170: JD Ewing & Cameron Brandis — Continuous Learning

Are you thinking about how to grow your business with near and offshore staffing, but you're also wanting to make sure that it's reliable, cost effective, and really well done? I think docsa talent is the way to go. Here's why. They don't just fill your jobs. They bring integrity, top talent, and a people first approach that's hard to find. I've known the people at Doxa talent for over 20 years now and I say that you can count on them. I have. Talk to Docs of Talent and you won't be disappointed. Go to docsatant.com Bill G Again, that's doxatalent.com Bill G One more time. Doxatalent.com Bill G Check it out today. Well, I'm excited about today's topic because it goes to the core of our work and our show in general, and that is continuous learning and improvement. Sharpen the saw, they say. So you've got to go back and figure out how to train and learn new approaches if you want to grow from your presentation state. But the interesting thing is we all have different learning styles and what may work for one doesn't work for another. So I used to struggle to read a lot of business books until somebody taught me a skimming method and then I got audio books and that worked for some but not for others. And then video courses. It seems like lots of especially newer learners today find all kinds of things that they learn online. Oh, I need to know how to do something. Check, check YouTube, see what there is there. But there are plenty of categories that aren't covered by that. So we're going to talk about online and continuous learning in general and online learning in particular. And I'm going to showcase in this recording a lot of discussion with two CEOs about the growth of their businesses using our online learning platform at the Growth Institute, and in particular their MBD program, the Master of Business Dynamics. But this is not just a recording about mbd, but about learning in general. So listen in at how they've applied it and what they do and the kinds of surprising results that they've achieved through continuous learning. Listen in. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business Podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is an entrepreneur talking about growing his business and using the practice of continuous learning that we think is so essential to so many businesses. So joining us today, you're in the Philadelphia area, right? Pennsylvania somewhere. Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh area is J.D. ewing. So J.D. has Coe distributing a furniture Business. He grew up in the business. He'll tell you more about his story. But he grew the business, he sold it, he took it on, he's grown it quite a bit since then. I'll let him share some of that, but welcome to the show, J.D.

Thank you, Bill. Appreciate being here.

Thanks so much. So tell folks a little bit about the growth of the business, how you got into it. Take through the narrative of that a little bit before we talk about the learning piece.

Sure. So the initial step into the business started in grade school, let's call it. Grew up in the business, family business that my grandmother started in the late 40s and that was on the, on the retail side of the business. It was a full service office furniture supply business, machines, technology, typewriter repair. And we had four retail stores and I grew up working on Saturdays with the family, stocking shelves, taking walking deliveries downtown when there still was a downtown in small town America and really taught me a work ethic from my, my grandmother and my father as to what it meant to work and accomplish things. So continue to work through my high school years and actually once I had a driver's license, exited school early every day to go and spend three hours working and continue to stay in touch with the business. And this gets us to the, to the mid-80s. The retail business was still going well at that time. We started a wholesale business of office furniture only wholesale selling to folks like ourselves. So we were our initial and for quite a while our largest customer of the wholesale business. And I worked in that business for two summers while between senior and senior year, high school, freshman year, college, freshman year of college, sophomore year of college, really enjoyed the wholesale side significantly more than the retail side. Sometime in mid October of my sophomore year of college, my father called me and made mention that he was going to have to close the wholesale business because the retail business was taking up too much of his time. But if I was interested, I could come back from school and take over the wholesale business. And he told me to think about it and I called him back two days later and said, I think I'm ready to do just that. School was not where I really felt I needed to be. Wasn't very satisfying from an education front. Had plenty of other things that were a lot of fun, but none that were necessarily leading down a path of success long term.

Isn't that funny too, because we're talking about the topic of our show today is learning. Right?

Right. It's a little ironic for sure.

Right. So you're dropping out of school to go into business. Right.

Late December 1989, at 19 years old, took over the wholesale business. Closed the books that year at about $220 or $220,000 in revenue for the year. For the net for the next two years, work the business as the only employee managing the warehouse, handling all of the inventory, customer communication via phone, fax and ar AP outside sales. Took all the deliveries, made sales calls in between. I can distinctly remember stopping at payphones in each town that I would enter, tear out the yellow pages from the phone book at the payphones and. And that's how I generated additional customers and leads through that. Actually also made vendor pickups and slept in the truck at times while I was waiting at the vendor stock overnight to make a pickup the next morning and would then take those deliveries out the following week once I got back with that product picked up. So that again two years working the business completely by myself, learning it and understanding it intimately. And then slowly started to hire part time help both in the office and the warehouse. That gets us into the early 2000s or I'm sorry the early 90s, excuse me, jumped ahead, met my wife, future wife in the business and after we were married in 94 she came in and took over customer service and marketing and continued to run run the business and grow it. Hired first sales rep in 1997, outside sales rep who's still with me today and comes into the story a little later. So we, you know, we're now into the to the early 2000s. Business continues to grow. And in 2006 we were approached by a company that was rolling up regional wholesalers in our channel and ultimately made a deal. And at that point we had reached about $22 million in revenue. So with 100x over the course of 2020 years from the beginning of the company in 86, 17 years as I was running it and everybody including myself stayed on to work for the company that was that purchased us, right? And we were third of five buys. We were the third largest when we were acquired within 18 months we were the largest division of the ultimately the five that were there. And of course that's very much the timing when the financial crash and the recession started. But we as a division were still growing and we almost doubled our revenue for the division within three years. But unfortunately the parent company ran out of money and subsequently filed for bankruptcy and late 2009. So myself, along with the largest creditor and another former owner ended up buying the company out of bankruptcy and going our separate ways after that buyback. So in December of 80 of 09 we closed that and closed on the deal and then reopened in January 2010. So we're finishing up our 10th year in operation as the new company. We are on target to be four and a half times the size revenue wise when I sold the business in 06 and half the time the business has been in operation.

And what was the shift with the relaunch that led to that growth? How come? What was different from the time when you sold it? Or did you just realize you could run it better?

That was a big piece of it. Certainly that after sitting through corporate meetings and we weren't a particularly large company but certainly were larger than each of the individual divisions were. I think at our peak we were just under $100 million in revenue. All told, with 16 or 18 distribution centers across the country. But having the confidence to know that I certainly was able to make better decisions than were being made within the larger company and had just a different outlook as to what it took to be successful in our space. And I think the last nine and a half years has proven that to be exactly the case. We have two distribution centers currently servicing the bulk of the United States. We're on a run rate of revenue that will exceed the largest year that the rolled up company had with 1618 distribution centers. And we continue to grow. We're on a 30% year over year pace this year. And bottom line, profits are on a 3x track this year over the last year.

That is really outstanding. And I think there's a couple things I hear. It certainly goes to our conversation today, but I do remember well some friends who sold their companies with decent timing in run ups in the late 90s and in like mid 2000s. And then after, after the companies that bought them failed, they were able to buy the companies back either out of bankruptcy or for the companies who were ditching parts of the company they didn't know how to run and they were able to buy them back and then grow them again another round having learned and benefited from it. But I'm also wondering about the potential damage to a brand having been part of another group for a while. To did you encounter any of that? Did you have any struggle with that?

Well, that was one of our big concerns in contemplating the buyback. Certainly we were a little hesitant as to what the damage really was for the last six months of what should be classified as an operation. And we weren't operating much because there was simply no money to pay any of the vendors. But for those last six months, we were unable to ship any orders to any of our customers and any semblance of completeness. And we disappointed, and would be putting it mildly, quite a few customers. But I would say by May of 2010, so less than six months after we relaunched, we had one out of, at that time, approximately 500 customers. One customer who still held a grudge over what took place the previous year. And that was the first and last customer we ever fired simply because they were not receptive to the changes that we had made and were simply bringing down everyone that they talked to in our operation. So one out of 500 was, was not a bad ratio.

They couldn't get over it. They couldn't move on.

Correct.

Yeah, it's a great thing. So talk to us about how you encountered, well, what continuous learning has meant for you and where does the MBD course and that kind of thing come into it. Give us a little bit of that background.

Happy to the continuous learning. Something that I would say stumbled upon almost two years ago. It was at a YPO event and it was a lunch event. There's a gentleman there that was talking about the book that his father had written. This gentleman, Stephen Shallenberger, was the author and the book was becoming youg Best. And I jumped into that book after leaving that luncheon, said to myself, this is something that's meant for me to share and I've got to share that with my executive team because I felt it was a perfect balance between personal and business improvement, personal improvement in your outside of work life, as well as the ability to, to improve life at work. And the executive team felt the same way. And we ultimately introduced that book to the entire company through a book club and the quarterly readings going through each of the 12 chapters. And that's really what fueled me to dig in further and through that period. One of the books also mentioned that that seminar that people had benefited from was the Rockefeller Habits by Vern Harnish. And that was a book that I purchased shortly after leaving there. And after I read Become youe Best, I dug into that and after reading that and looking at some things online, discovered scaling up and reading through that. It was another moment of this is. This is meant for us to dig in further and expose my executive team to the scaling up book and the methodology and in very short order, full unanimous agreement that this is the model that we need to follow to grow the business and do it in a disciplined way. So that's where then continuing to read books. Let me back up A second here, that Becoming youg Best Book was the first business book that I'd read and well over six years. So I simply wasn't reading and felt that what we'd accomplished with the business and restarting it and growing the business at 20% plus annually was all that I really needed to do. And you know, reading a white paper here and there about inventory control and managing employees and felt that that was more than enough for me to, to continue down a path of success. But getting into Rockefeller habits, scaling up and then introduced to Patrick Lencioni's series of books, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which we read as a group throughout the entire company and Temptations of a CEO and Ideal Team Player continued to fuel my desire to read even more. So in the course of the last 20 months, I've read over 30 books and have continued to seek out books that can have an impact on me both personally and in business and share those with my staff and the entire company. And then through that, through the process of scaling up, got introduced to the Growth Institute and and we took a scaling up course through the Growth Institute with my executive team. And then subsequent to finishing that course, I then made the commitment to sign up for the mbd and I'm six, eight months into that process now.

Keep going. Tell us, what have you done with it so far? What have you taken? How have you applied it?

So the first after scaling up took the Top Grading, which is a methodology that we had started to follow and I had, prior to joining that course had I have not read Top Rating, but I read who and that was a great book to have under my belt going into that course because a lot of the methodology is the same and Top Rating just went significantly deeper on several topics. And we now utilize that method to hire. In the last three executive level hires we've made in the company, we followed the WHO top grading hybrid method. And we have no doubt that we hired the best possible candidate for all three positions. And one was a cfo, one was our national Sales manager and one's a distribution facility manager for our new operation that's opening in Houston two months. And just couldn't be happier with those hires. And without Top Grading and who and the MBD course to support that learning would never have been able to accomplish it. We would have stumbled and struggled without a doubt hiring at that level. And I just finished the Exponential Organizations, Celine Ismail's book in that course and really enjoyed that. That was to me, that was Scaling up on steroids, if you would of really thinking differently about some topics that are a bit intimidating to the way that they're presented and challenging. Which if you're on a learning path, that's what you want. You don't want to hear the same thing over and over. You want to get the. You want to be challenged and you want to force yourself and your team to think differently. And even if you don't implement everything that's being discussed and what you're learning, you're thinking about your business differently because of what you've been exposed to. And that's what I felt was extremely helpful with the Exponential Organizations class.

Yeah, I totally get that. So how is your group interacting now about the ongoing learning? You were talking about a book club or a discussion that you do. What does that look like?

So we still have the book club. The next book that we're introducing to the management supervisory team, which, including the executive team, is 25 individuals. And that next book, which we're starting in September, is Scaling Up. So we're going to introduce the greater management team to Scaling up and get into the details of the methodology and spread that knowledge to them. And with the goal being that they're going to own portions of the OPSP and help support the executive team in our quarterly, our annual and three year and bhag at a more intimate level, as opposed to just being shown or told, hey, this is what we're doing and this is why we're doing it. They're going to be involved in that process and the goal of is to have them buy in at the beginning and really take hold of that and make their personal plan a part of and in support of the OPSP from day one and on a quarterly basis.

Yeah, it's really great to be wading your way through that, learning pieces of it as you go and then apply, applying it directly yourself to the business. There are a lot of folks who, for a variety of reasons, don't engage a coach. They haven't found one they like or they just enjoy doing it. They haven't hit a block yet. And they're using this combination of books and video and online courses and groups. So talk to us about the components that you get in the MBD program so our listeners can hear about that.

That absolutely. So the, you know, what the MBD program does is it introduces you in each class to different coaches so you get a feel for if you're not ready or not convinced that you need to hire a coach and have them integrated into your planning sessions. It gives you the opportunity to do a quasi interview and learn different styles of coaching. And that's been helpful for me to kind of navigate and really get a feel for what works best for me. And we've actually through the Growth Institute, we're in a. Our executive team is on a five course deeper dive into scaling up. They partnered a coach with us and quite frankly, through after three classes, there's a good chance that we'll engage, at least dig deeper into the possibility of engaging with this coach because the styles, his style aligns extremely well with the way that we look to work as an executive team, what we want to accomplish. And there's been certainly challenges that he's put in front of us that have taken us to a deeper level of learning and understanding and that's really what we're looking for. So I think the Growth Institute has done a great job of understanding and giving the opportunity to participants in the MBD of exposure to different styles of coaching. So that's been a great benefit for me. And also through this process with the community and hearing other people's experiences as we're learning the same material and what they're struggling with other students in the course, particularly with exponential organizations. Because it was new introductory material to most of the participants, hearing what someone else is struggling with makes it a little less intimidating to know that you're struggling with a very similar difficulty understanding material, how it's going to apply to your old organization and how you can accomplish getting through to the next level within the course. So community within the. Within the MBD and then the variety of coaching styles that you get to experience, both of those are equally beneficial in my opinion.

So if you jump in here, reminder for our listeners, the MBD and the Growth Institute. So MBD is the Master of Business Dynamics. The Growth Institute is our official online partner for scaling up the online learning track for all things online. So it's not just video courses. There's also the related work to it and the groups that go along with as you go through it. What's the one that you're in now?

I took a break for the month of August. I've got three kids going back to school. Our oldest who graduated university this past spring, moving to Dallas for work. So I needed to take a take a breath and did a family vacation there as well. So I did not want to be absent from the first couple of classes. Picking it up in a few weeks. Yeah.

Nice. All right. And do you know what's up next, what the next one is? The next Intensive.

I cannot pull it out of my head right now to tell you.

Sorry, I should know, too. But anyway, they range on a variety of topics. So we have small courses, the on demand, and then we have the master classes. And then of course, in the mbd, you have all of the support groups. So you go through with a group of other students, you get instructors and course leaders coming on. You have a support person facilitating the group, plus the others in the group that you can do some of the assignments to together with. It's a great mix of stuff. And I particularly like. People will ask me, well, I'm not a really good reader, how do I get through who or whatever it is that we might be talking about in that quarter with the business? I'm like, look, it doesn't. I mean, there's always a compromise in each, but the tool that's the best is the one that works for you. So if you have trouble with concentration and reading or physical reading because of a learning difference or something like that, fine, listen to something or look at a video or do whatever mode of thinking and engagement works for you, like be modified, which is what's so cool about and different from regular traditional learning. Right. People come to our conferences, they hear folks live, they go into recorded sessions. That works better with their timeline without traveling. There's a variety of approaches that work with it.

Yeah, I would agree.

And now your group is engaged in finding and discussing things. So they're reading chapters, they're talking about stuff, they're applying it to the business in different ways, ongoingly. All the different core ideas of scaling up, Right?

Definitely. And it's been enlightening for me to see how eager most of the folks are to learn more and to be exposed to this type of opportunity. And I think that those that are participating are getting the benefit of adding more value to the business than they thought was possible previously. So it's worked both ways.

Well, as we talked about doing this sharing case study kind of thing with you, I thought it was really relevant because you grew up in a business, right. And this business and the experience around this business is really your education, Right?

Big part of it, sure.

Yeah. Except how would you know how to take it to the next level? You didn't work for five or six other wholesale furniture companies.

That's right.

And that would be a valid way, too. You could go out and work around an industry and travel around. You would learn different things. But without doing that, you've got to find some other way to sharpen the saw to Engage to learn some new approaches or you'll just keep doing the same, same thing, better with diminishing returns.

Right, exactly right.

Maybe find some efficiencies, but there isn't real learning and improvement in that way. And that's what I think is so cool. So many of us, especially our founder, owner types who created the business, it's the main thing that they've done through a majority of their career or they came in with a family connection.

Right.

I have coached a number of people who, who were in a family business and then found themselves there. Well, I think this is super helpful. I think you've advocated for it, the growth. Right. Taking it 22 million, selling it, then buying it back, then taking it 4x that over the next number of years using this process of continuous learning and development, not only of you, but of the whole team. If only the CEO is learning, it's going to be a tough time trying to translate that to the rest of the team. But you're engaging. You might be going deeper than everyone else, leading the way from the front, but engaging the whole team and learning.

I think is really cool. So I think that's a great point, Bill. Yeah, it was me on my own and not exposing the executive team or the greater management team to some of the methodology that I'm really preaching and putting out there. It's just me pushing it down without any other support material. This doesn't work anywhere near as well.

Well, thanks again for sharing your story with us. We're going to talk to a couple people on this subject, get some contrasting viewpoints. I really appreciate sharing the learning and listening of your approach to continuous learning with our listeners. Thanks again.

Good talking to you. Thanks for the opportunity to share.

Hope to see you at the next summit in Anaheim.

Very good. Thanks, Bill.

All right, bye.

Bye.

Bye.

All right, I want to go to another user of our online learning platform and hear a different experience with a different business going around the world. Now to Brisbane, Australia. Let's take it up with Cameron Brandeis. Hello and welcome again to the Scaling Up Business podcast. I'm your host and scaling coach, Bill Gallagher. On the show with me today is one of our Scaling up fans and somebody's been doing some learning, some self help through the process and I thought it'd be great to share that perspective because the continuous learners in our world do so well. So, Cameron Brandeis. Brandice. Brandeis.

Brandice.

Didn't get the pronunciation of your name.

People are going to hear and of course, I won't edit this Out. But they'll just hear that I'm a bozo. Right, Brandis. So Cameron Brandes is in Brisbane right now, right? That's right, yep. Brisbane, Australia, not Ohio. Is there another Brisbane somewhere in the world? I don't even know the answer to that question. Right. But Brisbane, Australia, and we're talking about this. And so like many of you, Cameron found out about it through the world of scaling up, through his broader business network. He was a member of VEO for some years. He's got a couple businesses today. I'm going to let him tell you more about that. But you've got a couple businesses, you've got a family, you're balancing all that, you're growing it. Right. Thanks for coming on the show with us today.

Thank you so much, Bill. Appreciate the opportunity.

Yeah.

And for managing the time zone differences. Right. It's early where you are. Right. It's later where.

Ah, that's, that's cool. It's actually really interesting to be part of it.

So give folks a little bit of sense of the business that you're in and your background a little bit before we get into what you've learned and how you've learned, how you've developed yourself.

Yeah, for sure. Okay. So I've got three businesses on the go at the moment. The first one I started in 2007 and that was a electrical contracting business, doing electrical type work, but in a high voltage space. So power stations and mines and things.

Like that and that lines you don't want to touch.

No, that's it. All the big bitey stuff.

Yeah.

So that business started off slowly and then around 2011, 2012, there was a boom in our industry in Queensland here and we grew really, really rapidly and we peaked at about 60 staff in 2014, 2015. And then at the end of 2015, the boom finished and so we came crashing back down with it. At the time we only had the one company. We had to let a lot of people go. We had a lot of equipment and plant sitting around and it kind of forced us to rethink things. So then we started up a second company which was an equipment hire company. And all we were doing was hiring out the equipment that was left over from our electrical business. So the electrical business was still ticking over very, very slowly. We had a lot of equipment sitting around. So we thought, why not start a hire company? Went through that process. Took a little bit longer, as everything does than we thought. That took about 18 months to get our E Commerce site up and running because it's E Commerce for rentals. It's a bit more complex but there was a lot of education that came through that and I thought why not create something else? Which is now our third business, which is a website marketplace for any business to effectively get into the hire game. So if they've got tool plant and equipment sitting around, they can use our platform to hire out their equipment and it's, it's at no cost to them. We, yeah, we take a fee from any hire that comes through. So we've got three businesses, one very traditional, one more of a product business and then the third one is the marketplace platform, all arising out of crazy boom time and then a terrifying crash.

And you manage all those today? How many folks working combined between those businesses and are they in different locations?

Yeah, so we've got all up about 17 or 18 people across the three businesses. So not a very big operation. I've got a full time manager looking after the electrical company. We're recruiting staff right now for our hire company and then the marketplace platform is really in startup stage, it's been launched. So we've only got a handful of people on that one. But it's the scale of that one is the really exciting thing for me.

So. Yeah, nice. So you have been working on your own. So talk to us, tell our listeners a little bit about this MBD program, the self study, that's one of the programs that we have to learn, the scaling up and the larger body of work there about developing yourself. So talk to us a little bit about that. First of all, what is it?

I guess the mbd, it was one of those strange sequences of events that while I was in eo, I was an EO member here in Brisbane for quite some time and I was always looking for education. I was looking to learn, I was thirsty to learn from others and find out how to really make this business thing work. And through eo I managed to send an email to Vern Harnish and not really expecting that he would reply, I said to him I'm looking for a program, something that's going to help me learn real business, not university type business. And I'm. I apologize to all the university listeners out there. I do have a university degree as well, but I was looking for something that's practical. And Vern responded and he told me about the mbd. So I feel, I feel I may have offended some listeners there. So you can edit that out if you like.

Well, no, I think, look, it is an MBD, right? It's not the MBA.

That's right.

People have MBAs and an MBA, well, there's different types of them, but for the most part that's about deals and finance and things like that. There's a little bit of management stuff, but it's not really about the kinds of things that we deal with in growing most businesses.

Well, for me as an entrepreneur trying to start something totally new and get things off the ground, really what you want to do is learn how to breathe life into an idea and bring something alive. And you've got everything from strategy people, marketing, sales, operations.

Beautifully said. Yeah.

All of that that I don't find anywhere else. And going through my undergrad studies, I didn't find any of that. So that's what I was yearning for was that really practical advice about all of those key aspects of bringing an idea for an entrepreneur or even for an established business owner to really ramp up their business or get it off the ground and make it sing. So that's how I came to be in the MBD program. And at the time when I joined, the first course that I did was the Exponential Organizations course with Salim.

Yep.

And kind of freaky that the first video in the course was to do with the changes in society and transforming from scarcity to abundance and so on. And it was just perfect alignment with HigherX, which is our platform. And I thought you've got, I mean, let's go. So yeah, I've been, been doing the courses now I'm up to my fourth one. Been doing them for a little over 12 months now. So it's been fantastic. It's been on point, really, really appropriate for every thing that we need at that starting up point. You know, Exponential Organizations was perfect. Then the next one we did was out think the competition which was all about strategy. The next one was marketing, mastering new marketing. So timing at that point we were really looking to market and the next one is sales, which I'm doing right now. So almost a ridiculously coincidental perfect sequence of events for what we were doing in our business. The courses at the time aligned with our business.

Talk to me about, to our listeners about the structure. So what does it look like to do one of the courses?

Yeah. Being based here in Australia, there's not a great lot of online courses that are run very, very well. With the mbd I was a bit unsure about how that would run. But they do an online platform so you log in, there's a bunch of videos, there's a bunch of resources that you can use, you read through Those and it's all structured what you have to do for that week. And then what they do at the end of each week is they have a live session and you do a Skype hookup or something like that with your coach and a bunch of other, what do they call them, students from around the world that are taking the same course. And it's a chance to kind of have a bit more of a virtual classroom on it. So you have an hour long conversation. You can reach out to people before or after the live sessions and so on. You can reach out to the crew at the Growth Institute if you've got any questions or issues. So if you're not in a physical classroom, it's the next best thing. You've got all the courses, sorry, all of the course material and you've got the support and you've also got that face to face time. So I really like it.

Yeah. So tremendous amount of flexibility. You get some of it. You can self study and work around your own schedule doing that online. And then you do end up working with other people, instructors, and I don't know if they call them your coach or whatever, but you're working through it all together as well. So you're getting some feedback and working through things in these remote zoom calls. Right. Video conference, definitely. So how have you applied it? What difference has it made in your business? What have you learned? What have you done?

There's plenty of examples there. I'm going to try and pick out the good ones. The exponential organizations that was really, really appropriate for the website platform that we have. One of the problems we had was communicating to people what it is and what it does. So through the exo course they talk about a massive transformative purpose. What's the purpose of your business? And if it goes gangbusters, what does it mean to the world? And our Arab MTP ended up being revolutionizing the way businesses use their plant and equipment. And that to me that's a big enough purpose that I can say that to anybody and it generates a bit of interest. It's like, oh, tell me more about that and then we can start the conversation. It's one of those things that we use for our own staff, we use for supply suppliers that are coming onto the platform. We use it for people that are hiring through the platform so that it's a conversation starter. But it's that really clear, concise communication about what it is and what it does. So that's, that's one example.

Yeah.

Some of the marketing stuff that we've learned through the Mastering New Marketing with David, Mim and Scott. Yeah, very, very interesting course and some different approaches to marketing. News jacking, especially from that course is fantastic.

We just had him on a podcast recently.

Yeah, nice. He's obviously very, very smart and good at what he does with marketing and there's a lot of great ideas that gives a small player like us a real chance to get some media time if you like, by piggybacking on big stories and even just being a little bit cheeky sometimes making comments about current affairs and things. Yeah, it's great.

Yeah. Okay. And then what was next? So you did and then how'd you apply that one? The marketing one? Yeah.

So the marketing one, I've only just finished that one a few weeks ago. So I've got a full time marketing manager who's little looking after marketing across our three businesses now and we're going through the strategy of how to roll this out across all of our marketing. So we're now blending what we learned with Kaihan Krippendorf in the outthink the competition and strategy side of things. We've taken the marketing, we're now kind of putting the strategy behind that and then we're going to start pushing that out for all three businesses. So it's, it's a constant evolution. It's not we do it once and then we do one thing as a result. We do it once and then we do a hundred things moving forward. And every week there's something new that comes up that we do as a result of not just the mbd. It's as a result of the education. There's tons and tons of great ideas that have come from the mbd. But it's about putting some of those plans into action and they don't have to be monumental changes into your business. It's just putting small changes in and getting some momentum.

So what have, what have you done after the marketing you're into? Which piece now?

I'm doing hyper sales growth with Jack Daly.

Hypers. Oh, Jack Daly. And did you do something before that between marketing and sales? Or is, or is that the logical progression?

No, no, no.

So it went from exo, outthink the competition, mastering marketing, and now hypersonic growth. Yeah.

Okay, good. Yeah. And, and you're in the middle of that one right now.

Yeah, I'm only a week and a half into that one. Only just started that. So pretty appropriate because for our equipment rental company, we've just opened up a second branch. We're recruiting sales and operational stuff for down there and having a whole bunch of weapons now, so to speak. In terms of sales, we can give that to our salespeople and say, look, here's how we want you guys to run. The sales playbook is a big, big ticket for us. We want to develop a sales playbook in the next few months, and then our salespeople can literally execute the plan.

Right. Well, you really can accelerate things with when you get the sales playbook working.

Right. Right.

Getting that repeatable sales process makes a huge difference.

I think if I can just add something there, please.

Yeah.

For me, that's been probably the biggest thing to come out of the MBD is that you end up with all of these tools where you can communicate and document and organize all of your crazy ideas into something logical and workable, which is a plan. Be it a plan about starting a business or marketing a business or strategy, it's about creating something that others can understand. So when we bring team members on, we can now onboard them so much easier and they can understand what it is we're doing and where we're going and how we're going to go. Yeah.

Who do you think? So who's the MBD not for? Who do you think would be a bad candidate for this? What would be not the fit?

Is that a trick question? I honestly, no.

It's an unusual question. Right. But I'm serious, because sometimes it's like, this is really awesome for one kind of person, not for another. So maybe you can't think of anything on the spot, but I approach it from a different.

Yeah, I'm honestly struggling because anybody in any role, I think could learn from it, you know.

Yeah.

All of my team across any business, they love getting involved in the strategy stuff. So.

Yeah.

To do a course on strategy, it seems to me that they would enjoy it. Salespeople would love to do a course on sales. Yeah, look, I. I really don't have an answer for that.

Well, it occurs to me, like, if you're not open to learning, if you're not a natural learner, then you don't like it. Like, you know, if you don't want to do that continuous improvement, then you probably should do this because just changing the structure is not going to make it any better for you.

Yeah, look, the. The thing is, if you can create a machine that everyone has a part in and they're all part of the machine that works well and is growing and is creating success almost like a sports team, you know, if there's a football Team. Every member of that team works together. And if they all work together, they understand the goal, they understand the culture, they understand how we recruit new members into the team. They understand how we market the team, how we represent the team. Sport and business are not a lot different. And how to learn that in business is. Yeah, for me, is gold. It's. Yeah, yeah. Maybe a little off track there.

So you're a fan.

Definitely. Well, probably sound like a raving idiot right now, but I'm just calling it like I see it. I really do enjoy it.

Oh, it's awesome. Well, in general, we're passionate advocates of learning. We promote the heck out of all of our channels. We promote the podcast, we promote the online courses. We promote reading. We promote coming to our summits. We think that our scaling CEOs learn again and again, that you have to develop yourself and your leadership team as you try to grow the company.

Or.

Or you either are the lid on it, like, you keep the results contained because you're not developing yourself in the process, or you sabotage it in some way. So if you don't develop yourself along the way, you'll encounter stuff because inevitably you encounter new challenges. So we're super advocates of it, and I wanted just to talk to somebody who's been through the course so that others could learn about it, because it is one of the channels. We talk a lot about our public workshops, our summits. We're interviewing authors here all the time on their books and ideas around the stuff. But this particular thing, I thought it'd be useful to talk to someone. And I'm glad to hear that you have. That you're digging the course and you're getting value out of it. And you can hear. I mean, just in the fact that you have three different businesses at different stages and you still have time for family and to come on random podcasts. Right.

No, look, the other thing, if I can just add to that, is it helps me help other people succeed. That's the underpinning thing. The people in my businesses help me succeed with my crazy idea, but I can also help them. I can help them, you know, learn things through business, and I can help them get a little bit of improvement in their life in some way. And I think that's the underpinning thing, that if we can educate ourselves better, then we can all help each other improve and grow.

Right? Yeah. So if you want to find out more about reading your. Well, you got a lot of business, but let me just tell you about the latest one. Thehire-x.com we'll put a link in the show notes so people can go check out you and your business. Hirex.com au right is Hirex. And then if you want to find out about the MBD or any of the programs at the Growth Institute, just go to growthinstitute.com and you can look up the Master of Business Dynamics and all the rest of it there, as well as the individual program courses and like that. We give our clients access to the classes right online and encourage them to check out key classes and programs during our work with the clients. I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Remind our listeners we're here every week with a new conversation about Scaling up growing your business. You'll find all of these shows and more@point scalingcoach.com you can subscribe. We'll send you a notice so you never miss an episode. Or you can go like and subscribe wherever you get your podcast, your favorite content there, itunes, et cetera. Go to our place for the whole back catalog. Scalingcoach.com Free downloads of the tools, all the show notes, plus I'll give you a copy of the Scaling up book for free if you just pay the shipping and handling cost. Thanks again Cameron for talking with us today. We'll talk to everybody again next week.

Thank you so much Bill.

Well, let's give special thanks to the original growth guru, Vern Harnish. Our show is produced by Lucy Summers, audio production at Podfly Productions and audio editing done by Albert Burge. The show notes are compiled by Ian Kodina and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you got some value out of the show, please let somebody else know. If you'd like to give us some feedback, you can drop us a Align and tell us what you want more or less of to info. Scalingcoach.com of course you can like and subscribe to get our podcasts every week. Thanks again for listening and Keep Scaling Up. Are you ready to turn your goals into daily wins? You should check out our Scoreboard software. Powered by Align, it's the official software for scaling up. With Scoreboard, you'll get an AI driven coach for priorities and KPIs and it'll help keep your team focused on what matters most. With Align, you can track your goals in real time and you'll even see results on the go. With their mobile app you can rest easy knowing that Align has world class onboarding and support to set your team up for success. This is really more than just software, it's what I actually use to manage growth in our scaling up client teams. Unlock clarity and results with scoreboard by Align. To try it now, go to aligntoday.com Bill Gates one more time. Aligntoday.com Bill G that's aligntoday.com Bill G Check it out and try it now.