Shows / The Operating System Show
The Operating System Show
Everything your business knows walks out at 5pm. You rent it back every morning. And every time someone leaves, you lose a piece of how the place runs. That's the problem The Operating System Show exists to solve. I'm Matt Dixon, fractional CTO. I talk to the founders, COOs, and executives who are figuring out how to get their companies to run without every answer living in one person's head. Every week: what broke, what they rebuilt, and where the real leverage was. New episodes every week…
Episodes
- The Operating System Show
Nobody Knows Who You Are | Graeme Barlow on Finding the One Constraint That Matters
Graeme Barlow sold a company at 16 and grew Iversoft from 7 people to more than 50. Today he oversees growth across the AI companies at Martell Ventures…
- The Operating System Show
Cheap Code Is Not Cheap to Keep | Mishka Kofman on Technical Debt in the Age of AI
Mishka Kofman has been writing software for 28 years, from Madden at EA to AWS. Today he runs Paracorp and builds ARC, a platform that modernizes legacy…
- The Operating System Show
Only 5% Have Mapped Their Real Process | Jordan Fleming on Redesigning Your Business for AI Agents
Jordan Fleming bootstrapped smrtPhone from Poland, with the technical team in Romania, to just under 10 million dollars and nearly 60 people. Along the way it…
- The Operating System Show
300,000 Transactions, Under 50 People | Bryan Clayton on Building GreenPal to Run on Systems
Bryan Clayton started mowing yards in high school and grew it into a Tennessee landscaping company with about 150 people and 90 trucks. Fifteen years in, it…
- The Operating System Show
Fix the Data Before the AI | Jay Bourgana on Buying the Business in the Owner's Head
Jay Bourgana took a real estate brokerage from zero to 350 million dollars in sales volume in four years, then sold 70 percent of it to a much larger firm in…
- The Operating System Show
Stop Hiring Only A Players | Craig Wahl on Building a Leadership Team That Scales
Craig Wahl coaches CEOs and founders whose companies got bigger, faster than they expected. He runs Njorth, works as a fractional COO for tech companies, and…
- The Operating System Show
Hit Every Metric, Missed the Number | Chris Mader on Running EOS Inside His Own Business
Chris Mader was drafted by the Chicago White Sox, spent four years in the minors, then built a business career that ran all the way to chief revenue officer…
- The Operating System Show
You Can't Scale Complexity | Derek Fredrickson on What a Fractional COO Actually Builds
Derek Fredrickson left Wall Street in 2008 to run operations for his wife's coaching company, which she describes as having been built on toothpicks and band…
- The Operating System Show
600 Clients on a Team of 16 | David Salerno on Why He Will Not Hire to Fix a Problem
David Salerno built Solpak into one of Canada's most recognized packaging companies. Six hundred food sector clients across the country, on a team of sixteen…
- The Operating System Show
Your Team Says They Are at 140% Capacity | Kati Peterman on What a Fractional Operator Actually Fixes
Every founder Kati Peterman meets says a version of the same sentence. I'm just not there yet. Not there yet for a COO. Not there yet for a real operator. And…
- The Operating System Show
Saying No Is Twice as Safe as Saying Yes | JL Heather on the Can't Culture Killing Your Best Ideas
JL Heather has a name for the thing that kills a good idea before anyone notices it died. He calls it can't culture. Not a person saying no, a system saying it…
- The Operating System Show
73% Faster With the Same Team | Steve Schroeder on the Invisible Factory Inside Your Business
Steve Schroeder has spent almost twenty years finding the delays nobody can see. He calls it the invisible factory. In a plant you can walk the line and watch…
- The Operating System Show
The AI Flagged Your Best Engineer for Cuts: Alisa Reznik on Why People Decisions Stay Human
A tracking system did exactly what it was built to do. It showed one senior engineer closing seventy percent fewer tickets than everyone around him, and the…
- The Operating System Show
85% of Your Calls Don't Need a Human: Timothy Bramlett on Building an AI Receptionist
Timothy Bramlett bootstrapped an AI receptionist by sitting in a dental office day after day and cloning the tool they already hated paying for. He walked away…
- The Operating System Show
Irritation Is Operational Data: Gwen Taniguchi on Getting Your Business Ready to Sell
Gwen Taniguchi is a Certified Exit Planning Advisor and partner at Peek Advisory. Her diagnostic tool is one nobody talks about: the low grade irritation…
- The Operating System Show
They Don't Want to Buy Your Job: Peter Boolkah on What Founder Dependency Costs at Exit
Peter Boolkah spent fifteen years inside McDonald's, which is about the most ruthlessly systematized business on the planet, and then spent twenty one years…
- The Operating System Show
30 Points of Engagement in Six Hours: Omar L. Harris on Culture Operating Systems
Omar L. Harris ran a 900 person organization in Indonesia and nearly sank it with a handful of bad hires. To dig out, he wrote himself a manual. That manual…
- The Operating System Show
From 7 to 150 People: How Sean Griffith Scaled SimpleTexting and Now Ships Features Overnight with AI
Sean Griffith joined SimpleTexting at seven people and helped grow it to about 150 in under four years, through an acquisition, without a dedicated sales team…
- The Operating System Show
Why 95% of AI Pilots Fail and How to Build a Business You Can Sell, with Ted Wolf
Ted Wolf started at IBM in the 1970s, built an IT services company to 650 people with his brother, and sold it to Iron Mountain in 2018. Now he runs GuideWise…
- The Operating System Show
How to Build a Business That Runs Without You, with David Hori
David Hori is the founder of Top Line Operators. He buys businesses that already work and makes them work better, and along the way he has become obsessed with…
- The Operating System Show
Your Business Depends on a System You Don't Own
Everything your business knows walks out at 5pm. You rent it back every morning. And every time someone leaves, you lose a piece of how the place runs. That's…