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Guest: Jack Daly, Speaker and Sales Trainer
Episode in a Tweet: More than 60 international CEOs spend two days together and share some insightful wisdom about business growth, health, and relationships.
Quick Background: CEOs from around the world gathered in Newport Beach, CA recently for the third annual CEO Coaching International Summit. Guest speakers included bestselling authors, health experts, CEO Coaching’s founding partner Mark Moses as well as several of CEO Coaching’s clients. By the end of the two days of learning, networking, and socializing, attendees headed home to all parts of the world with new ideas and relationships that will accelerate their business growth for years to come.
Transcript: Download the full transcript here.
Key Insights on Business Growth
1. Each year, ask yourself the four Make Big Happen Questions.
CEO Coaching’s founding partner Mark Moses kicked things off with some highlights from his recent Amazon bestselling book, Make Big Happen. He said after years of running his own companies as well as coaching top entrepreneurs, he’s identified four questions that help CEOs accelerate business growth. These four questions are:
1. What do you want?
2. What do you have to do to get what you want?
3. What could get in the way of getting what you want?
4. How do you hold yourself accountable for making it happen?
Answer these questions each year and then follow through and you too can Make Big Happen.
2. Turn being curious into a practice.
You couldn’t help but be drawn to a speaker who puts up a slide titled, “7 Rules of Interestingness.” Cyrus Sigari, the co-founder of jetAviva, a leading seller of executive jets, captivated the audience by being very interesting himself and by sharing his seven rules. Cyrus makes it a point to live life being curious about the people he meets, the places he visits, and the things he does–and this leads to enhanced relationships. He shared a quote from Albert Einstein who said, “I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.” How curious are you?
3. Data is the new basis for competitive advantage.
Another great takeaway came from Tim Kreytak, the founder of The Ironside Group. He shared some fascinating stories about how local law enforcement agencies are using big data to reduce crime. This idea of “big data” has been around for a while but too few companies have cracked the code. Ask yourself, how are you using big data in your business? It could be the edge you need to accelerate your business growth.
4. Your employees need to be trained to spot fishy hacking attempts.
Silka Gonzalez, the president of Enterprise Risk Management, shared some scary stats about external hacking attacks. The cost per breach is about $206 per comprised record, so if you have 1 server and 10,000 stolen records, you’re looking at a cost of $2,060,000. These costs come from legal fees, litigation, sanctions or fines, new regs in your industry, paying people to identify what happened, and paying people to fix the problem after the breach. The biggest problem in having breaches is ignorance on the part of the company being breached. So, train your people to spot fishy hacking attempts.
5. There are no bad teams, only bad leaders.
We’ve talked before about the importance of having the right people on the team. Well, it’s critical to have the right team leader! Michael Maas was a very successful entrepreneur who is now a coach for CEO Coaching and he gave a fascinating talk about Extreme Ownership. He shared some principles from the Navy Seals and one of the great takeaways was, a team is only as good as its leader and there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. He recounted a story about two military units, one high-performing run by a talented leader, and a second poor-performing team run by a weak leader. The military switched the leaders of the teams and guess what? The poor performing team turned around and became a top performer while the former top performing team slid toward the bottom. Leadership matters for business growth!
6. Go conference crashing.
Brent Bushnell, the co-founder, CEO and Roustabout of Two Bit Circus, is one creative guy. Having just gotten off the plane from a trip to China, he dazzled the attendees with his energetic take on creativity and innovation. He said part of creativity is simply connecting the dots. And he said one way to connect the dots is to go conference crashing. And what he meant was, go to conferences outside your industry, and then adapt ideas you learn to your business. You’ll be surprised how portable–and profitable–ideas are from one industry to the next.
7. Life is short, what are you doing with yours?
Leading sales trainer Jack Daly was standing at the bottom of the Grand Canyon looking up when it stuck him that he was staring at 500 million years of history in the canyon walls. As Jack told the story to the CEOs at the Summit, he said, “I realized my presence on this planet is really just a little bit of a grain of sand.” This caused him to ask himself, “What am I doing with my life? Am I all-business or do I have a blend? Do I have a life by design? Have I packaged in and enabled my business to fuel everything else that I want to do in my life?” Those are some excellent questions for all of us to ponder and answer.
Coaching Takeaways
1. Systematically work through the four Make Big Happen Questions. These four questions are an excellent guide to building your business. Work through them every year.
2. Minimize the possibility of a hacking attack by training your team to spot fishy activity. Breaches are very costly but you can minimize most of them by training your team to be on the lookout for suspicious activity.
3. Keep life in perspective and don’t lose sight of the most important things. We’re only here for a very short time so make the most of it. Live your life by design, not default.
Transcript: Download the full transcript here.
