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Helping Entrepreneurs Build Real Businesses on Generative Platforms with Neil Twa

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Listen to the episode here:

How do you build a real business — not just a product — inside a marketplace like Amazon? And how does generative strategy change the way entrepreneurs think about scale, risk, and value creation?

In this episode of The Value Creators Podcast, Hunter Hastings talks with Neil Twa, founder and coach of Voltage Holdings, to break down what it really takes to build, operate, and exit successful marketplace-based companies. Neil explains his Train–Equip–Activate framework, how to separate business-building from product-picking, and why discipline, patience, and marketplace fit matter more than trends or hacks.

Key Insights:

  • Why marketplaces reward systems, not spontaneity — and how most sellers fail before they truly start.
  • Generative entrepreneurship vs. opportunistic entrepreneurship: building for scale rather than chasing outcomes.
  • Why the goal isn’t just revenue — it’s margin, defensibility, customer value, and eventually sellability.

This episode is a hands-on masterclass for entrepreneurs who want to move beyond “Amazon hustle culture” and instead build asset-backed, generative companies that endure.

Resources:

➡️ Learn What They Didn’t Teach You In Business School: The Value Creators Online Business Course

Connect with Neil Twa on LinkedIn

Learn more about Voltage Holdings

Get the book Almost Automated Income with FBA: Build a Profitable Lifestyle-Driven Amazon Business. Exit for Millions. Even Without Any Ecommerce Experience

Connect with Hunter Hastings on LinkedIn

Subscribe to The Value Creators on Substack

Knowledge Capsule

1. Generative Entrepreneurship Over Transactional Selling

  • Generative builders design systems that repeatedly produce outcomes, not one-off wins.
  • The business must create value autonomously through structure, discipline, and process.
  • A generative business is an engine — not a product — capable of compounding results.

2. Marketplaces Reward Structure, Not Hustle

  • Amazon benefits operators who understand the platform and play within its rules.
  • Sellers chasing hacks and trends burn out, while system operators scale.
  • The game is to align with marketplace incentives, not fight them.

3. Train → Equip → Activate Framework

  • Train the mindset — discipline, patience, data-driven thinking.
  • Equip founders with research tools, sourcing processes, and operating systems.
  • Activate through controlled tests, feedback loops, and scale strategies.

4. A Business is Bigger Than a Product

  • Products can fail — systems endure and generate new opportunities.
  • When the founder steps back, a true business keeps moving.
  • IP, SOPs, and processes are the real assets, not the SKUs.

5. Data Reduces Risk and Guides Decisions

  • Product selection is mathematical — not emotional or intuitive.
  • Historical patterns and validated demand replace guessing.
  • Data must direct decisions long before inventory is purchased.

6. Margin is the Real Scoreboard

  • Revenue can deceive — profit is what compounds.
  • The best companies scale contribution margin, not top-line excitement.
  • Margin must be calculated and protected before launching a product.

7. The Long Game Beats Shortcuts

  • Six-month miracles are illusions built on survivorship bias.
  • The compounding curve rewards those who stay consistent and iterative.
  • Mastery is boring — and that’s why most never reach it.

8. Market Pull > Founder Preference

  • Winners serve demand that already exists rather than forcing novelty.
  • Customer behavior validates truth — not opinions or surveys.
  • Fit precedes innovation, not the other way around.

9. Build to Sell — Even If You Don’t Sell

  • Exit-ready businesses are structured cleaner, run smoother, and scale faster.
  • Buyers pay for systems, margin, defensibility, and brand equity.
  • A sellable business is simply a better built business.

10. Partnership is Leverage

  • Collaboration compresses time, learning, and access to opportunity.
  • Networks unlock resources that solo operators can’t reach alone.
  • Shared capability increases execution speed and reduces bottlenecks.

11. Risk Management is a Skill, Not Luck

  • Small tests prevent catastrophic outcomes and reveal real demand signals.
  • Maintaining cash flow discipline protects growth during volatility.
  • Diversifying channels and suppliers reduces platform fragility.

12. Generativity Compounds With Time and Iteration

  • A scalable business is a generative system that outputs value repeatedly.
  • Improve the engine, not just the activity inside it.
  • Wealth follows those who build systems — not those who hustle products.

There’s no place for management any more. What will replace it?

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The Drucker Forum has put out a call to management scholars, executives and consultants to “reframe management”.  The existing management model that dominates today’s business practice and education – Drucker Forum calls it the “inflexible machine-management model” – is at odds with today’s complex and unpredictable world. Therefore, they propose, let’s replace this model with another, “The Next Management”.

A more appropriate step would be to recognize that management as a concept is no longer needed and no longer valid. There should be no “management”, whether the old model or a new one. When business sensed the need for management as a rational approach to bring order to the new scales of mass production, mass distribution and mass marketing that the Industrial Revolution made possible, the science of complex systems had not been formalized. This science, specifically the science of complex adaptive systems or complex evolving systems is genuinely new. The business world didn’t have its insights and findings when management was invented. They had Newtonian physics; economics aspired to be like physics; and management looked to economics for initial guidance. 

We now have the opportunity to learn from the latest advances in systems science.

Business firms, industries and economies can themselves be viewed as a member of a class of complex evolving systems. Evolving systems display these three attributes.

1. They are composed of numerous diverse and interacting components that have the potential to combine in vast numbers of different configurations – a multiplicity of emergent structures. It is impossible to predict the configurations that will emerge, which will be successful, which will survive and which will die.

2. The multiplicity of new configurations is autocatalytically generated, simply from the interaction, combination and recombination of the components. More firms are born than survive, more projects and business models are created and tested than actually persist and become established.

  • The term autocatalysis introduces one of a number of related principles from systems science that are fundamental for emergence: self-organization, autopoiesis, self-creation. They all relate to the idea of evolution: that there is constant endogenous change that has its own energy and can’t be stopped or even influenced by exogenous forces.

3. In the multiplicity of new emergent configurations, as in evolution, there are winners and losers, those that survive and thrive and those that don’t. Winners are established through a process of selection. Configurations are preferentially selected based on function (sometimes referred to as fitness, as in fitness for a purpose).

Among business firms, the function that is selected is the creation of value for customers. The market is the selection mechanism, through customers’ willingness or unwillingness to pay for value.

The functional capacity for value creation is determined by functional knowledge – knowledge of what actions are advantaged in value creation. There is actually a scientific law in play: the law of increasing functional information, that the system will evolve (its functional information will increase) if many configurations of the system undergo selection for function. Firms are knowledge building systems utilizing experimentation to generate new knowledge.

Therefore, the function of “management” – which can be thought of as an arrangement to attempt to bring developmental order to a firm, making the results it achieves more predictable and controllable – is replaced by experimentation, a number of concurrent trials, tests and bets with no attempt to predict or control outcomes since no predictability is conceivable. 

There’s an equivalent in economics, which is entrepreneurship: action under absolute uncertainty. Entrepreneurship is a mindset of imagining multiple possible futures and setting in motion a selected set of experiments from which one of those futures will autocatalytically emerge through the mechanism of creating value for customers, a value that is unpredictable from the entrepreneurial perspective because there is too much swirling change in the evolving ecosystem for any prediction or estimation.

Management as a rational approach to bring order has no role to play. Decision problems are no longer well defined, and therefore not amenable to rationality. The challenge is to translate knowledge and expertise into new experiments, without predicting how they will work or what the payoffs might be. This challenge can’t be conceived as management in any form. Entrepreneurship is the method to establish new starting conditions for new value creation, and market selection will take care of future allocation of resources between winners and losers.

The Value Creators Podcast Episode #16. Beverlee Rasmussen On Systems For Organized And Profitable Small Business

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A breakthrough technique for Small Business: Don’t manage, build systems. 

Many small business owners experience frustration in trying to manage their businesses. So many things can get in the way of organized and profitable implementation. Management is hard, especially when it involves managing other people. Beverlee Rasmussen has interviewed and coached thousands of small business owners all over the world, and spent 10,000 hours developing her small business system of systems.

Systems are how things get done. If you build systems, you don’t have to manage people. Beverlee offers systems for every facet of small business: Leadership Systems, Operations Systems, Financial Systems, Team Systems, and Marketing Systems. Those titles might seem like something for big businesses only. But they’re not. Every business owner can design and implement their own systems – and doing so will bring back all the joy and freedom and success that you expected from becoming an entrepreneur.

Don’t manage, build systems.

Resources:

Beverlee’s latest book: Small Business, Big Opportunity: Systematize Your Business.

Small Business Coach Training

Small Business Field Guide: Organized and Profitable

The Small Business Coach Gameboard

Knowledge Capsule:

Leadership Systems:

  • Leadership systems are essential for maintaining consistency and stability in a small business.
  • Having a leadership system means paying attention to what you measure, control, how you allocate resources, and how you react to incidents.
  • Leaders need to ensure they don’t favor certain employees over others and maintain fairness.
  • Leadership systems are about creating a consistent experience for employees and customers.

Financial Systems:

  • Understanding financial concepts like cash flow, profitability, debt, P&L (Profit and Loss), and balance sheets is crucial for entrepreneurs.
  • Entrepreneurs often struggle to differentiate between cash flow and profitability, which can lead to financial problems.
  • Borrowing money for a small business is acceptable but comes with rules; avoid high-interest traps.
  • Tracking real expenses accurately is vital for borrowing and financial stability.

Operations Systems:

  • Effective operational systems enable a business to run efficiently and independently of its owner.
  • Having documented processes and checklists for various operations ensures consistency and reduces errors.
  • Adaptation and change are part of small businesses, so having systems in place can help pivot and respond effectively.
  • Operational systems are crucial for scaling and maintaining high-quality service.

Organization Systems:

  • Organizational systems include structure, job roles, and defining how things are done within a business.
  • Position agreements and clear expectations for employees help in reducing frustrations and improving productivity.
  • A system for compensation is essential for profitability and stability.
  • Understanding your target market and catering marketing efforts to specific customer segments is part of organization systems.

Marketing Systems:

  • Effective marketing systems require a deep understanding of your target market and consistent messaging.
  • Avoid falling into the trap of chasing the latest marketing trends without understanding your customers.
  • Making and consistently keeping promises to customers is crucial; going above and beyond creates a memorable experience.
  • Marketing should be based on a value proposition and understanding customers’ emotional and product needs.

In summary, Beverlee emphasizes the importance of systems thinking in leadership, finance, operations, organization, and marketing for small business success. Systems provide consistency, stability, and adaptability, allowing entrepreneurs to achieve prosperity and freedom in their businesses.

The Value Creators Podcast: Episode #12. Mark McGrath On Adaptive Entrepreneurial Management

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Mark McGrath of AGLX has developed a management approach he calls The Adaptive Entrepreneurial Method. He combines the insights of John Boyd and the entrepreneurial principles of Austrian economics. 

Boyd was a prolific writer on strategy, particularly famous for his development of the OODA Loop model of decision-making under uncertainty, feedback, and responsive re-orientation, as well as the author of a vast body of work on strategy. 

Austrian economics overlaps in the area of entrepreneurial judgment, which is purposeful action under uncertainty, and dynamic responsiveness to the resultant marketplace signals (ie. feedback loops) that action generates.

He joined The Value Creators podcast to explore the intersection of John Boyd and Austrian economics.

Resources: 

AGLX

Mark’s podcast: No Way Out

Mark’s Substack: The Whirl Of Reorientation

Knowledge Capsule:

1. Austrian entrepreneurship is a Human-Centered Approach:

  • Boyd’s theories emphasize prioritizing people in decision-making.
  • Human-centered approach over technology-centric focus.
  • Recognizing the role of consumers, employees, and stakeholders.

John Boyd’s insights underscore the significance of placing human understanding and interaction at the heart of decision-making processes. Rather than fixating on technological advancements, his theories advocate for acknowledging the central role of people within any system. This approach emphasizes the vital connections between consumers, employees, stakeholders, and their collective impact on the overall success of an endeavor. The equivalent space in Austrian economics is subjective value.

Action: Always place human values at the center of all business strategizing and decision-making.

2. Continuous Learning and Adaptation:

  • Adaptation and flexibility in ever-changing environments.
  • Shaping strategies based on evolving circumstances.
  • Emphasis on continuous learning to respond to changes.

A core tenet of John Boyd’s philosophy is the value of perpetual learning and adaptability within dynamic environments. His approach encourages a constant re-evaluation and adjustment of strategies in response to evolving circumstances. Instead of adhering to rigid plans, Boyd’s philosophy advocates for organizations to actively engage in continuous learning, enabling them to proactively address shifts and remain relevant. This is perfectly consistent with Austrian principles of continuous change and dynamic efficiency (as opposed to the static equilibrium approach of conventional economics).

Action: Your firm’s knowledge accumulation plan – i.e. learning – is its first priority.

3. Interaction and Isolation Dynamics:

  • Balance between interaction with allies and isolating competitors.
  • Drawing allies through effective engagement.
  • Isolating competitors to disrupt cohesion and effectiveness.

One of John Boyd’s pivotal concepts revolves around the interplay of interaction and isolation. The strategy for success involves effectively engaging allies while simultaneously isolating competitors to weaken their cohesion. This dynamic equilibrium plays a critical role in influencing outcomes and securing advantages within competitive environments.

Action: Choose the right partners as allies and isolate your competitors from these relationships.

4. Strategy as a Mental Tapestry:

  • Strategy as a dynamic mental tapestry of changing intentions.
  • Emphasis on self-awareness and situational awareness.
  • Continuous evolution of strategies based on circumstances.

John Boyd’s approach to strategy departs from conventional thinking by framing it as a dynamic mental tapestry of evolving intentions. He underscores the importance of self-awareness and situational awareness, advocating for strategies that continuously evolve in response to changing contexts. Unlike static planning, Boyd’s philosophy aligns with the adaptive nature of complex systems.

Action: Don’t plan – adapt.

5. Embracing Complexity and Distributed Leadership:

  • Embracing complexity over linear solutions.
  • Acknowledging distributed leadership in multifaceted challenges.
  • Orchestrating interactions to adapt to evolving contexts.

Boyd’s theories encourage a departure from linear problem-solving towards embracing the intricacies of complexity. By recognizing the multifaceted nature of challenges, Boyd’s philosophy promotes distributed leadership. This approach involves orchestrating interactions and collaboration among diverse elements, enabling organizations to respond nimbly to evolving contexts and foster innovation. Austrian economics, in the same way, is complexity-aware and orchestrates through value creation.

Action: Use value as the attractor in a complex business world.

The Value Creators Podcast: Episode #11. James Burstall On The Flexible Method

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There’s a considerable debate among consultants and academics regarding the definition of management: what is it? Is it a science, is it a process, is it a set of tools that business schools teach us how to use? 

In this episode, James Burstall comes on to explain his perspective on management as a mindset (the interacting mindsets of many different people in many different circumstances in fact)  as proposed in his new book titled The Flexible Method: Prepare To Prosper In the Next Global Crisis.

Resources:

James Burstall’s Production Group – Argonon

James Burstall’s Book: The Flexible Method: Prepare To Prosper In The Next Global Crisis

Knowledge Capsule:

  1. Introduction to the Flexible Method:
  • “Flexible Method” is an approach tailored to managing uncertainties in business.
  • Central components include adaptability and radical determination, combined to form a powerful decision-making framework.
  • This method encourages an open-minded approach to research, teamwork, and resolute action for decision-making.

Action: Elevate responsiveness to change over planning.

  1. Radical Determination and Decision-Making:
  • Making and committing to decisions is crucial in the Flexible Method.
  • Teams need to reach a consensus and show unwavering determination.
  • Tough decisions are embraced and executed with full resolve.

Action: Don’t just make decisions, commit to them, and get team commitment.

  1. Adaptiveness and Scanning for Opportunities:
  • Radical determination is about executing decisions; adaptiveness involves identifying opportunities.
  • Scanning the horizon for changing circumstances is vital.
  • A case from the credit crunch illustrates the need to be open to new avenues.

Action: Where possible, anticipate change in the form of an opportunity space.

  1. Cash Flow as a Critical Metric:
  • Cash flow is the most critical business health metric, needing respect and management.
  • Managing finances during crises involves making tough decisions.
  • Strategies to retain relationships and sustain the business are discussed.

Action: Measure your business’s health with cash flow and cash availability.

  1. Entrepreneurial Mindset and Restlessness:
  • Organizations in crisis operate like startups.
  • Restlessness is essential for fostering an entrepreneurial mindset.
  • Embracing change, creativity, and innovation is emphasized.

Action: All business is entrepreneurial, not managerial.

  1.  Leadership, Care for People, and Reflection:
  • Leadership involves emotional intelligence, authenticity, and prioritizing people.
  • Values like diversity, inclusion, and environmental responsibility are retained.
  • Gratitude, rewards, and reflection play a role in the Flexible Method.

Action: Caring brings resilience to business.

190. Peter Klein: Why Managers Still Matter:

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Entrepreneurial businesses embrace adaptiveness and change, and continuous innovation enabled by flexible and responsive organizations, empowered at every level. That doesn’t mean there’s no role for managers. Inside the corporation, entrepreneurial management co-ordinates the business flow of responding to changing customer wants and preferences, so that resources are allocated and reallocated to the production activities that customers value the most. In fact, management is becoming more important, not less. Professors Peter Klein and Nicolai Foss explain entrepreneurial management in their latest book, Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company (Mises.org/E4B_190_Book), and Peter Klein visits Economics For Business to highlight the key points.

Key Takeaways and Actionable Insights

Management co-ordinates the constant flux of entrepreneurial business.

The essence of the adaptive entrepreneurial organization model is responsive change. Entrepreneurial businesses don’t lock themselves in to 5-year strategies and annual plans. They recognize that markets are in constant flux as a result of changing customer preferences, changing competitive activity, changing technologies, and changing conditions in business channels and in the economy. Change is the normal condition. It’s what Ludwig von Mises termed constant flux.

Management is required inside the firm to adapt and respond to change outside the firm. It’s not possible to manage the change in markets, but it is a necessity to manage resource allocation and productive activities inside the firm.

Management is co-ordination and orchestration, not authority and hierarchy.

We might think of the concept of management in its industrial age guise of authority and hierarchy: some people “higher up” in the organization telling others “lower down” what to do. This kind of hierarchical authority can’t work in the digital network age; it’s too slow to process incoming data from the marketplace and too rigid to quickly or effectively implement newly imagined responses to those incoming data.

But in Professor Klein and Professor Foss’s analysis, management no longer equates to old-fashioned authority and hierarchy. Management is co-ordination: assembling the right resources — both human capital and complementary capital assets such as supportive technologies — in the right combinations (often referred to as “teams” in today’s management language) for the right shared task with the right shared goals. Professor Klein likened this to orchestration — there’s a conductor who guides the orchestra in playing the same symphony together, without telling the individual players how to play their instrument, and leaving the details of implementation to the individuals and their specialized skills.

Some orchestras may have better results than others because their teams have been well-recruited and well assembled and they respond better to management co-ordination. All firms and teams are complex adaptive systems, with emergent outcomes influenced by internal forces, one of which is management.

Management is culture more than authority.

How do managers achieve a better outcome as a result of managing their teams? Professor Klein believes that they institute a successful culture, as opposed to designing an organizational structure. He defines culture in terms of norms, customs and practices — the accepted way (or simple rules) of “how we do things around here”. More specifically, in the customer-centric entrepreneurial firm, “here’s how we plan to facilitate value for our customers around here”. Skilled managers paint the pictures — the “vision”, if you will — in the minds of employees of the customer value standards the firm will achieve, and the customer experiences that the firm will facilitate.

Modern managers are comfortable with and quite expert at adaptation.

The modern managerial culture is a far cry from traditional hierarchical managerial authority. It has the built-in flexibility for adaptiveness to the rapid rate of change in today’s digital business world. A well-functioning management process in a loosely structured organization can change internal production processes, teams and resource allocations in response to external changes in customer demand and marketplace conditions.

In fact, Professor Klein points out, through relevant case studies, such a management structure can be better at adaptation than, for example, a network of independent contractors and suppliers that would be challenged to orchestrate responsive changes to an external change, since each would have a different experience and process it through a different cultural orientation. They wouldn’t co-ordinate as well or as quickly as internally managed teams.

In certain cases, management authority can sometimes be a relevant organizational tool, so long as it is applied in a contingent fashion.

The relevance and usefulness of authority varies by circumstance and business situations. Its usefulness is contingent, and managers must be sensitive as to when to apply authority and in what style.

Why Managers Matter identifies two distinct styles of managerial authority, Mark 1 authority and Mark 2 authority. Mark 1 authority is traditional command-and-control, exerted top down — superiors telling subordinates what to do.

Mark 2 authority is exercised through design rather than command: finding the right person for the task, combining the best-qualified people in teams, and giving them a goal with a wide latitude in their process and implementation in achieving the goal.

An important element of the contingent approach is to empathically identify the subjective preferences of employees. Some will respond well to flexible, open-ended direction that enables them to exercise their own initiative. Others might prefer the certainty of clear direction. One type of salesperson might be highly motivated by a 100% commission remuneration plan, another might feel more secure with a base salary with the potential for an achievement bonus upon exceeding quota.

Professor Klein identifies two broad sets of conditions for the exercise of Mark 1 and Mark 2 authority. When there is a high degree of interdependence between people, teams and tasks, such that it is critical that tasks are highly coordinated, completed at the same time and combined in a highly specific fashion, then management intervention is required and it will include Mark 1 elements. When production is more modular, when tasks and projects can be completed interdependently, then Mark 2 management can be exercised through a decentralized, flat and culturally aligned organization. (Professor Klein cited the example of the type of higher education institution where he works; all the professors can design and teach their classes, do their research, and publish their papers and books with a high degree of autonomy.)

Management is becoming more important, not less.

In a rapidly changing world, where employee attitudes and experiences are very different than in the pre-digital world, and where global markets and their interconnected structures are more uncertain and cyclically unreliable, and where the pace of disruptive technological innovation is accelerating, good management is more important than ever for the success of our economy and our society. Smart managers are needed to find the right balance between operational excellence through established processes and adaptive change through adjustment and experimentation, a balance that business scholars call the ambidextrous organization. It can’t happen without management, and without managers.

Additional Resources

Peter Klein’s book page: Mises.org/E4B_190_Klein

Why Managers Matter: The Perils of the Bossless Company by Peter Klein and Nicolai Foss: Mises.org/E4B_190_Book

Public Affairs book page: Mises.org/E4B_190_PA