Disruptive Influence: The Business Storytelling & Brand Communication Podcast
If you know what you do but struggle to talk about it in a way that lands - this podcast is for you.
Most founders, creators, and leaders have the expertise…but not the story, clarity, or communication skills to express it with confidence, conviction, and influence.
Disruptive Influence is the storytelling, communication, and executive presence podcast for founders, solopreneurs, and LinkedIn-era leaders who want to communicate with more clarity and power - in meetings, in pitches, in content, and in everyday conversations.
Learn how to:
- turn lived experience into clear, compelling stories
- communicate with clarity, confidence, and executive presence
- build a strong POV that attracts the right people
- sell your ideas, your value, and your vision with conviction
- unlock the mindset shifts behind real influence and high-performance communication
Hosted by Jeff Abracen - executive storytelling coach, former agency VP, Creative Director, and creator of the Disruptive Influence™ system - each episode reveals how exceptional thinkers shape narratives, build presence, and communicate in ways that create opportunity.
Through a mix of solo tactical episodes and deep conversations with founders and creators who are disrupting and influencing their industries in their own way, you’ll learn how real leaders think, speak, and tell stories that move people.
If you're building a company, growing a personal brand on LinkedIn, leading a team, or simply want to communicate with more confidence and conviction - this podcast gives you the tools and perspective shifts to become the most influential person in the room.
➞ Subscribe and learn how to tell stories that sell - and speak with clarity, confidence, and conviction.
➞ Connect with Jeff Abracen on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.
Disruptive Influence: The Business Storytelling & Brand Communication Podcast
Don’t Be Better. Be Impossible to Compare: Category Design with Josh Lowman
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What if the secret to building a better business isn’t being slightly better than everyone else - but becoming impossible to compare?
Josh Lowman is the founder of Gold Front, a category design studio that helps companies create, define and own their categories.
In this conversation, Josh explains why differentiation usually gets ignored, how category strategy can align an entire company and why founders need a simpler place in their minds from which to tell their story.
But this episode goes beyond strategy.
Josh and Jeff explore the tension between love and money, why wanting financial success doesn’t invalidate meaningful work, what it means to build a personal brand publicly and how Josh is navigating doubt during difficult seasons in his business.
They also unpack the rapidly changing relationship between creativity and AI - from Josh’s experiments building an AI-powered operating system for his agency to the increasingly important role of human judgment, emotion and craft.
In this episode:
• Why being slightly different usually isn’t enough
• The two ways a business can own its category
• How category strategy aligns founders, marketers and product teams
• Why great work alone doesn’t guarantee a great business
• Reconciling creativity, purpose, ambition and money
• Building a personal brand without treating LinkedIn like a money machine
• Sharing uncertainty instead of pretending to have every answer
• How Josh built AI agents around Gold Front’s strategy frameworks
• The danger of overbuilding with AI
• Why processed creativity quickly loses its value
• What humans may still contribute that AI cannot
• How to find work you genuinely want to do - and frame it differently
Chapters
00:00 – We’re All Greedy
00:44 – What Makes a Good Business?
03:13 – The Two Ways to Own Your Category
05:51 – From World-Class Agencies to Gold Front
08:10 – Why Great Work Wasn’t Enough
10:34 – Category Strategy as a Company-Wide Idea
14:19 – How Ready Must a Company Be to Change?
15:19 – Storytelling, Underdogs and Josh’s Deeper Motivation
17:43 – Reconciling Love, Money and Ambition
23:09 – Learning to Actually Sell
24:16 – Becoming Josh Lowman in Public
26:14 – The Complicated Relationship with Content
28:09 – Sharing Doubt When Business Is Down
31:29 – Building an AI-Powered Agency OS
36:11 – The Danger of Overbuilding with AI
37:55 – Turning Expertise into Helpful AI Agents
39:42 – The Builder’s Brain vs. the Storytelling Brain
43:58 – Why AI Creativity Feels Processed
46:55 – Finding the Human Advantage
51:03 – Josh’s Best Advice for Building a Brand
53:06 – The Lifelong Desire to Tell Stories
Josh Lowman is the founder of Gold Front.
Find him at GoldFront.com and on LinkedIn.
Connect with Jeff Abracen on LinkedIn [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffabracen/]
If you are or know a disruptive influencer who would make a great guest, we'd love to hear from you.
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Cover art by Daniel Devoy
Music by Stephen Voyce
©2024-2026 The Disruptive Influence Podcast - Jeff Abracen