Inspirational Mentor 🚀 | President at NobelBiz™ | Author 📚 | Podcaster 🎙️ | Growth consultant 📈

I’m a disruptor in a suit. A storyteller at heart. A strategist by design.

I don’t just lead NobelBiz, I challenge what leadership should look like in a world full of noise, jargon, and copy-paste strategies.

One moment I’m breaking down lead gen myths or reshaping how contact centers approach CX. The next? I’m turning big ideas into real-world strategies, campaigns that convert, conversations that stick, and stories people remember.

I don’t follow trends. I interrogate them. Flip them. And build something better.

From scaling B2B SaaS brands to mentoring rising leaders, I stay 10 steps ahead, and try to make it look easy (even when it’s not). I lead with truth, not fluff. Impact, not ego.

And behind all of it? I’m driven by something deeper: building something meaningful for my team, my industry, and my family...the world! 

I’m not here to make impressions.
I’m here to make waves.

"Decision making is not a gift.
It is a muscle. You build it repetition by repetition, mistake by mistake, and over time you learn your own tells.

I have been leading companies for decades, and I can promise you this.
Most leaders do not get better because they suddenly become smarter.
They get better because they finally start paying attention to their patterns.

The hesitation before a tough call.
The impulse to overthink simple choices.
The tendency to avoid conflict by delaying the obvious.
The belief that one more meeting will make the decision safer.

These patterns run the company long before you do.
If you do not see them, they will shape every outcome while you convince yourself you are being intentional.

When I coach executives, I ask one question before anything else.
What is the pattern that keeps showing up in your decisions even when you know it should not?

Break that pattern and your leadership jumps a level.
Ignore it and you stay stuck, no matter how many books you read or plans you write.

So let me ask you the same question.
Which pattern are you finally ready to break?"

Steven Michael Bederman

Better Decisions, Fewer Regrets

Disruptive Content Creator. Chief Executive Officer at NobelBiz. Co-Managing Partner at bXceptional LLC. Author. Titan 100 Colorado

After forty years in business, I’ve learned that growth doesn’t always mean adding more.
Sometimes it means letting go.

The noise, the old habits, the systems that made sense once but don’t anymore.
The kind of growth that lasts isn’t about scaling up. It’s about digging deeper, getting clearer, simpler, and more focused.

Bigger isn’t always better.
Better is what keeps you in the game.

What does growth look like for you right now, expansion or refinement?

3 Things Decades in Business Taught Me About Growth

The truth nobody wants to hear:
Day 1 gets the applause.
Day 1,000 gets silence.

I’ve seen it again and again. The world celebrates launches, not longevity.
But the people who actually win aren’t the ones making noise.
They’re the ones who keep moving when the noise stops.

When the dopamine fades.
When nobody’s watching.
When it’s just them and the grind.

Progress isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t trend.
It’s repetition. Consistency. Boredom done right.

Everyone’s chasing virality.
The real builders are stacking invisible wins - one decision, one conversation, one hard day at a time.

You don’t need another “big moment.”
You need a thousand small ones no one ever claps for.

So ask yourself - Are you built for the hype, or are you built for the haul?

Because business doesn’t reward the best starter.
It rewards the last one still swinging.

I’ve watched hundreds of companies fail.
Not because their product was bad or their team was weak.
They failed because they were comfortable.

They moved too slow.
They trusted the wrong people.
And they made “gut” decisions when the data was screaming otherwise.

After 40+ years building and scaling businesses, I’ve learned something:
Leadership isn’t about being the smartest person in the room.
It’s about building systems that make the room itself smarter.

The companies that win aren’t the ones with deep pockets or fancy marketing.
They’re the ones that adapt faster than the rest even know change is coming.
They decide, execute, and iterate while their competitors are still in meetings.

At NobelBiz, I live by 5 rules that shape how we lead, grow, and win.
They’re not theories. They’re scar tissue.
They separate the companies that scale from the ones that stall.

Which of these 5 rules would your company struggle with most: speed, systems, people, clarity, or courage?

The CEO Playbook: 5 Rules for leading in a World That Won't Wait

We’ve never had more data in business.
Customer sentiment. Behavior. Voice analytics.
Everything is tracked, tagged, and analyzed to death.

But here’s what everyone forgets - data doesn’t hear hesitation.
It doesn’t catch the pause before a customer says “never mind.”
It doesn’t feel the frustration in someone’s silence.

I’ve spent decades leading contact center teams and tech companies.
And the biggest insights never came from dashboards.
They came from listening. Really listening.

The future won’t belong to the companies with the most data.
It’ll belong to the ones that know how to hear what the data misses.

Because behind every number, there’s a human story.
And that’s something no algorithm will ever decode.

A business rarely collapses in one dramatic moment.
It erodes. Quietly. Slowly. Almost politely.
It starts with small things you ignore.
A customer you lose and chalk up as an outlier.
A process that breaks and you promise to revisit later.
A key player who checks out emotionally long before they leave.
By the time the damage is visible, the real decline happened months or years earlier.
And most leaders never saw it because they were too focused on today to notice what was dying underneath.
The companies that survive are the ones that look for the cracks long before they become cliffs.
So ask yourself.
What slow leak in your business have you been pretending is a harmless drip?

People love to romanticize failure.
I have seen it happen over and over. You fall on your face, everyone gathers around, and suddenly you are the tragic hero in your own movie. There is sympathy, applause, even admiration.

But that glow is a trap.
Failure does not make you wiser by default. It does not hand you some magical lesson that transforms you into a better leader. Most of the time it teaches you one thing very well. How to fail again.

The real growth happens after the noise stops.
When nobody is patting you on the back.
When you stop performing the struggle and start interrogating it.
When you ask yourself what you actually need to change, not what story you want to tell.

So here is the question worth sitting with.
Are you learning from the failure, or are you enjoying the attention that comes with it?

We’ve all been there.
You make a decision that feels so obvious, you stop asking for input.

It happens quietly. One meeting, one assumption, one moment where you think you already know. And before you realize it, you’ve stopped really listening.

That’s how leadership starts to slip into control, and control slowly turns into ego.
The best leaders I’ve seen stay curious, even when they’re confident.

Listening doesn’t mean you agree. It just means you haven’t stopped learning.

When was the last time you caught yourself talking when you should have been listening?

In leadership, the volume of what you produce rarely matches the impact of what you produce.

Some of the most valuable work I’ve done never showed up on any checklist.
It was a conversation, a decision, a shift in direction that changed everything later.
Productivity metrics don’t capture that.
They measure output, not outcomes.

The productivity myth is believing that doing more is the same as doing what matters.

What’s the smallest decision you made that produced the biggest impact?

Somewhere along the way, we started confusing innovation with motion.
Every new tool, idea, or trend gets called “progress,” even when it’s just noise.

Real innovation solves a problem. It makes something work better for people.
It’s not about replacing what already works. It’s about understanding why it works and building from there.

Sometimes the smartest move isn’t to invent something new. It’s to simplify what’s already in front of you.

Are you really innovating, or just keeping busy?

By 2030, customers won’t want to be served. They’ll expect to be understood.

“Customer service” will start to sound old-fashioned. What people will look for is alignment , companies that anticipate needs instead of reacting to problems.

Technology will take care of transactions. People will take care of trust.
And the businesses still measuring success by handle times or ticket closures will slowly fade away.

The future won’t belong to the fastest. It’ll belong to the ones who listen best.

So the question is, are you chasing efficiency, or are you earning understanding?

I have watched more deals fall apart from hesitation than from the wrong call.
Leaders often wait for perfect conditions, perfect numbers, or perfect timing. None of that exists.

Momentum creates clarity.
Stalling creates doubt.

If you look back on the decisions you regret, how many were about what you did, and how many were about what you waited too long to do?

After decades of building, buying, investing in, and working with businesses, one thing has become clear to me.

Success doesn’t really teach you much. It just confirms what you already know.
Failure, on the other hand, is where the real lessons live.

It hurts in the moment. It stings. It tests you.
But if you’re paying attention, it shapes how you lead, how you decide, and how you grow.

Failure isn’t the opposite of success. It’s what builds the foundation for it.

What’s one failure that ended up teaching you the most?

taplio

Steven Michael Bederman's Linkedin Analytics