Making BIG Shifts

Most entrepreneurs spend years thinking about how to build a business.
Far fewer think seriously about what it takes to leave one.
Chris Slocumb built her agency over more than two decades before beginning a three-year exit journey that included roughly 50 buyer meetings, multiple letters of intent, several rounds of due diligence, and eventually a successful sale.
In this episode of Making BIG Shifts, Chris and Josh talk about the parts of selling a company founders rarely hear about.
They dig into valuation, recurring versus project revenue, founder dependency, paying yourself properly, choosing the right buyer, negotiating earnouts, and why a great financial outcome can still create a major personal identity shift.
Chris also shares lessons from her book, Mastering the Exit Gauntlet, and the three questions founders should answer before deciding to sell:
Why do you want to sell?
When do you want to sell?
What number do you need?
If an exit might be somewhere in your future, start thinking about it long before you actually want out.

Most entrepreneurs start businesses because they want more freedom.
Then the company grows, the team grows, the responsibilities grow, and suddenly every important decision still comes back to the owner.
Dan Paulson calls it The Owner’s Trap.
Dan is an executive advisor and bestselling author of Escape the Owner’s Trap. In this conversation, we dig into how owners become the bottleneck, why delegation and training so often break down, how to create real accountability without micromanaging, and why reducing owner dependence can dramatically change the long-term value of a business.
We also talk about succession planning, better meetings, simpler KPIs, employee onboarding, and one lesson Dan learned after a major health scare forced him to look at his own business differently.
The biggest takeaway is simple: if you know something in your business needs to change, don’t assume you’ll get to it tomorrow.
Start today.

More AI. More data. More technology.
But does any of that automatically create more revenue?
Not even close.
I sat down with James Roth, CRO of ZoomInfo, for a wide-ranging conversation about what the next era of sales and marketing actually looks like.
James shares his unconventional path from college football and professional music to door-to-door sales and eventually the CRO seat at ZoomInfo. We talk about why leaders need enough competence to challenge the experts around them, why listening directly to customers matters more as you move up the organization, and why being willing to admit what you don't know can actually become a competitive advantage.
We also get deep into AI.
James explains how businesses are thinking about build versus buy, why AI is only as useful as the context and data underneath it, how small businesses are adopting these tools, and where ZoomInfo is headed next as it brings more of its go-to-market capabilities together.
A really interesting conversation about AI, leadership, sales, marketing, and what still matters when everything around us seems to be changing.

Entrepreneurs are constantly told to keep going.
But what happens when persistence becomes stubbornness?
Nuri Otus has built seven companies, experienced successful pivots, raised capital, shut down ideas that weren’t working, and is now building DUO, an AI-powered matchmaking platform.
In this conversation, we dig into how founders can recognize real market validation, why criticism can actually be incredibly valuable, how positioning affects whether a product gets traction, and the signals that tell you when it might finally be time to change direction.
Nuri also shares how an elevator conversation led to an investment from AOL, why DUO gained users almost immediately after launch, and why some of his best business lessons came directly from mistakes.
A very real conversation about entrepreneurship, product-market fit, marketing, and knowing when to keep pushing versus when to move on.

Referrals are fantastic, but they shouldn’t be your entire growth strategy.
I sit down with Craig Lowder, author of Smooth Selling Forever, to break down how businesses can create a more predictable pipeline by bringing sales and marketing together.
We talk target audiences, messaging, lead generation, sales processes, connector networks, and a really simple 4-quadrant outreach strategy any business owner can start using immediately.
One of the biggest takeaways: most sales problems actually start much earlier than the sales call. If you don’t know exactly who you’re targeting and why they should care, everything downstream gets harder.