best Marketing Budget Is No Marketing Budget (Joe Webb)Joe Webb is the founder and president of DealerKnows Consulting, a sales-training and consulting firm for automotive dealerships.Joe started out in liquor, wine and spirits marketing before taking a class on how to sell cars, and getting kicked out of it on day two. He sold cars anyway "for research," discovered he could out-work everyone in the room, and became the person who figured out the internet side of the dealership before most of the industry knew it mattered. He wrote for the trade magazines, started speaking at the conferences, and in 2008 launched...
2026-10-0128 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastYou're All In Or You're Out (Clemens Brandt)Clemens Brandt is a Partner at Eidra, a global collective of digital consultancies, brand and creative agencies, and technology companies that works with clients across brand, product, technology, and AI transformation.Clemens spent well over a decade at Omnicom, starting in a creative agency at BBDO before moving to the group level to build a global center of excellence, production, data analytics, marketing science, UX/UI and high-end engineering for the network's agencies. A friend talked him into visiting what he'd written off as "this Swedish shop," and a day in Stockholm was enough...
2026-10-0122 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastBusy Isn't the Same as Profitable (Dr. Dave Rominski)Dr. Dave Rominski is the president of Doctor Referral Institute, which helps healthcare practices and other businesses build systems that turn referring providers into a repeatable source of new clients.Dave practiced in the Chicagoland market for a dozen years, running a pain management, physical therapy, and chiropractic practice. He noticed his best cases kept coming from other healthcare providers who referred patients directly, and started working out how to build those relationships without sounding like a salesperson. He sold his clinic 16 years ago and has spent the years since turning what he learned...
2026-10-0114 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastSmall Events, Big Connections (Cristiana Carpini)Cristiana Carpini is the CEO of Tara Home Consulting, which advises vacation rental owners, hospitality companies, and family offices on real estate investment across Europe.Cristiana spent five years traveling the world working on cruise ships before a guest at the front desk noticed how she handled problems on the spot, in five languages, and told her to send her CV to a short-term rental company, an industry she knew nothing about. She spent the next twenty years working her way from quality analyst to property recruiter across a fragmented, multi-language Europe, before founding...
2026-09-3023 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastGreat Hires Take Months, Not Weeks (Rich Decembrele)Rich Decembrele is the managing director at Kindred Partners, a boutique executive search firm that recruits senior leaders for venture-backed technology and healthcare companies.Rich joined Kindred Partners right out of college and has spent the last 22 of his 44 years there, working his way up as the firm built its name recruiting executive teams for venture-backed startups. Kindred was founded in 2001, and this year the firm celebrated its 25th anniversary. Instead of scaling into a high-volume shop like many of its competitors, the partners kept Kindred deliberately boutique so they could stay close to...
2026-09-3026 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastBranding Is Your Only Moat (Kim Than)Kim Than is the CEO and founder of Genius PR (also known as The PR Genius), a PR firm for AI and crypto companies.Kim spent close to four years running Scale Rex, an appointment-setting agency he built during COVID that scaled to about thirty thousand dollars a month on a lean offshore team, before competition drove margins down and he realized he'd never built a defensible brand around it. On the side he'd started pitching journalists for AI and crypto founders, and that side project, Genius PR, hit its first million dollars in 2022...
2026-09-3019 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe Two Words No CEO Will Say (Ernie Turner)Ernie Turner is the president of LIM, short for Leadership in Motion, a global consulting firm that works with CEOs and leadership teams on shared leadership and company transformation.Ernie trained as an educator and spent years living and working in Borneo, Malaysia, Angola, Brazil, Italy and Kenya before a former college roommate called him back to New York City. The job was to help the fifty most dysfunctional schools in the city turn around, and he spent ten years doing it across all five boroughs with a team of twelve consultants. That work...
2026-09-2926 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastSoon Nobody Will Care That You Use AI (Dave Vann)Dave Vann is the owner and managing director of said & done, a UK consultancy that works on positioning, messaging and thought leadership for organisations that sell expertise.Dave started his career in marketing roles inside overseas development and aid organisations, in the UK and in Southeast Asia, before joining the creative agency he now runs. He took the business over from its previous owners in September 2020. It was called ABA at the time, after the initials of the man who owned it, and it did a lot of things for a lot of clients...
2026-09-2825 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Warns Founders How Hard Hiring Really Is (Tom Bright)Tom Bright is the founder and director of Bright Evolve, a strategy and sales-execution consultancy for founder-led businesses.Tom spent his career in B2B sales (as an individual contributor, in strategy, in leadership), working for founder-led businesses and helping them grow into the millions. After a run at an ed-tech company that hit strong growth, he found himself pulled toward the building and growth stages of a business rather than the day-to-day, and about four years ago he set up Bright Evolve to work directly with founders on turning founder-led sales into something...
2026-09-2816 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy Half Your Marketing Never Gets Used (John Morris)John Morris is the chief operating and financial officer of Forever North Partners, a firm that takes life sciences companies from clinical trials all the way to market.John spent about 25 years in publishing, starting in educational publishing with IBM, moving to Time Warner, and becoming national account manager at Sunset. He went on to run publishing companies, and in 2000 sold one he had grown from $5 million to $12 million. He then built a practice management company for doctors, putting their procedures, hiring, payroll, HR and buying in place and building out 15 medical offices, ran...
2026-09-2819 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThey Restructured A Department To Avoid One Conversation (Neil Bett)Neil Bett is a partner at Frank Partners, a UK communication training firm he co-created with his business partner Anna Carus-Wilson, working with leaders on difficult conversations, personal impact and presenting.Neil trained as an actor and got into a good drama school, then discovered how hard it is to make a living from acting alone. He worked in a warehouse, an auction room, as a waiter and a barman, and hated only one thing: sitting in an office. A friend of a friend put him into role play work for job assessments, and...
2026-09-2822 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe Overnight Theft That Wrote This Book (Tim Krulia)Tim Krulia is the founder of Savvy CFO, a fractional CFO firm he's run since 2009.Tim started helping small businesses with bookkeeping on the side after a layoff during the Great Recession cost him his corporate finance role at a large German company. What began as informal help for a couple of startup founders grew, over about 17 years, into a full fractional-CFO practice built for small and medium-sized businesses that sell online: SaaS, digital education, affiliate and direct-response marketing. A year and a half ago, after a merchant account gateway pulled hundreds of thousands...
2026-09-2729 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastAI Is Not Ready To Talk To Your Clients (David Williger)David Williger is the President and Managing Director of Alder Bowman, an executive search firm headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee.David started out running Williger and Associates, a recruitment advisory practice that offered executive search, contract recruiting and recruitment strategy consulting, until his client JPMorgan asked him to join the firm. When the credit markets collapsed in 2008 and JPMorgan bought Bear Stearns, the need for recruiters dried up and his role was eventually eliminated. In 2010 he joined AIMS International, the executive search firm of John Poracky, whom he had met on the commuter train and...
2026-09-2721 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastRevenue Isn't The Problem. The Founder Is (Tiara Tragas)Tiara Tragas is the founder of Tragas Consulting, where she works exclusively with e-commerce agencies on operations and finance as a fractional CFO, COO and operational coach.Tiara started out in hospitality, working in the restaurants at the Waldorf Astoria, before taking a job at an e-commerce agency in her hometown doing the invoicing and planning the company Christmas party. She never turned back. Today she and her team help agencies with HR, legal, resource and capacity planning, utilization reporting and financial forecasts, and instead of handing over homework they roll up their sleeves...
2026-09-2721 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Grows A Business By Guessing (Ben Cooper)Ben Cooper is the owner of Amplify, a fractional CFO firm for growth-stage businesses.Ben started his career as a staff songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, writing music for a living. After he and his wife Brittany started having kids, he went back to his numbers roots: grad school, an MBA, and a role leading due-diligence conversations for investors evaluating growing companies. That work showed him that business owners rarely see their own numbers the way an investor does. A decade ago he started Amplify to close that gap: instead of businesses selling a stake...
2026-09-2730 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastEvery Financial Crisis Starts In The Same Place (Larry Bomback)Larry Bomback is the founder of Strategic Nonprofit Finance, a Philadelphia-based firm that steps into the finance seat for nonprofits facing a financial crisis or outgrowing their finance function.Larry spent years as an in-house nonprofit CFO, most recently at the Curtis Institute of Music. When he left that role to spend a summer with his kids, he weighed another CFO job and even a franchise before trying fractional work. Two part-time clients became six within a couple of months, and rather than scale back, he built a firm. Two years later Strategic Nonprofit...
2026-09-2635 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastZero To A Hundred Employees In Twelve Months (Lucas McCann)Lucas McCann is the Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of CannDelta, a regulatory and scientific cannabis consulting firm.After completing his PhD in organic chemistry at York University, Lucas spent time at Health Canada analyzing compounds seized from illegal drug labs, before Canada's 2018 legalization of adult-use cannabis pulled him into consulting. He co-founded CannDelta with a former Health Canada colleague, and the company grew from a two-month-old startup to over 25 employees with offices in Toronto and New York City, helping businesses navigate licensing, operations, and now compliant digital marketing across Canada, the US, and...
2026-09-2623 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Knows What Their AI Actually Returns (Sumantra Sen)Sumantra Sen is the founder and managing director at Transnational Business Solutions (TBS).Before founding TBS, Sumantra spent his career inside large corporations, running country-level P&L at Mobil, sitting on Lazard's corporate finance desk, and leading strategy at Cummins. He walked away from that world after realizing the same playbook that worked with the backing of a global footprint and deep pockets doesn't translate for the middle-market and startup companies that need it most. TBS was built to bring that corporate-grade thinking to smaller, owner-driven businesses: sometimes just a few people, sometimes a...
2026-09-2622 min
Consulting Rainmakers Podcast8 Out Of 10 Barriers Are In Your Head (Justin Wasserman)Justin Wasserman is the co-founder and managing partner of Empactful Advisors, a strategy and strategy-execution consulting firm.Justin trained as an organizational psychologist before spending a decade at Shaffer and nearly nine years as a managing director at Kotter, the firm founded by legendary Harvard Business School professor Dr. John Kotter. His turning point came leading a $40 billion M&A deal for a pharma company: his team delivered $3 billion in cost and revenue synergies ahead of schedule, and the client CEO was thrilled, yet almost no one at the 80,000-person company had ever heard...
2026-09-2629 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastDon't Spill Your Candy In The Lobby (Jonny Staker)Jonny Staker is the founder of Vanquish Consulting Group and bestselling author of The Frame: Unspoken Laws of Power, Status & Influence.Over more than two decades, Jonny built and exited three companies, oversaw a $435M P&L, and led global M&A for one of the world's largest PE firms before founding Vanquish. He now advises CEOs, PE-backed founders and executives at companies like Google, Salesforce and Toyota on "the frame" (the invisible dynamic that decides who controls a negotiation) and on why the fastest way to lose a sale is proving you can...
2026-09-2623 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNever Give A Client Only One Answer (Lauren Kaplan)Lauren Kaplan is the founder and CEO of Growth Ops Advisory, an outsourced HR firm whose real product is business performance through people performance.Lauren knew she wanted to run her own business from high school but did not know what it would be, so she joined Nomad Financial, an accounting, CFO advisory and tax firm for startups, as COO, partly to see a company go from one to ten and one to fifty rather than only zero to one. People there started asking how she would solve their own problems, and those conversations...
2026-09-2519 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastSelling Your Practice Is Not An Exit (Paul Martin)Paul Martin is the president of Martin Healthcare Advisors, the firm he founded in 1999 to help outpatient physical therapy businesses grow, get ready for a transaction, and take that business to market.Paul played football at Gettysburg College and left it with the idea of building a physical therapy company, so he went to PT school to learn how to run one. He and two partners built a practice from three clinics to 21, with a consultant named Alan Cox spending a week a month with them, and Paul walked out of that transaction knowing...
2026-09-2525 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy Ten Shorts Beat One Music Video (Chris Bianchi)Chris Bianchi is the owner of CB Entertainment, a one-stop entertainment company that manages, books, markets, prints merchandise for and distributes artists around the world.Chris signed with Metal Blade Records straight out of high school and spent roughly three years touring the United States and Canada, learning budgeting, merchandising, inventory, booking and repairs on the road. When the band slowed down he kept going, helping run a local concert club and taking over its booking, which grew into CB Entertainment. Almost 20 years on, the company partners with Virgin Music Group and Universal Music...
2026-09-2525 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNever Walk In And Ask For The Vote (Corky Kyle)Corky Kyle is the president of The Kyle Group, a Denver advocacy and association consulting firm, and has spent 45 years lobbying state and local government.Corky studied political science and public administration and started lobbying at 32, and he describes the job as the bridge between the real world and the legislative world. Colorado gives him 100 legislators to know, 35 senators and 65 representatives, and his rule is that you never walk into an office cold and ask for a vote. He has been taken to the woodshed by a speaker of the house, has watched the...
2026-09-2431 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy Startups Fail On People, Not Product (Miles Bonell)Miles Bonell is a partner and the people director at Foundation Partners, a consultancy that helps startups and scale-ups build the teams and people processes they need to grow.Miles came up through the big corporates, Amazon and Tesco among them, and left because the impact any one person could have there was too small to see. What he kept was a picture of what good looks like: a good onboarding, a good appraisal, why people stay and why they leave. Today he works with founders, co-founders and CEOs, many of them running AI...
2026-09-2316 min
Consulting Rainmakers Podcast90% Of Salmonella Cases Never Get Reported (Scott McNabb)Dr. Scott McNabb is the Managing Partner of Public Health Practice, LLC, and spent 20 years working at the U.S. CDC.Scott started his career in the laboratory of the Oklahoma State Health Department, earned his PhD in microbiology and immunology in Oklahoma, and joined the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service, a two-year training program that took him to New Orleans. At the CDC in Atlanta most of his work was international, including helping Armenia establish public health after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, during a measles outbreak. He retired from the CDC in 2010 and now runs...
2026-09-2319 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy AI Still Can't Value Your Business (Hussnain Shakil)Hussnain Shakil is the managing director of DMP Accountants & Valuations, a UK firm that gives small business owners corporate-level accounting, tax and valuation advice.Hussnain started out in investment management, watching financial markets and noticing that most of the wealthy clients he served were business owners. A top 10 accounting firm picked up his CV on the strength of that investment background and put him straight into technical accounting and valuations, a corner of the profession that usually takes a chartered qualification and years of experience to reach. He then moved to a smaller firm...
2026-09-2328 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastSafety Is A Profit Center Nobody Measures (James Boretti)James Boretti, CSP, FASSP, is the founder and CEO of Boretti, Inc., a safety and health consultancy built on a four-word vision: better business through safety.Working in environmental health and safety, James watched companies spend money to become compliant, then watched the gains fall off because nothing tied safety to business performance. He set out to change that, and on January 1, 2003 he formed Boretti, Inc. to take clients through compliance and beyond, across the US, the EU and Asia. About two years ago he moved from president and CEO into the CEO role as a succession...
2026-09-2322 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Wakes Up Wanting A Fractional CFO (Josh Notes)Josh Notes is the founder and CEO of Sustain CFO, a fractional CFO firm that works with founders and owner-operators.Josh has been an entrepreneur for 25 years. He started in real estate and moved into energy. The first scaled startup he was part of was greeNEWit, an energy efficiency business in the mid-Atlantic that launched about twenty years ago. Looking back, he calls it a flawed business model: it funded energy efficiency projects through the utility, and it took about nine months to get paid, which is hard for a small business with no outside capital. At...
2026-09-2320 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Cares About Your Product (Brent Keltner)Brent Keltner, PhD, is the President of Winalytics, a go-to-market and revenue acceleration consultancy, and the author of The Revenue Acceleration Playbook.Brent started out as a PhD social scientist, doing qualitative research at Stanford and the RAND Corporation. At RAND he found he was good at raising money: in his last year there he was principal or co-principal investigator on about three and a half million dollars in grants and contracts, and was offered a 5.5% raise instead of 3.5% for it. So he did what academics call going to the dark side, and went to work for...
2026-09-2221 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Fixes A Toxic Workplace With Training (Catherine Mattice)Catherine Mattice is the founder and CEO of Civility Partners, a consulting firm that turns around toxic workplace cultures, and the author of Navigating a Toxic Workplace For Dummies.Catherine was working in HR at a company with a bully on staff when she started her master's degree. A research project in her first semester led her to the phrase "workplace bullying", and everything she did in graduate school, her thesis included, followed from it. She started Civility Partners on the other side of grad school, wrote her first book, Back Off, and taught college as an...
2026-09-2220 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Needs The Consulting Pyramid Anymore (Bill Rausch)Bill Rausch is the founder and managing director of Bright Point, a Pigment implementation partner that helps corporate finance and operations teams plan, forecast and model their business.Bill started out as an ERP consultant deploying JD Edwards, moved into consulting for Hyperion, and later led presales at Host Analytics (now Planful). He left that role because of the travel and started Bright Point so he could work from home. The first version of Bright Point grew into Planful's largest partner and was acquired by UHY; he reacquired the firm in 2022 and refocused it on Pigment. Bright...
2026-09-2122 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy Nobody Wants To Buy These Businesses (Edosa Obaseki)Edosa Obaseki is the founder and principal of Prairie Crossing Advisory, which provides quality of earnings and financial due diligence for lower middle market acquisitions in energy services.Edosa knew early that advisory was where he wanted to end up, but the route was unconventional. After a startup and an accounting firm, he quit his job when a close friend asked him to run the finances of a new fashion tech startup, which took him from New York to the UK and Nigeria and back. That put him among founders, and he saw how often an understanding...
2026-09-2024 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe $10 Million Nobody Came Back To Collect (Marty Abbott)Marty Abbott is the founder and president of Incentives Management Group, which helps manufacturers secure state, county and local incentives when they expand.Marty spent the early part of his career in brand management at Kraft General Foods and Procter & Gamble before running his own advisory practice. He fell into incentives by accident: as a consultant to American Standard, he was handed a letter in which the governor of New Jersey had promised the company ten million dollars in incentives if it moved its headquarters to the state. The company had moved three years earlier and never...
2026-09-2015 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy This Firm Does AI Without AI (Bill Devine)Bill Devine is the managing partner and co-founder of Naitiv Partners, an AI-native ServiceNow consultancy for regulated industries.Bill went to law school before he got into insurance, and then spent the better part of twenty-five years on the corporate side of it, most of that at Travelers, where he was Senior Vice President for Business Capabilities in Business Insurance, running business architecture and strategy, line product management and business intelligence. He has had a support staff since he was twenty-five. Naitiv came together in April this year through a series of roll-ups, and going from a...
2026-09-2027 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe Wrong Message Wastes 100% Of Your Budget (Kristin Zhivago)❯ Kristin Zhivago is the CEO of Zhivago Partners and the author of Roadmap to Revenue: How to Sell the Way Your Customers Want to Buy.Kristin started in Silicon Valley at the beginning of tech and ran an ad agency with her husband until 1991, when the Mac arrived and she told him the work was all going in house. She reinvented herself as a revenue coach,doing marketing and sales turnarounds for companies of every size, from startups to IBM, and wrote Roadmap to Revenue to give the method away. She founded Zhivago Partners in 2017 aft...
2026-09-2024 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWe Built The First AI CFO And Nobody Wanted It (Jim Miller)Jim Miller is the founder and CEO of Astero Group, a fractional CFO firm in El Segundo, California.Jim has spent twenty-five years leading accounting teams, including nearly a decade as CFO at Choura and seven years as controller at Solver, with consulting stints at Dollar Shave Club and CrowdTorch along the way. In Los Angeles he became the person founders called when a business had grown faster than its infrastructure. He started Astero Group in January 2021 doing CFO work plus bookkeeping, senior accounting and some tax, and then learned that niching down did not mean picking...
2026-09-1913 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastAI Made Recruiting Harder Not Easier (Chris Berta)Chris Berta is a partner at Laurel Group, a retained executive search firm on the US West Coast.Chris started out at aQuantive in Seattle, the digital marketing firm Microsoft bought for roughly twice what Google paid for DoubleClick, then moved to Amazon as a product manager to stand up its online marketing capabilities, and then to Washington Mutual to run digital marketing for the bank. Twenty-two years ago people in his own network recruited him into Laurel Group, which he resisted for the better part of a year because his experience of recruiters was closer to...
2026-09-1927 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastAI Is An Aid To The Doctor, Not A Replacement (Eric Zudak)Eric Zudak is the founder and CEO of Thalocan Research Innovations.Eric spent nineteen years in clinical research before starting anything of his own, almost fifteen of them at Trifecta Clinical, where he rose to Senior Director of Enterprise Accounts, followed by two years as VP of Strategic Partnerships at WCG Trifecta. He came to it sideways: a BFA in fine arts, four years lighting theme park attractions at Walt Disney Imagineering, a stint as a stand-in on Desperate Housewives, then producing at Trifecta Multimedia. He founded Thalocan four years ago in Indianapolis to fix a problem...
2026-09-1919 min
Consulting Rainmakers Podcast40% Of Growth Comes From This One Thing (Anton Dudarenko)Anton Dudarenko is the founding director of Lift-Off Consulting, a London growth consultancy that helps companies decide where to play and how to win, then builds the technology to execute on it.Anton spent his career in brand strategy and analytics, starting as a junior business analyst at Millward Brown Optimor and rising through Kantar to Consulting Director of Analytics, working on brand strategy, marketing ROI and market sizing for clients including HSBC, Unilever, Virgin Media O2, LEGO and Mondelez. He founded Lift-Off Consulting in 2024 and built AI into the firm from day one, codifying his and...
2026-09-1822 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe $2 Million Change Order Nobody Plans For (Robert Carmona)Robert Carmona is the CEO and founder of Carmona Collective, which helps local governments, developers, businesses and nonprofits with strategic planning, public-private partnerships, leadership development and bold new ventures.Robert started out as an assistant recreation manager in Oro Valley, Arizona, running summer camps and inclusive programming, and knew within a week that he wanted to be a director. He went on to lead parks, recreation and facilities in Wickenburg and then Gilbert, Arizona, helping deliver nearly $1 billion in capital projects and public-private partnerships along the way. He left Gilbert at the top of his game to...
2026-09-1831 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy Nobody Tells The Truth On Your Engagement Survey (Steve Rix)Steve Rix is the CEO of PlayLab, which brings play into the workplace to reduce attrition and raise productivity and engagement.Steve has spent more than three decades starting and running businesses, including six companies before PlayLab. Thirteen years ago, after losing more than $100 million in business opportunities and the end of his second marriage, he was sitting on a beach in Hawaii when two kids asked him if he wanted to play. He started experimenting with play every day, went on to coach more than a thousand people with it, and over the last three years...
2026-09-1827 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy Treating Recruiting As A Task Keeps You Losing Candidates (Nick Mastrovito)Nick Mastrovito is the owner of Mastrovito Associates, a recruiting firm serving architecture, engineering and construction, manufacturing, defense and government.Nick came to recruiting from operations. After a military career he led an engineering company, and kept running into outside recruiters who did not understand what the business was actually looking for. He learned to recruit as a Patrice & Associates franchisee, a franchise he still owns, but his very first client was a defense company, so he built Mastrovito Associates around the sectors he knew from the inside. He also hosts The Aligned Leader podcast....
2026-09-1722 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why AI Told Them To Delete Every Row (Jeff Garbus)Jeff Garbus is the co-founder and owner of Soaring Eagle Consulting.Jeff started programming at 12, more than fifty years ago, earned a computer science degree in the early 80s and took a concentration in writing along the way, because he did not want to fit the stereotype of the engineer who cannot communicate. He and his wife built their first consulting company into a public company during the internet startup boom, then left to start Soaring Eagle. It began with training, consulting and some software, and moved into database managed services for the recurring revenue. Along the...
2026-09-1719 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why Your Margins Look Better Than They Are (Seth Kimble)Seth Kimble is the owner of Irongate Financial Partners and a fractional controller.Seth graduated with a finance degree from Clemson in 2013 and spent the first half of his career in sales, financial planning and employee benefits. Around 2017, about to get married, he moved into accounting, the field he had actively avoided in college despite coming from a long line of accountants going back to a great-grandparent. He built a freelance bookkeeping practice on the side for about five years before Irongate became a full-time business in 2022. Today the firm works with owners roughly between one and...
2026-09-1722 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy Delivering The Work Was Never The Hard Part (Dan Gallagher)Dan Gallagher is the managing partner of 13point1 Advisors, a consulting firm focused on healthcare payment integrity.Dan spent more than 20 years in payment integrity and strategy roles at Anthem, Change Healthcare and Optum. The work kept putting him on the same cycle: initiatives would succeed, investment would stall, and he would find himself defending his job. With a mentor pushing him and an investor putting up the startup capital, he launched 13point1 in August 2025, sized from day one to chase the clients a five to ten person firm can realistically win.Expect to learn...
2026-09-1724 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Taught You The Game You're Actually Playing (David Richter)David Richter is the founder of Simple CFO Solutions.David was studying to teach when someone handed him Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and he ended up in a residential real estate company that grew from five deals a month to around twenty five. Sitting in the finance seat, he realised they were doing twenty five deals a month and spending twenty six worth out the door. When a one deal a month investor he helped told him it had been life changing to finally know where his money was, Simple CFO was born. He later wrote Profit...
2026-09-1622 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe Headline Number Is Lying To You (Nirvikar Jain)Nirvikar Jain is the founder and managing partner of BayTech Capital Partners.Nirvikar spent the early part of his career at global institutions including Citibank, Bank of America and First Abu Dhabi Bank, then moved to the US as a Stanford GSB Sloan Fellow to follow his interest in technology and startups. He spent seven years as an operator inside tech startups, including as CFO, before combining banking and technology to advise founders on M&A, capital raises and strategic finance. He describes himself as a founder friendly banker, and says plainly that he would advise a...
2026-09-1619 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Tells You AI Is Mostly Plumbing (Kevin Williams)Kevin Williams is the founder and CEO of Ascend AI Labs.Kevin started his first company in business school, then spent years as the executive venture capitalists brought in to decide whether a struggling portfolio company could be turned around or had to be shut down. He went on to build product businesses by testing ideas with digital marketing, licensing patents and selling through Amazon, Walmart and Costco, and when Apple's tracking changes took away his visibility into eight figures of ad spend, he leaned into machine learning out of necessity. He exited those companies shortly before...
2026-09-1625 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why One Training Session Never Works (Paul Walsh)Paul Walsh is the managing director of commercial services at Enolla Consulting.Enolla is a family business Paul's father co-founded and still runs as CEO, built around helping organisations create the conditions for their people to thrive. Paul came to it after a semi professional football career and about ten years in customer services, joined thinking it would only be a couple of months, and now runs the commercial side: the pipeline, the social team and the webinars that bring the work in. Around eighty percent of that work arrives through referrals.Expect to learn...
2026-09-1626 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why Your Team Is Draining You (Greg Stephens)Greg Stephens is the founder of Alignment Resources.Greg is an executive coach and professional mediator, and the author of Build New Bridges: The Art of Restoring Impossible Relationships. He went out on his own at seventeen, spent years in sales at Roche before starting his own business, and turned a habit of lifelong learning into more than twenty years of teaching the conversations most people put off. Today he sits with executive teams and business owners when the relationships that drive the bottom line have quietly broken down, and runs closed door team mediations where everyone...
2026-09-1528 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is The Conversation Your Team Is Avoiding (Martin Egan)Martin Egan is the co-founder of Culture Impact.Martin has a PhD in analytical chemistry and a background in pharma and drug discovery, and kept being recruited for something that was not on his CV - his ability to work with teams that had stopped functioning. Somewhere in there he noticed the technical skills were never the thing that made the difference, retrained part time as a psychotherapist, and in 2004 walked away from science entirely to join a mental health team in South West London. Culture Impact started in 2014 because he wanted to run whichever diagnostic actually...
2026-09-1520 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Wants Death By Mouse Click (Richard Harris)Richard Harris is the founder of The Harris Consulting Group and the creator of the N.E.A.T. Selling methodology.Richard did not set out to run anything. He was line 432 on a 75-line spreadsheet of employees Intel wanted to keep when it acquired Mashery, so he was hugged out the door with a respectable severance and no idea what came next. Interviews stalled at the fourth and fifth round. To feel useful he started answering other people's posts on LinkedIn, found out strangers valued opinions he assumed everybody already held, and the consulting work arrived...
2026-09-1530 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis AI Found a Leak in a Bill Nobody Opens (Sheetal Guttigoli)Sheetal Guttigoli is the founder and CEO of Seamless Assist.Sheetal spent twenty-five years in software and product management, bought a set of gyms as a side gig, sold them at a profit, and then built a recruiting company placing talent from around the world into US businesses. Then he did something most agency owners would flinch at: he looked hard at AI, concluded his clients were about to need fewer people, and went back to his software roots to build the automation himself rather than wait for it to arrive. The moment that captures what that...
2026-09-1424 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis One Word Loses You the Nonprofit Client (Sean Hale)Sean Hale is the founder of Nonprofit CFOs.Sean's first job was in his mother's nonprofit, pushing a broom and cleaning toilets for four dollars twenty-five an hour, and twenty-five years later he is still in the sector - now with a team of fractional finance people serving several dozen organisations a year. His observation after all that time is blunt: when a nonprofit is struggling to deliver on its mission, the finance and accounting function is almost always struggling too, and you cannot fix one without the other. He also has the most economical piece of...
2026-09-1426 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Is Having This Conversation About Leadership (Jason Farley)Jason Farley is the managing partner of BridgeGap Consulting.Jason is a classically trained Six Sigma black belt who grew up in the TQM era, ran a quality circle programme inside a Japanese company, and has since seen enterprises from every angle - including work with McKinsey in Iraq, helping state-owned enterprises become private industry. That vantage point left him with an unfashionable conclusion: everyone is talking about leadership, everyone is talking about going agile or leaning out the process, and almost nobody is talking about governance of the whole enterprise - which he defines as the...
2026-09-1427 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Told You AI Screening Could Get You Sued (Jared Black)Jared Black is the founder and president of NewVine Employment Group.Jared got into recruiting the way most people do - completely by accident. Three generations of the Black family were in the imported flower business, an industry that lives and dies on temporary staffing around Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, and the service on the customer side was appalling: unprepared workers turning up to a thirty-degree cooler in shorts and sandals. Asking around, every peer had the same experience and every one of them had quietly made peace with it. That was the opening. The sharpest...
2026-09-1321 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNever Call Yourself a Thought Leader (Peter Winick)Peter Winick is the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage.Peter spent years turning down offers to write a book - he does not especially enjoy writing and did not think anyone wanted to read a catalogue of consulting frameworks. Then on a rainy Saturday he dropped thirty of his own podcast transcripts into ChatGPT and asked it what patterns it saw, and the answers were things he had said out loud himself and completely forgotten. By the end they had fed in 650 transcripts - 2.3 million words, about fifty business books' worth - and the models...
2026-09-1320 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Buys Your Product, They Buy Your Business (Shawn Khorrami)Shawn Khorrami is the founder of ePlaybooks.Shawn has started more than a dozen companies from the ground up as employee one, and the first one was an accident - a tool he built to fix something that was not working for his father's construction business, which his father then sold to his friends. Decades later owners kept arriving at his door in a crisis, and after the hundredth one he stopped improvising and built a system. The idea underneath it is the one he has been saying for years and has never heard anyone else say...
2026-09-1326 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why Networking Stopped Working (Andy Baker)Andy Baker is the founder of Lurnex and a business architect.Andy's route into consulting ran through artist management, more than a thousand live events across twenty countries, one of the UK's first creative agencies for musicians, and a crowdfunding platform for music projects. He now describes himself as a business architect on the grounds that most businesses get built in a hurry — shaky structures, sloppy systems, nobody consulted before the bricks went down. He moved his own company into the cloud twelve years ago, went remote before micro businesses did that, and has been hiring across th...
2026-09-1325 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastYour Worst Hire Decides Where You Finish (Dominic Monkhouse)Dominic Monkhouse is the founder of Monkhouse & Company and a coach to founder CEOs.Dominic scaled Rackspace in the UK to thirty million, did it again at Peer 1 Hosting, and turned around IT Lab, building six leadership teams along the way — all while privately believing he was not much good at managing people. He started coaching twelve years ago as a stopgap before his next proper job and never went back. His focus is the transitions founders hit at ten, thirty and a hundred people, and his blunt framing is that somewhere past a hundred the game ch...
2026-09-1223 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastSeventeen Owners And Not One Had A Plan (David Mosberg)David Mosberg is the CEO of MSH Business Solutions.David started working in New York restaurant kitchens at thirteen and spent the front half of his career as a professional chef before twenty years inside a large corporation and, eventually, his own firm. MSH is an advisory business with an accounting backbone, serving companies doing between one million and a hundred million a year — tradesmen, service providers, and a lot of restaurants. The hospitality years turn out to be the useful part: most owners are technicians of their trade who know the outcome they want but cannot de...
2026-09-1227 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Told You Your Company Qualifies (Charles Goulding)Charles Goulding is the president of Energy Tax Savers and R&D Tax Savers.Charles did his first R&D credit work in 1981, the year Congress wrote the credit — copied, as he tells it, from Canada's version after Japan bought Rockefeller Center and Pebble Beach and Washington started looking for an answer. He had already run the Canadian credit at Dover Corporation, so he could stand the US programme up from day one. Twenty six years at Dover and a spell at Cooper Industries later, the firm he built exists because he would not move to Cleveland. He...
2026-09-1223 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastNobody Hires Anyone Over Fifty Anymore (Charles McLachlan)Charles McLachlan is the founder of the Portfolio Executive Community.Charles left big consulting when Arthur Andersen collapsed in 2002 and wrote himself a manifesto: fee earning twelve days a month, four to six clients, each one a long-term leadership seat rather than a project. Ten years in he noticed something uglier in the market around him. Senior people with twenty and thirty years of experience were hitting fifty and finding the door shut, and large organisations had quietly become incapable of hiring anyone into a six figure salaried role past that age. He calls it the scrap...
2026-09-1224 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThis Is Why Clients Never Take Your Advice (Fay Niewiadomski)Fay Niewiadomski Ph.D is the managing partner of ICTN and the author of Decisions That Matter.Fay has spent more than three decades advising sitting heads of state, government ministers and boards across Lebanon, Jordan, the UAE and now the UK, and she says most consultants misread the job entirely. When an expert is brought in, they are usually not brought in to help. They are brought in to confirm a decision that has already been made, and there are only three relationships on offer: a pair of hands, a scapegoat, or a genuine...
2026-09-1124 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe Client Type That Quietly Kills Small Consultancies (Tina Louise Thompson)Tina Louise Thompson is the founder of Sweet Spot.The consumer insight sitting in most brand decks is years old before anyone acts on it. Tina walked into an agency strategy room, asked where the insights papered across the wall came from, and was handed a six year old Mintel report. She spent the next fourteen years building the alternative out of the biggest data source in the world that almost nobody treats as quantifiable: the comments. She called matcha as a shift four years before it was everywhere, and found the real reason milk sales were...
2026-09-0831 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe AI Setup That Replaced His Inbox And His CRM (Bennett Maxwell)Bennett Maxwell is the CEO of Franchise Key.Bennett has not opened his email app in over a month and has not logged into his CRM in two or three. He dropped out of college after making a quarter of a million dollars knocking doors in five months, sold his solar company, then sold four hundred and fifty cookie franchises in two and a half years before exiting that too. Now he builds agent systems that do the parts of his job he used to do by hand, including booking this interview. His argument is that anything...
2026-09-0727 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastWhy the leaders chasing a legacy are the hardest to work with (Camron King)Camron King is the president and owner of the Association Resource Center.After 20 years as an ARC client, he joined as a senior executive in 2019 and bought the company during the pandemic. Previously, he ran the Western Hemisphere’s largest caviar company. Expect to learn how a shared services model reduces overhead, AI's pros and cons, why volunteer-turned-leaders are challenging, and his advice to his younger self.0:00 Intro0:22 How he ended up running the Association Resource Center1:41 Buying the company during the pandemic2:31 The boutique consultancy in wine and caviar5:35 Ru...
2026-09-0725 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe qualification question everyone teaches is the wrong one (Will Fuentes)Will Fuentes is the founder of Maestro Group, a Washington DC firm that teaches B2B teams the science of selling.He was fired 35 days into a VP of Sales job, started his own firm the same afternoon, and had sold a million dollars of contracts nine months later. Ten years on, this is what he has learned about the part of selling that happens before the call.Expect to learn why "do you have budget" is a poor question, why 80% of selling is process rather than charisma, the difference between speed and velocity in...
2026-09-0719 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastConsultants Never Have A Sales Problem, They Have This One (Amanda Northcutt)Amanda Northcutt is the founder and CEO of Level Up.Nearly every boutique consultant who calls Amanda opens with the same line: I need more clients. She has worked with hundreds of professional services firms and says almost none of them have a sales problem. They have a positioning problem.Expect to learn why grit beats talent and why you cannot think your way into a go to market strategy, what a model problem looks like next to a sales problem, how to pick a niche without boiling the ocean, why generalists get picked off...
2026-09-0723 min
Consulting Rainmakers PodcastThe Outbound Rebuild That Got Him 15X More Replies (Sam Mezei)Sam Mezei is the CEO of Slash Staffing.Most outbound advice tells you to send more. Sam spent years dropping 2,000 leads at a time into a sequencer and watching almost nobody reply. Then he stopped buying lists. He built a system that finds companies with an open role he can actually fill, reads the news on them, and offers two free sample candidates before it ever asks for a call. Reply and conversion rates went up fifteen times in the first week.Expect to learn why a five dollar an hour hire beat the eighty...
2026-09-0622 min