[EO DC] Identifying and Removing Bottlenecks To Scale Your Business With Jordan Solender

Jordan Solender is the Founder of IT Select, where he serves as an IT Executive, helping organizations transform their technology procurement with faster, AI-driven models. Under his leadership, IT Select has expanded to serve clients in 38 states, streamlined procurement cycles from 120 days to as few as 30. For himself, Jordan achieved an eight-figure exit from a previous technology advisory firm. Beyond IT Select, Jordan’s entrepreneurial journey began at age 13 and spans multiple businesses in technology, events, hospitality, and business coaching, and he is widely recognized for his expertise in AI transformation and optimizing business processes.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[03:57] Jordan Solender explains how IT Select slashes procurement cycles with AI
[04:33] Why traditional IT procurement is broken and how to fix it
[07:33] How Decision Maker Dinners spark collaboration among CTOs
[12:09] Expert tips to prevent ransomware disasters in your business
[13:26] How founders can escape bottlenecks by automating tasks
[21:53] How one simple automation helped a founder gain 10 hours weekly
[24:18] Jordan’s bottleneck framework to scale by removing yourself from the equation
[34:01] Insider picks for the top tools to streamline SOPs and train your team
[39:44] Understanding sales math and the 80/20 rule behind business growth

In this episode…

Scaling a business can feel like a balancing act between growth and control. Many founders find themselves buried in day-to-day tasks, unsure of how to delegate without losing visibility or quality. But what if the biggest obstacle to scaling isn’t the market or the team but the founder?

According to Jordan Solender, a tech entrepreneur and systems strategist, most businesses hit a ceiling because the founder becomes the bottleneck. He explains that by identifying where time and decision-making pile up, leaders can begin to document, delegate, and automate. Jordan highlights that real growth starts when founders remove themselves from one process at a time, using AI, automation, and clear systems to replace their constant involvement. This shift not only restores time and focus but transforms businesses from founder-dependent to self-sustaining.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Jordan Solender, Founder and IT Executive of IT Select, to discuss how entrepreneurs can identify and remove bottlenecks to scale their businesses. They talk about automation and AI as growth tools, how to delegate effectively, and the importance of knowing your numbers. Jordan also shares his bottleneck audit framework and insights from building multiple successful companies.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related episodes:

Quotable Moments:

“It’s purely just helping founders remove themselves as the bottleneck by systemizing, and optimizing, and automating their businesses.”
“If you can document it, you can delegate it.”
“The goal isn’t more hustle. It’s more clarity, and control, and more time.”
“Elimination is the cleanest form of optimization. No system is better than a bad one.”
“Distance creates clarity. And when you zoom out, you realize most bottlenecks aren’t people problems.”

Action Steps:

Identify where you are the bottleneck: Mapping tasks that rely solely on you exposes growth constraints and inefficiencies.
Document and delegate repetitive processes: Creating clear SOPs empowers your team to act independently while maintaining consistency and quality.
Automate wherever possible: Leveraging AI and automation tools frees your time and ensures crucial tasks run smoothly without manual oversight.
Audit systems regularly for friction: Ongoing reviews help eliminate unnecessary steps and ensure your operations stay lean, scalable, and effective.
Focus on one improvement at a time: Incremental progress compounds over time, making lasting change more achievable and less overwhelming for you and your team.

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Episode Transcript:

Intro: 00:02

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs podcast, where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 00:12

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here, Founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders. Today is no different. Jordan Solender. You can check him out his website JordanSolender.com. it’s Solender.

You can also check out itselect.io. He’s got nine other companies. I won’t mention all of them on here. But before I formally introduce you, Jordan, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out. Since Jordan and I met through an EO connection Entrepreneurs’ Organization, people can check it out.

It’s all over the world. Actually. Some great EO members I’ve had on are Robert Hartline of EO Nashville. I had Michael, so he built up a chain of cell phone stores and then sold them. It was really interesting.

And he had a software. You know how it is. He’s got like six other companies as well. Michael Attias runs Caterson also an EO Nashville. Very interesting.

You know, interview on how he built up his SaaS company through the restaurant business. Actually Jordan has started a barbecue business, caters then helps a lot of barbecue businesses. Obviously he’s in Nashville, so maybe you guys should connect. But Mat Zalk, Key Renter Property Management in Tulsa, just sharing how he built up. You know, he was doing investment properties and he’s like this is a pain.

I need a team around this. And then he started doing that for other people. So he manages his property. So that and many, many more. Check him out.

This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. We do that in a few ways. One, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast.

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So Jordan, we kind of call ourselves the magic elves that run in the background, that make it stress free for companies to build amazing relationships. And, you know, that’s the number one thing in my life. I’m always looking at ways on how I can give to my relationships. I’ve found no better way over the past 15 years to profile the people I admire in my podcast and send them sweet treats in the mail so you can check it out at rise25.com or email us at support@rise25.com

I’m super excited. Jordan Solender is a tech entrepreneur and he’s Founder of IT Select. They transform how IT leaders by technology by replacing slow, expensive procurement cycles with faster, smarter AI powered models. His journey actually began when he was 13, right as a snow his snowblower service. It evolved into launching a successful DJ company in high school.

He went on to build a technology advisory firm that grew rapidly, tripling its team and reaching an eight figure exit. And like I mentioned, he’s got several other companies barbecue, restaurant, capital company, and even a coaching business, which we’ll go into because all the stuff that he’s done to remove himself and optimize a sales funnel and all these things, people are asking him, how do I do this? Jordan. So, Jordan, thanks for having me. Yeah.

Thanks for coming on.

Jordan Solender: 03:26

Thanks. Thanks for having me. No, I appreciate it. What an honor to be on an EO, another EO members podcast as well as Inspired Insider. So this is awesome.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 03:36

Yeah I’m excited. And just start off and we’ll start with it select and we’ll go from there. But talk about it. Select a little bit and what you do. Because I know a lot of the learnings come from it.

Select and your other event company. So let’s it select. What do you guys do.

Jordan Solender: 03:57

Yeah, absolutely. So it select quick elevator pitch is we are it selection as a service. Think of us as an IT broker. We don’t get paid by you. We get paid by the vendor.

We are an agnostic advisory firm that brings the right providers to you by doing a short and fast needs assessment. And then from there you pick the provider, you save time, you save money. So what takes you by yourself? Normally 90, 120 days we’re doing in 30 to 60 days.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 04:24

How did you come across that model? Because when I hear it, I hear we’re going to run all your back end systems and things like that, and you kind of took a different route.

Jordan Solender: 04:33

Yeah. I mean, what we found was procurement was broken, right? Like procurement should be a growth lever. You know, it’s time we we change that. Procurement should be something that one the IT person shouldn’t be doing.

The headaches that we hear constantly are all right I need a new solution. And when a CTO goes out to the marketplace he does a little Google fu. Right. And he says, this is what I’m looking for. He types in the feature.

Then he deals with an SDR that we’ve all talked about, you know, and talked to, you know, a guy out of college qualifying you, you know, as a CTO and IT manager, IT director, VP, you don’t have this kind of time. You have a lot of people relying on you to run the organization’s back end operations, right? Email and cloud and whatnot. So you go through the SDR and then, you know, a couple days later, you talk to the sales guy. The sales guy says, okay, let’s do a demo.

It’s another week later. Then we’re talking to an engineer doing the demo. Finally, we go back to the sales guy. We get the pricing, and after the pricing, we, you know, we we go back and forth negotiating. Now I need executive buy in.

So now I need to come up with a deliverable for an executive buy in. At this point we’re at four to to eight weeks depending on how complicated this process is or what the solution is for scoping and how technical it is. Then we get to the end. In a lot of the times, you know, Jeremy, you know, the CTOs and the VP’s and the IT directors get to the end with the pricing and they realize this isn’t exactly what I needed, and it doesn’t check all the boxes. Now we’ve just wasted 4 to 6 weeks on one solution, and typically you need 3 or 4 bids.

You want to do some research. You want to make sure you’re getting the best price, the best fit right, all the features you want. You want to make sure you can grow into a solution, not out of one. This is where it comes in. We’re going to do a short needs assessment, something very familiar to say what the Deloitte’s PwC’s Bcg’s of the world do.

We’re going to gather all the quantitative details of the KPIs and operational considerations that your team might need. What matters most to everybody. Then we’re going to go out to the marketplace. We’re going to find the top three providers that do everything you need within budget, within deployment timeframes, within all those KPIs. And we’re going to say, here you go here.

Here are the three that we recommend. And we’re going to organizationally put them on your calendar in a way where you’re not dealing with the time constraints and disparaging meetings all over the place. With your team. We’re going to organize it. We’re going to make sure that the process is very efficient in how you evaluate them.

We’re going to have scorecards and data books around how each of them perform could perform for you both from a financial perspective as well as a features perspective. And from there, we’ll make sure that the process is really efficient. Right? It’s not going to be all over the place. You’re not going to be wasting your time.

We’re going to save time. We’re going to save money.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 07:20

I’m curious, there’s a couple of things that stick out on your website, which I want to go through. One is decision maker dinners, right? This is not a normal thing you see on a website. Can you talk about that?

Jordan Solender: 07:33

Yeah. Decision maker dinners are really cool. They’ve they’ve really taken form over time. It was just a idea I had to get, you know, customers that were like minded, not even with projects involved in the same place that I was, just like, hey, we should share some ideas. These people will get along with these people, etc..

So the first one was in Philadelphia back in early 2025. Like in January. We did it at like a Fogo de Chao. Rented rented a room. Right.

And we got unlimited meat.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:04

You can’t go wrong with that.

Jordan Solender: 08:05

Unlimited unlimited meat, unlimited ideas. You know, there’s a tagline right there. So that being said, we got like, I think it was, you know, 8 to 10 CTOs and decision makers. Some were customers of mine, some weren’t right. Some were just potentials.

And they brought a friend in a room and we gave them a scenario. Right. Like you get hit with ransomware, you know, what do you do next? And then we just kind of went around the table and we talked about like, oh, well, this is where I’m strong. This is where I’m not strong.

This is where, you know, we could have probably done better because this actually happened to us. Everybody signs an NDA before getting into the room, right? We want everybody to feel comfortable. Typically we’re not. We’re making sure that these 8 to 10 people aren’t competitors in any way, you know, so different industries, different markets, that kind of thing.

They were all around the Philadelphia area though. And then we had two vendors that specialized in the topic. Right. And I made it very clear to the vendors, this is not a sales conference. This is not a sales pitch.

We want you to come in. And after everybody has gone, you can say, here’s how you would have alleviated the problems that they would have had in how they addressed that, the ransomware issue. And that’s it. After we did the the question and the roundtable, we just kind of, you know, just had some chatting. We had dinner and then afterwards we we had cigars.

It was a lot of fun outside on the patio. It was it was a really good time. So we’ve we’ve done this in a few cities now. We did it in Philly. We did it in Minneapolis.

We did it in Dallas, San Jose. How do you.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:37

Choose the city?

Jordan Solender: 09:39

It’s really just where you have your customers.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:41

Jordan like for this, this company, they could be all over the US. I take it.

Jordan Solender: 09:46

All over the US. So we have customers in 38 states right now. Nothing. Nothing is helping us decide outside of, you know, where. We have a cluster of customers that want to want to do this.

Yeah.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:57

So you’ll look at like a concentration and you’re like, oh, Minnesota seems good. We have a bunch of people there. Let’s do a dinner.

Jordan Solender: 10:04

Exactly. We have a request to do it in New York, but we don’t have a ton of customers in New York. So we said, hey, if we can, you know, drum up enough interest, we’ll we’ll do one there, maybe at, like, Nobu or something like that. Right. We want to have a great dining experience.

We want to have a great situation for the vendor to to come in and alleviate any weak points in what a customer might see. So there’s there should be a lot of value on both sides.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 10:28

Yeah. I think again, we’ll talk a little bit about the sales process and sales funnel. But that’s just like just a unique way of getting people together and kind of a non salesy add value environment. One they’re getting food. Do you have people typically pay for like how do you structure that piece.

Are you paying for the thing. Or maybe there’s a sponsor that help offset the cost. I know these dinners could be expensive. I mean, I’ve run events in, you know, 20 or 30 people. It gets it gets pricey.

Jordan Solender: 11:01

Yeah, it gets pricey. So these are sponsored transparently right in the invites, the private invites. Because again, it’s invite only. You can’t like sign up. You know.

It is completely sponsored by the two vendors that we would bring in. Right. So they’re paying for the dinners, you know, the customers, you know and you know, can get some free swag, which is fine. You know, everybody loves swag stuff we all get. Right.

And we make sure you know it’s a good time. But for the most part we try to keep the spotlight on the collaborative networking in the topic. Right. You know, this CTO over here is doing something similar to you. You guys should be buddies, right?

I have I have a lot of that where I’ve just introduced a couple CTOs to each other and, you know, they’ve, you know, shared ideas and expertise.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 11:49

Yeah. I’m curious. I know you can’t share names or whatever the case is, but some of the advice you mentioned, you get hit with ransomware, right? And it’s what are what’s like some good advice people gave around the table that if a company is listening earlier to prevent it or if they are, you know, experiencing it.

Jordan Solender: 12:09

Stop, drop and roll. No, don’t do that in your data center. It’s probably super dirty. Unless you have very hygienic data center. But immutable backups is a great place to start, right?

Having backups that ransomware can’t get into testing those backups, right? So if if you don’t have a backup system that you are constantly testing, right, talk to us and we’ll make sure we have you with a service or a solution where you can constantly test the state of those backups. How many times? Oh my God, I would be a very, very rich man if I had a dollar even just for how many times I’ve heard an IT administrator say I tested my backups and they were corrupted. Right.

It’s like, well, you clearly weren’t testing enough because, you know, you would know that and you would do another backup, etc., and fix that. So if you aren’t testing your backups, talk to me. If you don’t have immutable backups from ransomware. Talk to me if you don’t have backups off site or in the cloud. Talk to me.

Right. We want to get you in a better place.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 13:09

I’m wondering, in this business, if you look back at the other businesses, what are some challenges or mistakes that you now do differently with it? Select because you learn from those things from, you know, the 17 other businesses in the past.

Jordan Solender: 13:26

Oof! Well, I mean, this kind of leads into what I’ve started with the coaching, right, is, is figuring out ways to work on the business and not in the business. Right. Removing myself from the business. Right.

So and that’s, you know, just to pivot a little bit here, if that’s all right. That’s that’s what I’m doing with the coaching. It’s it’s purely just helping founders remove themselves as the bottleneck. Right. By systemizing and optimizing and automating their businesses so they can scale without everything depending on them.

So all of my businesses, I really practice that, you know, I practice, you know, auditing, you know, what are the things that are completely repetitive every single time? What am I in on the day to day when I refer to the bottleneck? You know, what is the choke point? Where are things not being able to scale? Typically that’s you.

That’s the owner. That’s the founder. The amount of businesses that I see every day, including my own. At one point, right until I kind of came up with my framework to evaluate, it was bottlenecked by me. I had to pull myself out.

I needed to scale. I needed to scale faster. I needed to run, you know, faster, scale harder, and make sure that I was, you know, documenting and delegating, you know. So, I mean, I could go into why don’t we start with the.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 14:52

Yeah. Why don’t we start with the event company and maybe talk through some of the bottlenecks you discovered and how you removed yourself?

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Search Interviews:

[EO DC] Identifying and Removing Bottlenecks To Scale Your Business With Jordan Solender

[EO DC] Identifying and Removing Bottlenecks To Scale Your Business With Jordan Solender

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

In this episode…

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Special Mention(s):

Related episodes:

Quotable Moments:

Action Steps:

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Episode Transcript:

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