IAM2684 – From Engineering to Business Coach: Redesigning Your Business Concept to Build on the Vision

In this episode, Gresham Harkless welcomes Steve Chiama, a business expert with over 30 years of experience growing companies. Steve’s impressive career includes growing customer service businesses for large industrial equipment supply companies, through to his own ActionCOACH Business Coaching franchise today.

One of his highlights was increasing sales for his business unit at a large industrial company by over 300% in just a 3 year period. To achieve these sales and profit growth goals, he recruited, trained, and led a team of people with a focus on building high performance through strong communication and powerful target-orientation.

To achieve sustainable growth, Steve advises entrepreneurs to focus on vision over technical skills. His framework centers on mastering five key variables: lead generation, conversion rates, transaction frequency, sales value, and operational efficiency.

By providing the “secret sauce” of context and objective perspective, Steve helps owners transition from “doers” to strategists. He recommends the “CEO hack” of hiring to replace oneself in low-value roles to maximize productivity. Ultimately, he views a CEO as a visionary leader who builds the business into an independent, valuable asset.

Website: https://stevechiama.actioncoach.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevechiamabusinesscoach/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@actioncoachwesternfairfax8379

Full Audio Transcription:

Steve Chiama 00:00

If you're hiring and you're hiring for capacity, you might be looking at the wrong thing. Hiring to replace yourself in a relatively low value role so you can spend more time in a relatively higher value role is probably a more important consideration. How you value your time is incredibly important. Your time as a doer is not nearly as value productive. As a strategist, are you ready to.

Gresham Harkless 01:03

Hello, hello, hello, this is Gresh from the I Am CEO Podcast and I have an awesome guest on the show today. I have Steve Chiama. Steve, excited to have you on the show.

Steve Chiama 01:11

Fantastic, Gresh. Thank you very much for bringing me on.

Gresham Harkless 01:14

Yes, I'm super excited to bring you on and talk about all the awesome things you're doing. Steve has done so many awesome things that of course we're gonna have a phenomenal conversation. But before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Steve so you can hear about some of those awesome things. And Steve has been growing businesses for over 30 years. His experience includes growing customer service businesses for large industrial equipment supply companies through his own Action Coach business coaching franchise. Today one of his highlights was increasing sales for his business unit at a large industrial company by over 300% in just over a three year period. To achieve these sales and profit growth goals, he recruited, trained and led a team of people with a focus on building high performance through strong communication and powerful target orientation. And one of the things I absolutely love is always having fellow podcasters youtubers on the show. And Steve also has his own show, the Business Spotlight podcast, which is available on the Action Coach Western Podcast, YouTube and also the Business Spot Spotlight USA. And one of the really cool things I saw when I was poking around and preparing for this is that he has this quote that's so powerful that I had to make sure I mentioned it where he says, most business owners believe their identity is in the business, but a business is an asset, like a house or a car. The owner is a person with a life. The ones who get that are the ones who succeed. So Steve, excited to have you on the show. Are you ready to speak to the I Am CEO community?

Steve Chiama 02:37

Let's do it.

Gresham Harkless 02:38

Let's make it happen. Then so to kind of kick everything off, let's rewind the clock a little bit, hear a little bit more on how you got started. What I Call youl CEO Story.

Steve Chiama 02:46

You know, I went through a long, complicated history. I started working as an engineer. I actually have an engineering degree. I did a bunch of years of engineering, moved along, discovered that business is about making money, so decided to go on to the business side of things, which was a revelation. Got an MBA along the way, worked for over a 20 year period or so, worked for about 5 different companies running business units, profit centers, if you will, ranging anywhere from a half million to 25 million, depending on which. Which organization I was working with at that time, mostly for manufacturers, but also they had construction units. And so we were involved in all of the aspects of that kind of business. Someplace along the line, I was spending an awful lot of time in airports, awful lot of time traveling, and I had a child who was reaching the preteen years. And I said, not a good plan. So I want to be at home and why don't I start making money for me instead of making money for corporations. And so I elected to look for and buy a business and I chose an action coach franchise, which turned out to be a really good choice. It's a really good organization, a really outstanding set of systems. So perfect.

Gresham Harkless 04:11

I would love to drill down a little bit more, hear a little bit more on how you're working with and serving your clients and having these great conversations. Can you take me through a little bit more on what that looks like?

Steve Chiama 04:19

A business isn't. It's a piece of paper that represents an asset. It's not you, or it doesn't have to be you unless you're looking for a job. And so this becomes a major difference. If your why is to have a job, then your future is certainly a monthly income, but there's no big lump available at the end. If your why is to create a system that will continue to produce results for clients in the future beyond your participation now you've built an asset, and now the question is how massive an asset do you want in your time with the company? And. And then what's a path that will take us there? And after that it's a matter of sitting down and looking at what are the variables that drive that and then what are the strategies that we can impose for each of those different variables? I tend to think of five principal variables that we talk about. One being numbers of leads, one being conversion rate. How, how efficiently do you convert those leads? To clients. One being, how many times can you attract clients back to buy from you over and over and over again in the course of a year? Another being, how much can you help them buy? And the fifth one being, how efficiently can you operate that system? And if you sit down and work it out, there's a whole bundle of strategies for each one of those five variables, which are the 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 that are best for your business, your industry, and your situation where you are right now. So we can sit down with that kind of a thinking process, and then we build a business around it. How many people do we need to do how many things?

Gresham Harkless 06:23

I think so many times, like, when we're going through tasks, when we're doing things, we're saying, no one can do this. Like, I can do this. But when you start to say, there's that many people in the world, is there not one person? You start to realize that you're so close to it. And sometimes we. I don't know if we overestimate our abilities or whatever it is, but we realize that we're not seeing the full picture. We're not seeing what they're already trying to do. Do you feel like your ability to see that and of course, help people execute that is part of what I like to call your secret sauce?

Steve Chiama 06:53

Yeah, I think that actually is my most important role, is to help them see the context. They are the visionary, not the doer. Build on the vision, don't build on the skill. Don't try to become the very best at whatever you are trying to do. Make your mission finding the best, building the best, training the best, and satisfying the most number of customers that can be satisfied within whatever technology or whatever business concept that you've got. But that also invites that. Sometimes you got to stop and ask the question, is this business the best design? Is this really the best idea? Or have I boxed myself into a very narrow, small, little niche? And while I've got a really good skill and a really good thing to offer, should I look a little bit to the side and say, is there a better path to go down? So sometime once in a while, we have to redesign the concept so that there's a better, a bigger, better, more lucrative opportunity. Meaning what that means is there's more people to serve.

Gresham Harkless 08:16

I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or even a habit that you have, but what's something you lean on that makes you more effective and efficient.

Steve Chiama 08:28

There's a book I'm reading now that I think is doing. I won't say it's changing my way of approaching some of this, but it's affecting maybe how I explain it to people. The name of the book is Buy Back youk Time. It makes a couple of really interesting points. One is that if you're hiring and you're hiring for capacity, you might be looking at the wrong thing. Hiring to replace yourself in a relatively low value role so you can spend more time in a relatively higher value role is probably a more important consideration. Yes, capacity, but. But we've got to identify what exactly is the bottleneck and what exactly is the value of the roles that are being looked at there. And I think that's how you value your time is incredibly important. Your time as a doer is not nearly as value productive as a strategist.

Gresham Harkless 09:40

And so you might have already touched on this, but I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget, a little bit more word of wisdom or piece of advice. I like to say it might be something you would tell your favorite client or if you hopped into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

Steve Chiama 09:53

What I would tell my younger business self is I should have done this in 2001. I lost a job in 2001 and took another job in a different company, in a different industry, more or less doing exactly the same thing. And I had a lot of, I got to admit, I had a lot of fun and I learned a lot and I saw a lot and did a lot that I never would have seen. But gosh, if I had gone off into running my own business, then where would I be today? And I think the nugget that you're reaching for is don't postpone a good decision. If it's aching, do it now.

Gresham Harkless 10:49

Now I want to ask you one of my absolute favorite questions, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And our goal is to have different, quote, unquote CEOs on the show. So, Steve, what does being a CEO mean to you?

Steve Chiama 10:58

All right, so I'm going to play with the word CEO from an entire and from probably from a very different side than most of the people you talk to. Because I come from a corporate environment and when I think of chief executive officer, that means there have to be other executive officers. And what's an executive officer? Well, at least it's a manager of managers and probably a manager of managers of managers before executive is Kind of a meaningful term. To me, the term CEO implies an organization perhaps of several hundred people. It might be several hundred people scattered over a broad geography, or it might be several hundred people in that building over there. But still, you've got a complicated organization. So when I think CEO, that's what I'm really thinking of. And might even have a board of directors. That said, even a one person business has to have a leader and a visionary. So the CEO is that visionary. And then the question is, given the size of the organization and the scope of the organization, how much of his time is being spent on the visionary? It's not 100%. If he's one person business, that's probably 5% or 10%. So we got to sit down and think, where are we in that life cycle of a business? But I think CEO really becomes meaningful in the case of a 500 person business more than it becomes in a five person business. But it's a popular title.

Gresham Harkless 12:49

Well, Steve, truly appreciate that definition. Of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I wanted to do now was pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and how best people can get a hold of you, connect with you, find out about your show, your podcast, all the awesome things you're.

Steve Chiama 13:05

Doing as well too, for getting a hold of me, several easy ways to do it. I'm at Action Coach Western Fairfax, and all you have to do is look that up that way on Google and you'll get to the right place. You can look me up in LinkedIn at Steve Kiama. That will bring you right to my page on LinkedIn. And there's a pretty good amount of information about me and what I do on there. The podcast I'm doing is the Business Spotlight podcast. And I'm doing this in collaboration with a bunch of other Action Coach franchise owners around the country and in fact and several other countries. We're all kind of working together to do this, not as an Action Coach venture, but as our own collaborative effort to help more business owners see that we are a community and see through people's challenges, that their challenges are not so unique, that other people are working on exactly the same things, and that we depend on each other to see new ways to get better at what we're doing. Because what we're doing is kind of an obscure profession. There are schools for all this other stuff. There is not a school that I know of for small business owners other than coaching Organizations like myself. So that's, that's really what we're trying to bring together and to share a little bit of the wisdom, a little bit of, you know, would you rather learn from somebody else's scars or your own? And that's a big part of what it's all about. And so, Gresh, I really appreciate you bringing me on the show and having the opportunity to share these little tidbits with people. I hope they found them helpful, I hope they found them amusing, but also I hope they found them inspiring, inspirational, so that they can do something better with what they've got.

Gresham Harkless 15:12

Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate you so much, Steve. And of course, to make it even easier, we're going to have the links and information in the show notes and, and I appreciate you so much and especially leaving us with that last nugget around, like, knowing what your why is. And I think a lot of times, even for me, like, I think one of the things I'm most excited around, collaboration, having people on the show, getting the sharpness all a little bit, is it, it opens up that collaboration piece an opportunity to kind of see things from a different perspective, but on a deeper level, as you said, and you all are collaborating in the YouTube space as well too, is being able to say that, hey, my problem is not just my problem, there's someone that is going through my problem. And on a deeper level, there's a solution to that problem. And I think the more we can get that information out there, the more prepared, the more successful that business owners, CEOs, entrepreneurs, CEOs, all these titles will ultimately be because we're aligned with our why. And then we have the community that we can kind of lean into to get in and see further. So appreciate you so much in doing that. Appreciate your time, of course, as well, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of day.

Steve Chiama 16:11

Thank you, Gresh. Have a fantastic weekend. I appreciate you taking time to put me on your show.

Gresham Harkless 16:18

Absolutely.