Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for High Velocity Radio.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here another episode of High Velocity Radio and this is going to be a good one. Today on this show, we have Bill Gallagher, author of the new book Busy is Broken, Do less, Scale More, and he is with the Scaling Coach, welcome.

Bill Gallagher: Thanks for having me on the show.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. First, let’s talk about Scaling Coach. How are you serving folks there?

Bill Gallagher: Well, I’ve been helping people with business growth for about 20 years, 13 years, full time. And then a few years when I was CEO of the last company that I ran.

Lee Kantor: So you were first in your own business, and then you left that to become a coach full time?

Bill Gallagher: Yeah, I had four different companies of my own and I was partner in several others. And there was an executive for another organization. Actually a couple before that as well. So a range of executive leadership, CEO roles. And then I started coaching on the side back in the early 2000, and I went full time coaching in 2013.

Lee Kantor: Now, were you coaching folks who were kind of doing what you were doing at that level, or were you coaching a different type of client?

Bill Gallagher: I coach a whole range. The companies that I led spanned a whole range of industries and sizes and stages. I just really love business growth and I know it can be lonely and challenging. Um, and it’s nice to have somebody in your corner who’s helping you think it through in a broader context than you tend to think of within your own industry.

Lee Kantor: So is it kind of industry agnostic or is it size? Does it matter.

Bill Gallagher: Industry? No, it doesn’t matter about size. So I have I work an accelerator program today that we run through the global EO organization. We have 2000 companies in that I have a number of small companies that work with me after their first million in sales. And then the core of my private coaching has tended to be maybe like 70 million average revenue. So from before your first million million to 20. And then beyond that, I’ll design different coaching programs to fit each of them and, and try to have my impact be as wide as possible. And then of course, I also do a number of like shorter engagements, like workshops and things like that all the time.

Lee Kantor: Now, is this your own coaching methodology?

Bill Gallagher: Yeah. Yes, yes and no. So, um, the core of my work is based on the work of scaling up, which is a best of framework created by Verne Harnish. And then the work of Busy is Broken is distilled from my work with our clients over time. So in addition to kind of the basics of the scaling up work, I started to notice that leaders became a bottleneck and specifically the kind of bottleneck that comes after you conquer things that Michael Gerber talked about in the e-myth. So you start to build a team, you build some processes, then what comes next? How is it that even after you have some of those things, you can still be a bottleneck in your own organization?

Lee Kantor: So what are some symptoms that you’re the bottleneck?

Bill Gallagher: Well, the symptoms are a couple of things. One is we see you putting in too many hours. That’s a good guess that you might be the bottleneck if you’re putting in past 50 hours a week. Um, and a lot of people say to do that, right. You started the company as being an intense, hard working person, a busy person. We are by nature busy. We live in a busy culture. We like to be busy, we’re uncomfortable not being busy. But then at some point, if your busyness, if you’re trying to solve every problem, if you’re trying to lean in on everything, you’re trying to hustle and grind your way beyond. Once you have a team, then you are becoming the bottleneck because too much of it is going through you. So there are things like you don’t delegate, you’re still hanging on to things, and that could even last for decades. Or you delegate, but you still are in people’s business, and that’s micromanagement. And then the next one is perfectionism. So you just, you worry about getting it right and you keep looking for the, the perfect answer for things. And you, you keep throwing more things on. Um, and so you never ship anything. And the last one is you’re so focused on the internal working of your company, you don’t see the big picture. We call that strategic myopia.

Lee Kantor: Now, I mean, for a while there, the grind and the hustle, those were badges of honor. Are you seeing a change in that?

Bill Gallagher: They still are. People say, how are you doing? You’re like, oh, I’m so busy. And the best way, but it’s BS. And when you are like that, like you just don’t know any better and you haven’t stopped to change your behavior. So the things that Marshall Goldsmith said, who also recommends my book, What Got You Here won’t get you there. You, you get to that point by doing that, but then you have to start to build a team or sell the company and move on. Like let somebody else lead it. So the kind of person who starts the company, who figures out initial things. Once you’ve got the team in place, you really have to start to develop the team and empower the people to, to lead things.

Lee Kantor: Now, to make that change, it takes a level. I mean, some self-awareness. Do you find that the leaders want to do that, or is some of it is a pushback in that this is how I identify. This is my identity is I’m the guy that answers all the questions. I have all the answers.

Bill Gallagher: Yeah. So identity and self-awareness, the people who need it the most. And there’s quite a bit of like academic research on this. The people who need it the most can see it the least. So I know again and again the book is filled with stories of my clients. The ones who are cautionary tales are anonymized. But you know, people like Lee, who started a behavior in the eighth grade, or Eddie, who started his company, uh, in mid-career and, and just was freaked out about it. Um, Thomas, who started a business decades earlier and couldn’t change, just like kept hanging on to the same habits. And, uh, sometimes they know, like Lee was like, I kind of know I’m a micromanager, but was not really interested in the total cost of it or interested in changing.

Lee Kantor: So then then it’s game over, right? Like how do you change a person who doesn’t want to change?

Bill Gallagher: So Lee’s business still exists. It has thousands of employees. It goes across the country. I worked with them through, uh, the buyout of the founder and then the changeover. The problem is it costs millions of dollars and burns through a lot of people. So Lee’s thing was slow, expensive transition and a cost of growth. Um, but they survived. Um, Thomas’s company, um, uh, survived was passed on, but Thomas’s retirement was delayed by about seven years. Um, Eddie’s company failed. Eddie company got sold off in parts, and Eddie’s family failed. His relationship collapsed, and he became a weekend dad. Uh, and then, uh, Rocky is probably the most difficult story in the rocky blue chip background. Terrific things. A range of organizations try to take over a company from some founders. We got to 2 billion in value. And then Rocky, by trying to be Superman, um, torpedoed the company. And the company went from, uh, 2 billion in value and was sold off in parts for less than 200 million.

Lee Kantor: So some. So it becomes kind of self sabotage at some point.

Bill Gallagher: Yes. So sometimes they survive with some impact could be millions of dollars of impact. And, and sometimes they fail outright. They get sold off in parts, that kind of thing. They, they, they. So it could be a range of things. Very often there’s a personal, um, cost. And I also share three stories in the book and some public figures who made the shift. So I talk about Tony Hartle, an actual like a name person. You can look up. One of my recent clients who ran a business one way, grew it, sold it, but his marriage, uh, collapsed. He was exhausted. He knew he couldn’t grow beyond that point. He took some time off. He came back, he led a different way. I talk about another of our clients, Larry, who had a company. He got it to seven, 8 million. Um, but everybody around him thought that he was, uh, that he and his wife were separated when in fact, he just was absent, um, most of the time. So there are costs like that. Like it plateaued the company and it cost the family relationship. His marriage survived. He started another company. I work with that company today. It’s doing well. Um, Michel Kripalani, another one of the stories in the book, um, and Michel led his company several companies one way, working 360 days a year as a badge of honor. Proud of his overwork until, um, until both his dad died. And then his wife got a brain tumor, and then he finally stopped and said, wait a minute, there’s got to be a better way. And now he works a very small number of hours a week. He owns a business. He doesn’t have this superstar job where he has to put in a jillion hours.

Lee Kantor: So now in your consulting, you’ve come across these stories that led to the Busy is Broken. How do you go about coaching the busiest broken philosophy in, you know, for new clients?

Bill Gallagher: Right. So look, my own story is I ran different companies growing up and, um, and when my kids were young, um, I, uh, I walked in the house late one day for dinner and, um, as I often did. And then I continued to be on a call for a while. And then after about 15 minutes, 20 minutes, I hung up the phone and I, I’d been looking over at the family in the dining room, and my wife came over to me and she said coldly, if you’re just going to be on the phone when you come home, we don’t need you at home. And it broke my heart, and I realized I missed all the little events. Like I made the graduations and the performances and the big games, but I didn’t make the little things. The Tuesday night rehearsals and that kind of thing. And that was the first wake up, and then the next wake up came, and that’s when I made the shift. So when, um, in 2009, we realized that we were at the point of our lives where we were supposed to take big time off. Like before we’d had kids we’d talked about, we hit a certain age with the kids. We were going to travel extensively and give them experiences.

Bill Gallagher: And now is that time. And now I had all the scaling up framework. I did the things the daily huddles, the quarterly planning, the strategic stuff. I had scoreboards and dashboards, and I had key people in the roles, but I couldn’t get away because I was still the bottleneck. So in 2009, with my business very much on the ropes. In that year, we said, okay, we’re going to get away no matter what. And then I began teaching my team and myself to work differently. So for about ten months I kept saying and repeating, hey, I, what are you going to do when I’m not here in June? Um, how will you do? How will you handle this when I’m away next summer? And so I said that in a variety of ways. And I asked more questions, and I, and I forced them to find the answers. And I gave them the confidence to do it. And me the confidence and trust in them to let them do it. Uh, and then in June of 2010, I went away. Um, I, my wife and our kids and I, we went away to Italy for a month and, um, you know, it’s not a big deal if you’re like a French CEO or whatever.

Bill Gallagher: But for us in North America, that was a pretty big deal. And I went away and I wasn’t on calls, Zoom, Skype or any equivalent. I wasn’t an interventions. I wasn’t in email all day and night doing things. I was just away in Italy. I got one report a day with a recap of the daily huddle. I got one report each week with a recap of the weekly stats, and I was away for a whole month and we had a great time. And my kids were 11 and 13. And um, Jack today is 29 and I have a three year old granddaughter and he’s a, a leading AI scientist with anthropic. And my daughter is a creative director for musicians. She lives in Los Angeles. Like, you know, they’re off in their lives today. I can’t get that time back. But I had that time in Italy because I stopped and I changed the way I work. I went away to Italy. The old bill never came back. Things were changed both in the team and myself. We leveled up in that time. That’s when I realized, oh, I could do this with my clients too.

Lee Kantor: Now, when the clients raise their hand and say, okay, I’d like to, I’d like to be you, you know, I don’t want to be there just for the photo ops. I want to be there for all the family time. How do you help them? Kind of, you know, self awareness is one part of it. But how do you like what are some action steps they can take to actually, you know, take a month off?

Bill Gallagher: Yeah. So the first thing is the self-awareness. And we use things like 360 reviews and we use these personal assessments, um, uh, some different frameworks like that so that they can build awareness and get in a dialog with their team. And then very often they pick an event like we’re going to sell the company. So they have to begin grooming the company for them to be away. Or they pick a place like Italy like I did, and they pick a date. And so they pick a reason that they’re going to have to disengage. They acknowledge it publicly, and then we go to work on the difference between them and their team. And sometimes it takes a while. Like the I shared the story of Thomas, whose retirement was delayed by seven years, um, at the age of 70. And I, I got him started, but I didn’t see him all the way through it because he was slow to make the changes.

Lee Kantor: And then when they when that’s the case, what is typically the reason why they can’t pull the trigger on something like this. That’s this important.

Bill Gallagher: So look, it’s really important. But there’s a there there was now, uh, in Thomas case, there was over 40 years of habit. Right. So it, it took something to break eventually, like we retire, we die. Um, so something will change eventually with us, but, uh, hopefully it happens sooner so that you have a better quality of life. The thing is, you get a better quality of life, but your team actually gets stronger, your business is more valuable because you didn’t work. And take, for example, a very different story, a couple guys that some of you may know, two different guys running Disney, two different ways. The first was Michael Eisner starting in 1984. Michael Eisner was a titan of the industry. He was an absolute genius. He was involved in every decision, everywhere, all the time. He knew scene direction. He knew the design of hotel properties at Disney properties in Europe. He knew like everywhere. But that also meant that at two in the morning, he famously gave feedback or corrections on a lampshade in a in a new hotel property that was being opened or renovated. Um, that kind of thing has a cost. And at, at, at some point everybody knew that and two things happened. One of them is he had a big heart event. He was on the operating table. And investors started to ask, wait a minute, if he’s on the table, who’s running Disney? Because everything went through him.

Bill Gallagher: The second one was he started to lose key partnerships. So people like Jeffrey Katzenberg, an absolute genius, and Steve Jobs, uh, walked Pixar away from their work with Disney. Uh, so it, it was a real disaster. And eventually the shareholders, uh, revolted, the family revolted, and they kicked Michael Eisner out because he became the lid on things. Everything had to run through him. It was a very significant organization, but at some point, everything has a limit. So they kick him out. Bob Iger comes in. One of the very early moves that Bob Iger does is is tell, uh, Steve Jobs that they were wrong, that they wanted to do. They should do a deal with Pixar. So he restores the relationship there and with other people. He develops an approach to teams. So he’s an intense guy. He comes in early in the morning. Uh, he starts before most people, but he opens his meeting, getting input, hearing what people have to say, bringing a spirit of collaboration and empowerment to his meeting. And then most nights, he makes it home for dinner, and on the weekends, he has time to go sailing and stuff with his kids. So he has time for fitness. He has time for recreation, he has time for family, he has time for his spouse, um, because his team is stronger because his relationships are stronger. So wider circle or tighter control. That’s kind of the choice.

Lee Kantor: Well, it sounds like I mean, there’s, you can, I’m sure there’s endless examples of people doing it each way. Um, and with levels of success in each way and levels of failure in each way. It as a leader though. Um, it sounds it feels like we’re in a time when there is a, especially a younger generations are demanding more of this kind of work life harmony where it isn’t. I’m not 247. I’m not, you know, I’m not that person. Are you seeing that generationally?

Bill Gallagher: Well, the millennial stereotype is like, they’re super coddled and they’re, they’re super fragile and they can’t do anything. I own kids, uh, are are in that ballpark for 97, 99. They’re both highly accomplished people. So I’m not sure that the stereotype always fits, but, uh, I know a lot of people today were like, oh, you got to hustle and grind. So within business people, within entrepreneurship, there is a feeling often and a common conversation that you just lean in. And that is true to get started. Uh, but then you have to change your approach and you have to start to build a team of capable people and let them do their jobs.

Lee Kantor: And is that the heart of the book is how to build the team.

Bill Gallagher: So the book talks about my experiences, my clients, some of these famous figures. Um, and then highlights the four things that we do that we talked about here, failure to delegate micromanagement, perfectionism, and the strategic failure. And it talks about some of the reasons, talks about the history of how we got here, particularly in North America. Um, because that’s where I am and where more of my clients are. Um, there are different versions in other parts, like 996 culture in Asia, um, that are equally problematic. But, um, so we talk about those kinds of things, then we talk about the shifts and then the moves that are required of you to do that. So there’s also a chapter about the scaling up framework, which is, you know, about how to structure the company. Those things that I had in place. Not everybody has those things. So you get those things in place and then you deal with yourself and, and you start to make your own changes.

Lee Kantor: So, um, what advice do you have for that leader who may be sensing that something’s amiss? What’s something actionable they can do today? Um, in this regard to be less busy?

Bill Gallagher: Well, the thing to do would be to ask the people who report to you say, listen, I really want the truth. I’d love for your honest feedback if I’m going to keep growing this company through the next stage, I’m going to have to level up. So which of these four things do I do or in what combination? Very often we do some combination of them in different situations. So where do I fail to delegate that I should delegate? Where am I micromanaging you after I delegate things? Where am I holding things from? Going out the door? You know, the perfectionism and where am I to operationally involved and missing that. That one is probably easier for peers, um, investors and other people to speak to than it is for your employees because they’re inside, working inside and they don’t tend to as much appreciate that except that maybe you’re losing ground to competition.

Lee Kantor: Well, if somebody wants to get a hold of the book or get a hold of you, what’s the website for the firm or the best places? The book is.

Bill Gallagher: As busy as broken.com, or you’ll find the book on Amazon or wherever you buy your books. Um, be, you know, uh, whatever form you like paperback, Kindle, audiobook, uh, all those things will be by the time they hear this. It’s all available for sale.

Lee Kantor: And then your website is scalingcoach.com.

Bill Gallagher: scalingcoach.com, but easiest to remember. Busyisbroken.com, from there they can go to all the things related to this.

Lee Kantor: All right Bill, well thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Bill Gallagher: Thank you.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on High Velocity Radio.