hey george i have a crazy idea do you want to do a podcast with me well what kind of podcast are we going to talk about your dog here's the catch it's kind of all about me i mean my business i mean small businesses but yeah it's pretty much whatever i want to talk about for my business i'm happy to do that but uh why me you're my brother and i love talking to you so it's kind of a good excuse to just talk to you more but you know i was realizing the other day i was talking to some friends about this because i've been talking about wanting to start a podcast because i do better when i think out loud i'm processing ideas and i'm having thought partnership with somebody and when you and i talk the few times when we get to talk not about nephew lobby but about business stuff it's really fun it's really engaging like you're telling me stories of work and i get to bounce my ids and i realize i start putting those into the framework of your big corporate experience and my big corporate experience into a small business context and it's a really fun thought process for me and that's what made me think of you when you tell me about maybe how this thought relates to an entrepreneur's point of view i find that fascinating because that's really not my point of view i mean most of my experience has been with big enterprises i've been managing a lot i love talking about management i love talking about it with you but i don't have that perspective these conversations have been really fun for me so if that's the podcast i'm in that is the podcast so we're doing it now it's happening right this moment i just started recording you in case you didn't know you're actually now in the podcast
welcome to the belief shift you've been asking for it and now we finally have an answer the belief shift podcast this show explores what you need to know about building a successful small business whether it's your beliefs on success or how exactly to achieve it no matter the topic we'll cover everything
so i guess we should probably introduce ourselves to our audience now that we've started this whole thing so first of all as we've already said we are brother and sister i am a small business owner but i started out in the corporate world well i will say i actually worked i've worked for various size consulting companies as a business consultant and i've also worked internally in a company as a leader leading teams that were really trying to bring about change and improve performance of the organization so lots of project management uh lean performance improvements leadership development yada yada all of that experience is what i bring to the table as a small business coach and i decided to do small business coaching because i realized in big business they have all these tools and they have all these resources you know they've got a vp of strategy who's great at strategy they got a vp of marketing great at marketing and these poor little small business owners they have to be good at those things too they have to be good at strategy at marketing and all the things but they don't have an expert to like just say hey that's that department's job they got to do all of it and i realized wow they really need some help just getting some of this fundamental stuff understood enough that they can really like wear all of those hats because as much as they have to be the ceo of their business they also got to wear the marketing hat and they got to wear the strategy hat and they got to wear the finance hat and it's a lot of hats so i just wanted to be able to bring my experience from big business to small business owners so they could feel more comfortable in those hats because i think they get really uncomfortable in a lot of these spaces because they don't know what they don't know so i want to close that gap for them and that they don't have to be experts like in the big business world but we can get them to just level up even just one or two clicks from where they are now and it does make a big difference as soon as i see people those light bulbs go off they gain more confidence they start making smarter strategic decisions in their business their business starts to just more smooth out and take off and that's what i want to be able to do that's about me okay me i got a couple computer science degrees uh i started out after school being a software developer which i loved doing did that for a while and i've done it for large and small companies i've done it for a university big university i worked for a 40 person company for a while and then spent most of my career in large enterprises you know like thousands of people five to 25 thousand people company something like that i've been a manager for over 20 years some sort of technical manager and something i realized about my career is since the very beginning i've almost always had some sort of collaborative aspect to my job like when i was working at the university i would get funding from other companies and i would end up working with grad students and myself and other companies since the very beginning so for some reason collaboration has been part of my thing seems to attract me in jobs and i love it the further i get in my career the more i like thinking about management topics and managing people because i look around and i see so many people don't pay proper attention to they really don't it's just crazy and frustrating i also feel like i have more well like you said curiosity than most people so i'm truly interested in the people i work with and understanding them better and i think if i understand them better that puts me in a position of trying to want to be a support for them not the boss of them i like that that mindset so i think about these topics all the time and where it goes right and where it goes wrong and i just love it so technical manager um i'm really happy with what i do and really the further i get into it i like thinking about how to help people achieve more than they think they can achieve just by supporting them and helping them discover themselves better most of the way i manage what the feedback i get from the people who report to me or work with me is man you ask questions i never really thought of before or you manage by asking questions you rarely tell me what to do if i'm telling you something you'll usually ask me a question like like is that really what you intend to do or how do you think the people you're working with are going to receive this like oh yeah i never thought about that and then that's how we'll go along and i'll discover it on myself but it's from questions that you kicked off that's me the reason that we're having this conversation i think is we both think of this as this is a very human endeavor like i know business is business but it's it's people to people is what it's all about it's just all about people and i think a lot of our conversations are always about that people that human aspect and how often businesses just get that wrong like we see it all the time right even the businesses with the best of intentions i have clients right now who they say one thing and then they're doing another and i'm like do you see the disconnect in the type of you know culture and business you're trying to create and then these decisions you're making and there's lots of reasons why that happens and we can get into all of that because i think it's important for small business owners to keep an eye on because they're doing it to themselves maybe later one of our topics can be really about this concept of leadership for small business owners because i just i just read an article on medium that sort of talked about this concept maybe we'll pull it in later but it really got into um it did not say the word leadership and should have because it was talking yeah it was talking about somebody who had gotten burnout in their job and then you know still like a typical story and then how they sort of figured that out that they were overworking themselves and how they came through it and blah blah blah there was no discussion about leadership's responsibility and that there was no discussion about them um being a good leader to themselves and learning how to like that's what you have to do and so this is a huge potential trap for small business owners is to work themselves to the bone and not be a good leader to themselves some of them have been in corporate jobs and they leave me included because they got burned out because they weren't treated well it wasn't fulfilling anymore and they were just killing themselves for something that didn't give them the same return that they were putting into it right and so it just starts to suck the life out of you and you just start to give more than you should business owners who come from that environment are at risk of now doing that to themselves because it's all they know and so they treat themselves this horrible way that their past company treated them and they don't even realize they're doing it but they've just put themselves in that same trap and so i always love this concept of how do you be the best leader to yourself by setting up proper expectations and boundaries and knowing what success looks like and doing check-ins with yourself and having goals you know all of those things that a good leader would do so i think that's a place where you and i align in a big way and as a common thread that'll be throughout this whole podcast discussion is humanizing every aspect of business because without that we just become cogs in our own little business machines i watch people do it and they just get miserable and they just want to jump out of their business some of them are like i think i just need to go back and get a job like what but you because they just recreated the thing that they had and they're like well if i'm going to do this i might as well do it with somebody else telling me what to do yeah we want to well that's heartbreaking yes so if any of you listeners out there have had that moment where you've hesitated and you've thought you know i don't know if the small business thing is for me maybe i should get out maybe i should maybe i'm not cut out for it stick around because we have ways to help you not give up to have you not feel like you have to you know burn the candles at both then to make it happen it's not like it's your first time having done this you've done this a bunch we're going to talk about examples people you have helped work through this concrete examples actually have happened examples and and clients who are right now in that space right of because we go through cycles of it too this isn't an easy choice to be a small business owner but you can do things there are smarter ways to do it and it's not apparent if you're just looking at what's going on on instagram on twitter wherever it's not really apparent in all of that noise how to do it well most of those are giving you pretty crummy examples of what to do so yeah we will talk through that let's talk a little bit about who this is actually for so we've been kind of all over the map and what we're talking about yes we have big business examples but this really is a small business owner podcast i think of this for business owners who they are anything that we've been describing so far so feeling at risk of burnout right or maybe you clued into like oh i think i'm one of those people that might be telling myself a couple little lies right like we're all doing that to some extent um but maybe you clue in on that maybe you are one of those business or you're just out there hustling your butt off and you've had this thought that like is there a better way or is that all made up yeah this is the place to come and find out like there is a better way is what i will tell you so spoiler alert there is a better way and we're going to talk about lots of different ways to do that there's not one silver bullet is the warning you have to pay attention and learn in order to find your better way because everybody's scenario is different so if you're out there hustling too hard or maybe you're um you're in a space where you're really worried about how much risk is involved in this small business endeavor so you might be starting to hesitate a little bit or maybe you're trying to grow your business and you don't feel really confident in the moves you have to make like a great example that i run into a lot is uh small business owners who don't have any experience with hiring or managing staff i think you and i have tons of experience with that that we can really help people with so i think that's a if you're if you're even thinking about that or if you've thought about it and said nope i'm never going to do that you should hang around because we can help you get good at that absolutely really important it's not something you have to do so i don't want people to feel like for my business to be successful i must hire someone but if you think you want to grow in that way don't let your lack of knowledge or experience in it keep you from doing it those people should definitely listen to us also i think business owners who want more long-term stability like maybe you're in firefighting mode and you want to smooth things out and be able to like you could right now you're like i can't keep running my business this way for the next 10 years i will kill myself right yeah i'm kind of long-term sustainability uh maybe you've tried some stuff in the past too that just didn't work for you and so you're starting to get a little skeptical about you know how this all works there's lots of there's some great programs and coaches out there there's also some really bad quick fixy stuff and we'll talk more about that as well feeling like you don't know what you don't know and yet you know you need to do something different that's a really frustrating place to be like i think that i should be doing something else and i've been in this place and i'm like i don't know what it is i don't know enough right now to like i don't know what i should do different but whatever i'm doing now isn't working oh man yeah that's a frustrating place to be in a horrible place to be yeah this is definitely a great place to learn and listen and start to close that gap on i don't know what i don't know business owners with big ideas that they cannot wait to pursue but right now their business is too unpredictable or it's too burdensome for them to do it so an example would be i have small business owners who are like i really want you to help me launch x business but my current business i tried to step out of it for like a month and let my employees run it and it was a disaster they tried to move on too soon right because lots of business owners have this like you're a serial entrepreneur and you're like i launched this thing and now i want to watch this other line of this other service this other whole business yeah to get the stability of a business solid enough that you can then launch another one takes a lot more than we think it does but it's also not as complicated as we might think it is so if that's you this is also a place where we can help you and then finally i think you know if you're just tired of either listening to i'll say the um so-called experts i'm not going to ever name any names but there are lots of people out there who are parroting ideas about how to build a small business they're doing it because they said i did it and i can teach you too that's not why i teach this i want that to be super super clear i am not teaching you how to build a small business because i am a successful small business owner that's not why i do this i do this because i have learned what it takes to build a high performing business from all of my past experience before i even started my business so there's a lot of people out there that are telling you they can help you just because they did it that does not make them an expert also just because you can do a thing doesn't mean you can teach a thing oh yeah i think that's a huge mistake that people make too so yeah we're here because we are good at coaching people at teaching people written delivered long training courses on leadership development on business performance so that's why i'm doing this so i'm not me being a small business owner helps me have an understanding now of how to translate things for small because that's what i've been doing for myself how do i translate everything that i learned in big business into developing my small business yeah and now then teaching that to other small businesses so that's really what we're about and finally i'll say if you're also tired of listening to all these crazy like unicorn business success stories is what i call them like it's that one in a million success story that you're it makes you feel bad right we've always listened to them where they're like oh i guess i'm not really a very successful small business owner because that guy did like three times the revenue and half the time i have so i guess i'm not very good at it like it just makes you feel bad yeah we're gonna talk to other small business owners that are the normies like all the people all the normal business owners who are having normal success that's who we're going to talk to because too many of the stories out there are actually these one in a million not relatable versions of business success and it's kind of depressing and i think we need to talk about what's really happening because there i see lots of really successful happy business owners out there who are not that but they're super happy where they're at and what they're doing they're they don't have million dollar businesses because they don't need them and they don't want them that's not what makes them happy that's who we are all awesome and did i miss anything what do you want to add i'll just make a comment about something that i knew but i hadn't thought about in a while it's just like you made this transition to build your business and you have so much knowledge about these topics in a large enterprise thinking about how you've translated your own lessons and big business into your small business made it work for you i definitely want to hear about that because you're doing it and you've you're smart person and you're very well organized and a clear thinker about this stuff so i'm now i'm really curious to see what you've done yourself to take topics or um frameworks that you've gotten from big enterprises and use them yourselves and slim them down yeah now that you say that that might be a good uh topic for the future is i've spent more time than i want to admit working on those frameworks and mental models and and trying to adjust them into this more simplistic and yet impactful sort of form and and i still keep changing it just yesterday i was like oh you know what i need to change because i use it and then i go no there's a better way for me to do it and i keep changing it which for me is actually what's fulfilling about what i do is that i get to do that and i don't have to ask anyone permission to change the entire framework of how i'm doing it and improve it i get to do it and then deliver it to my clients and see how it works and that's i love doing that okay so let's talk about what we're going to talk about so we've talked a lot about it already you kind of are getting a feel for what we're going to talk about maybe with many digressions but we're going to talk about the fundamentals of running a successful business and really from that perspective of taking big business world concepts like how do big businesses do it and how do we translate that into small business terms so a lot of what you were just talking about george and just my experience in taking that and translating it down we're going to be talking about those concepts and in tools and how to um how small business owners can benefit from that in a way that works for them that is properly scoped to a small business want to talk about the foundations for small business success we're going to talk about business strategy how do you do it why would you do it how does a small business actually think about strategy that might be a word you kind of want to run away from but we want to teach you to embrace it uh we're going to talk about how to turn your business into a really like running like a well-oiled machine by being more organized having more processes that really support your business and having the systems in place to do that there's lots of simple things business owners can do that make a big difference and this is a big one that i see for small business owners where they just struggle with um they're just out there kind of winging it and just a few tweaks and how they do things can really smooth things out and this is gonna be pretty realistic like we're gonna talk about real tangible things people can do i talk about micro moves so what are the micro moves people can make that make a big difference because big change is not realistic it can happen but it's not the most realistic thing to go after especially for long-term sustainable success right you've got to just keep making small these micro moves to improve things yeah and then finally i think we will always end up bringing this back to like we talked about in the beginning there's always going to be a people aspect we're always going to we're always going to humanize this like it's about people at the most basic level whether that's from a hiring perspective or if you're not hiring just from thinking about your business as one human serving another human especially if you're just a solopreneur who's a coach or a consultant like i am it's a very very human business so we'll always get to sort of the how do you do that better because there are lots of improvements we can make there i see lots of people struggle with how to be good managers leaders of people but also just had to have better interactions with their clients so we'll talk a lot about that too and this is what we're not about we are not the small business unicorn podcast like i said before we're not the vc funding podcast that's somebody else somebody's lots of people have that covered already we're also not the manifest your millions podcast which is basically like dream it believe it and it'll happen we will talk about mindset but in a different way from a leadership perspective i would say and we're not just going to be about the money or that destination i mean money is important because it's the sole reason your business exists frankly but we get too attached to the destination and we don't focus on the process in the moment enough yeah and so we're not just going to be all about you know making big dollars and making big goals all the time and it's not going to be the hustle to win podcast we're also not going to talk about the hustle we're not going to talk about quick fixes um we're not going to do the thinking for you so if you want us to just spoon feed you answers you can stop listening right now because that's not what's going to happen we're definitely going to give you actionable things to do but you're going to have to show up here to basically learn how to be a better thinker and so along those lines like we're not going to give you growth hacks we are going to give you a growth path which i think is very different like there's a path for you to keep growing hacks are not the way we're going to do that so what you will get are actionable tips ideas to ponder new skills tools and methods how to be a more critical thinker i think that's probably one of the most important things and just be a better decision maker in your business and like i i want people to come out of this podcast basically just feeling smarter about business that's ultimately what i want them to be able to do that's our aim our aim is to just every time i want you to just feel just that one little notch smarter about how to run your business and ideally and this is your job george ideally we're going to take some what are sometimes really boring topics and make them super entertaining i can guarantee that at some point you're going to hear questions you've never heard before and that was going to help you be a more critical thinker because you're going to hear something wow i've just never really examined it from that angle i've never heard that question before and it'll get you thinking like a little ear worm you'll see i've talked about this already so i'm just going to sort of sum this up which is why i do what i do i just see small business owners struggling with things that i wasn't struggling with and i realized that i had all this benefit from my past experience in business and once i recognized i knew things that they didn't know and that there was really no good way for them to learn them these fundamental things that business does and how they do it how they operate well when i realized they nobody was really teaching that they didn't have a good way to learn it they couldn't learn from big business because it was too big and complicated so it didn't make sense for them to just adopt like you said these complex strategic planning frameworks that's not going to work for a small business there's no way they could translate that when i realized that they were missing and some of it was very simple stuff just how to set a good goal how to just manage a basic project they just didn't have any of these basic skills and when i would just teach them a few things it would completely transform their approach to their business so it doesn't take a lot to make a big difference so that's why i do what i do because it's also more fun frankly no offense big business owners if any of you are listening but you guys are slow and complicated and difficult and i think i have had my feel of coaching the big businesses because it's just kind of exhausting i love working with a small business owner who once i start to coach them and i start to consult them on where to go with their business they light up they take all of it in they just become a sponge and then start taking action and and things change so quickly because it's just them making decisions about their business and they can i don't have to move this whole bureaucracy of a giant team of you know leaders who don't get along so that's sort of the joy of doing all this and i hope that george you get to experience it some of it by when we have guests on the podcast you'll get to see how much fun it is when you're just working with this one other human running a business and how much change you can create in them in just a little moment guests on this podcast are definitely going to get free coaching i can tell you that right now and that's part of what's coming so we're going to be interviewing some guests some small business owners your everyday small business owner uh we're going to be diving into all these topics together having that big business to small business translation happening where we'll talk about leadership we'll talk about mindset we'll talk about systems so i talk about these three components clarity systems and mindset so how do you get more clarity in business how do you build better systems for your business and how do you develop your mindset and those are the three elements of performance when i talk about having a high performing business we will talk about all of those things and we also might provide recommendations like maybe we'll do book reviews we'll do some podcast reviews because you can't learn from just us i mean we should be the most important place you learn but we also will have other recommendations of where to learn it and maybe where not to learn from i think there's gonna there's a lot there that we can go into we're just gonna have management stories from time to time about i'll tell you about something that happened in my work you will talk about it you'll tell me here's how i see this happening in a small business perspective i'm really fascinated when i tell you some story and say oh yeah i see this happening in small business money whoa so how's how do you deal with that there's going to be a lot of that stuff going on too we'll just have fun and we might have an avi story on occasion for those who don't know since we haven't really said it explicitly avi is george's son my nephew he's six years old and that kid has some wisdom so we're going to be learning some stuff from time to time i know it's going to happen you're going to be like i'm going to tell you a story about it you already did talking about wanting to tell avi about you know lying yeah so yes he may creep in there and maybe zoe my rescue pup will work in every once in a while we'll see all right so we're going to wrap this up as our first episode congratulations to us for getting episode one out there for those of you um who heard even just a little bit like we're gonna get better at this of course but if you heard just a little bit of something that you think might be interesting your job right now is to subscribe that's all you got to do just subscribe to the podcast so you can get them they're going to come out weekly and in our next couple episodes we're just going to go into a deep dive on some of the when we talk about belief shift we're going to go into our core belief shifts that we're really going to talk about throughout this podcast so we're going to take a deep dive and that'll be a two-parter for the next two episodes so please return for that but for now subscribe and we have an instagram account now so you can follow us on instagram at the belief shift leave us comments leave us ideas of what you'd like us to talk about ask us questions whether we want them or not
thanks for sharing the time with us this is going to be fun all right thanks for listening everybody you'll hear us next week see ya