Building a Clear and Compelling Vision for Growth, with Brett Gilliland

This is the Athletics of business podcast, episode 18. Welcome to the Athletics of Business, a podcast about how the traits and behaviors of elite athletes and remarkable business leaders frequently intersect the real stories and hard lessons to help you level up your leadership and performance. Now your host, Ed Molitor. Welcome to the Athletics of Business podcast and our special guest today is Brett Gilliwan. Brett is founder and CEO of Elite Entrepreneurs, which specializes in helping business owners who are running seven figure businesses by giving them the knowledge, tools and processes they need to grow and scale to $10 million and beyond. He's an expert in organization development, leadership and Strategy and spent 10 years helping Infusionsoft grow from $7 million to over $100 million in annual revenue.

One of Brett's favorite professional accomplishments is co creating infusionsoft's Elite Forum alongside CEO Clayton Mask and building the elite business inside of infusionsoft. Outside of work, Brett enjoys spending time with his wife, Sharon and their eight. Yes, eight children. Brett, welcome to the Athletics of Business podcast. I am honored and humbled to have you here, and I am not sure that our listener knows how much they are in store for today. So thank you again for joining us.

Ed, it's my pleasure. I'm excited to be part of your podcast. I'm impressed with who you are and what you're doing and just glad to help however I can today.

Well, thanks. And that, you know, it's not so much about me, it's about the incredible guests that we have on, have had on the podcast and what they shared with us. And can you, before we really dive into the questions, can you bring us back to your journey, the beginning of your journey, and how you got to where you are today with elite entrepreneurs?

Sure, sure. So I got an undergraduate degree in business and my dad was an entrepreneur. So I grew up in the Phoenix area. He was a general contractor, growing that business. And he worked this really well in the summers outside in the Phoenix heat. That was kind of his get as much education as you can program. Right. Don't want you doing what I'm doing. Get out and get some education. So I thought I would always join the family business. So I went and did the general business degree and was ready to go back. Meanwhile, he kind of shut things down. He said, you know what? I'm going to wrap this up so that you don't get stuck in the family business. I want you to go out and do and be your own thing. Okay, so now what?

So I went out and got my first job as a customer service advisor at a Ford dealership, and I was like, I need customer service experience. And I was pretty brutal for a couple years, just dealing with unhappy customers. But I learned a ton. And eventually that job got so stressful, I thought, I'm going to go back for more schooling. So I went back to school. I went to graduate school and got a degree in organizational behavior, which is really. It's a. It's a business discipline, but it's a social science business type of thing. And it's how organizations tick. If you want different results, how do you change the inputs in the organization to get different results? Anyway, after graduate school, I went to work in big companies, and I saw firsthand some of the challenges of mashing two huge companies together.

So specifically, I went to work for Compact computers in. In 2001, and HP bought Compaq within months of me joining that company. And so for about five years, I just watched the mashing together of those two really large companies that had some great history, Especially in the case of hp, there's kind of this storied HP way and this great culture. We just saw the mashing of these two big entities together, and in the process, were doing a bunch of restructuring and letting people go, and there was layoffs and early retirements, and it was just a bunch of change. Very turbulent for about five years. I decided that was enough. I'm leaving that behind. And I went to home building, which was kind of up and to the right at the time in 2006.

And anybody on this podcast who can think back to 2006, 7 and 8, you know that as soon as I got to home building, things started to crash in home building, and I was doing this restructuring and layoff thing again. So I was done with big companies and decided to go out on my own. Started consulting, wanted to help small businesses grow. I wanted to help small businesses avoid some of those big business challenges. I just wanted to develop small businesses. So I came across a company called infusionsoft, convinced them that they could use my services, met a guy named Clayton Mask, who at least saw enough potential in our partnership that I could help them grow their company.

And I ended up hiring on at Infusionsoft about eight or nine months into that consulting engagement, and helped build Infusionsoft for 10 years to over 100 million in revenue, 500 plus employees. It's quite a. Quite a ride. So sorry, that was a lengthy introduction. No, that's kind of who I am and where I come from.

Well, I'm going to keep the introduction going. So I would love for you to go back and talk about how you met Clay. You saw him at a speaking engagement, is that correct?

That's true. So Clay was speak. He had infusionsoft. Not just Clay, but Clay took the lead in raising a series A around of venture capital from a Silicon Valley firm named More davidow. And here were in the Phoenix area, fairly low tech in general as a geography here, and there's this software company called Infusion Software at the time that was able to get a Silicon Valley venture firm to take enough notice and pour millions of dollars into this startup. And so he was telling the story how he did that to a group of entrepreneurs here in the Phoenix area. And I attended the event. I heard him speak. I could tell Clay had a compelling vision. He knew exactly what he was going to do. And that's the reason why they raised money, by the way. You don't raise money without a plan.

And he had a clear vision and everybody around him could see it, including me. And I was interested in helping them achieve that vision. So they had some money, they were going to hire some people. I said, hey, I can help you with your strategic HR and organization development work. And, you know, we tried a little engagement. It worked. And I progressively did more and more work with infusionsoft until I joined full time about eight months, eight or nine months into that.

That's outstanding. And we're going to go back to this a few times, I'm sure. Compelling vision. It's so significant and so key. Can you talk a little bit about what goes into creating, building, communicating a compelling vision?

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I get to do that all the time now. It's what I dedicate my time to. One aspect of helping businesses grow is helping them get this clarity. And to me, I'm a big Jim Collins fan. You and I talked about this a little bit before the podcast started, but Jim wrote a book called Beyond Entrepreneurship under the name James C. Collins. That's apparently his lesser known. More full name, James C. Collins. Anyway, this book called Beyond Entrepreneurship he wrote with his mentor at the time and his name is Bill Lazear. He since passed away, but Bill and Jim wrote this book. And in that book is my favorite definition of the term vision. Vision gets tossed around a lot, right? We have.

I mean, everybody kind of knows it's the thing that they should do, but they're not really clear about how to do it well. So clear vision in my definition has three components to it's purpose, it's values and its mission. So in other words, there is no vision statement. When you set a clear vision as a leader, you're getting clear on the why, the value, excuse me, the purpose, the how we do things around here, the who with the values and then the what, the very specific mission that we're up to right now. So it's just getting clarity on who we are, what we're about, why we're doing this thing, and the very specific objective that we're up to next. So that's what I mean by a clear and compelling vision. And I love that definition. It's one I would recommend to people.

So how do you go about communicating and getting your vision group, your folks, to not just buy into that compelling vision, but to believe in that compelling vision?

Yeah, it's a great question, Ed. It actually starts with enrolling or getting buy in before it's even fully crafted. So what I mean by that is this isn't one of those moments where the lone genius, the founder, the entrepreneur, ascends to the top of the mountain and comes down with the stone tablet answers. It's not like that.

Right.

And I believe there's a place for that, but not in a 21st century, great place to work. That's not the way you have, like, you can't do it that way. You have to get people involved and enrolled from the start. So what I like to recommend is that leaders, they're also not bringing a blank canvas and saying to the team, hey, my vision looks like a blank canvas. I want you to help me craft it. Not that either. There's something in between where you say team. I'm starting to see something bigger than what we've been seeing as a group. And I want to share enough of it with you to help you see that and help me flesh it out, make it crystal clear. Right now it's not clear.

But I want you to see there's something bigger for us, more exciting for us to go do. A way for us to have a bigger impact on the world, contribute something meaningfully more than just cranking out widgets and selling something. This is, this is something bigger that we can, we have the opportunity to go declare it and go create it, go make it happen together. It's that sort of enrolling leadership that I think allows people to co create a vision that then they can be super passionate about because they helped make it real. They helped declare it and then they helped bring it about.

Have you seen with the groups that you've worked with, have you seen ego get in the way of the leaders empowering their people to co create their vision?

Yes. Outstanding question again, can tell you've spent enough time around leaders. Yes. The leaders who do this well learn to set aside ego and realize that the bigger thing that they have an opportunity to lead others to go do requires putting themselves aside as the primary focus. If it's ever just about them, this thing falls apart really quickly. If it's about something bigger than them that everybody else can see, this is bigger than all of us, then we can work on it together.

Right? And we keep talking about clarity and a couple of podcasts ago, an episode on podcast number 12 I had Dr. Brandy Plunkett and Brandi is the Executive director, the center for Executive Development at Mays Business School, Texas A and M. And she said something that has just really resonated with me and sticks in my head and she said you have to get clarity because then inside clarity you can be flexible with your compelling vision. Does that change over time?

The compelling vision, the purpose does not change. That's enduring. You might as well think of it as lasting forever. That doesn't change. The values, they don't change either. And there may be some adjustment in language used, they may get refreshed. But the core of those values, the essence of those values, that doesn't change. So those two elements are enduring. Not going to see a bunch of change in that. The current mission, however, is, I use the term current very intentionally. That is the current focus. And when we achieve that mission, and usually that's like a three year time frame when I'm working with somebody, I want them to set a three year mission. When that, when we're getting close to achieving that mission, we're going to set the next mission and that's going to be the focus for the next few years.

So we're looking at kind of knowable, doable chunks of time that we're going to have focus. And, and within that time of clarity, there is flexibility in how we're going to go achieve that for sure. But there's not a lot of, we're not moving around a bunch on the objective. We stay, here's where we're going, we set some strategy of what we think is the best approach to get there, where I think there's plenty of flexibility. And then we have a quarterly, annual, quarterly, monthly, weekly planning and execution rhythm to go make that happen. And of course business is going to happen. There's going to be all sorts of things that come up. There are going to be challenges, new market dynamics, competitive landscape shifts. All sorts of things happen where you might need to adjust and have flexibility.

But the clarity on where we're going, why we're in this in the first place, how we're going to operate with one another, the right team members to go do it, all of that needs to be super clear.

And I like to call that the non negotiables, you know, the unshakable foundation. One of the things I'm always curious about, and you talk about organizational behaviors and personal effectiveness, there being similarities. And one of the things I'm always curious about is people's ability to align their personal vision and their personal core values with the organizations. Can you, can you talk a little bit about how significant, significant that is and B, how challenging that can be?

Yeah. So let's just acknowledge what you said there. Let me, let me emphasize it a little bit.

Okay.

There is a separation and it's really hard for some founders and small companies to see the separation. But there needs to be an identity with the company, with the business itself. There needs to be this living organism and the purpose, the values and mission kind of give that organization life. Even if it's not articulated, it's not stated. Your business has a life, there's a culture, there's an identity. And when it's connected completely with the founder, that's challenging for a couple reasons. But one, sometimes the founder's original reason for starting that business wasn't that inspiring, right? And a lot of them would tell you that, like, I started this business to make a living. I started this business to grow wealth, to have freedom, to own my own schedule, right?

There's lots of reasons they started that business and those are all valid, really good reasons. But at some point that reason doesn't, isn't sufficient to align a bunch of resources and team members to go pursue it, right? Who's excited as a team member to go to work for me and say I, nothing more. The only thing I want in life is for Brett to get, you know, personally financially sound future in place and own a schedule, you know, that's not inspiring. So if you really want to scale a company, you want to grow something meaningful and significant, you have to separate the founder's purpose from the company's purpose. Now if they're not linked powerfully by the company's purpose, if that founder isn't fired up by the thing that company's in existence to do. That's a problem. Right.

They can't effectively motivate other people to follow something they're not super passionate about themselves. So you can't really fake this.

Right.

Let's.

So let's take one of the divisions of the organization. Let's take a sales team, for example. And they have their individual identity. It's almost like a culture inside of the culture. But they have to be aligned with the goals, the objectives, the purpose. I mean, there has to be a singleness of purpose. How much work is there to do to make sure that you align your personal core values, your department's core values with the organizations.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for bringing me back to that part of your question, because I didn't answer. Well, I didn't answer it. The, the personal. When we talked about the owner's values. And, and the purpose for the owner has to be in line with the company. It doesn't have to be exactly the same, but they got to be in alignment. And especially around this purpose. Well, every team member has a similar version of that. So we talk all the time about hire, lead and fire to the vision. You are not going to bring somebody into this company who's not excited about the purpose. If they're not excited about it, they can find something else they're excited about and they can come in and punch a clock and do a good job, quote, unquote.

But they're not going to give any of their discretionary time their thinking. They're not going to be all in if they're not excited about the purpose. And you can't afford that. Winning teams, as you know from your sports background, winning teams have full commitment of the team. They're all in on a common objective. If they were there just to do a job and check a box or pay a bill, that's not going to get it done. Right. That's not going to be a winning combination. So for every team member that has to come in, they've got to be in alignment with the values of the company. Now, Clayton, I will. When we talk about this with other people, we'll use this analogy or this example. Not analogy, Ed. You might have, let's say you have 20 values, right? And I have 16 of them.

I have 16 of my own values. You have 20. Our company has five, seven, maybe core values. They're the values of that company. We've got to share those five. We can value other things. We can be different, but in these five things, we have to be completely in alignment. We've got to have tendencies towards these core values. Otherwise there's going to be friction, there's going to be weird things that happen in the organization. So we don't have to be a perfect match on the full set of values combinations that there are out there, which are as many as there are unique people. Right? There's everybody's different. But on a set of core values in the company, we've got to have sameness. So sameness of purpose, sameness on values doesn't mean they have to have no other values.

They just have to operate consistent with the company's values in the organization.

And when you are in the hiring process and your group's in the hiring process, do they ever pass on rock star talents and embrace, say, rock solid star talent? In other words, they might not go after the most talented individual because they are not a fit. They don't embody and embrace the core values or they don't communicate those core values in the interview process and they wouldn't fit inside of your culture.

Yes, yes. We can't hire amazing talent or rock star talent that isn't in alignment with our values. It just won't work. We've done it painfully too many times. The problem is we as entrepreneurs, as business owners, we convince ourselves that there's enough of a match on the values because we kind of fall in love with the skill set or the results that this person can drive. And we're kidding ourselves if we think we can get that's a sustainable winning combination. It's not. You got to have the values fit first. So we've trained ourselves to look for values fit first and then if there's enough values fit, we can then allow ourselves to fall in love with the candidate. In other words, we don't want to fall in love with a resume.

Go through any sort of interviewing where we might be, you know, starry eyed about the talent aspect until we know there's enough fit. Because if there's not enough fit, we don't want to go down that path.

I'm going to try not to get sidetracked here, but something just popped in my head and you have this incredible proven track record of building and helping to build great organizations in your time when you were working in big corporate America. Okay, so when you started out in, you're firing people. Okay, a lot of exit interviews,

Did.

You learn, did you take some of the things you learned in that process many years ago and still to this Day you're conscious of it as you are building and continue to build your culture and share your vision.

Well, that time when were doing lots of exiting of people, the sad part about that time is it had nothing to do with the values fit. Right. This was all about organizations coming together and not having enough seats on the bus for everybody anymore. Right. So you're letting go of people who have the skill set who were a good fit and you're still letting people go. So all I took away from that experience was, well, one, I got too good at having difficult conversations. I got really good at having conversations like that. But two, I got really motivated to help organizations avoid having to have those conversations. Right, right. So I don't know if there's a bunch here for your listening audience about, you know, how do I avoid having those conversations?

Well, you avoid having those conversations by creating a great place and then only hiring as much as you need at the right amount of time to. And there's going to be cycles. Right. There's going to be some unavoidable things that happen where you might have to somebody go, but you want to do everything you can to not have those difficult conversations.

Well, and I'll tell you what will help our listeners and this is my fault. Let's talk a little bit about what you do at elite entrepreneurs and what you look for in the hiring process and how that aligns, you know, those core values and skill sets align with the organizations you're. You're helping.

Sure. So one of the things that I did at infusionsoft to help infusionsoft growing was put together the. I mean, they had. Clay had a compelling vision. He saw a big picture. They hadn't done values work. So one of the first things we did was to put put in place values. And that was a process over about six weeks. We got together like the core members of the team who'd been around for a little while. But more than that, they were. It's not really a tenure a matter of 10 years. Those who kind of bled infusionsoft red at the time, that was the color. Right. Whatever your company color that they are your company, you haven't put words to it yet.

But if you were to put words to it, you want to invite the ones in who are the best demonstration or exhibit of the words you're going to put in place. So we did that over about six weeks. We just bring in some lunch every week for about an hour, 90 minutes once a week. And we brought this group together and said, what do we value? And we just started doing this work. Anyway, we put values in place. Then we started, we built a hiring process. So I said, all right, how do we assess for fit? And we created a hiring process to do that. Then there was an onboarding process that followed after that. And then there was a performance management process where we incorporated behaviors that were based on values plus the. Plus the performance aspect.

So all of this was happening as were building out infusionsoft's scalable model for hiring, leading and firing to the vision. Once we got that vision set and were, we did it, we did a good job of it. So we started to get recognized as being a great place to work, which isn't the goal, but just something that happens when you do this well, you start to get recognition for having a great place. Your turnover goes down, you have more referrals of people who are great talent. So all these like virtuous cycle things start to happen. When you get clear on who you are and type of people that should be part of the team, you start to create what we call a talent tractor beam. Attracting the right talent, repelling the wrong ones. Right. That magnetic property of repelling the wrong ones.

Anyway, all of that happened and our customers who were small businesses started to take note and they said, hey, can you teach us how you did all of that?

Right?

And so we created this little business that's a whole nother story, but it's called Elite Forum. At the time, just one experience, it was a two day event and then people just kept signing up for it. We started to do that every quarter and then they wanted more after that. We created an ongoing program that then we had this business inside of infusionsoft that was helping small businesses, particularly those who had hit seven figures in revenue, started to get stuck, started to have some of these people process systems, challenges in scaling a business. And we said, we don't know how to do this, so let us share it with you. Anyway, after about six years of doing that inside the company, infusionsoft decided, you know what, it's time to put our focus back squarely on the software.

The Elite business wasn't getting a lot of infusionsoft's focus, but any distraction is a distraction. So let's get squarely focused on the main thing. And the software is the main thing. So we spun it out this year. I bought it. I now own and run that business completely separate from infusionsoft. But we unlock potential in seven figure businesses, we help them figure out the methods, the processes, tools that we used at infusionsoft to scale. And it's very effective. We've helped hundreds of businesses do it now. And there's patterns. Doesn't matter if it's a service based business or a product business, manufacturing business. We've helped all kinds because they all have similar challenges as they get to the same stage of growth and then they need our help to keep going.

And I think one of the things, there's a couple things inside of this here. When people listen to your story and the whole journey and the evolution of your career, they're going to think, wow, things are really going seamlessly. And then you sit here and you look at this incredible time where you have the spin off and you bought, you know, elite and now it's lead entrepreneurs and it's taking off. What some folks fail to realize is the grind inside of the process and the circumstances that we all have going on in our personal lives that we may not have control over. And being able to focus your attention despite all the distractions, has it been a seamless transition for you?

No. No, it has not. And again, great question. And I would think most of the people listening to this are going through their own version of this, right? There's personal stuff in everybody's life. So I'm not unique in that regard. But what looks like a dream situation, I helped create this elite business. I helped run it, I helped grow it for six plus years inside of the safety of the infusionsoft harbor, right? There's this smooth water, smooth sailing. People would come to the infusionsoft annual user event and sign up for our elite programs in large numbers all at once, right? So in a three day period at the annual event called icon, which is no longer in existence, we would sign up about 80% of our year's worth of business at that event just for the Elite business. Not for infusionsoft, but for Elite.

So it came pretty easily. As the decisions were being made, the talks were happening about spinning out this elite business, my family and I decided we were going to buy a home. We felt that it was a good move for our family. We bought the home, then we spun out the Elite business. So we closed on the home in January, we spun the business out in February. My younger brother, I have a younger brother that passed away in March. And this is intended to be a sob story, but life happens to you, right? The annual conference went away in the same Strategic decisions where infusionsoft said we gotta focus all of our time, energy resources on the software, making that what it needs to be for a broader audience.

They put all their resources toward the software and towards building the partner ecosystem to serve a scaling number of customers. Well, ICON went away. Elite was spun out. Other high touches, customer oriented live events that were lots of very resource intensive and only benefited a small percentage of the customer base. For infusionsoft, all of that stuff went away so that they could put resources towards the software that was benefiting all of the customers. Right. So it was a great strategic move, but were definitely thrust out into the open waters. No more safe harbor of infusionsoft. And all of the infrastructure that you take for granted inside of a company had to be built so that we could stand on our own two legs.

So yes, we did have an existing business, yes, we had an existing customer base, but there was no customer acquisition machine. There was no infrastructure like, you know, website. All of those things had to be done. And so were a startup in that regard. And all these personal things were going on in my life, including some challenging things with kids and now some health challenges of my own. All my immune system has been depleted and. And I just found out yesterday that I have shingles, which is not, you know, it's not life ending, it's just an inconvenience.

I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, it's. So how do you do it? How do you, how do you manage and not just. Not just get through, but how do you grow through it?

Yeah. So again, Jim Collins is a great thought leader for me. Kind of a professional mentor without being a personal mentor. Right. I don't have personal connection and relationship with Jim Collins, but we did have an opportunity as a leadership team. We invested for two half days to go to Jim's Boulder, Colorado lab. He has a lab there and he saw enough potential infusionsoft to allow us to come. Allow us for a hefty fee. Right. You gotta invest in your own growth sometimes. And my hat's off to Clayton for the amount of time and dollar investment to go and spend and doing something like that. We went for two days. One of the key takeaways, it'll sound really simple to you, but it was amazing takeaway for us as a team.

He talked about just a slight tweak in the way that people see success versus what most people see, success or failure. Right. Success or failure. Those are kind of the two options and Jim helped us to see something slightly different. He said, the most successful people see success or growth, it's not success or failure, it's success or growth. And so when you ask the question, how do you go, how do you grow through this challenge, through this adversity versus just getting through it? I think it starts with a little bit of a mindset that says this is success and growth. It's not failure. And so all of this getting set back or all of the challenges, all of the stumbling, it's just growth. And you got to see it that way. And that's why the clear and compelling vision is so important.

If you don't have that clear and compelling vision, all you see is what you're dealing with right now. And it's overwhelming, like you said, and it becomes too much. And people start to have thoughts like, maybe I can't do this, maybe I'm not going to make it through this, or maybe it's just. I'm just going to get through it. And we'll just keep spinning our wheels. We'll get there, we'll get there. So they endure, but they don't progress or thrive. And my whole intent is to get. To get. Not just get through it, but to get the growth that I need to be stronger on the other side. So I wish I had the. After that I gave you.

We'll have you back on when you do have the.

Yeah, all right.

There's an open invitation. Why do you ever. Someone as successful as yourself, I think this is good for the listener to hear, is do you ever get a little bit of a little twinge of self doubt, like, what have I done? What am I doing? Am I doing it the right way? Do you ever experience that?

Yes. Yes, absolutely. And again, it was a different story when I. I was leading a success story inside of infusionsoft. First, I helped create a success story infusionsoft as a company, and then we built this other little elite business that we grew it to over a million in revenue and it was having high growth rates and our customers were happy with it and everything was very positive around that. Then you spin it out and it's on its own and it's starting to experience some challenges. And we don't have the influx of new customers from Icon this year. And we have people saying, you know, I've been with you a while and it's been great, but I'm ready to go do something else. So you start to.

You can start to doubt you can start to see the challenge and go, wow, am I really cut out for this? And all of those things. And what I would tell you because, you know, thankfully I had now seven years of experience coaching people through some of these doubts that it's now easier for me to coach myself through it or to surround myself with others who've been through similar things and have them help me talk through that. Because this is normal, people. If you're having struggles, if you're having any of those doubts, it's all very normal. And here's what I love. The guy's name is Mark Chesley. He was the chief technology officer at Infusionsoft for 10 years. He helped grow this business for 10 years. And amazing individual, very high capacity.

He would say when things were, when things look down or challenging, he would say, I have 100% track record of getting through difficult days. I've never not survived a day. Right.

Think about that. That's pretty significant, is it?

Not very significant. It's simple though. 100% track record. It's never not happened that I didn't get through a tough day or tough situation. I've always gotten through it.

Yeah, it's a great perspective. And we all have our ways of dealing with self doubt. And one of my favorite sayings is my success started when I started talking to myself and stopped listening to myself. Yeah. When I really think about that. So how about you? When that self doubt creeps up, when that little voice that you can't stand, when it appears, how do you. Do you have sort of a, I don't want to say a trick, but a method. Just kind of suppress that and just keep moving ahead and moving forward.

Yeah. So I, I'm an advocate of filling our minds with good material. Right. So when you say stop listening yourself, stop talking more to yourself, the listening is all the fear based doubt kind of stuff. Right. The talking is all the positive. We're gonna go figure this out, but the way to fill your mind with that is to read is to listen to good things like this podcast.

Exactly.

It's right, it's. It's to fill your mind with positive influence. And yeah, this is going to sound like a broken record. I'm going to go back to Jim Collins on the Stockdale Paradox. And having read Jim Collins, you will recognize this, but he interviewed a guy named Admiral James or Jim Stockdale. And I don't know if he liked him because he shared the name, but Jim Collins interviewed Jim Stockdale after being in the Hanoi Hilton in Vietnam for seven years, going through, you know, horrendous situations that we can't even compare with. I hope most of your listeners can't even compare with that. But he talked about the paradox that confronting the brutal facts of your current reality. So we're not just turning a blind eye to it. We're not pretending it doesn't exist. It's there.

We're going to confront those brutal facts, but we're going to maintain an undying belief that in the end we will prevail. We will come out as conqueror of this thing that we're dealing with. So it's not pretending. It's not there. It's not turning a blind eye. It's confronting the brutal facts and then maintaining an undying belief. If you don't have belief, and that's where that clarity of vision comes in, you have to believe that it's true, that it's doable, or else it doesn't serve you. If it's just a kind of a vague dream, something that doesn't seem like it's. It's really going to happen, that's not powerful enough. It's got to be something that you can have an undying belief in. And then you got to fill your life with enough positivity to overpower the doubts.

That's so powerful. And you think about it, that's right where you're at right now. I mean, you're in the middle of that grind in the process and confronting the brutal facts of our current reality. Can we talk for a minute about how incredibly important self awareness is? And I like to tell my clients that with self. Because people, some folks are going to get a little bit. Oh, here we go with the self awareness with, hey, here's one talk reality. Here's the reality of situation increase. A high level of self awareness is a competitive advantage. That's just, that's facts, right? So for you, how important is self awareness? And where at in your career did you really start working on that?

You know, it was because of really great people that I ended up working for. And with that I became more self aware. The first manager I had, actually, while I was in graduate school, I worked for a technology company called Novell, which is all but a memory for people now. But they had, at the time, they had this great networking software. They were a leader. And at Novell I had a manager by the name of Mike Sandberg, great mentor leader, who taught me that the power of reading and filling your mind like growing yourself. And if you're really going to grow yourself, you have to kind of start at a place of self awareness. And we did some concepts like, you know, there's a concept called the Johari window that helps you with some self awareness.

There are some tools out there like the Myers Briggs type indicator, which might bring some language to some of your personality or behavioral tendencies or preferences. Right. So if you start to engage in some of these self discovery, self awareness tools that are out there, you begin to kind of wake up to those things. Before that, I was just kind of following along in the system. Oh, you go to high school, then you go to college, then you do it, you know, then you get a job. And I think most people just go through life doing what is next instead of being aware of themselves and what possibilities are out there for somebody who's awake, self aware and can go create their own future. And that's what I love about working with entrepreneurs.

Even if they haven't created that full self awareness, they've still seen possibilities about what they can go do in the world. And the self awareness piece only enhances their ability to go make.

It happen, which is so cool. And when you talk about Jim Collins and Good to Great, you reminded me of a story, I think it was right at the beginning of the book, how Good to Great came about how he was at a dinner party and I forget the gentleman's name that leaned over and said, it's an awesome book. Not this one, the one Built to Last.

Right.

Built to Last. A phenomenal book, he said, but you know, it's useless, you know, and I'm sure that costs caught Jim Collins off guard. But with these entrepreneurs and people in the business world that you know, what's next and what's expected of me. Good is the enemy or great. How much do you see entrepreneurs and people in the business world getting to that point of things are going well, things are good, life is good, and they're afraid to get outside their comfort zone just a little bit more and get to that next level of great.

Yeah, we've all heard the phrase grow or die. A lot of us want to kind of discount that and say, I can get to a place and just kind of not coast, but maintain. Right. I can get to this place, I'm comfortable, I know how this works. I'm just going to maintain. Our world is constantly evolving and changing anymore. And it's, it's an unfortunate reality that unless you want to go like complete lifestyle with your business. You know where I'm going to, I'm really just going to create enough of a thing that supplies my material desires and I'm not going to grow any further. You know that kind of business dies with you. But the business life needs to be growing, progressing, developing, and the organization needs to do that or it starts to decline. And that's kind of a universal law, right?

There's this law of nature. Either you're growing and thriving, you're declining, you can't really do status quo for an extended period of time. You might be able to do that for a little while, but you either grow your die, right? And it may seem simplistic or harsh, but that's kind of what happens. So you don't have to be the one to take it forward. But the minute you see a need to kind of step off of that bus, you need to start grooming people who can take that forward or that organization's not going to be lasting. So you got to keep pushing, you got to keep growing.

And if you feel like you're just too tired to make that next leg of the journey, then you need to get people in place who can take it forward so that organization has a chance in the future.

Well, this has been phenomenal. Before I ask the last question, I want to thank you for spending this time with us and pouring this value. And I know our conversation probably isn't the normal conversation you have on podcasts and the fact that you shared the struggles, the distractions, the things that happen and how do we word it, Brutal facts of current reality is awesome. But where can our listeners find out more about you? Where can we find you?

Yeah, thanks for asking. So elite entrepreneurs you've mentioned a couple times that's not the best way to find us. Because nobody wants entrepreneurs in their URL. Let's just be there, let's be clear. Their website address. Having entrepreneurs in there is not a success factor. So we tried to make it easier. And our website is Grow with Elite. I'll smash together right growwithelite.com spelled like it sounds. That's the best way to learn more about what we do. Again, we're helping seven figure businesses that are in that million dollar range with the methods, processes and tools they need to scale their seven figure business. And for those who aren't at that place, we have an offering called Elite Access.

Maybe they're at six figures still and they got their eyes set on seven figures and they want to learn some of the things that would help them avoid some challenges in the future. We do have an online program called Elite Access, but all of that can be learned about and accessed there on growwithelite.com and you can find me on Twitter built2last champ. Love that the number two. So built and last is spelled out the number two built. The number two last champ is my Twitter handle. Find me on Facebook, wherever LinkedIn. I'm on all those places.

Awesome. And all of this will be in the show notes as well. So in any other. Anything else you want to share in the show notes will put in there. So the last question is, we live in a time when folks, not everyone, but the majority seem to think that hard work and enjoyment are mutually exclusive. And we've talked a lot about the grind and the process and the reality and what you go through and growing your organization. You're out of the safe harbor of infusionsoft. When you're in the middle of the process and you're dealing with the things that you're dealing with now, how do you still stay focused and enjoy what you're doing?

Yeah. So we do a couple little practices. One of them is called positive focus. So you said, how do you stay positive? At the front end of our meetings and our team meetings, our interaction, we share a positive focus. What are you positive about? And as much as we can, we interact with our customers who are doing great things. And really what that is a tie back to our purpose. When we see that our purpose is having an impact, that fills us up with that joy, that fills us up with that satisfaction. So it helps lift us through the grind. Instead of just being focused on all the things that we have to do, all of us have inexhaustible to do lists. Right? Right. They come on. The new things come on there as quickly as you. As you take them off.

That's just a part of life. But when you can focus on the things that are going to move forward, your purpose, they're consistent with your values, and you're excited about the mission that you're up to right now. It breathes a ton of life into your business. It makes everybody excited about being part of it. There's just positive energy on the team. So it's not all doom and gloom and doldrums. Even in hard work. You can enjoy the process when you're clear on why we're doing it. And we're doing it with people that we enjoy being around because we all share these some values. That are core. And then we're up to something. We're up to something important. And we know each of us has a contribution and we're pulling together. So it's about vision. It's about teamwork. It's about fulfillment in serving our customers.

That's what keeps us going through that time.

Well, Brett, I can't thank you enough. And one of the things were talking about earlier is feedback loops, and I love feedback. So if you can go to itunes and rate and review this episode or any other podcast episodes, that would be great. You can go to the athleticsofbusiness.com website and do that. Just a ton of great content and value today. And I sincerely can't thank you enough for not just joining us and being here, but sharing what you shared with us and pouring some value, a lot of value, into our listener and myself, as you can tell. If it seems like I was distracted, I have about five pages of notes here, Brett, So that's why I kept looking away and jotting things down. And thank you very much.

Great. No, I appreciate it. It's been my privilege. Thanks, Ed.

Thank you for listening to the athletics of business. Be sure to give us a rating and review so we know how we're doing. For more information about the show, visit theathleticsofbusiness.com now get out there, Think, act and execute at the highest level to unleash your greatness.