How to Transform Leaders and Skyrocket Engagement in 100 Days with Aaron Lee

Welcome to Founders Future, a podcast powered by closers.io, where we dive into the journeys of innovative entrepreneurs and explore the road ahead for them and their companies. I'm your host, Jay Encarnacion, and in each episode, we uncover the stories behind impactful ventures, the challenges faced along the way, and the strategies driving their future growth. Today, we are excited to have Aaron Lee, CEO of Leaders Rising Network. Aaron brings a unique blend of expertise in disaster management, leadership development, and authorship of The New Generation Leader. Based in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, Leaders Rising Network, founded to develop leaders worth following, is transforming organizations through programs like the Next Level Leaders 100-Day Accelerator. We'll be exploring Aaron's founding story, how his company empowers leaders in the digital age, and his vision for scaling this mission-driven venture. So let's dive right in. Aaron, welcome to Founders Future.

Thanks, Jake. Good to be with you today.

Absolutely a pleasure to have you on there. And take us back to the top for our listeners here. In the very beginning, what specific problem in the leadership development space really inspired you to start Leaders Rising Network?

One of my earlier stops in my career, I remember having a conversation with one of my coworkers and we joked that the bad leader experiences we had seen could help us understand how to build good leaders and leaders, like we say now, worth following. Not that you have to follow because they have the title and the position, but leaders you actually want to work with, work for, and follow. Into the hard work and the crisis every day. And in each stop along my career journey, I've had the opportunity to work with some great leaders, work for some great leaders, but also work alongside partner organizations, for-profit, nonprofit, government, all across the board. And especially in my work in emergency management, when disaster struck, you call somebody because you formed a relationship. And time after time, the person I was calling wasn't there anymore. And so you just start to notice these things and see trends. You notice the little behaviors that leaders have and start to wonder, hey, how do we fix this?

Gotcha. Incredible. On that front, with the way that you looked at it and got into Leaders Rising Network, how have the offerings evolved thus far? So from the services that you're providing to who you're serving, how's that changed?

I don't think it's an anomaly or I don't think this is a made-up statement that people always encourage you to niche down and focus. Now you can pursue a niche. Sometimes I think the niche finds you. And so for us, uh, when you're just getting started, it's all about relationships and the trust that you build in a relationship. And that's so true for us. I did this exercise about a year, 15 months ago in our company. We were trying to figure out where to focus our energy and our efforts. And so I looked back, what's been successful for us? And so I made a note of every client. We were currently working with, had recently worked with, and every single one of them except for one came from a relationship we had somewhere. We had spoken, somebody we knew, somebody we had worked with previously. Every single one of them was built on the network relationship. And so that has driven us. In the beginning, but as we think about messaging, the stories we tell, we do have to keep focusing. And so as much as we want to help serve, support everybody, we also realize, hey, we need to clarify a little bit.

Yeah, no, definitely makes sense on that front. And clearly being able to have that hyperfocus is going to continue to lend itself to the quality that you can bring towards and forward for your clients. So absolutely makes sense that you're on that thought process there. So Talk to us a little bit here, Aaron, with the experience that you have in the space and what you're doing with the company. What's a misconception that you're hearing about the leadership development industry as a whole, whether it's around its value to organizations or its scalability as a business? What's something on that front that you can address for us here?

I think people get either scared or they just shy away from developing their people. Out of a few specific fears. Number 1, what happens if I invest in these people and they go take these skills somewhere else? Number 2, we did something last year and the flavor of the month, maybe a new book, New York Times bestseller, and we tried to apply one principle and it didn't work. Or number 3, we just don't have time for it. And we've worked to respond to all 3 of those. Number 1, part of our pace and our rhythm is we're not going to take you out of the life of your business, 9 to 5, Monday through Friday in this big program. We're also not going to only do it once a year. Once a year is not going to change anything. We've got to build some discipline in bite-sized chunks. And so we've changed the rhythm. We've made it consistent, but relatively minimal investment so that you can invest in yourself, in your people. Our ultimate goal is that you change the complete culture of your whole organization so people don't want to leave. But I always come back to, okay, you train them and they leave, but what's the inverse? What if you don't? Equip them and they stay. We were talking to a leader this morning who's having some challenges. He had people in an all-staff meeting texting him backchannel, hey, if you end up firing this person because of the mistake they made, let me know. I'd love to take over that department. Like, no, we're not going to go this route. We're going to build a culture where people can bring their best. Gallup just came out with their 2025 State of the Workplace study. Engagement is at a low productivity that we're leaving so much money on the table in terms of how engaged people are at work. And there's a direct dollar dynamic to building the culture where people want to come to work and don't just clock in and clock out, but they give you that extra, extra 10% each and every day. It's a game changer for your business.

No, I mean, it definitely sounds like that. With that being said, staying on that same path, love to get more into the nuts and bolts of Leaders Rising Network, especially around how you're generating revenue and the core offer for our listeners that end up coming and working with you on that front. What is the core offer there? I know you have the Next Level Leaders Accelerator, the cultural transformation services. How is that structured for your clients when they come to you?

Yeah, Next Level Leaders is our foundational experience. It's 100 days. We are just starting a new public round of that allows us to bring in 1 or 2 team members, either future or developing leaders from a variety of companies. So you don't have to go all in on the investment in building your own leadership development experience, but we also do it in-house. There are a number of clients where in various stages of just getting started with. And that at a minimum, it's 100 days. And 100 days, you're like, oh, what can you accomplish in 100 days? People get to the end of 100 days and they see things about their own leadership and their style that they've never seen before. And so many of the leaders wrap up that 100 days and then almost immediately get a promotion. It's like they're just on the brink of taking that next leap in their own career journey.. And this gives them the toolkit to be able to do that. Not just the skills of whatever your industry is, but how do you lead people? How do you motivate people? And it starts with leading yourself well. So that's our foundational front door because our core premise is we can't lead other people if we can't lead ourselves. And so that first 100 days really focuses on us as individuals. And what we're bringing to the table. If we can help you get on a solid foundation, solid footing for yourself, then you're set up for success in leading other people. So that's the front door, the first conversation we have with so many people, and it gives a nice introduction to a lot of the tools in our toolkit. It's not all of them, but it's the foundational ones that we keep coming back to. Time and time again. So, we say the first step is often 100 days, and then we'll build on that. Let's take 6 months then with your team. Now that you're healthy as a leader, let's go on a long-term quest to build your culture playbook. But it all starts in that foundation. We can't build a culture playbook that everybody plays by unless we're all speaking the same language. So, we start in that first 100 days by introducing The key tools and the language that's most important.

Absolutely incredible. Just that, that it's so powerful what you're able to do with someone and then watch them just evolve in their career. So really acting as that consulting side for them, that mentorship side, the coaching side's all wrapped into one for these leaders, no matter what industry they're in. Aaron, walk us through a bit of what's working best for you right now on the acquisition side to get those new clients in to work with, whether that be referrals and word of mouth with your success so far, or ads, social media, organic? What's, what are you seeing work best for you on that front?

Again, it comes to the relationships. And when we have a relationship, somebody we have trust with, if we can build on that foundation of trust, then we can really mine out with the, like with this leader we did this morning. We were walking through what does his organization look like? What are the challenges and pain points, the growth opportunities they're taking? If we can get to that and really understand what's bubbling under the surface, then we can talk about the value add. What's going to change if you work on your culture and your leadership as an organization? Everybody in any industry knows what they're experts at. And so being able to tie that story together based on what's going on in their world, what's the pain they're talking about. I've said to our team, if we're looking at the client development journey from, I'll say the second stage, once we know somebody and we can have a coffee and dive into that conversation. From there all the way through the delivery journey, it's gonna go really well. It's that step 1, expanding our network, getting in front of more people. And so we're working on the industry keynotes or breakout sessions, local association and networking groups. One of our team members just moved here on the East Coast to a new city, and so he's blitzing the city with coffees, getting to know people. So my challenge here in the CEO seat, I'm thinking about, all right, how do we turbocharge this leveraging the power of, of technology and social networks? How do we not sell, but how do we build that trust and get the word out beyond our typical networks that our team has had up to this point?

Gotcha. So it sounds like a lot of it is really off that referral word of mouth, not doing anything around ads just yet. Trying to get into that social media organic aspect to really start building the brand, building the name on that front. It sounds like everything's clicking on that side. Is there any reason that you guys haven't done the ads yet to really start pushing that name out? It's just something that you're not too comfortable with at the moment?

Yep, we've tried a few different campaigns here and there, and really, if you look on social media, I'm even getting hit up in hosting a podcast. By every other leadership coach and consultant. And so we've got to posture, we've got to create that messaging platform about what really makes us different. Maybe it's the 100 days, maybe it's the toolkit and laying that foundation for people. But there's multiple components to that, I think, that come out when we have a conversation. And so it's a matter of how do we change all of those things that we talk about over a coffee and digitize them, which is, it's hard to pull some of those from, boil them down to a single infographic or ad campaign. So we're working on what is that messaging? How do we simplify that, clarify that? And every time we go around, every few months, we've got an updated iteration. Things get simpler and simpler. And just when I think we can't make it any simpler than it already is, We go one step further.

Yeah, I love it. I love that. So with that being said, walk us through what it looks like when a client does come in contact with you as far as sales process. Is this something that you're dealing with from kind of start to finish? Do you have a sales team, marketing? What does that process look like from the outside looking in for you guys?

It's really an all-hands experience, and it depends on who has the initial relationship and connection. Gotcha. So I, I'd say over the last 5 or 6 of those kind of sales conversations that I've been in, I've brought 1 or 2 relationships to the table. A few of our other team members have brought a couple. It, that rotates. And so then who we bring to the conversation rotates along with that. Really one of the distinctives for our team is that Unlike a lot of coaches and consultants that you see out there, we're bringing multiple people, multiple voices, multiple perspectives into the sales conversation. So it's not just what I'm saying. It's not just what I'm seeing in what you're describing. There's a few of us around that table or screen, as is usually the case. So this morning there were 3 of us on this call. We'll debrief that and explore the possible solutions behind the scenes, and we'll pull together what we call the navigator team. So we're trying to get multiple voices and perspectives into even how we build the solution path for a client. And I'll say already, we've been working on this about 6, 9 months now, and there are a few clients that we had started a year, 18 months ago, and we've adapted midway through, brought that navigator team approach and having multiple people weigh in. It gets so much better than if it was just me doing it by myself, which it was for my first 5, 6 years of doing this. It was me, a team of one. Even if I was on a team per se, working with another consulting group, it was still just me. And so building it with a team gets so much better.

Absolutely it does. And it's awesome that you were able to do it for so long, see that success, and now you're able to expand and grow and you're seeing more success on that front. So point to us what you're thinking about as far as a bottleneck goes to growing into scaling right now, whether that be lead generation or converting those into clients or delivering services with your current capacity on the fulfillment side. What are you thinking about on the day-to-day and on that front for Bottlemix?

Yeah, I think what's keeping me up at night, I'll say, is leads on the front end. How are we targeting and getting in front of the right people? And almost flipping that, flipping that question a little bit. Marcus Sheridan's one of my favorite authors, marketing gurus. He just came out with a new book. He's thinking about and talking about how to do it well. I've read a bunch of these other books that, and I have a couple of them on my shelves around here, talking about sales. How do you get sales? How do you get in front of more people? Marcus is just so genuine in how he talks about telling your story, building trust, and putting the information out there. And so I think that for us is the key question. I'm thinking about, hey, what are the questions that we're always answering? What's differentiating us? How do we put that out as a message? How do we update our website presence, social media? How do we get into video and audio podcasting? Or as I was just looking at one of our clients this morning, they have a vidcast. You familiar with this term? It's the intersection of video and podcast.

Yeah.

Yeah. So put that out there, tell the story, make it, make everything more human. If everything that we're doing that we've seen success in is human and conversational and relationship-driven, why would we let marketing or sales go any other way? Let's keep it personal.

I absolutely love that. Paint a picture for us on that front then. You gave us a good idea right there with what you just said, but What are you laser focused on, Aaron, top priorities wise for the next 6 to 12 months, whether that be any specific revenue targets you're going for, impact goals, what are you really locked in on for the next year here?

Yeah, I think we've built the delivery system and so our delivery will be top notch and it is top notch in what we're delivering. So we're really focused on. How do we bring more clients on board? Our team's growing. We've got more coaches on the bench that we can pull into clients. And so we're really focused on that side of bringing more people in. I actually have a conversation with our president this afternoon. We don't break up our year into 4 quarters. We do 3 100-day windows. So we start the year. Everybody's a little slow starting the year. So why start the year January 1st and already feel like you're behind when you get to the middle of January? So we give ourselves a little buffer, start 100 days. Our 100 days ends this week. Then between Memorial and Memorial Day and Labor Day is 100 days. So between this week and we're recording the end of April, between the end of April and Memorial Day, you've got like a 30-day window. And so we're going to take a sprint, and part of our sprint, not quite yet developed, but we're going to get laser focused on what's the one thing, what's the one thing we can do and focus on, put some energy behind that then sets us up for the summer. Summer is a change of pace anyway. Things look different. I've got young kids at home who will be home and not at school for the summer. So things just look different. So if we can build this plan, launch our focus— last year we did a— our goal over the summer, those 100 days, was 100 coffees with people, get to know people, build the network. Uh, so it'll be something along those lines— lead-focused, information-focused, building relationships and cultivating that. Still not completely locked in on what that'll look like, But ask me tomorrow, I should have a better idea of our game plan around that. But I'm excited. I'm confident. I know we've got the people on the team who will be able to contribute to that and really help us propel forward. And come fall, then you've got 100 days from Labor Day to mid-December, and then you naturally slow down a pace coming into the end of the year. Our last 100 days of the year, I think, will be a really great stretch for us to see how these things come to life and bring this plan into action and hopefully fill up that pipeline, fill the top side of the funnel, get us in front of the right people. We'll see.

I love it. I love it. I have one more question for you, and it's clear as day with how you're thinking and the plans that you guys have set that you're going to be able to achieve all the goals that you have set in front of you. You're doing some incredible things in the space. So one more question for you before I go into the lightning round for you to wrap up, and that's going to be as far as what you're seeing in the evolution of the leadership development industry as a whole? Where do you see it going and what are you really doing to prepare Leaders Rising Network to position yourself in the forefront of that evolution that you're picturing?

A lot of leadership development platforms through the years have either been lean, like they're built around one tool or concept. And you look at any business book, so many business and leadership books are one tool. I won't even start to name them, but they describe one thing. And so either you try to implement one thing or you try to implement something that's way too complex. So keeping it simple, building a system around it, a culture playbook that's not just a value or a vision and mission on the wall, This is how we live each and every day. And how do we connect and tie all of our goals, quarterly rocks, all those initiatives back to the culture that we've developed and cultivated? I think that's going to be key, especially as AI comes into the mix. People are already working on being coached by AI. AI, hop on any platform and it can help you. Even problem solve how you work together or collaborate. But in a day-to-day conversation, you're still going to be talking live to real people on your team. And you've got to know intuitively, how do I react and respond in the moment? We can't just say, hey Jay, timeout, let me go ask AI, how should I respond to this situation and solve this conflict I'm feeling with Jay right now? We don't have time for that. Maybe by email or Slack message, that'll work. But we've gotta know these kinds of things. It's way different than information that we used to learn and focus on in school. Yeah. It's more about how we work together. So I think that's gonna be key is simplifying and strategizing, building a simple, sustainable, sticky system that allows us to lead well.

Incredible. Absolutely incredible. And with that right there, I want to take it into just one last question for you with the lightning round. For our listeners, Aaron. And just especially with how intelligent, knowledgeable, and just passionate you are about what you're doing, I would love to hear some advice that you can give to our listeners, other founders, entrepreneurs, business owners that are either just starting out on their journey or in the middle of it and want to have that passion that you have and see the success that you're seeing. What can you offer them before we wrap up today?

I think about an image of a mountain. Think of a mountain icon. And you're on one side of that mountain. There may be somebody on another side of that mountain that's going to see things differently than you are. If you can get to the top of that mountain— and it's hard, it's daunting, it's overwhelming— you can set out with the vision. We can get distracted though on the path up the mountain. We can think we're close when we're not even close. We're just to that first summit. The more people you have on your team, the more voices you have speaking into how you're seeing things and how you're reacting to the world around you, the clearer that picture will be that you have to have confidence and clarity to be able to scale and grow, creatively problem solve when a crisis comes your way. Just imagine getting up to the summit and you've met with somebody, you meet up with somebody who came up another path up that mountain. Now you've got this 360 view. Of incredible territory, incredible land sites beyond anything you would have imagined if you had stayed on the ground. That's your destination. But along the way, it's all about the people that you climb the mountain with.

Absolutely love that. I really hope our listeners tuned into that because that is incredibly powerful and will absolutely take you a long way on your journey. With that right there, that is going to wrap up another inspiring episode of Founders Future. Aaron, I just want to thank you again. An incredible journey. Truly appreciate you coming on the show, sharing your insights with us, and it's clear as day as to why you're seeing that success, the passion that you have. And again, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show and sharing with our listeners. To our listeners, if you did enjoy this episode, which I know so many of you have, don't forget to subscribe to Founders Future wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. You can also check out Leaders Rising Network at leadersrisingnetwork.com for their free resources like the 5 Proven Ways to Improve Team Communication. And follow Aaron on LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/aaronleecko. For more resources, visit closers.io, where we help businesses accelerate their growth through trained appointment setters and world-class marketing systems. Until then, keep climbing, and we'll see you on the next one.