In this episode, Harris and Chad share their first firing stories and the mistakes that shaped how they lead today. Chad was 23, managing someone older than him. Harris let the tension build for months before it finally erupted. Both learned the same lesson: do it sooner, keep it short, and treat the person like a human. 

If you've got someone on your team you've been avoiding a conversation with, this episode is your permission slip. 

Key topics: 
• Why most founders wait too long to fire 
• The identity shift that comes with hard leadership moments 
• Michael Hyatt's advice on keeping terminations short 
• The "resignation test" — how to know if it's time 
• Why firing is a scale muscle, not a leadership failure 

🎙 Subscribe: https://istoria.com/scale 

In this episode Harris and Chad tackle pricing...not as a math problem, but as a story problem. Because the moment a prospect is focused on your price, you've already lost the value conversation. And that's a story failure before it's a sales failure.

They get into the real cost of underpricing — overextended teams, razor-thin margins, attracting the wrong clients — and walk through a practical framework for figuring out where your prices actually should be and how to get there without losing the clients you want to keep.

In this episode Harris turns the tables and interviews Chad — tracing the origin story of the man he calls when nothing in his business is working.

Chad grew up blue collar in Northwest Indiana, watching his dad turn down every offer to start a company. That one childhood memory explains a lot about everything that followed. From growing a $500K division to $4M at 23, to navigating the 2008 recession as a young executive, to launching 25 New York Times bestsellers in four years at Thomas Nelson, to six years scaling Michael Hyatt's business from seven to mid-eight figures — Chad has spent his entire career inside other people's businesses, and he wouldn't have it any other way.

In this episode:

• The "accidental entrepreneur" pattern is more common than you think — and why recognizing it in your own story might change how you see where you're headed
• What Chad learned from 1,600 one-on-one conversations with business owners that you can't learn from any course, book, or MBA program
• Why the founder who's profitable at $1M is often better positioned to scale than the one doing $3M at thin margins
• The coaching program that had 2 sales against a 400-unit goal at the halfway point — and what turning it around actually required
• Why your dad's relationship with risk might have more to do with your business than you'd like to admit
• What happens when you stop thinking like an employee and start thinking like an owner — even when you're still working for someone else
• The difference between knowledge and wisdom, and why that distinction is about to matter more than ever in a world where AI has all the answers
• Why the people who've helped the most businesses scale are often the ones who'll tell you the smallest things make the biggest difference

In Episode 2 of Story of Scale, Harris opens up about the journey that shaped him as a founder — long before Story Conference or Astoria ever existed.

You’ll hear:

• How a $25 magic show at age 11 turned into six figures at 15
• What it was like to make a million dollars by 21 — and go bankrupt by 22
• The identity trap of chasing status, perception, and approval
• Why no one would hire him to do the work he actually wanted to do
• The painful tension between creativity and commerce
• The risk behind buying Story Conference
• How Astoria was born out of chaos and consolidation
• Why personal brand eventually becomes a bottleneck
• The deeper lesson: leveraging story for sustainable scale

This episode sets the foundation for everything that follows in the season. Because before we talk about systems, hiring, pricing, or leverage, we have to talk about identity. Scale requires an evolution of self, and if you don’t consciously choose that evolution, it will choose you.

In this first episode of Story of Scale, Harris and Chad break down what “scale” actually means, why founders often become the biggest bottleneck in their own businesses, and the identity shift nobody warns you about when your company starts to grow.

This isn’t a podcast about unicorn startups or hustle culture. It’s for founders doing real work—creative, service-based, and founder-led businesses—who feel stuck between making great work and building something that actually scales.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• Why scale isn’t just about more revenue (and why chasing it blindly often backfires)
• The hidden tension between creativity and commerce every founder faces
• How your role must change as the business grows—or everything stalls
• Why sustainable scale should support your life, not consume it

If you’re tired of feeling like your business only grows when you sacrifice more of yourself, this podcast is for you.

Don’t just scale your business...make sure you’re living a story worth scaling.