In this episode of Default Profitable, host Matt Nettleton sits down with Gerry Bailey, founder of Corvano, a veteran-owned technology consultancy in Fishers, Indiana. Gerry spent twelve years in the Air Force before landing at Sprint, where he learned what a P&L actually was, then spent nearly a decade helping grow someone else’s consulting firm across South Africa, Brazil, Australia, and the UK. He founded Corvano in 2016 while still employed, named it for Core Values Now, and left to run it full time on December 31, 2019, with plans to take a quarter off first. Three months later the market he’d built the whole plan around stopped buying anything.

Gerry is the rare guest who answers yes to all three of Matt’s prerequisites — the strategic plan, the savings, the clear read on what customers would pay — and the episode is mostly about what happened next anyway. He and Matt get into why no plan survives contact, why you need a fallback to your fallback, and the discipline Gerry credits to growing up poor in Marion: never let your lifestyle expand to meet your maximum income. His advice to anyone about to start something is blunt. A good idea is not a business plan, whatever timeline you’ve got in your head is a third of the real one, and when the opportunity shows up, stop protecting your pride and go sell.

Learn more about Gerry Bailey and Corvano at https://www.corvano.com. Listen to more Indianapolis Business Leaders at https://defaultprofitable.com or subscribe to Default Profitable on your favorite podcast platform.