In this episode, Paul Dio sits down with Jonathan Feldman, founder of NextCoreFlow, an automation and AI integration consultancy for small and medium-sized businesses. Jonathan is not a theorist. He's built and exited two businesses of his own — a college advertising magazine he ran across twenty markets and a planner business he grew past thirty million dollars a year on Amazon — before launching NextCoreFlow in the summer of 2025 to sit at the front edge of what he believes will be the most seismic decade of business change since the late nineties.

Jonathan walks Paul through the "cold start" problem he sees over and over with founders — the ones who know AI matters, use it themselves, and still can't figure out where it belongs in their business. His answer is counterintuitive. The starting point isn't an AI tool. It's the operation itself. Where does work move? Where is it duplicated? Where are the workarounds nobody documented? Only after those workflows are visible does layering in automation and AI actually pay off.

The conversation gets specific. Jonathan describes the acquisition scenario every founder-led services company should think about — the file cabinets, the extra ops headcount, the fragmented systems that quietly haircut the valuation on the way out the door. He walks through what a discovery call actually looks like, why the tokenized survey to every employee is the most valuable step in his process, and why the frontline view of the business is almost always different from the owner's.

The episode closes on the humanity of the work. Jonathan is clear that he doesn't take engagements aimed at reducing headcount. He's after the two hours a day a producer spends creating invoices instead of writing new business, the menial layer that AI can strip out so the humans can go do what humans are best at. And he's built his engagement model around that idea — quick fixes, under ninety days, under fifteen thousand dollars, with ROI that has to justify itself.

In Episode, Paul Dio sits down with Dr. Nicole Aliotto, founder and CEO of Alla Breve Consulting, for a conversation about what good education actually looks like — and why the easiest metrics to measure are rarely the ones that matter most. With nearly three decades of experience spanning higher education, K-12, and the private sector at IBM, Nicole has spent her career helping schools turn data into direction.

Nicole walks Paul through her journey from internal practitioner to founder, the early uncertainty of stepping off on her own in 2017 with no clients lined up, and the leap of faith that turned into a thriving consulting practice. She also shares how the pandemic forced her to diversify her clientele almost overnight, and how she's now rebuilt the K-12 work that first lit her up.

The heart of the conversation is what she calls the "in-between" measures — trust, morale, belonging, staff voice, educator well-being — the indicators that schools often ignore in favor of the easier outputs. Nicole explains how she designs survey work that actually surfaces those nuances, why most school measurement efforts go awry, and what changes when an entire district finally starts talking about success in the same language.

The episode closes on legacy. Nicole reflects on the clients who've taken her frameworks and used them to secure millions of dollars in grant funding, the second book she has releasing at the end of May 2026, and why, after thirty years, she still gets choked up when a team tells her they're finally all moving in the same direction.

Erica Goode spent her early career on the traditional accounting track — Big Four, Fortune 50 finance, the late nights and missed dinners that come standard with the path. Then she looked up at the senior leaders above her and realized she didn't want to be any of them when she grew up. That single honest moment set off a decade-long pivot that took her out of corporate, into full-time motherhood, and eventually into building the kind of accounting firm she'd never seen modeled for her.

In this conversation with Paul Dio, Erica unpacks what it looks like to bring corporate-level skill — forecasting, cash-flow modeling, strategic finance — to the small businesses sitting right down the street. She talks about her first client, a Taekwondo studio, and how the work she'd built her career on suddenly became the thing standing between that small business and bankruptcy during the early months of COVID. The story is a quiet argument for why human accountants still matter, especially now.

The episode also takes a hard look at the million-dollar revenue obsession that's everywhere in the consulting and accounting worlds. Erica makes the case that a business owner pulling $300K can take home almost as much as one chasing seven figures — minus the headcount, the overhead, and the burnout. Million-dollar revenue, in her words, is a vanity metric. What actually matters is what lands in your personal bank account at the end of the month, and how much of your life you got to keep along the way.

There's also a fascinating detour into AI. Erica fed her own redacted tax return into Claude this past tax season just to see what would happen — and walked away with a 50/50 hit rate that captures exactly why human advisors still matter. The conversation lands on an optimistic note for the profession: when AI handles the rote work, accountants finally have room to be the human their clients actually need.

00:00 – Introduction and welcome

01:00 – From Big Four to Fortune 50 to walking away

03:30 – "I don't see anybody I want to be when I grow up"

04:45 – Choosing to be home and not knowing there was a third path

06:00 – Missing accounting and the first client down the street

09:00 – The freedom of choosing your clients

11:00 – Books worth keeping on the shelf

13:00 – Why the Life First Accounting Firm podcast exists

17:00 – The vanity metric of seven-figure revenue

18:30 – Where AI can't replace the human

20:30 – Feeding her tax return into Claude

23:00 – Where accounting goes from here

25:30 – The Taekwondo studio and a cash-flow story that saved a business

30:00 – Where to find Erica

Discover how Erica helps small business owners and entrepreneurs build profitable, life-first accounting practices through intentional forecasting, strategic finance, and client-by-client growth: www.ericagoodie.com

Legacy Podcast: For more information about the Legacy Podcast and its co-hosts, visit https://businesslegacypodcast.com

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For more information: Visit https://businesslegacypodcast.com to access the show notes and additional resources on the episode.