Have Jon Allen on as a guest

How can I add a TON of value to your audience?

Topics
that worked well in the past

Business

Issues listeners might be struggling with


📈 Growth Stagnation

📉 Revenue and LTV Decline

🗓️ Overloaded Calendar

🗣️ Delegation Disconnects

🐌 Operations Drag

🧠 Innovation Stagnation

🤖 Leadership Isolation

👀 Original Vision Drift

🚪 Team turnover

Business

Goals they’re aspiring towards


Small business

😍 Keeping the team excited with the mission

💣 Executing a big bold idea/product

🤖 When to hire vs Automate

Medium - Large Business

⏳ Increase Idea-to-execution speed

🏄‍♂️ Achieve a safe exit from my company

😒 Find the fun again in my company

🚪 Keep knowledge & money from walking out the door

Personal Growth


🧬 Spiral Dynamics is like seeing the Matrix code

🩵 Finally forgiving myself with Daniel Kanehman’s System 1 and System 2 thinking

📈 Sure EQ is important, but Synergist empathy has been the key to working happy for me

🕺 Turns out, the hippies got a lot right

(as they started the transition to the next human development level 🧬)

Favorite Quotes for sparking topic ideas

All of these have been great conversation starters before for topic ideas, social quotes, and just general musings during an episode

Focused bat shit crazy visionaries can change the world. Unhealthy, unfocused ones quickly tank a company that could have made the world better
— Jon Allen
You are the average of your five closest friends (choose carefully)
— Jim Rohn
‘Visionary’ doesn’t have to be a bad word
— Jon Allen
Trust is equal parts character and competence... You can look at any leadership failure, and it’s always a failure of one or the other
— Stephen M.R. Covey
Only the Synergist can put aside their own agenda and interpret the language of difficult personalities, capture the best from each person, and put the good of the enterprise ahead of their own ego
— Les McKeown
Pessimists get to be right. Optimists get to be rich
— Shaan Puri

Quick grab info

Bio Pictures

Jon’s Bio / Intro recommendation

Jon Allen, founder of Visionary Clarity, launched his whirlwind of a career in the music touring industry, taking on roles from audio engineer all the way to executive producer. His firsthand experience with the cycles of creativity and burnout among artists led him to recognize crucial patterns. To avoid his own burnout he shifted to the startup world, founding a software company, a marketing agency, and a consultancy, where he significantly increased the profitability of a large doctor coaching firm and taught over 200 doctors how to scale their businesses.

Today, at Visionary Clarity, Jon harnesses his observations from 100s of visionaries to address the challenges that often ensnare successful early to mid-stage businesses. He has developed a unique process that helps visionaries escape these ruts and align their initial momentum with sustainable growth strategies.

Links

The longer, spoken version of the bio that Jon uses

It’s worked well for quick authority building and familiarity with the audience at the start, but we can roll with however you usually do things.

I’ve had a crazy life, I’ll try to go fast…

  • 1 semester of college > Then joined the circus, IE the Music touring industry

  • Spent 15 years touring the planet with tons of bands and artists

    • Audio engineer

    • Production manager

    • Tour manager

    • Show Desinger

    • Producer > Executive producer

    • Designed some huge shows and had a ton of fun

    • Created a “tour management as a service” business, had some decent sized clients

    • Saw repeating destructive patterns in Visionary artists

    • 37 countries, airline status all over the place

  • Quit cold turkey

  • Started a software company - Aware

    • amazing product, crap partner, ran out of money

  • Started a podcast about processing people exiting the modern church - The Airing of Grief

    • Learned so much about people transitioning from one phase of life to another

  • Marketing agency 1 > Agency 2

  • Freelance Integrator

    • Realized I was kind of a visionary whisperer

  • Built a large doctor coaching company

    • Built a viable product out of the founder

    • 9 clients, negative P&L > 200+ clients, nearly 3mil / year, 25% profit

    • Working w 200+ visionary doctors confirmed lots of my theories about how to FOCUS Visionary energy

  • Founded Visionary Clarity as side hustle

  • Co-Founded a startup doing health certifications for short term rentals called Clearstay

    • Got funded, made it into the validation stage… didn’t validate out. STRs don’t want a big light shined on their moldy dark corners

  • Sold 95% of worldly possessions and went full time nomad

    • Added a few more countries to the list

  • Co-founded a platform that would have fixed medicare insurance -

    • Got shot down by monopoly powers

All of that taught me….

Focused, batshit crazy visionaries can save the world

Unhealthy, unfocused visionaries are the death of so many great ideas, that could have made a big impact

I realized the greatest impact I could have for humanity was helping focus visionary energy with all that I learned

If you do a Blog Article with your episodes

Here are some previous questions answered

  • We’re all about helping Visionaries rediscover the spark that ignited their journeys, from early-stage startups to established enterprises. 

    As someone who’s personally been through the whirlwind of creating and managing multiple businesses, I’ve seen how easy it is to get caught up in the day-to-day and lose sight of that initial, brilliant vision, which can easily cause the visionary to drift off to other ideas, taking the company's greatest asset away.

    Here’s what I believe: focused, batshit crazy visionaries can save the world.

    But when they lose that focus, it’s not just the business that suffers—great ideas that could have made a significant impact fade away. That’s where we come in. By refocusing that visionary energy, we not only bring back the passion but also drive better business results. We’re talking about increased profitability through clearer strategic direction, enhanced team cohesion as everyone aligns with the core vision, and accelerated innovation because your energy is directed toward creating value, not just maintaining the status quo.

    Our approach is tailored and personal. We dive into what drives you, reignite that passion, and align your team during an immersive process we call the Visionary Timeline. Your personalized process can be virtual, in-person at a private offsite location, or a luxurious hands-on mind & body retreat. Whether you’re running a small team that’s just finding its way, or you’re at the helm of a larger operation that’s veered a bit off-course, we’re here to help extract the next growth strategy FROM you and with you. 

    The result? A re-energized leader, that motivates the team's buy-in, and a business that not only grows but also makes a profound impact on the world. Let’s focus that incredible energy of yours and turn your visions into realities. Together, we can make sure those amazing ideas don’t just stay ideas—they become the innovations that truly shape our future.

  • Honestly, it had nothing to do with any of the businesses I've started. Because at each of them, I didn't see myself as the pedestal-based "entrepreneur" who in my mind is a successful person full of confidence, cars, and airline status. Despite being 6 businesses in, I still felt like the 19-year-old kid hustling for some cash to survive.

    It came from focusing on my personal mental development. Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking Fast & Slow was my backward way of discovering how to connect with my body and treat it like a person. Once my body and I figured out how to work together, I realized... No matter how much I make or how many startups fail or succeed, I'll be just fine. Panic hustling season of my life... Over.

    The freedom that comes from that confidence leads to a flood of clear thinking and happiness. Together we learned a huge truth for myself... It's ok to be happy. I don't have to self-flagellate on the altar of imposter syndrome or put on a persona that others are expecting of me. I get to be nerdy me... And I want to be happy.

    Now the "persona" of entrepreneur that I dreamed of, actually doesn't matter to me. I'm happy and have a brain full of cool stuff I love helping people with.

  • I mean... I was kinda always that way. My parents have no idea where it came from, but apparently, I was taking charge of kids on the playground and organizing them into departments to serve a larger storyline we all worked out.

    BUT when I was 19, I was working a summer job, training to be a chef. I went to a concert, was mesmerized by all the cool audio and lighting gear, walked up to the audio engineer, and demanded: "How do I get your job? This looks awesome". 2 weeks later I was on my first tour. 15 years later, I retired from the touring industry and dove head first into startups.

    That concept of Have a good idea that gets me excited > Do the good idea, has kinda stuck with me ever since. Now it just involves pitch decks and capital raises.

  • Well, that depends on the stage of the business. Some of my startups had super sexy massive HubSpot implementations with every hub on an enterprise level (not so humble brag)... but then I've also seen an intern kid with a spreadsheet be just as elegant.

    All that matters is how easy it makes your customers' lives. Focus on their results. Dream in their perspective. Choose tools that make their life easier, not yours.

    All that nerdy context being said:

    I LOVE Notion. I'm bordering on Jedi Master level at this point. It's my love language I think. When me and the friends are scheming some cool idea, they all know I'm taking it seriously when a new Notion account gets spun up and they all get invites.

    Zapier was huge and always has been. It’s the “integrate everything” platform. When I’m trying to create a specific experience for a customer but the service I’m using doesn't do it; I use Zapier to do the handoff, without needing a staff member who might forget, which hurts the customers… The people I serve. 

    At this point, ChatGPT is an irreplaceable tool, which happened shockingly fast. We’ve written internal bots trained on our processes, that helps keep our ideas fresh. We have a copywriter bot that was trained on 1000s of lines of text from books (authors way smarter than us), internal research, and other sources on exactly who our customer is and what kind of language they use, which is why if you look at our website and it makes no sense to you… congrats! You self selected out of the funnel!

    Squarespace has been awesome for Visionary Clarity. Our beloved Visionaries tend not to think linearly (as they should!) so the traditional Section > Square Div > content section of most page editors just don’t offer the organic free-flowing design we needed.

  • Having co-founded a few startups at this point, several of which failed, I’ve had a few. 

    I’ll give the highlights:

    Partnerships are like a marriage. Do your freakin research. 

    You’re marrying not only them and their history, but their family, their beliefs, and their other entanglements. If they pass research, clearly define roles. “Partner drift” is a real thing.

    Disruption is costly:
    If your big idea is trying to take on a massive incumbent industry… do your research, do it again, then pay someone on Upwork to do it again. 

    1. Why has no one else done your idea?

    2. How much power are you about to piss off? Do you have a similar level of power/cash? (”Power” can be a crowd of loyal customers. Doesn’t have to be cash, but cash helps too)

    3. What kind of preferential treatment do they have in higher power centers that could prevent you from launching your solution? Can you change that faster than your cash runway?

  • Validate the idea on paper in greater detail, as best you can, before you raise capital. If you’re great at getting people excited about your passion, you’ll get the money. But you only have X number of years left in your life which is Y number of startups in total… Don’t waste one on an idea that won’t validate 2 years later after you spent a ton of your biggest believers' money. They prob won’t believe you again

    Also… 
    “Pessimists get to be right. Optimists get to be rich”

    Which honestly might not help all readers and out of context sounds kinda terrible. But at the time I heard it, it really helped me to stop freaking out about and building solutions to all the things that could go wrong and just focus on a little blind faith it would work and just launch the damn thing so you can start selling. Sales are the true validation.