Two Basic Rules for Being Online without Losing Your Mind

My One Big Lesson On Culture - and Why It's So Easily Ignored

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2365925/fan_mail/new] In this episode of Damns Given, Nick walks through the Trust-Made Growth framework's take on culture — one of the six core factors that determine whether a venture is ready to grow or quietly working against itself. He goes back to the literal definition of the word: culture is what you put in a petri dish, the organic matter from which everything else grows. In organizational terms it's simpler and harder than any offsite can address. Culture is just what an organization does, how it works, and what it is without pressure or influence. He talks about how systems self-reinforce — why a good person in a bad team eventually becomes a bad player, because the system wins. How a leader's unspoken resistance to articulating values doesn't create a blank space, it creates a vacuum that people fill with their own interpretations, producing exactly the fractured, directionless behavior the leader didn't want. And why the only thing Trust-Made Growth is actually looking for in a culture is minimal resistance to organic growth — not kombucha fountains, not Silicon Valley theater, just healthy soil that lets things grow. The weeds tell you everything. A garden full of weeds doesn't mean you have a weed problem. It means the soil is broken. Questions about how this applies to your venture? Reach out at culturecraft.com or find the Trust-Made community at trustmadegrowth.com Trust-Made Growth® Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com [https://www.culturecraft.com] Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com [https://www.trustmadegrowth.com]  Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

Revenue Models: The Hidden Operating System of Your Venture

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2365925/fan_mail/new] Damns Given Episode 2.15: "What is one way you can become more knowledgeable about the business case for whatever you're selling? One notch more knowledgeable. The more we think about these economic tools as mechanisms for value delivery, the more we get into the loamy soil of trust — which is where all the good things grow." It's common for leaders to think their biggest strategic decisions happen in leadership meetings. They don't. They happen in the revenue model—the underlying structure of how money flows through a business—and most ventures have never seriously looked at theirs. Nick Richtsmeier opens this episode with two client stories that have no business being in the same conversation. A solopreneur content marketer working from home in Idaho. A SaaS company with 25 employees and an engineering arm in India. Completely different scale, completely different problems... except they share the same root cause.  Neither of them understands the business case for what they're selling into, and because of that, both of them keep making the same decisions over and over, wondering why nothing sticks. Nick breaks down how revenue defines a structure for decisioning, even when  and especially when you don't attend to it. It's why most specialists — content marketers, HR consultants, compliance experts, operations people — have built their entire practices without ever learning to speak the language of the businesses they're selling to.  He walks through the death of per-seat SaaS pricing and what's replacing, and he makes the case that learning to read a P&L is one of the highest-leverage things a non-financial specialist can do right now. The subscription addiction era — build a thing, get as many subscribers as possible, extract maximum value before anyone notices — is over. What comes next requires something the extraction economy never asked of anyone: genuine understanding of the financial reality of the person on the other side of the table. **Chapters ** 00:00 Two Case Studies 10:03 The Importance of Financial Leadership 14:27 Your Takeaway Question Join Nick for the revenue model free MasterClass: https://www.trustmadegrowth.com/c/trust-made-training-events/escaping-the-funnel-growth-models-and-building-from-trust Trust-Made Growth® Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com [https://www.culturecraft.com] Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com [https://www.trustmadegrowth.com]  Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

Two Basic Rules for Being Online without Losing Your Mind

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2365925/fan_mail/new] "Trust doesn't look like attention." In fact, the things that steal our attention, grab it out of the agorithmic haze are some of the most trust-breaking things we face. Just because something is good at dragging us into its orbit, doesn't mean its building trust. In fact, often quite the opposite. A lot of people are trying to spend less time online. And brand leaders have questions of what to even do with extractive social platforms (like this one) and whether to keep playing in these sands. Well Nick has decried these platforms more than most, and yet—he's here. What's up with that? In this brief episode, Nick explains why he broke his own rules, and what it cost him to figure out a better way.  He offers two simple guidelines for founders, fractionals, coaches, and executives who need to be online but refuse to be owned by it Nick walks through what the feed actually does to your brain (and your prospect's brain) and your business clarity, why LinkedIn is more aggressive than you think, why his most viral moment (2 million views) was also his most useless one. Finally he offers the framework of a Trust-Made library of content: what it looks like, and why it works in ways the algorithm chasing and numbers boosting never will. **Chapters:** - 00:01 “I’m Breaking My Rules” - 02:38 Two Rules for Social Media - 06:15 Choosing Your Space - 08:43 Why Nick Regrets the Word “Trust” - 09:53 Building Your Library Trust-Made Growth® Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com [https://www.culturecraft.com] Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com [https://www.trustmadegrowth.com]  Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

A Real Life Moment of Resistance & a Heartfelt Debate w/ Janice Porter about Relationships Now

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2365925/fan_mail/new] "The obsession with up and to the right is definitionally gonna make you less effective because it forces you to act in ways because it forces you to act in ways that are contrary to the natural flow of how things change." Most leaders are fighting their resistance. Nick Richtsmeier thinks that's the wrong move. In this episode of Damns Given, Nick opens with one of the most honest soliloquies he's recorded about resistance as a function of growth, what it means when your organization keeps producing the same problems, and what he's personally been up against finishing his book The Damn Rules (get advanced access at DamnRulesBook.com). The thesis: resistance doesn't need to be fought. It needs permission to soften. And the way you do that is by pausing long enough to ask — what is this resistance trying to protect me from? Is that still a real risk? Or am I carrying something that doesn't belong here? Then Nick practices what he just preached — live, on camera, in real time — in a conversation with Janice Porter, relationship marketing specialist and LinkedIn strategist. Because Janice does things Nick resists: cold outreach, DMs to strangers, systematic LinkedIn prospecting. And instead of filtering her out, he lets the conversation happen. And it challenges him. We can't wait to hear how you observe this moment. Email us at podcast@culturecraft.com. What they find across their disagreement is that they care about exactly the same thing. Human connection. Trust. Showing up for people in a world that has quietly trained us to hide behind walls we don't even know we've built. Janice's approach: be interested, not interesting. Hang out in the mailbox, not the feed. Nick's reframe: we've been so focused on protecting ourselves from the wrong risk that we've missed the real one — isolation. If you're building something and feel like you keep hitting the same wall, or if the very idea of reaching out to someone new fills you with low-grade dread — this one is for you. Find Janice at the Relationship Rules podcast and at janicerporter.com Make sure you're in the early access group for Nick's book, The Damn Rules: How Vulnerability, Inefficiency, and Love Liberate Leaders from the Trustbroken Economy at DamnRulesBook.com. **Chapters:** 00:00 Introduction 01:40 Why Resistance? 11:49 Nick’s Restance — Damn Rules Book 13:47 Identifying + Releasing Resistance 22:34 Janice's Journey into LinkedIn 26:46 Janice’s LinkedIn Strategy 32:30 The Narcissist’s Dilemma in Networking 47:24 What’s Giving Janice Hope 50:16 Nick’s Final Thoughts More at damnsgiven.com | TrustMadeGrowth.com | CultureCraft.com Trust-Made Growth® Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com [https://www.culturecraft.com] Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com [https://www.trustmadegrowth.com]  Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.

Businesses are Systems & Systems Will Resist Change, Until You Give Them a Really Good Reason Not To

Send us Fan Mail [https://www.buzzsprout.com/2365925/fan_mail/new] "Every system is working exactly as designed. Even when those designs weren't intentional. Especially when those designs weren't intentional." You've moved departments around. You've changed leaders. You've fixed the website. You've brought in new talent. You've reorganized budgets. And the same problems keep coming back. Until you can see the system as it is, none of your solutions are going to stick. In this episode of Damns Given, Nick Richtsmeier walks through one of the most important frameworks in the Trust-Made Growth playbook: how to actually see the system you're in, understand why it's self-reinforcing, and begin to change it, without burning everything down in the process. Lots of people are in victim mode about "how the system works now," and while that makes for great social media quips, it only supports the system as is. The first thing you've got to do is accept the requirements for change. For the business, problem, opportunity, resistance that is right in front of you. Nick starts where every real change effort has to start: with the energy of frustration. That white-knuckle feeling of why does this keep happening is not a problem to solve away. It's information. It's the beginning of seeing. And the first thing you have to accept — the thing most leaders resist — is that every system is working exactly as designed. Even the frustrating ones. Even the ones that feel broken. Especially those. Nick walks through a real client story of owners whose decisions weren't sticking, traces it back to a resistance they didn't know they were carrying from a previous chapter of their careers, and shows how turning fight energy into curiosity energy opens the door to actually seeing what's going on. He connects it directly to the sales ghosting problem from the previous episode showing how a fractional leader's sales system was perfectly designed to produce people who liked her, couldn't explain her, and disappeared. This is systems thinking made practical, made human, and made actionable for founders, department heads, coaches, consultants, and anyone trying to change something that doesn't want to change. **Links:** - Preorder the book: http://DamnRulesBook.com - Engage Deeper: https://DamnsGiven.com - Become or Hire a TMG Strategist: https://TrustMadeGrowth.com - Hire Us: https://CultureCraft.com **Chapters:** 00:12 Who this is for 06:15 Everything is a system 11:55 How NOT to change systems 13:11 How this shows up in sales 15:30 Nick’s advice Trust-Made Growth® Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.com [https://www.culturecraft.com] Independent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at trustmadegrowth.com [https://www.trustmadegrowth.com]  Have a business topic you want us to decide if it's working or broken? Have a question about the episode? You can email us at podcast@culturecraft.com.