Growing community, conference, or business without losing your original vision — and your sanity — can be a picasso painting that easily gets distorted.

Host Samantha C. Prestidge chats with Megan Shapiro, construction attorney and founder of the Converge Construction Summit, about strategic community growth, what sustainable business building actually looks like, and how to stop people-pleasing your way into something you didn't mean to create.

Megan grew Converge from 13 people in Savannah to 55 in Chicago — and her most important work wasn't any of that growth. It was the months she spent figuring out why her best-reviewed event left her completely drained.

In this episode:

• 
  How to grow a community or event without losing what made it work
• Why strategic growth beats fast growth — and how to tell the difference
• What people-pleasing in business actually costs you, even when things look successful
• How to hear what your audience wants and identify what they actually need
• Why sustainable business growth requires knowing your vision before you scale it
• What months of business coaching, therapy, and a mastermind finally unlocked that a successful event couldn't

You’ve hired an assistant before. It didn’t stick. And if you’re honest, you’re not totally sure why.

Host Samantha C. Prestidge of Auxo Business Services breaks down the three areas of clarity founders need to have in place before they bring on an assistant — and why skipping them is almost always what tanks the working relationship.

This solo episode gets into why even strong assistants fail when founders aren’t ready, the difference between delegating tasks and delegating outcomes, and the Map It → Keep It → Delegate It framework Sam uses with her own clients.

Topic Bullets

• Why building SOPs before you hire is the wrong starting point — and what to do instead

• The “cart before the horse” pattern that ends most assistant relationships early

• What “how you want to play in your business” actually means — and why founders who skip it become micromanagers

• How to write a value statement that ties your assistant’s work to real business outcomes, not just your to-do list

• When “I can’t grow because I’m at capacity” is actually a clarity problem, not a bandwidth one

• The Map It, Keep It, Delegate It framework
• Book a delegation strategy session: auxosvs.com/strategy

Timestamps

• 00:00 Hidden Expectations
  00:21 Podcast Mission
  01:49 Delegation Failures
  03:31 Skip The SOP Trap
  04:52 Three Clarity Areas
  05:08 Map What Youre Building
  07:18 Keep Your Founder Role
  09:13 Delegate Outcomes Not Tasks
  11:49 Map Keep Delegate Framework
  12:27 Book A Strategy Session

Hiring operations help for your small business is harder than it should be — and most founders are looking at the wrong things when they do it.

Ashley Connell, CEO of Prowess Project, has spent seven years matching small business owners with operations partners. She's learned that the skills on a resume tell you almost nothing about whether someone can actually run your business alongside you.

In this episode:

• Why hiring for tech stack and job titles fails service-based business owners
• How to find the right operations partner for your small business
• The four-step framework Ashley's ops partners use from day one
• Why delegating outcomes doesn't work — and what to communicate instead
• How to know if you need an operations partner or if your processes need fixing first
• What a two-week time study reveals that no hiring process can

00:00 The Need for Management

00:41 Welcome to Can We Not

01:41 Meet Ashley Connell

02:22 What is an Ops Partner

04:46 Meeting Leah

05:42 Flexible and Fulfilling Careers

06:59 The 97 Percent Statistic

07:38 The Matching Algorithm

10:47 Proven Results and Success Stories

13:14 Overcomplicating the Journey

15:38 Niching Down to Accounting Firms

17:22 Testing and Experimentation

19:22 Naming the Ops Partner

21:20 Experimentation With Intent

22:35 Accountability and Feedback

26:06 Four Step Delivery Method

29:03 Setting Clear Expectations

32:24 Behaviors Over Outcomes

34:28 Practical AI Integration

36:29 Time Study to Simplify

38:40 Closing Thoughts