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Unconventional Wisdom About Conventional Wisdom

Unconventional Wisdom About Conventional Wisdom

De : Kim Miller - Hershon
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Unconventional Wisdom About Conventional Wisdom: Where clichés come to retire and fresh thinking we inspire. Smart minds don’t think alike—and that’s the point. Unconventional Wisdom About Conventional Wisdom takes you inside the messy, brilliant, and bold thought processes of high-achieving leaders, entrepreneurs, and out-of-the-box thinkers. We skip the clichés and spotlight the real talk: the strange decisions that worked, the brilliant ideas that bombed, and the thought patterns that defy the rulebook—but still lead to growth, impact, and the occasional mic drop. If you’re tired of surface-level advice and crave the kind of wisdom that makes you pause, laugh, and level up—this is your new favorite listen. Because let’s face it: playing it safe never built anything worth bragging about.Copyright 2025 All rights reserved. Direction Economie Management et direction
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  • The Second-in-Command Advantage: How a Great COO Lets Founders Scale Without Burning Out | Derek Fredrickson

    The Second-in-Command Advantage: How a Great COO Lets Founders Scale Without Burning Out | Derek Fredrickson
    Oct 20 2026
    In this episode of Unconventional Wisdom About Conventional Wisdom, Kim Miller-Hershon sits down with Derek Fredrickson, founder and CEO of The COO Solution. With over 16 years as a second in command and COO, Derek helps seven and eight figure business owners streamline operations, build high-performing teams, and scale sustainably without burning out. He leads a team of 15 fractional COOs serving companies across many industries. He also happens to be a New England boy who has called Paris home for the past 10 years, a move that he admits makes no sense on paper yet turned out to be exactly right.That Paris story is more than a personal footnote. Derek went virtual with his team back in 2015, a full year before the move and years before "pivot to online" became a pandemic cliché. Living six hours ahead of his US clients forced him to build operations, systems, and communication habits that most businesses only scrambled toward much later. He was, in his own words, ahead of the curve, and the discipline it demanded shaped how he runs everything today.The conventional wisdom Derek followed early on was that his lane was set. He studied business, worked on Wall Street for big investment banks, and believed the corporate ladder was simply what you were supposed to climb. Watching his wife, a business coach, come home lit up by the impact she was having, he realized the corporate track was feeding his bank account but not his sense of mission or purpose. So he took the leap into entrepreneurship, not overnight but after a year of reflection, even with a new house and a third child on the way. He is careful to frame it as his journey rather than a prescription, but for him the pull toward something more meaningful was undeniable.Derek's core leadership insight is that growth requires separating your ego from the engagement. In his early days running The COO Solution, he felt he needed to be in every room, in every client meeting, personally part of every solution. He came to see that instinct as his own old mindset left over from his days as an individual fractional COO. Clients now hire the results, the methodology, and the roster of brilliant COOs he has assembled, not Derek personally. The more he inserted himself, the less room his COOs had to do their best work. Learning to feed his own need for significance without being in the room was, he says, night and day from where he started.That led him to a contrarian belief: business owners are not meant to run their own businesses. Most founders, he argues, build something where the tail wags the dog, slowly becoming the operator of a company they started out of passion. The identity shift from operator to owner frees them to be the rainmaker, the visionary, the relationship builder, which is how companies grow exponentially. You cannot scale, he says, when the founder is still stuck in all the day-to-day.Asked where he still wrestles behind the scenes, Derek is refreshingly candid. His biggest current challenge is a scaling problem he has not solved. His 15 COOs are exceptional, and many of them also serve clients outside his firm, which he genuinely applauds. The rub is consistency. If every COO does the work their own way, the model is not uniform and not scalable, because you cannot scale complexity, only simplicity. Yet clamp down with rigid guardrails and the best COOs feel reduced to project managers. He is still searching for the balance between a shared methodology and enough room for talented people to flex, and he is honest that it remains a work in progress.This episode explores:Why going virtual in 2015 put Derek years ahead of the remote-work curveMoving a New England family to Paris for one year that became tenWhy the contrarian truth is that business owners are not meant to run their own businessesThe identity shift from operator to owner, and why it is the key to exponential growthThe real, unsolved challenge of scaling a team of brilliant, independent COOsWhy you can scale simplicity but never complexityOvercoming the belief that you are "not a salesperson"Reframing selling as providing an opportunity, not applying pressureWhy people love to buy even when they resist being soldQuieting the imposter voice by selling the collective, not yourselfHow better questions often matter more than direct experienceWhy the fundamentals of leadership stay the same no matter the revenueThere is something quietly instructive in how Derek holds success and uncertainty at the same time. He has built a scalable firm, moved his life across an ocean, and conquered a fear of selling, yet he speaks openly about the problem he has not cracked and the voice that still whispers doubt. That honesty is the point. Growth, for him, is less about arriving and more about continually separating what is truly yours to own from what is not, in business and in life.Connect with me here:Website: https://www.kimmillerhershon.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/...
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    38 min
  • From J.P. Morgan to Cannabis Fintech: Leading Without Carrying It All | Aubrey Amatelli

    From J.P. Morgan to Cannabis Fintech: Leading Without Carrying It All | Aubrey Amatelli
    Oct 16 2026
    In this episode of Unconventional Wisdom About Conventional Wisdom, Kim Miller-Hershon sits down with Aubrey Amatelli, founder and CEO of Payrio, a fintech company providing payment solutions for cannabis, alternative medicine, and other highly regulated industries. Before founding Payrio, Aubrey spent more than a decade at J.P. Morgan Merchant Services, rising to executive director of commercial banking, specializing in technology and disruptive commerce in Silicon Valley. She also serves as chair of the National Cannabis Industry Association's Banking and Finance Services Committee for the 2025-26 term. A devoted Burner, she opens the episode sharing how Burning Man (which she treats as her new year, a time to reset and pour self-love back into herself) grounds someone who works in finance in a place where, for two weeks, no money changes hands at all.In this conversation, Aubrey challenges a piece of conventional wisdom she carried straight out of J.P. Morgan, the Harvard of payments: that being a founder means being the hardest worker in the room, carrying everything yourself, and wearing the most-hours badge. She's a relentless worker, but she's learned that badge doesn't mean anything anymore. Real leadership is leading with efficiency and the right team, and real success has shifted from "I started this working 20 hours a day" to freedom, time with her three kids and room for others in her organization to step up and feel like leaders themselves.A rich thread is the limits of the founder-as-expert myth. Aubrey knows what she knows (payments, compliance, how funds flow) cold, but she didn't grow up at J.P. Morgan learning marketing, HR, SEO, operations, and reporting, and she doesn't know anyone who's an expert in all of it ("maybe Claude"). Kim reinforces the balance she coaches constantly: you don't need to become a CFO to be a good CEO, but you don't get a free pass on your finances either, you have to know enough to be sure things are kosher. They land together on the strengths-over-weaknesses reframe, if you pour all your energy into your weaknesses you just get stronger weaknesses, so build on your strengths and hire for the rest.Her biggest current challenge is managing rapid growth, especially in the fast-expanding peptide world, as a solo founder with no one above her to run decisions by. She wants to hire efficiently without over-hiring and eroding the margins that keep Payrio profitable, and much of it comes down to trusting her intuition, moving, and course-correcting rather than falling into analysis paralysis. She and Kim dig into mistakes as the source of the biggest learnings (you didn't know it was a mistake at the time, but you tie your shoelaces tighter next time), and into the practice of challenging the story you tell yourself with curiosity rather than just correcting the behavior. Aubrey's version is the muscle she keeps exercising: intuition, that quiet "pause" that she's learned to honor, because nobody knows you better than yourself, right down to the voice that told Kim to finally put on an apron before cooking.This episode explores:Why the most-hours badge of founder honor means nothingRedefining success as freedom, not hustleSlowing down a fast launch, and hiring to make yourself do itWhy no founder is an expert at everythingKnowing enough about finance without becoming the CFOBuilding on strengths and hiring for weaknessesManaging rapid growth without over-hiring or analysis paralysisTurning mistakes into the biggest learningsChallenging the story you tell yourself with curiosityTrusting intuition as a muscle you strengthen over timeLeading with heart and relationships over the bottom lineSurrounding yourself with people who share your valuesReframing imposter syndrome as a complimentJust saying "thank you," and letting a compliment landAubrey's perspective is a powerful reminder that you don't have to be the hardest worker, the expert in everything, or the founder who chases margins to build something that lasts, you have to trust your intuition, lead with your heart, and surround yourself with the right people. Her journey from executive director at J.P. Morgan to the founder of a profitable, award-nominated fintech serving the businesses no one else will shows that doing genuine good for your customers can be the smartest growth strategy of all.If you're a founder, leader, or anyone building something in an industry everyone else overlooks, this conversation offers practical insight, honest talk about intuition and imposter syndrome, and a refreshing case that leading with heart and simply saying thank you will take you further than you think.Connect with me here:Website: https://www.kimmillerhershon.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmillerhershonNewsletter: https://link.kimmillerhershon.com/widget/form/aEdmdA1W5MhoMCMfy5O8Webinar: https://webinar.kimmillerhershon.com/?utm_source=PodcastGuest Details:Guest: Aubrey Amatelli, Founder & CEO, PayrioFocus: ...
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    36 min
  • Rocketman to Set Medic — How high-risk flying led to building National Set Medics Dan Schlund

    Rocketman to Set Medic — How high-risk flying led to building National Set Medics Dan Schlund
    Oct 13 2026
    In this episode of Unconventional Wisdom About Conventional Wisdom, Kim Miller-Hershon sits down with Dan Schlund, the Rocket Man himself, a world-renowned jet pack pilot, stunt man, and award-winning author, and the subject of the forthcoming documentary The Last Rocket Man, based on his memoir of the same name. Dan spent a decade flying rocket belts across 25 countries and six continents, over 100 feet in the air and up to 85 miles an hour, while surviving devastating skin graft surgeries and a broken neck. When he had to pivot, he founded National Set Medics, a company that provides medics to TV shows, films, and events nationwide, and grew it into a multi-million-dollar business over ten years. His memoir recently won Best Memoir at the 2026 New York City Big Book Awards.In this conversation, Dan challenges a piece of conventional wisdom that weighs on anyone cast as the expert: that you always have to have the answer and the plan. He used to burn enormous mental energy war-gaming every possible direction a problem could go. What freed him was learning to simply say "I don't know, but I'll figure it out," which focuses your attention on the actual issue instead of performing certainty. As he puts it, most of the time he doesn't know exactly what to do, he's just very good at figuring it out. Kim connects it to a current trap: people now think they can fake the answer because they can ask an AI, and she's candid from building her own custom agent workforce that AI can send you down wildly wrong paths if you abdicate your own thinking. Dan's version is clean: AI has a lot of information but it's not intelligent and it can't read your mind, so you still have to put your own brand on it.Dan's whole origin story is a case study in scrappiness. He started as a live-action stunt performer (getting shot off roofs and set on fire thousands of times as Batman, Indiana Jones, and cowboys at theme parks), met rocket-belt creator Kenny Gibson, and was selected to become one of the few Rocket Man pilots. After his 2013 crash and broken neck, he asked himself what his passion was, became a paramedic, and spotted a niche no one was serving well: film and TV sets legally require medics, and he knew both the entertainment side and the medical side. There was never a business plan. He threw his name out to producers, got double-booked, started splitting jobs with other medics, and realized he could earn a percentage on every medic he placed. National Set Medics now has 13,300 registered medics nationwide, and Dan describes his real job as balancing two customers, the medics and the producers, so that at the end of every day, everyone goes home alive.This episode explores:Why "I don't know, but I'll figure it out" beats faking the answerWhy AI can point a direction but can't replace your own thinkingSpotting an underserved niche by combining two kinds of expertiseBuilding a business with no plan, one working chunk at a timeTesting a category, then pivoting when it doesn't get tractionWhy shotgunning the whole market drains your resourcesSticking to your bread and butter before adding a second thingBalancing two sets of customers so everyone goes home aliveTiming a launch: packaging news instead of doubling the workContaining your own excitement as the real disciplineTreating every decision (and hire) as asset vs. liabilityEmbracing imposter syndrome by building a team and not micromanagingLetting managers lead in their own style, not yoursBeating anxiety by focusing on successes, not failuresIf you're a founder, creative, or anyone who's ever been told you need a plan before you can start, this conversation offers practical insight, honest talk about anxiety and imposter syndrome, and a refreshing case that figuring it out as you go is its own kind of genius.Connect with me here:Website: https://www.kimmillerhershon.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kmillerhershonNewsletter: https://link.kimmillerhershon.com/widget/form/aEdmdA1W5MhoMCMfy5O8Webinar: https://webinar.kimmillerhershon.com/?utm_source=PodcastGuest Details:Guest: Dan Schlund, "The Last Rocket Man"Book: The Last Rocket Man (memoir, Best Memoir, 2026 New York City Big Book Awards), available on AmazonDocumentary: The Last Rocket Man (coming 2027)Company: National Set MedicsWebsite: https://rocketman.tv Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
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    34 min
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