183: The Best of Scaling Up Over the Years!

Well, at the end of every year and every decade, people and media outlets love to look back, look back at everything that happened, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And our production crew has taken the time to look back and reflect on the parts in our shows that went really well, what they loved, what touched them, and what we heard from listeners about. So listen in to this best of show with the best of all of our recent shows. 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, Stacy Baer. We deal with stress and upsets and breakdowns, and I've got another executive in the middle of a breakup of marriage. And I've got somebody like, we've got people at all times. I've had mental breaks. I've had relationship breaks. I've had thefts. We've had all kinds of stresses, financial woes that affect us as we go through life. And in particular, leaders, where you can't always share everything that you're dealing with with the people that surround you or you don't know how necessarily to talk about it in a way that's appropriate to your role. So your topic really touched me. And even after we did it, I'm reminded of these more immediate things. I'm like, holy crap, this is so relevant. So thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I think. I don't know if we're at any more trying time in history than other people have been and other generations have been. I have a great aunt who's 100 years old and still very with it and talks a lot about, you know, the. The long view of history. But I think one of the things that is really different is, is that we hear about all the bad news all the time in a way that past generations haven't. And I think for some of us, there's a real feeling that a lot of the things we hold dear are under attack. And I think there's a greater understanding that there's a lot of people who never felt like they received the benefits that I know I certainly felt growing up and. And I didn't realize that there were people for. For years that were struggling to be accepted simply for being who they were. Right. And that there were people out against their humanity. And things like the Holocaust or slavery seemed super far away. But, you know, those are only a couple generations or four generations ago in most cases. And so. But with all the news and all the information that can impact us all the time and I think oftentimes can be overwhelming and create a negative sense of awe. It's really important to find ways to find a positive sense of awe in our daily lives, if we can. And the thing that I really took away from that conference where we met was this notion that joy is a moral imperative, right? No matter. Life is going to be hard, life is going to be difficult. But we have a moral duty to work towards and try and find joy, even amongst the pain and the messiness and the anger. Because if we don't, we're not going to survive and we're never going to create the change that I think so many of us desperately want and are desperately working for in our daily lives.

On the show with me today is Brian Solis.

Purpose can't be overstated, but purpose is also. It's evolutionary and sometimes revolutionary, right? Because the more you unlearn and the more you learn, the more you grow. And as you grow, the more you see what you couldn't see before. And I think that's one of the beauties of life, right? But when we're so caught up in doing anything and everything at the moment, no matter how busy we are, no matter how productive we are, I think the key is being in the moment. And for whatever reason, you have to be in that moment. If it's single tasking, if it's giving somebody your undivided attention, if it's breathing in and taking in that sunset, allowing yourself to be in that moment is exactly what wires you to be in those moments more and more and more. Because right now we have been rewired, intentionally or unintentionally, to be distracted. And we confuse distraction with multitasking, and we confuse multitasking with productivity, and we confuse that busyness with happiness because that gives us some sense of achievement. But achievement and outcomes are really aligned with what it is that you're trying to do and why it's important beyond just that moment. I can't tell you how difficult it is for anyone to be in the moment, which is what you were talking about earlier with people walking on their phones, driving with their phones, responding to every email that isn't living, and also being spent at that finish line has to be much more than the energy you exerted to get things done. I mean, that GTD and NLP and all of these things that we're using to hack our brains to do all kinds of things isn't necessarily what happiness is about. If you can love and be loved, if you can create and have people Enjoy and appreciate your creations. And if you can give yourself to something bigger than yourself, then that's what life is about. And that's. That's where I want to be at the end. But that part is so difficult to appreciate these days because we're sort of living life on the standards of what other people and generations before us, going back centuries, have defined success, right? Material assets, material wealth, superficial relationships. All of the things that actually could be challenged now in a world where we have access to more information, more insight, more cultures, more scenery, other places around the world that we didn't necessarily have access to. So I would challenge anybody who's multitasking and hustling out there to ask yourself, what is it that truly will make you happy? And what is it that you can truly create beyond that mission that you feel you're on today? But the only way to get there is to give yourself the space and time to explore that.

We're talking about stories today. I have with us Nick Nanton.

I mean, you think about it, stories are like one of the few things, and I love stories that are told in. We'll call it moving pictures for now, but movies and film. I can show you a 90s second story about someone you don't know, or it can even be a fictional character, and I can make you cry within 90 seconds. And it's just that powerful because stories literally move you. I mean, there's a chemical in your brain called oxytocin. And I'll, you know, if that's not the thing Rush Limbaugh got in trouble for, that's OxyContin. That's a different deal. Oxytocin, something your. Your body creates. And when it's. It's a. It's a love and bonding hormone. And interestingly, when. When hearing stories, oxytocin is also released, which creates a chemical trust bond between the storyteller and the listener. So, you know, first of all, you've got chemistry working for you, body chemistry. And then second of all, there is a. There's a concept called transportation. And kind of the easiest way to think about it is, you know, when you're reading a good book, let's say a fiction book, and you really kind of stop seeing words on a page, but you see a picture of something that's happening in your mind, you kind of see the movie playing out. Well, that's like you transported yourself into this scenario. And in. In our world of storytelling, when you tell a good story, you actually can transport your listener or your reader in your business, of your business, into your story. And they actually start to feel like they were a part of it. They actually kind of start to bond. They feel like they feel they're part of your success and your trials and your tribulation. So they get literally, they feel somewhat. Start to feel somewhat responsible for your success. So to connect that to one more thing, there's a number called Dunbar's number. And Dunbar's number is. There's debate, but I. Between 100 and 150. And I think nowadays it's probably closer to 150, but basically says you can have 150 relationships at any time. And that's really all your brain can process. Well, if you think about, it's interesting, if you watch Oprah every day, then One of those 150 spots is taken up by Oprah. Now, I'm sure, like, you know, your spots 1 through 10 or 1 to 20, I don't know. The numbers are. Your brain knows the difference between, you know, your mom and the level of relationship you have with her and Oprah. But the point being is, you know, it sneaks into repetition, also causes a sneak into your subconscious as a relationship. And I know you know, some of you relate to this when you, you might have a car dealer in town or a personal injury lawyer in town is like on TV all the time. And at some point you may have run into him in a grocery store and, or in a sandwich shop or whatever, and you probably said hey to him. You know them really well, and you stopped and felt dumb afterwards because you really don't know them. They don't know who you are, but you just feel like, you know, because you've seen them so many times. Now what's intriguing about if you put all these things together is if you tell your story effectively and you use different types of media to stay in front of your audience, so you take up one of those relational slots. You know, you really become their friend in the business without, you know, and a lot of times just one to many communications. And so when you create that friend in the business relationship with them and they have a chemical bond to you and they have, they feel transported in your story. It's really interesting because they actually will start to feel like, like I said before, like they're responsible for some of your success. And so they'll never go anywhere else they'll refer all their friends to because if they went to somebody else, they would actually feel like they were tearing down something they subconsciously feel like they helped to build so it just goes really deep when you tell your story effectively. And, you know, it is absolutely the best way to get any point across, as we all learned from, you know, Aesop's Fables and everything else, you know, for, you know, generations and generations, thousands of years, you know, things that were remembered were told by Stor.

We're talking with John Rulin, all the.

Little details of the theme and the timing, and that's where people are like, oh, I've tried the gifting thing. It doesn't do anything, so I'm just gonna cut it out. And I'm like, well, tell me what you did. They're like, oh, we sent a gift basket at Christmas and. With a bunch of cookies and crackers. And I'm like, oh, so you broke all 20 of the rules of what we teach. And you think that that's the same thing as what we're teaching? It's like, people don't understand. There's a big difference. It's like comparing watches. Like, there's a difference between a Casio and a Patek Philippe. Like, yes, they're both watches, but very different operating and very different value and worth. But to some people, they don't care. And so they're just like, oh, yeah, all watches, they're the same. Like, no, like, all gifts are not the same. They're not all created equal.

So let's talk about the gifting mistakes, right? Because I bet we've all done these. Tell us, what are the crappy gifts? What shouldn't we do?

Yeah, well, part of it is the item itself. So, like, food is horrible, and people are like, oh, I give food. Everybody loves to eat. And I'm like, yeah, we eat our drink ourselves to death, number one. So it's not original. You know, everybody gives food to the point of tables collapsing at. At the holidays. Like, literally conference tables. There's so much food, they're giving it away, and they don't even realize. And some of Those things are 50, 100, $200 baskets.

Oh, yeah, we get the big baskets. Pareto baskets in the winter. Pears, salami, lox. Just, like, everything piled up. Lots of filler, big cellophane. It's a huge business, Harry and David.

Oh, it's massive. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so they kind of created the whole corporate gifting thing. But, number one, it doesn't stand out because everybody does it. Number two, you spend $100 to have one impression, so people eat the food or whatever else, and it's gone in five minutes. Whereas, you know, if you're looking for an ROI, I want something, I give a gift, and 10 years later, they're still talking about it. Like, cost per impression. Like, I want to measure it the same way I measure any, any other piece of advertising or anything else I'm doing. So food is hor. Alcohol is even worse. Food, you know, yeah. Food allergies. Everybody's gluten free, or oh, I'm noti'm not eating meat this month, or I mean, food has gone crazy. Alcohol is worse. Like, you don't know. Like, you give a bottle of wine to somebody, number one, they might be into a certain kind of wine, and you give them the wrong kind of wine, or maybe they're a recovering alcoholic. Like, I've seen that happen hundreds of times. They send the same bottle of wine to everybody, and they don't realize they're spending money to actually piss people off. They have seen people that are Jewish, they get hams in the mail. They're like, what the heck am I supposed to do with this? And so there's, yeah, there's so many ways to offend people, and it's not a good investment. Like, everybody, you know, as an entrepreneur, you want to spend a dollar and get 10 back. And people don't look at gifting that way, and they should. And so it's really unfortunate that they're not, they're not looking for an roi. They're looking to do things as a nice to, not as a, as a real strategic business decision. Gift cards are the worst.

Well, I hear you're really talking about gifting as, not only as a reward, as a thank you, but as a communication tool, as a way to stand out as a promotional item, as a combination of these things. Right?

Yeah. I mean, at a core level, if you look at how gifting was done, go back to like biblical times, like Old Testament, Like, a gift represented the value of the relationship. It was an artifact. Like gift. Like, you'd see kings give other kings, like a thousand head of cattle. Because the relationship was important. And I think in our DNA, even in 2017, when somebody, it's like you get a million dollar referral and somebody sends you a Starbucks gift card, you're like, seriously, you just sent me 50 bucks and I just sent you a million. Like, in our heads, we can't help but think, like, the value of the relationship is based upon, like, tangible things that are in front of us. And when somebody does something really nice for us, there is like a deep rooted, like, DNA of like, they Want some reciprocation? Not everybody there are true givers. But most people in business, when you do nice things, you're expecting to plant some good seeds that eventually come back to you. And I think that most people view that as, oh, it's a token of my appreciation, which basically means my gift was too lame to put any thought into it. So I'm going to call it a token so I don't really have to try or do anything over the top. I hate the word token. Like, you would never describe a relationship as a token relationship. Why would you describe the gift that's supposed to represent the value of the relationship as a token? It's a cop out. It's a way to be lame. And so what we've seen is most people's bar is so low in the corporate world with swag and crap, with logos the size of softballs on it, that when you actually do it well, people are like, oh, my gosh, in 2017, I'm being treated as a human being, as an individual, I'm being acknowledged as a person. And that's really what the gift is. You're right. It's a communication tool of value, of relevance, of quality, and even of your values. Like everybody says, they're first class, best in class, world class. And they have these beautiful headquarters and beautiful cars and beautiful suits. And then they give a bar of chocolate with their logo on it that's not congruent in any way, shape or form with the values that you're saying your business operates under. And it's the one thing that you're giving as a tangible act to that other person who's supposed to be your most valuable relationship. It just doesn't make. In fact, it's better to do nothing at all than to do things half baked because you're actually spending money to have negative consequences. It just doesn't make any sense.

On the show with us today is John Ratliff.

You know, one of the. I think one of the things from a mental health perspective that's really important is sleep. I picked the business that provided the most possible sleep deprivation you could possibly have. The way I had the office set up, I had a bedroom with a bed and I would sleep in there and there was a buzzer next to the bed. When the phone would ring, the buzzer would go off and it would wake you up and wake me up, and I'd have to kind of stumble out and answer the phone. I started the business in the summer of 95, and I'm pretty sure. I don't remember the entire year of 1997. I was so sleep deprived, but. And actually I had kind of my first sort of like, epiphany turning point moment in that sort of 1997 range. It's a great story. It was about 4am on Monday morning. So Sunday night into Monday. I had not slept more than two hours the entire weekend. I was the only person there for the whole weekend. Fortunately, the business was growing, so we were starting to get more calls and had more customers. But the downside was there was less time to sleep in between those calls and. And I was literally at the end of my rope. I was at the end of my rope physically, emotionally, personally. I destroyed a lot of relationships and was probably in the darkest place I had ever been. And it was 4am Monday morning, and I'm asleep. I'd finally fallen asleep probably an hour before, and the buzzer goes off again. And I woke up and I was smart enough to set it up where I had to get out of bed, walk across the apartment and sit down at the desk to answer the phone so that I could at least sort of sound a little bit awake, even though I was completely, like, catatonic asleep. And in the process of walking across the apartment, I had to walk by this little closet where we had all of our telephone equipment. And without even thinking about it, not even again being catatonic, I walked into the closet and I reached out and our equipment looked like half of a filing cabinet. And I reached out and I grabbed that piece of equipment and my plan was to rip it out of the wall, throw it on the ground, and go back to bed and be done with the business.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Literally, f this business, I'm done.

I was done. I was at the end of every possible rope you could be at the end of. And so I reach out and I grab it and I had one of those kind of like, I guess, epiphany moments where, you know, they say your life flashed before your eyes. My business life sort of of flashed before my eyes. And I literally almost got a glimpse into the future. And I knew that kind of in that moment, if I stuck it out and I really kind of like doubled down and reapplied myself and maybe changed our strategy a little bit, that there was going to be a great outcome at the end. I had no idea at the moment what that meant. We certainly had an outcome I could have never envisioned in 1997, but I knew that if I just could get past this Sort of like hamster wheel that I was on, that things were going to work out on the other end. So I have that moment. I get complete clarity. One of the few moments of clarity I had early on. And this funny sidebar that people think I'm making up, but from my lips to God's ears, this is what happened. I then walked out, I sat down and I answered the phone. And we had a limo company that was one of our first clients called Delaware Express. And I said, good morning. Thank you for calling Delaware Express. The guy on the other end goes, oh, sorry, dude, wrong number. So the call was a wrong number, but it was the moment where I know, I know you can't make that up. When the universe calls, you got to kind of pay attention.

It's time to change something.

Yeah. And I did not realize that at the time, but that was absolutely one of those turning point moments. And things were bad for years to come after that, and there were lots of challenges, but that was the first time I really sort of got to a place of like, I'll call it the ultimate despair place, and was able to have a moment of clarity that sort of pulled me out of it. And, you know, it's interesting. I talk and I hid this up until very, very recently, and, you know, we're talking about 20 years ago. But as you know, I battled depression from the time I was a kid, through my teenage years, through all my entrepreneurial career, until really very recently and kept it a secret from pret much everyone in my life. It was one of those kind of things that I carried around but never wanted to talk about. I describe my personal experience with depression. It's kind of like wearing a blanket around your shoulders, and you're always aware that it's there. Sometimes it's heavier. Sometimes it almost feels like it's soaking wet. At times it's not very heavy, but you're always kind of aware that this thing is with you. I think a lot of my personality was sort of a manifestation that that was my ability to try or my, you know, my attempt to try and hide this from the people around me.

And what did people see on the outside then?

You know, that's a great question. I guess you'd have to ask some of them. But looking back to me, I was often one of the life of the party guys, you know, perfect, funny personality. Well, I thought I was funny anyway, but. But kind of larger than life in a lot of sort of settings.

Jokester, expressive.

Yeah.

Did you drink?

I did. I drank pretty significantly through my 20s and 30s. Yeah, I was definitely a drinker all throughout. And it was. If you had polled any of the people that were close to me and said introvert or extrovert, they all would have said extrovert. And I would tell you, I'm a. A painful introvert. But again, the way I sort of hid that and kind of, I guess, attempted to mask all this other stuff was in very extroverted ways.

I'm totally like that. I think a lot of. I pretended to be an extrovert. Right. And I could be very expressive, demonstrative in certain public settings when I was set up in a particular way. But in reality, I could only manage it for a short period of time. Of time. Now I'm much more clear. No, I'm an introvert and I can take the stage, I can do certain things, but I am at my core, you know, like, to retreat.

Yeah. You know, it's funny, I was. We had a party at the house. I think it was around Christmas time. And my mo. When we had a party, I could. I could handle about a half hour to an hour. And then I would sort of disappear. And whether it was, you know, my bedroom or just somewhere by myself, and then I'd come back. And now I've been telling the story of how. And I'll get to it with you, how I overcame this depression thing that I've had going on forever. Someone said to me, they're like, wow, it's the first time I've been in a party with you where you're not vanishing every hour for 20 or 30 minutes. We always wondered what that was about. And that was completely from the whole introvert, extrovert.

You're right.

You can only fake it for so long and then it becomes painful. And as I share that now, people are still shocked when I say, yeah, I'm a total natural introvert.

On the show with us today, the founder, our guru, patron saint of scaling up Verne Harnish.

So I'm back at the reunion of the birthing of giants class. And one of the guys reported out, he said, we just experienced this. We've had this really great solution to a critical problem that Fortune 500 deal with. And our solution is only 30 grand, but we're not selling any of them. So he goes out and talks to the customers. They're like, look, this problem is so critical, we don't trust that you can solve it for that little bit of money when we have 10 times that budgeted. So he went literally 10x the price, and he sell them so fast he can barely support what's happening. And so I think what happens is, you know, what got us here won't get us there. You know, when guys launch, when you launch a company, you have a tendency to kind of low ball it. You don't have a lot of confidence. You're new into the marketplace and you fail to ever let that go. And so, as you know, we recommend Herman Simon. He's kind of the father of pricing and his book, Lessons from a Pricing Man. But look up Herman Simon on Amazon and get his pricing book. But that, to me is the biggest mistake, is not submitting three bids. If you're B2B, you know, varying the price, just like you had three offers, there's a whole slew of psychological tools that we need to take advantage of and focus more on getting the price right.

Really brilliant. All right, so that's in the world of marketing. And you talked about the four P's which anybody who's had any amount of marketing or business schooling will know those. And too often our world, they just think of promotion. We get into place with things like Sandbox and Core Customer.

But a lot.

Of times it's just about how do I promote better? And the pricing has such a huge impact on that growth. So then let's talk about people for a minute.

Minute.

This was the question Bill Gates considered the best he'd ever been asked. And it was a question that was asked of Steve Jobs. He then carried that through all of what he scaled up. And I was privileged to be asked this question back when I was originally launching Ace and Yeo. And it was a question that Regis McKenna, the marketing guru of Silicon Valley, had taught Steve and Intel and Genentech. And I cold called him and said, hey, I want to scale up the world's largest entrepreneurship organization. So I guess it was a good elevator pitch. And he said, all right, I'll take you on as his only free client. And he sends me out the big notebook that he was taking Steve through. And our very first session, he had signed a young guy, Rich Moran, to help me was this. Take a piece of paper out, and if you want to scale your company 10X, who are the top 25 influencers, relationships, people, whatever word you want to put in there that you need to get behind your venture. And he said, look, the bigger the names, the faster your scale you'll scale. So I'm young and dumb and a student at Wichita State University. So I boldly put on the top of the list, President Ronald Reagan. We're talking about 1984. I'm thinking if I can get the president of the United States to be the first to talk about the importance of entrepreneurship. No other president had done that to that point. I then wrote down, look, I got to get Steve Jobs involved with this organization and Michael Dell. Michael had just launched and was growing rapidly his company. And then I didn't know who ran him, but I somehow I knew I had to get Inc. Magazine and at the time Venture magazine involved. So we made the list of 25 and all we did was we spent an hour every week figuring out how to get ourselves to each of those people and convince them to support us. And in 36 months we were global, Bill. That's how quick we were able to scale. And from, you know, launch in 83, 86, I'm hosting the first public event from Steve Jobs post him being fired from Apple. I've got him sitting up there with Michael Dell and Mark Cuban and the other, you know, folks, Ted Leon have come on to be really, you know, superheroes in the entrepreneurship field. We have President Ronald Reagan agree to fly in to do the opening. Welcome. Inc Magazine does a six page story. Honest Ventures given us full page ads. Bill, I couldn't have scripted it any better. And it's what Steve Jobs did when he went into launch itunes. Who are the top 25 people I've got to get on board in the music industry. He didn't actually know anyone and so he had to begin to work that list. And so that's practical step number one.

So I think like today this has gotten easier than ever before with things tools like LinkedIn and our social networks. We start to realize how connected we are to other people. And you can find and track down how to get to these people. But it starts first with targeting. And I want to underscore this is not just with the launch of your business, but a launch of a new product, a new division, the expansion of something, a breakthrough of some kind. These connectors that you're talking about, the key influencers that are going to make all the difference.

You got it? Absolutely. And in this day and age, don't ignore bloggers, YouTubers, my daughter's body butter business, she's identified the top five kind of YouTubers that she has to get behind what it is that she's doing. And so there's a new type of influencer that we can't ignore and they know it well.

So the YouTubers. My nephew is a lead on A top kid show on Nickelodeon and, and the amount of money that they get now for promoting products on Instagram and that kind of thing that any celebrity has offered for that is extraordinary because a well placed product or mention from some influencer can make a difference. Now you might not be selling to kids and you might not need a Kardashian or Nickelodeon star, but you might be selling to business influencers and so on. And there's all kinds of people who have more sway than we realize.

You bet. Yeah. Look what Guy Kawasaki's done in our field as a huge influencer.

Huge influencer.

Yeah. And I've got a good friend that's launched a top notch champagne. I mean, it's an existing company to your point, but they've launched a new product line and one of the top ad agencies has said, look, in Italy, this is the guy. And if he says what you've got is great, the thing's going to fly off the shelves. And that's what happened. Esther Dyson in the software industry, if Esther says what you have is golden, you're gonna go to a billion. If she says it's not, you better fix it. So every industry has their opinion leaders, the lead customers that if you've got them on board, everyone else falls in line and that's the list you've got.

To put together and work on the show. With me today is Maura Ahrensmiele. What matters to you? What role do you want to play? What's comfortable, what's uncomfortable? From when can we find a path or a way? Right.

Well, and tuning in, you know, I mean, I have a great quote from a therapist in the book who says, you know, most people show up in her office because they haven't tuned in or paid any attention over the years. And so eventually their psyche and their body starts sending them all these signals like help, help, emergency. And they're just not paying attention. I mean, and the reason I love the example of your colleague and your client who you were talking about is it sounds like he tuned in and he realized that something was making him on unhappy, violating his boundaries. Right. Whether he wanted more time, whether he wanted more space, whether he didn't want to be on a plane all the time, whether he didn't want to be dealing with management issues and team building issues, which can be very taxing frankly, for introverts, if they are for anyone, frankly. I think that it's also really important. And one of the exercises I take readers through in the book is really tuning in which for a lot of us, especially those of us who are overachievers and who have been achieving since we were five years old, right? And you know, who you are is to take a moment and say, is this what I want? Am I happy? You know, I have people in the book who sort of look up and I get reader mail all the time. You know, I graduated from a great law school. I'm sitting here, I'm a first year associate in a giant law firm in New York City. I look up at the walls, I sit under the floor, fluorescent lights, and I think, oh my God, how did I get here? Now that's someone who really is all of a sudden tuning in and thinking, this job is violating every boundary I have. I cannot do it. But what I would say is it's very tempting to say, well, I'm just going to quit and go start a yoga studio. Right? Which is like the narrative that we want to follow. No. You know, if you're an introvert and your job is violating your boundaries because you're sitting in an open plan office and there's too much stimulation or people won't leave you alone, or you need space.

I love your phone just rang when people won't leave you alone. That's just fantastic.

I know, Please, it's probably my town calling to tell me we're gonna have a snow emergency, you know, is to think, well, wait a minute, could I do the same job that I do but just do it differently? Right? Could I work in a different office environment? Could I work from home sometimes? Could I take away some of the management duties so I don't feel so taxed? I think that it's really, really important. And this is no matter what level of your career you're at or if you're an entrepreneur, you work in a large organization, to think about is my job making me unhappy in a way that I have control over? Because it's about, I don't like the fluorescent lights, or I need some alone time, or I don't want to be on a plane all the time. You know, like more simple fixes than sometimes we think about.

Tell us about the process that you, you apply for. So you talk about tune in and you didn't say it explicitly, but you're talking about tuning into yourself. What do you want? What do you need? Right?

Yep, absolutely. Tuning into yourself. And also in a realistic way. I mean, I think that many of us, when we tune in and we realize, I don't want to be a corporate lawyer or I Don't want to run this company anymore. I need a succession plan. Or for me, I quit nine jobs very, very quickly. I kept bouncing from job to job because I just was not happy in office environments. You know, sometimes situations force you to tune in, but then you also have to think about, well, okay, but what do I have to do? I have to earn a living or, you know, I spent all this money getting a law degree. I don't want to give it up. I actually like practicing law. For me, I quit nine jobs and I was determined because I thought I hated what I did. I was going to go to social work school and be a social worker, which was a total 180 from everything I had trained for and worked for 10 years advancing in corporate America for. But I was that unhappy at my job. Luckily, circumstance intervened and I realized I actually liked what I had trained to do. I just needed to do it on my terms. I needed to not show up in an office all day and not deal with co workers all day and not have to go to networking events all the time. So it's about tuning in, thinking about what you want, what motivates you, what you cannot give up, which for most of us is an income. Right. And various other things, and then figuring out how you can make the changes to your life and your schedule that will keep you and sustain you.

Yeah. So for me, it was always a lot about schedule. And my own personal office has been a retreat for many years, so wherever the office happened to be. And I've had about three different offices over the last 22 years, which I guess is not that many compared to a lot of folks. But like, I always have a couch and a comfy chair and there's a place to sort of retreat, reflect, and digest as well. And I'm happy to invite people in, but then. But my office is not the open plan. I'm not sitting out with everyone, which I've been criticized for before. But I'm like, yeah, it just doesn't work for me. I need to. I need to separate sometimes.

That's right. And I think, honestly being able to say that. And again, this is an issue of privilege and position in your life and even sometimes gender. You know, women often will get criticized if their office is too homey because sometimes people think they're not serious enough. So, I mean, I think that it's also understanding the realities. But I do dream of a world where we are able to have more of a work day and a work environment that suits our temperament. And we don't get punished for it. I would love people to make partner even though they worked from home one day a week because they work really well by themselves at home. But you just don't hear these stories enough.

I think that evolution is key. I think about that with our teams. I lead multiple day planning and strategy sessions with teams is one of the key things we do. And then when I think about, okay, we're a couple days in, we're going to have a dinner together. So I always like to give people an hour or two to go back to their room to handle phone calls, to to use the bathroom to take their shoes off for a minute or whatever because I know that a good number of people in the room need something like that. And so we're designing in the diversity and I know the folks that don't need it will go like straight to the bar, the coffee shop or whatever and they'll keep talking to everyone else. And I'm like, oh geez, I just need to go away.

I do think that one of the things that's really important is that I think that intention setting is extremely important and vision setting is very important. But I'm a big believer in more pedestrian vision setting. You know, my vision is that I like Mondays, that I don't dread Mondays. That Sunday night blues don't exist for me because going back to work just means going down to my home office, you know, having control and like. Exactly. And so I think I encourage people to actually think of a vision that works for them and the everyday and to think about when I go to work, whatever that means, and I sit at my desk, how do I feel? Do I feel like I want to escape or am I happy to be there? It is equally important that you enjoy your work in the day to day than that you have a big shiny goal that you want to achieve in 20 years. Not for everyone. Some people are so extremely driven and got extra again. God bless them. But for many of us, especially for those of us who feel things in Technicolor, as my friend Christina Wallace says, and who really need to manage our energy and our emotions, we really need to be much more practical about our life in the day to day. So that's where I'm at on this.

Show is a guy named Ron Lovett.

I did my first backpack and I did my first trip in South Africa and then went to Australia and then just kept backpacking. I did try university, took a course and a half and I just really didn't enjoy it and continued Backpacking and then came back. Long story short, but in 2002 I came back from a three month trip in Colombia and I was training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu at the time under the Gracies, under Renzo and Hoist Gracie. I would go to New York and train in Henzo Gracie's studio. And I thought, you know, I'm going to be a bodyguard, that's what I'll do. And I want to get out of the pot business. At the time I was looking online and sure enough, you know, you don't know what you don't know, but in Halifax, Nova Scotia, there's not a great career to be a bodyguard. But at the time I had a good name running nightclubs. I was running four or five bars. Just, you know, essentially I was hired as a guy who could take care of myself and keep my friends out, which were a benefit to the bar owners. And so I decided to start a company called Source Security in 2002 doing nightclub security in Halifax. So that was my real first legal business that I started. And so, yeah, we started doing bars and then we kind of. I blinked my eyes and within two or three years we had 18 bars in Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Started to expand into the event concert business. And within four years we had 350 staff do an 85,000 person concert at the Rolling Stones outdoor concert. So we just grew, we exploded and we're doing projects that we had no business doing. Essentially. I was able to talk my way into some interesting contracts and then we started to get into the bodyguard work. My first gig was with Ringo Starr for a month at the Casino Rama in Ontario where I work with him on the Ringo Star tour. And then, yeah, so things started to go from there. And then we did get into the kind of regular private security guarding contracts, the uniform guard service at malls, construction sites. And I don't know how much you know about the security business, but it's a really tired industry. There's really been zero innovation in there. And so I had met a Gazelles coach actually in a guy named Andy Biting, who you may know.

Yeah. Know Andy very well.

Right. So Andy was our Gazelles coach. And look, that was instrumental turning the company around, actually building systems and processes and bringing on our daily huddles and brand promise Scorecard and coming up with our purpose and our values. It was awesome. I mean, really solidified, built a strong foundation. And once our culture was right, you know, it just turns out that that wasn't enough for us. We just still weren't getting ahead and we had to really throw some Hail Marys and be very unorthodox. And I'll talk more about that later. How we kind of turned the company around, but essentially we just continue to grow. Once we had figured out some very interesting HR practices and really got our frontline staff aligned and were able to tap into really that untapped potential of the frontliner, the company blew. Blew up. I mean, we had 1500 staff across Canada. We grew by 60% last year. And then I did sell two years ago to a company out of California and had a great exit it. And you know, it's been almost two years now that I sold and got two kids and things are going great.

So let's talk about this. So first let's just anchor this thing. This immature maybe bumming around the world. Pot dealer starts to dabble in the security business, encounters the rock habits, gets a Gazelle's coat and takes it to 1500. Was the peak.

Yeah, 1500 staff.

1500 staff right across the country, across Canada, and eventually selling out at a very premium multiple to a US based company.

Correct?

Yeah. Before 40.

Yeah, yeah.

Two years ago.

37.

And that growth. So we've got the scaling up framework, your Gazelle's coach. But then you've also got this thing that you see about empowering frontline employees. And the book is Outrageous Empowerment. Talk to us a little bit about what it is that you see there about empowering and engaging that Frontline.

Yeah, look, it just became obvious to me. I mean, I remember reading books like nuts Southwest Airlines and thinking, there's no effing way this is true. And I always remember walking through an airport in New York. I'd never flown Southwest and I didn't buy into the whole culture thing. And I went up to a young guy at the counter and said, I look, I had like five pages left in the book and wasn't. Wasn't buying it. I went to this young guy and I said, look, do you like the company you work for? And the guy looks at me, he says, what? I said, do you like the company you work for? And he says, dude, I don't know if you're looking for a job, but this is the best goddamn company work for on the planet. I was like, oh my God, I need to find. He did like, do something here. This is crazy. So I had a lot of work to do. And I know you know, your notion.

Before then was that people hate their company.

Yeah, people hate their company. And in my business, it's military style, lots of bureaucracy, hierarchy. And that was the business. You know, you had these ex military, ex police folks joining saying, here's how the business is run, it's always been run and here's how it should be run. And anytime you had any type of profits, you hired a more expensive mid or senior manager that would eat it up and start becoming a firefighter. And I just knew, look, I went through a tough time in 2011 where we lost a million dollars. And, and I think I heard you say you or Vernon on the last podcast. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs, we wait until you're smelling rock bottom before you really go back to the drawing board and innovate. And that happened to me. I'll never let it happen again. But it did happen to me. And the real question for me, Bill, that pivoted things from a model perspective was what if I had to recreate this industry? What if I had to start the private security industry today knowing, you know, going through each stakeholder and their top five challenges, and that's a great exercise to go through and can I do that and still be profitable?

On the show with me today is Laura Hodgson.

I started running a real estate development company for a while, was blessed to have my son, which is the greatest venture and adventure of my life. And at that point realized that I really wanted to go off and do something on my own instead of helping everybody else build their companies. Mostly not because I was dying to be the boss, but more because I wanted the flexibility to be a great mom and a great wife and a great CEO. And I wasn't sure if I could do that for somebody else. So one of my leadership, Atlanta classmates and I were talking one day and she was leaving her job to run for state representative. And so we decided to start a company together. We didn't know what we were going to do. We knew we loved to solve impossible problems. So we initially took on some large infrastructure projects, like working with an Alaska Native corporation on their zinc mine, working with an aggregate company in Florida on water reservoirs, you know, like fun and sexy stuff like that. And in the meantime, I am toting around a baby and a carrier. And I realized that there was nothing that you could use with an infant or a toddler that didn't spill all over your car. And I also realized that whoever had invented the juice box should be badly hurt because those things do nothing but squirt in your face and put sugar in your child. So I had an idea to come up with a spill proof bottled water for kids and My business partner and I said, well, okay, let's do it. So we launched a company called Nourish that was a patented spill proof bottle for babies that when you were traveling you could just add the formula, shake, serve and recycle. And for toddlers, it's a spill proof bottled water designed after the camelbacks that I used to use when I was doing triathlons and running. And so we had this new product that was, we bootstrapped it. We had offers to take in private equity, but we didn't want to give away half our company. So we started selling the product into newsstands, at the airports, parody shops, etc. We started selling into small retailers, small distributors, and the cadence worked fine. The business was growing great. And then we got our first big order from Whole Foods, which was a, an awesome day. I mean, my business partner and I are high fiving. We bagged the big deal. Now we're shipping truck lids across the country until our brain caught up with our excited hands doing the high five. And we realized, wait a minute, these orders are huge. There's lots of zeros on the end of them. We're going to have to ship this product and send an invoice. And we don't know when we're going to get paid. And sadly we found out that it doesn't matter if your invoice says net 30 or net never. You're going to get paid whenever the customer feels like paying you. So we had this awful realization that we were going to grow to death, that everything we had done supposedly right would be the very thing that put us out of business. And I think your greatest challenges come from some of your greatest strengths. Our greatest strength is we have this great product that we, it was selling like crazy and it became our greatest weakness. That's where most innovation comes from, is your problems.

Well, there's two ways of dealing with. One is an internal innovation where you solve your problem in a novel way. It becomes your secret sauce. And then the other is where you turn that problem into a business into itself. Right?

That's right. That's right.

And right off the bat it sounds, sounds like you go looking for problems and don't have any hesitation about turning them into businesses.

That's true. And I don't know if I look for problems. Although my mother might argue with me saying that she would probably say I absolutely look for problems. I think it's more when I hear of someone else's problem. I have this dire need to help. And so when someone says they have a problem. I immediately think, well, how could we solve that? And you're right. It's an interesting way to think about it because to me, when I created Now Account, which is the business I have today, I was really only trying to solve Nourish's problem. It was that internal reaction. It was actually quite selfish. I was just trying to make my life better. It wasn't until I started working on it that I realized everyone else had the same problem as me. And I didn't realize that because being an entrepreneur can be very lonely. When you're sitting in your car thinking, what an idiot am I, Why did I not know this was going to happen? And then you finally share that with someone and they say, oh Laura, everyone has that problem. You just have a working capital issue. And I'm an engineer, not a banker. So when people said that to me, I thought, well, I don't want one of those. How do we get rid of it? And then that internal innovation became, wait a minute, this is something that other people could benefit from too.

On the show with me today is Carl Goa'. Uld. So that. So we've got this avatar or a couple of types and we're now trying to figure out what their main complaints are. So for this category or this type, we're looking for what it is they're worried about, what pisses them off, what stresses them out, what's got them up at night.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there may be things that are on their mind that have nothing to do with your service. You know what they might be worried about, what they get grief for at the end of the day might have nothing to do with you. And you might say, well, if I'm a business advisor and they're trying to get their kid in school, what does that have to do with me? And it may have nothing to do with you. However, in our obnoxious offer, when we structure our obnoxious offers, we have what we call a nonlinear benefit. And a nonlinear benefit is what can I bring to my clientele that has nothing to do with my service? And I'll give you some examples in a moment. But well known examples, but you know, some that you could think about now is imagine for a moment your core clientele is in their 40s and 50s and likely has high school kids. And those high school kids are trying to get through high school and into college. So what if you approach a well known tutor or tutoring company or test taking company or extra credit educational organization and you say, I would be Willing to promote you to your core clientele. That's part of my client list. What I'd like to do is in my gold level offering or to my core clientele, I want to offer them a free strategy session on how to help your kids increase their test scores or get into college. All right, I've got 100, 500,000 clients that fit your mold. What I'm asking, tutor or expert, would you be willing to put on a free webinar and give anyone who's Interested a free 15 minute introductory session? No cost to my clientele. You can sell them whatever you want after that. Right. And, but would you be willing to do that, you know, as a trade off? Our experience is that they say yes. Oh my God, you're going to promote me. All I got to do is free a free webinar and a 15 minute strategy session to the 10 or 20 people that might inquire and then I can sell them whatever package I have. Absolutely. They almost always say yes. And then in our next newsletter, we send out a note to our group that says, hey, many of you have high school kids, Many of you are trying to get in, your kids are trying to get in college, many of you are trying to do better on your exams. So knowing that at no cost to you, we've went out and vetted a couple of really top tutors and consultants on how to advance your kids schooling and their schooling experience. We're putting on a free webinar if you'd like to attend. And they've agreed to give a 15 minute strategy session to anybody. Compliment. So I hope you take it up, take us up on it and thank you for being our client.

So it's a value add thing and it's totally outside your realm. Right. But it addresses a core concern of, of that ideal client and it's unexpected.

You didn't, they didn't ask for it. They didn't come to you and say, hey Bill, do you know a tutor that'll help my 16 year old old, you know, pass his math test so he can get a 3.2 so I can apply to that college? They didn't come to you for that. Why would they? Because that's not your area of expertise. But you just went ahead and did it anyway. My wife and I like to go to the US Open tennis tournament in New York City, you know, and if you're familiar with that area, the U.S. tennis center is right next to Citi Field, the Mets baseball stadium and the parking lots are connected. Well, Mercedes Benz is a sponsor of the event. And if you, when, when you walk, when you park in the, in the joint parking facility, but the closest area to park is roped off and it's only for Mercedes Benz owners. If you own a Mercedes Benz, you can park in that area. What does tennis have to do with driving? Nothing. But they've, It's a, it's a perk. It's a value added benefit for being one of our clients. And if, and we've, we've, we know you're tennis fans, so we sponsored the event. Event and gave you. And there's many perks, but that's just an easy, obvious one that you can, you could park and you don't have to walk far to it. An event that we're, we figure you're probably going to attend.

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome, right? And ties in nicely. And it's like, oh, yeah, there's then pride. Brand pride that associates. Yeah.

Here's a, Here's a quick, funny one. This was big news in New Jersey years ago, about 10 years ago, I think Rod Stewart was going to put on a concert, a summer concert at the PNC Art Center. It's the outdoor amphitheater, runs a lot of summer concerts. And as you know, American Express card holders oftentimes get first crack at seats. Okay, well, Rod Stewart sold out. He would sell out anyway, but he sells out his concert. And they go to Rod Stewart and they say, hey, Rod, good news. You sold out in record time. And he's like, wow, that's great. And they said, yeah, you know, interestingly enough, we. And he knew that the tickets go on sale to the American, the Amex holders. And he said all the Amex owners bought it. And he said, wait a minute. The tickets never went out to the general public. And they said, well, they would have, but the Amex holders all bought them out. And he said, he goes, he goes, I want to put all the tickets out to the general public. Public or I'm gonna cancel the concert. And he said, they said, we thought we were bringing you good news. And he says, I don't do public events. Sorry. I don't do private parties.

Private parties.

I don't do private parties. And so they said, well, look, Rod, it's out of our control. That's the, that's the contract with the, with the venue. And so he canceled the concert because they said, we can't do that. It's under contract. He says, well, and so he canceled it. But, you know, that's if you have. That's, I think a good problem to have if that were to happen to you. But, but that's an example of a perk amex. You're a cardholder, you get first crack at concerts. We think you would enjoy that.

Amex perk is really good. And the idea of getting first crack and your special seating and special packages and access and obviously they did that a lot of times, but they don't usually sell the whole thing out.

That's what made it so unusual. It's a smaller venue. It's not like a big 20,000 seat venue that he could sell out any day that the week this was a, I think it's five to 8,000 seat venue and he happened to sell it all out, you know, just to his Amex holders.

Yeah. So we figure out that ideal avatar client and. And then you're advocating being really extraordinary in value, but then also really getting paid for that. So giving a high premium for that. An exclusive kind of a price.

Yeah.

And. And people are then buying into that because it so fits what they care about.

It does. And I would challenge your listeners right now. Do you as a company, have you as a company created a path for your best clients to really be your best clients? Meaning if I wanted to go see Rod Stewart and I was a fan, I would not call up the venue and say, say I'm really excited about seeing Rod Stewart give me the worst seat in the house. I wouldn't do that. I would say give me the best seat or what's the best I can afford? Or what's the best available? In other words, for things I'm passionate about, I want to be the best customer I can be. And that venue gives me that opportunity. My challenge to your listeners are, are you doing the same for your customers? Is there a premium vip, Is there a premium and VIP experience that you can provide to your. Can you provide that path? So they can elect to take that path or not? Disney has the express lane at the amusement park. Right. The airlines give you first class if you want it.

They're.

All they're doing is, I mean, all you're doing is sitting in the front of the plane instead of the back. But they're giving you the ability to be the best client you want to be. So on the same plane, I can be in first business economy plus economy or basic economy, and I get to choose what kind of customer I want to be. And you know what? It's been an awfully long time since I walked through first class and it was empty.

And our biggest thanks, as always, to the originator of Scaling up in the Rockefeller Habits, Verne Harnisch, the Growth Guy. This show is produced by Lucy's Summers. Audio production done at Podfly Productions. The audio is edited by Albert Burge. The show notes are combined by Ayn Kodina and proofread by Tim McGowan. If you love this show, please give us a good review like and subscribe at itunes or wherever you get it and and then share it with somebody else so that you and they can get the best of this world of Scaling up every week. Let us know the parts that you loved and what you'd like to hear more or less of with an email to info scalingcoach.com thanks again for listening. Keep Scaling Up.