# Ryan Tansom

Top podcast episodes
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#506: David Kachoui | Leadership Is a Trade, Not a Personality

You have somebody in a leadership seat you are not sure about, and you could not write down why. So the calls keep coming back to you and you stay the one holding the building together. That is the owner-operator trap wearing a disguise, and the honest reason is that nobody ever defined what good l…

#507: Pat Hobby | Get Ready for Q4 Budgeting with the Model That Predicts Your Cash (Replay)

Budget season is about to open, and I want this conversation back in front of you first. Your CPA says you had a great year. The bank account in March disagrees. That gap is what happens when you budget the income statement and nothing else. Pat Hobby share-screens a real three-statement model and …

#508: The 3 Functional Leaders: The CFO, CRO, and COO Who Run the Business Without You

Somewhere in your office is an org chart with seven titles on it, and if somebody asked you today who owns revenue, the honest answer is still you. Same for margins. Same for cash. Kim and I opened Module 7 with this episode, and I want to be straight about how I landed on three functional leaders:…

#509: The 5-Year Leadership Roadmap: How to Fill the Three Seats You Cannot Afford Yet

Last episode I made the case that your org chart is three seats, because your income statement is three buckets. The question everybody asked afterward was the obvious one: fine, but I cannot afford a CRO, a COO, and a CFO, so what am I supposed to do on Monday? This is that answer. Kim and I walke…

EP 314: Navigating the Owner/Operator Trap w/ Ryan Tansom

You can hit every number and still feel trapped. Why? Ryan Tansom is the founder of Independence by Design, where he helps business owners get rewarded for the value they create instead of trapped by it. He rebuilt his family's copier and IT business from a 940,000 dollar loss to an eight figure sa…

#510: The Leadership Development Plan: How to Build the Confidence to Actually Let Go

There is somebody at your company you want to put in a seat, and the last time you promoted someone on promise it went sideways: the team lost respect for them first and for you second. So you hold on. Not because you want to run the function forever, but because you do not have the confidence to l…

#511: Camille Nicita Higley | The Business Is the People

Great people doing great work for great clients create great impact. That is Camille Nicita Higley's whole model in one sentence, and the financials are the output. You have a version of it on a wall somewhere. You have never been able to point to it on the P&L, so every quarter it loses to the num…

#512: Alan Beaulieu & Kim Clark | Turn Economic Uncertainty Into a Plan

Summary Your 2027 budget needs a price, a hiring plan and a cash number, even when the economic headlines disagree. Kim and I sat down with economist Alan Beaulieu to work through what owners can do with that uncertainty. We start with the difference between rising sales and real growth, then conn…

#513: Jim Brown | The Imperfect CEO

You are the shareholder, the board, and the CEO, and somehow every meeting is still a mess. Same people. Same table. Nobody knows which hat is talking. Jim Brown has spent thirty years on that problem. I wanted to get specific with him about how an owner separates those jobs without pretending to b…

199: How to Engineer Business Value: Scaling Smart, Hiring Right, and Creating Freedom with Rens Hayes IV (Guest Episode)

Most business owners go through a pivotal moment—their first real look behind the curtain at how buyers value companies. For Rens Hayes, that moment came when he went through a sale and due diligence process for his father’s structural steel business. What he learned from that experience completely…