Summit OS Steve Preda Shares His Shuffled Ink Experience

My Shuffled Ink Card Story

I recently ordered custom card sets for Steve Preda Business Growth (SPBG), to promote our flagship business operating system: Summit OS®. I’ve long been a fan of custom playing cards and was itching to get one designed for SPBG.

So, let me tell you the story of the Summit OS card deck.

Back in the mid 2000’s I was an avid follower of info marketing guru Dan Kennedy, including some of the people in his orbit.

Fitness Poker One of these entrepreneurs was Matt Furey, a fitness influencer who taught practical, do-it-at-home, workout methods. He created a game for such workouts called Fitness Poker.

Source: Brian J. Pombo, YouTube

Fitness Poker was a pack of poker cards with each of the four suits representing a different exercise. Players would pull cards from the pack and do one of the four exercises in the number of repetitions displayed on the card. I can’t locate my pack anymore, after we moved to Virginia, but I think the exercises may have been the Pushup, the Tablemaker, the Sit-up and the Hindu Squat.

I played this game a few times with my two sons and we always had a blast competing who would be the last to drop.

Buyout Bridge

Now, about 18 years ago, Fitness Poker inspired me to create a card game for my business at the time, called MB Partners. We were advising on Mergers and Acquisitions and Management Buyouts and we named the card “Buyout Bridge”. (It was actually called the alliterating Hungarian equivalent: “Kivásárlási Kanaszta.”)Buyout Bridge was a pack of poker cards with each of the four colors represented by one of our company’s services: Company Sale, Recapitalization, Valuation and Acquisition.

We had 500 pairs of packs of Buyout Bridge printed and distributed them to clients, prospects and attendees of a Private Capital Markets Conference which we hosted. (This latter was inspired by Robert Slee, a fellow member of the M&A network IMAP, and author of an influential book called Private Capital Markets.)

The graphics of the Buyout Bridge were hand drawn in full color by my friend, Akos Kiss, whose dry Central European sense of humor shined through the illustrations.

Source: cmbp.hu archives

How Buyout Bridge Helped Sell My Business

Buyout Bridge was hugely popular at the time, it helped increase our notoriety in the Hungarian M&A community, and promoted our flagship publication “Firm Value” (“Cégérték” in Hungarian) which ultimately helped me sell my business to Private Equity.

The Summit OS Card Deck

Now earlier this year, our company, SPBG, launched a new coaching brand, “Summit OS”, which helps business owners create a massive Execution Momentum in 45 days and triple the value of their business in 3 years.

We decided to promote the brand with unique merchandising items, including the Summit OS Wheel™, and the Summit OS Slide Puzzle (see below). The slide puzzle was quite popular, but we figured that a card game might be even better to promote The 5 Business Growth Principles™ of: People, Purpose, Performance, Playbooks, and Profit.

The first four of these principles of Summit OS, People, Purpose, Performance and Profit are the respective suits of the card, and the fifth, Profit, is the Joker. Zoltan Ember a talented Hungarian graphic designer created the pack and came up with contemporary illustrations for the Spade, Diamond, Club and Heart, as well as the Summit OS graphics on the higher value cards.

Summit OS Poker™, ©Steve Preda Business Growth 2024

We are debuting the cards and the annual conference of the International Exit Planning Association in Boston in the third week of October. My hope is to use the packs to popularize the concept of how to dramatically grow small and medium size businesses, by Empowering Leaders, helping them Execute Like Hell, and Digging a Moat around their business (to make them highly profitable).

I am immensely proud of the workmanship of Shuffled Ink, who truly did justice to Summit OS and Zoltan Ember’s art. You can download the full pack here.

For a link to my product page click here.