Dana Severson

Weather delays. Compliance gaps. Lost days and lost dollars. Every contractor knows the pain. Pavewise, based in North Dakota and built by operators who’ve lived it, has just raised a $2.5M seed round led by C2 Ventures Fund II, alongside Connetic Ventures, Service Provider Capital, M25, gener8tor 1889, and Broadwater Capital. Their platform brings real-time compliance, weather, and production tracking to road construction, helping crews make better calls, cut rework, and keep projects on time. This is exactly what we mean when we talk about our thesis, Dirty, Dull, and Dangerous innovation: solving real operational problems in essential industries with durable tech. https://lnkd.in/eecPMHdN

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If you have to pay your CTO $200k, you’re already behind. Ryan Baird, founder of Baird Augustine, a Silicon Valley neo investment bank, and the Focus On Risk community, sees this pattern all the time. Founders launching with $0 payroll between them tend to outpace those burning $200k salaries from day one. From what I have seen, startups take off when the CTO is equity instead of a high salary. Here’s Ryan explaining why lean teams get the upper hand. 👇

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Why scaling feels heavier instead of lighter: This hits a nerve because no founder scales to feel more trapped. Yet that is exactly what happens when complexity is left unchecked If scale feels heavier, complexity is winning. Most founders do not notice it until decisions start taking meetings. #scalingecommerce #founderdecisions #opsclarity #Shopify #Ecommerce2026 #AICommerce #FounderReality #DigitalTrust #AgenticAI #USA #NorthAmerica #Canada #Australia #UnitedKingdom #UAE #CommerceInfrastructure #EcommerceLeadership #AIShopping #OperationalExcellence

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Gamma + n8n + GPT-5 is kind of wild... It basically turned into an AI presentation engine that pulled in $47K in deck services last month. 🤯 While agencies charge $3K–$5K per deck and take two weeks… this thing spits out investor-grade presentations in *11 minutes.* No designers. No PowerPoint prison. No revision hell. 🙏 Here’s the workflow in plain words: → Client fills a form with 5 things: topic, audience, goal, brand colors, deadline → n8n fires off a GPT-5 run that builds the entire narrative architecture → Gamma renders a polished, investor-ready deck instantly → System auto-exports to Drive, drafts the client email, logs everything in Sheets → Every output is tracked so delivery is literally instant And the whole stack runs 24/7 while you sleep. 😴⚙️ Why it feels unfair: → You generate 50 variations while competitors build 1 manually → Each deck costs pennies, you charge $500–$2K → No designers slowing anything down → Quality looks Fortune-500 level → Delivery happens automatically through pre-written emails One consultant used this to productize their entire firm. They jumped from 4 custom decks a month to 40+. Same workload… just scaled by automation. 📈 The real shift is psychological: You’re not selling “presentations.” You’re selling *presentation infrastructure* that compounds.

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AI tools promise easy wins. But renting generic solutions leaves STL businesses stuck in someone else’s box: paying an innovation tax on every repetitive click. The companies who thrive aren’t smarter. They treat custom apps, scripts, and workflows as business assets: not expenses. To be blunt, every manual process is buried profit. When you invest in building the tools you actually need, you build equity and control. The workaround is playing small; ownership is a force multiplier. Local leaders choosing custom solutions are quietly buying back time, boosting profit, and raising the bar for everyone else. Ready to shift from renters to builders? DM me if you want hands-on help with training or implementation. I’ll show you exactly how to architect systems that pay for themselves. STL businesses deserve better. Build the asset. Own the value.

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People often ask about difference b/t agencies & our fractional team models: Here's a few key differences: 1) We work with partners across various verticals vs having 1 in-house team. This allows for vertical expertise (i.e. service biz get a Google Ad person with home service expertise, while a cannabis dispensary gets a Google Ad person w/ cannabis experience). This allows for flexible bandwidth as well (i.e. we don't just have 1 internal Google Ad person who could become overwhelmed). We work with plumbers, dispensaries, multi-unit franchisees, HVAC companies, B2B cannabis groups, SaaS tools, THC bevs, etc & each team looks different than the other. 2) We're flexible on scoping & projects. For example; we just closed a deal where client needed small support hours for Shopify, HubSpot, cold email, strategy, etc & we were able to pinpoint a specific level of service / support that not only met their needs but their budget. This can scale up or down very easily. 3) We work with a lot of the best agencies because sometimes they are the best fit. For example; we just hired Sandra Bergman, CLMP™for a consulting project for a dispensary client. This is because she fit their needs. We can bring a lenses of not only knowing all the good agencies but knowing WHEN to recommend one + get the added benefit of rolling her services into other deliverables (SEO + website) vs just working with her on a stand alone basis. 4) We embed; we don't just deliver. A fixed scope with clear deliverables is important; but there is a gap. Many small businesses need an ever-changing set of things, from design, to minor website edits, to async comms on global strategy; etc. And we try & bake in some grace for these items to allow for the variance & unknown that comes each month. This is done by sharing a Slack or Basecamp project together. We can work real-time on things as they arise. 5) We are business owners also. No offense, but many agency owners are agency owners only. Being able to bring experiences to our clients from owning multiple businesses can help provide a powerful POV to the conversation. I truly believe our model is a great hedge against hiring a generalist FTE for your org. For 50-75K a year; we can bring a lot of evolving resources to the table.

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If you're doing podcast guest appearances but not seeing consistent high-ticket conversions, this episode will challenge how you're thinking about growth. Most established coaches believe more visibility equals more revenue. It doesn’t. Without financial infrastructure and backend conversion architecture, authority growth increases pressure instead of profit. In this episode of Podcast Profits Unleashed, I sit down with fractional CFO Monica Roca-Quesada to unpack the financial systems required to support scalable authority. Because visibility without structure leads to feast-or-famine cycles. And conversion isn’t just a marketing metric — it’s a revenue metric. Watch here:

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When Dave Pickles and I started TTD, we wanted to create a platform that was more transparent and more aligned with buyers. We wanted to create closer alignment with brands and agencies. We were one of the few DSPs that didn’t focus on disintermediating the agencies. I stand by our choice to partner with agencies. I stand by our choice to be transparent, even though I think we at times have been too open (as I shared at Marketecture Media last week). Over the last year or two, things have gotten much harder for agencies. Lately it seems that there are those who want to wave the flag of transparency publicly, but run from it in practice as they arbitrage in the inefficiencies of programmatic. Or in the most ironic programmatic practice, principal-based buying. (More on this next week. I know…I’m such a tease.) It bothers me when leaders of non-transparent business models are critical of those of us who are setting the bar—especially when they advocate for moving dollars to more opaque platforms and transaction methods. As Terence Kawaja said to me last week as we sat backstage at Marketecture, the long arc of programmatic, like any market, will inevitably bend toward efficiency and competition. Those who succeed will be those who embrace transparency and offer clients competitive, objective value. Thankfully, almost all of our clients, including the world’s largest brands and agencies, share this point of view. TTD has not “failed" any audit ever. Ruben Schreurs, CEO of Ebiquity plc, assured me today that he was unaware (until after published) that his firm would be quoted or used in any articles about TTD. Relatedly, we will not disclose the bills of all of our clients and partners to one of them simply because they assert ambiguous audit rights.   Working with our clients, we always welcome objective and rigorous analysis of our processes, fees, and the value we deliver for clients.

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Pete Martin-Calling out Midwest VC risk aversion and misaligned incentives is not a character attack. It’s an accurate diagnosis. And I disagree with “we’re in this together.” Founders are the only ones going unpaid, taking existential downside, and absorbing failure. While investors collecting fees, fund managers, program operators, intermediaries, ecosystem builders, are compensated regardless of whether any founder wins. That asymmetry matters. A meaningful portion of capital here is state managed, often with higher management fees and lower carry. Top ecosystems are overwhelmingly funded by private dollars. Michigan relies far more heavily on public capital. That shifts incentives and shows up as smaller checks, lower conviction, reluctance to lead, and founders leaving the region to raise real rounds. It also shows up as tranches, reimbursements, and restricted spend because the system does not fully trust founders with capital. Then founders are expected to produce venture scale outcomes with constrained resources and assigned contractors instead of empowered teams. When it predictably doesn’t work, it reinforces the narrative that founders weren’t investable. At the same time, an entire layer of programming and intermediaries positions itself between founders and actionable capital. Activity gets rewarded. Outcomes don’t. Capital gets diluted before it reaches the builder. And then there is the theater. The ecosystem has to sell the version it hopes to become. But too often that story is built on the backs of current founders, who are asked to tolerate worse conditions today so the region can claim success tomorrow. For us to be “in this together,” current founders would need to be centered in the system we’re building, not treated as the cost of getting to a better future ecosystem.

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