IAM844- Business Growth Coach Helps Leaders Eliminate Guesswork

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00:02 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:30 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Bill Flynn of Catalyst Growth Advisors on the show. Bill, it's awesome to have you on the show.

00:38 – Bill Flynn

Hey Gresh, thanks for having me on. Appreciate it.

00:40 – Gresham Harkless

No problem. Super excited to have you on. Before we jump in, I wanted to read a little bit more about all the awesome things that Bill is doing so you can hear and learn a little bit more about him. Bill has more than 30 years of experience working for and advising hundreds of companies, including startups, where he has a long track record of success. After working for 10 different high-tech startups in different market segments, such as speech, recognition, e-commerce, and affiliate marketing, where he was a VP of sales 8 times, twice a CMO, and once a GM of a division of a hundred million multi-million dollar IT service company, he pivoted to becoming a business growth coach.

Prior to he had 5 successful outcomes, 2 IPOs, and 7 acquisitions, including a turnaround during the 2008 financial crisis. Bill is a multi-certified growth coach, has a certificate with a distinction, Foundations of Neural Leadership, is a certified predictive index partner, author, international speaker, and Bill's best-selling books, Further Faster, the Final Few Steps that Take the Guesswork Out of growth continues to garner a five-star Rating bill. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:41 – Bill Flynn:

I am ready to fire away.

01:42 – Gresham Harkless:

Let's do it so to kick everything off, I know you're doing so many phenomenal things. I wanted to kind of I guess start from the beginning So to speak here a little bit more about what I call a CEO story Well that you get started with all the awesome things you're working on

01:53 – Bill Flynn:

Yeah, so I kind of started being a CEO starting my own business because I think it's a shame that a Really good idea is really good people really good businesses either die or struggle for completely preventable reasons. So I sort of dug into figuring out why that was. I've been studying business for almost 3, 30 years now, really a lot more intensely in the last 4 to 5. And I found that there are a few things that really good leaders and really good companies do, and they're the same few things. And they do them well. So that's sort of how I got to where I am after that intro that you gave me. You missed it. I'm also been a contributor to the CEO blog nation

02:34 – Gresham Harkless:

Yes, you have been a contributor and we've definitely been proud to have you contribute so many times you're doing so many awesome things That help make us an even better platform and so I know 1 of the big things we're always talking about is kind of resources and making sure that we kind of tap into the minds of really successful people that have so much insight like yourself is Is that what you do? You know from your your kind of business coaching standpoint able to really guide people into how to be successful How would you kind of quantify exactly what you do to support these clients?

03:00 – Bill Flynn:

Yeah, so my little tagline is I help leaders take the guesswork out of growth. Most leaders are guessing. And if you look at the data from the last 25, or 30 years, we don't guess very well. I think if you started business in 1994, by 1999, half of you were out of business. And by 2009, I think it was 75% were out of business. And if you went to the full 25 years, only about 14 or 15% were left. So the longer you're in business, the more likely it is that you go out of business.

And I said, it's completely preventable in most cases, but we've sort of never been taught that. So that's what I do is I teach a framework and really more of a mindset, which starts from having the leader fire hammer herself from the day to day. Because your job, really, once you've sort of gotten through that startup knothole and you've got a business that's predictable and somewhat scalable, you get somewhat of a business model. The next thing you have to do is start figuring out, what should do less of. Because my job now is really the business, not the product. So that's sort of what I help leaders do.

04:05 – Gresham Harkless:

Yeah, absolutely. And it's so funny you said that phrase and it really stuck with me because I was going to ask you, do you feel like some of the time, the reason that businesses haven't been as successful as they could be is because they haven't been taught that, they haven't learned that it isn't something like they, I guess they could have went to school for it, but it may not have been taught in the right way in school. So it kind of gets you in that same place.

04:22 – Bill Flynn:

Yeah, it's a great question, Gresh. I looked that up because I was curious. I said, you know, how do we teach people how to be CEOs, how to lead an organization of disparate people and figuring out the problems of their customers and doing them in the best possible way, delivering, you know, sort of, excellence to their clients. And I really couldn't find anything. We're taught how to be good in finance or engineering or, you know, marketing or something like that.

But there's very, there are very few places you can go to teach to run an organization. Most people who are good at it are good at it because either they had a good person that they followed or that person that they followed made so many mistakes over time and just kept getting better and better and better and learning from the mistakes. And then they became a really good CEO. But other than that, it's really hard to do. So that's sort of what I've made my mission I just wanna share the few secrets that I've learned over 30 years of studying and doing it myself and see if they fit with other people and most of the time they really work well So yeah, no 1 as far as I can tell You're not taught how to be a CEO. You have to figure it out on your own sort of like being a parent, right?

05:24 – Gresham Harkless

Exactly. You know, you should be a parent.

05:26 – Bill Flynn:

Everybody can be a good parent, right?

05:29 -Gresham Harkless:

Yes, Just have the kid you'll figure it out on the way down or build the plane on the way down So I know your book has loads of gems and information in it, too Could you touch a little bit more on that and what we can find, you know in your book?

05:41 – Bill Flynn:

Yeah, so what I found is That there are 3 things really that the best leaders do and the best leadership teams. I don't want to say it's just a leader. It's also the team that helps the leader. The first is the team. The sort of little phrase I came up with was performance is a team sport. Most people are on a team. I follow Marcus Buckingham his work at ADP and he talks about some survey He did or some research he did a year or 2 ago that over 80% of all of us at work are on at least one Team about 70% of those folks are on more than one team and about 60 some hundred percent of those folks are on more than that. And most of those teams in that third group are not represented in the org chart.

So what you have to do is you have to really know how to craft, grow, and help to create the environment for really good teams and not just one team, but teams of teams because most of the businesses are like a jig a crossword puzzle, right? They're all interlocking and things are dependent upon other things. So you have to be really good at teams The second thing you have to do is understand that if you want your business to scale you have to think about systems and processes. And the one really big system that overlays all of them to me is your strategy and execution system. You have to have a decent strategy that sort of is unique. The best strategies are typically unique strategies, you know, like Southwest or Dyson or Nest or someone like that.

And then you will have to execute on it because that's basically what you're executing on is you're executing on a strategy. And then if your strategy is always going to have issues with it because it's sort of organic, right? Your customer's issues change technology changes, and all sorts of stuff changes. So your strategy at a high level probably stays about the same, but you have to sort of mix and match a little bit. The best strategy on the planet, at least in terms of public companies, is Southwest. Their strategy is called Wheels Up, and their job is to get the plane in the air. And they do everything around that. They've modified their strategy a little bit over time and they focus on that.

So strategy and execution are really 2 sides of the same coin. And then lastly, if you wanna be a growth company, cash should be your primary financial growth metric. Why? Because cash is an antecedent to growth. You have to invest in front of growth. So what I teach my clients is, okay, let's figure out what we want to look like in 2 or 3 years. How much will that cost? Okay, now let's build a plan to generate the cash to pay for the stuff that we want to do because you might have to hire some more people, you might have to build a factory, you know, whatever it is, you got to do stuff in front of it to be able to support it. So those are the 3 things teamwork performances of team support, You have to create a cohesive and coherent system of execution and strategy and use cash as your primary financial growth metric.

08:22 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that. And I think so many times, as you said, so well in the beginning, that so many times as leaders, we're just kind of going through the motions or not really staying focused on what we're trying to do. And I love especially that last point because so many times we forget about where we're going and what we need to get there and how we break that down as far as steps and actions or systems that we need to put in place or the team that we need to have to be successful so that we can get to where we want to be. And I think so many times we forget all of those integral pieces just like the leg of a table. If we don't have one of them, it sounds like they can all kind of fall over.

08:45 – Bill Flynn

Yeah, good summary.

 08:48 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So you might have already touched on this, but I wanted to ask you for what I call your secret sauce. This could be for yourself personally, or your business, or a combination of both, but what do you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

09:01 – Bill Flynn

Yeah, it's probably a little bit of both. So I sort of have 2 things that I think set me apart. At least that's what I'm told. 1 is, we've touched on a little bit, I sort of have this cradle-to-grave perspective on business. I've been to 10 startups. I'm 5 for 10, so I've seen success and how it works. I've seen failure in startups. And I also have worked with dozens, really hundreds of companies that are beyond startups. And I've worked for them or I've done that. So I've seen that. So I basically studied success and failure, and I had the experience and the research to do that. So I have a generally good idea of what has worked and what hasn't worked. My brain works pretty well at finding patterns. So I kind of have a pretty good idea of how to distill it down into sort of simple things.

And then lastly, speaking of simple, I have a first principles approach really to life and to business. And so I weave neuroscience into everything that I do because that's a first principle. Your brain basically controls almost everything that's around you. And I've been studying cause and effect for years. So I work with folks to help them understand, for instance, do you know exactly what causes your customer to buy from you? And most of the time when I ask this, I get an answer, but they're almost always wrong. And you ask your customer, they don't actually really know why either. So I'm a big fan of jobs to be done, if you're familiar with that philosophy, which basically says that people don't buy products, they hire solutions to help them make progress.

They have a struggling moment and they hire something to help them make progress. And if there's something that they're working on now that isn't, they fire that and hire something else. Understanding the sort of functional, social, and emotional needs that people have when they make a purchase or make a decision of any kind is the underpinning of jobs to be done. It's been around for 30, 35 years. It is like magic. If you can do it, it's like magic. You've probably already seen it. You're probably familiar with the Snickers commercials that are out about satisfaction.

So the gentleman Bob Mesta, who's really one of the co-originators of the philosophy in the 80s and 90s Was the guy who worked on that campaign and he found out that Snickers doesn't compete with Milky Way Because Snickers people hired Snickers because of fatigue And they wanted the energy and they found that the peanuts and whatever was in it gave them some energy where Milky Way is more of an indulgence. It's like brownies or cookies. So they started to focus on, you know, it's about satisfaction and etc. And now they sell like 3 and a half billion dollars worth of Snickers bars every year. And it was from that understanding of that sort of cause and effect. So it's kind of a cool model.

11:35 – Gresham Harkless:

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. And so I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple Book or a habit that you have, but what's something that you feel makes you more effective and efficient?

11:45 – Bill Flynn

So I think for me or for anyone really and I kind of said already you need to figure out a way to make yourself useless because your job isn't to run the business anymore as I mentioned and if you're running the business on a day-to-day that's a doing it, that's a doing the thing And leadership is more about thinking that it is about doing. Especially if you're trying to predict the future. That's about insight creativity and innovation. And I ask this a lot, and honestly, this is a view, Gresh, is, so when do you get your best ideas?

12:12 – Gresham Harkless:

What are you doing? Usually not working, which is funny enough, in the shower, or I could be running or doing working out doing something like that away from work.

12:19 – Bill Flynn

I have asked hundreds and hundreds of people this question CEOs and it's the same thing I was running I was running my bike I was in the shower I was sort of waking up in the morning you know it's another 1 And that's because your brain is quiet, right? And that's when you get your best ideas. And if you want to do innovation and insight and creativity, that's what you have to do.

12:38 – Gresham Harkless

Now I would ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. And this could be a word of wisdom or piece of advice, could be around leadership, or it might be something you would tell yourself if you were to hop into a time machine or maybe a client as well.

12:50 – Bill Flynn:

Yeah. So the nugget I have is few things truly matter in business or in life, but those that do matter tremendously. And as a leader or as a parent or as a friend or whatever, you should spend more time there.

13:03 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanted to ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Bill, what does being a CEO mean to you?

13:13 – Bill Flynn:

So I think a CEO has to do 3 things really well. And I've touched on it a little bit, but I'll sort of summarize. You have to pick a great team for yourself, right? And the team isn't necessarily people who just report to you. You could also have an advisory team, but the people you surround you, that you surround yourself with should have skills, abilities, and knowledge that round you out. So you can go to certain people when you need it, whether it's internally or externally. So you got to figure that out. Then you have to create a safe environment that helps people to be their best selves every day and to pursue their strengths as often as possible. The work from Marcus Buckingham says that we have to do it about 20% of the time.

As long as we can do what we really love, about 20% of the time or more, we're more fully engaged at work. We're more satisfied and fulfilled. I don't know if it's true, but I think it's sort of that light at the end of the tunnel, right? As long as you have something to look forward to, it's like a vacation. As long as I know the vacation's coming in a few months, I can get through some tough times. I think if you know I'm going to enjoy something at least one day out of this week or parts of this week, I'm going to get to do something I love, it helps make the harder stuff a little less hard. And then lastly, I think this is important is you have to have the courage to be a leader.

You can be humble like Alan Mullally as I mentioned, or not like Bill Gates. You can be charismatic like Sam Herb Keller from Southwest, or not like Warren Buffett. You can have empathy like Jacinda Ardern, or not like Jeff Bezos, you can have integrity like Mulcahy, or not like Steve Jobs. You can be honest, like Marcus Aurelius, or not like LBJ. But the one thing I found across all leaders is courage in one form or another. We can argue how great or not each of these leaders was, but it's hard to deny that every single one of them had courage. So I think you've got to do that.

You've got to focus on those 3 things. Great team, create a psychologically safe environment, as Amy Emerson says, and have courage. If you can do those things, you'll be a good leader. You gotta have that compelling vision, of course, right? As part of it. But if you can surround yourself with people who can help you realize that vision and do those 3 things, I think you'll be a great CEO.

15:12 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Bill, truly appreciate that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know. And of course, how best they can get an overview, get a copy of the book, and find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

15:26 – Bill Flynn

Yeah. So, I'm more about the messages and the money. So the book I gave away for free on my website. You can buy from Amazon or Audible or one of those places if you want to pay money, which is great. I get, you know, a few bucks every time it happens, but I will never make the money back that I put into the book. It's more about getting the word out and trying to help people make their lives a little bit better. And my book, and I write, I write a little bit, as you know, because I've helped you out with the Blog Nation stuff. So I put a post out twice a month. They're all really short, a minute to 2-minute reads. And there's almost always something of action to do for the person who's reading it. And that's on my website, which is catalystgrowthadvisors.com, And all my contact info and Twitter and all that kind of stuff is on there too.

16:06 – Gresham Harkless:

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Bill. We will have the links and information in the show notes so that everybody can, you know, find out about all the awesome things that you're putting out. Of course, you know, get that free copy of the book if you don't want to get it from Amazon or Audible. So I appreciate you for giving us all that wisdom and of course, creating so much content and information for us to learn from as well. And I hope you have a great rest of the day.

16:23 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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