Moving from Surviving to Thriving - expert panel discussion

Cloud. Okay. Cloud recording engaged. Hi, I'm Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of the show. The show is all about how to scale and grow your business no matter what the economy looks like, no matter what industry or what part of the world you're in. You'll also find several hundred other episodes on Leadership and Scaling up at our website scalingcoach.com the website has the downloads to all the tools that we talk about, the show notes and we'll even send you a copy of the international best selling book Scaling up right there@scalingcoach.com you just pay the shipping and handling. Alright, listen in now as we talk to Andy Clayton, Daniel Marcos and Judy, three esteemed coaches from around the world who we are going to just talk about what we are seeing, what we are dealing with, the best things that we have heard like that in the world of leadership and growing your company. Welcome to the show guys.

Thank you. Welcome.

Thank you.

Thanks Bill.

So Andy joins us from farthest away from me anyway in England. Andy is the head of the PETRA coach operations across Europe and I look forward to having him on. Andy and I have become friends and collaborators in the world of our accelerator programs through the EO organization. Daniel Marcos is, you'll hear from his accent he doesn't sound like a typical Toronto, but he's in Toronto right now, originally from Mexico, works across Latin America. He in addition to being a really successful coach entrepreneur, Daniel heads our Growth Institute online learning platform which has become super hot and important to everyone right now. And then Judy Gaido in Los Angeles, Southern California, deep experience with some of our more successful companies. Extraordinary background and quite a bit involved in the green industry. So Judy is always a pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome guys. Did I miss anything?

Thank you.

Links to everyone and that kind of thing in the show notes as well. So like that, welcome and thanks for joining us. So first off let's just talk about what are you hearing, what are you noticing, what's happening out there in the world of your clients and companies and like that.

So to start so guys to jump in. So what I'm hearing is a lot of this information. I'm seeing a lot of people worried that they're hearing one thing and they're hearing the other thing and, and no one really knows what it is mostly about timing, about impact, about how governments are going to react, supporting their economies and the small business and how the impact is going to be from health impact going to economic impact, to go to political impact. So there's a lot of people saying, I believe this is going to happen. I believe this is going to happen. So you get a lot of contrary views. But I think the most important one is how long is this going to take and how the ramification of that is going to be in our businesses. And I'm hearing a lot of people really asking that question. And reality, no one knows. We all could have our own guess, we could have our own thoughts, but really no one knows. We're all in uncharted territories, and I'm seeing a lot of this information and a lot of guessing that we could get us in trouble a lot. Just an idea to start. Yes, Judy.

Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, Daniel. I would agree with Daniel. It's coming from a couple different areas. One is just right from the medical and the health, what's going on, and it's that uncertainty, right? And to Daniel's point, you know, none of us really know. But, you know, one of my favorite lines and, you know, Bill and Daniel, we've been on podcasts together before, and one of my favorite lines since I've been a kid was by my mom, which is, you know, there's nothing common about common sense. And so, you know, common sense really is a great baseline for anything. And so, you know, my, you know, my response back to my clients when they, you know, ask me medical questions is, I'm not a doctor, right. You know, I'm a subject matter in business. You know, common sense tell you when you need the best, you know, medical advice. Listen to what the doctors are saying, right? Listen to what the health subject matters and that, you know, the medical, medical experts are saying. That's who you listen to for medical advice, right? Don't come to me if you say my back hurts or my knee hurts or I have a fever, right? So there's that baseline when it comes to business, right? Come to people like us, that's that. That, you know, that ourselves. And in terms of the right is I start saying the same things, you know, I tell my clients and, you know, good, medium and bad times. Talk to your competitors, right? Go out and reach out. Look at the trends, what's happening, you know, what businesses are essential versus non essential. Who's there? What are they doing? Go out and talk, right? Ask the right questions. Don't speculate, don't guess. It's never been more important to ask really smart, intelligent and targeted questions because that'll give you the baseline. And go to the experts, right? If you need, you know, if you're you know, cash flow. Right. What about for cash flow? Right. Lending is a big thing. What do I tell you know, how.

Do I.

Go to those people and talk, Be transparent, be honest. We've got a great colleague and. Right. Like Ami Kassar with the SBAs. And so I know with a lot of my clients, you know, I've used AMI before for some of my smaller businesses. He's a subject matter expert in s. You know, SBA loans go to your. Go to your bank.

People are making stuff up or they are actually seeking experts. What are you seeing?

There's both. Some people are giving you misinformation and others don't know. Right. And so I, as I say, you know, all things sba, I go to ami. Right. I go to AMI and all his resources with the sba. I learn, I give it back, I give the connected number. I'm making a lot of calls and conversations with bank and my clients, lenders.

Right.

We're having very transparent, very honest and detailed questions. So, I mean, the baseline is right. Go to the subject matter experts, have a plan. Ask the right questions. Don't take advice from people who don't know what they're talking about and shouldn't be giving you that information.

So I arrived back in the country from Europe and the Middle east on March 8th. I was in one meeting there with Andy Clayton, and I arrived back, and almost immediately, they shut down stuff in the San Francisco Bay Area pretty hard.

And.

And we began to shelter in after just a couple of days of a fairly loose but increasingly paranoid public. And it feels like from the numbers, we maybe slowed things in New York. Now it's just out of control. But all over the United States, it's all over. Kind of different vibes of control and business and social impact. Andy, you have some similar things in Europe with a wide range of things from Italy and Spain to Germany and.

The UK yeah, I spent 15 years living in China, so a lot of my friends, my family, they're still out there. So we're witnessing now in Europe is a rerun of what's happened over there. So I'm seeing these things for the second time. And my sense is that maybe in the States, things are what it was maybe a few weeks behind now, maybe catching up pretty quickly. So what are we seeing over here? Well, if we take it to China, you know, China is. So I've had friends a couple of months ago who are in the situation. A lot of us are over here in terms of having to shut up their businesses and Some cases lose their businesses entirely. Things are starting to reopen there. So the way I think of it is there's like this phases to all of this. You know, the first phase is lockdown and that's, that's where we are over here at the moment. What happens after that though, is that you, you don't just go back to normal, it goes back to a kind of reduced activity because the virus hasn't fully passed through the population entirely.

Yeah, for example. Sorry, like a thawing or a phasing in of normal.

Exactly, yeah. So if you take the example of a restaurant. So I have a friend who runs a restaurant out there, so his restaurant has been shuttered for a couple of months. So obviously in that period he said to let staff go and basically live on savings. But now he's only allowed to open his restaurant at essentially 30% capacity. He's normally got 150 seats and now he can only have 50 seats because of social distancing. Right. And so examples and variants of that are being played out across the whole economy, either because supply chain disruption or because you can't get the labor back for the factory, or simply that the markets aren't returning. So things are opening up. But it doesn't mean it's businesses as normal here in Europe at the moment. Obviously we're still in phase one, just like you guys. So I see three types of response and reaction. There are a few companies that are doing really well out of this, including we have one or two clients for whom this is their day and this is our opportunity and they've really grown. So there are a few. I mean, we've had one client that's had to grow 10x within three months. We've got another one that's looking like it's going to be 100x within three months. So there are those. The majority of people obviously are hugely disrupted. And so mostly it's kind of what can you do to pivot and what do you have to shut down and shutter? So we have, for example, a new member who are in the events business and they're having to execute a big pivot. Whereas previously they were in person events and they're now launching. They're pushing this huge first time, they're doing one of their events entirely online. And then there's a lot of companies that have just had to shut up shop. And what we see in China is no one really knows when you come out the other side of how viable a lot of those businesses are going to be. Now in China, there hasn't been a lot of state aid over here, the government stepping in to furlough staff. But you get this thing of zombie companies whereby you either on paper owe so much to so many that you might as well close it up. So. But then it's hard to say what will happen to a lot of those businesses. But certainly here in the uk, anybody that's in, obviously hospitality, coffee shops, those sorts of things, the first thing that happened was we let people go. Then the government stepped in to provide a lifeline for those people. But will those jobs really come back and to what extent? Well, that's when we start guessing.

Well, when I think back to my experience in my own companies in 87, in the early 90s, in 2001, those are much more personal experiences of leading through things. And they all came back in different ways, but with lasting effects, right? Lasting impacts. Some things change, like 2001, we still have all kinds of airport security and things like that. That remains like forever. Right. By 2009, I was coaching other people as well as navigating the downturn in a CEO. And some of those things feel like less lasting or lingering kinds of effects than we might see with this one. But when I think about this right now, it does feel like there will be things that will be needed by folks. Like we had Y2K consultants, right? There was a huge software related, IT related consultancy thing that ran for years leading up to 2001, the turn of the calendar there. And it feels like after this we're going to have people who are going to want to make their company more disaster resilient. Right. And change sanitary practices and things like that within their businesses.

So let me bring Pandemic Prep. I was having a discussion with Vernon about this yesterday and he said this is going to happen to several industries. Going back to what Andy said, some companies had to grow 10 times or 100 times. He was telling me a story about CNN. CNN was a network that it was broke. It was not making any money until the Iraq War, the first Iraq war with George Bush Sr. Before then, people were used to just see the news in the morning, on the paper, on the morning radio or tv and then at night. And if something happened the other part of the world at 2pm, you never heard of it until that night. But our consumption of news used to be two times a day. When the world in Iraq started, the American people changed their habits to start watching news all day long. And that significantly changed the way we live today around the world.

The most Popular online shopping platforms. In fact, the number two shopping platform in China after Alibaba is called jingdong. So it's JD.com they were founded during the SARS outbreak.

Interesting.

Whenever that was 15 years ago, because no one could get access to stuff because there was a lockdown. So they started delivering things and then they built a website around it. And now they're one of the most valuable technology companies in all of China.

Dan, to your point, I remember that event that you're speaking about like it was yesterday. And it was the gentleman we all know now, Wolf Blitzer. Right. Wolf Blitzer was the field reporter. And I remember the president was broadcasting basically strategically, very strategically. Like any minute now, we're, you know, we're sending missiles over, right? And there was, you know, Wolf Blitzer with kind of this green aura, light, night light around him, right. And a microphone.

Right.

And the whole world was watching this. I'm thinking this is the strangest thing. Like, first of all, the president's. And, you know, usually wars, you know, I'm not a war specialist, right? So don't ask me about war. But, you know, I'm thinking it's usually kind of stealth and covert. Like, you don't tell people we're coming in. That's basically, you know, we had basically given them we're going to be coming in, and there's Wolf Blitzer with his mic nightlight waiting. And I remember him, you know, God knows where he was, you know, in the country. But then all of a sudden, you see kind of like the orange, you know, fireworks coming and the war is starting and we're watching this live and we be, you know, we became riveted to this tv and that really did. I remember that day thinking, like, this is changing news forever.

I remember watching CNN in, when it was. Well, I remember watching CNN in like the library or student union or something like that in the early middle 80s in college. And see, there was some kind of natural disaster going on. And they had live coverage going on. And I thought, wow, this really does change everything. And it was the beginning of that, of course, what you're talking about, bringing events more real with video and that kind of thing we saw beginning in the Vietnam War for the first time, that really changed things. And CNN took it to 247 coverage. Now, of course, we have not only that, but the Internet and a lot of disinformation, misinformation that comes out and then is corrected or maybe never corrected. Now we have people who don't seem to believe that There are any disputable facts available. It's all perspective.

Let me follow up with this story, because I have a lot of millennials working for me. I have a company today. We have a lot of millennials in countries. And one day I was having a conversation with one of my employees, and she's probably 26 or 27, and she said, hey, why did your first company was so popular? Our first company, we grew it to 1200 employees and sold it to a Spanish bank back in the 2000s. And I said, well, we're the first one that put financial news live online in Mexico.

Yeah.

And she looked at me like, why is that important? And I was, what do you mean? And she said, yeah, what does that. Why is that important? And I was like, before you had to pay Reuters A $3,000 screen to be able to have financial data in real time, before we were the first one that put it free online for the financial market in Latin America. And that just changed everything. We raised $70 million from Venture Capitals, and we went to 1,200 employees in less than two years. And she was looking at me like, what do you mean? And I was like, you don't get it. Because before then you had to pay $3,000 and you saw the news at 5pm of what happened with your stocks during the morning, or you had to wait until you see the newspaper the next day to see your personal stock. You could not get the price of your stock when the market ended or how it was trading. That completely changed the ball game. So I think we're going to have this being the Gulf War moment for cnn, for many industries, like Andy was explaining, and Julie, I love your live explanation, saying, hey, I was there remembering. They were telling us in the news before the attack and saying, hey, we're going to enter the war in the next 10 minutes. We're going to have missiles coming in. They were letting them know they're going to be attacked. That never happened. And now we have that, and it's just normal news.

Look at the word that all four of us have just said multiple times. Change, change, change, change, change, change. Right? And you know what's kind of the essence of growth and opportunity in business, right? It's identifying often, you know, before anybody else, what changes should happen, where they're coming from, how to be able to enact them. And, you know, if you think about it, those people who are generally those change, you know, change identifiers, change creators, change adapters are the people who don't do well. They do great. You know, I have to laugh when I hear people saying, wow, you know, you know, all these great tools, right? Like, we're on, you know, zoom. Gotomeeting. Quick example. I had a client, was a very small commercial landscaper. Big by industry, but small for, you know, for most businesses. There's a company in the Virgin in Virginia, and he had one guy on his team who was a real techie way back when. I was talking to him doing Monday video conferencing type conversations with him a decade ago. And it works so well. I was in California, they were in Virginia. And every Monday morning we worked on this. And as company, we grew it exponentially. And when I told people what I was doing, they're like, that's crazy, Judy. I'm like, that's crazy good. This guy, you know, he's a 10x type of client. And so now when I hear people, some big companies, it's like, well, I guess we're going to kind of have to, you know, embrace this new change. And I'm like, really? Is video conferencing new? Because I've kind of been using it for a decade, and it works really well. And you can watch people, you know, I can't touch you guys, but I could see, you know, I could see the sparkle in Bill's eyes that I love and his smile. And I can, you know, see Daniel's little. Like, he's got this great little tweak when he smiles. And I could see, you know, Andy, right now you could read body language and, you know, we could throw up reports, and we can talk and we can get a sense of everybody. So, I mean, I think in the whole essence of great strategy, right, is identifying that white space being unique, embracing change. Otherwise, you're on the same playing field as everybody else. And so, you know, I think if there's any, you know, great lessons in there, be really incredibly proficient at learning at how to identify change. And then once you identify, what do you do with it? And. Right. And how do you execute on it? I think it's just a really.

That's a great, great segue to our round of good news. I was amused in this. I've started clients doing interesting things and starting the beginnings of pivot. But one of the more amusing things I saw was from the Portland area, the owner of a strip bar suddenly hit with the realization that he had no business left, that nobody could. Patrons could not come into his strip bar, and the contractor, independent contractors who worked entirely on tips, were not going to make any money. And the kitchen staff who made their burgers and wings and whatnot, and the bartenders who sold their beer. And so nobody was going to make any money. And he was looking at that, he's like, you know, maybe we should just become Uber and we should all drive Uber. And then somebody said, no, we're going to do better than that. We're going to be Boober. And then they started brainstorming on it a little bit longer and then they're like, actually we should be Boober Eats because we have a kitchen. And so here's the pivot. Their strippers go with like booty shorts and little pasties, so they're technically not nude. And they deliver food from their kitchen, which, you know, most of our places restaurant delivery is still allowed. So two girls will deliver food from their kitchen, scantily clad to your door. And the drivers are the former bouncers and other staff of the place. So Boober Eats has started in the Portland area and getting national attention. And I thought that is amusing. You know, whatever your thoughts are about whether or not that sort of entertainment is appropriate, I will leave that to the side a minute. But I thought it was a very amusing and charming pivot, rapid pivot to deal with what's happening in the world. So I'd love to hear the good news. You might not have something quite so amusing.

So antil, can I add to this? I would love to hear from everyone here. What do you think what industries are going to come back or they're going to be like this CNN moment.

Yeah, the pivot, the emergence. Right.

Which are the. We have to be looking at.

So let's come to that of the projections. We're going to go there next. But do you have any good news to share Clients yourself, news items. What's the good news that you could share? Judy's got something.

Yeah, well, I didn't.

Andy's itching.

First of all, we were just talking about how. Right. Video conferencing. You could really see people's body language. So the faces on Andy and Daniel were priceless doing Uber Eats. And so priceless to the point where I had to take my phone and capture it and I'll send you guys that later. He took it's worth a million dollars. I'll give you just a kind of a couple of things both with my clients and non clients. But how people have, you know, have pivoted. But you take, you know, some luxury brands like the Louis Vuitton brand that lvmh right. And they own a lot of major perfumeries.

Right.

You know, even though the high net worth individuals still have the money to buy those. But they, you know, they've pivoted, right? And really instead of, you know, they, you know, pretty much slowed or stopped their perfumery business and really have pivoted to creating, guess what? Hand sanitizers. And another great story I think, which is the where this is, we're really kind of go down decadence alley since we've done the strippers and the boobers eats. Now I'm going to go to the booze because I think that kind of follows here. But Tito's right. You know, used to be a small little cottage alcohol company, a vodka company in Austin, Texas, and now it's pretty much a great Tito's brand. And there was this whole, this is going to tie in a lot of what we've talked about. There's a lot of misinformation about, you know, what you can, you know, how you can make hand sanitizers. And there was a lot of misinformation about, you know, you use booze and vodka and, you know, you can make hand sanitizers out of booze. Well, Tito's, which could have really benefited, benefited by that rather than saying, you know, not saying anything and saying, hey, let's we'll kind of reap the benefits of this. They said timeout, you know, no, not only, you know, don't do it, it's wrong to do it. It's not healthy and safe. So what they did was, you know, they really did the right thing and guiding the people that they shouldn't be doing this and really to kind of put their money where their mouth was, they started creating hand sanitizer. So now they created now just the Tito hand sanitizers, less the vodka, but handcrafted. Handcrafted that they have a dog in the branding. There was an interesting pivot. A great company in the green industry. Distribution company, a company by the name of Central Irrigation and Landscape Services. What they did was they're very, very customer centric company. And what the owners did was the Luciano family did was encouraged all their salespeople to send their customers gift cards of things that were still open. Things like, you know, Starbucks and some of the other things where they could just do pickup. And they were having, you know, virtual lunches with their clients. So they send them something where they can go to a place and eat. And then in terms they kind of, you know, get on Zoom or their go to meeting and they would have virtual lunches to keep just, you know, to know that they were supporting, get a level set on what was going with the company, how they can help them and, you know, and support them. But I thought that that was a great idea.

Really great. Andy, what are you hearing?

Well, yes, I think the nicest story for me is there's a guy that I know here, Michael, he spent 10 years developing this product and it's a type of screen, it's like a collapsible screen and specifically designed it for privacy and infection control in hospitals. And like the rest of us, he's been a struggling entrepreneur for a decade and his moments really come. And so he's been really bold and he's making a lot of investments and bets and it's paying off and he's seeing orders coming in. So we're helping him to manage that scaling up process. So it's, you know, that moment when you see somebody whose time has come and it's that that's inspiring and great to see. We have lots of stories over here as well of, you know, like, so James Dyson who's invented a new ventilator in 10 days or people who've got like ways of doing virtual haircuts for people. You know, we've been sharing a lot of stories like that. I suppose the one thing I would say is that as people of influence, we also need to be a little bit careful. So we have one of our members who's like a beautician, they do skincare and they were enthused and excited about opportunities for doing virtual sessions. But when they really sort of got into the modeling of what that would be and what the cost of the business were, they realized actually for them the only sensible thing to do was to shut up shop for a while. So as much as I enjoy those sorts of stories, it also needs to be considered and realistic. And there are for a lot of people the right option at the moment, I'm sorry to say. It's kind of close the doors and throw yourself at the mercy of the state really, because not everybody is going to have successful pivots at this time. Much as I love those stories, I'm sorry to be.

Well, I think they continue to emerge. Right. There's opportunities for immediate action where people can deal with and deliver something against. So one of our friends is a yell at Waldman and her husband Michael Chabon and yell. It had this idea that restaurants were struggling and er, staff were putting in increasingly long hours. And so she bought some meals for Local, ER, staff from one of the local restaurants and delivered them. And she realized that we needed a lot of them across all of our staff across the area. So she started this group, East Bay Feeder, and my wife heard about it. And so they quickly just started broadcasting out to their friends to say, hey, here's what we're doing. Restaurants and the restaurant staff need to keep making money. If possible, we could help them. People want to do something that's valuable and that contributes, like help the war effort kind of thing. And then there are these, ER staff that are putting in long hours. And so they've started doing this in the last couple days. They've raised $90,000. I think they have 400,000 to go to ensure that all the staff get a meal in the area. All the staff get a meal. But Michael's the writer and creator of the new Star Trek Picard series. So they're tapping into influential people and getting access to fundraise and things like that. And they've pulled together a great team of people that are coordinating people to deliver. Giving people something to do. Right in this timeframe is the, like, the immediate opportunistic thing like the boober eats and then follows on the more profound pivots where, like, as a coach, you know, my work has been so much coaching and then keynoting, leading team sessions, that kind of thing. And now, like, everything's going online. I have multiple teams each week where I'm doing online and then individual coaching. But I'm all sitting here, right in this office or around the house somewhere doing that. I wonder how much of that will change and how that will impact, even after we come out of this, will people do a little bit less in person and be a little more comfortable with the online thing?

I mean, you know, I want to go back to something that Andy said. And Andy, I didn't see it. You know, I didn't view you as being a buzzkill at all. Quite, you know, quite the opposite. You know, one of the things I share with my clients all the time is there's a big difference between the words can and should. Right? Can we do it versus should we do it? And that's one of really the essence of marketing too. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. And then the other thing is get to, yes as quickly as possible, but also get to know as quickly as possible. And that's really the right. The can versus should kind of analogy. And that, you know, that's not just in vogue or smart now. That's Always, always the case. So I just. Andy, to your point, I thought that was. Well said.

Thank you.

And going back to the good news, I really believe on the world climate and pollution, we're having really good news. And going a little bit of what Andy said that it was time for this entrepreneur to shine. The companies that my clients are doing the best are companies that are in the food or produce industry, and they're just blowing up. And I think produce should be more important and should be more expensive in the world compared to what they do for our bodies, for what we do today. And I think it's time for those kind of businesses to really come and shine. Everyone is shutting up their businesses. They're closing all our offices, and the produce industry is just blowing up. They're doing amazingly well. I have a client in Mexico that sells bananas, and they have 200% more orders today than before from supermarket stuff around the world. I have a company in Guatemala that is doing coffee and all kind of produce. They're doing amazing. Well, a client in Colombia doing the same. And I really.

Why is that?

So whenever you get home, everyone's buying rice and pastas and all that. We know our bodies will not function if we don't eat produce and live things. So people are buying. Yeah, people are buying way more or putting way more importance on that. Of course, if you have a very, very limited budget, you're going to buy pasta and rice for the next six months. But people that have more disposable income, they have begin to put more attention on produce and really are willing to spend more in getting the organics and all that. And that has flow.

As I'm listening to you, I'm realizing we're eating way less fast food and way less prepared foods, and we are cooking every single meal. And it's my daughter and myself who are doing most of the cooking. My wife's doing a little bit, but we're making way more involved things. Like each time we're like, oh, what could we make? Let's try something different. So we are drawing a little more on the produce than we have typically where we might open a package or do something. Now it's like last night it was roasted vegetables, roast chicken and shrimp scampi. Right. The night before, shakshuka, like, and poached fish. And like, we're doing all.

The family time. And the family creation is a big win. I'm with my kids every day for the last two weeks.

One of the women in one of my webinars or in one of our webinar accelerator sessions last week, said she said, as a result of this thing, my dad, who never had a lot to say, was always very busy and not particularly expressive, is talking to me every day and telling me that he loves me again and again.

That's huge.

Like, in her whole life, it took this virus to cause the pause that rejuvenates. She's like, I will be forever grateful for that.

Think about it. Does, you know, to your point, does saying I love you to people you love, is it ever out of vogue? Is it only a crisis thing? I mean, right. You know, if you want to be really corny, right? Love makes the world go around. A lot of this stuff that we're talking about has always been there. It has always been foundational, has always been common sense. And, like, you know, some people are, like, unearthing this. You know, it's like, be kind to people now. No kind of people always, right? Just don't be kind because times are tougher, right? As they always say, it's really easy to be a leader and be lovable in great times. It's a lot more difficult, you know, in difficult times. So things like that. I mean, look at what Daniel is saying, right? Eat healthy, right? Is this, like, news alert, you know, breaking news. Eat healthy, eat good foods. Right?

There's a meme going around that dogs invented this virus because they wanted us home more.

Hey, in Toronto, we cannot go to any restaurants or whatever, but in our area where we live in just outside of Toronto, we have great parks and stuff. We could all go to the parks or the parks are closed, but everyone's walking. The amount of that that I see with their kids.

Yeah, our neighborhoods all walking around several times a day, as long as it's not raining. And they're all keeping a lot of distance. But there's now more people waving and saying hi to each other every day, like, oh, laughing and making jokes. I didn't even know that was one of my neighbors. Right? So there's a lot more. And then everybody, like, crosses the street to avoid each other, which isn't the case everywhere across California, they've had to shut down beaches. In some of the areas. We went to one of the beaches last week thinking, we just wander along the sand alone. It looked nice. And evidently a few hundred thousand other people had the same idea because the beaches were packed. We stayed in the car and drove the hell out of there. It was a lot.

But I think that's a huge win that society were Winning on that. Hey, the four of us were business coaches. We're on the plane a lot. The last year I've probably been 50 nights a month on the plane. Bill, you've been traveling for EO everywhere in the world in the last year. And now we're home for two or three months with our kids every day.

And that'll raise other issues too, right? So a 5 year old on the radio this morning in some city was talking about how he loves staying home, but I'm sure his parents are kind of losing their minds.

By the way, we're going to see.

Several divorces because we do fly a lot. And again, I'm going to go back to my client in Virginia a decade ago. One of the things I always say to my clients, I'm there with you face to face when I need to be and when you really need me. But again, in terms of just being smart business, saving you money from a plane ticket to a hotel, all those additional costs that come with it, like make those choices wisely.

Right.

Use some common sense. I'm going to keep coming back to that. Right. Use some common sense. And when we don't, we've got these tools that we can be just as effective and even, you know, faster and more efficiently. So again, I think so much of what is happening, it's really going to people kind of just come back to those bare basics of saying, you know, why weren't we doing this before? This really does make sense and it's, and it's a heck of a lot more efficient.

So in terms of some of the things that people are doing now, Andy, you guys have been putting out information on how to deal with the crisis as factual and useful kinds of information you've been sharing with your, with your membership community as well as the general public. What else are you doing in your practice in your area?

I mean, what are we doing ourselves rather than what other companies doing and.

What are you offering people and like that?

Well, we've had to change the way that we work and to the point that's being made, some of it genuinely is beneficial. So we're fortunate in that we have a team of coaches and so we've had to move to doing kickoffs and planning days, all entirely virtually, which is actually, it's a product that we've developed previously and I always really liked it because I found that there were so many benefits from doing it virtually, but no one ever wanted to buy it. Always say, come in person, we'd rather have you here. We'll pay for the tickets. And so now obviously everything is having to be done virtually and there's really a lot to be said for it. There's a lot of benefits. So for example, because we have a team of coaches, there are some parts of the day when you want to break people into groups so we can just pull others in in a way that you wouldn't be able to do, obviously, if everyone had to be there in person. It also changes the makeup of a quarter. Whereas previously we would have to bracket things this quarter because that was when the planning happened, because that's when we met in Face to Face. Now we're finding that we're shortening planning cycles so we'll say, right, rather than plan out the whole quarter, we can set targets for quarter end, but we're just going to plan actions for the month and then we're going to do another one of these sessions a month out because we don't have to fly anywhere. Right.

We can do this great idea, do shorter cycle given the dynamic nature.

Yeah. And so we're actually one of the things that we found, if, you know, if we're really being honest about how we did things previously, things actually took much longer to stick than they maybe should have done because we were too spread out. Whereas now we're actually, we're touching in with people much more regularly than we previously did. So, you know, daily huddles, weekly huddles, we're actually getting ourselves involved in those more frequently than we otherwise would have done. Partly. We kind of have that time and we want to stay very close to our members at the moment. But I, you know, I had this revelation actually a week or two back, particularly when we kicked off with some of these new members that have to move really, really fast. When I saw the things that I was doing with them, I can remember saying to myself, I must remember, I must remember the things that I am doing now because these are the things that actually work when that environment is so constrained and a company is forced to scale. So this is a company that has to 100x within a few months and so capture that Andy. Because if I can enforce that type of action mentality on thinking, on thinking on people in peace time about how to scale that's going to be so effective. So we've started using new software like say our check ins are becoming much more rapid, our planning cycles are shortening and we're able to sort of flex in and out with the people on days because it's all being done virtually and so it's kind of smashed the rules of what we do. It's tremendously liberating, in fact.

Hmm. We've been doing this stuff online as well, but also not our regular clients, but our workshops are now moving online, and we're modifying those to have them be topical and so on. And I know all of our workshops around the world for scaling up, like the beginning place where people get started, right. For a few hundred dollars, they come and they begin to get a taste of working with a client and they start some of the work. Those are all moving online as coaches become familiar and capable of doing and delivering them. And of course, we're tailoring content.

For example, let's say you're doing a session with a client and you know that cash flow is going to be an issue. Like, I would previously never have beamed you into one of my kickoffs. Right. I wouldn't even thought of doing it.

Right.

But I know I could be in anyone that I wanted to because, you know, you can. And so it changes that mentality.

Think.

Well, actually, did you join us at 10am and. Yeah.

Right.

And also tell you what makes it very like, one of the great hidden benefits of doing stuff virtually is it's not so much about me anymore. There's, you know, that power of the pen. There's something about being front of the room, being physically there, and being the one to write stuff out. Whereas when you do breakout groups and it's all virtual and online, it's almost more like sort of. How can I describe? It's like sitting on top of a process, monitoring it and helping it. But they're the ones doing it, not me. I'm so much less involved, and it feels so much better for them. I don't know if you've experienced something similar with virtual planning.

My ego.

You know what? Your ego will survive. You've got a really healthy. Andy is spot on. I mean, people are. I mean, they're becoming a lot more emotionally intelligent, Right. They're becoming a lot more independent and they're becoming a lot more focused, too, because, you know, the whole compendium of time has really shrunk. You know, our, you know, those monthly meetings now are our weekly meetings. Those weekly meetings now, in many cases, are daily. Why? Well, because, you know, a day, you know, a day equals almost a week. Right. And so, you know, and, you know, what used to be a quarter is now a month. And so it's really people to really, really focus. And I, you know, and I love. I think we're all, you know, Jim Collins is a friend of ours and you know, he's a just a brilliant business mind and you know, in his book, Great by choice, right, that whole 20 mile walk story. And if you haven't read his book or any of his books, but certainly his Great By Choice, you know, that whole 20 mile walk episode where if you want to get from, right from coast to coast, from here to your North Star, right, It's just about being focused and disciplined every day. And you know, the whole point of that is no matter what, you know, like they set the group out to walk 20 miles every day no matter what. Whether they were in the desert and it was hot or whether, right they're climbing the mountains of Colorado and it was cold and snowy. No matter what it's like, hey, you know, it's, you know, the weather or you're in a beautiful area, it's like, hey, we can do 30 miles or 40 miles. No, be consistent, you know, because those days where you think you could do the extra 10 or 20 that next day when you're just too fatigued and you can't go, you know, you can only go two miles, right, Everything kind of gets backed up. So again, it comes down to those things you should focus on, right? Focus, discipline, make sure you have that plan and again you monitor it, you know, every single day. And I, and I love that story.

Talking about monitoring the plan every single day. One of the great spinoffs of the PETRA Coach organization is the Scaling Up Scoreboard. Scaling Up Scoreboard is our online tool for managing your online plan together remotely. And they are doing something special and it's always a good idea to use a system like that, but in particular a purpose built one. And they are doing a special thing right now for this time and that's giving access to the daily hudd. So if you want to get your teams huddling better with better shared information, you can add the Scaling Up Scoreboard right now for free and start to get your team using that, which I think is great as each of us moves to new ways of working and going to that online learning, both with our summits, which will probably have always had a remote viewing capability thanks to the Gross Institute, will now increase in that. But Daniel, if it hasn't happened yet, your world is about to get busier and busier. I know we're about to start offering a special package that combines remote coaching or online coaching with online learning with the Gross Institute. Talk to us about what you're doing there with the offerings and through all the coaches as well.

So I've been doing what we call a private implementation online for some months now and now it just became way more relevant. We signed up three companies, last like 10 days or so for it and they gave access to the videos with vernonline, over nine hours of videos over teaching all the methodology and then eight live sessions with a coach to walk them through the process. And every team member is home now they have time. And I've heard this from a couple of CEOs. I'm doing whatever I can to get my team to stop watching CNN and the news because they're freaking out and I want to give them something they could watch that will give them focus and productive in the company. So they get some videos or some courses with the Growth Institute and then there's live discussions with a coach to walk them through the process of how to implement correctly. And it's been huge success. Last week we set up 34 coach or so into the process and we're changing significantly to do it that way. Our Traffic is like 40% up this month compared to last month in our website in our courses. And clients that have been paying in the past that they didn't have time to see courses, now they're watching two or three. I've heard clients today. I'm going to binge watch these negotiations course now because I need to negotiate everything in my business. I need to negotiate with a landlord and everything. I need to really get better in negotiations. And he binge watched our negotiations course with Victoria Medved last weekend. So those are the kind of things that make a big impact. As an example, I send an email to my team, I talk in video. I do a lot of things in video for many years. So Monday I woke up at 6am, took a shower and recorded a video for my team and said, guys, I'm worried about next three months. I think they're going to be challenging and all that, but I'm really more worried that we don't double our business in the next year just knowing what it was going to happen. And now we're seeing it every day of the calls that we're getting and how teams are using it. And as you said, it's getting more common. People are willing to test new things and just get your employees out of watching the news every day and focus them on something that is important and going back to coaching and what teams are doing. I got a call from all my clients and hey, my strategy for the year just went through the waste I need to redo my strategy altogether. And that's what I need the most, Someone that could guide me through the process, that will have a perspective of what's happening in business and how to implement. Let me give you an example of something that we're seeing really, really difficult. We all have a lot of employees, and that's one of our biggest problems, fix expenses. And we have countries, Mexico, Colombia, a lot of Asia, that there are certain restrictions in the country that if you fire someone, you have to pay them at least three months of severance. In the U.S. canada, you let go someone at 2pm and you pay them until 2pm and if you want to give a severance, that's optional, but that's not by law. We're getting a lot of businesses around the world that they don't have, that they have to do three to six months. I have people in my team that has been working with me for 10 years. I have to pay them over a year of salary as severance, just by law.

I think Canada depends on the province, right?

I really don't know. I've been in Canada for a year and a half, so I'm not that vested on the rules. But I have a lot of clients in Latin America with those kind of issues, and they're figuring out ways to do it that helps the employees. As an example, I had a client in Mexico and in Colombia that they say, hey, I have to pay my employees three months of severance. They are officially laying off their employees, all of them, and giving them three months of severance in the next three months to buy some time to see if this area will turn around. And they said, what I need the most is be able to keep them focused and aligned. And really for them to see that we're doing the change that we need to do in the business for them to stay engaged with all these issues. Because we've seen a lot of our employees, our clients, lowering salaries 50%, 30%, 20%, laying off certain amount of employees, and people get really worried and the stress, the level is really bad. So it's really important to keep them focused in something that it's positive and towards helping the business survive. And using all these online tools and collaboration is amazing. I had a session with a client in Vancouver Friday, and when we finished, I got a call from the owner after and said, I've never seen my team in the last two weeks so engaged and so positive that just finishing a session with you because we were really understanding what to do. All our clinics are closed. We've been home for a couple of weeks. People were really getting worried. And now the alignment of my team of how to change our business model and be better after we come out of this, we know we're going to come out of this. This is my third crisis. We've been come out of this all the time. We don't know exactly the timing. It could be three months, six months, a year or so. But reality, we know we're going to come back and we know we need to adjust our business model well, eventually.

Right. And yet there are. I've talked to a number of folks whose view is particularly pessimistic. They are predicting depression level extended financial social impacts. I don't know what it is. I tend to be a little bit more optimistic, but it's hard to say. You could certainly see some similar factors at work in terms of the things that contributed to the Great Depression we had in the United States and similar things around the world. So it's hard to know exactly. But eventually something emerges from stuff. People find a way.

I think we're going to figure out the way. I've heard those things and I've seen the similarities, but I think as a human population and we have so much technology and so much knowledge compared to 29, that I think we're going to figure out different.

Yeah. Well, our mutual friend Salim Ismail with Exponential Organizations is hosting a special meetup, I think next week at considerable discount online. And he says, you know, we really faced kind of two dystopian or utopian future. It's really up to us to figure out which actions to take and what we're intending and building. Is it with vision or from fear? And so that's, I think, an interesting thing as well.

It's going to be April 14 to 16, and the amount, the level of people he's getting to the event is just crazy because everyone wants to help, everyone wants to go online and the access he's been able to get for doing this. They're calling it the Bretton woods conference of the 2020s, where all these minds are going to align and figure out ways to do it. So I think it's going to be a really interesting place to be.

You know, Salim, I had the profound privilege of coaching Saleem as a coach of others in a leadership program many years ago, and his project at the time was launching the Singularity Universe. And Saleem is one of the more generous, creative, upbeat people that I've had the pleasure of working with in that environment.

And he has that positive mindset and people around to be able to see the world different and really make a significant impact.

I want to comment on something that, excuse me, Daniel just said and I couldn't agree with him more, comparing kind of the Depression right in the beginning of the last century versus now. I think that technology and knowledge are the two greatest things that we have in our favor. From a personal perspective, I have never seen more innovation, creativity, inspiration and ideation than I have in the last three weeks. And from people you know, I would least expect it to happen from. And something I've always worked with my clients on. And we do this exercise, it's called ideation to execution. Right. How do you come from, you know, that spark of an idea to, you know, to try to solidify it, package it, whatever it is, whether it's a product or service, and get it out the door to the right people, you know, helping them in the best way. And I just really see kind of that time frame, the process from the ideation to execution because of the unknown. And it's just like, you know, people are, we don't know what's going to happen. And it comes back to what you know. I also share control what you can control, right? Not just now, always control what you can't control. You can't control what the government's going to say about whether somebody could be open or closed or whether you could do this or that. Right. You can't control how quickly potentially, you know, you know, a respirator is going to be built, you know, unless you, you know, unless you're on the front line. So control what you control. And you can look at your, right, you can look at your market, you can look at your skill sets, you can look at your suppliers, you can look at your partners, right? You can look at all those things and say, oh my gosh, given this whole bowl of people and partners, what ideas are the best to serve the current needs, the medium range needs and the longer term needs. And again. And start there. But again, I've never seen more great creativity. Again, innovation and ideas, not from just the thought leadership group, the executive leadership, but from the, the flattest, the flattest organizations all the way up. And it's been wonderful, by the way.

Yeah, Follow up on that. Education, as an example, is a contra cyclical industry. When things are going really, really well, people say, I'm great, I don't need education, I know what I'm doing. And when things don't go as well, people say like this is the flag. So I think as an example, education as an industry is going to come back stronger in a different format, completely different format than before. Less focus on credentials, saying, hey, I have degree from this university and more impractical things that I could use tomorrow. But a lot of people are going to take this time and sharpen the saw. Like, I had this call with a client last week and said, hey, I begin seeing a lot of movies and whatever in Netflix. I'm done three or four days, I'm done. I need to see something different. I need to see something that helps and works like, I need a distraction now. I passed that. Now I need to learn something that I feel is going to help me go through this better at it.

You haven't started watching that Tiger King show yet.

What Tiger King show?

Here we go again, right? Is education ever out of hog or not important, right, people? It's like, oh, we really have to get educated now. It's like, no, you want to be the 10x, right? And the 15x companies that we work with, those are the ones who are, right, what do we call them? CBEs, continuous business education and Learners. Right, Continuous learners. It never goes out of. Never goes out of vogue. And the model that also never goes out of vogue. And this has been my model from day one. And whether you're religious or not, it's kind of that biblical. Teach a person to fish moss, right? So it's, you know, if you're always teaching people how to fish right now, feed them, you know, give them a fish, you feed them for a day, teach them how to fish. If, you know, you feed them for a lifetime, whenever you could do, be two or three steps ahead of the educational model and always teaching. And so your people, the whole point is you're their lifeline to learning that never ends, right? And it's something that we continually need, right? It's that. It's that intellectual nourishment that people always need just as much as we need, right? Food, water, great vegetables to grow healthy bodies. It's the mind, food.

So let me tee up and transition to kind of a final segment. We've been talking a lot about dealing with the crisis and what's happening and the good news and the glimmers. But when we talk specifically about moving from surviving to thriving, there are some key moves and I think it'd be useful for us to share from experience. Experience. What maybe our top priorities would be from our own experience. So I'll let you guys think about it and I'll tee up the first two. When I think about what did I do in the aftermath of 2001 as CEO and what did I do in 2009 in dealing with those downturns? Aside from the specific direct moves, there were two big things that we did that each led to substantial growth years following that. So in 2001, our pain was delayed and maybe deepened from the impact of that because we borrowed some money and we dipped into all of our assets. And that pushed me out a couple of years beyond other folks. But then when I was really forced to make profound changes in the company, the innovation wasn't something I came up on my own, but the principle was pretty straightforward, and that is this. I ditched everything that didn't work. So we made a big. We made two big sheets on the wall, and we started putting up what works and what doesn't work or what's easy and what's hard. So those two columns, working and easy and hard or not working. And we just started putting everything up there. And given that we were about to get shut down and be put out of business and I was going to lose my house and my family would be strained and all that kind of thing, we put everything up there and I just ditched everything. And I didn't hold on anymore because there was no illusion that I could hold on to anything that was hard or not working. And another way of doing that might be like with waterfall graph or profitability analysis, but we did it a little more operationally and less numerically driven. What's easy and working and what's hard. And we went to people and we said, you know, like, this clearly hasn't been working, so we're going to stop doing it, but if you could work this way, we're happy to work with you. And we shifted everything over the next couple of years. Over the next year, we doubled. Then we doubled again in 2009. It was a little bit different approach. And in that one, we used process that was more like strengths, weaknesses, trends. And faced with a global or a deep US Recession, what we did is we looked broadly at the trends that were going on, and we saw opportunities to be producing different kinds of products at different price points for different purchase occasions. Right. And looking keenly at trends. And although we didn't name it the case at the time, we were considering jobs to be done as well. So what was the job to be done with our products? And then we fast tracked new products. And then over the next couple years, we sustained very substantial growth into new Categories, new market segments, that kind of thing as a result of it. So those are the two. One is focusing on what works, ditching what doesn't work, and the other was looking at trends and opportunities for me as a CEO in the past, in 2001 and 2008. 9. I wonder what experience you guys have to share. Andy.

So. Well, a few, a few thoughts. I mean, I went through a failure in one of my businesses and so the investors had to decided to exit and remove all the cash from the business and start to start again.

Right. Suck the oxygen out of the room.

Yeah. And this is similar. And I mean the key thing is like people's reactions and responses now do depend a little bit on what their prognosis is for how things going forward. And so I, you know, I think it's important to be realistic with people at the moment. And you know, we're naturally, by the nature of who we are as entrepreneurs, as coaches, we have a very strong bias towards the positive. We're attracted to that. Right. And it's kind of part of what we do as well. And we are used to being that voice. I've written a book, right. It's called Sweet Spot. It's a great book and it's all about how.

I got that in there.

But.

One of the things about Sweet Spot is like those that grow quickly as entrepreneurs are the ones that have a mindset whereby they're kind of spending ahead of the curve, so they're ditching low value tasks and they're outsourcing and delegating and recruiting in order to get rid of this. So they're always focusing on what their sweet spot is. However, I have to be honest at the moment, and a lot of companies I'm working with, it's how can you ditch costs as fast as you can right now? Because we are entering a long period of very, very bad trading and that is true across the vast majority of markets at the moment. So right now for a lot of businesses, yeah, pivot what you can pivot. But there has to be a strong bias towards like you will thank yourself for what costs you can be ruthless about now, in three months time, in six months time, when you're kind of having to get by on a shoestring. So I think there is a difference between a regular recession and this type of exceptional event in terms of the forcefulness of the response required. Depressions mess with things in ways that recessions don't. So recessions, they pick off the unhealthy depressions go further than that they pick off even companies that have strong fundamentals, depressions, they screw with asset prices, things that were previously worth money. So maybe you have a license or you have a technology or a company or whatever it may be that previously might have been an asset can now very easily be a liability. And so mindsets do need to change a little bit in extraordinary times. So. Right. So my experience from, from that period anyway, when, when the oxygen was removed forcefully firstly, do people realize at the moment just how much oxygen is being sucked out of their system? Because you know it's coming and for a lot of it, we realize it's already here. But some people need help actually making difficult decisions about shuttering up certain bits of their businesses or letting people go or those kind of hard decisions.

I couldn't do it until I was forced, until it was really game up and I was on the fence. I couldn't shut down things. I kept hanging on to them. And I've always admired CEOs that were stronger and more decisive at that. But I really struggled in the early 2000s.

I find that my role with people has changed a little bit in terms of what things that I am helping them with and what hard truths I'm helping them to face. But then, yeah, I mean, it's similar to what you were saying, Bill. It's like that sort of ruthless focus on the few things that do work because and then the other thing is like there is a difference between a pivot and going Greenfield. Like a pivot is a change to something that you already do and already know.

Like the mistake right.

Over, over time historically, is because times are tough in an area that I know well, I think, oh, I'll just, I'll jump left field. And that for me has, unless I'm willing to spend years and invest much more than I originally anticipated, that is very, very hard to do. Like, so it's how do you reconfigure what you already know? You know, that thing about grow where you're planted, that still applies. However, it's, you know, you might just have to grow in a different direction, but it doesn't mean that you go and jump to something that you don't know. And often that is the instinct that we have when like home turf feels like it's like it's tough.

Yeah. JUDY Experience shares yeah, I'm going to.

Go back to what I've been saying since the beginning and, you know, this will date me much like the CNN and Wolf Blitzer story. But, you know, there was a Years ago, there was this great PSA public service announcement and it was called Reading is fundamental. Right? And I loved it as a kid. I remember, I remember like you remember being in school and seeing that reading in fundamental, much like education is fundamental, business is fundamental, right? And there are fundamentals that really never stop working. And Bill, to your point, Andy, not only to Bill's point, but to your book, that sweet spot, right? How do I identify that sweet spot? Part of the way you identify that sweet spot is being really, really smart about not only again, knowing how to read the market, right. But what to read in the market, right? And trends, you know, trends have always been so important. And why are trends important? Because what happens is, particularly when things can change on a dime and they have in a nanosecond, look at how people like, you know, what now becomes their need, right? The thing that they have to have. How are they changing their behaviors, right? What channels are they going out to activate those levers to pull their changing behaviors? Those are all things that have always been really kind of fundamental and focused on what trends are. So again, going back to understanding and knowing how to look at trends and adapt before anybody else and be innovative has always been a fundamental tool. So the swat versus the sweat, right? The, the tea being, you know, it's important to understand the threats, but also to really understand the trends is always important. And even today, you know, and to Andy's point about, you know, you know, being optimistic, right. You know, and that that's our nature, you know, but, you know, by what we do, it is very much a part of our nature. All four of us are, you know, we're not the glasses half full. We're, you know, we're kind of what, glass people, right. You know, but it goes to that, you know, Andy didn't use these words, but, you know, it's brutal facts, right?

It's. It.

You never. Right. I mean, one of the most important things I say to my clients when they're thinking about hiring me, I always say, and have been saying it for 20 something years, if you're looking for a yes person, don't hire me, right? You're not going to get a yes person. I'm going to be the, you know, not just, you know, and I hate that term good cop, bad cop. I love the term good cop, better cop, right? Because the person who can have those tough love decisions and those brutal facts are doing the right thing because those facts aren't there. And if you, and if you think you're being a really great coach or leader by saying, I'm going to kind of assuage and work around those facts. That's not the right thing. So you have to show that those brutal facts and you know, and focus on those and you know, and speed matters, right. Whether it's a pivot or a chasmic change, speed has always been important. And the people that can do it faster, better, more efficient than anybody else are the people who are going to win. So I keep going, coming back to that, you know, that business is fundamentals and focusing on the right strategies, reading the market, identifying the trends, having the right people with the right tools, right? Always having that AA team, focusing on execution and particularly now short term versus long term. You know, I had a recent zoom session with one of my clients and you know, about 30% of the salespeople were focusing on, you know, I all of a sudden realize that 60% of their time we're focusing on longer term projects. No, when cash and liquidity is always important, why are you focusing on things that are six and nine months and 12 months out versus what you can do today? And then the other thing that they were focusing on were much more customized products and customers versus stuff that they had in stock and inventory that they can be selling and should be selling right now, Right. And again, that doesn't really matter whether you're in a crisis mode or just normal conditions. Those are always smart, you know, smart. Focus on your short term things that you have. Don't go out and spend cash when you don't. Right. Then you know, you should be spending the next amount of time on your medium term projects, you know, and then your long term. And again, if you stick to that kind of business is fundamental kind of approach, you'll never go wrong.

Spot on. Let me just reiterate on that. First, accept the brutal facts. And the one thing that I've been doing with my clients the last couple of weeks is help them to accept the brutal facts. As a business owner, as Bill said, you tend to hold on to things and it's difficult to make those changes. So first, accept the brutal facts and move fast. Really fast. Don't wait. It's tough to take decisions, but they're going to get tougher with time. So if you want less pain, do it fast as you can. Think about things, don't do it without data, but accept the brutal facts, see the trends. Judy, I thought that was amazingly well said. As business owners, we have to understand that the world has changed for good in many ways. Understand the trends and do your changes fast to be able to adapt as much as you can. And as Andy said, the one thing is lower expenses. Number one thing today, like the first things you have to do to change is lower expenses. See what's mandatory for your business, what's not mandatory and reduce expenses. If you reduce expense and move fast towards the right trends, most likely you're going to come out of this compared to your competitors better. So I think that's what we need to do as business owners.

That's really great, succinct and well put. You know, it's funny, we all have different temperaments, different mindsets. Andy would probably call himself much more rigorous and maybe realistic than me. I would tend to be more optimistic and hopeful. Judy and I are probably closer in our psychology and temperament. And Daniel's already moved on to the next next thing.

Yeah, business in something different.

I think we've given people a lot of things to think about. I want to I'll give you guys a shout out. You can remind people where to go, get more information. I want to tell our listeners if the show helped you in any way, please share it with somebody else. Pass it along so somebody else can benefit from this right now if you like it and give us a review that helps us a great deal. We also love to hear from you. If you'll drop us an email to infocalingcoach.com youm could also subscribe to get them every week, wherever you get it. I want to give special thanks to Vern Harnish, author and creator of the Scaling Up Framework and the original Rockefeller Habits. This show is produced by Lucy Summers and the audio and video are edited by Albert Burge at podfly Productions. The show notes are compiled by Ayn Kadina and proofreading by Tim McGowan. Round of shoutouts Judy where do people find out more about you and get in touch with you?

People can find out about me 818-800-0135 and www.guido g u I d o a-s s o c.com I'll be doing several what I call instead of Netflix Bizflix how to fundamental teaching so that's kind of my new you know always has been my model but I just love the name the bizflix instead of the Netflix of providing education and one thing before you go on to my dear partners and friends and colleagues on the line, one of the things we talked about kind of trends and what's important, you know, being organized right and you Know, organization is really, really important, you know, always has been, right? Not having a sense of clutter, being at working efficiently. The one thing we didn't get a chance to talk about some of those trends. But you know, if you think about the home, I think is really, really important, right? The home for most people was a just, you know, I shouldn't say just a home, but a home, right, where we stayed with family. And you know, then there was this trend maybe 10 years ago about, you know, some people had home offices. You know, I think, I think now it's upward of 40% of people in the world have some semblance of a home office. Well now we're also a home school, right? So think about some of those trends where the home is the home, it's your office and now it's your schooling, whether it's senior middle or a level kind of education. And to be organized to make sure that you have all the, all the, all the tools that you can to be organized. I'm going to just, I want to give a shout out to one of my favorite clients, amazing magnets who's just been doing, You know, give them education, teach them how to be much more organized in their home, in their office and their home schools, if they will. So they've been writing and we've been writing some really just great, you know, kind of educational efficiency and organized tools that can help everybody at this time. So I want to shout out to those guys as well.

Thank you, Judy. Gaidoassoci.com we'll put the link in the show notes. You know, my gardener sent me a message last week that he was working from home now, but he offered to schedule a video session.

Guess what better part of the home is that outdoors, right? More people are realizing that oasis, their home. And that's one of the trends that is growing because people want to create that oasis and that meditative, anxiety free place in their home. So that's another one. We'll talk about that on another show.

Daniel, remind us about Growth Institute and what you've got going on right now.

So growthinstitute.com my email daniel.com whatever you need, solutions for learning with your team. Be able to align your team, get them on the right page, be able to learn something new, get them out of watching CNN and focus on something positive. Just give us a shout. Happy to set up something. We usually get into a phone call with the CEO, really figure out their challenges and get them the right training to be able to get the team aligned and focus on fixing them and the right tools with the best of leaders. Jack Daly, Verde Hartnish, Shalim Ishmael, Patrick Grazioni A lot of the really great thought leaders of business, we put them all in video in a price and more format that makes sense for remarket companies around the world.

Outstanding. And Andy, tell us about your book and the business.

Sure. Well, the main business is I'm the European arm of Petra Coach. So that's petracoach.com I'm@andy claytonetrocoach.com and so we help high growth companies to get their teams aligned and scale their businesses.

Yeah.

The interesting thing from our end at the moment is we do have the book coming out. So it's Sweetspot Guru and it's all about how you can find the thing that you're great at and love doing and also that adds value in your life. So what are the things that you need to remove from your life in order to spend more time focusing on your sweet spot and that makes you more effective, more engaged in life, also gets you better results. And it's also a great tool for entrepreneurs to use with their teams because you can check in with each member of the team what their sweet spot is and help them to become more efficient, productive by removing things that are getting in the way and then spending more time in their sweet spot. So it's a great, it's a book, it's a workshop. We also do coaching around it and yeah, we're launching it this month.

Well, I got a preview of it recently. I haven't been through the experience or seen the video live yet, but I saw some of the materials and stuff from you earlier and I thought it was really great and creative and fun and useful for what people are dealing with. So sweetspot guru and petracosh.com thank you guys all so much for joining us. Thanks again to all of our listeners for listening and watching. Thanks again for listening. Keep scaling or get back to scaling.

Yeah, thanks Bill.

Bye everyone.