Most owners think their job is to be the one who fixes things. Mitchell Kasselman learned that every time he jumped in to save the day, he was taking the chance to learn away from somebody on his team.

Bobby is joined by Mitchell Kasselman, co-founder and CEO of Ressio Software, which builds construction management software for custom home builders and remodelers. They have known each other since 2022, and Bobby was one of the people Mitchell leaned on when Ressio was starting out.

Mitchell has gone from two founders to a growing team in four years, and the conversation is about what that took. Moving from what he calls heroics to systems. Hiring for culture so seriously that a ten out of ten candidate still fails if they do not fit. Letting people go sooner, and finding out that the person and the team were both relieved. Setting company goals and deliberately leaving his own name off them.

There is also a practical stretch on AI, from somebody building it for builders: why the owners who get value from it are the ones who check its work, and why that is exactly how trust gets built with people too.

"What I'm actually doing is preventing an opportunity for a team member to actually learn how to do that themselves."

"Even if we had the ten out of ten best technical candidate, we will still fail someone at the cultural stage if they don't exceed in our values."

Chapters:

0:00 Stop being the hero

0:29 Welcome

0:55 Meet Mitchell Kasselman

2:23 How he found the contractor

3:30 Why builders' software feels twenty years old

4:13 Building Ressio

5:22 A hundred decisions a day

6:08 Year two: talent and culture

6:38 From heroics to systems

8:11 Your job is the environment

9:31 Building a company is like a marriage

10:30 What AI is actually good for

12:01 From a customer call to working code in days

13:15 AI built for builders

14:51 Getting past "I don't trust it"

17:04 Decide if this is really for you

17:52 Bias for action

18:37 Getting back off the mat

19:24 Do not go it alone

20:04 Keep reinvesting in your team

21:02 Rock stars and superstars

22:42 People are the competitive advantage

24:14 The castaways who thrived

25:02 How they hire for culture

26:53 Hire fast, fire fast

29:02 Two out of three salespeople

30:16 You already have values, write them down

31:42 Let your values evolve

33:13 From doing the work to managing managers

34:01 Four goals, and his name is not on them

34:42 Teach a man to fish

36:21 Stop pointing at the individual

37:25 Seek first to understand

38:18 Curiosity over prescribing

39:03 Ask more than you tell

39:58 What not to do

40:38 Take advice, but think for yourself

41:38 Hallway decisions that become policy

42:37 You cannot be everything to everyone

43:15 Six dimensions, twenty one points

45:11 What to take away

47:02 Close

Learn more at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity, are at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.

Most business owners think they need a new website. Mickey Mellen has been building them for seventeen years, and a lot of his job is talking people out of it.

Bobby is joined by Mickey Mellen, co-founder of GreenMellen in Marietta, Georgia, for a practical conversation about marketing when you run a company and nobody on your team owns marketing. Mickey's argument is that almost everybody overthinks it. He gives five things to focus on, website, email, local, data and social, and says a little bit in each one beats a lot in one and nothing in the other four.

Along the way: why your website is now the last place a customer goes rather than the first, what your homepage should say instead of how many years you have been in business, and what he found when he ran fifteen thousand WordPress sites through a scanner he built.

The back half is about AI, from somebody who uses it daily and is not entirely happy about it. What it is doing to search, to attribution, to pricing, and to the number of people who will ever see anything you make.

And then the part Bobby keeps coming back to, which is numbers. Mickey on running his first five years off the bank balance, and the agency owner whose accountant called three days before Christmas to say there was not enough money for payroll.

"Google is the reward for doing all your other marketing right, in all the other places."

"If you are at all consistent with your stuff, you are the top five percent of businesses right there. The bar is so low."

Chapters:

0:00 Where people actually decide

0:37 Welcome

1:05 Meet Mickey Mellen and GreenMellen

2:47 Do not overthink it

3:28 The five things: website, email, local, data, social

5:31 "I need a new website." "No, you don't."

5:53 Lead with their problem, not your history

6:23 Your website is the last place they go

7:37 Perfect is the enemy of good

8:05 Trying to do too much

11:29 Why you should own your website

12:17 Fifteen thousand sites, four thousand broken

13:28 What is your marketing budget

14:46 Consistency, and the content calendar

16:50 What AI is doing to Google

17:28 Why a link costs you most of your reach

17:57 The CPA he hired ten years later

19:02 Lift versus attribution

19:55 Building your own tools with AI

21:30 What worries him about AI

22:08 A thousand pieces of content a day

23:28 I miss the handcrafted days

23:59 Confidentiality, risk and hallucinations

25:44 The Braves score the AI made up

26:44 Hire for fit over talent

27:13 What AI does to what you can charge

28:26 Cookies, a swing set, and fifty AI videos

29:35 Get your books in order

30:05 Forecasting instead of checking the bank

31:25 Three days before Christmas

32:32 Find somebody gifted differently than you

33:41 What makes a business partnership work

35:13 Trust

36:11 There is no such thing as a done website

37:09 Consistency puts you in the top five percent

37:47 The king of shiny objects

38:54 Kobe at five in the morning

39:47 The fundamentals of a top shelf organization

40:53 Look at your site through your customer's eyes

42:47 How AI search actually works

43:47 Close

Learn more at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity, are at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.

Everybody asks where to find good people. Bobby thinks that is the wrong question. The right one is less comfortable: why would a great person want to come and work for you?

This episode came from a listener who asked how to find people to hire, and the answer turned into forty years of hiring compressed into a system. It covers the part almost everybody skips, which is everything that happens before you post the job. Whether you actually need a person or need a process. The numbers worth looking at before you add payroll. Defining a seat properly instead of writing a list of activities and calling it a job description.

Then the seven places great people actually come from, and only one of them is a job posting. Your own employees. Your vendors and trade partners. Competitors. Industry associations. LinkedIn. Colleges, trade schools and the military. And your customers.

The last third is the part most hiring advice leaves out: keeping people once you have them.

"Technical skills can usually be taught. Character usually cannot."

"If good people keep leaving you, the market is not the problem. Look closer to home. That is not an accusation, it is the best news in this episode, because the market is not something you control but your environment is."

Chapters:

0:00 Why would a great person want to work for you

0:31 Welcome

3:18 The wrong question

7:17 Before you hire anyone, ask this

7:57 Know your numbers before you add people

10:28 When it is genuinely time

12:31 Define the position before you hire

18:16 Where to actually find great people

24:43 Never interview without a process

32:18 How do you know they are the right person

35:31 Keeping great people

42:25 This week's challenge

44:30 Close

Learn more at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Bobby's books, Choices and Clarity, are at ChoiceConsultingMan.com/books

A video version of this episode is on YouTube. Search Choices Create Change.