Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher

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

How do you fund your business? Is it with investors? Loans from the bank? Or something else entirely? Today’s guest will share the various ways you can fund your business and what option is right for you!   Ami Kassar is the founder and CEO of MultiFunding and a bestselling author of The Growth Dilemma. Ami specializes in helping people develop creative cost-effective alternatives to navigate the (very expensive) needs of a business.   Ami shares an example of how entrepreneurs should be thinking about their businesses. If all of your dreams came true, what would your business look like three years from now? And, what’s holding you back?   In Ami’s example, what was holding the entrepreneur back from growth was because she was still managing payroll and admin when her talent was really in consulting and leading the consulting teams. In order for her to switch her focus, Ami asked her, “How much would that cost you and how long would that take to start paying for itself?” Her answer was 350K.   So, the question was, could she afford the switch? She couldn’t. She runs her business the way many small business owners do, on a hustled budget, which means they don’t feel like they can spend more than what they can bring in.   Ami opened her eyes to the different loan options she could afford based on her situation. She qualified for a Small Business Loan, which means she could borrow 350k without putting a lien on her house. She would have a monthly payment of $4,300, which was around 12-13% of her cash flow and it would allow her to successfully make the switch in the least painful way.   This is the perfect example of how you can responsibly use leverage to scale up and grow without putting too many financial risks and burdens onto you and your personal household. If everything works according to plan, the entrepreneur would have paid the loan off in 2.2 years and she would triple her bottom line.   Interview Links: Multifunding.com Ami 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  

Is it possible to grow a business worth over a million dollars with just one person? Yes, it is! Today’s guest shows you why this question is relevant for companies who aspire to grow its worth into the several hundred million dollar mark.   Elaine Pofeldt is an independent journalist who specializes in small business, entrepreneurship, and careers. She is the author of the Million-Dollar, One-Person Business, which takes a look at how entrepreneurs are hitting seven-figure revenue in businesses where they are the only employees.   Elaine is a contributor for Forbes and writes frequently for them about solopreneurs, also known as the one-person business. While researching for her next new piece, Elaine stumbled upon a treasure trove of data about the one-person businesses who were making over a million dollars in revenue. How were they able to achieve such success, solo? This sparked the idea for the book.   Elaine shares some of the common traits these one-person businesses have in common. They automated things right away! They also hired freelancers to help them with small tasks like designs, templates, and more. These solopreneurs were also quick to outsource certain tasks to bigger companies who were experts in that particular task or field.   By being able to outsource tedious tasks to the experts, these solopreneurs could spend more time where it matters; cultivating relationships with their best customers and finding new business.   A lot of these solopreneurs make an active effort to step away from the business so that they’d not tied to the phones or the computers. Instead, they’re attending business events and they hire coaches to help them get to the next level. They’re constantly surrounding themselves with high-level ideas.   When it comes to automation and if you’re not feeling 100% secure about hiring a freelancer just yet, Elaine recommends making a detailed inventory of what types of things you’re spending your time on in your business. See if there’s anything you can outsource based on that data that would free you up to do something more beneficial and useful.   Interview Links: Elainepofeldt.com Elainepofeldt.com/new-book   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  

Will AI machines destroy humanity as we know it? Actually, quite the contrary. AI matters to the everyday business owner more than they might know. There’s a lot to be learned in prediction technology and today’s guest shares advice on how you can use this knowledge to grow your marketing and sales potential.   Avi Goldfarb is the Ellison Professor of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. Avi is also Chief Data Scientist at the Creative Destruction Lab, Senior Editor at Marketing Science, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Avi is also the author of Prediction Machines, which he will be discussing on today’s show!   In 2012, there were only a couple of companies at the time that were calling themselves AI companies. However, that slowly grew and by 2015, Avi had seen a huge increase of at least 50 companies being created a year. Avi and his co-authors decided to investigate and research what this technology meant for our modern society.   The Mosaic web browser made the internet accessible to the general population, but it took us about a decade to figure out how to really commercialize it. Avi believes the same will hold true with AI. We are going to see businesses use AI tools in various ways to solve key problems.   Although AI will not improve the general intelligence of your company, prediction is still really, really valuable. Why? Because it cuts down on all the unknown variables in your decision-making process when you are faced with uncertainty. Through prediction, you can be much more confident (and you have the data to prove it) on what’s the correct direction to take your business in.   Interview Links: Avigoldfarb.com Creativedestructionlab.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