Growth Coach Warren Coughlin

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 morning. You guys are in for a real treat. Please join me in welcoming to the broadcast with Jump Start Coaching. Mr. Warren Coughlin. Good morning, sir.

Warren Coughlin: [00:00:34] Good morning, Stone. How are.

Stone Payton: [00:00:35] You? I am doing well. Really been looking forward to this conversation. I’m thinking a great place to start would be if you could articulate for us mission purpose. What are you and your team really out there trying to do for folks? Ma’am?

Warren Coughlin: [00:00:51] That’s a great question. A great place to start. I so I’m a business coach, but with a bit of a bit of a different twist, I guess. I like to work with what I call entrepreneurs to do what I call a business that matters. That’s one that wants to make for the entrepreneur a lot of money, but also makes a positive impact on the world or just some corner of it. And those folks are people I think deserve a little bit of extra help because they’re actually trying to do some good in the world.

Stone Payton: [00:01:16] Well, it sounds like it would be incredibly rewarding work. What’s the what do you enjoy the most about it?

Warren Coughlin: [00:01:23] I love entrepreneurs. I have been an entrepreneur and I’ve worked with entrepreneurs and they’re I say this cheekily, they’re kind of a freak. They’re freaks of nature. They’re a different breed. And because they take a lot of personal responsibility, they’ve actually taken the gamble or the risk to say, I’m going to go out there and carve a niche in the world for myself based on my own vision, my own effort, what I want to contribute to the world. That takes courage, it takes confidence, it takes energy, commitment, compassion, all kinds of great things. And so the challenge, though, is they do that with all those motivations, but most of them don’t have the grounding in business skills. And so they’re out there trying to do good, but without necessarily having all the tools they need to do it. And so that’s kind of why I do what I do. If I can help them accomplish that better than I’m having fun, I’m working with people who I think are fantastic people. And it just it’s ultimately very, very rewarding to see the outcomes. When somebody started from struggling to selling a business for eight figures a few years later, it’s super rewarding.

Stone Payton: [00:02:33] So how did you get into this line of work? Man? What’s the back story?

Warren Coughlin: [00:02:39] Oh, man, I got to I have got a weird long. The Reader’s Digest version of I was supposed to die at birth. I was given zero chance of survival. I was the second person in history to live through a weird congenital defect. And when I found out about that, I wanted to do something with this kind of unexpected gift. So I went through all kinds of iterations. I was a lawyer thinking I go to politics or pursue justice. I was a college professor, I was an actor, a theater director, and then it was really an entrepreneurship that I went, No, this is entrepreneurship matters. It’s entrepreneurs create, they create jobs, opportunities, wealth, innovation, solutions to problems. And there’s a great line in the play rent that says the opposite of war is not peace, it is creation. And so I really felt no entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are the ones that make the difference. And so that’s where I want to play. So it was this long, circuitous route, but when I landed on it, it was like, okay, this is where I want to play. And then after I exited one business, I was sort of looking for the next thing to do. And a family friend back in 2002 was doing this weird thing called business coaching that I’d never heard of. And I looked into it and thought, Well, that sounds pretty fantastic, and looked into it and jumped into it and never looked back.

Stone Payton: [00:03:50] So you write and speak about and consult toward I think you describe it as three foundations that kind of set businesses up for growth and success. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Warren Coughlin: [00:04:03] Yeah, for sure. There’s there are really three foundations, and I think the best metaphor for it is, is like sports. So you can’t win if you if you don’t know how to keep score, you can’t win if you don’t have a winning team and you can’t win if you don’t have a game plan. So those are the three foundations for success in any sort of competitive endeavor. And so in businesses, how do you how do you know how to keep score? You’ve got to know your numbers. The number of entrepreneurs who don’t know how to read their numbers, all they do is they look at their sales and they look at what’s in a bank account and they think that’s all they need to know. And they’re just missing so much valuable information on how to perform in their business better building a high performance team so that it means creating a culture and having a recruitment, performance management systems, all that kind of thing that builds what I call a high performance culture. No one likes to play on a team with a slacker, so you want to make sure that your team is populated with high performers who care about winning. And then the third is you need it. You need a game plan. And so I actually created a software tool because I’ve been doing this for 20 years.

Warren Coughlin: [00:05:03] I’ve coached people from start up to 150 million, and I can count on one hand the number of people who do strategic planning well. So I’ve actually created a software tool that automates the whole front end of the strategic planning process. So what I do is within the first three months of working with a client, we get each of those foundations in place, make sure you really understand your numbers. I’ve got some software tools that just produce KPIs, financials, projections, all that kind of stuff, so you always know what you’re doing. Then we go through a process to define your culture, build that high performance team. Then we go through the planning exercise and at the end of the three months you walk out with a fully baked 90 day action plan, a system for execution and a series of areas of focus for subsequent plans. So it’s an intense three months, but it really it’s sort of like if you ever see a condo being built, you know, there’s this hole in the ground for three, four or five, six months. You don’t know what’s going on and you walk by a week later and all of a sudden it’s three stories up and it’s because they took the time to build those foundations, right? And then everything gets built on that platform.

Stone Payton: [00:06:06] And you place a great deal of weight on numbers. And I kind of resemble some of your remarks because I’ll confess to you and the listeners, I was just looking at my own QuickBooks before we got on the line here. And, you know, I looked at sales volume for the month, sales volume for the quarter. I looked at the bank account and that was about it. And then I got ready for the for the interview. We won’t ask for the whole intense course here, but what are some of the other things that I that I should be looking at?

Warren Coughlin: [00:06:34] So rather than looking at I won’t tell you particular numbers, I’ll just get your books are a story. Your numbers actually tell a story and we know how to read them. When you know how to tell the story, you can actually understand what’s going on in the business more effectively. So the main thing is you don’t just look at one number or one period of time. You look at it as a trend. You look at your numbers over time. And so you need to see it charted out over a year so you can see what the trends are, because that’s you know, if you can look at, for instance, a number called a quick ratio or which is a measure of liquidity, you can look at the number once and say, oh, it looks good. But if you actually see it went from 5.1 to 4.1 to 3.1, you know, 3 to 1 is a decent number. But if it started at five, you’re heading in the wrong direction. Right. And so you want to intervene before it gets bad. Not once it’s bad. And so if you’re not if you’re not looking at it as a narrative, you know, as this is a book that’s trying to tell me something, then you’re just you’re not really gleaning the information that helps you make smart decisions.

Stone Payton: [00:07:37] I think you and I may have touched on this when we had a chance to chat by phone a few weeks ago. But you might remember in a in an earlier part of my career, I was in the change management world. And I if I heard it once, I heard it a thousand times that, you know, culture eats strategy for breakfast and you’ve got a whole different take on that.

Warren Coughlin: [00:08:02] Yeah, Yeah, I do, because it’s I used to believe that. I used to preach that and now I’ve shifted. I actually think culture and strategy are bedfellows. They’re a perfect marriage because strategy defines what’s to be done and culture makes sure that it gets done. If you have a culture without strategy, you have a really motivated group of people who will wind up getting frustrated because they don’t know what they’re supposed to do or there’s no clear direction. And then like winners want to win, right? So if you get to really just think of it again in a sports analogy, if you have a really, really great player and you put them on a team that doesn’t have a strategy, they’re going to get pissed off. They’re going to get annoyed and frustrated. Right? But if you put that person in another team with a coach who kind of knows this is the direction that we’re going, this is the strategy that we’re going to deploy. Now they’re liberated to really use their skills in a way that’s going to motivate them. And so I think those two things, culture and strategy, when they’re when they’re aligned, man, you’re unstoppable.

Stone Payton: [00:09:00] Then I got to believe it has a tremendous impact and a real influence on your ability to to recruit and develop and retain as well. Yeah.

Warren Coughlin: [00:09:12] Oh, so again, you’re you’re a high performer. You’re being offered for jobs, you know, And that’s that’s the reality right now in the marketplace, right? Somebody who’s a high performer has lots of opportunity. So you look at a place now they’re going to pay me a bunch of money, but man, they’re a they’re a dog’s breakfast, they’re a mess. And then there’s this place over here that they’re paying a little less to start. But man, their path that they’ve laid out for me looks really interesting. And the culture they’ve got is aligned with my values, the people they have or other high performers. And I like to play with high performers, and there’s some way for me to benefit when that strategy pays off. Which of those two jobs are they going to take? You know, you put yourself in the position of the decision maker on the other end. Of course, they’re going to go for that place. That’s got a clear strategy, a high performing culture, opportunity for growth. And so if you if you build your business that way, you’re going to wind up attracting the high performers. And then the result of that is you’re going to attract better customers as well.

Stone Payton: [00:10:08] Yeah. And and keep them both.

Warren Coughlin: [00:10:11] Which is exactly which is how you build long term sustainable growth.

Stone Payton: [00:10:15] So how does the whole sales and marketing thing work for a guy like you, a practice like yours? Do you do you have to have some sort of rigor and discipline to a sales and marketing process? Are you or are you at a point now in your career where it just sort of comes in over the transom?

Warren Coughlin: [00:10:31] So you’re asking that at an interesting time, because I actually am just starting some new marketing things, but more because I’m trying to build a platform to help some other coaches as well with with these three foundations and some other tools. But historically, yeah, it’s been, you know, I don’t want to pad myself on the back too much, but I’ve had some good fortune that I think in the coaching industry, the average client retention is I know the numbers have changed over the pandemic, but like 6 to 8 months or something like that. Mine, I’ve got an average client retention of between two and a half and three years, so I haven’t had to do a ton of marketing. It’s usually by referral or somebody hears me on a conversation like this and then they reach out. So that’s that’s been my model. But now I am actually trying to be more proactive in marketing because I’m wanting to feed other coaches.

Stone Payton: [00:11:16] So have you had the benefit of one or more mentors, especially in the early years when you made this pivot to this arena of having a mentor or two that have that have helped you kind of navigate this terrain?

Warren Coughlin: [00:11:32] Yes, very much. I was I was with a group of people and there was there were I retained mentors. I went and studied with people. Yeah. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t have those folks. And I’ll tell you, just I remember when I first started, I did this sales profile that says I have a really high personality match with consultative sales, but I wasn’t selling like my revenue was not where I needed it to be and the organization I was part of, they actually at that point had a sales coach to go out with the coaches and he went out with me on a couple of sales calls and he actually reported back equals warns like the best sales guy you’ve got in the country. And I was so mad at that because it was just patently untrue. There were some things I was good at, but I wasn’t closing. So by definition his analysis was just wrong. And so I actually targeted a couple of people who did have high closing ratios, and I went and followed them. And then I realized it was just like two turns of the tumbler that I was missing. And as soon as I got those in place, my conversion rate started to skyrocket. So like, if it weren’t for those couple of people who let me go along with them, I would have never figured that out. And so, yeah, having someone because you can read like I read the books, I knew the theory of sales sales, right? But it was just contextually there was just this little thing that I was missing. And as soon as I went, Oh, that’s what they’re doing. Then all of a sudden everything fell into place.

Stone Payton: [00:12:56] So there are so many reasons to struggle or even fail on this entrepreneurial journey that so many of us are on. You know, there’s COVID, there’s inflation, there’s potential recession, there’s the challenge in the labor market. Do you think resiliency and working through all of that comes back to what you mentioned earlier in the conversation, the personal accountability, the self-awareness somehow coupled with these these disciplines of strategic planning? What’s the. I mean, is that the magic? Is that is that what helps us get through it all?

Warren Coughlin: [00:13:29] Yeah. I mean, there’s a common approach. I call it the brute force approach, right, that a lot of people use, which is I’m just going to jam my way through it. And I admire people who do that. And there are some people who succeed just through brute force. And so that resilience is one piece of it, but the discipline is also required. And I use the metaphor of poker. Some people think poker is a game of luck, Right. But it’s not. Poker is a game of skill, of which chance is an element. Business is the same way. So when poker, a rookie can beat a pro in a given hand, but a pro will always win the game. And why? Because they have the discipline. They have the skills, right? So you can’t just sit at the poker table and say, I’m going to be resilient and just keep trying when I don’t know what I’m doing. You’re going to continually get your butt kicked. Right. But if you say, I’m going to be resilient and I’m going to study and I’m going to watch those people who are successful and I’m going to try those strategies, then you will wind up being successful. Right. There’s a reason why when you look at the people who are most successful, if you look at their history, they’ve had failures, but they don’t just keep failing. Each one of those failures, they reflect and they learn from, right? So it isn’t just resilience that I’m just going to keep pushing against a brick wall doing the same thing. It’s resilience to say, I just need to figure out a different way of doing it. I’m going to have faith in my ability. I’m going to have faith in my dream and vision, but I’m not going to have faith that just the way I do things or the way I want to do things is the right way. Right? So it requires a certain humility that goes along with that resilience to be open to the learning.

Stone Payton: [00:15:03] So if and when you get a little worn down, the batteries run a little bit low, where do you go? And I don’t necessarily mean a physical place, but where do you go for, I don’t know, inspiration to recharge, get refreshed. Where do you what do you do personally?

Warren Coughlin: [00:15:20] I do a few things. So one actually is a physical place. I get on a mountain bike and I go in the woods and I go mountain biking for a couple of hours. That just lifts me like nothing else. I also do something called SDR, which is non sleep depressed, also called yoga. And it’s sort of a form of meditation but a little bit different. There’s a neuroscientist, Andrew Huberman, who really just turned a lot of people on to that. It’s a really, really useful technique. And then do some journaling. And then as well, I have I have some really, really good friends. And, you know, and we’re we’re guys who really support each other. So any time any one of us is a little bit down or struggling or something like that, we just we’re there for each other. So those three things like being in nature, getting physical exercise, doing some meditation and then having a network of supporters is really, I think is the magic combination to for me anyway, to always be ready to.

Stone Payton: [00:16:20] Go Well, and it’s so important for us to build those things in, right. No matter what the mechanism is, that’s it’s important to have that that support system and those those things where we can go and kind of get refreshed and ready for the next thing.

Warren Coughlin: [00:16:35] And yeah, and you know, as a side note, there’s a thing, right, that, you know, men don’t talk about their feelings and all that kind of stuff. So there’s just this part of the conversation is directed specifically at guys. What I found like with this, this group of buddies I’ve got, there’s actually a lot of vulnerability that we share and it’s it’s not anti masculine, you know, it’s it’s not like it’s very strengthening. To have people that you can be open with and we’re going to have your back and we’ll frankly kick you in the ass a little bit. Yeah. You know, like, that’s that’s such a powerful asset. And people who are like, well, I can’t talk about how I’m going to. What I’ve discovered is I think I, me and one other guy sort of let it is that guys actually want to be able to do that if you’re you’re a guy listening alone you know this to be true you want to be able to say what you’re thinking and feeling to somebody, and that means other guys around you do as well. And if you’re willing to take the risk and just share a couple of things, you’ll find that the guys around you who you think are tough, macho guys can have it all together, don’t. And they’re going to be open to having the conversation.

Stone Payton: [00:17:46] All right, let’s. Let’s leave our listeners with a couple of pro tips, if we could. Just a couple of things to be thinking about, reading about, maybe even something we could take a little bit of immediate action on. And my recommendation to you going is the number one pro tip, reach out to Warren, have a conversation with him. But but maybe there’s something you know, just after listening to this that we can start thinking about, reading about doing anything on that front would be great, man.

Warren Coughlin: [00:18:13] So first thing I would learn how to read your financial statements. I mean, as maybe boring or as intimidating as that may sound, even if you’re not good at math, you don’t have to be good at math to do it. Just look at your financials over a six month period and just look at the trends on your sales, on your cost of sales, on your gross profit and your cash flow. Just look at what’s happened to your cash on a month by month basis and see what one thing you could tweak. Like if you could drop your accounts receivable days by ten days, that’s going to boost your cash flow by a whole bunch. So that’s just one real pro tip. The second pro tip is actually think about the next 90 days or we’re in the time of this recording. We’re nearing the end of 2020 to say, Where do I want to be at the end of 2023? And what are the two top changes I can make? Don’t, don’t list 23. So what are the two top things that I could do in my business to make that change? And if you just do that, you just focus on two and then start knocking them off. You’ll be amazed at the momentum that starts. So those two things get get a handle on your numbers and then just start doing some planning with just a couple of key items.

Stone Payton: [00:19:30] All right. So what’s the best way to connect with you? Have a conversation with you. Someone on your team start to tap into your work. Whatever you feel like is appropriate, whether it’s LinkedIn, email, website. I just want to make sure that our folks can connect with you.

Warren Coughlin: [00:19:44] Yeah, sure. So my website, Warren Coughlin. So Warren Coughlin. There’s a way to book an appointment with me there. There’s also a description of what I do, and there’s actually a free resource there that can really help you with some of the things that we’ve just talked about.

Stone Payton: [00:20:01] Fantastic. Well, Warren, it has been an absolute delight having you on the show this morning. Thanks for investing the time in In Energy to share your perspective and your insight with us. You do an important work, man, and we we sure appreciate you. All right. Until next time, this is Stone Payton for our guest today, Warren Coughlin with Jumpstart Coaching and everyone here at the Business Radio X family saying we’ll see you in the fast lane.