Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher

Building and maintaining teams in an operational setting is a critical pillar for many entrepreneurs, but if you make a mistake in this arena, it can cause harm. Today’s guest shares how you avoid these mistakes and execute with precision. Robert “Bo” Brabo is a retired U.S. Army Chief of HR Operations with the White House Communications Agency and was the Presidential Communications Officer for both Presidents Bush and Obama. Bo has served in several executive positions including most recently Vice President of Human Resources at the National Spine & Pain Centers and Founder of Hail Media Group. When it comes to the power of execution and those who do it well and don’t do it well, it comes down to the empowerment of your team. Before you get to the “execution” phase, there is a ton of training and testing that goes behind the day of the event. This process can’t be skipped. When you have the complicated task of making sure the President is safe, there are too many variables for one person to handle. This is where trusting the training process and empowering your team come into play. If you tried to micromanage everything, things would not be ready by the time the President came into town. These critical tasks also mean that you don’t get a “do-over” when something isn’t working. How do you get things to just run seamlessly? You check in with your team frequently and make sure they know they can call upon you when there’s an unexpected problem at hand that needs to get resolved quickly. It’s about trusting and verifying the process.   Interview Links: Sponsored by: Sweetprocess.com Robertbrabo.com Bo on LinkedIn   Resources: Scaling Up Workshop: Interested in attending one of our workshops? We have a few $100 discounts for our loyal podcast listeners!Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube  

Are you prone to getting distracted by the latest and greatest? Do you feel like you’ve just got too many projects on your plate, and you’re not sure which one has the priority? Two of Bill’s clients would always come to him with the latest book or idea that they learned and wanted to implement. They had a substantial business but they were continually being sidetracked, even within the business meetings they’d have with Bill. It was difficult to get them to focus! If you struggle with too many ideas and too much input, stop for a second and just ask this question: Which one of your quarterly priorities does this apply to? Use your quarterly goals and metrics as a hallmark to keep you focused on the tasks that truly matter. Keep asking this question as you go through the journey and it’ll help you bring yourself back in focus.   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube   Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes and leave a review. Help other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they, too, can benefit from the ideas shared in these podcasts.   Scaling Up is the best-selling business growth book by Verne Harnish and our team of coaches. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading coach.   We help leadership teams with 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash, and the 5th Decision about what kind of leader you want to be. Our purpose is helping you Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success.  

Have you played small in your business? Are you still playing small and hesitating on some core moves that you know will move the needle in your business a lot further? Today’s entrepreneur has some solutions for you! Mike Gunderson is the Founder of Gunderson Direct, Inc., a direct marketing agency that helps businesses drive new leads and close more sales through traditional offline channels, especially direct mail. He is also the Founder and CEO of Respond Fast, a voice technology company that helps offline marketers connect with customers through smart speakers. Mike was looking back in some of his old files back when he was a kid and he saw that he did have some entrepreneurial tendencies. He was the founder and president of his neighborhood clubhouse. It was in him at an early age to start something from scratch. Throughout Mike’s corporate career, he always maintained a bit of a freelancer career on the side. He thinks it’s important to have a side hustle of some kind or hobbies of some kind. He even encourages his staff to take on additional freelance projects to keep the creative juices flowing.   Interview Links: Gundersondirect.com Mike on LinkedIn Sponsored by: Eonetwork.org   Resources: Scaling Up Workshop: Interested in attending one of our workshops? We have a few $100 discounts for our loyal podcast listeners!Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube  

Feel like you’ve thrown money at marketing and have no idea what the ROI was on it? How many times have you felt like you were spinning your wheels and like your marketing dollars weren’t going as far as they could? Today’s guest knows how to spend your marketing dollars wisely to get the results you’re looking for. Dan McGaw is an award-winning entrepreneur and speaker. He is also the Founder and CEO of McGaw.Io, an analytics and marketing technology consultancy firm. In 2015, Dan was selected to be a United States Ambassador of Entrepreneurship by the United States Department of State, where he had the privilege to advise the government, universities, and private corporations on how to build entrepreneur ecosystems. Dan has been an entrepreneur since he was 13 years old. He makes a good employee too, but not a lot of CEOs like him too much because he’s always trying to take their jobs or make the process better. Entrepreneurship is all Dan knows and he has worked with companies like Kissmetrics and CodeSchool in the marketing department. It’s incredibly important to try and reduce the barrier to entry in whatever product you’re working on. However, in today’s day in age, you can find a wide array of tools that can help simplify this process down and get your customers going from point A to point B in a seamless way. It might sound complicated, but it really isn’t! You can actually hire a web developer online, either through Upwork or Fiverr, and they can go in on the backend and connect the tools you need to keep tracking all within one dashboard. The most important thing is as long as your marketing automation tool knows who has visited a page, you can take that URL and show it to that same visitor within an email campaign. This means that whenever someone goes to your site, you can send them more customized emails based on their unique preferences.   Interview Links: Sponsored by: Sweetprocess.com McGaw.io Dan on LinkedIn Utm.io Autopilothq.com   Resources: Scaling Up Workshop: Interested in attending one of our workshops? We have a few $100 discounts for our loyal podcast listeners!Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube  

Do you have a decent size team, but you still seem to be overworked and taking on a bigger load than necessary? Are you having trouble just letting go of the responsibilities? Don’t worry, this is a common problem entrepreneurs and CEOs have. We want to make sure things look right, and are running smoothly, and the truth is no one can truly do the work ‘just like you’. For example, Bill worked with a CEO who had a team of 75 people and she was exhausted. People got used to asking her for help and advice on every little problem and detail, and she would willingly give in and provide them the answers. This made her team dependent on her instead of finding autonomy within themselves. If you’re looking to scale, you need to make your people accountable! Bill uses a couple of tools to help people get clear on what their roles and responsibilities are in their position, and then it’s off to the races!   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube   Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes and leave a review. Help other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they, too, can benefit from the ideas shared in these podcasts.   Scaling Up is the best-selling business growth book by Verne Harnish and our team of coaches. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading coach.   We help leadership teams with 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash, and the 5th Decision about what kind of leader you want to be. Our purpose is helping you Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success.  

Shelby Scarbrough has led an interesting career throughout her life and shares some of her lucky breaks, biggest regrets, her struggle with perfectionism, and more in this week’s episode! Shelby began her career in the White House as a member of President Ronald Reagan’s advance team, where she helped coordinate such landmark events as the Reagan-Gorbachev Moscow summit and economic summits in Germany, Italy, and Japan. In 1990, Shelby founded Practical Protocol, LLC, a company that plans bespoke events for foreign dignitaries such as Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, Lech Walesa, and more. Shelby had an unusual start working in her family’s Burger King Franchise and worked in every single role at Burger King that you could possibly imagine. Growing up in an entrepreneurial job daily taught her a lot about life at an early age, and it seemed quite natural to create her own path when she left college. What were some of the foundational lessons Shelby learned when she was working at the White House? Treat everyone you work with with kindness and respect. You never know where those people will go and grudges carry a lot of burden because it can be quite a small world. Interview Links: Shelbyscarbrough.com Shelby on LinkedIn Sponsored by: Eonetwork.org   Resources: Scaling Up Workshop: Interested in attending one of our workshops? We have a few $100 discounts for our loyal podcast listeners!Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube

We have a returning guest for you today! Today’s guest talks about entrepreneurial forums and how beneficial they can be for your growth as a business owner, but only if you get plugged into the right community. Mike Maddock is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, executive coach, and writer. He calls himself an Idea Monkey because he loves to solve problems with disruptive ideas. His company, Maddock Douglas, INC, has become an internationally recognized innovation consultancy firm and has helped more than 25% of the Fortune 100 create and launch new products. The second best decision Mike made (aside from marrying his wife, Ruth) was joining YPO/EO because he was able to get plugged into a high-level mastermind and get connected with a world-tier of entrepreneurs who understood exactly what he was going through. One of the mistakes Mike made early on when joining an entrepreneurial forum was that he would only network with people who were “relevant” to him or who could help him. This was a mistake because what you really need is diversity of thought. You want to surround yourself with people who ask you tough questions that might get you bent out of shape and/or irritated. They’re forcing you to grow, and think differently. A measure of a good forum is also the ability to get vulnerable. Entrepreneurs put everything in a blender, mix it up, and pray. We need people in our corner who can help us through the professional crisis as well as the personal crisis because it all blends together.   Interview Links: Sponsored by: Sweetprocess.com Maddockdouglas.com Flourishforums.com Mike-maddock.com   Resources: Scaling Up Workshop: Interested in attending one of our workshops? We have a few $100 discounts for our loyal podcast listeners!Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube   Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Gazelles Coaching, on how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading Gazelles Coach. Gazelles is the term we use for fast-growing companies. We help leadership teams with 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Scaling Up for Gazelles companies is based on the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).  

Do you have some of the wrong people still lingering around in your business that you can’t seem to let go of? You know in your gut that they’re not the right fit, but you still have a hard time pulling the trigger? There’s nothing wrong with believing in your people, but the truth is that they’re not going to change magically. Bill worked with a CEO who kept believing in one of his employees. He kept believing that he’d ‘work out’, but years went by and it was still the same result. Values are important within a company. If your employees are having a mismatch or aren’t aligned with your company’s core mission, then there’s going to be trouble down the road. You might keep an underperforming employee because at least it’s ‘better than nothing’, but that’s the wrong perspective to have. The changes we make on our team are important for the business and if you want to scale!   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube   Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes and leave a review. Help other business leaders discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast so they, too, can benefit from the ideas shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up is the best-selling business growth book by Verne Harnish and our team of coaches. My name is Bill Gallagher, host of the Scaling Up Business Podcast and a leading coach. We help leadership teams with 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash, and the 5th Decision about what kind of leader you want to be. Our purpose is helping you Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success.  

Noam Bimbaum is part of the EO San Francisco East Bay Group. The EO organization was critical in his success when it came to getting over the $1M in revenue mark, but it wasn’t easy and he shares his open entrepreneurial struggles on this week’s episode! Noam is the Founder & CEO of Ignition, inc, an IT Managed Serviced and Security Provider. He started in the IT industry almost three decades ago at the age of 19 and began consulting when he was 23. His company specializes in deploying and supporting cloud-based infrastructure to support the new challenges of the distributed, work-from-home workforce, and they are one of Apple’s most preferred IT partners in Northern California. Noam got into entrepreneurship because his father made corporate life sound so boring, and like it was hell. He accidentally stumbled upon IT when he was trying to become a novelist and needed some extra cash to get by. It turned out to be a blessing because he fell in love with the career. Noam likes to collect data. Growing up, he thought he was indecisive, but really, he’s just slow to make a decision because he likes to gather all the facts first. Noam’s gut check, and what helps him decide now is the right time to take action, will usually wake him up at 3 a.m., and then everything will fall into place.   Interview Links: Ignitionit.com Noam on LinkedIn Sponsored by: Eonetwork.org   Resources: Scaling Up Workshop: Interested in attending one of our workshops? We have a few $100 discounts for our loyal podcast listeners!Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube  

Today’s guest is a legendary person in his own right and he’s out with a special new book about leadership. He lays down an actionable blueprint in this week’s episode on how to become the person you always wanted to be. Warren Rustand is a visionary that has led many successful private, public, and not-for-profit entities. He has a passion for family, entrepreneurship, and community. Warren is the author of The Leader Within Us. He is also the Global Chair of WPO and the CoFounder and CEO of several companies. Throughout Warren’s career, he has seen common principles and themes that great leaders exhibit. He has taken examples from his own life, like his father, all the way up to the present time on what some of these leaders have showcased. The first principle in the book is clarity of vision. Leaders need to know how to communicate a clear vision to the team they’re leading if they hope to be followed. It’s a difficult thing to do, but Warren’s father would often paint a vivid picture of what the work would look like once it’s done. Another lesson Warren learned from his father early on was the ability to start conversations with anyone. There are thousands of great stories out there and we need to be good listeners of these stories. There is a lot to learn from others, and as leaders, we need to be involved in things that expand our minds. There are a lot of talkers out there, but leaders are people of action. Their philosophy is “do.” It comes naturally to them, but with that, there comes a lot of failure. And, that’s okay, because it’s part of the “doing” process. You went out there and tried when most people didn’t even get that far. Interview Links: Sponsored by: Sweetprocess.com Theleaderwithinus.com   Resources: Scaling Up Workshop: Interested in attending one of our workshops? We have a few $100 discounts for our loyal podcast listeners!Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshop: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Summits (Select Bill Gallagher as your coach during registration for a discount.) Bill on YouTube