Tommy Griffith is the founder of ClickMinded, a comprehensive digital marketing training company that started as a simple, in-person SEO workshop.
Tommy and I chat about why he made the decisions he did, how he kept going when things were nowhere near awesome, and how his expectations routinely got in the way of his execution.
Alethea is the founder of Co-Creating Inclusion, a diversity, equity, and inclusion consulting firm with a mission to shift culture and drive equity through workshop facilitation, leadership development, and business integration.
But Alethea has also been the founder of a host of other ventures!
To continue our focus on resilience and entrepreneurship, I wanted to talk with Alethea about the long and winding journey she’s taken to get to where she is now. Because where she is now is authentic, organic growth and a whole new level of success doing work that is incredibly important to her (and to the world).
Today, I invited my dear friend Charlie Gilkey back on the show to talk about the subject of his new book, Start Finishing: How To Go From Idea To Done. It’s perfect for this month we’re spending on resilience.
You see, Start Finishing, sounds like a book on productivity—and it is. But it’s the kind of productivity book that only a philosopher could write. And this is the kind of interview on productivity, decision-making, planning, and doing your best work that only a philosopher could give.
If you don’t know Charlie already, let me give you a bit of background. Charlie is a PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Nebraska. He was a logistics officer in the Army National Guard and was deployed in Iraq. He’s now the co-founder & CEO of Productive Flourishing, which helps people build better businesses through strategic planning, system development, self-mastery, and personal effectiveness.
I wanted to find out what resilience has to do with the way we do—or do not—complete the projects that we start and the goals we half-heartedly commit to.
My conversation with Charlie certainly provided some answers to that question—and a whole lot more.
Today, you’re going to hear from me.
A few months back, I got an email from Malia Russell, the founder & host of Big Dreams. Bold Moves., which helps expat families deal with the challenges—and opportunities!—of living and working abroad. Malia wanted to know if I’d do an episode on what works for What Works.
So I invited her to interview me and pick my brain about how things have evolved at What Works, why we’ve landed on running things the way we do, the mistakes I’ve made along the way, and what goes on behind-the-scenes.
By the end of this interview, I think you’ll have a better idea of why I’m steadfastly committed to What Works and the philosophy that powers it. Plus, you’ll learn more about what’s working for us right now.
My guest is Debra Giunta, the founder of Design Dance, a community dance education company that’s reaching over 1500 K-12 students with arts education and social-emotional learning every year.
I talk with Debra about her vision for Design Dance and how it led her to making important choices about when she started hiring help. We also talk about how Design Dance has expanded from its original school partner into 50 different sites, how she hires teachers to manage all those programs, and the nitty-gritty of how the business runs on the inside.
My guest is Natalie Gingrich, the founder of The Ops Authority.
After spending 15 years in corporate at a Fortune 150 company, she dove into entrepreneurship leveraging her project management and HR experience to assist high-level influencers in the online and small business worlds. What she discovered along the way was that there was a ton of super capable women whose skill sets were not leveraged and whose natural tendency toward leadership wasn’t acknowledged.
In this conversation, Natalie and I talk about why she decided to create a certification program instead of an online course, why she takes screening candidates very seriously, and how the certification unfolds from start to finish. We also talk about some of the new opportunities she sees for growth now that the certification program is underway & successful.
My guest today had a business that resembles so many: one that required her constant input, expertise, and care just to stay afloat.
While she felt like it was already a success in many ways, Katey Schultz realized that her business wasn’t really meeting her needs. She wanted more of a challenge. She wanted more time. She wanted more money.
So Katey started to look at how to scale her offer, a monthly mentorship for writers.
This conversation is the story of her journey to do that. We talk through the mindset shifts she needed to make, the experiments she ran, and the aha! moment that made her realize she’d scaled the wrong thing.
Carol is the founder of Speaking Your Brand, a speech coaching agency that helps women entrepreneurs and executives craft their signature talks.
I wanted to ask Carol how she worked out the recipe to her own special sauce so she could start training the first speech coach she brought on board.
Carol and I talk about the time and energy she put into working with clients 1:1, paying attention to exactly how she worked her magic. We also chat about how she knew it was time to hire, what have been her biggest fears throughout the process, and how her mindset about the business she’s building has shifted.
Susan Boles is the founder of ScaleSpark, a consulting firm that helps companies break through growth ceilings by fixing back-end processes and creating systems designed to scale.
One way she does that is by addressing operational capacity problems through software. She helps business owners and their teams get more done by better utilizing the software they have—or the software they should be using.
In this conversation, I ask Susan what’s working for her clients—how she helps them identify their operational challenges, choose the best software, and adapt their processes to create additional capacity. We also talk about the challenging work of implementing new software—and how to make a change easier and more effective.
Today, my guest is Marie Poulin—our first 3 time guest here on the pod!
Marie is not someone to miss the important questions. Her and her husband Ben are building Oki Doki with the life and work they want to lead top of mind. That choice has brought them face to face with some scrutiny from people with a scale-or-die mindset.
Marie recently wrote a lengthy article about her choice not to scale—or, not to scale in any conventional way—so, of course, I wanted to bring her on the show while we’re covering scale to talk about it!
Marie and I chat about the hybrid business model Oki Doki has developed, the cocktail party conversation that shook her up, how she approaches finding a equilibrium with her energy, and how her focus on profitability has paid off.
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