240: How to Build a Business That Runs Without You with Jeremy Shapiro

A lot of founders hit seven figures and assume they’ve built a business. But if sales slow down, decisions stall, or customers feel the difference whenever they step away, they may still be self-employed.

 

Jeremy Shapiro has built companies across SaaS, ecommerce, technology, and services. He’s seen the same pattern repeatedly: The hustle that creates momentum early on eventually becomes the thing holding the business back.

 

We talk about why founders stay trapped in low-value work, how technology can quietly create more complexity, and why growth often stalls when you keep relying on the same channel, habits, or people.

 

We also get into niche strategy, the hidden costs of building your own software, what separates a valuable mastermind from an expensive networking group, and why an SOP is useless if another person can’t produce the same result.

Mic Drop Moments

• “You can’t always be doing founder-led sales. You can’t be doing everything involved in the business if you want to keep on growing.” – Jeremy Shapiro

• “For many business owners, they end up thinking they are a true business owner when really they’re just self-employed and have like the worst parts of employment and the worst parts and all the liabilities of a business.” – Jeremy Shapiro

• “A really, really key piece for business owners is creating that repeatability. That gives you a simple system that can support you.” – Jeremy Shapiro

• “For whatever reason, whatever got them to the stage they’re at now isn’t going to get them to the next stage they want to be at.” – Jeremy Shapiro

• “Simply creating a system and then running your own system is a good first step, and then having someone else do it.” – Jeremy Shapiro

• Why Hustle Culture Keeps You Stuck
• When Doing Everything Stops Working
• The Realtor Closing 30 Deals Monthly
• How FuseDesk Found Product-Market Fit
• Escaping Platform-Dependent Churn
• Why Narrow Niches Win
• Building Better Features Than Stripe
• When to Buy vs. Build
• Escaping the Founder-Inventor Trap
• Curating High-Value Mastermind Rooms
• Learning from Outside Your Industry
• What Makes Masterminds Actually Work
• Three Levers for Profitable Growth
• Building Systems Others Can Run
• The Daily Flight Plan
• Creating Founder Accountability
• Recovering Faster From Failure
• Choosing More Scalable Business Models
• Validating Ideas With Real Customers

Brad Weimert: Founder of FuseDesk, as well as a myriad of other businesses. You’ve got the Bay Area Mastermind, and most recently, your Business Growth Playbook. Jeremy Shapiro, welcome to Beyond a Million.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Thanks for having me.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, man. So, I have known you forever and ever and ever, which is so crazy, but haven’t seen you in quite some time. You’re sort of the unemployable entrepreneur in my eyes. You’ve done a whole bunch of different stuff, and a theme for your book is around sort of getting out of the hustle or transitioning from hustle to actual structure and frameworks of business, which is a great thing to talk about. So, I want to start there. What do you think the first thing is that breaks when you actually do make the transition from hustle culture to having a structured business, or trying to?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, oftentimes, like when you start a new business, there is some hustle. You’re trying to validate your idea. You’re trying to see if customers want to buy this thing, if you’re selling something that they actually want and will pay for, and so on. But at a certain point, like that just isn’t scalable. You can’t always be doing founder-led sales. You can’t be doing everything involved in the business if you want to keep on growing. And for many business owners, they end up thinking they are a true business owner when really they’re just self-employed and have like the worst parts of employment and the worst parts and all the liabilities of a business.

 

And if you can step out of that and break that, you can actually grow and be a true business owner, but that requires people, that requires systems, right? In this day and age, we’re not talking about building out a huge staff, right? But you do need to have at least a standardized way of delivering and servicing and growing and doing all the things that your business needs without it being all you.

 

Brad Weimert: What do you think is something that business owners are proud of that’s actually something that’s getting in their way, that’s keeping them stuck?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Oh, I think the hustle piece is a big part. There is what I call like this toxic hustle culture, right? You see this online, you hear this all the time about this, like bragging of how many hours someone’s working and how they are on seven days a week, and if you’re asleep, your competition’s taking your customers. And like that is such a toxic, dangerous headspace to be in, and that quickly leads to burnout. So, the whole hustle culture thing, like I’m on the other side of that. It is possible to build businesses that support you, your community, your life, provide jobs, service customers, and have that not be an all-consuming pursuit.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I know. But it’s also, you can always do more. And I think that’s where that mentality comes from, is like, “Oh, if I had been doing this, I would be a little bit further ahead.”

 

Jeremy Shapiro: That’s a dangerous place to be.

 

Brad Weimert: I agree with you. Yeah. I think specifically today, in the advent of AI, there’s this term or construct of AI zombies. And it’s the idea that like you just get roped into interacting with it, and because you’re able to be more productive if you’re focused on the right things, it’s easy to like not cut the clock off, because the AI keeps prompting you with, “Then you can do this, and you can do this, and you can do this.” And coding in particular now, there are people that are like vibe coding until 3:00 in the morning because they just are moving.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah. And it’s okay to pursue that to a certain extent. But remember, as a business owner, there is no shortage of ideas. There’s no end to the to-do list of things we could be doing. We don’t often take the time to look back at all that we have accomplished and see what got us to where we are, and that’s really important to do, and then looking forward to think about like what actually matters, right? What’s going to move the important needles that matter in your business?

 

Brad Weimert: Outside of hustle, what is something, what’s a popular piece of advice that works early but becomes really problematic once you get bigger?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, as a solopreneur, you do everything. You wear all the hats. And sometimes it feels productive to be juggling all these different hats and doing all these different things. And you get to the end of your day, and you’ve done so much, right? But is it working on the important things? Not always. And look, in the beginning, all those things do need to get done. But then you make that first hire, and you create that first system, and you start to use your own systems. And yes, there’s always more to do. But when you figure that piece of it out, now you can actually build on that structure. And that’s like a really, really key piece for business owners is creating that repeatability. That gives you a simple system that can support you.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think your backdrop has so much to do with what you have programmed yourself to feel successful from. So, I grew up in transactional sales. And as a result, I was used to getting lots of little dopamine hits all the time. If you grew up in luxury real estate sales, you’re not making a bunch of sales all the time. The sales are very stretched out. So, you better get your dopamine hits a different way and tie your feeling of success to different things. But I often see that translated into entrepreneurship exactly how you just said, which is you end up feeling productive by checking the boxes. And it’s really important to break out of that at some point and be in deep work mode.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: And we as business owners, especially with AI assistance, can give ourselves endlessly long checklists that forever grow, right? And that can become a dangerous place to be. There’s a real estate agent who was, I think, similar to where you were at, right? Like, not luxury real estate sales, but more on the transactional side. He would crank through every morning 300 cold calls. That was his morning. And he had an appointment setter and, like, an assistant. Then the afternoon, he’d go and do his listing appointments, right? Like, that is a volume game. A lot of rejection and all that. And this is back in the day when you could just cold call homeowners. And he was moving 30-plus properties a month.

 

Brad Weimert: Oh, sh*t.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Right? When, like, at least at the time, the average realtor moved 0.6 a year. He was doing, like, 30 a month. But it was a system. He came in there, got it done, wasn’t overcomplicating it, had someone else helping him, and it was just a machine. But it was simple.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I’d be remiss to not point out that being a realtor does not really make you, certainly doesn’t make you a real estate investor. And you’re not even really in real estate as a business. You’re in sales. And I think that’s a really important distinction. I was talking to somebody about this yesterday, and I was talking about wholesaling, which is, I think, a more apt comparison to this, which is wholesaling, is basically securing a property, like getting a contract on a piece of property and selling that contract to somebody else. All of those people self-identify as investors, as real estate investors. But at no point do they have any upside to the real estate at all.

 

They are getting their foot in the door with real estate, but they’re really just running again. That actually is an interesting business model, but it’s a very, very, very time-intensive, transactional model. Backing out of that, so let’s go back out to when I met you. I met you in, sh*t, ’12 maybe, ’13?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Somewhere around there, yeah.

 

Brad Weimert: Something like that. And I met you because I had just started Easy Pay Direct, or maybe very close to it, and at that time, Infusionsoft was this all-in-one sales and marketing platform, and it was, like, one of the first that did what they did, and now there’s HighLevel and ClickFunnels and all these other platforms that are out there. But at the time, that was it, and that was what people built on. You built a company called FuseDesk, which had always been interesting to me. Did you start that in 2009?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Right about there, yeah.

 

Brad Weimert: So, at the time, this platform didn’t have a ticketing system, and I don’t know if it was a scratch-your-own-itch situation, but you had a ticketing system that plugged into Infusionsoft directly. As a starting point, did you assess that logically? Did you think about the total addressable market for it, the exit value of it, any of that stuff when you got into it? Or was it just like, “They don’t have a ticketing system. I need one. I’m going to build it and use it”?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, it’s funny, because I identify my whole life as a builder, a creator, right? And this was one of those times where I very intentionally did not want to go build something else. In fact, the company I had prior, we had built up the entire company, e-commerce, marketing, subscription management, event registrations, all of it, we built in-house ourselves, which meant we owned and managed the entire tech stack, which is not a good thing.

 

Brad Weimert: No.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: And when I met the guys who started Infusionsoft at an event, I was like, “Wow, there is a third-party platform that can just do all this?” Looking at the current business, I had at the time, I’m like, “There’s no way I’m going to overhaul and rebuild what I have to go to a new system,” but I noted, I’m like, “The next business we launch, we’re launching on a CRM like Infusionsoft, so we don’t have to do that. We can just build a business and not worry about the tech.” And so, when that opportunity came around, we launched a new business on our brand-new Infusionsoft application, and one of the first things we needed was customer support. And I very intentionally said, “We’re not going to build something. There are products on the market.”

 

And we looked, and we tried out all the big names you know and all the small names and all the self-hosted and the SaaS and everything, and nothing really solved all the things we were looking to do. And so, that’s when I sort of faced the option of either we adjust our business model to fit someone else’s platform, we try and customize some other platform to meet our needs, right? We could build our own just for our own use, or we could build a tool that solves this for us and others. And so, it was kind of those latter two options where I found myself stuck, because to build for yourself and do your own thing, well, that’s like X dollar in time investment. To build it as an actual product that the market can use is like a 10X to 100X investment of time, because now you’re creating a whole thing around it.

 

So, I was in a high-end mastermind group and had this idea, like little napkin sketch idea, and I was asking the folks at the table like, “Hey, like, I’m thinking about building this. It’s going to take me away from the core business we’re actually building, but it’s going to solve a need we have.” And the resounding feedback was, “That’s a terrible idea. The addressable market is tiny. It’s a super, super niche market of people who use just that one platform, and it would not be a good idea to go that way.” And the very next sentence was always, “But can we get access to that? We’d love to use that in our business.” So, I’m looking at this duality of don’t do it, but if you do, can we be part of that?

 

So, we did a little more market research. I’m like, “All right. What is our MVP, our minimum viable product that we can test out, get early feedback, get some beta testers on board?” And we had some wonderful beta testers who quickly were able to start using the system, give us some feedback, and within a matter of a few short months, we were able to launch that as a paid SaaS platform. And all of our initial beta customers converted over to paying on day one. So, when we launched that as a company, we had revenue day one and then were able to build and essentially reinvest the money coming into the business in building the platform more, marketing, expanding, and going further.

 

And thankfully, we sort of hitched onto a company that was growing. Infusionsoft did grow over the years. So, the addressable market grew as well. But it was still a pretty niche market, so there are a few moves we made later on that helped to break out of that addressable market.

 

Brad Weimert: So, yeah, and today, FuseDesk is tied to a couple of other platforms as well, right?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah. So, we found when we looked at our churn numbers, at the end of the day, there are four reasons that customers leave you, and we found that for us, the biggest reason, overshadowing anything and everything else, was people were leaving Infusionsoft. And they’re like, “We want to keep using your platform, but we’re moving our business elsewhere.” And so, the first place people were going was ActiveCampaign.

 

Brad Weimert: Oh, right.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, if you remember those guys.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, yeah.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Right? So, we were like, “All right. Well, how do we do something with them?” And the first step was to have it so FuseDesk wasn’t tied just to one platform, Infusionsoft, but could be used standalone. So, once we did that, people could leave whatever. They could leave Infusionsoft and still use our product standalone, and then we added on the ability to connect to, at the time, ActiveCampaign. Ontraport was growing and building at the time, and then of course, the tides shifted, and everyone was going to GoHighLevel. So, how people move their business between CRMs every few years is beyond me.

 

Brad Weimert: Oh, my God.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: But companies are constantly launching and starting and occasionally moving.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. Yeah, a lot of different threads to pull on here. I was just talking to somebody the other day about AI implementation, and we have a unique, not unique to the world, but unique to most business owners’ situation around privacy concerns. Right? So, we’ve got PCI compliance, which is card data, and then we also have all sorts of personal identifying information, Social Security numbers, tax ID numbers, bank statements, etcetera, etcetera. So, we have privacy concerns around that. We’re living in HubSpot for as a sales and marketing tool. And the person I was talking to was like, “Oh, you should use something else that’s more cost-effective,” and I was like, “Fu*k that.”

 

Like, this business will not move off that. The switching cost of that is not worthwhile. It is integrated into what we’re doing. I will deal with whatever is around there. And we’re never leaving.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I still remember and think of you as a case study in leaving Infusionsoft, and you went to Salesforce next.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: That was not a cheap implementation.

 

Brad Weimert: No, it was not.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Time-wise, cost-wise, I mean, that was a major, major overhaul.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: And then from there, right to HubSpot?

 

Brad Weimert: Yep.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think, I mean, we grew while we were on Salesforce, but we would’ve grown significantly faster had we picked a better platform in the first place. Salesforce is you can dig your own grave with Salesforce. I mean, because it’s so flexible, and I kind of look at this is an Apple to Microsoft conversation, or in this comparison, HubSpot to Salesforce conversation. Look, you can do a lot. Historically, you’ve been able to do a lot of stuff with Microsoft. Apple just tells you what to do. You can do a lot of stuff in Salesforce, but if you architect it the wrong way, you’re going to architect it the wrong way, and then you have technical debt. And you have to have software developers help you with it.

 

HubSpot largely is going to tell you what to do, and it’s become more flexible over time. But this is a good segue to this. Those platforms have a significantly bigger TAM than Infusionsoft, which is now Keap, or ActiveCampaign’s probably pretty big, too, but different market. If you were to recreate FuseDesk now, would you look to latch on to a marketplace like that, or would you create the software platform as a standalone?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: It’s a really good question because I think the key to our initial growth was the fact that we were the only player in that niche, right? You know red ocean, blue ocean?

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Right? Looking at the marketplace at the time, we had I think it was, like, 10 or 12 different other platforms we evaluated and looked at and wanted to use. So, if we were going to be just a generic platform, that was a very, very red ocean. So, it was…

 

Brad Weimert: Oh, interesting.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: It was intentional to be super niche. And I really think in most any business, if you can have a niche so that you are a marketplace of one, that’s really valuable. If you’re just yet another company or an easily reproducible or vibe-quotable solution, what is your competitive edge?

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think that that’s, yes, and you also see these pivotal moments, and sometimes it doesn’t even seem like a pivotal moment, but you see somebody reinvent the category, and sometimes it’s in a way that you’re like, “Wait, what? How did you get so much steam and take over? What was it? What was the thing that you overcame?” And sometimes it’s just they reduced friction. So, you look at, like, the implementation of Slack, for example. Slack has no business being the size they are at all. It is a stupid tool, and it’s just a fu*king chat engine. But it rolled out really quickly, rolled out with a bunch of APIs, and it took over the world.

 

Zoom is the same way, right? There were already… Skype has been around forever, right? Google Meets has been around forever. It used to be Hangout. Remember that? These are things that, like, you have to ask, what was the competitive advantage? And it is a red ocean, but somehow, some little thing allowed them to cut loose. I don’t know what those things are. But I don’t think that answered my question, which was would you build on a platform or build independently moving forward?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I would still start niche.

 

Brad Weimert: Okay.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Right? And if you look at bigger picture, where do you want to go from there? You can grow from there. But one of my biggest competitive edges was we were working with platforms that were almost too small for the big players to care about. Like, we’re going up against billion-dollar companies, multi-billion-dollar companies. Right? They’re going to connect to or work with the bigger players. And in the case of, like, HubSpot, they have their own platform. Salesforce has their own platform. Right? So, if you’re using those, you got no business working with us anyways. But we’re working with these, the newer upstart platform partners, and that was a much better place to be.

 

And so, yeah, starting all over or starting next business, I really like a super narrow niche audience. That way, they know they are absolutely a fit for you, or they absolutely are not a fit for you. Then you can grow from there.

 

Brad Weimert: I like that advice. It’s fairly common advice to hear, know your avatar, sell to one person, don’t try to sell to everybody. I think parallel to that, in some way, is to know what pool you’re playing in. And if you are a small bootstrap company, don’t try to play the same game that a large, funded company is going to play. And if you’re trying to compete with them, you’re going to lose. Like, you shouldn’t be playing that game. Play the game that they can’t play, right? If you’re bootstrapped, you have some advantage there, but it’s not to try to go feature for feature with the heavily funded massive company.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I mean, the table stakes at that point are their entire product.

 

Brad Weimert: You got it.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: If you’re not already there, which there’s a huge technical mountain ahead of you to get there, you’re not even competing yet. So, it’s not a great place. I mean, look at Easy Pay Direct, right? When you started EPD, were you just sure, processing for anyone anywhere?

 

Brad Weimert: No. Though that was the mentality I wanted to be. That was a lesson I had to learn.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah. But starting out, though, that’s not where your focus was. You found an underserved niche, an underserved market, a market that needed a solution, and you served them like nobody else could. That was a great beachhead. That got you in the game, and you were able to build and grow from there.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s totally right. I mean, life is long. Hopefully, you learn the lessons the first time around. I like to say that I’m not very good at learning from other people’s mistakes, but I’m good at learning from my own after I’ve made them a few times.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Somehow, we just got to learn the hard way a few times, don’t we?

 

Brad Weimert: Oh, dude. People are like, “Oh, how did you learn high risk?” And I’m like, “I beat my fu*king head against the wall for, like, years.” Yeah. And risk was the beginning of it for us, and now our market’s much broader, and a big chunk of our audience is just e-com. Or just people selling stuff. But you’re right, and it’s sort of a feature at a time, and we’re deep in rolling out a new platform, that I don’t think I’ve talked about on the show at all, called EPD Commerce, that we’re in closed beta on. So, we’ve got a couple of dozen clients that are using it now. We’ll probably have a few hundred on it over the summer, and then we’re doing this big launch in Q4.

 

But when you look at the feature development and the roadmap of it, there is a tremendous amount of planning and analysis around what features to build and who they serve.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: How are you making that decision?

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I mean, largely, some of it’s around the target markets that we want to serve. And then from there, the question is, how can we build a feature that’s better than what’s out there for that one feature? And so, the baseline for anybody on the team that’s contributing to product development is if we roll out a feature, we don’t have to roll out all the features, but every feature that we roll out, each one has to be better than Stripe, for example. Like, how it works, what it does, functionality, user experience, something needs to be a big jump up from what people are used to using. And, for better or worse, Stripe is the benchmark there.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: And they are a solid benchmark.

 

Brad Weimert: Oh, a fantastic company. They just, unfortunately, like if you look at the Trustpilot reviews, they have 17,000 reviews, and they have a 1.7-star rating, or 1.6 now.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Wow.

 

Brad Weimert: Oh, it’s crazy. And it’s not because they’re a bad company, it’s because people, there are two, if you happen to like dissect the reviews theoretically, you might find out that half of them, roughly, are customer service problems. Okay, they’re huge, and you don’t have anybody to talk to, so it’s a ticketing system. And you don’t get a response in time. The other is that they held my money and closed my account. And those are people that shouldn’t have been using Stripe in the first place. Unfortunately, Stripe doesn’t filter those out. That is their model. Spin everybody up, close them if they don’t work. So, they’re a great platform, but that market is where we started, with like the people that shouldn’t have been on Stripe in the first place.

 

And people have figured that out over time. but when I met you in ’09, ’10, ’11, ’12, PayPal was Stripe, right? PayPal was the platform that would spin everybody up, and they would close everybody. And for sure, they struck some deal with Google and wiped out all their bad press. because like, overnight, they went from having tons of negative press online to like none. This was, yeah, this was like ’09, ’10, ’11, something like that.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Wow. Oh, great review purge.

 

Brad Weimert: Crazy.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Wow.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, crazy. But when Stripe popped up, immediately, it’s the same business model. It’s a payment facilitation model, which we used to call an aggregator. As soon as I saw it, I was like, “This is the exact same model. It’s a much better platform, but the same model.” And I was like, “Give it time. They’re going to have all the same negative press.” It took a little longer with them, but same sh*t. We’re in the same place. History rhymes, as they say. So, yeah. Anyway, from the payments perspective, that’s my stance. You have done software, you have done e-com. You are technical by nature, I think.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Unfortunately.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I have become that way, which is annoying.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I’m sorry.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I know. Which only teaches you more that maintenance on software is a bitch, which leads me to, before we transition into other business models in the book, the buy versus build conversation. So, today, in June of ’26, people think they can develop all their own software by vibe coding it, and they can develop some of it. And developers can develop things much faster than they used to be able to. When do you buy something? When do you build something? And how do you make that choice?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, if we’re talking vibe coding solutions, we don’t know what’s going on under the hood per se, and you may get a very wonderful, confident-looking solution that may not do what you expect the way you want.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, it is a wonderful solution. There’s so much we can vibe code, and we can, man, launch SaaS products faster than ever nowadays, right? Building, expanding beyond that is a different story. In general, if there is an off-the-shelf solution that I can click, click, click onboard with, and it does everything I need, and it has room to grow and customizability and all that stuff, I’m happy. There’s got to be a pretty big gap between what a solution I can buy does and what I really need for me to start considering do I want to build this thing. Because my nature is, I quickly think to, “I could build this. We could create this.” But like we were sharing earlier about learning lessons the hard way, I’ve learned so many times that when you create it, you now own that whole tech stack. And you own everything it takes to keep it running.

 

Brad Weimert: Yep.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: And as you’ve seen from software, libraries, operating systems, everything is upgrading versions, and so just to maintain with no new functionality, no new bug fixes, nothing, you still have maintenance you’ve got to do just to keep it compatible and working. And that’s a pain if what you want is a solution. So, buy is often a better choice.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I agree with that entirely. I have two additional thoughts on that. One is clarifying why maintenance is so rough, because there are people listening that have vibe-coded stuff, and it hasn’t broken yet, but I bet you, if you vibe-coded it more than a month ago, you’ve run into a situation where nothing changed. You didn’t change things, you didn’t add features, and something broke. There are two reasons that happens. One is that the actual code that was written wasn’t good, and it conflicts with itself. So, something’s happening in the code, something runs, a cron job runs, which is just a reminder for the software to do something, it runs, and it compounds. And over time, it expands, and it’s like storing data somewhere that then ends up conflicting with something else, and it breaks.

 

So, internal code that you didn’t write or architect the right way can be a source of that. The other is what you said around other code bases get updated. So, if you tie into a front-end framework or a back-end framework or a database or a chart builder, a graph builder, a report tool, which is what the vibe coding tools do. Though when those upgrade, for security reasons, it often breaks things. And those are realities of building.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Even in content, like if you think way back, like early days of WordPress, WordPress fits a category of things called content management systems, or CMS was the technical term. There were a few out there. They were all in their early stages, and it was the better alternative to just writing HTML from scratch.

 

Brad Weimert: Yep.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Right? And so, for a company of mine, we were debating do we build on Movable Type or WordPress? Most of our listeners probably never heard of Movable Type. At the time, it was a pretty close competitor to WordPress, and it was kind of a crapshoot which way you went. And we really looked at the pros, the cons, everything, and we bet on Movable Type. And we created systems in the back end that could create content and put it through the system and built all the stuff on that. And within, I mean, months, not even a year, WordPress pulled ahead so strong, and now, I mean, that’s all we talk about. No one’s heard of Movable Type.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. WordPress is what, like, 35% of the internet or something?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: It’s about a third, yeah.

 

Brad Weimert: It’s crazy.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: And that was an intentional, well-thought-through, good decision that ended up being the wrong bet.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: And so, in the same way you’re talking about, you decide, “Ooh, do we go with Google versus AWS, or where do we host this? Oh, should we build this on Claude versus GPT?” At some point, you’re going to make a well-thought-out, informed, good decision, and it may not be the right one. And even if it is the right one, it’s great. Those APIs change over time, right? Those systems, those platforms evolve, and at some point, whatever you’ve built on is going to have breaking changes that you will need to deal with, just because time went on, not because you did anything.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I’ll pin the WordPress conversation, because we can go down a rabbit hole on that one. We have leaned very heavily into headless stuff. And the capacity to build dope websites now is wild. So, that’s on the lighter end of things, right, from an architectural perspective. But I’ll leave that aside. I’ll give another approach to people that are conflicted with, “Should I vibe code something or buy it off the shelf?” If you buy it off the shelf today, most platforms that you buy off the shelf today have good APIs and web hooks that allow you to develop into it, for any of the things that you don’t have, which ironically, is how FuseDesk came to be.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Exactly.

 

Brad Weimert: Right? Infusionsoft had an API that allowed you to plug into it. I think that’s a valuable frame to think about. We have an internal development team that built an onboarding platform for us, and our rule is that if it can be done in HubSpot, we do it in HubSpot. If it can’t, then we custom-code it outside. And now we have a tremendous like, all sorts of use cases for what we have to build, what our unique product is for the onboarding process. But it still feeds into HubSpot for sales and marketing.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: And the example you shared there with Infusionsoft’s API is on point, because at some point, they went through and depreciated an older version of their API and changed to a new authentication model, which was architecturally and fundamentally a complete overhaul. And it’d be one thing if they said, “Sure, you can use one or the other,” but they set a timeline and said, “No, that’s getting sunset. That old version’s going to go away.” And, like, the entire architecture had to change to support this, and that was a massive undertaking, because they were making a business change so they could get acquired. So, they have their own, as all your API partners do, their own motivations and reasons for doing things that may not be aligned with yours.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. And I’ll get off development so we don’t lose all the people that are, like, non-developers listening. But the sun setting and how platforms sunset anything, but specifically their APIs, is incredibly important. And there are good ways to do that, and there are bad ways to do that.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I mean, Facebook has a new version, like, it seems like easily once or twice a year.

 

Brad Weimert: Oh, yeah. And to relate this to anybody that doesn’t do development work at all, it’s analogous to logging into a platform, and then all the buttons move, and the menus change. And you’re like, “What are we doing right now?” And like when iOS updates, when your phone updates and everything’s different, usually it’s only a little bit different, right? But, like, HubSpot lately, they pop new things in here left and right. And so, like, if you’re not in the platform every day, two months pass, and I log in, and I’m like, “Where the fu*k are these things?”

 

Like, I don’t even know where to go anymore. So, I’m stumbling around clicking like I’m a geriatric, and my staff is like, “No, no, dude, over here, over here, over here.” And I’m like, “Oh, God.” You know? It’s always the tech founder that’s having the issues stumbling through it, too.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Well, I think a relatable analogy is it’s like you get a car, right? What we want is to get from point A to B. None of us wants car maintenance or upkeep or repairs or any of these kinds of things, but it’s kind of par for the course. It’s going to come with it. It’s not a matter of will my car need work? At some point, over time, it will. So, instead of buying, you can lease, right? You could build your own. Whatever way you roll, at some point, there are going to be things that take you out of getting from A to B, and now dealing with the thing that gets you from A to B. So, in our business, we want to just run our business. Ideally, the tech stack and all the stuff that is underneath the hood that helps it to run is not our concern. And then we can just focus on the business we want to run.

 

Brad Weimert: Well, speaking of the differences between brand-new founders or solopreneurs and established businesses, part of that is the clarity and the focus around what your business is. And spending your time on the things that actually are your unique advantage and what makes the company money and serves the client. And it is very easy, now more than ever, to get caught in technology for the sake of building the technology, not for the sake of the outcome.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: And that’s the inventor archetype right there, right? That is the entrepreneur founder who has an idea, and they tinker away and toil away in their garage for years on the world’s best next mousetrap. But it never gets to market. It’s never tested. They never try selling it. They have no idea if the market wants this thing, and worse is they’re in that perfectionist mentality of always wanting to add that one more thing. Right? And this applies to technology companies, where it’s a technical founder-led company. If you can get your hands dirty in the code, you’re probably going to get your hands dirty in the code, and that’s like the worst thing for you to be doing as a founder, right?

 

I was just meeting with a friend of mine last night, and he’s had technology companies and is absolutely not a technology person. And I love that because it forced you not to get your hands dirty because you can’t. You get to focus on being the visionary, and you can have a team execute on that vision.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. I think yes, and those are tough decisions because the question then is, where’s the lever? And the lever is either you have a deeper understanding of what you’re doing to be able to create leverage, or you effectively hire somebody that can do it for you. And hiring that person is a skill set in and of itself. Finding the right ones. And then you have examples like Elon, who, like, breaks all the rules, and he’s like, “No, I’m not going to hire the right people to do it. If the right people come in and they’re doing it and they get stuck on a problem, I’m going to come in and fix the problem with them,” which is like, Jesus Christ, what, you learned how to be a rocket scientist, you know? Yeah, and yes is the answer, like crazy.

 

So, yeah, look, there’s not one way to do things, but I largely agree with that. Well, outside of software, you built a bunch of other businesses. One of them is the Bay Area Mastermind. I fundamentally, and I’ve said this a lot, so I won’t belabor it from my perspective, but believe that relationships are the foundation of everything else. How do you think about curating a room in a mastermind environment? Do you want homogeny? Do you want diversity? Do you want the same types of businesses? Do you want a variety of types of businesses, age, gender, background? How do you think about curating a group like that?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, for me, what I look for are homogeny in terms of business stage and size, and diversity everywhere else. What I learned is that when you’re talking with in a low early six-figure business or prospective business or five-figure business, the conversations that they’re going to be part of with seven and eight-figure businesses, just the advice doesn’t apply to them. The questions and things they have and things they want to know, right, are how do I questions. Right? There’s not a whole lot they can share that will help the rest of the group. With your seven-figure businesses and beyond, well, now we’re talking about businesses that have figured out what their product is. They know how to sell this thing. They’re generating revenue. They probably ideally have a team in place, systems, and so forth.

 

Now they’re able to share all the things they’re actively doing and actively have done and plan to do, and can get the feedback and insight from others, but more importantly, hear from others who are doing the same kinds of things in their business, right? The biggest and greatest ideas that I hear are when we have, like, what I call the cross-pollination. So, you have one business owner sharing something that someone in a totally different industry is able to pluck up and use in their industry, and now they are disruptive, and now they can differentiate, right? Whereas if you want to go be around people like you, you can go to your trade industry conference.

 

And if you’re an attorney, you can meet all the other attorneys who are doing the same kind of thing the same way and be one of them. How do you differentiate that way? So, I do look for a diversity of the room in that regard.

 

Brad Weimert: Can you give me an example of taking a business practice from one industry and applying it to a different industry altogether?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, I still remember the day. I was sitting at the head of the table, and we had an e-commerce business owner on one side of the table and a brick-and-mortar retail store owner on the other. And the brick-and-mortar retail store owner was talking about how they’re using, like, direct mail in their business, and that way people who’d never heard of the store location would find out about it and would come in and visit the store and buy stuff. And the e-commerce store owner was talking about how they use email marketing in their business, and they send an email out, money comes in. Simple as that. And they look at metrics like earnings per click and all these different things.

 

Now, these businesses had never used the other strategy. The e-commerce guy’s like, “Direct mail? Like, we do business online. That’s ridiculous. Who’s going to put a piece of paper in the mail with a stamp on it and generate business? Like, that’s not how we do it.” The retail store owner is like, “I don’t even have my customers’ email addresses,” which, like, is shocking, right? So, strategies were discussed, best practices were shared, and over the course of the next month, between meetings, the retail store owner started asking people for email addresses at the counter, right? We all see this at stores all the time: sign up for our list, get on a newsletter, get a coupon, all these things. They started collecting and actually building an email list. And not only that, emails were sent out.

 

And wouldn’t you know, she sent emails out, new business came in, and it was a strategy she’d never used. And the e-commerce store owner, who’d been growing and had built a healthy 8-figure business, started using direct mail, and direct mailings were going out, and people who’d never heard of them, who weren’t searching online, were now coming and buying for the first time. And so, this is one of those areas where if you’re around a bunch of people like yourself, you’ll hear more of the same, and you’ll reinforce the things you’re doing. But you step outside your industry or business model, you get that really beautiful cross-pollination.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I like that. I think that it’s the job of an entrepreneur to try to learn those lessons from other places. And today, there are a lot of people out there that do sort of case studies and assess businesses. But if you listen to those podcasts, watch that content, read those books, eventually you will program yourself to think, “How can I apply this to my business? Are we doing something like this?” And I think in the beginning, the default is, “Yeah, but my business is different.”

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Right?

 

Brad Weimert: Right. And to a great extent, business is business, marketing is marketing, sales is sales, finance is finance, and you have to figure out how to apply those lessons to your specific situation.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah. At the end of the day, I think, yes, every business is a beautiful, unique, wonderful snowflake, especially to the business owner. But peel back one layer, it’s all those things you just mentioned.

 

Brad Weimert: Yep.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: That when you sit across the table from business owner to business owner to business owner, you see those commonalities. And I’m a dot connector, and so I see those patterns. And yeah, at the end of the day, one person is super strong in operations. Someone else is really strong in hiring. Someone else is excellent in marketing. Someone else is great on sales, right? Like, everyone brings some kind of superpower into the room, right? And that is their area of genius, their area of expertise, the stuff they get excited about, and they are constantly experimenting and playing with. But they’ve also got some other areas, right? And they could use some work there.

 

And I think knowledge generally falls in, like, these three categories, right? There’s the stuff you know you know, and that’s that area of genius. There’s the stuff you know you don’t know, and this is where we get questions. That’s where we go, and we search things online, right? We ask our AI assistant, we take a course, we find a mentor, we buy a book, and we seek out knowledge to answer the questions we have. But the vast body of knowledge is this unknown unknown. And so, how do you find out about the unknown unknown? Well, you got to put yourself out there, right? You go to a conference where there’s a lineup of speakers talking on things you don’t really know a whole lot about, and you get those ideas.

 

You surround yourself with other business owners who are going to share what’s going on in their business, what’s working, what’s not, where they need help, and you get ideas, right? So, you intentionally step out of that comfort zone and put yourself in the company of others, and that is where we really get a spotlight on the stuff we don’t know we don’t know. And that’s where all those pivots happen.

 

Brad Weimert: Napoleon Hill popularized the construct of a mastermind to at least present-day entrepreneurs through Think and Grow Rich. Today, masterminds have transformed into all sorts of crazy stuff. And today, most of the time when you hear the term mastermind, it’s a high-dollar amount or a high-ticket mechanism for businesses to monetize their knowledge with their unique business, or just general business. It’s usually not actually a mastermind, though.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: No. The terms have kind of bastardized over the years.

 

Brad Weimert: Oh, 100%. What do you think the mechanisms are or the makeup is for a high-performing mastermind versus like a networking group with lipstick?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah. So, there are a few different ways I divide up groups, right? There’s, first of all, sort of the caliber, right? So, you have your high-end paid, maybe destination masterminds, right? These are usually in your mid to high five-figure a year investment. You may have two to three meetings a year. Sometimes you fly out and go to a different location to meet up with folks, and there’s a lot of value. It’s sort of like the country club model. You’re getting to hang out with folks who can also afford to stroke that check, right? And that’s a good qualifying factor. It shouldn’t be the only, right?

 

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the groups where maybe they meet weekly. It’s a phone call. It’s a Zoom meeting. It’s a coffee at something, right? Maybe 60, 90 minutes. They might be free to $100 a month, right? And the caliber of folks you’re getting there, it’s vastly different. Your accountability is lower. If you miss a meeting, no big deal. If something comes up versus the free meeting you’re going to go to, like you might take to something else, right? So, there’s not a whole lot of consistency. The accountability is not great. Curation isn’t high, and so on. In the middle, I think, is that sweet spot, meeting monthly, so you have a whole month to implement things in your business.

 

You haven’t built and sold a business between meetings, right? You are still making measurable steps forward, but you haven’t finished the bigger picture of the company, right? Meeting for a full day or at the very least half a day, as opposed to multiple days or only 60 minutes. And so, that’s really that sweet spot that I see, in terms of structure. Then I look at two other factors. Is it guru-led? Meaning everyone’s there to be around the organizer, right? And this is the kind of category you’re talking about, where a company is add on a new revenue stream by having a mastermind, which can be great. But if people are there because they want to be around that person, that has some scalability challenges, and people aren’t connecting as much with each other as they could be because they’re mostly trying to rub shoulders with and sit next to and be with that leader.

 

The other is facilitator-led, and these are more of your peer groups, right? So, this is where you’re hanging out with people who have also been curated to be in sort of the same growth stage you are, and you have someone who’s facilitating that meeting, but they themselves as the facilitator aren’t the big draw. They’re just doing a good job of running an effective meeting.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, which are two different skill sets.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Very.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Facilitation is, I’ve got a good friend, Jon Berghoff, that runs a group called xchange. And the whole platform, the whole business is about how to facilitate the dynamics for an event to get people to engage the right way, and what the process is for that. But, yeah, I think that’s a really good distinction between those two. So, you wrote a book, Your Business Growth Playbook. Breakthrough Strategies to Scale Your Business for Business Owners Who’ve Outgrown Hustle is the subtitle of it. I like that transitional moment, and one of the things that I like about it in general is it’s never-ending. And so, I see for me, like, the obvious target for this are the people that are just doing that jump.

 

But I think inevitably, what I see in business is at each different level, at each different plateau, you find yourself having to reassign responsibilities to a given role or jump into a new role entirely. But as the founder growing it, what it means to be a CEO at a million versus 10 million versus 50 versus 100 versus a billion are very different things. Early on, what are the symptoms that you should look for that you are hustling too much, and you have not crossed that line yet into ownership?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, when your business is scaling up, early on, you are doing a lot of the things, and that’s okay early on. But once you’ve sort of figured out who your customer is, what your product is, how you communicate that, and how you sell that, that is now the time when you can start to step back and have others execute the system. And that’s a really, really important part of growth. But we can also look at growth in a different way, right? What I find classically is business owners have a channel that they’re all in on or a few channels that deliver for them, but as the business grows, the channels kind of tap out. And for whatever reason, whatever got them to the stage they’re at now isn’t going to get them to the next stage they want to be at.

 

And so, we’ve got to look at what are the fundamentals under the hood that are the limiting factors. If you’re familiar with the Theory of Constraints, or TOC, for our listeners, a great book on that is called The Goal. It’s sort of the bible on Theory of Constraints. There’s going to be something in that business that is holding you back, and it can come down to, for example, I’ll share from one of my businesses. I was building this in the early days of, like, Google AdWords, and we were spending $10,000 a month on Google Ads, and we were getting, like, 40K in new business upfront in the door. It’s great, 4:1 return. So, we scaled that, and we were at 20K, and we’re getting, like, 3:1 return. Still pretty good. About the same.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Right? We went to 30K a month, and we’re down to, like, 2:1. We got to 40K a month, and we’re breaking even. And so, that’s what we call, like, diminishing returns. And so, that’s still okay. It was a continuity-based business. We were fine getting a dollar back in for each dollar we spent because we knew next month we’d be making a bunch of money on that new business. But then, like, we took our eye off the ball, and we were doing other things in the business, and now our 40k a month was getting us, like, $0.50 on the $1, right? And this was now what we would call a problem. So, we looked at this and said, “Do we manage this ourselves? Do we learn all the changes that Google is making and try to keep up? What do we do?”

 

Or do we just bring someone in, right? This is the buy versus build approach. And so, we brought in an agency to run this for us. And, like, right off the bat, they’re able to do a few important things. But one is they’re able to reduce the ad spend, and two is they were able to increase the ROI on the ad spend. But more importantly, someone else was now managing this and responsible for it. But we also had to look at, like, okay, have we tapped out that particular channel? What else can we be doing? And so much of business growth that we hear about in books from speakers and courses and so forth comes down to, how do I get more customers? And most business owners are asking, “How do I increase my quantity of customers?”

 

And that is one lever you can pull, right? Dump more in the top of the funnel. I argue there are two other levers we can pull that if you are getting lead flow in your business, there’s so much more we can do with an existing business model to grow revenue and, more importantly, to grow profit.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Well, I think that you’re… So, you have a framework FAQ inside of the book, which is frequency, amount, quantity. And I love a good framework. I also love a good acronym. What I’ve heard very often, I can attribute this to some marketing guru or notable person at some point, that there are only three levers. And it’s get more customers, increase the amount they buy when they buy, and then increase how often they buy. Right? Which is the same thing, right? Backwards.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah. The variables can get rearranged.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: To fit your acronym of choice.

 

Brad Weimert: That’s exactly right. Yeah, exactly right. I’ve got a good buddy, Hal, who wrote The Miracle Morning and he has an acronym in there, SAVERS, which is, silence, affirmation, visualization, exercise, fu*k, something, but the last S is writing, but it’s scribing, because he needed an acronym.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yep. No one wants…

 

Brad Weimert: What’s R? Damn it. Yeah, no, you need a good acronym. Actually, notably from a marketing perspective, you really do. So, I said it playfully, but actually, tactical business advice is if you don’t have a heuristic, then a simple way for people to remember something, and an acronym could be one of those, they’re probably not going to remember it. And so, if you have a checklist of 13 things somebody’s supposed to do, or even if you have a checklist of five things that somebody is supposed to do, are they going to remember the five? And the answer is maybe. But if you have an acronym for it, the answer is a little bit more likely.

 

So, I like that from a marketing perspective in general. When you think about operating principles, how do you feel about implementing operating systems in the business, whatever those are? Do you have a framework that you use for that? Do you latch onto an existing one? How do you think about growing businesses and running them?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, from an SOP standpoint?

 

Brad Weimert: EOS, Rockefeller habits, scaling up, that stuff.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I think I grew up in, from a business standpoint, in the world of like E-Myth and some of the structures from that program, and I still love and enjoy a lot of that today. And there’s a lot of similarity between all these frameworks, but at the end of the day, you have a documentation on how a thing is supposed to be done, that if you are doing it in your business currently, is good to document down how it is you do it. And you’ll quickly realize at times that you may not be consistent. So, simply creating a system and then running your own system is a good first step, and then having someone else do it. And in any system we create, it’s going to go one of three ways, right?

 

Ideally, our happy path is the system is run, you get the result you want, all is well in the world. Early on, the first few runs, your first few trials of your system, what you’re going to find is that you’re not going to get the outcome you want because the system wasn’t perfect. And so, we tweak the system, we adjust it, we clarify the thing that was obvious to you but not to the person running it, and so on. Later on, when it’s a mature system and running well, we might not get the output we want, and that’s often because the person isn’t using the system, right? And that’s an opportunity for coaching, management, and so forth.

 

Brad Weimert: Or firing.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Management. Yeah. That kind of falls in that umbrella.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, it does.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Sometimes it’s the wrong person. You know, it’s the right person in the wrong seat, right?

 

Brad Weimert: Sometimes it’s a bad manager.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Also, very often. And many of us business owners can fit that bill. Yes.

 

Brad Weimert: Yes. That’s very true.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: We often are operators, right? Or we’re visionaries, but not many of us realize there’s management that comes with that, too. So, to your point about the systems, though, one of the exercises I like to do is to figure out sort of the org chart for the business, what all the different roles are in the company. And for an earlier company, your name might be in a lot of those different roles, and that’s okay. But when you have a system or structure for those, as you grow, you can bring people on to take care of that outcome, that well-defined, clear definition of success outcome. And then at some point, ideally, your name is in like none to few of those boxes, and you’re working fewer hours in that business, and the business is still running or ideally even growing.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I think one of the ways that I think about SOPs and whether or not they’re functional, obviously end of the day do they get the results or not, but if you take even today with as good as some of the translation tools are out there, if you take a sentence, much less a paragraph, and you give it to Google Translate and say, “Translate this in Spanish,” and then you take the Spanish output and you put it back into Google Translate and say, “Translate it to English,” 100% you’re going to end up with different English than what you started with. SOPs are very similar from that lens, which is if you hand an SOP to somebody and they execute it and they’re not getting the outcome that you were, you internalize that SOP differently. And so, the output’s going to be different.

 

And so, the first check that I give with an SOP is, can somebody else read it? And there’s a baseline of, like, what do they have to know to use the SOP, right? But can the qualified person read it and actually deliver what you want with it? Is it clear enough to do that? And if they can’t, then you need to tighten up the SOP.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: A really fun exercise I love to do with folks when we’re teaching SOPs on how to do this is we have you write down how you make your morning coffee. Really simple. And everyone usually jots down what’s necessary for that. And then we just tear it apart. And we go into like all these different things of like, “Oh, so the whole beans go in the filter?” “Oh, no, you need to grind them.” “Oh, okay. So, just grind it, like, super, super coarse?” “No, no, it should be fine.” “Oh, okay. We grind it fine. And it just goes right in the filter?” Like, “No, no, it needs to go in the pour over the actual ceramic piece.” “Oh, okay. And, like, just dry filter?” “No, no, you should pre-wet it.” And so, you iteratively realize all the ways it can be screwed up. And you can watch it in real live action, hand it to someone else entirely, and see how they do with it.

 

And so, then we quickly come to learn all the things that need to be communicated, from what supplies, equipment, and so forth you’ll need, right, to what knowledge or baseline information you’ll need, but most importantly is, like, what that definition of success is. Because ideally, like, not everything is factory style, follow an SOP. Ideally, we have these roles in the company that are bigger thinking, right? And so, that’s not exactly as structured, but there still is an outcome we want. Like, you’re head of marketing, you’re not going to tell them how to resize an image. But you are going to have some outcome for what your head of marketing should be doing, and so you need some clarity on what we call definition of success.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. Nope, I love that. You have a construct in the book called a daily flight plan. I like this in general. Give me the basic idea and then tell me how you decide what goes on the daily flight plan.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah. So, the daily flight plan and concept is just a way of organizing your day. It’s a little tool I created years ago. You think about pilots. Before they fly somewhere, they file a flight plan. They don’t just get up in the air and then radio over to control like, “Oh, hey, I’m thinking about maybe I’ll fly to Dallas today.” That’s not how that goes. It’s all pre-filed ahead of time, and there’s a plan. So, the daily flight plan, the idea is before you leave the office for the day, you have in front of you I like to do this old school with a pen and paper, but you jot down, like, what your actual meetings and obligations are, and yeah, it can change, and we have tools for that, great, but just bigger picture, you know your blocks, like I got this meeting, this recording, this launch, and so forth.

 

Then you look at, like, what is it that I’m going to accomplish tomorrow? A measurable, specific thing you’re going to get done. And some folks will time block this, so you can also do it that way. You just go to your calendar for the next day, and you block out sections, but you have real clarity there on what you plan to get done. Then, when you get in the office the next day, there’s no jumping into your email and the fires of the day, all the things that are just jumping up in front of you. You know what needs to get done, and you know those are the important things that’ll move the needle forward, and they’re all things that are proactively planned versus the fires that you’re reacting to.

 

Brad Weimert: So, to that end, how do you think about accountability to execute that? So, founders, in particular bootstrap founders, don’t have a board typically, and typically, they have people in their company that, because they report to them, say yes, and do not argue or create contention around whether or not something got executed from the founder. How do you keep yourself accountable? How do you think about that with a founder-led company?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, the norm, I would say, is that entrepreneurs have a little bit of ooh-shiny-itis. You’re distracted by the cool new idea, that thing you just heard on the podcast in the car, the thing you just read in a book, the idea your buddy’s doing. And so, you just shift gears constantly, and things don’t ship because you’re always working on something which feels good. It feels productive. It’s busy, not productive. And all these half-started things don’t get across the finish line, right? When you do grow, and you’re at that larger stage, then you are accountable to others, that’s wonderful, but early on, that’s not the case. There are others of us, more the rare breed, and I think you and I can fit in this, and the parallels here, by the way, like to athleticism, fitness, endurance sport, is unparalleled, right? You commit to doing something, and you just do it.

 

And I have friends, other business owners, who look at me and they’re like, “I don’t understand,” like “How do you just get that done?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I said I’d do it, so I got it done.” That is rare, right? So, what are the tools that most of us need to accomplish what we want to accomplish? Well, accountability partners are great. Mastermind groups are great for this as well. One of the things I do in the groups that I run is after each person finishes up their hot seat, we just recap what are the accountability items, what do you want us to hold you accountable to between now and our next meeting? And that gets shared, that’s publicized, that has check-ins with, and how are we doing on those things?

 

There was one group I was part of. I love this. You had an accountability buddy, and you figured out, like, the few big things you were going to get done, and you figured out, like, what was the enormous, giant, painful stick that was going to come your way if you didn’t get it done. And you got to be a little creative with this, but, like, it had to sting in some way, right? So, you can have an accountability partner hold you accountable. I know folks who’ve done things where it’s like, “If I miss the thing I said I’m going to get done, I’m making a donation to a charity which I absolutely would not support.”

 

And for the other person, vice versa. And so, you can do that, right? You can just have your check-in. It can be a spouse, a friend, someone to share what you’re going to get done. And this is where daily flight planning comes in handy, because now you’re committing to what you’re going to get done, and then they can hold you accountable and check in on that with you.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I like that. I mean, I think about, for me personally, habits are such a significant driver, and I think that you build habits through consistency. And increase data points, build habits, build habits to drive additional data points. Meaning, like in the endurance world, and I talk about this a lot, but like as soon as you make a mistake, as soon as you allow yourself to rest, then you’re building the habit the other way. So, it’s like you need to have some consistency and to say, “Hey, no matter what, I’m doing this,” and that flight plan I think is very valuable to do that, where it’s like the flight plan doesn’t have to be, “Here’s the massive thing that I’m getting done.”

 

You can have a simple thing on it, which is like, this is why morning routines help people so much, right? You can say, “No matter what, every morning I’m getting up and I’m writing every day.” And as long as you just do that, you start to build the muscle of doing it.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: There are certain things we don’t think about, like brushing our teeth, getting dressed for the day. Whatever baseline routines we have, we do. And you can, you know, Atomic Habits talks about this. Habit stacking is a technique, right? And when you figure out what are the things you want to have in your life and just make a part of your life, it is. Like for me, exercise is a part of my life every day. We’re Strava buddies. You see on there the consistency of every day. I just picked up my phone to check my number, but I’m on Duolingo day 2,250.

 

Brad Weimert: Damn. Learning English?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I’m trying. Yeah. How am I doing?

 

Brad Weimert: You’re doing pretty good, man.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Oh, phew. Thank you. English is the 12th language. It’s one of those things I don’t even think about it. It’s just you do it. It’s part of the day. And it’s to the point our whole family’s on this now. Our kids are on their 800-and-something day streak. And they’re happy with that. My wife is also at 2,000 and some hundred days. And so, as a family, we just talk about like, “Hey, did you do your Lingos today? Did you get your bird worship in?” Whatever you want to call it, it’s just something you do every day. And so, that can be applied in your business as well, that if you say you’re going to do something, you build that habit of I do what I say I’m going to do. And like, to me, that is like such a core value in who I am.

 

We show up. We get it done. Like, the workout groups and things that I lead, a lot of my working out is social. I know some people like to just be in their zone, do their thing, put AirPods in.

 

Brad Weimert: Me, yeah.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Which is good for you. For me, the social accountability helps of like…

 

Brad Weimert: Totally get it.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I know, I run ParkPT on Tuesdays, right? Bunch of us run to a park. I lead a HIIT workout, and everyone runs home. And I know if I’m not going to be there, that’s letting down my buddy, whom I said I’d be there. And I know if I don’t share the workout ahead of time with the group, if I’m not going to be there, the others who are showing up won’t know what it’s going to be, right? So, like, there’s a social responsibility there, a social contract built in. And everyone knows if I say I’ll be there, I’m going to show up for it.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah. It’s so simple, and it’s so complicated for people. It’s hard. It’s simple. It’s not easy.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Right.

 

Brad Weimert: Right? But I think that one of the reasons that I like external activities as a part of people’s lives so much is because it allows you to build habits, period. It allows you to drive integrity, period. And integrity is the foundation of all this, which is just do what you say you’re going to do. And if you get in alignment with yourself to say, “No matter what, I’m going to do what I say I’m going to do,” one, it keeps you from bullsh*tting. So, you’re more hesitant to commit to something that you’re not sure if you’re going to do. And two, it increases the follow-through in every other area of your life, right? Hey, no, no, no, I said I was going to do it.

 

So, like you brought up that’s an internal value for you at some point, and I think most people sort of segment different areas of even business, where, much less life, where they’re like, “Yeah, I said I’m going to do it and I did it. Yeah, but this other thing, yeah, I didn’t really, I wasn’t really going to do it.” It’s like, “Well, what the fu*k did you say you were going to do it then?” You know? And so, you’re creating this internal disparity with your own personality.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I have this reputation when it comes to like volunteerism and different things like that, like I say no to things a lot, because when I do say yes, it’s 110%. So, people now know that I may say no if they ask me to do something. But the yes is a real yes with real follow-through that doesn’t need reminders. It gets done. And I think there’s something interesting about like identity and adjectives and such, right? So, for example, if you say like, “Yeah, I’m a punctual person, I’m always early to on time,” if you are late once, that doesn’t shatter everything. That means today was the exception. So, it’s the difference between saying like someone’s a bad person versus making a bad choice. Those are two really different things.

 

One is like visceral to the ethos of who they are, and one is talking about the decision. So, if we tell ourselves things like, “Yeah, I do what I say I’m going to do,” and if we slip one time, it doesn’t happen, like it’s bound to happen. Like, that’s okay. That doesn’t shatter everything. There’s no like, “Oh, I need to get back on the wagon,” or “I was wrong.” No, you just get back into it. You look at like pro tennis players, right? They miss a shot. What do they do? They throw the racket, get bent out of shape, lose it, and have a terrible rest of the match? Ideally not. The better ones like turn away, pluck a few strings, reset, and they’re back in it. And that shortening that timeline from “failure” to getting back in the game is a real-life skill.

 

If you can lose a race and then get back into it, if you can have a crappy lap but then do it again, if you can lose a big sale but then go and get your next one, like you cut your teeth with Cutco on this, right?

 

Brad Weimert: Oh, yeah.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: If you got one no and said, “This isn’t for me,” that’s not going to work.

 

Brad Weimert: I would encourage nobody to cut their teeth with Cutco. But yes, it was actually during selling Cutco that that realization came to me, which was, and the phrase that I used was, “One day we’re going to laugh at this.” And I realized that it was this precious skill to try to just laugh now. And the more you could compress the timeframe from the thought of one day we’re going to laugh at this, and when you laugh, the quicker you can move to the next thing, and maintain your own focus.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: That’s just it. You can wallow and try and go back and postmortem everything that happened, and maybe find some learnings was good, right? Versus just beating yourself up and then just not getting back into it, or taking too long to get back in. The sooner you can get back up and get back into it, the better.

 

Brad Weimert: Reading. The R in SAVERS is reading. Yes, sorry. I totally agree with you.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I’m glad the acronym worked.

 

Brad Weimert: Yes, the acronym works.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Good job, Hal.

 

Brad Weimert: This is how this works, though. By the way, that’s another mechanism that I don’t know why this works, but years ago, I decided that when I was stuck on something, and I couldn’t remember it, people will just ruminate, and then you’ll lose them, and they’ll be like, “I’ve got to figure this out.” I realized that I could let it go, and I had confidence that I would remember again. And I don’t know how much that is just happenstance or there’s something to letting go of the idea with confidence versus letting go without confidence that you’ll remember it that allows it to come back. But there’s something there.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Do you remember when we used to have meals, and there weren’t things like smartphones? And you’d have a conversation, or you’d try to remember something, and collectively as a group you discuss it in a circle, and then you come to a consensus on what the answer is? And now it’s like a question comes up, and before someone can answer, someone’s got a phone and looking it up. And, like, what a loss that is to not…

 

Brad Weimert: Think through it.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah. And the dopamine hit of discovering, the eureka moment of finding that knowledge. Like, you lit up when you remembered that R. You’re like, “Ah.” Right?

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: You know, the joy of discovery, and, like, for our parents who are listening to let your kids find things and figure it out and solve things and have that eureka moment is so powerful. And if you rob them of that, you’re taking away that joy that comes with discovery.

 

Brad Weimert: Well, speaking of younger years, what is something that you believed about entrepreneurship when you were 20 that you no longer believe?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: That is a great question. I absolutely was deep into entrepreneurship at 20. At that time, around that time, I had a business where we actually had physical goods, and it was computer hardware. And like that is an awful business model. And at the time, I remember hearing like Michael Dell’s story and thinking about like, yeah, in the bathtub building computers, this is great. And thinking like, “This is a great business model,” not realizing all the challenges that come with that. Not that you can’t have a physical goods business or do wonderfully with that. There are a lot of huge companies, and many guests on your show have done that really well, but that is a tough place to be in. Like that is a tough kind of business.

 

I’m really glad I got out of that. And I had services businesses, but like finding recurring revenue-based businesses, having scalable softer goods is like a really good thing that I had to, as we talked about earlier, learn the hard way, and I’m glad I did. So, now when I look at businesses, I’m looking at like what is the recurring revenue component to this business, and is this something that our cost to add new customers is near negligible versus having a really high cost of goods sold?

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. That’s great. What are you listening to or paying attention to, or who are you following to learn right now?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I mean, you and I were talking about this before the show. I absolutely love your podcast.

 

Brad Weimert: Love that.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: You bring on phenomenal guests, great questions, well-researched, so I really enjoy that. I find myself, depending on the week, reading about a bookish a week. And so, you and I both have large bookshelves that just grow over time, and I think there’s value in that. I tend to lean towards nonfiction, business-y books naturally. That is terrible nighttime reading for me. Like, that is the intentional create some space, sit down, and read and be able to take notes kind of reading. The nighttime reading stuff, like, it can’t be that because I’ll just be up and writing ideas down.

 

Brad Weimert: Yeah, it’ll keep you up.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I want to get going on stuff. Bigger concept-wise, like we are in such a fast-moving world of AI. Whatever we say now is dated in a week. Whatever was talked about a year or so ago is dated. So, I’m optimistic about where things will shape up and where they’ll end up. Cautiously optimistic, so following some of those trends in terms of how people are effectively using AI in business, right? Not just the poster child examples, where we don’t see the long-term effects, but the businesses that have been using it in smart ways, not just kind of bolting on, but actually building with, I find really interesting.

 

Brad Weimert: What advice do you have for new entrepreneurs starting out today?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: So, we touched earlier on minimum viable products or MVP. I’m a huge believer in if you have an idea, like go talk to a handful of prospective customers, right? Just set up a, like, “I’m not selling anything. I don’t have a product. I just want to interview you.” Validate the idea, right? And we know real validation comes not just from someone yes-ing you, but from someone saying like, “Yeah, like I, I would pay for that. And like when can I buy that?” Like, one of my first subscription businesses was an e-commerce company back in the day, before there were providers like Easy Pay Direct, right? Before Authorize.net was a company. Like this was ’90s, right?

 

And I remember the crossroads on a Friday afternoon of a bunch of different business ideas I had and opportunities that were in front of me, and I was torn. How do I choose which way to go? What do I do? And I reached out to a mentor of mine, and he gave me a really great framework to decide what to work on, and I realized I could get like the MVP, the minimum viable product version of this site online over the weekend, right? So, I worked over the weekend, and by Monday morning had a mildly functional site. We were not set up to take credit cards, didn’t even have PayPal set up, didn’t have a bank account, didn’t have a company, an entity, any of it. Like a website and like one really big file that ran the whole damn thing.

 

And by Monday morning, I still don’t know how, we had people opting in. And they got to the page asking for billing information. We had no HTTPS. There was no SSL certificate, right? Nothing was stored. We even said on the page, like…

 

Brad Weimert: Nobody had that sh*t back then.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: “Don’t enter your credit card information. We are still building this,” and we had customers signing up. And by Wednesday, these customers are reaching out saying, “Hey, so when can we get access to the product?” And so, this was, I mean, within 48 hours, we were getting people effectively giving us money to get on board. And so, we scrambled and got the entity filed, which applied for the EIN, which let us open the bank account, which let us apply for a merchant account, and all the rest of the things that needed to get lined up. But at the very least, we got that PayPal account set up, and those first handful of customers were able to get us money and start using our product. We didn’t get the bill from the attorneys for creating a company until like Net 30.

 

So, we had cash in the bank from day one from just a weekend’s worth of work that validated the idea for a multimillion-dollar business. And that had a great run, and that’s a whole other wonderful story. But that all came from having an MVP that we could get out there really quick, validating by real customers saying, “We want this,” and actually buying. And then we could go build and deliver and create what the customers wanted and what they would keep coming back for.

 

Brad Weimert: That’s awesome. I mean, that ties very well back to make sure that you’re not getting caught in technical debt, make sure that you’re spending your time on the thing that actually is the point of the business. It is incredibly common for new entrepreneurs, in particular, to spend all their time, energy, focus on a bunch of things that don’t really matter. They do matter. They just don’t matter as much as actually creating revenue and getting customers.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: And perfectionism fits in that category, right?

 

Brad Weimert: I agree.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: If you’re creating a new product, a new website, a new whatever, sometimes you’re so focused on the detail of something that just doesn’t matter. Ugly web pages can sell just fine, right? Now, do all those other things help? Sure. But if you can validate the idea from conversations with people, if you can say to them, “Well, this is great. Here’s how much this costs. I take these major credit cards,” and they take out a credit card just from a one-on-one conversation. You’ve got an idea that people are willing to pay for.

 

Brad Weimert: Yep. I agree with you. Jeremy, your Business Growth Playbook, where do you want to send people? Where can people find the book? Where can they find out more about you?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: All of that is at yourbusinessgrowthplaybook.com. The book is available digital, print, audiobook just came out last month, which is really exciting as well.

 

Brad Weimert: Did you read it?

 

Jeremy Shapiro: I did.

 

Brad Weimert: Nice.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Yeah. We can do a whole conversation about that, but no, it was very intentional. If you’ve loved the sound of my voice today, imagine just how great that audiobook is. No, so it’s available on all your platforms. It’s everywhere. It’s gone super wide. You also can read all my musings and writings and get the tools that I talk about that help businesses get back to growth. There’s a ton of great resources there, as well as episodes of my podcast with business owners who’ve done exactly the kind of stuff we’re talking about, breaking through and getting back to growth. And so, everything is at yourbusinessgrowthplaybook.com.

 

Brad Weimert: Amazing. Jeremy, I’m looking forward to dinner tonight. I’m so glad you’re in town. It’s great to catch up. I’m looking forward to more of it.

 

Jeremy Shapiro: Thanks for having me. This was fun.