Larry Galler With Larry Galler & Associates

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 on the show, we have Larry Gawler with Larry Geller and Associates. Welcome, Larry.

Larry Galler: [00:00:44] Thanks, Lee. Nice to be here with you.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:47] Well, I’m excited to learn about your practice. Tell us a little bit about who you serve.

Larry Galler: [00:00:52] For the last 25 years or so, I have been working with owners CEOs of small to midsize businesses. I suppose that means that requires a definition. And to me, a small business is. Well, the bulk of my clients are anywhere from one to 12 employees. A substantial number of them are larger, going up to 50 to 100 employees, and a few are. Over the years, a few of them have been much larger companies.

Lee Kantor: [00:01:27] Now what’s your back story? How did you get involved in coaching?

Larry Galler: [00:01:30] You got two hours. I have a I come from a small business background. My parents owned a retail flower shop. I went into business with them after college and after a few years. We had a major disagreement into the future of the company, so I went off on my own. I opened a retail store in what was then a brand new retail shopping mall, which was a very hot destination in those days. The store is sold primarily gift wares and housewares, a broad assortment of things that you would have in your house. The store did very well, and over the next 10 years I opened up five more stores, so we had a total of six stores and. Of then shortly thereafter, in the next four or five years, the economy changed substantially. It became known as the Rust Belt depression or recession. Interest rates went up into the low twenties, the high teens and we were highly leveraged and had a very rough time paying the rent and paying the interest and paying the vendors and ultimately at the end of about a five year struggle. We had to close the business and had to look for something else to make a living, and I did some marketing work for a number of small businesses, people that I knew.

Larry Galler: [00:03:04] One of them introduced me as his business coach. I had never heard that term before. And so I looked it up. And sure enough, there are people out there that call themselves coaches and they’re making a living at it and looked at what they did. And I said, That’s what I do, and I’m very qualified to do it. So I became a business coach and I joined the chambers of Commerce. A couple of them, three of them actually worked very hard to get clients, and the first year was really a struggle. But. I’ve been doing it for 25 years now and slowing down the practice, but still very involved in my practice and in the people I serve. If you want to know something about industries, just about everything, I have worked with one person carpet cleaning company to a statewide community college program where I coached the campus. Chancellors on communications and delegation did that for quite a while. And so and just about everything in between manufacturers, retailers, restaurants, professionals. I think everybody but a veterinarian. I’ve never done a worked with a veterinarian. Not that I’m adverse to it. It just hasn’t happened.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:35] Now is there a typical pain point that your clients all have or it could be anything? It could be a marketing problem. It could be a leadership problem. It could be a communications problem. Or do you solve or do you find you have a sweet spot where you’re really good at a certain aspect of business?

Larry Galler: [00:04:52] Well, I like to think that I’m very good at strategy and no matter what the problem is, and it’s all of those things, it’s, you know, it’s leadership, it’s human beings. It’s it’s having a vision or articulating the vision, having a mission or understanding what that mission is. Training your training the staff to deliver on the mission and vision and values marketing. And I mean, they all want more. All of my clients want more. They want more business, they want more profits, they want more ease of administering the business. And I work in just about all of those areas. I don’t do accounting. I don’t do taxation. I don’t work with insurance. Those are areas that are much better left to professionals who are expert at those things. I will and have negotiated with banks on behalf of my clients, you know, as part of part of the team that negotiates with the banks. But I I think the sweet spot and I don’t I don’t think that most of my clients, when we initially get started, know what that sweet spot is going to be for them because they want more business.

Larry Galler: [00:06:24] But that means that they are lacking something or it would be coming. So what are they lacking? They could very well be lacking a long term marketing advertising strategy. They could be lacking a training program to get their staff to be part of their marketing, be part of their advertising example, HVAC company heating, air conditioning, ventilating. They have people out in the fields. Some of them go in and fix whatever. It’s fixed the furnace and leave and hardly mumble anything to the to the customer. Now, what we’ve worked with is to get those people to be quiet salespeople or marketing people for the company so that that client, that customer knows which H-back company actually service them last time, ways of getting those people back as customers rather than thinking that all HBC companies are commodities. So help we help differentiate our our clients companies from their competitors. So no matter what it is, it’s really a complex. It’s not a magic bullet that you say, do this in your business is going to explode. It’s do a lot of things and implement them properly.

Lee Kantor: [00:07:51] Now, do you see entrepreneurs kind of making similar mistakes or is every client you work with kind of on its own adventure? So everything is kind of totally different.

Larry Galler: [00:08:05] Well, it’s different because we’re all different people. And each each of my clients has strong points and weak points, just as you and I do. Some people are very articulate, able to communicate thoughts. Others have to do have to work in different ways. And I have to know as a coach, I have to know what what will or have to learn and then know what will what will work for my clients and what will help them get to where they want to go. And that’s part of the problem is very often they just want more. They want bigger and they don’t strategize their way to figuring out how they are going to get bigger and more profitable, how they’re going to. I always think of. The eye make up little stories for myself, and one of them is going into the first Starbucks coffee shop in Seattle. Twenty five years ago and going into the back room, sitting at their conference table, which is a bunch of beanbag chairs, coffee beans and everybody sitting around and talking and saying, Hey, we’re doing great. The store is growing. We’re profitable. Yet it added somebody. Somebody says, Hey, we can have a second store. Wow, what a concept. And somebody else says, if we can learn how to run to stores, we can run 10 and somebody else says we could even have 100.

Larry Galler: [00:09:40] Well, today they have twenty five thousand stores across all over the world and it came from. I’m guessing, a grand strategy that they developed and from that they had to do, they had to grow it. There was no model for what they did. So they had to develop leadership managers training, how to how to pour the coffee and how to talk to the customers and how to display the product they had. They had to figure out how to distribute their products, so they had to have a logistics and transportation issues to deal with. Of course, they have internal growth issues like human resources. How do you hire enough people for thirty thousand stores? How do you train them? Well, it starts with when you train your second employee and you build on it and build on it so that you can. You can eventually attain your your goal, your dream. And. Oh, very often the things that just imagine the issues with with inventory management for thirty thousand stores, I don’t care what you’re what you’re selling. But in this case, it’s coffee cups, right? And the little lids that go on the coffee cups and the raw product, the coffee. And how do you maintain the machines that they have on a regular basis? How do you replace them? When do you do it? What are the strategies behind all of those things? Growth is not just one thing, it’s not, except in extremely rare cases.

Larry Galler: [00:11:20] I mean, we probably anybody of a certain age remembers the ad for Wendy’s Where’s the beef? But every company has got a little saying, and very few of them attain that kind of viral viral importance. So. You know, yeah, there is no magic bullet to what they want. Every company is different, every owner is different. Every board of directors is different. Every staff is different and you have to figure out what will work for your company. And that part of that is is going to have a mention this, but part of it is creating a culture. This is the way in a culture is a fancy word for translates into the way we do things around here. And if you have that culture, if you’re able to create a culture and maintain it and teach. To the people who are disseminated to your public, you’re going to go a long way towards getting that business of your dreams, and I think that’s what my role is, is to help them articulate it, to help them figure out how to attain it.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:36] Now do you find that your clients, most of them, are they dreaming too big or dreaming not big enough?

Larry Galler: [00:12:44] Both. And again, you know, it’s, you know, they’re individuals, and I’ve had clients that want to take over the world. And I’ve actually got a couple that have released their world. And others that want to just get a little bit bigger, I think both of those things are valid because it’s their vision and. You know, it’s it’s their it’s their dream, we all have different dreams.

Lee Kantor: [00:13:21] Now, what’s the most rewarding part of the job for you?

Larry Galler: [00:13:24] The most rewarding part of the job is when we develop something and it works and they’re able to replicate it and they’re able to put it throughout whatever their system is. If you’ve got a moment, I’ll give you a short scenario. A client of mine some years ago, landscaping commercial landscaping company, they mow lawns of industrial areas and schools, hospitals, things like that. Nature. They won’t come and do your home. They had no growth for quite a while. They have a very nice business, by the way. It’s been running at about the same level for a number of years. Family owned operation Why can’t you get any growth? I ask. And they say, Well, property managers aren’t interested in talking to us when the snow is on the ground. They only want us to be there when the grass starts growing and I can’t get appointments. I rarely can get appointments with them to sell anymore. So when the grass starts growing, they all sign contracts very, very quickly. There’s no I’m busy getting my contract signed, so I don’t have time to go out and work on getting new business. Ok, I heard that a couple of times and then I said, Well, maybe we change the model for how you sell and market the company. I asked if they were could get appointments at towards the end of the season. September. October, when the grass is hardly growing and they’re kind of ramping up their operations here in the north and. Yeah, I can get those appointments so great. So let’s make an appointment for a end of the season, end of the season assessment of how we did and what we look forward to next year.

Larry Galler: [00:15:20] He could do that and he went out and he called on 10 of his accounts and he got appointments with seven of them. And when a when they had the assessment of how they did, he would then talk about next year and he would have next year’s contract in his portfolio and would get out of the top of the first 10. He called on and he got seven appointments. He sold four of them. And then before the season started in next spring, he sold three or four of the rest of them. And so now we had all, and he did it for much, much larger number of people. So we did it at the start of the spring when other property managers are thinking about lawn mowing. He was able to go out and get get appointments with them, and he was able to expand his business the first year, over 30 percent. He’s been doing this now for a number of years in the business is substantially larger than it was when we first did it. And is this something that he could have done by himself? Yeah, but he never thought of it. He doesn’t think in those terms. He thinks about mowing the lawn and sharpening the blades and having the right people at the right places, at the right time. And and he’s very good at it. So we change the paradigm of how he markets and sells his business, and the business got a lot bigger. I do that for lots of companies, not only in that mellow in that way of doing getting business, but in many other aspects, most other aspects of running a business.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:59] And if somebody wants to learn more and have a more substantive conversation with you, is there a website there is.

Larry Galler: [00:17:05] It’s Larry Geller, Larry Y, JLL and somebody can send me an email. Larry at Larry Gallacher. Well, they are why JLL?

Lee Kantor: [00:17:23] Well, Larry, thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Larry Galler: [00:17:29] Thank you much. It was a pleasure being with you, Ali.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:31] All right. This is Lee Kantor. We will sail next time on Coach the Coach radio.