Default Profitable

Amanda Hill started her business because her therapist told her to. In this episode of the Default Profitable podcast, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Amanda Hill, founder of Connections of Hope, a private counseling practice she launched in 2020 and has grown to five locations and 14 therapists. She'd been a counselor for 20 years and was working four jobs, teaching college on top of multiple counseling agencies, when her own therapist, a private practice owner, told her she couldn't keep going the way she was going. Amanda ran with it. What she didn't see coming was how much she'd like the business side. Six years in, she says she enjoys building the company about as much as she enjoys the counseling itself. The reason she keeps opening locations is simple: people who need a therapist end up on waiting lists, and every new office is a way around that.
Learn more about Amanda Hill and Connections of Hope at https://connectionsofhope.com/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Jenna Romens, owner and agent at Martin & Martin Insurance in downtown Noblesville. Jenna spent 16 years at Erie Insurance, moving through customer service, marketing, and agent roles before being promoted to district sales manager over agents across Hamilton, Marion, and Tipton counties. Then one of the agents she supported asked her to come to the agency side as part of a perpetuation plan. It took three asks before she and her husband Andy sat down and weighed the company car, the health insurance, and the steady paycheck against the chance to own something. Nine years of working side by side with the owners later, they retired, and last July she took over an agency that had been in business 37 years.
The insurance part she had down. What she didn't expect was everything else: payroll, the bills, hiring decisions, and a line of people asking her to sponsor things she now had to fit inside a marketing budget. The thing she got right early was the team. Before the purchase closed, she and Andy sat down with every employee to make sure they were on board and staying, then found ways to pay them better once they owned it. Matt runs his usual question about whether there was an actual business plan, and this time the answer is yes. Jenna and Matt also get into why the agency competes on coverage instead of price, what she tells people thinking about leaving a steady paycheck to run their own shop, and the one thing she'd tell herself on day one as an owner.
Learn more about Jenna Romens and Martin & Martin Insurance at https://martinandmartin.biz. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Bob Fasick, a Certified EOS Implementer based in Fishers, to trace a path that runs from a corporate career at Charles Schwab to a property management company he and a friend started without either of them knowing how they'd get paid. Bob moved to Indianapolis in 1992, spent about a decade at Schwab helping the firm transition from discount brokerage to advice provider, then took his first entrepreneurial leap in 2003 — one manufactured housing community in Urbana, Illinois, grown to roughly twenty-five inside two years. Then the 2008 downturn hit, occupancy covenants got missed, the banks moved, and the portfolio had to be sold.
What came next is what ties the story together. Bob landed at Defender Direct to lead a division, got handed a copy of Traction, and watched what happens when a fast-growing company gets everybody rowing in the same direction — rocks, scorecards, a weekly meeting pulse, and the most accountability-focused environment he'd ever worked in. Years later he became an EOS Implementer himself. He and Matt get into the gap between an MBA and what Bob calls real-world grad school, the delegate-and-elevate problem he still hasn't solved (he likes ordering the lunch), and the advice he'd hand his 2003 self on day one: don't do anything stupid financially, plan for uncertainty, and remember that leaders eat last.
Learn more about Bob Fasick at https://implementer.eosworldwide.com/bob-fasick/. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Gerry Bailey, founder of Corvano, a veteran-owned technology consultancy in Fishers, Indiana. Gerry spent twelve years in the Air Force before landing at Sprint, where he learned what a P&L actually was, then spent nearly a decade helping grow someone else's consulting firm across South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and the UK. He founded Corvano in 2016 while still employed, named it for Core Values Now, and left to run it full time on December 31, 2019, with plans to take a quarter off first. Three months later the market he'd built the whole plan around stopped buying anything.
Gerry is the rare guest who answers yes to all three of Matt's prerequisites — the strategic plan, the savings, the clear read on what customers would pay — and the episode is mostly about what happened next anyway. He and Matt get into why no plan survives contact, why you need a fallback to your fallback, and the discipline Gerry credits to growing up poor in Marion: never let your lifestyle expand to meet your maximum income. His advice to anyone about to start something is blunt. A good idea is not a business plan, whatever timeline you've got in your head is a third of the real one, and when the opportunity shows up, stop protecting your pride and go sell.
Learn more about Gerry Bailey and Corvano at https://www.corvano.com. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Jon Meeks, owner of the Jon Meeks Agency, to trace an entrepreneurial path that winds from fixing tanning beds and running a tanning salon to a mortgage company, a construction business, and the Farmers Insurance agency he's run since 1999. For most of those years the agency simply bumped along in the background, until Jon had the realization that changed everything: build the business the way you'd build a house, by handing the work to people who are great at it.
Jon shares the mindset shifts behind that turnaround, from why surrounding yourself with confident people beats trying to do it all, to how the "birdcage theory" gets others invested in your goals, to what he means when he says you're either part of your own plan or part of someone else's. Founders and operators will pick up practical lessons on delegation, recruiting people who buy into your vision, and why his number-one piece of advice for anyone opening a business comes down to one thing: keep selling. Whether you're launching your first venture or breathing new life into one you've run for years, it's a candid look at how vision, people, and a little stubbornness add up to sustainable success.
Learn more about Jon Meeks and the Jon Meeks Agency at https://agents.farmers.com/in/anderson/jon-meeks Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Jason Swathwood, a corporate attorney turned entrepreneur turned business broker at Indiana Equity Brokers. Jason traces his path from practicing law at a mortgage company to building and selling the Perfect Wedding Guide franchise in Indianapolis, then crossing to the other side of the table to help founders exit the businesses they spent years building.
Jason gets candid about what actually makes a business sellable — and why so many owners are stunned when they hear what their company is really worth. He and Matt dig into the difference between selling a business and selling a job, the risks a buyer spots before you do, and the moves a founder can make years ahead of an exit to protect the payday. If you're building something you might one day want to walk away from, what would a buyer see when they look under the hood?
Learn more about Jason Swathwood and Indiana Equity Brokers at https://indianaequitybrokers.com. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Ed Gunnell, founder of Gunnell Financial, to dig into what it takes to launch a financial firm at the worst possible time—Ed went out on his own in early 2008, just before the market crashed. He shares how he built a holistic, one-stop practice that brings taxes, investments, and insurance under one roof, why his financial-planning background makes him a more proactive tax advisor, and the one early partnership he says he'd undo if he could. Founders and aspiring business owners will walk away with grounded takeaways on landing those first clients, knowing when to bring on help, and why the attorney and the accountant are the two things you never cheap out on.
Learn more about Ed Gunnell and Gunnell Financial at https://gunnfin.com. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Hunter Beale, Executive Director of High School Hustle, the Indianapolis nonprofit that teaches teenagers to build real businesses—gutter cleaning, car detailing, power washing, thrift flipping—and turn a summer side hustle into something that lasts. Hunter traces his own path from a fifth-grade snow cone stand through the Orr Fellowship and the Jiffy Lube system, then breaks down how the program uses incentives, mentorship, and a gamified leaderboard to push thousands of students past the one thing that stops most people from ever starting: fear.
His whole philosophy comes down to two words: action provides information. The kids who get it learn more from knocking a hundred doors than they ever would planning the perfect launch, and founders at any stage will recognize the lesson—stop perfecting the logo, get in front of a customer, and let the work teach you. Whether you're raising a future entrepreneur or just trying to get out of your own way, it's a reminder that a structure and a scoreboard will take you further than waiting for permission.
Learn more about Hunter Beale and High School Hustle at https://highschoolhustle.org. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Clayton Tomasino, CEO of Scorpion Protective Coatings, a family-owned manufacturer of spray-on truck bed liners and window film based in Cloverdale, Indiana. Clayton shares the company's gritty origin—from a family asbestos-removal business, to his father's low-cost batch-mix coating system built to undercut the steep buy-in of the big bed liner franchises, to his own return from Hawaii in 2007 to "help out" and his takeover of the company by 2010. He walks through how a four-product automotive add-on program eventually narrowed to the one offering with the demand and margins worth building a business on, and how that focus carried Scorpion through 30 years and counting.
Listeners will gain grounded lessons on the financial literacy most founders learn the hard way—the gap between net income and actual cash, and how a growing business can still run itself short. Clayton and Matt get into why hitting a revenue milestone can quietly stall a company, why revenue is a lagging indicator rather than a measure of health, how to give your team metrics that aren't just dollars, and the regret that catches a lot of owners off guard: chasing new customers while neglecting the ones they already have. Perfect for bootstrapped founders who'd rather make new mistakes than repeat the same ones.
Learn more about Clayton Tomasino and Scorpion Protective Coatings at https://scorpioncoatings.com. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.

Jesse Wechter figured out the whole business at eight years old. He was at a Greek festival, his dad wouldn't give him money for food, so he stormed off, grabbed a leaf off the ground by the gate, and sold it to a stranger for twenty bucks. He'd only asked for five. The lesson stuck: people will buy almost anything if you present it the right way.
It took him a while to turn that into a company. Jesse came back to Indianapolis after flipping cars in West Hollywood and bartending in Chicago, living with his mom, owing money, and unable to land a job in a brutal hiring market. He had the skills, including email marketing for healthcare and medical device companies and a stretch at Red Bull Media House, but no work. So he started building a logo and pulling leads off Google into an Excel spreadsheet, emailing over a hundred people a day. That became Wechter Media.
When Matt runs his standard question, the one about whether you had a strategic plan, six months of savings, and a clear read on what customers would pay, Jesse landed about where most founders do. No savings. A plan that wasn't strategic or detailed. And a customer understanding he had to learn the hard way, after getting stiffed by two clients, one he nearly took to court and another who dumped the contract right before Christmas. The scramble to backfill all of it took about three years.
Then came the part a lot of founders recognize: trying to get stable too fast. Jesse hired three salespeople, bought a CRM, fed them 1,250 leads a month, and watched it sink him into a hole because the reps treated salary as the finish line. His takeaway is the difference between what you need and what you want. These days he only buys the thing when it actually makes sense.
The advice he keeps circling back to is the stuff nobody teaches you, mostly financial literacy. Running a business is not the same as running a household checkbook, and the IRS does not care how small you are. He pays for a bookkeeper and two CPAs now, and he sleeps fine. It's the same answer Matt hears more than any other when he asks founders what they wish they'd known going in.
And if he could sit his 2019 self down before opening the doors, it's one word: focus. Build the frame and the skeleton before the glamour muscles. Do it for yourself, not to impress a table full of friends. Celebrate the wins when you actually land a client, and don't take the big loan and blow it.
Learn more about Jesse and Wechter Media at wechtermedia.com. 
If you're listening, three things really help: leave a review, hit subscribe, share an episode. If you're a bootstrapped business owner and you want to be on the show, head to defaultprofitable.com. Stay focused, keep working, stay profitable.