While editing an episode of Leader Generation, I heard something that stopped me mid-cut.

The guest — Mariano Bosaz, VP of Global Consumer Strategy at Coca-Cola and author of The Digital Mindset — had dreamed of becoming an ambassador for a country. Official title, formal post, the works. It didn't happen. (Turns out without a family diplomat connection, they just send you somewhere terrible when you're old to make photocopies.)

But what did happen? Eighteen years at Coca-Cola, three continents, 92 countries, building bridges between people, technology, and culture.

He became an ambassador. Just not the one he'd imagined.

That got me thinking about my own story. My son Austin asked me what I wanted to be when I was young — like, little-kid young. I told him the truth: a teacher and a children's author.

Neither happened the way I'd pictured it at 12, 15, or 22.

But I taught volunteer art literacy at my kids' elementary school for 12 years. I teach clients every day how to show up authentically and stop hiding behind corporate-speak. I host workshops. I've been in teacher mode longer than most credentialed teachers I know.

And my book, Dino Manners, came out in 2009. I've finished others. There's a binder of short stories written for our kids sitting in our house right now.

I did both things. I just didn't recognize them because they didn't arrive in the packaging I expected.

In this short episode, I want to push back on the idea that unrealized dreams are failed dreams. They're rarely that literal. They're pointing at something — a drive, a value, a way of moving through the world.

Those don't expire.

Give it a listen. Then maybe pass it along to someone who needs to look at their dreams from a different angle — at any age.

Links mentioned in this episode:

https://marianobosaz.com/

https://tenloradio.com/e/ep161-digital-mindset-the-bridge-leaders-need-for-the-ai-era/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/marianobosaz/

https://binkypatrol.org

https://dinomanners.com

Susan Finch sits down with Laura Patterson, President and Co-Founder at VisionEdge Marketing. They explore why businesses chase shiny new tools instead of maximizing what already works, the real cost of remote work on mentorship and professional development, and how strategic restraint might be the most powerful tool in your marketing arsenal.

Laura brings decades of experience helping companies achieve measurable business outcomes through marketing, while Susan brings her perspective from working with business-focused podcasts and small- to mid-size companies. Together, they challenge the assumption that more tools, more content, and more technology automatically equals better results.

The conversation moves from the "random acts of marketing" that plague so many businesses to the critical importance of in-person mentorship for young professionals. Laura shares insights from her 20-year intern program, while both hosts discuss how the shift to remote work has created a mentorship crisis that's hurting the next generation's ability to navigate difficult conversations and workplace dynamics.

Whether you're drowning in marketing tools, struggling to find clarity in your strategy, or wondering how to bring up the next generation of professionals, this episode offers a refreshing dose of reality and actionable wisdom.

Laura Patterson is President and co-founder of VisionEdge Marketing, a growth strategy firm she launched in 1999. A globally recognized expert in customer-centric growth and Marketing Performance Management, Laura has worked with over 300 companies to replace disconnected acts with deliberate, measurable strategies rooted in creating business and customer value. Her career began at Motorola and grew through leadership roles in marketing operations, product and strategic marketing, and customer marketing and loyalty. She is the author of multiple books, including the award-winning Fast-Track Your Business: A Customer-Centric Approach to Accelerate Market Growth, and holds a patent for Accelance®, a SaaS platform that connects activities directly to business outcomes. Laura hosts the "What's Your Edge" podcast and has mentored over 50 marketing interns over 20 years. A LinkedIn Influencer and frequent keynote speaker, she has won over a dozen thought leadership awards. Connect with Laura at visionedgemarketing.com.

After getting flooded with AI-generated guest pitch emails, Susan and Lany decided to remind everyone what Rooted in Revenue is really about. It's not just about making money. Everything you do impacts your revenue: your sleep patterns, your workspace, your team, even that specific spot on your couch where you always fall asleep. The podcast is about how to keep money from draining out of your business through inefficiency, procrastination, and all those hidden time thieves you don't even notice.

Neither Susan nor Lany went to college. They learned to run businesses by working in businesses, making mistakes, and course-correcting. The education system doesn't teach you who to hire first, when to buy the domain, or that you probably don't need a 40-page business plan. Real business transformation takes 9-12 months, not 30 days, because you need space to think, innovate, and rediscover the joy you'd forgotten about. Time is your real currency, and everything is rooted in revenue.

• 00:45 - Why they started Rooted in Revenue several years ago
• 01:45 - Everything impacts your revenue: systems, processes, efficiency
• 02:30 - You're an athlete in your business: how is the athlete performing?
• 03:30 - The education system doesn't teach you how to run a business
• 07:15 - Small Business Development Centers (SBDC) and their limitations
• 08:15 - The problem with business plan obsession
• 11:45 - The biggest deficit: time, not money
• 13:15 - The trap of creating vs. implementing with AI tools
• 13:45 - The Love-Hate-Delegate framework
• 17:30 - Using spreadsheets with formulas to track tasks
• 23:30 - Nine to twelve month process vs. 30-day overwhelm
• 24:30 - The plan is never the plan: it's a concept
• 25:45 - Rediscovering joy and forgotten talents
• 26:30 - Cheryl Walsh's Laguna's underwater mermaid photography metaphor
• 27:30 - What you say vs. what the team says vs. what consultants find
• 28:00 - Bringing back the original spark
• 28:15 - Lany's six-week Chaos Cleanse Facebook group
• 29:00 - Reviewing old course materials for new insights
• 29:30 - Keeping materials in a "Stuff I Learned" folder to revisit and search

Technology promises to solve every business problem, but what if the tools themselves are creating the chaos? Susan Finch and Lany Sullivan explain some reasons why organizations continue to struggle despite investing in the latest software, platforms, and systems.

The pattern is predictable: Someone attends a conference, hears about a game-changing tool, signs up immediately, and brings it back to the team without considering compatibility, redundancy, or whether anyone will actually use it. Or worse, a new executive arrives and forces their favorite tools on everyone without understanding existing workflows.

Before reaching for another software solution, companies need to answer fundamental questions about mission alignment, internal communication, and who will own the implementation. The disconnect between leadership vision and team reality creates friction that no amount of technology can fix.

They break down the patterns they see repeatedly: reactive purchasing, shiny object syndrome, and tools piled on top of unresolved problems. They offer a framework for slowing down, asking better questions, and ensuring your team is aligned before spending another dollar on software that might just become expensive shelfware.

Susan Finch and Lany Sullivan dig into something nobody wants to talk about but everybody needs to hear. A client's new bookkeeper asked a simple question about canceling a former employee's card. The owner said they already had the card. Turns out the physical card was in a desk drawer, but the numbers were saved in the employee's personal Amazon account. For 18 months.

Lany brings her banking background to this conversation - branch operations, mortgage processing, risk management, the whole deal. She's seen what happens when businesses don't have proper controls in place. She's also seen the theft, the fraud, and the embezzlement that follows.

They walk through why your bookkeeper just paying the bill isn't oversight. Why the "put it on your personal card and expense it" model doesn't work anymore. Why most employees probably don't need company cards at all. And what to do instead - purchasing processes, approval limits, the works.

If you've got company cards floating around and you're not 100% sure where they're saved or what they're being used for, this episode is for you.

00:00 - Introduction and WinCo shopping conversation 00:45 - The company credit card discovery story 02:00 - How easy it is to add cards to personal accounts 03:15 - Why checks and balances are critical 04:15 - Understanding financial leakages and OPM 05:15 - Risk tolerance and compliance boundaries 06:00 - The bookkeeper's role in reconciliation 06:30 - Small business vulnerabilities 07:00 - The American Express expense report model 08:00 - Individual card numbers and identification 09:00 - Generational differences in floating expenses 09:30 - Two-factor authentication and dual signers 10:00 - The four-step purchasing process 11:00 - Setting spending limits and approval levels 12:30 - Trusted contractors and liability 14:00 - Ethical contractor practices 15:00 - Who really needs a company card 16:00 - Onboarding and credit card policy documentation 17:00 - Honest mistakes vs. intentional fraud 18:30 - Simple prevention: stickers on business cards 19:00 - The debt obligation reality 20:00 - Rethinking your approach 21:00 - Executive branch only recommendation 22:00 - Streamlined purchasing processes 23:00 - Questions for your bookkeeper 24:00 - Real theft, fraud, and embezzlement experiences

We're drowning in content glut. Empty posts churned out to keep up with everyone else. There's no joy, no depth, no controversy. You can FEEL the difference between obligated content versus real engagement.

What are we losing? The skill of conversation. The skill of listening. Those spontaneous "hey, come look at this" moments. Pulling each other into offices to analyze something together. These aren't scheduled Q&A sessions. These are the messy, real exchanges where magic happens.

Here's what's fascinating: I was editing Deborah Fell's episode when she mentioned a CEO who told her he NEVER takes meetings, that his schedule is impossible, and that she shouldn't even try. But when she said, "Would you like to be on my podcast?" His response? "Oh, I'm glad to do that."

Professionals at all levels don't want more meetings, sales pitches, or brain-picking sessions. They want real conversations with pushback. They want to share their stories. The best ones are willing to go eyeball to eyeball on important topics.

Stop trying to feed the algorithm with volume. Stop the sycophant responses and empty praise. Stop formatting everything with bullets just because you think you're supposed to.

Start having conversations worth recording. Start capturing spontaneity. Start admitting when we don't have the answer and need to think together. Start going back to people and saying, "Remember when we talked about this? What happened?" Consider getting the "monument" update - the current state of a conversation or event of the past.

That's what this conversation with Deborah is about. Getting back to real conversations.

Stop drowning in business chaos - your SOPs are the life raft you need. In this game-changing episode, Susan Finch and Lany Sullivan expose why your team's knowledge hoarding is sabotaging growth and share their proven system for creating procedures that actually get used. They reveal why writing at a 5th-grade level isn't dumbing down - it's smartening up your business operations.

From horror stories of employees creating secret binders to success stories of businesses transformed through proper documentation, this episode delivers the blueprint for organizing years of scattered procedures into one powerful system. Learn the exact folder structure, naming conventions, and review processes that turn procedural chaos into operational clarity. Whether you're a solopreneur ready to scale or managing a team that's reinventing the wheel daily, this episode provides the roadmap to document, delegate, and finally find joy in your work again.

As always, we try to give you an action list you can do on your own:

1. Create Your Hub • Set up a main folder called "SOPs," "Procedures," or your preferred name • Ensure it's in a shared drive accessible to your team • Remove individual access permissions temporarily if needed
2. Assess Current State • List all the procedures you currently have documented • Identify which team members have created their own "personal" procedures • Note any critical processes that exist only in someone's head
3. Choose Your Categories • Divide your business into main operational areas (e.g., Admin, Sales, Production) • Create main folders for each category • Keep it simple - aim for 4-7 main categories maximum

1. The Great Document Dump • Move ALL documents from subfolders into main category folders • Review for duplicates and conflicting versions • Don't panic - this temporary chaos leads to clarity
2. Establish Naming Conventions • Agree on a team-wide naming system • Include dates, version numbers, or status (TBD, Complete, Archive) • Rename all documents consistently
3. Create Missing SOPs List • For each category, list procedures that need documentation • Create placeholder documents titled "[Process Name] - TO BE COMPLETED" • Assign ownership and deadlines

1. Develop Your SOP Template • Include: Purpose, Tools Needed, Step-by-Step Instructions, Screenshots • Add revision dates at the top • Create a video component for complex procedures
2. Write Priority SOPs • Start with your "hit by a bus" procedures - the critical ones only you know • Use simple language (5th grade level) • Include where to find things, which buttons to click, what fields to complete
3. Implement Approval Process • Create a procedure for creating procedures • Establish who approves new SOPs • Set review cycles for existing procedures

1. Build the Habit • Schedule weekly SOP time • Update procedures as processes change • Archive outdated versions rather than deleting
2. Create Onboarding Materials • Develop a "Start Here" folder for new team members • Include how to navigate the SOP system • Add role-specific procedure lists
3. Regular Maintenance • Quarterly reviews of high-use procedures • Annual audit of all SOPs • Celebrate when team members create or update procedures

You earned that certification. Now what?

If you're like most professionals, you invested time and money into leveling up your expertise... only to let that shiny new credential sit quietly in your inbox, in your bank statement, rather than on your LinkedIn profile. Sound familiar?

In this episode of Rooted in Revenue, I'm sharing the exact 14-day launch plan I use with clients to transform professional certifications into credibility, conversations, and clients.

What you'll learn:

• Why the first 48 hours after certification are critical (and what to update first)
• The "badge reality check" that could be killing your credibility
• How one announcement postcard generated 10 quality conversations
• The LinkedIn "position hack" that notifies your entire network
• A complete checklist to implement in just 2 hours

Whether you just completed training, earned a designation, or achieved any professional milestone, this episode gives you the roadmap to maximize your ROI.

Episode highlights:

• [2:00] The trust signal you're not using effectively
• [5:00] Why print marketing still works in 2025
• [8:00] Your 14-day certification launch plan
• [10:00] The part-time position trick for LinkedIn visibility

Stop letting your credentials collect dust. It's time to make them work as hard as you did to earn them.