Carla Fowler, MD, PhD and CEO of THAXA Executive Coaching, is driven by a mission to help ambitious leaders perform at their best by applying the principles of performance science.

We explore Carla’s journey from scientist to coach and explore her Performance Framework, a science-based model that guides high achievers through four core areas: strategy, execution, mindset, and physiology. Carla explains how strategic clarity and resource prioritization drive focused leadership, and how physiological resilience and mental perspective are essential to long-term success. She also shares how she applies scientific tools to coaching engagements to help leaders build empowered teams and make high-quality decisions under uncertainty.

Good day, dear listeners, it’s Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And today my guest is Carla Fowler, who is an MD, a PhD, and also the CEO of THAXA Executive Coaching, which helps CEOs and executives with clarity, focus, growth, and support using a proprietary process based on performance science. So welcome to the show, Carla.

Thanks so much, Steve. It’s really fun to be here chatting with you.

It’s exciting to have a scientist who is also a coach because I love to combine the two and to have the scientific approach in coaching. I’m trying to do the same thing, but I’m sure I’m not mastering it to the degree that you are. So I’m all ears of how that works. But let’s start with my favorite question for guests, which is, what is your personal “Why” that drives you to do what you’re doing and how are you manifesting it in your practice?

I love that you asked this question, Steve, because I think taking this moment, like there are often a lot of different “Why’s” along the way, but for me, I think in reflection, one big “Why” was that as a young person growing up, I always looked out at the world and saw there were a lot of things you could go do. There were exciting goals that you could set for yourself. And I wanted to figure out how to go do that. That was just a very pure sort of desire that even as a young person I had. And I also was very interested, I mean, I certainly had some talents, but I wanted to know like, what could someone do? What did someone have control over? To have more agency in your life as you were trying to navigate and do all of that.

And so I think for me, how this manifest was number one, an interest in science, like approaching things scientifically, because certainly my coaching practice, I look at performance from a scientific standpoint, which is to say, what are the principles that really guide how we perform and how it is received and what results we get that has nothing to do with our talent? I mean, we get whatever talent we’re born with and we don’t really get to control that. But

when we think about performance scientifically, now we're talking about things that anyone could access that might help them improve their leadership and I really liked that idea.
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Wow. Okay, so let’s dig in and see how that works. So these scientific principles, so how do you connect it to the work at hand? So you’re talking to a CEO or an executive, you’re trying to figure out what they need to do to perform better. How do you apply principles? Like you observe what’s going on and then intuitively some principles flash into your mind and then you say, okay, that would work here or you have a process that you walk people through?

It’s a little bit of both. I think coaching has to be very individualized. I don’t think anyone wants to be sort of run through a bunch of modules that don’t feel like they fit their particular situation. On the other hand, one of the good things about having a process is it means that coaching doesn’t wander into just sort of a coffee chat that feels really good, but that doesn’t get you in there. Part of the way I build some of these principles into coaching is in number one, how I set up how we get started.

So, a great example of this is when I start working with a client, we do a longer form session and you could view it as a bit of discovery about getting to know them and their situation. But

we start out by focusing on one of the first principles right at the start, because I think it’s one of the most important, and I think it really sets us up for success.
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And what I mean by that is saying, Hey, there are lots of things you could do, and there are lots of goals you could go after, but we need to be focused and clear about what few goals are we going after? And also what are the most important priorities that we might invest our resources or our energy in to actually get towards those?  So, in coaching, I think this is a very powerful question to start with. And I combine that in a longer session. It’s three hours and we chat and I ask questions, but a lot of the questions I ask are trying to get at what’s most important to that executive, like what are the objectives that really matter in their space or to their business? And then also to try and ask questions to understand what priorities might be most important for their team to be focusing their energy on, or even for that executive to be thinking about or spending more time researching or learning about, or where’s the money most potently spent?

And so we start there and try and get some clarity on those things, because then as we move through coaching and even move through the other buckets of performance science principles, I find that everything we do is more potent and tends to get more of the results that it would get. That’s how we start and that’s a very structured piece.

Okay, so strategy is the start. So I think you call it The Performance Framework or what is the name? The Performance Framework. So you have this Performance Framework. So, okay, what is the strategy? What are we trying to focus on? What is the most important thing to move the needle on? So that’s the first phase of it. So what are the other phases? There are four phases, right?

That’s correct. Yes. So the other phases are strategy. We start there, we will come back to that. It’s not one and done, but the other three buckets are, we have to think a little bit about execution and often it’s how is the team executing, not just how is the individual executing, that’s number two. Number three is we think a lot about mindset because a lot of entrepreneurship and running a business is that it’s a long game. It’s not a sprint. In very few cases, it is a sprint and then you’re done and you exit and everyone throws the party. That’s not the common scenario. And so we really wanna think about mindset. How do you stay in it? How do you feel confident even when you’re having to do something new or if you’re facing a lot of uncertainty, which is almost very prevalent now and is always the case when you’re starting a business or being an entrepreneur, you’re making bets.

And so

the mindset matters because it is something that we have to bolster over time.
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These are the buckets. So, strategy, execution, mindset, and physiology. So it sounds like only half of the buckets are about what you do and the other half are about who you are and what you think.

I love how you broke that down. Yeah, and what’s great is there are different ways to approach any problem. Client could come in with a particular issue and one of the things we can always ask ourselves because we have these principles and this is where in ongoing coaching, I don’t necessarily have a specific like, oh, now we go to this or now we go to this. What I listen for is, given the challenge they’re having or even the opportunity they want to go after, what are all the different principles that could be at play here? And then I can even ask the client, I say, Hey, I can see some different ways we could approach this. Are any of them popping out to you as most resonant or that seem the easiest, like the lowest hanging fruit? Like, okay, let’s start there. Build some momentum. So this is what I love about performance science.

That’s great. So I’m thinking about tennis, which people talk a lot about it’s an individual sport. It’s a professional sport and people take a lot of coaching in tennis. So tennis players often they have different coaches. Often they have a separate coach for serving, for keeping in shape, and then you have a strategy coach. So I’m just thinking about these different areas. Would you say that it is a leadership related thing that these soft areas like minds. Maybe it’s not soft at all, but essentially the thinking piece and the staying in shape piece, that they are so critical or they would be critical for any type of job?

Oh, that’s a great question. I think they matter for any job that these things do come into play. Maybe the reason it comes out more strikingly for leadership is because of the amount of pressure that is typically there, the amount of stretch that leaders are often pushed into or drawn into to do something really challenging. And they’re usually the front person. They are responsible at the end of the day for everything. And also they’re not in control of everything. Not that any of us are, but I think the point is when you lead something that is more than just a single person business, for example, immediately you have other people who are executing and who are carrying out pieces of the business. When you scale that with investors, now you have a whole host of other people that you have to satisfy as well as have ideas and things. So it may just be that because

leaders are often pushed more to the edge, managing all of those categories becomes more important.
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Yeah, it brings to mind, there was an interview with Jeff Bezos, and he talked about how he is not involved in managing his companies anymore. And basically what he said was that his main job each day is to make not more than three decisions, but three good decisions. And he does a lot of work to stay fit, to be rested in order to make those decisions right. So it sounds like he has more than 50% of his buckets or 50% of what he does or what he needs to be in those latter two buckets. So it’s not even a 50-50, maybe it’s a 5-95 distribution. So I wonder whether when someone is moving up the ladder and they go from doing things to leading people and to coming up with a vision and maybe to leading leaders, as you’re elevating the ideas, the communication, the energy projection, and just your being is becoming more important and then you have to put more energy into it. Is this how you see it?

That’s an interesting observation. I think that I suspect, and of course I’m talking out of turn here, I suspect that to make those one to three really good decisions takes a ton of strategic effort and investment in learning and thinking. I might say the execution bucket probably does decrease quite a bit, but the other three buckets still potentially are quite important. And maybe the execution bucket, what that has really become is really good decisions about who your very next line of leadership is. And that even though it may not be that many people, that the decision in who you hire, who you pick, who then of course is going to have much more influence on that execution. That’s a strategic decision, but that impacts the execution bucket. But I might be splitting hairs at this point. I think it’s a really interesting observation, Steve.

Or maybe the execution is the communication. Maybe it’s about being in those meetings and arguing the point and listening to research, to other people’s positions and try to synthesize things. And maybe that’s the execution. It’s not by hand. So how much time do you spend on each of those buckets? Is strategy more an upfront thing and then it becomes less of the time or does it not even matter? How do you share your time between the different buckets with a typical client?

It depends. And it depends both where the client’s strengths are, but also sometimes what the context is that they’re dealing with. So for example, I’ve encountered clients who have kind of a buoyant personality. Their mindset is often in a pretty good place. So in terms of just their sense of optimism, willingness to like keep going on stuff, we don’t necessarily need to bolster that very much versus for a different person where something’s really difficult, like things have been really chaotic. And maybe not through any of their own doing. It’s just the situation they came into. We might have to spend more time there because they’re working really hard and it may be a slow journey to seeing results. And so we have to figure out how to keep them in there.

But I think

one of the interesting things about strategy that I will bring up is you can use strategy as a lens, both they're sort of high-level strategy.
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You can always ask three questions or spend some time thinking and then ask some three questions as prompts to help you approach things less from a reactive standpoint and much more from a strategic standpoint. So the three questions I like to ask, and these are true for high level strategy as well, are what is it I want to have happen? This is the simplest way, not even what is my goal, but it’s like, what do I want out of this? What is the outcome that is most important? And if there was a sub outcome, maybe what would that be? But like try to not have a list of 20 outcomes you’re trying to achieve because that means we’ve lost our clarity. And then the second question is, what do I think is actually going to be most important in driving towards that outcome? There may be many things that we could do or work on, but what’s probably the most important? You could also view this as sort of that 80-20 rule, that we get 80% of our results from about 20% of our efforts. 

And then I think the third question, which is one of my favorites, is what is going to distract us or me? What is the red herring or the emotional button that’s getting pushed that is going to be a total like distraction as I’m trying to navigate this circumstance versus if I can just focus on what is probably needed to encourage the outcome I want. And so this is a tool I use for strategy to just simplify it and also to help people think strategically, even outside those moments when you’re very clearly in your like planning moment, even if you’re just an executive sitting in a meeting listening to what’s happening and trying to decide what your biggest value add could be, is to run through those questions in your head and it will often hone what you say, make it clear to the audience, and also not overstep and get to meddling in what is probably weeds you shouldn’t be in.

Yeah, I love it. These are great questions. And I like to ask the first two questions with my clients, but I haven’t thought about the third one. I think it’s very important. So the way we use the first two questions or something similar to the first two questions, when we figure out who’s doing what in a company, then we figure out the functions that they do, whether it’s sales, marketing, engineering, administration, whatever they are. And then we look for those outcomes. What are those one or two big outcomes? And then how do you drive those outcomes with a weekly activity?

So what’s the KPI that’s going to go and drive the outcome? And it might not drive it, we can then tweak it, but what is that? But I really like the distraction piece because that is what’s preventing some of those activities in happening, the distraction. And as you were explaining it, I was just thinking about myself and my businesses that I have some distractions in my business. I have to remove them. I have to start thinking about removing them to make time, energy for those important activities that will drive the outcome. This is very helpful. Well, thank you. Thank you. So, is this just a strategy piece or in the other buckets that also applies?

I think one can always ask those questions in the other buckets. The buckets aren’t independent. They influence each other. And so certainly you could ask the question like, Hey, when I think about execution, like that sort of falls into like, once you’ve decided what the priorities are, you could also then start to say you define KPIs. That’s a great way of saying, okay, well, in executing this priority, what is actually the activity that is perhaps most important. Or what’s the leading and the lagging indicators that we would want to be looking at measuring tracking.

One of the things I think about a lot, just coming up back to a principle level for that execution buckets. Now we’re moving on to bucket number two, we’ll talk about some tools. That one of the things I like to think about is how do you empower your team to execute efficiently, more effectively? Because once a business grows to a particular size, like again, as the leader, you’re probably not actually doing the execution. And so thinking about your team matters a lot. So there are three pieces. When I think about making a very powerful team, or you could even say cultivating the power of your team is how I put it. There’s three different elements to it that are great for a leader to be thinking about.

One is just capability. So

this idea that if you can have your team growing in their skill and their capability, they are going to produce more for you over time. Like that's, it's an investment that is good for them because as human beings, actually we are motivated when…
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If we know, for example, what our role is and why that matters to the group objectives, why it’s important. But also, for example, if we’re trying to solve a problem and there are moments where the team is actually asked, do you have ideas about this? Like, are we approaching this in the right way? Or is there something we’re missing?

That ability to influence decision-making is very motivating to a team.
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So for example, within a company, you have a particular team and they are known for what they’re able to produce, how well they do it. This could even be your accounting team. An internal service provider. But if they’re known within the company as like great to work with, can get your questions answered, can make things happen. Suddenly your other departments may be talking to them sooner and earlier, and things may be going better because of it. There might be better budgetary planning or fill in the blank.

The goal is that being visible does matter. And that can be both external to the company as well as internal to the company.
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Yeah. I love it. I’ve never thought about it this way. I have experienced people, obviously learning is fun and when people learn and they know they grow, it’s just the learning itself is fun, but it also increases their market value as employees. So they know that they’re in a good place because even though maybe their salary is not rising, but their value is rising and they know that it’s going to have an impact down the road. The influence, yeah, I mean, if we all want to have a meaningful job and if you don’t influence, if you’re not part of a bigger picture and we don’t impact or we don’t know how to impact it, then that’s not motivating. But if you do, that really is. And if it’s visible, then other people know that we are making the impact. So that makes a lot of sense. Okay, well, we are running out of time, but what else about the mindset that you might want to talk about? How do we improve the mindset of our team and of ourselves?

This is a great place to finish up because we can wrap in a little bit of physiology here too. So in mindset, I think one of the biggest things that leaders and team members are dealing with is uncertainty. I think uncertainty is one of the hardest things that we can come up against with our mindset these days. When I think about mindset, there are both actions we can take and also perspectives we can take that are helpful.

So one perspective that I think is really important in the face of uncertainty is to understand that the stress that we feel in the face of that, the discomfort we feel, which is very biological, by the way, our brains were built to not like…
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A lot of it has to do with how we think about it.  And so, a flip side of a way to think about uncertainty is to say that if we had no uncertainty in our work and our life, we would be bored out of our minds and there would be no growth, there would be no opportunity, and that that would not actually be a very good human state to be in. And it’s helpful to remember that the opposite is a not good place. And then it can be helpful to reframe the uncertainty as like, this is something I don’t know yet, but it actually can be a force for good in terms of my own growth. And also it is probably in service of something I really care about. And it’s just good to have things you care about in your life. It means you are engaged. It means you’re impacting things. So from a mindset standpoint, as a leader, you can help kind of reframe it for your team, but also reframe it for yourself.

The yin and yang, it’s the risk and opportunity thing, right?

Exactly. But frame it. And you’re not trying to say it’s all good. Like no one will believe you if you say that. But I like it how you said it. The yin and the yang. You say this is part of why we have some good is because we are having the risk. And so they come together. And then in terms of actions that you can take that are really helpful, I think number one is you can help your team understand what do you do in the face of uncertainty.

And there's usually two things. Number one, you can spend some time thinking. And number two, you can spend some time learning.
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Because uncertainty often highlights a gap between what we know right now and what we might need to know to be successful in a new context, in a new environment. I think we all, as people, feel better when we have a plan. And so one of the plans you can make in the face of uncertainty is to say, what do we want to learn about? What are the topics we need to think about and maybe think about our values on? And then finally, what experiments could we run? So you get to be a scientist and you can say, well, how could we learn some answers, even though they’re not things we could read in a book or find on the internet? What could we try? And I think that’s very powerful for people to have a plan.

Then the last piece, the physiology, is that uncertainty revs up our fight or flight system. There’s often a lot of adrenaline. And so just a little bit about physiology, This is a wonderful time when things are uncertain to take extra care, to find ways to bring your system back down again. Our systems are capable of handling adrenaline, they were built to handle it, but they do better when we get some rest and recovery and then ramp back up. So things like sleep, a breathing practice or like a meditation, just even like one minute of deep breathing can be really powerful during a stressful day. Going outside or going for a walk, it doesn’t even have to be intense exercise, just moving your body will process some of that. Being outside is very good for us as human beings. So a couple of tips on that physiology front, like how you can help with that.

Yeah, I love it. This is a really good perspective through the scientist’s lens that how do we control, how do we manage our mindset, how do we manage our physiology, how we reframe things. My grandfather always used to say that there’s a kernel of good in every bad, and that I would ask him if someone died, what’s good about that, and kind of put him on the spot. But yeah, I mean, Napoleon here talks about that as well. It’s a great reframe. And yeah, I love it. I love it. It’s all the four buckets and definitely gives a lot to talk about with the CEO who is going through these things. These buckets are pretty deep. So there’s a lot fit in those buckets. So Carla, if someone is really intrigued by this and they would like to either have you talk to them to explore these buckets and their mindset and their strategy and so on, or if they want to learn more about your techniques and what you do, where can they find you and your staff and how can they connect with you?

Yeah, thanks for that, Steve. Well, I love connecting with people and if you’re interested in hearing more about performance science, LinkedIn is a great place to connect and follow along. So I’m at www.linkedin.com/in/carla-fowler. And then if you’re interested in learning more about coaching, my website is a wonderful place to go. You can message me through the site and also there’s a great FAQ page. So that’s at thaxa.com.

So definitely check out thaxa.com by mind or by brain. Very interesting. I asked you during the pre-interview why THAXA and you said that it’s Latin for task, but I should have asked the follow-up questions. Okay, so why are tasks so important?

So I liked it because I think the first performance principle I ever learned in my life was that if you want to do something really big or ambitious, you don’t have to do it all in one step. It’s just a series of lining up the right smaller tasks in a row and stacking them up. A lot of coaching is helping people do that. They’ve got ambitious goals and lots on their plate. So I love just thinking about how do we break this down into the manageable tasks that they can stack up.

Wow. That’s very profound. So I love this metaphor, and James Clear in Atomic Habits, he talks about habit stacking. And I like this idea of habit stacking. And I like to think that when I work with companies that that’s what I want to do with them. So teach them another approach and then ingrain it so that it’s going to be part of their arsenal going forward and kind of habit stack them so that they become more and more powerful as this time goes on. So that’s fascinating. So Carla Fowler, MD and PhD, the scientist of coaching, and CEO of THAXA Executive Coaching. Check her out on LinkedIn, check her out on thaxa.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, and if you’re like me, then you probably have. If you like to think about what is behind different concepts and what makes them tick, then stay tuned because we get more and more exciting thought leaders and CEOs come on the show and explain how they make their businesses run. So, thanks for coming, Carla, and thank you for listening.

Michael E. Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited and over 35 other books, is driven by a mission to transform the state of small business, entrepreneurship, and economic development worldwide.

We explore Michael’s origin story and the moment that sparked the E-Myth movement, including his revelation that most business owners don’t understand their own businesses. He shares how his intuitive and soul-driven approach led to the creation of the first business operating system and the now-iconic principle of “working on your business, not in it.” Michael introduces his Eightfold Path Framework, built on the eight discrete personalities of an entrepreneur: The Dreamer, Thinker, Storyteller, Leader, Designer, Builder, Launcher, and Grower. We also discuss his Dreaming Room methodology, the Radical You 5-year entrepreneurial school, and how AI is enabling the creation of 199 vertical-market E-Myth books.

Good day, dear listeners. So guess who I have here as my guest today. After five years, we finally got to the day when I can interview Michael E. Gerber, who is the author of the E-Myth Revisited, E-Myth Mastery and 35 other best-selling books that have sold over 5 million copies in 30 languages and 150 countries. Michael was the original mastermind behind the concept of the first business operating system back in 1986. And he coined the idea of Working On Your Business, Rather Than In Your Business, which idea touched at least 100 million entrepreneurs worldwide. So Michael is also currently the founder at age 88, almost 89. He is the founder and CEO of the Michael E. Gerber companies, owning programs including Gerber Works, Radical You, Become The One, and The Dreaming Room most recently, and he owns the rights to 35 E-Myth books. So Michael, without further ado, welcome to the Management Blueprint Podcast.

I’m delighted to be here. Thank you, Steve.

I’m so excited because really, I read your book back in the early 2000s. I got immediately smitten. I actually started a side business trying to implement your system without any training from you, which unfortunately was not successful. So I had to close down my side business, but we definitely implemented it in my own business. And I was just very enamored. I also got a dog-eared copy of E-Myth Mastery, which is like a big volume, and I kind of went through all the ideas there. And finally, to have you be a guest is a great honor, and it’s a very exciting day.

I’m delighted to be here. Thank you.

So, Michael, I’m going to start with my favorite question, even though you are like a super guest here, but tell me about your personal “Why” and how it influenced your life and how it got you where you are at age 88, almost 89, still going strong, still being an entrepreneur. So, what was that “Why” that you had and have?

Well, I have said it so many times, it’s to transform the state of small business worldwide. To transform the state of small business worldwide. I can almost dance to it because that is what I’ve been working on all these years. And in the heart of that is to transform the state of entrepreneurship worldwide. And in the process of accomplishing each of those to transform the state of economic development worldwide. Because were

I capable of doing the first in order to do the second, I would absolutely achieve that result, economic development worldwide.
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Well, I mean, I know as much as you’ve written down and as much as you told me, I definitely know that part. I don’t know what’s going on in your mind because you’re still being creative. You’re still developing programs, which is amazing to me. I like to be like you when I get to your age. It’s definitely awesome. So tell me about the beginning. What prompted you to write the E-Myth? That was the original book in 1986, the E-Myth, and then 1995 you came out with the E-Myth Revisited, which was a fable book, the first one potentially in business. So what was this thing that prompted you to create the E-Myth and to start this Working On Your Business movement back in 1986?

Well, I was invited by my brother-in-law, his name is Ace, Ace Freeman. He’s still alive, he’s still my brother-in-law, to come visit one of his clients. Ace had a small advertising agency in Silicon Valley. And his problem was his clients weren’t able to convert the leads that Ace was creating for them into sales. So, Ace asked me to come visit one of his clients and see what the problem was. I told Ace at the very beginning, I don’t know anything about business, Ace. And Ace said, Michael, you know more than you think you do. So just shut up, come visit Bob and let’s see what happens. So I’m fond of let’s see what happens, because that’s the story of my life. Let’s see what happens. So we went to visit Bob and Ace told us that he’s going to take off for an hour and for us to get to know each other. So Bob asked me, what do you know about my business, Michael? And I said nothing, Bob. And he looked a little discomforted.

If you don’t know anything about my business, how can you help me? So he essentially then asked me, what do I know about his product? And I said, less than that, Bob. So if you don’t know anything about my business, you don’t know anything about my product, and on and on and on. You get the point. So I said, we’ve got an hour to kill, let’s find out. So I started asking Bob questions. And it became obvious to me as I began to ask Bob questions, that while I didn’t know anything about his business, Bob didn’t either. And it was astonishing to me. He’s a guy in Silicon Valley, started a company with a product that’s built upon a software system. He’s got salespeople who aren’t successfully selling his product. And I was blown away that Bob didn’t know anything about his business either. It was astonishing to me. And I asked Bob if he had the selling system. And he said, what do you mean by a selling system? I said, well, if you’re asking me that question, Bob, you don’t have one. And that’s your problem. You’re bringing aboard salespeople with sales experience and knowledge of your technology.

You don’t have a system through which they’re all of them engaging your clients and the absence of that system is the problem. So Bob asked me, can you create that system? Of course, Bob. So when Ace comes back to pick me up, he said, so what happened? So I said, well, Bob just hired me. He said, hired you to do what? Hired me to create a selling system. He said, how in hell are you going to do that? You don’t know anything about his business. You don’t know anything about his product. I said, I told you that before we got here, Ace. The reality is I know more than Bob does. And honestly, Ace, I know more than you do. So, I’m going to create the selling system for Bob. And I did. And it worked. It was the way their salespeople now sold what Bob was selling. Suddenly, Bob understood his problem, but not totally, because I discovered then that Bob didn’t have a management system either or a marketing system either. In short, Bob didn’t have a methodology through which he operated his company. And it blew my mind. And Bob was only the first of Ace’s clients that I did the very same thing with.

And each and every single one of them, Steve, had identically the same problem. It blew my mind. It was remarkable to me. And what was also remarkable to me is that Ace didn’t have one either, and he didn’t let me do it for him. So I finally said, I’m going to go out and do this by myself. So Ace brought a guy in to replace me. The guy’s name was Tom Travisano. So Tom watched me for a while doing what I did, and he said to me, where are you going, Michael, when you leave here? I said, I’m going to start a company of my own to do what I’ve been doing here for Ace. And Tom said, I’m going with you. And so we left and created our very first company.

It was the Michael Thomas Corporation (MTC), to do exactly what I just shared with you. And we did that for almost 10 years before I wrote my first book. A guy had come to one of my seminars. At the end of the seminar, he said, how would you like to write a book? I said, about what? He said, what you just said in the seminar. I said, sure. He said, I’m going to go back to Ballinger Books and tell them I’ve got a guy to write that book they want to get written on small business. And I’ll get back to you and let you know what they say. He got back to me, said, they want to do it. And I’m going to edit it, he said. So we started to write that book. And I wrote that book in about three months.

That was the first book. That was the E-myth. Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What To Do About It. And that's the beginning of the story.
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Yeah, and that was HarperCollins who actually issued it. So it was a major business publisher at the time. They seemed to recognized the idea immediately, and they embraced it.

Yeah, absolutely.

So what happened, because you came out with the E-Myth in 1986, so I’m just counting the years. So you must have been in your early 30s when you had Ace approach you and you did this management consulting for Bob.

I was 40.

You were 40. Okay, so 1986, that was almost 40 years ago. So if you’re 88, you must have written a book at 47, 48, 49 and then 10 years earlier. Yeah. So you were basically…

Don’t confuse me, Steve. Whatever it was, however it was, here we are.

What I’m curious about, Michael, is the original E-Myth book, this was just a non-fiction book, and then you turned it into the E-Myth Revisited, which is a business fable. Since then, because Lencioni has written a bunch of business fables, I wrote one myself, which is nowhere near yours. But what we know is that business fables are a much better way to communicate ideas. So how did you come up on this idea to rewrite it as a business theory?

When you ask me, how did I come up with the ideas? I haven’t had any business training. I had no business education. Everything I’ve written has been written through my intuition and my experience. So as I’m speaking to a small business owner and as I hear what they are attempting to do, I intuitively understood what was missing in the way they were doing it. So everything I’ve created, Steve, has been created based upon my intuition.

Intuition is a profoundly important ingredient. It's one of the great ingredients missing in most small businesses. So it's very, very important to understand what's missing in most of the work written about business.
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It’s the intuitive genius that’s required at the heart of entrepreneurship. Great entrepreneurs are intuitive. Everybody else isn’t. And what’s missing in most work about business, management, leadership, marketing, et cetera, and so forth, what’s missing is that intuitive genius that’s crucial to create. You know what’s said in Genesis? Born in the image of God, born to create a world fit for God. How does one create intuitively? How does one develop one’s intuition by generating a passion, a love for the creation? What’s missing in almost everything that’s written about business? Everything that’s written about business writes about the mechanics of it. You asked a question about EOS and on and on and on and on and on. They’re all about the mechanics of it. The mechanics of management, the mechanics of leadership, the mechanics of etc, etc, etc. It ain’t about the mechanics, Steve. It’s about the love. It’s about the passion. It’s about the heart. It’s about the soul. The soul of a great business, the soul of a great enterprise, the soul of a great leader, the soul of a great manager, and so forth.

I love that, and you write about this in The E-Myth Revisited, when you talk to Sarah about the bakery shop. You talk about love, the passion, the intuition, and yeah, I love this idea of the intuition. John Lennon has a song, Intuition. I think I can’t sing it, but it’s a wonderful song and the lyrics are really great. I recommend you check it out. I’m sure you know it anyway. So yeah, that’s great. So the passion, definitely without passion, it’s probably impossible to build a great business because it’s too hard to do it without the love and passion that you talk about. So what is your favorite concept of the E-Myth books? Is there a favorite concept that you have?

The favorite concept, obviously, is summarized with going to Work On Your Business, Rather Than In Your Business. And by on your business, I’m talking about way up here, looking down on your business, the whole of it, the entirety of it, seeing it from that perspective, you’re suddenly removed from it to experience it in a completely different way than you do when you’re in it, doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it. So that’s the soul of what I speak about when I engage anyone who is an owner/operator of a small company, what I call the smallest of the small. I have to pull them out because until I can pull them out, we’re so consumed by everything they have to do that they can’t be relieved of what they have to do.

But once I’m capable, able to pull them out of it, to begin to look down upon it, much like Ray Kroc did in his first McDonald’s store, he built his franchise prototype to get the first one right. In fact, that was just a little bit ago. The anniversary of the very first McDonald’s store was on April 15th. He created his first store. Now, understand he didn’t create it. The McDonald Brothers did. Ray Kroc simply grew it, but he didn’t grow it until he rebuilt it in such a way that it worked beautifully, systemically, perfectly. So then he could open his second one. Huge mistake almost everybody makes is they don’t do that.

Yeah, I love the concept that you talk about the franchise prototype concept. I think it’s a really good way to articulate that you have to build a perfectly working machine before you start replicating it. Because if you have a half-baked thing, then you’re going to replicate the bad machine, the imperfect machine and that’s the worst chaos. You don’t want to do that. You want to do the prototype, which is a really interesting one.

I like to say every small business is a franchise. And so the business format franchise model is absolutely crucial. Every single operating business on the planet, if every new company, every startup, would start up as though they were going to franchise it, failure would be completely eradicated. If every single startup were started up like a franchise, it would be immensely transformational.

Yeah, because basically what you want is you don’t want to be a slave to your business. You want the business to be operable by anyone else, which means you have to make it a franchise prototype so that this is possible. That’s what makes it possible. I love this idea.

But I’m gonna understand Steve, it’s not so that you don’t become a slave to your business. It’s so that you transform the state of your business into an operating system that can produce the dream that you have, the great result you intend to produce. That’s why I’ve created the Eightfold Path.

The Eightfold Path is built upon the eight discrete personalities of a great entrepreneur.
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So it starts out with, I have a dream. I have a vision. I have a purpose. I have a mission. First a dream, second a vision, third the purpose, fourth the mission. Based upon what? Every great entrepreneur is a dreamer. Every great entrepreneur then is a thinker. Every great entrepreneur is a storyteller. Every great entrepreneur is a leader. First a dreamer, second a thinker, third a storyteller, fourth a leader. I have a dream, I have a vision, I have a purpose, I have a mission. You get me? The job is the designer of the client fulfillment system. The practice is the builder of what I call the three-legged stool, the franchise prototype. Lead generation, lead conversion, client fulfillment, the three-legged stool. Every practice desiring to become a business. So the practice is the business format franchise prototype. The business is up to seven turnkey practices, plus a turnkey management system. The enterprise is up to seven turnkey businesses, plus a turnkey leadership system. A dream, a vision, a purpose, a mission, a job, a practice, a business, and enterprise. 

The evolution of an enterprise from a company of one to a company of 1000. And therein resides the platform upon which a great growing company is designed, built, launched, and grown. So you might say it’s the evolution of a great growing company. Now, if every single startup were started up in exactly the way I just described, a dream, a vision, it would profound positive impact upon entrepreneurship, upon small business, upon economic development. If you were to speak that, if you were to teach that, I’m telling you, Steve, it would blow your mind.

It does blow my mind. I think it’s a wonderful concept. I’m very passionate about it. And I love listening to you telling me about it. And I have a question. Can I ask you a question about this?

Of course.

You say that every business should start with a dream, but you also say that it’s technicians who start businesses, it’s not entrepreneurs.

Of course.

So what happens when a technician starts the business and they want to turn themselves into an entrepreneur? How do they do that?

With a dream, a vision, a purpose, a mission, a job, a practice, a business, and enterprise in exactly the way I’m just describing. So I walk that technician through that process and they first have to describe, what’s your dream? They don’t have one. I want to make a lot of money. That’s not a dream. The dream is the great result you’re going to produce, not for you, but for them. For whom? The crucial question. So, who are you going to transform? To transform the state of chiropractic, to transform the state of accountancy, to transform this. Until that happens, nothing else is going to happen. So we’ve got to awaken the entrepreneur within every technician starting a small company. And that’s the process through which I do it. And it’s a struggle, Steve. You’ve got to stay with the struggle. You don’t get beyond the dream until you’ve got a dream. And until you’ve got a dream, it’s a waste of time. I want to become my own boss. That’s not dream. I want to make a lot of money. That’s not a dream. That’s dreams about them, not about you. Dreams about it, not about me. In every great entrepreneur’s case, not one of them started what they started to make a lot of money. Not one, not ever.

I love it. I mean, I thought I could explain this much better than most people, but actually you are explaining it a lot better than I can. And you’re kind of connecting the dots for me as well, even though I’m supposed to be doing that. So that is pretty cool. And I never thought about the technician actually not having a dream. I thought the problem was that they couldn’t make the dream attractive to people around them so that they also connect to it. They had it, but they could not proselytize it properly. I thought that was the problem. But what you are putting the spotlight on is that they actually don’t have it articulated for themselves, so they are not able to generate the passion in order to make it happen. Is this what you’re saying?

No, you’re very accurate. You understand the vast majority of startups have started to get rid of the boss. They’re gonna go out and do it on their own. It’s going out and doing it on their own. My book, I don’t know if you’ve ever read it, Making It On Your Own in America, or wherever you happen to live, Is A Journey Toward Radical Self-Employment. So you understand what they do. You see them doing it, doing it, doing it, doing it. They’ve gotten rid of the boss. They’ve become their own boss. And now they’re working for a boss, which is the business they created. And they’re working for a lunatic. So I’ve said this again and again and again and again, very crucial to understand we have to awaken the entrepreneur within them. And it’s a tough thing to do. It’s not easy to do. Anybody who tells you it is easy to do has never really done it. And that’s why I asked the question, so what is an entrepreneur? People answer, well, they’re people who started a business.

No, that’s only a little, little, little piece of it. So that’s where I came up with the eight discrete personalities of an entrepreneur. The dreamer, the thinker, the storyteller, the leader, the designer, the builder, the launcher, the grower. Until we awaken the dreamer, the thinker, the storyteller, etc., etc., within the owner of a small company, until we do that, it’s just more of the same. So how do we do that? I walk them through the Dreaming Room. I have a dream, I have a vision, I have a purpose, I have a mission. And I call that Dreaming Room One and Dreaming Room Two. Dreaming Room One is to discover their dream, their vision, their purpose, and mission. Dreaming Room Two is to discover their job, their practice, their business, their enterprise. Dreaming Room One creates the platform upon which we’re gonna design, build, launch, and grow.

Dreaming Room Two. So it’s a process, and it’s a magical process. Because as I walk people through that, Steve, just huge stuff happens. I mean, it’s just huge. They say, what in the world happened? They find themselves in a completely new way. And it’s extraordinary. By the way, I’m doing a webinar on the 25th this week, introducing people to the Dreaming Room. And then I’m enrolling them, several of them, in the Dreaming Room, which I start, I believe it’s on May 2nd. Go to the webinar. I’ll have Amethyst send you a link to it. And then if you care to, I invite you to join me in the Dreaming Room. I’ll do that pro bono. You’re not going to have to spend the $10,000 to do it.

Okay. Yeah. I would love to.

And when you do it, you’re going to have a direct experience of what I’m talking about. And once you have that direct experience, Steve, I’ll then invite you to become a Dreaming Room leader.

Okay.

And should that occur, it’ll be magical.

Well, I’m definitely interested. Friday is going to be tough. I don’t know what time is your… but we can talk offline about this. But I’m definitely interested. I want to learn more. And I love the idea of awakening the entrepreneur. I’m afraid some of my clients are still asleep. I have to awaken them. Maybe I’m still asleep. So I have to awaken these clients.

Well, you understand it. You’re a genius. I’ve read your stuff. You’re a genius on the mechanics of it all. You write brilliant stuff.

Thank you.

Unfortunately, your brilliant stuff, I say this in the kindest of ways, your brilliant stuff leads the one I speak to behind. So the question becomes, how do I do it in a way that doesn’t leave them behind? Who? The smallest of the small. You’re too smart for the vast majority of them. You’re just too damn smart for the majority of them.

Maybe for my own.

And so, it becomes stupid.

Anyhow, well, I’m definitely interested and definitely dive into it. But for the moment, we are still recording this. So I’d like to ask you a couple of personal questions. Is that okay? Because you’re an entrepreneur, you started several businesses, you’re currently running the Michael E. Gerber Companies. So as an entrepreneur, what has been your greatest disappointment in business and how did you bounce back from it?

My greatest disappointment is in myself. My greatest disappointment is the fact that I don’t enjoy operating a company. I don’t enjoy the work of it. I enjoy creating. Over the past decade, that’s all I’ve done. We have grown our company, but I haven’t been interested in growing our company. I’ve been in love with the creation of entrepreneurial dedication. So over the past decade, we’ve published now 24 new books, what I call vertical market books. The E-Myth Chiropractor, the E-Myth Accountant, the E-Myth, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And doing that with co-authors. So a chiropractor who’s done the E-Myth and had a practice, but it never created a true business of it. And so we’ve published now these 24 books. I write a chapter on people, they write a chapter on people. I write a chapter on money, they write a chapter, et cetera, et cetera. My chapters are the same in every one of those books. Their chapters are vertically centric. So they write a book on chiropractic about people, about money, etc., etc. There are 199 vertical markets we’ve identified.

So I want you to imagine 199 vertical market e-myth books. That’s the objective. Now, obviously, I’m going on 89, so the question becomes, so Gerber, how are you going to create all those books? With AI. So the future doesn’t require a co-author. AI becomes the co-author. Because now we’ve created the perfect model for doing it.

We can now create, utilizing artificial intelligence, human intelligence, and business format intelligence to create a completely unique world of vertical market books that speak to this process that I'm talking about.
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Everything I’ve created is applicable to every kind of business on the planet. We’ve proven it. Chiropractor, accountancy, on and on and on and on and on. Every single one of them have applied the E-myth. The E-myth and the way we’ve created it in exactly the way we’ve created it. And it works every single time. So that’s one piece of Michael E. Gerber Companies. The second piece you wrote about Radical You. Radical You is a five-year school for entrepreneurship. So it’s an entrepreneurial development school. 52 weeks a year for five years. So I have completed the first four years of 52 weeks each year of the content for walking somebody through the process from the very beginning to the very end. That’s the second component of Michael E. Gerber Companies. So you get my point.

Yeah, that’s wonderful. And then you have the Dreaming Room that’s also part of the Michael E. Gerber Companies. So you’ve got the Dreaming Room as part of it. So that’s amazing. So that takes the E-Myth concept to the next level because you verticalize it, you actually put into practice how to awaken the eight personalities of the entrepreneur, and then you train them in a five-year school. I wonder if it’s 52 weeks a year, why don’t you just give them a few weeks off and then maybe the fifth year will write itself?

It’s a great question.

Because entrepreneurs need to take at least eight to 10 weeks of vacation every year.

Of course, of course. Take your time off.

So tell me, Michael, I mean, you’ve been doing this for, I don’t even dare, 60 years probably. How do you keep young? How do you keep passionate? How do you not lose your zest and your love of life? What keeps you going?

It’s spoken to when I talk about the soul of it. So understand the soul of a creation, this continuous creation, I’d love to create. I love to create. It lives within me. It is my soul. It’s the spirit that calls me to the process. And so mechanics die without the spirit, without the soul. So I don’t focus on the mechanics, I focus on the creation of it. And that creation of it keeps me, I won’t say young because obviously I’m not young, but my spirit is young. As young as it was the very first day I started this. So that’s how. And essentially saying when I engage someone in the dreaming world, no matter what their age, it happens to them as well. And as it happens, and it doesn’t happen immediately, although it does happen with some of them immediately.  As it happens, something miraculous occurs. And they write about that. They speak about that. Something miraculous occurs. And it’s something miraculous that touches my soul, my spirit, that keeps me, my spirit, young. Because as I experience that with another, it rejuvenates that within me and it will do this very same thing with you.

Okay, I need some rejuvenation for sure.

Now you’re very young. How old are you?

I’m 58.

Just a kid.

Yeah, you could be my father. You are my father in many ways, actually.

Where are you from?

I’m from Hungary.

And how long have you been in the United States?

13 years.

And why did you come to the United States?

Well, because I had my dreams, my entrepreneurial dreams and I saw a ceiling to it there and I thought that I was still 45, I was still young enough to make a new start, and to do it in a world which doesn’t have a ceiling. And that’s why I came.

Wonderful. And how’s that worked out for you?

Touch wood. So far, it’s working. It’s not perfect, as you know. No business is perfect. My business is not perfect either. So it’s plenty of work to be done left. So with this, let me ask you the final question, Michael. What do you think is the most important question for an entrepreneur that they should be asking themselves?

Why are you doing this? And what I discover is mostly I get is stupid answers. And so I have to press it and press it and press it and press it. And as I press it and press it and press it, something real happens. And something real is I don’t know. And then the point is, let’s find out. And then I engage them in the process. If you had a dream, what would it be? If you had a great result, passionately determined to produce, what would it be? And as I begin that process, Steve, something happens.

Yeah, that’s huge. The “Why” is huge. I agree with you. That’s the biggest one. Well, that’s awesome. So your “Why” is to transform small business and the economy and the world through it or something like that. I’m paraphrasing. And you’re still at it, which is fantastic. And you have developed new programs, the Dreaming Room, the transformation, and the Vertical Books. So if you’d like to learn more, well, I assume you guys have all read the E-Myth Revisited. If you haven’t, then go to Amazon right now as soon as the podcast is over and download it and read it. This is essential stuff. And then check out the Dreaming Room. So on the 25th, there’s going to be a webinar. Now, I don’t know if you can come out with this podcast before the 25th. I will try, but probably it’s going to be really hard to do. So is there another date where people can kind of get this concept of the Dreaming Room?

It’ll be recorded, Steve.

It’s going to be recorded, okay.

Yeah, so I’ll have Amethyst send you the recording.

Okay.

At the same time, I’m going to have her send you the link, and you can publish the link for all of your listeners for our webinar on the 25th, okay?

Wonderful. So please check out the show notes to this episode for the link, and you can watch by that time. It’s gonna be a recorded webinar. Do check it out and you can reach out to Michael. This is how I did it. I reached out through LinkedIn. He’s on LinkedIn. You cannot miss his white hat there. Michael, thank you very much for doing all of that, for starting the movement, Working On Your Business. Now, 100 million entrepreneurs are working on the business, trying to make it better. And now we have to all start dreaming about our business as well.

My delight, Steve, thank you.

Thank you, Michael. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to like and review us and follow us because now we have Michael Gerber and who knows where we’ll end up. Thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

Nick Warner, seasoned business coach and host of the Together at the Top podcast, is on a mission to help leaders and emerging professionals align their values, careers, and impact.

We explore Nick’s Managing Up Framework:

What’s in it for them, Preferred Cadence, Preferred Channel, Prioritize, and Make It Convenient.

Nick explains how to adapt communication to busy executives, navigate different leadership styles, and influence without authority. He also shares the mindset shifts needed to coach effectively, why humility is non-negotiable, and how soulful leadership fuels high-performing teams.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast, and I’m excited to have today on the show, Nick Warner, who is a seasoned business coach with over 4,000 sessions under his belt, but he also was the managing partner of a lobbying firm in California for a couple of decades before that. So, lots to bring to the show. Nick, welcome.

Thank you for having me, Steve. I really appreciate it.

Well, it’s great to have you. You’ve got some good information and a great career and lots of experience. So let’s dive in. My favorite question for guests is, what is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice?

Yeah, great question. My personal “Why,” I hope this doesn’t sound cheesy, this is a second career for me, is I really want to help people. I want to help them find the highest level of confluence of what they want in their life, in their career or their companies. So I’m really motivated by helping. I’m not sure I knew that until I got a little bit further into it and it started to like affect my soul, a more scientific way to say it. You realize it’s their families and their stress environments and their kids’ college accounts, and you may end up mattering in their lives. So, I really enjoy helping people in that regard.

Yeah, I mean, coaching is a high leverage activity. You touch people who are multipliers, especially when you’re in business coaching and that’s a pretty awesome aspect of it. So if I multiply the 4,000 with the number of people touched, it’s probably more like 50,000 something.

It’s funny you say it that way because when I was an employer directly, I would think about my staff of 25 times and I’m making this up a little bit like an average family of four and I would think of it in my sphere of responsibility was 100 people. So if I have an agency, I have a public sector agency where there’s a thousand people that working in it, there’s four, they have different titles, but essentially vice presidents. And I urge them to think about 4,000 people. There are very small number of us in this room and we can really impact people’s lives. So yeah, I use that same similar multiplier when I think about it.

Yeah. That’s pretty awesome. You’re probably undercharging for your coaching, talking about this.

I doubt it. Some might disagree.

All right, so let’s switch gears and let’s talk about your framework, because that’s also pretty interesting. You developed a framework about something that a lot of us struggle with. I no longer struggle with it because I don’t have anyone that I report to other than my wife. But I know that when I was working for big companies, it was very hard to manage up to get your bosses to actually not complicate your life and not want to second guess you and to exert your influence when you didn’t have authority for it. So what is that process? What is that framework, The Managing Up Framework? Can you walk us through please?

Yeah, for sure. I want to thank you too, because when you asked me the question about, do I have a framework? I said, no. And then you asked me to just talk about it. And when you played it back to me, I realized I do have a framework. So, I appreciate it. You actually really helped me a lot in my conversation. I hadn’t thought about it in my context ‘til you were a mirror and played it back to me. So yeah, I do. And every situation is different. I think you know that as a coach and my guess is your listeners probably already accept that as a premise that no two things are the same. No two human beings are the same. And all of this should be taken in style to taste and if it’s helpful, take it as a framework, but I’ll use the book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There as a start to when you get to a certain level and mostly you’re working with I’m going to guess emerging leaders and leaders, and I’m working with emerging leaders and leaders.

The people that you’re talking to in your company managing up are very successful people and what they’ve done has worked for them. And the reasons they say no or intransigent or don’t listen is because they’ve been successful. And so you have to find different ways to reach them. And it’s not a game. They’re not even mechanisms. I guess it’s psychology or sociology perhaps. But what’s in it for them? Why do they care? Why should they care? Money is not an issue for them. They already make money. A reach to the company isn’t an issue. They already have the reach. Like what is it for that person you’re trying to move? So I think what’s in it for them, if I have to have a tagline for step one of the methodology would be, why does the person I’m trying to influence care and I need to craft a message to that.

Yeah. It’s like any marketing. You need to talk to the audience and find their buttons.

Let me give you an example of that. We’re trying to get a top boss to stopping a micromanager and to stop being a supersized individual contributor. And his version to me is this is my brilliance. This is what I do. Like GSD, pardon the parlance, getting shit done is what I do. I’m amazing at it. And his staff wasn’t able to, I wasn’t able to get him off the spot because the reality is he does add a lot of value there. But where we got progress in the discussion was, with him, it was, he’s very proud of his team. And so we had a very soulful conversation in my office, not on his, by the way, to talk about we’re stunting growth. Like no one’s saying you’re not good at this, but you’re stunting growth. Think about where you were at this time and to get him to think about his team and that people you love, you’re hurting them, you’re stunting them. And so he hadn’t taken that. He hadn’t thought about it from that perspective.

It's real and that you really have to figure out what the person cares about, what could move them. But number one is what's in it for them.
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Okay. So when you know that, what do you do then?

Well, I think preferred cadence is important if you’re managing up. Let’s say you’re briefing your boss. I deal with busy a lot in terms of trying to account for busy for increasingly successful people ascending. And you run into, I brought 10 things to Steve and honestly the meeting went 15 minutes. He was busy, he was distracted. And so if it’s working fine, keep doing that. But a lot of times it’s not. And that’s how it ends up centrally in our coaching session. I’ll ask probative questions around how often are you briefing Steve? Well, I do it once a week. How many things are on your list? 15. How many do you normally get to like seven, but thin, we don’t cover them well at all. What if you, for an example, again, back to preferred cadence, how often, what if you met with him every day for 15 minutes and only brought him two things?

That alone doesn’t crack the code. There’s different variations of that theme. It could be the boss doesn’t like it that quick, that he or she wants a thorough briefing on one, or I want to cover 15, like you’ll give it to me. But there’s also, boss, I really need you to stop. I need your feet to stop, and I need you to look at me, and I’m gonna stand in front of the door until you listen to me. But cadence can really help improve digestibility based on how your boss needs it and how the people above you need it.

Be flexible on how often you give it to them, how much you give them at that.
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Yeah, I personally experienced this because my staff, they produce social media posts and articles and videos and sometimes they send me 10 at a time and I look at my Slack, I say, okay, I’m not touching this because I’m not going to get through it. So I keep pushing it back and I ask them only send me one or two and then I can quickly look at it and then it’s done. Don’t send it 10 at the same time.

Yeah.

It’s the wrong cadence for me.

James Clear in Atomic Habits, which is a really good book, talks about the enemy of priority one and two is three, four, five, six through 10. And so I think that’s so true. And so, in that briefing space, it might be too much for your boss to digest. Let’s pare it down. It’s not always that it could be variations of that. Like I said before, but let’s start messing around with cadence. How often do we meet? How much we brief on? Do we send Steve 10 things or one thing? Listen to them. Hopefully I’m not getting the too much. Well, let’s talk about preferred channel. So, that’s where I was going with that is, I’m not an email person. If you say that to me, we’re going to have discussions.

I don’t think that’s an option, but the reality is some people respond better on text than email, or you can get to the top of their list on text or they’re phone people, or my 21 year old daughter said, anybody knows they want to get ahold of me is going to FaceTime me, which I did not know by the way, because apparently only old people leave voicemails. I didn’t know that. So I’m listening really carefully, or watching carefully for what’s going better in terms of how often I brief you, how much I brief and then what’s your channel. Is it a memo? Is it a verbal conference call or a video call? Is it some combination? More times than not if I’m managing up, I need to not bend to their will, but I need to adjust to their style. So I’ve sent them email after email, Steve, they don’t get back to me. Okay, how do you do when you walk in his or her office? Fine. Then let’s do that ‘cause we got to make something stick.

It is interesting. It’s also generational thing. I had someone on my podcast who said that the silent generation was all about, I think they were all about in person and then the boomers were the phone and the Gen Xs were about email. And then the Gen Z is about, I don’t know, text. And now they have this messaging app for the Gen Alpha. So it’s fascinating.

I have all the leverage I need in this world in terms of I don’t really need your money. Like I like the work and I want the money, but I don’t need it. I’m usually the coach or the boss. But that said, he or she who has the most ways to communicate wins. If you can’t get a hold of me, you’re not trying because I will adjust however you communicate. I will adjust to that because I want smoother communication, better flow. You don’t have to adjust to me. I’ll adjust to you because I want my life to go better.

Okay, I’m making a note of this. The one who has the most weight to communicate wins. That’s huge. Okay, so let’s go on. You have figured out their message that they need to hear, their preferred cadence, the preferred channel. What’s that?

Well, we talked a little bit about this, how to prioritize what to bring to the boss. I mentioned before as a primer, oftentimes, the enemy of priority one and two, which are the really big things you need to get done this week or today. The enemy is three, four, five and six and down the list. So let’s prioritize what we bring to our boss. We’re storytelling, too. Stories that, like for example, even a paper in college where you have like way too many topics in there, not sure what the takeaway is. What I’d like you to think about is when I walk out of that briefing, what did they take away? It’s less important what I think I said and way more important what stuck with my boss. So prioritize what you bring to them. And again, to the previous points, how and when, how much and when, prioritize.

Yeah. And busy bosses, they have so many decisions to make every day and they burn out. They hit decision fatigue probably by lunchtime. So the first thing you want to do then is give them 10 things to think about. They probably are going to shut down and not think about even one.

The irony is a lot of times when you’re talking to your client, I guess I’m asking you if this is true for you. For me, it’s true where they’re telling me what they did and I’m like, it’s pretty good. That should have worked. And we presented to the ladies and gentlemen of the jury and they go, that was perfect. You did a great job. Like how’d it go? It didn’t work at all. Like, okay, let’s regather. We got to figure out what’s going to stick because like going away and not getting this done is not a thing. So, making it more convenient is probably the fifth part of the model, if you will, or the mechanism is. In the ideal, and I’d say most cases inside the norm where you don’t have aberrant behavior from people above you, where it’s like you just cannot get to them at all. Normally it’s well-intentioned people that just don’t have time and you’re battling real busy. Make it convenient.

Can you check with somebody’s executive assistant to find out when they’re walking from one side of the building to the other and walk with them and brief them? I have walked with many, a boss with a folder in my hand under my arm, and briefed them, and got exactly the answer I needed. I mean, I’m being mostly facetious, a little bit serious about this, but not in a stalking way. But you can wait for your boss to come back to the parking lot and walk back to the office with him or her. You can potentially find out where they eat, what their path is again, check with their executive assistant to find out when they might have a free five minutes. I don’t hate an Uber ride. I mean, you’re not going to go from Los Angeles to San Francisco with your boss, but many times they’re going cross town. There’s no reason in the world, say for $25 back for an Uber or Lyft ride, you can’t ride in the car with your boss. So if you can make it convenient when you really have to have it, because what I don’t want to hear is I can’t get to my boss. Okay. It’s 10 different ways to get your boss in front of us. And we’ll figure this out.

Yeah. It’s a good point.

I’ve been as far, this is a little bit extreme. I’ve said this before. I said in my previous career, it didn’t go amazing when a governor staffer said to me, I can’t get to the governor’s chief of staff. I know I promised your guys this thing in the meeting, but I can’t get to her. And 40-something year old little fierier version of me said something like, are you kidding me? Do you know where she eats? Do you know where she works out? Do you know what flight she’s on? Do you know what parking spot? Do you know where her next meeting is? Stop telling me you can’t, you can. I don’t give it the same way now, but I feel the same way.

Yeah, you have to want it bad enough and then you figure it out.

Well said.

Okay, so that’s a great way to manage up. So figure out what is their favorite radio station, WIFM, what is their preferred cadence, whether it’s once a day, once a week, once a month, how do you apportion the material for decisions? Time of day, possibly also.

Favorite channel.

Is it phone? Is it Zoom? Is it in person? Is it text? Whatever it is, and then prioritize. So you can’t just give them all the stuff. You have to make the decisions that you can on your own and forget other people to make smaller decisions and bring the big one and then make it convenient. This is huge. Yeah, be creative, make it convenient. That’s awesome. So let’s talk about a little bit your experience as the managing partner of this lobby firm. What did you find, as a leader, the most important thing for a great employer to do?

Yeah, I don’t think it’s endemic to lobbying or specific to lobbying. I just happened to be running a lobbying and at times, a law firm. Also, I think it translates to most businesses, frankly, I just happened to be in that business, like I said. I think it’s in the soulful space. Forgive me if I’ve said that twice already. I think being a great human is a probably 90% of the way toward being a great employer. The rest is laws and I’m in California and we got a lot of them. So there’s definitely skill to go with a soulful and the caring, but I think that’s the first thing. I mean, I’ve said before in a staff meeting, I’m like, swearing and vulgarity is definitely not my thing, especially in the workspace, but you guys, it’s okay to give a shit. It’s okay to care about your clients. Okay to care about each other.

My favorite part, and I think this is what migrated me toward being a business coach, is I love being centrally involved with people's careers and especially when they come to get it and they're motivated and they're dedicating themselves to…
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So you have 6,000 employees or 60,000 employees in your company, but your team’s not bad. It’s okay to give a shit and care a lot and invest and not manage all your time. Again, forgive my vulgarity. It’s mostly just for the phrase, but I think a little bit of caring and a little bit of humanity goes a really long way. And there’s a lot of good product out there. I mean, what does Good to Great say? The who before the what. The people before the product. For me, that’s the most important thing is an employer, first and foremost, to your question.

How much of that can be learned? So, some of us have higher emotional intelligence than others. To what degree is it nature versus nurture?

Well, the nurture is normally mentoring because what I hear is, you mentioned the generational thing. I actually hear it exactly that way. It’s like, well, coming up, they didn’t explain the “Why” to me. They just told me, Steve, can you just do it? Because I said so. And you’re like, yes, sir. Yes, ma’am. I’ll do it. Mostly yes, sir. Back then, I’ll do it. Did it work? Yeah, but to 60% fidelity, it’s amazing if you could explain to your really smart employees, even if it’s no, and you’re overruling them, if you could explain it to them, I think that would be amazing. I think things like that are really, really helpful. And yeah, in my head, in terms of old school versus new school, I mean, you can tell people if you want, or we can inform people. People say really smart things too, especially different generations and benefiting from diversity as an example.

Yeah, but I mean, let’s say if I’m a leader and I’m high IQ, but maybe lower than average EQ, what can I do to improve my EQ?

Yeah. To me, it’s in the space of coaching motivation and coaching drive. It’s really hard to do that, but I’ve seen some success. I mean, I’d say I have more limited success when they’re lower IQ and dug in, but when they’re open-minded and humility opens up like so many things, when you get them to understand the impact you can have on somebody’s life, that by doing that you’re taking somebody’s best opportunity, that you’re the mentor now. The power of your voice, like what a compliment explained means to somebody. It’s one thing to say you did really well, but if you say this is what you did that really helped me and the team.

You can at times get people to understand this is the highest, best use of your skillset.
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I’m like, I’ve never been in this position. It’s not the same thing. I mean, I’d say there’s some level of success and when they show up, one thing I know coming from politics and big business, now to being a business coach, is one of my requisites is I will not have no know-it-alls and no a-holes. I’m not doing that anymore. I’ve already done that in politics and big business.  You know who never calls a business coach? Know-it-alls and a-holes. So people that show up are motivated, humble professionals. So we have a shot. Like you want to have a shot at that point because they’re showing up for some reason. If you knew it all, you wouldn’t talk to Steve or me, but it’s not my favorite. It’s not my favorite when, like, I heard a phrase this morning from a sales director who told me that his boss uses a phrase of I’m going to bring in the hammer and he uses it a lot. And I go, what does that mean? He goes, fire people. He goes, what do you think of that? I go, I freaking hate it. I hate it. Does it work? He goes, a couple of folks, maybe arguably, but the other ones are like either have a half foot out the door, they’re kind of cowering. I go, does it embarrass you as a director? He goes, It totally does.

Yeah. Driven people are not motivated by the hammer.

I mean, really rare.

A lot of people want to inspire the ones that are A-players that are really coachable and who have the drive and they just need a little bit of love. So that’s a good segue to my next question. How would you describe your coaching philosophy?

I think it’s an opportunity, it’s a place, it creates a safe forum for mostly successful, humble, driven people to discuss the things that are most salient and poignant to them in a safe environment. Everything I do individually is governed by confidentiality. If I’m in a group, I ask for sanctity of the conversations. I mean, I would like confidentiality, but if there’s 25 people in a room, you can’t always 100% get it, so I ask for sanctity. But I want them to understand I deal in trust, and I’m here because I care. I rarely take on a project or a person that I don’t think is really trying to do better, and that lights me up, so it changes my posture. Having a safe place for people to discuss the matters that are most important to them at work and a lot of times it gets into personal because it’s stress and it’s kids and it’s money and things like that.

Part of my philosophy is also humility. I’m hunting for it. I’m also hunting for lack of it because when I get humility, I’m humble too. I say things all the time like I never thought about it that way. I say sorry too. I said sorry last week. Somebody cancelled on me right as I was sitting down in my chair and I’d rushed to get there and it had happened before. And when the person’s assistant called me and told me the reason, I kinda didn’t listen. I went me first and I was like, okay, I appreciate it, but it’s the third time, I’m probably gonna charge a cancellation fee. And then about an hour later, I started getting those beads of sweat on my forehead and I was like, I just realized what she was telling me. It was an emergency.

And I called back and I freaking apologized and she was like, Mr. Warner. I’m like, I was trying to figure out what I could have done different. I’m like, you couldn’t have done anything different. You called me respectfully and it wasn’t horrible. I didn’t like lose my temper, but I just said, I apologize. I really do. And she said, I really appreciate it. It really means a lot. I want to be around humble, successful people. You do not have it all figured out, so I want it to be a safe forum.

Humility matters a lot. And then I think, also, part of the philosophy is, if you’re working with really smart people, it’s rarely,
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Let me hear it. Let me hear it next month too. ‘Cause I pick up things, like an example of fresh eyes and philosophy is an executive telling me the board is asking us question over question over question about all these budget asks we’re making. And the year before, they hadn’t asked any questions and he got exactly zero. This year they had a lot of questions and he was going for big money and I said, aren’t they saying yes, not no? And I don’t normally say things that completely flip the conversation on its head, but he goes, they are. That was the value of fresh eyes. And that is part of the philosophy is I do not take the position that my clients are in deficit. A lot of times they’re not. I’m expensive too. And sometimes they’ll hire me for deficit when like you want me to assess and get fresh eyes. But mostly it’s like, hey, I’m here to see if I could see something in nooks and crannies. And sometimes I do. So I think that’s part of the philosophy as well.

Love it. Talking about questions, what do you think is the most important question an entrepreneur should ask themselves?

I’m stealing from Good to Great again, because I love it. I mean, it’s probably proven to be one of the best business books, but what’s your genius? They describe it as your hedgehog, which to me is like a little bit of a weird word. I have to look it up on Google what hedgehog means, but the confluence of what you love the most and what you think are uniquely best out in the world. What is that? Can you sell that? Can you make that stick and then go do it? But I think that’s the question you need to ask yourself is, do I do something better or best and do I happen to love it? ‘Cause if you do, it’s game on.

Yeah. That’s powerful. When you love it, it delivers value and makes money. If you can do all three, then you got it made, basically.

Yeah. I think the second time I’ve quoted by 21-year-old daughter, Alex, but she was saying to me, she’s a junior at University of Tennessee. She’s an advertising major. And she’s like, I don’t know about sales. I don’t know if I want to like sit around and call people all day on something. I was like, you ever felt really strongly about something and felt like you really had something to offer? And she had one job actually at a boutique that she really liked and she won a bunch of sales contests because they had really cool stuff to sell. I love selling my coaching products. I love it. I’m passionate about it. I’m good at matching up with people who are like, Oh, I actually need that. That’d be amazing. Yeah. I mean, I think if you can get in that spot where you love somebody, you know damn well, you’re really good at it. You got a real shot as an entrepreneur.

Yeah. I often talk about this. I read a quote many years ago from an author who talked about sales and the mindset of sales. And he said that I can sell someone on a product or service to the degree that I believe in it. If I’m a 100% sure that it’s going to help that person, then I can close the sale at 100% certainty. And I find this to also be true and maybe not scientifically, but definitely experientially.

Yeah. It’s not for you, you’re the host. I’m not the host, but I think your question, but I am a geek of a coach and we’re having this amazing coaches quarter. You could tweak that question just as easily for sales because I would have the same answer. What does anybody go into sales with? What’s the most important question somebody in sales should ask? I might have the same answer. What is your company best at? And then I’d probably take the way you said it from the author, which is like, what do you really feel strongly about? And you know they’re going to love it. Like go sell that. You don’t have to own the company. Go sell that. What do you see? How good you are at it?

Yeah, that’s a great thought to have. That’s awesome. So if people would like to learn more about your philosophy, how you coach, maybe reach out to you, get in touch with you, they have a question. Where can they find you?

That’s nice of you. Thank you very much. My website is nickwarnerconsulting.com. Warner like Warner brothers. And my podcast is called Together at the Top. And I interview people from all different industries. And I’m trying to actually focus on different stage of career also, and not just interview people at the top, but interview, I mean, some of my clients in particular, like 35, 42, and I’m like, wow, they’re not running things yet, but they are really making things happen in a way that I want to put voice to. So I’m getting more and more excited about bringing in some, it’s not always younger, but like middle stage career, but really killing it for middle stage career, hearing their thoughts.

So you like to work with people who are already successful and they have the hunger to take it to the next level?

I like motivated professionals at all levels. I mean, I’m not inexpensive, so that probably tilts me toward the middle and up, but I make room for sometimes the people don’t know their lower fee, I just send them a lower bill. And like some of these young people light me up, Steve, honestly, and I want what they have. I want to understand their pressures or technology, their verbiage or phrases, how they think about things. Like I read in the Wall Street Journal, I read trends, but I want to know it from them too.

So I want to be of service to people. So I definitely leave space in my calendar and my body for helping people that earn in. Like there was a kid at the gym, they hired him for sales and I didn’t mean to notice him, but like from the first day, he always had his tie and then really quickly he was in a corner, he was in an office selling and I like slowly but surely kind of like put myself in front of him and one day he goes, man, I would love to hire you someday. I go, let’s start next week because I can’t afford you. I go, I assure you, you can’t. And we’ve been working on it for about three years and he lights me up. I don’t know, he pays me some nominal amount, but it’s not nominal to him. I work with emerging leaders and leaders up to the CEO level, but I also love to work, not down. It’s not down in humanity, just maybe down in price and age.

Okay, awesome. So if you listen to this, you just learned that you get a chance if you’re a kind of person that inspires Nick, then reach out to him and he might take you on as an apprentice. So, Nick, thank you for coming and sharing your wisdom. So, Nick Warner, a seasoned business coach, former entrepreneur and managing partner of a big lobby firm, successful lobby firm. If you enjoyed this show, then don’t forget to hit subscribe on YouTube and follow us on LinkedIn and give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you are. And stay tuned because every week we get a great entrepreneur or subject matter expert who shares their special framework with us. So thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

Adam Coughlin, Co-founder, CMO, and Managing Partner of York IE, is on a mission to help startups beat the odds by building strong, capital-efficient brands that resonate with their markets.

We explore Adam’s Drumbeat Marketing Framework:
Messaging & Positioning, Develop Unique Point of View, Execution, and Scorekeeping.
He shares why brand consistency beats shiny-object syndrome, how vertical AI is redefining SaaS, and why startups need to balance storytelling with measurable impact. Adam also explains how to foster entrepreneurial thinking early and why founders must lead with a deep sense of purpose.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Adam Coughlin, co-founder, CMO and managing partner of York IE, where he works with startups on foundational messaging, content, communications, go-to-market strategy, website and digital marketing, revenue operations, and corporate storytelling. Welcome to the show, Adam.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. Appreciate it.

Yeah, you guys are really a full-service shop. You do almost everything. So tell me, how are you guys unique, and what is it that makes you a superior solution for people?

Yeah, absolutely. So the founding team of York IE, we all work together at a company called Dine here in New Hampshire that did the domain name system. And we built that company to about a hundred million of annual recurring revenue, got acquired by Oracle. While we were inside of Oracle, we kind of reflected on the growth journey that we took at Dine. And we felt that a lot of the legacy institutions that we turned to for growth help, whether that was our investors, our advisors, our vendors, they were operating out of antiquated models so that were really good for them, but not necessarily for us as the operators. And so that’s what we wanted to disrupt. So in 2019, we launched York IE. We are an advisory and investment firm. So we help technology companies grow. We do that through investing in early stage exclusively B2B software companies. And then because we were operators, we also built a strategic advisory firm that does strategy and execution across the functional areas of R&D, go to market and G&A.

Because we feel like we want to roll up our sleeves and help companies be successful.
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Yeah. So you’re basically investing companies that advise them, help to improve them, and some you just advise them and don’t invest. So it’s a combination.

Combination. Exactly. Right. And I think in addition to the advise, it’s really important to get across that we do the execution because that is where companies need help. Especially early stage companies. A lot of those teams are small, they’re dynamic, they have a good strategy, they just need help and take some things off their plates and we’re there to help them with that.

Sounds great. So that leads to my question. What is your personal “Why” and how are you manifesting it in your business?

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a great question. And my personal “Why” is I love entrepreneurs. I think that they are both visionary and builders and that they are pursuing their dreams in the effort to create something and build something that makes the world better. And

I think that if they build good companies, then they hire good employees. Good companies have impacts on communities. Good companies build wealth.
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Yeah, well, I couldn’t resonate more with that. I call it Business Covid or these companies that fail, and I think they can be saved as well with the right structures and processes and approaches. So let’s talk about how you do that because you do a lot of stuff. But one of the things that we talked about was your framework called Drumbeat Marketing and marketing is difficult these days because there’s so much noise out there. So how do you overcome that noise? How do you get your message heard? I like the visual metaphor of drumbeat marketing, you’re beating drums. So how do you beat the drum and how do you get the message resonating?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is actually a concept that I came up with in my previous life when I was a journalist. And so I was covering the New Hampshire primary, and in New Hampshire, we’re the first in the nation primary, so there’s a lot of retail politics that happens. And I talked to Jon Huntsman, who was running for president in 2016, former governor of Utah, former ambassador to China, and he said, in New Hampshire, you have to shake someone’s hand 10 times before they’ll consider voting for you, and then 10 more before they actually do. And that really resonated with me because it’s true about messaging.

Only when you are sick of saying something does it actually begin to resonate with anybody outside of your own walls. We live in a very noisy world. And what happens with a lot of new companies is that they get a little bit of shiny object syndrome. They say this, they say that, they’ve said everything and they’re known for nothing. And so that drumbeat marketing framework is all about discipline. So the first step in that is coming up with your messaging and positioning. We work with a lot of founders that take a product-out approach to their company. They had a problem personally, they solved it, they then assume that everybody else needs that solution. But the reality is that every company is but one player in a larger ecosystem.

We always advocate that you should take a market-in approach. Understand the market landscape, the competitive landscape, and how you fit into that.
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Because the best companies are ascending as their market is expanding. What you don’t want to be is if you do the hard work of actually making a successful company, you don’t want to be on the up as the market you are in is beginning to be commoditized and shrinking. And so taking that market in approach and how you position, and the way that that’s really valuable is that you begin to think about other things besides yourself. You begin to put yourself in the shoes of your customers and your prospects and you begin to think about their perspective, which I think is very valuable for every company.

Love it. So, basically, it’s very easy to fall in love with your product. They say that you should fall in love with your market instead and to conquer this urge of this personal bias about what you think other people will react to test the markets. Okay, so market in, whereas product-out, that makes sense. So what’s the next step?

Yeah, so then once you’ve kind of surveyed the market and the competitive landscape, you’re in a better position of power to see sort of where is the green field space and then what is our unique point of view. And I think that this is very important and it’s only going to become more important in the world of AI and marketing. Like there is just so much noise and the barrier to putting stuff out is basically zero now. And so then what is going to resonate? What is going to have you stand out? It is having a unique point of view that you become known for and you’re doing that because you’re telling that story. And that’s the key word, storytelling. Particularly in technology, we can often think about speeds and feeds, but at the end of the day, no matter what you’re selling, you’re selling to a human being. And since the dawn of man, people have learned and engaged with stories. And so being able to tell that story,

back your story up with data that's unique to you and your company, and it's a story that is unique, not just to yourself, but into the broader market, you're going to be in a really good position to be successful.
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Yeah, I love it. And it’s so easy, especially when you’re a tech entrepreneur, you may have an engineering background, or you may be a very smart mathematician and you want to focus on objective facts rather than stories, kind of have the implication that maybe it’s made up and no, but this is the medium of communication. It is through stories. So you have to articulate the stories. That’s very important. So what’s that? You articulated the story. You have a unique point of view. So that’s kind of a differentiation already through your story. Then what’s next? How do you get this Drumbeat Marketing to be impactful?

Now once you have your story and this point of view that you want to get across, you need to disseminate it through all sorts of integrated marketing channels. People consume information in a variety of different mediums. If you’ve done your marketing research, you kind of have an understanding of where are the watering holes that my prospects are gathering. And then you can tell that story, that point of view, in the way that they’re going to consume it the most. Sometimes, though, you’ll talk to a company and they’ll say, here’s my marketing strategy, and it’s just a bunch of different channels. The biggest hurdle for success for companies is that they have such fragmented audiences. And if you try to reach those audiences in the 10 or 12 different places that they’re gathering and you tell them 10 or 12 different stories, then they have no idea who you are. But if you take that story that we talked about and now you just kind of slice and dice it up in the different ways, whether that be social, whether that be media relations, whether that be ads.

Now that bubbles up and it’s telling one story, you’re just reaching them in different ways. And I think that’s the best way to sort of gain that strength and not introduce confusion to the audience. And to your point that you made, depending on the founder, it’s also about finding the channels that you’re comfortable with. I’ve worked with a lot of deeply technical people. They weren’t necessarily super excited to do a podcast like this, but maybe they’re doing client meetings. And now this is where some of the technology can be helpful. And now you say something really good in a client meeting on a Zoom, you can record that, turn it into a blog post and put it out there in a way that’s more natural to you. So I think it’s getting creative, but it’s about telling that story.

Yeah, and it’s so important. I mean, you see big companies, fortune-ranked companies, when they rebrand, for example, then they make this huge campaign, they plaster the airwaves, and the internet, television, everywhere, they push it at the same time so that people, wherever they are, they’re going to get those impressions from multiple directions and then it’s going to start to create that knock-on effect of breaking through with their consciousness and start to make a mark. And if you just sporadically do it, then it’s just part of the noise and nothing happens.

Absolutely. Like, we’ll talk to a company and they’ll have a big announcement, maybe a new product, maybe a funding announcement. And then I always say, great, we will help you with that launch, but what’s the next announcement? Because you can’t go dark for a period of time. Most of us aren’t launching the iPod or something revolutionary. It’s that consistency. Like a brand isn’t made in a moment. A brand is when you look at a company over three, six, nine, 12 months, and you just see all of this momentum. Success is a giant boulder that needs to be pushed and it’s really hard to get it going. But once it starts building some of that momentum, suddenly it’s going downhill. And now

everybody wants to be a part of pushing it. Nobody wants to be a part at the beginning. And so you just need that consistency and discipline over time to have it actually be meaningful.
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Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, and then how do you iterate? How do you know that you are on the right track and you are doing well or how can you do even better?

The part that I always find when it comes to marketing and storytelling is that it has to be both art and science. And I think it can be very easy for creatives and people like that to like, hey, we’ve done something now we want to go on and create something new and do something else. And it’s like, well, like what is working? And so that is really important to get some of the fundamental dashboards and reporting and things like a HubSpot CRM and things like that so you can kind of track what’s effective. Because like in this world that we live in now where there aren’t infinite resources and everybody has to work smarter because they can’t work any harder, you have to know exactly, the impact of the things that you’re doing.

I say art and science because I don’t believe that you can skew too far to just the data. Because again, this is about human beings and storytelling and, trends and data can put us in the right direction. But at the end of the day, there has to be some things that are being done without immediate giant ROI. And I think that’s one of the things that is a struggle for early stage companies is that you need to thread the needle between sort of brand building, which takes time and lead generation, which is like more immediate because you don’t have an infinite runway and finding that balance where you don’t take too long, but you also don’t become too transactional that you cannibalize your potential of a long brand. And I think that’s where that marriage between the art and science is really important.

Yeah, that’s really tough, especially when you’re burning cash and how do you build the long game and how do you then keep feeding the beast as well? Wow. Okay, so let me take a step back. So this is the framework, like messaging, positioning, that’s Drumbeat Marketing Framework. Messaging and positioning, develop unique point of view, execution and scorekeeping, so that’s great. Now, what you said about the efficiency of, especially startups is really important, and you talk about capital efficient versus growth at all costs approach. So what do you mean by that? And how does one become capital efficient and keep capital efficient growth?

Yeah. So I think that like, again, I’m in the tech space. And so there was a period of time, say a few years ago, where everything was about growth. How do you become the next decacorn? They used to have the triple-triple, double-double model. Like triple your growth, then triple your growth, then triple your growth, then double, then double. And it was growth at all costs. Like HubSpot, for example, when it was growing, it was spending 120% of its revenue on go-to-market sales and marketing. And some of that was driven by sort of the investment profile. Like these funds raised so much money, they invested so much money, they needed that decacorn to get the return. And then it kind of became clear that maybe that’s not the most efficient way to grow a business.

And kind of added to our problem of those models were like, hey, if one company becomes that as an investment firm win, even if the other nine in our portfolio fail. Now I think there’s like this more movement towards what we call like Rule of 40 companies, which is like, hey, can you, between growth and profitability, get to about 40%? So that might be like 20% growth, 20% profitability, 10% growth, 30% profitability. And that is just prioritizing sort of like efficiency and pragmatic growth, which I think at the end of the day, we kind of lost sight of like what a healthy company looks like. And I think healthy companies give the entrepreneur and the founders more option. And I think

when a founder and an entrepreneur feels like they have a lot of options for their company, that's in a really good place to be.
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I love it. This “Rule of 40”, I’ve not heard of it. So basically your profitability and growth should add up to at least 40.

Correct.

And it could be any combination.

Right. And I think that flexibility, as opposed to like we needed to have 200% growth. Well, there’s only so many certain ways. And like, at the end of the day, like these companies that are seeking these giant billion dollar valuations, like have to go achieve them too. And it’s actually very hard to scale at that way with like a very strong foundation. And I think that “Rule of 40” allows you to build. You may get to a point at some point where you’re like, wow, this foundation is good, this business is healthy. There is this opportunity to go for it, but it’s not go for it or fail.

Yeah. Well, I love this balanced approach. So how do people even learn this stuff? Where should entrepreneurs go and learn how to be an entrepreneur? Do you think it could be taught to people?

Yes, I think that, yeah, I’ve talked with this woman named Dr. Julie Gerner. She’s a professional coach and she, she often says that businesses fail most likely from internal factors, not external factors. And being a successful entrepreneur means that you can handle adversity. You can iterate and change in mid-flight. You can handle failure and rejection and learn from them. You are persistent and determined. You can operate in chaos. You can motivate people.

These are skills that I think are best learned through experience and they are obviously the kind of skills that will help you navigate successfully in a business, but they're also the skills that will help you navigate successfully in life.
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So if only experience can teach entrepreneurship, resilience, overcoming adversity, then how can you teach it? So can it be reduced to a theoretical formula?

Well, I think that the mindset can be taught. And you’re seeing this. My brother works at the Magnuson Center of Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth College. And we’ve always been in the space and you’ve obviously seen tons of successful college age students starting companies. But now he’s seeing that entrepreneurial mindset that creates your own path and the frameworks to that, how you view things, even just the exposure to that way of thinking, moving down market and high schools are beginning to teach entrepreneurship, beginning to have business pitch competitions, beginning to celebrate some of those things. I always remember a story of an entrepreneur that when he was in grade school, he bought a pack of gum for a dollar and he sold each slice or each piece of gum for a dollar.

So he was making profit on his gum pieces and his teacher yelled at him and told him to stop doing that. But he was laying like, well, if I showed promise in sports or music, I would be celebrated. I would have been nurtured. But when I was showing promise in business, it was kind of rejected. And I think that mindset is changing. And I think that’s just going to help kids have longer period of time for that experience with a little bit less risk, but then also being exposed to sort of the frameworks and some of these things. I have a nephew who’s a freshman in high school and he’s reading Atomic Habits in some of these books that I was never thinking about when I was 15 years old. And I think that’s a great headstart for them.

Yeah. Atomic Habits is great. And I like to think of businesses that they should also be developing atomic habits. Stack their habits and make sure that they implement the process and they make it stick and then build the next one top. Okay, but we digress. Another topic I wanted to ask you about is entrepreneurship. A lot of people talk about AI as being a big engine of entrepreneurship and people can now use AI to create a company with a much lower cost base. So what is your view on this, on how AI can be an engine of entrepreneurship? And also, what is your view, it’s kind of two questions in one, about SaaS companies? Are they being threatened by AI? Is there going to be a disruption there?

Yeah, so I think AI is going to have an impact in entrepreneurship in two ways. I think when it comes to SaaS companies and the products that they build, we have as an investment firm always been very interested in vertical SaaS, taking sort of the software approach to legacy institutions or industries that were ripe for disruption like pest management, or we work with a company that’s involved in the shellfish industry. But now I think vertical AI is gonna be a real big opportunity for companies. So I think of horizontal AI, like the long, large language models of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.

They’re very horizontal for certain things. Vertical AI is gonna be when you have very specific data sets that you’re working in that are in very specific industries, and those will end up being the platforms of which decisions in those spaces like law, finance, healthcare are made. So I think companies that are thinking about vertical AI are gonna be super successful. Then I think AI itself is going to help kind of manifest this sort of efficient growth that we talked about. When I worked at Dine, which I talked about earlier, I was part of a 40-person marketing team. Like, I just don’t see that happening because teams are gonna be able to leverage technology and tools to get them a little bit farther. And again, there’s a saying like AI is not going to take your job. Somebody that knows how to leverage AI and get the most out of it is going to. Having those understandings of how to do them. Like we mentioned, you’re doing a Zoom call, you have a great point, it’s recorded, you’ve now taken that transcript, you’ve put it into a Jasper or a ChatGPT, you’ve now made a blog post, you’ve edited it with your own personal touch and now you’ve done that. In the past, that could have been a multi-hour, multi-person process that can now be done pretty instantaneously.

It will impact, you’re seeing AI being leveraged obviously on go-to-market teams, you’re seeing it on development teams, you’re seeing it even in back office functions. It’s just gonna give people who have the strategic thought and the vision an opportunity to sort of make themselves stronger, which I think will be ultimately a positive. It’ll eliminate the barrier to entry and we may be entering into the golden age of entrepreneurship. Like the hurdles to spin up a team and a product and these things are lower than ever. And I think there’s a saying, the riches are in the niches. And so maybe those companies don’t become the decacorns. Maybe they’re very specific to a geography or an industry or a vertical or whatever. The opportunity for entrepreneurship, which is why I think teaching those skill sets earlier. Like if you’re a young person, that’s just going to be wait to be told what to do. You’re going to be struggling.

If you have that ambition, you have that ability to dot connect and see different trends and put them together into something new, leverage AI to help you magnify that, it's going to be a wonderful future for those people.
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Yeah, no, I think AI is a huge thing. And also outsourcing. I think outsourcing is also a very powerful force because when you can have people in South America, in Asia, in India, Europe, they all can work for your company part-time and you can basically pick experts. You don’t have to commit to having them full-time, potentially much lower salaries.

As an entrepreneur, you can leverage it much better than as a big company and that’s also a huge good thing.

I think that’s such a great point. And especially in this world that we’re living in right now, I’m in New Hampshire, I know you’re in another location. It’s like a global workforce. But like so many companies are being built remote first, whether they’re full-time employees or whether they’re outsource vendors. And I think that skill set for the entrepreneur and the founder, the ability to galvanize the team and get everybody rowing in the same direction when they’re all in disparate is going to be really important for them to understand. But I think that it does allow the teams to be built and that combination, I think, of a great idea, leveraging technology and outsourced expertise is going to be the model for sure.

All right. With that, let me ask you my final question. What is the most important question any entrepreneur should be asking themselves?

Steve, I think you nailed it at the beginning of this interview, the “Why.” There are a lot of easier ways to make money than being an entrepreneur. I’m a big Dave Goggins fan, and that guy puts himself in a lot of extreme situations. And when you are running a hundred mile race and you’re at 65 miles and it sucks, you can’t lie to yourself. You have to know why you are there. And that’s the same thing with entrepreneurship. When you are late at night, it’s three o’clock in the morning, you’re awake because you’re worried about the 18 different problems that you have. You have to know why you are doing it. Because it’s going to make you uncomfortable. It’s going to push you beyond what you think you are capable of.

And if that’s your “Why,” like you want to do something, you want to make the most out of life, you want to have like learning and skills and have an impact and feel like you’ve built something, then you’re in the right spot. But if it’s just to make money or to be on the cover of TechCrunch or whatever, like you’re gonna have to kind of reevaluate because it’s not always as glamorous as that. But that’s a good point for everything. Why did you get married? Why did you have children? Like nothing worthwhile in life is easy. And in those difficult moments, if you can be able to dwell upon like, this is why you’re doing this, it’ll make it all more fruitful.

So is it really a spiritual dimension that we are bringing into companies where we asked “Why?” Is this that we want to provide people with not just the intellectual stimulation, not just the financial, obviously, you have to feed your family, your career progression, but then the bigger “Why” is it’s more of a spiritual thing. Can you emotionally connect to a purpose that is bigger than yourself and doesn’t necessarily have to be religious. It can be something that you really strongly believe in, it’s kind of a spiritual dimension.

Yeah, I mean, literally, life is just about how you fill your time. And right, like I love my wife, I love my children, yet I spend a lot of time at work. And so if I’ve chosen that I have to spend that time somewhere besides there, I want it to be meaningful. And it’s one of the reasons when we go back to the Drumbeat Marketing plan and having that market in and having that unique point of view, we try to always bubble that vision up to something more meaningful beyond just the thing you’re selling. We worked with a company that did digital notary. What we’re trying to do is provide peace of mind for people in their most intense moments. Like when do you need a notary? When you’re buying something, when you’re doing like some medical thing or something, like there’s these really big moments of your life. And if we can make that process easier for you, then we’re allowing you to be focused on the biggest moment. It’s that connection, It’s that thing. That’s what people want to work for. They want to work with people and they want to work on something. I think they want to work with something that’s meaningful. And that’s the little bit extra that gets you to run through the wall, as opposed to just stopping and saying like, eh, it’s kind of hard. And that’s in the end of it, that’s the difference between the companies that make it and the companies that don’t. And so that’s why I think  it’s a really important thing to have.

Love it. Love this metaphor running through walls. This is very powerful. Adam Coughlin, co-founder, CMO and managing partner of York IE, helping startups to go to market and beat the drum on marketing and increase their revenue and tell their story. Thanks very much for sharing your wisdom on the show. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you follow us on YouTube, you subscribe as well, and give us a review, please, on Apple Podcasts, so we can beat the drum louder going forward. So Adam, thanks for coming and thank you for listening.

Thank you very much for having me, Steve. And if anybody’s interested, we are just york.ie. And please hit me up on LinkedIn. I’d love to carry this conversation on with anybody.

Yeah, do check out york.ie and you’ll find great resources. Thank you, Adam.

Thank you, Steve.

Dave Molenda, Business and Sales Coach, Speaker, Best-selling Author, and Host of the Positive Polarity Podcast, is driven by a mission to help business owners grow intentionally by strengthening their teams and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

We dive into Dave’s journey and his ST+ICE=P Formula, which stands for Strengthen the Team + Improve the Customer Experience = Profit. Dave explains how focusing first on internal team engagement leads to outstanding customer experiences, which then fuels sustainable business growth. We also discuss lessons from his book Growing On Purpose, why most businesses grow by accident rather than design, how to spot hidden blind spots, and when letting go of the wrong customers is the right move for your company’s health and future.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest here is Dave Molenda, who is a business and sales coach, speaker, best-selling author and the host of the wonderful Positive Polarity podcast. Dave, welcome to the show.

Hi, Steve. how are you today?

I’m doing pretty good because I’m meeting you, so it’s already injecting some positivity in my day.

Well good, I’m honored to be hanging out with you and thanks to you for being on our episode 260. I loved our question, “does your business have Covid?” That was a blast. So that was a great episode. So, for anyone listening, if you wonder if your business has Covid, I’m not going to tell you anything else other than head over and listen to Steve’s answer to that question. It was awesome.

Well, hopefully your business doesn’t have Covid because it’s a potentially lethal malady.

Exactly. For sure.

But it was, it really was a fun episode and we created a lot of snippets that we put on our website, so we definitely are excited about it.

Awesome.

But we’re not going to talk about this because we are going to talk about your stuff and what you are doing because it is at least as good, if not better, and we are going to dive into your frameworks, your book and all your experiences, your “Why” and all that good stuff. So, are you ready?

I’m ready. I got my seatbelt on. I’m all set here so we can go as fast or as slow as you want.

Okay, so let’s fast track into my favorite question. What is your personal “Why,” Dave? And how are you manifesting it in your practice and in your business?

Yeah, for sure. I tell you, it’s interesting, Steve. I love the name of your podcast, using a blueprint as a framework, because I can’t believe how many people start and try to grow a business without a blueprint, without some kind of framework. So I love unpacking that with you on my show. But my “Why” is for all the people that are out there that are so good at what they do, they’re good at their craft, they’re good at their skill, whether it’s building a house, whether it’s selling something, whatever it is, making something, they’re so good at that. But boy, they struggle when asking the question about, how do I grow this business? How do I create a team? How do I develop this team? How do I make this a long-lasting business?

So my “Why” is really coming alongside of those people. Again,

genuine people, really good at what they do, but they very often are struggling with what to do once they have gotten to the end so far.
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Yeah, I mean, customer is king. So definitely, I’m curious about how do you start with the customer and how do you strengthen companies through looking at their customer service?

Yeah, for sure.

Tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, and the interesting thing is we’re all customers to somebody in our own as a consumer. So, we know when we’ve been treated bad. We know when we’ve had a great experience. And let’s just look at it from a super simple perspective. If you have a great experience at a restaurant, you’re going to tell a bunch of people. Just like if you have had a bad experience. If I come up and say, Steve, I’m going to be up in your neck of the woods in a week or so, where would be a great place to eat? You’re not going to tell me the place that you had a bad experience unless you don’t like me. You’re going to tell me about the place that you had a great experience with, and then I’m going to go there, and then I’m going to tell people. So having that good customer experience is so crucial to pretty much any business. And that’s where we love to kind of put on the glasses of the customer and see what they’re seeing and help business owners understand their business from the customer’s perspective.

Okay. So you have a framework around this, haven’t you?

Yes.

How to strengthen and develop the customer experience. So tell me a little bit about this framework and how that works and how can our listeners visualize what they need to do with it.

For sure. Again, there’s three primary parts to everybody’s business. There’s the product or service that you make or sell or whatever you do. There’s something you do, which is one piece. There’s the customer that buys it, and then there’s the team that actually creates that experience. So I wrote a book called Growing On Purpose and we found the connection between a strong team creates a strong customer experience just like a weak team provides a weak experience. So we created an easy formula of ST, which is strengthen the team, and then plus ICE which is improving your customer experience, equals P for profit. And it’s pretty safe to say that if you’re looking for profit, the two places that you really need to invest your time in is strengthening your team and improving your customer’s experience. Because all the research that we did shows that those two are very strong. And I’m guessing you probably run into a lot of people, Steve, that they focus a lot on the product or service. They’re a master at what they do, which is great, but they forget to invest time in the team and they forget to invest time in that customer’s experience.

So again, wrote the book to be able to help people to see how they can strengthen the team, some pieces around that, and how to improve that customer experience.
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Yeah, and what I think Jeff Bezos speaks about is that you have to start with your team, because if you have a happy team who are being treated well and who are excited about your mission, your “Why,” then they are going to project that out to the customer and then they’re going to take care of the customer and then both of them is going to work. It’s very hard to imagine that you mistreat your team and then they’re going to take care of the customer. It’s probably highly unlikely.

Yeah. And I totally agree with that. And it’s funny because as a consumer, we just switched mobile phone carriers and we went from one company to another, won’t mention names, but interestingly enough, the new company, the gentleman that we were working with, he is actually leaving the company and going to a competitor. So, his experience, my experience as a customer was average to below average. And you could just tell that there wasn’t the engagement, there wasn’t the enthusiasm, there wasn’t the excitement. And I think that happens so much more often than we as business owners. We think our team is as strong as we are. And I speak all over the country about this, Steve. And it’s funny because Gallup says right now that one in three people on your team show up engaged in their job, which means two out of three people are not engaged. And everywhere that I speak around the country on this, people always come up to me and they’re like, well, that’s not my team.

That’s not my team. And I’m like, hey, I’m not saying it is or isn’t, but somewhere there’s a bunch of disengaged people and chances are pretty high that you have some on your team. So

we invest a ton of energy to make sure that team is as strong as possible because like I said earlier, a strong team creates a strong experience for that customer.
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So what are the key ingredients to having, I mean I understand the mystery shopping or secret shopping thing, but that’s more of a control mechanism. But you’re just quality controlling of what they are doing. How do you get them to do it better? What are the key ingredients to great customer experience?

Yeah, no, it’s a great question. And it starts with the engaged employee. Like I said, there’s engaged people, there’s not engaged, and then actively disengaged. I mean, if you don’t treat your team like a customer, I mean, I always tell the people that I run into, there’s an external customer, which is your client, and then there’s an internal customer, which is your team. And it’s crazy how few people really consider and think that way. So the first thing is to consider your team as important as your customer and treating them fair and treating them with respect and treating them with being open with them, helping them as much as you can. It’s not like rocket science. When we did the research, it wasn’t like these complicated things.

I mean, a team member, they want to feel connected to the rest of their team. So that’s a simple piece. They want to feel like they are making a difference. So they want to know what the values and mission are of the company. So if you don’t have those, I always laugh, I tell people that know anything about golf, just imagine going to a golf course that was absolutely beautiful. It’s just the best, prettiest golf course you’ve ever seen. The difference is, Steve, is it doesn’t have a green and it doesn’t have a hole. And so you’re standing at the tee box and they say, go ahead, tee off. And you’re just like, well, where do I tee off? And they’re just like, well, tee off anywhere. And that’s how it is when a company doesn’t have a goal, individual goal, a corporate goal, some kind of goal for that. I’m sure you talk about goals like crazy in your Summit OS, because again, without goals, what good is it? Well, we need to be able to have goals for our team members as well.

And sometimes they’re financial, sometimes they’re behavioral goals. And I think the big goal that a lot of people miss, Steve, is the attitude goal. We really look at the attitude to make sure, because again, we’re all consumers. Think of the last time that you were buying something somewhere and you were not getting a very good experience. Maybe it was a restaurant, maybe it was a clothing store, wherever, but it really caused a negative experience to the point a lot of people, they’re just not gonna go back. So we’re trying

to do everything we can to make sure that people come back and it all starts with that engaged employee.
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Yeah. Well, yesterday I had one such experience where I decided never to go back. I’m not going to name names, but it was very disappointing. So anyhow, I like your analogy with the green and the hole. I’m thinking maybe the green is the core values, is the foundation where you start. And then the goal is maybe your BHAG, your Big Hairy Audacious Goal, at the end of the fairway. It’s a really good analogy.

Yeah, and hopefully the goal isn’t just to get to five o’clock so I can punch out and go home. Hopefully the goal is not to just get a paycheck so that I can pay my bills. I’m hoping, and we train, there’s gotta be deeper stuff than that. Whatever bad experience you had yesterday probably was because there wasn’t a very good team behind it or an individual behind it or a leader behind it because the best companies today, look at Google, the top 10 customer experience type companies. You’re seeing things going on that 10 years ago you never saw. And because people are going to whatever length they need to improve that customer’s experience.

We have some people in different industries that are putting their money where their mouth is, Steve. They’re saying, if you don’t like it, you don’t pay for it, whatever it is, whether it’s a service, a product. And we’re so worried about the 2%, and the research shows like about 2% of people will take advantage of that. Well, the amount of positive movement and the amount of momentum that you get from the other 98% of people that are gonna get this concept, the 2% ruin it. So I suggest to the companies that we work with and people listening today, don’t worry about those 2%. The 98% are going to more than cover you. There’s so few people that are out there to take advantage of you and yes, they are out there. Maybe you know a bunch of them, but the vast majority of people,

they want a good service and the best part is they'll pay more for good service.
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I agree with you. And what people forget when they think about the 2% that maybe cancels or whatever, that those people are not helping themselves. Because if you provide the good experience, then they found someone who can help them. They should treasure you and keep you in their good graces. That they found a reliable someone who’s helping them. Why did they even cancel? It doesn’t make sense. So if you don’t provide good service, then they are right to cancel. So it’s important to provide good service. But I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s not about you. It’s about them. Maybe they have a scarcity mindset or something like that. So Dave, I’d like to switch gears and talk a little bit about your book.

Sure.

A couple of questions I have about it. First of all, the title ,Positive Polarity, which is also the name of your company. And I read a little bit on your website about the polarity, the opposites, and the dynamic. But I’d like you to explain it in your own words. Why did you choose this as the name of your company, your podcast? What’s important about polarity?

Sure, for sure. And we started with positive because again, the only people, Steve, that like to hang out with negative people are negative people. So they all kind of gather somewhere where we don’t want to be, which is fine. I mean, if you’re a negative person and you’re okay with it, you know what, that’s up to you. But I love hanging out with positive people. I love seeing and talking to people that look and see the glasses half full, not half empty. It’s just really a perspective. So the positive piece was definitely something that we wanted. And the polarity is interesting because in today’s world, we’re looking for the easiest way out. Most businesses, most companies, you hear words like low-hanging fruit. You hear words like easy opportunities. I don’t know about you, but I get inundated on LinkedIn and they’re telling me, hey, for five minutes a day, I can make you millions of dollars. And it’s just like, it doesn’t even make sense. There’s gotta be some friction.

There’s gotta be some opportunity where something’s hard. I mean, it’s hard to grow a business in today’s world. So the polarity piece is we try to challenge the natural way to do things, the easy way. The worst words that I hear is, that’s just how we do it around here. My grandpa did it this way. My dad did it this way. I’m going to do it this way. There’s no real challenge there. And it might have worked back then, which is great, but what worked 50 years ago probably won’t work nearly as well today without some type of modification. So we brought the polarity word in just as an opposing force to that natural way of, hey, let’s just take the easy way out on this. And it’s just been a great ride to find people that are buying into that process as well. I like it because I think about this expedition, I’m trying to remember the name of the adventurer in 1911 who went to the South Pole and got stuck in the ice. Before the actual expedition, he put a little ad in the Times and he basically described the challenges of this expedition. They’re looking for people who are not afraid to die and who are willing to be frozen for like two years and be in terrible hardship.

Wait, show me that ad, I’m all in on that. Dying and freezing to death.

A lot of people applied because they just were attracted to this challenge. That was exciting. There was something to work with there. And I’m thinking that you’re probably right. If you want the right kind of clients, then the offer is not that you take the pill and you wake up slim tomorrow. That’s not credible. And you don’t want to attract those people that are hoping for this kind of results. You want someone who’s willing to work hard, willing to get out of their comfort zone and do the work. So tell me, Dave, what is the Positive Polarity book about and what prompted you to write it?

Yeah, so you’re talking about silver bullets and secret sauce. That’s what everybody wants. They want that super easy opportunity and I haven’t found it. So again, if it’s out there, great. And you’re listening here, let us know. We can both learn from it. We wrote the book called Growing On Purpose because it is one of those books that I run into again a lot of people that grow by mistake. They don’t have that blueprint. So you ask them the question, how did you get where you are? And they’re like, you know what, I don’t know, hard work, a lot of hours. Well, what were the steps or can you replicate that if you needed to? Or if somebody was going to give you $10 million to franchise your business, could you walk them through these steps? And so many people couldn’t. So people are growing by mistake. And I said, when we were writing the book Growing On Purpose, it was like, let’s talk about being intentional with our growth. And

the two areas that we focused on were the team and the customer.
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And those are two fixtures in your process that you control them. You control what the customer does and doesn’t do to a large extent. You control what your team does and doesn’t do. And if you have, like, that’s why I love this podcast, the blueprint, without a blueprint, hey, you know what, who builds a house without a blueprint? Let’s just kind of put a wall here and a wall here and let’s just see what happens. I mean, it’s not how this works, but yet this is how people do it in business all the time. And it’s unfortunate. So I was hoping, and again, we became an Amazon number one bestseller in three different categories. So it was cool to see people are like using these pieces to learn how to treat my team and how to treat my customer. And I thought it was common sense, Steve, I really did. But I realized that we may know it up here, but we’re not actually practicing it. So that’s, I think, the power is to have a blueprint and follow it and then see what happens.

Yeah. I love this bipolar focus, the team and the customer, the internal customer, the external customer, or you can even say the internal team and the external team, because your customers can become your missionaries for you if you give them a good product or good service. So that’s a really great perspective. I have a couple of questions to you, Dave, because you’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time and you’ve been through thick and thin and you know that things don’t come easy. What has been the most unexpectedly rewarding part for you of being a business owner?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s really, I’m shocked at how simple information revealed in a certain way to people can transform their business, transform their life. I just had somebody on my show the other day and we released it not too long ago and it was interesting because it was somebody that doesn’t normally do podcasts and she was so afraid and she almost cancelled. She was like, this isn’t live, is it? I’m like, no. I mean there was just so much apprehension on the front end and I said we just went through it and it was easy. And then on the back end, she shared it with her family and her family was just so supportive and they were just like amazed at how much this person has grown. And they were so excited. It was so transformational for me to think that I had something to do with this family coming closer together, this person tackling things outside of her comfort zone. I just think the impact on others has been the biggest reward for me. It’s just in places that you don’t even know. There was another person that came up to me.

I was doing a talk on comfort zone and getting outside of it. And somebody raised their hand because I said in the audience, who here is struggling with something in their comfort zone? A lady raised her hand and she said, I want to speak in front of others, but I’m scared to death. I’m like, well, here’s the mic. You want to do it right now? So she gets up and she starts talking. And then I find out a year later at the next conference that I saw her at that she applied to be a speaker and got accepted. And she has been working on conquering that fear. So I just think that impact on others has just been way more helpful for me, and it’s just been way more impactful on me than I ever thought it would be.

Yeah, it’s certainly a very rewarding profession to be a coach. I used to be an investment banker, and we did the deals, and we made some money, and it was very exciting, and it’s very stressful often, but it’s so much more positive to help people in all circumstances and not make it a win-lose. So it’s definitely great.

Yeah.

Okay. So let’s take the flip side of this. So we talked about the rewarding experience. What was the hardest decision you ever had to make in your business, Dave?

I think that we run into this on a regular basis. I have to make this decision about, and it sounds weird, but do I fire a customer or don’t I? Those are really hard decisions and I don’t want to make it from a decision of I’m better than a person, they’re inferior to me. I make that decision based on am I adding value to this particular person? Because if we go and we don’t add value to somebody’s life, it’s really hard for me personally to charge them money for that. I mean, I tell people, whether it’s in a training, a keynote somewhere in the country, whatever it is, if you don’t leave the time with me better than you came, it really wasn’t a success. And it can be small little course corrections. It doesn’t need to be life-altering things that go on, but it’s just really small course corrections. And the best example that I can think of from a course correction is, I live in the Midwest, and if I want to fly to California and let’s just say my destination was San Diego because we live there part-time.

So if we are flying from the Midwest to San Diego and up in the air, the pilot decides to make a two-degree course correction, you don’t feel it on the airplane, you don’t see it on the map, but all of a sudden you end up landing in LA at LAX, which is a painful two and a half hour drive south. So that small course correction at the beginning made a massive impact on the back end. And so that’s what I really like is I’m not looking for people that, oh my gosh, you changed my life, which I love when that happens. But I like when someone walks up and says, I’m gonna do this different. Like that lady, I’m going to jump outside of my comfort zone and I’m going to act to apply to be a speaker. And now she’s doing it. And it was because of something that I said that caused that. So the hardest thing is when do you fire somebody, when don’t you? And again, it’s tough, but it’s something that we as business owners, we probably need to do more of.

I agree with you. I think when you are able to do it and discontinue your relationship with a client who is no longer a fit or no longer gets value. It raises your own self-esteem. You’re holding yourself to a higher standard and then it means that you’re aware of what you’re doing and you’re holding yourself accountable to delivering value. I love it. I think it’s a great concept.

Yep, absolutely. And again, the whole goal, and this should be for anybody listening, that hopefully when somebody leaves your presence, they feel better. They’re farther along. They’re advancing. There’s something that happened that’s not bringing them backwards. And that’s where we need to make sure we understand the importance of our words, our body language, our tone. All of the pieces of communication are just really important when it comes to communicating with your team and communicating with your customer.

Yeah, no doubt. All right. Well, one more question. I have to get it off my chest. We talked about coaching. Coaching is done through questions. It’s creating awareness, creating that little bit of forward movement so that people live different and better than they arrived. So what is the most important questions entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?

That’s a great question. I’m working on my next book about business blind spots and it really actually kind of what we talked about before and the question really is to the entrepreneur listening right now, who is helping you with your blind spots? We all have them. We all operate from them sometimes. And who’s helping you? I mean, the funniest person is one that says, you have blind spots, I have none. That’s like we all have them. It’s proven we all have blind spots. So who’s helping you? Whether it’s a coach, whether it’s someone on your team, whether it’s an advisory group, whether it’s a board of directors, whatever that looks like in your world, I am totally open to whatever. But that’s the interesting thing, is we all have a blind spot. Who’s helping you with them? In a car, we have a rear view mirror and we have side mirrors because they help us with our blind spots. Who is doing that for you? Because otherwise, you can go your whole life, Steve, and never really address those blind spots.

And it’s funny because I work with leaders from around the country and I hear, oh, my team, I can’t keep a good team together. And the first question I always ask is, what are you as the leader, what are you not doing, or what could you do better? Look at it for yourself rather than again blame the team, because it’s super easy to blame the team. It’s super easy to blame the customer, the government, the environment, whatever. It’s easy. It’s really hard to look internal and say, what am I doing? And we don’t know what we don’t know. So there’s plenty of times where people have blind spots. They don’t even know that they’re doing it. So that would be my number one question is who is helping me with my blind spots?

Yeah, I love it. Love this question and actually we do an exercise in our annual leadership team meetings, which is titled “Cover Blindspots,” and we give each other feedback on blind spots and it’s always very powerful.

But think about that, Steve, if I come at you negatively, if I come at you demeaning, if I come at you in disrespect, anything I say, you’re probably going to try to refute. You’re going to build a wall. So we need vulnerability. We need respect because if you’re going to talk about my blind spots or I’m going to talk about yours, I really have to be in a safe place to be able to receive anything that you say. So that’s why I think it’s important to have somebody that you trust, a coach, an advisory board, a partner, whatever it is. But if we’re not in the right headspace, we’re not going to be able to receive that feedback because we’re just going to justify it and blow it off and just go about our day. So, in addition to making sure you’re helping with the blind spot, it’s got to be in a safe place that we can trust who’s sharing that with us. Because let’s face it, if you didn’t trust me, Steve, and I was going to tell you about a blind spot you had, your wall would go up and you probably would have a little bit harder of time receiving that from somebody that was doing it disrespectfully.

Yeah, that’s no doubt a very delicate approach. It’s required. People don’t like to be confronted with their blind spots and they need trusted advisors who they can take it from. So definitely a good point. Dave, we’re coming to the end of the show. So if people would like to learn more about the Positive Polarity Podcast, would like to perhaps apply to be on it, or like to reach out to you and talk to you and figure out how you can help them cover their blind spots, or make those little course corrections that’s going to get them to LA, especially in the film industry, they don’t want to end up in San Diego. Where should they go and where can they find you?

Sure, yeah, positivepolarity.com is the easiest place to go. The podcasts are there, the book is there, Growing On Purpose, everything’s there, our coaching schedule, our training schedule, where we’re speaking, so all that’s there. You just go there, connect with me on LinkedIn. Whatever’s easiest for you, we’re here to serve you any way that we can. And again, thank you for letting me hang out with you. And I’m glad that you didn’t ask me any Covid questions like I asked you.

Awesome. Well, Dave, thank you for sharing your wisdom about growth, about customer service, the importance of it, the team, covering blind spots, making little course corrections and leaving coaching sessions better than when you arrived. These are all very golden recommendations. So, if you’ve been listening to this and you enjoyed the show, then make sure that you follow us on YouTube. You give us a review on Apple Podcasts, please, and follow us on LinkedIn. And stay tuned because every week, I get a wonderful guest who is bringing some golden nuggets to the show. So thank you for coming, Dave.

Thank you.

And thank you for listening.

Adam Coughlin, Co-founder, CMO, and Managing Partner of York IE, is on a mission to help startups beat the odds by building strong, capital-efficient brands that resonate with their markets.We explore Adam’s Drumbeat Marketing Framework:
Messaging & Positioning, Develop Unique Point of View, Execution, and Scorekeeping.
He shares why brand consistency beats shiny-object syndrome, how vertical AI is redefining SaaS, and why startups need to balance storytelling with measurable impact. Adam also explains how to foster entrepreneurial thinking early and why founders must lead with a deep sense of purpose.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Adam Coughlin, co-founder, CMO and managing partner of York IE, where he works with startups on foundational messaging, content, communications, go-to-market strategy, website and digital marketing, revenue operations, and corporate storytelling. Welcome to the show, Adam.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Steve. Appreciate it.

Yeah, you guys are really a full-service shop. You do almost everything. So tell me, how are you guys unique, and what is it that makes you a superior solution for people?

Yeah, absolutely. So the founding team of York IE, we all work together at a company called Dine here in New Hampshire that did the domain name system. And we built that company to about a hundred million of annual recurring revenue, got acquired by Oracle. While we were inside of Oracle, we kind of reflected on the growth journey that we took at Dine. And we felt that a lot of the legacy institutions that we turned to for growth help, whether that was our investors, our advisors, our vendors, they were operating out of antiquated models so that were really good for them, but not necessarily for us as the operators. And so that’s what we wanted to disrupt. So in 2019, we launched York IE. We are an advisory and investment firm. So we help technology companies grow. We do that through investing in early stage exclusively B2B software companies. And then because we were operators, we also built a strategic advisory firm that does strategy and execution across the functional areas of R&D, go to market and G&A.

Because we feel like we want to roll up our sleeves and help companies be successful.
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Yeah. So you’re basically investing companies that advise them, help to improve them, and some you just advise them and don’t invest. So it’s a combination.

Combination. Exactly. Right. And I think in addition to the advise, it’s really important to get across that we do the execution because that is where companies need help. Especially early stage companies. A lot of those teams are small, they’re dynamic, they have a good strategy, they just need help and take some things off their plates and we’re there to help them with that.

Sounds great. So that leads to my question. What is your personal “Why” and how are you manifesting it in your business?

Yeah, absolutely. I think this is a great question. And my personal “Why” is I love entrepreneurs. I think that they are both visionary and builders and that they are pursuing their dreams in the effort to create something and build something that makes the world better. And I think that if they build good companies, then they hire good employees.

Good companies have impacts on communities. Good companies build wealth.
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Yeah, well, I couldn’t resonate more with that. I call it Business Covid or these companies that fail, and I think they can be saved as well with the right structures and processes and approaches. So let’s talk about how you do that because you do a lot of stuff. But one of the things that we talked about was your framework called Drumbeat Marketing and marketing is difficult these days because there’s so much noise out there. So how do you overcome that noise? How do you get your message heard? I like the visual metaphor of drumbeat marketing, you’re beating drums. So how do you beat the drum and how do you get the message resonating?

Yeah, absolutely. So this is actually a concept that I came up with in my previous life when I was a journalist. And so I was covering the New Hampshire primary, and in New Hampshire, we’re the first in the nation primary, so there’s a lot of retail politics that happens. And I talked to Jon Huntsman, who was running for president in 2016, former governor of Utah, former ambassador to China, and he said, in New Hampshire, you have to shake someone’s hand 10 times before they’ll consider voting for you, and then 10 more before they actually do. And that really resonated with me because it’s true about messaging.

Only when you are sick of saying something does it actually begin to resonate with anybody outside of your own walls. We live in a very noisy world. And what happens with a lot of new companies is that they get a little bit of shiny object syndrome. They say this, they say that, they’ve said everything and they’re known for nothing. And so that drumbeat marketing framework is all about discipline. So the first step in that is coming up with your messaging and positioning. We work with a lot of founders that take a product-out approach to their company. They had a problem personally, they solved it, they then assume that everybody else needs that solution. But the reality is that every company is but one player in a larger ecosystem.

We always advocate that you should take a market-in approach. Understand the market landscape, the competitive landscape, and how you fit into that.
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Love it. So, basically, it’s very easy to fall in love with your product. They say that you should fall in love with your market instead and to conquer this urge of this personal bias about what you think other people will react to test the markets. Okay, so market in, whereas product-out, that makes sense. So what’s the next step?

Yeah, so then once you’ve kind of surveyed the market and the competitive landscape, you’re in a better position of power to see sort of where is the green field space and then what is our unique point of view. And I think that this is very important and it’s only going to become more important in the world of AI and marketing. Like there is just so much noise and the barrier to putting stuff out is basically zero now. And so then what is going to resonate? What is going to have you stand out? It is having a unique point of view that you become known for and you’re doing that because you’re telling that story. And that’s the key word, storytelling. Particularly in technology, we can often think about speeds and feeds, but at the end of the day, no matter what you’re selling, you’re selling to a human being. And since the dawn of man, people have learned and engaged with stories. And so being able to tell that story, back your story up with data that’s unique to you and your company, and it’s a story that is unique, not just to yourself, but into the broader market, you’re going to be in a really good position to be successful.

Yeah, I love it. And it’s so easy, especially when you’re a tech entrepreneur, you may have an engineering background, or you may be a very smart mathematician and you want to focus on objective facts rather than stories, kind of have the implication that maybe it’s made up and no, but this is the medium of communication. It is through stories. So you have to articulate the stories. That’s very important. So what’s that? You articulated the story. You have a unique point of view. So that’s kind of a differentiation already through your story. Then what’s next? How do you get this Drumbeat Marketing to be impactful?

Now once you have your story and this point of view that you want to get across, you need to disseminate it through all sorts of integrated marketing channels. People consume information in a variety of different mediums. If you’ve done your marketing research, you kind of have an understanding of where are the watering holes that my prospects are gathering. And then you can tell that story, that point of view, in the way that they’re going to consume it the most. Sometimes, though, you’ll talk to a company and they’ll say, here’s my marketing strategy, and it’s just a bunch of different channels. The biggest hurdle for success for companies is that they have such fragmented audiences.

And if you try to reach those audiences in the 10 or 12 different places that they’re gathering and you tell them 10 or 12 different stories, then they have no idea who you are. But if you take that story that we talked about and now you just kind of slice and dice it up in the different ways, whether that be social, whether that be media relations, whether that be ads. Now that bubbles up and it’s telling one story, you’re just reaching them in different ways. And I think that’s the best way to sort of gain that strength and not introduce confusion to the audience. And to your point that you made, depending on the founder,

it's also about finding the channels that you're comfortable with. I've worked with a lot of deeply technical people.
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Yeah, and it’s so important. I mean, you see big companies, fortune-ranked companies, when they rebrand, for example, then they make this huge campaign, they plaster the airwaves, and the internet, television, everywhere, they push it at the same time so that people, wherever they are, they’re going to get those impressions from multiple directions and then it’s going to start to create that knock-on effect of breaking through with their consciousness and start to make a mark. And if you just sporadically do it, then it’s just part of the noise and nothing happens.

Absolutely. Like, we’ll talk to a company and they’ll have a big announcement, maybe a new product, maybe a funding announcement. And then I always say, great, we will help you with that launch, but what’s the next announcement? Because you can’t go dark for a period of time. Most of us aren’t launching the iPod or something revolutionary. It’s that consistency. Like a brand isn’t made in a moment. A brand is when you look at a company over three, six, nine, 12 months, and you just see all of this momentum. Success is a giant boulder that needs to be pushed and it’s really hard to get it going. But once it starts building some of that momentum, suddenly it’s going downhill. And now everybody wants to be a part of pushing it. Nobody wants to be a part at the beginning. And so

you just need that consistency and discipline over time to have it actually be meaningful.
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Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, and then how do you iterate? How do you know that you are on the right track and you are doing well or how can you do even better?

The part that I always find when it comes to marketing and storytelling is that it has to be both art and science. And I think it can be very easy for creatives and people like that to like, hey, we’ve done something now we want to go on and create something new and do something else. And it’s like, well, like what is working? And so that is really important to get some of the fundamental dashboards and reporting and things like a HubSpot CRM and things like that so you can kind of track what’s effective. Because like in this world that we live in now where there aren’t infinite resources and

everybody has to work smarter because they can't work any harder, you have to know exactly, the impact of the things that you're doing.
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Because again, this is about human beings and storytelling and, trends and data can put us in the right direction. But at the end of the day, there has to be some things that are being done without immediate giant ROI. And I think that’s one of the things that is a struggle for early stage companies is that you need to thread the needle between sort of brand building, which takes time and lead generation, which is like more immediate because you don’t have an infinite runway and finding that balance where you don’t take too long, but you also don’t become too transactional that you cannibalize your potential of a long brand. And I think that’s where that marriage between the art and science is really important.

Yeah, that’s really tough, especially when you’re burning cash and how do you build the long game and how do you then keep feeding the beast as well? Wow. Okay, so let me take a step back. So this is the framework, like messaging, positioning, that’s Drumbeat Marketing Framework. Messaging and positioning, develop unique point of view, execution and scorekeeping, so that’s great. Now, what you said about the efficiency of, especially startups is really important, and you talk about capital efficient versus growth at all costs approach. So what do you mean by that? And how does one become capital efficient and keep capital efficient growth?

Yeah. So I think that like, again, I’m in the tech space. And so there was a period of time, say a few years ago, where everything was about growth. How do you become the next decacorn? They used to have the triple-triple, double-double model. Like triple your growth, then triple your growth, then triple your growth, then double, then double. And it was growth at all costs. Like HubSpot, for example, when it was growing, it was spending 120% of its revenue on go-to-market sales and marketing. And some of that was driven by sort of the investment profile. Like these funds raised so much money, they invested so much money, they needed that decacorn to get the return. And then it kind of became clear that maybe that’s not the most efficient way to grow a business. And kind of added to our problem of those models were like, hey, if one company becomes that as an investment firm win, even if the other nine in our portfolio fail.

Now I think there’s like this more movement towards what we call like Rule of 40 companies, which is like, hey, can you, between growth and profitability, get to about 40%? So that might be like 20% growth, 20% profitability, 10% growth, 30% profitability. And that is just prioritizing sort of like efficiency and pragmatic growth, which I think at the end of the day, we kind of lost sight of like what a healthy company looks like. And I think

healthy companies give the entrepreneur and the founders more option. And I think when a founder and an entrepreneur feels like they have a lot of options for their company, that's in a really good place to be.
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I love it. This “Rule of 40”, I’ve not heard of it. So basically your profitability and growth should add up to at least 40.

Correct.

And it could be any combination.

Right. And I think that flexibility, as opposed to like we needed to have 200% growth. Well, there’s only so many certain ways. And like, at the end of the day, like these companies that are seeking these giant billion dollar valuations, like have to go achieve them too. And it’s actually very hard to scale at that way with like a very strong foundation. And I think that “Rule of 40” allows you to build. You may get to a point at some point where you’re like, wow, this foundation is good, this business is healthy. There is this opportunity to go for it, but it’s not go for it or fail.

Yeah. Well, I love this balanced approach. So how do people even learn this stuff? Where should entrepreneurs go and learn how to be an entrepreneur? Do you think it could be taught to people?

Yes, I think that, yeah, I’ve talked with this woman named Dr. Julie Gerner. She’s a professional coach and she, she often says that businesses fail most likely from internal factors, not external factors. And being a successful entrepreneur means that you can handle adversity. You can iterate and change in mid-flight. You can handle failure and rejection and learn from them. You are persistent and determined. You can operate in chaos. You can motivate people. These are skills that I think are best learned through experience and they are obviously the kind of skills that will help you navigate successfully in a business, but they’re also the skills that will help you navigate successfully in life.

And I think that that entrepreneurship mindset, that thinking outside of a box, loving solving problems is a skill set that would be super beneficial in every industry.
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So if only experience can teach entrepreneurship, resilience, overcoming adversity, then how can you teach it? So can it be reduced to a theoretical formula?

Well, I think that the mindset can be taught. And you’re seeing this. My brother works at the Magnuson Center of Entrepreneurship at Dartmouth College. And we’ve always been in the space and you’ve obviously seen tons of successful college age students starting companies. But now he’s seeing that entrepreneurial mindset that creates your own path and the frameworks to that, how you view things, even just the exposure to that way of thinking, moving down market and high schools are beginning to teach entrepreneurship, beginning to have business pitch competitions, beginning to celebrate some of those things. I always remember a story of an entrepreneur that when he was in grade school, he bought a pack of gum for a dollar and he sold each slice or each piece of gum for a dollar.

So he was making profit on his gum pieces and his teacher yelled at him and told him to stop doing that. But he was laying like, well, if I showed promise in sports or music, I would be celebrated. I would have been nurtured. But when I was showing promise in business, it was kind of rejected. And I think that mindset is changing. And I think that’s just going to help kids have longer period of time for that experience with a little bit less risk, but then also being exposed to sort of the frameworks and some of these things. I have a nephew who’s a freshman in high school and he’s reading Atomic Habits in some of these books that I was never thinking about when I was 15 years old. And I think that’s a great headstart for them.

Yeah. Atomic Habits is great. And I like to think of businesses that they should also be developing atomic habits. Stack their habits and make sure that they implement the process and they make it stick and then build the next one top. Okay, but we digress. Another topic I wanted to ask you about is entrepreneurship. A lot of people talk about AI as being a big engine of entrepreneurship and people can now use AI to create a company with a much lower cost base. So what is your view on this, on how AI can be an engine of entrepreneurship? And also, what is your view, it’s kind of two questions in one, about SaaS companies? Are they being threatened by AI? Is there going to be a disruption there?

Yeah, so I think AI is going to have an impact in entrepreneurship in two ways. I think when it comes to SaaS companies and the products that they build, we have as an investment firm always been very interested in vertical SaaS, taking sort of the software approach to legacy institutions or industries that were ripe for disruption like pest management, or we work with a company that’s involved in the shellfish industry. But now I think vertical AI is gonna be a real big opportunity for companies. So I think of horizontal AI, like the long, large language models of ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. They’re very horizontal for certain things. Vertical AI is gonna be when you have very specific data sets that you’re working in that are in very specific industries, and those will end up being the platforms of which decisions in those spaces like law, finance, healthcare are made.

So I think companies that are thinking about vertical AI are gonna be super successful. Then AI itself is going to help kind of manifest this sort of efficient growth that we talked about. When I worked at Dine, which I talked about earlier, I was part of a 40-person marketing team. Like, I just don’t see that happening because teams are gonna be able to leverage technology and tools to get them a little bit farther. And again, there’s a saying like AI is not going to take your job. Somebody that knows how to leverage AI and get the most out of it is going to. And so I think having those understandings of how to do them. Like we mentioned, you’re doing a Zoom call, you have a great point, it’s recorded, you’ve now taken that transcript, you’ve put it into a Jasper or a ChatGPT, you’ve now made a blog post, you’ve edited it with your own personal touch and now you’ve done that. In the past, that could have been a multi-hour, multi-person process that can now be done pretty instantaneously.

So it will impact, you’re seeing AI being leveraged obviously on go-to-market teams, you’re seeing it on development teams, you’re seeing it even in back office functions.

It's just gonna give people who have the strategic thought and the vision an opportunity to sort of make themselves stronger, which I think will be ultimately a positive.
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Yeah, no, I think AI is a huge thing. And also outsourcing. I think outsourcing is also a very powerful force because when you can have people in South America, in Asia, in India, Europe, they all can work for your company part-time and you can basically pick experts. You don’t have to commit to having them full-time, potentially much lower salaries.

As an entrepreneur, you can leverage it much better than as a big company and that’s also a huge good thing.

I think that’s such a great point. And especially in this world that we’re living in right now, I’m in New Hampshire, I know you’re in another location. It’s like a global workforce. But like so many companies are being built remote first, whether they’re full-time employees or whether they’re outsource vendors. And I think that skill set for the entrepreneur and the founder, the ability to galvanize the team and get everybody rowing in the same direction when they’re all in disparate is going to be really important for them to understand. But I think that it does allow the teams to be built and that combination, I think, of a great idea, leveraging technology and outsourced expertise is going to be the model for sure.

All right. With that, let me ask you my final question. What is the most important question any entrepreneur should be asking themselves?

Steve, I think you nailed it at the beginning of this interview, the “Why.” There are a lot of easier ways to make money than being an entrepreneur. I’m a big Dave Goggins fan, and that guy puts himself in a lot of extreme situations. And when you are running a hundred mile race and you’re at 65 miles and it sucks, you can’t lie to yourself. You have to know why you are there. And that’s the same thing with entrepreneurship. When you are late at night, it’s three o’clock in the morning, you’re awake because you’re worried about the 18 different problems that you have. You have to know why you are doing it. Because it’s going to make you uncomfortable. It’s going to push you beyond what you think you are capable of.

And if that’s your “Why,” like you want to do something, you want to make the most out of life,

you want to have like learning and skills and have an impact and feel like you've built something, then you're in the right spot.
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So is it really a spiritual dimension that we are bringing into companies where we asked “Why?” Is this that we want to provide people with not just the intellectual stimulation, not just the financial, obviously, you have to feed your family, your career progression, but then the bigger “Why” is it’s more of a spiritual thing. Can you emotionally connect to a purpose that is bigger than yourself and doesn’t necessarily have to be religious. It can be something that you really strongly believe in, it’s kind of a spiritual dimension.

Yeah, I mean, literally, life is just about how you fill your time. And right, like I love my wife, I love my children, yet I spend a lot of time at work. And so if I’ve chosen that I have to spend that time somewhere besides there, I want it to be meaningful. And it’s one of the reasons when we go back to the Drumbeat Marketing plan and having that market in and having that unique point of view, we try to always bubble that vision up to something more meaningful beyond just the thing you’re selling. We worked with a company that did digital notary. What we’re trying to do is provide peace of mind for people in their most intense moments. Like when do you need a notary? When you’re buying something, when you’re doing like some medical thing or something, like there’s these really big moments of your life.

And if we can make that process easier for you, then we’re allowing you to be focused on the biggest moment. It’s that connection, It’s that thing. That’s what people want to work for. They want to work with people and they want to work on something. I think they want to work with something that’s meaningful. And that’s the little bit extra that gets you to run through the wall, as opposed to just stopping and saying like, eh, it’s kind of hard. And that’s in the end of it, that’s the difference between the companies that make it and the companies that don’t. And so that’s why I think  it’s a really important thing to have.

Love it. Love this metaphor running through walls. This is very powerful. Adam Coughlin, co-founder, CMO and managing partner of York IE, helping startups to go to market and beat the drum on marketing and increase their revenue and tell their story. Thanks very much for sharing your wisdom on the show. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you follow us on YouTube, you subscribe as well, and give us a review, please, on Apple Podcasts, so we can beat the drum louder going forward. So Adam, thanks for coming and thank you for listening.

Thank you very much for having me, Steve. And if anybody’s interested, we are just york.ie. And please hit me up on LinkedIn. I’d love to carry this conversation on with anybody.

Yeah, do check out york.ie and you’ll find great resources. Thank you, Adam.

Thank you, Steve.

Dave Molenda, Business and Sales Coach, Speaker, Best-selling Author, and Host of the Positive Polarity Podcast, is driven by a mission to help business owners grow intentionally by strengthening their teams and delivering exceptional customer experiences.

We dive into Dave’s journey and his ST+ICE=P Formula, which stands for Strengthen the Team + Improve the Customer Experience = Profit. Dave explains how focusing first on internal team engagement leads to outstanding customer experiences, which then fuels sustainable business growth. We also discuss lessons from his book Growing On Purpose, why most businesses grow by accident rather than design, how to spot hidden blind spots, and when letting go of the wrong customers is the right move for your company’s health and future.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast. And my guest here is Dave Molenda, who is a business and sales coach, speaker, best-selling author and the host of the wonderful Positive Polarity podcast. Dave, welcome to the show.

Hi, Steve. how are you today?

I’m doing pretty good because I’m meeting you, so it’s already injecting some positivity in my day.

Well good, I’m honored to be hanging out with you and thanks to you for being on our episode 260. I loved our question, “does your business have Covid?” That was a blast. So that was a great episode. So, for anyone listening, if you wonder if your business has Covid, I’m not going to tell you anything else other than head over and listen to Steve’s answer to that question. It was awesome.

Well, hopefully your business doesn’t have Covid because it’s a potentially lethal malady.

Exactly. For sure.

But it was, it really was a fun episode and we created a lot of snippets that we put on our website, so we definitely are excited about it.

Awesome.

But we’re not going to talk about this because we are going to talk about your stuff and what you are doing because it is at least as good, if not better, and we are going to dive into your frameworks, your book and all your experiences, your “Why” and all that good stuff. So, are you ready?

I’m ready. I got my seatbelt on. I’m all set here so we can go as fast or as slow as you want.

Okay, so let’s fast track into my favorite question. What is your personal “Why,” Dave? And how are you manifesting it in your practice and in your business?

Yeah, for sure. I tell you, it’s interesting, Steve. I love the name of your podcast, using a blueprint as a framework, because I can’t believe how many people start and try to grow a business without a blueprint, without some kind of framework. So I love unpacking that with you on my show. But my “Why” is for all the people that are out there that are so good at what they do, they’re good at their craft, they’re good at their skill, whether it’s building a house, whether it’s selling something, whatever it is, making something, they’re so good at that. But boy, they struggle when asking the question about, how do I grow this business? How do I create a team? How do I develop this team? How do I make this a long-lasting business? So my “Why” is really coming alongside of those people.

Again, genuine people, really good at what they do, but they very often are struggling with what to do once they have gotten to the end so far. They’ve asked all their neighbors and friends, they’ve asked all their acquaintances to buy whatever they have. I don’t know about you, but we get inundated with all the Girl Scout cookies from all your friends and family. But rarely do you get a knock on the door from somebody that you don’t know.

So my whole goal is to help businesses that are struggling, that want to grow.
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Yeah, I mean, customer is king. So definitely, I’m curious about how do you start with the customer and how do you strengthen companies through looking at their customer service?

Yeah, for sure.

Tell me a little bit about that.

Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, and the interesting thing is we’re all customers to somebody in our own as a consumer. So, we know when we’ve been treated bad. We know when we’ve had a great experience. And let’s just look at it from a super simple perspective. If you have a great experience at a restaurant, you’re going to tell a bunch of people. Just like if you have had a bad experience. If I come up and say, Steve, I’m going to be up in your neck of the woods in a week or so, where would be a great place to eat? You’re not going to tell me the place that you had a bad experience unless you don’t like me. You’re going to tell me about the place that you had a great experience with, and then I’m going to go there, and then I’m going to tell people. So having that good customer experience is so crucial to pretty much any business.

And that's where we love to kind of put on the glasses of the customer and see what they're seeing and help business owners understand their business from the customer's perspective.
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Okay. So you have a framework around this, haven’t you?

Yes.

How to strengthen and develop the customer experience. So tell me a little bit about this framework and how that works and how can our listeners visualize what they need to do with it.

For sure. Again, there’s three primary parts to everybody’s business. There’s the product or service that you make or sell or whatever you do. There’s something you do, which is one piece. There’s the customer that buys it, and then there’s the team that actually creates that experience. So I wrote a book called Growing On Purpose and we found the connection between a strong team creates a strong customer experience just like a weak team provides a weak experience. So we created an easy formula of ST, which is strengthen the team, and then plus ICE which is improving your customer experience, equals P for profit.

And it’s pretty safe to say that if you’re looking for profit, the two places that you really need to invest your time in is strengthening your team and improving your customer’s experience. Because all the research that we did shows that those two are very strong. And I’m guessing you probably run into a lot of people, Steve, that they focus a lot on the product or service. They’re a master at what they do, which is great, but they forget to invest time in the team and they forget to invest time in that customer’s experience. So again,

wrote the book to be able to help people to see how they can strengthen the team, some pieces around that, and how to improve that customer experience.
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Yeah, and what I think Jeff Bezos speaks about is that you have to start with your team, because if you have a happy team who are being treated well and who are excited about your mission, your “Why,” then they are going to project that out to the customer and then they’re going to take care of the customer and then both of them is going to work. It’s very hard to imagine that you mistreat your team and then they’re going to take care of the customer. It’s probably highly unlikely.

Yeah. And I totally agree with that. And it’s funny because as a consumer, we just switched mobile phone carriers and we went from one company to another, won’t mention names, but interestingly enough, the new company, the gentleman that we were working with, he is actually leaving the company and going to a competitor. So, his experience, my experience as a customer was average to below average. And you could just tell that there wasn’t the engagement, there wasn’t the enthusiasm, there wasn’t the excitement. And I think that happens so much more often than we as business owners.

We think our team is as strong as we are. And I speak all over the country about this, Steve. And it’s funny because Gallup says right now that one in three people on your team show up engaged in their job, which means two out of three people are not engaged. And everywhere that I speak around the country on this, people always come up to me and they’re like, well, that’s not my team. That’s not my team. And I’m like, hey, I’m not saying it is or isn’t, but somewhere there’s a bunch of disengaged people and chances are pretty high that you have some on your team. So

we invest a ton of energy to make sure that team is as strong as possible
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And for that, for us as consumers, and we’re one consumer in the grand scheme of things, but how many other people did that individual negatively affect in the business and what does that look like long-term? So my suggestion to business owners is take a good hard look at your team. Secret shop them. We secret shop our clients, they ask us to do that, we videotape, we do everything we can to make sure that they are getting the absolute best experience possible so that they can charge more, they can have people come back more often, they buy more. There’s just no negatives to a great customer experience.

So what are the key ingredients to having, I mean I understand the mystery shopping or secret shopping thing, but that’s more of a control mechanism. But you’re just quality controlling of what they are doing. How do you get them to do it better? What are the key ingredients to great customer experience?

Yeah, no, it’s a great question. And it starts with the engaged employee. Like I said, there’s engaged people, there’s not engaged, and then actively disengaged. I mean, if you don’t treat your team like a customer, I mean, I always tell the people that I run into, there’s an external customer, which is your client, and then there’s an internal customer, which is your team. And it’s crazy how few people really consider and think that way.

the first thing is to consider your team as important as your customer and treating them fair and treating them with respect and treating them with being open with them, helping them as much as you can.
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It’s not like rocket science. When we did the research, it wasn’t like these complicated things. I mean, a team member, they want to feel connected to the rest of their team. So that’s a simple piece. They want to feel like they are making a difference. So they want to know what the values and mission are of the company. So if you don’t have those, I always laugh, I tell people that know anything about golf, just imagine going to a golf course that was absolutely beautiful. It’s just the best, prettiest golf course you’ve ever seen. The difference is, Steve, is it doesn’t have a green and it doesn’t have a hole. And so you’re standing at the tee box and they say, go ahead, tee off. And you’re just like, well, where do I tee off? And they’re just like, well, tee off anywhere. And that’s how it is when a company doesn’t have a goal, individual goal, a corporate goal, some kind of goal for that. I’m sure you talk about goals like crazy in your Summit OS, because again, without goals, what good is it?

Well, we need to be able to have goals for our team members as well. And sometimes they’re financial, sometimes they’re behavioral goals. And I think the big goal that a lot of people miss, Steve, is the attitude goal. We really look at the attitude to make sure, because again, we’re all consumers. Think of the last time that you were buying something somewhere and you were not getting a very good experience. Maybe it was a restaurant, maybe it was a clothing store, wherever, but it really caused a negative experience to the point a lot of people, they’re just not gonna go back. So we’re trying to do everything we can to make sure that people come back and it all starts with that engaged employee.

Yeah. Well, yesterday I had one such experience where I decided never to go back. I’m not going to name names, but it was very disappointing. So anyhow, I like your analogy with the green and the hole. I’m thinking maybe the green is the core values, is the foundation where you start. And then the goal is maybe your BHAG, your Big Hairy Audacious Goal, at the end of the fairway. It’s a really good analogy.

Yeah, and hopefully the goal isn’t just to get to five o’clock so I can punch out and go home. Hopefully the goal is not to just get a paycheck so that I can pay my bills. I’m hoping, and we train, there’s gotta be deeper stuff than that. Whatever bad experience you had yesterday probably was because there wasn’t a very good team behind it or an individual behind it or a leader behind it because the best companies today, look at Google, the top 10 customer experience type companies. You’re seeing things going on that 10 years ago you never saw. And because people are going to whatever length they need to improve that customer’s experience. We have some people in different industries that are putting their money where their mouth is, Steve. They’re saying, if you don’t like it, you don’t pay for it, whatever it is, whether it’s a service, a product. And we’re so worried about the 2%, and the research shows like about 2% of people will take advantage of that.

Well, the amount of positive movement and the amount of momentum that you get from the other 98% of people that are gonna get this concept, the 2% ruin it. So I suggest to the companies that we work with and people listening today, don’t worry about those 2%. The 98% are going to more than cover you. There’s so few people that are out there to take advantage of you and yes, they are out there. Maybe you know a bunch of them, but the vast majority of people, they want a good service and the best part is they’ll pay more for good service. Two out of three people that they surveyed said, I would pay more for a better experience. So if you’re listening and you’re struggling with profit, you’re struggling with sales, look internally rather than blame your competitor or the government or the weather. Look internally. You’re going to find a ton of great opportunity right there.

I agree with you. And what people forget when they think about the 2% that maybe cancels or whatever, that those people are not helping themselves. Because if you provide the good experience, then they found someone who can help them. They should treasure you and keep you in their good graces. That they found a reliable someone who’s helping them. Why did they even cancel? It doesn’t make sense. So if you don’t provide good service, then they are right to cancel. So it’s important to provide good service. But I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s not about you. It’s about them. Maybe they have a scarcity mindset or something like that. So Dave, I’d like to switch gears and talk a little bit about your book.

Sure.

A couple of questions I have about it. First of all, the title ,Positive Polarity, which is also the name of your company. And I read a little bit on your website about the polarity, the opposites, and the dynamic. But I’d like you to explain it in your own words. Why did you choose this as the name of your company, your podcast? What’s important about polarity?

Sure, for sure. And we started with positive because again, the only people, Steve, that like to hang out with negative people are negative people. So they all kind of gather somewhere where we don’t want to be, which is fine. I mean, if you’re a negative person and you’re okay with it, you know what, that’s up to you. But I love hanging out with positive people. I love seeing and talking to people that look and see the glasses half full, not half empty. It’s just really a perspective.

The positive piece was definitely something that we wanted. And the polarity is interesting because in today's world, we're looking for the easiest way out.
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There’s gotta be some opportunity where something’s hard. I mean, it’s hard to grow a business in today’s world. So the polarity piece is we try to challenge the natural way to do things, the easy way. The worst words that I hear is, that’s just how we do it around here. My grandpa did it this way. My dad did it this way. I’m going to do it this way. There’s no real challenge there. And it might have worked back then, which is great, but what worked 50 years ago probably won’t work nearly as well today without some type of modification. So we brought the polarity word in just as an opposing force to that natural way of, hey, let’s just take the easy way out on this. And it’s just been a great ride to find people that are buying into that process as well. I like it because I think about this expedition, I’m trying to remember the name of the adventurer in 1911 who went to the South Pole and got stuck in the ice. Before the actual expedition, he put a little ad in the Times and he basically described the challenges of this expedition. They’re looking for people who are not afraid to die and who are willing to be frozen for like two years and be in terrible hardship.

Wait, show me that ad, I’m all in on that. Dying and freezing to death.

A lot of people applied because they just were attracted to this challenge. That was exciting. There was something to work with there. And I’m thinking that you’re probably right. If you want the right kind of clients, then the offer is not that you take the pill and you wake up slim tomorrow. That’s not credible. And you don’t want to attract those people that are hoping for this kind of results. You want someone who’s willing to work hard, willing to get out of their comfort zone and do the work. So tell me, Dave, what is the Positive Polarity book about and what prompted you to write it?

Yeah, so you’re talking about silver bullets and secret sauce. That’s what everybody wants. They want that super easy opportunity and I haven’t found it. So again, if it’s out there, great. And you’re listening here, let us know. We can both learn from it. We wrote the book called Growing On Purpose because it is one of those books that I run into again a lot of people that grow by mistake. They don’t have that blueprint. So you ask them the question, how did you get where you are? And they’re like, you know what, I don’t know, hard work, a lot of hours. Well, what were the steps or can you replicate that if you needed to? Or if somebody was going to give you $10 million to franchise your business, could you walk them through these steps? And so many people couldn’t. So people are growing by mistake. And I said, when we were writing the book Growing On Purpose, it was like, let’s talk about being intentional with our growth. And the two areas that we focused on were the team and the customer. And those are two fixtures in your process that you control them.

You control what the customer does and doesn’t do to a large extent. You control what your team does and doesn’t do. And if you have, like, that’s why I love this podcast, the blueprint, without a blueprint, hey, you know what, who builds a house without a blueprint? Let’s just kind of put a wall here and a wall here and let’s just see what happens. I mean, it’s not how this works, but yet this is how people do it in business all the time. And it’s unfortunate. So I was hoping, and again, we became an Amazon number one bestseller in three different categories. So it was cool to see people are like using these pieces to learn how to treat my team and how to treat my customer. And I thought it was common sense, Steve, I really did. But I realized that we may know it up here, but we’re not actually practicing it. So that’s, I think,

the power is to have a blueprint and follow it and then see what happens.
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Yeah. I love this bipolar focus, the team and the customer, the internal customer, the external customer, or you can even say the internal team and the external team, because your customers can become your missionaries for you if you give them a good product or good service. So that’s a really great perspective. I have a couple of questions to you, Dave, because you’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time and you’ve been through thick and thin and you know that things don’t come easy. What has been the most unexpectedly rewarding part for you of being a business owner?

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think it’s really, I’m shocked at how simple information revealed in a certain way to people can transform their business, transform their life. I just had somebody on my show the other day and we released it not too long ago and it was interesting because it was somebody that doesn’t normally do podcasts and she was so afraid and she almost cancelled. She was like, this isn’t live, is it? I’m like, no. I mean there was just so much apprehension on the front end and I said we just went through it and it was easy. And then on the back end, she shared it with her family and her family was just so supportive and they were just like amazed at how much this person has grown. And they were so excited. It was so transformational for me to think that I had something to do with this family coming closer together, this person tackling things outside of her comfort zone. I just think the impact on others has been the biggest reward for me.

It’s just in places that you don’t even know. There was another person that came up to me. I was doing a talk on comfort zone and getting outside of it. And somebody raised their hand because I said in the audience, who here is struggling with something in their comfort zone? A lady raised her hand and she said, I want to speak in front of others, but I’m scared to death. I’m like, well, here’s the mic. You want to do it right now? So she gets up and she starts talking. And then I find out a year later at the next conference that I saw her at that she applied to be a speaker and got accepted. And she has been working on conquering that fear. So I just think that impact on others has just been way more helpful for me, and it’s just been way more impactful on me than I ever thought it would be.

Yeah, it’s certainly a very rewarding profession to be a coach. I used to be an investment banker, and we did the deals, and we made some money, and it was very exciting, and it’s very stressful often, but it’s so much more positive to help people in all circumstances and not make it a win-lose. So it’s definitely great.

Yeah.

Okay. So let’s take the flip side of this. So we talked about the rewarding experience. What was the hardest decision you ever had to make in your business, Dave?

I think that we run into this on a regular basis. I have to make this decision about, and it sounds weird, but do I fire a customer or don’t I? Those are really hard decisions and I don’t want to make it from a decision of I’m better than a person, they’re inferior to me. I make that decision based on am I adding value to this particular person? Because if we go and we don’t add value to somebody’s life, it’s really hard for me personally to charge them money for that. I mean, I tell people, whether it’s in a training, a keynote somewhere in the country, whatever it is, if you don’t leave the time with me better than you came, it really wasn’t a success. And it can be small little course corrections. It doesn’t need to be life-altering things that go on, but it’s just really small course corrections. And the best example that I can think of from a course correction is, I live in the Midwest, and if I want to fly to California and let’s just say my destination was San Diego because we live there part-time. So if we are flying from the Midwest to San Diego and up in the air, the pilot decides to make a two-degree course correction, you don’t feel it on the airplane, you don’t see it on the map, but all of a sudden you end up landing in LA at LAX, which is a painful two and a half hour drive south.

So that small course correction at the beginning made a massive impact on the back end. And so that’s what I really like is I’m not looking for people that, oh my gosh, you changed my life, which I love when that happens. But I like when someone walks up and says, I’m gonna do this different. Like that lady, I’m going to jump outside of my comfort zone and I’m going to act to apply to be a speaker. And now she’s doing it. And it was because of something that I said that caused that. So the hardest thing is when do you fire somebody, when don’t you? And again, it’s tough, but it’s something that we as business owners, we probably need to do more of.

I agree with you. I think when you are able to do it and discontinue your relationship with a client who is no longer a fit or no longer gets value. It raises your own self-esteem. You’re holding yourself to a higher standard and then it means that you’re aware of what you’re doing and you’re holding yourself accountable to delivering value. I love it. I think it’s a great concept.

Yep, absolutely. And again, the whole goal, and this should be for anybody listening, that hopefully when somebody leaves your presence, they feel better. They’re farther along. They’re advancing. There’s something that happened that’s not bringing them backwards. And that’s where we need to make sure we understand the importance of our words, our body language, our tone. All of the pieces of communication are just really important when it comes to communicating with your team and communicating with your customer.

Yeah, no doubt. All right. Well, one more question. I have to get it off my chest. We talked about coaching. Coaching is done through questions. It’s creating awareness, creating that little bit of forward movement so that people live different and better than they arrived. So what is the most important questions entrepreneurs should be asking themselves?

That’s a great question. I’m working on my next book about business blind spots and it really actually kind of what we talked about before and the question really is to the entrepreneur listening right now, who is helping you with your blind spots? We all have them. We all operate from them sometimes. And who’s helping you? I mean, the funniest person is one that says, you have blind spots, I have none. That’s like we all have them. It’s proven we all have blind spots. So who’s helping you? Whether it’s a coach, whether it’s someone on your team, whether it’s an advisory group, whether it’s a board of directors, whatever that looks like in your world, I am totally open to whatever.

But that’s the interesting thing, is we all have a blind spot. Who’s helping you with them? In a car, we have a rear view mirror and we have side mirrors because they help us with our blind spots. Who is doing that for you? Because otherwise, you can go your whole life, Steve, and never really address those blind spots. And it’s funny because I work with leaders from around the country and I hear, oh, my team, I can’t keep a good team together. And the first question I always ask is, what are you as the leader, what are you not doing, or what could you do better? Look at it for yourself rather than again blame the team, because it’s super easy to blame the team. It’s super easy to blame the customer, the government, the environment, whatever. It’s easy. It’s really hard to look internal and say, what am I doing? And we don’t know what we don’t know. So there’s plenty of times where people have blind spots. They don’t even know that they’re doing it. So that would be my number one question is who is helping me with my blind spots?

Yeah, I love it. Love this question and actually we do an exercise in our annual leadership team meetings, which is titled “Cover Blindspots,” and we give each other feedback on blind spots and it’s always very powerful.

But think about that, Steve, if I come at you negatively, if I come at you demeaning, if I come at you in disrespect, anything I say, you’re probably going to try to refute. You’re going to build a wall. So we need vulnerability. We need respect because if you’re going to talk about my blind spots or I’m going to talk about yours, I really have to be in a safe place to be able to receive anything that you say. So that’s why I think it’s important to have somebody that you trust, a coach, an advisory board, a partner, whatever it is. But if we’re not in the right headspace, we’re not going to be able to receive that feedback because we’re just going to justify it and blow it off and just go about our day. So, in addition to making sure you’re helping with the blind spot, it’s got to be in a safe place that we can trust who’s sharing that with us. Because let’s face it, if you didn’t trust me, Steve, and I was going to tell you about a blind spot you had, your wall would go up and you probably would have a little bit harder of time receiving that from somebody that was doing it disrespectfully.

Yeah, that’s no doubt a very delicate approach. It’s required. People don’t like to be confronted with their blind spots and they need trusted advisors who they can take it from. So definitely a good point. Dave, we’re coming to the end of the show. So if people would like to learn more about the Positive Polarity Podcast, would like to perhaps apply to be on it, or like to reach out to you and talk to you and figure out how you can help them cover their blind spots, or make those little course corrections that’s going to get them to LA, especially in the film industry, they don’t want to end up in San Diego. Where should they go and where can they find you?

Sure, yeah, positivepolarity.com is the easiest place to go. The podcasts are there, the book is there, Growing On Purpose, everything’s there, our coaching schedule, our training schedule, where we’re speaking, so all that’s there. You just go there, connect with me on LinkedIn. Whatever’s easiest for you, we’re here to serve you any way that we can. And again, thank you for letting me hang out with you. And I’m glad that you didn’t ask me any Covid questions like I asked you.

Awesome. Well, Dave, thank you for sharing your wisdom about growth, about customer service, the importance of it, the team, covering blind spots, making little course corrections and leaving coaching sessions better than when you arrived. These are all very golden recommendations. So, if you’ve been listening to this and you enjoyed the show, then make sure that you follow us on YouTube. You give us a review on Apple Podcasts, please, and follow us on LinkedIn. And stay tuned because every week, I get a wonderful guest who is bringing some golden nuggets to the show. So thank you for coming, Dave.

Thank you.

And thank you for listening.

Devin Sizemore, Connector, Consultant, Speaker, and author of Connection Expansion, is driven by a mission to help entrepreneurs unlock opportunity by building meaningful, leveraged relationships that drive growth.

We explore Devin’s journey into connection strategy and his creation of the Connection Expansion Framework, a system designed to help business owners stop chasing prospects and instead build a thriving network that brings opportunity to them. The framework includes five key steps: identifying connectors to your target market, asking to be introduced, building strategic partnerships, saturating your niche, and staying top of mind through long-term follow-up.

Devin explains why most entrepreneurs overemphasize referrals and underestimate the value of partnerships, events, and collaborations. He shares how to reduce friction in introductions, build authority in niche communities, and turn warm relationships into a consistent flywheel of growth. He also discusses his book Connection Expansion, a tactical guide to putting this system into action.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And today my guest is Devin Sizemore, who is a connector, consultant, speaker, and author of Connection Expansion. Devin, welcome to the show.

Steve, thanks so much for having me. Been looking forward to this conversation.

Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to it too, especially since I read, I’m through about halfway through your book, Connection Expansion, and I found it fascinating, so let’s talk about it. But first, let’s start with your personal “Why” and how you are manifesting it in your business and businesses.

Definitely. I love that question. I think a lot of people aren’t aligned with their “Why,” and so I love that you start there. My personal “Why” is my first core principle that I share in the book, which is always add value. So everything I do, I focus on how do I add value to others, whether that’s just people I’m meeting, whether that’s clients, whether that’s your listeners, I’m always focused on adding value.

And so everything I do, every decision I make has to align with adding value.
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That’s a good principle to live by, to always add value. I had a client who had one of their core values was always add value. It was a consulting company and I thought it was very appropriate. So let’s talk about your book, Connection Expansion, which describes your unique networking system. So my question is what prompted you to write a book about networking and about the system?

Yeah, again, another great question. I’ve been doing consulting for 15 years. I’ve owned a bunch of companies and the core of it has always been connections. But where I think we’re a little bit different and where I’m different is I have the ability to be a visionary. So what do I think I wanna create, but also being tactical. So grounding that into an actual system. Seven years ago, I really focused on connections. A couple of hundred clients later, and we’ve proven the system works. And so writing the book was kind of the last step of that process with me going through and really documenting the questions, the follow-up, the cadence, the templates, the whole system in a way that I could share it easily with the world.  And then I work with a lot of book clients with one of my biggest clients. And so the combination of, I want to do it, and I’m watching all these people have success with books kind of led to me going, hey, it’s my turn to do this and I need to share it with the world.

Okay. And why is it important to build a network, to have lots of connections? Maybe it’s a stupid question, but I’m still curious.

No, it’s a great question because depending on what your goals are currently, the answer is different. And so the subtitle I have on my book is you’re one connection away from massive success in your life and business. And so that subtitle is really about this idea that one connection can unlock everything for you personally and professionally. And because of that, that’s why connections are so important because you never know which one of those connections is going to unlock something super big for you.

Can you give an example where a connection unlocked a big opportunity for someone?

Yeah. So, let’s go the kind of whole gamut. So, the first would be like an ideal internship. So as a college student or someone young in their profession, they want to land this perfect internship in the right industry with the right people. It could be finding the perfect job with no competition. So being invited to be an applicant for a job instead of having to go through a candidate pool of 30 candidates, it could be seven figure deals, JV partnerships, integrated offers. I’m doing a workshop in two weeks at a mastermind, I’m facilitating the whole second day, that was through a connection. So it’s everything from a connection for an attorney, a service provider, something you need, a job opportunity, seven figure deals. Like there’s so many examples and reasons why one connection can unlock something for you.

Yeah, that is true. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, they say. Let’s talk about the framework because in this book, Connection Expansion, you developed or you documented this framework which people can actually use to build their own network, their own connection expansion process. Can you share the steps? I think it was about six steps. Share the steps of this framework and how that works.

Yeah, for sure. So in the book, the first step is the connection expansion exercise, and that’s where we shift from targeting clients to targeting everyone who surrounds our clients. That’s the first thing that really unlocks the process, and then it shifts your ask from the ideal client profile to these strategic partners. Once you have that grounded, the rest of the process is how do you approach networking? How do you follow up? How do you schedule connection meetings? What is a connection meeting and how do you have a successful meeting? How do you follow up and add value from the connection meeting? And then how do you nurture someone long term? What’s that template and the messaging there? And so those are all the different elements that when combined with the core principles will unlock your network success.

So connection expansion exercise, and then you get into the networking follow-up, so how you use this whole networking process and adding value. So what does the connection expansion exercise do? What is the outcome of this exercise?

Yeah, so let’s talk about it. We’ll use realtors as an example, because I think it’s something everyone can relate to. So when I ask a realtor who they want to connect with, they’ll usually answer with their ideal client profile. So, first-time buyers or move-up buyers or investment buyers. They have a profile of a buyer or a profile of a seller. Typically, it’s buyers though. That’s great. That’s the ideal client. The savvier realtors, when you ask them, who can I connect you with? They’ll go, I want to know mortgage lenders or insurance agents. Because they know that those are good strategic partners that have access to a lot of potential ideal clients. But that’s where most people stop. And so in your industry, it’s probably the same thing.

Who do you want to connect with is the ideal client profile. And then the next step would be like the standard referral partner. Where we go steps further in the connection expansion exercise, we look at vendors. So which vendors are your ideal client spending money with? Where do your ideal clients get educated? Where do they gather? Who has influence over them? Who do they trust? And who’s a general connector? And so there’s six more categories we explore so we can build out a much deeper list of potential connections to that ideal client. Then we align that list with our personal preferences, our history and background, the things we’re passionate about, and we identify five or six strategic connections that we can ask for.

That starts to position us in better rooms and better meetings and it eliminates all the friction when we’re building our network. Because if we only ask for ideal clients, I’m asking Steve to connect me with the prospect so I can sell to them. It creates so much friction in the introduction. Whereas if I educate Steve and say, Hey Steve, I want to connect with the business CPA because we’re targeting similar clients and there’s great alignment. You can go through your database like, oh, I know a few CPAs, let me connect you. Now there’s no friction, it’s easier to make the intro. And so the process is to get you to change your ask, to build this list that your competition is not thinking about, and then to open all these opportunities up with less friction.

Yeah, I like this idea. And you’re right. I mean, sometimes I hesitate. Someone asks me, okay, this is the ideal client. I’m a service provider. Maybe I’m an HR, fractional HR. And unless I know that this person would do a fantastic job and I trust them, I hesitate to introduce them to my client because then the implication will be that they want me to talk to that person, that I am vouched for that person and I might not be in a position to do that, but other connectors would be easy to do. Now, if someone introduces me, let’s say my target client is small to medium sized business owners and maybe financial advisors would have good connections and I don’t know, CMOs, marketing people. And I drew the six different types of connection, build this list. So, what do I do with that list? Do I just talk to these people and explain what I do? Or is that also part of the connection exercise, how to engage with these people who are not my target market?

Yeah. So once you have your list, the quickest action item is to go back to your current network and schedule more meetings. The issue is there’s so much untapped potential in your network. You’ve probably met with a lot of people in your network, but when you were meeting with them, they were probably focused on educating you on ideal clients.

You were probably focused on educating them on ideal clients, which kept your conversation really closed.
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I’m betting you have a lot of marketing contacts because of that. Those are great connections for me because we’re targeting similar people but offering different services. Like anyone that you connected to while you were in that part of your journey, we probably could collaborate. And what we’re doing is we’re eliminating all these barriers for connections. So the list, although it’s your target, you shouldn’t be going out and cold prospecting the people on that list. You should then be taking that idea to your warm market and changing the conversation because what we’re trying to do is get them to introduce us to these strategic connections. Because if we’re getting two, three, four of these connections a day, we start to fill our calendar with much better leveraged meetings, which allows us to expand our network rapidly.

Okay. So it’s not that we don’t want to talk to our target market clients, it’s just that we want to first build a connector network so that we can have a lot of opportunities connect to our target markets. Is that it?

Yeah. We want referrals, but the problem is most people stop there. They ask their clients to give them referrals, they ask their network to give them referrals. It’s all prospects, which goes back to that friction. The quote I tell everyone is everyone wants to buy. Nobody wants to be sold. Yet, everything about that referral world positions people to be sold. So what we’re doing is we’re taking the barriers down and we’re going one step before that. Let’s build the connection network. Let’s build the strategic partnerships.

Let’s surround our clients so that when they do raise their hand and the time’s right, the budget’s right, they have enough pain point and problem, we’re the only option because no matter where they look, everyone’s saying, hey, you got to work with Steve, you got to work with Devin, you got to work with Bob. And so we’re going to get referrals at the long end of this process, but in the meantime, we’re going to explore integrated offers, strategic partnerships, podcasts, beakings, events, joint masterminds, all of these other things that you’re missing. Because again, you’re just chasing clients. You’re not chasing the strategic connections.

Okay. So the goal here is to really build up the top of mind awareness in a small community, which is like the local community of all those people who could connect you to the ideal target market. You basically want to saturate all those connectors with the top of mind awareness for us so that whenever someone raises their hands, we’re going to be the logical choice?

Yeah. So the quote I use there is, you want to be the authority in rooms where your competition doesn’t play. And so let me give you a real example. I was on with this gentleman named Peter last week that I was connected to. Just a joint connecting email. We were connected because he’s targeting faith-based business owners and so are we for one of our projects. I get on and talk to Peter. He tells me a service offering, tells me what he’s doing, and then we start trying to connect some dots and I ask him how he is doing a service offering. He says, I’m doing it through group coaching. Do you know this person? That’s who I’m working with. Oh, funny. I’m going to be the host of that guy’s summit in two weeks. Oh, you’re going to be attending?

So instantly, I just went from some person he was connected to. I was already edified and elevated to now all of a sudden, I’m more of an expert because I’m facilitating day two at an event he’s already paid for. And then we keep going and we find out that his best referral partner, I helped them write their book, they’re a client. His second best referral partner is a really good friend. And the next event he’s going to refers all their business to me. And so, by the end of the meeting, he didn’t even come in to buy my product or service. By the end of the meeting, he was asking what I sell. Because there’s so many connections in common, he’s going, oh, you’re playing at the same level with all these other guys. I must need to work with you or I need you in my network. And so that’s what I want. I want people to get connected to you.

And sure, if they’re an ideal client, there’s so much alignment, but in there, there’s so many strategic things that have happened. There’s events, there’s podcasts, there’s speaking, and this is just one meeting. But most meetings I’m in, this is exactly the scenario is, oh, do you know this person? Yeah, by the way, I work with them or I talked to them or I did this. And so, we’re becoming authorities in these little micro rooms. Sometimes they’re not micro. Sometimes these are big events with 5, 6, 10,000 people. But if you’re the go-to expert there, that’s where you really start to set yourself apart from the competition.

Yeah, I love it. That’s pretty cool. Okay. And what do you find is the appropriate geographical area where you want to create that kind of saturation? Is this a geographical area? Is this a niche market that you want to do this in? So what are the considerations as to delineating this market that you want to go after?

It doesn’t matter what the market definition is. And so the system we use works if you’re trying to attack a geographical market. We do that. We’ve done it in our own market. We do it for clients where we open new markets. It works extremely well if we’re going after verticals. So we’re going after a certain industry type because then we can build all of the relationships in the industry. Or it works if we’re going after a client type just to surround the client type, which becomes its own sort of market. It really doesn’t matter what the strategy is. It just matters that we figure out what our target is and we surround it and we use the network to surround it. And again, we want to do this in ways that we enjoy doing so that you shouldn’t be choosing strategies in places you don’t want to play and places our competition isn’t playing. 

Because there’s nothing worse than going to an event where there’s nine of you in the same room exhibiting and speaking. Do you want to go to an event, even if it’s a hundred people, which I’m going to this week in Philadelphia, we’re the only sponsor. Matter of fact, they don’t even have sponsors, but because we had such a good meeting and we were so referred and edified to this person, we became the only sponsor at their event.  So now we have a captive audience of perfect fit clients and we’re the only one there offering them anything. So that’s what I want for you. I want you to end up in a room where you’re it. You’re the authority, you’re the go-to and you’re not having to compete for it.

Yeah, that’s great. So do you have an ideal number of connectors that you can effectively work with? Because I find that it’s very hard when there are too many of them. It’s hard to stay top of mind. It’s hard to really know everyone. It’s hard to have enough touch points. So, what’s the Goldilocks zone of these connectors to work with?

Yeah. So, the system works really well with one person. Like you can literally meet one person and start the process. But the backend conversation here is the system. So, we check in with every contact every six weeks and we send them a check-in template. It’s all templatized. It’s not automated, so we do manually send it, but that’s how we nurture our database. We also track all the connections we’ve made. We sort our database. There’s a lot of tips and tricks on the backend there. But the answer is you want to go really wide. We want tons of people to know what you do. We want tons of people to see value. We want you to have made connections and added value to as many people as possible because that’s where we start to get the snowball down the mountain.

If you’ve made a hundred connections for other people, if you’re nurturing a hundred people, it is inevitable that you’re going to get amazing connections for other people.  If you’re nurturing a hundred people, it is inevitable that you’re gonna get amazing connections, amazing alignment. I just finished my Monday morning setup for the week and just from Friday noon to Monday morning, 17 inbound connections for me. That’s 17 conversations. I didn’t have to cold call. I get to follow up with, I get to book meetings with, all just from the network.

Okay. Well, that is interesting. I don’t know if it’s possible to have infinite number because how do you then even keep track of who these people are? Maybe they don’t do this with other people, you’re the only one and okay, you don’t even have to know everyone for them to know you. I mean, maybe that’s possible, but I’m still wondering how that works.

So yeah, let’s go a little deeper. So it’s not that we’re trying to have one referral partner sending us a hundred referrals. We wanna have a thousand advocates that anytime someone mentions anything that relates to what we do, we’re the option. And what that does is it spreads it out so that when someone needs something, you’re the only go-to. So, if someone wants to write a book, I get an introduction, hey, Devin’s the guy to write the book. That might be someone I met two years ago and I’ve just been checking in every six weeks. Maybe we haven’t even connected, but I’m still top of mind. Maybe they’ve replied to a couple of emails. But as soon as someone raises their hand or they find an opportunity, and then my checking email shows up, they go, oh, I was thinking of you, but I couldn’t remember who you were. Or I did have a conversation, right?

So we’re trying to create those mental cues where people can go, Oh, you know what, Devin? Yeah, I do have a connection for you. And the other part of this process is we want to nurture long-term because that’s where you set yourself apart from your competition. Your competition is only asking for client referrals. They’re likely only nurturing one or two referral partners that they hope give them enough referrals. They’re not building a long-term nurture strategy where they’re staying top of mind and they’re activating their whole network instead of a really small part of it.

Okay. So it is a numbers game and you want to build this big network that are aware of you and stay top of mind with them and then you can get referrals. Okay. So you’ve been in business for 15 years and you’ve met with lots of entrepreneurs. What do you think is the most important question an entrepreneur should be asking themselves?

It’s so interesting. I think the biggest question is why and then where are we going? It’s kind of a two-part question because I think a lot of people get into business for a lot of the wrong reasons when they start. And so I think really understanding why you’re in business, why you’re doing what you’re doing personally, professionally, who you’re trying to impact, that’s important. And then I did a Mindset podcast last week, and I think that the future anchoring is critical. I think so often people don’t have a big enough vision to where they’re going, what that looks like, what that feels like. And so you’re so stuck in today’s fires and today’s to do list because you’re not thinking about the future. You’re not thinking about the systems and processes, the team, the things you’re going to need to build to become that future version of your business that you’re growing. So why and then where are you going? You’ve got to have clarity on both of those things.

Yeah, I agree. Vision includes both. Why are you doing this and where are you going? Awesome. Well, Devin, thank you for sharing your expertise on creating powerful networks. That’s definitely not been on our podcast yet. I encourage you, if you’re listening to this, to check out Connection Expansion, which is Devin’s book, and it’s available on Audible as well as print and Kindle. So Devin, thanks for coming to the show. And if you’re listening, then stay tuned because every week we bring an exciting entrepreneur or thought leader who helps you grow your business and make it better. If people would like to connect with you, where can they reach you?

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, Steve. I appreciate your questions. You can go to connectionexpansion.com. That will take you to my community where we help facilitate connections. You can also go to devinsizemore.com, which has a bunch more information about me, videos on the system we talked about, templates, frequently asked questions, and a whole bunch more. Love to connect with you. If you have questions, reach out. Happy to answer those questions specifically for you.

Awesome. Well, thank you, Devin. Thanks for coming and thank you for listening.

David Anderson, Founder of Off Madison Ave and Lighthouse PE, is passionate about helping people and companies thrive through leadership coaching, board service, and team development. We explore how David helps companies build high-performing teams using his High-Performing Team Framework, which includes: psychological safety, a learn and grow mindset, the chemist mentality, and attention to team dynamics when introducing new members.

David also shares lessons from his book Leader is not a Title, emphasizing that true leadership is about influence—not hierarchy. We talk about building trust, breaking silos, and knowing when to evolve as a leader.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And today I have David Anderson with me on this episode, who is the founder of Off Madison Avenue and Lighthouse PE, two companies that are now doing their own thing. And he is spending his time sitting on boards and doing leadership team coaching as an executive coach, business coach. He’s also the author of Leader is Not a Title, which actually has a very cool cover. You have to read it closely to really see what is the title, what is not the title. But we can get into this later. So David, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on today, Steve.

Absolutely. And let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice and perhaps in your businesses as well?

Yeah, awesome. Great question to kick it off here this morning. My personal “Why” is to help people and companies thrive. I have been very blessed over the years to had a lot of things go my way, be lucky. Believe me, I’ve had my fair share of rough times and screw-ups and bad businesses, but overall, I’m very fortunate. And as you mentioned early on, I am the founder, technically CEO of two companies, Off Madison Ave and Lighthouse PE. I’m not involved day-to-day with those anymore. And I really am helping people and companies thrive now by working as an executive team coach. I really focus on building high performing teams. As we all know, you can have the best strategy in the world, but if you don’t have the right people, it doesn’t really matter. I do speaking on this topic and a few other things and also sitting on boards of directors, helping companies really thrive. So it’s all about helping people and companies thrive.

Love it. Well, okay. So help us and help our listeners thrive as well. And so let’s talk about this thing that you mentioned, the building high performing teams. I totally agree. A company is really a group of people committed to a cause. And if they’re not thriving, then the company is not thriving. So what does it take for a business owner or CEO to build a high-performing team? What are the steps? What is your framework on this?

Well, there’s a few things. There’s lots of factors that get you to a high-performing team, but a high-performing team is one where everybody’s roles are extremely clearly defined. People know how to interact with each other to accomplish the common goal, the strategy, the vision that they’re going to. There’s no silos. Many organizations get caught in silos. They keep it from being a high-performing team. They know how to communicate with each other. 95, I would even say maybe more percent of our challenges are poor communications, lack of communications that get us in the way from ensuring that we are a high-performing team. My most favorite analogy of that, I don’t know how many of your listeners out there are race car fans, maybe race cars once in their life, whatever, but think of a pit crew for a Formula One, IndyCar, NASCAR race.

The driver actually is very important, just like a CEO, chair of achieving goals, winning the race, but it doesn’t happen without the pit crew. And the pit crew is the best example I have been able to come up with of a high-performing team. When they come over the wall, everybody knows exactly what they need to do. I need to jack the car up. I need to take the lug nut off. I need to put the new tire on. I need to adjust the tips for better aerodynamics. I need to clean the windshield. In Indy, you got to refuel. Formula One, you don’t refuel. I know exactly how much fuel it is to get to the next lap or to win the race. That is a high-performing team.

Yeah, it really is and it’s amazing. In Formula One, I remember when I was a kid, it was 15 seconds to do all that stuff and now it’s down to just a few seconds. I don’t even know what it is. Is it like five seconds or less?

It’s unbelievable and if one of those team members, something goes wrong and it becomes a 15 second pit stop, a 20 second, that means the race. It can very well mean the race. So, the question I ask a lot of CEOs that I work with, chairs of the boards and others is can you draw your team out as a pit crew? Who has this role? Who has that role? How does this role interact with the others? Do you have somebody who’s coming over the wall that maybe was good when you were in the minor leagues of auto racing, but now you need a better person to come over the wall, more experience, has done it before, whatever, to ensure you achieve your goal?

One of my absolute favorite people and favorite books is Marshall Goldsmith. While he’s been ranked the number one business coach in the world many times over, but one of his books, he has several, is What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. And as high-performing teams, you may have great people, very good people, but you have all the right people in the right seats at the right time to accomplish the current goals. And that’s a high-performing team when you can say, yes, we have all of those people. 

Okay. Yeah. Now, in our pre-call, you also touched upon a couple of concepts I’d like to bring up here. One is psychological safety. So what do you mean by psychological safety and how does one create that?

Yeah, it’s a great question. And that’s one of the factors that with you can have, again, the best people in the world, but if your team doesn’t have psychological safety, I need to come up with a better term. That’s a Harvard term for it, McKinsey, all of those guys, it’s not a Dave term. Does your team have frank conversations? Do they debate? Do they maybe even argue through that? Does everybody in the team feel safe to bring up issues? Does the CEO allow it?

Because the absolute best incomes always come from a team environment where there’s deep conversations where you’re bouncing ideas off of each other and go there. In my book, I talk about the difference between brainstorming and conflict is one thing, ego. Well, actually, let me take that back. Emotions is the one thing, but ego leads to emotions. And does your team, are you able to communicate as a leadership team without emotions? People’s feelings don’t get hurt because you all know that you are working for the good of the organization. And that doesn’t mean we all always agree.

What it does mean is that each person in the room feels heard, and when they leave that room, you leave with one voice. You may not all agree, but you leave as one voice. So again, only difference between brainstorming for the good of the organization and conflict is emotions. And it’s the CEO or the leader’s responsibility to ensure that the emotions are kept to a minimum and it doesn’t become personal. Emotions mean it’s becoming personal. Don’t let it become personal.

Okay. So another concept I’d like to just switch to it that you mentioned was the learn and grow mindset. What do you mean by learn and grow mindset?

Yeah, great question. So I am a graduate of a school here in Arizona, Arizona State University. I’m a little older. It’s an amazing university. Now, I sure had a great time in college, but when I graduated, well, first of all, my grades were never that great. But when I left, I didn’t continue a mindset that I need to learn and grow and expand not only my skill sets, but my personal skills of how do you have a learn and grow mindset where I don’t know everything. As a matter of fact, I’m far from knowing it. How do I have a mindset to hire people that are better than me with skills and that? How many podcasts do you listen to a month? How many books do you read? How many articles do you read? How many would ChatGPT, the greatest thing ever to allow you to learn and grow, dive into topics to learn more?

And it took me a lot of years before I realized that, Dave, you are so far from knowing everything. And there is just about everything I’ve gone through. Thousands and thousands and tens of thousands of people have gone through before are experts of things, learn from their experiences and make yourself better. 

Love it. Another concept that you talk about is the chemist mentality. So is this about personal chemistry on the team? Or what is this about? 

Yeah, I do. In my book, I talk about CEOs are really chemists. If you think about it, what do chemists do every day? They mix different ingredients. They bring things together to try to get to a formula that provides an outcome. In pharma, in industrial, whatever, it’s all about that. Well, think about your team in the exact same mindset, that it’s the right mix of people, skills, mentalities, levels of experience, all of that that lead to the best outcome. That means a high-performing team that’s achieving the corporate goals, whatever it may be, your division goals or whatever. But, so many times, a new person comes into the mix and we don’t give enough thought to of how that changes the chemistry of the team. How does that change perspectives, all of that? So we constantly need to be thinking about our teams as the outcome of what we are building as chemists and how do we mix and change, adapt that to get there. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. I mean, I see this all the time. I’ve got some clients where there’s a lot of stability on the team, sometimes too much stability and no new team members coming and things starting to get stale. And I often recommend to the CEO that bring in one person who is going to be the yeast in this team, who’s going to stir things up and make everyone perform at a higher level. If you bring in an A player, a high performer, they’re going to pull everyone up with them. And I was fortunate to have such a person on my team, in my business, 15 years ago that I brought in from basically a college professor.

I gave a donation to his foundation and he referred his best student to me. Boy, this guy was really awesome and he really moved and shook things up and he was very creative, he was very ambitious and he was very driven and it elevated the whole team up. So that can be a very, very useful thing.

I completely agree with you. We all worry so much about turnover and too much turnover can be a challenge, but not enough turnover can also be a huge challenge. We get comfortable in what we’re doing. If you’re a CEO listening, is your team too comfortable? How do you shake it up? And something that I had to deal with, I had to know too, when it was time for me to move out of the role that I was in and that somebody different needed to come in and be the president, CEO, pick whatever title you want. The agency’s been around for, I think, 26 years, I know more than 25 years. That’s probably too long for one CEO. So when is it that you bring in the next person to help? And that goes right back to the foundation of Marshall Goldsmith’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There to go through.

Yeah, and sometimes, a lot of people say private equity is you’re just focusing on EBITDA and they fire a bunch of people. But I do think that sometimes private equity is really helpful because a company gets stale, maybe the founder already fulfilled their vision and then you need the fresh energy, someone to come in and have another vision and climb another mountain. And then you can keep rejuvenating these companies and they can actually grow faster that way.

Absolutely. I mean, look at Bill Gates stepped aside and brought other people in. There’s tons and tons of examples. What I say is focus on what you really enjoy doing, not what you think you have to do. So many founders think we have to stay in a specific role. I’m not a detailed person. I’m not a great day-to-day person. So you got to go back to the chemistry. And the difficult part of that is that we have to include ourselves in that formula as CEOs, chairs, founders, whatever it might be, because I’ve dealt with, and I’m sure you have too, Steve, companies where it’s the CEO founder that is the biggest obstacle to growth going forward. So you need to evaluate. Those are always fun conversations, but it’s the truth.

Yeah. I like to say that the bottleneck is always at the top of the barrel.

Very good. I like that. Yeah.

All right. So, I mean, you are a good example of stepping out and letting someone else come in and take things forward from there. That’s very impressive, actually. You did that with at least two companies that I saw on LinkedIn. There’s a software company, the AI company that you founded, and then this Off Madison Avenue, which is an advertising agency. So how did you know that it was the right time to move on? And was this a difficult thing to do, or it was kind of something that you yearned to do it and you kind of intentionally got yourself to the point where you could do this at some point?

Well, there’s a lot to that question, so I’ll try to keep it simple. First of all, my own coaches helped me realize that, my own business coaches. I am also a member of and have been very involved in the global leadership of an organization called EO, Entrepreneurs Organization. So I am part of a forum in EO with other CEO’s, CEO forums. I’ve traveled the world with the organization meeting entrepreneurs around the world. And so I learned a lot from them. Some of them had done it. So I learned from that. Now I will tell you the first time I did it, I completely screwed it up and made a total mess of it because I brought a person in to run and they started on Monday. And on Tuesday, I was like, I’m out, good luck, which was about the stupidest thing I could do.

Anytime you do that, you have to ensure there’s a good transition. I would say at least a year transition with kind of stepping down, going forward. So the first time after, about four months, I lost three of the six leadership team members because the new guy was so bad. Then the new guy, he technically quit, but he knew his days were numbered to go forward and then I had to rebuild. The second time I did it, I did much better, but not great. I hired somebody within and they did a very good job to a point. And then I realized that what got you here helped us get to the next step, won’t get you there. And it took me too long to make a change to the person that I have in now, again, because I got complacent and it was easy.

And then it wasn’t. And the third time, we’re only about more than six months now in, and it’s going fabulous where we had a transition. I did bring somebody in from the outside. I had a transition schedule. I did extensive interviewing, cultural stuff. We use culture index a lot. So, a lot of that we went through and the new person in a matter of six months has made such a significant difference. Now I just wake up and go, well, why didn’t you do that 18 months ago? So it’s there, but it’s a live and learn and you know where you’re going from there.

Yeah. And what’s important is that you did it and now you are on to your next thing. So that brings me to the question of your book. You wrote a book which is titled Leader is Not a Title, but it’s a very cute way of saying you’re a leader and then you have to look really closely to read what’s the subtitle? Is not a title. Okay. 

Yeah. 

So it is the title, but it’s not the title. So tell me a little bit about why you thought it was important to say this and what is the message? What is the outcome that you are trying to foster with this book?

Yeah. Great. Thank you for asking. So I wrote the book actually back in 2019. And as a thank you for the compliments about it, it’s less than 100 pages. It’s not a long book at all. If you read the intro, you will say that there is no earth shattering, groundbreaking new research on this. What I just basically did was take my learnings, my experiences that I had personally and that I had seen so many of my fellow EO members go through and broke it down to a simple leadership guide that we can use for newer people coming into leadership. It’s a great refresher for people coming into leadership.

But the basic message is, as we’ve seen people go through our organization, they’re always so focused, well, what’s my title gonna be? I’m gonna be assistant vice president. I’m gonna be a vice president. I’m gonna be executive vice president. And I’m like, what’s the difference between all of those? None. You can be christened with a title, but it doesn’t mean you have any more influence. On Monday, you get a promotion and a new title than you have on Tuesday. Leadership is about, first of all, you’ll read in the book, leadership equals influence. That’s all that it is. If you can’t influence people, you’re not really a leader. You just have a title. And how do you influence people? We influence through motivation. How do we motivate people to do what we need them to do for the good of the organization and then the good for themselves?

That’s where my helping people and companies thrive comes together here, is motivating people. How do you motivate people? You motivate every single person differently. There’s no manual on blonde-haired people, gray-haired people, you motivate this way. You have to get to learn the people. But think about your organization’s people that have no significant title, but have huge influence in the organization that can help protect your culture, help do other things because people respect them, they listen to them, they know that they’re trustworthy, they know they have integrity. And I’ve had some leaders I’ve worked with that lacked all of those, but thought they were pretty big crap because they had a title.

Yeah, I’m with you. I mean, leadership is all about leading people. It’s not about the authority. It’s about the influence. And for the people to know that you have their best interest at heart, so you’re worth following. Because you are leading them to somewhere good that you want to get to. It’s huge.

Absolutely. I agree. One of my favorite quotes, John Maxwell, is before you can lead others, you have to lead yourself. And I believe that’s a big part of leadership. Just take a minute and think, okay, if I’m a leader, what do I want in the leader that I have? Integrity, motivation, they care about me. Level five of John Maxwell’s stuff is, it’s about creating other leaders. You are a level four, level five leader when you are creating other leaders because you know those leaders will help the overall company go forward. So, if you follow John Maxwell, your focus should be on developing leaders because that, by naturally, will allow the organization to achieve what it needs to.

Yeah. And I guess this is what you’re doing by coaching leaders. You are developing them. You’re using this force multiplier effect where you are creating leaders who are going to create great organizations and who are going to help a lot of people be successful. That’s pretty awesome. So, I have a question about your previous life still, which is being an entrepreneur. Maybe it’s your current life because you haven’t sold your businesses as well. What is the hardest decision that you ever had to make in your businesses?

That’s a great question. The first hardest decision I ever had to make was when to hire the first person, because now, I’m responsible for another human being and their family and whatever. You can always deal with if you’re not getting a paycheck or whatever, but once you hire that first person, you’re committed. So that was a long time ago, but that was the big one. For me, the hardest part is still on the people side as you’re a growing organization and you need to have the difficult conversations with, you’re a great person, you’re valued here, we appreciate your loyalty.

This day and age too, sometimes people cap out at salary levels and other things too, where you just have to have the tough conversations of how much they’re appreciated and valued, but the what got you here won’t get you there. Now, I’m not in any way saying that you always have to replace somebody, but if people don’t have the right learn and grow mindset that you asked me about early on. Sometimes people just cap out at where they are and those are the toughest conversations if you like the person. Sometimes it’s just time for a change because people, attitude, they think they’re entitled, whatever, just being blunt, those need to change. But the people conversations are always going to be the hardest. 

Yeah, and I see some entrepreneurs who have this idea that they want to make the company their second family, and then at some point, they hit the ceiling because they realize that, well, there’s a difference because I won’t be able to grow this company if I keep all the family members here. And in a family, you obviously cannot fire family members, but in a business, it can be counterproductive and you tolerate people that don’t fit anymore and then it can backfire.

100% you are. That family mentality, while I understand it, can also be a real challenge to people, as your organization evolves and grow. And again, there’s probably a place for them. It’s just maybe not what they want, what they expect, the title they want, the salary they want, but that’s where you need to make those tough conversations. And it’s even more challenging when there’s family members in the business or family businesses or other things that makes it even more difficult. But you gotta have them or you gotta bring somebody in like me. I’m consulting with a company right now and I just went and did a leadership training and there were 19 people in the room. I’m like, this is your leadership team?

And they were like, yeah. And the mentality when I asked later on was, well, such and such has been with us for so long. So just as they kept adding people, you can’t have a leadership team of 19 people. You just can’t get it done. You can tier it. You can, you know, executive committee, senior leadership, you can go down. But to have 19 people on your leadership team because you don’t want to have the tough conversation of you’re no longer part of this team is going to hamper their growth.

Well, sometimes they want you as the coach to have this conversation. I had a client that merged because it was kind of a veterinary horse. It was a family business founded by the father and then the son was a very talented guy. He also founded his own business and both businesses became successful. And then, at some point, they went to merge it and the father wanted the son to take over, but not just yet. So we had this situation where there were 18 people on the leadership team or everyone came on the leadership team who was in either company and we basically had to use this process of coaching them to whittle it down over time. So there were other issues. But yeah, I agree with you. Big teams can be really, really challenging to do, but sometimes you have to do it because no one else will. 

You’re exactly right, Steve. 100% they bring us in to be the bad guys to do that. The consultant said, we need to do this. It’s happened over and over again. Or the same situation of this person’s been there 20 years, and they were the director of operations when the company was doing two and a half million dollars. And now it’s doing 10 million. It’s probably not the right person to continue to be doing the operations. You need somebody who’s taken a company from 10 to 50 million to get where you need to go.

Absolutely. So, David, if someone would like to learn more about your approach, read your book, check out your businesses, where should they go and where can they learn about you and from you?

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Steve. Well, first of all, the book is on Amazon, Leader is Not a Title by David W. Anderson. I also have a website, my personal website for my coaching, my speaking board of directors, which is [email protected]. The W is my middle name. So [email protected]. You can reach me there. There’s a bunch of information about me. There’s a “Contact Me.” You can find me on LinkedIn. Also there’s a few David Anderson’s in this world. So, look for David Anderson, DWA Leadership, Off Madison Ave in Arizona. You can find me that way through the search on LinkedIn.

Yeah. So definitely check out David’s website, dwaleadership.com and check out his LinkedIn page as well. There are good posts that you can read there and learn about the businesses. So, David, thank you so much for sharing your wisdom about coaching and building high performing teams on this show. And those of you listening, if you enjoy this conversation, then you know that every Monday, we’ll have a new episode. So make sure that you subscribe to us on YouTube, you follow us on LinkedIn, on Apple Podcasts to give us a review and stay tuned because we bring great guests every time. So thanks for coming and thanks for listening.

Dr. Sharon Spano, Executive Coach, Business Strategist, and author of The Pursuit of Time and Money, is driven by a mission to help leaders realize their fullest potential and elevate their impact across business, family, and community.

We learn about Sharon’s journey helping high-performing leaders navigate stress, growth, and transformation through The Awareness Elevation Framework. By guiding them to witness themselves, build awareness, observe patterns, and shift behaviors, Sharon empowers deeper personal and professional growth. In this episode, Sharon unpacks the 12 stages of adult development and reveals why many leaders plateau early—despite external success. We explore how awareness creates lasting change, and how the “emptiness of success” often mirrors one’s inner relationship with time, money, and life.

Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And I have today Dr. Sharon Spano, Executive Coach and Business Strategist, and the author of The Pursuit of Time and Money. As my guest, Sharon, thanks for joining me on the show.

Thank you so much for having me, Steve. I am looking forward to this.

Yeah, I am very curious about what you’re bringing to the table. You have some original ideas on executive coaching and business strategy. But let’s start with my favorite question. What is your personal “Why” and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice?

Well, that’s a very big question. The “Why” is all about helping people realize their fullest potential. And the reason that it’s so important to me is because I have seen just so much damage across the country and across the world from individuals who have been under poor leadership. And I really believe that leadership is just a very important part of our economy and how businesses are run. And so anything that I can do, the primary focus is to help leaders as I’ve moved into this other stage of my career, really help them discover and uncover some of the things that are holding them back, even though they may be successful. I find there’s always something more that they’re looking for so that they can be better leaders for themselves, their families and their businesses.

Yeah, I think it’s such an overlooked idea that leaders are multipliers. And when you coach a leader and you make them better, then you improve the quality of not just the family, but their employees and the employees, and they are happier then they’re going to help the customers and their family. So it’s a real force multiplier that you do when you coach your leaders the right way. So this podcast is a podcast of frameworks, and I’m always after frameworks, as you know. So I’m wondering about your framework that you could share with us. We talked about a three-stage transition framework for entrepreneurs. I don’t know if that’s the right title for it. Can you talk a little bit about this framework?

I operate, as most of us do, I think, from many frameworks. The primary framework that I use is grounded in human development because I believe that’s a very important part of how we become more effective leaders. Many people don’t understand that the stages of human development are exactly that opportunity. But if we wanted to boil it down to some of the things that you and I talked about, we talked about being able to witness oneself, have that awareness of awareness, and then to look at how to leverage opportunities for growth so that if something is going on in your life, for instance, it might feel like it’s very, very challenging, it is actually an opportunity to move into another stage of development. And then to look at what is the best option to get there, because sometimes, we’re not able to do that on our own.

We need other people to walk alongside of us. And that’s why I believe the coaching profession has grown in the way that it has is that as people are experiencing more and more stress and not understanding what that means in their lives or how to move through it, they often need a professional and sometimes it’s therapy, sometimes it’s just an executive level coach to help walk alongside them as they move through whatever’s going on in their life.

Okay, so is there a framework that you could talk about to help people actually visualize what they need to do exactly? So are there like a three or four step approach that would help people think about, okay, I need to become a better leader. How do I do this? How do I put one foot in front of the other? And how do I start in this process to getting there?

Yeah. I think the first thing is to look at the patterns in your organizational system and also the patterns that you’re seeing within yourself, because those are the flags that tell us there’s something more that needs to be done here. And then to me, the second one is what I alluded to earlier is that to understand there are 12 stages of human development as we know of them today based on research.

The average person in the workforce is at stage four or five so that tells you there’s a great opportunity for growth there. You don’t necessarily have to know about the stages but to know that there is an opportunity for growth. We’re not just stuck at where we are based on our age or even our career choices or outcomes. So to know there are stages, there’s opportunity for growth. Look at the patterns first. And then where is it that I need to grow? Once I look at the patterns, that should give me some clues that, okay, maybe it’s in my interpersonal skills, maybe it’s in my moral capacity, maybe I’m feeling that emptiness of success that I often talk about, So I need some spiritual development. We look at six lines of spiritual development in my work as well. And then to develop the awareness.

And that in my work is teaching people how to witness themselves in the moment, which takes some practice and why you need someone to walk alongside you through that process, so that I can really see myself in the moment and the kinds of things that I’m doing. Most of that is at a subconscious level. So when I develop the awareness of awareness, then the final piece is I am able to make different or healthier choices once I have that deeper understanding of what it is that I’m about and what it is that I’m doing that is working for me versus what’s not working for me.

Okay, that’s really interesting. So let’s unpack this for a moment. So one of the things that you talk about is witnessing yourself. So how does a person witness themselves?

We don’t do that. So, let me tell you how it looks for most of us, and then I’ll tell you how you learn to do it. Most of us have an awareness, let’s say, after the fact. Let’s say we get impatient in a meeting with one of our employees or a superior even. And then after the fact, we recollect, oh my gosh, I can’t believe I did that again. And we feel bad. We go into regret or remorse or shame or whatever. The process of learning to witness yourself is a very high level skill. And it’s about really expanding consciousness. So what I do with clients is we develop obviously a full program, but then within that context I have practices that are customized that I write for each one, each client specific to whatever’s going on with them and the topic and objectives that we’ve agreed upon.

So I might, for instance, if I have a client, here’s a good example. If I have a client who’s very intense, as I did some years ago, that she was in marketing and the boss said, I’m going to fire her because she’s got her nose in every department’s business and she’s too aggressive and she was just a big personality. So we got to the root of what that was about for her. And then like her very first practice as an example was I asked her to just observe herself throughout the course of the day, one or two moments where she kind of felt herself getting intense. But I didn’t have her do that in the heat of the day in meetings, that would have been too much. I had her notice, how does she get her kids up for school in the morning? How does she load the dishwasher? How does she talk to her husband?

And what she started to see, it came back to me that even the very first week was, oh my God, I’m so intense all day long. I’m so high strung everywhere I go. And then we built upon those observations, eventually moving into the meeting space where she started to see how domineering and aggressive she was at every meeting. And then typically once someone starts to witness themselves in the moment, they’re able to make those changes in the moment. Eventually, they stop those behaviors altogether once they realize that it no longer serves them or the people around them.

Okay, that’s really interesting. So just go through the day and if you have identified something or someone helped you identify something that is maybe holding you back, then you just stop yourself and say, okay, what am I doing here? Am I exhibiting this? And why I might be doing it? That’s fascinating. And then basically, you create the awareness and self-awareness and then you can do something about it.

And that’s an oversimplification even as I’m stating it because again most people do not have awareness of their behavior as problematic. I find at least with most of my clients that we tend to think it’s the other guy’s fault because basically the way we are wired as human beings is what we call a first-person perspective. I’m only able to see my point of view. So, it takes a lot of work to expand consciousness to where I can have a second, third, fourth, even fifth-person perspective and see beyond my own point of view. But that is part of the developmental trajectory and why this work is so important and so different because we’re not just coaching for goals. We’re coaching for developmental growth, which is a completely different approach.

Yeah, I love that. So people witness themselves, then you help create the awareness, and then how do they actually get going from there? What is the process? Let’s say I realize I’m intense, I’m packing the dishwasher, I’m slamming some plates in, and I’m kind of very curt with my wife. I realize, oh, wow, I should not be doing this. How do I get out of this habit?

Well, a lot of times, once you have awareness, I always say awareness is the first opportunity for change. So with my clients, I’m not even suggesting or dictating the change. I’m just helping them. I’m creating the container for them to witness. And then we work through it. They report the patterns back to me. And in reporting the patterns, they start to change automatically. If there’s areas where there’s trauma, and often there is trauma in the background, then we have to do another layer of work to deal with that trauma. And there’s many different ways that I do that because all of my work is trauma-informed. But if they’re on their own and trying, they’re only going to probably get so far.

Because again, if you don’t have a trained professional that can see what you’re not able to see and hear what you’re not able to hear, you’re only going to go so far. So I like to think of the developmental stages, the 12 of them, like a mountain, even though it’s not a hierarchy in the traditional sense. If you imagine stage one is a baby in a crib and all that baby can see is their fist and they don’t even know it’s their own fist for a long time. But as you expand consciousness, you have, let’s say now you’re at the top of that mountain, and imagine on a clear day you can see seven states from there. You have a much broader awareness and a much broader understanding.  We know that people do not move into the later stages of development unless they do a significant amount of work, and it can take probably anywhere from a year to two years to move to a later stage. The idea, Steve, is not necessarily to move to a later stage, but to live the most robust experience of life at whatever stage you’re at.

I find most often if people, for instance, entrepreneurs often fall at what we call the achiever stage, where they’re chasing time and money and all the accolades and all the things that all of us as entrepreneurs even look for, then as they move on, sometimes that’s where that emptiness of success comes in is now I have all that, but what does it really mean? And I’m working extra hard to keep the machine running and I’m feeling very sad or anxious or depressed. Often that means they’re leaning into another stage and they’re wanting something different or more. And that’s where I think they’re wise to seek out a developmental coach or if they have severe trauma in the background, which many do, then even more extreme measures depending on the nature of the trauma.

Okay. So that’s very interesting. So basically there are 12 stages of development and to expand consciousness.

Yes.

And then you are on a certain stage, you’re not aware where you are, but with coaching you can figure that out. And then your solution may just be to have a more robust life in whatever stage you are. You become aware of what you’re missing at later stages. So you want to get to the next stage and then you want to work on this. But it’s kind of optional whether some people want to go there, some people don’t want to go there.

Yeah, and the other thing that we say about stage development that I think is important to understand is that we say everything transcends and includes, means it goes with us. So even that shadow side of us, that dark side of us, if we’re not doing the work, we might advance to another stage, but we’re bringing all that dark side with us. So, we want to do that work around those elements that are not serving us so that as we advance, we’re healthier. And I like to compare it to an infant because we’ve all been infants or been around infants. And so when we talk about development, I always say, easiest way to think about it is a baby does not forget to crawl when they learn to walk, when he or she learns to walk. They just crawl less and less often. So we bring everything along with us as we advance, good, bad, and ugly. The point is to perhaps do something that allows us to bring more of the healthier side along.

So why would someone not want to advance to the next stage or to higher stages? What would be the good reason for that?

Well, there is no real reason not to want to advance. I think that the thing is that most people don’t even know about the stages. So they hit a wall in their career or their life. Maybe they go through a divorce or something happens and this is when I get them, they think, oh my God, my life is over. Something terrible is going on and I’m a failure. And it’s like, no, no, this moment, sometimes we grow the most through our suffering or through the negative events ‘cause we learn if we’re looking, we grow when we look to make meaning out of what has happened to us. And that’s, again, sometimes where we need a professional because all we can see is, oh my gosh, this terrible thing has happened to me.

I’ve lost a bunch of money or my wife left me or my kids are on drugs or whatever. The stages are just a way that we talk about the expansion of awareness and consciousness, meaning I understand things differently. And there’s a great amount of peace that comes into being in the later stages because you have more wisdom, you have more patience, you have more compassion, more love, if you’ve done the work to get rid of that shadow side of yourself.

Yeah, no, no, I get it. And I’m just reading a book and it talks about the friction that you need to have in order to be able to work on yourself. If you have a very easy life, then you have no raw material to work with. It’s a fascinating topic. But what I’m curious about is that they’ve worked with you, they realize that they’re at a certain stage, they have the awareness, you help them find the awareness of it, and now they are aware that there are other stages. Why would someone not want to get there? That’s kind of what I’m wondering.

Yeah. I’ve not met anyone that once they know about the stages, don’t want to get there, and even if they don’t know about the stages, they want something more in their lives. They’re trying to figure out what that more is or how to get that more even if they know it. I don’t think it’s a question of not wanting to. I think it’s a question of not knowing that human development is available to us. I mean, here’s how I think about it, Steve. It wasn’t that long ago that we used to think people didn’t develop or mature beyond the age of 21. And we were basing that on the frontal cortex of the brain, because that is about that.

It’s a little different for men than women, but that’s when that frontal cortex fully develops in the human brain. But if you think about it, that’s really kind of ridiculous. Because we continue to have all these life experiences after 21. So we’re going to either grow or we’re going to regress. And people that get stuck in the earlier stages, I mean like the adolescent stages, what we refer to as the pre-conventional or conventional stages, they are often so traumatized, or there might be a drug addiction, for instance, that keeps them kind of stuck developmentally. Our prisons are full, unfortunately, of human beings. When I wrote the book on the pursuit of time and money, I did it looking through the lens of the stages. And we know that people in the earlier stages, they don’t have the ability, literally do not have the ability to see the ramifications of their actions in terms of time and money.

It’s instant gratification kind of thing. And so that alone, if you’re having trouble with time and money, that’s something to look at, to tell you there’s an opportunity for growth there. Because as you mature, you should be able to see further out in terms of time. I should be able to see, well, if I do this, this is going to impact me the next five, ten years. And also with respect to my use and appreciation and responsibility around money.

Okay, so we’re going to talk in 30 seconds about your book, The Pursuit of Time and Money, but I’d like to just ask a final question on what you mentioned about the emptiness of success. So why do people get to feel the emptiness of success and how does that connect to the pursuit of time and money? And then also please share with us why you decided to write this book.

I decided to write it because what I saw with my clients was people either had a lot of time and no money or a lot of money and no time because they were working so much. So I was curious about that. So the emptiness of success comes to what I mentioned earlier is you acquire a lot, particularly the achiever stage. That’s what that stage is all about. As I said, your entrepreneurs land. Expert stages before that, it’s not necessarily directly correlated, but we see a lot of people like your financial advisors, engineers, people of that nature in that stage before the achiever. But often they just get to a point where they have all the degrees, the clients, the money, the house, the cars, all of that.

And then again, something is missing. And so I wanted to explore that through the lens of developmental stages in time and money. And we saw very interesting things in that early research. And one of the most interesting was that moderate scarcity and moderate abundance looked the same in terms of the things people were saying and doing. The difference was that the moderate scarcity, they were making fear-based decisions rather than sensible decisions for the future or whatever. So it’s very complicated and hard to talk about in a few seconds, but I hope I answered your question there.

Yeah. So basically, they feel like they achieved the success they set out to achieve, but it doesn’t feel as good as they thought it would feel because it’s just not enough to have the money, but you also have to have meaning and there are lots of layers there. So tell me a little bit about the book, The Pursuit of Time and Money. How does it help people? So, let’s say I reach this, I feel this emptiness, I’m financially abundant, but I don’t have friends, or I don’t have good relationships or I don’t know why I’m doing this in the first place. Whatever it is, what does it do for me if I read this book? How is it going to change me?

Well, what I did in the book was I made the correlation between the abstract and concrete nature of time and money. We don’t talk about the two of them and how really intertwined they are often. But what I found was that people have issues with time, they often have issues with money. So we did some work around that, and then I break it down into the stages and how each stage, there were categories that came out of the initial research, and we kind of help helping people see, for instance, generosity is one but each of the stages look at generosity differently. What is responsibility look like? And then I have reflective practices at the end of each chapter so you can really start to look at, well, how is this showing up for me? Another aspect that was very important in the book was giving people a chance to understand that how you use your time and money in relation to the people in your life really tells them how you value them. Am I giving my children my time? Am I hoarding my money?

For instance, we had a gentleman that came, he was moderate scarcity, which was a great example in that he was doing the right things, saving for retirement for him and his wife, but he was so worried about retirement, which was like 30, 40 years out, I can’t remember exactly that he wouldn’t even take his kids on vacation or to Disneyland. And they lived in the Disneyland LA, Southern California area, which to me is missing the point. If you’re making those kinds of fear-based decisions and you’re not even enjoying your life, you’re saving for something. That’s a good thing, but maybe for many of the wrong reasons. So those were some of the things that we looked at in the book.

The other thing, Steve, I want to say for your listeners is that we have developed a moderate quiz because the way we look at where people are in terms of their stages is very complicated. The assessment is complicated and it’s quite expensive. So I developed a quiz that looks at the six major stages that most people in the workforce are in. And it also has input in the report around your propensity for time and money use and experiences. They can go to that or we’ll have also your podcast and everything on a specific page on my website. And that is sharonspano.com/managementblueprint. And if they go there, they can take that quiz and also the podcast that you and I are doing today will be there as well.

Okay, fantastic. So we’ve got it already in place. We’re going to put it on the show notes as well, so people can just click on it and find it, but definitely through your website as well. So, let me ask you kind of more of a general question, which is not connected to your work directly, but you’ve worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and you see how they operate and what are the good decisions, the bad decisions they make. What do you consider the most important question for any entrepreneur to ask themselves?

Well, that’s a great question. I think, because again, everything I do is so customized and dependent on what’s going on with the individual. But maybe it’s about asking, am I being the most effective leader/human being that I could be? Meaning not just in my business or my work, but for my family, because I see that disconnect every day. And it’s a great concern to me that we are losing families for the sake of our businesses. And I would like to see high impact leaders be well-rounded and that their life is integrated in such a way. I’m not one that believes in work-life balance, but integrated in such a way that they’re fulfilled in every area of their life is integrated in such a way.

I’m not one that believes in work-life balance, but integrated in such a way that they’re fulfilled in every area of their life. So if you’re not feeling that, like I run into a lot of people who are, they don’t know how to connect with their kids now. And we literally, like, I don’t have a relationship with my children. Well, then that’s an area that we might focus on in our work together if that’s something the client wants. So I don’t think you have to sacrifice your family for your business, I guess is what I’m saying. And if it feels that way, then maybe some things need to be recalibrated.

Yeah. I always felt like it’s the easy thing to just focus on a single thing and neglect everything else. That’s kind of a cop-out. Because of course we can be better than others if you’re just simply focused on one thing. But life is more of a marathon than a sprint and you have to keep more plates in the air to have long-term success, which is very difficult. So before we wrap this up, Sharon, I’d like you to just run through the 12 stages of development. So what are the 12 stages?

The names of them? Okay, well.

Yeah, whatever short way you can.

I mean, that’s a very big question because there are many. The first one is like Conformis, there’s Expert, Achiever, then we go into Pluralist, there’s Construct Aware, that’s not all of them. And then there’s Illumined. I mean, I don’t remember them all, but the ones I’m focusing on most of the time are Expert, Achiever, Pluralist, and Construct Aware. The earlier stages are babies. That’s the very, very early stages from like infancy to adolescence, the first four. And then from there on, it’s kind of anyone could be anywhere as adults. But the final two, we don’t really have people in the workforce that we know of that’s like 1%. Think of like the Dalai Lama or someone like that, way up there. Jesus might be way up there.

Construct Aware is about 5% of the population as we know now based on the research. And I did have a client years ago that was a pluralist. She was an attorney, which surprised me. So each one has different perspectives and things that matter to them, which is what I go on in the book. So for instance, with money, again, I mentioned the Achiever is chasing money. But when someone gets into the later stages, like Construct Aware, where the 5% of the population are, it’s more about they think of money at that stage as in service to humanity. So they want less, want less toys, jewelry, they’re going to be more of a minimalist and thinking more about the greater good. One is not wrong or better than the other, it’s just different.

Yeah. So it feels like it’s all about the consciousness of the person growing over time. And first, you’re just a conformist. I mean, I can see in companies, people join in the company and they don’t experience and they just want to follow blueprints. They want to be told what to do and be accepted that they are doing what they need to do. And then as they develop their expertise, then they develop more autonomy. And over time, they start to manage people and then they start to lead people and then they have to think about the bigger context of the organization as the ranks and the CEO is thinking about the annual plan. And then maybe an entrepreneur that has multiple businesses, they are thinking about the industry and the impact and then you become a statesman, then you can think about the generations and stuff like that.

But you can still be at those levels thinking of all those things and still be at an early stage. That’s the interesting piece is that often the earlier stages are more concrete in their thinking. Like I’ve seen this in the United States right now. I believe our leadership for the country is very concrete, achiever stage, and not necessarily thinking about the rippling effect of actions on the global. They’re not able to think globally, where people in the later stages are much more likely to be abstract thinkers and have consciousness and understand the rippling effect of one action on many, many others versus just what I want. So it’s very interesting because I think it’s happening around the world. It’s almost a backlash.

We’re moving into more autocratic leadership, which is seemingly more egocentric and concrete in nature than what you might see of someone who years ago we used to talk about teal organizations and they were organizations that were the opposite of autocratic. They would be more flat, less hierarchical, more input from the masses kind of thing. So who knows where all this is going to land, but my job is one person at a time because I feel like if I can help one leader be more effective in his role as a leader, but also in his personal life, then the rippling effect of that is generations because we know now from the field of epigenetics that trauma is generational. So if I can help be an interruption to that, I feel like it’s worth the effort.

Yeah, we have to make the difference that we are positioned to make and make the most of what we have. So I totally agree with you. And it’s just a fascinating topic and we could take this to different directions and make it much bigger. So I love the frameworks that you shared about witnessing yourself and creating the awareness and observing the patterns and working through some trauma potentially and make some changes in our lives and try to get to the higher level of consciousness and development. So if you would like to learn more about Dr. Sharon Spano, then check out her website and her LinkedIn page. So Sharon, can you share your website?

Yeah, it’s easy. It’s just my name, sharonspano.com. And then for the assessment that I mentioned, it would be /managementblueprint specific to this. I’m going back to your first question, just quickly would say that quiz, we’re looking at the center of gravity, meaning the higher percentage of which stage you’re in. But we also give you a report that shows you all of them of the six, not all 12. And it tells you specific things that you could do for the other two that you are also, ‘cause you’re never just in one, but you are, you do have a center of gravity. So, it gives an opportunity to take that first part of the framework and develop some awareness.

That’s awesome. So, definitely check it out. sharonspano.com/managementblueprint. That’s that’s easy. And check out the six stages where you are, what you can do. And if you want to do further work, then reach out to Sharon on LinkedIn or through our website. Well, thank you very much, Sharon, for coming and sharing your wisdom on the development stages and witnessing ourselves and creating more awareness of becoming a better leader. And if you enjoyed the show, then stay tuned because every week we have a great entrepreneur or subject matter expert sharing the knowledge that can help you as a business owner. So thanks for coming and thank you for listening.