Neal Conlon

Hey, my name is Neil Conlin, and I'm the founder of a company called Press Forward Ventures.

So we're a strategic advisory firm that has two core focuses. Number one is going to be helping people...

We call it revenue architecture, which is helping people to scale their businesses when they've got all the traditional systems already in place. And the other piece is where we have a thesis that your business is actually worth more money than you realize it is, and you're the one getting in the way of that. So we do capital architecture, which is reorganizing the business so that the company can be acquired by another company.

Target audience is going to be a business that's been around for five or 10 years. They clearly understand their industry and their category. They've done all the things, and they're looking for that next big leap, which is probably going to be out of the business.

Everybody who wants to exit their company at the max kind of exit architecture is possible, which means really, I want to retire from this business, not I want to sell the business and start another one right afterwards.

Yeah. So the reason why I started this company was the real interesting thing that I bring to this business when I started it is that I have been a business owner, I was also at a private equity fund, and I've also been on the VC side and the investor side of it. And after that exercise of doing 10 years of that,

built and sold and exited three companies back to back. And of every single one of those three businesses, every time the checks were written at the end of the business, never felt like I was getting the amount of money out of it that you thought you were going to get when you did that. And I kind of sat and stood on that for two years during 2020 and was like, wait a minute, I think everybody does this wrong. And really started this idea that if we work with an exit in the plan of like, how am I going to get rid of this business versus like, how am I going to build it? You can re-architect the business completely different. And so we spend all of our time now working on your business with an operator who's probably worked in the business as much as they can. And the thing that's wild is I really like helping people retire these days. I wanted to help them go to the beach with an umbrella with their kids and do the big exit and not walk away from an exit of a business from a place of scarcity like they didn't make enough money or do enough things.

Yeah, lessons learned are number one, start with the end in mind first and foremost before you even start anything. Number two, good and great ideas are always going to do well versus there's this interesting thing in the industry of entrepreneurship where you have to have all the things in order to be investable or to exit.

And I'd say the third one really is nothing in the business world nowadays should feel like it's heavy. None of us are figuring, you might be figuring it out for the first time for you, but we're just recreating things that have been successful. And so the heaviness is something that's a mindset thing or an emotional thing or a healing thing that actually becomes this mirror in entrepreneurship where you're going to have to face yourself over and over again.

Yeah, so my background before all the cool investing stuff is I was a data product manager for a bunch of years at a technology company and I've actually been working with machine learning stuff since 2015.

And so we use AI every single day, every single employee on the team has a co-pilot.

So an AI that is kind of their intern that we've built to be their intern. So every note, every piece of information, every phone call that we do is all going into one kind of central nervous system and we pull all of our kind of thesis information out of that. And I think that there's a lot of things we got to figure out about AI, but there is no doubt that it's going to be a force multiplier for anyone.

And I find that if you're not using it, you can't compete against people who are using these tools well. It's like a carpenter nailing nails on a roof versus the guy who's like, "I got a nail gun." And he's just always going to beat you to the punch.

Yeah, so we're hoping this year to take 10 more companies into exit through mergers and acquisitions, a sale or a big exit strategy. And so we're very focused on finding companies that are like, I think with either AI coming in or the stage of life that I'm in, that it's time for me to exit this company and I want to go to the beach and I want to enjoy life more so. So that's our goal for the year, is 10 transactions.

I think when someone's building a team, what I've learned over the years is I think alignment in understanding the goals that are going to happen is becoming the most critical thing, especially with AI because you can move so fast. It comes down to does the team you're hiring share in the vision of what you're trying to achieve and then the skills can be kind of filled in along the way.

I think awareness nowadays is what you want to stand out. The days of somebody being the subject matter expert and being hired because of the knowledge base I think is kind of obsolete.

You want the person who can be agile, who can pivot, who's going to understand the vision, but understand that we're going to move in different ways and we might start something and then change direction very, very quickly because the environments that we're working in nowadays between the government and geopolitical stuff and economic stuff is so vastly changing that a business plan that we had six weeks ago might need to change tomorrow to course correct for that. So that awareness to it, that flexibility and that agility I think are things that we're ultimately looking for more than anything else.

I think the culture fit question is really interesting because I think what would have been a good culture criteria 10 years ago has drastically shifted so much into I think culture fit now is really tied into like, hey, what's the mission that we're on? I mean, I'm a military guy by background, so it comes into being like mission focused first and then understanding that things, you know, that nothing else matters anymore because we can work off of laptops. We can work remotely. We can work in different locations. We can work at different times of the day and all those things used to be culture things. And now it's becoming like, I want to work with people who share the vision, share the mission and as long as we're aligned on that, the rest of the stuff just becomes almost obsolete.

I think the biggest red flag is people have to be tech savvy. I think you have to be, you know, you shouldn't have to explain to somebody any of those non techie things because again, it's all about force multipliers. You could have somebody be sitting there using an abacus to do calculations or they're like, let me think about how I'm going to do this thing versus someone's going to be like, let me figure it out with a calculator versus someone going, I'm just going to ask a chat GBT how to do that for me.

That lack of tech savviness in 2026 is really one of the most important things because you can't keep up with people who are very tech savvy.

I think going with your intuition on hiring practices will teach you a lesson for sure. I think if there's any red flags in your mind when you're thinking about hiring somebody, one red flag is too many.

The classic phrase of higher slow, fire fast is definitely a relevant thing for sure.

I think AI fluency I think is super important because again, you don't want to have to inspire or educate or teach somebody to be AI first, I guess the term we're using now, whereas like millennials became digital first. The first thing they're going to go is go to their phone and go to Google it. Now we're becoming AI first where people are going and asking AI for something before anything else. I think fluency is important. In our business, and we do this when we inspire all of our clients to do this also, is we think 10% of your week should actually be dedicated to AI learning and AI arbitrage and factoring it in so it's not only about hiring somebody to be fluent, but also inspiring them to continue to be fluent because every week there's some new AI cool thing that you could fall behind on if you're not focusing on fluency as well.

Build yourself a co-pilot. Build the version of yourself that instead of writing down notes in your notepad or keeping them in your notetaker, whatever it is, build a co-pilot that captures everything that you're doing and constantly just building off of like it's an encyclopedia of you and it becomes such a force multiplier for you to be able to move fast when you capture all of that stuff in a single place.