Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher

What do you do when your whole industry has been challenged? How do you make a pivot and think out of the box and adapt? Today’s guest shares how he’s turned his very physical business model online!   Dan Chan is an award-winning Master Magician, where his talents have taken him all over the world. Dan is regarded as one of the nation’s top corporate magicians, which has been an industry that’s been affected lately. How is he managing to keep up with the changing times? By practicing in something called ‘Zoom magic’!   Dan invested 20-plus years of his life learning magic and when the pandemic hit, he was depressed. He did what most people do and binge-watched Netflix. He thought his career was over and it was maybe time to get a day job. Some of his existing clients asked if he’d be willing to do a virtual show, but not wanting to disappoint anyone, he decided to start off small and work his way up from there.   People have adapted quickly in these virtual times. Birthday parties, holidays, and family gatherings are all on Zoom now. In some ways, families in different time zones feel more connected because they see each other more often. It’s actually become more cost-effective to hire an entertainer via Zoom.   For certain startups, they might not be able to afford entertainment, but this is actually a perfect time to get creative with your rates. Ask for stock or equity instead. When you’ve built a good standing relationship with clients, they’ll be more than willing to exchange ‘other goods’ for your services.   Interview Links: Danchanmagic.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  

Are you working on low-value things and not enough high-value action items? Do you dislike some of the tasks on your plate? What about your team? Today’s guest shares how you and your team can operate in their sweet spot and get good, and happy, work done. Andy Clayton leads Petra Coach Europe, the UK’s leading Scaling Up coaching company, and helps entrepreneurs and high-growth companies eliminate what’s getting in the way and focus on what truly adds value. Andy is also a long-time member of EO and the author of Sweetspot. Andy discovered the importance of the sweet spot within his own team member at first, who was running a lot of the mission-critical tasks at his organization. He knew she had to narrow down her skill sets and focus as the company grew bigger and if they wanted to scale. Andy decided to create four quadrants. 1. Sweetspot: High-value items and what you like doing, 2. Distractions: You like doing these tasks but they don’t add that much value, 3. Drains: Important work but you dislike it, and 4. Disasters: You’re neither good at these tasks nor do you feel like it’s a good use of time. The real question is, as we do this exercise a couple of times throughout both our professional and personal life, why don’t we spend more of our time in our sweet spot areas? Andy conducted a sweet spot workshop in a room full of entrepreneurs and just by doing this exercise for an hour, a number of his participants were able to save 100 hours each month just by putting some of their tasks in these four quadrants and seeing how to take delegation and outsourcing to another level.   Interview Links: Sweetspot.guru Andy 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    

Our three panelists in this episode of Scaling Up Insights are Lisa Ridley, Cheryl Biron, Kristin McLane. Lisa is a Scaling Up Coach and focuses on facilitating positive change with her entrepreneurial clients. Cheryl started her career in corporate before having an ‘entrepreneurial fit’ and starting her own business. Kristin has been an entrepreneur for the last 24 years in the software industry. Let’s talk about stress management! Lisa believes a lot of it comes down to mindset and how we approach upcoming problems. Cheryl believes it’s important to ask, ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’ Get it all out there and then reframe/reason with yourself on different ways to solve the problem. When Bill was faced with possible bankruptcy, his financial advisor told him that there is no such thing as debtor’s prison, it helped him relax and see the bigger picture. Kristin noticed that athletes use stress to help them get better at what they do. Stress isn’t seen as a negative thing, but a positive. It’s almost like you have to use stress to get to the next level. The truth is, how do you see stress? In a study of 30,000 people on stress management, if you think stress is a bad thing, then you are 43% more likely to die. If you see stress as something that is not harmful to you, your chances are drastically lowered. That’s how powerful our mindset is in deciding whether something is good for us or not. Stress can be used as a useful tool and is an important part of how we navigate conflict. Lisa shares an example. A large number of the population is afraid of public speaking. Before you go on stage to speak, you can tell yourself two things. That you hate this and that you’re nervous/scared of doing this or you can say that these emotions you’re feeling right now are your body’s way of energizing you. You can redirect this nervous energy into focus. There was a study that used these two different public speaking groups, one that was scared and the other that was energized, the audience believed the ones who used this fear in a positive way performed better, despite being just as scared.   Interview Links: Compassgroupltd.com Lisa on LinkedIn Lexagen.net Cheryl on LinkedIn CIMx.com Kristin on LinkedIn   The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It, by Kelly McGonigal Solve for Happy: Engineer Your Path to Joy, by Mo Gawdat Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl   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  

Does your company have values? Are you living them out each and every day or have they become another action item on the list? It’s okay to be a bit cynical about your values. Today’s guest showcases how values can really move mountains. Darius Mirshahzadeh is a high growth CEO, serial entrepreneur, and culture-building mad scientist at The Money Source. He was ranked #9 on Glassdoor’s list of Top CEOs of Small and Medium Companies in the U.S. Through the use of values, Darius grew his company of 30 to over 1,000! Darius has always been an entrepreneur, starting from the age of 10, and when he was 25, he started his first high-growth company. However, despite his success, he had no idea what he was doing. He joined the Birthing of Giants program and it opened his eyes to what core values could do to a company and its people. However, the journey was still not perfect. As Darius was sharing the core values to his team for the very first time on a call, one of his team members did not have their mic muted and he overheard what they — really — thought about the company’s values. He was upset, but looking back, that person was right. The company was still a mess. Three years into the Birthing of Giants program, they conducted an exercise to see which of the founders could remember their own core values. Half of the room didn’t (Darius being one of them), and the remaining other half didn’t believe their employees could remember them. Darius was dumbfounded, how could he not even remember his own core values? Darius went back to the drawing board. What he created was not memorable and they couldn’t be applied to real-life scenarios. He decided to rework his core values in a simpler way and have it be something that everybody could realistically live through and take action on. Interview Links: Themoneysource.com Darius on LinkedIn Birthingofgiants.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

Have you ever thought you were doing it all wrong? It could well be! Today’s guest shares some big lies about work that will help you get out of your funk and focus on the bigger picture. Ashley Goodall is an executive, leadership expert, and author of Nine Lies About Work, and has spent his career exploring large organizations from the inside. He is currently the Senior Vice President of Methods and Intelligence at Cisco, where his organization aims to reveal the answers to some of the most challenging questions about work. Ashley fell into business and when he worked at Deloitte, they would rate his performance on a scale of 1–5 every year. He hated this process and even more so when he had to do it to other people. Deloitte heard his disdain for it and put him in charge of making their system better. A theme that runs very powerfully throughout Ashley’s book is that we are humans, we are imperfect, we are different, and too much of the world of work finds that difference annoying. Large organizations make a conscious effort to level the playing field, but what they’re really saying is that they’re uncomfortable with human difference. The best organizations and the best teams have figured out how to help people prosper and grow within their organization using their unique talents and differences. Human individuality and uniqueness is a critical feature, not a bug! And, it’s the most important feature of them all.   Interview Links: Ashleygoodall.com Ashley 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

Bill and today’s guest go way back — nearly 18 years — and he served as a mentor and someone who inspired Bill to change directions from CEO to Coach. Today’s topics dive into boosting employee engagement, what it is, and some of the signs your team is highly engaged. Dean Jones is a Senior Learning Expert at Gallup, responsible for leading Gallup’s global learning strategy. In addition to advising clients on learning and organizational development interventions, he has overseen Gallup’s client learning strategy, the development of the organization’s workplace consultants and learning offering, and the growth of Gallup’s learning business worldwide. Dean doesn’t know if he’ll be getting on a plane this year. The pandemic has made people realize that there are other ways, and possibly better ways, to work. This falls in nicely with the work Dean is doing, which studies how people develop and how organizations can address development in really meaningful ways. Gallup, Inc. were the ones that coined the term employee engagement and have been studying this topic for longer than anybody else has. The reason for this is because they wanted to distinguish between employee engagement and employee satisfaction. Fundamentally, engagement is driven by a finite number of things. It starts with people knowing what’s expected of them, having the right materials to do their job right, and having the ability to do what they do best every day. When leaders and managers focus on those things, they create a culture that’s far superior to just buying ping pong tables for the break room.   Interview Links: Gallup.com Dean 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

Our two coach panelists have both been on the show before. Bruce Eckfeldt is a consultant, Certified Gazelles coach, and speaker on organizational development and performance management. Anita Cabell is the Founder of Leading Edge and has been in the Chinese market for the last 18-plus years as a Scaling Up Coach.   Today’s panel dives in on what they’ve been seeing when it comes to scaling forward during this pandemic. Bill has seen some surprising things happen this quarter, as some of his clients have been able to scale effectively to $1 million-plus in their revenue.   Anita has been working globally for a number of years and her advice is to not be afraid of the virtual world. There is so much that can get done. Anita has a lot of Asian clients and since they were hit first, she was able to see what they did to pivot and bring that knowledge and advice back to her U.S. clients.   Bruce has seen two things happening here when it comes to pivoting and scaling forward. The first is that his clients have been very quick to get a top-down approach and look to where their company can change and adapt within the market. Second, the mindset of the entrepreneur is very flexible. Those who have seen this level of crisis before are taking this as just another challenge to work through.   As Bruce is currently working with a lot of CEOs in New York, he is noticing a lot of them are comparing these new events to 9/11. It’s bringing back memories of how to figure out things when everything was uncertain and up in the air.   When this pandemic hit, Bill was concerned. He thought he might have to retire early because we were going through a recession. Not wanting to have idle hands, he provided coaching services for free or ‘pay what you can’ and because of this, his business is thriving and busier than ever, and revenues are up!   Interview Links: Eckfeldt.com Bruce on LinkedIn Leadingedgebusinesscoaching.com Anita 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

We all know the benefits of having a conscious culture where innovation and reinventing are rewarded and supported, but realistically, most of us are not innovating or reinventing. Today’s guest shares how to incorporate the right structures to make innovation easy!   Josh Linkner is a five-time tech entrepreneur, hyper-growth CEO, two-time NY Times bestselling author, and venture capitalist. Josh, who organically started his career as a jazz guitarist, uses his background to cultivate and create disruptive innovation.   Josh put himself through college playing music. Whether you like jazz as an art form or not, one thing is very clear, 99% of what you play is made up as you go. Josh took the same approach when he started his tech company 30 years ago. He had no business education but knew that he could figure it out as he went along and adapt to whatever was thrown at him. He was right.   The models of the past do not work today in this new environment that we’re in. We have to take a fresh approach if we want our company to succeed for years to come. However, just sitting down and thinking about it can be very overwhelming. Where do you start?   Too often, we think good ideas come from a lightning bolt from the heavens and it arrives to us perfectly. That just doesn’t happen. The best ideas come from multiple iterations of experimentations until you get it down right. What great leaders do isn’t bet the entire company on one great idea, they run constant experiments on several ideas to see which one has legs to stand on, and then run with it.   Interview Links: Joshlinkner.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  

We are in the same storm, but not in the same boat. We have seen throughout history that when a recession hits, it comes in waves. Today’s episode is all about how to navigate whatever the future holds so that you and your business come out stronger!   Jonathan Slain coaches high-growth leadership teams across the United States and helps them implement the Entrepreneurial Operating System also known as “Traction.” He is also the author of, Rock the Recession: How Successful Leaders Prepare For, Thrive During, and Create Wealth After Downturns.   Since WWII, every 7–10 years the United States has had a recession. Jonathan knows people roll their eyes when he talks about the ‘next recession’ but honestly, if you lost your biggest client tomorrow, you’re in a recession! The economy can be booming around you and you are in a recession in your business.   Jonathan talks about how to plan for a recession so you can adapt and cope! Jonathan wrote the book so that when something bad happened, you weren’t reactive and forced to pick between two ‘okay’ options. Taking from his very own painful life experiences, Jonathan didn’t have a plan when things went south and his business suffered because of it.   Employees were coming to Jonathan asking if they still had jobs coming Monday, clients were asking for refunds, and, throughout all of this, no one had good answers for them. The only reason Jonathan survived was that a family member loaned him money. Running a private check on your mother-in-law might not be the best and most savvy business move for you. The good news is, this is all avoidable!   Interview Links: Autobahnconsultants.com Recession.com Jonathan on LinkedIn Rock the Recession: How Successful Leaders Prepare For, Thrive During, and Create Wealth After Downturns, by Jonathan Slain and Paul Belair   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  

People are often a challenge for business leaders and sometimes it can even be difficult to source the right types of talent. Everything in business revolves around people. They are your asset. Today’s guest shares how people are the key to helping you get through tough challenges.   Tom Peters is author of 17 books and has been at the forefront of the management industry for the last 35 years. It is Tom’s belief that people and action-taking are what get good work done, not necessarily all the talking and the theory. Additionally, Tom’s work, both written and speech material, covering the last 15-plus years, is available for free on his website.   Tom has been spreading the message of ‘people first’ for the last 43-plus years. As a 77-year-old man who understands his own mortality, his definition of what success looks like is if he can walk past the mirror without barfing. People are watching and what you’re doing now to manage this pandemic will be remembered.   When the pandemic hit, Tom knew he could use his expertise to help people in need and help them through this crisis. It’s just good to give back. Sometimes people don’t necessarily need to know the strategy plan, but just need a bit of reassurance that everything is going to be okay, that they will make it through.   Tom is not a fan of the word ‘vision’ or the way executives come up with ‘company values.’ These things don’t think about the people. He would help companies create their visions when he was working with McKinsey & Company. However, he discovered that the definition of vision is a strategy study marked up by 30%.   Interview Links: Tompeters.com Excellencenow.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.)