Eliminate Bottlenecks, Scale Faster With Jordan Solender

Jordan Solender is the CEO and Founder of IT Select, a tech advisory firm transforming how companies acquire IT solutions through AI-powered procurement. Under his leadership, IT Select has expanded to serve clients across 38 states and earned recognition from FinTech TV and CIO Review. A lifelong entrepreneur, Jordan has launched several ventures in tech, events, and hospitality. He’s passionate about helping founders scale smarter through automation, delegation, and process optimization, driven by his belief that technology can turn complexity into growth.

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

• [4:07] Jordan Solender shares how IT Select slashes procurement time with AI-driven efficiency
• [12:19] Ransomware defense strategies shared by top CTOs at exclusive events
• [13:38] How to escape the founder bottleneck and start working on your business
• [19:47] Automation system that saves founders ten hours a week on invoice approvals
• [24:29] The bottleneck audit framework to uncover your biggest time drains
• [34:11] Top tech tools for SOPs, automation, and seamless team onboarding
• [36:18] How integrated tech stacks fuel collaboration across multiple companies
• [38:47] Mastering sales math and the 80/20 rule to accelerate business growth

In this episode…

Founders often find themselves buried in endless processes — approvals, meetings, and decisions that only they can make. Growth slows, teams wait, and burnout creeps in. What if you could cut weeks off your workflow, remove yourself as the bottleneck, and let automation handle the heavy lifting?

According to Jordan Solender, a multi-business builder who turns chaos into scalable systems, scaling faster starts with replacing manual control with intelligent systems. He shares how he transformed IT procurement with AI through his company IT Select, and how the same principles apply to any business. From hosting Decision Maker Dinners that foster collaboration without sales pressure to using AI voice agents that qualify leads in seconds, Jordan reveals how to eliminate inefficiency at every level. He shows how founders can reclaim hours each week by systemizing, automating, and relentlessly optimizing their operations.

In this episode of the Inspired Insider Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz talks with Jordan Solender, Founder of IT Select, about removing bottlenecks and scaling through automation. They discuss Jordan’s bottleneck framework, the role of AI and SOPs, and lessons from his EO network and books like Buy Back Your Time. He shares how he helps founders reclaim time and scale smarter.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Jordan Solender on LinkedIn
• IT Select
• QuickBooks
• Sweet Process
• Slack
• Loom
• Salesforce
• ChatGPT
• Monday.com
• Understanding the Pareto Principle (The 80/20 Rule)
• Entrepreneurs’ Organization
• The Goal: 40th Anniversary Edition: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M Goldratt and Jeff Cox
• 80/20 Sales and Marketing: The Definitive Guide to Working Less and Making More by Perry Marshall and Richard Koch
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It―Unlock Your Persuasion Potential in Professional and Personal Life by Chris Voss and Tahl Raz
• Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire by Dan Martell

Special Mentions:

• Whale
• Maryland’s DJ
• Domino’s Pizza

Related episodes:

• “How to Sell More And Save Time with Robert Hartline of Absolute Wireless” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “[SaaS Series & EO Nashville] How To Transform Catering Chaos Into Calm With Michael Attias” on Inspired Insider Podcast
• “EO Tulsa | Real Estate Investment With Mat Zalk of Keyrenter Property Management” on Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable moments:

• “Procurement should be a growth lever — it’s time we change that so IT leaders can focus on innovation, not headaches.”
• “If you can document it, you can delegate it. The goal is to remove yourself from one thing at a time.”
• “Elimination is the cleanest form of optimization — sometimes it’s better to just stop doing what slows you down.”
• “Distance creates clarity; most bottlenecks aren’t people problems, they’re visibility problems — you can’t fix what you can’t see.”
• “If you don’t know your numbers as a founder, big red flag — you might just be creating a job for yourself.”

Action steps:

1. Audit your personal bottlenecks: Map out where your time goes and identify tasks that rely on you.
2. Eliminate, automate, or delegate: Tackle one repetitive task at a time — remove it, automate it, or delegate it — to reduce founder dependency and reclaim valuable hours.
3. Leverage AI and automation tools: Use platforms like AI voice agents or automation systems to streamline communication, lead handling, and approvals for faster, error-free workflows.
4. Standardize and document SOPs: Record and centralize your processes with tools like Loom and Whale so your team can operate independently and efficiently.
5. Encourage peer learning and collaboration: Join or host mastermind-style meetups to exchange insights, challenge assumptions, and discover smarter ways to scale.

Episode Transcript

Intro 00:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 00:22

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. 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 entrepreneur organization, people can check it out. It’s all over the world. Actually, some great EO members I’ve had on 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 CaterZen 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 and helps a lot of barbecue businesses. Obviously he’s in Nashville, so maybe you guys should connect. But Matt Zalk, Key Rental 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. We do the strategy, accountability, and the full execution and production. Number two, we’re an easy button for companies gifting, so we make gifting and staying top of mind for clients, partners, prospects, even staff. Simple, easy and affordable. You just send us the addresses, we’ll do everything else.

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 [email protected].

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 snow blower 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 for coming on.

Jordan Solender: 03:37

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: 03:46

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 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: 04:07

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: 04:34

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. You kind of took a different route.

Jordan Solender: 04:44

Yeah. I mean, what we found was procurement was broken, right? Like procurement should be a growth lever. You know, it’s 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 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 what not. 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 8 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, oh, 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 select 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: 07:30

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: 07:43

Yeah. Decision Maker Dinners are really cool. 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.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 08:14

Unlimited lead. You can’t go wrong with that.

Jordan Solender: 08:15

Unlimited, 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: 09:48

Choose the city?

Jordan Solender: 09:50

It’s really just where we have our customers.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 09:52

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

Jordan Solender: 09:57

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: 10:08

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: 10:14

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: 10:39

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 basically 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: 11:11

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 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: 11:59

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: 12:19

Stop, drop and roll. No, don’t do that in your data center. It’s probably super dirty unless you have a 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: 13:19

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: 13:38

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 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.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 15:02

The 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?

Jordan Solender: 15:11

Yeah, yeah. You know, the most recent one, this this is super fresh, right? Was my team for the events company. So we do about 450 weddings alone a year at one I have three events companies. One of them we’ll just talk about is a company called Maryland’s DJ. We do about 450 weddings a year. Okay. We get about, you know, 30 to 50 inbound leads a month. Right. Just people on our website saying we want info. Right. So immediately they get hit with an email just in an automated fashion to book a call with somebody on our sales team. But I realized about 50 to 60% of those leads, you know, weren’t booking time, you know, and hey, you know, 4,050% is is is great still right. Booking time. But it’s an inbound lead.

They’re requesting info. It should be more than that. It should be higher. They’re requesting that info. So I said to my team. All right, well let’s let’s go ahead and call every single one of these leads that comes in in addition to an email. So I have my team calling. Some of my team is located overseas for operational just efficiency sake. I have a good amount of team overseas like most people. So they’re calling every single lead, right? But that’s still a bottleneck. It’s it’s bound by the time of that person. So I thought to myself, okay, well, how do we get, you know, the most optimal results in a call? You know, within 30s of somebody submitting that lead, I want it to be fast every time. So we deployed an AI voice agent that calls every single lead 30s after they submit that web form, which is pretty cool, you know, and they’re taking the data from the web form.

We’re passing it through to the AI agent. And the goal of the AI agent is to do three things. It’s to qualify the lead on budget. Okay. The second thing is, are you the right person to talk to about your corporate event, your wedding? You know, your private event, whatever it may be. And the third is to make sure that we’re available on that date. So it’s checking the CRM. It’s checking the form that they submitted info. And then the goal is to book a meeting with the sales team. So it’s connected into all of our systems to actually book time on the calendar. And if it doesn’t get on the phone, it leaves a voicemail in the callback number is an actual live person. So right there removes the, you know, the bottleneck of somebody on my team being able to call fast enough with enough information, which is nice.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 17:43

Do people know if they answer if there is a voice agent or is it that is a technology that good where they wouldn’t know?

Jordan Solender: 17:51

You know, it’s pretty good. I think you could still tell it’s AI. You know, I was talking to a bunch of EO was last night at dinner, actually, and I was showing them a couple of the recordings and they were like, I would know it’s AI. And I’m like, well, you’re not the normal person, though. You know, there’s a few recordings where, you know, you have somebody’s mom, you know, talking to the agent, you know, the agent’s name is Kelsey and says, hey, I’m Kelsey.

You know, and I’m here to talk to you about your daughter’s wedding, you know, on this date. And she’s like, oh, thanks for calling. You know, she you know, she has no idea. It’s it’s it’s it’s adorable to be honest. And then you have people in their late 20s, early 30s, which is our normal ICP. You know that immediately know it’s AI, but they don’t care because they’re getting the information immediately. Yeah. You know, so how do you train that?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz: 18:36

Like how how much of the conversation does it transfer over to someone if it asks a question that they’re not sure about, like transfer to a salesperson? How does how does the agent get trained? You train the agent. So like kind of can obviously it’s a conversational you know any questions or things can come up.

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