Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. Super excited about my guest today, Dr. Melissa Patton, managing partner of Patton Consulting Group and the author of the Grit and Growth Workbook, a practical resource for passionate teams, emerging leaders, and resilient cultures. Melissa, I have more. Just a second. Melissa is a strategic consultant, fractional COO and transformation expert with more than 20 years of experience helping organizations scale with clarity, align people and priorities, and build resilient cultures. Her career spans industries like education, aerospace, Stem and workforce development always centered on one mission helping leaders grow through challenges, not around them. She’s known for her grounded authenticity and real world perspective, which is why I have her on the show. Dr. Patton brings both heart and strategy to leadership, whether she’s guiding executives through organizational change or trekking a mountain trail, she reminds us that grit isn’t about pushing harder. It’s about knowing when to recalibrate and rise stronger. Dr. Patton, welcome to the show.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Hi, Trisha. Hi, Houston. How are you guys doing?

Trisha Stetzel: So excited. And, you know, aerospace I’m sure was like, ding ding ding. I want to hear more. What’s going on with Dr. Patton? All right, so before we go there, tell us more about who you are.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Yeah. Well, you know, you you said all the nice words. And from a corporate perspective, from a professional perspective. You nailed it. But at the end of the day, I just try to be a really authentic person. You know, I work with super stuffy people, uh, huge CEOs of multi-million dollar companies. Um, definitely that economic development arena, um, where I’m connecting people within industry, within academia, and obviously within workforce development. So I try to bring a little bit of fun to conversations. I try to jazz it up a bit, uh, probably to a fault. And, um, just to help people have really important conversations. Um, but I never take myself too seriously. And so I think that’s what I want people to walk away with, uh, when they kind of think about me and my leadership style.

Trisha Stetzel: Um, so how do you navigate that whole people thing, like the human, uh, human interaction is hard sometimes, and particularly when you’re working with bigger companies and people who they’ve got a mission, they’re on a mission, they have a thing that they need to go get done. So how do you navigate that with your Dr. Patton style in those workspaces?

Dr. Melissa Patton : Well, it’s just a title. It’s a lot of years of schooling. It’s just Melissa. It’s plain old Melissa. But you know, I really think it goes back to my background. And I think that’s why, um, I have found a place here in, you know, the Stem and space industry. Um, it’s because I’m not spacey or stemmy at all. Uh, I don’t even have a Stem degree. I have three degrees in essentially liberal arts. Uh, so there’s a component of me that has been talking and having conversations since I can always remember. Um, but it’s also understanding. It’s like a, it’s like a game of double Dutch, right? You know, figuring out when to get in, looking around the room, realizing when it’s time to talk and when it’s time to just listen and be quiet. Uh, and then also helping people be included in the conversation. I think that’s a big part of it. Um, but again, I am Melissa. I am learning I have just as much to learn in a conversation and in a meeting than anyone else does. And I’m excited to kind of soak it all in, um, and be able to give back my insight.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, I love that. Just real true human conversations and putting everybody on a level playing field, right? I love that. I think that’s awesome. Um, let’s talk a little bit about your workbook. So grit and growth. Tell us what it is. And then I want to dive into a couple of parts of it, because I think we can pull out some good pieces or conversation around that.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Yeah. So, you know, like most authors, you you come up with these ideas to author books based upon experiences, right? And I wanted something to be honest with you. When people ask me to come in and speak. I could have an authentic voice that complimented the experiences that I’ve had, but also was adjacent to what I was going through at that particular moment. And so I kind of thought about the Grit and Growth workbook just from a perspective of, now I have something to talk about on stages, right? Um, but it actually came out to be a practical workbook that people can use with their teams. I was super excited to see a post on LinkedIn from, from from a group that I love, absolutely love. Go Knights. Charge on. Ucf and there’s a few groups there that are using my workbook to go through team meetings, and that’s what it was for. It’s so that you can have those authentic conversations with people that are in your ecosystem, um, people that you’re doing life with. But at the same time, if you’re an individual and you’re looking to use that grit that you ultimately have to grow further, you can use the workbook for that as well.

Trisha Stetzel: Um, I love that. So before we dive into the content, uh, of the workbook, how did you find the time to actually sit down and write this piece of work. I know everyone who’s listening is like, I want to write something, but I can’t find time. So how did you find the time to do it?

Dr. Melissa Patton : You just do it. That is one of the questions that I don’t understand why people ask busy people that. Can I just say that out loud? Yes, yes, ask busy people. I’m never going to ask you. How do you find time to put all of these amazing people on a stage, amplify their brands? You just find time. And I think that’s what it was. It was literally a weekend where I sketched out the outline for it based upon things that I had been going through, experiencing and things that I wanted people to hear me say, um, out of my mouth. And then I just wrote, I literally just sat down and wrote, um, it was an exciting journey. Most people don’t know this about me, but I was actually an undergraduate English major. Uh, so I have a writing degree, but I have been doing technical writing for almost my entire adult career. And so this was a treat. And I literally found the energy and the excitement in writing by climbing mountains in Colorado. And that’s why the front cover of it, everyone’s like, is that you? And I was like, no, my husband’s just really good at putting together a piece of artwork. Shout out to Stanley Patton. Uh, but but no, it’s not me. But it’s definitely an image of of someone that looks a lot like me, kind of looking out over the atmosphere and just taking it all in and soaking it all in. So it’s a longer answer to your question, Trisha, but it has a lot of levels.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. No, I love it. And I love your initial reaction to that question, which is, in my words, just take action. Just do it. I get asked all the time, how do you do all the things that you do? I just do, uh, because they don’t sit around and worry about what’s going to happen if I do this thing right. Um, so take action. That’s the bottom line. All right. Um, Excellence has a contingency clause. That’s something that’s in your workbook. So what does that mean for leaders navigating uncertainty.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Yeah. You know it’s a pretty simple answer but it has a really long explanation. But essentially excellence is not it’s not something that’s given. And just because you want it or just because you put yourself in a position to to be in an excellent kind of role or position or opportunity, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to happen the way you expect it to happen. But the beautiful part about that whole experience is the journey, and it’s about the different levels that you hit, the different layers that you peel apart, and it’s about how that’s making you a better version of yourself. That is probably one of my most favorite quotes, uh, because it’s so it just affirms everything that’s going on with me and the continuous process that I have as I grow and as I deal with grit and growth and trials and tribulations and And adversity. So I want people to realize that just because excellence doesn’t drop in your plate, um, on your lap, it doesn’t mean that you can’t operate in excellence. It’s just a process.

Trisha Stetzel: So you brought up adversity, and I’d love if you would share. So, um, you I’ve in your book or you have talked about or posted about adversity can be a catalyst for growth. So will you share a time when either you, uh, came to a turning point or one of your clients through this adversity and really helping it change the trajectory of where you’re going?

Dr. Melissa Patton : So how much time do we have, Trisha? I’m kidding. I’ll give you the short version. So when I speak on this, I. I call adversity a dirty word and I put it in explicatives. People crack up laughing. But those are all the type A perfectionists in the audience that are laughing. It’s hilarious because I know exactly who they are. Um, but one of my most memorable adverse situations, uh, it happened on just a normal day. It was two weeks before Christmas, about 17 years ago. Uh, everything was absolutely normal. And I’m sitting in front of my computer watching my three year old play with cars and trucks on the floor, and a call comes in and it’s my senior vice president, and I’m literally doing the running man in my office, because what senior vice president calls you two weeks before Christmas and doesn’t have the congratulations, you got a promotion. So I was thrilled. So, you know, I kind of like did my hair a little bit. I clicked the button. And on the other end of the call was someone that I didn’t even recognize. Her face was extremely pale. Uh, her voice was very monotonous. And she said, I’m sorry to let you know, Melissa, but as of today, your services are no longer needed. Your position has been eliminated. And I’m looking at her like, you know, like, okay, where’s the punch line? And at the same time, I feel the water, the tears welling up in my eyes. And from that moment on, it was like a 15 minute call. I have no idea what she said. She was talking about insurance. And you can get this and you can do that. And all I heard was like I was swimming underwater. It literally sent me in that moment through five stages of grief.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Trisha. It was the most devastating moment, and I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I had done everything this these people told me to do. They asked me to join boards, I joined boards, they asked me to have great measures as far as, you know, promotion for promotions and things like that, and I killed it. And lastly, they asked me to go on and get a Dr.ate, and not only had I gotten that Dr.ate, but I was excelling with it and doing a lot of things to amplify the brand, so it didn’t make any sense to me. And when we talk about adversity, we need to realize that adversity. It’s it’s where the grit is kind of born, right? So how you deal with that adverse situation is going to ultimately determine where you go and how fast you get there. And so I realized after three buckets of eating ice cream and a lot of beers and Kleenex, um, that I needed to do something about the problem. I’m not going to just sit around in my pajamas all day. And that was actually how we started Patent Consulting Group 17 years ago. It started and birthed out of devastation, out of anger, out of frustration. And that is the story that I tell a lot of the people that I coach. That’s the story that I tell a lot of people when I go on the road, because they need to realize that while you’re in the moment, you have to do something. You can’t just live in it. Uh. I’m sorry. I’m super passionate about that. I can laugh about it now, but I could not laugh about it even ten years ago.

Trisha Stetzel: No, as you were telling the story I have to tell you, I got goosebumps three times. I don’t know if anybody’s ever told you that before, but I. I was sitting there with you as you were telling this story about what you were expecting the call to be and what actually happened, like, but then you took action, right? You ate your ice cream, you use the boxes of tissue. And then you said, what can I do with this? What can I do with all of the work that I’ve ever done? And you took action was what we talked about a few minutes ago. If you want to do something, if you want to get something out of what you just learned, take action. Go do the thing. Okay. Um, before we move on, I would love because I know people are already ready to connect with you. They want to get to know more about Melissa. They want to know.

Dr. Melissa Patton : More.

Trisha Stetzel: About what you’re doing. Uh, what is the best way for listeners to connect with you, Dr. Patton? Peyton.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Yeah, yeah. So I’m on LinkedIn. That’s probably one of the number one ways, uh, people link in with me. And I’m not one of those people. They’re like, oh, you’re an you’re a stranger danger. No, I love to talk to new people, whether you’re a student or whether you’re a seasoned professional. So hook up with me on LinkedIn. I also have a website, uh, Dr. Melissa Patton. Com or Patent Consulting. And those are two really good ways to learn more about some of the work that I’m doing and learn how to get connected with me.

Trisha Stetzel: Um, very exciting. And that’s how I found you as well. Linkedin said you should know this person. And I said, okay, yeah, I love that. Yeah. I’m not a stranger danger person on LinkedIn either. You never know.

Dr. Melissa Patton : What she’s good.

Trisha Stetzel: Exactly. Okay. Um, you guys, of course, all of the links will be in the show notes. So if you’re sitting in front of your computer, all you need to do is point and click. You guys can connect directly with Melissa. And now I want to dive into, uh, a little deeper, like challenging that threshold of pain, something that you have in your work book as well. So how can leaders tell the difference between the discomfort that leads to growth and the kind that leads to, uh, burnout?

Dr. Melissa Patton : Yeah, it’s a fine line. One thing that I will say is that everyone needs to be coached. Uh, can I just be honest there? And this is not because Trisha is a coach or I’m a coach or you’re you’re, you know, your neighbor’s a coach. But there are reasons why there are so many coaches who are instrumental in helping you deal with different, different and difficult thresholds of life. And sometimes we need somebody to help as a differentiator. And so if you don’t have an executive coach, you need to get one immediately. And they’re very different than therapists. Okay. Um, everyone needs a coach. So I say that as a segue to help you understand that, yeah, burnout is a real thing. Um, but also threshold, if you look at the definition of threshold and there’s lots of definitions, but the definition that I love the most is when you’re pushing yourself past a point of comfort, you’re pushing yourself past a point of comfort. And it’s how far do you push before you’re going to kill yourself versus when you’re going to get to the next level. And the best way that I can amplify this, I don’t know if I have any athletes out there, but I’m an avid runner.

Dr. Melissa Patton : I’m terrible at it now. But in college, I was a Division one athlete. Okay, I can’t sprint anymore, but one of the ways that I knew that I was hitting my threshold and not hitting a point of pain was right around the last part of my race. I would feel what I call the monkey on the back. Okay. It’s literally like someone just jumps on your back and it pushes you past a point of what you’re familiar with. That is the threshold of pain that I’m talking about in the workbook. It’s it’s dealing with that thing on your back and realizing that you still have to finish strong. It’s going for that promotion and realizing that even though there are whispers, even though there are people saying that you’re not ready, even though the questions are hard in the first and second interview, you still need to you need to push forward. Okay, so that’s what I’m talking about. When I talk about thresholds of pain, burnout is something totally different, and burnout is what is going to help. In order to prevent yourself from a burnout. You need a differentiator, and you need somebody in your corner that’s going to be able to identify what those signs are.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh yes, yes. And more of yes. Thank you for just being blunt and telling everyone they need a coach and we all need one. I need a coach. You need a coach. Everyone needs a coach because we need that. I think that’s describing the monkey on the back. Although I don’t want to be a monkey. I’m kidding.

Dr. Melissa Patton : It’s whatever that thing is. Trisha.

Speaker4: The thing that pushes you to take.

Trisha Stetzel: Action for gosh sakes. Right? Sometimes our, uh, the people that we coach just need permission to go do the thing that they’ve always wanted to do. And that’s where the coach comes in. It can be something that simple, right?

Speaker4: Hundred percent. All right.

Trisha Stetzel: Um, we’ve talked about it, but we haven’t said it yet. Resilience. Resilience is the backbone of transformation. And how? Balancing the strength that we need to take action and move forward, but also the vulnerability to have the conversations or meet people where they’re at or get a coach. So can we talk more about resilience and strength and vulnerability?

Dr. Melissa Patton : Yeah, I mean, resilience has a lot of different words. Uh, stick to it. This is probably one that you’ve heard. Perseverance is another one that you’ve heard. I promise you, I’m not going to give you any football metaphors or any track analogies when I describe this. But isn’t sports a really good way to talk through resilience? I really feel like it is. And and even if you’re just someone that likes to go out for a jog, you know, pushing yourself past what you’ve done previously, getting a better time, uh, hitting a point in your career where, you know, it’s either time for me to be stagnant or it’s time for me to move forward for my next level. And and I do. I always caution people when I have conversations. These conversations are not for everybody. Not everybody is going to be excellent on the level that the person to their left and the person to their right is you make that choice. You ultimately are in charge of your destiny when it comes to your level of excellence and my level of excellence and what I’m pushing for and the goals that I have, and the resilience that plays into that is very different than Trisha’s. And that’s not a good thing. Or it’s not a bad thing, it’s just a thing. So you have to realize that this is your own lane and that you control that next step. And it’s going to take grit. It’s going to take resilience. It’s going to take stick to itiveness to fight through those barriers that are preventing you from moving forward. It’s actually really good for you, I promise.

Trisha Stetzel: So we’re all we’re strong here. We’ve been just telling it like it is. Let’s go take action. What where does vulnerability come in to being a good leader?

Dr. Melissa Patton : Yeah, in every single way imaginable. I, I have to work on that a lot because even though I’m a very transparent, very blunt person, like, this is how I, this is how I manage a team. Um, imagine that. People are like, whoa, really? Yeah. I mean, the people that are on my team, the people that I work with, they appreciate that about me. It’s unapologetic, but being vulnerable to my team showing weakness are like you’re talking to a Division one athlete. I’ve run competitively my entire life. I mean, there were Olympians in some of my races. So y’all, I’m not going to show you that I don’t have my stuff all together, right? Like, that’s what I’m thinking in my head. But that vulnerability is what’s necessary for people to really see you sometimes. So pretending like no one is listening to this. There are levels to this thing. So there are places and positions that I put myself in where I am completely, 100% real. Melissa. And then there are places and times where I need to protect that. That’s where I need to work. I need to be able to trust the experience and to lean into it and not be someone different in different arenas. And to be completely honest with you, that’s what my coach is working with me on. Uh, I need to be authentic, Melissa, every time I go into a room. And for me, that entails vulnerability.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay.

Speaker4: Yes. This is so much fun.

Trisha Stetzel: I really appreciate.

Speaker4: Uh.

Trisha Stetzel: How raw you are about everything. This has been such a great conversation. Um, can you tell me your favorite client story? We’ve talked about transformation, and we’ve talked about leadership and burnout and, um, challenging the threshold of pain. What’s your favorite client story?

Speaker4: Oh, gosh.

Dr. Melissa Patton : So I need to put out a disclaimer on my clients. Right. My clients are bad, mama jama. I mean, these are like, I’m so biased, but these are, like, some of the people that are going to, like, take over the world one day, right? These are your future multi-trillion dollar CEOs. And I don’t know why they talk to me, but I get more out of it, I swear, than they do. Trisha, it’s so much fun. And one of my clients, um, and she’s going to know exactly who she is because I talk about her all the time. Um, but she’s just. She’s just fun. And she’s got two IV, uh, you know, degrees, and she’s down to earth. She’s gorgeous, she’s intelligent, but she is someone that you can have a real conversation with. And our journey in coaching, number one has lasted way longer than both of us expected. Um, but number two, it’s one of those relationships and those conversations where we’re just going at it just one after another, and it just builds and builds and builds. And obviously I’ve seen her do some incredible things from when we started, which has nothing to do with me. I just ask questions and I open the door for her to be honest with herself. But she’s now having conversations about what does it look like for my next what? Who do I want to be when I see that next? Uh, I don’t need any more degrees, but where do I need to surround myself as far as continuing education? Um, how do I get on the big stages? How do I get on the boards? And so those are the kind of conversations. And so I like her because she’s a real person. And you would never expect someone that’s as decorated as she has to be. So down to earth.

Speaker4: Mhm.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Best client ever.

Speaker4: Best client ever. And uh, I see a.

Trisha Stetzel: You’ve been on this journey with her and I know as a coach, like we learn so much from our clients and the journey that we take with them, which is so important. So thank you to all of the clients out there and the coaches who serve clients. Okay, last but not least, as we get to the back end of our time, you’ve spent your entire career helping leaders find strength in adversity. We talk about that in your workbook. If you could leave our listeners with one lesson about grit growth, leading with authenticity. What would it be?

Dr. Melissa Patton : Yeah. Oh, I, I think it would center around showing up, you know, kind of be mindful of how you show up. Um, one of the things that my coach worked with me on, uh, was out of a really bad situation. And how do I have the strength and the resilience to show up as my true, authentic self, regardless to what the C-suite looks like, regardless to whether the conversations are going to the left or to the right. But how do I be the most consistent, authentic Melissa? And that is probably my mantra. Um, he was obviously an amazing coach. He still is an amazing coach. But that’s always my mantra when I am having conversations with my team and when I’m having conversation with my clients, it’s, how do you show up? Who is your authentic self and how do you take that person everywhere you go.

Speaker4: Mhm. Mhm. Okay.

Trisha Stetzel: We don’t have another hour but I.

Speaker4: Wish.

Trisha Stetzel: We did. This has been absolutely phenomenal. Thank you so much for joining me today Melissa would you please one more time tell people the best way to connect with you.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Absolutely. And before I say that Trisha you have so much energy. Um, we made a joke before this call started, and you have exceeded expectations. You’re amazing. She’s at the top of the leaderboard, y’all. I love that.

Speaker4: And and this is my true, authentic self.

Trisha Stetzel: Like, there’s.

Speaker4: No freaky.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Things.

Speaker4: Going on here. This is I love it. Yeah, yeah. So you want to capture.

Trisha Stetzel: Before you go there that you have said y’all twice. So you fit right in, my friend.

Speaker4: Right.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Can I come to you?

Speaker4: Yes.

Dr. Melissa Patton : Absolutely. Too funny. Alright. Yes. You can find me on LinkedIn and you can also find me at my website dot com and at consulting. I look forward to seeing you all there.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, fantastic. Melissa, again, thank you so much for your time today, you guys. That’s all the time we have. If you found value in this conversation that I had with Dr. Patton today, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, leader, veteran or Houston leader ready to grow. Yeah. Uh, be sure to follow, rate and review the show. It helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So please stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. It is my pleasure to introduce my guests today, Susan Schramm, founder of Go to Market Impact, a consultancy dedicated to helping leaders turn bold ideas into reality. After decades of working with global brands like IBM, Siemens and Nokia, as well as small businesses, nonprofits and faith based organizations, Susan noticed a pattern. Even the best strategies often fail not because of poor planning, but because leaders underestimate the people side of execution. That insight led her to create the De-risk system for impact. We’re going to talk about that, a framework that helps leaders surface hidden risks, build alignment, and move from vision to action with confidence. Susan is also the author of Fast Track Your Big Idea, navigate risk, move people into action, and avoid your strategy going off course. She’s passionate about helping organizations de-risk their growth, accelerate impact, and lead with purpose. Fueled by faith, family, and plenty of coffee. Susan, welcome to the show.

Susan Schramm: Well, thank you very much. It’s fun. And I’ll pull up a cup of coffee and and let’s get into it.

Trisha Stetzel: Yes, exactly. I’m so excited to have you on the show today, Susan. So tell us a little bit more about you.

Susan Schramm: So I’m a Houston native, by the way, grew up in Houston and, uh, ended up moving all over the country, um, mostly as a corporate nomad. My, my, my dad was moved us around for his job, and then I ended up with large corporations moving all over the country. So, um, and as you just said, after a years and years of, um, working in large corporations, I saw this need and launched my own consultancy about eight years ago and found that I thought it was small companies that I could help. I found that big companies and small companies have a lot of the same problems, so it was quite exciting to see that there was a need, a real need to address so many great ideas that would get stuck. And I haven’t looked back. I’ve loved being a small business person and being able to work wherever my laptop and I go.

Trisha Stetzel: And we were just talking about that before we started recording today. We should have started recording earlier. Um, Susan, as you know, and thank you for, uh, prefacing that you grew up moving a lot. Um, because many of us don’t, don’t know our military connections or veteran connections that we may have. And as I mentioned before, the vast group of veterans, business owners and entrepreneurs that are listening to this show, and I know that they would love to know what inspired you to start talking about risk in the first place? Because, listen, as a veteran, we don’t accept failure. We will make it work, right? So talk to me or talk to us about this idea of risk and how you see it differently. You, Susan, see risk differently than most.

Susan Schramm: Well thank you. And I you know, I studied in fact, part of my, um, uh, humility when I started noticing this pattern of important launches, important product products and programs and company launches and joint ventures and ecosystem where we try to launch 5G in these different, you know, very big efforts. I started to see this too many times. Great ideas would get stuck. And you’re right, failure is not an option. But sometimes things you know can get bumpy, right? And and what I, what I was struggling with was sometimes in an environment where everyone’s really mission focused, it’s almost, um, considered not loyal to talk about the risk. You see people walking straight into a brick wall and somehow that was considered Debbie Downer or, um, it was considered not loyal to the leader. And I don’t know, I mean, so I started studying military environments and the fact that, you know, risk was top of mind at the very beginning, but there’s a lot of real time decisions about risk. And my I found that risk in a military environment was a little bit more, um, I mean, loss of life is such an extreme that people were more open to the discussion. But when you get into marketplaces, loss of loss of revenue, loss of reputation, loss of of of capacity, um, often aren’t considered quite as severe or extreme. And the result is that as I was launching initiatives, I kept trying to bring these things up and got shut down a lot. And then I started looking at other organizations and realizing some cultures don’t allow for you to talk about the truth, that that risk exists all the time. We all deal with risk. But in some cases, the mission focused mindset doesn’t want to let the possibility of of failure be discussed, and therefore we actually have vulnerabilities as a result.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. Which is a scary thing, right? Let’s all just put our blinders on and keep walking into the brick wall, because that’s what somebody said to do, right? Hey, there’s a brick wall. Yeah.

Susan Schramm: Exactly. I mean, we. And when you go back and do all sorts of history. What battles failed and how did how could they have seen it differently? You know, you always have to make real time decisions based on your based on your best information. But what we often underestimate is the leader of an organization is often the one with the strongest vision. But actually, everyone on that team needs to have an understanding of that vision. And personalities are different, right? There’s different risk profiles of people who are more likely to see risk or likely to how to engage with risk. And if we don’t, our brains are wired such that if we don’t have a plan, our brains go into fight or flight. It’s trying to protect us. So what? I think most leaders underestimate what I found. Uh, people with wonderful visions. Underestimate is that you have to to get something done. You need people to come with you. They don’t always take the hill when you point.

Speaker4: Right.

Susan Schramm: It’s frustrating. Right? It’s frustrating. And so that challenge that risk poses is that different folks will start. If you are confused, if you are skeptical or you’re not aligned, a strategy will fail because you won’t take action. And that really is the end of the day is the biggest issue. If you’re the leader of a big idea and you want to have something happen faster, it’s on you to figure out how to help those people take action and in many cases, talking about risk early, although it seems counterintuitive, will actually help their brains calm down and feel like there’s options. And if they see problems, they can bring them up. That’s the that’s the net of the whole point I’m trying to make. It’s okay. Risk.

Speaker4: It’s okay.

Trisha Stetzel: So, Susan, is this what you do in your work?

Susan Schramm: Yeah I mean, this what I’ve been doing for the last Asked. Well, since what I did before was actually lead cross-functional initiatives to launch programs, products, companies, partnerships, what I’ve done as a consultant is I’ve developed a methodology to help proactively, um, get teams on one page when it comes to what the risks are, and then proactively plan for how they’re going to manage and navigate as risks might show up over time.

Speaker4: Okay, so is.

Trisha Stetzel: That a good lead in to de-risk system for impact?

Speaker4: Sure it is.

Susan Schramm: And what I found was that there’s not a very good language for talking about risk. The financial industry has a pretty good. They you know ever ever met with a financial planner. And they go what’s your risk profile. And a lot of times that means how much money are you willing to let go of if.

Speaker4: It’s.

Susan Schramm: Okay. So what if the cost isn’t money? What if it’s. I mean, sure, in a business, The horrible thing that you go out of business. But what if there’s other dimensions of risk that we really didn’t have a good words? And so what I did was, having spent decades in the tech industry, I decided not to use acronyms and to actually systematically lay out key questions that needed to be posed that make up an excellent strategy and realize that if you don’t have answers to those questions, you probably have risk in the making. And that those questions I have six principles of de-risk system for impact of six principles. And they are things like what’s the problem you solve? What’s the why, what’s the problem you solve, and why are you the one to solve it? And who has to take action and the what if scenarios. Let’s look at different scenarios that any of the dependencies you might have. Um, the other one speaks to how? Because a lot of times we end up with, um, a lot of strategies are built. They’re very tightly connected between the problem you solve and how you solve it, meaning the product you have or your process. But a lot of times the problem you solve may be very important, but how you solve it isn’t working. That doesn’t mean your strategy has to fail. That just means you have to rethink the how. Um, and then the last one is just this idea of adapting. How are you creating a business or an organization that can quickly shift gears and pivot? So for each of those, what I do is take people through the thinking process behind it and more than anything, the alignment necessary to accomplish it. Right. So all those questions are powerful, but if you’re all in different pages, you’ll fail too. So so that’s the issue of laying out the key elements of an important strategy. And then evaluate and openly talk about your risks and assumptions at each step.

Speaker4: Yeah, because.

Trisha Stetzel: If it’s just the leader sitting in a cave creating the strategy and they’re not bringing everyone along, or there’s no buy in from the team, then we’re not going to get very far. That Hill’s going to be really high.

Susan Schramm: That’s when I have a program I called the strategy reboot. Strategy reboot. If you go, there’s a half a day where I encourage senior leaders, boards and senior leadership teams to step back and think strategically for 4 or 5 hours. I mean, sometimes they say, oh, that’s too much. Can you do it in one? I’m like, okay, strategy takes thinking. But one of the one thing I do is I go through 12 common mistakes, and one of them is called the bunker. The bunker strategy, which is a one person or a tiny group of people go into a room, come up with a whole strategy, and then surprise the people who have to take action with the strategy and haven’t really sussed out. What would their piece of that be? Sometimes if it’s small business, they tend to think their team is just the people who work for them. But what they’re often surprised at is the number of people who have to do something different for a strategy to actually work. And the bunker is, oh, well, uh, me and the CFO and the, you know, the head of sales, we got this. But there’s an entire sales force, customer service frontline. Or if it’s all that one person, fine. But there’s also the customers themselves. If you shift your offering, they have to change your partners, your suppliers, your community that knows you one way. And now you’re you’re something new. And so that bunker strategy tends to cause it cause a lot of people to get excited, change their website, make a new logo, get all excited about how great this new thing is going to be. And then they’re disappointed six months later when it’s stuck.

Trisha Stetzel: No execution, no action because there was no buy in or not enough buy in. There’s buy in from the people who were excited about it.

Speaker4: Exactly. Oh.

Trisha Stetzel: So, Susan, um, I know people are already curious and want to connect with you. What is the best way to connect with you so they can get more information or even ask more questions?

Susan Schramm: Well, I’d love for your community to email me or connect with me on LinkedIn. So my email address is Susan at go-to-market. Com. I’m sure it’s going to be on the bottom of the well.

Speaker4: Yes.

Susan Schramm: And then the other thing is on LinkedIn, it’s Susan Bailey Schram is my there’s several of us. So that’s the one who I am. And uh, and it says right on there that I’ve got a new book coming out. So that’s when you get to me. Find me on LinkedIn and you’ll see that I’ve got the new book.

Speaker4: Yeah. Which is very.

Trisha Stetzel: Exciting. I know I had a little lead into that. So you guys. Uh, yes. Always. As always. There will be links in the show notes so you can point and click if you’re sitting in front of your computer. If you’re not, when you’re looking for Susan, her last name is spelled s c h r a m m. And remember, on LinkedIn it’s Susan Bailey Schramm on LinkedIn so you can find her or her first name. Last name, uh, at tell us the rest of it. Susan.

Susan Schramm: Go to market impact comm.

Trisha Stetzel: Perfect. Thank you very much. Okay. So I’d like to spend, if it’s okay with you a little more time on this alignment piece. So, um, you’ve you have de-risk system for impact. You’ve also got some other tools that you use with your, uh, with the teams that engage you. Let’s talk more about alignment. This sounds really hard. I’ve been there. We’ve all been on both sides. Well, not all of us. A lot of us have been on both sides of that. I have this great idea. I want to go do this thing. Talk to me more about the actual alignment and what that looks like, Susan, as you take them through your process.

Susan Schramm: Yeah. And I think if you have a military background, this is probably the most frustrating aspect of working in the marketplace because two things. And I’ve worked with plenty. I remember my, um, a nephew who’s in the Air Force and he he was going back and forth between civilian roles and military roles. And he just says, people just don’t. Do they don’t, you know, you say, let’s go do something. And then they all pause and we just don’t get going. Right. And the urgency and oftentimes in the marketplace, people don’t always share the same urgency or they the command control model doesn’t work, and they have a lot more likelihood to not just take the hill because the boss said so. Um, what’s interesting about alignment? Um, I can remember when I was doing my research on on this topic. People always talked about this idea of getting on board. Right? And I had one woman say, I hate that phrase getting on board. I said, why? It’s just it’s it’s an invitation. She said, no, I would. If you think about getting on board, it’s a it’s coming from the old ways of a definition of train or a ship saying all aboard where the leader has a destination preplanned and you’re telling get on board, right. Whereas another way to think about this is getting on one page.

Speaker4: Mhm.

Susan Schramm: The idea like if you’re climbing Mount Everest, there’s lots of different ways to scale that mountain. And you need as a group to have a common understanding of how you’re going to do it. But everyone has a part to play in getting there. And so that concept of helping people get on one page is an important mindset versus get on board or get out of the way, right? Which I was told at one point when I was trying to when I was part of a product team. So I know what that feels like. The other thing is, one of the principles I lay out early on is not only know the problem you’re solving, but why is it urgent to solve? Now? I’m creating urgency for your team, for your customers, for your investors, uh, for for your supporters. Uh, requires clarity about the. What if this isn’t necessary. In other words, the problem you solve, the consequence of you solve it, and the consequence if you don’t solve it. And sometimes I think we fall in love with our whatever it is we’re solving. Um, but we don’t realize the world has changed around us. And my favorite example of that is during Covid, there was a huge spike. The product managers for toilet paper were like, man, have we nailed this spike in growth? The great demand is up. But um, but then it ceased, right? So something changed.

Susan Schramm: And I think that what we’re sometimes not thinking is, has the has the demand for my solution, uh, is anything about it change? Is the market a niche versus a broad place? Uh, if there’s been a change, what do we do? Well, that could be addressed. But many, many times I think that when when it comes back to alignment, it’s the balance between inviting people to have a to play a role in shaping that plan B on one page. And they understand their role, they understand what’s expected, what they have to do, and they believe and trust you that that makes sense. And you combine that alignment with urgency and you sometimes can. You personally may feel urgent about it, but the rest of the team doesn’t feel urgent. They’re not going to take action as you expected. And it’s not again, it’s not just your team, but it’s all those people in the entire end to end model that you serve that are going to have to take action. You have to think through. And and truthfully, I would give everybody a test right now. So what if it doesn’t happen, you know, go there as a team. What if what we’re doing never happens? What’s the consequence? And if that doesn’t what’s the consequence of that. So you get you know, you keep going deeper to to really find the motivation for why now is so urgent.

Trisha Stetzel: This is amazing. And the the thing that’s coming through here is people, you know, we talk a little bit about this human factor and having the right people and the right room doing the right things. So what what is your thought around the people on the team that are going to take action? How do I know that I have the right people on my team?

Susan Schramm: Well, yeah, it’s um, it’s an interesting one because in in good to Great, Jim Collins talks about having the right people on the bus. I mean, you whatever, wherever you’re going, that bus, if you don’t have the right people on the bus, you might as well stop. Um, and I one of the things that I’m finding is that the hesitancy to step up to solve that is often when you have a small team, it’s hard to let go of someone who really isn’t the right person. Yeah. Um, the one thing I’d also say about this subject, which is values, alignment if everything falls apart, I we, I went through in the telecom industry and the tech industry, Three. Unfortunately, we spent a lot of time doing layoffs and ups and downs, hiring and then layoffs, hiring. And when we had to start over again, one of the questions we always also always asked was if you only had a rowboat, who are the 3 or 4 people you’d want in that rowboat and don’t care what the role was, you just want that person in the rowboat. Because your values were aligned, you were able to adjust that ability to pivot. And the risk if if risk is unknown, then how if they’re going to be part of a team where there’s constant risk, are they going to be someone who can, who can openly and and without too much fear? Um, adjust.

Susan Schramm: And but that might be adjust their strategy but means they’re just their role as well. And so the values alignment I work with a lot of organizations who put wonderful posters all over every room that talk about values, and then when it gets down to making day to day decisions with customers and employees, you question that those values are real. And so translating your values into because our value, for instance, is teamwork, we’ve decided to hire as in team interviews. You actually speak to your group. These values direct these actions on our part. And that’s accountability for the values. And then the second part is this idea of hiring for people who are adaptive leaders, not just technical leaders. They are actually leaders who who are comfortable. And this can be groomed. People can learn this. It’s part of my book Fast Track. Your big idea is actually helping you build teams that are adaptive from the beginning. But that takes an intentionality. And if you only had three people in your rowboat, you’d want people who were open to that.

Speaker4: Um, yeah.

Trisha Stetzel: So, Susan, how’d you know I was going to ask you about your book next? It’s like you knew.

Speaker4: You read my mind.

Trisha Stetzel: So tell us more about your book. Give us the title, tell us where we can find it and tell us what we’re going to learn from it.

Susan Schramm: So the book is titled Fast Track Your Big Idea. And if you were to go on Amazon, you could find it. Um, it’s navigating risk. Move people to action and avoid your strategy going off course. I wrote the book because so many people, after I worked with them, they said, you should write a book. You should write about this. And what I found was that the workshops that I run and the consulting that I do and speaking often, it starts a conversation. It prompts you, as this conversation has to go. I hadn’t thought about that. Let’s go deeper. And so what the book does is it walks you through what is a good strategy. And if you’re leading a strategy, whatever you are in your stages, how can you, from the beginning plan for risk? And how can you from the beginning plan to build a team that is comfortable adapting to risk. Um, and it has tons. It has over 20 deliverables that you can download and use with your team. Um, it has um, chapters where actually help you build a strategic message playbook so that everybody on your team can consistently communicate your strategy. So there’s a lot of wonderful, you know, pieces of it. More than anything, it allows you to, you know, I want everybody to write in the margins and keep track, because wherever you are, you’re in a you’re a work in process with most strategies. And, uh, it was designed to help walk with you wherever you are starting or, or or if you’re stuck getting back on track, that’s just as useful in those roles.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that. Okay, you guys fast track your big idea. Or you can even look up Susan Schram on Amazon and I’m sure you’ll find the book title there. You need to go out and get a copy of it. It’s going to be a great read for any business leader. I think this is fantastic. Susan, I have one more big question for you. Would it be okay, one more as we close up here today? All right. If you could give leaders one simple, practical way to de-risk their next big idea, no matter what stage they’re in, what would it be?

Susan Schramm: I’m going to ask you to ask a question more frequently than you may today. And that is at the end of a big session where you’ve got a big plan. Stop and say, what risks have we not talked about that we should be considering? Simply ask the question what you will do is you’ll do two things as a leader. Number one, you’ll invite in broader thinking. But the other thing you’ll do is you set a tone. You’ll set a tone that you don’t have all the answers, that you’re willing and humble and courageous enough to accept that you may have setbacks. You’ll invite and build courage and confidence of a team who, if they if they run into problems. It’s not that you weren’t open to adjusting. So it just sends a huge message to the people that you’re trying to lead, and that they feel more excited about being part of a place where their ideas are respected and they can contribute it to be on one page with you.

Trisha Stetzel: Um, can we just talk for another hour? Susan, this has been so wonderful. I’m just, like, taking it all in. I’m like, oh, there’s so many ideas here. I want to go execute my next big idea. This is amazing. I really, I think that everything we’ve talked about today will resonate with the whole audience, but in particular with all of my veteran friends who have moved from a place where we didn’t get to choose who was in our room. We just had to execute against whatever the mission was to. Now we’re in business and we do have choices, and we can start to ask those questions around risk. Yeah. Okay. I’m so excited. Susan, thank you so much for being with me today. This has been amazing.

Susan Schramm: Well, this has been so much fun. And I’m just really I have a heart for this audience. I think you you’re creating an amazing community of people who we all appreciate the service you’ve all had and then the the idea that you can shape a world that needs, needs, good ideas and, and and people who are, as you said, not, uh, not give uppers. Right. There are people who are have tenacity and courage to keep going. It’s just sometimes it helps if you’ve gotten off the road. It’s helped you to get back on track a little bit. So that’s.

Trisha Stetzel: Absolutely. And you know we all we all put on our our big big boy big girl pants and say failure is not an option. But it does come. And that’s how we learn our lessons. And the more we talk about risk and de-risking the things that we want to go do, the more lessons we can learn in front of these mistakes that we might make right, or these failures that we might encounter. So, uh, great conversation. Susan, thank you so much. I really appreciate your time today. You guys. All of her information will be in the show notes, as always, but if you’d like to connect directly with her, you can get her by email at Susan at go-to-market. Impact.com. Her last name is spelled S c h r a m and you need to go find her book on Amazon and grab a copy of it fast. Track your big idea or look Susan Schram up as the author, and it will take you right to the page you’re looking for. I’ll also put a link in the show notes so you guys can just point and click and get to Amazon to grab the book. Susan, again, thank you so much for your time today.

Susan Schramm: So much fun. Look forward to seeing everybody.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. All right you guys, that’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation I had with Susan, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, a veteran or a Houston leader ready to grow. Be sure to follow, rate, and review the show. It helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. Is my pleasure to introduce you to my guest today, who is Chad Ackerman, founder of CARE. We’ll talk more about that. And Chad Ackerman Real Estate, which those two things may be synonymous. You’ll see as a and a certified focal point business coach, which is how we met. After spending more than 25 years in corporate leadership, Chad made a bold pivot into entrepreneurship and investing, co-founding Left Field Investors, a nationally recognized community that supported thousands of passive investors before being acquired by Bigger Pockets and rebranded as Passive Pockets through care. Chad now helps new and aspiring limited partners build confidence, take action, and make smart, sustainable investment decisions. He’s passionate about making passive investing approachable for everyone, not just the pros, and teaching business owners how to grow income streams that align with their goals and their values. Chad, welcome to the show.

Chad Ackerman: Thank you. Can you hear Focal Point material in there as you read that too? Maybe a little. I’ve tried to bleed that in. It’s been very fruitful you know to get that focal point background. So but no thank you Trisha, I really appreciate you having me on the podcast. Really excited to have the conversation with you today. It’s great to see you again. Uh, thank you for all you’ve done for me to help get me to this point as well.

Trisha Stetzel: Hey. You bet. Uh, and I’m glad that you reached out. You know, you reached out just because we’re rekindling, uh, a relationship where we had a community together, and I said, hey, why don’t you come on the show? Let’s talk about what you’re doing.

Chad Ackerman: Yeah, you’re part of my Champions Network now, so I gotta work that Champions Network. That’s right.

Trisha Stetzel: So, Chad, for people who don’t know you, tell us a little bit more about you.

Chad Ackerman: Yeah. So, uh, again, thank you for having me on the show, but I was a career W2 guy. I was in human resources of all places, not the, you know, hunting grounds for turning into an entrepreneur, necessarily. But it worked for me that I did 25 plus years in HR and mostly focused on compensation, which was analytical at heart. I switched jobs, and when I switched jobs, somebody at the new job kind of put the bug in my ear that they were looking for multiple income streams. And that kind of triggered with me of, oh, you know that. Yeah, I’m getting later in my career looking for other options. I should look into this further. And this new job gave me windshield time. So I started listening to podcasts, I started doing audio books and so forth, focused on real estate investing and looked at a lot of shiny objects, a lot like like a lot of people do, and ultimately ended up falling into a local meetup group here in Columbus, Ohio, a beautiful Columbus, Ohio, where I am, and the last meetup that I attended, the founder got up and talked about how he left his W2 by investing passively in real estate, and that was kind of the switch that flipped for me of like, I gotta meet this guy, I gotta figure out what this is. And he ended up being one of the co-founders of Left Field with me as well, before it was over with.

Chad Ackerman: It’s his idea, really. I was a co-founder of his is what I should say, but I got very passionate about it. It left me built an opportunity for me to leave my W2 in 2022. Uh, so I’d say I’m retired from the corporate world anyway, but I wasn’t done by any means. I had to fill my time somehow, and I went out and bought a Focal Point franchise at that point in time. Got to go through some wonderful training with yourself and, uh, spurred me out and I, you know, I was soul searching, trying to figure out what to do with Focal Point, really find my customer. And somebody finally put the bug in my ear of saying, why don’t you go coach professionals that want to learn about passive real estate? And I’m like, yes, let’s blend focal points, materials, resources, knowledge with the knowledge I built by running left field and doing passive investing myself, and try to go help people that are just like me. My avatar is me, you know, my target audience is me. So, uh, try to go help people that have a curiosity about investing passively. Uh, just don’t know where to start. You know, those are the people I’m trying to find and help out now at this point in time.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that. So, Chad, it took me six years to figure out that I am her. She is me.

Speaker4: I am right.

Trisha Stetzel: You learned that lesson a lot faster than I did.

Chad Ackerman: Maybe you you you gave that to me subliminally without me realizing it.

Trisha Stetzel: Maybe I did, or maybe I spoke it at some.

Chad Ackerman: Yes, at some point.

Trisha Stetzel: Some class somewhere. Um, okay. So I, I love this idea of you shifting from your W2 into investing into coaching and now blending those things together. What lessons carried over into what you’re doing now from your corporate experience? I’m asking you to lean back into that a little bit and tell us what you bring to your business now, from those lessons you learned then.

Chad Ackerman: Yeah, I, I learned it in corporate focal point. Put this in us as well with your training and everything to to me this this space I’m in now trying to help people. It all starts with goal setting. You really gotta build your foundation first and foremost. Otherwise, you make mistakes and you only have a limited number of resources to utilize in this space. You don’t want to waste any money. You don’t want to waste any time. So I really Call coach people to sit and spend time on your goals and your strategies. I’m proof positive. My very first passive investing investment I got into was a 17 story building in Cleveland. That was an office space that they were going to gut and turn into apartments. Sounds sexy. Sounds fun. I was excited about it. Was definitely a shiny object. Um, but I didn’t realize at the time my real goal in all this space was cash flow. I wanted to build passive cash flow. Well, a basically a ground up development is almost what it was isn’t going to cash flow for a long period of time.

Chad Ackerman: So it was a mistake to get into it. I thought it was still going to be okay and I could ride the wave. It actually turned out that the gentleman didn’t operate it very well, so it ended up being bad all the way around. But the biggest lesson learned was pause. Take time. Figure out what you’re really trying to do in this space. Ask yourself those questions of what do I want out of this? And honestly, the the biggest benefit to what I’m doing now, the passive real estate investing. There’s a ton of noise in this industry. There’s shiny objects everywhere. Having your goals set really gives you alignment and cuts down on a lot of those noises. I can ignore all the noise that I see because that’s not what I’m looking for. So it really trims down that funnel then, so you can focus on what is important to you, what you’re really trying to do. So I learned it in corporate, learned it with Focal Point. And it definitely sticks with this space as well.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. So now I’m going to ask you to put your coaching hat on. Is this something you do with your clients? What if somebody comes to you and says, Chad, I don’t know what I want. I have no idea what my goals are.

Chad Ackerman: So then we start asking the questions. Then we dig deep with them and really start asking the why, why, why, why questions to them. Um, and it does take time. It took me a long time to kind of really nail down my goals. And you, you start with high level. I feel like, oh, I just I want to build my wealth. Well, okay. Why do you want to build your wealth? What’s your lesson behind it? Oh, well, I want to, you know, be able to leave my W2. Well, why do you want to leave your W2 at some point in time? And, you know, you see I like your lighting up about this. So my coaching is kicking in. But it it gets down to honestly at the end of the day, majority of the time it ends up being time freedom discussions that people are looking for, not financial freedom. Financial freedom, ultimately is the tool that lets you have time freedom. But it’s majority of these people that I coach. They’re missing kids soccer games. They’re, you know, working 60 hours a week. They’re doing all this. It always boils back to time. Freedom at the end of the day, is what they’re looking for. But it’s it’s helping them understand that on, you know, on the surface, they’re just like, I want to build my wealth. I want alternative investments to outside of the stock market to blend in and diversify all that’s good. But there’s more. Why behind all of that that I try to help them get to. So it means more to them?

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. Wow. This sounds like business coaching, Chad. Mm.

Chad Ackerman: It’s, uh. It’s amazing. Once I kind of figured out how to blend this, that it’s. Yeah. Business coaching fits in so many arenas. Um, it’s it’s borderline life coaching. It’s borderline. I always view it as accountability coaching. You know, this is what you taught us as well. At the end of the day, I’m just helping you think through what you already know or may know, helping you just take a clear lens to take a look at it and then hold you accountable for what you say you want to do. That’s ultimately my goal with the people that I coach keep them on track.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. I love that. Um, so if someone is listening to the show today and they’re like, oh, this sounds like a really great idea. And listen, Chad, you have the experience. You’ve got a reputation, um, in this passive Investing space and making it approachable. Um, why do you think so many people are intimidated by it? Even those people who are listening who are like, oh, something I want to do, but I’m never going to get into that because it’s scary.

Chad Ackerman: Yeah, I, I think there’s a lot of myths related to this industry. I actually have a webinar I do that covers seven myths that go with this industry. That first and foremost is people have fear, the fear of investing, which the risk that’s involved. I could lose everything that I invest. Well, there’s a risk in every investment that you do. The the beauty of investing in real estate versus the stock market, the stock market. You’re investing in paper, which could go to a value of $0. I mean, it could the building could close, the business could go out. Uh, it could be, you know, a total disaster for you. At the end of the day, with real estate, even if the whatever building it was, if it was self storage, if it was apartment building, whatever, if it burnt to the ground, you still own the ground. There’s still some value that you hold there because it’s real estate. You probably had insurance on it so you can get. I mean, you shouldn’t invest in anything that doesn’t have insurance on it. So you better have insurance, right? So even if it does burn like you’re going to get that back, you mitigate a lot of the risk because it’s a real tangible asset.

Chad Ackerman: Um, that’s one another big myth that people always think is you gotta have, you know, I gotta be a millionaire. I gotta have a lot of money to do this. Well, there are avenues most of the retail investments I’ve gotten into you can get into for as low as 25 grand. Now 25 grand. Still a lot of money, by all means. But it’s not millions of dollars. But there’s a business that we work with that we partnered with called Trivest. They help you pool money together. If you have friends and family that want to invest in real estate, too, and you don’t want to put a bunch in, you can pull money together into an LLC. And then you go invest and then you mitigate that risk even further. So I try to teach the myths so that I get people to understand these shouldn’t be obstacles. These shouldn’t be roadblocks for you. Let me get you comfortable. My whole point of care is to build clarity around these obstacles so you can have confidence, so you can take action. That’s what I’m really trying to coach on at the end of the day.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay? I’m really excited about what’s happening here. This is such a great conversation. Uh, you mentioned a webinar, and I am sure that there are people already wanting to connect with you, Chad. So what’s the best way to connect with you and find out more?

Chad Ackerman: Yeah, so I’m all over LinkedIn. That’s a great place to go or go check out my website at Real Estate. Com all one word Chad real estate. Um, a lot of material out there. I’ve tried to put some free material, glossary information, how to get started. These kind of things just it’s where Care was built. Chad Ackerman Real Estate was built to be educational, to help people get educated. I my goal, my legacy, is to educate as many people that this is a tangible way that they can diversify their portfolio. I fell in love with it so much. So I liquidated my 401 and moved it over. And I don’t I don’t encourage people to do this. This is a path. It’s not the path to do this. But I love the space. So I want to teach people, hey, if you want to diversify, if you’re looking for something else, that is a can be a passive investment for you. Check out real estate. And there is there is opportunity here for people and so forth. So go to my website. Go go to the LinkedIn. Check me out there and see, you know, reach out to me. I personally, the biggest thing I get joy out of is just having conversations with people to hear their journey. Where where are you? What have you done? What do you think you’re trying to do? And can I help you out in some way or shape or form? I, I tell my story on podcast all the time. I love hearing stories from other people is what I really strive to do.

Trisha Stetzel: And you guys can find the past podcasts on his website as well. By the way, his last name is spelled a, c k e r m a n. Just in case you’re looking for him on social or his website. You started down this path, Chad, when you were talking about care. And I know it’s Chad Ackerman Real Estate, but you started care and you said clarity. And I thought you were going to go into this using that acronym for your coaching as well.

Chad Ackerman: I have one I’ve tried to figure out, should I get away from Chad and real estate and use the clarity as the C? Uh, but I, I haven’t totally pivoted there yet. I honestly thought it worked out great. Chatgpt you.

Trisha Stetzel: Can use.

Chad Ackerman: Two.

Trisha Stetzel: Right?

Chad Ackerman: You can have your.

Trisha Stetzel: Your coaching acronym and your business name acronym. Okay. Um, the the next piece that I would like to jump into is really community as a business strategy and kind of left field investors and talking a little bit about that. But before we get there. Community makes me think of champions. And we mentioned that at the top of our conversation. Not everyone may understand what a champion is. And I think that let’s start there and then let’s dive into community as a business strategy.

Chad Ackerman: Yeah, yeah. So to me, champion is that everybody has them. You don’t maybe label them that way, but it’s that. Who is that mentor that you’ve worked with. Who is that person that when you’re in a group discussion they’ve got your back or they talk highly of you or whatever? Who are the people you can lean on when you have questions and you want to just kind of partner up with somebody to help you out with an issue or whatever. Um, those are, I think, of my corporate world. There were people that when I was trying for a job or I needed a reference, if you will. They were perfect for that. They were the ones that would kind of stick up and say my names. But it’s it’s so much more than that. It’s that that person that’s kind of looking out for your best interest. Um, that is your true champion in my mind. These are the people I’ve gone back to to kind of let them know what I’m doing now. And they’re the ones that are out there sending referrals my way because they want to help me out. So we all have those people, and they’re very important in our lives, by all means.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. They are. So, uh, I would be remiss if I didn’t if we didn’t talk about why you reached out to me as a champion and the connection that we have there. So let’s talk about this idea of connecting with veterans who may be interested in passive income.

Chad Ackerman: Yeah, yeah. So when we were running left field, we saw different pockets of groups of people. I mean, at the end of the day, the target audience for passive investing is a very broad topic. It’s anybody that’s that’s interested that has the means to do it. Uh, you know, so it’s a broad topic, but we would see pockets. We saw first responders that were trying to organize themselves. We saw military, we saw people that saw entrepreneurs, that sold businesses. So there was various avenues that go, but it was always trying to reach out and connect with those people where they are to help introduce the space, especially in a place that they’re comfortable and they’re surrounded by people that there is in their network or their community, so that they could kind of hash it out after conversations and vet it themselves of like, does this seem legit or not? Or whatever the case is, veterans was a big group of that. There’s there’s a lot of people that came into left field that were active duty still that had disposable income that they were trying to invest while they were still active, um, to put it to use. So it wasn’t just sitting around and, and was building wealth for them when they were ready to retire out of the military and so forth. So it was an avenue that after talking to you, I’m like, you know, there’s there’s a lot of work that could be done there, I think, to help introduce this space that I well, not just in military, It isn’t introduced. Well, one of my I’ll use the word legacy again.

Chad Ackerman: One of the legacies I wish we had from left field was I wanted to build educational material that might be taught in schools, whether it be college level, high school level. I’ve actually started a couple books, and one of them is a book that would be for kids 6 to 10 years old to start introducing it then so parents could read it to them, get interested themselves, but be able to have that conversation with a child growing up. I have two children. They’re they’re one’s 21 now. One’s 19. So they’re not going to read that book for me necessarily. But I put them in a tribe in an LLC with me, and I invest with them so that they could learn. My goal was to teach my kids my why was teach my kids about this at a much earlier age than I learned, so they can make more decisions around this than me learning it in my 40s. And I had a lot of, you know, expenses I was responsible for a lot of responsibilities, period. Uh, you know, they’re they’re living the cheapest life. They’re going to live right now because their expenses are as low as they’re ever going to be. Let me teach you how to manage your money. The money you do have, that’s extra. Instead of wasting it. All of it. Have fun. But let me teach you a way to save some extra money and invest it, uh, in a diverse asset class of some kind that just builds your wealth in a different way. That was a lot. A lot of information.

Speaker5: That was awesome. Okay, so did you write the book yet? Chad? Did you write that book?

Chad Ackerman: I wrote the book. The kids book is done. I need to get an illustrator. If anybody’s listening illustrates books, let me know. Okay. So yeah. Yeah.

Speaker5: Awesome. Yeah. Um. All right, so for business owners.

Trisha Stetzel: Entrepreneurs, anybody who’s listening who wants to step into investing, what’s one key mindset they need to make before taking that leap.

Chad Ackerman: Um, get get your get your business, your investment business structure. Before you get started, there are several things that you should think about. Do you want to form an LLC or do you want to invest in your own name? Do you want to? Where’s the money going to come from? Is it, is it um, if you have money in A41K that you wish you could use, there are tools called solo for one or checkbook for one. They have a lot of different names that you can move money out of your 41K into one of these, and you can invest it in anything you want then at that point in time. So there are multiple avenues. So it’s it’s spend time on the business side of this to understand all the different things you need to structure to be ready to invest before you go pull that trigger. And then it’s let’s teach you how to first vet an operator. Vet a general partner. Um, we we have a saying you’re betting on the jockey, not the horse, really is what you’re doing. So we’ll teach you how to vet a deal. But before you ever get a deal, you need to learn how to talk to the operators and get through the marketing that they do and understand the proforma that they send. That is a shiny object as well. That every deal that comes from an operator looks like it’s the best deal that’s ever existed. How do you find the ones that are really there? Well, you start with the operator. Do I trust them? At the end of the day, you’re turning your. The biggest risk that we have is you turn your money over to somebody that isn’t going to operate the deal the way they say they’re going to. That that’s the biggest risk in this.

Chad Ackerman: This gets back to the community discussion. This is why we form left field. This is why I’m a firm believer in community learning. At the end of the day, I won’t invest today with somebody that I can’t go into our forum on passive pockets and say, hey, I just talked to Chad Ackerman, general partner, and I’ve never used him before. Has anybody ever heard of him? And if the community of passive pockets, which is fairly large, I don’t get any responses out of that. I’ll go back to that general partner and say, look, I’m not saying no forever, but I’m saying no for now. Nobody in my community has heard of you. I need to follow you for a while. It’s too big of a risk to too much unknown here. That community, that word of mouth I can get from other people that say, oh, yeah, I’ve worked with Chad and he has great communications, and he followed his pro forma, performed well. He made it through this last economic cycle. That’s been terrible. He did really well with it. That gives me the courage then to go invest more or not invest in other research them more. I should say invest in understanding who they are, maybe before I invest with them. But it’s it’s called passive investing. But you have to be active when you start this process up until when you write the check and you invest in the deal, that’s when it becomes passive, really. So you got to put some effort in up front to make sure, you know, like and Alike and trust the operator. And you’re willing to do this and you like the deal, then you invest, and then you can sit back and be passive with it.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay. So I think it’s worth. We’ve got a few more minutes. I think it’s worth taking a little bit deeper dive into left field investors. So for those who are listening today and they heard bits and pieces of what you’re talking about, like you’re you get vetted through this group and all of these things tell me, take us like through the kindergartner version, like the Trisha kindergartner version of what left field investors is. And how is it something that if I’m interested, I could get involved in? What does that look like?

Chad Ackerman: So yeah, it’s it’s a membership community. Left field got bought out by passive pockets or by bigger pockets. It’s now called passive pockets. But it was we developed it when we were developing Left Field purely as a place to put like minded investors together in one space and share experiences and gain education off of those experiences by sharing with one another and networking with other people doing it. Passive investing and real estate is still new enough that we couldn’t talk to our neighbors. We couldn’t talk to our family. Our name, Left Field, came from when we had those conversations with people. They’re like, oh, you don’t want to do that. That’s out in left field. You don’t want to do that. So that’s exactly why we named it what we did. So we built a community then around like minded individuals just to share. So the intent was for us to become better investors ourselves is why we built it. Then it grew into a culture, and then we started having operators decide they would pay us to come advertise to it. And we’re like, oh, this is actually a business. Wait a minute. But the intent of it was just to put all these people together so that they could learn off of one another, because there wasn’t enough information out there to educate people. If people go Google this, you’re going to find a bunch of information to teach you how to flip single family homes or wholesale them, or do single family stuff, or you’re going to find a bunch of information to teach you how to be a general partner and go buy an apartment building and run it. But there wasn’t hardly any information about being that middle guy of, I just want to invest in the real estate.

Chad Ackerman: I don’t want to run it. I don’t want to be a landlord. I like my W-2, maybe, so I don’t want to leave my W-2. I just want to invest in real estate, and I don’t want to have to go to my single families every night and hammer a few nails, or clean a toilet or whatever, or run out of tenant, whatever the case is, this was that middle ground that gives you that flexibility to do whatever you enjoy doing, but you’re investing in real estate at the same time. You get all the benefits that real estate offers to it. So we put left field together just to bring all those people together, um, and allow them to share their stories so we could all learn good and bad. We had red flag sections of like, hey, who’s had a bad experience? Share that. That’s valuable information so we can know to well, it’s it’s your own personal risk assessment right of well somebody didn’t like the way they communicated. Well, maybe I don’t care as much about communication. So that isn’t as big a red flag for me. But other people, it’s one strike and you’re done kind of thing too. So it’s up to you. I mean, it’s a very individualized thing. Um, this is why, going back to my original comment, setting your goals and knowing your strategy is so important because don’t fall into the groupthink, your risks, your where you are in your life is everything that drives what you should be making decisions off of, not just what somebody else has done kind of thing.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh, brilliant. Okay, I have one more question as we finish up. Absolutely. If you could leave the listeners with one piece of advice about building confidence and taking action, it’s nice to talk about. Right, but actually taking action. And some may consider, especially in uncertain markets. Right. What would it be? What would it.

Chad Ackerman: Be? So very good question. And I was I was I fell into this myself. I had analysis paralysis for a long time. It took me 2 or 3 years to invest in my first deal. Um, what I will say one I am a firm believer there are deals to be found in any economy. You just gotta do your due diligence. You gotta know your goals, know your buy box, have a community to ask questions in, and you can find deals no matter what it is. So if you have money to invest, you don’t have to sit on it forever. You can find it. But to take action, you learn so much more from taking action. Um, I guaranteed you want to mitigate your risks with that first one, but even if that first one does end up being a mistake, you’re going to learn so much from actually doing it because you can read the books, you can listen to the podcast. You’re not going to have a full, firm understanding of it until you actually pull the trigger on one and try it out. And this is where things like tribe, this, this company that let you group invest, I think are huge and so important for new investors of instead of having to put 25 grand in, maybe you’re only putting five grand in because there’s five of you. Um, you know, that makes it a little bit easier to take that first action and learn and then get comfortable enough to keep going. That’s I want to I want to make the the process to get you there as easy as it can so that you do feel confident. It’s learning the terms, learning how to vet, learning how to ask questions of the operator that builds your confidence to get you ready to get in there. And that’s what I built care for, is to help out with all that kind of thing.

Trisha Stetzel: I love that. All right, you guys, if you’re ready to have a conversation with Chad, I know many of you already are. You can go to his website at Chad Ackerman Real Estate. All one word last name spelled a c k e r m a n. By the way, as always, the links to all of these will be in the show notes. You guys who are sitting in front of your computer can just point and click. If you’re in your car, please don’t do that, Chad. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Chad Ackerman: Oh thank you I really enjoyed it. Love talking to you anyway. But this is a great way to do it too. So thank you for having me on.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah thank you. All right guys that’s all the time we have for today. If you found value in this conversation that I had with Chad today, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, veteran or Houston leader ready to grow. And as always, be sure to follow, rate and review the show. It helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business. Your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Houston, Texas. It’s time for Houston Business Radio. Now, here’s your host.

Trisha Stetzel: Hello, Houston. Trisha Stetzel here bringing you another episode of Houston Business Radio. Today’s guest is Aaron Trahan, founder of Performance Mindset and a seasoned executive with more than 20 years of leadership experience in both corporate and startup environments. By the age of 30, Aaron was leading $1 billion publicly traded company, a role that gave him deep insight into what drives growth and what derails it. Today, he works with leaders and organizations to to achieve sustainable, profitable growth by breaking the chaos cycle and creating systems of clarity, focus and accountability. Aaron’s mission is to help leaders get better at getting better and build businesses that scale the right way. Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Trahan: Hi Trisha, thank you so much for having me excited for this conversation.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah. Me too. And for those of you who are not watching on video, you need to jump over to the YouTube channel because Aaron has this most beautiful Winnie in the background. And I’m not going to tell you what it is. So you guys just have to jump on and see.

Aaron Trahan: It’s it’s always good to have a cute, uh, cute, fluffy business partner, you know?

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. All right, Aaron, tell us a little bit more about who you are.

Aaron Trahan: Yeah. You know, I am someone who really, from an early age, just gravitated towards this big, bold concept of continuous improvement. Um, I was kind of just a nerd of business books from a very early age. I started watching CNBC to just learn about what all this stuff means. Someone asked me is like, do you even know what showing up on that thing running across the bottom? And I just remember saying, not entirely, but I’m I’m learning, right? And so it just this concept of growth and continuous improvement. And before I even really knew what the concept of scaling really was about, that’s it was just kind of a gravitational pull for me, and not only on an individual level of just trying to understand how can I be a better leader, how can I lead teams more effectively, but also then how that translated to an organizational level and really just finding myself, um, you know, positively obsessed with what is it that allows Those leaders and organizations to find the next level to keep growing over a long time. But more importantly, what is it that prevents them from doing that? Why do leaders burn out once great high growth organizations, you know, either become a non growth organization or fail outright? And so, um, that was kind of the invisible journey that I was on that eventually led me to, um, you know, being a seasoned executive operator to now finding myself on the other side of the table, serving those leaders, operators and businesses of trying to avoid the same mistakes that I made, being able to access all the lessons and key insights without having to acquire the same scars that I had to acquire.

Trisha Stetzel: Um, I love that. Not that you have all the scars, but that you’re able to bring all of your expertise, your knowledge and experience to others that you serve. Now that’s amazing. All right. Names always have a meaning. And I want to dive into performance mindset which is your business. So talk to me one about the name of your business. And then let’s take a little deeper dive into the services that you provide.

Aaron Trahan: Sure. Yeah. It’s, uh, it’s probably one of the most frequently asked questions that I get is performance mindset kind of what? Tell me more about that. And, you know, kind of going back to the past 20 years that I’ve had in and around all sorts of businesses, of all sorts of shapes and sizes. You know, I think the great work that Carol Dweck did at Stanford University of really bringing the concept of a fixed mindset and a growth mindset to the mainstream, I think was was pretty valuable for all of us. But I think as I started to understand the nuances there, I started to realize that, you know, when we think about that in terms of the application to business, I just found a different story kind of playing out. In reality, nobody is going to admit to having a fixed mindset first and for all. And so every room that I was speaking to, every team I was a part of, whenever I would ask the question and really explain what a growth mindset is all about, every hand in the room is going to go up and say, yep, that’s me. I’ve got to fix our growth mindset. That’s what I’m all about. And so then I started back to that curiosity of what makes people grow, leaders evolve, and what prevents leadership growth. I started scratching my head of saying, well, if everyone has a growth mindset, why are we having these wild variabilities in performance and outcomes and results? And what I realized was there’s kind of a next level to it with a growth mindset, that thinking and believing that nothing’s fixed, you can develop and grow and build intelligence and capabilities.

Aaron Trahan: That’s great. But what I was starting to understand was thinking and believing can only take you so far. It’s missing a key ingredient and it’s the willing to take action. So when I kind of think about what shows up a lot in the business world, it’s much more nuanced than just fixed versus growth mindset. I think it’s really kind of a status quo mindset of people getting comfortable with where kind of they are, and things are good enough, so to speak. But then this other group has the performance mindset, which is just the bias to action to continuously improve. They’re not looking in the rear view mirror, kind of hanging their hat on what has already been achieved, or look at what we’ve done. It’s always asking the question how do we further improve? How do we continuously get better? Where can there be areas to take it up a notch? Where am I not operating either at an individual or an organizational level at anywhere close to our full potential? So for me, it really became this status quo mindset. Are we comfortable with where things are and we’re just kind of playing the status quo game. Then it becomes the the performance mindset. Are we willing to take the action and do what’s required to truly see better performance and better results? And so for me, that’s what that was kind of the narrative that I was seeing play out in the arena of business. It’s not as simple as fixed versus growth. It’s much more about status quo versus that bias for action to do what’s required to get better performance.

Trisha Stetzel: Okay, so how do we get from status quo or just this growth mindset where we’re just sitting still to performance.

Aaron Trahan: Yeah, I think it it is all around first generating awareness, right. For for everything that I do, it all really starts there. And I love kind of the saying that says a weakness or a development area that you’re not aware of will never be strengthened. Right. And so much around that status quo thinking is really that belief that, you know, good enough is always going to, at some point lead to complacency. And when you’re complacent, you’re not going to be intentionally driving awareness around where the gaps are. And look for high performers. Gaps may not be underperformance. The gap we are really focused on is where you’re performing versus where, you know you can potentially be performing. So it’s kind of it’s a you versus you. It’s am I better tomorrow than I was yesterday? And do we understand and put the awareness on where the gaps are that if we took action to evolve, develop, build the capabilities will get us closer to that full potential that makes us 1% better every day. That drives the continuous improvement. And that’s not always a comfortable place to be in. Always looking for how to develop. What more can I do? What more am I capable of? It requires it just requires a different intention to build the awareness, to learn where to act, to generate a better outcome. And if you’re in the comfort zone of the status quo, that’s just going to be an area that is, you know, never going to be found in that zone.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. So what are your thoughts around doing it alone versus surrounding yourself with the right people.

Aaron Trahan: Oh, I, um, I’m just a big believer that you can only go so far alone. Um, you know, I’ve I’ve been the beneficiary of having a lot of great mentors, a lot of great coaching. Um, whenever I realized that I personally needed to leave that one zone of comfort and status quo thinking into a performance mindset, I needed a third party. I needed a coach to help me see what I wasn’t seeing. I needed someone to not only help me identify that there are corners coming up, but then to be able to have, you know, develop some insights, um, to proactively maybe understand and see what’s around those corners. And yeah, I think if the only, only voice of accountability that you’re kind of listening to, uh, is that voice inside your own head, I, uh, I think it’s going to be tough to really tap into the full potential that I think is there for, uh, all leaders and organizations. So I’m a big believer, um, that with others is a accelerated path to ultimately getting you to your destination.

Trisha Stetzel: Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, you need to check who’s in your room, too, right? Because we want to surround ourselves, like Aaron and I, uh, have the same kind of very uplifting, above the line energy, and we wouldn’t want to hang around. I hope I don’t want to speak for you, but I don’t want to hang around with people who have negative energy. I want them to have more energy than me and more passion. Uh, yeah. So that I can strive to be there, I love that. So let’s take this from growth mindset to sustainable growth. So can we unpack why the how of growth matters more than the how fast?

Aaron Trahan: Yes, absolutely. And it’s such a great time period of the year to have this conversation, because I believe Inc. magazine just recently released their updated list of what’s referred to as the Inc. 5000, which is the 5000 fastest growing private companies in America. And as you can imagine, every small and medium sized business would love to be on this list. What better marketing for you to put on your website or in a promotional blast of saying we are an Inc. 5000 company? Now, what’s interesting about this to kind of start this part of the conversation is fast. Growth is good, but it should not be the only thing you’re optimizing for, because follow up studies from this great list of the fastest growing companies has found a troublesome kind of where are they now? Um, you know, story that’s unfolded. And what the data shows is that 68% of companies that make the Inc. 5000 list remember the fastest growing companies in America over the next 5 to 8 years, 68%. More than two thirds of these companies either fail outright or are no longer a growth company, and they’re a significantly smaller size. And I think that just really puts an exclamation point on sustainable growth, growth that you can continue to maintain and work to compound over a long period of time is always going to be a better option than just rapid expansion.

Aaron Trahan: Back to having great mentors and someone sharing wisdom with you. I had to learn this the hard way, so I’ve got very intimate, first hand experience of all the chaos that emerges when you grow too fast. So luckily, I had a mentor on my board who pulled me aside after a not so pleasant board meeting to remind me never grow faster than you and your team’s ability to manage it. And that was always a stark reminder for me. It’s that if growth starts to outpace your ability to execute your team’s ability to manage it, chaos starts to ensue. Um, look, the graveyard is full of companies that grew too quickly, were not able to implement the systems and the structure to be able to support it and maintain it. And unfortunately, far too many businesses die by a result of collapsing under the weight of their growing pains, not from competition. Um, and so I think it’s just an important reminder that growing the right way, your ability to make sure you can manage it, the ability to generate operating leverage, um, allowing the growth to compound over longer periods of time is always going to be far more important than trying to just increase the top line by all costs as fast as possible.

Trisha Stetzel: Mhm. Yeah. That’s such a great point Aaron. And I know people are already wanting to connect with you to learn more or even just to pick your brain. If you let people do that maybe you do every once in a while. What is the best way for the listeners to connect with you? Aaron.

Aaron Trahan: Yeah, the two places I show up, most, uh, one’s going to be on LinkedIn. I would highly encourage anyone to connect, reach out. I’m always trying to share, um, the things that I’ve learned along the way and continue to learn. I’m pretty transparent with my community there of. Look, learn from my lesson. Avoid my scars. Uh, and then for a more in-depth review, my website would be the best place to go to really understand how I help executives and organizations. And that’s simply performance mindset coaching. Dot CEO uh, so those will be the two places that you’re going to be able to get access to me as quickly as possible.

Trisha Stetzel: Fantastic. And if you’re trying to connect with Aaron on LinkedIn, you can find him at r r o t r a h a n. And it’s actually Aaron Trahan. Coaching is the handle for LinkedIn if you guys are looking for him there. Okay I heard you say chaos cycle. I think we probably have an idea of what it is you described, what it is. But if we find ourselves in that chaos cycle, how do we break free from it?

Aaron Trahan: Yeah, yeah. So I think it it really comes down to one important thing. And if I could back up for a second, I think for a lot of business owners, founders, leaders, you know, it almost kind of feels like chaos is just kind of part of the game, right? It’s just if you’re in a growing business, there’s going to be some chaos that comes along with that. And I think while that’s true, I think there’s there’s different flavors of chaos to look for sure. When an organization stretching and growing and we’re reaching new heights, there’s going to be that healthy chaos that comes with stretch. But what to look out for is when the chaos really starts to hold the organization back. When you start to feel like there’s bottlenecks everywhere, you’re playing whack a mole. Your days feel much more like a, um, a day long firefight than actually doing things that are productive, that can drive the business forward. So to more directly answer your question, it all comes down to prioritization. And here’s what I’ve seen in businesses that have been a part of businesses that I help and just businesses that I’m observing is there tends to be a chaos cycle that ensues when some of the negative flavor of chaos shows up. And by the way, I’m a firm believer that when you’re experiencing that chaos in the business, that’s nothing more than the business’s way of screaming out to you that it needs better structure and needs better systems.

Aaron Trahan: That’s that’s just think about that as the language at which your, your business is communicating to you. But where the cycle starts is really going to be around your ability to properly manage prioritizations or the inability that shows up as priority mismanagement. And here’s what I see so much Uch when priorities start to be mismanaged. That could be in the form of your team feeling like priorities or switching every single week, or everything’s a priority. You know, when a business has 20 different priorities. Whether your employees say it to you or not, what they are talking about is we don’t know what the hell to focus on, right? And so priority mismanagement will always drive the next stage of the cycle, which is fragmented. Organizational focus. Focus for any business in any industry is a superpower. Period. Full stop. So when you think about the priorities at which the top level of an organization’s driving down to the team, when that’s not clear, when there’s too many, when they’re constantly changing the focus, that superpower of your organization is never going to be in the right dosage, in the right spot. So it’s going to be fragmented. It’s everywhere. So what happens when priority mismanagement leads to a lack of organizational focus? Results suffer. You see it in weak execution. You’re missing expectations. You thought sales would be here. They come in way short. We’re scrambling to figure out why. And so what do leadership teams do after this third stage? Priorities.

Aaron Trahan: Priorities were mismanaged. There’s not enough focus in the right area. Results start to show up. Weaker than expected. We need new priorities. We need a new initiative. We we need a new growth strategy to kind of get things back on track. Which then takes us back to the very top of the cycle. And you’ve now created the vicious loop. Too many or constantly changing priorities, fragmenting focus even more on, on and on through the cycle. And so to stop the cycle, to get out of the chaos cycle really comes down to a business’s ability to prioritize. And I like to think about it in terms of a question. If I was to randomly show up to your team leadership or management manager meeting, and if I was to go into the room unannounced and secretly ask everyone the same question, what are the top 2 or 3 priorities for the business, and why are these the priorities for the business right now? What would happen? Would everybody say the same thing? Would everybody say something different? So to break the chaos cycle, you have to have that team saying something similar to each other, because when they’re saying things different about the downstream chaos that that creates in an organization, everybody thinks the priority is different, which means their focus is behind something and nothing may come back and align to what is truly most important for the organization.

Trisha Stetzel: Yes, yes and yes and yes. All of these things resonate with me so deeply. Erin, thank you for taking us down that path. So does this play into that business GPS system that you talk about? Yeah. So can we dive into that a little bit 100%.

Aaron Trahan: And that’s why as I kind of in my the seat that I sit in today, kind of helping leadership teams and organizations avoid the same mistakes that I unfortunately made. You know, the past decade for me has kind of been a reverse engineering of what were the what were the tools that I was lacking, what were the frameworks and the systems that if I would have used, I could have avoided the mistakes, missteps and failures that that showed up on on my path that I had to course correct on. And yeah, because prioritization that I found is so critically important. I kind of like to think of it in terms of a business GPS. So if we were to pull out our phones and pull out whatever your maps app of choice is Apple Maps, Google Maps, whatever it is, remember, these companies that built these apps have spent billions of dollars to make it useful for us consumers. But it requires us to enter a critical data point for it to work. We need a clear destination. And if we don’t have a clear destination, that billions of dollars poured into this app will never work for us. So I’m sitting here talking to you today from Austin, Texas, right. And look, if we were to just type in central Texas into Google Maps, it’ll give us a million different options to choose from. Even if you, you know, you went into Southwest Austin. Okay, we maybe have thousands now, right? But until you get a specific location or address, that’s the only way you’re going to get an optimized route to take you from where you currently are to where you want to end up.

Aaron Trahan: I take businesses through that. Same thing is, where do we want to be over not too far out in the future because then it starts to lose its teeth. Not too short in time because we need some ability to kind of think out and plan. So I found two years to kind of be the sweet spot. So where I love to start working with businesses is really getting their teams firm on what’s our two year destination, kind of call it the vision. Within the vision, where do we want to end up? And I, I serve as kind of the challenger in the room to say, bring it down to abstract to conceptual, being the best or world class like that we can operationalize around that. How do we quantify what that looks like? How do we plug in my address in Austin and not just Central Texas or the greater Austin area. And then from there, we just didn’t execute a very streamlined, working backwards experiment. If we get the team very, very focused and aligned on what our two year vision looks like, where we want to end up, then knowing where we need to be at 12 months, knowing where we need to be at six months, knowing what’s most important over the next three months starts to get very clear and very simple. And now the prioritization of what we’re going to prioritize and what we’re not has the necessary guardrails for us to easily determine priorities from priorities. But most importantly, it helps an organization say no way more often than they are today. And as.

Trisha Stetzel: Oh my gosh.

Aaron Trahan: So.

Trisha Stetzel: I know.

Aaron Trahan: You said.

Speaker4: Yeah, Go ahead.

Aaron Trahan: Yeah. Is Warren Buffett’s always said the difference between highly, highly successful people and average people is the highly successful people say no to virtually almost everything. And it’s because the priority scope is so defined. We know what we’re going to say yes to. That fits within that scope. Everything outside of it is a no or not yet.

Trisha Stetzel: Mhm. I love this. So you just took us on this beautiful journey. Aaron thank you so much for this amazing conversation. I’ve got one last ask. Tell me your favorite client story.

Aaron Trahan: Hmm. My favorite client story is the one that’s top of mind. Was the call that I was actually just on. Um, okay. This is this was a client that was in the physical therapy space and also did some longevity, uh, strength training of really helping people coming in for physical therapy and a part of the country where people are very active, um, and have a huge interest in staying active for longer. But as you can imagine, someone running a big physical therapy operation and another business, the challenge was I can’t get out of the business. I kind of feel like so much depends on me. I’m the bottleneck. I’m reactive and firefighting all day long. And, you know, I’m not sure I want to keep doing this. Right. It’s like I’m working harder. Only for poor results on the bottom line. And so taking this client in his business through these different types of tools, we were able to get very clear on where we wanted to be. We were able to get very clear on what matters most. And we were able to then start prioritizing what needs to come off his plate, what needs to go on to different plates, how do we streamline the organization? Where where are the areas that’s really holding the business back? Um, and as you can imagine, the work that we’ve been doing over the past couple years where literally the call that I was just on before this call, a lot of the conversation was talked about how great the team is doing, how he’s got a team of individuals now operating like owners.

Aaron Trahan: He’s able to be 95% strategic, 5% tactical. Two years ago, it was the exact opposite. He was 95% reactive, 5% strategic margins have expanded in the business top lines expanding in the business. And he’s putting in fewer hours than he ever thought was possible in a growing, optimized business. And so it was just one of those feel good calls of seeing seeing someone be able to create the business that they dreamed of, for it to perform the way that he envisioned it performing without him having to be the bottleneck in every single step of the way.

Trisha Stetzel: Mm, I love that. So something simple, if you’re in your business and you can’t take vacation because you’re so embedded in it, you need to talk to Aaron. I’m just saying.

Aaron Trahan: It’s it’s kind of, uh. It’s nothing more than helping build the bridge, right? I think every business kind of has three islands, right? Vision, strategy and execution. And so few times I’ve seen are those islands connected with a clear bridge? That’s all we did in this case is we took the vision of what he wanted. We created a strategy that would make that vision tangible and put in the mechanisms to drive day in, day out, week in, week out execution to generate week over week progress. And so his three islands now have very tight, very solid, very well built bridges connecting those three islands.

Speaker5: Wow. That’s beautiful.

Trisha Stetzel: Thank you so much for this conversation today, I felt like I went on a journey and maybe even thought about vacation for a minute. We’re growth mindset. Oh no performance mindset. This was fantastic. Aaron, thank you so much for your time today.

Aaron Trahan: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Trisha Stetzel: That’s all the time we have for today, guys. So if you found this conversation with Aaron valuable, please share it with a fellow entrepreneur, a veteran or a Houston business leader. Ready to grow. Be sure to follow, rate, and review the show and helps us reach more bold business minds just like yours and your business, your leadership and your legacy are built one intentional step at a time. So stay inspired, stay focused, and keep building the business and the life you deserve.