218 - Exploring the Challenges of Leadership and Entrepreneurship with Kelly Roach International's Kelly Roach

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Kelly Roach, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are a serial entrepreneur, among other things, but you are really the founder and CEO of Kelly Roach Coaching, which can be found at kellyroachcoaching.com. Thanks for taking some time outta your busy day to be with us.

I'm excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

You're welcome. A little bit of the backstory. I know that from our Authority Magazine interview, you were in corporate for a while before you, yeah, your entrepreneurial wings. Tell us a little bit about your background.

Yeah, absolutely. I started in Fortune 500. I started in the most entry-level job. I was an individual producer, started doing sales and recruiting, and then basically got tapped to move into leadership. I ended up building a team of 100 people from the ground up, ended up going from managing 1 location to 17 locations. I was promoted 7 times in 8 years and ended up building and, and running basically a $50 million portfolio. And that's where I learned everything I know about business. That's where I learned about building teams and developing sales systems and marketing yourself and how to coach people and how to people help people to reach their potential. And I've been really blessed and really lucky to take everything that I learned there and translate it into what does that look like in the online world and how can people take those timeless billion-dollar corporate strategies and apply them to online strategies to build their own business.

What caused you to leave corporate? You were on a fast track to someday being a CEO of a company.

Yes, I was. I definitely was.

It was security there.

Yeah. Yeah, it, it was, there was a lot of security and, and I liked the work that I was doing. I didn't feel a deep sense of meaning or purpose with the work that I was doing. I wanted to have direct impact on the people that I was helping, number one. Number two, I worked for a publicly traded company so I could look up the CEO's salary and I knew I could make more working for myself. And number three, I didn't wanna do the planes, trains, and buses anymore. I ran 17 locations, so that meant a lot of weekend travel, a lot of airplanes, flying down to corporate meetings, all of these things. And I was planning for my future and I was deciding what I wanted my family life and my home life to look like. And I just realized, I was like, I have this vision for my life and I'm not gonna find it in a job working for someone else. I'm gonna have to go out and create it. And so that's what I did.

And you got 6 businesses that you own now. Why don't you describe those for us?

Yeah. And it didn't start that way. I always like to be very clear. I took my first company to 8 figures and I did not really start a lot of these other companies until I had established leadership, very strong cash position, and I could afford to take time away from the business and start other things because of years and years of building the foundation of success there. I think a lot of times people can hear something like that. And think, oh, let me go start my 7 streams of income. And they don't realize people like me worked very hard on one stream of income to get that to a certain level and then began to build the other complimentary things. And that's how I think about my businesses is they all serve the entrepreneurial market in some way, shape, or form, and they all complement each other in some way, shape, or form. So I have a marketing agency, I have a coaching and consulting company, I have a high-level networking organization for business leaders. Uh, I I have a virtual business school. They all serve the same purpose of helping empower people to accomplish their goals and dreams and supporting them at a different place and in a different way on that entrepreneurial journey.

Interesting. What are, what I'm curious about, what are the foundational rules of starting and building a business? Because it's obviously you've had success at this.

Yeah.

When you break it down to the, just the simplest ideas, what are those ideas?

Discipline, consistency, and intentionality. I think those are the three things. Mm-hmm. Discipline is understanding the consequences of your own commitments. So a lot of people want overnight success. People like you, people like me understand it's decades in the making. It's not a year, it's not a couple years, it's decades.

So 3-year overnight success, right?

Exactly. So discipline. Consistency, right? It's running the reps on the foundations of success every single day and stringing days, months, weeks, years, decades together of that discipline. Consistency. And then intentionality is holding the vision and knowing the why behind what you're doing and only making decisions that are in alignment with that core why. And that's both personally and professionally. It's like knowing the North Star for your life, knowing the North Star for your business and making sure that everything reverse engineers back to that.

How do you know when you've made a— how do you know when you've made a bad decision or you made a bad choice and you're not— it's taking you off course? What are the criteria you use for that process?

I think when you can see that a situation or a decision that you've made is taking you into something that is separate from that North Star. When you make a decision and the decision is distracting you from your bigger purpose and from that vision that you have, you know that you're off course. And I'll use an example of something that you can hire someone in your company and you think you're hiring someone for this role and you think that this is going to help you get on course, get on path. And all of a sudden you realize that you're having all of this worry and concern, and you're spending all this time managing this person on things that aren't actually moving you forward. Now you've made a hiring mistake because you hired someone to move you towards that North Star, but instead you're recognizing that you're managing all of these things. Maybe it's probably— maybe it's culture, culture, maybe it's work product that are actually taking you off course. You made a hiring mistake, you launch a new product, do you think that product is going to facilitate you moving forward in the business? Now it ends up that you're taking time away from your main product to work on the side product that's not having as much impact as it was. And I say this all the time, the people that perform at the highest levels and have the highest level of success also make the most mistakes. I make a lot of mistakes and it's the same as athletes, right? All of the highest performing athletes, basketball, baseball, football, they ran the most reps, they took the most shots. They also had the most failure, but because their quantity of output was so much significantly higher than everyone else's, even with the same failure rate that everyone else had, they're outliers in their performance. And I think in entrepreneurship, people are overly sensitive to people seeing in the public eye a mistake that they made or making an incorrect decision or whatever, that there's a lot of overplanning and overthinking, but you can't theoreticize business. You can't grow a business in theory. You can only grow a business in actuality. And as soon as you recognize that you made a decision that took you off course, you iterate, you correct it, you course correct and you reverse it. But yeah. So—

It reminds me of a saying that I learned in the martial arts. That's a, I would send it through the ranks, eventually became a secondary black belt, is that the difference between a black belt and a white belt is that the black belt has made thousands of more mistakes than the white belt can even conceive of.

That's it. And that's— I see that in business every single day. And I think that you have to drop the need to protect yourself or to look like you have it all together or to do it perfectly. You just can't learn in that environment. You can't get great in that environment. Right.

What is it that gets you up in the morning now? You've been doing this for a while.

Purpose. Yeah. Impact and purpose. I'm really big on vocation at this point. For me, I, I've accomplished a lot of my financial goals or my goals, I guess you could say. I'm not at a stage in my life where I'm pursuing things to check a box of accomplishments. It's much more so what's the greatest impact that I can have? What is the most amount of people that I can touch and influence in a positive way that creates a chain reaction in their life. And I am also a very big proponent of really trying to understand the gifts that you've been given and how you're intended to steward those gifts. And I think that our whole life is a journey of uncovering what are those gifts and how are you meant to steward those gifts and how can you exploit them and give them away and use them to be of service. And I think that it's exciting to get up in the morning and to ask yourself how you can do that each day.

Exactly right. If, if you don't have a higher meaning in your life by serving others, then yeah, burnout. And we see this all the time. Yeah. That gets me to my next question. What is it that, that's unique about you that has made you so successful? Your unique gifts. Yeah.

So what is unique about me? I, I, I think, in the world that I work in, business strategy and business mentorship, I think I'm one of the only people in my world that has been able to keep what's first, and that's faith and family. And I really pride myself in helping people to understand that it's not success at all costs, and that putting your life on a path of destruction in order to pursue success is never going to feel successful, right? And so I think that's what's unique about me and my persona and the way that I teach and who I am.

Mm-hmm.

In terms of my gifts, I think what my gift is taking complex things and making them simple. And that's probably because I was a B student. That's probably cuz I was never the smartest person scholastically. I wasn't great educationally in the classroom, but I learned through experience. And so I think for me, why I've been able to help so many other people to build successful businesses and to achieve extraordinary levels of success is I can simplify things in a way that people can understand how to take incremental actions over and over again that will produce a big result.

That's really interesting because that's exactly what I used to do as a trial lawyer. Ah. Very complex problems. Yeah. Simplify them so I could explain it to a jury. So a jury—

Yeah.

I love that.

There, there is, there aren't many people who can do that.

Yeah.

They don't, they cannot either. They get lost in the complexity. Yeah. Or they don't have the ability to take the complex and just, yeah. Down to fundamentals.

Yeah. And I see that and there's a lot of things I'm not good at and I, that's why I have great teams and I'm super thankful for that cuz I also know my limitations. But I do recognize that like I'll try to listen to someone speak a lot of times and they get lost in their own idea. And the reason why people can't effectively take what they're teaching and implement it is that it's not being presented in a way that the average person can follow and implement, right? So that's why I spend a lot of time doing things like podcasts and speaking and teaching, because I think that's a gift. I think it's needed when I'm trying to push it out there.

Exactly. I want to talk a little bit about leadership empathy, which is something that I'm focusing on these days.

Yeah.

Because as a lawyer turned peacemaker and now a person who is teaching people how to stop fights and arguments in their lives forever, I'm really interested in leaders taking these skills that I teach and using it to become the leaders that everyone wants to follow.

Yeah.

What's been your experience with that leadership empathy, the idea of being able to understand and work with the emotions of, of the people that you hire and work with you.

And yeah, I think so much of my success has directly correlated with my own growth in maturity as a leader, right? When you're a new leader, you're super impatient and you lack empathy and you just want immediate accountability and execution, right? And I think as you evolve in the maturity of your thinking and in your own life experience to understand the complexities of all the things that are influencing a person at any given time that are then impacting their response or their execution or like whatever the case, you have a much greater kind of depth or well to pull from as a leader to be able to adjust and adapt your communication. What you're communicating, how you're communicating, the timing of your communication to be able to get the best out of people. So I think that's a lifelong journey. I think that's a great topic for you to be focused on. I think it's one that a lot of leaders don't even understand the surface.

Or I find that a lot of people in leadership are afraid of emotions, so they run from them or they disdain them, or they say, oh, soft skills, get that outta here. I want my spreadsheets. When really it's the most important part of being a leader. And it's interesting that people can rise in the hierarchy and not have those skills.

But what was it?

There was a, somebody once said, you get hired on your technical skills and get fired for who you are.

It's 100%. And it's the same way with building a company. I find that's where entrepreneurs get shut down because when they get to the point where there's no longer any more that they can personally do, And the only way they can get to the next level is through their leadership skills. That's why so many entrepreneurs never make it to 7 figures. That's why so few even beyond that make it to 8 figures. That's why almost none beyond that make it to 9 figures and so forth.

But then you look at somebody like Elon Musk who seems to have the social skills of a bull elephant, right? Yeah. He doesn't seem to have a lot of leadership empathy. He's not, doesn't seem to have much in the way of emotional intelligence. And he's created, although a couple of his companies are tanking right now in the market, but it's just, it's really curious to me to see that some people are able to find, if you want to define financial success as success.

Yeah. I think someone like Elon though, I, I think the reason that he can have success at that level is that he strikes me as someone who is extremely aware of his own limitations. So I could almost guarantee that for everything that he is lacking from a leadership perspective, he has people that he's surrounding himself with that carry that for him. Right. So he's leading with visionary, right? And that's so inspiring to people that people will dedicate their life to following that. But I guarantee if you peek under the covers, he has some extraordinary leadership underneath him because there's no way you can you can't have the vision and then not have the leadership to drive that execution. So there's gotta be something in between there.

So how do you teach this to people? This is the core, and I think you've identified it as the core differentiation between being a wannabe and being—

it is—

successful. How do you go about teaching these ideas to your clients?

Yeah. One thing that I am very focused on teaching my clients right now is about self-leadership. Because what I see is everyone wants to be an influencer. Everyone wants to be a leader. Everyone wants to have tons of followers and fans and lots of clients and all these things. And they wanna be the leader, but you have to first learn to lead yourself. Emotional control, empathy, communication skills, agility, capacity, right? And so for me, I'm really trying to focus with my leaders on mastering themselves first, because here they are in a position of leadership and they don't have mastery of themselves. And that's why it's turn and burn constantly as they're building teams and acquiring more and more clients. So I'm trying to take it back to the foundation of how do you build something that can actually last?

Do you get any resistance from your clients on that? Because they are afraid afraid of doing self-development?

I wouldn't say— I don't get like tangible external resistance from them, but I think they have a really hard time with that. And I think in particular it's more difficult in the world of entrepreneurship than it is in corporate, because in corporate, no matter how high level of a leader you are, the buck doesn't stop with you from a legal, insurance, financial stakes. It's such a high-stakes game with entrepreneurship that the emotional regulation alone is a really complex thing to master. And so I don't get resistance like externally from my clients, but I think internally it's a very difficult tightrope for people to learn and to walk.

Yeah, um, I think part of the problem too is we live in a culture that makes says emotions are bad, emotions, you're irrational. When the fact of the matter is that we're not rational beings at all as human beings. We're emotional beings.

Yeah.

But that dissonance between what our culture teaches us going back 4,000 years and our true essence as we now understand it, as the neuroscientists unravel what, who we are as beings, is, I think that's a really difficult thing for people to grasp. One of the things that I tell people is to abandon reason in all of your relationships. Abandon reason. Has no place in relationship.

Yeah.

And, uh, they look at me crazy. What do you mean abandon reason? I said, I talk about what reason— we only reason for 4. There are 4 things we do with reasoning, and none of those have anything to do with relationship. Learning, learning how to listen to emotions.

Yeah.

Listen to the emotions and here's how you do it. And this is what happens when you do it. Finding that to be transformative for a lot of people.

Yeah, for sure.

For sure. So where do you go from here? You've got all these different companies going on. You're obviously successful. You're serving people. Yeah. That's a big thing for Kelly Roach.

I mean, I, I, when I set a goal of taking my first company to, from 7 to 8 figures, my primary objective in doing that was for other entrepreneurs to see me do it. Believe that they could do it and then for them to do it. And my vision in building the portfolio that I have today is to take it to a 9-figure portfolio. And my primary goal is to be an example that paves the way for other people. It's like the 4-minute mile. Within 1 year of us crossing over 8 figures, 2 of my clients did it. I had never had clients do that before.

Hmm.

And I firmly believe that when someone in close proximity to you does something, and you see it for your own self and you've never experienced it before, it completely changes your perspective on what's possible. And so that's a vision and goal that I have that I'm working towards. I spent the last couple years really laying the foundation, setting up the infrastructure, getting the teams in place, like really slowed down to speed up, really hard, like the heavy lifting over the last couple years. And then the focus for the next couple years is now to grow these companies up, right? To let them grow and develop and to take the foundation that we've built and to execute on it. Just leading people back to themselves, back to purpose, giving people the recognition of the power that they have. You talked about being counterintuitive. I talk about being counterculture all the time. I just don't think our culture is leading us in the direction that's best for us, and that's why I think self-leadership is so important.

Right.

So how do you manage work-life balance?

I am as intentional and structured about my home life as I am about my business life. Let's put it that way.

I am not surprised. Yes.

The workouts are in the calendar. The family time is in the calendar. Um, a couple Fridays a month I do us day where it's just me and my husband where my daughter's at school. Uh, like it's a system because if it's not a system and if it's like, oh, I'll just work until I'm done and then I'll have time for this, that, and the other, you won't. And so the workouts are there and the faith life is there and the family life is there and all of those things. So just being intentional and having a plan and keeping the commitments that you make to yourself. And, and I keep the commitments that I make to myself. And I think that's the work every day is getting better at keeping the commitments that you make to yourself.

And that's the discipline too. There are a lot of people who listen to you talk about how your whole life is systematized and they would say, oh, I could never live like that. It's too rigid. But what they don't realize is the system is what frees you.

1000%. It's why I can go to the beach on the weekends with my family. It's why I can be at the beach a couple of nights a week with my family. It's why I can be at all of Madison's stuff. It's why I have the freedom to prioritize all the things that matter to me, because I'm not wasteful in my time, wasteful in my energy. And it's exactly what you just said.

That's right. And that's a hard one for people to get to.

It is. It is.

So how do you help your clients understand that? That's gotta be a tough one.

Yeah. I try to give tangible structures. I try to give tangible structures that people can follow and no two people are the same, right? And you have to know your values. You have to write your values. You have to look at whether or not you're living your values and then you need to make decisions, right? And that's the process that I lead people through.

How much is your company mostly remote?

All remote, all remote, 100% remote.

So how, what, what has been your strategy for managing remote people in your organization?

Yeah, my company's been remote since 2012 and I started managing remote when I was, gosh, like in my twenties because I was managing branches all over the East Coast. So I could only be one place at once. So I was managing remote pretty much my whole career. You have to be really intentional about constructing really powerful interac— interactions digitally and being a good steward of people's time because people hate meetings and they hate meetings because meetings many times are not a good steward of people's times. Right. So learning how to run really powerful and really effective meetings is a make or break skillset for anyone that wants to manage a remote team. And I think I've mastered that and I think that's why I've been able to build multiple companies. That way.

That— I— it's so refreshing to hear that because that's what I preach. The number one skill, yeah, basic skill of any leader is knowing how to organize a meeting. And again, it's how— what are your systems? Yeah, simple stuff like it's simple agenda, people only inviting people that absolutely have to be there, keeping meetings under an hour and making sure that you start and stop exactly on time, and hopefully stop before you said you were going to stop.

Yeah, exactly.

And not using meetings to have your own ego.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Yeah, basics.

These things are not taught anywhere.

No, it's crazy, isn't it?

It is common sense stuff. Yeah, you wonder how people get by. Yeah. Huh, interesting. One more question before I let you go. What's one thing about yourself, Kelly, that we would never know about? Unless you revealed it to people.

Never believe me that I'm an introvert. My favorite thing to do is to sit and read a book in quiet. When I go to parties, I'm the person that sits and listens. I don't talk. I love to stand there. I will ask questions. I'll listen to people's story all night long. People see me on camera, on stage, on podcast, all of these things, and that's cuz I love to teach and I love to serve. But in my personal life, I would much prefer to listen. I much prefer to be quiet. I'm much more of an introspective person. So that's probably something I guess people wouldn't necessarily assume about me given my work.

I have done 200— I don't know what episode you're somewhere between 215 and 220 episodes of Leaders. And out of all the episodes that I've done, I've only met one successful leader who was an extrovert.

That's so interesting.

I'm an introvert myself. Trial lawyer and now speaker and mediator and coach. But isn't that interesting?

It is. Yeah. I think listening is a really important skill that's underrated.

That's another thing that is interesting. We're never taught how to listen as children. We're ordered.

Yeah, it's true.

How to listen.

It's really true.

And we're really taught what I call Type 1 listening, which is listening to gather information, to respond.

Not to seek to understand.

Correct. So we're taught that listening is about fulfilling our own agenda.

Yes.

And we're never taught Type 2 listening, which is listening to make the other person feel heard.

Yeah, I love that. Which is so important.

Yeah, these are critical skills, especially today with polarization All of that would go away if we would just listen to each other.

Yes, agreed, agreed.

Interesting. Kelly, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a real pleasure talking with you.

Thank you, I enjoyed our conversation so much. Thanks for having me.

You're welcome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.