Today we’re speaking to Alex Brueckmann from alexthestrategist.com

Alex is a strategy entrepreneur, author, and speaker. He  built and scaled companies in Europe and Canada, and led client projects  across the world. He helps entrepreneurs and founders create profitable  businesses to make real impact. In his new book, THE STRATEGY LEGACY,  Alex presents a framework called “The Nine Elements of Organizational  Identity” to help you build better businesses. He’s hosting a a global  strategy summit in February 2022, Legacy – The Premier strategic  business event, and has loads of things going on – welcome Alex!

Alex:

Thanks so much for having me. That’s yeah, that’s a lot of things  going on. There’s f actually true. And it couldn’t be more excited,  because there’s so many people involved. And we’re really see that we  can make the needle move into the right direction, when we all do our  part. And what I mean by that is, you already mentioned it, building  businesses, for profit and for impact, right? So a business that only  creates money. It’s something nice to have money, right? Is it that’s  the really fulfilling? Yeah, so yeah, that’s what we actually do during  legacy legacy, the premier strategic business. And as the name already  says, it’s all about creating strategies to help you as an entrepreneur,  as a business owner, set an intention, and then follow through on that  intention on how you can actually use your business as a force for good.  And that can be in the social space, it can be in the environmental  space, it can be all kinds of charities that you can support. And we  talk about what actually what options are out there. What can you do  with your business? How do you build it for profit, at the same time,  because hey, you can only support others, if you have that topic of  money off the plate, if you don’t have to worry about it, right? So you  need to make sure that your business is thriving, that you have a go to  market strategy that actually works, that provides the funds for you and  your family to live the life you want to live to live a fulfilled life.  And to make that impact that you want to make.

Michael and his cousin Sam support entrepreneurial consultants, helping them to build more profitable, scalable and strategic consulting businesses: "We're focused every day on helping consultants to become more successful."

Michael and Sam built their family business to satisfy their desires to live and work from anywhere, and enjoy traveling. So they created a business online, listened to the market, took onboard feedback, implemented and tested, and provided entrepreneurial consultants with what they desired.

SHOW NOTES

Michael and his cousin Sam support entrepreneurial consultants, helping them to build more profitable, scalable and strategic consulting businesses: "We're focused every day on helping consultants to become more successful."

Michael: Give before you try and get, lead with a relationship, and long-term mindset. Deliver value without the expectation of receiving something in return.

Michael and Sam built their family business to satisfy their desires to live and work from anywhere, and enjoy traveling. So they created a business online, listened to the market, took onboard feedback, implemented and tested, and provided entrepreneurial consultants with what they desired.

Michael: Our success was not necessarily a fairy tale. I've had to hustle. I've had to work very hard. I've gotten up early and stayed up late, had very long days working on the business.

Michael: I don't like to call them failures, I just call them learning experiences. We are constantly testing new things, we're trying new things, it doesn't mean that everything works. In many cases, things don't work. And what's interesting about building businesses and especially from marketing perspective, is you can try things.

Michael: Marketing and building a business takes patience, it takes time.

Michael: I think there's nothing more valuable than talking to somebody or engaging with somebody who's already been where you want to get to, because they can tell you what they've experienced. It doesn't mean that it's going to extrapolate and be 100% identical to what you're going to experience. But you can really get some some great feedback from that.

Michael: I've recognized my intuition tends to be quite accurate.

Michael: I always view things in a positive light, I will think about what could potentially go wrong. And as long as I'm okay with with that, then we'll typically move forward and see how it does.

Michael: Entrepreneurship and building businesses is not a warm blanket all the time. You can have the most expensive cashmere blanket, you know, as you build your business up, but many times you're naked in the cold.

Michael: We're a family business. We look at our clients like family, our values are very much about family, travel and being international citizens

Michael: we take risks every single day. I truly believe that every single person has just immense, you know, extraordinary potential inside of themselves. And typically, the reason that they're not seeing the results they want isn't because of a lack of knowledge or network or skills necessarily. It's their mindset, it's their own selves, right that are holding them back. And if you just start to move towards what you want to achieve you will learn something.

Lisa is the author of The Chiron Effect: Healing Our Core Wounds through Astrology, Empathy, and Self-Forgiveness book, which was published just last year. And she's been the host of a really successful podcast for the last five years now.

SHOW NOTES

Lisa is the author of The Chiron Effect: Healing Our Core Wounds through Astrology, Empathy, and Self-Forgiveness book, which was published just last year. And she's been the host of a really successful podcast for the last five years now. Her website is NolaTherapy.com

Speaking about her podcast, that she's done every week for 5 years: "There have been moments where I just didn't want to do it. It's like oh my god, I have to prepare for another show. And then there's this little voice in the back of my head that reminds me, you know you feel better after every episode you've ever done."

Lisa: The Chiron Effect was birthed from my own desire to understand, to answer the question, 'what is beyond?' What is beyond the narrative of our woundedness? What's the new story of who I want to be for myself?

Lisa: I discovered over after three and a half years of writing and research that where your chiron is, identifies the main area, that you tend to minimize yourself, you tend to doubt yourself, and you create these patterns of thoughts about yourself, and these thoughts dictate beliefs. And then we live within this parameter, a belief, and that becomes our set frequency of the people places and things that we orbit. And then the people places and things that orbit us -  imagine yourself as your own solar system. And that's what the Chiron effect is. And it's about identifying and healing and nurturing ourselves through empathy and self forgiveness.

Lisa: Because things in their lives haven't quite worked out be in a relationship, or in their work or in their finances or in their family. And, and we tend to personalize those experiences and think it's something about us when you are functioning just as you're supposed to the things we go through in life, shape and affect us. And it's the meaning that we make about those things, is what then begins to create our lives.

When writing her book Lisa did a lot of research. The very best books are the books that are able to bring together these ideas around the edges, bring them all together, and then bring them into some sort of coherent whole, so that other people can understand. And that's what Lisa did with The Chiron Effect.

Lisa: "I specifically scheduled writing time as if it was a client."

Lisa: We're all influencers in our own worlds, our own universes with our friends, and our family, and even the grocery store we go to. And it took me that whole time to realize that what I say does have value and is going to speak to people.

Phil is the co founder of a B Corp, called 25Eight, which includes another couple of companies which are Me Three and Marketing Entourage. They're focused on innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship, and they're based in Australia. Phil also co founded a social enterprise called Entrepreneurs & Co, to build a collaborative community.

We're here to talk about things that have gone well, things that have gone wrong, and explain basically your process. So what's your most recent creation?

SHOW NOTES

I've known Phil for more than 35 years, we've just started working together in the last year, I'm helping Phil make the most of his valuable assets by taking him through The Asset Path program.

Phil: One of the key challenges for all businesses is how to strategically grow your network, and in turn your business. You do it by making sure the right opportunities arise through meaningful relationships. That's how you hack serendipity.

Phil: You need a human-centered approach to help to sell your products and services. That's your business ecosystem: the stakeholders, key players, customers, team, the business & physical environment.

We're writing a book: Hacking Serendipity - A business leader's playbook for building a human-centred ecosystem for growth, sustainability, and fun - you can find out more at: SerendipityHacker.com

13 years ago Phil took a business trip to Singapore for Nokia. He watched a film called The Yes Man, based on the novel by Danny Wallace. He decided to BE the Yes Man.

Phil: It literally transformed my life.

Serendipity is about luck + action, or action + luck.

Phil: I didn't want to write a book for the sake of it, I needed to write a book that was actually truly going to help leaders.

Phil is the Chief Energy Officer in many people's lives.

He needed to manage constraints to get the book written. The most challenging his own constraint of believing he could do it. He started telling people he was a writer to break the 'self' constraint. Then he needed to manage time constraints.

Phil: I used your Ruthless Timeblocking to build a structure around what I'm going to do and my agenda. Because even if I had one job with one task, I'd still create 10 because I'd get a bit bored. I've got to accept that's who I am as a person.

Phil: It's a bit like when we build programs as 25 Eight to help people adopt innovative practices by teaching not telling - not everyone starts on the start line. It's not like the Olympics, and everybody's an Olympic sprinter. You know, they've got some people are just learning to walk, someone's Usain Bolt, and somebody's an amateur runner, and but we're expecting them all to run at the same pace. And I think that was the same for me is that, you know, you've actually got to accept where you are, your own pace and what you're going to do. I decided I would be Usain Bolt and realized, actually, I'm just learning to walk.

Phil: To hack serendipity the first thing is knowing your North Star - what you're trying to achieve. Find ambassadors who believe in your idea. Then get out there and take action. Hacking serendipity is not an immediate transaction.

Phil: Always leave a conversation giving more than you've taken.

Dr. Dawson church, an award winning science writer with three best selling books through credit.   

We're going to probably talk only about one of them today. But there are three of the books that he's written are the genie in your genes, which was a book that demonstrated how emotions drive gene expression, versus bliss brain, which is most recent, which demonstrates that peak mental states rapidly remodel the brain for happiness.   

And what we're going to talk about mostly today is mind to matter how the brain creates much of what we think of as objective reality. Now, Dawson's got the best laugh I've ever heard. So hopefully, we can get some laughs for him today. Those are welcome to character creation confessions.

I’d like to introduce you to the Queen of Clarity – Ann Latham.

Ann has worked with clients in over 40 industries and ranging from for-profit organizations, such as Boeing, Medtronic, and Hitachi, to nonprofit organizations as diverse as Public Television and Smith College.

Why does she work with such a wide range of clients?

because they all need greater clarity to get better results faster and with more confidence and commitment.

I’ve known Ann for about 4 years and we’ve worked on a couple of projects, but it was only about a year ago that I learnt that Ann can ride a unicycle

while carrying a canoe…

Welcome Ann, and thanks for sharing your confessions today…

First of all, what’s with the unicycle and canoe????

Show Notes:

With my business partner, Jeremy, we had come up with an idea to solve a problem for small business...

Find out about their ambitious idea - Agglomerate - to help small businesses group together to create a publicly listed company.

From an investor's standpoint, you've got half the world's economy locked up in small businesses like us

There's this weird situation where you've got half the world's economy that's off limits to the trillions of dollars in the finance markets.

Plenty of people create things - books, courses or businesses - Callum & Jeremy actually created a business class, an asset class.

The thing with creative ideas is they're always brilliant when you first have them, and then you have to test them against the market.

And you smack your head against the wall until something breaks. And hopefully, it's not my head.

The more you do it, and the more failures you have, the more you realise that the failures aren't fatal.

When it didn't work out we had to go back to our bigger why to keep us motivated.

For the first Agglomeration the market cap went from 14 million to 300 million euros in 100 days... and then we kind of came unglued...

Hair raising rollercoaster of bringing a group of companies together, listing on the European NASDAQ, the market cap going from 14 million to 300 million euros in 100 days, being shafted by a financier in New York whobought shares and then dumped them on the stock market

As far as we know, this bloke have never previously broken the law.

You discover that trying to prosecute white collar crime over international borders is nearly impossible.

the biggest mistake we made was, and this was down to a lack of experience was everyone advised us that what we should do is get ourselves off the board and put some old grey hairs on the board and restore investor confidence.

it was an incredibly painful, hideously expensive lesson to go through

Most sane people will think: Okay, maybe that wasn't the right thing to do. Maybe it was a bad idea. You guys didn't do that. What happened? What did you do next?

It solved a problem. We realised that if we didn't do it, it probably wasn't going to get done.

The advantage of so much stuff going wrong so quickly was that we got 10 years worth of lessons compressed into a very short, excruciatingly painful period.

Callum would have preferred to learn those lessons without "getting kicked in the nuts"

So we listed in Frankfurt, coming up two years ago, so sort of November 2018. And we have now added, as of last week, I think we're up to 17 companies in the in the group, we've got a combined revenue of 100 million dollars, $10 million of EBIT, we issued our dividends after the first year. So there was 110 companies listed in Europe last year, and by various different metrics were in the top three fastest growth for revenue and profit, and one of only five to issue a dividend.

The problem is, when you're doing something that hasn't been done before, there isn't really anyone that can can advise you.

The opposite of that is waiting for everything to be perfect before you do it. And the reality is, it's never going to be perfect. So better to get out, learn the lessons, iterate and move on.

Entrepreneurs record three, three or four minute answer to the question, what's the biggest challenge that you're overcoming your journey and what did you learn from it?

The Bigger Why: I've been an entrepreneur for 25 years, and I keep bouncing around different industries and kind of looking for what would be the perfect thing. And I realised, that's not the way to do it. For me, it's to find, who I want to be working with.

Michael Simmons is a Writer and a writing teacher whose writing has been  read tens of millions of times in publications like Forbes, Fortune,  Harvard Business Review, and TIME.  Michael co-founded his first business, Princeton WebSolutions (PWS),  when he was sixteen years old. PWS was later rated the #1 youth-run web  development company in the nation by Youngbiz Magazine.    

More on Chaosification.com

SHOW NOTES

The idea of soul market fit - I try to write about things such that even if they were never published, I would still be really happy because I enjoyed the process of writing.

Mental Model Club - 1 model per month to: avoid overwhelm, provide models in the best order, and allow reader to combine models to produce an exponential result.

Are you applying only 1% of the 80/20 rule?

The two types of knowledge, and how one diminishes over time, whereas the other compounds... Which type of knowledge are you majoring in?

I'm going to be learning several hours per day, for the rest of my life, I want to build a base of stable knowledge that I could apply anywhere in my life.

I tracked my triggers, logged them so I could see patterns...

On Learning How To Learn: Expert learning versus platform learning

Look for patterns

How do you make that a deliberate process? How do you know what you want to learn next? How do you know what you want to deliver next?

Learn to value earning - think of it as compound interest: a function of how much time you put in, and your learning rate.

Find out how Michael uses his "double time", what the "learning loop" is all about, what FUNRUC means, and how to get faster through experimentation.

Four steps for learning how to learn: 1. take in information and data, 2. algorithm and processing, 3. experimentation and action, 4. feedback.

One of the ways to get this rare skill set is to focus on reading books and articles that no one else is reading in your field.

No great author ever said that the key to being a great novelist is typing faster.

There's a really big difference between learning something from a world class expert and somebody who's good.

How he uses the "sell your sawdust" model to be prolific on social media.

And one of the mental models that I've coined is the explanation effect, that one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it to others.

The leverage you can get from being really good at the skill of creating content, understanding virality and having rare and valuable ideas is really high.

Check out Michael's gorgeous colour-coded bookshelves... I have bookshelf envy!

David Kadavy is a best-selling author whose books help artists be  productive. He was design advisor for behavioural scientist Dan Ariely’s  productivity app, where David’s mind management principles were applied  to features now used by millions – in Google Calendar.  His latest book: book Mind Management, Not Time Management, helps  creators be productive when creativity matters.

Show Notes:

Eight Days a Week: each day is an event - which is actually kind of a refreshing idea... that today counts.

Creative work is random, you kind of don't know when you're going to have a great idea or a great insight, you can't force it.

I was not a writer, I did not consider myself a writer, I did not enjoy writing. When I was a kid, I was a designer.

I might have these 15 minute bursts, where suddenly, I would write an entire chapter...

On writing his first book: Sometimes it was easy. Most the time it was hard.

David set out to understand the subtle differences for when he was creative so he could make the connection between the actions he was taking and the output that he was making.

I started to dig into the neuroscience of creativity. What does it mean to have a creative insight? What are the conditions that are ideal for that?

This time management paradigm that we've all been working on for the last 120 years or so, does not work at all, for creative work from a certain point - it becomes detrimental to creative work and creative thinking.

I'm an advocate of having a repeatable project: like a podcast because if it's a repetitive process, then you can start to fine tune your approach to it. And you can start to create constraints.

Create constraints where you can be creative within them.

You start to get systems going, where you can use your creative energy a lot more efficiently.

Break projects down into tasks that are small enough that I tend to not procrastinate on them. Then space them out, to take advantage of incubation.

How to be productive when being creative matters? Not through time management!

We're a time worship culture and this is my proposal to humanity - let's switch to more of a mind management world

Ask yourself: what's the better time to do this based upon your energy levels, what's the better time to do this based upon the stage we're at in the process?

Use your passive genius: take advantage of incubation

SHOW NOTES

Find out how Rintu accidentally wrote a bestseller

Why you should create something for people to solve the problem they struggle with the most...

Rintu wrote and gave away, for free, a 10 week course on NLP

He was only one week ahead of the course participants

JIT product creation: make sure it's fit for purpose by incorporating on the fly feedback

Rintu: It's my responsibility to give people the stuff they need to do their jobs - for free

I have a tendency to think I'm naturally creative... I can give this course away... there are more problems to solve and I can create another course

After writing and delivering the 10 week course he realised he had all the material for a book... but would people buy it?

People wanted the material in other modes, he was able to upcycle his material and turn it into a book

Play to your strengths, I'm a creator, I create. Make the statement, even if you don't believe it yet.

Expand your skills to accommodate your identity

Are you suffering from an identity constraint?

I went from not believing I was an author to realizing that the only thing that was stopping me was the physical tippety tappety of typing it all out

The biggest issue for me is letting go of my baby: I look for collaborators, and then I remove myself from the process

I was creating the course just one week ahead of the people reading it - that was a huge motivator. It let me incorporate feedback. I loved it.

Get the details of Rintu's bestseller plan and how he made the bestseller charts from an audience of just 6000

Rintu created a group of true fans who bought his book even though they'd seen the content on the course.

Add value all through the pipeline

I am a problem solver: If I don't have a problem to solve I don't do anything

I create stuff, systems, processes: I came up with a way to create 70 articles in a day... find out how

In the future Rintu wants to write a series of fiction books - and he'll use a system to write them

Look out for Rintu's hilarious memoirs... and how he's been looking at himself as a character in a book, wondering what his motivation was for his actions...

I asked myself: how do I make this interesting, how do I make it funny?

http://geni.us/PSBB