Chris Taylor, CEO of actionable.co, says business transformation starts with tiny steps, not big moves. He credits his happiness to finding a puzzle that consumes him, and his favorite question from Seth Godin: What do you want to have happen?
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Welcome to the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host, Tyler Wagner. This episode is brought to you by Authors Unite. Authors Unite makes the process of becoming a published bestselling author as simple as sipping your morning cup of coffee. You can learn more about Authors Unite at authorsunite.com. Now let's jump into the episode. Alright everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Business Blast podcast. I'm your host Tyler Wagner, and today I have Chris Taylor with us. He's the president and CEO of actionable.co. So welcome to the show, Chris.
Tyler, thanks for having me.
Of course, man. Thank you for coming on, and we'll kick it off with the first question. The first question I have for you is, what's the best story from your life that has an underlying valuable message?
I love this question. When you sent this through, I, uh, so I started a sort of quasi-franchise when I was 19 years old, uh, just wrapping up university, and I did really well really quickly with that business. Um, by the time I was 21, I was basically making more money than most people in my life, including my parents and parents' friends. And that success went straight to my head. I went from this place of working exceptionally hard to, you know, make stuff happen and to achieve that level of success, to then once I got there to sort of forgetting everything that I'd done to get there and shifting into this mindset of, well, obviously I'm this successful, I deserve this success. And that letting go of the work ethic and candidly the humility that had let me get to that level of success in the first place led to an even faster decline in success than the rise had been. And I think, you know, I come back to that all the time. You know, that's coming up on 20 years ago, but I try to recall that anytime I'm finding that success is getting to a place where it's starting to overshadow the actual work that went into creating that success, reconnecting to the fact that it can go away just as fast, if not faster, than it came, and that it was the work and it was the curiosity and the humility that created that in the first place. I really try to reconnect to that as often as I can.
And what's the most valuable piece of information we should know that's within your expertise or industry?
Sure. So the space that we play in is around really large-scale corporate change. This is what Actionable is all about, is how do you take a suite strategy that an organizational leadership team has and get the, you know, 200, 5,000, 20,000 people inside the organization on board. And what we see more and more is that the changes are bigger and more sweeping. You know, so many industries are being disrupted by technology, but that the change itself starts at an incredibly small level, smaller than most people are comfortable going to or admitting is a first step. I think we see things, you know, if we translate this into our personal lives, we reach December 31st and we look at the year ahead and we say, all right, so I know I've got a body mass index of approaching obesity, but I want to, by the end of this year, have six-pack abs, and I want to be able to sleep 4 hours a night, and I want to be able to run marathons. We strive for these massive objectives, but we ignore the fact that maybe the first thing is just not eating a bag of chips every night. Being able to start small, the fact that change starts small regardless whether it's personal, organizational, or institutional, or governmental. It starts with the smallest first steps and we build incrementally upon that.
And what's your best piece of overall business advice?
There's a woman named Erin Bury based here in Toronto that I read, I think it was a tweet or something on Facebook maybe. And she said, and I loved it, it was so succinct. It said a business owner's role is threefold. One is to have enough cash in the bank to fund operations. Second is to set the big picture vision. And third is to hire great people. And if you're leading a business and you're either not doing one of those three things or you're distracting yourself by the noise of other stuff, reconnecting to those three pieces just really sets you up for long-term success.
And if you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would that be?
Don't get caught up in your own greatness. Find— particularly if you're developing a new product, if you're an entrepreneur, find the need before getting caught up in the features.
And in your opinion, so kind of go a little different route. In your opinion, what's the key to happiness?
For me personally, it's about finding a puzzle that consumes you. It's about finding that— I call it sort of a delicious challenge. It's that one thing that while you're solving it, still affords you the lifestyle that you want so you can still keep life moving along, but that attracts like-minded people and has the potential for a really big payoff. Find the puzzle that consumes you.
And, what's the best book you've read and what was the number one thing you learned from that?
I've read a lot of business books. I've read a lot. I've read a lot. Probably though the one that comes back to me most often is Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Traders, and there's a concept in there around bullets over cannonballs. It echoes Eric Ries' concepts around MVP and building small first. I like the metaphor of test stuff. Just try those tracer bullets before you sort of fire all of your capital and time and attention to things.
What's your favorite quote and why?
I was at a Seth Godin event almost a decade ago now, and the question that he just kept asking over and over again was, "What do you want to have happen?" People would be talking, sharing their stories, they'd share all the big problem and the question that you would just ask over and over, what do you want to have happen? I love that quote because it cuts through the noise and allows you to focus on the ideal outcome.
Thank you so much for coming on, Chris. Extremely valuable. The last question I have for you is where's the best place for people to find you online?
Yeah, probably actionable.co.co, or you can find me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Perfect. Thank you again, Chris. We really appreciate it.
Thank you.
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