Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach and host of The Scaling Executive Podcast, sat down with Peter Malek, founder and CEO of Inbound AV, a HubSpot solutions partner, to pull apart one of the most overlooked questions in scaling: what does your background actually teach you about leading people and growing a company? Malek’s answer draws on 20 years of music production work, including projects for Disney and Blizzard, and a hard-won belief that the skills most CEOs don’t think to look for are the ones that matter most. Glenn Gow identifies Malek’s recording studio discipline as a direct parallel to what separates CEOs who build high-performing leadership teams from those who manage around underperformance.
This episode is for CEOs who have built a capable team but feel like they’re not getting full performance out of it, or who suspect their marketing funnel has a weak link they haven’t found yet.
Key Takeaways
- The most transferable skill from music production to CEO leadership is the ability to build a relationship that makes talented, high-personality people feel safe enough to perform at their best — and that skill applies directly to building a leadership team.
- Every public-facing part of your company (email, website, ads, sales process) is an interconnected system. One weak step does not just reduce that step’s results. It destroys the return on every step before it.
- When your company hits a wall, your first move is not to fix it yourself. It is to bring in someone who can see what you are too close to see.
- Peter Malek’s approach to agentic AI assigns each model a single, narrow task, which dramatically reduces hallucination risk compared to asking one model to do something broad or complex.
- Peter Malek draws a hard line on AI-generated outreach: treating it like it does not need a human review is one of the fastest ways to destroy trust with a prospect at the first touchpoint.
CEOs Who Build Great Teams Operate Like Record Producers
Peter Malek spent years as a music producer before he ever thought about marketing or startups. The skill he carried forward from that world was not technical. It was relational.
“In the recording studio world, nothing is for certain,” Malek told Glenn Gow. “You are working with different personalities every day, especially if you’re working producing an artist. That artist is likely to have a big personality. And so learning to thread that needle and at the same time figure out a way to bring out the best in that artist is, I think, the biggest skill that’s carried over into starting a more traditional business.”
Gow connected that directly to what he tells CEOs about leadership: the most important thing you do is build a great leadership team. The second most important thing is manage that team so they perform. The recording studio, it turns out, is a compressed version of that challenge every single session.
The producer’s job is not to perform. It is to create conditions where the performer delivers something they could not have delivered alone. That is the CEO’s job with a leadership team.
“The key of being a producer in music is it’s really all about the relationship you develop,” Malek said, “because you want to create an environment where the artist can really just be free to create something amazing.”
If you treat your senior leaders the way a poor producer treats an artist, you get defensive, guarded output. If you treat them the way a great producer does, you get performance that surprises even them.
Your Marketing Funnel Is an Interconnected System Where One Weak Step Kills Every Step Before It
Malek’s work at Inbound AV puts him inside the marketing and sales operations of multiple companies at once. The pattern he sees most often is not that one thing is broken. It is that one thing is weak, and that weakness silently wipes out the return on everything else.
“Every public-facing part of a company, which is your email, your social, your website, your webinars, whatever it is, they’re an interconnected system,” Malek said. “And each part is dependent on the other.”
Here is what that looks like in practice. A company spends money on a paid ad campaign. They optimize it well. The click-through rate is strong. Then a prospect lands on a landing page that delivers a muddled message. The prospect leaves. The entire ad spend just produced nothing.
“Each step along the way is an opportunity for success and an opportunity for failure,” Malek said. “So I find that companies don’t look at that whole ecosystem and how important each step is.”
The table below shows where the failure points appear most often and what each one costs:
| Funnel Step | Common Weak Point | What It Destroys |
| Paid ad | Poor targeting or message mismatch | Wastes budget before anyone arrives |
| Landing page | Unclear value proposition | Kills conversion on otherwise good traffic |
| Sales meeting | No continuity from ad to pitch | Prospect feels misled; trust drops |
| Follow-up email | Generic automated content | Destroys credibility built in the meeting |
This is not a marketing problem. It is a systems problem. And it is your problem as CEO because no one else owns the full picture.
Even large companies with strong teams have this failure. Malek has seen multinational corporations with deep marketing talent still deliver a customer experience failure at one step that colors the entire journey. One bad step is enough to make the best work at every other step irrelevant.
When Your Company Hits a Wall, Bring in Someone Who Is Not You
Malek’s advice for a CEO who feels stuck is direct. The first step is to acknowledge you have hit the wall. The second step is not to try harder. It is to get a different set of eyes.
“I think the general next step is to find a fresh set of eyes who has the skills and talent to recognize what the problem is and create a solution,” Malek said. “It’s very, very difficult when we’re in our seat that figuring out exactly what’s going wrong is not so easy.”
When you are too close to your own problem to name it correctly, Gow’s first move is to bring in an external diagnosis before attempting a solution. He put it plainly: “You’re the CEO and you’re staring at the bark of the tree, and somebody who isn’t you can say, ‘Hey, Peter, that might not even be the right tree.'”
This applies to Malek directly. He is transparent that Inbound AV, as currently structured, is not a highly scalable company. It is a services business. But his system architect, Joshua, recently showed him a micro-SaaS product he had built to solve a specific gap in their project management software. The product addressed two significant problems the platform itself had not solved despite knowing about them for years. Malek recognized it immediately as a scaling opportunity.
“From the concept of just keep putting one foot in front of each other,” Malek said, “the opportunity is going to appear.”
That only works if you are willing to see an opportunity that does not arrive labeled as one.
CEOs Should Use Agentic AI with Narrow Tasks to Reduce Hallucination Risk
Malek is building HubSpot apps using agentic AI. His approach is deliberate: each agent does one specific thing. Not five things. One.
“Our feeling is that’s a very safe way to get use out of AI right today,” he said. “There’s a swarm of agents, they’re all doing one thing, and the results you can count on, as long as you’ve tested it.”
The reason this matters is hallucinations. Malek described a period roughly six to eight weeks before the interview when large language models produced significant errors on even routine tasks. That kind of failure in a customer-facing system is not just a technical problem. It is a trust problem.
“If that can happen, it’s not something that you can just say, ‘Yep, I’m going to build this product and let it go,’ because the downside can be enormous.”
Gow added two frameworks for managing hallucination risk in your own operations. First, use multiple LLMs on the same prompt. If several models produce the same answer, your confidence goes up significantly. Second, keep a human in the loop for high-stakes decisions. If AI is making a recommendation about where to spend ad dollars, a human reviews it before it executes.
The one area where Malek draws a hard line: automated outreach. An AI-written email that gets the prospect’s industry or context wrong does not just fail to convert. It signals to the prospect that your company does not care enough to check its own communications.
“When I get an email that’s like, ‘Hey, I bet you’re doing great at this audio video business that you have,'” Malek said, “it’s like, okay, I’m done.”
That is a customer experience failure at the first touchpoint. And as Malek would tell you, one weak step in the funnel destroys everything before it.
Closing Framework: What Peter Malek’s Approach Teaches Every Scaling CEO
| Principle | What it means in practice | Named evidence from this interview |
| Treat your leadership team like a recording artist | Build the relationship first. Create safety. Draw out performance the person could not access without you. | Malek applied this discipline with system architect Joshua across the full run of Inbound AV’s operations — and that relationship is what produced the moment Joshua voluntarily showed Malek the micro-SaaS product, which Malek immediately identified as the company’s first scalable opportunity. Without the relationship, the product surfaces to no one. |
| Every funnel step is load-bearing | No step in your marketing-to-sales system is low-stakes. A weak landing page wipes out a strong paid campaign. Audit every step, including the ones you think are fine. | Malek observed this failure pattern across client engagements that included multinational corporations — companies with dedicated marketing teams that still lost pipeline to a single underperforming step. The result in each case: strong upstream spend produced zero return. |
| Hire someone to see what you cannot | When you are stuck, the answer is not more effort. It is a different vantage point. The person inside the company cannot see what someone outside of it sees immediately. | Malek could not identify his own company’s scaling path while operating it day to day. Joshua, his system architect, built the micro-SaaS solution and showed it to him. Malek’s role was recognition, not origination — and that recognition only became possible because he had built the relationship that made Joshua want to show him. |
| Give each AI agent one job | Narrow task assignment reduces hallucination risk. A swarm of single-purpose agents is more reliable than one agent doing many things. | Malek’s Inbound AV team built HubSpot apps on this model after observing that broad-task LLM use produced significant errors on routine tasks in the six to eight weeks before the interview. The narrow-task approach is their active production standard, not a pilot. |
Quotes from This Episode
- “In the recording studio world, nothing is for certain. You are working with different personalities every day, especially if you’re working producing an artist. That artist is likely to have a big personality. And so learning to thread that needle and at the same time figure out a way to bring out the best in that artist is, I think, the biggest skill that’s carried over into starting a more traditional business.” — Peter Malek, Founder and CEO, Inbound AV
- “Each step along the way is an opportunity for success and an opportunity for failure. So I find that companies don’t look at that whole ecosystem and how important each step is.” — Peter Malek, Founder and CEO, Inbound AV
- “Our feeling is that’s a very safe way to get use out of AI right today. There’s a swarm of agents, they’re all doing one thing, and the results you can count on, as long as you’ve tested it.” — Peter Malek, Founder and CEO, Inbound AV
- “You’re the CEO and you’re staring at the bark of the tree, and somebody who isn’t you can say, ‘Hey, Peter, that might not even be the right tree.'” — Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach
- “When I get an email that’s like, ‘Hey, I bet you’re doing great at this audio video business that you have,’ it’s like, okay, I’m done.” — Peter Malek, Founder and CEO, Inbound AV
Frequently Asked Questions
What skills from outside business actually help a CEO scale a company?
The skills that transfer most directly from creative careers to CEO leadership are people skills, specifically the ability to build relationships that draw out peak performance from high-personality talent. Peter Malek, founder and CEO of Inbound AV, spent 20 years as a music producer before entering the business world. His central insight is that a record producer’s job is to create conditions where an artist performs better than they could alone — and that is identical to a CEO’s job with a leadership team. CEOs who learn to build that kind of environment before managing through authority get more from their people.
How should a CEO identify the weak link in their marketing funnel?
A CEO looking for the weak link in their marketing or sales funnel must audit every step as if no step is safe, because one underperforming step destroys the return on every step before it. Peter Malek of Inbound AV describes the system as interconnected, meaning a strong paid ad campaign that lands on a weak landing page produces no return at all. The audit must cover every public-facing touchpoint: ads, landing pages, sales meetings, and follow-up communications. Companies that assume one step is “good enough” and focus only on obvious failures miss the single change that would unlock growth across the entire funnel.
How should CEOs use AI without getting burned by hallucinations?
CEOs who want to use AI reliably in customer-facing or operational contexts should assign each AI agent a single, narrow task rather than asking one model to handle broad or complex workflows. Peter Malek of Inbound AV describes this as a “swarm of agents, all doing one thing,” which keeps hallucination risk low and results predictable. For decisions with significant financial or reputational consequences, Glenn Gow, The Scaling Executive Coach, recommends keeping a human in the loop and cross-checking outputs across multiple LLMs before acting on the result.
CEOs Work with Glenn Gow to Scale Their Companies and Their Leadership
Glenn Gow is The Scaling Executive Coach. He coaches ambitious executives into the CEO seat and CEOs into successful exits. With 25 years as a CEO and 5 years in venture capital, Glenn helps leaders scale their companies by scaling themselves first. If this conversation was useful, you can apply for executive coaching with Glenn Gow or apply to be a guest on The Scaling Executive Podcast.
