Do you have a growing or established business - but aren't reaping all of  the benefits of owning it?

🙋🏽‍♂️ Is your team more focused on getting hours in than moving projects forward?
🙋‍♀️ Are decisions made with confidence and clarity or by hope and a gut feeling?
🙋🏻 Have other priorities taken a backseat?

Many owners are 🤩 at what they do, but 😩 to create the business and life they desire.  

Here’s why:

Doing the work and building a company requires two different skill sets. 

Most owners have years, if not decades, of experience and education in delivering their product or service.

Yet many struggle when it comes to:

❤️ Creating motivated employees that care
⚙️ Implementing business systems
🎯 Strategic planning
📈 Scaling profitable 

According to SCORE®, most business owners:

🔹 Don’t have a real plan (78%)
🔹 Overestimate revenue (73%)
🔹 Underprice their work (77%)

Over the last 20+ years of business ownership, I’ve experienced a lot.  In my last business, I built a team of 25 employees and, with their help, created a company that was growing 8x faster and was 4x more profitable than the industry when it was acquired.

✨ What Changed Everything for Me:

🏆 Positioning our brand so we didn't have to compete on price
😇 Creating a team of motivated employees that ran the business in my absence 
📊 Knowing our numbers and making strategic and profitable decisions based on the data
🧠 Creative problem solving


If you want things to change, here's what to do: 

➡️ 30 minute call 👉 HuddleWithAndrew.com 


What others have said:

"Working with Andrew was a game changer. He helped me significantly increase our profitability while building a business that works for me, not the other way around. His focus on KPIs and employee engagement was exactly what we needed." - John Riordan, P.E., S.E. President at Cornerstone Structural Engineering

"Working with you has unlocked my creativity and has given me a renewed sense of excitement in what is possible in my business." - Thomas Gore CPA, CFP, President at Core Advisors Ltd.

"I have renewed motivation and confidence in my abilities.  I look forward to building a great business with your help and guidance." Neal MacMillan, KBI Garage Door

"My business is growing and THRIVING and this is in large part from Andrew's guidance and support. I cannot thank him enough." - Kara Mumford LISW-S, Owner of the Trauma Therapy Company

➡️ HuddleWithAndrew.com to get started

Andrew Lamppa

Good design fixes poor leadership.

Most leadership challenges for small business owners are structural in nature, not personality or moral failures. Let me explain.

If you are nervous to step away because you don't trust the work of your team, you could think:

"Why can't they do it as good as I can?"
"Why do I struggle so often to hire great employees?"
"It's my business, who am I to entrust them when my name's on the door?"

These are all design issues. 

There is a good chance your standards and values haven't been communicated or enforced enough so you are relying on your leadership and, more importantly, your presence to do the heavy lifting.  This causes you to expense extra energy instead of the system, if it was designed properly. 

Instead of thinking, "I need to become a better leader," choose to become a better designer so when your leadership is needed, you have enough energy to do it well.

Wearing all the hats? Micromanaging everyone? Want employees who really show up and get it done 💪 — without burnout, chaos, or wanting to sell your business every Friday? We should talk.

Want to easily increase profitability and employee productivity?  Start with setting the expectation.

Changing your workplace culture starts with how you define culture…

Frustrated by an employee who doesn't think they can become better?

Motivation, incentives, discipline, criticism - none of these will work.

Why, because the problem is a belief issue not a performance issue.

To change this, you need to help them instill a new belief system and you do that by acknowledging them.

1. Clearly share what they did.
2. Acknowledge the effort or shift that took place
3. Communicate the results of their efforts
4. Empower them and others by sharing the impact it had

If you want the exact framework I use to build belief in teams and move them from victim to ownership, comment “Acknowledgment” and I’ll send it your way.

Why is your business so dependent on you?  

It’s because you allow it to be.

There are many things you do in your business that you may feel you need to do.  

I can assure you, many of those items, if you really explore and unpack them, do not require you.

If you want more freedom in your business, get really honest about why you do what you do and start thinking is there someone else that could do it.

Bonus: Eventually, they will be able to do it better, faster and it will cause them to achieve greater satisfaction in their work while you can focus on what you need to be doing as the owner and leader of your company.

Full calendars often mean misaligned effort - not business growth.

If your team is slammed, but margins are flat (or shrinking), the issue is rarely work ethic — it’s focus.

Busy teams often have low utilization: lots of activity, not enough profitable output because they're not focused on what matters.

And when people aren’t clear on the single result they own, effort spreads… and impact disappears.

The remedy:
 👉 Stop managing tasks.
 👉 Start managing critical results.

When every role owns one measurable outcome that actually moves the business, effort aligns with profit. 

Busy feels productive but clarity actually is.

If you want a simple way to assign critical results to every role, I’ve got a tool that makes it easy - comment CR below.

If you own your business and am still handling every sales call - here’s why that’s a problem—and how to fix it.

When you do the selling, clients expect you on the project.

That means every new deal pulls you deeper into the weeds…
Instead of freeing you up, it locks you in.

But when your team can explain your value—clearly and confidently—work comes in at the right level and only escalates to you if needed.

Here’s how to solve that:

✅ Define who you’re for
✅ Name the transformation (stop selling deliverables—sell outcomes)
✅ Clarify your positioning:
Positioning is perceived meaningful differentiation.
• Perceived — what they think when they hear your brand
• Meaningful — why that difference matters to your customer
• Differentiation — what sets you apart (and how you prove it)

Your team can’t sell what they don’t believe.

So your job is to make your positioning real internally and obvious externally—until your people live it.

Because when your team can explain your value, they can close the right clients—and deliver without dragging you into every decision.

That’s how you build a business that runs without you—not because you hired a team, but because you trained them to carry the vision.

3 reasons paying out an annual bonus is a bad idea:

1. It doesn’t improve employee performance 
2. It frustrates owners because of ☝️
3. It can backfire if employees receive less then they expected. 

If you want help moving to a quarterly model that solves all three - let me know.

Your employees should know how they’re doing before walking in for their perfomancw review.

Want to build a better culture?

Set clear expectations
Meet regularly
Share in the winnings

Most small business bonuses don’t work because they are not frequent enough, not intentionally funded and poorly distributed. 

A proper bonus plan is paid out frequent, has financial thresholds, intentionally funded, and distributed based on results.

Most employees never know what their bonus could be or is going to be.  A projected payout table changes that.  This increases motivation and turns the intangible into the tangible.

Most leadership challenges in a small business are not leadership issues they’re  design issues. 

You can categorize most into one of four ways:

1. Decision rights
2. Unclear standards
3. Capability not yet trained for
4. Comfort dependency 

Good design can makeup for a lot of poor leadership.

If your highest-paid people are doing the lowest-value tasks, it’s usually one of three things:

- Lack of delegation standards (no clear rules for what gets handed off, when, and how)
- “It’s faster if I do it” (short-term speed that creates long-term dependence)
- Role drift (senior people slowly become the default catch-all)

And the business pays thrice:

- You overpay for the task.
- You underinvest in the strategic work only your best people can do (decisions, leverage, growth).
- You steal development from the next tier down—lower-skilled employees don’t get the reps that build skill, confidence, and ownership.

Quick fixes that actually hold:

- Make sure every employee has a Critical Result they own (a clear “this is what winning looks like”).
- Make sure every responsibility has an agreed-upon outcome (so delegation isn’t “do stuff,” it’s “produce this result”).

If you don’t define outcomes, you don’t have delegation—you have task dumping… and your highest-paid people will keep catching it.

Business ownership doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

😬 Avoiding annual performance reviews?

Change the cadence to quarterly and make sure your employees know how they’re doing BEFORE they walk in the room.

If you want your core values to start meaning something to your employees, talk about one per week at your team meeting and give a real life example of how that would be lived out as a core behavior.

Scared to let go because your unsure how your team will perform?

If what you care about isn't clear and reinforced, your team will resort to how they naturally think.  Not wrong - but possibly not the culture you want to create.

1️⃣ Pick one core value that’s not being lived
2️⃣ Define what it looks like in action
(e.g. “Proactive” = flagging issues early, not waiting for fire drills)
3️⃣ Normalize it through peer reinforcement
Ask: “Where did you show this value this week?” and keep it visible

Keep going through all of your core values and watch your culture shift.

"How the heck can my team be so unprofitable when we bill out at $200/hour and they cost $35/hour?!!"

If you've ever felt this way, you're not alone. 

Here's a real example: An employee billing at $200/hour, working 832 billable hours, bringing in $166K... sounds good, right?

But after write-offs, overhead, salary, and benefits, they're actually LOSING the company $11K per year.

The reality? This person spends over 3 days per week on non-billable work. That's 24.5 hours on emails, meetings, and admin tasks before they even touch client work.

The good news? Small improvements make massive impacts:
✅ Increase utilization by 10%
✅ Improve realization by 10%
📈 And suddenly you're on the path to real profitability

The first step is knowing your numbers. The second is setting clear targets.

Want the employee profitability calculator I walk through in this video? Comment "CALCULATOR" below and I'll send it your way.

After 32 years of working for some of the biggest investment firms in the world, in March of 2022, I founded Daner Wealth Management to provide independent, objective, hyper-personalized service to individual investors. 

We are a three year old company with 35 years worth of clients. Our clients are like our extended family. 

If you’re looking for trusted, independent financial planning and investment management, including wealth building and preservation, retirement and estate planning, charitable giving, and tax planning, we’re always just a phone call, email, or DM away.

On a personal note, I've been happily married to my wife Maria for 37 years. We have two grown children, Alaina and Scott, and all of us have lived in Alpharetta GA since 1993.

“Arise and work! The Lord be with you!” 

1 Chronicles‬ ‭22‬:‭16‬ ‭ESV‬‬

Phone: (770) 368-6033
Email: marc@danerwealth.com
Website: https://www.danerwealth.com/

Daner Wealth Management is an independent, SEC Registered Investment Advisor.

Marc Daner

Quick test: Imagine losing your job tomorrow. Not the income. The identity. Would you know who you are?

Most high-performers wouldn't. Because somewhere along the way, work stopped being something we DO and became who we ARE.

The shift is subtle:

Good version:
• Using our skills meaningfully
• Serving others
• Building something that matters
• Taking pride in excellent work

Troubling version:
• Identity depends on results
• Rest feels like failure
• Peace only comes from performance
• Self-worth tied to title

I've seen too many successful people discover this the hard way, after the burnout, the health scare, the relationship that fell apart.

Tim Keller cuts right to it: "You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you cannot say that your life is meaningful because of your work."

The difference between healthy ambition and destructive obsession isn't WHAT you do.

It's WHERE your ultimate identity comes from.

When that's secure. When you know who you are apart from what you produce, you can actually work better.

Without fear. Without the constant need to prove yourself.

How confident are you that you can retire when you want, in the lifestyle you want? If you hesitated, even for a second, you need a financial physical.

You wouldn't skip your annual health checkup. Yet most high-income executives I meet haven't had a comprehensive financial review in years—if ever.

Here's what typically happens: You're maxing out your 401(k), your company stock keeps growing, and everything feels fine. But beneath the surface, critical issues often go undetected:

→ 30%+ of your portfolio concentrated in company stock (research shows 69% of individual stocks eventually experience catastrophic losses)

→ Investment allocation that hasn't been optimized to give you the highest probability of actually meeting your long-term goals

→ Estate plans that haven't been updated in years—or worse, just a basic will when your $2-4M estate needs trust structures for probate avoidance and privacy

→ Tax optimization opportunities missed during peak earning years (Roth conversions, deferred comp timing, charitable strategies)

→ No clear answer to: "How confident are you that you can retire when you want, in the lifestyle you want?"

If you're a Director, VP, or C-Suite executive in North Atlanta with $1-5M in liquid assets, you're in the "complexity sweet spot"—too sophisticated for cookie-cutter advice, but not needing dynasty planning.

*That's why we offer flat-fee comprehensive financial plans.*

No assets under management. No conflicts. Just a thorough financial physical examining retirement readiness, tax efficiency, concentrated positions, investment optimization, executive compensation, estate planning, and risk gaps.

Worth a chat? Send me a DM.

3 reasons the Roth catch-up rule isn't the problem high earners think it is:

1. You're probably more overweight in traditional accounts than you think
People making $150,000+ have 75-80% of their retirement money in pre-tax accounts.

That happened because most of us started maxing out 401(k)s before Roths even existed, then rolled those balances into traditional IRAs every time we changed jobs.

So when you retire, those withdrawals are taxable income. 

2. The tax problems compound in ways that aren't obvious.

At 73, you have to start taking RMDs. A $2 million IRA throws off about $88,000 in year one.

That withdrawal makes 85% of your Social Security taxable. Every $1,000 you pull out creates $1,850 in taxable income.

You think you're in the 22% bracket, but your effective rate on that money is over 40%.

3. The forced Roth catch-up is solving a problem you didn't know you had.

Yes, you lose the upfront deduction. But if you're sitting on a massive traditional 401k balance with almost nothing in Roth, $8,000 a year into tax-free money starting at 50 is exactly what should be happening anyway.

The bigger opportunity is still those gap years between retirement and RMDs - strategic conversions that fill up lower brackets before the government forces your hand.

But if you're 52 and still working? 

The Roth catch-up is just the IRS making you do what you should have been doing all along.
–
P.S. The math on strategic conversions is specific to your situation. If you want to see what the gap years could look like for you, send me a DM or email me at marc@danerwealth.com

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