https://youtu.be/l5fLRKRgpQc Alana Dobbins, Executive Director of the Business Owner Success Alliance (BOSA) and Business Development Specialist at W.G. Nielsen & Co., shares how servant leadership and active listening help advisors and entrepreneurs make smarter, faster, and more aligned business decisions. Alana introduces the 5-Step Listening Framework she developed through her extensive experience in investment banking and business development: Mandate, Plan, Team, Execution, and Self-Awareness. This framework helps leaders build trust, uncover risks, and strengthen alignment between vision and execution. She also discusses BOSA, an upcoming mentorship platform connecting business owners with trusted advisors through short, video-based guidance — creating an accessible way to get sound advice at the right time. From building chemistry with clients to balancing empathy with accountability, Alana shares how genuine listening and mentorship drive growth and confidence in the world of M&A. --- 5 Steps to Better Listening with Alana Dobbins Good day, dear listener. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast.  I'm the founder of the Summit OS Group, which developed the Summit OS Business Operating System. And today my guest is Alana Dobbins, the executive Director of the Business Owner Success Alliance and The Business development specialist at W.G. Nielsen and Company and Mid-Market Investment Bank in Denver, Colorado. Alana, welcome to the show.  Hi, Steve. It's such a pleasure to see you again. I enjoy every time I get to share a conversation with you.  Yes, you're referring to me being a guest on your podcast, which I very much enjoyed, and I'm sure this one is even gonna be better than that one. So let's get into it. And, you know, I'm very interested in what drives people, and I always ask on this podcast, what is your personal why and what are you doing to manifest it in your professional life?  I love that question. I've seen you ask that on the podcast I've watched yours. Gosh, everything is different when you get older and over the years you realize what is important to you, and I wanna live a good life. And I don't wanna walk by somebody that needs help and not help them. I don't wanna over promise and under deliver like I have in the past. So I think that would be my why, and manifesting that in my career, it's every day we're serving business owners every single day in some capacity we're showing upShare on X and we're utilizing skill that we've built over my 25 year career, your wonderfully distinguished career, but we bring that to the table. So I think manifesting living a good life is to really utilize everything that I've honed and I've developed, and that can be put to make someone else's life better.  Yeah, it is so true. And when I was younger, even not that much younger, even a few years ago, like 10 years ago, I wasn't really aware of this whole idea of why it's important to think about who you are serving and how we are helping people, but it's really a huge tool to empower ourselves to do our best work. And also to be able to have a long-term perspective, which helps iron out some of those rollercoasters that we all face. So yeah. You love your servant philosophy. You have developed an organization called the Business Owner Success Alliance. So what made you want to be involved with this organization and what is the mission of this organization? What I've seen and witnessed over my career are the business owners who are in growth mode, the business owners who are looking to exit the business owners who are leaning on others for sound advice, to make business decisions. And I've been very fortunate to have been exposed to this environment since I was 19. I was very fortunate for that and in seeing so many different types of business owners. The mission around BOSA is to bring together advisors and mentors that have sound advice that can very easily address something that might change the trajectory of a business owner's decision and having that advice at the right time along with it…Share on X We wanted to bring that in a way that was digestible. Connections can be made on BOSA where if an advisor and a business owner want to establish some sort of ongoing relationship, that's completely up to them. But we wanted to bring an opportunity to have a business owner pop a question out and get a response, a 15, 22-second video response from someone that has valuable advice that can possibly help them make that decision at that moment so they can position themselves to do the best they can do in leading their companies.  Wow, okay, so this is a unique format. It sounds like, that you're not bringing the peer groups together live, but it's more about communicating through asynchronous video. And giving them a platform where they can look at other questions that have been posed and review other content as short video snippets that they can easily digest and go, ‘Oh, I need more information on that. Maybe I'll reach out to that advisor’. But having that video library of other things, business owners in their realm, so questions that mom and pop business owners have are going to be different than established businesses in growth mode. So we have a dynamic way of allowing the person that owns the company in growth mode to see relevant contact and vice versa for the other stages of growth.  I love it. This is very interesting. And how many members are there in this alliance?  So we haven't launched our platform yet. We are taking pre-registration via our website, and so we have quite a list of business owners and we're building up our business advisors. When we want to launch, we want it to really add the value that we've built it for. So, we're looking for additional mentors and advisors. We have quite a few business owners who are waiting. So we're in the process. So if you're a business advisor with an excellent career that you think you might be able to donate a little bit of your time. Mentors that are leaders in various different spaces, that's what we're looking for.  It's so important. I actually was asked to do a keynote last week and there were only very short time, I only have 20 minutes and I picked three topics. One of the topics was mentorship and how important it is and actually looked through my life and I realized that I used a lot of mentorship, but I also missed out on a lot of mentorship. And I think the better mentors you find, the faster we can grow our businesses. So I allowed this initiative. I think this is very smart and very useful.  We've been exposed to so many in our careers. I know you and I have talked offline and so many in our careers have taken the time to lift us up and help us through things and, and teach us. So this is an--- it's giving back, but it's also allowing an avenue where the newest and greatest tools, you know, forget AI. I love AI. But this is one-on-one real advice from experienced people.  Yeah. And the couple of things there I'd like to mention. So, you know, AI is very useful. It really helps with productivity, but a couple of things AI cannot do. So AI is not always able to filter information. It can create a lot of information, which is sometimes overwhelming. But you need wisdom, not just information, and you need to filter this. And mentors are able to bring that wisdom to the table. Mentors can also give you validation sometimes, you know, because as entrepreneurs we don't just need good advice. Sometimes we need someone who actually gives us some encouragement so that we are doing good work, even though we are struggling. And the third thing is accountability. So again, it's not possible to be accountable to a machine, right? But it is to a human being. So AI, ChatGPT is not replacing mentors. For sure.  Well, and when you mention all of those, it's, you know, the failures that we learn the most from. I don't think AI can draw from its failure in business. You know, there's going to be triggers in our mentors and our business advisors history that something that triggers something that they failed on, that they had to really learn the hard way. And, helping business owners avoid that. That's our mission really.  And really, you are not gonna learn big things without failing big, I believe, because that is the forcing function to push you to be creative, find a solution, and then it could be a unique solution, which then gives you a competitive edge. So it is huge and mentors can help with that. Alright, so obviously the reason you are putting this together, because you are, and I experienced this when I was on your podcast and you were asking the questions. You're a really good listener.  Thank you.  And I think that's why you have utilized a five step listening framework that you talked about in, on the pre-call to this interview. I'd love you to share it with our listeners what those five steps are and how do you go about, you know, actively listening with this framework.  And you know, when we talk about framework, we all make whatever we're doing specific to our world, our universe who we're helping. And as an investment banker and someone that's been doing mergers and acquisitions for a very long time, I've found that this process of listening, it not only applies to my industry, but every single person that is running a business that has a specific job, it's helped me immensely for years and years.Share on X I wasn't the best listener. And when you come, everyone says, well, know your audience. Know your audience. It's not just about knowing who you're talking to, it's about understanding what you're trying to get. What is the mandate of this conversation? Why am I here? So the first part of active listening for me is really taking a minute and going, okay, what am I looking to get out of this conversation?