HOW I BECAME A BUSINESS LEADERSHIP STRATEGIST

What kind of experiences does it take to drive somebody to have a complete over-the-top commitment to growing businesses? 

Hey folks, doctor Kevin here. 

You know along the way I’ve had some experiences that have driven in me a deep commitment to helping businesses triple their profit, to creating enlightened cultures and leaders who lead with intention.

In today’s video, I will share some of those experiences with you and some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way so you can grow your business more intentionally. 

So it’s going to be a fun wild ride. Stay tuned.

One experience that drove that commitment in me was just simply where I grew up. 

You know, I grew up in Flint, Buick City. It was a thriving city back in the 50s, but as GM started to go more and more belly up, they would do huge layoffs and I would watch my friends, their parents lose their jobs. Restaurants shut down, malls were empty, the roads were in disrepair, and then of course you know all the stuff going on in Flint now with the water crisis and it’s simple, it’s simply not a place that you want to be. 

Well growing up and seeing that, I knew there had to be some way to do things differently. And I bought a motorcycle and drove as far away from Flint as I possibly could. I just drove and drove and drove and actually after a series of experiences, I ended up at one point in Montana and I was so committed to helping businesses grow, but I actually got my doctorate study in leadership trying to figure out exactly how to do it, right? To make sure I have the depth of knowledge and expertise that I can bring to organizations. 

So it was great. I was in Montana and I’m loving it. 

Missoula Mt is just a beautiful town. Tucked away in the mountains, a big river runs through it. In fact, that’s where the movie was made – A river runs through it.

So it was just a life. 

However, it’s kind of remote. There’s not a lot of businesses to help when you’re there. It’s a pretty small community.

So I finished up my doctorate. And I knew that it was time to head out and my wife, actually my fiance at the time, and had her heart set on North Carolina. 

She wanted to go to North Carolina. I looked up and down for a job in North Carolina that I thought would suit me and found nothing so and it was tough. 

I mean, it was a tough time. My wife really wanted to move and we were kind of at a dead-end out there in Mortana and I remember turning to her one day and saying “Honey, why don’t we just forget about North Carolina? Let me see if I can find a place where I can really belong, where I can really make a difference in businesses. Let’s forget about North Carolina and see if I can just follow my passion and do that work that’s going to help me allow businesses to grow and transform companies.”

And so I made that my search. I was in North Carolina, and my goodness there I was, a job that had my name written all over it as a consulting member for a consulting firm, doing leadership development. It just so happened to be in North Carolina, so we packed up our bags and moved sight unseen to North Carolina and there I work for this consulting company that was owned by a bank. 

Now, there’s a small consulting firm. It’s only four or five of us as consultants, and the bank left us alone for the most part. But we get to go in and help all the executives of the bank become more intentional and more purposeful. And it was beautiful because I really got a first-hand look into how businesses were working at a real experiential level. 

So I’m in the bank helping them grow, working with the executives, working with all of their clients as well or a lot of their clients, helping them to grow. 

And that’s when 2006, 2007, 2008 happened and the economy hit the skits. Now my commitment never wavered. I knew that even through tough times, businesses can be successful and if we just kept teaching the same core concepts – the same thing that I studied for my doctorate studying leadership – and how self-awareness and being intentional helps leaders create thriving businesses. We were teaching that to the bank through the recession while other banks were folding. We took that bank from the mid-size regional bank in 2008 to become the nation’s ninth-largest bank. 

When I left there in 2015, seven years, 8 or 9 years later, actually it started in 2006. So it was nine years later, that bank went from a mid-sized bank to one of the biggest in the country. And when I talked to the Chief HR Officer, I remember him telling me very clearly, he said ‘no surprise, our bank is doing so well. We are so committed to driving this teaching and this training that we’re helping our leaders become more purposeful and more intentional as they grow their own books of business and it worked. 

That’s what blew my mind. That’s one of those things that really cemented in me – the power of this coaching- is that coaching works. Coaching works when I’ve seen businesses like this bank go through the recession, and they come out bigger, better, and stronger. Holy cow! It’s phenomenal stuff. 

So that took me into so many more experiences, but that one specifically was seminal in getting me on the path to becoming the business coach that I am today. One who is committed to tripling the profit in businesses around the country. 

The success we had in the bank was amazing. In fact, it was so amazing that the CEO decided to make that consulting firm his pet project. He invested $40 million in to create a whole new facility. It was mind-blowing. Because it was having an impact, the work was working. 

However, for me, it changed the culture and I recognized too that I had been there a while and it was probably time to move along to the next thing. Now the next thing from my wife’s perspective might have been different than my next thing. You see, we had that point where we were married and had a kid, and we were living in North Carolina. But all our families in Michigan. Our mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers all live in Michigan. We’re in North Carolina and the thought of raising our family away from our extended family didn’t sit well with us. So we made a decision that we were going to move back to Michigan. 

Now the question is how are we going to move back to Michigan? 

This is one of those experiences that has formed me and changed how I look at the world and grow businesses forever. It’s a huge experience because we decided to move back to Michigan, but we knew we didn’t want to be in any of the towns we grew up in. At that point, my parents had moved out of Flint and we lived in the north of it a little bit. Her parents were north of that, so we’re in Saginaw Bay City, the east side of Michigan. It was not where we wanted to be. 

We pulled out a map and we studied the map and I asked her where do you want to go? We can go wherever you want to go. We found a nice little town on the west side of Michigan. But we knew nobody there, it was 100 miles from anybody we knew and it’s a completely new community. 

Now the question is what am I gonna do? 

I have been studying business development, leadership development, and team development. And I knew how to make a business. That’s what I decided to do. 

We went back to North Carolina. Well, actually we flew to Michigan over the weekend, we bought a house, went back to North Carolina, sold our house, I quit the job, we moved to Michigan and I just started off on my own. I started off but not a lot of money in my pocket. No connections, no business there, I didn’t know anybody, anywhere around, no people. It was phenomenal to throw myself into that and then to watch into practice. And I know that what I have done is growing a lot of businesses. I had something that was helpful. I could help businesses grow. 

And with that deep commitment, now I am more committed than ever. Because there was no safety net. There was nothing to fall back on. There was just me, and my wife in tow, and two kids and suddenly we had a house, and there I was. I was going to make it happen. 

It was phenomenal. And the more I help businesses, the more I watch them grow and begin to help teach businesses how to triple their profit, how to create engaged enlightened culture, how to have succession plans so that the next generation can have success in their business and doing a lot of work with family businesses.

That experience of leaving North Carolina, after all that success and jumping headlong into my own business in Michigan has been phenomenal. And it’s really informed me in the work that I do because now it’s not just watching and seeing what others have done, but also knowing my own experience as a business owner, as a business leader, as a consultant, as a coach, as a speaker, as a facilitator. It has definitely been one of those events that have helped round me out and give me the passion and the skill to help other businesses thrive the same way. 

Of all of the experiences I’ve had in growing my business and growing myself, those two were two of the most profound and powerful. Working for a consulting organization, ultimately a bank in helping that bank grow through the recession, mind-blowing stuff when you see the impact it has. The stuff works, these processes and systems work. People grow businesses. When people get better, the business gets better.

And then, growing my own business and learning the nuts and bolts from the inside out and understanding business metrics, not by watching other businesses, but by growing my own, putting all that together, it’s phenomenal stuff. 

It’s the special sauce that I have, for me, that has helped me become a force that helps businesses like yours to triple in profit. 

So make sure you hit the like button and stay tuned for more information and more stories on how you can grow your business to become a truly impactful business.