Workplace judgment, tested out loud.
Business Wingmen Podcast is a plainspoken business advice show built around Steve and Travis Smith talking through real workplace problems. Recent episodes focus on managing up, networking before a career crisis, preserving institutional knowledge, and deciding when a founder should step aside.
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Business Wingmen Podcast is built for the middle of the workday problem: the awkward boss mandate, the employee who will not follow up, the founder who cannot tell whether the company has outgrown their own leadership style. Steve and Travis Smith approach those situations in a measured, practical way. They do not treat business as a set of slogans. They treat it as a chain of behaviors that either create trust, clarity, and momentum or quietly make work harder for everyone around them. Recent episodes spend a lot of time on career control. Networking is framed as something to build before a person needs a job, not as emergency outreach after trouble starts. Managing up is treated as an adult skill, where disagreement has to come with facts, reasoning, and enough tact to keep the conversation moving. The show also watches the management bench closely. One episode asks why capable employees may avoid promotion, especially when management looks like less craft, more stress, and unclear support. Another looks at new hires and argues that follow-up, ownership, escalation, and basic communication still separate reliable professionals from people who simply wait for instructions. Business ownership gets the same plain treatment. Travis Smith's 10-year business milestone becomes a way to talk about endurance, while founder succession becomes a question of ego, employee stability, company growth, and whether the original builder is still the right person for the next stage. The show is also alert to operational memory. It treats institutional knowledge as a real asset that can leave with retiring or departing employees if a company never learns to capture it. Episodes about scaling use recognizable examples such as Peloton and Blockbuster to show how growth can turn fragile when demand changes or leadership mistakes a temporary surge for a permanent market. The pacing is patient. The advice often arrives through restatement, example, challenge, and correction rather than a polished lecture. That gives the show a useful shop-floor quality, even when the subject is business behavior. Its edge is not theatrical. It is the steady insistence that professionals should notice what is happening, name it clearly, and do the next responsible thing.
Made for: Suited to business owners, managers, rising professionals, and new hires who want direct advice on operating better inside organizations. It also fits listeners thinking through career growth, leadership responsibility, or founder-stage decisions.
What sets it apart: The show stands apart by turning ordinary workplace friction into concrete operating lessons. Its two-voice format lets advice get questioned, sharpened, and tied back to situations professionals recognize immediately.
Tired of boring business discussions fit for your out of touch boss? The Business Wingmen Show, brought to you by father and son duo Steve and Travis Smith, trade tales of corporate absurdity and career brilliance with an electric candor, one which isn’t scared to not be politically correct. Our show dives deep into the thinking, behaviors and actions professional people at the top of their game embody. From leadership and management challenges to climbing the corporate ladder or being a successful entrepreneur, Steve and Travis’ insights help their listeners put to practice REAL ideas and tactics that actually work in the business world. Gain some new, thought-provoking perspective on how t…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Steve and Travis Smith translate management friction, career choices, and scaling risks into concrete decisions professionals can act on.
Steve and Travis Smith turn workplace problems into practical conversations about judgment. Their father-and-son exchange moves from the founder deciding whether to remain CEO to the manager learning how to delegate, challenge a boss constructively, or help a new hire take…
Employee turnover raises the question Steve and Travis Smith want you to face: should you stay CEO?
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Networking is treated as a career asset beyond the company, especially for professionals who assume a good job is enough.
Networking comes through as career upkeep with a longer horizon. Steve Smith and Travis Smith treat it as a missing piece in building a durable career, especially for professionals who feel settled in a strong job or position.
A practical look at managing bosses with backbone, facts, experience, and the judgment to know when to push back.
Managing up comes through as a practical part of leadership, not a soft extra. A manager is shown as having to lead the people below while also working with a boss, or sometimes several bosses, whose mandates shape the job.
A practical case for treating follow-up as a visible measure of ownership.
This episode treats professionalism as something people can actually see: follow-up, ownership, and clear communication. Steve Smith and Travis Smith keep the idea grounded in a familiar workplace moment, with an engineer waiting on a supplier for a quote or delivery update.
A clear-eyed review of when founder control helps a company, and when it may hold it back.
A founder's hardest move is sometimes admitting that the company may now need a different kind of leader. Business Wingman Show treats the shift from startup to stable company as more than a growth milestone: it is a test of whether entrepreneurial energy is still matched by the…
Steve and Travis Smith ask what owners should plan for when a growth surge ends.
Steve and Travis Smith take up a familiar problem for owners: a rush of demand can make rapid expansion feel safer than it is. Peloton gives them a concrete example.
A practical case for delegation as an early measure of management readiness.
First-time management comes through here as a practical question about promotion: who should move up from inside the business, and what it takes to give that person a fair shot.
Rob Walling on bootstrapped SaaS growth, plateaus, and exits — with founders who lived them.
Abbey Ashley's playbook for turning your job skills into a virtual assistant business.
SaaS operators on scaling, pricing and AI, metrics included.
Alex Blumberg interviews guests like Megan Phelps-Roper and Shane McAnally about failure and reinvention.
Steve and Travis discuss the importance of helping others with genuine intent, referencing the law of reciprocity and the book The Go-Giver.
This episode discusses how to make your business easier to work with to improve client and vendor relationships.
Networking gets treated like an emergency tool, but Steve and Travis keep it grounded: build the habit while the job is still good.
Managing up is not the same as saying yes.
Father-son duo Steve and Travis Smith discuss why top talent often avoids management promotions and how to address this trend.
Steve and Travis Smith discuss the importance of capturing institutional knowledge from employees before they leave or retire.
Steve and Travis Smith discuss Travis's 10-year business milestone and the insights that helped him succeed where 65% of businesses fail.
Steve and Travis Smith, the father-and-son co-hosts of The Business Wingman Show, deliver five specific observable behaviors that separate standout early-career employees from those who get labeled bad hires within 12 months.
Steve and Travis Smith examine the founder's dilemma on The Business Wingman Show, asking whether the person who launches a startup is the right person to lead it through commercialization and scale.
Steve Smith and Travis Smith use Peloton and Krispy Kreme as case studies in scaling too quickly after temporary demand spikes.
This episode discusses why 60% of new managers fail and how to ensure selected managers succeed in their transition from technical roles to management.
Tom Sell shares his journey from East Africa to becoming CEO of a yachting logistics company, emphasizing patience and persistence.
Steve and Travis Smith discuss the value of business ideas and the importance of moving beyond ideation to execution.