Why Timing and Risk Tolerance Matter Most

The Playbook With David Meltzer

David Meltzer, Entrepreneur.com

Entrepreneurship, Business, Careers

4.6 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 30 October 2025

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In today’s episode, I sit down with Van Carlson, founder and CEO of SRA, to talk about what it really means to engineer wealth. Van’s company helps entrepreneurs protect what they’ve built through strategic risk management, turning potential setbacks into opportunities. We discuss how understanding timing, risk tolerance, and the architecture of wealth can help business owners position their dollars more effectively, especially in times of uncertainty. Van also shares how faith, family, and perspective shape his success—and why facing life’s storms head-on is often the smartest move a leader can make.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Entrepreneurs of Playboy. I'm David Meltzer, and I am so blessed to be here in gorgeous Boise, Idaho, with one of my favorite entrepreneurs.
0:08.1	We hit it off from the very start.
0:10.1	Van Carlson has a unique business, a successful business. It's a silent assassin of Boise.
0:15.7	You wouldn't even know how big and how powerful this business and how supportive they are, but 831B has continued
0:22.0	to grow exponentially every single year. The founder and CEO of 831B, Van Carlson, welcome back.
0:29.8	David, such a pleasure to have you here in Boise. Well, I'm glad to be here because the whole
0:34.8	idea of the playbook was to find people like you and ask for their
0:39.0	playbook to success. And you've grown a lot. Things change in our lives personally and
0:44.8	professionally. We were discussing them off camera. And I was curious in that playbook to success.
0:51.0	You've always had a playbook. But what were some of the things that have changed since the last time we spoke in your playbook to success. You've always had a playbook, but what were some of the things that have
0:54.4	changed since the last time we spoke in your playbook? You know, who is our client? You know,
1:03.9	what we do, I mean, we're risk management company, right? And we take advantage of a tax code
1:08.6	and we help business owners mitigate risk our
1:12.2	core co-self insurance basically our core competency
1:14.6	1986 law that was passed that now is utilized outside of farming right much more yeah but
1:20.4	we're more in a farming than ever actually those guys got a ton of risk they are the true gamblers
1:25.7	of our of our society but so so we're we manage that for clients,
1:31.1	right? And you know, what we do, and I'm working with a lot of strategic partners around the
1:36.0	country that represent our products and stuff. And you're going to be speaking our symposium here
1:41.5	today. So I appreciate you being here for that.
2:04.9	You know, what we ask business owners to do is not easy. You know, we're asking them, hey, you're going to have, you know, you got into a point you've achieved to the level of your business where you've got a lot of risk. You're self-insuring a lot of risk. You got tax liabilities and all that kind of stuff. And so taking money off the balance sheet and not missing it is a different,
2:08.1	is you've achieved a level of a different business, right?
	...

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