Sound Laws of Success Podcast

In this fascinating interview, you'll learn lessons on the birth of a brand from UGG founder Brian Smith. Brian was born in Australia, where he developed his love of surfing. A charterered accountant, he studied at the UCLA Graduate School of Management, and with $500 of start-up money, he founded UGG Imports to bring sheepskin footwear to America. After seventeen years, as sales reached $15 million, he sold the business to Deckers Outdoor Corporation. The UGG brand has since exceeded $1 billion of international sales times over. A passionate innovator and entrepreneur, Brian is one of the most sought after business leaders in the country today. As a media guest and inspiring speaker, he is committed to teaching breakthrough business strategies to entrepreneurs and translating personal visional and spirituality into company culture. Brian spends his time with family and friends in Southern California, still surfs, plays golf, and attempts to improve the planet everyday. You'll love this insightful interview about the ups and downs of entrepreneurship and learn valuable lessons from a leader who has been in the trenches and built a valuable brand from scratch.

In this episode, I talk with Sal Tirabassi of CFO Pro Analytics about how he got his start in business, lessons he has learned along the way, and helpful financial data that all entrepreneurs need to be paying better attention to in their businesses. 

Sal is a seasoned CFO and also brings a 15-year background as a partner in growth equity and venture capital funds. As a Fractional CFO, he brings a comprehensive background in financial strategy, financial modeling, analytics, data science, and capital raising. Over the course of twenty years, he has developed world-class expertise in strategic forecasting and capital management, significantly enhancing the financial operations of businesses he partners with. He is committed to providing actionable strategies and insights, aiming to guide businesses toward both short-term and long-term success.

As a tenured CFO, Salvatore has driven transformative financial leadership, steering companies through periods of substantial growth and change. His strategic financial planning has paved the way for overall stability and led to wide-ranging operational improvements. Salvatore is also known for his forecasting services, which are underscored by a remarkable accuracy rate.

For owners of cash-flowing businesses, Salvatore has direct experience structuring tax-advantageous structures such as captive insurance programs, state tax credits, and Employee Stock Ownership Programs. Working closely with a client, he details the strengths and weaknesses of each initiative, so that it is easy to understand how they fit into a company’s unique strategic planning, profitability, and cash flow objectives.

Beyond his work as a CFO, Salvatore also has a fifteen-year background as a venture capital and private equity investor, giving him a deep understanding of investment strategies and the cultivation of value in a variety of market sectors. He has sat as a key member on several boards of directors, handling audits, restructurings, and acquisitions. Over the course of his career, he has successfully facilitated over $400 million in equity and debt fundraising, which has proven critical for companies’ expansion and recapitalization efforts. His experience in mergers and acquisitions includes the strategic purchase and sale of 12 companies, processes that have included value creation and transaction management. As a supplement to his Fractional CFO and investor roles, Salvatore serves as an advisor and executive coach, offering guidance in analytical decision-making, strategic planning, and professional development.

His academic background includes an MBA from the Wharton School where he graduated with Palmer Scholar honors and a MSE in Telecommunications and Networking Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. He completed an AB at Harvard University.

In this episode, we talk with Heather Ripley, who is the founder and CEO of Ripley PR, based in Maryville, Tennessee. Heather shares her story about how she got into advertising and public relations, lessons she has learned from helping to promote many top franchise brands, how she helped a client get featured on the Celebrity Apprentice TV show, what she cautions brand owners to pay more attention to and what they should be avoiding in content creation, and her advice on how to differentiate yourself from competitors in your industry.

In this episode, I share several little known stories I learned from reading and studying about the life of Theodor Seuss Geisel or Dr. Seuss as he is known to millions around the world. I recently finished an excellent biography by Brian Jay Jones entitled Becoming Dr. Seuss: Theodor Geisel and the Making of an American Imagination.

This book is an incredible look inside the life of a fascinating individual who defined the reading of children over the years as he wrote and illustrated classics such as The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, Horton Hears a Who and How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

“At the time of his death, Dr. Seuss had published forty-eight books in more than twenty languages….” (Becoming Dr. Seuss, p. 428) and had sold more than 600 million copies of books. His books were adapted into 11 television specials, five feature films, a Broadway musical and four television series.

It wasn’t always apparent that Geisel would be a best-selling author and in this episode, I share how he got his start and how he persisted for nearly twenty years before he had a big hit with his book The Cat in the Hat.

In this episode, I talk with Jodi Orgill Brown, who went to the hospital to remove a tumor in her brain, expecting to return home after five days in the hospital, and ending up having three surgeries over the course of five weeks that completely upended her life. She shares her inspiring story of how she got through that challenge in her life and her advice on how you can overcome darkness and difficulty to find that the sun still shines.

In this episode, we talk with coaching and performance expert Meredith Bell about her new book: Strong for Performance: Create a Coaching Culture With Learning and Development Programs that Stick. Meredith shares her experience of working with coaching clients and the secret to making sure that behaviors are implemented so real change can happen. This is a very insightful interview about why most training programs miss the mark and what you can do to ensure that the training and coaching you offer to your clients and team members gets results and lasts. 

Guinness World Record Holder for the longest solo row across the Pacific Ocean Jacob Adoram Hendrickson is an inspiring individual. He planned and completed an eleven month journey from Washington state across the Pacific Ocean to Australia in his custom designed rowboat Emerson. In this interview, he shares his story about how he accomplished such a remarkable goal.

He is an Eagle Scout who spent his high school years running track and cross-country, and playing the saxophone in both marching and symphonic band. 

He attended the United States Air Force Academy and spent more than a decade as a military aviator, flying fighter jets extensively throughout the Northern Hemisphere, to include over 170 combat missions.  As part of military training, he became very familiar with land and water survival, and enjoyed the challenges associated with overcoming adversity. 

An avid traveler, Jacob has explored over 40 countries. He holds the world record for the longest non-stop time spent rowing solo across an ocean of nearly 336 days. He spent eleven months traveling from Washington state to Australia in a custom made boat he called Emerson. He started on July 7, 2018 and arrived in Queensland, Australia the following June (June 8, 2019).

He packed a year worth of food into the boat and spent a lot of time thinking and rowing. He rowed 12 to 16 hours every day and traveled 7,145 miles across the open Pacific Ocean.

He encountered waves that were the size of buildings, the monotony of rowing day after day for months, the pain and exhaustion of rowing to get back on track when the wind, storms, and rain drove him off course.

He spent 11 months at sea without stopping, without assistance, with no other person with him at all, as far from land as it is possible to be on this planet.

It’s an incredible story and I’m glad that he has taken a few minutes to share his experience and the lessons he learned from it. I’ve been inspired by his story and I hope you enjoy our conversation as you think about accomplishing your own goals.

Learn six lessons from Disney's life that impacted the way he grew his business from its humble beginnings to a worldwide powerhouse.

In this episode, Lee Milteer interviews me about Chapter 13 of my book Clear and Present Game Changers on how to deal with crisis situations in business and in life. I think you'll find this interview helpful as it seems that there are many crisis situations that emerge in business and in life from time to time and it is important to know how to better manage them so you can bounce back from difficult situations to be successful.