IAM1884 – CEO, Coach and Expert Helps People That Struggle with Sales, Marketing and Systems

Why it was selected for “CBNation Architects”:

The episode features the guest Michela Quilici, CEO of MQ Consulting and Business Training Inc.

Michela is well-known for her international business growth and marketing expertise. In particular, she is passionate about assisting coaches, consultants, and service professionals who are wrestling with their sales, marketing, and systemic organization. She has guided hundreds of entrepreneurially-minded companies globally, ranging from startups to $20+ million firms, helping them level up their businesses.

In the episode, Michela discusses:

Her Journey: Michela opens up about her successful career in the corporate world until she had a wake-up call questioning her purpose in life, which led her to start her own business.

What She Offers: Michela offers support to CEOs and entrepreneurs to purposefully navigate their business growth with coaching and consultation.

Her Unique Approach: Her “secret sauce” includes working with business leaders on both personal and professional levels. She brings an intuitive and strategic approach to her work. Collaborating with Michela is compared to an apprenticeship — part coaching, part consulting, and part hands-on tactical guidance.

Knowledgeable Insights: Michela shares her insights about the 6 main blocks or bottlenecks to business growth, including: Mindset, Skills, Strategy, Positioning, Productivity, and Leverage.

Her Contribution: She actively contributes to the Forbes Coaches Council and is a contributing author in the bestselling book “Conscious Business”. Michela has been featured in a range of publications, including USA Weekly, Canadian Living Magazine, and Profit Magazine.

Transcription:

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Michela Quilici Teaser 00:00

The third block is strategy. Strategic planning, and building a business growth roadmap based on values, goals, objectives will really help you go from inconsistent results to predictable and successful outcomes.

Intro 00:16

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 have 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 IAMCEO podcast.

Gresham Harkless 00:41

Hello, hello, hello. This is Gresh from the IAMCEO podcast, and I appreciate you listening to this episode. If you've been listening this year, you know, that we hit 1600 episodes at the beginning of this year. We're doing something a little bit different where we're repurposing our favorite episodes around certain categories, topics, or as I like to call them the business pillars that we think are going to be extremely impactful for CEOs, entrepreneurs, business owners, and what I like to call the CB nation architects who are looking to level up their organization.

This month, we are focusing on operations. The systems will set you free. So think about systems, think about flow, sustainability, potentially working out in your morning routine, waking up early, e-commerce, different business models. Think of the operations in the Models that basically set up the foundation to allow the creativity within organizations, but also to make sure the trains are running on time and things are going as they should.

Now, this is extremely important because we often turn to the sexy parts of business and forget about the operations and how important that is. So I really want to focus this month on this specific topic. So sit back and enjoy this special episode of the IAMCEO podcast.

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the IAMCEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Michela Quilici of MQ Consulting and Business Training Incorporated.

Michela is the CEO of MQ Consulting and Business Training Incorporated. Michela is an international business growth and marketing expert passionate about supporting coaches, consultants, and service professionals who struggle with sales, marketing and systems to gain exposure, magnetize qualified buyers and double revenues with much less effort.

Over the past 17 years, she has coached and consulted hundreds of entrepreneurial-minded companies globally from startups to 20+ million dollar companies to make business owners and take their business owners and their businesses to the next level of excellence. Michela has been featured in USA Weekly, Canadian Living Magazine and Profit Magazine. She is a member of the Forbes Coaches Council and is a contributing author in the best-selling book Conscious Business.

Michela, are you ready to speak to the IAMCEO community?

Michela Quilici 02:56

I'm ready. I'm ready.

Gresham Harkless 02:57

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. The first question I have is if you can expound a little bit more on the bio that I read and tell us a little bit more about your CEO story and what led you to get started in your business.

Michela Quilici 03:06

So I started my business really out of a strong desire to stop tolerating the life that I had, and to really start creating the one that I wanted. Of course, at the time I didn't really know what I wanted, but I sure knew what I didn't want. So that's where I started. In my early 20s, I was really on the fast track to climbing up the corporate ladder. I was young and eager to learn, had a really fierce determination to be successful. I worked for one of Canada's fastest-growing startups named by Profit Magazine leading the marketing department, supporting our hundred-person strong sales team.

We were actually the number one company in our niche in North America and I was the youngest woman on the executive team as well. I had always had like mentors and coaches, and I was really fortunate enough to have been in a 10-year-long apprenticeship with one of the most successful COOs that I had come to know. He had previously worked for PepsiCo and Heinz in Europe. So despite all of the success that I had created for myself at a very young age, I had some serious obstacles along the way. But I got to a point in my career where I had a bit of a wake-up call, as you do, and the question was, what was my real purpose in life? Was this it? Was this it to simply climb the corporate ladder? And was that what I was meant to do?

That question really led me on a quest to start my first business and then eventually to create the one that I have had for the past eight years. And my sole purpose has always been to step out of my shadow, my own shadow and into my spotlight, and to really stop tolerating and start creating. Ultimately for me, it was about not ever letting external circumstances define me. My core values were a real guiding light for me, freedom, truth, purpose, growth, leadership. I had a lot of my own emotional and psychological traumas to overcome along the way, but my persistence and insistence in the belief that I wasn't a victim of my own circumstances has always been a real driving force for me.

It's about self-leadership. That's what I'm talking about here. It's about doing it for myself and teaching others as well. And so my business has evolved as I've seen gaps in the marketplace. My mission has really evolved to help empower business owners and leaders to first lead themselves, and then to become more of who they really are.

Gresham Harkless 05:47

I love it. I love it. I wanted to drill down a little bit deeper into your business and get an idea of like how do you help your clients? What way do you actually serve your clients?

Michela Quilici 05:54

Yeah, good question. So really my company exists to support entrepreneurs and CEOs to navigate their business growth on purpose. And as a management consultant and a business growth coach and a marketing strategist all rolled up into one, I work with service-based business owners and CEOs and entrepreneurs to help them accelerate business growth to 6 figures plus, or take their successful 6 figure business to 7 figures.

Sometimes I even help businesses turn around. So I've had a number of cases where business owners have been in business for 10 years and they've got a six-figure plus business, but they're not profitable and they're about to shut their doors. So I help them turn that around into a more profitable situation. So my clients call me their business navigator. I bring diagnostics. I bring strategies, tools, systems, and tactics that are done with you, tactics and accountability in the areas main areas of sales and marketing, operational systems, and people in leadership.

The result is that the business owners confidently grow their business strategically. They market themselves authentically and they create better and faster results than if they were to do it alone. I really work alongside them doing a deep dive with them in their business. I provide a business growth roadmap and a compass essentially, and then help them navigate from where they are to where they want to go. So they have greater clarity in purpose, direction, and taking action that's going to produce unexpected results.

Gresham Harkless 07:36

Awesome. Now I wanted to ask you for what I call like your secret sauce or kind of what you feel like makes you in your organization unique or different.

Michela Quilici 07:44

I love that secret sauce. I call it my superpowers, but I love secret sauce too. So I would say three main unique features to what I do. Number one, I work with business leaders on both the personal and professional work. So the inner and the outer game, because I believe that you cannot separate the CEO from the business entity. As I have been known to say, your business is your greatest spiritual teacher, whatever shows up in your business at a tactical level can typically be mapped back to the leader and some sort of personal block, whether it's at the subconscious or the conscious level.

Most of the time, the root causes some sort of either limiting belief or emotional wounding that resides in their business, mind, body, spirit, that's fueling their habits, their beliefs, causing self-sabotage, they're fueling their habits, they're causing or triggering emotions, and this impacts the words and how they show up their actions. And so these blocks negatively influence the business owners ability to execute on strategies and tactics in a really effective way. So this is one of the main differentiators. Is the inner and outer game work.

The second one is that I work at both an intuitive and a strategic level. So I use my own personal awareness and sensitivities. And knowledge of many different modalities that I pull in like metaphysics, brain science, psychology, human behavior, alongside with my real-world experience of supporting my clients to build a profitable and sustainable multi-seven figure businesses.

The third one is that working with me is apprentice style. So it's a done with you approach, which is, I have found the most effective approach for creating real change. So it's a hybrid. It's part coaching, part consulting, and part hands-on tactical. I really immerse myself into my client's business and support the CEO directly, almost like their COO for hire, if you will. It's a holistic approach that I take to the business model. So we look at how we can improve each area of the business. resulting in overall increase in revenue, profit, productivity, and harmony, to be honest.

Gresham Harkless 10:15

That's awesome. So the fact that you're able to execute all your superpowers, so to speak, where you're able to help business owners out and in those many different ways, definitely probably results in a lot of success.

Michela Quilici 10:24

I love it. Actually when I initially started, this was not the model. It was straight-up consulting. And what I found was that I could teach strategies and business strategy, marketing strategy and tactics all day long. But what I found was that the business owner was to some degree getting in their own way. So that's when I started layering in and I started layering in the coach approach into the work.

I then layered in more of the apprenticeship style where we then take a look at the whole business because just taking a look at sales and marketing also wasn't working as effectively as it could. Because once we generate more leads and exposure, then if you don't have the right systems in place to deliver your service and the right leverage, then it creates another bottleneck.

So it's been a layered approach, just really trying to support my clients and really finding out like, what does the market need? What do they need now? Where am I seeing the struggle? And so I prefer to work with people, one on one for longer periods of time, because then we can create lasting change, and they really feel like they have a partner in their business because a lot of the times they're either alone. They're the only ones in the business, or they're the only executive. And so they can't necessarily talk to their team about business strategy and about what's going on for them as a leader. It's been an evolution.

Gresham Harkless 11:54

So what I wanted to do was switch gears a little bit and ask you for what I call a CEO hack. This might be an app or a book or just a habit or something that makes you more effective and efficient as a business owner.

Michela Quilici 12:06

Yeah, I love that. So one of the hacks, if you will, that really turn things around for me personally, and that I see really makes a difference with my clients as well, is going through a values exercise. So this is about getting crystal clear about who you are basically and what's important to you on a personal level. And then further to that, what is important at an organizational level.

Gresham Harkless 12:38

Now I want to ask you for a CEO nugget and a CEO nugget might be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice that you might have for an entrepreneur or a business owner.

Michela Quilici 12:48

Okay. So it's more than a nugget, but I'll share it anyway. So there are six main blocks to business growth, being aware of what these bottlenecks are will give the CEO a bit of a road map for growth so that you can plan for and navigate them and so that they're not a surprise when they might come up in the business. I work with my clients in these areas. So I'll just Run through them. There are six of them. The first one is mindset. Your beliefs are driving the bus. So change your beliefs and you'll change your results.

The second bottleneck is skills. As you're growing your business, you've got to up level your skills as well so that you're growing from a technician who's the chief of everything in your business to a leader and the CEO.

The third block is strategy. Strategic planning and building a business growth roadmap based on values, goals, objectives will really help you go from inconsistent results to predictable and successful outcomes.

The fourth block is positioning. This is about developing your business into a brand, going from a business to a brand that really connects with the hearts and minds of your clients and your consumers. This is about really understanding what you're actually selling in your business and positioning your value. This is instrumental.

The fifth one is productivity. So this is going from being busy and chasing shiny objects to having single-minded focus and following through and setting up really good systems.

The final one is leverage and leverage is about building and empowering teams and leveraging your time, money and your resources.

Gresham Harkless 14:42

I love that. Now I wanted to ask you my favorite question, which is like the definition of being a CEO. We're hoping to have different types of CEOs on the podcast. So I wanted to ask you specifically, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Michela Quilici 14:54

If I had to pick one thing, being a CEO to me means leadership. Whether it's being the CEO of your life or the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company, when you can lead yourself with self-responsibility, courage, integrity, truth, compassion, authenticity, and purpose, you're truly leading yourself and you can then inspire and motivate others to follow you.

You can support them to become leaders in their own right. So it's leaders creating more leaders. So that's what being a CEO means to me.

Gresham Harkless 15:37

I love it. I love it. Michela, I truly appreciate you for taking some time out of your schedule to speak with us. I wanted to pass you the mic so to speak, just so you can tell us anything additional you want to let our readers and our listeners know, and then also how best people can get ahold of you.

Michela Quilici 16:05

Sure. Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to chat with you today. For more business growth and leadership tips and resources, I encouraged the readers and listeners to visit my website. They can do that at michelaquilici.com.

Gresham Harkless 16:05

Awesome. What we'll do is we'll have those links in the show notes. Michela, thank you so much again for all the awesome wisdom you provided to us and definitely for taking some time out of your schedule.

Outro 16:16

Thank you for listening to the IAMCEO podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co. IAMCEO 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 IAMCEO podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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