Above The Business

Waking up in a cold sweat at 3AM in the spring of 2019, Jeff knew he was done with corporate life.The startup he moved his family cross-country for was broken beyond repair. Great concept, handful of happy clients, but zero marketing presence to get to that next level.After advocating for a strategic marketing approach that the President liked and the COO didn’t, things stagnated. Rather than do nothing, Jeff handed in his resignation.Today, what they rejected is what Jeff helps his clients with. Bradley and Jeff discussed the difference between strategies and tactics. Because many struggling businesses have to diagnose the problem, it’s important to understand that strategy is high level while tactic is specific. In order to really pinpoint your issues and increase profits, you have to know how to measure. Jeff shares more about measuring correctly in this episode.Jeff is a dynamic, energetic and knowledgeable speaker with actionable advice on what you can do RIGHT NOW to get your business back on track. You’ll love Jeff and his approach to comprehensive change without spending an extra cent!

Today on the Leadership Podcast, Bradley sits down with Erik Qualman to discuss problem solving, work-life harmony, and his new book The Focus Project.A 5x Bestselling Author and Keynote Speaker, Erik has performed in over 55 countries and reached 50 million people. He was voted the 2nd Most Likeable Author in the World behind Harry Potter's J.K. Rowling. He is the host of the popular Super U Podcast and his work has been used by the National Guard to NBCUniversal to NASA. Erik’s “Three Piece” for success is Purpose - Process - Progress (not perfection).  He often asks, “What’s the one thing I could do to make everything easier or unnecessary?”  Ultimately, working to solve problems in your business means focusing on what’s most important.The Focus Project is a guide to pursuing less in order to achieve more—both personally and professionally. We will realize that leading an overly busy life is a choice, but it’s not a wise one. Being over-scheduled isn’t something to be proud of, it’s something to avoid at all costs. Instead, we should choose to focus on what matters most.Learn more about Erik and get The Focus Project when you visit www.equalman.comIf you’re ready to implement this principle in your business, listen to this episode!

This week on the Leadership Podcast, Bradley sits down with Jay Steinfeld.  Jay is the founder and former CEO of Blinds.com, the world’s largest online window coverings retailer, acquired by The Home Depot in 2014.    A firm believer that one should not retire but “rewire,” Jay now lectures and serves as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, serves on the Advisory Council at The University of Texas’s Herb Kelleher Entrepreneurship Center, and is the author of Lead from the Core: The Four Principles for Profit and Prosperity.  Core values reduce turnover and attract good hires in every industry.Jay’s Four Core values are…Evolve ContinuouslyExpress YourselfExperiment Without FearEnjoy The RideGet the first chapter of Jay’s book free when you visit his website, https://www.jaysteinfeld.com/thebook.

Theresa’s passion is helping great leaders build high performing teams.  She has learned that the greatest challenge all business owners and team leaders face is the “people stuff”;  she has dedicated her work to helping her clients take the mystery out of their people problems and put new strategies in place to become better leaders. Her #1 goal is to help her clients achieve their goals with more ease and create more joy in their career.Theresa Callahan is an Executive Leadership & Career Coach who leads small business owners and team leaders within organizations through her Managing For Performance Leadership Development program.  Her background includes 15 years of service to State Farm, as a Team Member, Agent and Agency Field Consultant, and 18 years serving Agents and Sales Leaders throughout the country through her customized leadership programs. In addition to her private client work with State Farm, Theresa serves leadership teams within organizations such as Microsoft, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and clients within the Korn Ferry Global Consulting portfolio.Her “Stepping Into Leadership” Workshop offers insights and powerful lessons learned working with successful business owners throughout the country, and focuses on 6 Critical Building Blocks for attracting, onboarding and retaining a High Performing Team.  Twice a year Theresa also hosts a retreat program that is based in Tuscany, immersing small groups into a small medieval village in Southern Tuscany for those seeking adventure and travel through individual and group coaching experiences.    Visit Managingforperformance.com to get her book, Managing For Performance.

On this week’s episode, Bradley sits down with Liz Kislik to discuss developing stronger leaders in your business.  If you want to transform the way you do business, Liz —Harvard Business Review and Forbes contributor, management consultant, executive coach—can help whether you’re part of a family-run business, national non-profit, or Fortune 500 company.They first discussed change initiatives and organizations.  This includes the importance of pre-mortum and after action review.  Liz defines a Pre-Mortum as thinking through what could go wrong, aka “secondhand consequences.”  Once you’ve done this, you can build a safety net around what could go wrong.  Then you can better allocate resources in order to make the changes.After this, they discussed developing other leaders.  Liz suggested that you stop trying to train your team in your areas of weakness.  We try to delegate things we don’t love or aren’t good at, but you have to hire someone to do this. That means you’re training your new employee in something you’re not good at.  Instead, you’re better off to find someone else, maybe a course or a coach, to develop that person.  This will give them an opportunity to succeed in that role.Finally, they chatted about aligning your goals, mission, and values.  It’s important to strategically connect the day to day business of your organization to these guiding principles.Ready to develop stronger leaders?

In today’s podcast, Amy Lynn Durham and Bradley discuss Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Spiritual Intelligence (SQ).  They especially focused on the skills needed to grow your EQ, including self awareness, emotional Management strategies, and a recognize-repair-recover process. They also discuss how to engage your employees, and why it matters.  Finally, Amy emphasizes the importance of making wise and compassionate decisions.Amy has spent years in the corporate world successfully managing hundreds of employees for private and publicly traded companies. Her company, Create Magic At Work's intention is to offer Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) and Emotional Intelligence (EQ) tools to energize and transform the workplace.As an expert in building positive company cultures, Amy designed Create Magic At Work to bring a variety of services and strategies to aid in cultivating teamwork and harmony in order to improve profits and employee morale.Amy Lynn Durham is the CEO of "Create Magic At Work" and a U.C. Berkeley Certified Executive Coach. She is certified to coach in the 21 skills associated with Spiritual Intelligence (SQ) using the SQ21 Assessment and an Emotional Intelligence Practitioner (EQ). Learn more about her company when you visit https://createmagicatwork.net/.

Today on the leadership podcast, Bradley sits down with Scott Foster and Steve Cannon.  These experts are sharing advice on how to sell.  A native of Georgia, Scott graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Georgia with a degree in Risk Management & Insurance.  Along with his CLU designation, Scott is a life and qualifying member of the Million Dollar Round Table.  He has been in the top 10 State Farm life agents every year of his 40 plus year career with 24 years as the #1 life agent and 21 years as the #1 multiline agent.  He has qualified for State Farm President’s Club more than 80 times and State Farm Trophy 18 times, most recently in 2016.Steve, a native of South Carolina, graduated from The Citadel with a degree in Business Administration and worked in the medical sales field for seven years before joining the State Farm family.  On September 1, 1989, Steve opened a scratch agency and qualified for Ambassador Travel in just four months. Since that time, Steve has qualified over 30 more times for travel with 17 years as an Exotic Traveler, he has consistently been ranked as a top 50 State Farm Agent for 25 of the past 30 years, he is a 2 time President’s Club Trophy Qualifier, a Lifetime President’s Club Qualifier (qualifying over 38 times), a Lifetime MDRT Qualifier, a 17-time Chairman’s Circle Qualifier, and a Crystal Excellence Qualifier.

Does your existing business model work?  Today on the podcast, Bradley and Troy sit down to discuss some of the topics covered in his latest book, Inflection Point (find it at www.korsgaden.com/resources).  These include how to redefine your role when the existing model doesn’t work, how to build a team that can grow with the market, and having a flight plan for your business.  Troy Korsgaden is a highly sought-after insurance and financial services consultant. He is the principal of Korsgaden International, which specializes in global marketing, distribution, agency building and technology strategies for many of the world’s largest insurance carriers and financial services companies.As a consultant, speaker, and author of seven books, Korsgaden’s mission is to help the insurance industry and its representatives wake up to the radical transformation taking place in the insurance industry. He helps those in the industry learn how to better communicate with consumers, so that consumers develop a higher appreciation for the value of insurance products.They discussed recruiting practices, and specifically a recruiting mindset.  We’ve heard the term “The Great Resignation” frequently, but Troy poses that it’s always been difficult to recruit.  However, the ones who are actually getting it done have a constant recruiting process.  When you’re always looking for talent, you consider whether a lead is a new client or a good candidate for a new employee.Then, they considered how to develop a team that is able to keep up with changes in the industry.  We often use the term “growth to contribution.”  Technology is changing at a rapid pace, so your team has to have a mindset towards growing, learning, and improving.  You also need to think about whether your team member is contributing more to the bottom line or just contributing to your overhead costs.The best way to see whether or not your team members are helping your bottom line is to have a solid understanding of your financials.  You should have a process to review your numbers and look at your expenses on a monthly basis.Troy then pointed out the value of presentations over quotes.  Specifically in the insurance and financial industry, there is a volume method to sending quotes that works.  However, there is power in your words, and standing up new capabilities in the form of a presentation is very powerful.Finally, they discussed a flight plan.  You could think about it like an actual flight.  If you heard your pilot and copilot questioning what to do with all the controls on their panel, you wouldn’t feel very confident in boarding the plane.  As an owner, you need to know what buttons to push when things aren’t going according to plan.  In addition to a solid business plan, you need a flight plan that shows you what to do when things go wrong.Ready to find your Inflection Point?  Listen now!

Mike Smerklo is an experienced entrepreneur, investor and business leader driven by the desire to turn ideas into reality. Having bought and scaled a small business into a publicly traded company worth nearly a billion dollars in value, he has a deep understanding of the hard work, dedication and grit that truly powers successful entrepreneurship. Today, as the co-founder and managing director of Next Coast Ventures, Mike is a champion for a new generation of entrepreneurs building disruptive companies in big markets. His new book, Mr. Monkey and Me, is a “real talk” guide for entrepreneurs who want to cut through the noise to cultivate a mindset that supports greatness.Mike grew up in a blue-collar family in Ohio with dreams of achieving something more with his life. After working his way through college to earn an accounting degree and moving to Chicago to launch his CPA career, he eventually talked his way into a junior analyst gig with the Wall Street investment bank Lehman Brothers. He went on to earn an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and experienced the Silicon Valley dot-com boom as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.Mike was recruited by legendary entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz as one of the first employees of their new startup, Loudcloud. Here, he learned from the very best about what it takes to grow a company from an idea through an initial public offering. He began his own entrepreneurship journey in 2003, purchasing ServiceSource, a 30-person technology services startup in San Francisco. As CEO over the next 12 years, he grew the business into a successful 3,000-person publicly-traded company with close to $300M in revenue.He has developed a new perspective on entrepreneurship at the helm of the Austin-based firm Next Coast Ventures, which has backed more than 40 companies across two funds to help startup founders achieve their goals.

Today on the Leadership Podcast, Bradley sits down with AJ Vaden to discuss building your online and offline brand.  Over the last 15 years, AJ has helped create, launch and grow several multi-million dollar businesses from start up to 7 and 8 figures in annual revenue. She has played the role of Salesperson to CSO, recruiter to COO, spender to CFO and from just being bossy to CEO.Today, you’ll hear how to build your Know-Like-Trust factor, develop your leads system to bring leads from social media into your email list, getting testimonials, and the strategy behind building your brand.Her method for brand building is to PLAN: Communicate the problem you solve in one word, share your unique way of solving it, know for whom you solve this problem, and figure out how you make money solving it.Along with her company Brand Builders Group (https://brandbuildersgroup.com/study/), AJ has been featured in Inc, Success Magazine, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and Good Morning America.  She is the Co-Host of The Influential Personal Brand Podcast which Forbes named as one of the top 10 podcasts to listen to in 2021.Ready to build your personal brand?  After you listen to this episode, get AJ’s free resources to get started: https://brandbuildersgroup.com/study/