Episodios

  • Revolutionizing Business with Cloud Transformation and AI with Ryan Pollyniak
    Aug 20 2024
    In this digital age, there is a lot of technological change. Whether you're looking to sell, deciding who to market to, determining how to market, or considering technological advances and employment, all of these challenges can have technological solutions. So, what can you do with all this technology? In this episode, I have Ryan Pollyniak, Cloud Transformation Executive at Western Computer. We talk about cloud transformation, cloud computing, and data management. Ryan emphasizes how important it is to select the right technology solutions that can accommodate future growth and align with a long-term strategic roadmap. Additionally, we discuss the impact of AI on employment and its usefulness during the interview process. Listen and explore cloud transformation now! --- Listen to the podcast here: Revolutionizing Business with Cloud Transformation and AI with Ryan Pollyniak Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We live in an era where there’s a lot of technological change and a lot of technology to manage even without that change, and many of you out there are possibly looking at starting your own business and wondering, “What can I do with all this technology?” And it might even look daunting. It might even feel like another large task on top of everything else that you’re looking into, whether you’re looking into what product you want to sell, who you want to market to, how are you going to market, and what are you going to use. So, to help us sort through some of these technological solutions, technological advances, and technological change in employment, even, for those of you out there who are just looking at other employment options as well, I would like to introduce to you my guest today, Ryan Pollyniak, who is a Cloud Transformation Executive. --- Ryan, welcome to the program. Thanks, Stephen. Glad to be on. Well, thank you for joining and, first of all, take us through a day to day. What’s a normal activity for someone who’s a cloud transformation executive? As a lot of people are familiar with other types of executives but this particular one is very specific to our time, being that a lot of people are doing digital transformation and cloud transformations. Absolutely, and so if you ask my seven-year-old’s third grade class when she told them that I was a cloud transformation executive, they all think I’m a meteorologist now, which is not the case. Actually, working with companies, all different sizes of companies, small businesses all the way up to smaller enterprise level businesses, make that digital transformation, key buzzword you hear all the time, you just mentioned it, have their old, legacy, on-premise systems and siloed data into the modern cloud and there’s so many things that go along with that, from keeping your data secure to leveraging the future of AI and everything else. A lot of businesses are making that switch and then you’ve also got startups, of course, which are wanting to take the appropriate foundational steps as they create their initial business systems to make sure that they’re setting themselves up for the future. So, what I’m doing is typically strategizing with the leaders of these companies and pulling in teams of solution architects and project managers and consultants to kind of realize the vision that we set. So just to also orient our audience, in case anyone’s not familiar, like you mentioned, cloud is a term that makes people think of clouds in the air, and I think a lot of people when they put something on the cloud, even anything on their personal computers, probably think that their data just kind of floats around in the air the way the clouds do. So, what does the cloud actually mean? What is it? That’s a great question. There are several different iterations of that. In general, cloud is computing power servers that are not in the server on premise,
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  • Strategies to Get Noticed on Social Media with Wendy Pace
    Aug 13 2024
    When we offer services, one way to connect with our audience is through social media. The challenge is that while we want to reach a large number of people, there are important factors to consider. But how can you truly stand out in the crowded social media landscape? In this episode, I have Wendy Pace, Founder and Owner of PACE Setting Media. We talk about the importance of making content for a specific audience, and marketing strategies for businesses. We also discuss the limitations of algorithmic content creation and how social media algorithms work for content visibility. Learn how to stand out online! --- Listen to the podcast here: Strategies to Get Noticed on Social Media with Wendy Pace Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a broader category of getting noticed. You produce a product, you produce a service, you produce an offering, even wanting to, say, get people together for some sort of a social endeavor. No matter what you’re trying to do, you have to find some way of getting noticed, and as you’re probably well aware of, over the last half a century and particularly even the last 20 years, the landscape of getting noticed has changed quite a bit, there’s a very different way of getting noticed now than it was during, say, the middle of the 20th century. There’s a lot of stuff that involves digital marketing and content creation that I’m here to talk with my guest today, Wendy Pace, the founder and owner of Pace Setting Media, about this endeavor and what getting noticed in the 21st century really looks like. --- Wendy, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Starting on the topic of getting noticed and how much that has changed, what’s the number one thing that someone needs to think about, let’s say someone just finished building their product or finished outlining their service, outlining their offering, what’s the number one thing someone should be thinking on right now as far as getting noticed? Okay, so they’ve developed a product or a service, they need to be thinking about who is this for? What does my audience look like and where is my audience at? A lot of people just throw stuff at the wall and hope that it sticks and that’s not exactly the way it works in social media.Share on X If you’ve noticed or paid any attention to your social media feeds, your view of the world has gotten narrower and narrower because of the algorithms. So you really have to have a keen understanding of who your audience is so that you can tell Facebook, you can tell Google, you can tell them, “This is my audience,” and you can get some of that knowing what your hashtag should be, knowing what the lifestyle of your audience is, there are other ways of getting around what Facebook used to, and back in the day, when I started, you could pick your household, right? You’d be like, “I want two-income, I want four kids, I want the dog, I want the cat, I want the white picket fence. I want it in this zip code,” and you could really kind of hand pick who got to see your stuff. Now, you have to be a lot more creative. You need to think about, okay, say it’s a car decaling or car mats, you make custom car mats. Well, you need to think about who’s that lifestyle? Who’s going to be that car person? What are the things they’re going to be interested in? What are the most common job titles they might have? Because you can’t pick all of them. And then what’s the income around base, what kind of generalized income would you be in? And that is where your key audience members are. So, first and foremost, figure out who you’re selling this service to, what do they do, what does their life look like, so that you can pick the right pain points to get into their feeds. And while we’re talking about who your audience is, who you’re selling to,
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    45 m
  • Leveraging AI for Smarter Decision Making in Business with Greg Williams
    Jul 24 2024
    Decision making is a crucial part of our lives, affecting us regardless of whether we are pursuing our passions, thinking about business, or focusing on our personal lives. Many people believe that the outcome of our lives is the sum of all the decisions we make, which can be a bit overwhelming. How can we improve our decision-making skills to shape the lives we desire? In this episode, I have Greg Williams, VP of Strategy at Western Computer. Our talk revolves around decision-making in business. Greg emphasizes the importance of evaluating technology vendors and building strong relationships with customers. We also discuss the potential of AI to transform business operations and leverage it to attain work-life balance. Tune in to learn how these insights can enhance your business strategy! --- Listen to the podcast here: Leveraging AI for Smarter Decision Making in Business with Greg Williams Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a little bit of a broad topic, something that really affects all of our lives, regardless of whether or not you’re pursuing your passions, regardless of whether or not you’re even thinking about a business or a career at all, and that is decision making. There’s a lot of people out there saying that your life’s outcome is kind of a sum of all the decisions you make, which can get a little stressing to the mind, I would say, in that sense. To talk to us all about decision making, all the facets of decision making and how to make effective decisions that really, truly reflect who we are and what we want to see in the world in our lives, I would like to introduce you my guest today, Greg Williams, the VP of Strategy for Western Computer, --- Greg, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Stephen. It’s great to be here. Yeah. Thank you so much. And so, first of all, let’s get a little bit of your background. So, you’re a VP of Strategy, Western Computer, the name doesn’t necessarily clearly stay what it is, so what is it that you do as VP of Strategy? Yeah, so we’re an old company and I like to say that we don’t sell computers and we’re not really Western that much anymore but that’s our name and it has a good brand in the marketplace. We provide ERP and CRM solutions to small and mid-market companies. That’s what we do. We’re primarily a Microsoft partner so we implement the Microsoft Dynamics suite of products. For our customers, we support them long term. Last few years, it’s been their journey in digital transformation. And just so everyone knows what we’re talking about here, ERP and CRM, what are those two acronyms refer to? So ERP is the backbone software of the business, accounting, inventory control, sometimes ecommerce. It’s really the core system that you enter orders in and ship products out of or manage projects and that type of thing. Yeah. And CRM is, there’s two main companies out there, Microsoft and Salesforce, that do that for the most part and it’s for your front office. It’s your sales team, it’s your customer service team, it’s your field technicians, if you’re in a service business, the applications that they use, And in your role as VP of Strategy, are you mostly concerned with the strategy of your company and how to obtain and retain clients? Or are you mostly concerned with the strategy of the companies you work with, helping them pick which business solutions they want for their businesses? A little bit of both. I’m obviously very focused on our strategy but I do advise our clients quite a bit on what IT strategies they can take to optimize their investments in technology. Well, regardless of which side of your business, which side of this dichotomy you’re on, a big part of it is around this decision-making process. Do you have any general ideas or general piece of advice for anyone...
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    42 m
  • Embracing a Positive Mindset Towards Aging with Dr. Corinne Auman
    Jul 16 2024
    Aging is a natural part of life. As we get older, our physical body changes, our health, and our mind. But what actually happens to us as we age? What does it mean for us and for those we love? And how can we approach aging in a new way? In this episode, I have Dr. Corinne Auman, CEO and Founder of Choice Care Navigators. We discuss the negative views of aging and how we can refrain from it as a natural part of life. Dr. Corinne shares the challenges of retirement, particularly for the baby boomer generation. Tune in to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Embracing a Positive Mindset Towards Aging with Dr. Corinne Auman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, we’re going to talk about a topic that I have yet to really truly bring up or focus an episode around, which is aging. Now, we all know that aging is happening. Some people approach it quite differently than others. You’ve heard me talk a bit about the generations and the different generational experiences, but what happens to us as we get older? What does that mean? And what does it mean for the people that we love and care about as we get older? And also, how can we approach it a little bit differently? You probably know that I am a little bit skeptical or let’s say not fully on board with the traditional ways that we have viewed aging in the past and even treat it mostly today. To talk about this topic, I would like to introduce you to my guest for today, Corinne Auman, and she is the founder of Choice Care Navigators as well as the author of a book called Keenagers, which gives us a different new approach to aging. --- Corrine, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. Oh, yeah, thank you for hopping on and talking about this important topic because, as we know, everyone out there is getting older, we all have ideas around aging, and we have a lot of different ideas. What are the ideas that you usually encounter, say, in today’s society about what it means to get older and what it means to have your loved ones get older? So I think we are in a pretty ageist society, in the sense that the messaging you typically get around getting older is don’t do it, which, of course, we can’t avoid, so we’ve got this thing that is happening to all of us all the time, we’re going to be older at the end of this podcast than we were at the beginning, and yet we get this messaging from our culture around us that is constantly anti-aging, negative viewpoints on it, prevent it, if at all possible, look as young as you possibly can, which, I mean, it’s a multibillion-dollar industry. People are making a lot of money off of your fear of growing older. So, I think that is the predominant view. When you get to actual like retirement years, people typically view those years in one of two ways. They either view it as kind of a time of earned relaxation where you do a lot of vacationing and you spend time with the grandkids, or they view it as a time of just inevitable decline, the end is nigh and there’s nothing we can do about it and it’s just all downhill from here. So, those are the typical kind of viewpoints you see about growing older. And I have to admit that I’ve kind of succumb to it a little bit. Mostly, it’s because I think that that’s what’s pushed by our society. I think about what happens when people grow from their 20s into the 30s and 40s and stuff like that and it’s pretty emphasized to me this loss, this loss of the adventure, this loss of the independence, whereas I’ve actually experienced a little bit of the things that you actually do gain, like I think people sometimes start to become more self-confident, they start to reduce their give-a-fucks, to be able to just like not freak out over small little things anymore. Is that messaging, is someone turning 30 today hearing just overwhelming negative commentary about where their li...
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    41 m
  • Podcasting as a Business Growth Strategy with Nicole Grinnell
    Jul 2 2024
    When starting a business, there are several key things to consider, like marketing strategies and financial planning. In the early stages, it's crucial to reach a wide audience to make your business known. What are some effective ways to make an impact and connect with potential clients? Join us in this episode with Nicole Grinnel, an entrepreneur, CEO, and podcast host. We discussed the benefits of guesting on podcasts, especially for early-stage businesses for growth and connection, as well as having an entrepreneurial mindset and remote work flexibility, such as virtual assistants. Tune in to gain valuable insights! --- Listen to the podcast here: Podcasting as a Business Growth Strategy with Nicole Grinnell Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’ve advocated quite a bit on this podcast about kind of embracing a new way of thinking and I think one of the things that we’ve often thought about in the past is that when someone is doing something similar to what you’re doing, you see them as a competitor, as someone that’s kind of possibly occupying your space. But there’s a saying that the market’s only saturated when you’re trying to be someone else and it’s not necessarily saturated with you. So, I’m always here to support other people on the same journey, and the journey I’m talking about today is showcasing the stories of people who start their businesses or showcasing the stories of people who follow their passions very much here. So, my guest today, Nicole Grinnell, is the host of Mic'd Up, another podcast, as well as a two-time business founder. --- Nicole, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for having me, Stephen. I’m excited to be here. Well, thank you so much for popping on. And let’s first start by talking about Mic'd Up. Now, your podcast has been around for quite some time, even longer than this one. Yeah. So we have, obviously, like our actual show, and then we really serve as a booking agency to get other people on podcasts, which is a way that we’ve actually grown multiple businesses and supported a lot of businesses in that effort and so we really want to do much like the purpose of your show is show other ways that businesses can grow through different avenues and what other people have done and that’s what Mic'd Up plans to do. Nice. And so I guess the first question I have for you about that is, if someone is starting a business or trying to get any of their initiatives noticed, and I want to be all inclusive, not every initiative is a business but want to get something noticed, how should someone be thinking about podcasts? I hear people have advocating, say, start your own podcast or try to be on other podcasts. What’s the best way for someone to think through a strategy as far as building their business that involves the podcasting medium? So, it’s funny because I always say there’s a time and place for either of those. It really depends on the stage you’re at in business. So, when you are just starting out and you’re really trying to build your name, build pipelines, build relationships, that’s a great time to be in a guesting space because, really, what happens is the show is all about you. So, I compare it to having someone over for dinner. What’s easier, being the guest or being the host? When you’re the guest, it’s all about you, they’re doing all the prep, the legwork, they’re promoting it, they’re all of this, that’s really what guesting can be. When you’re in the hosting space, that’s a great time for when you are a seasoned entrepreneur, a seasoned professional, business is running, you’ve got some great pipelines and now you’re kind of at that stage that you want to give back and you want to be able to naturally connect. That’s a great time to be a host. So it really depends on that scale that you’re in and what that looks like for you.
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    47 m
  • Prioritizing Employees’ Well-Being in the Workplace with Tamara Fox
    Jun 27 2024
    As human beings, we all encounter problems in our lives. Some may be traumatic, and it's just a fact of life. These experiences can make it hard to focus on our daily tasks, especially at work. How can we create a workplace culture that supports employees during these times? In this episode, I sit down with Tamara Fox, a coach and head of consulting at LOEB Leadership. We discussed the impact of trauma on both personal and professional life, and the need for workplaces to address employees’ trauma, and the future of their work. Tamara shared about the approaches to leadership development and the benefits of prioritizing employee’s mental health. Tune in to learn how we can build a more supportive workplace --- Listen to the podcast here: Prioritizing Employees’ Well-Being in the Workplace with Tamara Fox Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. On this particular podcast, I’ve talked quite a bit about our work culture and about how many things about our culture that we all encounter at work need some adjustment in our thinking. And one of the topics that I was recently introduced to at the Boulder Startup Week last month is the topic of what happens when one of your coworkers, one of your employees has a traumatic experience. Now, we’re all going to have traumatic experiences in life, it’s just a fact of life that something major is going to happen to you and something major is going to happen to you that’s going to cause you to maybe even focus on that particular aspect of your life a little bit more, even a little bit more than your work, and we need to find a way to, on a broader scale, allow people to be coworkers but also human beings. Today, my guest, Tamara Fox, is a coach and a consultant, and she was the speaker at this particular event on workforce trauma. --- Tamara, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you so much. So, I want to first start off talking about your particular story, your particular journey, when you talk about what made workplace culture something that really interested you and then what made specifically how people endure these traumas at workplaces something that you want to kind of lean into with your career. Yeah, absolutely. So I’m definitely one of those people that I took my own personal experiences and made it into something I’m actually passionate about and doing in the workforce today. And I always start my story back in 2011, when I was 19, I always age myself now when I do podcasts, I think that was 13 years ago, it was wild. But in 2011, I was 19 years old and I woke up and I was living in an apartment in Denver, Colorado, and I woke up to a masked man standing over my bed with a gun who raped me and actually physically assaulted me as well, like dislocated my arm, did a whole bunch of stuff to me that, you know, won’t go into details. I truly saw my life flash before my eyes, thought I was going to die, never see my family again. So that was 19 years old. Wow. Pretty life changing experience, that was the catapult into my experiences with personal trauma myself, like going through something traumatic. Pretty shortly after that, my dad had been battling with an opioid addiction, most of my childhood, it just didn’t really come to the surface or I wasn’t really aware of it at like more conscious level until after my trauma and I think my trauma actually catapulted him a little bit, made him a little bit worse, because when your family experience something like that, of course it has an impact on the family around them so his opioid addiction got to the point that he was verbally abusive, he was blacking out and not remembering things, and he was abusing opioids illegally. So then that happened and he became suicidal and his mental health was just awful. So that had an impact for me on a trauma perspective. Then, from 2016 to 2024, I had nine deaths,
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    47 m
  • Achieving Work-Life Balance and Fulfillment with Brian de Castro
    Jun 20 2024
    Change is about becoming different in various parts of our lives triggered by our internal desires or external events. Through change, it helps us see new things and grow as a human being spiritually, mentally, and physically, which are all interconnected. How do these aspects of change come together to shape our life? Join us in this episode with Brian de Castro, founder of The Domestic Athlete. Our conversation focused on how we can maintain work-life balance, prioritize well-being, and explore creative projects. We also talked about how to align our passions to achieve fulfillment and avoid burnout through intentional management. Brian shared the benefits of exercise, mindfulness, creativity, and self-awareness. Listen to this episode and start transforming your life today! --- Listen to the podcast here: Achieving Work-Life Balance and Fulfillment with Brian de Castro Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. We all reach that point in life where we want to make some kind of a change and there’s so many different catalysts for change. Probably, if you’ve been listening to the podcast, you’ve heard several episodes with people who have had events such as health scares or even just getting laid off from a job perpetuating a new way of thinking, a new line of, “Okay, what change do I wanna make? What do I think through what do I really want?” However, there are so many components to it. There’s obviously the mental stuff, some of the spiritual stuff that’s been on in the last few episodes, but I’ve also covered on some episodes the physical aspect of it and it all kind of, in a way, goes together. And here to discuss how that goes together, I have the founder of The Domestic Athlete, Brian DeCastro. --- Brian, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Looking forward to the conversation. Definitely. I want to start by orienting our audience here. So what is The Domestic Athlete all about? Yeah, good question. Back in 2016, I was actually working, I was on my probably 15th, 16th year working in the same organization. For the last, say, nine years, I was actually employed managing the entire fitness department that consisted of 40 trainers, 20 staff, multimillion-dollar department, there’s a lot of moving parts. It was a very exciting position. We went through a $50 million expansion at the time and we cut the ribbon and then, after that, it was kind of like, “Now what?” Yeah. Ironically, the universe responded and they were actually phasing out people in sort of that middle management position as well. My position got phased out. I drove off the lot with a big smile on my face. I can move on to the next thing but also not with the risk of, you know, I had a family and everything so responsibility and all that stuff. When I started The Domestic Athlete within a month of leaving the club, my passion was in working with regular folks in the grind, day to day, parents, professionals perhaps with families that are trying to keep all the balls up in the air that also need the life force, the inspiration, the excitement. They still want that. You don’t want to wait ’til you’re retired to actually start living your life so how do we keep it all together and keep our life force but also manage all those moving parts, the dance class, the hockey practice, all that stuff, and then paying your bills and then you also have a marriage or relationship or something, right? So there’s so many different things going on. So Domestic Athlete is basically people like you and I operating in the sport of life, like I like to call it, so what do you need to operate at your best?Share on X Oh, wow. A lot to unpack there. Maybe let’s start with a little bit about your story because you said that you spent 16 years working with the same company, overseeing personal trainers and stuff like that.
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    43 m
  • Human Designed Strategy for Personal and Professional Fulfillment with Molli Lou Hollows
    Jun 11 2024
    We are all trying to build the life we really want, balancing what we are doing with the lifestyle we dream of. However, are we truly making a life that matches our deepest values? How can we be sure our path fits our real goals? In this episode, we have Molly Lou Hollows, founder of Strategy Sculptors. Her business focuses on both the practical stuff we need to build and understanding our true selves, so what we create aligns with the life we genuinely desire. Today, we will explore what human design strategy is for business consultant clients. Molli shares what Unified Field Theory and Morphogenetic Field is and how it actually attracts opportunities and experiences by just being themselves with purpose. Join us and align with your true self! --- Listen to the podcast here: Human Designed Strategy for Personal and Professional Fulfillment with Molli Lou Hollows Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’ve been doing a bunch of these podcast interviews and I’ve witnessed a whole bunch of different motivations, a whole bunch of different reasons why we all build our businesses and/or passion projects of any kind. Some of it’s based on certain specific circumstances and others based on something that we’re called to do, but at the core of everything that we’re trying to do, the journey that we are all on right now, is trying to build the life that we really want. Then there’s kind of a juxtaposition, a meetup of the physical thing that we’re building, what we’re actually doing as well as the lifestyle we’re trying to achieve, whether it be escaping something we don’t want or whether it be feeling really in touch with having our lives be in alignment with who we truly are. My guest today, Molli Lou, is the founder of Strategy Sculptors, and her business actually works at that intersection of physical, tangible thing we need to build as well as understanding who we are at a course that what we’re building actually matches the life that we really truly want. --- Molli, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen. Yeah. I’m excited to be here. Super awesome. Oh, that’s amazing. Now, first of all, let’s get a point in time out. How long have you been at it with Strategy Sculptors? Well, in 2020, that’s when I really started my full-time entrepreneurial journey. I think a lot of us did. We were all home so we all were questioning things and really looking at ourselves in a different way. We were all at home and so I really started to be like, okay, I’ve always wanted to do this. So I dove into it and I started going to school for hypnotherapy. I already had gone through and was a certified breakthrough coach, specifically, and I just felt like I needed something more tangible to use than coaching just for me. Coaching is great but I have always felt like I was going towards a framework that I was creating on my own, that I was going to enter the framework eventually.Share on X I ended up working towards other things. I felt limited, actually, by the hypnotherapy. I wanted to use it as a tool but I wanted to be able to make it scalable so that I could make as much income as I wanted and I wanted it to be more flexible because the one on one, it gets old. I didn’t want to trade my hours for dollars. I wanted that to be, for sure, part of the solution, part of my entrepreneurial journey was to find that, and I ended up working with a lot of entrepreneurs to begin with, and I realized maybe I just loved entrepreneurship and then it was kind of this delicate balance of finding a way to have both, to have both entrepreneurship and spirituality merge. And then I ended up where I am now, where, finally, I’ve figured it out. Coming into 2020 when you started rethinking a lot of things, what were you doing? Did you have a full-time normal job? Were you just trading your dollars for hours through this hypnotherapy coaching or was there somethi...
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