Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher

How do we become ‘known’ for something and remain top-of-mind? How can you use content marketing to help you achieve influence and engage with those who matter to you? Today’s guest speaker has some ideas. John is the CEO and co-founder of Influence & Co., a tech-enabled content marketing agency that helps brands and individuals extract and leverage their expertise to create, publish, and distribute content to gain influence, visibility, and credibility with their key audiences. Despite having experience under John’s belt, he would constantly walk into meetings and people would get confused as to why this ‘kid’ was there. John was running into trust barriers right out the gate and he hated that feeling. He knew he couldn’t have been the only one, so he and his partners decided to create Influence & Co. to help others overcome this barrier. Bill has also run into this in the past. He struggled to get taken seriously as well and one of his bosses even suggested wearing prop glasses to look older. We all deal with things like this, especially as leaders, it’s hard to get taken seriously when you look like you have no experience. This is where trust plays an important role. How can people become top-of-mind and build trust naturally? It starts with being helpful. Everybody needs help in a professional and personal setting. Ask them what that missing piece is and then begin to connect the dots by introducing them to others. This works wonders on an in-person level, but how do you scale up trust? The best way to scale up trust and grow your influence is through creating content. Remember, people don’t want to deal with ‘the brand.’ They want to deal with the people in the brand. By humanizing yourself, you’re humanizing your company and it attracts wonderful recruitment opportunities as well. Consistency in your marketing message plays a huge factor in building trust within your audience. People’s memories are a powerful thing and if you hit people with the right type of content at the right time, they will remember you forever.   Interview Links: Influenceandco.com Topofmindbook.com John on LinkedIn   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube   Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, 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 business coach with Gazelles. We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).

Have you ever wondered how you can effectively scale a service-based business without losing quality and your sanity? Today’s guest expert shares a case study on how she scaled a reception business to 500 employees and $50 million dollars.   15 years ago, Jill Nelson started from humble beginnings, but has grown her business, Ruby Receptionists, into a four-time winner of FORTUNE magazine’s top five Best Small Companies to Work for, and has helped over 8,000 small businesses across the US service and create loyal customers. Today, she shares a case study of how she was able to make it all possible.   Jill found out after graduating from university that her accounting degree just wasn’t for her. On a whim, she took a receptionist position and that’s when things clicked. She learned that there was real value in having a personal connection while growing a successful business. She was a critical touch point for the company.   Jill wanted to create an executive suite, but she had no money and she had no business experience. After obtaining a business loan, she was able to launch everything an executive suite could offer… minus the office space. Jill used her resources wisely and learned early on what her unique value proposition was and used it to her advantage.   With an extreme focus on friendly and attentive customer service, Jill’s client feedback praised the receptionist for making an excellent first impression on their customers and helping them land new client deals because he/she sounded professional and knowledgeable over the phone.   This very friendly and personalized service can be difficult to scale up, but Jill has managed to grow it to nearly 500 employees and still retain a personalized feel for each of her customers.   Jill has maintained this consistency by having a lot of systems in place and also by their trademarked ‘service pyramid’ that outlines clearly their business model and how they deliver exceptional service to their customers. The service pyramid is a bit of a regulation cheatsheet meets personalize service that incentivizes rule breaking.   Interview Links: Callruby.com Jill on LinkedIn Callruby.com/scalingupbusiness   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube   TWEETABLES:   “The phone call is the most important touch point for your customers and your new customers.”   “We just won a new client because the receptionist was so nice or we just won a new customer because you actually answered your phone!”   “How can you make a personal connection when you have all these rules and regulations?”   Did you enjoy today’s episode? If so, then head over to iTunes, and leave a review. It helps other entrepreneurs discover the Scaling Up Business Podcast, so they can also benefit from the knowledge shared in these podcasts.   Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...And Why the Rest Don’t, is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles, 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 business coach with Gazelles.   We help leadership teams to get the 4 Decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash right so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth success. Our 4 Decisions are all part of the Rockefeller Habits 2.0 (from the original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits).

What can we learn about our businesses through sports and the way coaches coach? Today’s discussion is all about how no team is a bad team and how you can be a better coach to your team and business!   Craig Ahrens is a speaker, author, and consultant as well as the Founding Partner for Fungo, a consulting firm designed for coaches to practice fundamentals with their teams.   Craig was first introduced to this field through his children’s sports leagues. He started out as a passionate spectator and then later as an assistant coach, head coach, and board member. He noticed that the people who were coaches were also small business owners, mid-level managers, and senior-level executives. It gave him the opportunity to watch different leadership styles on the field.   During the seasons, Craig noticed a correlation between successful youth teams and successful businesses. Regardless of the sport, successful coaches had a certain mindset that would help the team win games through and through.   Bill reflects on why two of his own children never really got into sports. It boiled down to how the coaches treated them. Craig believes a good coach is able to close the gaps. They are able to recognize grumblings, apathy, and other weak links and quickly address them.   Coaches need to know their short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals. Coaches also need to be able to get feedback from their team to develop buy-in as well as accountability for those goals. When people understand the ‘why’ behind the goals, they are able to work efficiently towards them.   Interview Links: Teamfungo.com Craigahrens.com Craig on LinkedIn   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko  

Whether you love it or hate it, diversity is an important aspect of our workplace culture. Today’s guest has some interesting insights on how diversity can actually make you money! Diversity can impact your business for the better and also improve the quality of it.   Maureen Berkner Boyt is the Founder of Moxie Exchange Movement, an organization that focuses on tackling the talent issue from both sides so that business owners can recruit and retain the best talent on the market. They also provide resources and systems for you to interrupt unconscious bias and create an inclusive workplace.   People often complain about how Millennials need to be treated extra specially, but the reality is, you should be treating all your employees that way. The only difference is that millennials demand it from their employers. People want to know your purpose, your values, and what you stand for. People want to make an impact in the world … everybody, not just the ‘millennials’.   It’s both smart to introduce diversity in your company culture and it’s also the right thing to do. When you have a diverse set of people working for you, everybody wins. Your teams are stronger, they’re smarter, and they innovate more effectively.   Maureen was serving on the board of a company that was in real trouble. If they didn’t make any changes soon, they’d go under. After a week in a room with leadership, she was more exhausted than usual. She realized she was the only woman in the room. She also realized that there should never be an ‘only’ in the room.   There are plenty of capable women and people of color, so why do businesses not promote them? Maureen dug deeper and realized that nobody is doing this on purpose. No one says they want ‘all white men’ on their board. In fact, companies are frustrated that they cannot keep or retain diverse sets of people despite mentorship and guidance.   Whether we like it or not, every single one of us is biased. It’s just the way our brain functions to ensure we are in a safe environment. Our unconscious biases are just mental shortcuts. If you want to interrupt your biases, question what you’re thinking whenever you have a thought about a person and their performance. Ask yourself why and dig deeper. Find out what could be true vs. not true and then go from there.   Interview Links: Moxieexchange.com Maureen on LinkedIn   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko  

There is more than one way to work in a team setting these days. At an office, at home, remote, or a combination of the three. Today’s guest discusses the different ways you can create a team that incorporates flexibility and yet is still responsive to the daily needs of a business.   Frank Cottle is the Chairman and Founder of Alliance Virtual Offices and Alliance Business Centers Network. He is a recognized expert within the business center, executive suite, and virtual office industries and often speaks on topics related to all forms of alternative officing.   Frank and his partners built buildings with the purpose to house and host executive suite centers for professionals who needed a quiet and private space to work. These are quite different compared to the more open space, coffee-shop-esque feel of a co-working facility.   Frank explains the difference between service offices, coworking spaces, and incubators. Technically, these working spaces combine people, place, and technology into a single bundled product that’s delivered with a highly flexible service agreement. However, each of these spaces offers a different type of brand promise.   Virtual office spaces help the small businessman and startup founder create effective growth by lowering their monthly business expenses on rent, utilities, staff, and office equipment.   However, they don’t just house small business professionals. The two biggest groups who use Frank’s service offices are actually the government and the global Fortune 1000. Large companies are changing their business models radically.   If you looked at an annual report five years ago from a large company in the bay area, they would have had roughly 300,000 ‘employees’ in the report. Today, that number is listed as ‘workforce’ with about 20-25% being listed as contractors. This shift is drastic when you think about how much money companies are saving in leasehold debt.   Interview Links: Alliancevirtualoffices.com Abcn.com Frank on LinkedIn   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko  

What is conversational intelligence? We know about emotional intelligence and ‘traditional’ intelligence, but there is also a third part to it. Today’s show is all about how leaders can produce greater results and be more effective by developing their conversational intelligence. Conversation can bring us closer together and allows everyone to effectively co-create.   Judith Glaser is an author, academic, business executive, and organizational anthropologist. She is the Founder & CEO of Benchmark Communications, Inc., an executive consulting and coaching company with an emphasis on the importance of conversations in shaping corporate culture and achieving corporate goals.   How do you create an environment where every human being has an identity of their own, even when they share the same job title? If leaders think of every human being as being unique and different, it creates a completely different atmosphere in the workforce and it even creates innovation.   What happens in the brain when people treat us with respect and love us, vs. when we’re told we’re doing everything wrong and will never amount to anything? They create chemical, and sometimes, structural shifts in our brain.   Leaders can find ways to create an environment that opens up part of the brain that will make people smarter and the best part is you can do that with just a conversation! That’s what it means to have ‘conversational intelligence.’   Part of conversational intelligence is understanding how to listen and hear in between the lines. Many people listen to figure out how they can fit into the conversation or to correct somebody. Unfortunately, that doesn’t build connections.   If you listen without judgment, listen to just listen, you are able to see more clearly the kinds of emotions people are talking about but can’t seem to put into words. As a leader, it is important to be able to connect with everyone, but just know that some people may take more work than others to reach common ground with them.   Interview Links: Creatingwe.com Judith on LinkedIn   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko  

Mark Cuban believes the world’s first trillionaire will come from the field of artificial intelligence (AI). Today’s show will focus on what you can do with the AI tools of today. Find out what types of opportunities are available and mistakes to avoid in this interview!   Doug Rose was one of the early adopters and teachers of Agile Software Development. For over 25 years, Doug has transformed organizations through technology, training, and process optimization. He is the author of several books on artificial intelligence, data science, and management and software development. He also teaches classes at the University of Chicago and online through lynda.com and LinkedIn Learning.   Doug discovered artificial intelligence through his passion for computers and programming. As more organizations started working towards machine learning to better understand their customers, Doug saw a need to help educate managers, and those with a less techy background, understand it all and help them develop products with it.   When it comes to working with predictive AI, what are some of the ethical challenges managers are faced with? A lot of these ethical decisions fall onto the engineers, which isn’t always the best path to take long-term. Doug shares a couple of examples of what these ethical challenges look like in real life.   Unfortunately, consequences of AI aren’t being addressed early enough. Doug believes there aren’t enough people in the room right now to make calculated and educated decisions about the direction and development of the company’s AI. He attributes the lack of understanding of key terms and concepts among leadership teams as the biggest factor in this.   Interview Links: Dougenterprises.com/ Doug on LinkedIn   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko

We want companies to be more than good — in fact, we want them to be more than great — we want them to be excellent! Today’s podcast show is all about achieving business excellence and our special guest will show you how.   Tom Peters is the co-author of In Search of Excellence, the book that changed the way the world does business. 17 books and 35 years later, Tom is still at the forefront of the business management industry. The best part of all of this is that Tom’s written and speech material covering the last 15+ years is available and free, to download on his website!   Through his father’s recommendation, Bill first read Tom’s book in 1982 while he was still in college. The funny thing is, a book critic, in an attempt to shame and undermine Tom’s business book, said that ‘Fathers are just buying it to give to their teenage kids.’ This ended up being a fantastic endorsement.   How did Tom’s search for excellence begin and why did he decide to write the book? Well, it all started with the Vietnam war. Tom graduated with a civil engineering degree but suddenly found himself responsible for the lives of 15-20 sailors. He was underprepared for a leadership role to say the least.   After two deployments, Tom saw two different leadership styles. One he calls ‘Captain Day,’ who was a fantastic leader and mentor of what good leadership looked like and the other was ‘Captain Night,’ who was the direct polar opposite and made Tom and his crews’ lives hell.   Why is it that people use the word ‘excellence’ to describe ballet, theater, football, baseball, etc., but never use the same word for business? Tom thought this was nonsense! Excellence should be an aspiration all of us in business strive for. By adding personalized human touches and making customers feel valued, recognized, and appreciated, it will only increase your business — not hurt it.   Interview Links: Tompeters.com Excellencenow.com   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko  

What can your organization learn from nature? What important lessons does nature have to offer to make your organization better, stronger, faster? Find out on today’s show!   Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker is an Evolutionary Biologist, Biological Innovation and Organizational Consultant, and an Adjunct Professor at Arizona State University’s Biomimicry Center in the School of Life Sciences. She is also the author of Teeming, which introduces proven strategies nature’s ant and honeybee teams use to create lasting and growing value in an unpredictable world.   Dr. Woolley-Barker was working alongside wild baboons as a primatologist in Ethiopia when she came to the realization that humans are more like ants than we are like apes (actually, we really are both). Our social system has made such a big jump and has turned into a more collaborative superorganism where none of us can truly survive on our own, like ants.   When you take a close look at ants, they all have a different job and they all depend on each other to function. Human societies have the same undertones. You did not make all the clothes you’re wearing, you did not grow all your own food, or make your own phone. We are so fundamentally intertwined and depend on each other to work. That’s a radical shift from our closest relatives.   Dr. Woolley-Barker shares some examples of how companies she’s worked with have successfully increased their employee engagement, innovation, and productivity through the use of biomimetics.   Interface, the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpets, asked the question, “How would nature make a carpet?” By going through this thought process, they ended up making the best selling carpet product of all time, and it’s non-toxic! They now have a mission to eliminate any negative impact the company has on the environment by 2020. Productivity shot up by double and that’s because the employees now have a mission they can get behind.   People always ask, “How can we make an organization like an ant team?” Well, if you watch ants, a lot of them are really terrible at what they do. They wander around in circles and are often clueless, but it doesn’t matter! The errors of those individuals cancel out due to the structured process the ant team, as a whole, have put in place. Their process is fool-proof and so everyone succeeds.   Interview Links: Drtamsin.com   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko  

Are you getting better every day? Kaizen is a rough translation of ‘change for the better’ and today’s show is all about what it is, how it’s different from other models such as Lean, and how you can achieve Kaizen!   Hilary Corna is the former Senior Executive Office for Toyota in Asia, where she managed a team of people across fourteen different countries as a Change Leader for all of the dealerships in Asia. Hilary is also the author of One White Face, a memoir of her time abroad working for the company.   Hilary studied in Japan and secured a job at Toyota Motors in Singapore after college. She then transferred into a more managerial role in Indonesia where she ran a pilot program with the end-goal of rolling it out throughout all of Toyota Asia’s facilities when it became successful. This is where Hilary learned that it’s important to start small and test and test before scaling up.   Hilary sees first hand how business owners get ‘shiny object syndrome’ with technology. People are constantly looking for bigger and better tools when the simplest tool you can use is pen and paper, or a free technology system, which is what the staff at Toyota use until they can prove results.   Kaizen is about trying to find the root cause or problem within a process as early in the process as possible to prevent it from becoming a bigger problem in the future. Most problems are just problems of problems of problems and Kaizen kills that right from the beginning.   Through Kaizen, it looks directly at the process and takes a real look at why did the process fail in such a way that the team member couldn’t complete the job, not the other way around. So many times upper management puts blame on the employees, when really, they might have just been working with a broken and unrealistic system all along.   Kaizen helps shift the mindset of putting blame on others or pointing fingers at those who are responsible and puts a focus on where did the process break down and how can the team fix it so that everyone succeeds.   Interview Links: Hilarycorna.com Hilary on LinkedIn   Resources: Scaling Up for Business Growth Workshops: Take the first step to mastering the Rockefeller Habits by attending one of our workshops. Scaling Up Website Gazelles Website Bill on YouTube Scaling Up Podcast — Brian Scudamore Scaling Up Podcast — Shannon Susko