Joel William Philhours FocalPoint Business Coaching

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.