Automate & Delegate Brad Stevens

Welcome to episode 8 of The Automate & Delegate Podcast! Thank you so much for coming and attending this episode of the Automate and Delegate Podcast, where we are talking all about fast, portable and flexible ways to grow your life, your business and relationships. I am your host, Brad Stevens and today I am super excited to be joined by Jim Beach.
Jim Beach is a lifelong entrepreneur, McGraw-Hill best-selling author, National Syndicated Radio host, and keynote speaker. He has presented in Egypt, Japan, Korea, Argentina, and India. In addition, Jim helps and introduces entrepreneurs to other business models and ‘cool’ people through his School For Startups Radio.
In this episode, Jim shares some of the challenges he faced while scaling and growing his business and what tools and strategies he used to navigate them. Tune in to listen to Jim’s success story and more entrepreneurial advice that he shares.
 
Timestamps:
[08:26] About Jim Beach
[12:33] Growth challenges
[12:50] Challenge #1: Personal growth
[21:25] Challenge #2: Human Resource challenge
[28:27] Challenge #3: Getting out of the business
[36:35] Most crucial characteristic for being a successful entrepreneur
 
Jim says his purpose for being an entrepreneur is to make a lot of money to “go to Disney more” with his family. He shares the three main challenges he’s been through as an entrepreneur and how he solved each one of them.
 
The first challenge, Jim says, was about personal growth and development. Although you can be good at something while starting a business, you later realize that you have to be good at everything; marketing, managing finances, HR, and everything.
Jim says he had to improve his skill set every year, including the ones he was never interested in just to help him grow his business.
 
“To scale, you’re going to to have to improve your personal development and skill sets at each and every level.”
Since he was growing his business in the pre-google era, Jim had to enroll in a week-long class to learn a new skill in HR. He also had his father, a successful entrepreneur mentoring him and giving advice on navigating the course.
 
The second challenge Jim faced was when his business grew and expanded to 89 locations. At this time, he had 55 permanent employees but needed to hire 700 more a year to teach at the Children’s education space, his business at that time. This means they had to interview 21,000 candidates, read their resumes and employ the 700.
Since this was before websites and LinkedIn which have made the recruitment process much easier, Jim relied on advertising in schools, newspapers, and career placement centers at 200 universities.
 
The final challenge Jim shares with us is about getting out of business. Jim says the goal of entrepreneurs is to grow a business, get out of it and sell it for a profit, not to run it.
He tells us that getting out of business requires delegating duties and only focus on bringing new revenue sources to the company.
“I have a rule of three years. If at the end of the third year you’re not totally out of business, you’re failing yourself.”
Some important tools that can help with delegating duties include Trello, Screencast, and Process Street.
Jim also advises entrepreneurs to read the synopsis of the books instead of reading the whole book. He believes that you can find all the information written in the book on the synopsis or the first two chapters alone. An excellent tool to help you do this is the shortform.com website, a summary website for books.
Jim believes the most crucial characteristic for being a successful entrepreneur is getting off the sofa and doing it.
“Entrepreneurship is not about creativity. It’s about the initiative, drive, and desire to succeed.

Welcome to episode 7 of The Automate & Delegate Podcast! Thank you so much for coming and attending this episode of the Automate and Delegate Podcast, where we are talking all about fast, portable and flexible ways to grow your life, your business and relationships. I am your host, Brad Stevens and today I am super excited to be joined by Chip Dodd.
Chip is the founder of Support Services of Virginia that focuses on helping people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. He also launched a new company during COVID, Adventure Racing, which provides a virtual racing experience. Chip shares what his biggest takeaways are as an entrepreneur in this episode, along with some advice for new entrepreneurs that are starting out.
[00:00] Introduction to Chip[05:26] Most impactful and provide most takeaway value[11:10] Technologies tools used to integrate to digital [14:10] Hiring a virtual assistant  [21:42] Retention tools[23:42] Launching a new business during covid[31:52] One skillset you would give as a starting point[36:35] Clearly define happiness  [38:42] Connect with ChipWHERE TO FIND CHIP:Website – Support Servies of Virginia (https://www.ssvainc.org/)ThisAbility website – Adventure Racing (https://www.thisabilityadventures.com/)ThisAbility YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY7C9YkZzd2tEEFBTLt80_g)ThisAbility Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/thisABILITYRacing/)
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Descript: https://www.descript.com/

Welcome to episode 6 of The Automate & Delegate Podcast! Thank you so much for coming and attending this episode of the Automate and Delegate Podcast, where we are talking all about fast, portable and flexible ways to grow your life, your business and relationships. I am your host, Brad Stevens and today I am super excited to be joined by Richard Andrew Mellen.
In this episode, we have invited Andrew Mellen. He is a professional organizer, trainer, and coach who is passionate about creating exceptional results for his clients. For 24+ years, he helped individuals, entrepreneurs, B2B businesses, and organizations get organized and simplify their operations—eliminating redundancy while increasing productivity and profitability. Today, Andrew guides us through his experiences in scaling his business, some project management tools, and how we can be remembered by our customers.
Scaling Challenges
[7:00]
Andrew and his team built a beautiful program that people weren’t buying because it was self-delivered. They discovered that their avatar was disorganized, has a short attention span, and they’re easily distracted.
[7:15]
A drip-delivered, automated class without any accountability is not a good fit for them. They reconfigured the program to make it high touch, high experience for the customer and teaching it to live instead of pre-recorded and raise the price accordingly. They also built a funnel so that with a free five-day challenge at the front end of it, people were really immersed in their content and philosophy.
[8:24]
No all-in-one platform is perfect. Ontraport allowed Andrew to scale because it’s CRM, landing pages, email campaigns, funnels, it’s everything all in one. While none of the functionality is completely top drawer because they’re doing all things, all of them are better than average.  They have very little mechanical failure as a result. Being on those platforms for a small business, trying to both market in a big way and deliver high touch, easily interactable experience was a solution for Andrew.
[10:42]
People will never argue with themselves. They will argue with us all day long because they think that they’re the exception. People think that if we understand why they are special, we would cut them some slack and allow one of their 200 lies to be true.
 
Generosity, Thoughtfulness, and Open-Heartedness
[12:00]
You’re never going to not benefit from being generous, thoughtful, and open-hearted. It’s just never. Being miserly and mean-spirited is going to typically harm you either in the short term or the long term.
 
Nurture Wheel
[12:21]
Marketing now is going to be education-driven. You got to put value out there and produce content at scale.
[12:39]
If you stay on a person’s nurture wheel and you earn the right to stay in their life and inbox to add value with content and nuggets, you’re keeping the content to stay in front of them. When that business event happens in the future, you’ve earned the right to be in their inbox, and they will remember you.
 
Foundations of Scaling
[15:08]
You have to pay attention to when you’re laying down the infrastructure. If you’re cutting corners, if you’re not finishing out your SLPs, and if you’re not laying systems out, every one of those is going to be a chink in your armor as you go to scale.
[15:43]
You have to have an integrator, you’ve got to have a CEO, you’ve got to have somebody who’s focused on operations and systems because everything about scaling is built on that. It doesn’t matter how fast you’re accelerating or how brilliant you are. As a visionary, you got to have that structure under you.
 
The Game Changer
[16:20]
Emails are a game-changer when we think about infrastructure. At every scale of his clients,

Welcome to episode 5 of The Automate & Delegate Podcast! Thank you so much for coming and attending this episode of the Automate and Delegate Podcast, where we are talking all about fast, portable and flexible ways to grow your life, your business and relationships. I am your host, Brad Stevens and today I am super excited to be joined by Todd Palmer.
Todd Palmer is an executive coach at Extraordinary Advisors, keynote speaker, and author of From Suck to Success: A Guide to Extraordinary Entrepreneurship. Todd is committed to helping business owners tackle their obstacles and clear their path to success. As an entrepreneur and an active CEO, Todd knows the struggles business owners face regarding people, cash strategy, and execution. He took his company from 600 Grand in debts to making it into an INC 5000 list, as one of America’s fastest-growing companies.
In this episode, Todd shares the strategies he used to address the three major challenges he faced on his road to success. He also shares tools and resources that were crucial for his growth from debts to making profits. Tune in to listen to these and more topics.Timestamps[01:20] Todd’s big purpose in what he does[03:18] Swimming in debts[04:30]Challenge #1: Imposter syndrome[08:58] Challenge #2: COVID-19[12:55] Challenge #3: Operating in vacuum[16:23] One critical skill for entrepreneurs[19:14] The power of active listeningTodd says his biggest purpose in what he’s doing right now is to improve people’s lives. He shares some of the challenges he has ever faced as an entrepreneur and how he addressed them.
He says the biggest challenge was imposter syndrome. Todd never felt he deserved his success. He never owned the success but owned his failures.  To solve this, he decided to work on himself and hired a coach to help him see purpose in his life.Another big challenge Todd faced was COVID-19. With its impacts felt in almost every industry, COVID-19 was also a threat to his business. But quickly realizing that COVID-19 “happened for us, not to us,” was key in navigating and finding opportunities amidst the pandemic.One final challenge Todd faced is operating in Vacuum. However, he was able to overcome this with the help of Jack Stack’s book, The Great Game Of Business, open-book management. He says he doubled down on using Jack Stack’s tools extensively and overcame this challenge.He says there’s one critical skill that all entrepreneurs should have to succeed.


“The best leaders I have ever interacted with are the ones who ask the best questions, and practice the most active listening.”

Links and Resources
Connect With Todd PalmerWebsite: https://extraordinaryadvisors.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddpalmer1/YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCswsalTqVuynCKv1rwCyJfQMentioned ResourcesLiving Well From Within YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcPn9PIGkEe5fWDOEIMB8yQ/featuredThe Great Game of Business: Unlocking the Power and Profitability of Open-Book Management https://www.amazon.com/Great-Game-Business-Expanded-Updated/dp/0385348339



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Welcome to episode 4 of The Automate & Delegate Podcast! Thank you so much for coming and attending this episode of the Automate and Delegate Podcast, where we are talking all about fast, portable and flexible ways to grow your life, your business and relationships. I am your host, Brad Stevens and today I am super excited to be joined by Richard Mulholland.
Richard Mulholland is the founder of Missing Link Presentation Powerhouse, a company that focuses on helping people deliver extraordinary and unforgettable presentations that activate audiences and generate income. He is also a co-founder of 21 Tanks, Human Writ.es, and the Sales Department.
Rich is a speaker and author. He has spoken in 30 countries on six continents. Besides that, he has written three books: Legacide, Boredom Slayer, and StoryTeller.
We got a chance to know each other when we were both members of the entrepreneurs’ organization. He and I shared resources as we were both tech junkies on tools of information and efficiency.
In this Episode, Richard shares essential digital tools to overcome key challenges such as laziness, boredom, and comfort while running his business. Tune in to find out more about the efficient technological resources that will bring your business to the next level.
Topics discussed in this episode:
[02:14] Richard’s background summary
[04:13] Key challenges and tools to overcome them
[05:15] The challenge of laziness
[15:50] The challenge of boredom
[26:12] The challenge of too much comfort
[29:30] What excites him every morning to keep going
[33:01] The power of reading
[36:24] One characteristic for being a successful entrepreneur
Links and resources
Richard MulhollandYouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMrwAu_jhyy0Cw-TlfjFe1wLinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardmulholland/Presentation Powerhouse Missing Link website https://msnglnk.com/Books
Green Lights by Mathew McConaughey https://greenlights.com/Jim Collins books https://www.jimcollins.com/books.html

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Welcome to episode 3 of The Automate & Delegate Podcast! Thank you so much for coming and attending this episode of the Automate and Delegate Podcast, where we are talking all about fast, portable and flexible ways to grow your life, your business and relationships. I am your host, Brad Stevens and today I am super excited to be joined by Atlanta Chiropractor, Austin Cohen.
Dr. Austin Cohen received his doctor of chiropractic degree from Life University in Atlanta, GA. He received his undergraduate training at Virginia Commonwealth University and received a Bachelor of Science in Biology. While pursuing his chiropractic studies, Dr. Cohen began focused studies on structural correction through the CBP and Pettibon protocol.
He has a passion for serving families and helping people who could not get better through traditional and alternative means.
Topics discussed with Austin today:

* Austin's early career and what motivated him to expand his reach in 2015
* The solutions Austin had to come up with to drive internet traffic to his 2nd location that had no online presence
* How outsourcing led Austin and his team down a path of creating easy comprehensible things for clients to get better value out of their services
* What gave Austin freedom as a business owner and how using a Virtual Assistant got him there
* Why Austin sees decisiveness as the #1 characteristic that's most crucial for being a successful entrepreneur

 
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