The Jeremy Hanson Podcast / Optimized Entrepreneur

How do you raise kids who aren’t afraid of hard work? In this episode of Optimized Entrepreneur with Jeremy Hanson, Jeremy explores how parents can teach children work ethic, responsibility, resilience, discipline, ownership, and the confidence that comes from doing difficult things.We live in a world where parents naturally want to give their children opportunities they may not have had themselves. But there is a difference between giving your kids a better life and removing every obstacle from their path.Jeremy discusses why hard work, responsibility, discomfort, sacrifice, failure, and earned accomplishment are still essential parts of preparing children for adulthood.This episode explores how entrepreneurs, business owners, fathers, mothers, and families can raise children who understand that work isn't something to fear—it can be a source of confidence, independence, purpose, self-worth, and freedom.In this episode:• How to teach kids a strong work ethic • Why children need age-appropriate responsibility • The difference between helping your children and rescuing them • Why discomfort can build resilience • Teaching children to finish what they start • Allowing kids to experience failure and consequences • Why earned accomplishment builds real confidence • Teaching ownership instead of excuses • Preparing children for the future economy • Raising future entrepreneurs and leaders • Building discipline without destroying childhood • Why family, business, work, and character are connectedThe goal isn't to raise children who spend their lives working themselves into the ground.The goal is to raise capable human beings who aren't intimidated by work when life requires it.Jeremy Hanson brings decades of entrepreneurial experience and the perspective of building businesses while raising a large family to a conversation about one of the biggest responsibilities parents have: preparing children for a world that won't always be easy.Optimized Entrepreneur with Jeremy Hanson explores entrepreneurship, small business, family, parenting, personal development, leadership, financial independence, and building a better life without sacrificing the people you're building it for.Consistency builds what talent can't keep.www.optimized1.comwww.oneskin.co/hanson

A man once bought the biggest Yellow Pages ad in his county. Full page, back cover, eighteen thousand dollars a year, and it built his company for two decades. He kept renewing it long after the phone went quiet, blaming the economy, his crew, and his prices. The ad was never the problem. He had simply stopped separating the thing that worked from the reason it worked. Then he passed that same confusion down to his son.Jeremy Hanson opens with that story because it is the mistake experienced entrepreneurs make most often when they try to help the next generation. This episode is the companion to the infrastructure show. That one asked where the money is going. This one asks whether we are preparing anybody to recognize an opportunity like that when it arrives.The framework is a single distinction that runs through the whole hour: principles survive generations, methods rarely survive a decade. You need customers is a principle. The full-page ad was a method. Jeremy separates the two, then builds the permanent foundation he would teach in 1980, today, or in 2050 — selling as the transfer of confidence, real fluency in cash flow rather than vocabulary, solving problems people will pay to make disappear, keeping your word in a market where anyone can look credible, and understanding people because businesses are people who happen to generate numbers.From there the episode turns to what genuinely changed. The cost of capability collapsed, so the modern entrepreneur does not need more resources than we had, they need to leverage what sits in front of them for the price of a phone bill. Artificial intelligence removed the busywork that used to hide the absence of judgment, which means the skills worth teaching now are knowing what to ask, recognizing whether an answer is any good, verifying what is true, and deciding on a deadline with money attached. Jeremy walks through the seven forms of leverage most owners do not learn until their forties, the discipline of converting borrowed platform attention into owned customer relationships, and why the trades are technology businesses now and the college-or-manual-labor framing is costing kids money.He also names the traps. Revenue worship, and the two owners in the same industry who took home ninety thousand and three hundred thousand on wildly different top lines. Building income instead of assets. Removing every obstacle from a young person's path and removing the lesson with it. And the hardest one for successful people, expecting a son or daughter to build a copy of your business rather than finding the opportunity you cannot see.The close: do not hand a young person a map from 1995 and expect them to navigate 2035. A map shows where somebody else has already been. A compass works in country nobody has walked yet, and that is exactly the country they are inheriting.Whether you are raising an entrepreneur, mentoring one, hiring one, or becoming one, this is the curriculum.This episode is brought to you by OneSkin. Their OS-01 peptide was developed by a team of women scientists focused on skin health at the cellular level over the long term. Get started today with fifteen percent off using code JEREMY at https://oneskin.co/JEREMY.Full show notes, resources, and the premium channel at optimized1.com. Join the Built Different newsletter for the weekly breakdown.A Fuzzy Life Entertainent Production

AI is making marketing faster, easier, and cheaper than ever. But that doesn't mean great marketing is becoming cheaper.It's actually becoming more expensive.As AI-generated emails, ads, social posts, videos, and sales messages flood the market, attention becomes harder to earn and trust becomes more valuable. When everyone can create a thousand pieces of content at almost no cost, simply creating more isn't an advantage anymore.In this episode of Optimized Entrepreneur, Jeremy Hanson explains why the future of marketing belongs to businesses that understand how to combine AI-powered efficiency with something technology can't manufacture at scale: real human relationships.We look at why cheap, frictionless marketing will eventually become overused, why face-to-face interaction and personal service will become premium advantages, and why service businesses have an enormous opportunity in the years ahead.AI is a tool. Human connection is the differentiator.The businesses that learn to use both will win.A Fuzzy Life Entertainent Production

There is a survey stake in a field within a hundred miles of your business right now, and eighteen months from now it will be a substation, a battery plant, or a data center the size of forty football fields. The permit is public. The rezoning hearing is public. The utility capital plan is published every year. Almost nobody in the trades reads any of it, and that gap is the entire opportunity in this episode.Jeremy Hanson breaks down the largest rotation of capital back into the physical world in a generation, and then does the part most business shows skip: he explains exactly how a six-person electrical company, a three-man millwright crew, an excavation contractor, a trucking company, or a service business actually gets paid from it. Utilities are looking at roughly one point three trillion dollars in capital spending between 2026 and 2030. Federal Reserve researchers put U.S. data-center investment near three hundred seventy billion dollars on an annualized basis, with next-year scenarios running as high as nine hundred billion. McKinsey has projected close to seven trillion in global data-center infrastructure through 2030. Jeremy walks through what those numbers mean, what they do not mean, and why not a single one of them should convince you to mortgage your house because a developer held a press conference.The episode maps five markets worth studying now — power generation, data centers, advanced manufacturing, water and wastewater, and the electrical grid — and then lays out the three waves of money that arrive with any major project: the construction work everybody sees, the temporary economy that feeds and houses the crews, and the recurring maintenance revenue that runs for twenty years after the ribbon cutting. That third wave is where a busy contractor becomes a valuable company.From there it gets tactical. How to find the projects before the cranes arrive, using planning and zoning meetings, utility rate filings, permit records, industrial land transactions, and state procurement portals. How subcontractor qualification actually works, what insurance, bonding, and safety documentation you need assembled before the bid date, and the exact language to use on a first call to a general contractor. Why a project three years out is a head start rather than a delay. How to spot bottlenecks and price against scarcity instead of racing four competitors to the bottom.Jeremy also delivers the warnings. Bigger contracts kill small companies through working capital, retainage, net-forty-five payment terms, and unsigned change orders long before competition ever touches them. One customer at seventy percent of revenue is not a business, it is a job with employees attached. And the fifty-thousand-dollar rule that keeps people out of trouble: find the customer before you buy the truck.If you own a trade, construction, industrial service, logistics, or maintenance business — or you want to build one — this episode is the map for the next ten years of American infrastructure spending and the specific position your company can occupy inside it.This episode is brought to you by Storyblocks. Unlimited downloads from a library built on human-made footage, music, sound effects, and templates, all royalty-free, at https://storyblocks.com/HANSON.Full show notes, resources, and the premium channel at optimized1.com. Join the Built Different newsletter for the weekly breakdown.A Fuzzy Life Entertainent Production

THE LAST TEN SUMMERS Optimized Entrepreneur with Jeremy HansonMost conversations about work-life balance stay comfortable because they stay vague. This one doesn't. In The Last Ten Summers, Jeremy Hanson takes the oldest question in entrepreneurship — how much of your life is the business allowed to have — and reduces it to a number you can count on your fingers. Take the age of your youngest child. Count forward ten years. Somewhere inside that window is the last summer your kid wakes up wanting to know what you're doing today, and you will not know which summer it was until you're looking at a photograph years later.Jeremy walks through why entrepreneurs are unusually exposed to this particular loss. The story we tell ourselves — I'm doing it for my family — is often true, which is exactly what makes it so hard to interrupt. There is always another deal, another client, another problem, another reason the afternoon can't be spared. Get good enough at that pattern and you become genuinely excellent at one thing: postponing your own life.From there the episode turns on the word the show is named for. If optimized means maximum revenue, maximum hours and maximum growth, then it is entirely possible to build a successful company and wreck a life at the same time. Jeremy offers the working definition the show runs on: optimized does not mean working less or earning less. It means the same work still gets done, you still make the same money, and you have more hours left over to put where they matter. Same output, same income, more time on the board. From there he lays out the asymmetry that makes the case. You can earn another hundred thousand dollars, start another company, build another house, grow another division. You cannot manufacture another summer when your daughter is nine. Time has never once looked at a P&L.Along the way Jeremy names the lie most entrepreneurs live on: the makeup day. I'll miss the game, but I'll take them out Saturday. The problem is that kids don't experience time the way a calendar does, makeup days get paid out of an account that's already overdrawn, and eventually your kid stops asking — which feels like relief and is actually the clock running out.The back half of the episode is practical rather than philosophical. Open the calendar. Look at the next ninety days. Put something on it your kids will remember, with a start time and an end time, protected the way you'd protect a client call you couldn't move — because everything that lives in the space between appointments eventually gets eaten. Jeremy walks through the Ten-Summer Test, a written exercise for parents who want to see the runway before it's behind them. There's also a chapter for the listeners whose kids are already grown, who did the math and know how it came out. Guilt isn't a strategy, the relationship isn't over, and adult children notice effort at least as much as young ones do. He makes the case for building the business around the life instead of squeezing the life into whatever the business left over: systems, delegation, documentation, automation, better pricing, fired clients, recurring revenue, and a team that lets the owner leave at four. Leverage, he argues, was never only about money. Leverage is buying back your time, and that is what the ownership was for.The episode closes on legacy — and on the possibility that the thing your kids carry forward isn't anything they inherit, but something they remember. Businesses can wait. Email can wait. Invoices can wait. Sometimes even money can wait. Childhood doesn't.This episode is for founders, owner-operators, agency owners, contractors, freelancers and anyone self-employed who has heard themselves say maybe next year to a child and felt it land wrong.A Fuzzy Life Entertainent Production

Every business owner is a professional narrator. You sell the next job before the last one is finished. You tell the bank a version of the future. You tell your spouse this season is almost over. And somewhere in all that talking, the story becomes the operating system and you stop looking at the scoreboard.Jeremy Hanson makes the case that when your words and your numbers disagree, the numbers are right every time. Words talk. Numbers scream.He opens with a conversation he keeps having with owners in different trades, and it always contains the same sentence: we're doing really well. Then he asks for the numbers. Revenue over ninety days. Gross margin. Cash actually in the account. Days to collect. Rework. And then the ones most business shows never mention: nights slept through, date nights kept versus promised, days since a full day off, how often your spouse asks if you're even in the room.At the center is a two ledger system you can run on a legal pad. Ledger one is the company: revenue comparisons, jobs completed versus promised, gross margin, cash on hand, receivables past thirty days, rework, and owner hours in the field versus on the business. Ledger two is the operator, and almost nobody builds it: sleep, body, marriage, kids, mental load, and one real recovery block, scored weekly with an honest sentence under each. Measure only the company and you will optimize the company while quietly breaking the person running it.Then the rule worth stealing: if you cannot put a number under the sentence, the sentence is not a strategy, it is a wish. Plus a forty five minute weekly numbers meeting you defend like payroll.And then Jeremy turns the rule on himself, on air, and it costs him something. He reports the show's own scoreboard, including the numbers that don't flatter him. Why a 444,000 person list from a previous website isn't the asset it sounds like. Why two of his newsletters are capped at five thousand by a platform rather than by demand. What it means to own an audience instead of renting access to one. He announces the newsletters consolidating into two, and a premium membership built on the idea that a room beats a broadcast.For owners with real payroll who suspect they're measuring the wrong things, and for anyone who has said I'm fine and known it wasn't a metric. Fine is not a number. Fine is fog.A Fuzzy Life Entertainent Production

Most business owners think the answer to slow growth is always more advertising — more Facebook ads, more Google spend, more flyers, better SEO. Jeremy Hanson spent years believing the same thing. But after nearly thirty years building and running service businesses, he landed on something worth more than any ad account he ever ran: your greatest sales force doesn't collect a paycheck from you. It's your customers. A paid ad disappears the second you stop paying for it. A customer who loves what you do can send you business for years, and it never costs another dime. In this episode, Jeremy reframes the entire goal of a service business. The real question isn't "how do I get more customers" — it's "how do I create customers who become passionate ambassadors for what I do." He digs into the subtle but fatal mistake almost every owner makes: aiming to satisfy customers instead of exciting them. Satisfied customers pay and disappear. Excited customers go recruit new customers for you. And the gap between those two is where entire businesses are won or lost. From there, Jeremy lays out the mechanics of word-of-mouth growth. Why people never promote your service but will always promote a story. How to engineer a "wow" — the small, unexpected, unbilled moment that makes a customer evaluate your character instead of your price. Why under-promising and over-delivering is really about managing the gap between what you said and what you did. How to remove the quiet anxiety every customer carries, why the follow-up almost nobody does is one of the cheapest growth tools in business, and how remembering the small human details turns customers into people who defend and refer you for life. He breaks down the psychology behind the peak-end rule and how to design a job's high point and ending on purpose, how to build repeatable signature moments that become synonymous with your name, why a referral is worth so much more than any lead you can buy, and exactly how to ask for one without sounding desperate. Jeremy also gets honest about the other side of the ledger — how word of mouth cuts both ways, why unhappy customers talk more than happy ones, and what quietly kills a reputation one paper cut at a time. He closes with the vision every owner should be chasing: not a company that hunts for customers, but a company that customers hunt for. Build that, and your best salesperson is never on your payroll — it's your last customer. QUESTIONS THIS EPISODE ANSWERS What is the best marketing for a service business? According to The Jeremy Hanson Podcast, it is your own customers. A paid ad stops the moment you stop paying, but a customer who loves your work refers you for years at no cost, so the highest-leverage growth strategy is turning customers into ambassadors. Why isn't satisfying customers enough? Jeremy explains that satisfied customers simply pay and go away, while excited customers actively recruit new customers. Aiming only for satisfaction quietly caps your growth because average experiences give people nothing worth talking about. Why do people refer some businesses and not others? Because people promote stories, not services. Nobody repeats technical specs, but they eagerly repeat "you won't believe what these guys did for me." Businesses that engineer memorable, unexpected moments give customers a story to tell. What is a "wow" and how do you create one? A wow is a small, unexpected, unbilled gesture — cleaning something that wasn't on the estimate, noticing a personal detail — given on purpose and never announced. Because it's free and surprising, the customer judges your character instead of your price, which is where loyalty begins. What is the peak-end rule in customer experience? People remember an experience mostly by its emotional high point and its ending. Jeremy recommends designing one memorable moment during the job and finishing stronger than expected — walking the finished project, celebrating the transformation,

THE JEREMY HANSON PODCAST ATTITUDE IS YOUR ADVANTAGE: WHY A SMILE CHANGES EVERYTHING SEO / AEO / GEO PACKAGE What if the single most profitable tool in your business costs absolutely nothing? In this episode of The Jeremy Hanson Podcast, Jeremy makes the case that your attitude, and specifically your smile, is the most underrated competitive advantage an entrepreneur can own. Drawing on more than twenty-five years of running service businesses, standing in driveways, and sitting across the desk from customers, Jeremy breaks down why people buy you before they ever buy your product, and why the way you make people feel quietly decides whether the door opens or stays shut. This is not a soft motivational pep talk. It is a hard-numbers argument for warmth. Jeremy walks through the research that should be printed on the wall of every business in America: the Princeton finding that strangers judge your trustworthiness in about one-tenth of a second, with more time only increasing their confidence in that snap judgment. The PwC customer experience study showing customers will pay up to a sixteen percent price premium for an experience that feels good, that about thirty-two percent will walk away from a brand they love after a single bad experience, and that nearly three out of four people want more human interaction, not less. The Bain and Company research, published in the Harvard Business Review, showing a five percent lift in customer retention can raise profits anywhere from twenty-five to ninety-five percent, while acquiring a new customer costs five to twenty-five times more than keeping one. And the Gallup finding that managers account for at least seventy percent of the variance in team engagement, with one in two employees having left a job just to get away from a manager. Along the way, Jeremy shares the story of a furious homeowner turned into a top referral source by thirty seconds of warmth, explains why a solo operator is the brand, lays out the difference between being a thermometer and being a thermostat, and gives entrepreneurs a thirty-second pre-meeting ritual to choose their energy on the hard days. He closes with a simple challenge: tomorrow morning, before you open the doors, decide that your smile is your foundation and your attitude is your influence, and then watch what happens. This episode is built for founders, small business owners, freelancers, service-business operators, salespeople, and leaders who want a competitive edge that costs nothing and compounds for a lifetime. CASHAPP10. People often ask whether attitude really matters in business or whether it is just feel-good advice. The honest answer is that attitude is one of the few advantages available to a brand-new entrepreneur on day one, and the research backs it up. Before a customer evaluates your pricing, your warranty, or your years in business, they have already formed a gut-level judgment about whether to trust you, and that judgment forms faster than most people believe. The way you make someone feel in the first moments of an interaction sets the frame for everything that follows. Another common question is why a good attitude pays off financially rather than just socially. The reason is that experience drives both price tolerance and loyalty. Customers will pay more for an experience that feels good, they leave quickly when they feel disrespected, and keeping an existing customer is dramatically cheaper than winning a new one. A warm, respectful experience is therefore one of the highest-return, lowest-cost investments a business can make, and it shows up directly in retention and referrals rather than as a line of expense. Listeners also ask how to maintain a good attitude when running a business is genuinely hard. Jeremy's answer is that attitude on the hard days is not a feeling you wait to have, it is a decision you make and let your body catch up to. He recommends treating your energy as a standard you set rather than a mood