If you’re looking for a complete set of simple concepts and practical tools that will help the leadership team of your entrepreneurial company make better decisions, create a clearer, simpler vision, get everybody on the same page and execute day in and day out with real discipline and accountability, then you want to listen to Mike Paton, award-winning speaker, best-selling author, Certified EOS Implementer™, and the Visionary for EOS Worldwide, on this week’s episode of The Melting Pot.

Paton (as everyone knows him as) discovered the Entrepreneurial Operating System® (EOS) a dozen years ago while trying to take a $7 million company to the next level. Feeling stuck and more than a little frustrated, his search for answers led him to Gino Wickman and EOS.

Paton instantly recognised the power of this simple, holistic “way of operating” a small business. Since then, Paton has conducted more than 1,200 full-day sessions with the leadership teams of more than 110 companies and helped thousands more entrepreneurs by sharing EOS in dynamic talks and workshops the world over.

During this journey, Paton wrote Get A Grip: An Entrepreneurial Fable with Gino Wickman and then succeeded Gino in the role of Visionary for EOS Worldwide.

Today Paton and Dom chat about why you might want a system at all, why you might want a coach and they talk about some of the tools in EOS. They also talk about rocks and the level 10 meeting.

So to hear this and so much more, tune into this week’s episode, it’s a great conversation that we are sure you’re going to hugely enjoy.

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Have you ever wanted to just put a pin in your life, upsticks and travel the world with your family before it’s too late? Well, that’s just what Nigel Bennett did.

Nigel is an entrepreneur. Just not like any other entrepreneur we’ve had on the show. Where most people work hard, scaling up their business in order to sell it, Nigel, after taking mind altering drugs deep in the Amazon rainforest had an epiphany, and decided not to sell.

That’s pretty much how this episode goes.

It is just story after story of Nigel’s fascinating life. It doesn’t seem like he’s had any dull moments, and he hasn’t stopped for a second.

Nigel is the founder and owner and International business development for Aqua-Guard's environmental response services and equipment business. Aqua-Guard specialises in marine oil spill response. He’s the author of "Take that Leap - Risking it all for what really matters"; the founder of TruBeach, an app and a mobile platform community for reporting coastline and ocean cleanliness, and he’s the co-founder of GiftAdd.com, an organisation that works to bring awareness to the actual gift of ADHD and dyslexia.

This is a truly enlightening conversation, one we are sure you’re going to enjoy.

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Dominic’s aim for The Melting Pot is to enable other businesses to optimise their business performance, to help them scale up. And so this week’s guest, Bryony Thomas, marketing guru, author and developer of marketing methodology - Watertight Marketing, is the authority on how to grow your business through marketing.

Having worked in marketing since 1997, Bryony has not only garnered a wealth of experience in the industry, but she’s written the book on it.

“Nobody needs more marketing ideas, they need fewer on which to truly focus. And one of the things that Watertight really does is get people to prioritise and focus in on the one thing to be doing right now.”

Having watched so many businesses waste money on marketing and finding that she was repeating herself constantly, Bryony decided to put her extensive marketing knowledge down on paper.

And so it’s this book and the fundamentals of marketing that Dominic discusses with Bryony in this episode. So if you’re keen to stop wasting time and money on ineffectual marketing, stop what you’re doing and tune in. It will be the best decision you made today.

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If you’re wondering if your business could have a channel as a route to market, then you’ve come to the right place.

Are you wondering if you could have 1, 10, even 100 sales people selling your product or service? Then you need to listen to Sandler trainer David Davies in this week’s episode of The Melting Pot.

Perhaps you want your salespeople to be more effective, but you know that no one likes pushy salespeople, so where is the balance to be struck?

“Having ‘salesperson’ on your business card does not make you a professional salesperson. And yet with all those millions and millions of pounds invested in sales, training, sales techniques and sales tactics, the results are the same today as they were when I started out.”

David has been in sales for over 35 years. He’s now a Sandler trainer based in Reading, Berkshire and the vast majority of the time he’s been involved in tech. But that doesn’t mean that what he’s got to say isn’t relevant to your industry, because David’s approach to sales is applicable whatever your business.

“The Sandler sales methodology is a B2C business as much as a B2B business. It’s as much for the individual as it is for the organisation.”

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Entrepreneurs are told time and again to embrace failure, to be proud of failure, to not be ashamed of failure. But failure is still something that is brushed under the carpet, something you shouldn’t be proud of. And so today’s guest, Ben Fletcher of Lead Bullets, is a breath of fresh air.

Ben is a serial entrepreneur and the proud maker of multiple mistakes, many of which Dom talks to him about in this episode. Because at the heart of it, Ben’s mistakes are what drives him. In fact, when asked what he would go back and change in the past, knowing what he knows now, he replies:

“I've learned so much from those mistakes, it'd be really hard to do anything that fundamentally changed the way my life worked out.”

And it’s those mistakes that have carved out his current role - the one that sees him help entrepreneurs and CEOs of fast growth companies not make some of the mistakes that he himself made. It doesn't matter what the industry is, or the sector the business is involved in, a scaling business is a complex thing that trips people up time and again, and always in the same places.

Dom and Ben talk about how to set objectives and why that's important; about hiring good people; about not being on the edge and losing innovation and most importantly, not spending time with your problem children.

This is a really fantastic conversation, one that we enjoyed hugely, so happy listening.

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Are you looking to innovate your business? To make it more agile? More effective? Then who better to receive advice from than the former Amazon executive who launched and scaled the Amazon Marketplace business, the guy who ran the enterprise services business at Amazon for 3 years?

That’s right, today’s guest on The Melting Pot is none other than John Rossman, the highly sought after analyst who worked for Amazon.com in its early days and who has since been featured by The New York Times and CNBC amongst others.

“I was an early person at Amazon, I was there from early 2002 through late 2005. I got to launch the Marketplace business. So that’s 58% of all units shipped and sold [on Amazon] are now on that Marketplace business.”

Today, John works with companies and leaders showing them how to innovate and operate better within their space, by teaching them new tools, techniques, strategies and leadership principles to do just that.

He’s also recently released a book called ‘Think Like Amazon - 50 ½ Ideas to Become a Digital Leader’. He talks at length with Dom about ideas in the book, as well as how operational excellence feeds into innovation, citing numerous examples of where Amazon have been successful.

Seriously, this is the episode, as a business leader, you won’t want to miss out on.

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If you’ve ever wondered if this is all there is, then you need to listen to this week’s podcast with Sue Hollis, the 60 year old who, having built the multi million dollar company TravelEdge, stepped down as CEO when she had a ‘midlife awakening’, and rode a motorbike around North America for 4 months.

Sue is not just an inspirational leader and adventurepreneur, she’s an example to us all that when you think you’ve achieved all there is to achieve, you can still strike out in a new direction. Let her be your motivator and guide and empower you on your own journey.

When Dom spoke to Sue it was 4am in Washington state and she was about to go and race superbikes around the Ridge in Seattle. That might be where she is now, but she started out in a very different place - as a corporate heavy hitter with British Airways and Qantas, before braving the wild world of entrepreneurship and starting her own business, TravelEdge.

And it’s TravelEdge that Sue talks about today and how it led her to explore a different kind of life - the one she’s living currently.

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This week’s guest on The Melting Pot is considered to be the world’s foremost expert on hiring, Dr. Brad Smart. Brad is the founder and CEO of Topgrading Inc, a company that, amongst many things, interviews candidates for hire or promotion to senior positions - the A players, the topgrade.

Brad’s methodology is so successful, he is credited with tripling the successful hiring and promotion of high performers at companies such as General Electric, Honeywell, Barclays, and the American Heart Association.

Since the 1970s, Brad has conducted close to 7,000 in-depth interviews with executives and has authored 7 books. Topgrading Inc doesn’t just interview candidates, it is also a software company whose platform is designed to integrate with any company’s applicant tracking software.

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Today’s guest is Les McKeown, founder and CEO of Predictable Success. Les has over 25 years of global business experience, including starting 42 companies in his own right. After a long career advising individuals and organisations on growth and development, Les started his own training and development business.

In 1999, Les relocated to the US, from where he writes, teaches and consults in high-performance organisational development. Les is also an internationally-renowned keynote speaker, with experience speaking to groups at Google, DO Lectures and numerous Fortune 500 companies.

Les McKeown consults with C-level teams on how to lead their organisations to the state of peak performance he calls "Predictable Success”. And it’s predictable success that we talk with him about today.

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Today’s guest on The Melting Pot is Giles Palmer, founder and CEO of Brandwatch, a company devised to help organisations find and engage with online conversations that matter; a digital consumer intelligence company.

Brandwatch exists to help brands primarily, but also agencies understand their modern consumers—who they are, how they behave, their preferences, what they're sharing and what they're saying—so that the company can make better decisions about what they make and how they bring that product to market.

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