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.

Charlie Genin has been building in Lafayette, Louisiana for twelve years, and the hardest lesson had nothing to do with construction: being a good contractor is not the same thing as being a good business owner. He and Bobby get into the hats nobody warns you about when you start a company.

Charlie founded The Gen Group Construction in 2014 with his father in law, and today runs residential and commercial, spec and custom. This conversation is the honest version of the first twelve years: the commitment nobody mentions when they tell you to go work for yourself, the day you accept you cannot be the best contractor and the best owner and the best dad all in the same afternoon, and the unglamorous systems that made the difference.

Along the way: why you should start writing processes while you are still an army of one instead of waiting until you have a team of ten, why the first thing you hand off should be whatever you like doing least, how to keep your standard without micromanaging the person you just handed it to, why a rainy day fund is a construction issue and not a personal finance one, and the change order habit that prevents most disputes before they start.

"The balance is really hard. To be the best contractor and the best business owner and the best employer and the best dad and the best husband. And the answer is you cannot do all of it at the same time."

Chapters:

0:00 Cold open

0:28 Welcome

0:59 Meet Charlie Genin

1:50 Founding The Gen Group in 2014

3:57 A good contractor is not a good business owner

4:50 The commitment nobody warns you about

6:31 You cannot be all of it at the same time

7:11 Siloing the parts of your life

9:59 Let the calendar be the driver

11:05 Competing without tearing anyone down

14:01 What you say about a competitor

15:42 Working with integrity

16:32 Surround yourself with better people

17:50 Goals you can actually reach

21:07 Sharing the goals with your team

22:40 Celebrating wins, yours and theirs

25:09 Advice for a new owner: the mindset

26:01 Know your numbers

26:54 Start processes as an army of one

27:26 Do not get over leveraged

29:11 All the hats you did not know about

30:12 Delegate what you like doing least

31:26 Consistency without micromanaging

34:25 Checklists are built from mistakes

37:17 Find a mentor, join your HBA

41:10 Buy time instead of paying for mistakes

43:36 First generation owners have no playbook

48:10 Get it in writing

49:30 Change orders are where people get burned

51:08 If it is too good to be true

52:27 Documentation ends disputes

55:46 Do not compare yourself to highlight reels

56:38 Work on the business, not in it

57:45 What success actually means

58:42 Clients are emotional beings

1:00:34 Give yourself grace

Guest: Charlie Genin, owner and general contractor at The Gen Group Construction, L.L.C. in Lafayette, Louisiana. gengrouphomes.com

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.

When your business gets quiet, people notice. And they do not assume you are fine. They assume something is wrong.

Bobby Mink makes the case that visibility is the most underrated competitive advantage a business has right now, and that it is not a marketing problem. It is a leadership one. Every week you are either building confidence or creating uncertainty, and silence communicates just as loudly as words.

Bobby walks through seven reasons visibility matters, from the fact that your customer's first visit is almost always digital, to why teaching beats selling, to why one viral post will never do what a consistent weekly one will. Along the way he shares the division president who asked him the question that sums the whole thing up: why did we wait until things got slow to start doing this?

If you are good at what you do but bad at telling anyone about it, this one is for you.

Seven reasons visibility is your most underrated competitive advantage:

1. Your customer's first visit is digital

2. Going quiet looks like you're struggling

3. Visibility builds trust before you need it

4. Teach more than you sell

5. Video makes your business human

6. Consistency beats intensity

7. Visibility creates opportunity

"Visibility becomes influence. Influence becomes trust. Trust becomes opportunity. Opportunity becomes growth. And that is how great businesses are built."

Chapters:

00:00 Cold open: why did we wait until things got slow?

00:25 Welcome and the seven reasons

01:10 Why most companies are bad at telling their own story

02:06 Visibility is not marketing, visibility is leadership

02:38 1. Your customer's first visit is digital

03:23 Knowing your target market

04:12 Your digital front doors

04:50 The division president who wished he had not waited

05:58 2. Going quiet looks like you're struggling

06:41 The real struggle is consistency

07:26 Confidence attracts confidence

08:09 3. Visibility builds trust before you need it

09:22 The trust account and third party validation

10:29 Start the conversation where they already are

11:02 4. Teach more than you sell

12:11 Every business should become an educator

13:31 Introduce your team, be real people

14:28 Raving fans, inside and outside

15:36 Teach your industry and become the expert

16:04 5. Video makes your business human

17:04 Show the space, show the process

17:33 Perfection is not required

18:32 Authenticity wins

19:14 6. Consistency beats intensity

19:44 One viral post will not change your business

20:25 Business growth comes from consistency

21:44 7. Visibility creates opportunity

22:28 Better employees find you

23:06 New partners and referrals

23:26 Better vendors and better opportunities

25:28 Visibility is leadership

26:22 The state of the company talk

28:38 Visibility is not ego, visibility is service

29:59 The better question to ask before you post

30:43 Influence, trust, opportunity, growth

31:37 Close and how to reach Bobby

Mentioned in this episode:

Raving Fans, by Ken Blanchard and Sheldon Bowles

Suggest a topic for a future episode: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Schedule a free coaching conversation: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/contact

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

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

Most business owners see their CPA once a year, drop off a folder, and hope for good news. Ryan Mink, CPA, explains why that relationship is costing you money, and what a real one looks like.

Bobby Mink sits down with Ryan, a partner at Suttle & Stalnaker in West Virginia and, as it turns out, his own son, for a plain English walk through the questions every owner asks and almost nobody gets a straight answer to. Do you actually need an LLC? Should you elect S corp status because someone on TikTok said so? Why does the money in your bank account tell you almost nothing about whether your business is healthy?

Ryan has spent 19 years in audit and tax, and he makes the case that the most expensive mistakes he sees are not aggressive ones. They are the quiet ones: jumping into a structure too early, spending a hundred thousand dollars to save thirty, and never asking why.

If you have ever nodded along in a meeting about your own money and had no idea what was being said, this one is for you.

"Just because there's cash in the bank doesn't mean you're doing well."

Chapters:

0:00 The surprise $30,000 tax bill

0:20 Welcome and meet Ryan Mink, CPA

0:52 Inside a full service CPA firm

2:14 Why the same questions come up over and over

4:19 Do you need an LLC?

5:01 An LLC is a liability tool, not a tax strategy

5:30 Single member LLC: the disregarded entity

6:01 What changes when you add a second owner

7:00 S corporations and how the tax savings work

7:39 C corporations and the double taxation problem

10:50 The reasonable compensation problem

12:14 Why leverage matters before you elect S corp

13:13 The S corp downsides nobody mentions

14:25 The truck, the son, and the deemed sale

16:40 Do not jump the gun on S corp

17:47 The taxes nobody warns you about

19:44 Estimated taxes and the four checks a year

21:12 The restaurant that closed over a tax bill

21:41 Profit First: pay yourself before you reinvest

22:52 Do not outspend your growth

24:56 Your CPA should be your partner

25:43 Why once a year is not a relationship

29:52 What a real quarterly check in looks like

30:32 Cash in the bank is not profit

35:45 The windfall and the Florida property

37:25 Do not let tax savings drive business decisions

39:18 The truck trap: $100K to save $30K

40:42 The Toyota Highlander phone call

42:27 Red flags: when to find a new CPA

48:47 Get your books in order

51:08 Seek to understand why

54:54 Takeaways and how to reach Ryan

55:37 Close and how to suggest a topic

Guest:

Ryan Mink, CPA, partner at Suttle & Stalnaker, PLLC, a full service West Virginia CPA firm with four offices offering tax, audit, consulting, bookkeeping, payroll, and virtual CFO services. The firm is a member of Allinial Global.

Mentioned in this episode:

Profit First, by Mike Michalowicz

Suggest a topic for a future episode: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Schedule a coaching conversation: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/contact

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

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

This episode is for general education only. It is not tax, legal, or financial advice, and tax rules and thresholds change. Talk to your own CPA or attorney about your specific situation before acting on anything discussed here.

You explained it. They nodded. Two weeks later nobody is doing it. That is not a people problem, it is a clarity problem. In this episode, Bobby Mink wraps up the two-part series on The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni with the part most companies skip: creating clarity, overcommunicating it, and reinforcing it until it sticks.

Bobby walks through the six questions every leadership team has to be able to answer the same way, including why you exist, how you behave, and the one almost nobody gets right, who must do what. Then he gets into why complexity kills execution, why your 33-item checklist is usually fear wearing a process costume, and why the owner who walks the floor giving orders is quietly undercutting every manager in the building.

The back half is the practical part: the meeting rhythm that actually works (daily check-ins, weekly tactical, monthly strategic, quarterly offsite, annual), how to run a review that is not a trip to the principal's office, and how repetition turns into alignment.

Whether you lead 500 people, 15 people, or a family, this is about making sure the people around you actually understand what you are asking for.

In this episode:

- The six critical questions: why do we exist, how do we behave, what do we do, how will we succeed, what is most important right now, and who must do what

- Why core values need descriptive words, not just words on a wall

- The builder who said we are creating a home where families make memories

- Role clarity: the 11-person company where nobody knew who to ask

- A warning for owners: telling someone on the floor what to do knocks the legs out from under their manager

- Why complexity kills execution, and how fear-based checklists and multiple layers of approval cost you real money

- Accountability, ownership, and setting expectations that actually match

- Clarity leaks: why you have to overcommunicate the same message far longer than feels reasonable

- Repetition creates alignment, and the moment you know it is working (when your newest hire quotes a core value back to you)

- The meeting rhythm: daily check-ins, weekly tactical, monthly strategic, quarterly offsite, and annual

- Reinforcing clarity through hiring, exit interviews, quarterly reviews, managing by walking around, promotions, and recognition

- The eight essentials of great organizations

- The biggest lessons from The Advantage, and why great companies are built from the inside out

Mentioned in this episode:

- The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, by Patrick Lencioni

- The Heart of Leadership, by Mark Miller

- "Vision leaks." (Andy Stanley)

"People cannot execute what they do not understand."

Learn more: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/Podcast

Book a coaching call: ChoiceConsultingMan.com/contact

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

Website: ChoiceConsultingMan.com

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Missed part one? Start with Organizational Health Beats Smart Every Time (Ep 16).

Most companies pour all their energy into being smart: strategy, marketing, finance, technology, operations. Very little goes into being healthy. In this episode, Bobby Mink kicks off a two-part series on The Advantage by Patrick Lencioni and makes the case that organizational health, not raw intelligence, is the single greatest competitive advantage any company can have. Part one breaks down the difference between a smart company and a healthy one, why talented companies still struggle, and the signs of an unhealthy organization: politics, confusion, low morale, silos, and poor communication. Bobby then moves into the first discipline, building a cohesive leadership team, and why trust has to come before strategy. Whether you lead a company of 500 or a team of 5, or even a family, this is about creating an environment where people can actually crush it. In this episode: - Smart vs. healthy: why talented companies still struggle - What smart companies focus on, and the three places Bobby sees the biggest struggles (marketing, finance, and technology) - What a healthy organization looks like: trust, productive conflict, commitment, accountability, and results - Why nobody on your front line knows whether to ask Bill, Susie, or John - The hidden cost of an unhealthy culture: politics, confusion, low morale, silos, and wasted energy - Why health pays off: lower turnover, better customer experience, higher profit, faster decisions, and better execution - One company that climbed from 5% margins to 20% margins over three years by getting healthy - The four disciplines of a healthy organization (overview) - Building a cohesive leadership team: trust before strategy - What breaks leadership teams: egos, politics, hidden agendas, and a lack of trust - Vulnerability-based trust: admitting mistakes and asking for help - Authentic leadership and healthy conflict: how to disagree hard and still leave the room united Mentioned in this episode: - The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business, by Patrick Lencioni - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, by Patrick Lencioni - "Everything rises and falls on leadership." (John Maxwell) "Organizational health is the greatest untapped competitive advantage in business." (Patrick Lencioni)