In this solo end-of-year episode of The Builders Podcast, Matt Levenhagen pulls back the curtain on what he’s been building behind the scenes and why it matters far beyond AI hype.

After briefly reflecting on a challenging couple of years in his agency, Matt dives into the real work: designing and building a deeply personal, enterprise-level system that unifies personal insight, business data, and AI into a single command center. This isn’t about tools or dashboards. It’s about creating structure that reduces friction, preserves context, and enables better decisions.

The episode explores how understanding your past, protecting your data, and eliminating constant context switching can become a powerful competitive advantage. From layered personal and business hubs to a daily command center and outreach workflows, Matt shares how building systems for yourself can quietly change how you think, work, and rebuild for what comes next.

Key Takeaways

• The real “killer app” isn’t software you sell, it’s the system you build for yourself
• Fragmentation, not effort, is what drains momentum in modern businesses
• Personal clarity and business clarity are deeply connected
• Security and ownership are essential for honest thinking and reflection
• A single command center can eliminate decision fatigue and context switching
• Building custom systems creates leverage that off-the-shelf tools can’t match

In this episode of The Builders Podcast, Matt welcomes back Damon Darnall to explore what happens when technology reaches a tipping point. While their first conversation focused on Damon’s background and the early days of drones, this discussion goes deeper into the drone revolution itself and how it dramatically lowered barriers to entry, unlocking hundreds of new business opportunities.

Damon breaks down how drones evolved from complex, expert-only machines into accessible tools powered by sensors, automation, and onboard computing. That shift didn’t just make drones easier to fly. It changed who could participate, which business models became viable, and how real-world problems like inspections, safety, and data collection could be solved more efficiently.

The conversation expands beyond drones into a broader lesson for builders. When technology removes friction, opportunity scales. Entire markets open up, new operators enter, and smart builders focus less on the novelty of the tool and more on creating repeatable, practical businesses around it. This episode offers a clear blueprint for recognizing those moments and building with intention when barriers fall.

Key Takeaways

• The drone revolution lowered skill, cost, and complexity barriers, unlocking hundreds of new businesses
• “Easier to use” technology often leads to higher-value outcomes, not lower ones
• Automation and AI enhance human judgment instead of replacing it
• Safer, faster workflows create stronger and more scalable business models
• Successful builders design systems that reduce friction for newcomers
• The biggest opportunity is rarely the tool itself, but what it enables others to do

In this episode of The Builders, Matt sits down with Rob Broadhead, founder of RB Consulting, to explore the experiences that shaped his business-first approach to technology. What begins as a story about curiosity and problem-solving quickly becomes a reflection on early failures, missed assumptions, and hard lessons learned inside consulting firms and startups alike.

Rob shares how watching software projects struggle, not because of bad code but because of unclear business problems, fundamentally changed how he thinks about building systems. From enterprise consulting to scrappy startups, each setback became a data point, teaching him that technology only works when it serves clearly understood processes and constraints.

The conversation turns pivotal as Rob recounts the accidental founding of RB Consulting, including launching his company just one day before September 11, 2001. Navigating uncertainty, stalled projects, and shifting markets forced Rob to refine his thinking. Those early failures didn’t slow him down. They shaped the philosophy he still operates by today: business clarity first, technology second.

Key Takeaways

• Early failures often reveal what theory and training cannot
• Most software problems begin as business problems
• Setbacks in startups provide a practical education in operations
• Incremental progress beats over-engineering
• A business-first mindset creates more durable systems