Business RadioX ®

Horace Williams With The Honey Baked Ham Company

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HoraceWilliams
Franchise Marketing Radio
Horace Williams With The Honey Baked Ham Company
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Brought To You By SeoSamba . . . Comprehensive, High Performing Marketing Solutions For Mature And Emerging Franchise Brands . . . To Supercharge Your Franchise Marketing, Go To seosamba.com.

Horace L. Williams, a veteran of corporate transformations and franchise operations, is currently Vice President of Franchise for The Honey Baked Ham Company, LLC based in Alpharetta, Georgia.

Mr. Williams oversees franchise operations, sales and development, and franchise relationships for the HoneyBaked brand.

Seasoned operations professional who also has considerable sales and marketing leadership experience, Williams came to HoneyBaked with a proven track record of crafting and executing strategies that reduce costs, improve service, drive revenue growth, and increase profitability for franchisees and franchisors.

He has extensive experience with corporate revitalizations for both startup enterprises and high-growth companies.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • How the pandemic has impacted HBH
  • HBH’s handling of satisfaction during the pandemic

Yasmine Jandali With Starwood Business Group

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StarwoodBusinessGroup
Atlanta Business Radio
Yasmine Jandali With Starwood Business Group
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YasmineJandaliYasmine Jandali began her business career in the 1990s working for one of the largest investment banking firms in the country. Helping clients succeed in their own businesses gave Yasmine the drive to build and sell her own company.

She is a business owner, entrepreneur and business intermediary who brings more than 15 years of experience to the task of structuring winning deals for the sellers and buyers of businesses. Yasmine has earned the prestigious CBI designation for professional business brokers, of which there are less than 500 worldwide.

She is an experienced business owner who founded her own chain of upscale tanning salons and played a key role in making the company a success. Under her leadership, the company consistently grew revenues and profits, and built a dedicated customer base which resulted in a profitable sale to a private investor in North Carolina.

Prior to her success in the service industry, Yasmine held numerous positions in the financial service industry such as Wachovia Securities where she specialized in Currency Risk Management and Foreign Currency Exchange; managing the currency needs of Wachovia’s Latin American bank market.

During the process of selling her businesses, Yasmine saw a service gap for entrepreneurs interested in buying and selling businesses in the Metro Atlanta area. There was a need for a new way of doing things, one that took into account the needs of both buyers and sellers.

So in 2005, Yasmine established a business brokerage firm in North Metro Atlanta and subsequently won numerous awards including Top Producing Office in 2008 and Top New Office in the Country in 2009.

In 2013, after years of growth and dozens of successful transactions completed, the firm was re-branded to Starwood Business Group and continues to offer exceptional service to both business buyers and sellers.

In addition to well-honed business skills, Yasmine brings a strong educational background to the task of business sales and business valuation. She has pursued post-graduate studies in Business Administration at the University of North Carolina and holds a B.A. in Marketing from Queens University.

She speaks Spanish, French, and Arabic and is well versed in international business issues. Her focus on detail and in-depth understanding of the essential workings of small and large businesses provide both buyers and sellers confidence that transactions will run smoothly.

Yasmine and her team at Starwood Business Group have successfully and confidentially facilitated the sale of hundreds of select businesses in the Metro Atlanta area and are ready to help you!

Connect with Yasmine on LinkedIn and follow Starwood Business Group on Facebook and Twitter.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • How to help business owners prepare their business for sale
  • How to choose the best business broker

About Our Sponsor

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Our award-winning customer service includes an accuracy guarantee, deep integrations with popular accounting software, and we’ll even enter all your employee information for you — whether you have five employees or 500. Take a closer look to see all the ways we can save you time and money in the back office.

Follow OnPay on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

 

Rob Bedell With Bedell Enterprises

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RobBedell
Coach The Coach
Rob Bedell With Bedell Enterprises
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RobBedellRob Bedell with Bedell Enterprises, has 30 years of professional sales experience, covering industries such as media, internet or new media, manufacturing, and SaaS. Rob has successfully trained individuals to be successful in their careers.

Today, Rob trains business owners to understand sales and their sales process to be more successful with their business.

Rob is an expert in sales and sales leadership, having worked with national and international companies.

He has extensive experience with companies from different industries including, media, tech, and business services. He not only understands the sales process but also operations to ensure the best workflow.

Connect with Rob on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • The first thing you look at when working with a business owner
  • The biggest mistake that business owners make when it comes to sales

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a good one today on the show, we have Rob Bedell and he is with Badel Enterprises. Welcome, Rob.

Rob Bedell: [00:00:44] Oh, thanks for having me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your practice. How you serving, folks?

Rob Bedell: [00:00:51] Oh, I’m a business advisor and coach. I’ve been doing this for a while now and I basically help business owners find the money that they’re leaving on the table.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:59] Now, what’s your back story? How’d you get involved in coaching?

Rob Bedell: [00:01:03] It’s funny because I got to the top of my profession for 40. I was publisher of a satire publication called The Onion in Los Angeles. I did not start the onion, but I was publisher of when they came to Los Angeles, and then I was publisher of a magazine group when I realized I still wasn’t really happy. And so I said, What really makes me happy? And I was like, I like making other businesses and people more successful. So for the past decade, I’ve been an outsourced VP of sales, helping a couple of businesses at a time set up a sales process. But it leads scoring. Make sure everyone follows the same process to get the same high results. And then over the last few years, it kept having people come up to me. You do coaching. And as I was like, No, I don’t do coaching. And then last year, in October, three people in a week walked up to me, said, Do you do coaching? I’m like, Maybe I should look into this coaching thing because people keep asking me about it. And so I found a platform that I just love that have all the tools that any business owner needs to really grow their business. And I’ve been doing that for a bit now.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:58] So now how is your work when you’re advising people different than coaching people?

Rob Bedell: [00:02:05] Well, when I was doing a advising coaching, it’s pretty much the same thing, I mean, basically with the coaching. It’s more coaching people on how to how to get more out of their business with the advising, it’s more of a structure infrastructure of how you lay your business out.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:21] So when you’re working with them, so obviously that’s one of the first thing you’re trying to determine if you’re coaching them as a you want to be a leader or or B you want to grow your business, those are obviously you would take two different approaches for that.

Rob Bedell: [00:02:36] Yeah, but it’s funny. The first thing I always look at when I work with any business is their value proposition because a lot of times they have it wrong. I worked with an insurance inspection company. They were around for 40 years, father, son, team. They had a great product there. The best thing in the industry. I sat down with them, unlike what’s important in your industry. They’re like, we’re we’re all about. We have the best time service and full time service and quality. Ok. I went out to their three best clients is sat down with them like, Hey, listen, insurance inspection companies, they’re a dime a dozen. Why do you work with these guys? And they all said the same thing. They’re like in this industry, Rob. There’s always going to be problems. And when they’re problems, we can call or email them. They’ll find out what happened, who is involved and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again and get back to us within 24 to 48 hours. And it was like, Well, that kind of sounds like customer service and communication. They also get that they have it and not of a lot of other people do. I asked all three, what about time, service and quality? They all said the same thing. If you’re not doing time, service and quality, you’re not working in this industry. So we went back, we changed the value proposition from we have the best time service and quality that everyone else in the industry is screaming about where we have the best customer service and communication. Hey, guess what, in this industry, there’s going to be problems when their problems were with you that next year the grew twenty six percent you after that sixty three because they were speaking to the market in the markets for us, not theirs.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:53] Now is that an exercise you recommend to other businesses doing just kind of asking your customers or maybe hiring a third party to ask the customer, Why are you doing business with these folks?

Rob Bedell: [00:04:04] I highly recommend doing it. I’ve been doing giving that out for free for anybody. It’s like, here, go out to your three best clients and your best clients, not the ones that pay you the most. Because really, as we know, sometimes the people that pay the most are the big pain in the rear ends. But the ones that you love working with, they love working with you. It’s just you want more of those people. Ask them, What value did you bring that you expected? What value did you bring that they didn’t expect? And what’s just the best thing about working together? Let them phrase your value proposition. I’ve done this for like five or six businesses this year, and they always come back to be going. I never thought of that because now they’re speaking in the market’s voice, not in their voice, and it’s a hard thing to do. It’s hard to get out of your own head and think in your customers voice.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:47] Now, in the first example, you mentioned that that the client was aware that problems occur and they were very concerned about or they were very happy that their the the your client helped them solve those problems when they do occur. Do you find that a lot of business owners don’t even consider that when they’re creating their value proposition, that to assume that problems are going to occur because theoretically, the business is in the problem solving business so that they don’t want to even think about problems. Once you’re starting to deal with me so that they’re missing an opportunity, they’re just allaying some fears that, hey, problems happen, they’re going to happen when you deal with us, too, but we’re going to be on top of it.

Rob Bedell: [00:05:33] Yeah, and it’s dealing in reality, you know, guess what, if you have a business where there’s never been an issue regulations, write down how you did it and sell a book and you’d be a billionaire. But the reality of situations is there’s always problems in business. There’s always little hiccups. And as long as you address them and deal with them, it’s not an issue.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:54] Now how has your business changed now that you’ve kind of leaned into coaching? Is this personally feel different for you to do this kind of work? Is this something that you’re like? Oh, I was always meant to do this? Like, personally, how is this kind of work appealing to you?

Rob Bedell: [00:06:10] I love doing it because I love and Lee. I’ll say this. You know, again, a lot of the things that I talked to business owners about, it’s not rocket science, it’s all stuff that they said. I knew this. I knew this like, OK, now that you know it now, it’s time to apply it. And in a way, it’s just I help them talk through their issues. And yeah, I love it. You know, right now, I’m actually looking at building a group coaching platform because I am having so much demand for me, people coming and saying, Hey, I want to work with you, that I’m, you know, trying to go from the one on one group coaching so I can help more people. And at the same time.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:45] Now you mentioned you have a platform. Is this something that you bought or hired someone to create a methodology or this is your methodology, you’re just kind of reworking to make it more scalable.

Rob Bedell: [00:06:59] It’s a platform that was built already by some guys who have all the tools at any business. Owner would need to grow their business, the marketing side of the operations side of things where we can kind of go in and really kind of look at your business, you know, department by department and really kind of fine tune it where you grow. How many leads that are coming in yet you streamline your operations. And so it is a platform that was already out there, built and again, I found it loved it and it’s been very, really helpful.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:27] And then on top of that, you add your jazz hands to help them in the areas of your specialty, which are a lot of it is sales and marketing.

Rob Bedell: [00:07:36] A lot of it is sales and operations. Yes.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:38] So now let’s talk about sales a little bit. Are you seeing kind of business owners make the same mistake over and over where you’re like kind of rolling your eyes and go, Oh, here we go again, this same kind of path that a lot of other folks have fallen into.

Rob Bedell: [00:07:53] I wouldn’t say I rolled my eyes, you know, a common mistake. Again, it’s a value proposition. It’s like they all think they’re speaking in their voice. I mean, especially with technology companies, it companies, they get so much in their head trying to explain exactly what they think. The customer would like that they don’t ask the customer. And it’s funny, too. That’s all part of sales is ask a question and let them answer. That’s part of business. As a business owner, you should be talking to your customers on a regular basis. What are we doing? Great? What more can we help? What more can we do? I’m not sure if you’ve ever heard it. Did you ever read the book Delivering Happiness?

Lee Kantor: [00:08:26] Yeah, the Tony Hsieh.

Rob Bedell: [00:08:29] Yes, Zappos. Right? You know, in every, you know, business should think about that. How can we make things better? Every time someone comes in, how can we help a customer? Because then you become the go to customer, the go to person, to go to business. And that’s really what you want is business owner.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:43] So now is there anything you do to help them kind of clarify that like, you know, there’s one thing you’re listening to the customer, that’s one thing. There’s obviously some incongruity sometimes where, like you said, the the business owner believes one thing and the customer is saying something else. How do you kind of help that all kind of work symbiotically?

Rob Bedell: [00:09:07] Well, and again, a lot of it’s just sitting there talking through, you know, sitting down with a business owner who who who is your ideal client, who do you lose your customer? And it’s so funny. I love when business owners say everyone like, no, everyone is not your customer. But Nike and Coca-Cola do not go after everyone. You shouldn’t either be a waste of your time and money. So really focus on, you know, and I always tell them, reflect on the business that you currently have. I’m sure there’s, you know, clients that you sit there and you just love working with. That’s your ideal client. And so once you get that focus, once you have everyone and the value proposition is not just for your sales team, it’s for every single person at your company. Because if everyone’s on the same page with the value of what you offer, the company will grow. And I get I get pushback sometimes on that. A lot, the business owners say, Rob, why does someone in my warehouse accounting need to know my value proposition? And I explain it this way. You never know when they’re sitting at lunch next to somebody and say, Oh, what do you do? Well, I’m in warehouse. Oh, who do you work for? I work for ABC Company. Oh, what do they do? And if they can spit out your value proposition now you went from having a sales team to having a sales company. Plus, they take greater pride in the work that they do when they understand the value of it.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:16] Do you think that in today’s world you have to have a sales company? Everybody has to kind of be on board when it comes to selling because it’s just so competitive nowadays?

Rob Bedell: [00:10:26] I wouldn’t say you have to, but I would say the ones that think that way do a lot better than the ones that don’t.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:33] Now, so let’s go through a situation, maybe share a story where you were working with someone and maybe they didn’t have their sales value proposition kind of complete and walk me through what their challenge was, how you landed on that and then help them get to a new level.

Rob Bedell: [00:10:52] I was working with an Australian company that was in the U.S. for a few years, and they did marketing for orthodontists. They got the leads into orthodontist and sat down with them and they their value proposition was off and their whole sales process was off. They had this deck that was 20 pages deep jam full of information, and I sat down with them. They flew into town, I sat down with them, I looked at the deck and looked at them and said, I’m not going to read this. And they said, What? I said, You’re paying me and I’m not going to read this. Do you think an orthodontist? Why do you have all this information here? And they’re like, Well, Rob, it’s everything they need to know to make a decision. And I was like, No, it’s not. It’s everything you want to impress them with with your knowledge, but it’s not what they need to know. And so we did exactly that. Little simple exercise went up to the three best clients. We reduced that 20 page deck to a one sheet with four bullet points on it. The next week, sales rep called me up to up. They’re reading it and like what, Brooke? They’re supposed to read. It was Rob. They never read anything I’ve ever sent them before. And so again, by sitting them down, showing them how this, you know, streamlining their sales, we took a different approach on the sales side of things, too. We didn’t go in there saying, Hey, Doc, we can do this for you. We called and said, Hey Doc, we want to see if you qualify to work with us made a huge difference in it. So it’s just and as soon as I was able to show them the process and show them the difference and how it shorten the sales cycle and increase their customer base, we shorten their sales cycle eight to 10 months and increase their customer base 33 percent in four months by doing this. And again, it’s simple little exercises.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:26] So now you mentioned earlier that kind of to be very specific when it comes to your ideal customer. And and sometimes people are I don’t want to use the wrong word, but they they maybe are skeptical that that’s the way to go because they feel maybe that they’re missing out on opportunities if they are that kind of, you know, within a specific niche. How do you kind of help them overcome this? Is there a way to test that theory? Like if you say, you know what, you should be targeting orthodontists and not just everybody that’s in dentistry? Do you kind of experiment and say, OK, let’s do a test to see if if this kind of theory is going to hold water or not?

Rob Bedell: [00:13:11] Well, and I kind of put it this way. It’s if you’re trying to reach a Spanish or Mexico Hispanic audience and you’re just speaking English to them. Well, yeah, you might get some of them because they understand English. But if you spoke Spanish, you might get all of them. So if you’re targeting an audience and you’re not speaking their language, so therefore, if you’re trying to reach too broad of an audience but you’re not speaking the language that your specific niche can understand, you’re losing out on more by not focusing on your niche audience, your targeted audience, then you are when you’re trying to cast such a broad net. Does that make sense?

Lee Kantor: [00:13:47] Yeah, I mean, I’m a big believer in niches like way of saying here niches bring riches and and the thinking is that too. I’d rather be the go to person in my niche than I would just be another kind of vendor in a in a big pool. You know, I’m shooting to be the go to person, not just another person that can do that. So I want that mindshare if I can pull that off. So. But not everybody kind of is like, Oh, that’s a greatest idea I ever heard. They’re kind of skeptical that to go to be bigger is you have to be smart, you know, aims in a smaller target.

Rob Bedell: [00:14:29] Well, there’s always that FOMO, the fear of missing out, and it’s you have to get through it and say, OK, guess what? But have I talked to and again, the way I always look at it and explain to the business owners, a lot of times are like, Well, my sales team needs to be making one hundred calls a day, and I’m like, Well, if they make one hundred calls a day every day for the week and they don’t get any sales, are you happy? And they’re like, No. So, OK, well, then they have to do, you know, 10 presentations, so they do 10 percent and they don’t get a sale. Are you happy? No, I said, What do you really want? I want sales and ask for sales. If you have a good sales team and they’re good salespeople, they will make the calls, they will do the presentations, they will do everything needed to make the end goal, which is the number of sales that they need.

Lee Kantor: [00:15:11] Now do you find and we use the term cosmetics in this regard that sometimes organizations are aiming at these metrics that sound good or maybe make headlines in an in an article but aren’t really productive for themselves. Like you said, when you ask them, is the metric sales calls or is the metric, you know, dollars in the bank? You know, which one do you want more of you? They want the dollars in the bank, but they think that the sales causes is going to be that lever that they can pull to get more dollars in the bank where that may not be the case.

Rob Bedell: [00:15:50] Well, there is some correlation to it, I mean, and again, if you use it as a tool, meaning your sales people are not getting to the numbers, then you say, Hey, you know something I noticed when you were making 10 more calls a week, you were getting to the numbers when you cut 10 calls off. Use that as a metric. That’s fine. That’s that’s perfectly good. But if you lean on it as a crutch, you’re going to have people making the hundred calls yet not making an effort. And that’s really what you want out of your teams, whether it’s sales, whether it’s operations, you want the effort to be there.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:20] But you also want the effort to garner the result they desire.

Rob Bedell: [00:16:25] Exactly.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:26] Because a lot of times when there’s a metric, I find that people stay focused on that and then they start gaming the system to hit the metric and they’re not getting the result. But they’re saying, Hey, you know, it’s like if if you have one of those watches that count your steps and you’re like, You know, if I just shake the watch, I get the steps, you know, like the object isn’t to get 10000 steps, it’s to lose weight, you know, so you got to take the steps. If you want to lose the way, you can’t just move the thing.

Rob Bedell: [00:16:56] Exactly, and again, it has to be the focused effort. It has to be, you know, and exactly what you’re just saying. It’s like, well, I made a hundred phone calls, so the market must just be not or a product must network know that, you know, and that’s that’s the thing that a lot of business owners I work with when they don’t understand what sales is, they have a hard time talking to their sales team and their sales team can make every excuse in the world. Hey, look, we did the numbers, but it just wasn’t there where if you actually understand what sales is and how to get your sales team to just go out and have a conversation to see if people need what you have. Make sure that your marketing team sets up lead scoring for your sales team to where it’s like, OK, these leads coming in are good. They’re getting through the process. These ones are bad when you set up lead scoring, especially for small business owners. I can’t tell you how much of a difference this makes when a lead comes in. Do they need your product and service? Is a contact information correct? Were you able to get a call with them? Were you able to show them what you had? Did you close them? If all the leads are not getting past those first two stages, stop getting those leads. The best way to burn out a sales team really fast is it give them a bunch of unqualified leads to call.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:04] Now, talking about sales, you wrote a book on sales, can you talk about what let’s talk about the book, but what what kind of compelled you to write the book?

Rob Bedell: [00:18:15] Well, what compelled me to write it as I was actually doing a webinar for a bunch of business owners about what’s setting up a sales process is setting up a sales process that your whole sales team follows, get you more customers more often and faster. And they kind of like the idea about more money, more often faster. And when I opened it up for questions at the end. Well, Rob, when we set aside time for our business development, our customer acquisition was like, Wait, you mean sales? We you could hear them groan. And I was like, We stop. Sales is the lifeblood of what do you think sales is? And I got some hold old standard answers. It’s influence. It’s controlling the conversation. And I was like, OK, stop, you know, you guys know, Zig Ziglar Dale Genius is giant among men to this day, but sales has changed dramatically over the decades with the internet and with social media. All sales is is having a productive conversation to see if there’s a reason to work at it. Sales just like the human body, two ears, one mouth. Here’s how you run a sales meeting. It’s not about policies and procedures, it’s about goals. It’s about wins. It’s about success stories.

Rob Bedell: [00:19:16] Or how did you get this one? Let’s get the next one. You want your sales team so pumped when they walk out of the meeting that they feel like they could run through walls. And when I was done with it, I was like, Are you afraid of sales now that I know that’s actually kind of easy. And so when I got off the phone, I’m like, That’s the book I need you read. I need to write a sales book. But for business owners, so business owners have a good foundation of what sales is, and I have a workbook that goes along with it. But here’s how you find your value proposition. Here’s a different types of salespeople. Here’s questions you ask your sales team. And so it’s so funny to me because I get people that read the book and can call me up or email me like, I knew this. I knew this, and I started laughing like, good. Now I play it. There’s a theme that I have throughout the book as saying that I created which I love. It’s like, Yes, what I tell you is all common sense. But when common sense becomes common practice, that’s when you find success.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:05] Yeah, that’s where the magic is. I mean, the days of ABC always be closing, you know, we’re in a different world now.

Rob Bedell: [00:20:13] Yeah. I mean, unless you’re in a multi level marketing where that still applies. Yeah, in regular business now it’s about building relationships, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:20:22] I tell them, I tell them the new ABC is always be connecting or always be curating. That’s the new ABC.

Rob Bedell: [00:20:30] I love it. I love it.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:32] Because, like you said, I mean, to me, sales is is just about fit. You know, can I help you or, you know, I want to help you and I might be the right fit or I might not be, but I’ll try to help you get the right fit for you. And I think I think when you have that attitude, it’s a lot less stressful and it’s a lot less kind of icky. The way that some people feel about sales that it’s icky is because they’re forcing people and it doesn’t have to be. You’re really a resource in helping person achieve the outcome they desire.

Rob Bedell: [00:21:04] And that’s what me and some of my colleagues in sales are trying to do, because a lot of times people think of sales and they think it’s a four letter word. And I always tell people, No. Sales is a five letter sale if you do anything at any cost. Get that one sale. Yeah, that can be a bad thing. But again, there’s you know, and that’s not called sales, that’s called a con man. And and there’s bad people in every industry. There’s bad politicians, bad lawyers, bad police, but there’s also great ones. There’s ninety five percent of them that are incredible. The same thing with sales. There are few bad people out there that are saying things that they shouldn’t be saying. But a majority of salespeople, if I call you up and it’s funny, I’ve called clients up before and I’m like, OK, I can’t help you. One of the first clients that I ever worked with when I was selling classified advertising that just dated me showed me how old I when newspapers were all having classified advertising and I was selling a legal directory and I called this lawyer up and I was really excited about it and, you know, got him excited about our demographics and everything.

Rob Bedell: [00:21:56] Oh, OK. And it’s like, So what type of business or lawyer are you? And he goes, Well, I do business business transactions. I was like, Oh, I was like, Well, then this isn’t going to work for you. It’s like, What do you mean? I said, Well, this is more for DUI criminal divorce lawyers. I don’t. We don’t do a lot of business. Mean, we’re not a business journal. And he’s like, So you’re not going to take my money. I say, I’m a sales guy. I’ll take your money, but I’ll tell you, this isn’t going to work for you, right? You know, any lawyers that are like that give me a call. And later that week, I had three lawyers call me up, sign up. They didn’t even question me. One of them became my biggest advertiser because I was willing to sit there and talk to us later and say, Oh, you know something, this isn’t for you. And, you know, basically he referred a lot of business my way, so that’s really what salespeople are. Does this work? Will this work for you or whether it’s not right?

Lee Kantor: [00:22:39] It goes back to your original value proposition? Part of the conversation is my value is I want to be a trusted adviser, whether it’s selling you what I have or not. I mean, I want you to think of me as somebody you can trust to help you achieve your goals. And that’s that’s your business. It’s not, you know, whatever it is, the, you know, activity you’re selling.

Rob Bedell: [00:23:02] Exactly.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:03] So now, if somebody wanted to learn more about the sales, book about your practice, what is the website to learn more?

Rob Bedell: [00:23:12] You know, my website, which is WW Dot Info Number for your business or probably the easier way to get me is on LinkedIn. Just look for Rob or OBE Adele. Bed in bed, L-l on LinkedIn. I pop up really fast there and I’m on there daily.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:32] So well, Rob, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Rob Bedell: [00:23:38] Well, I appreciate you having me on.

Lee Kantor: [00:23:40] All right, this ad Lee Kantor will sail next time on Coach the Coach radio.

Joel William Philhours FocalPoint Business Coaching

by

JoelWilliamPhilhours
Coach The Coach
Joel William Philhours FocalPoint Business Coaching
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Joel W. Philhours is a Certified Business Coach, Certified Executive Coach and Trainer at FocalPoint Business Coaching. Including his time in the Corporate World, he has 40+ years of experience in Accounting, Finance, Operations, and Coaching. He hold an active CPA license, an MBA in Strategic Planning, and he is a “Bonafide Simplificator”.

He coached and trained countless professionals and business owners over the years to clarify goals, make plans, execute and adapt – all in a quest to achieve the goals & dreams they only ever hoped might be possible someday.

Prior to joining FocalPoint, he served in Chief Financial Officer, Chief Administrative Officer, and Senior Operational Leadership Roles for domestic and international companies in the Logistics, Construction, Manufacturing, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, and Consumer Product industries.

Connect with Joel on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

  • About business coaching
  • How Joel got where he is today
  • What FocalPont has to offer that other coaches don’t have
  • The best coaching advice Joel has ever received

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com To learn more. Now here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a fun one. Today we have with us, Joel Philhours with focal point business coaching of the Mid South. Welcome, Joel.

Joel Philhours: [00:00:45] Hey Lee, it’s great to be with you, buddy. How are you doing?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:48] I am doing well. I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about your practice. How are you serving, folks?

Joel Philhours: [00:00:54] I serve folks using some 40+ years of corporate experience. Had an accounting background, passed the CPA exam when I got an MBA, moved up through the Finance Organization of Companies International as big as 60 billion and family businesses as small as 75 million in revenue. But recently I I got involved in business coaching. I retired from the corporate world, really looked around to see what I enjoyed most of those 40 plus years of working for others and decided I wanted to be a coach. And what I do as a coach is I help people solve their problems. I help them reach their goals, teach them all about business, all about the softer side of managing people communication, just the whole gambit of just trying to make things smooth and where they can get their life back if they’re working too many hours.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:59] So now when you’re making that transition from being kind of a practitioner of business to coaching people about business coaching to me seems more like asking questions and helping the person kind of self discover the path where a lot of people before they start coaching are doing some of the actual work, they’re doing more. What would be considered, maybe consulting where they’re kind of rolling up their sleeves and and digging in there and doing some of the work themselves? How was that transition for you from being a person that does a lot of work to somebody who is now showing other people, you know, kind of how to fish?

Joel Philhours: [00:02:36] Yeah, that’s a real good point. And that is one of the the biggest changes that I had to make. As a matter of fact, I had breakfast, excuse me, with my son in law this morning. He owns two or three businesses, and I even made that comment to him being a problem solver and then becoming a a coach, meaning I’m trying to get them to learn how to solve problems. It’s really tough for me to bite my tongue, to not just say, No, that’s not going to work. Let’s do this kind of thing. So that that’s kind of a behavioral change that we as coaches need to make. But the the value of us being in their shoes as someone who performed the various tasks of a business or that, you know, making strategic decisions like a business owner would do is we’ve been in that role. It’s like in sports, if if you have a coach or a manager, that was a baseball player, chances are he understands the game pretty well. From an application standpoint, what that manager has to do is become more of a person that develops others into being good ballplayers, into understanding the game. So that’s what I do. I’m in a position to try to herd this person, allowing them to make the decisions to come up with the ideas, but keep them from falling off the cliff. We’re not going to let somebody do something silly. We may allow certain things to happen as a means of trying out, so to speak, a new way. But we’re there to wear the safety net. We’re there to develop and and teach.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:27] So now you mentioned in your career you’re you were working with fairly large enterprises as your work with your clients. Are they all at that same level or are you working with kind of smaller entities now,

Joel Philhours: [00:04:41] Smaller entities now? It’s it’s funny from the standpoint of business processes, accounting processes, the culture, the motivation and such. It’s the same, really, between a smaller organization and a a sixty some odd billion dollar company that has operations all over the world. The numbers are certainly smaller, both in dollars and in transactions. If you’re a part of a smaller community, you don’t have the cultural challenges that a big company has. But the business challenges are amazingly similar. You may serve a different group of stakeholders. Privately owned business is not going to have necessarily a board or stockholders or what have you. But the day to day, month to month, year to year type of challenges are going to be very similar between a small business and a very large business.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:44] But don’t you find that kind of the mindset of a person running a small business versus maybe somebody that’s a leader in a larger business? The stakes are higher for the small business because the business is reliant on them like they. They can’t afford big mistakes where if you’re a cog in the machine of a larger entity, you might get fired or it may not work out for you may not get promoted, but the company is typically not going under because of a mistake.

Joel Philhours: [00:06:11] You know, that’s a good point. Or the risks or the cost of an error, the cost of a mistake can be devastating. And that is one of the things that we try to coach into a small business owner is to make sure that he or she doesn’t do everything, doesn’t make every decision that they have others in the organization that are smart, that that have had experience and have been exposed to the various principles that we coach. It’s great to have someone in the organization that you can run ideas by. You know, I look back over my career and there seem to be always someone that I worked with on my team that I trusted, that I knew I could go to and and discuss an idea. You know, sometimes they would provide me the last 15 percent of something, or we would create synergy and come up with even better ideas. So though the the decisions and ideas that a smaller business may come together, I think that risk gets mitigated by having others that can help. People that you trust, people that are competent, getting the right people in there and getting the experience that you need to help create synergies even in a small company.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:41] Now you make a great point in a lot of folks. For a lot of folks, coaching business coaching is a new thing, but it’s been going around, being been around maybe and not called coaching. But like you said, maybe it’s called advice or mentoring or some other name and a more informal manner. But now that coaching is becoming more accepted kind of practice and less of a nice to have and more of a must have for leaders, especially, are you seeing that that’s being the case and that folks are becoming more open to the concept even, you know, even at the enterprise level? Previously, only a handful of people typically had access to a business coach. Maybe it was the highest level leader, or maybe it was something in, you know, you were trying to fix a problem. So you were saying, Hey, you need a coach to solve this, but now are you seeing it permeate kind of deeper into the business?

Joel Philhours: [00:08:39] Well, I am seeing people better understand what a business coach is, though there there are still a lot of folks that think that business coaching and business consulting are the same thing. And I, after I retired last fall from the corporate world, I really didn’t know what it was going to do and and I always thought that I might do consulting. And that’s when I taught myself just from doing research about coaching. And I thought, that’s what I enjoy doing more so than consulting, I think, in the early part of the show. You would mention something about, you know, consulting is doing the work and that that is exactly correct. I wasn’t didn’t really want to be just a contract controller or a contract CFO. I wanted to coach people at all levels. And if you don’t mind, I just have a two or three quick examples of the difference between coaching and consulting. Sure, go ahead. A coach works on improving you, the client where a consultant works directly on your business. They come in and do a specific subject matter, expert activity.

Joel Philhours: [00:09:58] You pay them a lot of money and they’re gone. They’re not around. You probably didn’t hang out with them. You didn’t learn much. Coaching develops clarity for long term needs of the business, where a consultant provides expertize for the short term needs put in this new ERP system document and improve my standard operating procedures. Short term needs. Coaching develops vision and leadership skills. Consulting provides temporary gap filling. Specialized support in the last example here is with coaching, you learn to become more capable and with consulting you watch. You watch them do what they do. You remain dependent and you call the consultant again and again and again. So when it when a coach leaves, you get to keep what you learn. When a consultant leaves, you probably weren’t around to learn a whole bunch. And so again, that’s why you call them back. It’s like when the air conditioning guy comes out, fixes the air conditioner. He leaves, it breaks again. You got to call him again. If if you had HVAC coaches leave, we could do our own air conditioning repair.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:13] And then and and the solution, it might be different for different folks. I mean, some people have more time than money. Some people have more money than time, and sometimes they want help and sometimes they want to help or like everybody, has different needs at different times. But definitely a coach is something that’s more holistic and more systemic where you’re trying to fix kind of the broader macro of the company and not, you know, a specific fire that’s burning, right that second.

Joel Philhours: [00:11:42] That’s right. That’s for the immediate in the short term and long term, it comes into play. If someone a business owner could be a partnership, it doesn’t have to be just a single person. But if someone wanted me to come in and coach them, let’s say they’ve got an engineering, background, sales, marketing or whatever, but really no end in business understanding if I were to come in and do a complete end to end business coaching program. It would consist of five modules and in some 72 different sessions, so it’s about an 18 month process. If they were to do all the modules and all of the sessions, they may feel that they’re good leaders. Ok, that’s one of the five modules and there’s 13 or so sessions, so it can be designed specifically to what that client feels their needs are. What we see a lot of times is somebody will say, Well, I don’t want all five modules, I need these three, but then they see that there’s gaps in in what they understand and they’ll come back and say, Let’s do those other two modules. If it’s an executive coaching situation, that might be where the HR folks think that that Lee Kantor is a great candidate to become the CEO someday. And they would hire me as an executive coach and I would make sure that you’re ready when the time comes. I’m actually working on a succession plan like that with a client with the outgoing leader of the company of the corporation. Just between he and I said, Hey, I’m going to retire maybe three or five years, how can I make sure my four top people are ready? And then I was able to do behavioral assessments and then design executive coaching to make sure all four of these people were ready, you know, prepared. Who knows what’s going to happen in three or four years, right? So we made sure that we’ve got these four people ready to step in when the time comes.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:56] Now in your work, when you were making the transition from corporate to coaching, you decided to partner with focal point coaching. Can you talk about how that decision came about? Because obviously you have the knowledge about business from having a career for so long in a variety of businesses doing a variety of things? Why was it important to you to partner with a focal point that has a methodology that has a structure? Was that kind of the key reason that you decided to work with focal point?

Joel Philhours: [00:14:30] That’s exactly right. The some of the things that I knew I was not competent in and that was the whole marketing and sales side of the business. You know, I grew up in the corporate world. You know, first of all, us accountants, you know, we’re not known for being the the the most social people on the planet. I have been received some accolades from old friends saying, I can’t believe that you’re a CPA. We didn’t even know you could count or read, you know. But I do try to have a little bit better, a little higher level of personality than most of us. But we are pretty much we’re working in a in a trade and a field with a lot of rules. A lot of structured and such. And then as I moved more into the finance side again, we’re still dealing with a lot of numbers now. We’re forecasting and budgeting and helping make business decisions. But I’m not a marketeer. I don’t know how to create brands. I don’t know how to structure things that have been proven effective with with focal point. We’ve got Brian Tracy is kind of our overall overall mentor. He’s been a positive speaking, motivating kind of guy for since the 90s and the 2000s. He’s he’s pretty much our brand, and he put together a lot of these effective program sessions that I’ve been referring to. And they’re laid out well, they’re proven. We’ve got some 200, I want to say, 230 coaches around the world. Some are new like me. Others have been doing it for 25 and 30 years. We’ve got a tremendous network to rely on, and if we don’t know something for a client, we’ve got access to all of these different people. It’s, you know, they teach us how to make the Big Mac and they teach us how to get the fries crispy, golden brown and and therefore, you know, we are consistent in in what we deliver. But at the same time, we can throw in our own flair based on what our experiences are now.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:53] Can you talk a little bit about when you’re working with a client? What is that first conversation look like, what you know, what are the is there a typical kind of pain point that they’re having? Is there some symptoms that a business owner right now that’s listening could recognize and say, Hey, you know what? That’s happening to me? Maybe I should consider contacting a coach.

Joel Philhours: [00:17:16] Great question, I appreciate it. It’s a matter of fact, it is certainly we are listening for things that are causing pain, and generally it’s along the lines of, Hey, I started this business five years ago. I had worked for the man for a long time, and I kind of wanted the freedom of being my own boss. So they start this business, it’s going well, they’re growing it and such. But my goodness, they’re still working 50 80 hours a week, and they’re their families don’t know them. They have to wear name tags every day when they come home just so that the kids know, know who dad is kind of thing. So if people are talking about, my goodness, I’m just, I’m getting killed here, I’m doing everything. Um, I’m working too many hours, that’s the key, because I know as a father and a husband back in my corporate days, yeah, I would disappear. There was a time when I was working for a pharmaceutical company. Get on a plane here in Memphis, Tennessee, fly to New York and then come home on Fridays. And I did that for months at a time. Another company, I was literally traveling around the world and stuff, so I know what it’s like to work these these hours and you lose connection with family. It’s bad. So somebody, you know, feels that they’re working too many hours. I can help them through that. Another thing would be they’re growing like crazy, and their cash flow still sucks that a lot of businesses go out of business when they’re growing, because if we’re selling a good, we’ve got to invest in the components.

Joel Philhours: [00:18:54] We’ve got to invest in labor, we build it and then we sell it. So our cash cycle might be 90 days or even longer. A lot of people don’t quite understand that when they go into it and, you know, to be growing and then be upside down on cash flow, that’s got to be pretty, pretty scary if you don’t really understand what’s causing it and how to get out of that. Another thing would be can’t hire right the right people. I can’t keep people. I’m tired of doing everything. Well, if you’re doing everything, it’s because you’re choosing to do everything. You can get your people up to speed. Think about it. The owner probably, you know, has these dreams and hopes to be making two hundred dollars an hour, right? But if he she’s down there receiving goods in the back door and shipping goods, you know, at the shipping dock. There are two hundred dollars an hour is going to an activity that they could probably pay someone 20 dollars to do. Looking at business that way, we’ve got tremendous amount of tools to make the point of saying you’ve got to change and you’ve got to let other people participate in this business that you’re dealing with or you’re going to die now.

Lee Kantor: [00:20:10] Now in your work, has there been a moment where you’ve had kind of a moment where you’re like, You know what, this is exactly? This fits me perfectly. This was the right decision to go down this path. Have you made a change in a company where you’ve seen all your previous work in your new work kind of come together and say, Yeah, this is what I should be doing now?

Joel Philhours: [00:20:34] Absolutely. Absolutely. I get a I get a buzz off of the wow that that seems so simple. Why didn’t I see that? You know, it’s a forest or tree thing. You know, when you’re when you’re putting out fires, it’s really hard to start thinking about fire prevention. And and it’s it’s one of those things of you’ve got to get somebody, you know, to slow down, just stop right where you are. Take the deep breath that whole thing. And let’s break this thing down. Let’s clarify all of the activities that are going on. And if you if you stop and looking at stop and start looking at everything from a process standpoint, identify the root cause of all of the problems you’re having stopped fixing, go on down the process, fix it, improve it. Automated train people invest the time to make the madness go away. And I’ve got many experiences of where. We take people out of the process and we automated. Financial systems used to be, you know, millions and millions of dollars. Now there are softwares out there for they’re still not free, but they can certainly standardize processes. One thing about computers and software, it shows up pretty much every day. It doesn’t, you know, have four weeks vacation, doesn’t get sick, doesn’t have to wear a mask, you know the whole thing. And automation is is a great tool, and I’ve been able to help people automate things saving, you know, head count or, you know, being able to put someone in a in another role to where they can add more value, something that they enjoy more as well. So it really is stopping in in looking at everything and then working your way through again, the different modules to where we learn how to, you know, make more sales, find more prospects and gets more leads and etc. It’s all it’s pretty much a game of numbers, even even when they’re not dollars.

Lee Kantor: [00:22:52] Now, do you have a specific niche that you serve or is it kind of industry agnostic?

Joel Philhours: [00:22:59] I really enjoy manufacturing and distribution because I’m a simple thinking guy and I like to, you know, I like to draw on the board. I like to have a sample or a tool in my hands and manufacturing. If you’re curious about the cost, if you manufacture, I have a pen in my hand. If I’m manufacturing this pen and I’m trying to figure out why my costs are so high. Everything is in my hand, right? I mean, I see it. It’s right there in front of me. It’s not. It’s not a theoretical discussion on on the way services are provided, right? I mean, it’s you can look at that and you can figure out where the labor is killing you on putting this pen together. You can go to your purchasing guys and figure out what supplier is is killing us on components of the finished good. Same thing with with distribution. Very simple concept here, but you receive boxes, you put boxes away and then later on someone says, I need those boxes and you ship them well, you can stand there and look at that. You can figure out that, you know, my my fastest turning products are the furthest away from the shipping dock. Well, that doesn’t make sense. That’s time to go. Get it, time to bring it to the dock. All of these things from just visualization and some common sense, can help a business be more productive and and have its costs lowered it. It’s really a simple thing if you know what you’re doing anything simple. If you’ve experienced it, I guess.

Lee Kantor: [00:24:41] Now, before we wrap, do you have any piece of advice that you would like to share regarding kind of coaching or maybe some coaching that you’ve experienced in the past?

Joel Philhours: [00:24:52] Yeah, I do, and I appreciate that question. It’s OK to ask for help. It’s OK for an expert in one field to seek advice and and be it tutelage, you know, be it coaching, training, whatever you want to call it, mentoring, just someone to talk to. It’s OK for an expert to hire an expert. One thing that I totally enjoyed throughout my career working with companies that manufactured, for example, is I love to talk to the engineers that were designing things. I work for a company that that model that manufactured automotive and industrial parts. And these were things that are in your car. Or it could be anything that’s in a medical device or even a simple fan that just spins right? But I love to deal with the engineers that were designing things that were smaller yet stronger miles per gallon is a big thing on the car. If you can make a powerful electric motor to raise and lower windows, that never breaks, but it’s light and small. You’re going to do business because every all the manufacturers need that technology. I just enjoyed spending time with the quality people and the sales and marketing people throughout my career. I six years into my career is when I realized I didn’t want to just do accounting entries, reconciliations and reporting, I wanted to learn business. That’s when I got the MBA, and that’s when I started working collectively and having relationships with the different functions. I became bilingual trilingual whatever you want to call it, I understood the end to end things made me a much better finance guy. And that’s what I try to get. The business owners or anybody that I’m coaching with is to understand the end to end and be able to think in the end.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:54] Well, Joel, thank you so much for sharing your story today. If somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team. What is the website?

Joel Philhours: [00:27:04] My website is just my name. It’s Joelle P.H., i l h o u IRS dot focal point coaching dot com that’ll get you to my to my website.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:20] Well, thank you again, Joel, for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Joel Philhours: [00:27:25] Thank you very much, Leigh. I appreciate your time and the opportunity just to just to chat it up a little bit.

Lee Kantor: [00:27:32] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see, y’all next time on Coach the Coach radio.

Doug Ramsthel With Burnham Benefits

by

BurnhamDougRamsthel-scaled
High Velocity Radio
Doug Ramsthel With Burnham Benefits
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BurnhamDougRamsthel-scaledDoug Ramsthel is a Partner at Burnham Benefits, a Baldwin Risk Partners Company, one of the top 50 employee benefit consulting firms in the United States. He consults employers across the US on their benefits plan strategy, design, funding, and communication.

With health insurance being the major cost for most employers, he has been successful in helping employers creatively reduce costs while not compromising the quality of benefits offered to employees. He is a recognized specialist in self-funding, consumer-driven healthcare, underwriting, and financial analysis.

Within Burnham, Doug not only helps provide firm leadership, but he is also the industry lead for Hospitality and Healthcare and is also a co-founder of 360 Rx Solutions a company dedicated to providing PBM transparency and value for self-funded employers.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • The impact of pandemic on employee benefits
  • The most important thing companies should be doing this year in terms of their employee benefit packages

John Jennings With Inspired Business Concepts

by

JohnJennings
Coach The Coach
John Jennings With Inspired Business Concepts
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InspiredBusinessConcepts

JohnJenningsJohn Jennings, the President of Inspired Business Concepts, has a passion for helping entrepreneurs, business owners, and executives unlock their full potential and experience the joy and personal fulfillment of leading exceptional organizations.

He has a proven track record of driving positive change in both large and small organizations. He is seen as a “turn-around guy”, who credits his success to a strategic mindset and a positive attitude.

John has over two decades of IT leadership in Fortune 500 organizations such as LG&E Energy Corp. and Yum! Brands. He has also served in a variety of leadership roles for companies and non-profits of all sizes, to include building several organizations from the ground up.

Connect with John on LinkedIn, and Twitter and follow Inspired Business Concepts on Facebook.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Putting together a plan to solve challenges

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to brxambassador.com to learn more. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:33] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a good one. Today we have with us John Jennings with inspired business concepts. Welcome, John.

John Jennings: [00:00:44] Hey, lady, how are you?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] I am doing great, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about inspired business concepts. How are you serving, folks?

John Jennings: [00:00:53] Well, you know, I’ve been I’ve formed this company three and a half years ago after doing coaching inside corporations for for many years. And you know, I work with just a whole variety of folks, from executives to an executive coaching to small and medium sized business owners, mostly in the tech sector and health care sectors, but also do a little bit of everything else as well. Like most folks. So I’m just, you know, right now I’d say what I’m doing is helping people navigate this, this new normal that we’re in and figure out how to scale their business, restart their business, get over some of the hurdles they were facing. And, you know, working on mindset. I’ve got a lot of a lot of burnout, people who who are kind of frustrated. And so I always say I try to help business owners experience the joy and satisfaction that they should be experiencing as business owners.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:52] Now let’s talk a little bit about your corporate background. Was coaching something that was part of the culture at the organization that you were part of? Was that something that only like the high level executives got to experience? Or was it something that kind of trickled throughout the organization?

John Jennings: [00:02:11] You know, at two of the organizations I was at, which both Fortune 500 companies coaching was it, you know, we didn’t necessarily use the term coaching, but called it mentoring or or whatever. We’re very much part of. In fact, I 20 20 years ago dating myself here, but 20 years ago or so I was at a company that that really felt like, you know, we weren’t doing a great job of bringing those high, high performing high potential individual contributors into leadership and management roles very effectively. And so I actually created a a coaching and mentoring program targeted at that group. So that was kind of one of my first, you know, adventures into this kind of concept.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:59] So now are you seeing more and more organizations kind of take advantage of this modality and helping more people using this kind of whether it’s like kind of that mentoring, as you mentioned or a more formal coaching program, are you seeing that is more accepted and more prevalent?

John Jennings: [00:03:18] You know, I think it is. You know, I’ve just recently signed on a client that’s with a, you know, a major medical national medical company. And you know, she was she just found me locally and is, you know? You know, funding this through her, you know, her company is going to pay, reimburse her for it, that she’s at an exec, at an executive level, so that is maybe easier to do. But yeah, I’m certainly seeing that in some cases.

Lee Kantor: [00:03:48] Now, when you left the corporate world and decided to go kind of into your own practice like this, was that a difficult transition?

John Jennings: [00:03:56] Well, it wasn’t a one step. So I left Big Corporate in 2010, you know, during the kind of I survived the first couple of years of the economic downturn there, but finally got caught in that went in, went in in January 2010, went in for my performance review for what I thought was an outstanding year and it really was. And Salt found an HR sitting in the room instead of my boss and went, Hmmm, I know what this is about. I found myself unemployed for the first time since since college and actually went home. I tell people I went home and slept like a baby because that that those handcuffs that, you know, the corporate opportunities tend to kind of put on. You were gone. And so I went into small business and worked and served in small businesses for the next seven or eight years. It helped build build some new business units, and one case helped a startup get off the ground and another created some new product. It’s a product development, just different things, all kind of along my line of of being a turnaround business builder kind of guy. And so did that for several entrepreneurial kind of endeavors over seven or eight years and then finally decided it was time to to launch out on my own. And did that in, you know, I guess it was twenty eighteen.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:28] Now, any advice for the folks coming from corporate that are kind of exploring a coaching, transitioning into being a coach, is there kind of some dos and don’ts that you would recommend?

John Jennings: [00:05:40] Well, you know, so it’s a personal decision, and I think everybody has to make their own their own mind up. I would do a lot of due diligence and talk to people who are doing the type of work you want to do. That’s that’s kind of critical. And also, you know, don’t believe the hype. This isn’t an easy. This isn’t necessarily the easy way of making a buck. I’d say the first 18 months was extraordinarily stressful, getting getting things off the ground and then just as everything was clicking and humming along. We had a global pandemic that’s that set things back for for several months. So, you know, it was a it was. Pretty challenging start, but you know, I look back now. Man, I’m so, so grateful that I did it and glad I did it when I did before the pandemic. One thing I would say is when I was thinking of doing this, I went out and and part of my due diligence was to talk to a number of people from my past people that felt respected me and knew me. And some of those people were from corporate world, and some of them were more entrepreneurial, and I got frustrated by several of the people in the corporate world I talked to who would say, You know, you’re nuts, why are you going to do that? You know, they were just they were just really shooting, shooting the whole idea down, just telling me I was crazy to even think about doing something like this.

John Jennings: [00:07:08] And it really, you know, kind of caused me to take a little pause. And I was talking to a friend of mine who was in a similar kind of business and and just mentioned this to me. And he said, John, let me tell you something. You know, somebody told me years ago when when I was facing this decision, he said, Don’t ever ask for directions from someone who from someone who hasn’t been where you’re going. And I thought that was brilliant. You know, don’t ever ask for directions from someone who hasn’t been where you’re going. You know, you wouldn’t do that around anything else in life. So why do you do that about striking off on an entrepreneurial endeavor? If a person has spent their life in corporate it or or whatever, you know, they’re not going to understand why even the mindset behind why you would even think about doing something like this. And so once I kind of had that in mind, I realized that that the people from my past that were in the more the corporate sector, you know, they’re they’re good people and I don’t not take anything away from them, but they don’t understand this idea of being an entrepreneur. And and literally building a business from the ground up is something that’s completely foreign to them.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:28] Right? Well, it’s a different skill set to kind of manage an existing entity and being a cog in a machine and then starting something from a blank sheet of paper. Those aren’t the same skills.

John Jennings: [00:08:40] Yeah. Yeah. And I was just fortunate that I did enough in the corporate world. I was always kind of the create a new team or turn around a failing team or take a project that was failing and figure it out. So I kind of had that entrepreneurial kind of mindset in a in a corporate setting. But it was the entrepreneurial mindset also that kept getting me in trouble.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:02] And I know exactly that. That’s not always as valued as you would think it is.

John Jennings: [00:09:09] Yeah, I use that. It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission. One too many times

Lee Kantor: [00:09:16] I lived that to, I am right there with you now in your work. What is typically the pain that your client is having or your perspective client is having where John is the right guy to call?

John Jennings: [00:09:29] Well, you know, so on the on the business side, a lot of my business coaching the business owners, you know, they’re frustrated, they’re they’re stressed over what COVID has done to them. They’re still trying to figure things out. You know, they may have survived last year because of PPP and other things, but they’re worn out and they’re just exhausted and their sales are still going slow. And a lot of areas in a lot of my clients are in the B2B space and health care space in those spaces just don’t move fast. And they’re moving even slower right now because of because of COVID and things like that. And so they’re just frustrated and tired on the executive side. My executive coaching clients are typically people who have just recently elevated into an executive role over the last year, over the last year or two. And they’re working on things like, you know, what’s my leadership style? Do I have an executive presence? Do do people respect me the way I need to respect me and things like that? And I’m just helping them build their personal brand, build their style, develop their relationship with their teams and peers, and that sort of thing. So kind of different to different sets of needs and kind of different approaches as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:52] So now when you’re working with the business owner, how do you kind of or do you stay in the lane of OK coaching? Is me asking questions helping you kind of be the best you you can be versus consultant who is kind of rolling up my sleeves and kind of getting in there and helping?

John Jennings: [00:11:09] Yeah, so I do some consulting as well. In fact, I’m sitting right now, you’re in an office I have at a client where I’m doing some product development consulting, but I’m doing less and less of that, the more coaching I do. I just define it up front. You know that that’s that’s not my role. And if there’s a if there is a consulting role that needs to be filled, a lot of times I’ll try to bring bring in somebody I know that might fill those roles. But but I don’t try to fill them myself unless it’s truly a short term thing. There’s there’s occasionally I might take a short term thing, but yeah, I just, you know, I think we just define it up front what it’s about.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:54] Now, how do you kind of help that person who maybe is new to coaching? Kind of be vulnerable enough to share the important stuff and and be accepting of maybe the hard truths that that’s your job to share?

John Jennings: [00:12:15] Can you ask that again, I want to make sure

Lee Kantor: [00:12:18] So and for some people, coaching sounds good until you tell them something they don’t want to hear. And then, you know, they might take it personally. They might get defensive. They’re not as kind of vulnerable in the right kind of vulnerable mindset they have to be in order to really get the most out of this.

John Jennings: [00:12:40] Yeah, yeah, that’s actually those blind spots happen all the time. In fact, that’s that’s kind of a personal interest of mine. And actually, I’m writing a book on that kind of idea that business owners don’t know what they don’t know. And a lot of times they don’t know it because people won’t tell them or in other cases, it’s because they don’t hear it when people do tell because they don’t want to hear it. And and so, you know, I have been in that situation where the coaching through the conversation, it’s become clear that there’s a problem. I find that if if I’m the one that has to tell them it’s a problem, then it doesn’t go over so well. So as coaches, I think we really have to be careful to avoid prescribing the solution. One of the painstaking tasks we have to do sometimes as coaches, is to continue to ask the questions until the client gets to the point where they realize on their own that they’ve got a problem, something that they need to deal with. And whether that’s, you know, I tell you that one of the most common ones I run into is these entrepreneurial business owners who constantly have a new idea constantly trying something different, constantly want to try something new and different, which is, you know, that’s part of the beauty of an entrepreneur, right? I love having entrepreneurs that are creative and innovative and everything else. But the flip side is they don’t sometimes stay in their lane where they’re good and grow in a smart way. So I’ll give it an example. I had a head of manufacturing client that was really, really solid in one area, and they were they were toying with going into some completely different product lines and and we said, why do you want to do that? You’re going to have to.

John Jennings: [00:14:43] Bring in completely different salespeople, different management people. You know, it’s a completely different way of thinking. Let’s let’s look at what your business is today and why, why it’s so good they dominate their market. They’re not the cheapest price in town or in the country. They’re not the cheapest in town. But yet people continue to come to them. And so we set back and step back and looked at that and realized that there was a certain value add component that they were doing in their services for their clients, that those those appliances were those clients were willing to pay a premium for and somebody took that step back. They realized that that was really their market was clients who would pay extra for this higher level of service. And so we we evaluated the market and found a couple of parallel markets, if you will, that have the same kind of mindset, same kind of clientele, same kind of approach to how they did business and what they found was they could expand into parallel markets much more easily and stay really still within their wheelhouse. All they’re doing is widening their lanes instead of going into a completely different direction. And, you know, once they came to that conclusion, you know, we in the first year, they added 10, 10, 15 percent to their bottom line. I’m sorry to their top line with very little effort. And you know, that’s that’s smart growth versus just just trying anything that will come along.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:28] Now, do you find that folks that go through those exercises and you really kind of poking at their idea and you’re, you know, playing devil’s advocate, you’re really kind of making them defend the choices? Is it something that when someone self-select to be a coaching client that they’re already of the mindset of, OK, this is part of what I get and then I’m good with that? Or do they still kind of put up a defensive front when you’re, you know, asking some hard questions?

John Jennings: [00:17:01] Oh yeah, they still put up a defensive front because it’s their it’s their baby, you’re you’re criticizing. And so when they when they feel you’re doubting their their vision, then some will take it personally. Hopefully, they’ll get over that and I’ll remind them if they start to that, this is why you hired a coach. You know, you didn’t hire me to be your your yes man to know that you got you have those right. Most business owners have plenty of people who will sit there and nod and and agree with them, you know, because they don’t want to rock the boat. What they don’t have is someone who will be still kind and friendly and everything else, but we’ll ask them honest, sincere questions. I had a have a client who is in the IT space, has a great, great company specific niche doing quite well, and was just convinced that there’s something she could do with a drone license. And I kept asking her, What what are you going to do with it? You know, specifically, what are you going to do with this? And she kept coming back going. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just I just think it sounds interesting. And we kept pursuing that, kept talking about it. And eventually, after about six months or so, she she realizes that that was just kind of a temporary dream she had. She was just trying to justify some other interest. And I think he’s moved off that finally. But yeah, sometimes an owner will keep those ideas going because they’re committed to it. They’ve convinced themselves that that they’ve got a brilliant idea no one else has thought of. And if and if they can convince me, I’ll I’ll be right on there with them. But if, if they can’t, I’ll continue to question them about it.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:54] Now you mentioned you’re writing a book. How did that kind of book idea come about? Is it for your own kind of thought, leadership and marketing for your own firm? Was it something that you’ve always wanted to kind of dig deeper in? What was the kind of genesis of the idea of writing a book?

John Jennings: [00:19:11] Well, you know, I’ve always kind of had an interest in writing. I write a new blog. I don’t blog as much as I used to, but I wrote a lot of blogs. I’ve always kind of had a creative writing kind of mindset, not fiction, but, you know, business related. I’ve always been a good writer in business as far as writing proposals and contracts and all that kind of stuff. Not not legalistic contracts, but, you know, just, you know, user manuals and you name it, you know, just through the years. And so my wife and others have told me several times, you ought to write, you ought to write. And I never just it was just one of those things where one, you know, I think imposter syndrome start coaching myself. You’re probably imposter syndrome comes in. Oh, I’m not worthy news. Who’s going to buy a book from me? That sort of thing. And then the others is just over the past several years, as I’ve been in this coaching role and the roles leading up to it, I realize that I’ve had just tons of good experiences that when I share them with people, they’re always feel like they’re very insightful.

John Jennings: [00:20:16] And so, you know, I’ve always just been told I’m a good storyteller and that sort of thing. And so, you know, talking about blind spots, talking about things that business owners need to need to know about, need to hear about has kind of led down this path of of writing something that hopefully a business owner that would read it would would recognize maybe some some gaps, some blind spots in their own mind. And if you’re a coach or a, you know, a team member in a company, you might read it and get some ideas on how to approach your leadership on gaps and blind spots that you’re seeing. And so that’s it’s going to it’s going to be interesting. It’s it’s taking shape. It’s probably 25 30 percent through drafting the first manuscript, working with an editor and that sort of thing. So still early, write a few months down the road for. I have a whole lot to say about it, but it’s going to be exciting.

Lee Kantor: [00:21:20] Well, before we wrap, can you share a story, maybe of a you mentioned a few kind of anecdotes before, but maybe. A story where somebody did have a blind spot, you were able to kind of insert yourself and help them, maybe kind of revisit it or kind of spin it a different way so that they can reach a new level.

John Jennings: [00:21:42] Yeah, well, they kind of the one that that kind of. It’s really kind of stimulated the book writing thing was a client that I work with quite a bit. I’ve been doing some coaching strategic, advising some other things with them. And about just pre-COVID, I was hired to buy them first to develop a strategic plan, which we did. And then then I was retained for ongoing strategic strategic plan accountability. You know, kind of ongoing traction, kind of not traction. I don’t want to get in trouble with the EOS people, not attraction coach, but along that line of the ongoing accountability and that sort of thing. And so they hired me to do that. And then one of the things they asked me to do because I have a background in process re-engineering and improving, you know, improving processes and such. They asked me to take a look at some key areas of their business. And so we went through that. And then there was one area of the business that was kind of the CEO’s pet area. It’s kind of an area that he felt very passionate about. He felt it was a differentiator for them. But I got the feeling when I was talking to other folks in the company that nobody wanted anything to do with it. And so the CEO actually went on vacation and went on a cruise, and I was supposed to, when he came back, have have an update for him.

John Jennings: [00:23:17] And so while he was gone, I met with a consultant that was running that area and really found out that it was a it was a complete mess. There was there was no way this process, as it was designed, was going to make money. In fact, it was losing money and was just going to keep losing money. And it was one of those things where the more you, you know, the more customers that came on, the more money they were going to lose. And it was just it was just wasn’t a good, good situation for anybody. And so when the business owner comes back and we sit down and I won’t go into all the details around how it unfolded, but when when we told him that basically wasn’t going to work, he was he was kind of shocked. It was like we had told him his baby was ugly. And I actually thought for a moment he was going to fire me. But as it turned out, you know, COVID hit right after that, it kind of took a backseat. About six months later, still, they’re still doing some coaching and other things in the company. And he said, You know, John, I want to I want to relaunch that, that service.

John Jennings: [00:24:26] I still believe in it. I said, OK. And he goes, You know, would you would you consider it designing it, building it? I said. Yeah, I think I would, and so I’ve worked with them over the past nine months to essentially build a from a ground up, a new a new product based on better, better assumptions, better logic. And now we’ve got a a product that will not only sell but also is profitable for the company. And so, you know, I’ve I’ve kind of earned that reputation here with them and can do a lot of different things with them. Now moving probably be moving away from the consulting piece of that, but still still doing a lot of the coaching and everything that I’ve been doing. So I know that was still kind of vague a little bit because confidentiality stuff. But you know, the idea of signing a a business. And if you just took this as a business within itself, a business that is broken and is not as profitable or in this case was actually losing money and coming up with a new fresh way of doing it. Working with the team here, helping them figure that out and relaunching, it’s very rewarding to get to do those types of things.

Lee Kantor: [00:25:52] Yeah, absolutely. Well, if somebody wanted to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on your team, what’s the website

John Jennings: [00:26:01] So inspired business concepts? Is my my my personal business website. My my handle on almost every platform is John K Jennings. There’s a couple of exceptions, but LinkedIn and Facebook and those you know, John K. Jennings. And you know, I love to love to talk to folks always open for a conversation, always open for contacts if anybody wants to, to learn more or talk about how we could work together.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:28] Good stuff. And that’s inspired with a D business concepts with a NASSCOM. That’s it. Well, John, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you rightly.

John Jennings: [00:26:41] I appreciate the opportunity to talk to your folks and hopefully we’ll we’ll have future conversations as I get my book ready to launch.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:49] Absolutely. Well, thank you again.

John Jennings: [00:26:51] All right, buddy. Thanks a lot.

Lee Kantor: [00:26:52] All right, this is Lee Kantor. We’ll see, y’all next time on Coach the Coach radio.

Emily Alice Wilson With EKAT Productions

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EKATProductions
Atlanta Business Radio
Emily Alice Wilson With EKAT Productions
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EmilyAliceWilsonEmily Alice Wilson started editing in middle school and founded EKAT Productions shortly after.

She has since graduated from Georgia State University with a BA in Film and Media. Along with completing my BA, she also completed her Avid Editing certification through Georgia Film Academy.

She loves editing and has not only done promotional work for clients but also shot several short films that have been screened in the Atlanta area.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • How has the pandemic affected the video editing industry
  • The problem you’re solving

About Our Sponsor

OnPay’sOnPay-Dots payroll services and HR software give you more time to focus on what’s most important. Rated “Excellent” by PC Magazine, we make it easy to pay employees fast, we automate all payroll taxes, and we even keep all your HR and benefits organized and compliant.

Our award-winning customer service includes an accuracy guarantee, deep integrations with popular accounting software, and we’ll even enter all your employee information for you — whether you have five employees or 500. Take a closer look to see all the ways we can save you time and money in the back office.

Follow OnPay on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter

Andrew Frazier With Small Business Pro University

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Coach The Coach
Coach The Coach
Andrew Frazier With Small Business Pro University
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Andrew Frazier, MBA, CFA empowers business owners to Maximize the Value of their companies by helping them Grow Revenue, Increase Profitability, and Obtain Financing.

He guides them along the critical path to create a sustainable business that can run without them through invaluable coaching, consulting, and training services. Mr. Frazier has worked 1-on-1 with 500+ business owners and taught thousands of people about business.

His expertise in business strategy and financial management enables him to take a holistic perspective and provide more optimal solutions for clients.

Mr. Frazier’s book “Running Your Small Business Like A Pro” helps people increase the likelihood and magnitude of their success in business. He has also produced POWER BREAKFAST events in Northern NJ for almost 10 years generating $10+ million in both economic impact and financing for 1,000+ attendees.

His online Small Business Pro University provides entrepreneurs with access to best practices and useful knowledge for running their businesses more professionally. Mr. Frazier recently created The Masterpreneur Playbook a proven 5-Step Business Growth Plan for taking your business from start-up to scaling.

Mr. Frazier graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He also earned an MBA in Finance and Management from New York University’s Stern School of Business (NYU-Stern).

Mr. Frazier completed The Navy Supply Corps training in logistics management and qualified as a Surface Warfare Supply Corps Officer (SWSCO). His focus on continuous learning includes achieving the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) professional designation.

Connect with Andrew on LinkedIn.

What You’ll Learn In This Episode

  • Most important job as a business owner
  • The greatest fear of most business owners
  • Running your small business like a pro

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix 

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach radio brought to you by the Business RadioX Ambassador Program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to BRXambassador.com To learn more. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:32] Lee Kantor here, another episode of Coach the Coach Radio, and this is going to be a fun one. Today we have with us Andrew Fraser with Small Business Pro University. Welcome, Andrew.

Andrew Frazier: [00:00:43] Hey, Lee. Thanks for having me on today.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:45] Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about small business Pro University. How are you serving, folks?

Andrew Frazier: [00:00:51] Ok, great. Thanks. Lee created Small Business Pro University as a way to really help entrepreneurs and business owners learn some of the key things they need to know, because at the end of the day, your business can only be successful as you’re prepared to take it.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:07] So what’s your back story? How did you get involved in helping entrepreneurs?

Andrew Frazier: [00:01:12] Well, I started as a paper boy in fourth grade and have had different corporate was navy officer ran a nonprofit but really loved business and solving problems, and became an entrepreneur. Found that I can take, you know, the myriad of things that I’ve learned about business and really help other people to grow and be more successful and change their lives.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:36] So then how did you develop this university where you’re always a teacher?

Andrew Frazier: [00:01:42] I’ve done coaching, consulting and training with entrepreneurs and business owners the last 12 years and worked with over a thousand. So just you start seeing patterns and things that are common challenges. So that led me to write my first book Running Your Small Business like a pro and you know, from there, developing additional tools to really, you know, help them to learn what they need to do because a lot of times they don’t. They can’t afford to hire me, but they can still benefit from my expertize.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:15] Now, having worked with so many business owners and entrepreneurs, do you see kind of a thread of a mistake that they typically make or that you see over and over when you go? Here we go again?

Andrew Frazier: [00:02:28] Definitely. So actually, each chapter in my book outlines one. So the first chapter is how did we get here? Many times they lose focus and forget about why they’re doing it or what their goals are. You know, they also don’t know what their most important job is as an entrepreneur and business owner. So we cover that many times, you know, there’s a greatest fear that I find among business owners and really, that’s around basically finances and analysis. You know, they don’t know their most important job in terms of it being marketing and selling. So how are you going to be as successful as you could if you’re not doing the most important job that you should be doing?

Lee Kantor: [00:03:18] All right. So let’s kind of dig into those you said the most important job is selling or marketing. What are some kind of low hanging fruit that people can be doing to do better in that area?

Andrew Frazier: [00:03:28] You know, one of the things is as a small business, many times you have to do what the opposite of what a larger business would do. So, you know, understanding that is key. And, you know, understanding that one piece of it is you have to have the smaller, a smaller target market, you have to narrow it significantly into a niche. And you know, it’s counterintuitive because usually you think, Oh, well, I want to sell and market to the most people possible, but it’s really the least people possible, but the most likely people to buy from.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:02] So that is counterintuitive because, like you said, people don’t want to miss out on anybody. So how do you kind of narrow it down? Like, say, you’re an accountant and you’re say, Well, I can help everybody because everybody needs their taxes done or everybody, you know, needs help with their books in business. You’re saying that it’s better to be like the accountant for dentist and be the the ninja accountant for dentists that know everything about dentistry and and the best way to leverage accounting in dentistry to help them the most rather than just being the accountant.

Andrew Frazier: [00:04:39] Correct. Because it’s more likely a dentist is going to hire you because you’re the best, you know, expert in dentistry than, you know, maybe one out of three dentists may hire you. Whereas if you’re just the general accountant, maybe one out of 20 people will hire you. So you’ve got to take more time, more money and more energy trying to market, and you don’t have as effective a market of a message to them.

Lee Kantor: [00:05:05] So now when you tell this to your clients, are they like, I can’t I’m? I’d be afraid to do that because, you know, there’s only one hundred dentists in my market. I what if I don’t get enough of them? Then I’ll, you know, I’ll be out of business. Is there a lot of fear around that?

Andrew Frazier: [00:05:20] Well, I actually came up with an analogy, a way to really that helps people understand it. And really, it’s called. Market your business like a drug dealer, and one of the key things is they don’t sell to everyone and they don’t even really sell. They offer them, you know, so they don’t try to make anyone buy any drugs. They just offer them to people and they offer to the right people. So when you offer what you have and what you have is a value to the right people. You don’t even have to sell it. They’re going to be like, Oh, that’s what I need. And that’s really what you can do by narrowing your target market to the right people.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:05] So now do you have some exercises that you help people kind of decide who the right people are because it may not be the obvious people it might be, you know, might require a little digging deep.

Andrew Frazier: [00:06:19] Yes, there’s a couple of ways, I mean, depending on the business and how many customers you need, you know, you may only need 10 customers. So rather than try and market to a thousand companies, maybe you pick the most likely twenty five to focus on, you know, one of the key things is, you know, you want to target, but you also have to think about how many businesses do you have the money, bandwidth resources to market to effectively. And when you break it down from a sales thing, you need to have seven to 12 touches. So that means everyone you’re marketing to, you have to market to seven to 12 times. So you know, how many people can you realistically do that with? And you know, how many customers do you even need?

Lee Kantor: [00:07:12] And that and you mentioned this earlier, and I think it’s a critical mistake that a lot of small business people make is that they see the big guy doing something and they say, Well, I’ll just do that. And the big guy can afford it. No one and the big guy can make a lot of mistakes that you can’t afford. So by copying the big guy is not really a great strategy for the little guy.

Andrew Frazier: [00:07:37] Correct. I mean, you have to go where you have an advantage. And you know, you don’t you want to focus on smaller niche that the big guy. It’s not worth their time and effort to focus on because that’s where you’re. You could provide a more valuable offering than what they could provide because they’re providing general solutions and you can provide something more specific and have a better message to the people in your market.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:10] So now let’s talk a little bit about your master preneur playbook. How did you come up with that? That’s a great name. And and what is it?

Andrew Frazier: [00:08:19] Ok? Really, you know, one of the key things is, you know, a lot of business owners get stuck because they don’t know exactly what they’re supposed to do. So what I laid out is a playbook that gives you the path that you need to take to create a sustainable business that can run without you. And it’s a five step business growth plan. And by having that layout, you know exactly what you need to do to move forward with your business. So we look at it in terms of the five steps know there’s a path. Your path is working on the concept of your business, working in your business, working on your business, working on the future of your business and working on scaling your business. And there’s different things that you need to do in terms of a business goal that you have to achieve to make it from each step. There’s a key challenge that you have to make you have to overcome to make it from each step. You as a business owner, you have to evolve each each step and there’s different leadership skills that you have to exhibit and develop in each step. And then you need to build and structure organization behind you so it can support you moving on to the next step. So it really just gives business owners and understanding of what they really need to put into place and how they and their business needs to move, evolve to move forward effectively.

Lee Kantor: [00:09:56] So now you mentioned earlier your first book, but there’s a book out right now. Can you talk about that one?

Andrew Frazier: [00:10:05] Yes. So this is that that’s actually this one. The Master,

Lee Kantor: [00:10:08] The Master Preneur is the latest book. Yes, I thought it was called Running Your Small Business like a pro.

Andrew Frazier: [00:10:14] Actually, that’s the first book. So we got him. Ok.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:17] So the first book was running your small business like a pro, and then the latest book is the master preneur book. Yes. And then so is, have you always been a writer?

Andrew Frazier: [00:10:28] Actually, I studied mechanical engineering at MIT undergrad and actually went there because I didn’t want to have to take a writing course. So I had to develop my communication skills over time, and I had to seek help help, you know, as a business owner, many times you, you have to seek help because you can’t do everything and you’re not an expert at everything. So, you know, I have a great book coach consultant who I work with and probably would have never finished my book had I not worked with them.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:04] So now in your business, a person could tap into what you have in terms of taking courses online. But is there coaching also available from you? Or is this primarily kind of online courses?

Andrew Frazier: [00:11:20] Actually, you know, its online courses, we have online certification programs that are combination of courses, live and virtual or virtual, live and independent learning. And then I do small business pro coaching programs. So you know, there’s many ways depending on your needs and you know your abilities and where your business is.

Lee Kantor: [00:11:46] So now what was it like to go from the transition from being a mechanical engineer to being in kind of a coach the way you are to helping entrepreneurs? Because that seems like two different worlds?

Andrew Frazier: [00:11:58] It is. But I actually split off real early because when I was at college, I was in ROTC, so I went and served as a U.S. Navy Supply Corps officer where I ran all the business functions for a ship. So from there, I really found that, you know, business is just like engineering where you’re solving problems. It’s just businesses shorter term problems and you get to solve more of them and see the results faster and easier. So, you know, I’ve got. I guess almost 30 years of experience on the business side.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:39] So now, if somebody wants to learn more, have a more substantive conversation with you or somebody on the team, is the website the best place to go,

Andrew Frazier: [00:12:46] The website or, you know, connect with me on LinkedIn? Andrew Fraser, CFA

Lee Kantor: [00:12:53] And the website is SB pro-EU the letter UK.

Andrew Frazier: [00:12:58] Yes, let’s sb for small business.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:00] Pro-eu good stuff. Well, congratulations on all the success, Andrew.

Andrew Frazier: [00:13:05] Ok, thank you, Lee. Thanks for having

Lee Kantor: [00:13:07] Me. Well, you’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Andrew Frazier: [00:13:10] Okay, great. And so are you. This it’s important to get the word out and communicate.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:16] All right, this is Lee Kantor will sell next time on Coach the Coach radio.

Leveraging Your Business RadioX® Interview

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BRXmic99
Coach The Coach
Leveraging Your Business RadioX® Interview
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In this special live episode of Coach the Coach, Lee and Stone share tips on leveraging your interview on Business RadioX® and any other platform. While they aren’t coaches, they’ve learned a lot from coaches, and they share what they have learned from interviewing thousands of business leaders at BRXProTips.com

If you would like to help other coaches on the next live episode of Coach the Coach please go to BookStonePhone.com and schedule a short call to discuss what you had in mind.

Lee Kantor, Founder, Business RadioX®

Stone Payton, Managing Partner, Business RadioX®

This transcript is machine transcribed by Sonix

TRANSCRIPT

Intro: [00:00:02] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Coach the Coach Radio brought to you by the Business RadioX ambassador program, the no cost business development strategy for coaches who want to spend more time serving local business clients and less time selling them. Go to be brxambassador.com to learn more. Now here’s your host.

Stone Payton: [00:00:32] Welcome to this very special edition of Coach the Coach Lee Kantor Stone Payton here with you two decidedly non coaches. Lee, what in the world are we thinking?

Lee Kantor: [00:00:46] I don’t know what we were thinking, but we are definitely not coaches. I guess we do some coaching and we’ve been coached. I know your dad was a coach, so you have a lot of scar tissue from cousins.

Stone Payton: [00:00:57] That’s a fact. But now we do find ourselves from time to time, I guess, wearing a coaching hat with our studio partners, with our ambassadors, our correspondents, and, of course, our clients. And we’re we’re thinking that we’re going to set up this channel to not only share different coaches perspectives on their work, but also to offer some some tips on on how to leverage the fact that you’ve been featured on either a Business RadioX show or in some other media outlet, right?

Lee Kantor: [00:01:37] Yeah. We learn a lot from all of our guests. And usually in our day job business of running the Business RadioX network, we share those kind of tips on our Brex Pro Tips com website where we have a daily show where we talk about something we’ve learned and how it could help our clients and our people kind of be more productive and sell more and all that good stuff. But in the coaching show, we thought, hey, wouldn’t it be great if we can do a similar thing to help the coaches improve their practice, maybe grow, get one or two more clients. And and we thought we would start with how to get the most out of ordinary. We know most of the people that have come through our interact with us, our guests of our shows. So we thought, why don’t we tell them how they can take their interview, whether it’s with us or any place they’ve been interviewed? Because, you know, coaches like to be guests are very sought after guests on lots of shows. So how do you get the most out of an interview? And because some people think like, I’m going to do an interview and then I’m done and then all these clients are going to come my way. And I you know, I think that’s one of the myths of this industry, that they think that that just by being a guest is the secret and they don’t have to do anything else. And it is possible that you can get clients just from listeners listening and then finding you. That happens for sure. But that’s kind of out of your control. The things we’re talking about are more in your control. These are things you can take your interview and then do stuff with it and repurpose it and leverage it to help yourself when you want to get more clients to, you know, get more known, whatever your objective is.

Stone Payton: [00:03:25] Well, I’ll tell you, one of the things that’s certainly very easy to do within our system, if you’ve been on a Business RadioX show, are in specifically the Coach the Coach radio show, but I bet you can find a way to do it, even if it’s not in our system. In fact, maybe we’ll ask some other coaches about that. But one of the easy things you can do is you can embed the player that we publish for your episode. You can embed that same player on your Web site. And I think that’s a neat way to to to keep that really professional looking. Oh. Design of the image of you being on the show with that player. And you can just take some embed code and if you don’t know how to do it, someone on your staff will or somebody on our staff will coach you through it. But simply just embedding it on your own site is a good one. The other thing that that I think is a is a great way to leverage the fact that you’re on the show. If you have I guess you call it, I think I’ve seen people call this a guesting strategy, like as a strategy for growing my coaching business. I’m going to be on a half a dozen radio shows or media appearances, you know, in the next six months. Use your interview, use one interview, or as you begin to stack them up, use links to those interviews to court the next media opportunity. So those are two things that are just super easy that I think maybe sometimes get over overlooked. Use embedding the interview from Business RadioX or from wherever you’ve been, and then kind of keeping that is almost like marketing assets and linking to them when you want to court another media platform. What are some that come to mind for you?

Lee Kantor: [00:05:18] I think low hanging fruit for any interview is you should transcribe the interview. If the show doesn’t transcribe it, you definitely should transcribe it and then use that content, that digital text as some kind of social media food for all all of your social media for the next week or so. You can use grab a quote from yourself as a tweet. You can use it as a thought starter for blog posts or LinkedIn or medium articles. You can use it as an answer to a core question. You can take your content that you’ve come up with and talked about, take it in digital text form and then repurpose it as digital text on these other platforms. You’ve said a lot of smart things on your interview. So you just didn’t remember them and will have it all in one place. And you can just kind of cut and pasted and repurpose it in a lot of social media platforms pretty easily.

Stone Payton: [00:06:19] And then the. What do you call these things, audio grammes, I think the brand name of the one that we use here at Business RadioX is called Headliner, but there’s probably several of these providers. But I know that here out of the Woodstock studio and then also out of the Sandy Springs studio and probably in some other studios across the network will do what you’re describing. Go to the transcript and carve out just a good little three minute segment. And Endou, that’s how we repurpose the interview. But these services, they make it really look kind of sexy, right? It looks kind of cool if you see some of the stuff that we published on LinkedIn and some of the other social platforms, you’ll see these. I think audiogram is the right word for it. These are all three minute. It’s a video and there’s some there’s some movement, but it’s essentially built on a soundtrack of a of a you know, like a three minute clip. And I tell you what, man, those things get a lot of a lot of traction, don’t they?

Lee Kantor: [00:07:25] Yeah. That’s to use your interview as a soundtrack for video is a great use of the content, because like you said, the people say a lot of smart things in little bursts. Those little nuggets, you can pull out this highlight and then easily turn that audio into a video using one of those tools or even, you know, you can do it yourself in GarageBand and just kind of lazy visuals over the audio. And then you’ve created a video and now you have a little short video you could share, you can put on your website, you can share on the social platforms. It’s taking the content and then just kind of using it in another way and then just creating more kind of legs for it. So you did this interview once, and then you’re able to kind of repurpose it multiple times in different places. It’s a I mean, you’re trying to get the most out of your effort. And this is a great way. You’re you have a lot of gold there. So you you want to mine it and use it in these creative ways. But I think, Stone, it’s really important to share the number one thing that we think that people should do with their interview. This thing is kind of a no brainer. This is a great way to rekindle a relationship. This is a great way to get you one more client. Tell them this. I don’t see enough people doing this, but to me, this is a no brainer. Everybody should be doing this pretty much with every interview they do, Aimen.

Stone Payton: [00:08:54] And this is it’s one of those things that is just so easy and makes so much sense. It gets overlooked. And my most recent experience with this, this sort of reminded me, hey, dummy, you really ought to do this every time and you ought to be telling your clients and anyone you run into to do this. My most recent experience was not from a radio interview. It was from a write in interview. You know, one of these things where they email you the questions and then you craft your responses, you email them back, and then it appears in a magazine and in this case, both a print magazine and they have a digital version as well. But the what I did, I mean, we all ought to be doing this any time we’re on the on the on any media platform. I just crafted a brief two sentence, little note, and sent it out in my case, too, maybe 100, 150 people. And I didn’t do any mass mailing program or anything. I wrote, you know, I copied that to send its body copy. But, you know, I said, hi, Joe had an opportunity to be interviewed and blah, blah, blah. Thought you might enjoy it. You know the same thing if you’re on a Business RadioX show or whatever. Just a quick little too soon. This thing to be, you know. Hi, Cindy. I had an opportunity to be interviewed on the Business RadioX network and we spoke about. Now, that’s one way you can customize this note. If you if if you think about who you’re talking to and you know that they’re specifically interested in or the last conversation you had was on a very specific topic and you covered it in your interview.

Stone Payton: [00:10:30] Like in our case, in my case, I might talk about serving first. So if I’ve had that conversation with a prospective client, a market, may we call them a market partner? Anybody like that? I might. I might. I probably did do an interview. And if I did that, I would say, you know, hey, Joe had an opportunity to be interviewed on the Business RadioX network. And we spoke specifically about that topic. Thought you might enjoy. So here’s what I did. I did that right in an interview. I sent that note out to one hundred and fifty people. You know, it cost me a couple of hours on a Saturday morning. But I mean, boy, was it well invested. I cannot I’m consistently amazed there. There were a whole. Bunch of people, they came back behind that and said, hey, great job, way to go, because we all had that group of people that want us to do well and want to support us no matter what. But I must have had as a as a direct return on that time and energy investment. I must have had a half a dozen people come back behind that and say great job stone or something like that. It’s been a while. We need to talk again. Or I know we were talking about sponsoring that series. There are budget cycles coming back around. Let’s go grab a cup of coffee or let’s hop on the phone. And it’s it’s a marvelous, a genuine, authentic way to connect with people. And every time I’ve ever done anything like this, it’s always it’s rekindled and deepened some relationships. But you’ve had similar experience, haven’t you?

Lee Kantor: [00:12:10] Yeah. This is a it’s such an elegant way to let people know what you’re up to, to just it’s like you said, to rekindle this relationship. A lot of times the timing just isn’t right to do business. But this is a nice, elegant touch to let them know, hey, I’m still out there, I’m still doing stuff. I thought you might be interested in this. And it gives the interviewee this kind of social proof that they’re worth being interviewed. And it just reminds the people, hey, I like that person one on. I reconnect with them and see if if there’s a way to do business this time. I wouldn’t do this every day. But definitely on certain interviews you’re really proud of, I would definitely reach back out to my network and let them know that I was interviewed, because this is a very simple way and it’s something that most people aren’t doing. If you’ve gone through the effort of doing the interview, I recommend that you invest some time in taking that interview and sharing it with the people that matter most with you. I mean, I think it’s a something that is just sitting there waiting for most people. It’s you’re not going to if you’re waiting for people to listen and then call you. And you can still do that if you want to be more proactive. I recommend taking that interview and sending it directly to your last 100 people who goes, did you send that to your former clients who used to work with you? Send it to people who who used to refer to you. Anybody who’s in your kind of database that you hadn’t talked to in a while, I would recommend proactively sending your interview to those people. If you’re proud of the interview you think did a good job. Send it to them. Let them know that, hey, I’m still around and I would love to reconnect.

Stone Payton: [00:13:52] Another quick tip that that comes to mind for me, and it may sound self-serving, but I’ll tell you, it’s strong and it’s strong because it’s based on the timeless principle of when you serve other people. It just it just always comes back to you. But as a publisher and arguably one of the more prolific publishers of business material in the country, on the planet, when a guest comes back and endorses or thinks us in some way, and not only do they, of course, endear themselves with us that much more, we’re so we’re motivated to go right back behind that and do even more to try to advance their cause and promote them. So something as simple as, you know, down the road a little bit, kind of, you know, do your do your initial push and utilize all these strategies we’re talking about. But somewhere in there at least once. Go back and say something good or nice about the bumper magazine or the, you know, this network or that radio show that will pay huge dividends. And I mean, I would be remiss. I mean, I don’t know if you would consider this a shameless plug or not, but I believe it with all my heart. And if I’m if I’m getting the platform, I’m going to tell you all of these things are marvelous ways to to to round out your marketing strategy.

Stone Payton: [00:15:15] And there’s certainly good strategies and tactics to grow your business, seeking out opportunities to share your story and getting that information out there in a variety of platforms and with a truly integrated strategy, everything from social media to print to radio to TV, what have you. All of that is good mojo. And, oh, it’s it’s a little unpredictable. It can be inconsistent and it can be difficult to generate consistent, predictable results. I know that this is a coming from someone with a bit of a biased lens. So just run what I’m about to say through that filter if you need to. But I still say it with all the all the confidence in the world. If you want to get strategic about using this platform anyway and you want to produce consistent, reliable green dollar ROI results. The most effective thing you can do is get on the other side of the microphone and use this platform to shine the light on other people, use this platform to build relationships with the people who matter to you. Most use this platform to to give causes that are important to you, a megaphone to give all of these folks in your ecosystem, in your community, an opportunity to share the great work that they’re doing for the market, for the profession, for the community.

Stone Payton: [00:17:02] With that foundation in place. When you have something like this at your disposal and you use it to serve, to serve first, serve early and serve often. I guarantee you, I mean, I’ve seen it happen for 15 years, and you don’t have to do it with Business RadioX. I think we’ve got a pretty good handle on doing it and doing it well. But whether you do it with someone else, you do it on your own or you come come on board with us and let us work with you. Well, I really encourage you to seriously consider using the platform to serve others. You and yours, you and your organization, you’ll come along for the ride. But I think you’ll find that you get bigger, better, faster, more reliable. Green dollar ROI, actual real ROI from your from your time, energy and dollar investment. So I, I wasn’t going to get on the show and not say that. OK, leave back to our regular programing.

Lee Kantor: [00:18:03] Well, this show, we’re going to do it periodically. But I think what I would like is give the other coaches out there a chance to come on and share how they kind of grow their practice, some specific tips from them about how to grow a coaching practice. If there’s coaches out there that. Would be generous enough to share those kind of tips on how to serve their community, how to help more people, how to make more money and give kind of the right and the horse’s mouth type information to the other coaches that listen to this show. We would be most appreciative if they can reach out to stone that everybody knows. You’re the website book Stone Phone.com. Just have a conversation with Stone. Talk about how you think that on the next episode you can share some information that would help a coach, you know, help smooth out their learning curve. That would be most appreciated. So go there, bookstand, Phone.com, and then we’ll get you on the next episode when we do Coach the Coach radio live like this. And that’s the intention, is to just help the community grow their practice, get one more client, help the community get the most out of their efforts, and share best practices from the people that are doing the work. So if you want to participate next time, go to bookstand Phone.com. Let us now. And the next time we do this live, we will include you as part of the show and you can share what you know. That’s what I got. So.

Stone Payton: [00:19:43] All right, man, that is a wrap. We’ll see you next time on Coach the Coach Radio.

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