Scaling Through Freedom: How Founders Can Build Businesses That Run Without Them

Intro  0:06

Welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms. Let’s get started.

Susan Kearney  0:30

Hi, I’m Susan Kearney, the host of the Growth + Exit podcast where middle market owners and CEOs talk about founding, scaling and sometimes exiting their businesses. The episode today is brought to you by Newport LLC. Newport’s a cadre of founders, business owners and seasoned C-suite executives who help CEOs of privately held companies build more valuable businesses and exit them on their own terms. Newport is an Inc. Power Partner in 2026 as an example, we helped the owner of a government contracting company build the value of the company and then exit at a 13x to EBITDA a couple of years ago, and it was a life-changing experience for that owner and his team. It was terrific to learn more about Newport. Visit us at Newportllc.com. All right. Now, down to business today, I’m talking with Jordan Solander, who’s a serial entrepreneur. Jordan founded and led multiple businesses, including IT Select and Solender Ventures, and achieved multiple exits, which is the dream of many private company owners. So I’m sure he’s going to have some insights today that’ll be terrific for our audience. So welcome Jordan, and thanks for coming on the podcast today.

Jordan Solender  1:39

Oh yeah, no, my pleasure to be here, excited for the conversation, and love what you guys do. So I’m excited to contribute to the listeners. Great.

Susan Kearney  1:48

Well, let’s get to it. Then, let’s start a little bit talking about your professional background. Is there a common thread that runs through your career that has supported your success? Common thread.

Jordan Solender  2:02

That’s an interesting one. I would say common thread is, like most entrepreneurs, I got a little bit of ADD. I got a little bit of business in Yiddish. They the word is spilkies, like ants in your pants. So it’s not about ideas. For me, it’s, it’s more about things that I really enjoy, and, you know, people I want to help, and products I want to get involved in, and values I can get behind. So I have a plethora of different companies that I own, run and invest in right now, and I would say that is the common thread is that I believe in all of them, or they interest me as a hobby, so I get behind them. There’s no commonality in industry or what they do and who they serve. It’s everything from barbecue restaurant chains to software as a service companies, and IT procurement on a global scale. So the common thread is that interests me. I love this food, and I can get behind that owner, because he’s a great person.

Susan Kearney  3:05

Yeah, you know, in some of the startups I’ve been a part of in my career, we would call that shiny ball syndrome when it’s not well managed, right? But it sounds to me, like many entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, you’re like an idea engine, you know, and things appeal to you, and you don’t just go, that’s neat. You say, Well, let me how can I facilitate that? How can I make that successful? How can I be a part of it? And so that really speaks highly of your ability to not only have ideas, but to manage your way through them, that people aren’t just going stop with this. Yeah, that’s great. So tell us about it. Select. How did you come to start that particular business?

Jordan Solender  3:47

Sure, so IT Select was born out of a need to solve it. Procurement. I was seeing the same problem over and over again. Founders and IT leaders were wasting months and months talking to vendors who were never getting the right fit. And I didn’t want to be another MSP or a reseller. I wanted to be the filter. I wanted to build IT Select as a vendor agnostic advisory, we diagnose the problem first, whether it’s backup and DR cyber security infrastructure, whatever it may be, and run a very structured process to bring the right vendors to the table, fast, no bias, no time wasted, no sales circus. It really came from my own frustration of buying technology and realizing the real value wasn’t the tech, it was clarity and decision making. And that idea scaled because it solved a painful and expensive bottleneck for leaders, and that’s also the same reason I started the coaching platform recently. It’s realizing that bottleneck for different leaders.

Susan Kearney  4:50

Yeah, talk a little bit about the coaching platform. Absolutely.

Jordan Solender  4:55

So the coaching platform was was built to get. Founder led companies unstuck. It exists for one reason and one reason only. Founders become the bottleneck without realizing it. And ultimately, I work with operators who are smart, driven, very capable, but exhausted, because everything still runs through them in the business can’t scale until that changes. So my coaching is really about creating clarity first, then installing the systems, moving on to delegation and accountability so the business can really move without the founder in the middle of every single decision. It’s not motivation or mindset fluff, it’s practical operational work that removes friction and gives founders their time energy and leverage back.

Susan Kearney  5:38

And Is that Is that what you call scaling through freedom.

Jordan Solender  5:42

That is the framework, yes, so I’ve coined it as scaling through freedom, getting your life back. And freedom isn’t necessarily going on yachts and partying and stepping away from your business. Scaling for freedom, in my mind, means the business grows because of structure and not sacrifice, and when you’re able to work on the business. That’s the freedom. You’re not adding long hours, stress or heroics to get results anymore. You’re adding systems and clear ownership and repeatable decisions. Freedom is the signal that scaling is working. And if growth costs you your life, your business isn’t scaling. It’s just consuming you.

Susan Kearney  6:19

Yeah, yeah. That’s, you know, I come across that in my day to day life as an advisor as well, and the owners are, they’re just exhausted and they can’t see the forest for the trees because they’re so deeply in it. And so I really admire that you’ve put that framework together for coaching as a kind of a give back. What other kinds of businesses are you involved in these days,

Jordan Solender  6:43

where to start, like I mentioned, it’s it’s really about things.

Susan Kearney  6:47

I’m sorry, what you say. Can just tell us about a couple of them. I just want people to kind of understand the breadth of of your of your work, sure.

Jordan Solender  6:55

So most of what I do now sits around building and fixing operating systems inside businesses, right? So I have event companies that do big production for corporate events all over the DC, Virginia, Maryland areas, but we do service everywhere from Jersey down the North Carolina Research Triangle. I have a wedding DJ company. That’s actually what put me through college, wedding DJs. So I’ve had two others that I’ve sold, and I’m on my third now, and we do anywhere between 507 100 a year. So that was a passion of mine. Music turned it into a business. I’m an investor, one of the primary investors, in a barbecue chain in Bethesda, Maryland that is exploding right now. Should definitely chill. Check them out if you’re in the area, silver and sun barbecue, shout out to them. And you know, I’m always looking for new things. There’s a couple SaaS companies out in Colorado that an advisor with that are just revolutionizing how we’re capturing video at live events, lots of different businesses right now.

Susan Kearney  7:56

Yeah, that’s cool. And so tell me I want to talk about leadership for a minute, and you started as an entrepreneur quite young. You’re still pretty young. I’m not gonna say you’re old. You’re so young, but kind of tell me what leadership lessons you’ve learned as you’ve faced the unique challenges that each of the businesses has presented to you as a leader of your people,

Jordan Solender  8:22

being a leader, I think means, and it took me a lot of mistakes to get there, means you’re constantly learning in the biggest lesson, lesson for me has been that Leadership isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about creating clarity so other people are other people can win around you and without you. Early on, I thought being a good leader meant doing more, stepping in faster, and just being on top of things, right? But that actually capped the business and burned my people out, because I was always there real, real leadership I have found is restraint. It’s clear expectations. It’s clear ownership and letting people solve problems without rescuing them. Because when the team grows because you’re less involved, not more, that’s when leadership is working, they can follow your values and your vision very clearly and effectively.

Susan Kearney  9:16

Yeah, I mean, CEOs aren’t scalable, right? And that’s that’s the foundation for the business, and not growth, but scale. And so I understand that. And talk to me, it seems like most entrepreneurs in their business have kind of a near death moment at some point while they’re building an experience where it’s if I make the wrong decision here, or if things don’t work out here, they were going to have to shut the doors. Have you ever had that kind of experience? And if so, tell me a little bit about it and how you handled it.

Jordan Solender 9:53

I’m trying to think which one I want to get

Susan Kearney  9:56

into. There’s a bit of honesty, right? Yeah.

Jordan Solender  9:59

Yeah. I mean. Absolutely it. I think if you haven’t had one of those moments, you probably haven’t built anything real and of impact yet. And for me, it came when everything depended on me. I would say in my first IT company called premier technology advisors, back in 2015 revenue, sales, delivery decisions, one wrong move would have taken the whole thing down. What I learned in that moment was very simple but very uncomfortable. Hustle doesn’t save you at scale. Structure does. So I stopped asking, How do I push harder? I started asking, What breaks if I step away? And then I tried to fix those points one by one as I tested the step away point, and I say to clients constantly on the coaching platform, let’s test it. Step away, see what breaks document that. Let’s go back and fix those points in that shift didn’t just stabilize the business. It changed how I led. It changed how I built and how I help other founders survive that same moment without burning everything down.

Susan Kearney  11:01

And how did your team react to that? To that, you know, is in that moment when the business was so precarious and you stopped just trying to out hustle the problems and pause for a moment, and got very thoughtful about it. Found your did your team? Were they worried and frightened, or were they were like, Oh, thank God, he’s finally getting out of our face and we can do our jobs.

Jordan Solender  11:26

It was a little bit of both. At first. It’s very uncomfortable for everybody, because your leadership is doing something they don’t normally do. I had to stop being that safety net, and the team had to stop relying on me, and they had to step into real ownership of their roles and responsibilities, and with a small team that creates tension before it creates trust. So once expectations were clear and people knew and they truly own, the outcomes, confidence really went up. Over time, decisions got faster, the business got healthier. In the biggest shift actually wasn’t that the team didn’t need me to save them day to day anymore. They needed me to set direction and get out of the way. Yeah, because they were moving so fast at this point.

Susan Kearney  12:10

And did you end up, once you learned that lesson, changing the way you built the culture of the company, or changing the way you recruited talent in the company, you know, with that insight that you had gleaned from all that time and effort and sweat and tears

Jordan Solender  12:30

back then, no, okay, now looking back on it, right? It’s all about lessons learned. You know, failing hard and fast gives you a lesson. Good entrepreneurs know that. But now I I, you know, then I stopped hiring for raw talent, and I started hiring for ownership and decision making. If someone needed constant direction, they didn’t scale with the company. And culturally, we moved away from heroics and we moved towards clarity and clear roles, clear outcomes, clear accountability. The goal really became simple for every single company that I touch, that I start, that I lead, that I buy, it’s build a company where doing your job well doesn’t require burning out or waiting for permission. That’s when culture actually starts to support the growth that you’re trying to inject into it, instead of fighting it, because they own these decisions. And we’ve actually done this in a really cool way. We started owning the hiring process in a very unique way, which starts once we identify candidates that we like, we bring them in and we do a what we call a friction test, where they see where we we send them a test that essentially outlines category casually, how they would handle different situations as well as challenges, how fast they get to decision points, and from there, we can kind of score it, you know, almost like a consulting group. When you’re getting an interview. These days, they ask the famous question, how many windows are in New York, right? Do we do something very similar? So we try to understand who’s going to own decisions, who’s going to own outcomes, what’s going to stand in your way? Are you going to act independently? And that drives growth.

Susan Kearney  14:14

That’s great. That’s a challenge that many entrepreneurs that I work with have is making there are so many transitions as you scale a business, and one of them is the transition from owner thinks and and plans and you execute to owner enables and holds accountable. You plan, you execute, and you kind of meet together at this strategy spot, and that’s just such a hard transition, both for owners and for teams. So I love the way you think about particularly the changes in the way you recruit from those lessons that you learned. That’s terrific. What’s been your proudest moment so far with a business that you have. Let’s say owned, rather than invested. When you’ve owned and operated, tell me about some of your proud moments. Proud proudest moment, more than likely came when I had

Jordan Solender  15:15

my third son. They’re personal. My proudest moments aren’t revenue milestones, like they are for entrepreneurs, they’re they’re moments, the moments I’m proudest over the realizing of the realization that the business worked without me in the room. It’s watching the people I hired make strong decisions, solve problems and protect the culture and business without me. Because I know I can step back. I can live a life. I can be with my family, come back, and I still don’t have to be in the business. I can work on the business so I can talk strategy. I can think about what’s working. I can run reports on what customers are giving feedback on, and take that from more of an owner perspective as opposed to an operator perspective. And there’s nothing better, nothing better than seeing a team operate confidently while I’m focused on strategy instead of firefighting. And that’s when, you know, I didn’t just build a business. I built people that are eventually going to be able to lead so that that’s really big. And I would say that came recently after I had my third son, Elliot, I was able to step back when he was born in watch my team lead the organization, and I was, I remember watching it in amazement. I was looking at my phone, and I was offline, like a week after he was born, and I was just, really, just, I had gone dark with work, and they knew I was. I was with my newborn, with my wife, my other two kids, and I saw the emails and slacks flying back and forth just because I’m looking but I’m not getting into it, and I’m seeing them make decisions. They’re confident, they’re fast, they’re the right decisions. They’re talking things through when they don’t understand. They’re figuring out problems. That was a huge proud moment for my business. Oh, that’s awesome.

Susan Kearney  16:58

I love hearing that, and I’m sure that it is empowering and energizing for your team as well, right? I mean, the worst is to, particularly as an executive, is to be hired to build a business and to find out that you were really hired just to execute what somebody else thought, and not to bring your own talent and energy and creativity, innovative thought, you know, to that process. So that’s great. Tell me a little bit about how you instill accountability. This is a challenge for many business owners. They very much want to give the reins to their team, and you get this situation where they they delegate, maybe fully, maybe not, and then when things don’t go exactly as they’d envisioned, they kind of seagull in and pull the reins back, and that’s very toxic over time, right? It’s dispiriting for the for the whole team and for the owner. How do you build that culture of accountability, or how do you structurally create that accountability that allows you to step back and them to step forward confidently? Yeah? Definitely creating accountability takes,

Jordan Solender  18:07

takes an owner who is ready to step back. First off. It only works when exp expectations are painfully clear, like really clear. Most owners think they’ve delegated, but what they’ve really just handed off is tasks, not outcomes? Yes. So it needs to be painfully clear. You need to define the outcomes, and then they panic when results don’t match what was in their head, right? The tribal knowledge problem. I focus on three things when I’m looking at accountability, one owner per outcome, clear success metrics in a regular cadence to where the results can be reviewed without emotion. So it’s not about me rescuing no drive bys, no surprises, and when people know exactly what they own in how it’s measured, accountability stops feeling punitive, and it starts feeling very empowering, because they’re working on their own and they’re making their own decisions. And that’s what you want to create, that scale culture everybody moving towards the same target. You want people to feel that they’re hitting their goals, and they feel empowered by accountability, as opposed to, you know, scared of it and constantly looking at the KPIs and dashboards.

Susan Kearney  19:18

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s interesting to watch in some businesses, it’s so clear as a third party to any relationship, how that relationship is working. But when you’re in it, it’s so challenging to be able to calm yourself and step back and to your point, say, Am I really delegating authority? Am I empowering? Or am I just saying, do this task and this task, and this task, it’s a really hard transition, so I really appreciate your your perspective on that. Let’s turn and talk a little bit about you personally, which obviously will affect your profession. But tell me, where were you born? What was it like growing up for you?

Jordan Solender  19:58

Born in Allentown. Pennsylvania, close to Billy Joel Ville and so love Billy Joel. My parents. My mom is a teacher. Still up a teacher. We moved to Mary and my dad, it was an entrepreneur himself. I’m a third generation entrepreneur. So my dad, my dad, was actually an entrepreneur during the pizza boom, dropped out of college to work for Domino’s, realized this was a big thing, and ended up owning 1020 something dominoes. But I think even more than that, along the eastern seaboard, wow, that was his thing. So I moved to Maryland when I was like, six or seven, and I was always someone who was watching and liked building things, figuring out how systems work, even before I had language to do that, I think growing up wanting a title, I wanted control over, you know, outcomes and ideas. And I remember watching my dad go through this when he was doing dominoes. And I mean, my birthday parties were literally in Domino’s pizzas, with other kids in my class making pizzas. He would shut down a branch. It was really fun. He ended up getting into franchising for beverage distribution, and ended up selling that to Aramark later on. But I got to see how warehouses worked. I got to see how teams worked, how trucks rolled, and that was all that was. An education in itself. The upbringing really shaped how I work today, and I value the teamwork and independence and earning trust through results. And those early years definitely wired me to think in terms of what I do now, before I ever really ran a business, and my dad was always really encouraging of entrepreneurship, like my first business was a snow blower business, where I dragged a snow blower from house to house in the winter in Maryland, you know, as a, I think I was probably 1415, my dad bought me a snow blower and said, I bought you the snow blower go around, you know, you got to go pay this thing off. So for 20 bucks a driveway for, you know, years, I would do that, drag it through blizzards.

Susan Kearney  22:00

Yeah, and that’s fabulous. That was one of the questions I was going to ask you. Was like, where do you get your entrepreneurship? But you get it from your dad and from another generation in your family. Are there specific lessons that you learned about life, about business, either directly or indirectly, from your dad, and has he been a mentor to you, or is he kind of one of those who’s like, I’m an I’ve enabled you, and I’m getting out of your way.

Jordan Solender  22:28

Very much, very much enabled me and gotten out of the way we I’m always a big believer in listening to advice. You know whether, whether I take it or not. He knows right, like I’ll do what I’m going to do, but I always listen. I always come to my dad for advice. You know, he wasn’t giving me business lectures, but he did show me consistency responsibility and what it looks like to stand behind your decisions. I remember him when he, you know, bought a new branch in one of his businesses in high school. You know, I barely saw him, because every day, at four in the morning he’d take off to Virginia, and then he’d get home at seven at night. And I remember very, very succinctly, like back then in high school, showing that consistency responsibility and standing behind a decision again, right? You finish what you start. You take care of your people. You don’t make excuses. It’s on you as an entrepreneur, and I learned that very early, and I think that’s a hard lesson that entrepreneurs learned later into the business, when you have those doom and gloom moments, as we were talking about earlier, right? The balance of that all really stuck with me and support without control, trust, without hovering. It’s probably why I’m so focused now on enabling other people and the coaching platform and then getting out of their way, because that’s what was done to me. So it feels very natural to help others.

Susan Kearney  23:57

Yeah, that’s great. You know it’s, I know it’s trite to talk about parents as an influence in your life, but gosh, they really were. They really are absolutely I love that story, and I love how entrepreneurs got their start. The life of an entrepreneur is chaotic at times. There’s a lot on your plate, particularly someone like you, where you have investments, you have direct engagement, you have indirect engagement, and not to mention family and so on and so forth. But have you developed some daily rituals or other tips, methods to manage the madness of your day to day life so that you can continue to be successful in all the various venues where you participate absolutely,

Jordan Solender  24:45

I don’t pretend to, and I certainly don’t preach the the social media. Like I wake up at three in the morning every day and I journal Right? Like I don’t. I don’t do that. I’m a realistic entrepreneur, but I learned that, uh. CHAOS really doesn’t get managed with hacks, and it gets managed with constraints. So I do have routines, for instance, like I block thinking time and brainstorm time i I’m very big about protecting my calendar. I do not let urgency dictate any sort of decision during the day. The biggest ritual and discipline around what I do. Though, I’m a big believer in that. You know, your energy within the first hour or two of the day decides the entire day in the majority of the outcomes. I got three kids. They’re all under the age of five. And if I want to be and have breakfast with them and be present in their lives, and I still want to take care of myself and to dictate that energy that takes me throughout the day. I wake up most of the time around four, 415 in the morning, and I go to bed by like, 839 Yeah, so the kids go down. I usually spend an hour with my wife, Rachel, and then I’m sleeping. And she thinks it’s crazy, but most of my friends think it’s crazy, but like, that’s what I do during the week, Monday through Friday, and most weekends, I’m up by 415 I have a home gym. I’m in the gym for at least an hour, and then I’m with the kids as they’re waking up in the morning around, you know, seven, 637 so I can have a quick breakfast and a coffee with them, spend some time before they go to school. And at that point, you know, I’ve lived, I feel like, with kids of that age, I’ve lived the whole life and a whole day before eight o’clock in the morning in that but I’m fresh in my energy is good before I get to the office, and if I make that my one thing that I do every day, I really do feel like it changes my output, my interactions with my employees, businesses decisions. It’s a big game changer getting that done.

Susan Kearney  26:39

Yeah, that’s great. Sleep is all it’s cracked up to be. Some things in life are not, but sleep surely is so absolutely. Here’s my last question for you, and that is, what advice would you give to other entrepreneurs, other private company owners, CEOs? Maybe a tough lesson you’d like them not to have to learn on their own, or just a thought that would be helpful to them as they think about the transformations in their company and in themselves.

Jordan Solender  27:09

You know, I get asked this one a lot, yeah, and I typically go, I typically go with a tried and true, you know, don’t believe you know you want to be, you want to be surrounded by people that are smarter than you. It’s a cheat code. But on this, on this talk, right? It’s really made me think, you know, don’t wait until you’re exhausted to fix what’s broken. You know, as we’re talking about rituals and what makes big impacts during the day and doom and gloom moments in your business, right? If the business only works when you’re pushing, rescuing and deciding everything that’s not leadership, it’s liability. Start building the company your team can run without you, not the one that depends on you and your sacrifices constantly and to the freedom framework that I was talking about earlier, Freedom isn’t the reward at the end. It’s the prerequisite for scale.

Susan Kearney  28:03

Love it. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that so much. I’m going to have to pull that quote out and send it to a lot of my clients, along with this podcast episode when we’re done with it, where can our listeners go to learn more about you and the various things that you do? Obviously, they’ll look at your LinkedIn profile, but are there other places you would send them to learn from you?

Jordan Solender  28:24

Jordansolender.com It has a little bit of a step into my world for speaking, business, coaching, investments, for founder led capital, and anything else that I might be working on, I’d keep it as up to date as possible. So feel free to visit Jordansolender.com and reach out perfect.

Susan Kearney  28:41

Jordan, thanks so much for being with me today. I know it took us a little bit of time to get together, but it was well worth it. Your insights, I think, will be important to the people who listen to this podcast. You know, every entrepreneur has a story, and if something compelling to tell that people can learn from. And I appreciate you your candor and you sharing that with us today. So take care and thank you.

Jordan Solender  29:02

Thank you, my pleasure. Susan, thanks so much for having me.

Susan Kearney  29:05

All right, this has been the Growth + Exit podcast, sponsored by Newport LLC, and we’ll talk to you next time bye now.

Outro 29:19

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