Business Owners Tell All

Chris Jungjohann, Founder and CEO of Recess Creative in Cleveland, Ohio, shares how an early career in photography and design unexpectedly turned into 17 years of entrepreneurship. Growing up around his family’s restaurant gave him early exposure to business ownership, but he ultimately pursued art and design before realizing he wanted the creative freedom of a smaller agency combined with the opportunity to work with larger clients. That realization eventually led him to start Recess Creative from his basement. Pasted text Today, Chris has expanded beyond Recess Creative to build Buds & Pals, a video, photography, animation, and content studio, and Super Average. He explains that his ability to expand into additional businesses came largely from building a strong team at Recess, including employees who have stayed with the company for 10 to 15 years. One of his biggest leadership lessons has been learning to hire people who are better than he is at specific disciplines and then actually letting go. Pasted text Learning and development are deeply embedded in Chris’s approach to leadership. Recess encourages employees to pursue classes, tutorials, outside projects, freelance opportunities, and emerging tools such as AI. Rather than expecting every creative professional to develop in the same way, Chris recognizes that people bring different strengths and encourages continued learning both inside and outside the agency. Pasted text His passion for development also comes from his experience teaching at the Cleveland Institute of Art and community college. That same philosophy now appears in Recess Creative’s rolling internship program. Interns are treated as members of the professional team and given opportunities to participate in real brainstorming sessions, client projects, pitches, and presentations rather than being relegated to administrative work. Three former interns have become full time employees, including Recess Creative’s creative director, who began as an intern 11 years ago. Pasted text Pasted text Chris also speaks candidly about the personal cost of entrepreneurship. During the early years, balancing young children, teaching, and building the agency forced him to make choices about where to invest his time. Today, part of his definition of success is being able to be present for his team when he is working and present as a father when he is home. Building the right team has been critical to making that possible. Pasted text Ultimately, Chris says business ownership requires belief, hunger, passion, energy, continual learning, adaptability, and even a little bit of “delusion.” Owners have to believe they will find a way through difficult periods while remaining willing to learn and evolve as technology, their people, and the marketplace change. Pasted text Key Episode Notes The accidental entrepreneur: Chris grew up around entrepreneurship through his family’s restaurant in Western New York, where his first jobs included bussing tables and washing dishes. He later studied photography and design, worked in education and agencies, and eventually realized he wanted to combine small agency culture, big client work, and creative freedom. Pasted text Building beyond yourself: One of Chris’s biggest lessons has been surrounding himself with talented people who share the vision. His growth as a leader required recognizing when someone else was better at something and giving that person the freedom to own it. Pasted text Learning cannot stop: Chris encourages formal and informal education, experimentation with AI, outside projects, freelance work, and personal brand development. Learning is not limited to company directed training. Pasted text Internships should provide real experience: Recess Creative's philosophy is essentially “make art, not coffee.” Interns work on actual client projects and can participate in pitches and presentations. Chris sees the relationship as mutually beneficial because young professionals receive experience while the agency benefits from their fresh perspective and energy. Pasted text Pasted text Failure is part of development: Chris views failure as necessary to learning and success. Rather than protecting interns from meaningful work because they may fail, Recess gives them opportunities to participate in professional projects where their ideas may either be discarded or make it all the way to senior client decision makers. Pasted text Develop leaders over time: Three former Recess interns are now full time employees. One progressed all the way to creative director after joining the company as an intern 11 years earlier. Chris’s own mentoring role has consequently changed because that creative director now develops newer members of the team. Pasted text Pasted text Leadership requires selective transparency: Chris discusses protecting employees from some of the pressures owners experience. Business can be a roller coaster, with a major win in the morning followed by losing a client in the afternoon. Not every employee needs exposure to every challenge the owner is carrying. Pasted text What it takes: Chris’s answer to the signature question centered on belief, hunger, passion, adaptability, energy, and continual learning. His memorable addition was that successful entrepreneurship may also require “a little bit of delusion,” meaning the belief that failure will not ultimately stop you. Pasted text Memorable Quotes These are the strongest direct quotes from Chris for episode graphics, social posts, or promotional clips: “Failure is the best teacher.” Pasted text “Hire people that are better than you at the things.” Pasted text “When I'm at work, I want to be here for the people here. When I'm at home, I want to be dad.” Pasted text “You have to be a sponge.” Pasted text “The minute you stop learning and become complacent, the world will pass you by.” Pasted text “We have to adapt. You have to evolve.” Pasted text “You gotta have the passion and the energy, and maybe a little bit of delusion.” Pasted text Best Quote for the Episode “The minute you stop learning and become complacent, the world will pass you by.” That is the strongest quote for this particular episode because it connects directly to the Learning and Development theme while also capturing Chris’s answer to what it takes to remain successful as a business owner. Pasted text Strongest Overall Takeaway Chris’s story reinforces that developing people is not separate from growing the business. It is what eventually makes growth beyond the founder possible. His progression from doing the work himself, to hiring people better than himself, to watching interns become leaders illustrates the transition from individual talent to organizational capability. Pasted text

In this episode of Business Owners Tell All: What It Takes, Victor Huynh, cofounder and CEO of Ready Artwork, shares what more than 22 years in business have taught him about learning, adapting, and staying relevant through constant change. Victor and his cofounder Emily started Ready Artwork almost accidentally. Both had full time jobs when freelance design projects began piling up. Eventually, they decided they were young enough to take the risk, make mistakes, and go back to traditional employment if the business failed. Pasted text Their original business centered on graphic design, packaging, branding, and print. When the financial crisis brought business nearly to zero, they were forced to reinvent themselves. They recognized an opportunity between technology focused web companies that lacked design expertise and designers who lacked technical expertise. That became Ready Artwork’s next evolution. Over time, the company continued adding and removing services as the market changed until it found another sweet spot serving technical B2B and industrial companies. Pasted text That pattern of reinvention became one of the central themes of the conversation. Victor describes Ready Artwork’s 22 year journey in one word: pivoting. Rather than viewing change as an interruption to business, he sees the ability to change as fundamental to surviving in business. Pasted text Victor also discusses the latest major disruption facing his industry: AI. He compares the current transition from traditional search to AI driven answers with the earlier transition from search engines such as Yahoo and AOL to Google. While the technology feels revolutionary, Victor believes businesses that have lived through previous digital shifts recognize a familiar pattern. The platform changes, customer behavior changes, and companies have to learn how to become relevant within the new environment. Pasted text The conversation also explores how AI is changing talent and development inside agencies. Work that was previously outsourced can increasingly be completed with AI, which means Victor believes agencies must move toward higher level strategy and become even more human centered. Technology can handle more execution, but he sees human relationships, judgment, guidance, and communication as increasingly important differentiators. Pasted text Victor shares another important learning point from his partnership with Emily. Early in the company, they were both doing essentially the same creative work. Victor eventually made the difficult decision to step away from the creative work he loved and focus on sales and client relationships while Emily concentrated on creative and production. That division allowed each founder to develop a distinct role and helped accelerate the company's growth. Pasted text Even after decades in business, Victor continues having to challenge his own preferences. One example was remote work. Although both founders prefer working in the office, Victor realized the company needed to become more flexible. After trying hybrid work and finding that managing it created additional complexity, Ready Artwork moved toward remote work while maintaining office space for employees who want it. Pasted text Victor ultimately brings the conversation back to the lesson that has defined his entrepreneurial career: business owners have to embrace change. His answer to what it takes to be a business owner is simple: pivot, adapt, and recognize that refusing to change eventually means being left behind. Pasted text Key Episode Notes Primary theme: Learning and Development Strong secondary themes: Adaptability, continuous learning, AI, business evolution, cofounder dynamics, specialization, changing workforce expectations, remote work, human connection. Victor’s business journey: Freelance graphic design → print and branding → financial crisis → websites → SEO → digital advertising → B2B industrial specialization → AI driven marketing evolution. Pasted text Biggest Learning and Development takeaway: Learning is not presented as formal training. Victor’s story demonstrates organizational learning through continuous experimentation, recognizing when something no longer works, developing new capabilities, abandoning services that are not a fit, and changing individual roles as the company evolves. Strongest founder lesson: Victor had to stop doing creative work he loved so that he and Emily could develop complementary roles. He moved toward sales, relationships, and company direction while Emily focused on creative, production, and strategy. Pasted text Strongest current business insight: AI may make lower level execution easier and cheaper, but Victor believes that increases the importance of strategy and human connection rather than eliminating them. Pasted text Signature answer: What does it take to be a business owner? Pivoting and embracing change. Victor says that is the essence of business because, “If you don’t change, you get left behind.” Pasted text Memorable Quotes “Change is the only constant.” “You don’t know what you don’t know.” “If you kind of condense our entire experience the last 22 years, really one word is pivoting.” Pasted text “If we’re not going to take the leap now, when are we going to do it?” Pasted text “We had time on our side to make mistakes and fail early.” Pasted text “If you’ve been in the industry long enough, this all feels familiar.” Pasted text “We need to be a lot more higher level, more strategy focused, more human centric.” Pasted text “That human element is always going to be around and core to our existence as an agency.” Pasted text “If both partners are doing the same thing, you’re basically walking with your feet tied together.” Pasted text “I’m so old school in the way I work, but I also have to force myself to be flexible.” Pasted text “Pivoting and embracing change.” Pasted text “If you don’t change, you get left behind.” Pasted text Best Quote for Episode Promotion “If you don’t change, you get left behind.” That is the cleanest connection between Victor’s entire 22 year story and the premise of Business Owners Tell All: What It Takes. His business has survived not because Ready Artwork found one model that worked, but because Victor and Emily repeatedly learned, changed, specialized, and rebuilt as the market changed around them.

Eddie DeAngelis’s story is ultimately about learning through experience and becoming a different kind of leader as the business grows. He began more than 30 years ago selling imitation perfume and cologne in Northeast Philadelphia, eventually building retail and wholesale operations, spending nearly two decades in screen printing and embroidery, and later transitioning into commercial finance. Pasted text A major theme throughout the conversation was Eddie’s willingness to acknowledge what he did wrong for years. In his earlier businesses, he believed he needed to touch everything himself: every large sale, client relationship, order, and decision. Looking back, he believes his inability to delegate kept those companies from growing beyond roughly $2 million in revenue. Learning to build a team rather than remaining at the center of everything became one of his biggest leadership lessons. Pasted text Learning & Development Notes Hiring is part of development. Eddie said his earlier approach was essentially to find someone quickly, hire them, put them to work, and expect them to learn as they went. QualiFi now treats hiring as an actual process, using multiple interviews, multiple perspectives, prepared questions, assessments, and post interview feedback. His lesson is that investing more time before hiring dramatically improves what happens afterward. Pasted text You cannot develop motivation into someone who does not have it. Eddie admitted that he used to retain underperformers for 12, 18, or even 24 months because he believed he could eventually motivate them. One of his biggest lessons was recognizing that motivation has to come from within. Leaders can train, support, coach, and create opportunity, but the employee has to want it. Pasted text Development does not stop after onboarding. QualiFi now provides six to eight weeks of structured training. Eddie and his daughter created the training manual, and they use interactive tools such as Kahoot to keep people engaged. After formal training ends, employees continue receiving significant management support. Eddie described having three sales managers supporting 19 sales representatives and still feeling that additional support could be valuable. Pasted text Listening is part of leadership development. Eddie contrasted his current leadership style with the traditional CEO who dictates how everything should be done. He now sees tremendous value in listening to employees who are closest to customers, partners, and day to day operations. QualiFi intentionally tries to create a culture where everyone has a seat at the table and can challenge something that is not working. Pasted text Culture became real to him only after seeing a larger organization operate. Eddie said that five years earlier he would have considered culture little more than a buzzword. His experience after his prior brokerage was acquired exposed him to a larger corporate environment with departments, managers, systems, processes, and a deliberate focus on people. That experience heavily influenced how he later built QualiFi. Pasted text Great people can materially change a small company. One of Eddie’s strongest observations was that just two excellent hires can change the trajectory of a small business. He has watched highly motivated employees and managers elevate not only performance but even his own energy and thinking as the owner. Conversely, two poor hires can pull the organization in the opposite direction. Pasted text Additional Business Lessons Eddie repeatedly connected people development to systems and processes. His philosophy today is to look at each component of the company almost as its own business. Hiring has a process. Onboarding has a process. Training has a process. The client journey has a process. He recommends mapping the customer's experience from the first point of contact through the final outcome and continuously improving each stage. Pasted text He also emphasized client experience as a competitive advantage. One lesson he carried forward from former Nav Technologies CEO Greg Ott was to continually focus on the client experience. Eddie's takeaway was that when a company builds a great product, makes customers happy, improves its process, and gets incrementally better, financial results become a byproduct. Pasted text Technology is another component of development and scale. QualiFi has used API integrations and other technology to turn processes that once required multiple people and 15 to 30 minutes into tasks that can now happen in roughly a minute. His point was not that technology replaces people, but that the right technology allows good people and good processes to perform significantly better. Pasted text Signature Question: What Does It Take to Be a Business Owner? Eddie’s answer centered on resilience. He connected his ability to navigate entrepreneurial chaos to his childhood experience growing up in a family affected by addiction. He believes those experiences unintentionally taught him how to function amid uncertainty and adversity, something that later became an asset in entrepreneurship. Pasted text He illustrated it with a particularly personal period at QualiFi. During two difficult quarters, Eddie and his business partner Jason took themselves off payroll for several months. Eddie later discovered that his daughter had stopped cashing her own checks because she knew the company was struggling. Despite believing they were doing the right things operationally, Eddie said they questioned themselves nightly. They kept going. Pasted text His ultimate message was simple: business owners have to learn to navigate stress, keep improving, and continue moving when things go wrong, including when the circumstances are outside their control. Memorable Quotes These are the strongest Eddie quotes from the conversation: “Those failures are really the successes that are teaching us every day.” Pasted text “I held myself back... not knowing how to delegate.” Pasted text “Everybody has a seat at the table.” Pasted text “We’ve wanted it more for them than they wanted it for themselves.” Pasted text “If you solve for the client experience, the money’s just a byproduct.” Pasted text “We’re building the plane while we’re flying it, and we’re still learning every day.” Pasted text “Two good hires can literally change your whole company.” Pasted text “Failure’s not an option... Plan B is make Plan A work.” Pasted text “Go to sleep, get a good night’s sleep, tomorrow’s a new day.” Pasted text “It’s all about those experiences that got us here... that really matter the most and make the most impact.” Pasted text One other memorable line Eddie used was “Hire slow and fire fast,” but he specifically said on the episode that the quote was not his and credited it to his Sandler Training trainer. That distinction is worth preserving if you use it in episode graphics or promotional content. Pasted text Best pull quote for this episode: “Two good hires can literally change your whole company.” Best quote tied specifically to Learning & Development: “We’ve wanted it more for them than they wanted it for themselves.” Best quote for the overall What It Takes brand: “Failure’s not an option. Plan B is make Plan A work.”

In this episode of Business Owners Tell All: What It Takes, Boris Zhukov, Co-Founder and CEO of LetYouKnow®, shares how his background in economics, statistics, and mathematics helped him build a marketplace designed to reverse the traditional buying process. Boris explains that his vision goes beyond simply making car buying more convenient. His goal is to shift transactional power toward consumers, allowing them to research the market, determine what they are willing to pay, and instantly discover whether a seller will accept their offer. Convenience and eliminating negotiation are benefits, but Boris repeatedly emphasizes that they are byproducts of the larger objective: empowering consumers to take control of transactions and save money. The conversation also explores the strategic challenge of getting dealerships to participate in a model that initially appears to compete with their existing sales. Boris explains that LetYouKnow was intentionally structured to provide incremental business rather than replace a dealer's normal sales channels. Dealers establish hidden pricing thresholds that operate automatically, allowing transactions to occur without manually reviewing individual bids. The platform also generates demand data from unsuccessful bids, which businesses can use to evaluate pricing and potential demand. One of the larger strategic themes of the episode is building for expansion from the beginning. Boris says LetYouKnow intentionally started with automotive because of its complexity. By solving for a difficult industry first, the company could create infrastructure capable of expanding into restaurants, hotels, storage, services, and potentially virtually any other industry without continually rebuilding the underlying system. Boris also discusses how the company's strategy has evolved since 2019. One significant lesson came from initially expecting dealerships to actively manage their pricing within the system. He eventually concluded that this was neither feasible nor desirable. Feedback from dealership owners, including some who became shareholders, pushed the company toward creating a hands-free, automated system instead. That feedback also revealed an opportunity Boris had not originally anticipated: the value of unsuccessful bids as demand data. Rather than seeing only completed transactions, businesses could potentially understand transactions they could have had at different price points and use that information to improve pricing decisions. The discussion ultimately moves from process management into leadership. Boris says one of the skills he had to develop was recognizing individual team members' strengths and weaknesses and positioning people accordingly. He credits much of LetYouKnow's evolution to surrounding himself with experienced business owners, shareholders, and advisors who could challenge assumptions and contribute practical expertise. When asked what it really takes to be a business owner, Boris identifies optimism, perseverance, hard work, honest evaluation of progress, and the willingness to keep solving difficult problems. Rather than viewing obstacles as evidence that something is going wrong, he argues that genuinely difficult problems can be evidence that a company has reached the frontier where meaningful innovation happens. Key Episode Notes Core theme: Process Management / Strategy Major discussion points: Boris's economics, mathematics, and statistics background became foundational to building LetYouKnow's marketplace and matching methodology. His motivation is not simply eliminating an unpleasant dealership experience. He wants consumers to control transactions and get better deals instantly. LetYouKnow's model is designed so businesses establish hidden thresholds rather than manually accepting or rejecting individual bids. Boris views the platform as a source of incremental business, rather than a replacement for a company's existing sales process. Missed bids create valuable demand data by showing businesses transactions that potentially could have occurred at other prices. The long-term vision extends beyond automotive into restaurants, services, hospitality, storage, nonprofits, and other industries. Boris uses opportunity cost as a framework for strategic decision-making and expansion. Starting with automotive was intentional because solving for a complicated industry created infrastructure that could later support simpler industries. A major operational pivot was moving away from expecting dealerships to continually manage their own pricing toward creating a largely hands-free system. Dealer and shareholder feedback became an important source of product and process innovation. Boris learned that leadership requires understanding people's individual strengths and putting them in positions where those strengths can produce the best results. He believes meaningful progress should be measured over longer intervals rather than expecting visible results every day. Difficult problems aren't necessarily warning signs. Boris sees some of the hardest obstacles as evidence that a company is working on something genuinely innovative. Memorable Quotes “I want to empower people to take control of these transactions.” “The focus is actually empower you to take control of those transactions to save money. Everything else comes as a byproduct.” “Opportunity cost, you do this, well, you cannot do something else.” “We started with the most difficult industry.” “I all of a sudden have something else, which is the transactions I could have had.” “You have to recognize who's really good at what, and then position them in that fashion.” “You gotta have this sense of optimism that it will work out.” “You gotta keep that optimism inside of you, and then you gotta persevere.” “When you look back... you should see big progression.” “Whenever you hit a wall, that's great.” “Look at your challenges as almost like a benchmark... you're on the right track.” Strongest Quote for Episode Promotion “Whenever you hit a wall, that's great. That's when you should persevere, that's when you should actually have that optimism that things will work out.” That quote captures the What It Takes theme particularly well because it connects Boris's approach to strategy, innovation, perseverance, and business ownership in one thought.

Matt Kovacs, President of Blaze PR, joins Business Owners Tell All: What It Takes to discuss what happens behind the scenes of building and managing a successful PR agency. Drawing on more than two decades in public relations, Matt explains how Blaze has built processes that provide structure while allowing the team to remain nimble in an industry where the media landscape, technology, and client needs are constantly changing. Matt’s approach to process management starts with communication rather than rigid systems. Blaze uses regular Monday and Thursday team touchpoints, client meetings, timelines, and software to keep campaigns moving, but Matt emphasizes that effective processes also require understanding what team members and clients are experiencing. The agency views itself as a partner and counselor to its clients rather than simply an order taker. One of the central themes of the conversation is the balance between repeatability and adaptability. There are proven PR fundamentals, such as press releases, press kits, and media training, but Matt says those fundamentals must continually evolve. He points to AI as an example: rather than eliminating the need for PR, changes in AI and large language models are creating new considerations around how information is structured, distributed, and discovered. His team therefore has to continually learn while proactively creating new opportunities for clients. Strategy at Blaze begins by understanding the client's actual business objective. Matt's team asks whether the client is seeking investment, preparing for an eventual sale, building its brand, increasing sales, or pursuing another goal. From there, they map PR activity around launches, trade shows, seasonal opportunities, retail initiatives, and other important business moments. The objective is to ensure they aren't simply "doing PR for PR's sake," but connecting PR activity to meaningful business outcomes. Matt also discusses the importance of giving employees genuine ownership. Rather than requiring every idea or process improvement to originate with leadership, Blaze incorporates the experiences and perspectives of its team. Matt describes the company as "all our worlds," rather than his alone, and believes people should feel that their decisions matter. That philosophy has also allowed Matt to move away from being the decision maker for everything. After working together for years, his core team has developed the judgment and confidence to make decisions independently. Instead of focusing only on completing PR tasks or securing individual pieces of coverage, Matt teaches employees to think about each client's business as though it were their own and ask how their work can contribute to the client's larger objectives. The conversation closes with Matt's broader perspective on business ownership. For him, success isn't primarily about finding shortcuts or pursuing growth at all costs. It's built through "all the little things": remembering people's names, treating people well, being direct, doing the work, and investing in relationships. Those lessons trace back in part to his father, a third-grade teacher who emphasized the Golden Rule. Episode Notes & Key Takeaways Build structure without eliminating flexibility. Processes should create consistency while leaving room for teams to react to changing circumstances. Communication is part of the process. Blaze uses short, consistent team touchpoints to reset priorities and keep everyone connected. Start strategy with the business objective. Before deciding what tactics to use, understand what the client is actually trying to accomplish. Don't create processes simply because you can. Systems should support the strategy and ultimately affect the business. Create the newness. In a rapidly changing industry, waiting for the next opportunity isn't enough. Matt believes agencies have to continually generate fresh ideas. Give employees decision-making confidence. Matt doesn't believe everything should require his approval. Trust develops when people understand the business, clients, and reasoning behind decisions. Teach people the "why," not simply the task. Blaze encourages team members to understand why their work matters rather than simply completing a checklist. Think beyond transactions. A single PR placement may be useful, but Matt's focus is on long-term brand building, validation, and business impact. Relationships remain foundational. Even as technology changes PR, Matt believes knowing people, remembering details, and treating them well still creates lasting value. There are no sustainable shortcuts. Business ownership requires consistent work and attention to details that can easily be overlooked. Memorable Quotes "The kiss of death of any agency is, 'Well, you didn't do anything new.'" — Matt Kovacs "It's not my world, it's all our worlds." — Matt Kovacs "We want participants, not hostages." — Matt Kovacs, referencing Mike Tomlin "I don't need to sign off on everything." — Matt Kovacs "Think of it more of, this is your business. How would you want to treat it?" — Matt Kovacs "Coverage is transactional." — Matt Kovacs "I think it's all the little things." — Matt Kovacs "Treating people the way you want to be treated." — Matt Kovacs "If you look for angles and edges, and you're always trying to find the quick fix, it's not going to work." — Matt Kovacs "You're in the foxhole together." — Matt Kovacs, on the importance of strong client relationships Strongest Quote for Episode Promotion "Coverage is transactional." This is probably the strongest pull quote from the episode because it captures Matt's larger philosophy in just three words. The conversation that follows explains the distinction: individual coverage is transactional, while effective PR strategy is about building the business, strengthening the brand, and creating longer-term value.