Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher

Do your beliefs help you or hurt you in life? Leaders with limiting beliefs prevent themselves from showing up as powerful leaders. The thing about it is, everyone has limiting beliefs, it’s how we identify them and improve upon them, that helps us get out of the trap.   Elizabeth Crook is a business strategist and advisor at Orchard Advisors. She is also a Gazelles coach and the bestselling author of Live Large.   When Elizabeth was 30 years old, she was living in Latin America and working directly with the American Embassy as well as consulting companies on how to expand and grow.   One day, Elizabeth was invited to speak at a reading and learning group. Despite her extensive experience at the time, Elizabeth kept starting every sentence with, ‘I’m probably wrong, but...’ This belief was seriously limiting her career and her potential in life. When it was pointed out to her, Elizabeth had to stop and break through this.   We can’t scale a company without scaling its leaders as well. An important part of Elizabeth’s work is helping leaders develop and increase their self-awareness so that they can show up in a powerful way. If you’re not evolving your leadership, there is a serious problem within the company.   People can turn a strength into a weakness as they take on more responsibility. For example, Elizabeth was working one-on-one with a leadership member who believed asking for help was a sign of weakness. He cited that his best strength was being self-reliant.   This might have worked when he was an employee, but as a leader, he now needs to grow and start to depend on others. By putting this man in a leadership role, his primary strength effectively got turned upside down. This is where working closely with your leadership team and to help them develop awareness about their limiting beliefs is critical.   Interview Links: Orchardadvisors.com Elizabethbcrook.com Elizabethbcrook.com/resources A Free Chapter of Live Large   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  

There are five big ways you can improve your business credit. Today’s guest will discuss how it is slightly different than your personal credit, why it’s important for your business, and how to separate the two so they don’t get mixed up!   Ty Crandall is the CEO at Credit Suite, a leading finance software and business credit company in the country. Ty and his team help clients build their business credit and help them get financing.   When Ty experienced the 2008 market crash, he saw first-hand what it was like to build a successful business and then see it disappear. His revenue had dropped 90% and he couldn’t serve his clients as effectively anymore. He had no idea that business credit even existed at the time, much less know how to keep both his personal and business credit separate.   Ty signed everything to his personal credit, so when business was down and he was forced to default on payments, creditors were now able to take assets directly out of the company. It was a mess. Once the creditors couldn’t get any more money out of the company, they then went directly for Ty’s personal assets. He lost everything.   Fortunately, Ty was able to get out of it and he knew he had to help people fix their credit and repair the damage the economy had caused on them. He didn’t want anybody to go through what he went through. This is why he is in the line of work that he is in today.   At the time, there wasn’t a lot of information about corporate credit. Ty had to dig deep to find out how to obtain it, how it worked, and how you could use it to protect your personal assets. Ty was blown away by the various ways you could protect yourself and the financial opportunities you could have with business credit.   Ty walks through the five steps that will improve your business credit:   Step 1: Set up your business correctly! Step 2: Do a free check with all the reporting agencies. Step 3: Start building vendor credit. Step 4: Start building store credit. Step 5: Start building fleet/vehicle credit.   By doing these five steps, you build enough trust with the banks where you can qualify for loans and credit lines for your business. Step 1 is often the hardest part, but once you have it completed, building business credit is actually quite easy!   Interview Links: Creditsuite.com Creditsuite.com — D-U-N-S® Number Creditsuite.com — Monitoring Ty 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   TWEETABLES:   “I ended up being very successful at a young age and then systematically lost everything.”   “A downturn of one kind or another is inevitable.”   “Having your business and your personal credit intricately tied can make it a very personal crisis.”   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 a 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).  

As someone who is trying to grow your business, what can you learn from the biggest of companies out there? We define fast-moving companies as gazelles and we depict the big, larger, companies as elephants. However, there are important lessons you can learn from both that should not be ignored!   Mike Maddock is a serial entrepreneur, author, and keynote speaker. Currently, Mike is the Founder Partner of Maddock Douglas, an innovation consulting firm that has helped more than 25% of the Fortune 100 companies. Mike has personally launched five successful businesses, written three books, and he is also a columnist for Bloomberg Businessweek and Forbes.   Mike worked all throughout his teen years and has seen what good bosses and bad bosses looked like. A year-and-a-half after graduating high school, Mike started his own marketing communications company and grew the business up to 50 people.   Mike had a ‘Jerry Maguire’ moment and shifted his focus more on innovation. He started a new company and made $3.5 million in revenue within a couple of years. Since then, he’s learned a lot about research, consumer behavior, and fear!   Whenever you’re changing anything, people freak out and they go to what makes them feel strong, which is often the worst thing you can do when the world is changing around you. Fear makes people go ‘back to the basics.’ At the end of the day, it’s a balancing act between the creative/innovation types and the analytical types in an organization. When you can get the right balance of both, these companies survive and thrive in new environments.   Mike shares an example of a meeting gone wrong, at least it appeared to be. Mike was presenting research to dentists about an emerging marketing, teeth whitening, and they ripped into him. Mike and his team predicted teeth whitening would be a $4 billion opportunity, today it is an $11 billion market. The dentists that ripped into him were experts in their market. However, the more you’re an expert in something, the harder it is to see growth, opportunity, and possibility.   Interview Links: Maddockdouglas.com Mike 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  

Can you answer this question: What’s your life purpose? Most of you might not have a very good answer. When Bill asks high-achievers this question, only about 10-20% of them can answer honestly. People who know what their life purpose is have a competitive edge over everyone else. Find out the steps you need to take to discover your purpose, in this week’s episode.   Craig Filek is the Founder of Purpose Mapping, a tool to help high-achievers find meaning and purpose in their life. He holds over two decades of experience when it comes to inner work, authenticity, and agile entrepreneurship. He built what he thought would be his ideal life, only to walk away from it all and focus on what really matters — raising his family and living his purpose.   When Craig was introduced to The E Myth, by Michael Gerber, he did the Primary Aim exercises every six weeks for about a year to really hone down on ‘what’ his purpose was. A few years passed by and a couple of career changes later, Craig decided it was time to start Purpose Mapping in 2010.   Our identity is so tied up in the work we do. When we no longer work, we can sometimes start to have an identity crisis. And even then, some executives will suffer from depression after they’ve hit their personal and professional goals because they are left with a void of ‘what’s next?’. They have the vacation house and the high-status job, but those things do not sustain them emotionally or mentally. This is where purpose comes in.   How do you find your purpose? Craig found his purpose almost by accident. As an adopted child, he had an intense desire to answer the question, “Who am I?” Through taking several personality tests and introspection, the same keywords started showing up for Craig.   When you feel fear, that’s when you know you’re at the edge of your comfort zone and in order for you to get into your ‘flow’ state, you have to jump off that cliff. There are things we do that take us out of our flow state and end up sabotaging our success. Every one of us has shame, but the people who face their shame end up not letting it spill out into the rest of their lives. By owning up to our flaws, we are able to dig even deeper into who we are and find out our purpose in life.   Interview Links: Purposemapping.com Craig on LinkedIn The E Myth, by Michael Gerber   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 can you develop yourself and your team more holistically than just job training? In the beginning of the company there’s a lot of focus on job programs to help staff learn how to do their job, but what about after, when you have those systems in place? Today’s guest will show you how!   Robert Glazer is the Founder and Managing Director of Acceleration Partners as well as the Founder and Chairman of BrandCycle. He is a serial entrepreneur with a proven track record of success. On today’s show, Robert discusses different ways you can develop your team (and yourself) beyond simple job training.   Robert was always an entrepreneur and as he was getting comfortable with risk, he was also finding ways to minimize it. Through this, he started to align himself around how to make processes better and how he could also make himself and others better.   After running a high-performance company, he came to notice that you end up breaking a lot of people along the way. When you’re growing 30-40% a year, most people simply cannot keep up with that. Robert was finding issues where his team was great, at first, but he kept having to shift them out of positions as the company grew bigger and bigger. How could he keep and retain his people no matter what the company’s growth looks like? Robert was determined to break the cycle.   One of Bill’s values today is ‘Never Finished,’ which means that it’s important for him and his staff to always be growing and evolving. If companies want to scale up, they have to develop themselves and their leadership team along the way, because strategies and tactics will only get you so far and you will plateau.   People want to talk to Robert about their product, but Robert is more interested in the business of the business and the business of people. In fact, every business has two parts to it: the product and the business of the business. Many founders love working on their product, but completely ignore the business side of things and get overwhelmed by the growth.   As the founder, leading based on the company’s level of growth can be very tricky. You start off small and are visible to everybody, but as you grow, you have to begin putting new leaders in place, so that you can become a different kind of leader within your company. It’s difficult for many founders because their management/influence styles have to adapt rather quickly and that isn’t always easy.   When you focus on people not just in their job role but help them holistically develop themselves that they can apply it to their professional and personal life, you get a more engaged and dedicated workforce. However, with that being said, that can’t happen if the founder doesn’t lead the charge and work on improving him or herself first.   Interview Links: Accelerationpartners.com Brandcycle.com Fridayfwd.com The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz The Miracle Morning, by Hal Elrod   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:   “One of our values today is ‘Never Finished.’ Always be growing and evolving until you die.”   “Every business has 2 businesses: the product and the business. A lot of founders don’t like the ‘business’ part.”   “You’ve got to be a different kind of leader and influencing differently than you do in the beginning.”   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 a 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).

The best brands in the world make you feel sexy, invincible, and like a hero — and you can be just like them! When you start thinking about yourself and your business as a brand, it can open up all kinds of opportunities that you may have never seen before. Find out how to develop ‘the best brand in the world’ on this week’s episode.   Deb Gabor is the Founder and CEO of Sol Marketing. She is a brand dominatrix and investor pitch whisperer. At Sol Marketing, Deb has helped develop brand strategy for household names like Dell, Microsoft, and Goldman Sachs, just to name a few. Deb is also the author of the bestselling book, Branding is Sex.   After trying to become a doctor, Deb found herself being really, really bad at medical school. She decided to switch fields and study communication instead. While still in college, Procter and Gamble came to her school and she helped launch a test product called Fruitopia. This sparked a huge interest for Deb on the research involved as to why someone would buy a product. There are so many other drinks to choose from, what’s the person’s story and why would they pick this drink out of all others?   The best, most sustainable brands in the world are the ones who can create and convey a vision for the future and deliver on that promise. The biggest disruptions in business models tend to happen outside of the given industry. For example, big food innovations and disruptions that are happening right now are not coming from within the grocery market and food producer industry.   When it comes to branding, it comes down to a breaking point of “Brand or be branded.” You don’t own your brand, your customers own your brand. Your brand technically has two parts: The identity and the image.   The brand image is the part the customer owns. It’s their reflection back on you; it’s their perceptions and relationship with you. Most importantly, it’s their immediate experience with you. The brand identity is the part you own and control. It is how you show up. It is how you make promises and deliver on those promises to those you are serving. You have to manage both in order to deliver effective messaging. If you fail in these two areas, you leave your brand up to the control of your customers, and this can lead to broken brand promises.   Interview Links: Brandingissex.com Solmarketing.com 8hourbrand.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    

Bahaa Moukadam is a former Silicon Valley CEO with an extensive track record of success. He is also a Certified Gazelles International Coach and throughout his career, Bahaa has grown companies from $0 to $40 million in 5 years and $60 million to $173 million in 3 years. Now, he helps teach executives and Entrepreneurs how to avoid critical business mistakes while also enjoying the journey of building a successful company.   Although Bahaa worked mostly in the IT sector, he has helped CEOs and companies outside of his industry of expertise. In one example, Bahaa worked with a company in the MRI machine service industry. Even though he knows nothing about MRI machines, he was able to help the founder take vacations twice a year and enjoy more freedom. Prior to that, the founder had not taken a vacation in over 10 years.   When your company is organized in such a way where the leader can take time off, that company becomes much more valuable. There’s nothing worse than having to sell a company that only really works when there’s one man (the founder) running the show. It’s in everyone’s best interest that the leader can take a vacation and the business keeps on working correctly.   A lot of CEOs are really good at one of these two things: results or relationships; very few are good at both. Some business owners are focused on developing results and keeping the eye on the prize, unfortunately, they might burn relationships in the process. On the flip side, some founders are really good at creating a country club feeling with their customers but lose sight very quickly of their results.   The perfect example of this was a husband and wife team Bahaa worked with, a year ago. They had been in business for about 14 years and had 125 employees and 3 locations. They built a company that made 12 million a year, but neither of the two founders made any profit. They were too focused on the relationship side of things, which was good because they’re employees were very happy, but they weren’t focused on the results. After working with Bahaa, they ended up consistently making $50,000 to $90,000 a month in net profit.   On the flip side of things, Bahaa worked with a defense contractor that was heavily driven by results. It was a 250-million-dollar division out of a multi-billion-dollar company. The president of that division was not relationship-focused at all. In fact, his lack of awareness on the people side of things really started creating a lot of issues and it weakened the team heavily, which affected results. With some help from Bahaa, the president became a lot better about the needs of his staff and how to treat people.   The key thing to remember here is to keep a balance on the results of your company and the relationships of your staff. The easiest part of business is the systems and the production. The hardest part is the people. It’s okay to be good at one or the other, but just make sure you have the right people in place to help you in your weaker areas.   Interview Links: Seemetricspartners.com Business Fitness Assessment   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:   “When the company is totally dependent on their CEO or founder, that’s a weaker and less sellable company.”   “CEOs are like ‘it’s so expensive’ when working with a high-level coach. I promise the return is there in the 1st year.”   “The easiest part of business is the systems and the production. The hardest part is the people.”   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 a 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).  

This week it’s time to cut the BS out of your writing, your language, and your business. No one wants to hear lies! Most business writing and the way executives talk is just filled with BS and people are just sick of it. It’s time to stop now!   Josh Bernoff has been a professional writer since 1982 and is the author of Without Bullshit. Also, for 20 years, he was at Forrester Research, where he wrote and edited reports on the future of technology. He was also a speaker at the Gazelle’s Growth Summit this year.   While working at Forrester, Josh would often get briefs and press releases from hundreds of Tech startups, but he noticed that most of the communication he received was BS. Of all the press releases he received, only .02% of all the words in there had any real meaning to Josh. That’s a lot of waste.   So, when Josh left Forrester, he wanted to teach people how to get rid of the bullshit and get straight to the point. People use jargon because somewhere in their head they think everybody uses this terminology. However, when you use jargon, you are actually more likely to alienate the people you’re trying to connect with, your customer.   People who are used to pitching and promoting are used to using certain words like ‘widely successful,’ ‘great,’ and ‘powerful’ to drive home that big point they’re trying to make, but to the outside world, it looks like complete BS. In fact, the more of these overexaggerated words you use, the less credible you look.   Instead of being super intense and using these big empty words and jargon that no one understands, you can take lessons from famous speechwriters who would often open the speech or conversation with a proactive fact. Bill likes to lead with, “One in four of you will not complete this program, statistically speaking.” That immediately got the attention and the engagement of the entire room.   People’s attention spans are very short. Based on a survey Josh conducted for his book, people spend a total of 46 hours a week reading and writing for their work, more than a full-time job, so anything you have to say to them, it had better be eye-catching and important.   When you need to write an important memo or message to your team, then you will need to think of these four things before you craft it. The first thing is, who will be reading this? Second, what’s the objective? What change are you trying to make? Third, what action should the reader take? And fourth, what kind of impression would you like your reader to be left with about you? Josh uses the ROAM acronym to help him remember this: Readers, Objective, Action, iMpressions.   Interview Links: Withoutbullshit.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  

Did you know that 83% of small businesses around the world are not profitable? Business owners are living month-to-month and are desperately struggling. Today’s episode addresses this so that you never have to worry about living paycheck-to-paycheck again.   Mike Michalowicz is the author of several books including The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, Surge, and Profit First. He is also the Owner of Profit First Professionals, his third million dollar venture. This is Mike’s second guest appearance on the show!   Why did Mike decide to write Profit First? Believe it or not, Mike had grown his companies to multi-million dollar businesses, but was not profitable, at all. He had refinanced his house multiple times and was living check-by-check.   He thought if he could run the business long enough, they’d eventually hit their ‘big break’ and become profitable. After selling his businesess, he decided to become an angel investor with this mindset and, guess what, the 10 businesses he invested in all tanked. Within two years, he lost every penny that he had ever made.   After he told his family that he had failed them, he went through two years of ‘functional’ depression. It was not a proud moment in his life. Through this journey, he was able to ask himself some hard questions and those hard questions lend to a lightbulb moment. How can I make my businesses profitable, always?   Keep in mind, it’s also a lifestyle problem for many entrepreneurs as well. As they’re trying to live a good life and create a profitable company, in the back of their mind they’re worried about whether or not they can afford their car or their home tomorrow. The amount of stress this puts on someone makes it very hard to see the bigger picture.   Mike’s accountant was trying to help him by showing him the real numbers, by showing him the metrics, and Mike would brush him off and not listen to his advice. If Mike saw he had money in the bank, then he had money in the bank! But it isn’t always so simple.   Mike knew that he had to change somehow, but changing your behavior right off the bat is a very difficult thing to do. So, what he did was he decided to put a percentage of his money into a ‘profit’ bank account and run his business on the remaining cash. By making this simple shift, he was able to see things from a bigger perspective and he was forced to reverse engineer his business so it would survive on the remaining cash, no matter what.   Interview Links: Mikemichalowicz.com Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine, by Mike Michalowicz   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

This week’s episode explores Maria’s personal journey and discovery over the years. An entrepreneur at a very young age, she gave up the boyfriend, the oceanview property, and her business for a deeper meaning. Through traveling the world and finding her life’s purpose, she ended up creating a billion-dollar company in return. Find out how by listening in.   Maria Sipka created her first company at the age of 19 and by 21, it was a $2 million dollar business. What seemed to be the ‘perfect life.’ Maria gave it all up to search for deeper meaning. In 2005, she co-founded XING, which is now worth over a billion dollars. Maria later moved to San Francisco and Co-Founded Linqia, a company that aims to educate and inspire marketers.   Maria’s childhood sweetheart, a high-performance athlete, encouraged Maria to attend a Tony Robbins’ seminar at the young age of 16. She is forever grateful for going to that event at such a young age because it really opened her eyes to the world. She came out of it a changed person.   At the age of 17, Maria’s parents gave her $20,000 of what was supposed to fund Maria’s future wedding party to use as an investment instead. She took that money and invested in real estate. She was then hired as a marketing and communications specialist after she finished high school. And before she knew it, she had her first business at 19 and she was completely out of her league.   After hiring staff, Maria’s business was doing well, hitting a couple of million dollars in revenue within the first few years. However, what changed for Maria was when her childhood sweetheart introduced her to his personal trainer, and that’s when she found out he owned over 100 properties.   How did a personal trainer own so much property? She found out her way of investing was all wrong. She went home that night and put a spreadsheet together using his formula. She was able to work out that by the age of 40 she could own a billion dollars worth of property using his example. While following his model over 8 years, she acquired 50 properties by the age of 27.   Despite waking up to oceanfront views, she decided it was time to close this chapter and find a bigger purpose in her life. So, she left her business and her boyfriend behind in Sydney and went on a 10-day retreat to restart herself.   After the retreat, Maria later traveled the world for two years and met inspiring and amazing entrepreneurs along the way. Since then, Maria looks at her life like a storybook and tries to completely change, update, and rework her story and entrepreneurial journey. For the last 15 years, she has picked yearly themes that help her grow and live a more meaningful life.   Interview Links: Linqia.com Xing.com/en Maria 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