Press & Booking Kit
Steve and Melissa Fultz are not technologists. They are second-generation operators who run real companies in East Tennessee, and they built AI agents to work alongside their people. Everything they teach got tested there first, with real customers and real consequences when they were wrong.
Why hosts book them
The AI conversation is dominated by people who build software for a living. Steve and Melissa come at it from the other side: a parts counter, a welding bay, and a fleet of tankers. Steve spent thirty years unable to explain to the developers he hired what he actually wanted. Then he stopped asking AI to build things and started using it as a strategist.
The angle: what actually happens when a Gen X owner of an old-economy business puts AI agents to work next to people who have been doing the job by hand for twenty years. Including what the people thought about it.
Not a theory. A shipped product.
PartsNow.ai is a live, AI-native marketplace for heavy-duty truck and trailer parts, co-founded by Steve with Manna Justin, whose company TalkRev.ai builds the AI engine. It came straight out of the shop floor problem: a tech under a truck often can't name the part he needs. So PartsNow lets him describe the symptom, photograph the greasy component, or point live video at it, and the AI engine identifies it through an assistant named Mike. Mike is free, and answers by phone, text, web, or video, in English and Spanish. "Describe the problem. We'll find the part."
It's the same move Steve and Melissa teach other owners: use AI as a strategist first and a builder second. Steve brought the operator's read on what the industry actually needed; the enterprise-systems discipline behind running it at scale is the same one Melissa carried back from twenty years at Fortune scale.
Copy and paste
They book as a team. Either can appear solo on request.
Steve and Melissa Fultz run real family companies and teach other owners to build businesses that no longer need them. Authors of The Owner Shift.
Steve and Melissa Fultz are the husband-and-wife team behind The Fultz Group. Unusual among advisors, they still run the companies they teach from: a portfolio of East Tennessee businesses rooted in the fuel-tanker operation Steve's father started in 1964. Their book The Owner Shift helps married owners step out of the day-to-day without losing the marriage along the way.
Steve and Melissa Fultz are the husband-and-wife team behind The Fultz Group, the Knoxville advisory firm they founded in 2015 under the banner "Where Wall Street Meets Main Street."
They are unusual among business advisors in that they still run the companies they teach from. Steve is a second-generation co-owner of a portfolio of East Tennessee businesses rooted in the fuel-tanker operation his father, Pat Fultz, started in 1964, and he grew the family business from $6 million to more than $10 million. Melissa spent more than twenty years inside a Fortune-scale healthcare and automation company, where her most recent role contributed to more than $1.5 billion in revenue, and Gartner published a 2017 white paper built around a toolkit she developed.
Together they are the authors of The Owner Shift and Family Business Facelift. Their work centers on a blunt conviction: if the business gets fixed but the marriage doesn't, nothing has actually been helped.
Steve Fultz, PhD, sits where three worlds rarely meet: strategy, people, and technology. He holds a doctorate in counseling psychology from the University of Tennessee, spent about 25 years on church staffs, and has roughly four decades of operating experience running family companies. He grew the family business from $6 million to more than $10 million, and now designs AI agents that handle repeatable work inside his own operations.
Melissa Huff Fultz brings more than 25 years as a sales executive, marketing professional, and entrepreneur. Inside a Fortune-scale healthcare and automation company, her most recent role contributed to more than $1.5 billion in revenue. She is a Consultant of the Year winner, a repeat member of the Circle of Excellence and President's Club, a national-conference speaker, and the international best-selling author of The Art of Alignment.
Segment-ready
Each of these has been lived, not researched.
"I'm not a tech person" is the single most expensive sentence a Gen X owner says. Where it comes from and how to get past it without pretending to be someone you aren't.
Steve spent thirty years unable to tell developers what he wanted. The unlock was not learning to code. It was asking AI to think with him before building anything.
What actually happened when we put AI to work alongside people at the parts counter and in the service bay. Including the parts that did not work.
PartsNow.ai, a live AI-native parts marketplace. Steve co-founded it and shaped it from the shop floor; the AI engine is his partner Manna Justin's company, TalkRev.ai. Now in both app stores.
Why the people with the most operational knowledge are the furthest from the tools, and what closes that gap fastest.
The honest version. What we automated, what we deliberately refused to automate, and how we told our people.
For your prep doc
Steal these, or ignore them entirely.
The proof
Active operators, not retired advisors.
Coverage
A conversation on fear, courage, and the decisions owners avoid. December 18, 2023
With Brad Friedman · February 27, 2026
October 2, 2025
The Empowered Entrepreneur · Season 2, Episode 6 · September 11, 2025
August 21, 2025
Episode 93 with Jasan R. Julius · April 5, 2024
May 17, 2025
May 30, 2025
Interview by Martin Rowinski · June 19, 2025 · watch the video
Our launch announcement was syndicated to 500+ outlets, including NBC, ABC, CBS, and FOX affiliates. Additional podcast appearances are being added. Email us for a current list or a specific clip.
For your listeners
Four doors. Listeners pick whichever one fits where they are right now.
Five minutes. Find the one thing eating your week.
What's Eating Your Week?Booking
We answer our own email. Tell us the show, the format, and roughly when, and we will come back to you quickly.
steveandmelissa@thefultzgroup.com
