In this episode of the B2B Brand180 Podcast, Linda Fanaras interviews Brandon Pipkin, VP at Autobahn Consultants and co-author of Rock Your Business. Together, they explore why companies scaling from $50 million to $500 million face a different set of challenges, why traditional operating systems can become less effective at that stage, and what leaders need to address to continue growing successfully.
Brandon shares practical insights on leadership teams, mission and vision, communication, processes, and the role people play in sustainable growth. You’ll hear actionable strategies for identifying gaps in your organization, evaluating whether your leadership team can support the next stage of growth, and building the structure needed to scale without leaving value on the table.
02:06 Why Middle-Market Companies Need a Different Playbook
06:57 How a $156,000 Fraud Attempt Exposed Business Vulnerabilities
09:52 Inside Rock Your Business: Leadership, KPIs, Talent, and AI
12:19 How to Know When Your Company Has Outgrown Its Systems
13:46 Why the Right Leadership Team Is Critical to Scaling
15:30 The Most Common Gaps Holding Growing Companies Back
17:37 What CEOs Should Evaluate Before Their Next Stage of Growth
19:04 Rapid-Fire Questions: People, Processes, and Scaling
https://www.autobahnconsultants.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonpipkin
Brandon’s Book:
Rock Your Business
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1544551851
Linda’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindafanaras/
Millennium Agency: Brand Strategy | Marketing | Web Design: mill.agency
YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/@mill.agency
Linda’s Books:
Claim Your White Space
https://www.amazon.com/CLAIM-YOUR-WHITE-SPACE-CRITICAL-ebook/dp/B0CLK8VLYV
Passion + Profits: Fueling Business And Brand Success
https://www.amazon.com/Passion-Profits-Fueling-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B0CLLDDSNX/
Linda:
Welcome to the B2B Brand180 Podcast where we just don’t talk about growth. We challenge the assumptions behind it. And I’m Linda Fanaras, CEO of Millennium Agency and your host today. Today, I am joined by Brandon Pipkin. He is a VP at Autobahn Consultants, and we just had Jonathan Slain, the CEO of the firm on the podcast, and it’s a very interesting topic. Autobahn Consultants is built for companies scaling from $50 million to $500 million and beyond, and he co-authored Rock Your Business. Companies over $50 million are rare, most of them private. They sort of run in a black box. The team wrote the playbook for the stretch of the road. Brandon, it’s great to have you here. So I’m excited to dig deep into the book.
Brandon:
Great. Thank you. Glad to be here. Sometimes I think I’m probably the most boring guy in the world, and yet I’ve loved my life and the fun stuff that I’ve been able to have. I served a two-year volunteer assignment overseas, and that was my introduction into sales. I didn’t even know I was in sales at the time. I was trying to give away something people don’t want, religion. Used to be a pretty devout guy. And so I was selling, not even knowing that I was selling. I’ve since kind of moved away from that, but that’s where I cut my teeth, was in sales there and learned how to communicate and talk to people. I would talk to people on the street, stop them as they were walking by. And we went and knocked doors every day, ringing doorbells in apartment houses. It was such a great experience.
And I came back and fell into a sales role after that, stayed in sales, sales management for some time and then moved into sales training and then joined Autobahn two and a half, three years ago now. And it’s been this fantastic ride where we get to focus on advising these great companies, these wonderful leaders who know how to put the pedal to the metal and enjoy the view as they go along. And we help them grow and we help expose some of the cracks that growth exposes. We help shore those up and we help them get to the places they always dreamed of getting to with the people that are important to them.
Linda:
That’s awesome. Thanks, Brandon. So got a question on this book. So why now? Because you’ve kind of written it like another recession book. Nobody really knows where we’re headed, but instead your team wrote the book Rock Your Business. So why does the middle market need its own playbook? And what did you see in this $50 to $500 million client that maybe can be helped by this book that was put together?
Brandon:
In 2019, Jonathan and a co-author, Paul Bel Air wrote Rock the Recession. And if any of your listeners are old enough to remember what happened in 2020, you might say they were prognosticators because it released, I think it was six months before the pandemic. And it’s not that Paul and Jonathan are extraordinarily gifted at foreseeing the future, although they’re very gifted in many areas. It’s just that we always know there’s a natural cycle to the economy and there’s always a recession on the horizon. It’s like winter. It’s coming. Sometimes it comes a little later. Sometimes it’s not as harsh. Sometimes it comes earlier. It’s always on the horizon. And so that book was built or written to really help business owners understand how to prepare for and thrive during a recession.
Rock Your Business is the yin to the yang. So Rock the Recession is how do we navigate through these tough times? Rock Your Business is the call it a roadmap, although there really is no roadmap after you get to $50 million. It’s the travel companion idea roadmap, and I’ll tell you what I mean by that in a second, of how business owners after $50 million can succeed. Very few businesses make it to a million dollars, even fewer make it to $10 million. The businesses that make it to $50 million are incredibly rare and there isn’t an operating system like there is when you’re smaller. EOS, Rockefeller Habits, those kinds of platforms and systems are great to help businesses grow to a certain point, but then they break, not because they’re not great systems, but they’re not built for the $50 million and beyond. And so leaders in that segment are often left to kind of figure it out and maybe have a networking group with other $50 million leaders, which is exactly why we love YPO, EO, Vistage groups.
We love working with them because they understand the power of travel companions. So we’re Autobahn, everything is car themed, and we are the travel companions who have travelled this road and helped others travel the road from $50 million to $500 million. That’s what was missing in that segment is a custom operating system for those businesses with the specific help that they and their leaders need, with the specific help that they need to streamline and operationalize what they need to, and with the unique cracks that start to develop at 50 million.
Linda:
Yeah. No, that’s great. So you didn’t write the book on your own and neither did Jonathan, you really engaged the entire team. So what was the decision by engaging the entire team and how did that bring value to the book?
Brandon:
Yeah. Well, it’s sure brilliance, sheer brilliance to involve everybody else in the book because I have never sold a business to a Fortune 500 competitor, but Jim has, the president of Autobahn who wrote a couple of chapters in the book. I didn’t run Nike Mexico for their football division, their soccer division, but Rafa did. I’m no marketing expert, but Yaz is. And so what happened was Jonathan pulled together 21 of us total from the team and had us each share our expertise and what we know about growing businesses and what we have experienced so that it wasn’t a myopic view of this is one person’s view of how it can be done, but rather here are multiple experts’ views. And sometimes even within the chapter, you’re getting multiple views because for instance, the chapter on KPIs was written by three of the authors and you’re getting unique perspective into that so that as a leader, you can take that, hear what resonates with you in the way that it resonates with you, even as the authors sometimes are providing some countervailing arguments to one another.
So we red team ourselves and we want leaders to do the same and that’s why there’s brilliance in 21 voices getting involved in it.
Linda:
That’s great. The founder sort of builds that team that carries the thinking behind it. They’re not completely doing it all by themselves, although sometimes they may feel that way, but I think the great piece is that the book has been written by everybody. So you had a fraud scenario, which we talked about with Jonathan, sort of the case in point. And I think you talked about that in the book. Is that accurate?
Brandon:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s in the book.
Linda:
And it cost your company about $156,000. You had recovered the majority of it, but still lost around 21,000. Yeah. So if you could give me sort of the short story behind that, I think that would be helpful and how you may have covered that in the book.
Brandon:
Yeah, that’s great. Now listen, there are really significant world events that happen and we remember where we are when they happen, when we hear about them. And this is not on the world scale, but I remember where I was when Jonathan and I talked about he woke up, he checked the bank account like he does every morning and saw that $156,000 had vanished from the account. And he thought it was some error, he wasn’t seeing it right, checked the wrong account, whatever it was. And as he dug into it, he found out that over the course of a few transactions, $156,000 had been funneled out of that account. And as he dug into it, we learned that we had been the victims of a cyber attack or call it a social engineering attack. So it’s a very sophisticated attack where they got into our email and spoofed email addresses and made it look very legit, “Hey, I need you to transfer this amount of money over to this account.” And it looked so legit that the person transferring it didn’t think to check on it.
And they had a second tier to it as well that made it look like it was even more legit. And what we learned through that experience is it’s important to have the right insurance coverage. That’s one thing. Number two, what we learned is we could either be really frustrated with AI and think, “Wow, this cost us a lot of money.” But rather it became a $21,000 lesson, which could have been $156,000 lesson. It became a $21,000 lesson in the importance of getting out in front of things, not only protecting ourselves, but then sharing with our clients, “Here’s what we need to do. Here’s what we should have done.” We have an MSP, a managed service provider. They were about to apply an update that would’ve been helpful. So it was just bad timing and bad couple of things and some of the training wasn’t in place that needed to be in place.
So we learned how to protect the house. We teach our clients to do the same thing. We really jumped into the AI game based on that. And that has been a game changer for us because I don’t think it’s hyperbole when I say there was electricity, there’s the computer, internet, iPhone, smartphone, and there’s AI. It will revolutionize the way we interact with each other, the way we do work, the way we do business. We’re just at the beginning stages of that. So that experience, that fraud experience helped jumpstart us into the AI world and do the same thing for our clients and get them ahead of the J-curve so that they can be incredibly productive in the coming years.
Linda:
I mean, it sounded like you were doing a lot of the right things, but it sort of exposed, I guess, a structure gap. And I’m sure a lot of companies have that and potentially an insurance gap that I learned a little bit about myself. So if you were to kind of look at each individual, they wrote a section of the book, what are some of the sections that are in the book and what are you covering?
Brandon:
I’d love to tell you about my favorite sections, which are every part of the book. So Catherine Slain, she is a former pediatric intensivist, so a child ER doctor. She wrote a chapter on leadership and talked about the importance of leadership and knowing how much to trust and when not to trust team members because they don’t have the experience and they don’t have the skills that they need for certain things. Jim, Rafa, and Matt all talk about KPIs. There’s another section on the talent engine and using behavioral profiles to make sure you get the right people in the right seats. A great chapter that is really interesting, and you’re probably not going to find in a lot of other business books about $50 million to $500 million, is the imposter syndrome where three of the authors talk about almost every successful person at some point deals with this imposter syndrome and thinks, “I may not belong in this room.
These people are very capable. These people are really on the forefront, and I don’t know that I belong here.” So we included a chapter on that because we know that very successful people deal with that. And even if it isn’t the owner’s founders that we deal with, their executive teams are very much feeling that as they look around the room at the other executives and at other people at similar companies. And we have a chapter on AI, a full dedicated chapter on AI, which is co-authored by Jonathan and our AI specialist, Hudson Shank. Hudson is this unbelievably brilliant recent grad business and computer science double major who can translate business to the AI piece. And I’ll be out doing an AI presentation with him 9:00 AM in the morning. Claude or ChatGPT will have just dropped a new feature the night before. Somebody asks about it and he said, “Yeah, I was playing around with it last night and I found the X, Y, and Z and it also takes this and this.” He’s already formulated an opinion on it in the time that it’s been out for the 12 hours that it was out.
So it’s a lot of fun to read these chapters and to hear the different voices from those different people in those different subjects.
Linda:
Yeah, no, that’s great. When you’re dealing with a CEO and they have a system that they feel like is working, how would you sort of approach it if you think they’ve maybe outgrown their current system, like there’s some holes and gaps that they really need to get addressed. What are the types of things that you would do in that instance?
Brandon:
Well, I’ll start by using the old analogy of the two guys who are out on the porch and they’re sipping lemonade, having a great conversation, and the one guy’s dog is laying on the porch with them, but he’s whimpering the whole time. So the friend says, “Well, why is your dog whimpering? He’s laying on a nail. Why doesn’t he get up off of the nail?” Well, he’s really old, he’s tired, and the hassle and the energy required to get up off the nail is just too great. So it’s easier to stay laying on the nail. A lot of CEOs for as capable as they are, CEOs, founders, et cetera, they’ve gotten to the point where they are just by sheer grit and sheer willpower. And they start to build teams around them. And at some point, they don’t recognize they’re laying on a nail. They don’t recognize that there’s a lot of pain here that they’ve gotten used to because in their mind, they’ve put in so much effort, so much energy to get to this point, thinking about doing other things.
Sometimes doesn’t make sense to them. One of your previous guests talked about this, the founder burnout. What I like to talk about is we are an EBITDA expansion and founder relief engine. We help make sure you’re not leaving millions of dollars on the table when you exit at some point because you can’t run the business forever. So when you exit, we’re going to help make sure that the people that you care about are taken care of, that you don’t leave millions of dollars on the table, that you have a legacy, and we want to make sure in the process that you’re not burning out as the founder. So all of that to say, your question is, what do we do? How do we engage with them? The first thing we like to do is help the founder understand we’ve got to offload a significant portion of things onto your executive team.
And what that means is we’re going to look at your executive team and we’re going to tell you one or two of them are probably not going to make it.
That’s just what we find. And it’s not surprising if there’s a Greiner article, Harvard Business Review from the late ’90s, a guy named Greiner wrote this article that the same level of leadership that takes us to one level will not get us to the next level. And that doesn’t always mean the people. The people can keep up with it if they’re willing to step up and change and engage differently. But what we find is not every executive team member is willing to do that or they might be lacking a team member and not even know that that was the key that would unlock some things for them. So long way around the barn there, the first couple of things we do is we’re going to investigate and diagnose what’s going on right now, what does their strategy look like, what do their systems look like?
The best way I can say it is we’re going to look at people, we’re going to look at plans, we’re going to look at processes, and then we’re going to look at platforms and see where the cracks and the holes are in those, but we’re going to start with the people first.
Linda:
That makes sense. I mean, when you usually tackle scenarios like that, are there sort of common denominators that you see across the board, like the systems or the workflows or whatever? Are you finding common denominators when you’re finding these holes and gaps?
Brandon:
Yeah. This is where I want to do the face palm emoji. When I first joined Autobahn, Linda, I thought, hang on a second. Mission, vision, values, that was old and tired in the ’90s, and we’re talking about that. And what I didn’t understand is that very successful businesses do not have their mission, vision, values nailed down. And the problem with that is that it’s really hard for everybody to get on the same page because there is no same page for them to get onto. So one of the key denominators that we find is there’s a lack of clarity around what are we trying to do, why are we trying to do it, and how are we trying to do it?
So we’re going to start there. We’re also going to start with communication downstream. Every company we deal with has a communication issue. It’s not surprising. If you think about the lines of communication in a business, it’s the number of employees times that number minus one. So an employee group of 100, you have 100 times 99 lines of communication. So 9,900 lines of communication in that business. It’s an insane amount of information and communication to manage and no company does it well without some help. We are also going to look at the problems and pains that they’re having in that moment that revolve around people, right people right seats, plans, mission, vision, value, strategy, platforms, their technology, AI, et cetera, or their platforms or processes, sorry, processes or platforms. So we’re going to look at where they have holes in each of those and start to shore those up.
Linda:
So if I’m a CEO and I’m listening in today, do you have a couple of immediate takeaways that I should just go back and check on or do or whatever the case may be?
Brandon:
Yeah. The first thing you’ve got to do is evaluate your leadership team and just be real. That’s the first thing. Most CEOs, founders, et cetera, they want to reward loyalty and they’ve been laying on the nail and/or they’ve been laying on that nail and it’s hard for them to do a realistic objective look at their executive team. That’s where I would start. If I were a founder, I would really evaluate them and determine who’s going to make it and who probably isn’t. And we have a hack: If you’re wondering if the person is the right person, they’re probably not.
And oftentimes the founder just doesn’t quite want to get in touch with that. Some other things that I would recommend, go to recession.com. That’s a URL that we own, recession.com, and take the full 20 question rock the recession quiz to see how ready you are for recession, because it will also expose other operating areas in the business. It will help you understand where you’re strong and where you’re not for good times and for recessions. And then we can talk about some of those areas.
Linda:
That’s a great URL. I don’t know how you got that, but –
Brandon:
Isn’t it great? Yeah.
Linda:
That’s amazing. That’s impressive. That’s awesome, Brandon. So I have some what I call Rapid Fire Questions. You can answer them in one to two sentences. Are you ready? Ready. The most dangerous debt a scaling company carries.
Brandon:
People. The wrong people on the team, the right people in the wrong seats, that debt will cost you.
Linda:
Great answer. Love that answer. And the one system founders hold onto, far too long. I’m definitely guilty of that.
Brandon:
Their gut.
Linda:
Love that.
Brandon:
I love intuition and I believe we should trust our gut. And when you get 20 million plus, you need systems, processes, and to involve other people. Yes, lead the business with your gut, but you can’t run the business with your gut.
Linda:
Okay. And a bigger lie, we’ll fix the process later, or we’re too small for that to happen to us?
Brandon:
Probably we’re too small for that to happen to us. You can still fix things later. It’s going to be painful, but thinking it’s too small to happen to us will be a bigger problem.
Linda:
Okay. And the biggest gap between those 50 to 500 million dollar companies in one word?
Brandon:
People.
Linda:
I knew you were going to say that.
Brandon:
It’s not even close. It’s people.
Linda:
Yeah. So that’s awesome. So one chapter of Rock Your Business, every CEO should read first, like if they had to pick a chapter.
Brandon:
It’s probably the first chapter, Lead Like Lives Depend on It by Catherine.
Linda:
No, that’s great. Is there anything else you’d like to share before we close off?
Brandon:
Touching again on that people part of things, we are a strategic planning firm and Jonathan, Jim, Rafa, Hector, the consultants are very smart, very capable. They know how to look at KPIs, business metrics. Deb Dixon knows how to run a sales team and get the sales metrics right. And they’re very skilled, very capable at the systems of it. As I’ve touched on, if you don’t have the right people, then the plans, then the processes, then the platforms, you’re going to get in your own way and keep tripping.
My background is in organizational leadership with a specialization in HR and OD. It’s the longest title for a bachelor’s that was ever created. I didn’t even tell you the full title of it. But even though we are really good at the systems and the plans and the strategic planning and the hard side of things, we know that it starts with the right people. Get that right and we can fix the rest of the things from there.
Linda:
That’s great. Awesome, Brandon. So I would love for you to share how people can get in touch with you, where to buy the book, maybe mention both books, that would be great, and to check out your website. So I’ll let you take it from here before we close.
Brandon:
So the website is autobahnconsultants.com. Autobahn’s spelled like the German highway, A-U-T-O-B-A-H-N, consultants.com. I’m [email protected]. Love to connect. You can find me on LinkedIn, Brandon Pipkin. You can buy either book at Amazon, Rock the Recession, Rock Your Business, pick up both. Then you have the Yin and the Yang, Audible. Listening to the Audible is quite fun actually of Rock Your Business because each of us read our own chapter pieces. So you’re going to hear South African, you’re going to hear Mexican accent, you’re going to hear Midwestern Nasal, which is what Jonathan calls his. You’re going to hear all the different accents of all the areas and cultures represented on the Autobahn team. And you get to hear it in their own words, which I think is really special.
Linda:
That’s great. Thank you, Brandon. Pick one system in your business today and apply it. You have plenty of takeaways here. If you like what you heard, please hit like, share, comment, or subscribe. Definitely connect with Brandon directly, pick up the book. That would be great. Thank you for listening to the B2B Brand180 podcast. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn and you can reach out to mill, M-I-L-L. Agency (mill.agency). I’m also pleased to announce that we just launched the Brand180 Reality Check. There’s 12 quick questions to find out where your brand actually lands. So if you click on brand180.mill, M-I-L-L.agency (brand180.mill.agency), you can check that out. Thank you for listening today.
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