Episode #640 - Unlock Entrepreneur Potential with Eric J. Gall, Founder at Edison Business Advisors

Welcome to this edition of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. We talk about process systems, whatever. Really the growth of a maturity of a business and growth of a business is built into how they do it and their processes and all and the, the way you do people feel like, well I don't know how to do that. If you just get out there and learn the business, whatever it is and you get success for yourself. Document how you do it like you're talking about here or now we can go to Cheat Chat GPT and they'll tell you the outline of, they can give you the outline of it anyway. And the thing is that you develop those things by what goes right, what gives you a little bit of a bigger result, but quicker, faster, better. But also when things go wrong, you solve that problem. But if you're smart, you build tweaks into your system so you can steer around that problem. And if things go the way they're supposed to, you'll never have that come up as a problem again. And that's really why how people get to be so productive like yourself is you do so many of these things instinctively and people would look at you like how does he make those sales? How does he do all that? Well, you know, you've, you know, you've got these, this track, you've got lots of tracks in lots of situations of life you've learned how to run on successfully. And those are the process. You gotta have a, you gotta have a process other the alternate to that is trial and error or hit or miss or make it up as you go. And that's just not a pattern for building the next Ford Motor Company.

Yeah, there's enough chaos in life, you know, no need to add to it, you know.

Yeah, yeah, no, no reason. Well and the other thing of that is behind the thing is to make things as easy as possible for yourself to be successful. And so it's not like a budget, you know, you know, but a budget, you can look at the budget the same way. The budget just saves you from problems, you know, but we all have budgets, we all have limitations on time, money, resources, things we could do. And so the system, the processes allow you to get the, the biggest value out of what you're doing. And so as one of the things that, the way I, I look at it, I'm sure you do the thing about second Getting second guess. I always say to, to myself that when it comes to do, am I going to quit something or am I going to just give up on it or I walk away. It's like I'm just not going to give the sobs the satisfaction of saying I couldn't do it, you know, because usually most things are not that hard, you know, not that difficult. It just can. It's kind of like my Georgia Tech education is just incredibly annoying, you know, and it wasn't that it was that difficult. It was just annoying and a bunch of annoying professors that you had to accommodate to go through the gauntlet. It wasn't like it was, you know, you had to be Einstein. You just had to be willing to put up with X amount of abuse to get that ticket. And. But if you don't get it, it's like, oh, it's too hard for you. Wasn't it too hard? Everything, no matter how you can explain away, they hear it as an excuse. And I would just prefer to go through life with giving without giving people an excuse to have those thoughts, you know, especially when you can do it, you know, it's just easier to get it done rather than being always starting over. And have you discovered that?

Well, you know, I think, I think the one thing that I've learned over the years is, you know, try to get the feedback directly back to you. What? You know, if someone's not happy with something or someone's uneasy about something you're doing, if you give them the opportunity to tell you.

Yeah.

You know, and get it off their chest and give you an opportunity to fix it or correct it.

Yeah.

You know, generally, you know, they became a raving fan afterward as opposed to, you know, some, someone who's going to go out there and tell other people that they're disappointed in, in the job that you did. So, you know, certainly no one's perfect. I'm not perfect. I make mistakes. I, you know, once in a while, as infrequently as possible, obviously. So. But you know, when I do, when I do make a mistake or I miss something, you know, I owe up to it, you know, I talk to the person about it, you know, we formulate a plan to get around it, you know, and 99 of the time they're happy with that, they're satisfied with that, you know, and you get a better outcome that way too. But, you know, obviously if you've got a really good sound process, you can limit, you know, the number of times you get yourself into those situations. So you know, we go back to the process and the methods, the tools that you use, you know, are critical to minimizing mistakes. But you know, you're still going to make them because there's, you're going to get yourself in situations where it's something that you've never had to navigate before and you might pick the wrong direction.

Yeah.

So when that happens, you know, to say, oh, I picked the wrong direction.

Yeah.

I see three ways to get back on course, you know, you know, option A, option B, option C, just want to run them by you to see what your thoughts are. And you know, most people understand that, you know, you know, mistakes are made or decisions and lack of, you know, with a lack of adequate information are made, you know, and you know, they respect it, honor and they help out. And like I said, you can turn people into raving fans from raving lunatics.

Yeah. And one of those things about getting that is to when, when we're busy, like you say, your instincts, you'll notice something. But you know, a lot of times it's one more question asked at the right time can open up a whole new hidden world. But if you're too busy and you just say, ah, no, it's, you really need to think about asking that extra like, what question? Didn't I ask what you know and does that. I'm sure you can relate to that.

Well, I can because I have, I have a wife who's, you know, Polish and Polish people love to ask questions. So it's in her nature, you know, I'm more, you know, English, Irish, you know, Scandinavian and you know, you don't ask questions, you just barge through the wall.

Right.

So it's been a learning process, you know, but she's taught me well. I think I'm doing much, much better at asking a lot more questions and probing, you know, a lot more.

Yeah, it pays off because you know, you, you get, you find out things you need to know. But the, you can only do that if you have that relationship with the key person. Like, you know, all of these things seem to be tying back together. What you said right from the beginning is like have a relationship with the decision maker. Talk directly, get, you know, have a system in place and you basically you're. All of these come down to setting yourself up for success with, with, with everything you do and everything you say. And you've got the track record and the awards to prove. You got a pretty good handle on that. Any last thing you want to pass on as we, we wrap this thing up.

Well, I mean, you know, you just somewhat summarized up a few things and I'll, I'll kind of add to that. You know, when you talk about building that relationship, it's really all about, you know, setting expectations with that client, you know, and clearly communicating those expectations and then making sure that they understand those expectations and then delivering and exceeding on them. And then if, like we talked about, if you fail, you know, making sure you jump right on it and get it corrected. And, you know, that's, I think, probably the key to success. I mean, you can in. In communication nowadays, it doesn't always have to be, you know, face to face. You know, you can do zoom meetings, you can do, you know, phone calls, you can do, you know, texts. You can, you know, do all sorts of things, you know, to communicate, you know, to your clients, you know, during each step of the process without, you know, overburdening them.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I think that, you know, technology is again, another help in that. And it's something that we, you know, you need to know how to use and leverage to, you know, to, you know, aid those communications with your clients. And once you master that, I think, you know, you're. You're on your way to success for sure.

Well, thanks so much, Eric. I'm really excited to see the success you've had. And the thing is, when you're, you know, in your business, when you make a sale on other business to another family, you create. You create good things for the people that got that business sold, that they could be unleashed to go on and do things where they're empowered now to go on and do great things, fun things in their life. But also, you're empowering the new people to jump in and move up fast. And for people who want to be an entrepreneur, want to be their own boss and do great things, a lot of times, buying another business is the best way to do it, you know, gives. It gives you a running start. And you've seen that yourself, right?

Oh, without question. I mean, you don't have that, you know, multi year, you know, effort poured into scaling the business up to, you know, a certain, you know, level of income that makes you comfortable. You can literally go out, you know, and leverage an acquisition of a business that's already generating that level of income. And then, you know, if you really have that entrepreneurial spirit, you know, you can take that business and you can put your own spin to it, you know, after you learn it. I would recommend not right away, but, you know, after you learn that business, put your own spin to it, put your own time and effort and energy into growing it or you know, taking it in a little bit, direct, different direction or adding product, adding services, you know, doing things that, you know, you, you might enjoy more than that base business that you purchase.

Yeah.

You know, let your entrepreneurship, you know, your entrepreneurial spirit, you know, take that existing business and, and, and build it versus, you know, trying to build from scratch is so hard. It is very, very hard.

But even, and that's what even big companies do when they're going into new industries or they're wanting to expand and things like that. They're partnering up all the time. And so it is an idea that you can use possibly yourself or something. One you ought to consider anyway, so thanks so much. When you do, make sure you give Eric a call. He's probably got something in his pipeline for you to take a look at. And so Eric, thanks for talking with us. And if people want to find you, where do they find you?

Yeah, I'm Eric, all at Edison Business Advisors. My website is www.edison e d I s O N like the inventor, B as in Bravo, a as in alpha.com and my phone number is 239-738-6227.

Thanks so much Eric. This has been a whole lot of fun. Talk to you later.

Absolutely. Appreciate it. Larry.

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