I sat down this week with Mark Galauner of Fractional CX Consulting, and I want to be upfront, this is about as newborn as a business gets on this show. Six weeks old. We're talking about a company that's still finding its legs, and honestly, that made for one of the more interesting conversations we've had.

Learn

Mark's path into data-driven decision-making didn't start where you'd expect. He went to school for radio, wanted to be a DJ, and only backed into research methods through a communications master's program at Cleveland State that turned out to be unusually heavy on statistics. That's where the light bulb went on. From there it was business analytics for an insurance company, then a stint at Ernst & Young managing metrics and survey work, and eventually running customer satisfaction programs for banks, credit unions, and even a government client managing tribal lands for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Along the way he picked up a phrase I loved: "I can drive the statistical car, I'm just not necessarily the mechanic." He's not a math guy first, he's a translator. That's his edge.

Evaluate

Here's the problem Mark keeps running into with businesses: everyone's collecting data. Almost nobody's using it. Dashboards look great and sit there. So when he evaluates a client's pain points, it's usually one of two flavors, either customer defection nobody can explain (people just leave, and the exit interview never captures the real reason), or a total blind spot about their own audience, like the government client who didn't know their own tribal members didn't realize they had ancestral land rights until Mark's team went and knocked on doors. His sweet spot: mid-size companies with a lot of customers or members, run by a director or VP of marketing who's on the hook for numbers they can't fully explain.

Act

This is where the episode turns. Mark had been kicking around the idea of starting his own consultancy for ten years, and did nothing with it. Then, when a wave of DOGE-driven government contract cuts hit his employer, his company lost 25% of its revenue in a single day. Headcount followed. Mark found himself job hunting again, and instead of spraying resumes everywhere, he got selective, and finally acted on the idea he'd been sitting on. LLC, website, positioning: fractional CX consulting, an alternative to old-school consulting where you come in, fix what's broken, and hand it back to the team already in place instead of trying to sell them new systems.

Protect the Dream

Mark's five-year vision isn't about scale for scale's sake. It's a handful of clients he genuinely enjoys working with, doing work he believes actually matters, because he's spent enough of his career doing work that got filed away and never looked at again. The honest tension he's sitting with right now: fractional consulting is still an unfamiliar model to a lot of business owners, and part of his job over the next few years is simply teaching the market what it is. As he put it, he's either on the ground floor of something that's about to take off, or knocking on a door nobody's ready to open yet. We'll find out, and I intend to check back in.

Find Mark at fractionalcxconsulting.com or connect with him on LinkedIn.

I've been doing this show long enough now to recognize when a conversation has something extra in it. This one did.

Nate Tulett is someone I've gotten to know over the past few years, we first crossed paths at Friday night concerts at Mapleside, talking shop while walking the grounds. At the time he had four Crumbl Cookie franchise locations and was about to open two more. Today he operates six locations across the greater Cleveland area. And watching how his mind works has been one of the genuinely great privileges of building this community.

Here's the thing about Nate that took me a while to fully articulate: he's an engineer who wandered into the cookie business and found out that it was actually manufacturing the whole time. Mechanical engineer by training, window cleaning entrepreneur by necessity, Crumbl franchisee by calculated instinct. He sees raw materials, value-added processes, and quality control where the rest of us just see pink boxes and rotating menus. And that way of seeing things turns out to be a real asset in the franchise world, because whatever Crumbl corporate hands you, the back-end operation is entirely yours to build.

What I didn't expect from this conversation, and what I think will stay with you, is the story he tells about a window cleaning customer from his early days. An elderly woman called in a complaint. He went to investigate. She turned out to be legally blind. And what she was actually asking for, underneath the complaint, had nothing to do with the windows. That story is why I do this show. It says something true about every transaction any of us has ever been part of.

We also dig into: how Crumbl's rotating menu creates a recurring engagement loop that most businesses can't manufacture; the psychology behind why bad customer service makes the product itself taste worse; Nate's plans to build a genuine sales culture across six locations rather than a passive one; and why his engineering background gives him a vocabulary most entrepreneurs lack, the expectation that version one fails, and that's not a setback, that's the process.

Nate is also among the first Crumbl operators in the country to roll out the new flavored soda program, and his take on how complementary products build customer relationships rather than just upsell opportunities is worth the listen on its own.

The LEAP framework, Learn, Evaluate, Act, Protect the Dream, runs underneath this whole conversation, even when we're not naming it explicitly. Nate knows where he's been, he's honest about where he is, and he's calling his shot about where he's going. That's the whole game.

This is one of my favorites. I hope it's one of yours.

Topics covered:

• Mechanical engineering background and the leap into franchise ownership

• Building and selling a 3,500-customer window cleaning business from scratch

• Why franchises are still independent businesses, and what that demands of operators

• Customer service psychology: peak memories, high/low points, and the Chick-fil-A "my pleasure" effect

• The rotating Crumbl menu and why flavor novelty drives engagement

• Launching the dirty soda program as one of the first 75 U.S. operators

• Building a sales-minded culture vs. a passive one

• AI and workflow automation as operational tools for multi-location businesses

• The engineering "version one always fails" framework applied to business iteration

There are moments in life where the plan you made and the life you're living stop matching up. What you do in that gap, that's where character gets built.

I've known Kristen Eiermann for over a decade through our BNI networking world here in Northeast Ohio, and I've watched her work up close. She is, without question, one of the most polished, committed, and genuinely excellent professionals I know. But what I didn't fully appreciate until this conversation was the full weight of the story behind all of it.

Kristen came up as a high school English teacher and reading specialist. By 24, she was already a landlord, living in one half of a Lakewood double while renting the other, and then flipping HUD homes in her summers with her own two hands. She wasn't handed a head start. She built one, slowly and deliberately, long before she ever had to.

And then life handed her a moment she didn't choose.

Home on maternity leave with a one-year-old and a two-year-old, a month after giving up her tenured teaching position, her husband came home and everything changed. The income they'd counted on was gone. The trajectory she'd planned was gone. And in that moment, Kristen made a decision that would define the next twenty years of her career: she bet on herself.

That first year as a real estate agent? Rookie of the Year, not just for Ohio, but across multiple states. No one was close. Because she was, as she said herself, hungry in a way that isn't manufactured.

What's followed is a career built on the kind of relentless professionalism that most people don't even see happening. Subtle negotiations on your behalf. Paperwork that's legally sound and filed on time. The invisible work on the back end that makes the experience feel effortless for clients, which, as Kristen puts it, is the highest compliment she gets: "Well, that was really easy."

She's been in the top 1% of agents nationally for somewhere between eight and ten years. She and her team partner Kira did nearly $25 million in sales last year, just the two of them. She has her own brokerage? No, and that's the point. She's deliberately kept her team tight: two family members she trusts completely, soon to be a third agent, never more than five or six. Because at a certain scale, you stop doing the work you love and start managing. And Kristen isn't built for management. She's built for quality.

That phrase, "I'm not built for quantity, I'm built for quality," is the key to everything she's done. Her philosophy on team-building mirrors her philosophy on client relationships: deep investment, real loyalty, and nothing half-done.

In this episode, we cover the origin story behind her teaching-to-real estate pivot, the practical real estate investing moves she made in her 20s that gave her a financial foundation when she needed it most, what it actually takes to stay in the top 1% year after year, her vision for the Kristen Eiermann Group going forward, and what "betting on yourself" actually feels like when the alternative is real.

Kristen can be reached at callkristen.com or homes@callkristen.com. Her direct line is 440-935-0993.

Future Proof is built on the idea that the best business owners don't stumble into success, they LEAP into it. Learn. Evaluate. Act. Protect the Dream. Kristen has done all four, and this conversation is proof of what that looks like across twenty years of real work.

Future Proof Podcast is hosted by Brian Pritchard and produced by Iron Age Marketing.
To learn more about working with Brian on your marketing and financial future, visit makemefutureproof.com

There's a phrase that stuck with me from this conversation: "It's a problem, not a brag."

Kim Kitchen has been doing search engine optimization for small businesses since 2015. She has her first client from that year still on retainer. Her clients see their names showing up in AI overviews. Her phone rings because of referrals from people who love working with her. By most measures, Burning River Marketing is a success story.

And yet, Kim will be the first to tell you: she's the bottleneck.

That's what makes this episode so interesting to me. Kim isn't somebody who doesn't know what she's doing, she knows exactly what she's doing, and that's the problem. The strategy, the insight, the ability to reverse-engineer how a potential customer thinks before they even know what they're looking for, that lives in her head. It's not easily documented. It's not easily handed off. And it's the reason clients stay.

We talked about what it actually means to build a business around SEO in the age of AI overviews and ChatGPT results. We talked about why the phone book analogy still holds, the delivery mechanism changes, but the need to be found never does. We talked about BNI, about partnerships, about the very real fear of training your competition. And we talked about the crossroads that naturally emerges when growth requires you to replicate something that, until now, has only ever existed as you.

Kim also gave one of the clearest explanations of how SEO actually works for a small business that I've ever heard, and it involves a chimney nest. You'll understand when you hear it.

I genuinely look forward to checking back in with Kim down the road. These conversations are designed to be revisited, and I suspect the next chapter of Burning River Marketing is going to be worth documenting.

Connect with Kim Kitchen:
🌐 burningrivermarketing.com
🔍 Search "Kim Kitchen BNI" to find her full profile and social links
📧 Email is her preferred way to connect

The Future Proof Podcast is a place where Cleveland-area entrepreneurs talk openly about where they've been, where they are, and where they're going, with the intention of coming back to hold each other accountable.

There's a concept that I keep running into, and the more I dig into it, the more I think it's one of the most underappreciated ideas in personal finance. It's called the Infinite Banking Concept, and my guest today, Luke Tatum of Perfect Spiral Capital, has made it the foundation of everything he does.

Luke is the author of Between the Lies: How to Reclaim Your Future from the Banks and Wall Street, host of the Between the Lies podcast, and founder of a financial education company built on a deceptively simple premise: somebody is going to control your money. It ought to be you.

We cover a lot of ground in this conversation. Luke walks through why checking a box on your 401k enrollment form isn't investing, it's abdication. He explains what it actually means to become your own banker, and why the conventional opportunity cost argument (just put it in the S&P 500) misses the most important variable: life happens. Pipes burst. Kids need cars. Kitchens get renovated. And if your wealth strategy can't survive contact with reality, it's not a strategy.

What surprised me most about this conversation was the human side of the work. Luke describes his process as something closer to financial counseling than sales, sitting with people who've been carrying an entire ideology about money that no one in their life has ever bothered to listen to. That resonated with me.

I'll also be transparent: I have a policy with Perfect Spiral Capital. I'm newly licensed and actively building out my own understanding of this world. That's part of why I wanted to have this conversation publicly, because I think too many people have never been given a genuine explanation of what IBC actually is and what it isn't.

We close with Luke sharing the vision for The Perfect Spiral Capitalists, a private community he's building for clients and engaged followers who want to be in a room that elevates them rather than drowns them in noise.

Connect with Luke:

• PerfectSpiralCapital.com: "Become a Client" button in the top corner

• Book: Between the Lies: How to Reclaim Your Future from the Banks and Wall Street

• Podcast: Between the Lies

Connect with Brian:

• makemefutureproof.com

• Ready to talk about protecting your dream? Reach out directly.

There's a certain kind of courage that doesn't always get talked about, the courage to stop mid-life, look at what you've built, and say, "I want something more." That's the Claudia Duffy story, and it's one I think you're going to find genuinely energizing.

Claudia came up as an x-ray technician. Good career. Stable work. And then a cruise changed everything. One trip, one moment of clarity, and she decided that her next chapter was going to be built around helping other people experience the same sense of wonder she felt on that boat. Sapphire & Silk Travel was born, and she hasn't looked back.

What I love about Claudia's approach is that she's not just booking flights and hotels. She's providing a full-service relationship, before the trip, during the trip, and after. When something goes wrong at a hotel at 11pm in a foreign country, she's the one picking up the phone. When you need half your money back for a Wi-Fi situation on a cruise ship, she's the one running point. In her words: she's your answer to the what-if.

What makes this episode particularly fascinating to me is the depth behind the business model. Claudia is a certified life coach and Reiki master healer, and she's putting those skills to use in a way I genuinely hadn't considered before. She's building hosted women's wellness group cruises that blend transformative coaching work with the magic of travel. Think of it as a floating conference for women who are ready to receive something new.

She's also doing meaningful work in the autism travel space. As a mom of a son with autism, she knows firsthand how families can feel locked out of travel experiences, and she's determined to change that.

This is a conversation about reinvention, boldness, and what it actually means to step into the unknown, whether that's booking the trip or starting the business.

Find Claudia at sapphireandsilktravel.com and across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.