Scaling Up Business Podcast

Michael Synk is the owner and execution coach for In-Synk. He is also a Senior Certified Gazelles Coach with over 14 years of coaching experience. Michael and I talk today about brand promises, how to improve on them, and offer two client case studies to boot. Let's dive right in. Michael has been coaching Uniform Masters for the last year and a half. Unfortunately, it was only until two months ago that he and his client began to see brand promise. It has taken them quite some time to figure out the market and their core strengths. The company itself has been around for seven years and their operations have been great, but they've just been a little too shy in telling their company story. Although some time has passed, quite a bit of things have improved in the last year and a half. When Michael kept highlighting the company's key strengths, that's when he was able to see brand promise shine through. This is often a very different approach compared to the norm. Normally to achieve brand promise, you first loo

Caryn Kopp is an award-winning CEO, best-selling author, and self-proclaimed Chief Door Opener at her company, Kopp Consulting. Did you hear that 40-second audio recording at the beginning of the show? What is wrong with that message? Well, for today's podcast episode, Caryn will shed some light as to how to never be that kind of sales opener. People are missing several components when they're trying to get into the right door. Most of the time, people are lacking one or more of these five key pillars. To give a quick overview, the five pillars are: The right target/sales message, the right answers for objections, the right door opener doing the work, which also includes the right door opening mindset, then the right execution followed by the right workflow by that right person. It boils down to hiring talent and using their strengths effectively for the position that needs to be filled. Although it may sound easy, this is a big blind spot for companies. If you hire a closer to be a door opener, this will oft

David Hassell is a serial entrepreneur and founder of 15Five, a SaaS company focused on helping managers and CEOs get effective insights from their people. Having managers and high-level executives become more aware of certain aspects of their company, allows them to proactively address issues before they become problems, acknowledge successes, discover great ideas, and support their team's growth and development. When David was a young entrepreneur, he raised some capital to build his business, but shortly after, the dotcom crash happened and his capital quickly dried up. This forced him to reinvent his company during a market crisis. He could no longer offer competitive salary to his talent, so he got creative with the hiring process. Instead of finding emerging talent from amazing universities, he looked for the diamonds in the rough that perhaps had gaps in their resume or were only high-school graduates. As his company grew, his talent was given much more responsibility and autonomy than they ever had be

Kevin Daum is an award-winning and bestselling author of 5 books. He is a marketer, speaker, and columnist for Inc.com and Smart Business Magazine. On this episode, Kevin and I dive into one of his books, ROAR! Get Heard in the Sales and Marketing Jungle. What does ROAR mean and how is it useful? Kevin says the idea behind ROAR came from seeing so much noise in the marketing space and how advertisements and other marketing pieces would all just fall so flat. Everybody has a story to tell and most people simply do not care. However, with ROAR, Kevin addresses two of the above issues. The first one speaks to how you can tell your story in a compelling way. You may have fantastic ideas for the world, but the reality is the world is not about you. Boasting about how great you are will rarely generate good results. However, telling a great story has to start with empathy. What is the pain that you're solving? There are three core emotional motivators people will buy on: logic, greed, and fear. The most powerful of

Keith Upkes has a financial CFO background and is a business growth coach for The Upkes Group as well as for Gazelles International Coaches. In this episode, Keith and I talk about creating an effective dashboard, as this is something many clients and companies struggle with. Keith believes dashboards are important for three specific reasons. Number one, it helps get raw data into the right hands. Clients often do not know their numbers and this is because they do not have the right data in front of them. Number two, it quickly summaries data that clients need. When clients have data in front of them, many of them don't know how to make sense of it, but dashboards help simplify this process significantly. Number three, it helps get the most relevant metrics into the clients' hands quickly after each accounting period. The client is able to quickly see what is relevant in their industry based on data collected by dashboards and give the relevant data to their leadership team. How can teams make dashboards effe

Brian Scudamore is the Founder and CEO of 1-800-Got-Junk? and has been running the company since 1989. Since then, he has started several companies like Shack Shine, You Move Me, and Wow 1 Day Painting. Today, Brian and I discuss the process of how he comes up with big vision ideas and how he's able to get his team to execute them. After growing his company to a million dollars in 1997, Brian found himself depressed and comparing himself to other extremely successful people around him. He was a high school and university dropout and didn’t have a lot of money at the time. So he decided to stop the negative thinking and thought about what his company would’ve achieved without him.  What could the future feel and act like? Right then and there, Brian took out a piece of paper and started to write down his visions and his dreams for the company he had built. Brian calls this process the 'painted picture', because a picture says a thousand words and he put a thousand words on paper to create the vision for his co

Daniel Marcos is the CEO and co-founder of Gazelles Growth Institute as well as a certified coach of Gazelles International Coaches. Daniel has coached individuals all over the world and works with a wide range of businesses from the million-billion dollar range. Today, Daniel and I focus on the 4 key stages of growth in a business. Let's dive in. After being an entrepreneur for the last 16 years, Daniel has realized that the decisions you have to take in each growth stage are completely different and this is where CEOs seem to face the most trouble. CEOs often want to execute the same decision for each stage and they often encounter a substantial amount of pain points with this method along the way. If you want to grow your company, the first bottleneck is you, the leader. Companies need to evolve the leader from an entrepreneur to a CEO and turn their startup into a well-run organization. Daniel defines each stage by the quantity of employees on payroll instead of the amount of sales that are generated. His

David Rendall is a professional speaker, stand-up comedian, author of The Freak Factor, and he spends his free time competing in Ironman triathlons and ultramarathons. The Freak Factor discusses the concept of unleashing your inner freak and discovering your unique potential. It dives into the fact that your strangeness and weird quirks are the key to your success. Today, Dave shares his story on how he got into 'The Freak Factor' line of work. When he was growing up, he was constantly in trouble and was told by teachers to sit still and stay put. Dave believed for a good number of years that he was a problem, a loser, and that if he didn't 'control himself' he would remain so. It wasn't until age 30 that he realized he was actually getting rewarded for what seemed to be these 'awful' qualities both his teachers and parents frowned upon. He was getting rewarded for speaking out, taking control of the situation, and going against the grain. One day while he was listening to an audio book and reflecting back on

Rich Manders, co-founder of iAutomation and FreeScale Coaching, is a serial entrepreneur who has sold two businesses and has overseen seven acquisitions. Rich has a deep understanding on how to optimize and grow combining enterprises and has worked with many thought leaders on business management, personal development, and negotiation. In 1998, Rich was having problems finding and keeping talented employees for the business he was starting. Someone recommended that Rich look into a Topgrading workshop and, after a brief course on the subject, found that this system was undoubtedly the best way to hire new employees. Rich attributes Topgrading to making his business millions of dollars because it took the chaos out of hiring talent. Due to the technical nature of the company, it took roughly two years of employee training to be brought up to full speed. This had huge costs for Rich. Not only did it take two years to test out talent, but it also cost Rich $250,000 in salary, training, and benefits before the co

Greg Crabtree is a speaker, author, entrepreneur, and financial expert. In 2011, Greg published his first book, Simple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits! where he shares his core principles on how to turn your business into a wealth building machine. Today, Greg and I discuss the labor efficiency ratio (LER) and what it means to your business. Greg grew up on a chicken farm in Alabama and quickly realized that raising chickens was not something he was destined to do. At the age of 14, his mother took him to a CPA to have the family's taxes filed and he discovered a passion for finances. If you were to get run over by a bus today, what would it take for your family to continue your business? Who could accurately replace you? Greg says there are two types of laborer categories: direct labor and management labor. Based on the role you play in your business and what category you fall in, you will have to find a person that matches your category type in order to successfully carry on the business. By practicing

Nick Scott is a certified Gazelles executive coach and management consultant. He specializes in strategic planning, accountability, technology management, and executive team development. When Nick first began his career as consultant, he looked towards the Lean approach to help his clients succeed. He believes to improve any organization, it first has to start from the top and that's one of the reasons why his career path lead him to coach clients as well. Nick's position allows him to really dig deep in a company and help improve it by figuring out the main pain point . Is this a process problem, cash flow problem, or a people problem? When the problem has been spotted, then it's time to bring focus to the leadership team and solve it. Any process-improvement project has to have strong support from the top of the organization or it is destined to fail. The leadership and top management team has to understand why this project is important. When looking to improve a certain process within the company, a big mi

Jeff Redmon is a senior Gazelle coach and the founder of Redmon Law Chartered. He has over 25 years of experience and has served as a trusted advisor to fellow business owners. Jeff also runs the Inner Circle of the St. Croix Valley in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. In today's show, Jeff and I discuss the power of Jeff's 1+1+1=19 formula and what a difference it can make in a company. Jeff has created what he calls the 1+1+1=19 workshop. Obviously, Jeff's workshop does not follow the traditional math rules we've all learned in school, so how does the 1+1+1=19 formula work? To break it down simply when you're looking at a straightforward profit/loss statement, you're often looking at four lines – sales, cost of the goods sold, overhead, and then the bottom line. Based on the concept Jeff is using in his workshop, if you increase your top line by 1%, then you cut your cost of goods/services by 1% and cut your overhead by 1%; you can then increase your net income by 19%. That's how the 1+1+1=19 for

Jabez LeBret is a NBC Chicago Business Columnist, author, speaker, and Chief Marketing Officer of GNGF. Jabez is considered a leading authority on monetizing social media and often speaks at industry conferences on this subject. In today's episode, I discuss with Jabez on how to work with millennials. I know many clients who are having challenges with keeping the millennial generation engaged, so hopefully we can demystify and solve some of those issues for you today.  There are four core fundamentals that really help millennials succeed at work. Not only do you get them to work more effectively, but it changes the whole work environment for them too. These four tactics are actually good for any employee, no matter what their age. With that being said, these fundamentals are specifically targeted to get that everyday millennial employee to the next level. As a millennial himself, Jabez really stumbled into this space by accident. He was doing leadership presentations at companies that needed to know how to le

Andy Bailey is the head of Petra Coach and Align software. His specialties include implementation of Rockefeller Habits and other business processes that drive results in any business setting. Andy’s passion is to assist business owners and entrepreneurs in building the foundation allowing them and their teams the ability to achieve their goals. In today’s episode, I discuss with Andy how to utilize Align for the purpose of alignment between the employees and business. Tune in to hear how Align can help organizations achieve their priorities. The number one question most people have is “how do I know if my employees’ priorities align with the organization?” Align is a business project planning tool that allows working on your business instead of in your business. It is important for leaders to know what is going on throughout the entire company. The person in the front line needs to understand what they are doing everyday aligns with their enterprise's priorities, and when these two things match up, people wi

Mike Michalowicz is the author of The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, The Pumpkin Plan, Profit First and Surge, and the founder of Profit First Professionals, an organization designed to support accountants and other financial professionals differentiating themselves in the market. Mike is an entrepreneur at heart and loves sharing his knowledge and experience with the masses. In today’s episode, Mike and I chat about his new book Surge and how to leverage the market for consumer demand. “How do you time the market?” - The question that prompted two-year of research for his new book Surge. Mike discovered that there is no magic bullet, but there is a way to improve the odds of success dramatically. Mike wrote Surge from his own business experience achieving atypically fast growth from applying and refining the methods outlined in his book. His newest company is still in the learning phase, and Mike plans to write addendums to Surge throughout the process. Tune in to hear more about how Mike used Surge to drive his

Sean Evans is the founder of STEP Consulting in Toronto. He is a Certified Gazelles International Coach, a Certified Topgrading Coach, and holds an MBA from London Business School in the United Kingdom. Sean helps companies get out of the weeds and assists them to focus more on building their businesses.   What is Topgrading? Topgrading is a methodology created by Bradford Smart. It is the standard of hiring, coaching, and retaining top talent. You want to fill every position within your company with ‘A’ players. Companies need to know what a candidate is about, so they need to dive deep into their history.   What's the process in recruiting talent? The number one thing a company wants to do is create a specific job description; this is a typical hiring problem in most companies. There are four areas of a job scorecard: describing the company with excitement, creating a job mission, accurate accountability that can be measured, and a list of key competencies. The best way to find the best people is to recruit

 Robert (Bob) Bloom is the authority on customer centric growth. He is the author of The Inside Advantage and The New Experts. Bob was the US Chairman and CEO of Publicis Worldwide. He got his start as an entrepreneur, took his company national and then sold it. Bob has developed strategies for companies like BMW, L’Oreal, Nestlé, and even helped to launch Southwest Airlines, T-Mobile, Juicy Juice, and many others. In today’s episode, Bob and I talk about strategy and finding your own inside advantage. There is a secret that so many business leaders are missing. Most people start with a strategy, but it is one that is in their minds and may not be contemporary at the moment. Secondly, the most important thing that a strategy has to have is consensus internally; with all of your staff, whether you have three people or hundreds. If everybody doesn’t agree that you are going in the right direction, it doesn’t matter because you will never get there. The other thing that is absolutely critical is differentiation.