Ep 160 – David Shriner-Cahn, Smashing the Plateau – You Are Your Own Bottleneck — Here's How to Get Out of Your Own Way
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Featuring: David Shriner-Cahn, Smashing the Plateau
In episode 160, I talk with David Shriner-Cahn, host of the Smashing the Plateau podcast and founder of the Smashing the Plateau community, which helps consultants, coaches, and other expertise-based business owners grow through structured peer partnerships.
We get into why solopreneurs plateau in the first place: underpricing out of fear, spending time on work that doesn't generate profit, and running a business without ever being trained to run one. David breaks down his SMASH framework for setting goals specific enough to act on but not so metric-driven that they choke curiosity, and explains why a trusted group of peers is often the only way to see the blind spots you can't see yourself.
If you've ever hit a ceiling and told yourself a story about why you're fine there, this conversation is a useful mirror. Growing a profitable business isn't complicated, just hard, and you don't have to figure it out alone.
Key Bytes
• Most plateaus don't come from the market. They come from the business owner being the bottleneck.
• Underpricing usually isn't a math problem. It's a confidence problem dressed up as a pricing strategy.
• You can't see what you don't know you don't know. That's what a trusted peer group is for.
• Goals should be specific enough to work toward, but not so metric-driven that they choke curiosity.
• Ninety-day objectives are long enough to matter and short enough to stay real.
• If your renewal conversation only happens once, you've already lost leverage. Build it into the relationship from day one.
• Weekly accountability isn't for everyone, but for solopreneurs, the seven-day cycle just works.
• Every person, team, and organization has gifts. Share them and the world prospers.
Chapters
00:00 Welcome and introducing David Shriner-Cahn
00:39 From 28 years as an employee to solo consultant
02:39 How the Smashing the Plateau community took shape
03:53 What counts as an expertise-based business
04:53 Why business owners are usually their own bottleneck
09:03 What you don't know you don't know
11:10 Building the renewal conversation into the relationship
14:08 Turning vague goals into ninety-day objectives
21:18 The five steps of the SMASH framework
24:13 Rapid fire questions and a closing piece of advice
David Shriner-Cahn is the host of the Smashing the Plateau podcast and the founder of the Smashing the Plateau Community, where experienced professionals building expertise-based businesses strengthen their decision-making through structured peer partnerships.
After leaving corporate roles, many accomplished professionals discover that what they miss most isn’t capability — it’s infrastructure: the thinking partners, feedback loops, and shared judgment that help leaders make confident decisions.
Through his podcast and community, David helps expertise-based business owners navigate complex decisions, reconnect with their vision, and build businesses that allow them to do more of what they love and get paid what they’re worth.
Connect with David on LinkedIn or the Smashing the Plateau website.
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Steve Guberman (00:02.04)
Welcome to Agency Bytes. I'm your host, Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I help agency owners turn their agency into an asset they can grow, sell, or actually enjoy. This week on Agency Bytes, my guest is David Schreiner Kahn, host of the Smashing the Plateau podcast and founder of the Smashing the Plateau community. David helps experienced professionals build expertise based businesses through structured peer partnerships and strong decision making. David, great to have you on the show.
David Shriner-Cahn (00:28.728)
Good to be here, Steve.
Steve Guberman (00:30.628)
So what's your backstory? Talk about like you know, smashing the plateau and how you got into that and what you're what you're doing with that.
David Shriner-Cahn (00:39.724)
like most of life in business it was not linear. and some things were planned and a lot of things weren't. so the sh the short story is I spent the first twenty eight years of my career as an employee. Two thousand six went out on my own as a solo independent consultant. I'd come out of the non profit sector and was a solo nonprofit management consultant.
Steve Guberman (00:46.201)
Mm-hmm.
David Shriner-Cahn (01:06.494)
At least that's what I thought. and I actually that that was the main part of my business for the first few years. but over time others started asking me for help, small businesses, and then more and more it was solopreneurs. similar to my own journey, people who had a corporate career
left, started their own independent consultancy and wanted help to try to just grow their business, smash their own plateaus, whatever they were. and and I also heard from some of them that they would prefer and actually this is it started with with one new client who did a session with me and said
they wanted to do more work with me, but would prefer to be in a group. And I hadn't thought about using the group model for my business. but I, you know, if somebody wants to do something and you think you can provide it, why not? so I said, sure, let's let's talk about what might be a minimum viable group and see if we can find a the the number of people that we need to start it.
so a few months later we started with three people and it ended up becoming five and then six. and then there was there was another group and then a few years ago we expanded that to to a broader community model.
Steve Guberman (02:39.482)
And so that community lives online, in person? What's the structure there?
David Shriner-Cahn (02:43.138)
Well, interestingly enough, it was designed to be online so that location would not be an impediment. and we have I I'm based in New York. We have I say a concentration of of members in the New York metropolitan area, although we have we have members currently throughout the US.
one of our members who was who is based in Atlanta was planning to come to New York to speak at a conference and reached out to a New York based member said, You want to get together for lunch. well one thing led to another and then it turned out we were doing a like three quarter day workshop. and and sadly the person from Atlanta the
the plans got changed and he ended up not coming. so it was just New York metropolitan area folks. But they they really loved what we did and wanted to do it again. So now we've done I don't know, probably like two or three of those a year over the last few years.
Steve Guberman (03:53.85)
Amazing. And so they're all solopreneurs or entrepreneurs in what you call expert based businesses. And so that's coaches. How like how do you define expert based business?
David Shriner-Cahn (04:05.686)
someone who is selling their own knowledge, essentially. yeah. So we have it it it runs a gamut. from yeah, consultants and coaches are probably like the biggest portion. but professional services like attorney, other professional services are are also part of the mix.
Steve Guberman (04:31.018)
Roger. Okay. And so your kind of thesis behind the whole smashing platform is that people who run these expertise based businesses, we eventually plateau. And you've got a model that helps kind of break through that plateau. What what do you think are the like the driving factors behind the plateauification? Which you you can use that word from now on if you want, by the way. Yeah.
David Shriner-Cahn (04:53.382)
you yeah. Thank you. yeah, the the the biggest factor is the business owner. Business owner is usually the bottleneck, right? Which it varies depending upon the person. a big one is not charging enough. you know, we we kind of get this this thing in our head if
Steve Guberman (05:06.127)
Mm-hmm.
David Shriner-Cahn (05:21.614)
s i if we're proposing to work with someone where we're a little unsure about the value that we're going to be providing or whether or not we can produce the kind of outcome the client wants, that often will translate into underpricing. you know, there's a lot of lot of fear that goes into pricing. so that that's a big one.
spending time doing things that don't actually generate a lot of profit is another big one. And you know, when one of the the biggest challenges I think is and I know you talk about this on your show a lot, we're
people who who are in any kind of professional service, they're trained to work in their professional service. They're not trained to run a business. And it's right, it's a very different skill set. so
When it comes to administration, operations, finance, marketing, sales, those are skills that you probably weren't taught in school. You probably didn't have that much responsibility if you were in corporate to to do any of those. And if you want to have a successful business, you need you you need
that skill set, whether you have it yourself or somebody on your team has it, it it's really important for you to be able to do what you wanna do and and get paid well.
Steve Guberman (07:06.874)
All right, so what I'm hearing is the signs of plateauing for a business like mine is I hit a certain ceiling of price because I there's a fear that I'm not confident enough to go upstream and sell for more money or larger clients. I'm doing too much that I shouldn't be doing, whether it's the hat needs to be worn, whether it's me wearing it or delegating it to somebody else. and as a solopreneur, it's like I don't want employees, but there's still people you can delegate to. what like and sorry, so those are key indicators.
And you've built like a platform, the Smash system that helps kind of break through those things that we identify as the plateau. I I've definitely experienced like bottlenecking of my own, like I'll hit capacity. I'm like, yeah, I'm I'm the ceiling. Like my t I'm selling my time for money, which I tell clients not to do. And I've hit a capacity of ten, fifteen, whatever number of clients it is, I don't want to work any more than that.
My kind of justification or rationalization, whichever BS word you want to use for it, is I'm building a lifestyle business. I want to be able to go fishing on Fridays and snowboarding for long weekends or like whatever. And I don't want to work a zillion hours. But the reality is there's still like I don't know, like a manipulation game I'm playing with myself that like I could still go upstream and I can still bring on more business and I can still do more, like, you know, group cohorts that I do, like they're an amazing way.
to provide a lot of value in a shorter amount of time versus one on one coaching or MA advisory, which both of those can be very time consuming. So yeah, so I so I guess there's a number of different ways to break through that of finding new services like you did with your groups or like you said, going upstream, things like that. what are some of the other like things that you're seeing in your community in this day and age, right? You've been doing this for, I guess almost 20 years now.
David Shriner-Cahn (09:03.805)
yeah, basically. what I what I'm seeing is when you're creating a plan, you know what you know and you know what you don't know. and what you're going to work on
Steve Guberman (09:16.516)
Mm-hmm.
David Shriner-Cahn (09:22.989)
Proactively is generally based on what you know that you know and you know that you don't know. If you like what you know that you know, you just you just do. What you know you don't know, you'll try to find a way to learn what you don't know or get somebody who knows what you don't know to do it. The biggest challenge is what you don't know that you don't know. And you're not gonna see that. But if you are in a community with trusted colleagues,
Often somebody in the community will see what you don't know that you don't know. And if it's a trusted environment where people feel free to share their experiences and and you feel comfortable asking and saying, This is what I'm trying to do, this is what's happened so far, this is what's not working. anybody have any questions? Anybody have an experience like this? And then you'll you'll hear
somebody share something about what they may have done in a similar situation, which w which is gonna be that's when the light bulb is gonna go off and you're gonna realize, yeah.
Steve Guberman (10:29.944)
Magic that I've seen happen, and I was in a group similar to that when I had my agency, is when two other people are talking, they're asking questions, digging into the problem, giving feedback. And it's always been like direct lived experience. And I and I channel that into my groups as well. No opinions, just like something you've done, whether it's worked or it hasn't. But when these two people are talking and I pluck something out of the air, I'm like, I can use that for myself. That's to me, that's super magical. But what you're also talking about is the fact that when you've got a group of peers
who approach things from all of their own like worldly perspectives that's different than yours, it helps unveil the things you don't know, you don't know. And like that's just immensely powerful.
David Shriner-Cahn (11:10.485)
Yeah, I'll I'll give you I'll share a story that happened w with one of our members who has a business model with
Steve Guberman (11:16.794)
Mm-hmm.
David Shriner-Cahn (11:24.311)
fairly large long-term engagements. And the challenge with these kinds of engagements is that particularly as you get towards the latter half of the term of the engagement, and these are often year at a time, you need to have a conversation about what's the next step. And if most of your work is with
with a a liaison in the client's organization who is not the d the budgetary decision maker, then the conversation needs to be needs to happen with the budgetary decision maker about renewing the contract or whatever the next step is going to be. And someone shared an experience with a similar kind of relationship where they had built into
the the work with the client, regular conversations to update the budgetary decision maker on the progress and what could potentially be the next steps. So that person was always clued into what was going on, understood the value of of the engagement and what the what the consultant was bringing to the relationship. So having the renewal conversation was built into the process. Otherwise
it y you know, you're trying to get on t on the calendar for somebody who's super busy. It's really hard to do. And your liaison may or may not be the best person to advocate for you when it comes to renewing the contract.
Steve Guberman (13:05.466)
Yeah, and and so if i I I guess I would add to that that the decision maker can't just be like a one time conversation. Like that relationship has got to be nursed over the course of the engagement. Or it's like who's David? Why is he calling me? you know?
David Shriner-Cahn (13:19.988)
Right. So if you so if you build into the eng yeah, so if you build into the engagement, regular converse live conversations with the budgetary decision maker, you then you're gonna be in a position to renew the contract much more easily.
Steve Guberman (13:34.862)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, all right. So your your your community or your the people in the community are helping guide people through what might seem obvious to other people, but to the person holding the challenge is like, this is keeping me up, this is hurting my business, and you identify those things as like these plateaus in in these service based or expertise based businesses. talk about how you how you identify like what success looks like or what goals look like or
ideal lifestyle looks like. Like how do you work through that with your members?
David Shriner-Cahn (14:08.916)
Yeah. So part of our framework is identifying what's important to you, setting goals for your for your life that include your business, and and I define goals as being specific enough so you know that you're working toward them, but not metric driven. So there's always more to do. Right. So for an ex as an example, I I want to live a lifestyle where
where I'm doing enough physical activity so that my body feels energized. Right? That's you know when you're working toward that, but there's no there's no measurement that's part of that. so you identify what's important, what your your your big goals are, and then when it comes to business, break
break your business goals into shorter term objectives. And objectives are met metric driven. we use ninety day objectives because they're big enough so that you know that you're working towards something significant, but it's not so far out into the future that it's not attainable. So it could be I want to land one major new client this quarter. Okay. So then you break down that objective into a weekly plan.
and one to two major action steps per week that you're gonna work on. And it could be that you're working on the same action steps for the whole quarter, or it could be that there's a a series of progressions of what you need to do. Like if you're trying to land a major client, there's the whole lead generation process, which has d you know, could have a bunch of steps in it. and then every week in the live session you talk about what your plan was for that week, what you did, what worked, what didn't work.
and where you'd like feedback. And then open it up and people will share their experiences. And ask you questions. An and ask you questions.
Steve Guberman (16:03.47)
So generally specif say that last part?
Okay, gotcha. Yeah. So j so generally specific enough that I know what feeling good or living a lifestyle where my body's moving feels good, but I'm not checking a box that says I've got to be at the gym three times a week or yoga four times a week or run X amount of miles.
David Shriner-Cahn (16:22.23)
For your for your goal, no, you wouldn't have that checkbox, but if you but for your quarterly objective, you would have a checkbox, right? So you so you know, let's say you're currently going to the gym once a week and it's not quite enough for you and you want to increase that to two times a week over the quarter. So how how would you what would you do every single week so that you have the time in your schedule and you have the commitment to add that extra time in the gym?
Steve Guberman (16:47.416)
Yep. Yeah. And so the parallel to that is I want to win one new client, reverse engineer engineer that into, you know, if you think like a marketer, into a funnel. How many top of funnel activities do I need to lead to the second phase of the funnel, to the third phase, to contract to my close ratio of forty, fifty percent? There's my new client. Right. Yeah, basic math. Yeah. yeah, we do the same thing in my groups where we come up with like 12 month rolling goals.
David Shriner-Cahn (17:08.042)
Right. And it's just math.
Steve Guberman (17:16.334)
And those goals are very specific to the individual. I don't predefine anything. If you want to hire a certain person or hit a certain revenue or profitability goal or get exit ready or like whatever the thing is, I support it so long as I try to align it with like the smart analogy, or acronym rather. so it so it is like measurable and and you can reverse engineer it. And then we do it break it down into also quarterly, I pull from EOS, rocks or projects, whatever you want to call it.
And then month to month the the tasks are what are gonna feed into those projects that are gonna feed into the twelve month goal. so super similar in that we don't meet weekly though, and and I think that's a an aggressive cadence that I think works probably very well for your group.
David Shriner-Cahn (18:01.14)
Yeah, I've I've tried this model with different meeting frequencies and once a week seems to be the ideal. Yeah, it's like you know, we're used to a seven day cycle. And so ha having your day that you're gonna work with your group on your business makes a huge difference.
Steve Guberman (18:05.988)
Mm-hmm.
Steve Guberman (18:15.022)
Yeah, absolutely.
Steve Guberman (18:20.878)
I wonder if and I don't this is just kind of a a thought, not even a theory or anything. So most of my group members, they own businesses. They're you know multiple employees, five, ten, fifty employees, whatever, versus solopreneur where they have more flexibility in their schedule where they can do weekly. And I I wonder if one is more effective based on size of business or mindset of founder or priority of founder to carve out that amount of time. yeah, and I I don't know, just kinda thick thinking out loud.
so you developed this process yourself or did you go to any kind of like coaching programs or school or just kind of this is what I see would work and sharpen over time kind of thing? Yeah.
David Shriner-Cahn (19:05.779)
Yes. and you know, EOS and and all these other frameworks all have things in common. so if if I'm sure if you dig through your framework or you dig through my framework, you're gonna see things that are that exist in other frameworks as well. and the bottom line is growing a profitable business that supports your desired lifestyle is not rocket science.
Steve Guberman (19:24.026)
Mm-hmm.
David Shriner-Cahn (19:36.092)
yet it is still very hard for many, if not most people, to do.
Steve Guberman (19:43.418)
But your perspectives and accountability and groups of people that understand the lonely at the top mindset makes it that much easier. You know, so there's that phrase you can you can go fast alone or can go farther together. And I think that defines like how these groups really support business owners, whether they're solepreneurs or they've got employees. because and mine started when I had my agency, I got together with like three or four of my
closest geographical quote unquote competitor friends, and we would commiserate, like, you know, I beat you out of that pitch, or, you know, this employee left me and came to you, or these clients, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and it was like, have you tried this and have you tried that? And so for me, it's like the common thread is each the groups have to have I guess a commonality. And so for you, these are all these knowledge or expertise based businesses.
For me, they're all agency owners. But when I was in a group, it was like a landscaper and a lawyer and I don't even know what, you know, some guy owned a gym and random things. And sure, they know about business from what they've learned and kind of winging it themselves, but they didn't understand like my PL and my business and the structure of my accounts and things like that. And so I felt like there was just like that much of a difference that it almost felt alienating. And I don't know if they felt the same, like, should I find other landscaper groups and
We all do landscaping pure. I don't know. I'm sure that exists for every industry. but for you it's absolutely my god. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Talk about all right. So you've got the five steps of the smash system, which just reminds me of like the Jersey Shore. They called it smush, but anyway, what what's talk about that, your framework that you developed.
David Shriner-Cahn (21:18.453)
Look, there are professional associations in in every industry, right? Right? Is it s also ha there's some similarity?
David Shriner-Cahn (21:37.183)
so it's so stir up your dreams, which which is the whole that whole visioning process. Map your future, which is about defining the business that you actually want. act with purpose, which is taking the deliberate action and testing ideas, week in and week out. Stick with it is about
Focusing on one strategic objective for ninety days and finally hold yourself accountable is about leveraging the pure perspective so that you can avoid the blind spots.
Steve Guberman (22:10.84)
Hmm. I love that. Yeah. Those are great steps and well defined and just kind of the the verbiage that assigned you know owns each one of those is something that like people can actually execute on. And and I again I think that a hundred percent applies for like the solopreneur of the expertise based business or the person that founded a business and has now grown it to five, ten, fifteen people. Like they're core principles of like if you don't define it, you don't visualize it, you don't have people supporting you, mapping through it.
And I think any like, you know, my coaching program is the same thing. We start with discovery. We start with the vision. I take them through a magic paintbrush exercise. I've had people on here, you know, Cameron Harold talks about his vivid vision. Debbie Millman talked about the way she did it with Milton Glazer 50 years ago. Like, so there's so many different ways to do it, but the core principle is if you don't visualize it, if you don't like see what it is that you want to achieve, there's no way you're gonna get there. You're just kind of meandering through.
opportunistic potential success. so yeah, I love that. I even take it so far as like I've got, you this this house that we're gonna buy next year. I've drawn a picture of what I think it could look like. And so like taking it to the next step of can you really visualize it? Can you do a vision board of like this is what success looks like and and some people will do that as well. I don't think that's part of your framework though.
David Shriner-Cahn (23:11.743)
Right.
David Shriner-Cahn (23:32.509)
No. You I mean you can those exercises will work fine within our framework, but it's not part of part of the the actual exercise we we do.
Steve Guberman (23:40.578)
Yeah. this is amazing, great steps that people can take to kind of find their success, break their plateaus. I know in in the six-ish years I've been doing this, I've experienced some plateauing and have kind of broken through that. also through like other peers telling me like, have you tried this? Have you done that? so yeah, super valuable. Let's wrap up, throw a couple of r random rapid fire questions at you.
there's no wrong answers to any of these. The first is what's something that you are binging these days? A hobby, a book, a podcast, a show?
David Shriner-Cahn (24:13.194)
David Shriner-Cahn (24:19.72)
Hm, that's a great question. you know the show actually the show that I've been binging kind of on and off is the show Shrink Shrinking. Yeah, it's kind of it's an interesting show.
Steve Guberman (24:31.738)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Steve Guberman (24:36.506)
Poncho, yeah, yeah. favorite type of cuisine that you love to eat?
David Shriner-Cahn (24:50.906)
someone is able to create a cuisine that has a lot of particularly fresh vegetable ingredients, those are often hard to do.
Yeah, so I appreciate it when with with fresh ingredients, particularly like this the farm to table stuff.
Steve Guberman (25:12.098)
yeah. Yeah yeah. Love it. and then finally, what's a invaluable piece of advice that you could go back and give yourself, let's say thirty years ago?
David Shriner-Cahn (25:25.006)
I I would say it's every person has gifts, every team has gifts, every organization has gifts. When you share your gifts the world prospers.
Steve Guberman (25:37.496)
Mm. Yeah, I love that. Give it away. Share it. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. this is amazing. David Schreiner Khan, thank you very much for joining us. Smashing the Plateau podcast, Smashing the Plateau community. I think the the common thread is there is nobody succeeds alone, right? We all need people in our corner. So thanks thanks for joining us.
David Shriner-Cahn (25:57.172)
There's a reason why there are eight billion plus people in the world. It's all because we are collaborative.
Steve Guberman (26:03.918)
That's true. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you, David. Appreciate you.
David Shriner-Cahn (26:08.703)
Thank you, Steve.