Alisa Cohn on Holistic Business and Having an Entrepreneurial Mindset – What You Need To Succeed

Hey, everybody, it's Mo. I have exciting news. My new book is out. Give to Grow, Invest in relationships to build your business and career. It's everywhere. Books are sold. Hard copy audiobook, which I recorded myself, Kindle Digital everything. Check it out at your favorite bookseller. Hi, it's Mo Bunnell, your host here at Real Relationships, Real Revenue. I'm author of the Snowball System. And I and my teams have trained over 15,000 people around the world on sales, sound efficient and authentic business development techniques. And I'm joined this week by Alyssa Cohn. Alyssa was named the number one startup coach in the world. And all of us, all of us in the audience are either running a business or running a book of business. And I think it's important to have an entrepreneurial mindset and a holistic view on how to do just that. So that's why I wanted to have Alyssa on the show. And man, I've already recorded all the episodes, but let me tell you, they are awesome. And in this one, I ask Alyssa what's her big idea on how we can be successful in having an entrepreneurial mindset as we, as we grow a business or a book of business. And her and the conversation we have after that is just absolutely fantastic. So know this, if you want our big insights on how you can grow your book of business, just head over to growbigplaybook.com growbigplaybook.com sign up there and you get this killer little overview of the mindset that you need to have to grow your book of business. And, and you also get signed up for our emails where every week I spend about three hours writing a three minute nugget that you can read. It takes forever to write short, but I try to write really short and give you a powerful insight that you can put into place right away. So that's over@growbigplaybook.com so here is Alyssa Cohn.

Hey, everybody, it's Mo Bunnell, your host here at Real Relationships, Real Revenue. I am smiling so much because I've got Alyssa Cohn the line. Today we are going to tape a fantastic series of episodes. And we've been laughing so hard just in our final prep and Alyssa, you just cracked me up. So everybody out there, I'm so happy to have Alyssa because so many of our experts have been deep, specialized experts in one thing or another. You know, Vanessa Van Edwards and in captivate and, and Marisa Cohen in social chemistry and people like that. And I really love deep technical experts. But I also want to Bring you people that have this holistic view that can help you in a big picture way. And Alyssa Cohn is just that. So Alyssa, get this everybody. She was named the number one, the number one startup coach in the world. And Alyssa, if I've got this right, the number one global guru of named by the Global Guru Institute of Gurus or something like that, set me straight.

It's all gurus all the time. First of all, thank you, Mo. It's great to be here with you. And yes, I was named the number one startup coach in the world by the Thinkers50 organization, which is a research think tank as well as the number one global guru for startups by the Global Guru Research Organization. So say that 10 times fast.

That's a lot of cheese. And I'm a big fan of alliteration, so I just love it. And folks, this is what Alyssa is going to bring to us in the sense that we've got that we don't have just the number one startup coach out of Silicon Valley or Brooklyn or Austin. We don't even have the number one startup coach in America. We have the number one startup coach in the world with us today. And I think it's so important because as we think about our all of you, our audience, you know, folks with one foot in delivery, one foot in business development, you are, whether you're an entrepreneur or you're working at a big law firm, or you're an account manager at a healthcare company, you are running a business. And Alyssa, tell us why, tell us why that is important to think about running the business holistically.

Oh, absolutely. So everybody has to think of themselves as their own entrepreneur, their own CEO. Basically. When you're trying to run a book of business and you're trying to deliver your, you have to think about yourself with an entrepreneurial mindset. How am I going to build the clientele that I need? How am I going to do all the things that entrepreneur needs to do, which is to manage yourself, manage others, and then manage the business around it.

Yeah, so good. And when you think about people doing that, running their business, this might be actually fun. I'm interested in sort of a two part question. We come back and forth on this, but what do you see as the number one mistakes people made make doing that? And what do you see as the number one strengths people have that succeed at that kind of thing? Maybe we start with the mistakes and then we go to go to the, go to the strengths in a little bit. What do you think?

Yeah, that's A great question. I think that the, what people miss is that notion of having to have that entrepreneurial mindset. They sometimes will shift in the direction of delivery, of being excellent professional, sometimes being a little bit like heads down in the work by itself. And they don't recognize that they need to be building business today, tomorrow and well into the future and so doing the activities that you need to do to take yourself out of the business and sort of stop, stop working in the business and working on the business. As Michael Gerber would say from the E. Myth revisited.

Yeah, I love that. And obviously that's what you're helping people do. Well, let's just go down this, this road a little bit. So because we handled you somehow, you handled both questions in one answer, which is really good. So what do people do to do that? You know, I think of our, our high stakes litigators that are our clients where we're teaching them business development skills. Man, they're headed for trial in two months. They're going to fly around the country or do virtual depositions. They're back to back all day long. They can get swallowed up in the work. Same with account managers at big healthcare companies, consultants and entrepreneurs. How do you keep working on the long term things and not just the short term things?

Yeah, it's such the powerful question. As you know, I just wrote a book called From Startup to Grownup and in part of that book I really address the need to step back when you're managing yourself. The most important thing is that you get your mindset together. So you need to recognize with your right, the right mindset, your need to step back from your day to day and carve out time to handle the things which are not just the day to day and your preparation for the trial in a month or two or three, but also they're going to prepare you to build business for the next two, three, four years and beyond. And the way to do that is to step back and remind yourself to do it. The second thing is to build in activities in your calendar to make sure that you have them coming to you all the time. Because the truth is what we do is we live by our calendars. So having the things on the calendar that build that long term sort of business, that is the key.

Yeah, I like that. So give us some hacks. I mean how do, how do people, how do you do that so that you're just dripping in these things that you do today that your year from now self will be happy that you did.

You know, that's a great strategy just by, by saying that, I mean, there's nothing wrong. And I actually, I actually ask all of my entrepreneurs and all the founders I work, all the professionals I work with to do some journaling. And a lot of the things that are powerful to do is to journal on your future self. One activity I give to people that I work with, my clients is to think about my best possible life five years in the future. And you could say my best possible business five years in the future. What would it be like? Who would I be dealing with? How would the clients be coming to me? All those things. Great. Now working backwards from there. What do you have to do over the next few years? What do you have to do this year? What do you have to do today to ensure that those results will come to you? So when you think about it that way, it's really like sort of working backwards and planning from that point of view. And it's also really having in your mind's eye and actually having a list of activities that is going to ensure future business and making sure you're with discipline and ritual and habit, putting those activities into your calendar on a weekly, daily, monthly basis.

Yeah. One of the things we talk about a lot in our book the Snowball System and in our training, our growbig training is having that vision for a future and then pulling it all the way back to typically like quarterly level would be like projects, like three projects that you might do down to weekly. We call the most important things or MITs, three tasks we're going to do in the next week and then a day trying to do those kind of things first at your first possible opportunity.

Good.

Yeah. And then. Yeah. And then you can judge your week, you know, on big success. Did I get my three most important things done? Yeah. I still have 50 emails to answer and 27 voicemails. That'll always be that way. But I can declare victory for the week if I get some things done. So along those lines, a lot of our audience does that kind of thing, or at least they, they know they should or they want to, or they're striving. What's your best advice to. Or to, to. To focus on those things and somehow get them done. When you, maybe somebody sits down at 8am they have the best intention of knocking one of those MIT's out or one of the things that, that they use from your program and all of a sudden they see that email, you need your help right away. How do you, how do you handle those distractions?

I Know, well, there's two things to say. One is that actually it's very helpful to practice not being distracted. So for example, don't turn your email on, don't look at it. Schedule the time, 30 minutes where you're going to really plan your day and try to knock off one or two of those things off of your list because that creates momentum, that creates a feel good energy. You get the feel good juju working inside of you and that helps motivate you for the rest of the day. Trust me, that email is going to be there like, you know, later today. Like, don't worry about that at the end of the week. Something else I talk about in my book From Startup to Grown up is about merchandising success. You've got to look at your whole week and you've got to say, wow. I actually did a number of those things from my MIT list, for example, and I can see how they already built results for me, made me feel good. Now I feel really organized. I feel in control. I know I'm planning for my future. Whatever it is that you accomplished from those most important things list, you have to give yourself a big pat on the back and really showcase to yourself how you created success that week and then monthly and then yearly and then. And that's how you develop a flywheel of great habits.

I love your words. I wrote these down in all caps. I feel in control. And I feel like one thing I'm sensing in the world right now as we give programs and speeches and things like that is people feel out of control. But your idea of merchandising your success, taking that moment, gosh, I bet we, a lot of times we'll say it only takes 15 minutes. But Journal, write, reflect, look at your calendar, think about the things you did get done, and give yourself just a little bit of a pat on the back to get some of the big things done. Let's close out this episode with this. How do you help people feel good about that? How do you. What's your best advice on doing that? That weekly reflection that I actually did get a lot of things done. I feel in control and I want to celebrate a little bit or feel good about it. What's your, what's your thoughts there?

My thoughts there are make it a ritual, make it something that you do. For example, planning every morning, either either every Monday morning or every Sunday late afternoon, something like that. And, and recognizing this is just the thing that I do. The second part of that is about celebrating. On Friday afternoons. You can Celebrate your success. You can give yourself a treat. You can do that with a group and share successes with a group of other people who are like you, sort of a peer group or even your team around you. And you can make it a real celebration. You'll be amazed at how good you feel and you're celebrating the things that are going to actually build your business and make it move forward. So that's a, that's a double whammy, so to speak.

I love it. Alyssa. I mean, you sound like we're preaching from the same hymnal all the time. These are the things we share too. And I think it's funny because there's so much impact from this little 15 or 20 minute thing once a week. It has so much things that builds that momentum. And I'm just thrilled that you see it because you see such a broader world than I do. We're really laser focused on these folks with one foot in delivery and one foot in business development. But you see all. And include some entrepreneurs, of course, but you see all these entrepreneurs and it's cool that, that you see the same success habits that we do. And audience, I hope you're listening because Alyssa's really good at this stuff. Remember the number one startup coach in the world. So listen to her because that one little thing can change everything. So, hey, listen, everybody's going to want more of your big brain. I. You were so kind to send me from start From Grown up to Startup as an early release or from From Startup to Grown Up. I had it. Why did I say it the wrong? Gosh, it's so obvious from Startup and I loved it. And there's so many cool templates in the back and scripts and it's got this sort of holistic view of how someone should run a business or run a book of business. And that's what our audience does. So where can they get the book? Where can they get more of your big brain? Where should they go?

Oh, thank you so much. They can come to my website and get all of it. So my website is alyssa cohn.com a l I s a c o h n dot com. You can sign up for my email list which will also help you download. I think it's a great tool about questions to spark great conversations with people. From there, you can also go to pre order my book if you so choose.

I love it. Questions and asking great questions are something that just is so important to our audience. So I'm actually going to sign up for that. I read the book and loved it, but I didn't think about signing up for the email list. So I'm going to go to alyssa.com right after this and I want those questions. Alyssa. So thanks. Thanks for being on the show, folks. If you like this and I know you did, then in the next episode I'm going to ask Alyssa how can we use her? What's her best advice to create and close more of the media business and the growth activities with the growth things that we want. So stay tuned for that. Lissa, thanks for being on the show. This has been awesome.

Thank you Mo so much.

Hey everybody, it's Mo. I hope that you enjoyed today's episode. If you want to grow your skills around business development so you can grow your book of business and your relationships in your career, high recommend to sign.

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