It’s Not Too Early to Be Thinking About 2026

Introduction:

This week, David C. Barnett and Jennifer Kerhin say they’re already making plans for next year: adjusting pricing, conducting employee reviews, and setting budgets. In the past, Jennifer has chosen to restrain growth to give her employees and her processes a chance to catch up. But this coming year? She says she’s ready to “unleash the hounds.” And for the first time, she’s planning to budget for profit first and then force her expenses to fit her margins. Unlike Jennifer, who conducts employee reviews throughout the year, David saves his evaluations for the end of the year. As he looks forward, he’s trying to figure out what the economy means for his business. He’s seeing more companies in distress, but also more opportunities to help people with severance packages who decide to buy businesses. Plus: David and Jennifer share how they’ve each been experimenting with ChatGPT of late.

— Loren Feldman

Guests:

David C. Barnett helps people buy and sell businesses.

Jennifer Kerhin is CEO of SB Expos and Events.

Producer:

Jess Thoubboron is founder of Blank Word.

Full Episode Transcript:

Loren Feldman:
Welcome David and Jennifer. It’s great to have you here. As we head into the fourth quarter of a pretty wild 2025, I’m eager to hear if you’ve started to think about 2026. But first, it’s been a while since either of you has been on the podcast, and I’m curious how you’re doing. Jennifer, the last time you were here, you told us, of all things, that your house had burned down. I think that was a couple of months ago now. How have you been doing?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Better. The emotions have run their course. We kind of have a new plan. We’re in a rental and sort of planning next stages, going through the insurance. Our insurance company has actually been incredible, wonderful, fantastic.

Loren Feldman:
You don’t hear that every day.

Jennifer Kerhin:
You do not. And in the beginning, I think, until we got some of the right people—considering how big of a disaster it was—it was a little bit of a bumpy ride. And then we found the right people, and they’ve been really fantastic. And then the last couple days, they’ve started to demolish the inside, take out the belongings, and start to demolish the stuff.

So, you know, it’s sad as you go through. The house is still kind of standing, and you go through it to try to pull anything that you can find of value. So that’s been sad the last few weeks, but I think the strongest emotions are over. Any small business owner knows your personal life has to sometimes take a back seat to your business, your professional life, but sometimes it can’t. I’m back to a little semblance of normalcy, and then trying to plan a new future, but good, and on the path to better.

Loren Feldman:
Glad to hear that. You know, Jennifer, I remember early on when you joined this podcast, we had an episode where we actually laughed a lot because we were talking about insurance. And every time—

Jennifer Kerhin:
I remember this. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Clearly you do.

Jennifer Kerhin:
I said was over-insured.

Loren Feldman:
Every time somebody brought up a different kind of policy, your reaction was, “I think I have that.”

Jennifer Kerhin:
Good memory, Loren. Wow, I forgot about that podcast [episode].

Loren Feldman:
Is that what happened with your home insurance? Is that why you had a happy experience with that aspect of this awful situation?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Yeah, probably. It’s been great. I’m kind of shocked, the kind of insurance that we got. Because there’s insurance for everything with your house, just like a business. There’s insurance that if you have to live somewhere else, they’ll pay for the rental. There’s insurance for your belongings. There’s insurance to redo the house. There’s insurance based on if you had artwork, if you had jewelry with certain types of valuables. It costs now more than it did when we bought the original insurance years ago to rebuild—the escalator clause. It’s unbelievable the different ways.

Loren Feldman:
And you had all of it?

Jennifer Kerhin:
I did. I did. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Well, I’m glad that paid off for you. One thing you told us a couple of months ago, when you were here shortly after the fire, was that you had an event coming up, I think that week, a company-wide retreat, if I recall correctly. Were you able to pull that off?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Yes, surprisingly. It was a staff retreat. We had 30 people flying in from around the country, and they said, “Jen, just don’t go or cancel.” Well, you can’t cancel. This is once a year. The entire staff is counting on it. We’ve had plans, we’ve hired consultants, we’ve signed contracts. So I had to go.

Loren Feldman:
You had only the clothes you were wearing, right?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Absolutely. I had jeans, a T-shirt, and flip flops. I didn’t even run out of the house with keys to my car. I didn’t run out with my purse. I ran out with a cell phone. So I had nothing, literally nothing. And my neighbors gave me some clothes. Some of my friends gave—I didn’t have a suitcase. I was putting stuff in trash bags. I didn’t have an extra set of glasses, so I couldn’t find my glasses. And I thought, “Oh my goodness, I can’t see anything.”

I did go. The retreat was about five days later. I tried very, very hard to not make the retreat about my personal tragedy. So I started off, I put one or two slides in my CEO intro, and then I didn’t talk about it again until five days later. And then I talked at the end, but throughout it—

Loren Feldman:
Wait, this was a five-day retreat?

Jennier Kerhin
It was four days, but I had gotten there the night before to set up. So it was four days of the retreat, and you know, I’m getting calls in between things. I have two kids. They’re young adults now, but my daughter still lives with us. She’s 20, and she’s trying to figure out what to do and how to live. And I got a lot of really generous requests, like, from my industry: What can we do for you?

Loren Feldman:
Competitors or people you work with?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Well, suppliers and vendors and different people I know in my industry. And so somebody said, “Jen, look, you’ve got to come up with an answer. Everybody’s asking what we can do for you.” So I said, “Well, I need Uber Eats or DoorDash because I can’t go to the grocery store. My husband was in somebody’s basement. I was in my sister’s house. My daughter was at her friend’s house. “Can you just get us so we can have some food?” Because I don’t know where we’re going to eat. We didn’t have a kitchen for six weeks. So I got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars. It was really generous and sweet, mostly to give to my daughter, because she was living out of friends’ couches for weeks.

And then, in my office, which happened to not get burned, I had logo clothing from my company. I think I wore that straight for the first three weeks. I wore the pair of jeans I came out with and then SB Expos & Events’ green long-sleeve shirts and short-sleeve shirts for the first three weeks. So I wore a lot of SB green during that time, but we got through it. The retreat was fantastic. I was able to compartmentalize and separate, and then move on. And then at that point, then try to figure out: Okay, where are we going to live for the long-term? It’s probably going to be two to three years. And what to do, how to deal with insurance—just everything. I mean everything.

Loren Feldman:
And have you been able to keep up at business? I mean, what kind of impact has this had, if any, on your business?

Jennifer Kerhin:
I think the first three weeks, I was probably working 75 percent, but now I’m back to 100. I’ve gone to industry events. We have a stable house. We have some stability. And look, honestly, we need the income. As anybody with a small business, I can’t afford to not keep your business going, especially until I understood what was happening with insurance. We needed to make sure that the business could support us. So I didn’t really have a choice, to be honest.

Loren Feldman:
Were there aspects of the business that you’ve kept to yourself that you had to delegate because of the situation?

Jennifer Kerhin:
There were some things I don’t think I had to keep to myself, but I had maybe held on too long, to be honest. And this fire forced me to delegate, which was a good thing. So that was a silver lining. It forced me to give up some aspects of control and realize that I didn’t really need it. So that was really good. But there are some things that no one else can do but me, and it made me realize I have to figure out ways for other people to do this, because it shouldn’t all be stuck with me.

Loren Feldman:
Well, one thing, we should say: Nobody was hurt in the fire, right? You were in the house.

Jennifer Kerhin:
I got out. That’s right. Nobody was hurt. Absolutely. Everybody was okay.

Loren Feldman:
David, what’s going on in your world?

David Barnett:
Well, I’ve been busy traveling over the last month, Loren. I actually went to two different conferences. I went to one in the middle of August, and I went to one just last week, actually. I was out in Portland, Oregon, for the first time in my life. It’s a great town. They have a little restaurant there that only sells s’mores. [Laughter] So if you’re a fan of camping, you might want to go there for dessert one night. I took some photos because I’d never seen that before.

Loren Feldman:
That’s pretty funny. And how’s your business doing, David?

David Barnett:
Things are going well. The number of clients that we’re serving and all that kind of thing tends to be steady. And now we’re getting ready for our year-end series of things that I try to do every year, starting to plan for that and make sure that I don’t forget anything. But the end of the year is usually a time when we do a review of all pricing.

And then we also have our employee reviews, and I’ve got a method for how the employees go through all their different tasks and areas of responsibilities and give their feedback about what they like, what they didn’t like, how well they thought they did over the year, what they would like to see change for themselves. And I’m starting to work on some things that I might change in that process for next year that, in part, were inspired by some of the things I’ve heard on this podcast.

Loren Feldman:
Well, that’s intriguing. I’ll be eager to hear a little bit more about that. But tell me, that’s interesting to me that you’ve got this set process at the end of the year. You know, for example, you mentioned pricing. There’s been a lot going on this year. Why do you leave it to the end of the year? Why isn’t that something that you deal with whenever it’s necessary to deal with it?

David Barnett:
Well, because there’s a lot of work that goes into changing the pricing the way we do it. So, our prices are integrated in a lot of different systems and processes that we do. And if we have to update our engagement agreements, it means setting up new contracts through online signature platforms and all that kind of thing. So I don’t look at it as though I’m doing it late in the year. I look at it like I’m doing it early for 2026.

Jennifer Kerhin:
David, do you do all the performance reviews at one time? Is that what I heard?

David Barnett:
Yeah, well, they’ll all happen over the course of a couple of weeks.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Okay.

Loren Feldman:
It sounds like that’s not what you do, Jennifer?

Jennifer Kerhin:
No, and someone asked me if I should start doing that. And so, it’s intriguing. I do mine based on when they were hired. So if they were hired in March, we do it in March the next year. But it’s a lot of work. And someone said to me, “Why don’t you do it all at one time?” So it’s intriguing, David, to hear that.

David Barnett:
Well, I can tell you why I do it all at once, because we are a team of five. But on our org chart, we have about 16 roles. And so everyone on the team has their name in more than one box. And so when we do the review at the end of the year, and I get feedback on how people found their jobs over the course of the year—like last year, for example, some of the people thought that they would do better taking on some of the other boxes, and they weren’t really happy about some of the boxes that they were charged with. They didn’t really enjoy that kind of stuff. And so based on everybody’s feedback, I moved some of the names around on the org chart. And so, that’s why I do it all at once—in case I want to change how things are functioning.

Loren Feldman:
Jennifer, I think one reason a lot of people do them all at once at the end of the year is because they link the employee annual review with a salary discussion, and the salary discussion is part of budgeting for the coming year. There are a lot of people who think that’s not a great practice. How do you handle that?

Jennifer Kerhin:
That’s exactly why it was mentioned to me that it would be much easier to track compensation and raises to the budget if you did it all at one time. We have 30 staff, and I have five different directors, plus myself, who does the directors. And it can be hard to balance across all of it for raises to budget, but it would also be hard for everybody to do it at the same time. And so I’m balancing employee bandwidth to do the raise, to do the performance review, combined with the work it takes to balance out for budgets, and I’m trying to figure out which one’s more important.

Loren Feldman:
So don’t you run into the situation where you make a decision on somebody’s compensation, and maybe it goes in a slightly unexpected direction, and that can have a ripple effect on other people?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Absolutely. And I think that’s why, Loren, people have said to me, “This would be better if you did it all at once.” And when they first told me this a year ago, I pooh-poohed the idea, because I thought, “That’s ridiculous. That’s a lot of work to do it all at once.” But I think as you grow—or I’m wrong, because David is smaller, and he does it all at once. I was thinking: It’s problematic. It does have ripple effects financially. It has ripple effects on titles and sort of equity across departments for compensation to my budget. Yes, it does. And so I am considering whether I should do it all at once.

Loren Feldman:
David, do you have the compensation discussion at the same time you have the annual review with employees?

David Barnett:
I do. In fact, part of the annual review is getting their input on their salaries and what they think we should be doing, as far as adjustments and things like that. So I like to have the conversation all at once, because they’re giving feedback on how they felt they did at their job and what great projects or other contributions that they handled and were responsible for and all that kind of stuff. And I find it’s an easy time to discuss how their salary might change.

Loren Feldman:
I don’t know that there’s a right or wrong answer here. The critique I’ve heard of doing it together is that, when you do it together, the only thing the employee really tends to hear is the salary discussion, and other stuff can get lost or fall through the cracks. Have either of you experienced anything like that?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Loren, are you saying if you separate the review from the compensation discussion?

Loren Feldman:
Yeah.

Jennifer Kerhin:
I haven’t ever heard of that, honestly. That’s interesting.

Loren Feldman:
I think there was a little bit of a boomlet for that maybe 10 years ago. I think for the reasons I just said, that if you really want to talk about performance, it’s better to just focus on performance and not make it be all about compensation, which can happen. But as David just said, one follows naturally from the other. And I’m not espousing that view. I certainly understand why people link them.

David Barnett:
We do regular one-on-ones. I mean, basically, because my company is so small, everyone reports to me. And so we do regular one-on-one calls, and we’re always talking about the ongoing projects or how something was handled. Or I give people feedback as quickly as I can if I see something slipping or they’ll ask me for input on stuff.

So I don’t think that we’re necessarily waiting until the end of the year to talk about their performance, but I think in the review, it’s an Excel spreadsheet that I’ve created that basically they can input all the areas of responsibility from our org chart into this spreadsheet, and then they can make comments on the different things and how they thought they did in the year. It allows it all to come together in one big conversation. And as far as I was concerned, it was to feed the salary conversation. There’s also the fact that my name is in the HR director box, and I like to compartmentalize it and get it all done in as short an order as I can, so I can focus my time on more valuable aspects that produce revenue and stuff. [Laughter]

Jennifer Kerhin:
Yeah, and it’s time-consuming to do these if you want to do it right. We do the one-on-ones too, and try to give feedback. But we also created, a couple years ago, a career matrix where sort of the job—whether you’re a coordinator, manager, senior manager—and expectations, so that we can have criteria to evaluate on that’s less subjective. And that’s been incredibly helpful to give people honest feedback. It’s also been interesting.

Last year, we put into the performance review smart goals, and some people were surprised this year when we brought those back up and they didn’t accomplish, and others had accomplished them within the first couple months. And the line of where your career is at, it’s a constant balance between the employer and the employee. As an employer who cares about her employees, I want to give opportunities for development—professional development challenges, training—but I also want the employee to take ownership of what they want and how to get there, so that’s a constant balance between the two.

Loren Feldman:
Have either of you learned anything about that face-to-face review process that’s made it a more productive, more enjoyable process for you?

Jennifer Kerhin:
As a founder and an owner, you do so many different things—the 21 hats—and so, when your company grows, you lose flexibility. And it has been hard. When we first did the career matrix, I fought it tooth and nail, but it’s been very helpful to others to have a matrix in which to gauge their performance. We’re never going to be the government with their steps, their GS-4s versus GS-15s, but to have some semblance of criteria and requirements that aren’t vague, that aren’t subjective.

It’s not how, as an owner and founder, you start the company, but when you have employees, they want that, and they crave that. So I found that process, once we’ve had it, we have a pretty in-depth performance review that goes through technical skills as well as soft skills as well as technology skills, and we rate them on it and then go through their goals from last year, if they accomplished them—things like that. I like our process now, because it’s taken not all of it, but some of the subjectivity out of it. It’s taken a lot of flexibility out of it, but I think it’s been better for employees to see how they’re doing.

Loren Feldman:
What have you lost by losing that flexibility?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Ugh. A lot, but that’s a part of growth. Every time you want to grow, it’s not two people. And so, you can’t say, “Okay, we’re going to do this today.” I used to give out subjective bonuses all the time. “Okay, you’re going to do this for me. Okay, well, here’s a couple hundred dollars.” I’ve had to stop doing that. I’ve had to take some of the subjectivity out of this process so that a staff of 30 can feel comfortable. It’s still, obviously, somewhat subjective, right? But to take out more of that than I would have liked, so that everybody feels that they understand where they stand and where they can go.

David Barnett:
This year, I tried to bring our clients into the loop of feedback for some of our employees, the ones who work directly with our clients. And so we introduced a feedback form that gets sent to clients when we deliver our consulting projects to them. And I had great hopes that people would fill in this small, 10-question survey, and we actually linked some of the annual bonus to maintaining certain kinds of scores from the customers.

But what unfortunately has ended up happening is we aren’t getting enough people to fill them in. I don’t know if there’s a secret to this or what. I’ll give you a crazy example. We’ve had people tell us verbally how happy they were with the service, or how thankful they were that they worked with us, and we helped them avoid something that would be problematic. I’ve had people send emails that make great testimonials, but they still don’t fill in the form.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Is the form directed about an employee’s performance?

David Barnett:
It’s both the employee and the company and how they feel about us. And it’s a simple 10-question form, and I’m not sure if the problem is the form, or the way we’re asking, or what.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Do you give away prizes?

David Barnett:
Hmm. No, but I don’t know if that kind of inducement would be apropos to how we position ourselves.

Loren Feldman:
David, you mentioned that you’re going to be looking at pricing. Do you have a sense where that conversation is going to go? What are your expectations?

David Barnett:
Well, we do an increase of some kind every year. And so it’s just going to be a matter of where I think it should go. I mean, I intend to give all my employees raises this year, and all my other costs have increased as well. And so there will be an increase of some kind. I’ve got a product matrix, as it were, which refers to different products relative to other products. So, I kind of get in there, and I think, “Hmm, would this percentage increase in one of our most popular products make sense? What would the result of that be?” And then it shows me what the other prices would be relative to that. And then I just massage it a little bit, like, if it gives me a number ending in 37, I might change it to 49 or something like that.

Loren Feldman:
Is there any increased urgency this year, given the state of our economies—you’re in Canada, as people will recall. Or is this just another year?

David Barnett:
So far, for us, it’s just another year. We’re performing really well this year. I mean, we have an increase in revenue over last year. I’m not quite sure what’s going to happen with the economy. I think that there was a lot of excitement and drama earlier in the year with news headlines and things changing quickly from one week to the next. I think that things are settling down a little bit, but there is definitely real change happening in the economy. I mean, I’m talking to business owners now who are seeing declines in their businesses. We’re hearing now about more and more layoffs and things like that.

So there definitely is something happening with the economy, and I don’t know how it’s affected us yet. Because we work with people who are trying to buy or sell a business, certain kinds of layoffs or job terminations can actually lead us to have more customers, because some people will get some kind of severance from their employer, and they’ll consider perhaps buying a business as an alternative to finding a new job. That was my experience back during the big downturn in ’08, ’09. And so we’re really in a kind of wait-and-see sort of pattern. But so far, things seem to be pretty stable for our business.

Jennifer Kerhin:
I went to a conference last week called CEIR Predict Conference, and CEIR is the Center for Exhibition Industry Research. It does research. It’s the largest one for exhibitions in North America, and they had four different economists give their different spiels on what’s happening in the economy, what’s happening next year, and how it relates to exhibitions. And all of them sort of put in that there’s a 20- to 35-percent chance of a recession for next year—not super high, but also not very low.

And for the exhibition industry, at least with trade shows, just marking things down, especially with attendance, even more so than exhibits and sponsors, but attendance, marking that low. And I think many of us have seen some of the articles about tourism into the U.S., and international tourism specifically. And that affects the trade show industry quite a bit in attendance. So it’s interesting that you say that about severance and buying businesses, because that makes a lot of sense. If you are laid off and you have it be harder to find a job, especially if you have a lot of experience and had a pretty high salary, that makes a lot of sense.

David Barnett:
Are you seeing attendance levels at trade shows and conferences go down? Because I think it’s probably one of those business expenses that someone might feel is a pretty easy thing to cut out if they’re trying to be more lean with their budget.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Not yet, not yet. We have a lot of fall shows that are doing well, but talk to me in six months.

Loren Feldman:
I guess, right now, that money’s already been budgeted probably.

Jennifer Kerhin:
David, one have you heard about? I’ve gone to a lot of different business economics speeches where they talk about the Great Depression of 2030 to 2031, so that you should sell your business before then.

David Barnett:
I have not heard anyone speak about that. I’ve heard people sort of over in the personal investing space, talk about big cycles in what’s happening economically, all that stuff inspired by the book The Fourth Turning and things of that nature. But I have not specifically heard anyone talking about sort of a deadline to get out, because everything’s gonna have problems.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Explode? Yeah, it’s a forecast made by ITR Economics.

Loren Feldman:
That’s what I was gonna say. I’ve heard their presentation.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Yeah, me too. Me too. And so I’m like, “Okay, maybe I need to sell my business December of 2029,” I don’t know.

Loren Feldman:
They have, for several years now, been predicting a Great Depression, with a D, beginning early in the 2030s. I think a lot of it has to do with demographics. But yeah, it’s a little scary. Jennifer, what’s your process? How are you starting to think about 2026?

Jennifer Kerhin:
I have to say, my company only did a budget last year for the first year ever. It was a formal process I did with my CFO, a little embarrassing to admit, but we did it. We spent a lot of time on it, from the revenue forecasting and expenses and on the good side, we stuck to that budget pretty close. Our forecasting was right on track. Our expenses were right on track. So that was great.

This year, I’m involving others in it, but I’m doing something called a roadmap, which is basically just goals and objectives that will help tie into a budget, sort of from the CEO level down to each department level, so that we can all be aligned on the goals and the budget for next year. So I’m working on that right now. I just finished my part of the roadmap, sharing with my senior leadership team in the next few weeks, so that we can have a budget by the end of November.

This part is important as you grow. It is not fun. This is the part, like anybody who starts a small business is like, “Arrrgh.” But the roadmap is more fun, rather than the budget. The roadmap is kind of exciting, because it’s taking your vision, your ideas, your enthusiasm for the future, but turning it into objectives that your other leaders can actually look at, come up with ideas that flow into that, and rather than constantly explaining yourself, you can disseminate the vision. And they can align themselves with you, with their own objectives. So that part, I’m pretty excited about.

Loren Feldman:
Goals and objectives along the lines of adding more clients? Or new lines of business? Or what else?

Jennifer Kerhin:
So we have a very unsophisticated business development marketing system, and that was one of the things that’s still on my shoulders a lot. We have a person on staff, a senior director who’s great at estimating, but a lot of business development is still on my shoulders, so I just hired a fractional chief revenue officer to help get that system next year more sophisticated, specific goals each month, a cadence. We have a cadence to social media, but tying that into a marketing strategy and following that, watching our services, and tracking that. It’s more haphazard and ad hoc. That’s my goal for next year, to make it a more strategic thought-through business development marketing.

We also just launched a whole new set of services a few weeks ago. So right after the fire, I have a retreat. The week after, I have to go to a big trade show to launch our brand new services. It was in California. I’ve never been so exhausted in my life, emotionally, and my booth, my exhibit booth, was damaged in the fire. So within those two weeks, I had to hurry up and get a brand new booth and ship it there. So we launched these brand new services, and they’re doing really well.

Loren Feldman:
What kind of services?

Jennifer Kerhin:
We do trade show sales and management, and this is customized work over multi-years. So an association will hire us, and we become their outsourced department, and we’re ingratiated into their team, whether it’s through trade show sales or meeting logistics or registration. Well, that’s very customized, a lot of handoffs, multi-years, a lot of responsibility. We happen to use a certain event technology. We are not agnostic to event technology. We have chosen the one that we think is the absolute best. It’s called Cadmium event technology. We love it. We think it’s fantastic. We’ve become a partner with them for years. We’ve launched a whole new set of services where we are doing implementation and auditing and on-site support of this event tech.

So if you think about Salesforce, they have a million of those types of partners out there who will do consulting, onboarding, whatever you need to support that rather than doing it yourself. We’ve started this with Cadmium event tech, and it’s really taken off. I already have the staffing to do it, but it’s separate, from a business perspective, because of the standard pricing, the short-term, the handoff. So I’m very excited about the future for this.

David Barnett:
Jennifer, is this like the app you would use if you’re an attendee at a conference to navigate?

Jennifer Kerhin:
That’s right. Oh, yeah. So you may not know there is a lot of technology behind the scenes, rather than just the app. The app is what every attendee sees, but David, have you ever exhibited at a trade show?

David Barnett:
Not for a really long time, like 15 years.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Okay, well, have you ever spoken? Are you a speaker?

David Barnett:
Yeah.

Jennifer Kerhin:
So there’s a lot of event technology that manages speakers, manages taking your session title and putting it into a website and the app so people can see it; getting your biography; getting your photographs; and what session you’re going to. All of that technology, the app, is sort of the tip of the iceberg that people see.

But there’s a whole world out there of event technology, which is mostly databases. But then registration forms—how do you register, and then how do you sell exhibits and sponsorships? We are very tech-forward, and we happened to choose this one platform that I absolutely love.

Loren Feldman:
So Jennifer, I think you said that the roadmap part of this is the fun part. It’s the vision, imagining, being creative. The painful part is translating that into a budget. Is that thinking about how much revenue it’s actually going to produce?

Jennifer Kerhin:
No, it’s not that part. It’s getting into the nitty-gritty of, like, I’ve never worked backwards from a net profit. I bought that book Profit First. Have either one of you read that book?

David Barnett:
Oh, yes.

Loren Feldman:
I know about it. I haven’t read it.

Jennifer Kerhin:
So I just read it over the summer, and I’ve never put the budget where I put the profit first. So putting the profit first! Let’s see how this works out this year. And working backwards. And I’m like, “Uhhh, okay, we have to change this. I don’t like these details. I want to make decisions.”

And honestly, Loren, I had never really thought about the roadmap as the creative side. That’s a great observation by you. I hadn’t really linked that into my head, but yeah, going from profit first and going backwards into the nitty-gritty of expenses and revenue to get that profit. That’s not fun. My CFO is fantastic. I love her. And she’s helping me get through this painful part.

Loren Feldman:
I assume she’s kind of doing the heavy lifting?

Jennifer Kerhin:
She is, and she’s fantastic. She’s a fractional CFO that’s been with me since the company was, I don’t know, a couple hundred thousand dollars, and has helped build the entire infrastructure. And she can also speak my language, so she knows when I’ve reached my limit. And I know where she’s like, “Okay, stop being creative. Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty.”

Loren Feldman:
Jennifer, you said at various times that you’ve done things to kind of restrain growth, because you thought you were growing too quickly and you wanted to improve processes. What are you thinking for 2026 in that regard?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Unleash the hounds! That’s why I want this business development system. We’ve built the systems. We’ve done a fantastic job. The infrastructure is there. We invested a lot of resources into a new HR platform and new systems with our financials. We had very good accounting, but we’ve done a better job of systems, fantastic job of operations. So we’re ready. We’re ready. So now, if I can go hog wild on these sales, I think we should be able to manage it—and not like we did a couple years ago where we grew 145 percent and I almost killed myself from exhaustion.

Loren Feldman:
How dependent are you for that vision on the economy as a whole? Can you have a good year if the economy is down?

Jennifer Kerhin:
So one good thing is associations, unless there’s a global pandemic, almost always have their convention and trade show, right? That’ll never happen, right? They almost always do. Even if there’s less people, they almost always have their event. This isn’t where, like, for example, if you have a luxury item, people might cut back. Or, if you’re at a restaurant, people might cut back on how often. They’re still gonna have the event. They just might be smaller or get less money. So it’s not recession-proof. I’m going to knock on wood, absolutely not. But I have more margin of error for that. So I’m not as worried for that.

Loren Feldman:
Last thing I wanted to cover with you today: There’s just been so much talk about AI. I know you both have given it a lot of thought. Have either of you done anything recently that you’re excited about? Any new use cases?

David Barnett:
Well, Loren, this is what I wanted to say that we’re going to be doing new for next year that was partly inspired by this show. So I created a strategic advisor project within ChatGPT, and I gave it all kinds of information about our company history, products, the way we serve clients, etc., so I could brainstorm with it. And then I thought, “Hmm, maybe I could give it information about us on the team.” So I had the employees resumes from when they were hired, and I just changed them so that would just be their initials and not their full names, but I put that in there too. And so then it started to brainstorm with me and give me ideas and then tell me about how the people on the team might be a part of these different plans or ideas, etc.

So this year, when we do our annual reviews—I’m pretty sure I’m going to do this; I haven’t quite made the final decision—I think I’m going to create some sort of resume update where people are going to detail, with the information from the review, sort of the things they’ve done over the last year, the projects they worked on, that kind of thing, so that I can have more up-to-date HR information in this strategic advisor chat.

Loren Feldman:
And how are you using it? Are you having conversations with it and with those personas that you’ve created for your employees?

David Barnett:
Well, not with the employees, but with the advisor itself, that is the chatbot. So, if I have an idea when I’m out for a morning walk, I’ll come back and I’ll just type it in. And I’ll say, “You know, I was thinking about doing this. How do you think this fits in with the rest of what we do?” And it’ll just sort of generate a list of ideas, pros, cons, concerns, etc. I’ll give it a website, for example, for a conference I might attend, and then I’ll say, “What do you think the fit is between me attending this conference? And what do you think the advantages might be for our company if I go?”

And so, it’s interesting to see what it turns out. And I’ve got to say, about half of what it says is easily dismissed, because it doesn’t make sense at all, or have much credence, but other things—and here’s the key: It’s not that I’m seeing these things from ChatGPT and then I want to do them. It’s that these other things are then sparking other further ideas in me. So it’s just kind of like a brainstorming session that people will do together. You know, I’m doing it with the machine.

Loren Feldman:
What is the advantage of having told it about your employees and giving it the initials of those employees. How do you use that to your advantage?

David Barnett:
Well, when I sometimes make queries to it, it’ll come back and it’ll say, “If you are able to pull this off, or if you wanted to do this, then this person has experience in this area from a previous job that could be applicable to this new initiative.” It’ll try to relate the people on the team and how they might fit into something new that we might do: a new product, service, event, or thing that we might try to do.

Loren Feldman:
Jennifer, the last time that you and I talked about AI on this podcast, you told us about how you had asked ChatGPT to identify your blind spots as a CEO. [Laughter]

Jennifer Kerhin:
I do remember that.

Loren Feldman:
You thought they were pretty on target.

Jennifer Kerhin:
They were, they were. Well, we did something recently. We hired a director, and we used ChatGPT to help us sort through—we input the resumes of our finalists, along with, we did StrengthsFinders, which is an assessment. And then we asked them some questions specific to our work and we asked ChatGPT to rate the finalists based on what we needed in our job description and tell us which person would come across best.

And it was interesting. It gave fantastic feedback, really great feedback. We did the hard work of getting to that, but it helped us really narrow down our choice. We hired somebody fantastic—a wonderful, great choice. And it helped, I guess, to David’s point, to sort of have a conversation with and point out things to us. So it was really valuable.

Loren Feldman:
Have you eliminated your blind spots as a CEO?

Jennifer Kerhin:
Oh, goodness, no. The top one was basically work to exhaustion and death. Since the fire, I would love to say that that has gone away, but it has not. So, no.

David Barnett:
I think you work to ignition.

Jennifer Kerhin:
I like that. It sounds much better. I think there is something about founders and owners that drives us past the point of madness, and honestly, I can’t figure it out. Is it the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow? Is it some desperate need for external validation? What is it that drives us? Why are we doing this? I don’t know sometimes. But no, ChatGPT has pointed a mirror at my blind spots, and I have yet to change.

Loren Feldman:
Well, I’m guessing you’ve probably made some adjustments.

Jennifer Kerhin:
Of course, absolutely. I just remember the one about exhaustion. I think what it did is, it put a stake in the ground that I had to confront. Some of those, you can kind of ignore them and be in denial. It said, “Look, you really have to reevaluate some things, getting your company to the next level.” And so, maybe I haven’t changed yet, but maybe I’ll see the change over the next year. How about that, Loren: an annual check-in, and we’ll see if all of us still have the same blind spots?

Loren Feldman:
Well, the thing that made it worthwhile for you, that not everybody can do, is that you had been using ChatGPT very regularly, and it knew a lot about you before you asked it to identify those blind spots.

Jennifer Kerhin:
It absolutely did. And I think what I’ll do is I’ll go back to that. I think I’m gonna do a six-month check-in, and I’ll go back to where it said that and ask it, based on my—because I probably talk to ChatGPT about four or five times a day. And I will say, “Have you seen change?” Goodness, it’s now my therapist, I guess. And see, that’s a really good point, Loren, to go back to that.

Loren Feldman:
We’ll be eager to hear about that. David, you’ve told us that you, while you’re driving, like to have conversations with ChatGPT. Have you asked it for your blind spots?

David Barnett:
I have not. I tend to get into brainstorming sessions where I talk about business ideas or things that have just been bugging me subconsciously or whatever. I find it’s a different interface when you’re talking to it. It’s interesting how it presents stuff, and I’m finding it’s becoming a more preferred way to pass the time in the car than listening sometimes to podcasts or music.

Loren Feldman:
Can I get you to commit to asking for your blind spots and then sharing them with us?

David Barnett:
I can do that. Let me write it down on this piece of paper. [Laughter]

Loren Feldman:
Thank you very much, both of you. I really appreciate your sharing and taking the time. My thanks to David Barnett and Jennifer Kehrin.