Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher

Ron Lovett is an author, entrepreneur, and a leader with a passion for change. He is the Founder of Connolly Owens, where he and his team build companies with a purpose. They teach companies how to create accountability so that their entire team is focused on the same company goals. Are you looking to get more engagement from your team and from your front-line staff? And, do we really need that much middle management support? Today’s show is all about developing a more agile and less ‘managed’ team that’s also engaged, happy, and empowered! Ron struggled throughout high school, but he was always finding ways to make a buck and hustle. At one point, he had three jobs and was selling marijuana on the side. He decided to go backpacking and when he came back he started his security business. Within four years of starting his business, he had 350 staff members doing security for an 85,000 person Rolling Stones concert. The security industry hasn’t changed much in terms of innovation, but after Ron hired his first Gazelle’s coach, it really turned around his company and sparked him to take some risks. Ron actually didn’t believe in the whole ‘culture’ thing. After reading the book, Nuts!: Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success, by Kevin Freiberg, skeptical, he asked a Southwest employee one day if he liked his job. The employee said, “This is the best … company to work for on the planet.” It blew Ron away. He realized he had a lot of work to do to bring his company to the same standards. Ron decided to take some interesting HR practices to help get his front-line staff more aligned and empowered. However, Ron ran into another challenge: his corporate staff loved the company and their culture, but they hated their jobs (specifically, their tasks). So he found ways to outsource the tasks they hated to their front-line staff (who loved the extra work). It was messy at first, but eventually it ended up increasing everyone’s happiness levels. Interview Links: Connollyowens.com Ron on LinkedIn Resources: ScalingUpforBusinessGrowthWorkshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Register now for our next workshop on Scaling Up! And hurry to get one of the limited $100 discounts for loyal podcast listeners (while supplies last). https://scalingcoach.com/scaling-business-growth-workshop/ Enter code “SUP” for scaling up podcast during checkout. We’ll see you there! ScalingUpSummits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes and leave a review. Help other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they, too, can benefit from the ideas shared in these podcasts. ScalingUp is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Gazelles Coaching, on how the fastest growing companies succeed where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up business podcast and a leading Gazelles Coach. Gazelles is the term we use for fast-growing companies. We help leadership teams with 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Scaling Up for Gazelles companies is based on the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Wendy Lieber is the Founder of ContentBacon, an inbound marketing service that helps clients tell their stories through digital content. Wendy approached Bill because she’s ready to scale her business by 10X. The company was founded in 2014 and it’s ready to make the next big jump. What strategies come to mind that would allow for Wendy to scale her business 10X? Wendy and her team have been focused on building their infrastructure and are in the process of customizing it to fit their needs. They are looking into automating some of their processes so that they can better leverage their team. The biggest challenge right now in this strategy is performance — the ability to deliver the agreed-upon work without the use of additional staff. Wendy has seen a growth of, on average, 40 percent a year and has had some huge wins from the marketing point of view. Wendy currently has 10 full-time employees and a pool of 30 freelancers/contractors. Wendy realizes that the team that got them to where they are today isn’t going to get them to their next BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal). So, Wendy has had to invest more in her team. Bill recommends Wendy use a Scaling Up coach to help her detect blind spots that she’s not aware of. So far, Wendy has done a really good job structuring her company for successful 10X growth, but having someone hold your hand through the process can make a world of difference. Interview Links: Contentbacon.com Wendy on LinkedIn Aligntoday.com Metronomegrowthsystems.com Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube

Good storytelling is essential to both great leadership and great marketing. At the core of telling great stories, is the ability to be real and to go beyond the superficial level. You can accomplish this by having the courage to be vulnerable. Corey Blake is the Founder and CEO of Round Table Companies (RTC) and is also the publisher of Conscious Capitalism Press. Some of RTC’s clients include Microsoft, First United Bank, and Marketo. Corey has spent over 12 years helping business leaders use storytelling to transform themselves and their organizations. When Corey’s mother was diagnosed with depression and had also exhibited traits of bipolar disorder, Corey began to learn really quickly how to read a room and develop survival tactics to reduce the number of outbursts and to make his mother laugh. It was through this experience that he discovered (although unconsciously at the time) he liked being a performer and went to school for acting. After Corey got married, he decided to make a transition from acting to something a little more consistent, so he started his own company! Before RTC, Corey created two other storytelling companies for the film industry. He learned a lot of valuable lessons and did a lot right but in the end, he made some huge mistakes he could not recover from. As Corey worked with his clients at RTC, he and his team saw the kind of impact they were able to have on their clients when the client felt safe enough to be vulnerable in their story. They would often share things they hadn’t even told their spouses or, it was the first time they even expressed these vulnerabilities out loud to themselves. Flipping the script, when Corey was able to become vulnerable with his team (and vice versa) about trying to avoid making the same mistakes he made at his prior two companies, a deep and profound trust was developed. By having the courage to express vulnerability in the workforce, the team was able to grow in a meaningful way and had each other’s backs. Interview Links: Roundtablecompanies.com Consciouscapitalism.org Corey on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTubeMentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Today’s show is about hacking happiness, fulfillment, and connection for both yourself and your team. Our special guest has generated terrific business results by digging deep into something so simple, but complex: happiness. Mike Simonsen is the Co-founder and CEO of Altos Research, a company that analyzes real estate markets in real-time. Mike is also a Board Member for the San Francisco chapter of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization. In 2001, Mike bought his own house in Silicon Valley. It was overpriced, the mortgage was ridiculous, and the NASDAQ was going crazy. Mike started building models based on the data he had about the U.S. real estate market to better help him understand what was going on. Realizing he had collected more data about this industry than even the financial institutions, he started his company in 2006 to help anyone with an interest in real estate. What exactly does it mean to ‘hack’ happiness? Mike noticed himself getting into a funk. He was feeling uninspired and just getting lazy in his business, and he wanted to get out of it… he wanted to feel inspired again. During his research, he discovered nine pillars that would help him feel connected and happy again. He tried it on himself and discovered something amazing — he had a really good year in 2018, both professionally and personally. In fact, It wasn’t just a ‘good’ year, it was actually the best year he’s ever had. What did he do? Well, first, he changed the way he tackles stress. Typically, when Mike gets stressed, he starts to avoid things. So when Mike noticed he was getting stressed, he decided to meditate, which immediately drops cortisol (stress) levels. After three months of meditation, there were positive changes in his physical tests. Second, he stopped putting goals down because he would routinely never complete them. Instead, he put measurements in place so he could track his progress and he also set a schedule for himself so he made sure he’d do that thing. This took an enormous amount of pressure off of him. Third, Mike wanted to boost up his serotonin and oxytocin (joy/happiness) levels, because it’s much more sustainable than dopamine (reward). He did this by recording his moments of joy. This gave him the opportunity to remember all the positives that have happened in his day. He would also journal his negative emotions down because it gave all this pent up energy an ‘out.’ Interview Links: http://bit.ly/hacking-happiness-mike-simonsen Altos Research Mike on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

The secret to successfully scaling up is to focus on a few things, but be different, be unique, in your industry. So, how can you stand out from the crowd and be different? Today’s show is a rerun all the way back to Episode 1 and it dives into your unique talents and how you can discover what you bring to the table. Robert (Bob) Bloom is the authority on customer-centric growth. He is the author of The Inside Advantage and The New Experts. Bob was the U.S. Chairman and CEO of Publicis Worldwide. He got his start as an entrepreneur, took his company national, and then sold it. Bob has developed strategies for companies like BMW, L’Oreal, Nestlé, and even helped to launch Southwest Airlines, T-Mobile, Juicy Juice, and many others. In today’s episode, Bob and I talk about strategy and finding your own inside advantage. There is a secret that so many business leaders are missing. Most people start with a strategy, but it is one that is in their minds and may not be contemporary at the moment. Secondly, the most important thing that a strategy has to have is consensus internally with all of your staff, whether you have three people or hundreds. If everybody doesn’t agree that you are going in the right direction, it doesn’t matter because you will never get there. The other thing that is absolutely critical is differentiation. In this day and time, if you don’t differentiate your brand, your company, or your services, you will not make it. The competition out there is mushy; everybody is doing the same thing. There are four steps in the Growth Discovery Process Who is your core customer? You must start with the first element. Customers are human beings; you can't talk to a statistic. You must talk to this human being and understand his/her company or personal needs from that standpoint. When you do that, you understand your ‘Who.’ Get inside that person’s head and heart. Look at your customer as if that person was right in the room with you. What does your core customer want, need and desire? You want to look inside your business. What does your core customer want, need, and desire? You have a WHO and WHAT. What do you do inside your business? What is the uncommon offering that your business will own and leverage? ‘How’ is the persuasive strategy that will convince your core customer to buy your uncommon offering versus all competitive offerings. You need to persuade or convince your customer that you are really going to do what you say you are going to do. You need to develop an approach to convince your customer to buy from you and not your competitor. ‘Own it!’ is the series of imaginative acts that will celebrate your uncommon offering and make it well known to your core customer. You want your brand or company to stand for it! You have to own what you say you are going to own. OWN YOUR WHAT! It has to be yours and yours alone in 15 words or less. Simple — Consistent, Committed and Clear! Check out the podcast to find out more in-depth about how Bob took these strategies into the big businesses mentioned in the introduction. Interview Links: Bobbloom.biz Robert on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTubeMentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

As we transition from the end of the year to the new year, we might imagine what’s next in our future and what kind of goals we should aspire to do. Verne Harnish joins us today to guide us through the goal-setting process! As Verne is coming up to his 60th birthday, he is faced with the ‘what next?’ question. He attended a Tony Robbin’s seminar to help unblock himself from… himself! As Bill says, you’re never truly finished, so it’s important to continually grow and develop yourself until you die. We want to be informed of the past, learn from it, make our peace from it, and then get ready to move on. As Verne sits and imagines the future, he has some changes of thought on the goal-setting process. We have some real cultural barriers when it comes to our accomplishments. Every day, Verne is more and more convinced that you’re a danger to yourself if you think you can have three-year objectives. The whole idea of even knowing where you’ll be in 3, 5, or 10 years is very limiting. This doesn’t mean Verne is against making your BHAG for the next 20 years, and taking steps for you to get there, but it just means that everything in between before you get there is a big guess at best, and it’s okay to learn and grow from that. Interview Links: Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube TWEETABLES: “The greatest lesson of history is we fail to learn from history.” “The biggest constraint is between our ears.” “You’re either winning or you’re learning.” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes and leave a review. Help other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they too can benefit from the ideas shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Gazelles Coaching, on how the fastest growing companies succeed where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up business podcast and a leading Gazelles Coach. Gazelles is the term we use for fast-growing companies. We help leadership teams with 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Scaling Up for Gazelles companies is based on the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

As we head into the holiday season, we start to make New Year’s resolutions, and they often don’t get completed! How can we avoid that? Today, we’ll be sharing an older podcast episode that will help you paint a picture for your life and for your future… so that you can actually get your goals finished! Brian Scudamore is the Founder and CEO of 1-800-Got-Junk? and has been running the company since 1989. Since then, he has started several companies like Shack Shine, You Move Me, and Wow 1 Day Painting. Here are the steps it takes to create a painted picture for your business (and your life). First, it starts with you being in an inspirational place. Second, you want to take out a piece of paper and write in very specific and intentional language. Brian didn’t write, ‘I hope to be’ or, ‘I want to be,’ he wrote, ‘I will be.’ Third, Brain gave himself incredibly specific goals, in this particular case, a five-year goal to achieve his big vision. And step number four, after writing out the big idea, he added color to the picture. What would we feel like as a company? What would the culture be like? How would the brand be presented to the world? Here are some questions you can ask yourself: What is your top-line revenue? How many people are on your team? How would your people describe the culture of your company when talking to a family member? What is the press saying about your business? Be as specific as possible — what would your local paper say about your company? What would your favorite magazine say? What do your people love about your vision and where the company is headed? How would a customer describe their experience with you? What would they say to their best friend? What accomplishment are you most proud of? What accomplishment are your people most proud of? What do you do better than anyone else on the planet? Describe your office environment and culture in detail. Describe your service area. Who are your customers and how do they feel? When he was finished, he was surprised by the results. As he re-read what he wrote down, Brian realized what he wrote was absolutely possible, so he shared it with his team. Some members of his team were excited, and those who weren’t ended up leaving. Brian believes it’s best to come up with a vision about where you’re going and then recruit the who – the people that will help figure out how to get there. However, the one thing a painted picture will not do or even try to do is to say how to get there. The reason for this being is that the CEO doesn’t always know best. His team will have a better execution plan than he will. It also prevents the CEO or the founder from getting cold feet when he realizes the ‘real’ work involved. Let your team support your vision and use their expertise to help guide you to your end result. Interview Links: Painted Picture Visualization O2Ebrands.com 1-800 Got Junk Website Good to Great, by Jim Collins Brian on LinkedIn Twitter – @brianscudamore Facebook – bscudamore Instagram – brianscudamore Scaling Up Business Podcast – Bruce Eckfeldt Scaling Up Business Podcast – Brian Scudamore Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTubeMentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

How do we get beyond the startup phase and into the scale-up zone? And what are some of the unique challenges women face throughout this process? Today’s guest has some insight on how this transition can be made a little bit easier. Julia Pimsleur is an entrepreneur and the author of the best-selling book Million Dollar Women. During her years as a CEO, Julia has raised angel and venture capital for various startups and discovered that only 3% of all women entrepreneurs ever reach the one-million-dollar mark. Today, she aims to change that and coaches women through their business so that they can scale and grow effectively. When Julia built her language business into a multimillion-dollar business, she looked around and saw that there were very few women at that level. Despite women starting twice as many businesses than men over the last two decades, they still weren’t reaching that million-dollar mark. Julia suspected that women were running into the same kinds of problems she did when she first started out, which was what inspired her to write her book. For example, bank loans. Very few women seek financial aid, and when they do, they’re often turned down by the bank. In the Million Dollar Women® masterclass, Julia helps her students in three core areas: finances, mindset, and strategy. Finances and strategy are timeless but when it comes to mindset, women are much more cautious in their approach to scaling up, and this can hold them back significantly from growth. Interview Links: Juliapimsleur.com Julia on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Meetings! They can either be great or they can be terrible. The general consensus is that meetings suck, but today’s special guest wants to transform your experience with meetings so that the entire team feels productive and ready to go! Elise Keith is the Founder of Lucid Meetings and the author of Where The Action Is, a book about more productive and happier, meetings! She helps her clients implement an effective meeting operating system so that everyone in the company prospers. When Elise first started her career, she experienced a lot of pointless drama and needless side conversations. Different departments had different objectives and they would often clash with one another, which meant the meetings were endless and also ruthless. These mixed messages would also confuse their customers too! Elise experienced all the ‘interventions.’ Leaders did the DISC and StrengthsFinder’s assessment. The DISC profiles became excuses and the strengths became weapons. The diversity interventions ended up creating more barriers between team members. Yet, still, everyone tried so desperately to work together. They still cared. Things changed for Elise when she witnessed firsthand what it was like to have competing interests and a system that was able to bypass all the drama and get things done. That system was centered around a very clear and defined way on how to run Monday meetings. They weren’t always interesting, but it got the job done. These meetings had clear goals and objectives already laid out each week so that everyone was on the same page before they even started the meeting. Just with this simple shift, Elise saw people being aligned on what they had to achieve and… they were having fun doing it! If you run your meetings better, your people will get along better! Interview Links: Blog.lucidmeetings.com Elise on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTubeMentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

What lessons can we learn from a symphony orchestra? More importantly, what can a symphony conductor teach us about teamwork and leadership? Our special guest shares how we can enhance and develop our leadership skills by learning to lead with deeper listening skills. Roger Nierenberg is a Symphony Conductor that has enjoyed long tenures as Music Director of both The Jacksonville Symphony and the Stamford Symphony. Roger is also the author of Maestro, which contains surprising messages about business leadership. What does a symphony conductor do? A conductor is in charge of making the whole music piece, all the little different parts, coherent. They are in charge of taking big messages and simplifying them, and they help lay out the vision of the music so that the musicians can buy into it and follow it. All of this is translated by the simple movements of the baton. In Roger’s process, first, he sets the tone for his business students so that they understand how an orchestra works. They come into a room where they sit right where the action is, inside the symphony orchestra, and find themselves side-by-side with the musicians. Without any words spoken, the music begins and the students watch as Roger conducts. After the show, Roger explains that the orchestra is a metaphor for a well-run, successful organization. The funny thing is, Roger had only met with the orchestra an hour prior and they, too, had no idea what Roger was going to ask them to do until the baton was moving. So many people are not musicians, so by structuring it in this way, students are able to fully comprehend and experience what it looks like to work together unscripted, in a flow, without trying to explain or converse. You are only using the power of observation and your listening skills to understand what it means to really work in sync. Interview Links: Musicparadigm.com Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

When you’re launching, scaling, or even selling a business, it comes with a lot of tough challenges… as well as some amazing breakthroughs. Today’s show is all about achieving those breakthroughs on a regular basis and getting more of those ‘aha’ moments. Scott Duffy has been listed as a “Top 10 Keynote Speaker” by Entrepreneur and even sold one of his businesses to Richard Branson. He is also the best-selling author of Launched! and gives a deeper dive into his most recent book, Breakthrough, in today’s episode. As a junior in college, Scott got into a horrific car accident with a garbage truck while he was going 90 miles an hour. He had two brain hemorrhages and had to drop out of school. While on bed rest, Scott was listening to motivational speakers and he made it his mission to intern/work for these very people who helped him recover. After his recovery, he went back to school and landed an internship with Tony Robbins. The job was hard. Scott would be on the road for 50 straight weeks and his training team would speak up to seven days a week, five times a day. Unfortunately, Scott burned out from this high-paced and high-energy environment. After some time off, Scott joined with his old roommate to create an Internet company (this was back in 1994). The first two months were a disaster. Nothing was working. So, Scott decided to go where the action was and move to San Francisco where all the smart guys, like Yahoo, were. A ton of friends’ couches and six months later, Scott ran out of money and people stopped calling him back. So, he pawned all of his stuff! He took the money he had, bought some pizzas, smashed his resume into the cheese, and delivered them to companies. He got a call from Bill Peck, the father of Internet Advertising, and that’s when Scott got his first breakthrough. Interview Links: Scottduffy.com Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount) Bill on YouTube TWEETABLES: “We have this energy, we have this enthusiasm, and we know if someone would just give us a shot, we’d do a great job!” “In life, we gotta position ourselves.” “The rule number one I’ve learned with being around people like Richard Branson or Tony Robbins — just never get in the way of possibility.” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so then head over to iTunes and leave a review. Help other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they too can benefit from the ideas shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Gazelles Coaching, on how the fastest growing companies succeed where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up business podcast and a leading Gazelles Coach. Gazelles is the term we use for fast-growing companies. We help leadership teams with 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Scaling Up for Gazelles companies is based on the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

This week’s show is a case study featuring an entrepreneur finding the right balance between the people vs. the profits. Our entrepreneur has created a for-profit business with an emphasis on the people who work there. Find out more! Matt Altman Co-Founded the brand Sportiqe, a lifestyle clothing company. He serves as CEO of the company with a mission to help people feel comfortable. Matt has a lifelong passion for helping people be the best version of themselves. He also serves on the board of The Prem Rawat Foundation, which serves to address fundamental human needs of food, water, and peace. Matt had a 12-year career in retail operations before starting his own business in 2006. From day one, Matt and his co-founder were constantly thinking of their company culture and how they wanted to develop it. He believes the health of the company, the profits, the people, are all integrated. In his career, Matt saw time and time again decisions being made that grew profit… but at the expense of the people. For him, it didn’t seem fair to operate a business that way. He knew there was a better way and sought out to find it. Matt first heard the term ‘Conscious Capitalism’ four to five years ago and didn’t think much of it. However, he was invited to his first Conscious Capitalism summit two years ago and the event was eye-opening. He discovered so many companies that had a purpose-driven reason to exist and it transcended beyond ‘just to make money.’ He was able to see first-hand the positive-impact capitalism has had on a global scale. Conscious Capitalism is about thinking long-term instead of short-term. It’s planning out the sustainability in a company and utilizing smart business practices to leverage the humanity of people. It’s basically asking yourself, “What are the decisions I can make today that will help the company five years from now?” Interview Links: TPRF.org Sportiqe.com Episode 088: “Rajendra Sisodia — Conscious Capitalism” Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount) Bill on YouTube

Stressed out? Are you constantly facing tough challenges on a regular basis? Everyone goes through people problems, relationship problems, family problems, and financial problems but our reactions to these stressful events can be changed through the use of mindfulness and meditation. Rob Dube is the Founder and President of ImageOne, which focuses on Print Management. Rob is also a Forbes Best Small Giants Company Leader and the author of the bestselling book, Do Nothing, which is what Bill and Rob will be talking about on today’s show! Growing up, Rob had a host of health issues as well as some family issues under his belt. As a kid, he was always anxious and stressed, but he kept it bottled up inside. After college, he and his childhood friend started a business, which did not help Rob’s anxiousness and stress. By the time Rob was 25, he was already married, had a kid on its way; he also had no money and was living with his dad… which meant even more stress! It finally took a toll on Rob and he went into therapy. It helped a lot, but it didn’t ‘cure’ him. When Rob first heard about mediation in the early 2000s, he was skeptical. However, he reached a breaking point after he sold his business and was willing to try anything. He tried it… and he felt better. His problems were still there, but at least he felt a bit better. That’s when he dug in deep to see whether there was any scientific proof behind all of this meditation stuff. 14 years of practice later, Rob is a believer. He is a fan of doing silent retreats because it brings you to the present and he has done eight of them so far that were each around 7-10 days in length. Although there are different types of meditation, Rob likes to do MBSR (Mindfulness-based stress reduction) meditation. How does Rob define mindfulness? There are a couple of definitions for it, but one of them is the ability to be in the moment, right here, right now. As one body, as one breath. As challenges are coming at you, you are able to bring yourself right into the moment and not let your mind go into problem-solving mode. Interview Links: Imageoneway.com Rob on LinkedIn Donothingbook.com Smallgiants.org Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach TWEETABLES: “I just kept building that foundation of stress and anxiety and I just didn’t feel like I was as good of a person as I needed to be.” “Having been an entrepreneur basically my whole life and never having worked for anybody, I was just not adapting to this new company/environment.” “We learn to first bring awareness to yourself. Then, over time, you bring that awareness to each moment you’re experiencing.” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

What story does your cash flow tell? Is it a happy ending? Does it end in romance? Or is it a horror story? Your balance, your cash flow, tell a story. The good news is there are four levers you can pull to change it! Alan Miltz is a numbers guy from South Africa but currently lives in Australia. He is the co-founder of Cash Flow Story, the co-author of Scaling Up, and he’s an International Speaker. Alan is on today’s show to shed some light on the numbers and help Founders and Entrepreneurs get a better understanding of what it all means. Unless you come from a financial background, looking at the numbers in your business can be overwhelming and hard to comprehend in a ‘big picture’ perspective. As Alan likes to say, you might be speaking Spanish, but the bank is speaking Portuguese and these language barriers can be disastrous for a new startup. Alan left South Africa in 1987 while the country was in the midst of apartheid. Through his accounting degree, Alan was able to travel all over the world, where he finally landed in Australia at 26 years old. At the time, he was an advisor and realized everyone he spoken to (accountants, business owners, etc) all spoke “numbers” very differently. They all interpreted it… differently! So, Alan and a few other South African expats decided to create a technology platform that could be used by anyone. The belief was that banks should be able to communicate in credit in one simple language and have businesses understand it. Through that adventure, Alan and his co-founders were able to sell it about six years ago and start Cash Flow Story shortly after. Cash Flow Story is aimed at CEOs, Coaches, and Accountants to tell a story in a way where everyone will understand the numbers. The biggest danger in a business is what you don’t know about your own business! The goal is simple, to help people eliminate their financial blind spots. Alan believes revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, and cash is king. When CEOs look at their financials and see their profit margin, they think they understand the business. Alan says you don’t! Profit numbers are just an opinion! You can manipulate your profit. Cash, however, is a fact. Interview Links: Alanmiltz.com Alan on LinkedIn Cashflowstory.com Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Fast-growing companies typically grow between 20-30% a year and doubling that every few years. However, some companies grow quite a bit faster than that. Today’s topic is Blitzscaling, where companies exceed their growth expectations ten- or twenty-fold! Chris Yeh is the Co-Founder and General Partner of Wasabi Ventures. Chris has worked in high-tech startups since 1995 and attend Stanford when he was just 15 years old. Chris is also the author of Blitzscaling, which Bill and Chris will be discussing in depth today. How do you define Blitzscaling exactly? It is the pursuit of rapid growth, where you prioritize speed over efficiency and environmental uncertainty. More and more industries and markets are winner-take-most or winner-take-all. The first to reach scale becomes the dominant player. For example, Facebook was not the first social network. Before it, there was Friendster and MySpace. However, Facebook was the first to scale and get its name out there. The perfect example of Blitzscaling is actually Google. When Google decided to partner with AOL, they made a commitment of $150 million dollars a year with them. This was a huge jump because the year before they had only done $19 million. Through their AOL partnerships, they became the dominant player in advertising today. Is Blitzscaling just all about getting big fast? No, it’s not! It is a systematic way to understand and take intelligent risks. Blitzscaling has four growth factors and two growth limiters. It first starts with market size, distribution, gross margins, and network effect. The two growth limiters are lack of product market fit and operational scalability. For example, Groupon by all measures should have been successful, but what stopped them dead in their tracks was lack of product market fit. They offered a poor customer experience for both the vendors and the buyers as they grew. They had rocket-like growth in the beginning, but it ended up crashing due to their inability to cater to their core customers. Interview Links: Wasabiventures.com Globalscalingacademy.com Blitzscaling.com Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach TWEETABLES: “Blitzscaling is the pursuit of rapid growth by prioritizing speed over efficiency.” “The ability to actually scale your people, your technology, and infrastructure is absolutely essential.” “When you’re a Blitzscaler, you need to be able to continue learning new ways to play the game, because it’s changing at every stage.” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

What does it truly feel like to 10X your company? How does your mindset change and how do you navigate between the startup phase to the $10 million in revenue phase? On top of that, how can we keep sustaining that growth? Today’s episode features a case study that details this entrepreneur’s experience! Kevin Pasco is a 26-year-old entrepreneur who built an eight-figure brand, Nested Naturals, into an eCommerce powerhouse with his partner Jeremy Sherk. Kevin has a team of 25 employees and plans to grow to more than 50 in the next 3 years. How has he been able to see such success? Find out on today’s episode! When Kevin first started 4-5 years ago, he was trying to pursue a more nomadic “4 hour work week” schedule. However, it slowly grew into something more. The company first began because both Kevin and his business partner were fed up with taking supplements that didn’t fully disclosure what was — really — inside the bottle. The first product they launched was to help with sleep since both of the Founders had trouble sleeping regularly. When they launched, they had to really bootstrap it and get the support of their friends and family to support their first product, initially. In the first year, their product saw a lot of success and it grew to a million dollars in revenue. What led them to quick growth in the first year was their ability to listen to the customer and adapt to their needs. The customers were still paying the same price for a better product and they were thrilled. Also, their extensive A/B testing helped significantly to see what was really working and what was not. The keys to Kevin’s success, in the beginning, was listening to feedback, adapting, and then brand testing. By getting social proof early on through Amazon Reviews, Kevin and his business partner were able to charge a higher price for their product as well and stand out from the competition. They’re not just selling ‘pills,’ they’re selling a good night’s sleep where you won’t be waking up groggy. People really value that and are willing to pay extra for that feeling. Interview Links: Nestednaturals.com Kevin on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach TWEETABLES: “We really learned to listen to the customer.” “We found pretty early on that the more reviews we could get — the more people talking about the product — the more we could charge.” “In year 3, we placed such a big emphasis on people, leadership, autonomy, hiring great people, and offering them incredibly culture and perks.” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

We often focus on company performance and leadership, but what about individual performance? What can we learn from just the individual and how can we improve it so that everyone on your team is a star performer? Today’s guest has the answers. Morten Hansen is a management theorist, motivational speaker, and author. Formerly a professor at Harvard Business School, Morten now teaches management at The University of California. He also co-authored the New York Times bestseller Great by Choice with Jim Collins. Morten has recently released a new book titled, Great at Work, which he dives into, on this week's show. Morten was working 80+ hours to achieve good work, but his colleague was working 50 hours a week and still delivered good work, if not better. How was it that she was able to achieve such great quality of work within less time? This spawned the question, why are some people great at work and others are not? Through extensive research and five years later, Morten discovered that there were 7 factors or principles that explained two-thirds of people’s work performance. If you’re good at these seven things, it will go a long way into really performing exceptionally well in your role. This is great news because it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘do more’ or ‘work harder.’ The great performers are not the ones up in the middle of the night sending emails at 3 a.m. to their staff. In fact, they’re much more organized; they’re more focused and incredibly good at prioritizing. Morten found that if you’re working more than 65 hours per week, you’re getting diminishing returns in your performance. To find out how to increase your performance and what the seven principles are, listen in for more! Interview Links: Mortenhansen.com Morten on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoachMentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

It takes a team to scale and grow but how do you do that with ease and grace? How can you become a powerful leader that both inspires and engages your team? Today’s guest has some answers! Jeff Hoffman is a successful entrepreneur and the Founder of Priceline, UBid, and ColorJar. Jeff has worked alongside celebrities like Elton John, Britney Spears, and NSYNC. He knows a thing or two about what it takes to engage people and on today’s show, he shares his expertise in team building practices that bring good people together! One of the most important lessons Jeff learned about scaling up is the value of teams. As a founder, you started the company yourself and are used to taking care of everything yourself. The problem with this though is that if your company does well, you start to think you’re pretty good at all of this. But later, founders find themselves overwhelmed. They find themselves working harder than ever before and putting in more hours than they’ve ever done before, yet, despite this, they’ve stopped growing. The truth is, you’re never going to do anything massive or at scale by yourself. Jeff was not smart enough to understand this in the beginning, but through his mistakes, he’s learned that the day you start taking some of your time to delegate your tasks and to find people that are smarter than you to run the company, is the day you can finally work less and be less stressed. Jeff had to make an active effort to find talented people. Sending out an ad doesn’t work. The best people in your market aren’t looking for a job, so schedule the time to scout them. The second part of running a successful team is getting out of their way. Let the people who are smarter than you do their jobs! Your real job as a founder is to build a workplace environment and culture that people love to go to, where the best people in the industry all want to work for you and never want to leave. Your job is to take care of the people who work for you. When you’ve achieved this, you never have to worry about the growth of your company. Interview Links: Jeffhoffman.com Jeff on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

The bigger you get, the harder it becomes to know what’s going on within your company. You may know your financial numbers, but how are you really doing? Are your people happy? How are you doing on those ‘softer’ skills? Well, you are able to track this in real terms by using a system called Net Promoter Score (NPS). Sturdy McKee is a Physical Therapist, Entrepreneur, and Business Coach. He has been using NPS for the last five years and shares on today’s show his case study and some of his business insights on how NPS has helped grow his business and measure those ‘intangible’ metrics. Sturdy had been in business for over 10 years before he even considered implementing NPS. He had 6 locations and over 40 employees, and he was losing touch with the frontline experience. He didn’t know how his customers were doing across the board and it was difficult trying to find this info from all of his different locations. In the NPS survey question, business owners can ask their customers, “How likely are you to recommend this company, this product/service, to a friend or family member from 1-10?” 1-6s are considered detractors, 7-8s are neutrals, and 9-10s are promoters. The formula works like this: Take the number of promoters minus the detractors and divide the remainder by the total surveyed and then you end up with your ‘Net Promoter Score.’ Typically this system ignores those who voted 7-8 and looks carefully at those who rated the service 1-6 to see what you can learn from them. And from those who rated 9-10, you use this data to see how you can attract more of these people and even receive a testimonial from them. Sturdy’s company sent an automatic follow-up email two weeks after a patient’s evaluation asking the ‘Would you recommend us?’ question and sent the same follow-up question around the six-week mark, which ended up being a really good decision. For those who weren’t happy at the two-week mark, and having Sturdy’s team quickly address and fix it, they ended up changing their score at the six-week mark to a more positive one. During this time, Sturdy discovered two things about his company. Volunteers and students studying physical therapy were observing/treating patients, but some patients did not consent to this and felt like they were paying a high cost only to be treated by an unskilled staff member. This caused Sturdy to change his process so that students could still learn and volunteers could still observe, but it was documented more effectively and the patients still felt like they were receiving the highest quality service. Interview Links: Sturdymckee.com Sturdy on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach TWEETABLES: “For people who are brand new to this, NPS is really asking one question and then leaving an open end.” “Even from the get-go we realized it was a process, it wasn’t just a number.” “Fortunately, we’ve eliminated specific things that were being done across the board.” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

In order to grow your business, you have to recognize that you are often times the bottleneck. Everything needed to grow your business starts with you! This is why it’s important to become a lifelong learner to better develop yourself and grow your business. Daniel Marcos is the co-Founder and CEO of Gazelles Growth Institute. He is also a long-time coach and an international speaker who has shared the stage with thought leaders like Peter Diamandis, Guy Kawasaki, and Jack Canfield. On today’s show, Daniel dives into what it means and why it’s important to be a lifelong learner and how it accelerates your career. Daniel was a very bad student academically but he built his first internet company in Mexico City back in 1999. As Daniel began hiring Stanford and Harvard graduates to come work for him, he felt uncomfortable that he wasn’t able to understand what they were saying to him. They were using jargon he had never heard before. This experience prompted him to study for his own MBA and to better understand the people who work for him. When Daniel started his next company in the U.S., it went under during the 2008 crash. It was awful and he lost a lot of money. Verne Harnish reached out to him, and after complaining for 30 minutes, Verne asked, “What’s next?” Daniel, feeling like an absolute failure, said he was going to return to Mexico and get a salaried job to pay for his kid’s education. Verne thought this was nonsense and offered him a new opportunity. The rest is history! Through that experience, Daniel has become obsessed with KPIs and looking at the numbers. He now has insight into what good numbers look like to help prevent others from suffering the same faith his company did back in 2008. Back then, he saw the warning signs but ignored them. Today, he helps entrepreneurs avoid them. Daniel has a very extensive book collection, but the problem with books is they tell you how to do things, but they never mention at what stage or when you should do those things. As we go through different stages of growth, each company is going to experience something different. A one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work the way the books say it does. Daniel saw a chart that stated the U.S. today has 28 million firms and 96% of them will never do over a million dollars in revenue a year. Only about 0.4% of companies go over $10 million a year in revenue. In the end, only 17,000 companies go above $50 million in revenue each year. And in each of these financially diverse companies, they all need a completely different level of attention and systems. Interview Links: Growthinstitute.com Daniel on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach TWEETABLES: “The reason we’re great coaches is not because we’re so ‘brilliant.’ It’s our willingness to share the things that didn’t work for us.” “Everything was backward for me. How much money we made, we were looking into the past. Now, a lot of my metrics are for the future and I can see what’s going on.” “Are you, yourself, coachable?” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).

People are certainly the hardest part about scaling up a business. Finding the right people is crucial to helping you grow. So, how can you improve your odds from 50% to 90% or better? Through smart recruiting methods! Geoff Smart is the Chairman & Founder of ghSMART, which was founded in 1995 to help Fortune 500 CEOs and entrepreneurs achieve their goals through hiring, developing and leading talented teams. Geoff is also the bestselling author of Who, Leadocracy, and Power Score. As a freshman at college, Geoff was fortunate enough to get an internship at a venture capitalist firm and he noticed that large sums of money were either gained or lost due to who the investors invested in. Geoff wondered if there was a way to hack the system to help investors make better bets on people, and so his company was born. The topic of how to get the right people on your team is one of the most popular concerns for people in business. If you get this aspect right, you are going to have the most solid improvement in your revenue and profitability and in your own enjoyment in your work. A lot of entrepreneurs/hiring managers use their gut feelings to hire, but this could possibly be the worst mistake you can make. The reality is, you can’t judge a person based instantly on gut feel. You’re going to make a mistake and it’s going to cost you a lot of money. Leave the emotional hiring methods behind! The average success rate for hiring is about 50%. Recruiters only get it right 50% of the time, which means people regret every 1 in 2 hires! That’s horrible! A bad hire can cost you 15 times that employee’s annual salary. However, you can improve your 50% into 90% by focusing on these four things really well: Scorecard, Source, Select, and Sell. Geoff explains each section in depth inside the podcast episode! Listen in for more wisdom! Interview Links: Geoffsmart.com Geoff on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach TWEETABLES: “If you look at global surveys on what’s on the minds of entrepreneurs, talent is number one or two out of 30 different topics.” “If you get [talent] right, you’re going to have the most solid improvement in your revenue and profitability.” “Ever since I started my company, I realized that managing is easy… except for the people part.” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

If you think about it, there’s really no such thing as B2B. People are behind these businesses and they work with other people! It all comes down to relationships and communication. Today’s guest shares how you can build more meaningful, deeper, and stronger relationships! Mo Fathelbab is the Founder and President of Forum Resource, LLC and co-founder of Alumni Forum Services. He is also the author of the best-selling book, Forum: The Secret Advantage of Successful Leaders and his latest book, The Friendship Advantage: 7 Keys to Building Relationships that Transform Corporate Culture and Drive Productivity. Mo will be diving into why strong relationships make all the difference and how you can build deeper relationships from the ground up in this episode! Mo is so passionate about relationships because he knows what it’s like to not be able to connect with anyone. Growing up, he purposely put himself in situations where he was forced to talk to people so he could get better at connecting. During a ‘Forum’ training, Mo experienced something magical. He was sharing personal details with mere strangers, things he had never shared with his family or closest friends, and it was liberating. Mo thought it was so valuable that he decided to host these trainings all over and deliver it to busy entrepreneurs wherever they may be located. These trainings provided a model for powerful, meaningful, real, relationships that people don’t usually see in their day-to-day lives. Looking back, Mo reflects that he has shared literally everything with his group; he has no secrets and it’s an amazing feeling. The seven keys to building relationships that Mo has outlined in his book, The Friendship Advantage, are judgment-free, mischievous fun, vulnerability, kind-truth, reliability, sharing and generosity, and to share purpose and value. The combination of these seven help build connections wherever you are. Mo provides an example of how this would typically play out in a company setting. The first thing to determine is how does a company handle or resolve conflict. After that, it’s time to set an agenda, and then have those difficult conversations to pull everybody onto the right track. Interview Links: Forumresourcesnetwork.com Mo on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube

An effective growth strategy is key to everything we do in scaling up. Growth strategy is a thinking game and today’s guest shares tools that will keep your growth consistent and help you figure out when to pivot when things just aren’t working. Tiffani Bova is the Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce and was previously VP, Distinguished Analyst and Research Fellow with Gartner. She is also the author of Growth IQ: Get Smarter about Building Your Company’s Future, which she will dive into on today’s show! It took some time before Tiffani got into the groove of what she does today. In fact, it took her nearly eight years before she got her stride and felt comfortable giving intentional and helpful advice to struggling companies looking to grow. Businesses were looking for that silver bullet, that ‘one thing,’ to turn their companies around and hit their numbers. The truth is, 80% of companies will experience a growth stall and fewer than that will be able to recover from it. So, how can Tiffani help companies avoid the stall in the first place? She discovered many companies were not looking at the context of the market today. They might have looked into it briefly when the plan was made 12 months ago or 36 months ago, but few were following up with the market trends of today. Things move too rapidly in today’s environment and, by not keeping up-to-date, it can be a real growth killer. Tiffani also noticed that it’s never been ‘one thing’ that keeps a company’s growth accelerating. It was always a combination of things that the company was doing that gave them the competitive advantage. For company A, for example, it was about entering a new market with the right partnerships and with the right sales model. That’s what led them to growth. The third thing that’s also an important factor in growth is timing, which Tiffani calls ‘Sequence’ in the book. If you put partnerships in place after you’ve entered a new market, you may be delivering a poor service experience, which will end up breaking customer trust. Context, Combination, and Sequence are the three things that make up an intelligent growth IQ. Interview Links: Tiffanibova.com Tiffani on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

How do we become ‘known’ for something and remain top-of-mind? How can you use content marketing to help you achieve influence and engage with those who matter to you? Today’s guest speaker has some ideas. John is the CEO and co-founder of Influence & Co., a tech-enabled content marketing agency that helps brands and individuals extract and leverage their expertise to create, publish, and distribute content to gain influence, visibility, and credibility with their key audiences. Despite having experience under John’s belt, he would constantly walk into meetings and people would get confused as to why this ‘kid’ was there. John was running into trust barriers right out the gate and he hated that feeling. He knew he couldn’t have been the only one, so he and his partners decided to create Influence & Co. to help others overcome this barrier. Bill has also run into this in the past. He struggled to get taken seriously as well and one of his bosses even suggested wearing prop glasses to look older. We all deal with things like this, especially as leaders, it’s hard to get taken seriously when you look like you have no experience. This is where trust plays an important role. How can people become top-of-mind and build trust naturally? It starts with being helpful. Everybody needs help in a professional and personal setting. Ask them what that missing piece is and then begin to connect the dots by introducing them to others. This works wonders on an in-person level, but how do you scale up trust? The best way to scale up trust and grow your influence is through creating content. Remember, people don’t want to deal with ‘the brand.’ They want to deal with the people in the brand. By humanizing yourself, you’re humanizing your company and it attracts wonderful recruitment opportunities as well. Consistency in your marketing message plays a huge factor in building trust within your audience. People’s memories are a powerful thing and if you hit people with the right type of content at the right time, they will remember you forever. Interview Links: Influenceandco.com Topofmindbook.com John on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Have you ever wondered how you can effectively scale a service-based business without losing quality and your sanity? Today’s guest expert shares a case study on how she scaled a reception business to 500 employees and $50 million dollars. 15 years ago, Jill Nelson started from humble beginnings, but has grown her business, Ruby Receptionists, into a four-time winner of FORTUNE magazine’s top five Best Small Companies to Work for, and has helped over 8,000 small businesses across the US service and create loyal customers. Today, she shares a case study of how she was able to make it all possible. Jill found out after graduating from university that her accounting degree just wasn’t for her. On a whim, she took a receptionist position and that’s when things clicked. She learned that there was real value in having a personal connection while growing a successful business. She was a critical touch point for the company. Jill wanted to create an executive suite, but she had no money and she had no business experience. After obtaining a business loan, she was able to launch everything an executive suite could offer… minus the office space. Jill used her resources wisely and learned early on what her unique value proposition was and used it to her advantage. With an extreme focus on friendly and attentive customer service, Jill’s client feedback praised the receptionist for making an excellent first impression on their customers and helping them land new client deals because he/she sounded professional and knowledgeable over the phone. This very friendly and personalized service can be difficult to scale up, but Jill has managed to grow it to nearly 500 employees and still retain a personalized feel for each of her customers. Jill has maintained this consistency by having a lot of systems in place and also by their trademarked ‘service pyramid’ that outlines clearly their business model and how they deliver exceptional service to their customers. The service pyramid is a bit of a regulation cheatsheet meets personalize service that incentivizes rule breaking. Interview Links: Callruby.com Jill on LinkedIn Callruby.com/scalingupbusiness Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube TWEETABLES: “The phone call is the most important touch point for your customers and your new customers.” “We just won a new client because the receptionist was so nice or we just won a new customer because you actually answered your phone!” “How can you make a personal connection when you have all these rules and regulations?” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

What can we learn about our businesses through sports and the way coaches coach? Today’s discussion is all about how no team is a bad team and how you can be a better coach to your team and business! Craig Ahrens is a speaker, author, and consultant as well as the Founding Partner for Fungo, a consulting firm designed for coaches to practice fundamentals with their teams. Craig was first introduced to this field through his children’s sports leagues. He started out as a passionate spectator and then later as an assistant coach, head coach, and board member. He noticed that the people who were coaches were also small business owners, mid-level managers, and senior-level executives. It gave him the opportunity to watch different leadership styles on the field. During the seasons, Craig noticed a correlation between successful youth teams and successful businesses. Regardless of the sport, successful coaches had a certain mindset that would help the team win games through and through. Bill reflects on why two of his own children never really got into sports. It boiled down to how the coaches treated them. Craig believes a good coach is able to close the gaps. They are able to recognize grumblings, apathy, and other weak links and quickly address them. Coaches need to know their short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. Coaches also need to be able to get feedback from their team to develop buy-in as well as accountability for those goals. When people understand the ‘why’ behind the goals, they are able to work efficiently towards them. Interview Links: Teamfungo.com Craigahrens.com Craig on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

Whether you love it or hate it, diversity is an important aspect of our workplace culture. Today’s guest has some interesting insights on how diversity can actually make you money! Diversity can impact your business for the better and also improve the quality of it. Maureen Berkner Boyt is the Founder of Moxie Exchange Movement, an organization that focuses on tackling the talent issue from both sides so that business owners can recruit and retain the best talent on the market. They also provide resources and systems for you to interrupt unconscious bias and create an inclusive workplace. People often complain about how Millennials need to be treated extra specially, but the reality is, you should be treating all your employees that way. The only difference is that millennials demand it from their employers. People want to know your purpose, your values, and what you stand for. People want to make an impact in the world … everybody, not just the ‘millennials’. It’s both smart to introduce diversity in your company culture and it’s also the right thing to do. When you have a diverse set of people working for you, everybody wins. Your teams are stronger, they’re smarter, and they innovate more effectively. Maureen was serving on the board of a company that was in real trouble. If they didn’t make any changes soon, they’d go under. After a week in a room with leadership, she was more exhausted than usual. She realized she was the only woman in the room. She also realized that there should never be an ‘only’ in the room. There are plenty of capable women and people of color, so why do businesses not promote them? Maureen dug deeper and realized that nobody is doing this on purpose. No one says they want ‘all white men’ on their board. In fact, companies are frustrated that they cannot keep or retain diverse sets of people despite mentorship and guidance. Whether we like it or not, every single one of us is biased. It’s just the way our brain functions to ensure we are in a safe environment. Our unconscious biases are just mental shortcuts. If you want to interrupt your biases, question what you’re thinking whenever you have a thought about a person and their performance. Ask yourself why and dig deeper. Find out what could be true vs. not true and then go from there. Interview Links: Moxieexchange.com Maureen on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

There is more than one way to work in a team setting these days. At an office, at home, remote, or a combination of the three. Today’s guest discusses the different ways you can create a team that incorporates flexibility and yet is still responsive to the daily needs of a business. Frank Cottle is the Chairman and Founder of Alliance Virtual Offices and Alliance Business Centers Network. He is a recognized expert within the business center, executive suite, and virtual office industries and often speaks on topics related to all forms of alternative officing. Frank and his partners built buildings with the purpose to house and host executive suite centers for professionals who needed a quiet and private space to work. These are quite different compared to the more open space, coffee-shop-esque feel of a co-working facility. Frank explains the difference between service offices, coworking spaces, and incubators. Technically, these working spaces combine people, place, and technology into a single bundled product that’s delivered with a highly flexible service agreement. However, each of these spaces offers a different type of brand promise. Virtual office spaces help the small businessman and startup founder create effective growth by lowering their monthly business expenses on rent, utilities, staff, and office equipment. However, they don’t just house small business professionals. The two biggest groups who use Frank’s service offices are actually the government and the global Fortune 1000. Large companies are changing their business models radically. If you looked at an annual report five years ago from a large company in the bay area, they would have had roughly 300,000 ‘employees’ in the report. Today, that number is listed as ‘workforce’ with about 20-25% being listed as contractors. This shift is drastic when you think about how much money companies are saving in leasehold debt. Interview Links: Alliancevirtualoffices.com Abcn.com Frank on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

What is conversational intelligence? We know about emotional intelligence and ‘traditional’ intelligence, but there is also a third part to it. Today’s show is all about how leaders can produce greater results and be more effective by developing their conversational intelligence. Conversation can bring us closer together and allows everyone to effectively co-create. Judith Glaser is an author, academic, business executive, and organizational anthropologist. She is the Founder & CEO of Benchmark Communications, Inc., an executive consulting and coaching company with an emphasis on the importance of conversations in shaping corporate culture and achieving corporate goals. How do you create an environment where every human being has an identity of their own, even when they share the same job title? If leaders think of every human being as being unique and different, it creates a completely different atmosphere in the workforce and it even creates innovation. What happens in the brain when people treat us with respect and love us, vs. when we’re told we’re doing everything wrong and will never amount to anything? They create chemical, and sometimes, structural shifts in our brain. Leaders can find ways to create an environment that opens up part of the brain that will make people smarter and the best part is you can do that with just a conversation! That’s what it means to have ‘conversational intelligence.’ Part of conversational intelligence is understanding how to listen and hear in between the lines. Many people listen to figure out how they can fit into the conversation or to correct somebody. Unfortunately, that doesn’t build connections. If you listen without judgment, listen to just listen, you are able to see more clearly the kinds of emotions people are talking about but can’t seem to put into words. As a leader, it is important to be able to connect with everyone, but just know that some people may take more work than others to reach common ground with them. Interview Links: Creatingwe.com Judith on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

Mark Cuban believes the world’s first trillionaire will come from the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Today’s show will focus on what you can do with the AI tools of today. Find out what types of opportunities are available and mistakes to avoid in this interview! Doug Rose was one of the early adopters and teachers of Agile Software Development. For over 25 years, Doug has transformed organizations through technology, training, and process optimization. He is the author of several books on artificial intelligence, data science, and management and software development. He also teaches classes at the University of Chicago and online through lynda.com and LinkedIn Learning. Doug discovered artificial intelligence through his passion for computers and programming. As more organizations started working towards machine learning to better understand their customers, Doug saw a need to help educate managers, and those with a less techy background, understand it all and help them develop products with it. When it comes to working with predictive AI, what are some of the ethical challenges managers are faced with? A lot of these ethical decisions fall onto the engineers, which isn’t always the best path to take long-term. Doug shares a couple of examples of what these ethical challenges look like in real life. Unfortunately, consequences of AI aren’t being addressed early enough. Doug believes there aren’t enough people in the room right now to make calculated and educated decisions about the direction and development of the company’s AI. He attributes the lack of understanding of key terms and concepts among leadership teams as the biggest factor in this. Interview Links: Dougenterprises.com/ Doug on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon SuskoMentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

We want companies to be more than good — in fact, we want them to be more than great — we want them to be excellent! Today’s podcast show is all about achieving business excellence and our special guest will show you how. Tom Peters is the co-author of In Search of Excellence, the book that changed the way the world does business. 17 books and 35 years later, Tom is still at the forefront of the business management industry. The best part of all of this is that Tom’s written and speech material covering the last 15+ years is available and free, to download on his website! Through his father’s recommendation, Bill first read Tom’s book in 1982 while he was still in college. The funny thing is, a book critic, in an attempt to shame and undermine Tom’s business book, said that ‘Fathers are just buying it to give to their teenage kids.’ This ended up being a fantastic endorsement. How did Tom’s search for excellence begin and why did he decide to write the book? Well, it all started with the Vietnam war. Tom graduated with a civil engineering degree but suddenly found himself responsible for the lives of 15-20 sailors. He was underprepared for a leadership role to say the least. After two deployments, Tom saw two different leadership styles. One he calls ‘Captain Day,’ who was a fantastic leader and mentor of what good leadership looked like and the other was ‘Captain Night,’ who was the direct polar opposite and made Tom and his crews’ lives hell. Why is it that people use the word ‘excellence’ to describe ballet, theater, football, baseball, etc., but never use the same word for business? Tom thought this was nonsense! Excellence should be an aspiration all of us in business strive for. By adding personalized human touches and making customers feel valued, recognized, and appreciated, it will only increase your business — not hurt it. Interview Links: Tompeters.com Excellencenow.com Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

What can your organization learn from nature? What important lessons does nature have to offer to make your organization better, stronger, faster? Find out on today’s show! Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker is an Evolutionary Biologist, Biological Innovation and Organizational Consultant, and an Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University’s Biomimicry Center in the School of Life Sciences. She is also the author of Teeming, which introduces proven strategies nature’s ant and honeybee teams use to create lasting and growing value in an unpredictable world. Dr. Woolley-Barker was working alongside wild baboons as a primatologist in Ethiopia when she came to the realization that humans are more like ants than we are like apes (actually, we really are both). Our social system has made such a big jump and has turned into a more collaborative superorganism where none of us can truly survive on our own, like ants. When you take a close look at ants, they all have a different job and they all depend on each other to function. Human societies have the same undertones. You did not make all the clothes you’re wearing, you did not grow all your own food, or make your own phone. We are so fundamentally intertwined and depend on each other to work. That’s a radical shift from our closest relatives. Dr. Woolley-Barker shares some examples of how companies she’s worked with have successfully increased their employee engagement, innovation, and productivity through the use of biomimetics. Interface, the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpets, asked the question, “How would nature make a carpet?” By going through this thought process, they ended up making the best selling carpet product of all time, and it’s non-toxic! They now have a mission to eliminate any negative impact the company has on the environment by 2020. Productivity shot up by double and that’s because the employees now have a mission they can get behind. People always ask, “How can we make an organization like an ant team?” Well, if you watch ants, a lot of them are really terrible at what they do. They wander around in circles and are often clueless, but it doesn’t matter! The errors of those individuals cancel out due to the structured process the ant team, as a whole, have put in place. Their process is fool-proof and so everyone succeeds. Interview Links: Drtamsin.com Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

Are you getting better every day? Kaizen is a rough translation of ‘change for the better’ and today’s show is all about what it is, how it’s different from other models such as Lean, and how you can achieve Kaizen! Hilary Corna is the former Senior Executive Office for Toyota in Asia, where she managed a team of people across fourteen different countries as a Change Leader for all of the dealerships in Asia. Hilary is also the author of One White Face, a memoir of her time abroad working for the company. Hilary studied in Japan and secured a job at Toyota Motors in Singapore after college. She then transferred into a more managerial role in Indonesia where she ran a pilot program with the end-goal of rolling it out throughout all of Toyota Asia’s facilities when it became successful. This is where Hilary learned that it’s important to start small and test and test before scaling up. Hilary sees first hand how business owners get ‘shiny object syndrome’ with technology. People are constantly looking for bigger and better tools when the simplest tool you can use is pen and paper, or a free technology system, which is what the staff at Toyota use until they can prove results. Kaizen is about trying to find the root cause or problem within a process as early in the process as possible to prevent it from becoming a bigger problem in the future. Most problems are just problems of problems of problems and Kaizen kills that right from the beginning. Through Kaizen, it looks directly at the process and takes a real look at why did the process fail in such a way that the team member couldn’t complete the job, not the other way around. So many times upper management puts blame on the employees, when really, they might have just been working with a broken and unrealistic system all along. Kaizen helps shift the mindset of putting blame on others or pointing fingers at those who are responsible and puts a focus on where did the process break down and how can the team fix it so that everyone succeeds. Interview Links: Hilarycorna.com Hilary on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko

How do you fund your business? Is it with investors? Loans from the bank? Or something else entirely? Today’s guest will share the various ways you can fund your business and what option is right for you! Ami Kassar is the founder and CEO of MultiFunding and a bestselling author of The Growth Dilemma. Ami specializes in helping people develop creative cost-effective alternatives to navigate the (very expensive) needs of a business. Ami shares an example of how entrepreneurs should be thinking about their businesses. If all of your dreams came true, what would your business look like three years from now? And, what’s holding you back? In Ami’s example, what was holding the entrepreneur back from growth was because she was still managing payroll and admin when her talent was really in consulting and leading the consulting teams. In order for her to switch her focus, Ami asked her, “How much would that cost you and how long would that take to start paying for itself?” Her answer was 350K. So, the question was, could she afford the switch? She couldn’t. She runs her business the way many small business owners do, on a hustled budget, which means they don’t feel like they can spend more than what they can bring in. Ami opened her eyes to the different loan options she could afford based on her situation. She qualified for a Small Business Loan, which means she could borrow 350k without putting a lien on her house. She would have a monthly payment of $4,300, which was around 12-13% of her cash flow and it would allow her to successfully make the switch in the least painful way. This is the perfect example of how you can responsibly use leverage to scale up and grow without putting too many financial risks and burdens onto you and your personal household. If everything works according to plan, the entrepreneur would have paid the loan off in 2.2 years and she would triple her bottom line. Interview Links: Multifunding.com Ami on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Is it possible to grow a business worth over a million dollars with just one person? Yes, it is! Today’s guest shows you why this question is relevant for companies who aspire to grow its worth into the several hundred million dollar mark. Elaine Pofeldt is an independent journalist who specializes in small business, entrepreneurship, and careers. She is the author of the Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, which takes a look at how entrepreneurs are hitting seven-figure revenue in businesses where they are the only employees. Elaine is a contributor for Forbes and writes frequently for them about solopreneurs, also known as the one-person business. While researching for her next new piece, Elaine stumbled upon a treasure trove of data about the one-person businesses who were making over a million dollars in revenue. How were they able to achieve such success, solo? This sparked the idea for the book. Elaine shares some of the common traits these one-person businesses have in common. They automated things right away! They also hired freelancers to help them with small tasks like designs, templates, and more. These solopreneurs were also quick to outsource certain tasks to bigger companies who were experts in that particular task or field. By being able to outsource tedious tasks to the experts, these solopreneurs could spend more time where it matters; cultivating relationships with their best customers and finding new business. A lot of these solopreneurs make an active effort to step away from the business so that they’d not tied to the phones or the computers. Instead, they’re attending business events and they hire coaches to help them get to the next level. They’re constantly surrounding themselves with high-level ideas. When it comes to automation and if you’re not feeling 100% secure about hiring a freelancer just yet, Elaine recommends making a detailed inventory of what types of things you’re spending your time on in your business. See if there’s anything you can outsource based on that data that would free you up to do something more beneficial and useful. Interview Links: Elainepofeldt.com Elainepofeldt.com/new-book Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Will AI machines destroy humanity as we know it? Actually, quite the contrary. AI matters to the everyday business owner more than they might know. There’s a lot to be learned in prediction technology and today’s guest shares advice on how you can use this knowledge to grow your marketing and sales potential. Avi Goldfarb is the Ellison Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi is also the author of Prediction Machines, which he will be discussing on today’s show! In 2012, there were only a couple of companies at the time that were calling themselves AI companies. However, that slowly grew and by 2015, Avi had seen a huge increase of at least 50 companies being created a year. Avi and his co-authors decided to investigate and research what this technology meant for our modern society. The Mosaic web browser made the internet accessible to the general population, but it took us about a decade to figure out how to really commercialize it. Avi believes the same will hold true with AI. We are going to see businesses use AI tools in various ways to solve key problems. Although AI will not improve the general intelligence of your company, prediction is still really, really valuable. Why? Because it cuts down on all the unknown variables in your decision-making process when you are faced with uncertainty. Through prediction, you can be much more confident (and you have the data to prove it) on what’s the correct direction to take your business in. Interview Links: Avigoldfarb.com Creativedestructionlab.com Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Today’s podcast is all about reaching beyond your comfort zone. You’re never really finished doing good work, but with that, come some tests to your limits. How can you go above and beyond while also being comfortable with the uncomfortable? Today’s guest has the answers! Andy Molinsky is a Professor at Brandeis University’s International Business School, with a joint appointment in the Department of Psychology. Andy received his Ph.D. in Organizational Behavior and M.A. in Psychology from Harvard University. Andy’s extensive knowledge helps people develop the courage to act outside of their personal and cultural comfort zones while doing important work. One of Bill’s company values is ‘Never Being Finished’ and it’s the idea of always working on your growth and development. In order to truly improve, you must push yourself and get a bit uncomfortable, kind of like exercise. Andy agrees. In Andy’s work and while researching for his book, Reach, he has studied a wide variety of people throughout a number of professions to better understand why is it so hard to step out of our comfort zones. Why can’t we just be comfortable? Why do we need to force ourselves to be uncomfortable? Andy doesn’t recommend to always strive to be uncomfortable but to strategically pick a couple of high-leverage and important situations that are key to your growth and development. The types of challenges people face while stepping out of their comfort zones vary. People can experience a crisis with their authenticity or identity, “I’m not the kind of person that fires people.” The second challenge people experience is likability, “This person will hate me if I fire them.” And there’s also confidence issues, “What if I’m bad at this?” Combine confidence issues with authenticity issues, it’s no wonder so many people suffer from imposter syndrome. They often think, “This doesn’t feel like me, I’m bad at this, and people can tell I am bad at this.” Our lives are often organized in such a way where we can remain comfortable. We have developed elaborate strategies to purposely avoid discomfort, and it makes sense from a survival perspective. It helps us avoid pain and loss, but it also helps us avoid growth, which can mean death for business owners. Interview Links: Andymolinsky.com Andymolinsky.com/books Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube TWEETABLES: “In any professional and personal phrases, stepping outside of your comfort zone is a key skill.” “You want to pick a couple of high-leverage, important, relevant situations that are key to your growth and development.” “Our lives are well-organized around avoiding discomfort.” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

The process of scaling up really begins and ends with the leadership. If you’re a leader, then you must face yourself in the mirror and take care of yourself. There are many great ways a leader can develop themselves and today’s guest discusses how leaders can thrive under tough pressure. Kevin Lawrence is an international strategic advisor and has coached hundreds of clients across a wide range of industries. His work as a coach for the last 20+ years inspired him to write the book, Your Oxygen Mask First. The book discusses the dark side of leadership dichotomy, and offers 17 practical steps to triumph in business, without being trampled in life. High-performing CEOs and executives have to push themselves in such a way where they get stronger and better, without burning themselves out. This is a hard thing to do for any passionate leader as the world of business is so vast (and exciting) that it can take everything out of you if you’re not careful. With Kevin’s extensive work with high-level achievers, he’s heard it all. The powerful CEOs you see in magazines are overwhelmed and they’re beginning to doubt their ability. Just the other day, a CEO was having a panic attack just before his flight was taking off. When a CEO begins to unravel, addictions start to kick in to escape the stress and their physical and mental health suffers. The good news, however, is that it’s all fixable. If you want to play the bigger game, you just need better tools, and Kevin’s book has all the tools a CEO could ever need. You can learn techniques to help you gain your confidence back and you can build from a place where your new leadership position is not overwhelming you or forcing you to handle new thresholds of stress. Interview Links: Lawrenceandco.com Kevin on LinkedIn Episode 25 with Kevin Lawrence Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTubeMentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Carl Gould is an entrepreneur and business growth expert. Carl has built three multi-million dollar businesses by the age of 40, has mentored the launch of over 5,000 businesses and has trained and certified over 7,000 business coaches in 35 countries. Why should you be ‘obnoxious’? To give you a little bit of a background, Carl became very, very good at listening to customer complaints about the industry he was in. He also leveraged himself in such a way where he was constantly adding value (by doing the exact opposite of what his customers hated), and his pricing reflected that. In fact, his pricing was obnoxious. It was so obnoxious that a potential client vented to him about how ridiculous his pricing was… and then he handed him a check. Carl was confused at first, but after thinking about it, the client wasn’t actually mad at Carl. The client was mad at all of the other contractors who had failed to meet his expectations and he was hoping Carl was different. The client was willing to pay what he paid (although he wasn’t happy about it) because of Carl’s high-quality services. Carl listened to his client and was able to address his most painful concerns right away. He added obnoxious value, and with that came an obnoxious price. In your obnoxious offers/services, you also want to establish a nonlinear benefit for your clients. Ask yourself, “What can I bring to my clientele that has nothing to do with my service?” Create a path for your company so that your best clients can actually be treated like your best clients. Interview Links: 7stageadvisors.com Carl on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube TWEETABLES: “My fundamental premise is to get as obnoxious as possible, not just in price, but also in value.” “The reason why I was hired was I addressed the top-of-mind concerns of the client.” “Have you, as a company, created a path for your best clients to really be your best clients?” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Roland Siebelink is a serial entrepreneur, a certified Scaling Up coach, and the author of Scaling Silicon Valley Style. Roland grew up in the Netherlands, but he has started businesses in Belgium, Switzerland, and now in California. Currently, he helps founders and startups in Silicon Valley scale their businesses and avoid tricky pitfalls with their investors. Running a startup is very, very different compared to running a traditional business. This is one of the reasons why Roland decided to write his book. He wanted to offer a roadmap specifically to startup founders who needed to understand what stage they’re at, what that means for their funding, and how to effectively scale up without destroying it all. As a startup, your style is forced to evolve as your company gets bigger. Leading a team of 10 is much different than leading a team of 100, and not every startup founder can properly make that shift. The stuff that made you successful in the startup phase is actually completely detrimental to you in the scale-up phase. Learning how to pivot is a key skill towards making your startup business successful and finding your right target clients. However, once you’ve reached the limits of the startup phrase, pivoting can no longer be the solution to your problems. In fact, pivoting further can damage the company’s integrity and cause internal confusion. People in Silicon Valley aren’t focusing on change of leadership tactics when they get to a certain phase of their company. Instead, their solution is to just change CEOs and find a more ‘charismatic’ leader for the company. Unfortunately, this means that the 2nd CEO might not be the best culture fit and it forces an unnecessary disruption in the company when it could have been prevented. Sometimes, providing the first CEO with more awareness/leadership training could have been the solution the founders were looking for all along. Interview Links: Scalingsiliconvalleystyle.com Roland on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube TWEETABLES: “It’s not just [that] your style has to evolve, your style almost has to diametrically change.” “The stuff you learned that made you successful is completely detrimental to you in the scale-up phase.” “In the startup phase, founders learn to pivot and pivot and pivot until they become successful.” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

We often hear the term ‘pivot’ in business. When things aren’t working out, we figure out how to make it work in a different way, whether that be changing business models or switching businesses. However, what about the mini-pivot? This is where you add a small change that helps the business scale up. Stayed tuned to find out more. Brandon Bruce is the co-founder and COO of Cirrus Insight, an all-in-one sales productivity platform. Since launching in 2011, Cirrus has been listed as #41 on the Inc. 500 list. Brandon has grown Cirrus as a lightly-funded distributed company via scrappy tactics in the same industry as billion-dollar software companies and competitors. Find out more about his story and how those small pivots were key to his success. Brandon grew up in a very small town and went to a class of two. It was very self-directed learning and he was able to explore his education without being too restricted. Brandon started his company at a perfect time. When he and his partner created a product that integrated Gmail with Salesforce, both of these platforms were growing exponentially and now he and his team work with over 5,000 different organizations. He credits a big difference for their growth compared to others in the same space is that they got creative with the use of their bootstrapping methods to succeed. They were able to achieve a lot with a lot less and, through that, they were able to scale up more effectively. A lot of people think pivots have to be a big shift or change but do not discount the mini-pivots at all. Brandon’s business model was simple, do you use Salesforce? Yes. Do you use Gmail? Yes. Well, then you’re our target market. As their company grew, Brandon kept hearing from others who wanted their service but weren’t using Salesforce just yet or weren’t using Gmail. This caused Brandon and his team to do a mini-pivot to service those customers. With 7 years of feedback, Brandon has a good idea of what his customers want and how much they’re willing to pay for it. You don’t have to do a big pivot to improve your business and to scale up. There are lots of opportunities for mini-pivots and growth within your company. Interview Links: Cirrusinsight.com Brandon on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

How do you create a business that scales massively but also showcases your purpose and values? How do you build a company you can truly be proud of — a business that can make a huge difference in the world? This week’s guest shares his insightful business expertise and his company’s mission! David Katz is an inspirational speaker and the Founder and CEO of The Plastic Bank, an internationally recognized solution to stop ocean plastic. The Plastic Bank is a global network of micro recycling markets that empower the poor to transcend poverty by cleaning the environment. David has been an entrepreneur his entire life and was in charge of executing projects since he was eight years old. He came from a family of immigrants who had to be creative and entrepreneurial to make their mark in Canada. The Plastic Bank was inspired by David’s life experiences as a youth sailing with his father. David’s father was an early adopter of GPS in the 1980s, which wasn’t readily available at that time or up to the standards of today’s GPS technology. It helped David learn how to map out where he was in the ocean at all times. Since David grew up on the ocean and had learned about the immense and beautiful power of the sea, he was saddened when he kept seeing waves upon waves of trash float up to the shore. David has started companies before but he was purposeless. When he came upon this cause, he knew he could create a company that was far bigger than himself. If he could only just showcase how much value each plastic item floating in the water was worth ($20-50), then there would be no more plastic left. The Plastic Bank is its own ecosystem that reveals value in what was once viewed as waste. Plastic Bank has a chain of stores for the ultra, ultra poor where everything in the store is available to be purchased by using plastic garbage as currency. Plastic Bank is able to offer school tuition, medical insurance, wifi, and cell phone minutes, power, fuel, and food. Interview Links: Plasticbank.org Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTubeMentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Scaling up means getting consistent and reliable at your core processes. It also means there will be an acceleration in onboarding new talent, which tends to damage and create bottlenecks to your processes. How do you get your core processes tuned up efficiently as more and more people join your company? That’s the topic of today’s show! Chris Ronzio is the founder of Trainual, an online platform for business owners that helps them document their processes step-by-step. Prior to that, Chris built a nationwide video production company that sold over $3 million in youth sporting event videos before he was 25 years old and founded an operations consulting firm that helps entrepreneurs create scalable systems and processes. Chris has been an entrepreneur officially for 18 years, starting his first video production company at 14 years old. By the time he was finishing up college, he was able to get big corporations to sign on with him and had built up quite the reputation. Through delegation, Chris had enough time on his hands to work on the company’s systems and processes. Through Chris’s first company, he was able to learn some very vital lessons in systems and processes that were transferable to other industries. He learned that companies who were really scaling up all had figured out this simple formula: they honed in on doing one thing consistently. Because of this, they were able to document the process effectively and delegate it out without much worry. From Bill’s observations, it’s not that hard to get to $3-7 million in revenue without having focused your business. However, very rarely does Bill see people hitting the over $10 million threshold in sales with an unfocused business. By focusing and specializing in one key area of your business, growth begins to happen… rapidly. Interview Links: Trainual.com Chris on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTubeMentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Are you afraid of public speaking? Have you tried it in the past because you understand the benefits, but you don’t feel 100% confident in your ability yet? Well, this episode is for you! Today’s special guest discusses how you can get over your fear and become masterful — not just great — at public speaking. PJ Brady was the Vice President of Europe, Middle East/ Pakistan, and Africa for the Entrepreneurs’ Organization and is currently the Founder of 42 Walls, where he helps people inform, inspire, and influence others. Not everybody was born reaching for the mic, but PJ grew up being a theatre kid. Through his experiences volunteering for a non-profit that specializes in developing community broadways, he was able to teach his fellow volunteers how to get comfortable being in front of a group of people. The biggest barrier to achieving greatness often happens within your own brain. If you want to get comfortable being on stage, then you have to be comfortable in your own skin first. You can learn how to bullshit everyone else, but you can not bullshit yourself and that is one of the reasons why speaking in front of an audience is so terrifying. The biggest ‘bullshit test’ you can do on yourself is to look yourself in the mirror and rehearse your story. Bill recommends retelling your story 10 times in that mirror to see how it feels. For him, when he did it, it was the fifth or sixth time when things really began clicking for him. People have told PJ that this mirror exercise is the most awkward thing they’ve ever done. Some people even walk out during this session. People hate it. However, there’s a silver lining; once people finish this exercise, they feel much more comfortable in their own skin and progress gets made. Interview Links: 42walls.com PJ on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

Meetings! They take up our time and nothing actionable ever gets done by the end of it. No one really likes meetings. However, good meetings can actually give you back time. How can you execute a good meeting so that everyone will feel happy and more productive by the end of it? This week’s guest shares how! Rob Simons is a Certified Gazelles Coach, the Strategy Summit Facilitator and Accelerator Facilitator for Entrepreneurs’ Organization, and has over 25 years of experience as a brand expert, business coach, and entrepreneur! Rob grew up during the beginning of the personal computer revolution. He started his first publishing firm at 23 and started his first branding firm at 25. A defining moment for him was going to an all-day workshop with Verne Harnish and that’s when he realized how much he didn’t know about how to run a business. Things really started to kick off from there. In 2011, Rob started coaching clients on a full-time basis. One of the biggest mistakes Rob made was not getting an outside coach. He thought, “I’m a smart guy. I can figure it out.” Yet, even the best golfers in the world have a coach and running a business is no different. When Rob was running his businesses, he hated meetings. He had a lot on his plate and the last thing he wanted to do was sit in a room for an hour. However, good, effective meetings on a regular basis set you free. One client told Rob that he was able to reduce his email by 60% just by having good meetings. In our digital world, so many things get lost in translation via email. Don’t try to have important conversations via email. At best, have a video conference if you need to talk. 60-70% of language is non-verbal, so you have to be able to see your team to fully understand the meanings behind the words they say. Believe it or not, having a daily huddle or a daily meeting can actually be very beneficial to you and the organization. However, so many clients hate doing the daily huddle. It sounds simple, but talking to each other every day and having good communication within the organization go hand-in-hand and the daily huddle helps bridge that. After you’ve established good daily huddle habits, then what’s the point of having a weekly meeting? The weekly meeting is basically helping you close your books. It gives you a quick recap of what was done that week. Some people like to do this monthly, but truth be told, most people can’t remember what happened 3 weeks ago and things often, again, get lost in communication. With any good meeting, you have to have an agenda, an outline, of what you’re going to talk about and you have to make sure you follow it! If you don’t have an agenda and you’re just winging it, then it’s never going to work. Interview Links: Petracoach.com Rob on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube

We all want to reach our potential yet nobody really knows what that really is. So, how can we recognize and keep hitting new levels of our potential? Well, today’s guest has all the answers. Mark Sanborn is the president of Sanborn & Associates, Inc., an idea lab for leadership development and turning ordinary into extraordinary. He is also the author of The Fred Factor and his most recent book, The Potential Principle, which is what we’ll be talking about on today’s episode! Mark got into competitive public speaking when he was ten years old and later in life, he went on and founded Sanborn & Associates. He wanted to help leaders communicate better and turn them from ordinary to extraordinary. Mark wrote The Potential Principle after working 30+ years with leaders. Mark realized that his clients were already really, really good at what they do. However, it dawned on him that in order for them to continue being the best at what they do, they had to continue to get better and improve themselves — but how could they do that if they were already the top leaders in their industry? They have no one else to emulate. They’re on the frontlines and they’re making things up as they go. The more you learn about any particular skill or industry, the more you realize you have to learn. There’s nothing wrong with arriving at your destination in your industry but the real problem is when you stop growing and stop challenging yourself to reach a new level of potential. What is the Potential Principle? Well, in a nutshell, we all know how good we’ve become, but none of us know how good we can be. The potential principle highlights this problem to help you realize and plan where your ‘next’ step is. As Mark was researching the book, he found out that 58% of professionals said they had a commitment to getting better, but only 30% had a plan. Commitment without a plan is just wishful thinking and daydreaming. Interview Links: Potentialprinciple.com MarkSanborn.com Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube

We would all like to be an innovative company breaking out of the traditional model. When we think innovation, we think of companies like Apple, Tesla, and SpaceX. Do you have an innovative company that comes to your mind that you wish you could emulate? Are you afraid it comes with big budgets, lots of resources, and time? Well, today’s show is all about how you can become innovative without the big pockets. Lara Hodgson is the President and CEO of NOW Corp, a company she co-founded to free small businesses from the burden of funding trade credit and to enable small business growth. She also serves as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard Business School. Lara went to Georgia Institute of Technology where she majored in Aerospace Engineering. Her professor told her she had an engineering mind and a liberal arts personality; She loved problem-solving, but she was very extroverted and loved worked with people at the same time. Lara applied for a program to go to Japan while she was still in university and she found herself learning Japanese and not speaking a word of English during her time over there. It was difficult and she was completely out of her comfort zone. This is when she discovered that she really didn’t want to be a research engineer anymore. She wanted to be creative. The good news is, being creative is not about learning how to sing or draw, it’s about being a good problem solver. It’s about looking at the same thing as everyone else and seeing something different. Fast forward a couple of years, Lara’s career is booming, she’s finding herself working alongside Shaquille O’Neal, Home Depot, Nike, and Coca-Cola, but it was time for her to go off on her own and build her own company. She wanted to be a great wife, mom, and CEO but she wasn’t sure that this was possible if she was working for somebody else. During this time as a new mom, she kept finding herself having spilled drinks all over her car and there wasn’t really anything out there that was ‘spill-proof’ for babies. So, going back to her problem-solving roots, she co-founded a company called Nourish, a patented line of spill-proof bottled water for kids and ready-to-serve bottles for babies. Great news! She started out small and suddenly her product was being bought by wholefoods. She was high-fiving her business partner in excitement until they realized … the company is going to have to grow to the point of death, that they’re not actually going to be able to make ends meet, and that this deal would actually put them out of business. Everything that Lara and her business partner had done right was actually going to be the very thing that would put them out of business. Lara’s greatest strength, her spill-proof product that was selling like crazy, became her greatest weakness. This is when she found herself needing to innovative on a small budget. Interview Links: Now-Corp.com Lara on LinkedIn Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube

Today’s show is all about how to transform your company in a remarkable way. Do you want to 10x your company and bring it to the next level? Well, that requires real transformation and this week’s guest has all the answers! Chuck Kocher is a Certified Executive Leadership Coach and the Owner of The Transformation Company. He works one-on-one with business owners all over the world who are serious about taking their businesses and lives to exceptional levels. Chuck’s first mentor asked Chuck what he wanted to learn at his first job, he replied with, “Everything.” She told him to keep that desire and ambition for the rest of his career and he will succeed. Chuck credits another mentor for helping him give him the gift of thinking. Chuck was excellent at execution but was not connecting the dots from execution to vision and strategy. Chuck’s mentor really challenged him to be better, to not just look at the product, but to also look at the market as well. It took him a couple of years before he got it right, but this was his first introduction to how good companies get transformed and scale up. One of Chuck’s clients was a husband-and-wife team where their company had stagnated in growth. They also wanted their son to take over the business. However, they weren’t sure if he was coachable or the right fit for it. After arranging a family business meeting, Chuck asked the family point blank, “Are you willing to change to take this company to the next level?” Everyone said yes, and with a lot of sweat and tears, amazing things began to happen. Transformation takes a lot of work to achieve. Chuck helped the family set their BHAG. They wanted to take their $8-million company up to $33 million. This meant a change in leadership styles and company culture. With these shifts, the company was able to hit two 10-year BHAGs in five years! 11 years later, they are now close to doing $55 million, employ 1,500 people, and they rank number three in their franchise. Why do some people fail the transformation process? Well, usually, one in five to one in four people will quit the process midway through. First, the leadership team is just unwilling to change their approach. Growth simply can not happen if the leadership style doesn’t change and evolve the higher up you go. Second, the leadership is just unwilling to make those ‘daring’ moves to get their company from point A to point B. Interview Links: Thetransformation.company Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Rajendra Sisodia, is an international speaker, a business professor, and an award-winning author. He has published eight books, including Conscious Capitalism, and over 100 academic articles. On the show, he discusses what conscious capitalism is and the difference it can make on your business. What are you really getting from all the money you spend on customer retention? Customer loyalty and trust have been declining steadily, despite the fact that companies are spending more money. Is there a way we can make this system better? This was the question that sparked Rajendra’s journey on how to optimize spending and become more efficient. Rajendra’s research over the years showed that we have a productivity crisis in marketing. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we think about marketing. So, how do we do it right? Rajendra dived into companies who were getting fantastic results and retention all the while spending less. Rajendra found that not only did customers love these companies, but their employees did too, and so did their suppliers. The pattern emerged that these companies were stakeholder-oriented and not shareholder-centric. They also all had purpose, and with that came better leaders and a caring company culture. At the end, Rajendra fully expected that these companies with purpose would not have exceptional returns because it was not their main focus or driving objective to make ‘tons of money.’ He was wrong. They outperformed the market 9 to 1. Rajendra was led to believe over the years prior to this research that if you showed any signs of being caring or compassionate, you would be walked all over — that being ‘nice’ was a sign of weakness. In fact, ‘nice’ companies were not only stronger but they were also resilient and more successful. When Bill speaks with entrepreneurs and business owners in a good size room, maybe only about 10-20% of them understand what their life’s purpose is. Business guys just don’t get all that ‘purpose’ stuff, but so many businesses are transformed (on many levels) by being purposeful. If you want to create win-win situations for your employees, suppliers, and customers, you have to give, give, and give. By creating this kind of environment, you receive a ton back and value systems get put in place that do not always have a byline monetary value on them, like high employee retention, satisfaction, engagement, and commitment to the bigger cause. Interview Links: Rajsisodia.com Consciouscapitalism.org Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.comQ20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

We all know that we need to coach people, not manage them. However, for many of us, we doubt our own ability to coach. There are actually principles of great coaching that you can follow and today’s show is going to break down those principles to help you effectively coach your people. Dave Baney is a fellow Gazelles Growth Coach and the CEO and Founder of 55 Questions. He is also the author of The 3x5 Coach, which is what we’ll be diving into today! Find out how you can stop managing your people and start coaching them instead. Dave went to school because he initially wanted to become a Spanish teacher, but quickly decided it was not for him. After graduating, he went to work for Burger King, where he spent 22 years working in both corporate and on the field. He then transferred to McDonald’s, where he spent 8 years with them and even relocated to Italy! This is where Dave learned that the government’s termination policies in Italy were quite expensive for the company to do. When you cannot simply fire people, you have to find creative ways to influence and inspire them. This is when Dave discovered the difference between managing and coaching people. After retiring from the industry, Dave started 55 Questions to help coach business owners and executive teams of mid-market businesses. He has worked with over 50 different industries and has been in business for the last nine years. Besides the army, McDonald’s has been one of the largest training grounds for people in America for everything from how to work, taking responsibility, and the discipline of showing up and doing your job the right way. There are so many amazing life lessons you can learn from a company like McDonald’s or even in the restaurant industry. How fast can a dog sled team run? Well, the answer is, only as fast as the slowest dog. If you had a dogsled team, you would want to work with the slowest dog to help bring him up to speed with the rest of the team. So, what are you doing to help the slowest members of your team learn and grow? This, in essence, is what the 3x5 method is about. Truth is, we tend to over-manage our people instead of training them to the point where they can become independent and autonomous. There seems to be a disconnect when it comes to the desires of the team and the desires of management, and because of this, it’s very hard to motivate a team when you can’t align with them. The 3x5 method is really about having the team member and manager sit down and agree on each other’s expectations and desires. It offers clear lines of communication between these two parties for, what it seems to be, the very first time. Interview Links: 55questions.com Dave on LinkedIn The 3x5 Coach: A Practical Guide to Coaching Your Team for Greater Results and Happier People, by Dave Baney Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube TWEETABLES: “Everybody should stop managing and start coaching right away.” “Some businesses can’t just lop off the bottom 10% of their team, so motivating people changes the game.” “Back ten years ago, one out of 11 people in America, at one point or another, worked at McDonald’s.” Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, on how the fastest growing companies succeed, where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits). Mentioned in this episode:Q20 Diagnostic OfferStuck? Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20Busy is Broken bookOur new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com