CEO Coaching International Podcast

Ash Garg spent the first 25 years of his career working for large companies like Lockheed Martin and Hughes. Then, at age 46, he decided to become an entrepreneur. But he wasn't interested in just being self-employed. Ash had a vision from day one that he wanted to build a pharmacy company in India that was as big as any in the world. 13 years later, Guardian Pharmacy was a $100 million business. On today’s show, Ash Garg discusses how he shifted from working for some of the biggest companies in the world to making BIG happen on his own terms.

Asha Saxena is a self-described data nerd, but she preaches the importance of using data as a tool, and not as a whole solution to a business’ challenges and opportunities. Unfortunately, too many struggling CEOs don’t grasp that distinction. Even worse, some CEOs put so much stock in what the numbers are saying that they ignore the human ingenuity and intuition that companies need to adapt to an ever-changing business landscape. On today’s show, Asha discusses combing data analytics with your top-level CEO judgement to ask better questions about your business, and make smarter, more profitable decisions that will help you make BIG happen.

Like any other discipline in life, you have to master the basics of business if you want to run a successful company. Have a clear vision. Set your targets and put steps in place to hit them. Measure your progress. Optimize your cash flow. Hire the best people. Keep learning. But once you have your fundamentals covered, how do you set yourself apart from the competition? How do you broadcast and leverage what’s unique about your company to expand your client base and start ramping up towards BIG? On today’s show, Anthony Geraci explains how his team started thinking outside the box to change how a law firm traditionally operates and create a radical new approach to marketing. The result of this innovative thinking? An incredible 70% growth in one year.

Business leaders and thinkers love using sports analogies to motivate their teams, “win the day,” and craft a game plan to beat the competition. Rafe Wilkinson’s career proves just how applicable lessons from professional sports really can be to growing your company and making BIG happen. On today’s show Rafe Wilkinson discusses what his NFL career taught him about playing to his strengths, the importance of team-building, and how he hurdled a common CEO stumbling block while growing his company from 30 employees to over 1,000.

One of the hardest lessons for CEOs to learn is: You can’t do everything. This was especially tough for Danny Peykoff because he’d grown up watching his father do just that while running the family business, Niagara Water. But when Danny became the CEO of Space Jam, he discovered that letting go and delegating were essential if he was going to grow into the kind of leader that the expanding company needed. On today’s show, Danny discusses how to grow as a CEO and how he narrowed his focus to four key activities that were essential to making BIG happen.

It’s very easy for CEOs and entrepreneurs to get so wrapped up in our businesses that we feel like we ARE our businesses. Then a personal crisis snaps everything back into focus. For me, it was when my son was diagnosed with a brain tumor. For Carol Clinton, it was opening a dream skin care business with her husband – at the cost of their entire life savings – only to find herself in an operating room one week later having surgery for ovarian cancer. On today’s show, Carol discusses how her experience affected her perspective on business and life and offers advice for how CEOs can keep a personal crisis from derailing their companies.

If you’ve just been skimming the headlines since the end of last year, you might be under the impression that the new tax laws are a gigantic gift to high-earning CEOs, entrepreneurs, and their companies. If only. Yes, some changes could make filing easier and taxes less onerous for you. But there’s a lot of misinformation and exaggeration floating around about just how generous the new tax laws really are. On today’s show, Brett Ellen is back to cut through the hot air and explain how the new tax laws will really affect entrepreneurs and CEOs. Brett also discusses some of the biggest mistakes he sees people make as it relates to handling their business and personal taxes and how to put a protective moat around the castle that is you and your company

The path from pre-revenue start-up to a successful million-dollar business is tough. Getting from that first million to $5 million can be even tougher. And if you want to scale BIG, to $10, $50, or even $100 million or more? Well, that takes great leadership. On today’s show, Jim Kenefick explains how CEOs can build a team and a learning culture that will transform good companies into great ones. And then we follow that with a discussion on how you can finance your company's rapid growth.

Most companies would love to have the kind of customer engagement, retention, and repeat business that Amazon generates with its Prime memberships. But Amazon didn’t dream up customer loyalty programs on its own – they based Prime on the membership program that Costco pioneered in the 1990s. Ginnie Roeglin played a big part in fine-tuning this innovative strategy. She led Costco’s corporate marketing for nearly ten years and also helped grow Costco.com to $4 billion in e-commerce sales. On today’s show, Ginnie discusses the essentials to crafting a loyalty program that will keep your customers coming back for more and lead your business to BIG growth.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it is absolutely critical to have the absolute top people working on your leadership team. But how do you land those superstars that separate the good companies from the great companies? How do you get a senior hire right so you don’t waste time and money cleaning up the wrong hire’s mess? On today’s show, Craig Coleman discusses the proven best practices that he uses throughout the interview process to narrow the field, ensure culture fit and skill alignment, spark productive background checks, and put together a team that will make BIG happen.