Todd Palmer, Author, CEO, Extraordinary Advisors
Todd Palmer is the CEO of Extraordinary Advisors as well as the Author of The Job Search Process. Todd is an exceptional leader who strives to improve the lives of others through his teachings of business strategy, organizational development, and profit growth. Todd specializes in teaching how to grow your business, not go out of business.
https://extraordinaryadvisors.com/
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AUTOMATED EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:01] You're listening to Scaling Up Services where we speak with entrepreneurs authors business experts and thought leaders to give you the knowledge and insights you need to scale your service based business faster and easier. And now here is your host Business Coach Bruce Eckfeldt.
[00:00:22] Are you a CEO looking to scale your company faster and easier. Checkout Thrive Roundtable thrive combines a moderated peer group mastermind expert one on one coaching access to proven growth tools and a 24/7 support community created by Inc award winning CEO and certified scaling up business coach Bruce Eckfeldt. Thrive will help you grow your business more quickly and with less drama. For more details about the program, visit eckfeldt.com/thrive . That’s E C K F E L D T. com / thrive.
[00:00:57] Welcome, everyone. This is Scaling up Services. I'm Bruce Eckfeldt. I'm your host and our guest today is Todd Palmer and he is founder and president of Extraordinary Advisors. They work with leaders, executives, entrepreneurs to help them figure how they're going to grow, transform their business so they can be more successful. We're going to talk about a whole bunch of things about business. We're going to learn more about Todd and his background and how he got to doing what he's doing today. I'm excited for this conversation. I always love to talk to other entrepreneurs of other INC 500 businesses executives that have been through their process. I know it's a journey that is full of challenges, full of stories. Hopefully we're going to talk about some of them today. So with that, Todd, welcome to the program.
[00:01:33] Bruce, thanks for having me on. And I'm happy to be here.
[00:01:36] So why don't we talk a little bit about your background? How did you get into this position of advising entrepreneurs, CEOs? What was the backstory? What was the process you went through?
[00:01:45] Well, you know, it's interesting. It's for me, it's really the messes I made in my business have now become the messages I give to my clients. So I started my company, gosh, when I was twenty seven years old in a company called Diversified Industrial Staffing. We at the time, we were a temporary help company. We were positioned in the Detroit market to provide temp help day labor for mostly manufacturing companies. And by nine years in real, we had some good runs at one point three offices, nearly 30 employees, things I thought were going pretty well. And I think like a lot of entrepreneurs who have been in business almost a decade, you think you've got it all figured out. And that's really when the wheels came off the rug got pulled out from under me and fast forwarded to clients, go bankrupt on me, that I'd given them extremely generous payment terms to which was not the best decision to make a mistake we make once.
[00:02:34] Oh, yes, we definitely make once. But unfortunate made it back to back.
[00:02:37] So that put us that a couple other unfortunate decisions. But it's about six or eight thousand dollars in debt. I was two months away from running out of all of my money, including losing my house, which at the time I was a single parent. And my then nine year old son was not too excited by the fact that being potentially homeless due to his father's choices and decisions. I finally got over my own center, which at the time had paralyzed me to the point where I didn't want to talk about the messes I'd made. It didn't want to talk about the position. I was in a fight. If I just buried my head in my sand, the world would pass me by and I would live to fight another day. And is anybody listening today knows that's a terrible strategy. I reached out. I hired a coach, got financially literate very quickly and realized I can move some dials on the finances. I took a look at my team. Team is toxic. It was dysfunctional. It was unproductive and underperforming. And on September 9th, I walked in and fired my entire company and I started over. In the iterative process of that, we figure out some niches that we can go after where there was an increased demand and a diminished supply. Great place for a service based entrepreneur to be. And we went on to make the INC. Five thousand is one of America's fastest growing companies six times. So I've been I've been to the bottom of the valley due to some of my own choices and with the above others I was able to dig out of it and live to fight another day, including paying off all six hundred thousand dollars in debt.
[00:03:52] Good for you. Yeah, not not I wouldn't say a common story, but not an uncommon story in that I find that many successful entrepreneurs, business leaders have had, you know, a challenging story in their past. You know, where there's kind of the crucible of figuring out who they are, what they're capable of, what they know and what they don't know. There's often a big humility streak in that kind of coming in terms of Jersey. You know, you mentioned the financial literacy. What were the things you realized you just didn't you don't know financially or understand financially that were hurting you or resulting in the situation you were finding yourself?
[00:04:25] You know, for me, it was I was chasing the revenue base I was in, you know, Kelly Services world headquarters, two miles down the street Miles. You know, I'm thinking I've got to get to 20 million dollars in revenue. I've got to do. You know, I was basically shooting all over myself. I should be here. I should be there. I should do this. I should do that. I was very susceptible to being led by my clients versus managing my business. I was really being of over service to their demands. And I was chasing the revenue, not focused on the margin. I was getting extremely generous payment terms. And in 0 6 0 7, when this all came down, it didn't realize that we were right at the beginning of essentially the depression. The recession that it hit. So we clients that were using us as their bank, which is again a bad business model. And so when I hired the consultant, we came in, we took a hard look at the numbers. We realized that we were overstaffed for where we were. Our internal expert, our internal costs were exceeding. What we can handle and our clients were we're not paying us quick enough. Our margins were terrible. We couldn't handle that. And what I thought I was doing was really it was almost three hundred sixty five degrees wrong. I just didn't know what I didn't know. And there was a lot like you talked about the humility piece. I think I eat humble pie for about a five year period.
[00:05:39] Yeah, yeah. It can be bitter. But, you know, once once consumed, it puts you in a new league. I think it was one of the best things you can do as a leaders is really learn from that and don't waste that opportunity because it is a unique opportunity and a growing growing from that learning from them.
[00:05:55] Absolutely. It for least for me, it really helped me focus on two things. I'm tenaciously persistent and I have much more resiliency than I ever would have thought I would have had before 0 6.
[00:06:06] And tell me about the rehiring. So, I mean, coming in and kind of cleaning house, letting everyone go, realizing this is not the team you need.
[00:06:13] What did you do differently or what was your strategy or what was your kind of, you know, new new approach when you went back to kind of rehire the people you needed? What was different?
[00:06:22] Well, that's a great question, because I'd fallen into the myth of only hiring people with the recruiting industry experience or temporary help experience. And I realized that when you hire someone with experience, you're getting a good experience, but also getting some of their bad experience. And there's a lot of people who especially the staffing space of the time, who are more retreads that you work two or three years here, two or three years there. And they were just kind of move through companies. So I came up with a process that would now we call it we take you to our clients how to hire for DNA, not for resumé. And we hired start to hire people. Definitely. We started interviewing differently. We looked for different traits because we felt that if you're a great person, I can teach you to be a great recruiter. But if you're if you're a mediocre person, but you're toxic to our culture, toxic for our environment, you're not going to last long. And it's an expensive choice for us to make. So let's flip that switch. Let's do it differently. So really, how do you fit into our culture? A lot of culture based questions. And what is your background? Where's your DNA around customer service? That really became the primary driver in want it for a long time. We didn't hire anybody with the human resources background. We didn't hire anybody with a recruiting background. We really focused on people who were transitioning maybe from restaurant retail with high levels of customer service training and turning them into great recruiters.
[00:07:34] Interesting. Any good questions that you would ask? I'm just curious about how people actually do their kind of cultural questions. Like what?
[00:07:41] What is the conversation that you have, the situation you create, where you get that insight about really what is that individual's core values and how does it relate to your company and how do you kind of understand or or figure out if someone's cultural?
[00:07:54] Well, the first thing we did is we put our core values on the website. And so we announced who we were to the world first and foremost. So we're very clear in who we are. And so we would ask a lot of questions around the areas of failure, because being a recruiter is really hard.
[00:08:09] You get told and told no a lot.
[00:08:12] And it's where those difficult occupations where you can do everything right. You know, you're essentially like a really, really crazy matchmaker. You get a lonely client who needs people, a candidate who who needs a new job and try to put them together. But so much of your success is predicated on that relationship forming. So we really started pivoting to how how do you help other people get things they want out of life. Tell me some stories about how you help people in college or how you help people in high school. I had one person, you know, we had a lot of people had it call reluctance, fear to get on the telephone. Petty, a young lady come in interview with me who came from the medical space. She was, you know, entry level on the phone. And she said, part of my job as I work for a specialist and he does can't eat a lot of work with cancer patients. And I could often call people every day and to inform them they have cancer. If I can pick up the phone and do that, I can pick up the phone and tell someone they have a new job.
[00:09:04] It's going to make my life a whole heck of a lot more stress free. And she actually ended up being with me for cash 12 years and at one point was my number two in charge and my top recruiter. So had I just only seen her resume and only saw that she had, you know, a year out of school working for a doctor's office. Why would I have brought her in? But when I talk to her and she told me her stories is that recruiters have to be great storytellers. We have to be able to to capture the audience and disseminate, you know, Bruce's story to employer X or Jane's story to employer Y and why they're great, because those nowadays, especially, you know, you would indeed reciprocate or post your ads and you're flooded with resumes. The recruiters are really being able to hopefully make a difference and help people in the marketplace get jobs they could not find other. We averaged about a 20 percent pay increase and helped companies find people they couldn't find because they weren't answering ads through portals.
[00:09:57] Yeah, yeah. It's you have to get out of that job board market to find those new candidates and those there's potentially untapped talent or talent that isn't actively looking. So they're not looking at the boards. You've got to go on and find them to examine the value for the recruiting. Absolutely. Absolutely. And when once you've got this sort of new team in place, what did you notice about your kind of role, your day to day? How did it change your. You with the company. The things you were focused on. Always curious when people clean house, bring together a new leadership team, a new team around them, how it changes their mindset and their kind of the day to day work that they're doing.
[00:10:32] You know, I had to lead differently because I didn't have a team that had a tremendous amount of recruiting industry experts. So I had to be different. And I worked a lot with my coach at the time to get them to essentially fail forward quickly. Now, you see, oh, so much more in the tech space where there's version 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3. Tech space is used to that in the recruiting space. It very much felt like a win loss. And so we're trying to get out of the marketplace right in the middle of a recession. And people are saying we're not hiring anybody. You know, we're not going to use you or anybody else. So we started coming up with different questions such as, well, Bruce, if you're going to hire somebody. Do you know if you could hire your perfect unicorn? Tell me what that unicorn would look like. It's kind of weird question. Plant manager is like, well, you know, if they could do this, do this and do this, I'd make space for them. Like, really? So we kept hearing that over and over and over and over again, especially as Detroit was moving away from automotive into aerospace manufacturing to medical device manufacturing, military, many different manufacturing like really catering it over and over again. And finally came up to us that we needed to pivot our model. Our model had been very client driven. We need to become what they would call the recruiting space. Candidates centric. It's like being a sports agent. There's one Mike Trout. And if I could market Mike truck to five ball clubs, get them into a bidding war for my services, I will make more money and like we'll make more money and one company will be happy and unearth four other companies that need Mike services.
[00:11:54] So we start doing that with CSC machinists, machine repair. Peterson and his blue collared non-tech spaces because these guys are essentially that the forgotten employee in manufacturers is always very slow to change in how it's doing things anyways. But these clients that would recognize hey, listen, if you can get me a guy who can program a machine, operate machine, run a machine. He's a profit center for my business. So it's not having the price conversation. And we figured out like, okay, so if I've got Bob and he can do what you need, you're gonna make space for me. Yeah. Well, you do realize that, you know, Bob's going to cost more than your average temporary employee. He had no problem. I totally understand that. Great. How when you pay your people, we pay weekly or bi weekly. Those are the only two answers I'm going to get. Well, that's what we need to pay, Bob. So we need to get paid weekly or bi weekly so we can't beat a 90 day payment cycle. And we'll put all that into our contract. So we moved our margins, got more pit. We got paid quicker because we found that inflection point of increased demand, diminished supply. We got paid faster and we got it by asking better questions. Anybody who's listening to it, they can come up with the best questions to ask their ideal target audience. The audience will tell you what they need from you.
[00:12:56] Yeah, it's a grand it's a great case of just the more you figure out your strategy, how you're gonna differentiate, where you're gonna focus, the more you can command a superior price that gives you the cashflow, gives you the profit margin to be able to actually invest in the business and grow in scale.
[00:13:10] And since it's this irony, the faster you want to grow, the more you need to focus. And I think a lot of companies just right now see that don't get that.
[00:13:16] We we absolutely couldn't agree with you more. We were way too high. The more niche focused media came in. Going back to your question of how did I manage the staff, we used to have contest to see how many people could get rejected per day. Now, how many people did you have success as predicted? So we took the paradigm because we knew we're going to hear no one hundred times. This is back in the days when you could use the telephone.
[00:13:35] You pick it up and call somebody, they would actually answer probably for anybody under 30.
[00:13:40] I think I saw that in a movie, Glengarry Glen Ross or something. It's the that used to work that way. We could get people on the phone, have those conversations and my staff would get rewarded for their activity based, not their result based pieces. And that really became competitive. And the beautiful thing is the recruiters and I would jump right in there with him. We'd say, I heard this, I heard that. And we would just we would iterate on the fly. We'd move a fly. We'd hear different things in the moment. And we would we would iterate and grow so fast that the failure became part of our journey. So once we got the recipe baked, we knew what we were doing. We decided we want to own a really tiny sliver of the marketplace and be the best at it, which allowed us then to get charge more, get paid faster and be seen as an expert in our space.
[00:14:26] Yeah, well, and I think you're hitting on one of the key things, which is once you figure out that focus, you can then design a clear process around a clear set of steps, a procedure and S.O.P. That tells you how to deal with that situation because you've defined that customer, you define that need very, very well and then you can actually focus on that input activity. And I find so many companies that are so focused on the results because they don't have a process. They haven't identified, you know, the series of steps, the sort of mechanism they're going to use to generate results. But once you do that, then you can say, look, all I need to do is put more things in the top. Right. I just need to measure my calls. I'm making how many people in my reaching out because I know that, you know, one out of twenty one on one hundred are going to lead to the results that we want. We can constantly improve that like we can. It can be you know, can we increase that conversion by 5 percent. Is there a way we can short this time for it by a day, but without having a defined process to iterate on like you're you're you're just swimming.
[00:15:18] You're not really working in any. Structured way in which then you're just saying, OK, well, I just need dollars right now. I got metrics that people have no ability to hit or there's no process to hit around.
[00:15:27] Well, that's so, so important for I think any startup, entrepreneur or any entrepreneur is trying to grow in scale as I hear this all the time from my clients. They're like, so I've got to put a process in place, but it's going to mute my creativity and I'm not gonna be in the chase, the Brighton's shinies. You know, there is some truth in that. That's what my staff fight with me. It created a governor for me because once the process was in place as a crazy entrepreneur, I wanted to invent a new flavor. No, this works really well. Get out of my staff. Get out of our meeting and go do it easy.
[00:15:54] Go away.
[00:15:55] But I've really discovered is once we put a process in place, it's like a box and inside of the box. The creativity can just grow with those at those boundaries there, because at the end of the day, all we're doing is entrepreneurs. We're trading one set of problems for a new set of problems. So my problem before us, I'm six or eight thousand dollars in debt. So I dig out of debt and I'm making great money. Well, now I've got to pay more taxes. Well, that's a different problem. And I argue it's a better problem for me to have problems there. But it's like like ironclad. It it. Oh, so now that I've heard, you know, I've retained you to get rid of all my problems. Oh, no. You're going to have a different set of problems. You know, I'm going to have to grow your staff from 20 people to 80 people, and you have to manage people differently. It's not going to be your friends and family working here anymore. You're right. Going to run out of people. So you've got to learn how to do this and get to learn how to do this. He's like, oh, my goodness, I thought I would get rid of all my problems. And it doesn't work that way.
[00:16:48] And so many times, I mean, I've just met with so many CEOs and founders that I've moved into the CEO position. And and they struggle with the transition. They struggle with that mindset shift of going from, you know, their kind of problem solvers and they're, you know, figuring out new opportunities and what's a new product and service we can offer to really being optimizers of how do you take this this problem that you're solving point well, and how do I make it repeatable and building quality and scale it.
[00:17:10] And honestly, I have conversations with folks. Do you want to do this? Like, is this is this really what you want? Are you going to be happy? And if you're not gonna be happy, let's either figure out a different role for you and let's bring in people that are going to do that. Or or maybe you just want to start new businesses. Maybe you really don't want to grow and scale this thing to a couple hundred million, maybe like a five, 10 million dollar business. Let's start another five, 10 million dollar business. I mean, I think there's I think people don't have that conversation or they assume that they're just moving to these roles without really thinking about it.
[00:17:36] I couldn't agree with you more. It's so interesting that the skill sets it takes to launch and start a company is essentially a lot of places. You're essentially building yourself a job and you're a practitioner. And then once you get to scale, you're no longer you're no longer just the only practitioner. And you maybe you once were the best practitioner, but if you hire, right, you should hire people better than you. And so you won't be the best practitioner. Then you go from working in the business to working on the business. Oftentimes I find a lot of the entrepreneurs I've worked with get so defeated in some way. They're they're itty bitty negative committee and their head starts feeding them with all this gunk and in in misery and they think it was going to turn out differently. So a lot of the work that we end up doing and I sure I'm sure you do the same thing Bruce has you you work on the mind set and you work out how to get them to pivot. How do you look at success? Because a lot of times, you know, typically entrepreneurs start their first business to prove to themselves or to somebody else they can actually do it as they do their second business or their scale, their business and becomes more legacy play, which then types ties in a different part. So know you start the business to prove to your dad or to your family member or some girl in high school who didn't want to go out with you, that you're great, you can do anything. Well, once he achieved the success in business, yet you stole that emptiness inside of that lack of purpose inside, then that's really where the magic comes in. And how do you create that, that sense of purpose around what you want to accomplish? You know, like Simon said he talks about is it's why book. So what is your why why are you doing this? If it's just fake money, it's not going to be super satisfying long term.
[00:19:05] Yeah, yeah. No, not sustainable. So, Chris, tell us about how you've taken your experience as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, growing your business into the work that you're doing now in an advisory capacity. What have you transferred into this process? What are you focused on now? What kind of problems are you working with in terms of helping entrepreneurs, those leaders inside businesses with their businesses? What is the work that you're doing today?
[00:19:26] Well, the work I do right now, always with the entrepreneurs starts first or foremost with the individual leader or the individual CEO. My work, as I call it, inside out work. I've got to work on the mindset. I've got to get the entrepreneur aligned with where they want to go, because every single client I've walked into is where they think they're going and where they want to go. Rarely align. And the only way to increase margins and grow revenue and have satisfaction is to recognize that you have to have a life by design. And there's work life integration.
[00:19:55] There's no such thing as work life balance.
[00:19:58] It's a myth that if you're chasing it, you're never going to be satisfied. So a lot of times what I have to do is I asked the authors, you think these questions are super simple, like, well, what do you want? All right. Well, I want to be rich. OK, great. Tell me why.
[00:20:09] Yeah, exactly. What do you do with it with your time, which I rich.
[00:20:12] Right. And then it really breaks them down too often, takes them back to their core values. And why are they doing this? I had one client say to me, I want to be in the Midwest, I won't be in 25 different states by the end of the conversation. Once he realized all that it was doing and the guy's making a boatload of money now, he's like, you know what? I think we can have a lifestyle business to hire a replacement CEO. And I'm going to go out and I'm going to become an investor and I'm going to travel the world with my wife. He's like thirty five. Good for you. But he thought he thought success was one thing. And I used to think success is what the you know, success was money and boats and houses and all the stuff. For me, success is really simple. Now it's doing what I want, what I want as often as I want to do it with whomever I want to do it with. And if you really break it down, you go for a walk in the park on a Wednesday at 2:00 p.m. with your significant other. Have a great conversation and that's a great day. Now, assuming you've set your life up correctly, so a lot of the work I do is getting them to figure out what do they want, why they want it.
[00:21:09] Then I take it down the path of it always starts with people. I know there's you know, we got Vern Horácio, Gazelles, человек with Gina Whitman, both great tools. I use their tools and they both know it and their tools are great. But they argue that I argue that it's the people first because people make all the decisions about strategy. People make all the decisions about execution, people make all the decisions about cash and people make all the decisions about staff and the people on the team, whether they stay or they go. So it always comes down to people. I spend so much time helping companies and entrepreneurs get out of their own way, work better with their people, because really, if you get your CEOs going in the right direction, they have one job. They have one job is to remove bottlenecks within the organization and make it easy for people to work for you and make it easy for people to do business with you. That's your number one job. You're number one job. I find so many even get so excited about being a firefighter. They want to solve problems. They want to get in there and do a bunch of things. When we really peel the back nine out of ten times, the chief firefighter or the CEO is also the chief arsonist who started didn't tell anybody.
[00:22:09] I love it. And I just laugh because it's so true. It's just sent in so many times, you know, it's there.
[00:22:13] So you mentioned this before and I just wanted to kind of touch on it this whole, you know, really understanding where your core values are like, why do you want to building grow the company? And I've just seen time and time again you get you know, we successfully grow the business. We take a couple of years. Things are doing really, really well. We now have offers for acquisition. We can start going on the path of doing a deal. And, you know, we get down in the final throws and Ottomans blew up deals because they get petrified. They're not sure what they're gonna do after they sell the business. And so right now what I do. One of the first conversations I had with Eddie, CEO and founder they're working with, is saying, OK, so we've sold the company. What are you gonna do? And we actually have to design that line. We have to figure out what it is like literally day by day. What's your daily routine going to be? What are you gonna focus on? Because if they haven't figured out how they're going to continue to to feel valuable, to how progress, to set goals, to be working on something and engage with it, they will do horrible things to derail deals at the last moment because they get petrified of actually wanting to sell anything. I actually don't want to sell because I don't know what I'm gonna do with myself.
[00:23:12] I couldn't agree with you more. In fact, I've got a friend of mine who went through that whole arc and decided not to sell. You actually created a process where he named a successor. So he still owns the company and enjoys that. But he doesn't go in anymore. He comes in for once a quarter board meetings and he has isavailable as a resource, but he's had a dark side. So he get it and now he travels the world. He just wrote his first book. He's speaking tours. He's giving any getting about all of his book proceeds and all the speaking fees go right to charity. So that's what he wanted to do. Because, Buddy, what he did think, like you're mentioning, is he wanted to sell the business to take cash out. It's so interesting because I often tell my my entrepreneur, I said, you know, the problem of not knowing what you're gonna do when you retires is a universal problem. And I tell a story about a machinist that I knew when I was actively recruiting. He was I can't wait till I retire. I'm going to start living my life and retire at 58. And I've got all these big plans. He was dead by 61 because he golfed all the golf he wanted to use. He went to roll. He did all these kind of things. That guy became buddies. And obviously I got an e-mail from his wife. One day they passed away. And I argue he he passed away because he had no reason to get out of bed.
[00:24:14] He ran he checked off everything on his list.
[00:24:16] Yeah. And he did about eight months. Now what? Well, it's so important now to do. You know, I always tell my entrepreneurs, what if you only work three days a week, what would those days look like? Would they be moneymaking activities? Would they be team building activities? Because, again, if all you're gonna be doing is crossing off the list and there's nothing wrong with being, you know, a solo producer or having being an active worker if you really enjoy the work. I got a client right now he does construction. He likes building things. He's like, you know, I like managing the project, but I like doing these things myself. So I know I'm not going to scale and I'm okay with that. But help me live a better life. And those are the things we work. Just like you talked about. It's so key. What is your endgame? But not just what is your name? Why do you want it? Because if you're gonna be the entrepreneur who's going to sell your business, think you're gonna be the next Mark Cuban on Shark Tank and you gonna go invest in other businesses. That's a different job. That's a different career than being a startup, being a tech person, cashing out for $2 million. Those skills are different. And I know a lot of guys who sold their businesses tried to become that next angel investor. And they don't know what they're doing because they're. Excited about the deal, they get excited about the sale. They get excited about the entrepreneur and they don't evaluate them as crisply as they should in their financial disciplines. A weak because their deal junkies.
[00:25:30] Yeah. Well, the other one I find is they they they end up wanting to really just get involved in the business. Right. And I and I always find that, you know, being a venture capitalist, you know, being an angel investor like that, that is a job. And and there are people that are good at it and they're people that are not good at it. And if you if you just kind of go into it as a hobby, it's gonna be painful and probably financially not very rewarding, because I think a lot of lot of people end up going to kind of angel investing as kind of a a side door into getting back into business, you know, doing battle for sure at running the business. And I think that's. I've seen that recipe fail.
[00:26:01] So if I may, again, I think, you know, you got a social media, you got a television. People live in the spectrum's. You know that everything's either awful or everything's wonderful. The rest of the world is. Most of us. Ninety five percent of us are in the middle. Just because you're great at starting a company, one doesn't mean you're gonna be a great just being a great entrepreneur doesn't make you a great CEO. Just because maybe you are a great entrepreneur and a decent CEO doesn't make you a great investor. There are different skill sets. You know, you're taking it back to. You know, I love sports. And I think Bill Belichick is an absolute genius. Bill Belichick is what better do more Super Bowls than either coach in history. He wasn't a very good player. He's been. And if you look at his lineage, how many coaches have fallen off his coaching tour? You've gotten head coaching job. So he's built leaders and so he's built systems and processes. So his players come and go. The success continues going up. Having Tom Brady, does it hurt? But also, Tom Brady was the number 200 pick in the draft. He came out. Yeah, I came out of college. So there's a system. It requires discipline and it requires adherence to the system with flexibility for the moment issues. But it's his system and his discipline to that system. I think has helped him. And again, if you're if you're not going to be a disciplined entrepreneur and you're gonna love the highs and lows and the rises and the falls that there's is, there is a there's an energy to that and there's a time commitment to that that may may prevent you from getting where you really want to end up, you know.
[00:27:20] And I think you're hitting on a mindset thing that I think is really important, which is this. I see a lot of founders who are are excellent individual contributors, are excellent doers in some way.
[00:27:31] So they're brilliant technologists, scientists, you know, legal minds, doctors, you know, people that have amazing technical capabilities, doing capabilities, you know. And so they found companies, they create companies and they grow them. And they they fail to make this shift of being. You know, my job is to do and to create value and to work with the client, to designing and developing the company and hiring talent and getting people in the right seats and making sure that I'm supporting them and developing them.
[00:28:00] And I think it's I think it's hard because I think a lot of folks, you know, end up their ego is kind of wrapped up into being a brilliant technologist, a brilliant security analyst, you know, and they fail to kind of make this jump to say, hey, look, I need to find other people there who are gonna be the brilliant people, the doers. And I need to be a brilliant leader. And I just I find that that is a tough, a tough transition to make. I'm curious what you've run into, anything that you've seen that helps the forces.
[00:28:23] I think I am the best example of that. You know, pride and ego doesn't care. And I pride an ego paralyzed me thinking I had to have all the answers all the time is paralyzed me. When I when I reached out for a lot of people, pride, ego prevents them from reaching out for help.
[00:28:39] I've got some some friends of mine and we had a long conversation one night and they've been 10 years sober. And I talked about my behavior and how my brain was firing at how my brain the decisions I was making when I was in chaos, when I was crashing my business, almost the behaviors and the mindset and the actions and the pride nago were almost identical to that of an addict, to that of. And you hear that. You'll hear people who've been sober for so long saying, yeah, pride and ego doesn't care. I'm like, oh, my gosh, it's so true because pride and ego begins to do things that are risky and dangerous and irresponsible versus you know what? This is now working. I need to get help. And whether it's with a coach, whether it's through a group like an E or a YPO, a peer to peer organization, or again, if you can't afford either one, those go to your local score chapter. There are resources out there for people who need the help. But the reality is we do a lot of silly things due to pride and ego. And what I've learned, especially in my coaching business, that if I do three things, if I got a TV ATV, if I'm authentic, I'm transparent. So I demonstrate transparency and I demonstrate vulnerability. I get a whole lot further with my executives because they're like, oh, my gosh, I thought nobody knew it. Now we all realized I thought you knew the breeze was telling you, Mr. Emperor, that you have no clothes to go. Your business is crashing. Nobody would tell me. I'm going to help point that out to you, because pride and ego are not going to get you out of this. By being humble, getting help, pivoting, adjusting, trying something a day that doesn't work, then scrapping and trying something new tomorrow and not beating yourself up for it. That's how you gonna get out of this problem.
[00:30:10] That's excellent advice. I think that it's something I learned as well in my personal journey. And yeah, I just see it all the time. All the time. It's been a pleasure. If you will want to find out more. You about the work that you do. What's the best way to get that information?
[00:30:23] Yeah. Bruce, the best place to catch up with me is at my Web site. Extraordinary advisors dot com and anybody who's heard me on the podcast. Please reach out to me. Go to the contacts section. Book some time on my killer. I'm happy to give anybody who's for the podcast today 30 minutes for free of my time to hear what problems they're having to hear with how they're stuck and how. Maybe we can give a couple of tips to get unstuck.
[00:30:44] Awesome. I will make sure that the link to the website and to the booking pages on the show notes so people can click through and get that and get a hold of you. Encourage everyone to take Todd up on that offer. It's incredible. What a half hour conversation with someone who's been through a lot of situations can do for you. I appreciate that. This has been great. I really appreciate the time. I think we've had some really good insights for folks listening in the podcast and I've enjoyed it. So thank you for for being on the program.
[00:31:06] Thank you for the opportunity. Bruce had a great time.
[00:31:10 You've been listening to Scaling up Services with Business Coach, Bruce Eckfeldt. To find a full list of podcast episodes, download the tools and worksheets and access other great content, visit the website at scalingupservices.com and don’t forget to sign up for the free newsletter at scalingupservices.com/newsletter.