Consulting is a Little Bit F'ed

Send us Fan MailDoes expertise still matter when information is cheap, instant, and increasingly generated by AI? Nick argues that knowledge alone is being treated like a commodity—but wisdom remains irreplaceable. Addressing the documented shift away from a literate and written long-form thinking culture to a more digitally distributed oral culture, Nick explains that our era of incendiary, hyper-reactive messaging is by design.But its not our only option. If we are in fact pivoting back to an oral culture, we will either by led by tyrannical masters of the con, or by sage carriers of emobdied wisdom.Time to choose. Your business may depend on it.This episode explores the shift from knowledge businesses to wisdom businesses: work grounded in context, human connection, coherent leadership, and the ability to apply what you know in real situations.Chapters0:00 Does expertise still matter?0:41 The credibility problem in an AI-saturated market3:05 Why mental friction matters4:09 The challenge facing knowledge businesses5:48 Knowledge vs. wisdom9:58 Embodying your work as a leader12:52 From written culture to oral culture17:34 Algorithms, reactivity, and attention21:40 Why long-form thinking still matters23:30 Building a wisdom-based organization26:14 Trustmade Growth and the undivided leader30:12 Notice meetings and deep attention34:40 A closing invitationTrust-Made Growth®Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.comIndependent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at 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 [email protected].

Send us Fan MailWelcome to Season 3! We're kicking things off with a bang interview EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Jason Wenk about his $4B (with a B) sale of Altruist to Vanguard. But this is no "how I built it" story...It's a story of what trust making is possible when we build for a community and from a community. What happens when we focus down and ignore the noise. What happens when aliens totalizing mission captures every decision including and especially your relationship to capital.Nick gets down to the real story of Altruist in his interview with Jason. Exploring some of the loudest critiques that have been surfaced since its sale for $4B to Altruist, and tying back the success to core principles that are applicable at any scale.This episode challenges that prevailing rhetoric around big acquisitions for big dollars being opposed to human-first, trust-making values. In this story, the two are inextricably linked. Chapters00:00 — Season Three: Our Humanity and our Businesses Belong Together05:05 — Introducing Jason Wenk and Altruist07:45 — Building Financial Advice for More People18:09 — Start Small: Focus, Product Fit, and Customer Trust39:19 — Funding a Mission-First Company47:10 — Staying Grounded While Building51:12 — Why Altruist Joined Vanguard64:40 — Build a Great Company, Not an Exit StrategyTrust-Made Growth®Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.comIndependent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at 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 [email protected].

Send us Fan MailA lot of founders — even ones who've been running their own thing for ten or fifteen years — are still missing the foundational architecture that makes a knowledge business actually work. They've swapped out who the boss is without actually becoming the owner. They've built a Cheesecake Factory menu of offers instead of one great dish. They've built dependency on algorithmic reach and frictionless stranger contact and autonomous customer experience and hourly pricing, all of which are failing systems, without realizing that's what they've done.Nick opens the episode with something personal: the moment mid-career when his anxiety got so severe he couldn't be alone in his house, and his best friend worked from his dining room for three weeks. He shares it not for sympathy but because it's proof that business design is a mental health issue, and that you can design your way toward something different.From there he walks through the seven foundations that a trust-made knowledge business actually requires: owner mindset and what it actually means to fire the employee within. Designing a customer — one particular psychographic customer, not a list of everyone it could theoretically work for. Building an around-the-block offer — the one great dish people line up for — and killing all the escape hatches from it. Pricing and winning in a way that protects trust. Defining an operating model that protects the time of your most expensive employee, which is you. Building a relational go-to-market instead of a frictionless one. And developing the leader capacity to know what's yours right now and what has to wait.The Damn Rules is out now wherever books are sold. The Wisdom School's next cohort opens in October at https://www.culturecraft.com/venturestock.Chapters:0:00 — News and Notes4:33 — Introduction to the Public Classroom Format13:52 — What Got You Here Won’t Get You There16:12 — Context: The Two Failing Systems20:16 — Exploring Trust Issues in Business28:36 — The Seven Foundations30:41 — The Shift from Employee to Owner Mindset35:45 — Designing the Ideal Customer39:25 — Creating the Around-the-Block Offer44:09 — Building an Effective Operating Model46:16 — Defying the “Frictionless” Buying Experience48:52 — Recognizing Capacity Limitations52:56 — Next Steps for FoundersTrust-Made Growth®Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.comIndependent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at 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 [email protected].

Send us Fan Mail"If we want healthier economies, better markets, freer commerce, healthier neighborhoods, better streets, less dependence on big disgusting tech — the energetic force that's going to make those things happen is you making more money by living your values. Plain and simple."This is a special episode of Damns Given. Season two is wrapped, and while we're on hiatus through the end of August, Nick is sharing the town hall he'd been avoiding for months — the closest thing he's ever done to the full picture of what Trust-Made Growth is actually for, how the economy actually works right now, and what you can actually do about it.Season three launches at the end of August with a new structure, an extraordinary guest lineup, and new ways to go deeper. In the meantime — this is worth your time.The town hall is called The Expansion: Make More Money, Live Your Values, and Save the World. Nick opens with a thesis that runs against everything the cultural conversation is currently telling you: that making more money and living your values aren't in opposition. They're the only way forward. That if you want healthier economies, better markets, more human-scale businesses, and less dependence on extractive tech — the energetic force that makes that happen is you, building your venture, living your values, and generating more than you take.He walks through the two games every business is playing — the Extractive Game and the Expansive Game — and what makes each one tick. He introduces the concept of the shitload fog — the compounding loneliness, overwhelm, anxiety, and distrust that every person you're trying to reach is carrying right now — and why your number one job is to move through it, not around it. He maps out the E7: the seven structural elements the economy needs rebuilt, and why at least one of them is you. And he walks through the practical path from rented growth to owned growth — what it actually looks like to move from being dependent on extractive platforms, extractive capital, and extractive selling models to building something that compounds over time in the direction you actually want to go.This is the map. The book — The Damn Rules — comes out September 15th at damnrulesbook.com. This episode is the context that makes the map make sense.Season three returns end of August. Subscribe so you don't miss it.Trust-Made Growth®Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.comIndependent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at 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 [email protected].

Send us Fan Mail"What is the most human, natural, joy-filled way we could solve this problem?"Chris McAdoo has been a musician, a brand strategist, a startup advisor, and an artist since he was 13 years old. He's worked with national lab scientists sending things to space and artists introducing their work to the world for the first time. And he's noticed something: it's the same conversation every time.Why don't people love the thing I made the way I love it?In this episode of Damns Given, Nick and Chris go deep on what's actually going on between craft and market — and why the answer isn't to make better work. The work is fine. The gap is context. The gap is relationship. The gap is the hard turn from seeking attention to paying it.They cover the brief window in internet history when showing up was enough and why that era socialized a generation into believing the algorithm would find their people for them. Why the people building extractive platforms don't actually like people — and how that shapes everything about what those platforms do and don't do. Why the inefficiencies we disrupted out of existence were load-bearing — and what we're left holding now that they're gone. Why the house concert in Knoxville probably made more money than the venue tour. Why your customer persona named Suzy is useless and the conversation with the real Debra who came to your show on a Thursday night is everything.And what it means to ask, as Nick puts it: what's the most human, natural, joy-filled way we could solve this problem?Nick closes with a reflection that came out of a conversation with a colleague: this economy, this uncertainty, this K-shaped gap — it's already creating discomfort whether you acknowledge it or not. Moving toward discomfort isn't going to make things worse. You're already uncomfortable. You might as well grow.Chris McAdoo: chrismcadoo.com | chrismcadoospeaks.com | fightingshapeimpact.comMore at damnsgiven.com | TrustMadeGrowth.com | CultureCraft.comTrust-Made Growth®Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.comIndependent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at 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 [email protected].

Send us Fan MailDamns Given Episode 2.20 - only two episodes of Season 2 yet to go!A lot of people are waking up right now to systems they've been inside of for years without fully seeing them, many of them leaders in tech, marketing, and professional services, and it's producing something that looks a lot like grief. Bargaining with the extractive economy. Fighting it. Sometimes just quietly depressed by it. The quiet despair under the surface is deeper than your LinkedIn feed is going to acknowledge.Nicholas Whitaker spends his days helping people work through exactly that. He's a coach who works heavily with people in tech and corporate America going through what he calls an awakening — a sudden class consciousness about the systems they're embedded in. He's also the founder of the Rebellion Collective, a community built for people trying to reclaim their time, energy, and attention from systems designed to extract all three.This conversation goes deep into what's actually different this time — why this isn't just a classic midlife crisis dressed up in new language, but what Nicholas calls a meta crisis: multiple systems collapsing simultaneously, compounding faster than most people have the tools to metabolize. This meta-crisis is an echo of host Nick Richtsmeier's Five Interregna, described in the first chapter of his book The Damn Rules, available Sept 2026. You can get the first chapter for free at https://damnrulesbook.comThe two Nick's talk about the psychological effect of the panopticon, the shift from external colonization by media and social platforms to the colonization of the last things that were still ours — creativity, critical thinking, self-trust. They talk about why the instinct to blog about it, sub-stack about it, or perform outrage about it usually isn't the answer. And they talk about what actually is: stillness, presence, noticing your own nervous system, and slowly building capacity so that courage and confidence become byproducts rather than goals you're chasing directly.Nick closes with a reflection on legacy, stewardship, and why the work might outlast both of them — and why that's not a discouraging thought, but a genuinely freeing one.Nicholas Whitaker: https://www.rebelliancollective.com — including a free capacity audit worth taking More at https://damnsgiven.com  and https://CultureCraft.comTrust-Made Growth®Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.comIndependent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at 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 [email protected].

Send us Fan Mail"In this AI-soaked era, the primary thing we're buying — anytime we're buying anything — is thinking. Consultants, you need a way for people to test the quality of your thinking. Efficiently. With a low financial impact."Nobody sat down and decided to build a consulting offer that was bad for them, bad for their clients, and bad for their industry. It happened anyway. And if you're in consulting, fractional work, agency work, or any kind of advisory role — you're probably working inside a system that came from one of two tainted pools: the agency model or the McKinsey model. Both are imploding in real time. Neither was built for the world we're in now.In this episode of Damns Given, Nick Richtsmeier gets practical. He walks through exactly what goes wrong with the two dominant approaches to getting hired as a consultant — the scoping process that produces 97-bullet-point SOWs nobody reads, and the audit tool that clients pay $5,000 for only to receive a boilerplate proposal recommending they hire you for the work they wanted to hire you for in the first place. He names both for what they are and explains why they exist — and why they need to stop.Then he gets to the fix. The entry level offering. Short. High impact. Structured around thinking with your client rather than selling at them. Priced low enough that nobody has to go through procurement. Valuable enough that the deliverable is worth more than what they paid. A way for people to test the quality of your thinking before anyone commits to a long engagement — which in an AI-soaked world where thinking is the primary thing anyone is buying, is the only sale that actually makes sense.This one is for consultants, fractionals, coaches, and agencies who are tired of the broken cycle and want a way out of it. And it's for founders and leaders who are hiring these people and want to know how to structure the front end of those relationships so everyone ends up doing better work.Trust Forge — Nick's four-week live workshop on offering design — is at trustmadegrowth.com/trustforgeTrust-Made Growth®Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.comIndependent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at 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 [email protected].

Send us Fan MailThe American economy is in contraction. That's different than recession. Most people who've been paying attention know it by now. We've got to spend less time debating it, negotiating with it, pretending it's not happening, like bad bargainers at a funeral. And start acting on what to do about it. Nick walks through the two games that every business, every market, every economy runs on: the Extractive Game and the Expansive Game. Not as a moral judgment about which kind of person you are, but as a structural reality about which direction your decisions are flowing. Because the direction matters enormously. It determines what you make, how you run your operations, how you build relationships — and whether those three layers are stacked in a way that builds something or slowly hollows it out.He traces the Extractive Game from Standard Oil to Facebook to your content marketing problem — showing how each one starts at the production layer, taking something communal and making it singularly owned, then builds an operations layer designed to make everything dependent on the thing it grabbed, then covers the whole thing with influence peddling and PR. And he shows how the same logic — in miniature, without the malice — slips into small businesses every day when fear is driving.Then he traces the Expansive Game in the opposite direction — starting at the relationship layer, winning by attention and clarity, distributing power through networks, and building production that actually comes from knowing the people you're building for. He uses the independent bookseller as the clearest example of a business running the expansive game right — and it's more useful than any Silicon Valley case study.This is a preview of the core framework from Nick's book The Damn Rules, launching this fall at DamnRulesBook.com. If this episode speaks to you and you want to go deeper: [email protected] Growth®Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.comIndependent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at 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 [email protected].

Send us Fan MailBrad Farris is back. And if you weren't here for the original run of the show under the old name Working Broken, here's what you need to know: Brad is one of the sharpest executive coaches working today, he was Nick's own executive coach for an extended stretch, and when the two of them get in a room together — even a virtual one — nothing stays safe for very long.This episode opens with something genuinely useful: Brad's honest account of how the pressurization of the COVID era made him play small, and the moment earlier this year he decided that was over. How fear contracted his social circle. How his social circle contracting made things scarier. How that compounded until he realized this was not his best self — and what happened when he dropped it. He's traveling more, seeing people in person, landing bigger deals. The correlation is not a coincidence.From there Nick and Brad play the first ever Hot Topic Knockout — a bracketed game where ten things the internet tells you to care about go head-to-head until only the one that actually matters survives. The bracket includes: Tim Cook's successor and the One Disney speech, tariffs being illegal, the end of entry-level hiring, the OpenAI bubble, middle manager burnout at a 10-year low, social media's big tobacco moment, Oracle's Larry Ellison doing what Larry Ellison does, macro economic signals and gas prices, and the cost of tokens.Along the way they cover why Brad thinks you should go back to 1995 and be a generalist who meets people. Why the real crisis in organizations isn't at the middle manager level, it's at the top, where leaders are navigating fog with no clear destination. Why agile is a response to a goal, not a substitute for one. Why risk management with trust is the only thing that works now — and why American business is terrible at it. And OF COURSE what the winner of the knockout game actually is...Trust-Made Growth®Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.comIndependent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at 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 [email protected].

Send us Fan MailIn 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.comTrust-Made Growth®Leaders who want to understand how to reformat their growth strategies to address trust decay should explore more at CultureCraft.comIndependent Professionals can join the free community exploring how to return trust to our commerce and our communities at 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 [email protected].