Evan Sitler-Bates is the co-founder and CEO of XpertVR, an Ontario company that builds virtual reality training simulations for firefighters and other first responders. He co-founded it in 2017 with Drew MacNeil while both were students at Brock University's Goodman School of Business, spent the early years on 360 video and academic research studies, and pivoted in 2020 when COVID left pre-service fire and police foundations students with no way to get hands-on training. XpertVR now works with multiple Ontario colleges and with the Office of the Fire Marshal of Ontario, and runs in California, Colorado, parts of South America and into Europe.In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Evan explains what a fire simulation is actually for: not the physical work, but the strategy, the communication and the resource management that a classroom cannot rehearse. He describes the shift from characters you drag out of a building to characters you can question about their injuries and who else is in the house, the Gaussian splatting pipeline that will let a department train in the buildings it actually covers, and why the heat, smell and haptic hardware he has built with before stays out of the kit on purpose. He makes the case that mixed reality, not pure VR, is the two-year horizon, and that the useful version of Ready Player One is the one that gets people looking at the world instead of down at their laps. Asked what he needs most to grow, he says new markets, bought the way Ontario bought it, at the provincial and state level rather than department by department.Evan is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He has spent years convincing a profession that trains for the worst day of someone's life that a simulation is worth its time, and he can show what changed when a province bought it at once. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about XpertVR: https://xpertvr.comEvan Sitler-Bates on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evansitlerbates/What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#vrtraining #firefighters #firstresponders #simulationtraining #mixedreality #immersivelearning #founders #podcast

Stephen Deason is the founder and CEO of The OPARASA Group in Roswell, Georgia, a family of businesses that ties healthcare staffing and home care to helping people in recovery build worth. The group includes OPA Home Care, a Georgia-licensed private home care provider serving the elderly, the disabled and veterans across metro Atlanta, OPA Staffing, and the OPA RASA foundation, which runs an earn-as-you-learn path from apprentice to journeyman for people in long-term recovery. He has spent more than 30 years building healthcare and technology companies and was previously CEO of the martech firm GRYYT.In this Founder Talk conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Stephen explains what happens after addiction treatment ends, when the formal stages of recovery stop and a person who has learned to stay sober is told to go forth and prosper. He describes OPA RASA's staged path into work the world will pay for, why the tenacity and resilience people bring out of addiction are exactly what employers value, and why OPA deliberately keeps its recovery workforce and its elderly clients apart. He walks through the four ways companies put people to work and how a licensed home care provider differs from an agency, makes the case that an entrepreneur and a person in early recovery share the same first job, being the guardian of what they have been entrusted with, and shares his plan to franchise the model. Asked what he needs most to grow, he says more veterans to serve, after OPA Home Care was approved to provide care through the Veterans Administration.Stephen is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He has built a business that does well by doing good, and he can show the stages it takes for a life to be rebuilt. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about OPA Home Care: https://opahomecare.comOPA RASA: https://oparasa.orgOPA Staffing: https://opastaffing.comStephen Deason on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephendeason/What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#addictionrecovery #socialenterprise #homecare #veterans #workforcedevelopment #recoveryworks #founders #podcast

Paul Battle is the co-founder and President of Medome, an AI-powered personal health record platform built on five years of research at Stanford and Harvard and designed to prevent primary care misdiagnosis before it happens. He spent more than two decades in technology at IBM and then Lenovo, where he rose to run healthcare as one of Lenovo's verticals, and he left to work on the problem full time after losing someone to a misdiagnosis. He vetted 25 AI healthcare companies first, found that nearly all of them were automating the administrative side of medicine rather than the diagnostic side, and co-founded Medome with Dr. Steven Charlap, MD, MBA, who had lost his brother, a trained cardiologist, the same way. Neither founder takes a salary.In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Paul explains why layering artificial intelligence over a broken process does not repair the process, it just reaches the wrong answer faster, and why that led them to rebuild the primary care diagnostic interview itself rather than speed up the one clinicians already use. He makes the arithmetic case that no primary care physician can hold the problem space, citing 28,000 possible diagnoses against the roughly 1,000 a physician may see across an entire career. He describes trying to sell to physicians first and being told they do not make mistakes, which is how consumers became the customer and the physician became a reader instead of a buyer. He is candid that his biggest conversion problem is his own product, a 30 to 45 minute upfront interview against an expectation of 5 to 10, and why he will not shorten it. And he names the single most valuable thing he could sell, the clean data, before refusing to sell it.Paul is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He walked away from a route to fast growth because it was the wrong one, and he is rebuilding a process most of his industry has decided to automate instead. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about Medome: https://medome.aiPaul Battle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulbattle/Dr. Steven Charlap, co-founder, on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-charlap-md-mba-8911906/What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#healthcare #misdiagnosis #personalhealthrecord #healthtech #AIinhealthcare #primarycare #founders #podcast

Content advisory: this conversation includes direct description of child sex trafficking.Dawn Manske is the founder of Made for Freedom, a St. Louis based for-profit social enterprise that sells apparel, jewellery, home decor, bath and body products, baby gear and coffee made by survivors of human trafficking and people coming out of marginalized situations. She also chairs the board of its nonprofit arm, the Made for Freedom Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that funds educational and career training scholarships for the same populations. Made for Freedom works with roughly twenty partner centres worldwide that handle rescue, safe housing, life skills training and manufacturing, measures its results in hours of dignified employment rather than dollars raised, and is an Arch Grants recipient.In this conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Dawn considers the nonprofit and for-profit models for a social enterprise built to combat human trafficking, and explains why she built a for-profit, after asking everyone she could find and getting the answer twice over. The operator closest to her business had started as a nonprofit and had to shut it down, and Dawn is blunt about the assumption the label creates: money does not land in your lap. She walks through how the model actually works, twenty centres doing the rescue and the training and the making, and Made for Freedom curating, warehousing and shipping into a market where professional women have few options that carry a story. She tells the story the episode is named for, a girl in the back of a safe house in India whose family would not take her back, and the standard she gave her team in that room. Asked what she needs most to grow, she names corporate relationships, companies that already buy gifts and companies that want to be in the fight.Dawn is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. She took the thing most people would rather not think about and built a business that pays people for their work instead of asking the world for sympathy. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about Made for Freedom: https://madeforfreedom.comMade for Freedom Foundation: https://www.madeforfreedomfoundation.orgDawn Manske on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dawnmanske/What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#socialenterprise #endhumantrafficking #corporategifting #impactsourcing #ethicalfashion #nonprofit #founders #podcast

Chris Berta is a partner at Laurel Group, an executive search firm that places C-suite and senior leaders at technology companies, where he leads business development and senior management searches. He has more than 24 years in recruiting, sales and marketing, and before search he was Head of Digital Marketing at Washington Mutual, a Client Strategist at aQuantive, and led product management for Amazon.com's first online advertising capabilities.

In this Founder Talk conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Chris asks the question he has been putting to leaders since 2023: if AI takes away the entry-level roles where people learn their craft, where does the next generation get its training, and how does it ever become leadership? He explains why he proposed an apprentice-type program, why growth companies struggle to fund one, and why large companies like Amazon can. He describes executive search as a business where clients become candidates and candidates become clients, why culture fit decides placements as much as function, and his rule for staying relevant over years of conversations: leave every person with a nugget, and keep the notes. Asked what he needs most to grow, he says new clients, the kind that come back again and again.

Chris is exactly the kind of leader, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He has spent two decades matching people to the roles that shape companies, and he is asking the question about where future leaders come from before most companies have had to answer it. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.

Learn more about Laurel Group: https://www.laurel-group.com
Chris Berta on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisberta/

What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.

Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLa

Podcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com

#executivesearch #futureofwork #leadershipdevelopment #AIinhiring #recruiting #talentmanagement #founders #podcast

Shawn Heeren is the founder and CEO of Crestline Cleaning Group, a long-term owner and operator of commercial cleaning businesses in Southern Ontario. Crestline buys owner-led commercial janitorial, facility and specialty cleaning companies with recurring accounts, and it does not broker and does not flip. Shawn came to the industry from a sales background and leads sourcing, diligence and every owner relationship himself.In this Founder Talk conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Shawn explains why so many cleaning business owners reach retirement with no one to hand the business to, and why some of them close before anyone calls. He describes the question every seller asks before price, whether they can trust the buyer with their people and their clients, and why he answers it over coffee rather than with a pitch. He makes the case that an industry grown almost entirely on referral now grows "at the whim of your last best clean," that fragmentation is the problem a regional roll-up exists to solve, and that AI adoption in the trades is so low that the owners who use it will outpace the rest by a wide margin. He shows how he uses it himself to reach brokers, accountants and lawyers at scale, and why integration capacity, not appetite, sets the pace of a roll-up. Asked what he needs most to grow, he says qualified deal flow.Shawn is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He is building around the people who built an industry most of us walk past every day, and his whole approach rests on being someone a retiring owner can trust. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about Crestline Cleaning Group: https://crestlinecleaning.comShawn Heeren on LinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/shawnheerenWhat We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#successionplanning #businessacquisition #commercialcleaning #rollup #smallbusiness #AIadoption #founders #podcast

Nico Photos is head of marketing at One Step GPS and co-founder of The Peachy Company, working as a fractional marketing lead across two or three companies at a time. He ran two agencies of his own before this, a design agency that became a PPC agency, which is where his scepticism about agencies comes from. At One Step GPS, a fleet tracking platform serving more than 20,000 customers, he built the SEO and GEO program that now carries the bulk of the company's lead generation after Google Ads hit saturation. The company has made the Inc. 5000 five times, first entering at No. 199 in 2021, and ranked No. 93 on the 2026 Inc. Regionals Pacific list.In this Founder Talk conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Nico makes the case that an AI now distils a company into one line, and that if that line does not land, nothing after it does either. He explains how he attached a single economically meaningful attribute to the One Step GPS entity, no contracts, in a market where every major competitor locks customers into three years, and why that attribute then propagates through everything written about the company. He gives the growth history straight: Google Ads built product-market fit from 2017, hit saturation, and the SEO and GEO program he built now carries the business, with AI-sourced leads well ahead of search. He describes mapping content to economic value rather than keyword volume, why the quality of any AI output is a function of how precisely you defined the problem, and how he splits work between ChatGPT for speed and Claude for faithful execution against a spec. Then he lays out Axiom, the positioning framework he is developing, built on the idea that a brand must own a self-evident truth the market concedes on contact. Asked the show's standing question, what he needs most to grow, he answers for every brand at once: reach, resonance, and agreement.Nico is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He is running a real AI-acquisition program at scale and can show his working, which is rarer than the opinions about it. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about One Step GPS: https://onestepgps.comThe Peachy Company: https://thepeachycompany.comNico Photos on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nico-photos/What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#AIVisibility #GEO #AEO #BrandPositioning #ContentStrategy #FleetManagement #founders #podcast

Matt Remuzzi is the founder of CapForge, the San Diego accounting and bookkeeping practice he started in 2000 out of a layoff and now runs with a team of about eighty serving clients across the United States. He got there the long way: a psychology degree, years managing restaurants and being sent into underperforming stores to turn them around, an MBA on the entrepreneurship track at San Diego State, then twelve years of business plan consulting, DIY financial-projection software, lead generation, a restaurant of his own and a stint business brokering before he settled on accounting in 2012. He is the author of QuickBooks Bookkeeping: The 10 Most Common Mistakes Everyone Makes and How to Fix Them and Amazon Seller Bookkeeping, and a long-standing QuickBooks Pro Advisor.In this Founder Talk conversation with Caleb Pedosiuk, Matt makes the case that there is no right time to start a business and that a downturn does not wash out good companies, it washes out the ones that were coasting. He explains why he walked away from paying consulting work he could not stand behind, and how building software instead turned the problem into a product. He traces the management lessons from restaurant turnarounds, where the failure always started at the top and he had no money to fix it with, into the rule he still runs CapForge by: build the kind of business you would be willing to work at. He describes leaving the venture-backed bubble for the 99% of the market that never raises capital, and does the arithmetic on why the lifestyle business he was taught to look down on was the better bet. And asked the show's standing question, what he needs most to grow, he names absorbing AI into a workflow that is still largely manual, and the fact that the target keeps moving every two weeks.Matt is exactly the kind of founder, innovator, and problem solver this series exists to put a light on. He spent twelve years learning which profitable work he could actually stand behind, and then spent fourteen doing only that. Authority is earned by building things worth talking about, and an honest account of that work is what makes a brand understood, trusted, and findable by the systems people now ask for answers.Learn more about CapForge: https://capforge.comMatt Remuzzi on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/capforge/What We Need to Grow is Caleb Pedosiuk's founder conversation series from 79 Development, on growth, judgment, and the thinking behind building great companies. It exists to shine a light on the founders, innovators, problem solvers, and pioneers building things that matter.Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5O6IiwVl4tHyhegQafVZLaPodcast sponsored by 79 Development Inc | 79dev.com#SmallBusinessAccounting #Bookkeeping #Entrepreneurship #BusinessTurnaround #CompanyCulture #SmallBusiness #founders #podcast