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The Pitchwerks Podcast

Want to know how the best sales & marketing people think? Looking for another perspective on a problem? Dreaming of a new career or a startup? Learn everything from startup sales and initial marketing to account management and advertising. Subscribe to The Pitchwerks Podcast. Scot MacTaggart has been a sales rep, a marketer, a manager, a consultant, an executive and an advisor for over 20 years.  He created Pitchwerks to help you to reach your business goals by learning from the experiences of others. Each week, Scot and his extensive network of contacts provide unique insights and examples that can help anyone - from the newbie to the veteran. Learn to present your ideas, explain your value and build your business.  Subscribe NOW.
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Now displaying: February, 2019
Feb 27, 2019

An entrepreneur who is 50% player, 50% coach, and 50% cheerleader, Kit Mueller is a hurricane of can-do builder spirit and supportive energy - with a definite mischievous streak - and Scot enjoys his company tremendously.  Kit has had an open invitation to come to the Epicast Studios and appear on the Pitchwerks Podcast since the show started, but he has always suggested others for the show instead. This week he finally comes in and talks about what he thinks real mentorship looks like, and tells us about his efforts to bring the Startup Boost program to Pittsburgh, working with our friend Jim Gibbs and serial entrepreneur Mitch Turck.  Applications for the first cohort will be closing soon, so if you’ve got a young company you might want to listen to this show right away!

Feb 20, 2019

If you’re not familiar with the Hardware Cup, it’s time to get familiar.  Startups that make physical products are getting hot again, and the Hardware Cup is the leading pitch competition for entrepreneurs in that space.  The Pittsburgh event is coming up on February 28th, so we invited Hardware Cup event coordinator Kayce Karlo to come into the studio and talk to us about what makes this event so special, what kinds of companies have competed in the past, the prizes and support the winners get to claim, and what’s going on in the United States with regard to building and making physical products.  

Feb 18, 2019

Jon Providence is the Vice President of EagleDream Technologies, who holds the #1 spot among resellers of Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the Northeast United States.  It’s a very competitive space - there are 58,000 other AWS resellers out in the world, and considering just because of Boston and New York City alone, the Northeast is an incredibly competitive territory.  Jon talks to Scot about how EagleDream climbed to the top spot, makes a few predictions regarding what the future might hold, and even tells us how he makes those predictions, providing instructive examples from history that tell us what we might expect from the future.  

 

This is a special bonus episode of Pitchwerks, provided in addition to our usual Wednesday programming because EagleDream has just announced a partnership with KRNLS, the firm that Scot started with Olga Pogoda to help businesses grow.  KRNLS is handling EagleDream’s launch in Pittsburgh, providing value-add tools and discounts to Amazon Web Services clients in the area.

 

If you’re interested in such things, check out krnls.co/eagledream

Feb 13, 2019

Hey kids! Do you like brilliance? Wanna know how to plan for change so it doesn’t kill yinz?  This week we’ve got Ben Mosior, founder of Hired Thought, who was recommended to us by some of the smartest people we know.  He’s a “go-to” strategic thinker who practices Wardley Mapping, among other things - and since we didn’t know what that was, we asked.  It’s a huge, wide-ranging discipline that studies and diagrams complex systems to understand them, so we only focused on a couple of aspects of it for this episode.  Ben explains the relative value of mapping - which includes efficiency and savings you get from doing things in a strategic order of operations - and then helps Scot to understand the evolution of ideas from genesis to commodity.  

Feb 6, 2019

Francois Gau has managed major initiatives for some huge worldwide corporations including Honeywell and Kennametal, but he started out as an accountant and innovator in Toulouse in Southern France.  He now owns Levy Industrial, which helps companies from $25 - $200 million per year to upgrade their processes and integrate their departments so that they can attract new clients, keep existing ones and multiply their revenues.  In this extended-length episode, Francois tells Scot MacTaggart about his “sweet spot” method for quickly identifying opportunities for improvement, the value of ethnography (cultural study), and a practice he swears by called “hard listening”.  These tactics have served him well over the years, and resulted in major improvements for manufacturing and industrial firms as well as their clients.

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