How To Scale Your Business: Scaling Up, Leadership, And Business Growth | Herb Cogliano

What if you could break through the barriers holding your business back and scale beyond $10 million in sales? Join us as we sit down with a distinguished Scaling Up coach, Herb Cogliano, who shares a wealth of experience from a remarkable 35-year journey transforming a family business across North America. Discover the hidden complexities behind scaling a business, not just growing it. It’s not just about increasing revenue; it's about expanding purpose, impact, and team capabilities. With only a tiny fraction of American businesses reaching that coveted $10 million mark, our guest offers strategies to overcome stagnation, from delegating key functions to experts to embracing a functional accountability chart.

The power of business coaching is harnessed in this enlightening episode, where we explore how certified business coaches can redefine a company’s trajectory. Learn to cultivate internal capabilities, such as employee development through a company university, to foster leadership and talent retention. Our conversation dives into the shift from hands-on management to effective delegation and the vital role of hiring individuals with management potential. An external perspective from a coach can illuminate blind spots and unlock new pathways for growth, ensuring your business runs smoothly even in your absence.

Prepare to unlock new growth opportunities by embracing adaptability and strategic pivots. We delve into the importance of tracking market trends and planning strategic pivots, whether through acquisitions or entering new markets. Our guest stresses the importance of transitioning from working in the business to working on it, focusing on activities that drive growth and profitability. With resources such as complimentary assessments and expert advice, this episode empowers business owners to chase their dreams without settling for less—because you deserve the company of your dreams.

Herb Cogliano: CEO and Founder of Aspire Growth Advisors

Website: https://www.aspiregrowthadvisors.com/

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

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/herb.cogliano.37

Blog: https://www.aspiregrowthadvisors.com/blog

Email: herb@aspiregrowthadvisors.com

#SmallBusinessGrowth #ScalingUp #BusinessCoaching #HerbCogliano #AspireGrowthAdvisors #BusinessStrategy #EntrepreneurshipTips #ScaleYourBusiness #DelegationMatters #TeamLeadership #BusinessPodcast #EntrepreneurSuccess #GrowYourBusiness #BusinessScaling  #VisionaryLeadership #ScalingStrategies #BuildToLast #Entrepreneurship #SmallBusinessTips #ScalableBusiness #EntrepreneurJourney #BusinessGrowth #StrategicPlanning #SmallBusinessSuccess #EntrepreneurMindset #GrowthStrategies #EntrepreneurLife #Oklahoma City #SmallBusinessPivots #Success #MichaelDMorrison 

Chapters

• 0:00 Scaling Up
• 16:35 Empowering Business Growth Through Coaching
• 23:32 Developing Leaders in Scaling Businesses
• 30:40 Charting Business Growth Through Pivoting
• 38:48 Small Business Growth Strategies

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

All right, Welcome to another Small Business Pivot brought to you by Boss. Today we have a special guest and I hope you buckle up today because we are both coaches. But before we do that, I always know that the business owner can only say their name and their business, like the business owner can. So tell us about yourself and your business.

Speaker 2: 0:20

Michael and welcome to all of you in the listening audience. I am a scaling up coach. I'm a person who had a journey of my own personal business for 35 years, part of a family business, and went through the dynamics of scaling up a business from one location to many locations across North America, dealing with the challenges in the drama with scaling employees, scaling clients, scaling services, scaling office locations, all thinking that when it got bigger, life would get better. But the more complexity that came with scaling, the more drama I felt and the more committed I was to making the journey simpler and easier. Share with others that journey in ways that you can enjoy the ride to scaling up with you and your team.

Speaker 1: 1:24

Fantastic. Well, how do you think we're going to help our listeners best today?

Speaker 2: 1:30

Well, I know you're going to give me some amazing questions. Those questions are going to draw that out of me and I look forward to helping answer them.

Speaker 1: 1:40

Fantastic. Well, we'll be right back after we introduce the show with more about scaling your business. Welcome to Small Business Pivots, a podcast designed for small business owners. I'm your host, michael Morrison, a small business coach and founder of BOSS, where we make business ownership simplified for success, so that you can own a business that runs without you. To learn more, go to businessownershipsimplifiedcom. But welcome back to Small Business Pivots. This is a true treat If you've ever read one of the popular books Scaling Up. Our friend today is a scaling up coach, as he mentioned, and we're going to talk about scaling up a business, because that is very difficult for small business owners to even fathom having more than one location, multiple employees, as you said it best in one word drama, right. So let's talk about let's start with the first of what's the difference between growth and scaling up.

Speaker 2: 2:42

I don't know if there's differences. I would say there's levels of excuse me, and the levels deal with number one what does the ownership want to accomplish with their company? I view the company as a vehicle for the owner and the team, and that vehicle really is helping them deliver a purpose, a service to the world. And so that when we identify the business purpose and we're doing that purpose let's say it's a $1 million business a year and you're servicing 100 clients and they're happy and they're impacted you're making a difference. But what if I scale that to a $10 million company servicing 1,000 people a year with 1,000 impactful outcomes? I'm scaling my purpose and my impact outcomes. I'm scaling my purpose and my impact. And so the question to the ownership team is how big do you want to scale that impact? And from that comes scaling revenue, scaling profits, scaling cash, scaling the people who run the business to deliver on that purpose.

Speaker 1: 4:07

So when most people hear scaling up, it's more than just growing your revenue, is that fair to say?

Speaker 2: 4:17

Yeah, to scale a business successfully, you're growing a bunch of different things. You're scaling the people in it. You're scaling the purpose and impact from it. You're scaling cash flow to fund it. You're scaling clients to deliver it, and all these things have to work in unison to do that, and that's why most people get stuck. And that's why most people get stuck. There's only one half of 1% of the companies in America today ever reach 10 million or more in sales.

Speaker 2: 4:57

Wow, Now, when I heard that number 32 million companies approximately one half of 1% only reached 10 million or more. 10 million didn't seem like a big behemoth company to me. But 99.5% never make it. Some of them are solopreneurs or lifestyle companies and that's all they want and that's great. But many others want that $10 million. But the complexity they're not able to break through the complexity to get to the other side and they're stuck.

Speaker 1: 5:39

That's a popular word that we use in our coaching world is stuck, and most of our listeners, their business is stuck and they've plateaued, if you will. In fact, most of them, I would guess, have probably doing less than a million in annual revenue and, to go along with your statistic, I heard that less than I believe 8% ever even hit a million. So when we're talking seven figures, you're talking about scaling, a lot of responsibility too. So what is kind of the first steps for business owners that are stuck and they're working those long hours and they just can't fathom even working on anything else or doing anything else other than what they're doing, which is putting out fires and working long hours? What are kind of those first steps?

Speaker 2: 6:30

I think one of the first challenges I see is bandwidth. The owner of the company is chief cook and bottle washer. They're doing marketing, they're doing sales, they're paying the bills, they're doing marketing, they're doing sales, they're paying the bills, they're doing the hiring and that's what you need to do when you're at that size. But one of the methods we use is a functional accountability chart which is simple for leadership bandwidth and over time we want you to grow your bandwidth by adding somebody to be in charge of sales, marketing, finance, it operations.

Speaker 2: 7:16

Now you might say Herb, well, that sounds great, but how do I do that? In every quarter we one the next best function. We need to increase ownership bandwidth a month or a part-time CFO for 20 hours a week. We do it fractionally until the business can afford the full-time person in that seat, but it also gets you away from it and gives you more bandwidth to put in the other more productive areas of the company that you're really good at, other more productive areas of the company that you're really good at. But most people think they keep having to juggling all these different hats and they need a pathway on how to slowly grow the leadership team and by that quarterly progressive pathway. Over time, our leadership team is developed, their bandwidth increases and they feel like they have more freedom and less drama to run the company, versus to actually have to work in the company day in and day out.

Speaker 1: 8:35

Is there a formula to use Like, for instance, a CFO would be your best first step, then a CMO then? Or is it just based on the company itself?

Speaker 2: 8:48

I think it's situational, michael, because every company owner has a different background of expertise. They have a different challenge. If your company has major cash issues and you don't have anybody who's managing your money well, doing the right financial statement reporting, making sure you can keep the lights on and make payroll, then I would say it'd be pretty critical. Then you get somebody on that team that can help that, or your business could go out of business very quickly, or your business could go out of business very quickly, but if your sales are flat or declining and you can't grow, it may be somebody on the marketing or sales side.

Speaker 1: 9:36

That's most pressing right now. I know systems and processes are a key component of scaling a business. So how does one find the time to figure that out, and are there some steps that they can follow? Because when we mention systems and processes, the first thing they think of is a lot more work for nothing. That's not increasing sales, not reducing debt, it's just piddly work, and they understand the importance of it. They just can't find the time to replace what they're doing with creating systems and processes. Do you have any input on that?

Speaker 2: 10:12

Yeah, I guess my perspective would be that we have another tool called the process accountability chart. Every company has very important processes that drive your business model and you can't deal with all of them at once. But which one is most critical right now? For example, if you're a company that cannot hire staff for some reason, you have all these openings but you can't find anybody. Some reason you have all these openings but you can't find anybody.

Speaker 2: 10:48

Do you think a critical process to work on would be recruitment to onboarding, because whatever's happening right now is not working. So if we don't fix or retool or re-engineer recruiting to onboarding, we're going to have a problem. So to solve that constraint, we identify the one most important process each quarter that will help unblock our major bottleneck and get us free to the next step. That's the one we work on, and in unison. When I hire that one person, fractionally or not, that works on the face chart. What I found is I can't be an expert in all of the functions, but if I hire a great fractional HR person with recruitment background, they normally come to the table knowing how to fix that process for me if they're any good at what they do, so normally together that helps me solve my issue as a business owner.

Speaker 1: 11:57

As a business owner. Is there a size of business? Is there a revenue size? Is it employee size? As to when you can afford to scale, Because scaling takes money, it takes an investment. You mentioned fractional employees, things like that, but is there some kind of formula, Because I hear so many business owners I want to scale my business and they don't really understand what it means or if they're even in a position to do that. Can you help explain that?

Speaker 2: 12:24

Well, I think, michael, it goes back to, first of all, what does the owner want? Scale to 1 million, scale to 100 million? So we need to find the actual target. But then I think scaling also, in its basic form, is about cash flow. So if I want to scale and I'm going to hire more employees before I get 20 more clients, let's say, I need capacity and bandwidth for delivery. How much can I self-fund? And if I can't self-fund it, would the bank loan it to me or an SBA loan and am I credit worthy?

Speaker 2: 13:11

So you need to be in a business with high enough gross margins in bottom line. The businesses that I was in had good enough gross margins that I could self-fund the majority of all my growth. Now I could have taken it out as a dividend or a distribution at the end of the year and that's a choice. But most scaling up owners, when they see a marketplace that's vibrant, when they see an industry with healthy bottom line and gross margin, they want to take advantage of that market and they want to scale it. So they keep reinvesting the profits and the excess cash flow back into the company so they can continue to make even bigger profits and bigger cash flow. But if you don't have good margins and good receivables and good cash flow, your scale up is very limited.

Speaker 1: 14:10

We offer business loans at Boss and we'll have a business owner from time to time come to us and say I hear you're not supposed to have any debt whatsoever, and I kind of combat that a little bit where there is good debt. If you will, yeah, Can you help explain that?

Speaker 2: 14:27

No, I think that there is good debt and it's like in your personal life. What can you afford? Debt that makes you cash flow negative is not good debt. But if you buy, like a car, if I buy a Mercedes which is $100,000 plus vehicle, but I only make $25,000 a year income, that's not fundable because I will always have more payment than I do income. So for a company it's the same way. Do I hire one employee or do I hire 10 employees all at once? And what could the business afford? Banks ultimately want to know that at the end of the day, when they loan you money, that your cash flow generated from the business will always be large enough to service their loan payment and when you can't show that, they don't want to make that loan.

Speaker 1: 15:35

So let's talk about kind of the process of scaling up.

Speaker 1: 15:38

So you're certified. You're listening to Small Business Pivots. This episode is proudly brought to you by BOSS, where business ownership is simplified for success. At BOSS, we help business owners create their businesses to run smoothly without them being there 24-7. Our seasoned business coaches, who have walked the path themselves, provide invaluable guidance and support, and with additional services like fast business loans. Seasoned business coaches who have walked the path themselves, providing valuable guidance and support, and with additional services like fast business loans, some approved within 24 to 48 hours. Comprehensive online courses, detailed workbooks and engaging classes. Boss offers a wealth of resources to help you succeed. Discover how small business success begins with Boss at businessownershipsimplifiedcom.

Speaker 1: 16:25

If you're enjoying the podcast, make sure to stay connected by hitting that subscribe button, giving us a thumbs up or leaving a positive review. Your support keeps us going. Now let's get back to our incredible guest. So let's talk about kind of the process of scaling up. So you're certified, you're a business coach. What does that look like? From start to finish? So somebody has an idea of the experience they could have with a coach like yourself.

Speaker 2: 16:50

Yeah, I think on a simple level, we want to understand from the owner what is their current state of their company. Where do they want to get it to? If you look at the next three to five years, if you're 10 million, do you want to double? Do you want to be 20 million or do you want to be 100 million? Most of the scaling up companies that I work with are companies that are committed. They have the mindset and they have the initiative that they want to double their business at least top line revenue, every three to five years. And, based upon that target, we want to come up with a shared vision, a plan of how we're going to get there.

Speaker 2: 17:47

What are the priorities that we need to have over three to five years? Capabilities that we need to create. One of mine was creating a university inside the company so we could train and develop our own internal people, because we know to grow the company, you need to grow the people in it. So that was a core capability we didn't have in the beginning. But to double our size, we'd need to create that capability to support the targets that we wanted to achieve, and so we work with the owner and, ultimately, the leadership team on putting their shared vision on paper. One simple page of paper to make it so easy to understand that everybody in the company can be on the same page while we together execute and build that company into reality. And we do that over the next three to five years together. And then we reset, and we do it again and again until the owner says wait, a minute timeout. I've achieved what I wanted to achieve.

Speaker 1: 19:03

Yeah, I love that. I love that. So coaching is a big thing. I know for myself. I struggled a lot, like most of our listeners, until I hired my first coach two decades ago. Can you share the value of a coach and what it did for your businesses that you owned, and then now the value that you see of actually being a coach and stepping into these other businesses, how valuable it can?

Speaker 2: 19:32

be formal coach, I would say would be my father, being a family business Very much mentoring, giving me different opportunities for stretch, different assignments in leadership.

Speaker 2: 19:53

That would expand my experience and my competency. But my first professional coach really brought outside perspective, because you can be very insulated inside your company. You don't always get the direct truth of what you need from your employees. Some of them may be fearful of telling you what you need to know because of their job or whatever. But it's true and this coach really could see my blind spots and help me address them in a way that was productive and made me become a better business owner and CEO. Because of it, and when I learned how to do that from him, I was then able to apply that same coaching mindset to all of my direct reports. And when you do that to your direct reports and they grow, then the business can run on its own without you always having to be there, and that was the ultimate freedom that I always wanted. I wanted to work on the business more than in it, but I needed to earn that freedom and that's where the coach really helped me grow and evolve.

Speaker 1: 21:13

So you're saying there is a chance of owning a business that can run without you.

Speaker 2: 21:18

Absolutely. I'm living proof.

Speaker 1: 21:21

I just, I just wanted our listeners and clients and everybody else to hear that it is possible. You know cause some of them? They're just putting out fires and they're just like, but how you know? So what are some challenges that you see today with most business owners? Because from time to time a business owner we work with will say am I the only one that is going through this? So can you share some of those challenges that you work with clients on?

Speaker 2: 21:51

Yeah, I think one of the number one barriers is the ability to hire, develop and retain leaders in your company, because in the beginning you're used to delegating. Let me tell you what you need to do, michael, as the owner do A, do B, do C, come back to me, let me know and we'll do it all again next week. Why, when you're small, that's the way it is. But when you get bigger and you need to delegate marketing finance operations number one the people you hired in the beginning weren't hired to be managers. They were hired to be great functional staff and that's hopefully what they are and that's hopefully what they are. But now you flip a switch and say, well, now I need you to be a manager and I need you to have all those skills and experience and capability, and they don't day one, and so you get frustrated, they get frustrated and hence drama occurs. So there's kind of a pivot period where you're internalizing, when I'm making new hires, what percent of them need to have management or leadership background so that they will be promotable sooner than later with the right skill set and the right desire to want to be a leader, because not everybody does. But once you do that, that's going to be a key inflection point for your growth and scale.

Speaker 2: 23:32

The second thing that goes with that you have to learn how to coach and develop people, because maybe you were a great sales guy. You sold insurance. You have your own little brokerage now three to five people, you're doing over a million a year. Life is good, but you never had to develop a leadership team. What does that mean? Like what do I have to do? What's the definition of success? What tools do I use? Do I even like doing it? And that's a turning point for a CEO of a scaling up company. You go from being the biggest sales guy, the biggest brand ambassador, to now being the number one developer of talent in your company, and that may not be the job you're used to doing the last 20 years.

Speaker 1: 24:21

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 24:22

So it's a learning curve.

Speaker 1: 24:24

Absolutely. What makes a good leader, a good manager these days?

Speaker 2: 24:32

Oh boy, there's a bunch of wonderful things. I think number one is the willingness to want to be. Do you see potential in people? Because when you think of good leadership, number one we repeat a lot of things over and over. What are they? What are the core values of the company? I'm always talking about our values in the way we behave, treat each other, treat our clients, and we need to be consistent. And so if you're not always repeating almost like a parent, do you remember ever saying to your parents oh my God, there they go again. They keep reminding me about homework or being polite, or saying thank you and please and all that good stuff, well, you're the head cheerleader of that for your company. So I'm always repeating our values, I'm always repeating our purpose, I'm always repeating our top priorities. I'm always talking about our big, hairy, audacious goal. And that's repetition. And you need heart, you need an emotional connection behind it, to want to keep doing it over and over, the way you want to do it, to raise good kids over and over.

Speaker 1: 25:54

That's some great advice. And I've got some business owners I know that listen, that they're kind of stuck in the fact that they have skilled workers right, they're doing the tactical things day to day. They're doing what they're supposed to excellent, dependable, responsible but they're not leaders and so the business owner is kind of strapped. He's like I can't really I don't have a position to hire for a leader because I've already got people in those positions and those skill set areas for a leader, because I've already got people in those positions and those skillset areas. So got any advice on how you could help them with some advice that I can go find a leader or afford a leader and how to kind of reorganize a little bit.

Speaker 2: 26:35

You can go out and hire outside people. I would just say that's risk. There's higher risk when you bring people in from the outside, and especially at the leadership level. When you hire the wrong leader from the outside and bring them in, they can cause a lot of disruption with the current team you have. So I'm not saying not to do it, but it's not my first resort, it's normally my last Internally, what do you do?

Speaker 2: 27:11

Well, number one if you have some other good leaders, can they mentor aspiring people that would like to become a leader, aspiring people that would like to become a leader? And by that mentoring relationship, you and I know the majority of leadership that we learned was not from a book. It was by modeling other people that we thought were great examples of leadership, whether from our family, from our friends or from our boss. The second thing that I would do, which is low risk, without changing anybody's title, give them a leadership assignment. Let them lead a project, let them lead a committee Low stakes, you know, low probability for big errors and costing you money, but let them try it and mentor them. They're going to make a mistake. Let them fall, but not fall off a cliff, maybe fall off one or two steps and then you can see how determined they are to want to improve, want to get better, take initiative. And then I would, just over time, make the leadership assignments I gave people a little bit more difficult, a little more challenging, and the more and more they grew and they got through the assignment, you'll know when they're ready for that promotion.

Speaker 2: 28:45

Most people do it exactly backwards. I'm in a spot. Michael's been with me for five years. He's a great worker on the shop floor. We're just going to make him manager tomorrow.

Speaker 1: 28:58

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:59

Complete recipe for failure.

Speaker 1: 29:03

That may work one out of 10 times, but most times it won't, and you could lose that wonderful employee if you do it wrong, so don't yeah, that's great advice too, because I've seen where people have shuffled an employee around without getting buy-in from that employee and then the employee leaves because that's not what they were comfortable doing. You know, they liked to be either the office person or the machine worker or the designer or whatever it was, but they didn't want to be a leader. They never asked for that. So that's a that's that's great advice. Well, the show is called small business pivots. Any pivots that you made in your historical entrepreneur journey that you'd like to share, that maybe someone else go. Hey, I can relate to that. Maybe I'll try that.

Speaker 2: 29:51

I think the major pivots are strategy pivots that were based upon my market dynamics changing. So in my education business, we were early on in online education, so my lead flow was very strong and growing for several years. But if you've looked at online education, over the years it's become mainstream. It can be commoditized, where there's millions of options that are very low priced via the internet, via AI, and so it got really hard to have the right traction for growth if you're in a highly commoditized competitive market. So I can either keep doing what I'm doing and losing revenue, losing lead flow, or I can pivot. And so you need to look at your business, your business's traction in your marketplace. Is your lead flow increasing or declining? Is your pricing being challenged or declining? Is your pricing being challenged? Do you still have high margins or are you pressured more and more to lower price in order to keep up with the competition?

Speaker 2: 31:13

And when I see those things happen, I don't just do it, incidentally, I'm charting it month over month, quarter over quarter the number of leads, the number of appointments, the number of proposal win rates, and you'll notice when the market's changing, that's going to start to drop off. I don't want to wait till it falls off the cliff. I want to catch it when I really see a trend that isn't going to change, a trend that isn't going to change. And then you have to look at a pivot. What other market, what other offering, what other pricing strategy would reignite the wind at my back and push me again into a competitively advantageous position in the market? And most owners wait till it's too late. They have a fear. It worked before. I'm afraid if I change it I'm going to lose everything. But yet if you don't consider change, you could lose everything.

Speaker 2: 32:20

That's why tracking it's so important that you're not doing this by your gut. Your business is very important, so having the data and planning the pivots with the right change at the right time is crucial. But not every owner gets that right and that's a problem.

Speaker 1: 32:40

And that's where a good coach can come in is they're that outside kind of sounding board, second set of eyes that works with other businesses and they could say, hey, the last four businesses that, blah, blah, blah. This is what happened.

Speaker 2: 32:54

So Michael, a real story. We were doing staffing services really in a regional basis and we've been around for decades. High brand identity, but more and more competitors. You could open a staffing company on any corner, any street, usa, and they were. And it was harder to get orders. More salespeople, lower pricing, and yet that's all we knew. So we come in and we're starting to lead the business.

Speaker 2: 33:28

Now, second generation, and what do you do? Well, my playbook for my early life was organic growth Hire more salespeople, make more phone calls, make more appointments, get more revenue. It wasn't working. I had to expand my pivot playbook. We learned how to make an acquisition. I learned how to open an office not only in another region but another side of the country and then into a different country up in Canada. I'd never done that before, didn't know what it was like to set up a bank account in Canada or employment law in Canada. But I needed to change my mindset, to have new vehicles for growth on a pivot, and that's where owners have to be willing to change and adapt when the business is not changing in the right direction.

Speaker 1: 34:31

What are some things? Because you mentioned being the owner and I'm asked this a lot what are some of those things? You've mentioned some of them, but percentage-wise, kind of like what could somebody envision as a business owner? So I have this business that runs without me? Finally, what are some of those things that you work on? I just met with a business owner yesterday. So when I have that business, what am I going to be doing?

Speaker 2: 34:54

Yeah. So you said something there. I just want to adjust. You said runs without me. The way I would say it is I'm working on the business versus working in it. That doesn't mean runs without me. You're still the owner, you're still the CEO.

Speaker 2: 35:13

If that's what you wish and what you're going to do with your time, what I ultimately love to do with my time is focus on more market facing activities. Market facing activities are the activities of growth Open a new location, roll out a new product line, create a new partnership or joint venture, do an acquisition. These are all market-facing activities which will help grow the company. But before I was too busy putting out fires, looking at the accounts receivable, managing the sales team and how many calls they made last week, putting out drama because we didn't have enough people doing delivery that I couldn't fill all the orders I had. So how much time do you think I spent on market-facing things? Very little, and my company's growth early on showed it. And so that's the mindset to go from working in to have the freedom to work on more.

Speaker 1: 36:24

I like that. I like that. We could go forever, I am sure, but we are almost out of time. How can someone get a hold of you, follow you? What social channels are you active on?

Speaker 2: 36:36

Sure, simplest way is to go to my website. Way is to go to my website aspiregrowthadvisorscom For anybody that wants to understand the gap in your current business for scaling. There's a complimentary assessment to determine your scaling up readiness, and I also have a high impact CEO assessment for you to understand your level of CEO readiness to lead that scaling up charge. So please take advantage of that. I'm also on LinkedIn, but just appreciate being able to share some experience with you, michael, in your audience today.

Speaker 1: 37:21

Well, this has been a treat to have you on the episode. So I always end with one little question. If you were in front of an audience of business owners all different sizes, seasons of business what is something that's applicable to all of them Advice, quotes, books, whatever it might be?

Speaker 2: 37:41

You deserve the business of your dreams. Don't settle. A lot of people start a company with a great vision and unfortunately it turns into a nightmare. I want you to really have the company of your dreams. That will not feel like a nightmare. Scaling up was just the growth methodology for me that helped me bring my dream to life and, if it helps some of you, wonderful. I know there's different growth methodologies out there. You have to find what works for you, but for me it was the most pivotal book I have ever read. But more importantly, it's not reading the book that's important. It's the mastering of the concepts in it that gets you to the dream that you all want, and thank you for your time.

Speaker 1: 38:44

My pleasure. You've been a wealth of information and a blessing to many. Herb, I thank you so much for being on our show today. Thank you, michael. Thank you for listening to Small Business Pivots. Please don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast. If your business is stuck, you need help creating a business that can run without you, or you need a fast business loan or line of credit, go to our website businessownershipsimplifiedcom and schedule a free consultation to learn why small business success starts with boss. If you want to talk anything small business related, email me at michael at michaeldmorrisoncom. We'll see you next time on Small Business Pivots.