What if the goal you're not setting is exactly what's keeping your business stuck?

Blake Erickson is the founder of Scaling.com, a New York Times best-selling author, and a TEDx speaker on The Secret to Achieving Impossible Goals. He's advised over 500 companies and took his own company from $0 to $10 million in annual recurring revenue in eight months.

In this episode, Blake breaks down why optimizing for incremental growth guarantees stagnation, and walks through his Frame, Floor, Focus framework for setting a goal big enough to force real change. He and John St. Pierre also dig into the tension between ambition and carelessness, drawing on John's own experience scaling a company to 55 million dollars and losing it.

What you'll walk away with: why a 10 percent growth goal is the fastest way to stay exactly where you are, the Frame, Floor, Focus framework for setting and reaching a 10X goal, how one Scaling.com member took a popcorn company from 250 stores to 26,000 with a single partnership, the 20 dollars versus 1 million dollar exercise that clears out bad decisions, and a simple homework assignment you can run tonight to expose what's holding your business back.

Download Blake's free audiobook, The Science of Scaling, at scaling.com/freedownload

Connect with Blake Erickson on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/blake-erickson-756b54168

Hosted by John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann, Entrepreneurs United is built for founders and leaders who want straight talk on building businesses that actually work. New episodes every week.

https://entrepreneursunited.us/links/

Caring about people is a key, and in this episode, John St.Pierre and Rich Hoffmann just riff on what that actually looks like.

They share the small, specific habits they actually use: DoorDash deliveries for someone having a rough day, handwritten cards (one a week adds up to 52 a year), TSP feedback, truthful, specific, positive, instead of a vague compliment, and time-delayed texts that follow up on what someone told you mattered to them.

They also introduce the happiness equation, expectations minus reality equals your level of happiness, and close with the idea that grounds all of it: self-care is not selfish.

Do you need better salespeople, or a better system?

Morné Smit is the founder and CEO of Emerse Sales. Before that, he took a commercial construction company from $18 million to $180 million in five years, without outside funding or a single acquisition. He now helps businesses build the same kind of predictable, repeatable revenue engine.

In this episode, Morné walks John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann through the McDonald's Principle: build extraordinary systems so that even ordinary people can win, then go hire the best talent you can afford. He breaks a sales organization into six parts, explains why C players are the most dangerous hires in any business, and shares the exact weekly formula his clients use to build real sales mastery.

What you'll walk away with: the McDonald's Principle and how it took one company from $18 million to $180 million in five years, the six part sales ecosystem of leadership, management, talent, enablement, integration, and culture, why C players quietly block scalability, the 45 minute weekly formula behind what Morné calls role practice, not role play, and why the customer experience is your marketing.

Explore Morné's masterclasses at mornesmit.com

Connect with Morné Smit on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/morné-smit-sales-guru/ or by email at takeaction@emersesales.com

Hosted by John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann, Entrepreneurs United is built for founders and leaders who want straight talk on building businesses that actually work. New episodes every week.

https://entrepreneursunited.us/links/

Is your bank quietly saying no to the growth capital your business needs?

Trevor Barran has started over a dozen companies, worked in venture capital and investment banking, and began his career in small business lending. Today he's the CEO of FNCR, a platform that connects growing businesses to financing that's increasingly hard to find, especially in the $1 million to $30 million range.

In this episode, Trevor and host John St. Pierre break down how to protect your equity, why banks have been quietly pulling back from small business lending since the financial crisis, and the financing no man's land that hits right after your business starts winning.

What you'll walk away with:

Why the equity trade should be evaluated as whose time you're buying and not just dollars raised. The real cost of capital across bank debt, private credit, and merchant cash advance. Why go to the bank is decreasingly a real option, and why it's not personal when they say no. How FNCR matches businesses to the right lender across seven dimensions and a network of about 2,000 lenders. How to think about leverage as a competitive edge instead of a risk to avoid.

Start Trevor's free 10-minute funding application (no fees, no commitment, no credit impact) at my.fncr.com

Connect with Trevor Barran on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/trevorbarran or email finance@fncr.com

Hosted by John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann, Entrepreneurs United is built for founders and leaders who want straight talk on building businesses that actually work. New episodes every week.

https://entrepreneursunited.us/links/

Would you let your kid fail on purpose?

John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann dig into a book called Raising an Entrepreneur and its 10 rules for parenting future founders, then talk through which ones actually hold up in real life.

From a hockey injury that taught a bigger lesson than the scoreboard to an 11 year old selling car washes and protein balls door to door, they get into why letting kids lose, embracing adversity, and supporting even the smallest passion matters more than protecting them from failure. They also question whether straight A's help at all, why a non-parent mentor might matter more than either of them expected, and flip the whole conversation around to ask what these same rules mean for raising intrapreneurs inside a business.

What you'll walk away with: why letting your kids lose is one of the most important things you can do for them, why supporting a passion matters more than whether it becomes a real business, why straight A's and traditional schooling might not nurture entrepreneurial thinking, why kids respond better to a mentor who isn't their parent, and how these same parenting principles apply to leading intrapreneurs at work.

Hosted by John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann, Entrepreneurs United is built for founders and leaders who want straight talk on building businesses that actually work. New episodes every week.

https://entrepreneursunited.us/links

About Entrepreneurs United

Hosted by John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann, Entrepreneurs United is built for founders and leaders who want straight talk on building businesses that actually work. New episodes every week.

What if 98% of people are just winging life, and don't even know it?

We don't do book episodes often on Entrepreneurs United, but Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People earned one. We brought back returning guest John Mitchell, founder of the Center for Advanced Leadership of Self at the University of Texas at Austin, to go through the book habit by habit with hosts John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann.

In this episode, the three of them talk about which habits actually shaped how they lead, why most people are proactive in theory but not in practice, and propose the eighth habit they think Covey left out of the original book.

What you'll walk away with: why John Mitchell says 98% of people are winging life instead of living it on purpose, Rich Hoffmann's data backed case for why listening beats talking when it comes to real influence, John St. Pierre's take on Covey's big rocks story and why it still beats every modern productivity hack, the space between stimulus and response and why that pause is the real secret to self-control, and the eighth habit John Mitchell thinks Covey left out: learning to control your subconscious autopilot.

If it's been a while since you've read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, this episode is your reminder to pick it back up.

Connect with John Mitchell

Hosted by John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann, Entrepreneurs United is built for founders and leaders who want straight talk on building businesses that actually work. New episodes every week.

https://entrepreneursunited.us/links/

Most founders think they have a lead generation problem. What if the real problem starts after the sale closes?

Bradley Rausch is a client experience architect, strategic advisor, and founder of Level Up Influence, the go-to backend profit partner for founder-led coaching and group programs. Over six years, he has helped dozens of founders turn chaotic growth into durable, higher-margin revenue without sacrificing their values.

In this episode, Bradley walks John & Rich through his four-sale framework: enrollment, onboarding, advocacy, and ascension. He breaks down the four emotional states every client needs to feel in their first 72 hours, the exact math and timing behind referrals and testimonials, how to price and pitch an ascension offer, and how a custom GPT can deliver a client's first win before the onboarding call even happens.

What you'll walk away with:

The four-sale framework and why most businesses only optimize the first sale

The four emotional states - Momentum, Clarity, Safety & Identity, to build in a client's first 72 hours

Connect with Bradley Rausch

Hosted by John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann, Entrepreneurs United is built for founders and leaders who want straight talk on building businesses that actually work. New episodes every week.

https://entrepreneursunited.us/links

Are you managing AI adoption on your team, or is it managing you?

In this episode, hosts John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann tackle one of the biggest leadership challenges right now: helping employees embrace AI instead of fearing it. They dig into why change resistance almost always comes down to a perceived loss of privacy, trust, individuality, or job security, and why leaders need to name that directly instead of dancing around it.

Rich shares eight AI use guidelines he built with a coaching client, covering everything from opt in consent for recordings to being transparent about AI shaped outputs to rewriting things in your own voice. John and Rich also get into piloting small AI use cases for quick wins, capturing institutional knowledge into SOPs and competency models, hiring for AI embracing talent, and mentoring employees into higher level work.

What you'll walk away with: a clear framework for setting AI ground rules on your team, practical ways to pilot AI without overwhelming your people, how to turn tribal knowledge into documented systems before it walks out the door, what to look for when hiring for an AI forward culture, and why focus groups and open communication matter more than a top down mandate.

Hosted by John St. Pierre and Rich Hoffmann, Entrepreneurs United is built for founders and leaders who want straight talk on building businesses that actually work. New episodes every week.

https://entrepreneursunited.us/links