Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher

We often focus on company performance and leadership, but what about individual performance? What can we learn from just the individual and how can we improve it so that everyone on your team is a star performer? Today’s guest has the answers. Morten Hansen is a management theorist, motivational speaker, and author. Formerly a professor at Harvard Business School, Morten now teaches management at The University of California. He also co-authored the New York Times bestseller Great by Choice with Jim Collins. Morten has recently released a new book titled, Great at Work, which he dives into, on this week's show. Morten was working 80+ hours to achieve good work, but his colleague was working 50 hours a week and still delivered good work, if not better. How was it that she was able to achieve such great quality of work within less time? This spawned the question, why are some people great at work and others are not? Through extensive research and five years later, Morten discovered that there were 7 factors or principles that explained two-thirds of people’s work performance. If you’re good at these seven things, it will go a long way into really performing exceptionally well in your role. This is great news because it doesn’t necessarily mean ‘do more’ or ‘work harder.’ The great performers are not the ones up in the middle of the night sending emails at 3 a.m. to their staff. In fact, they’re much more organized; they’re more focused and incredibly good at prioritizing. Morten found that if you’re working more than 65 hours per week, you’re getting diminishing returns in your performance. To find out how to increase your performance and what the seven principles are, listen in for more! Interview Links: Mortenhansen.com Morten 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 Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach

It takes a team to scale and grow but how do you do that with ease and grace? How can you become a powerful leader that both inspires and engages your team? Today’s guest has some answers!   Jeff Hoffman is a successful entrepreneur and the Founder of Priceline, UBid, and ColorJar. Jeff has worked alongside celebrities like Elton John, Britney Spears, and NSYNC. He knows a thing or two about what it takes to engage people and on today’s show, he shares his expertise in team building practices that bring good people together!   One of the most important lessons Jeff learned about scaling up is the value of teams. As a founder, you started the company yourself and are used to taking care of everything yourself. The problem with this though is that if your company does well, you start to think you’re pretty good at all of this.   But later, founders find themselves overwhelmed. They find themselves working harder than ever before and putting in more hours than they’ve ever done before, yet, despite this, they’ve stopped growing. The truth is, you’re never going to do anything massive or at scale by yourself.   Jeff was not smart enough to understand this in the beginning, but through his mistakes, he’s learned that the day you start taking some of your time to delegate your tasks and to find people that are smarter than you to run the company, is the day you can finally work less and be less stressed.   Jeff had to make an active effort to find talented people. Sending out an ad doesn’t work. The best people in your market aren’t looking for a job, so schedule the time to scout them. The second part of running a successful team is getting out of their way. Let the people who are smarter than you do their jobs!   Your real job as a founder is to build a workplace environment and culture that people love to go to, where the best people in the industry all want to work for you and never want to leave. Your job is to take care of the people who work for you. When you’ve achieved this, you never have to worry about the growth of your company.   Interview Links: Jeffhoffman.com Jeff 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 Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach  

The bigger you get, the harder it becomes to know what’s going on within your company. You may know your financial numbers, but how are you really doing? Are your people happy? How are you doing on those ‘softer’ skills? Well, you are able to track this in real terms by using a system called Net Promoter Score (NPS).   Sturdy McKee is a Physical Therapist, Entrepreneur, and Business Coach. He has been using NPS for the last five years and shares on today’s show his case study and some of his business insights on how NPS has helped grow his business and measure those ‘intangible’ metrics.   Sturdy had been in business for over 10 years before he even considered implementing NPS. He had 6 locations and over 40 employees, and he was losing touch with the frontline experience. He didn’t know how his customers were doing across the board and it was difficult trying to find this info from all of his different locations.   In the NPS survey question, business owners can ask their customers, “How likely are you to recommend this company, this product/service, to a friend or family member from 1-10?” 1-6s are considered detractors, 7-8s are neutrals, and 9-10s are promoters.   The formula works like this: Take the number of promoters minus the detractors and divide the remainder by the total surveyed and then you end up with your ‘Net Promoter Score.’ Typically this system ignores those who voted 7-8 and looks carefully at those who rated the service 1-6 to see what you can learn from them. And from those who rated 9-10, you use this data to see how you can attract more of these people and even receive a testimonial from them.   Sturdy’s company sent an automatic follow-up email two weeks after a patient’s evaluation asking the ‘Would you recommend us?’ question and sent the same follow-up question around the six-week mark, which ended up being a really good decision. For those who weren’t happy at the two-week mark, and having Sturdy’s team quickly address and fix it, they ended up changing their score at the six-week mark to a more positive one.   During this time, Sturdy discovered two things about his company. Volunteers and students studying physical therapy were observing/treating patients, but some patients did not consent to this and felt like they were paying a high cost only to be treated by an unskilled staff member. This caused Sturdy to change his process so that students could still learn and volunteers could still observe, but it was documented more effectively and the patients still felt like they were receiving the highest quality service.   Interview Links: Sturdymckee.com Sturdy 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 Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach   TWEETABLES:   “For people who are brand new to this, NPS is really asking one question and then leaving an open end.”   “Even from the get-go we realized it was a process, it wasn’t just a number.”   “Fortunately, we’ve eliminated specific things that were being done across the board.”   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).  

In order to grow your business, you have to recognize that you are often times the bottleneck. Everything needed to grow your business starts with you! This is why it’s important to become a lifelong learner to better develop yourself and grow your business.   Daniel Marcos is the co-Founder and CEO of Gazelles Growth Institute. He is also a long-time coach and an international speaker who has shared the stage with thought leaders like Peter Diamandis, Guy Kawasaki, and Jack Canfield. On today’s show, Daniel dives into what it means and why it’s important to be a lifelong learner and how it accelerates your career.   Daniel was a very bad student academically but he built his first internet company in Mexico City back in 1999. As Daniel began hiring Stanford and Harvard graduates to come work for him, he felt uncomfortable that he wasn’t able to understand what they were saying to him. They were using jargon he had never heard before. This experience prompted him to study for his own MBA and to better understand the people who work for him.   When Daniel started his next company in the U.S., it went under during the 2008 crash. It was awful and he lost a lot of money. Verne Harnish reached out to him, and after complaining for 30 minutes, Verne asked, “What’s next?” Daniel, feeling like an absolute failure, said he was going to return to Mexico and get a salaried job to pay for his kid’s education. Verne thought this was nonsense and offered him a new opportunity. The rest is history!   Through that experience, Daniel has become obsessed with KPIs and looking at the numbers. He now has insight into what good numbers look like to help prevent others from suffering the same faith his company did back in 2008. Back then, he saw the warning signs but ignored them. Today, he helps entrepreneurs avoid them.   Daniel has a very extensive book collection, but the problem with books is they tell you how to do things, but they never mention at what stage or when you should do those things. As we go through different stages of growth, each company is going to experience something different. A one-size-fits-all approach just doesn’t work the way the books say it does.   Daniel saw a chart that stated the U.S. today has 28 million firms and 96% of them will never do over a million dollars in revenue a year. Only about 0.4% of companies go over $10 million a year in revenue. In the end, only 17,000 companies go above $50 million in revenue each year. And in each of these financially diverse companies, they all need a completely different level of attention and systems.   Interview Links: Growthinstitute.com Daniel 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 Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach   TWEETABLES:   “The reason we’re great coaches is not because we’re so ‘brilliant.’ It’s our willingness to share the things that didn’t work for us.”   “Everything was backward for me. How much money we made, we were looking into the past. Now, a lot of my metrics are for the future and I can see what’s going on.”   “Are you, yourself, coachable?”   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).  

People are certainly the hardest part about scaling up a business. Finding the right people is crucial to helping you grow. So, how can you improve your odds from 50% to 90% or better? Through smart recruiting methods!   Geoff Smart is the Chairman & Founder of ghSMART, which was founded in 1995 to help Fortune 500 CEOs and entrepreneurs achieve their goals through hiring, developing and leading talented teams. Geoff is also the bestselling author of Who, Leadocracy, and Power Score.   As a freshman at college, Geoff was fortunate enough to get an internship at a venture capitalist firm and he noticed that large sums of money were either gained or lost due to who the investors invested in. Geoff wondered if there was a way to hack the system to help investors make better bets on people, and so his company was born.   The topic of how to get the right people on your team is one of the most popular concerns for people in business. If you get this aspect right, you are going to have the most solid improvement in your revenue and profitability and in your own enjoyment in your work.   A lot of entrepreneurs/hiring managers use their gut feelings to hire, but this could possibly be the worst mistake you can make. The reality is, you can’t judge a person based instantly on gut feel. You’re going to make a mistake and it’s going to cost you a lot of money.   Leave the emotional hiring methods behind! The average success rate for hiring is about 50%. Recruiters only get it right 50% of the time, which means people regret every 1 in 2 hires! That’s horrible! A bad hire can cost you 15 times that employee’s annual salary.   However, you can improve your 50% into 90% by focusing on these four things really well: Scorecard, Source, Select, and Sell. Geoff explains each section in depth inside the podcast episode! Listen in for more wisdom!   Interview Links: Geoffsmart.com Geoff 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 Growthinstitute.com/scalingcoach   TWEETABLES:   “If you look at global surveys on what’s on the minds of entrepreneurs, talent is number one or two out of 30 different topics.”   “If you get [talent] right, you’re going to have the most solid improvement in your revenue and profitability.”   “Ever since I started my company, I realized that managing is easy… except for the people part.”   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).  

If you think about it, there’s really no such thing as B2B. People are behind these businesses and they work with other people! It all comes down to relationships and communication. Today’s guest shares how you can build more meaningful, deeper, and stronger relationships!   Mo Fathelbab is the Founder and President of Forum Resource, LLC and co-founder of Alumni Forum Services. He is also the author of the best-selling book, Forum: The Secret Advantage of Successful Leaders and his latest book, The Friendship Advantage: 7 Keys to Building Relationships that Transform Corporate Culture and Drive Productivity. Mo will be diving into why strong relationships make all the difference and how you can build deeper relationships from the ground up in this episode!   Mo is so passionate about relationships because he knows what it’s like to not be able to connect with anyone. Growing up, he purposely put himself in situations where he was forced to talk to people so he could get better at connecting.   During a ‘Forum’ training, Mo experienced something magical. He was sharing personal details with mere strangers, things he had never shared with his family or closest friends, and it was liberating. Mo thought it was so valuable that he decided to host these trainings all over and deliver it to busy entrepreneurs wherever they may be located.   These trainings provided a model for powerful, meaningful, real, relationships that people don’t usually see in their day-to-day lives. Looking back, Mo reflects that he has shared literally everything with his group; he has no secrets and it’s an amazing feeling.   The seven keys to building relationships that Mo has outlined in his book, The Friendship Advantage, are judgment-free, mischievous fun, vulnerability, kind-truth, reliability, sharing and generosity, and to share purpose and value. The combination of these seven help build connections wherever you are.   Mo provides an example of how this would typically play out in a company setting. The first thing to determine is how does a company handle or resolve conflict. After that, it’s time to set an agenda, and then have those difficult conversations to pull everybody onto the right track.   Interview Links: Forumresourcesnetwork.com Mo 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  

An effective growth strategy is key to everything we do in scaling up. Growth strategy is a thinking game and today’s guest shares tools that will keep your growth consistent and help you figure out when to pivot when things just aren’t working.   Tiffani Bova is the Global Customer Growth and Innovation Evangelist at Salesforce and was previously VP, Distinguished Analyst and Research Fellow with Gartner. She is also the author of Growth IQ: Get Smarter about Building Your Company’s Future, which she will dive into on today’s show!   It took some time before Tiffani got into the groove of what she does today. In fact, it took her nearly eight years before she got her stride and felt comfortable giving intentional and helpful advice to struggling companies looking to grow.   Businesses were looking for that silver bullet, that ‘one thing,’ to turn their companies around and hit their numbers. The truth is, 80% of companies will experience a growth stall and fewer than that will be able to recover from it.   So, how can Tiffani help companies avoid the stall in the first place? She discovered many companies were not looking at the context of the market today. They might have looked into it briefly when the plan was made 12 months ago or 36 months ago, but few were following up with the market trends of today. Things move too rapidly in today’s environment and, by not keeping up-to-date, it can be a real growth killer.   Tiffani also noticed that it’s never been ‘one thing’ that keeps a company’s growth accelerating. It was always a combination of things that the company was doing that gave them the competitive advantage. For company A, for example, it was about entering a new market with the right partnerships and with the right sales model. That’s what led them to growth.   The third thing that’s also an important factor in growth is timing, which Tiffani calls ‘Sequence’ in the book. If you put partnerships in place after you’ve entered a new market, you may be delivering a poor service experience, which will end up breaking customer trust. Context, Combination, and Sequence are the three things that make up an intelligent growth IQ.   Interview Links: Tiffanibova.com Tiffani 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  

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