Bill Flynn with CGA

Intro: [00:00:04] Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity radio.

Stone Payton: [00:00:15] Welcome to the High Velocity Radio show where we celebrate top performers producing better results in less time. Stone Payton here with you this afternoon. You guys are in for such a real treat. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Catalyst Growth Advisors, Mr. Bill Flynn. Good afternoon, sir.

Bill Flynn: [00:00:35] Good afternoon to you as well. Great to be here.

Stone Payton: [00:00:37] Well, we are delighted to have you on the show. Got a ton of questions. Won’t get to them all, I’m sure, but I’m thinking a good place to start is if maybe you could share with our listeners mission purpose. What are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks, ma’am?

Bill Flynn: [00:00:55] Well, I think it’s a shame that really good idea is really good people. Really good businesses either struggle or die for completely preventable reasons.

Stone Payton: [00:01:04] Well, in the stats are not pretty or they the numbers are awful, aren’t they?

Bill Flynn: [00:01:10] But the numbers are surprising. Yes, a little alarming. And arresting the data coming from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as well as the Small Business Administration have similar numbers, basically says that most businesses die after five years and the numbers don’t get any better. If you go all the way down to 25 years, it’s about 16 or 17% of them left. And you’d think that after you’ve been in business for a while, you’d get better and learn and improve. But that doesn’t seem to be what the numbers bear out. So it’s unfortunate and that’s really only the ones who are no longer here. There are also a number of others that are struggling and they’re not gone yet, but they’re having a hard time. So it’s a very few businesses thrive, I’ve found, which is unfortunate.

Stone Payton: [00:01:56] So what are we doing wrong, you think?

Bill Flynn: [00:02:01] I don’t know that I have the answer, but my theory is that we do a lot of things wrong. Just not. We don’t do them completely wrong. We just sort of do them a little bit wrong and then they add up and you hire the wrong person and then they hire more people or you don’t quite get your strategy right. You’re not executing well. You just make sort of these small errors. And I think they just add up and it adds weight to the business. And the bigger you get, the heavier that anchor feels and begins to weigh on you.

Stone Payton: [00:02:38] But the information’s out there, right? It’s not like we have to to recreate and figure it out as if, you know, it’s not like we have to be pioneers. Information precedent about how to get this stuff right is it’s available to us. Yeah.

Bill Flynn: [00:02:53] Oh, it is. And it’s been around for about 100 years or so. It started with Frederick Winslow Taylor, who really taught people how to run a routinized business. So all about efficiency. There are some good books that come out of that. The goal is one that was written a number of years ago. Now I think we’ve come into a different era where it’s not really about routinized work anymore. It’s more about creative work and innovative work, etc. But management science has been saying the same thing for a long time. You’ve got Drucker and Deming and and Bennis and a number of other folks and more. In our generation, you’ve got Jim Collins and Pat Lindsay and a whole bunch of other people who have been saying, you know, this is sort of how really great businesses work. And at least what I’ve found or I think I’ve found is that those that that thrive and do well over a long period of time do the same few things really, really well.

Stone Payton: [00:03:54] So well. And I guess that leads me to ask about the other side of the coin. Is it because there’s so much information out there? Are we picking the wrong things and spending too much time on stuff that maybe doesn’t matter as much of a as the few right things?

Bill Flynn: [00:04:11] Yeah, Perito was a pretty smart guy, you know, the 8020 guy. And it seems that most of our the bulk of our results come from a little bit of our effort. And one of my favorite sayings and I say this to leaders all the time, which I think their job is, is is to really figure out the few things that matter because few things truly matter, but those that do matter tremendously. And if you can figure those things out, you have a leg up on your competitor.

Stone Payton: [00:04:39] So. So what’s the back story, man? How did you get involved in this line of work?

Bill Flynn: [00:04:46] So I’ve been so I did about 25 over 25 years. I did ten startups all in the high tech space here in the Boston area, and it was five or six for a while, ended up five for ten or five or seven, depending on what you count my contribution. But either way, it’s still a pretty good deal. But I’m also I have a curious nature and I was always sort of trying to figure out why do things happen the way they happen. And I’ve been studying business for about 30 years, really more so in the last six or seven pretty intensely. And that’s led me to be a coach to try to take what I’ve learned in my practical life in business, which wasn’t perfect, by the way. I certainly made a lot of mistakes and then combine it with what at least I think makes a big difference. And I’m I’m most. Most of it is said that 97% of it is not for me. It’s it’s from other great thinkers that I mentioned earlier and other people I’ve run into. And so I’ve been focusing on that. I’ve been working with leadership teams for the last six or seven years and helping them to try to figure out on their own how to make business thrive. As I like to say, help them take the guesswork out of growth.

Stone Payton: [00:05:59] I’ve always thought that if I if I knew a little bit more, I might enjoy being a coach. But it also it’s it strikes me as, I don’t know, a little bit nebulous about what to do. And when I talk about the work a little bit like when you first engage or a client engages you, what does the work look like, especially early in that in that process, where does it start?

Bill Flynn: [00:06:27] Yeah, we sort of do two things. One is we start at the ends, so to speak, and I ask my clients to write at least a three year vision. And it’s pretty it’s usually three, four, five, six, seven pages long. It’s pretty vivid to go into a lot of detail. And that sort of sets the bar up. Here’s where we’re going, because if you’re a leader, your job is to create followers. And followers want to know where are we going? And you need to create that for them. And there’s a great saying that Simon Sinek says a lot, which is you have to be able to articulate your vision as if it’s already happened. And so people will get an idea and say, Yeah, that’s I want to help make that come true or not. If they don’t want to make it come true, then that’s okay. They should go somewhere else and help their vision or whatever their purpose or mission or whatever you want to call them. Their life aligns with the company they work for or they create their own company. The other side of that is we help them really understand their identity, and that’s around values and purpose and objectives and sort of the main foundational things of who we are, how we behave, etc. Because most businesses unfortunately grow for growth sake. They’re like and they focus on revenue and really not important things.

Bill Flynn: [00:07:44] Revenue is great, but you can build $100 million company, but if it cost $100 million to run it, you’ve employed a lot of people and maybe you put out some products and such. But if if a stiff wind blows, so to speak, like a COVID or a 911 or a 2008 recession, you’re in trouble because now you know your business probably suffers and your costs haven’t really changed that much. So what I what I like to say is that if you if you grow for growth sake, then that’s the ideology of a cancer cell. And sometimes cancer cells kill their hosts. They certainly weaken them. So you’ve got to say, okay, these are ways that we can grow, but make sure it doesn’t violate who you are, doesn’t go against a core value or your core purpose or really what you’re good at and love and your passion, because eventually you will regret it. It may take years, and sometimes it’s hard to even tie it back to to that decision you made to three or four years ago, maybe even sometimes ten years ago, I’ve read. But it often happens. And I think that’s one of the one of those heavyweights I talked about earlier that start to pull in you as time goes by.

Stone Payton: [00:08:50] Well, it must be incredibly rewarding work. What what are you enjoying the most about it at this point in your career and in your practice? What are you enjoying the most?

Bill Flynn: [00:09:02] Well, I enjoy those two things that I enjoy. One, personally and selfishly, is is I love working with my clients. Time flies when I’m with them and I think about them often and I read a lot and I’m sending them things that I think might connect with them based upon general information or specific information I have from them. And then I really love that moment that comes every now and again when sort of the eyes open up and it’s like, Oh, right. They get their own epiphany. It’s not necessarily something that I told them, but through the work that we do because they’re really I, I truly believe that when you’re in coach mode, you know, that they either have or can come up with their own answers if you ask the right questions and keep pushing them towards that. When that happens, it’s really a great it’s great for me. And so an example is I was working with a client a few weeks ago and we were working on. Something called profit per X, which is if you focused on this one thing, this X mechanism, we’re going to call it, and and really optimize that either in volume or in margin or both, it would drive more and more profit and thus more cash into your business. And what I typically do is I say, one, write down what they think the X is, and then we put them up and we do that little sticky thing with coaches and we look at it and have questions and debates and comments, etc..

Bill Flynn: [00:10:27] And they’re they’re a two tier organization. I mean, they generally don’t sell directly to the end user. They sell through entities that go to the end user, but their X is revolved around what I call retail, right. Which is to the to the consumer. And I said, are you sure that this one of these is it? And I sort of lean back and it sort of seems to me that you’re more in front of that, that if you optimize something in front of that, whatever that might be, and a couple of them sort of set back and said, you know, yeah, if we optimize this, this more retail oriented thing, it wouldn’t necessarily drive our business, it might make our the end user happy, but it wouldn’t necessarily drive more profit into us and actually might drive more cost into us. So it’s great when when stuff like that happens and you get to see that on their face, like, you know, maybe, maybe, maybe we aren’t looking at this the right way. And I didn’t have the answer. I just I just said, you know, I sort of looked at it and said, I don’t know that we were done asking the questions.

Stone Payton: [00:11:28] So. So how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a guy like you, a practice like yours? How do you get the opportunity? How do you how do you get the new clients?

Bill Flynn: [00:11:38] Yeah, it’s not easy, I like to say. So when people say, Who’s your best client and they’re they’re looking for attributes, typically they’re looking for size of company or industry that they’re in or something along those lines. And I say, you know what? I teach for most industries except maybe a few. What I what I work with clients on is pretty universal. I teach first principles more than anything, and I say, I’m not really looking for that. I’m looking for a mindset. I’m looking for a humble, hungry learner who’s comfortable challenging the status quo and stone I’ve found that they’re rare at the highest levels of company. So especially the humility part, they’re they’re not they feel uncomfortable bringing in someone like me because they might look weak or they might be seen like they don’t know what they’re doing. They have to have some third party sort of run their company for them, although I certainly don’t do that. So it’s difficult. So I wish I had a magic bullet and I could say, Hey, I do this and magically, you know, months later or two months later or whatever client pops up. But what I do is I get referrals from my clients, which is great. I do work with partners who have access to a larger pool of hopefully like minded people. I do some speaking and writing. I also try to run some some boot camps and workshops, so I sort of do a mix of things and it depends. I think it’s more the currently, it’s the activity. And then every now and again something happens. I just had a call today with I was on a podcast a week or two ago and this guy heard me and said, I like what you said. And so we’re we’re talking, so who knows?

Stone Payton: [00:13:14] Fun. Well, I actually wanted to talk about the writing. Tell us a little bit about this book of yours further, faster and there’s more to the title, The vital few steps that take the guesswork out of growth. I’d love to hear a little bit about it in general, but my first question is, when you were getting the book together to parts of it come together a little easier for you than other parts were some parts a little bit of a struggle? I’m interested to know about the experience of writing a book.

Bill Flynn: [00:13:46] Yeah. So I am I call myself an accidental author. I am not a writer. I don’t really describe myself as as someone who writes for a living. I was I was encouraged by others to do it, which I thought was pretty cool. They thought that my perspective on things was unique enough in this world of business books that many of them say the exact same thing, and it’s really only the first part of it that that is of any value. And then the next 200 pages are filler. I read a lot of business books and fortunately that happens too much. So I was really concerned about I didn’t want to put something like that out. I wanted to add something of value to the conversation. So as I said earlier, I like Paradox and I think that I took not everything that I know, I took the things that I thought made the biggest impact, thus the further faster and put them down in a book. I will tell you, I hired I hired a third party to help me, and I had a scribe. I worked with a company called Scribe Media and she was terrific and the process was great. So the hardest part was the sort of promoting of the book more than anything, to be honest with you, because I’m not necessarily a big self-promoter, although I should be since I work for myself. She made it super easy. We laid out an entire process of framework and then we sort of just filled it in. And I had already been a coach for four or five years. So a number of the things that I had learned and have been saying just sort of came out in the conversation with her and luckily she took it and turned it into something that was, I think, much more comprehensible and useful than I could have done on my own. So that’s what I did.

Stone Payton: [00:15:25] So if you would speak to the to the structure of the book and then maybe specifically to any counsel you would have to offer on how to help the reader get the most out of it, how to approach the book and really leverage it.

Bill Flynn: [00:15:39] Yeah. So the book itself is comes in all the formats that you could imagine. It comes in a paperback and then a Kindle and an e-book. And, and then I also have an audio version of it. There are three parts to the book. The first part really is about team and how to attract, build and grow and sometimes dismantled if you need to. A really great team. There’s a lot to that. There’s psychological safety. As part of that, there’s making sure that you’ve got people doing things they love as often as they possibly can, and really thinking about the team as a as a as a well rounded team made up of individual and idiosyncratic and spiky people. There’s an art and a science to bringing those sort of different aspects of people together to make a really well rounded team. The next part is really about strategy and execution. There are two sides of the same coin. I talk a lot. I talk a lot with people about strategy and execution. And most of the time when I talk to people and I say, you know, what’s what’s really in your way and what’s going on in your business is slowing you down or giving you trouble, that’s almost always an operational issue, which is really around execution. And I say, well, what do you what are you executing on? And I try to get them to say they’re basically executing on some kind of strategy. And as you execute on your strategy, your strategy evolves and gets better, hopefully.

Bill Flynn: [00:16:57] And so so they’re they’re they’re different things, but they’re definitely connected. And I sort of help to connect those things. And the last thing is about cash. The shortest part of the book is about cash. I think if you’re going to grow a business and you want to grow it in a healthy way, cash should you should be your primary financial metric because as is often said, revenue is vanity, profit and sanity and cash is king. And your job is to put money into the business so you can grow and you can invest in the people and do great things for them. And also make sure that you have enough cash to weather any storms that might happen. As we mentioned already with 28, nine, 11, etc.. The book itself is a do it yourself book. So there are, I think, about 20 to 25 exercises that go with the book. You can do it in any particular order that you want. I still think team is is primary so you can read along and then it’ll have a part of it that stops and says, Hey, go to the go to my website. You can download the exercise. Hopefully I’ve written some good instructions so you can do it yourself. And then of course, I’m also a businessman. If if you would like me to accelerate the process and expand the process, you can certainly hire me to to give you the full experience of building a growth framework.

Stone Payton: [00:18:13] I’m so glad I asked. And now I have a new phrase, and I’ll try to remember to credit you at least the first few times I use it. Spiky people. I love it. So have you had the benefit of a one or more mentors that helped you along your career? And I’m actually more speaking to when you made the the leap into the coaching world and running your own your own thing. Did you did you have one or more folks that kind of helped you work through? That.

Bill Flynn: [00:18:47] So I, I don’t know that I keep thinking about do I have a sort of a mentor or a set of mentors? I certainly have people that I’ve learned a lot from. I’ve had two or three people that have been most instrumental in that, in that growth, mostly in my startup stuff, because startups are certainly difficult and was nice to have a supportive and loyal set of people helping me with that. On the coaching side, I really tried to learn from other coaches, especially successful coaches, and I tried to see what they they were all about, how they approached things, what processes they they employed in order to be successful and found. Again, a lot of similarities in really great coaches is they had systems that they that they leveraged. I wouldn’t say that they used them all the time, but they certainly leveraged them in a in a in a foundational way. And then as as needs arose with their clients, they would expand into other areas. So my teachers there in my book, I give them credit in my book at the at the end. These are people that are out there that are thought leaders in what they do, like people like Amy Edmondson, Marcus Buckingham, Verne Harnish, Pat Lindsay. I think I list about 15 or 20 Bob Nesta who influenced me whether they knew it or not. I’ve actually become friends with some of them since then.

Bill Flynn: [00:20:15] And then my, my ultimate mentor is, is Alan Mulally, and he didn’t know he was my mentor. Alan Mulally used to be the head of Boeing and the head of Ford through 911 at Boeing in 2008. And forties, to me is probably the finest leader we’ve had, at least in the United States in a century. He led both of those companies through existential crises, and they came out better than they went in. And I wrote a little bit about him. There’s a book called American Icon, which was about his journey through Ford from 2006 through 2014, I think, and a lot of what he did there. Is what I do. And I thought it was really amazing that, you know, here’s this guy who I have admired for many years, and then I really learned what he did and why he was such a great leader. So I wrote an article and he reached out to me and talk about Humble. I mean, this guy is has no need to call me a little bit of Flynn. And he reached out to me saying, Hey, I read your article. I thought it was great, I want to meet you. And and I’ve been connected to him. I wouldn’t say we’re friends, but we’re definitely friendly. You know, he answers my calls and emails, and I do the same for him. So it’s kind of cool.

Stone Payton: [00:21:22] Well, and I suspect that you. You learn a ton things to do, things not to do. Mindset approaches from the from the client work. Right. You must learn a ton just getting out there and and doing the work.

Bill Flynn: [00:21:36] Yeah. I’m now seven years in or eight years into this coaching thing and I definitely do things differently than I did when I started, right? I was a little naive, a little ignorant. I started from scratch and I sort of followed all the rules. And then as you do things and you and you see what you stumble into, clients don’t quite get it. Hopefully you sit back and reflect and say, okay, how could I do that differently? Again, I reach out to my peers and say, Look, does it go very well and what would you do in this situation? And you hear a number of things. And so, yeah, I definitely learn from my clients. They ask great questions, they challenge me every now and again, which is great. So I owe a lot to them as well.

Stone Payton: [00:22:12] Well, you clearly have a passion for the for the work it comes through in your voice. I know it does over the over the airwaves. And I know you’re human. I know sometimes the you know, the tank probably gets a little bit low. Where do you go? And I don’t necessarily mean a physical place, but where do you go to to to recharge the batteries, get inspiration and get, you know, kind of ready for the next thing?

Bill Flynn: [00:22:40] Yeah, I will say, even though I’m tired at the end of each client session because I’m a bit skew a little bit introvert, so I have to sort of summon the energy, if you will, even though time is passing by. It definitely brings me up right Is the time flies by the next day or two. I’m still feeling really good about what happened, even if even if it wasn’t a perfect session, there was always something to draw on there. And then I’ll tell you, Stone, I do something extremely practical is that in the book there are about 30 or so reviews for my book, and all except for one is a five star review, which is kind of cool. Yeah, I go read them and some of the some of them are people I know, but many of them are people either I don’t know or haven’t seen in a long, long time. And they wrote some really nice things and I didn’t write them. So that’s pretty cool as well.

Stone Payton: [00:23:33] Well, I’d love to leave our listeners before we wrap with a couple of actionable items that I’ll call them Pro Tips, something that we can be thinking about reading, doing or not doing. Number one Pro Tip gang is reach out to Bill and have a conversation with him. But just, you know something, walking away from tapping into this conversation, just something to, you know, something we can take some immediate action on if you have anything to to offer on that front.

Bill Flynn: [00:24:03] Yeah, I’m I’ve learned that outcomes are extremely important. And it can be it could be in a larger sense or even a smaller sense. So I would whenever anyone who’s listening is thinking about doing something, picture the end first and try to picture it as an ideal outcome. It may not end up that way, but think about it that way and really write it down, describe it, and then work backwards from there. It’s like, okay, if I were to want that to happen, what would I need to do to change whatever? To have that be something that I can can get, can get from it? And I think the most practical example is meetings. We we across the globe do meetings very poorly. Most people don’t like meetings. They’re long, they’re boring. You get distracted, especially these days with social media and phones and everything. It’s easy to get distracted anyway. And that’s what I say to folks is, is if you have whatever meeting you have, whether it’s an ad hoc meeting or a regular meeting that you have on a regular basis, describe the ideal outcome of that meeting first, then figure out who should be in the meeting That gives you the best chance of achieving that outcome. Then write the agenda. And then once you’ve reached that outcome in that meeting, then end it. Whether it’s early or if it’s if you’re running over, then either decide whether you should continue or or then reschedule and finish the meeting another time. The goal is to reach the outcome of the meeting, not to meet for 50 minutes and not to get through the agenda. It’s just to reach the outcome of the meeting.

Stone Payton: [00:25:40] All right. Let’s make it easy for our listeners to have a conversation with you or someone on your team. I want to make sure they have easy access to this book and a good way to begin tapping into your work. Whatever you feel like is appropriate. Linkedin websites, email. I just want to make sure that they can get connected to you and start tapping into your work, man.

Bill Flynn: [00:26:02] Well, thank you very much. My website is probably the best. It’s Catalyst Growth Advisors. And if you want to reach me just bill at Catalyst devices dot com, you can send an email to me as well. But all my contact information is on there. My phone number. You can actually schedule a meeting through my calendar link that’s on there. My book is on there. You can actually download my book for free if you want in a PDF. You certainly go to Amazon or Audible and places to download it. I appreciate that. I think I make three or $4 every time you do that, which is cool, but that’s probably the best place. Wwe Catalyst Growth Advisors.

Stone Payton: [00:26:35] Well, Bill, it has been an absolute delight having you on the show this afternoon. Thank you for investing the time and the energy to share your insight and your experience and your perspective. I found the conversation informative, inspiring and I want you to know we sincerely appreciate your work, ma’am.

Bill Flynn: [00:26:56] I love it. I love being on high velocity radio. It’s it’s what I say to folks. You want to add velocity your business, do some of the things that I’ve learned and you’ll definitely do it. So very apropos. Thank you for having me on.

Stone Payton: [00:27:05] My pleasure. All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Bill Flynn with Catalyst Growth Advisors and everyone here at the Business Radio X family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.