Making BIG Shifts

In this episode of Making BIG Shifts, host Josh Anderson sits down with Graeme Barlow, four-time founder, CEO of Iversoft, and founder of FounderLink and Barlow Consulting, to talk about the hard lessons that come from building, scaling, and selling companies over more than two decades.
Graeme shares the most expensive mistake of his career, losing focus, and how expanding Iversoft into too many services nearly broke the business. He walks through the painful decision to downsize half the company, the mindset required to protect momentum, and why founders often grow faster by doing less.
Josh and Graeme also dig into fundraising, AI’s impact on services and marketing agencies, building strong teams, investing in early-stage companies, and the simple framework Graeme uses to help founders get unstuck: cash, customers, or delivery.
This is a real conversation about focus, hard decisions, team energy, AI, and what it actually takes to build a company that lasts.
Chapters:
00:00 Meet Graeme Barlow
00:40 The Most Expensive Lesson From 24+ Years of Building Companies
02:06 How Losing Focus Cost Millions
04:33 The Painful Reality of Letting People Go
08:19 Why Team Energy Can Make or Break a Company
10:24 Rocket Owl, Fundraising, and Surviving the Hardest Moments
13:36 What First-Time Founders Need to Know About Raising Money
16:12 How Iversoft Evolved in the AI Era
19:04 Why AI Is Not a Moat by Itself
21:00 The Coming Shift for Marketing and Service Companies
24:05 Helping Founders Reach Their First $5 Million
26:32 Building FounderLink
28:23 Why Paid Coaching Creates Real Accountability
30:24 The Secret Behind Repeatable Founder Success
32:58 What Graeme Looks for Before Investing
35:49 The One Question Every Stuck Founder Should Ask
Connect with today’s speakers:
Josh Anderson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josh-anderson-diy/
Graeme Barlow: https://www.graemebarlow.com/
FounderLink: https://www.founderlink.com/

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In this episode of Making BIG Shifts, Jonathan David Lewis, President and Partner at McKee Wallwork and author of The Rebuilders, shares why the best leaders know when to say no, how to lead through disruption, and why rebuilding yourself is the first step to rebuilding your business. From navigating industry change and AI to creating meaningful cultures that thrive, Jonathan delivers practical insights for founders, CEOs, and leaders ready to make their next big shift.

🎙️ Listen now and discover how clarity, courage, and character drive lasting growth.

#MakingBIGShifts #JonathanDavidLewis #Leadership #BusinessGrowth #TheRebuilders

In this episode of Making BIG Shifts, host Josh Anderson sits down with Dusty Holcomb, leadership strategist, founder and CEO of Arcqus Group, and host of the Leadership Unlocked podcast. After 21 years inside the American Automobile Association and a stint as a company CEO, Dusty burned the boats to build a leadership practice focused on helping founders and senior executives unlock their next level of growth.

In this conversation, Dusty breaks down why most execution problems are not actually execution problems at all. They are clarity and alignment problems sitting upstream. He shares the reframe he uses with CEOs who complain that their team cannot keep up, why leaders need to articulate what must be done by when and avoid the how at all costs, and how to find a coach who will actually challenge you instead of coddle you.

Dusty also gets into his Rules of Engagement playbook, the Socratic method he uses to expose the real bottleneck inside a founder led company, leadership in the age of agentic AI, and the Monday morning practice every founder needs to stop being the bottleneck in their own business.

If you are a founder, operator, or senior leader who feels like everything runs through you, this episode hands you a clear, practical framework to step back, get clarity, build alignment, and finally let execution take care of itself.

In this episode of Making BIG Shifts, host Josh Anderson sits down with Barry LaBov, founder of LaBov Marketing Communications and Training and author of The Power of Differentiation. With 45 years of experience, Barry has worked with iconic brands like Harley Davidson, Audi, Volkswagen, and McAllan Scotch, helping them uncover what makes them truly rare in a sea of sameness.

Barry never planned to be an entrepreneur. He started in music writing jingles until a client handed him their entire marketing department and asked him to take it over. That single moment of trust pulled him into a 45 year journey of building brands.

In this conversation, Barry breaks down why so many companies sound exactly the same today, why AI generated content is making it worse, and why true differentiation is not about being superior but about owning what makes you genuinely different. He shares the five step process his team uses to uncover what a brand really stands for, the Wal-Mart of insurance story, why employees should hear a brand launch first, and how to find the right customer profile for your business.

If you are a founder, marketer, or operator trying to stand out in a crowded category, this episode gives you a clear and grounded framework to figure out what makes you different and how to protect it.

In this episode of Making BIG Shifts, we are joined by Vlad Pivnev, CEO of Stivi and co-founder of Acoda, a leader helping businesses integrate AI into their marketing and sales strategies to drive real growth.Vlad brings over sixteen years of experience building and running a traditional digital marketing agency. But when he saw the landscape shifting beneath him, he made the decision to pivot. Rather than wait for AI to make his business irrelevant, he leaned into it and built Stivi, a company focused on helping brands increase their sales and leads through AI-powered marketing. In this conversation, he shares how that shift happened, what he learned along the way, and why he believes the window of opportunity is wide open for anyone willing to start now.Josh and Vlad go deep on the topic of AI visibility and generative engine optimization (GEO). Vlad breaks down the key signals that large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude use when deciding which brands to recommend. From technical crawlability and media mentions to forum discussions and reputation management, the conversation covers what businesses actually need to do to show up in LLM-generated answers. Vlad also shares a compelling case study where a client saw a conversion rate of 46 percent from LLM-driven traffic, a number that blew away anything he had seen in sixteen years of marketing.One of the most powerful takeaways from this episode is the shift in how consumers search for information. Vlad shares a personal story about his six year old son, who now asks him to "ask ChatGPT" instead of "Google it." That generational shift signals a massive change in how brands will need to position themselves online in the years ahead. The conversation also touches on the future of the workforce, with Vlad sharing his prediction that senior-level professionals who know how to leverage AI will thrive, while many junior and mid-level roles in design, development, and writing may disappear within the next one to two years.Whether you run a small business, lead a marketing team, or are just trying to figure out where AI fits into your career, this episode gives you a practical and honest look at what is happening right now and how to stay ahead of it. Vlad's advice is grounded and simple: understand your background, find where AI fits into what you already do well, and start integrating it one step at a time.