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0:00:03.0 Wayne Brown: Hello, I’m your host Wayne Brown, and welcome to the ET Project. We’re delighted to be delivering this podcast to executive talent all over the world, whom we’re affectionately referring to as Team ET. Today we’re back in the United States, in Rayleigh, capital of North Carolina, visiting Mr. Dave Goodall. Dave helps entrepreneur-minded leaders align their energy skills and business process to realize their dreams. Growing up in his grandfather’s countertop manufacturing plant, he fell in love with the idea of business at a young age. Gifted with dyslexia, he realized that he could see things others struggled to see. His electrical engineering and neuro-linguistic programming education allows Dave to bring an analytical approach to solving your problems.

0:00:51.1 WB: He spent over 20 years developing tech teams and delivering product support, as well as change management integration solutions in the IT industry. Through his IT experience, Dave realized that there were two tracks of challenges in business, the logistical as well as the human. With a proven track record of delivering on strategy and knowing that everything starts with your team, Dave sought to understand workflows as well as the human element better, synthesizing his understanding of NLP-based mental and emotional programming and human interaction into his well-established consulting practices has taken his business to the next level.

0:01:34.3 WB: As I commented to Dave, he’s like the business doctor, and his focus is twofold. On one side, he helps the owner evolve, and on the other, he addresses the business processes and systems, ensuring that they’re in place. During our conversation, I asked Dave to introduce his six pillars, the six fundamental areas he concentrates on while supporting his client’s journey. I have to say first impressions count big with me, and right off the bat, Dave came across as super genuine, easygoing, and down to earth. In our initial conversation, I asked my guests what they hoped to achieve by appearing on the ET project, and Dave immediately responded that he wasn’t looking for anything, but he hoped he could share something that the listeners will benefit from.

0:02:26.6 WB: He openly talks about his struggles early in life, dealing with dyslexia and the impact that had on his learning, school years, and life in general, and it’s abundantly clear as you talk with Dave that he loves his role as a husband and a father more than anything else. So, Team ET, I’m excited to bring this conversation to you and welcome our guest, Mr. Dave Goodall, as we look at what it takes to scale your business and achieve the level of success you dream of.

0:03:00.4 Speaker: Welcome to the ET project, a podcast for those executive talents determined to release their true potential and create an impact. Join our veteran coach and mentor, Wayne Brown, as we unpack an exciting future together.

0:03:15.5 WB: All right. Well, here we are again, team, and great to have everyone with us. Looking forward to the conversation today. For all of those who may be budding engineers, we’re going to be talking to an engineer, maybe a long time back, Dave, since you worked as an engineer.

0:03:29.3 Dave Goodall: Yeah.

0:03:30.4 WB: One of the budding engineers, but more entrepreneurs looking to scale your business, looking to find ways that you can actually grow without sacrificing your life entirely, right? And I guess…

0:03:46.3 DG: Correct.

0:03:47.2 WB: Dave Goodall, that’s what you’re all about, you’re a business consultant, you’re a coach, and you help entrepreneurs, business owners to do exactly that, if I understand correctly.

0:03:58.0 DG: Yeah, you’re right. It’s kind of the new analogy I just came up with is how do you get the hate off your plate? I love one of my principles, it’s the what if principle. What if? Because a lot of us, we’ll always have that what if going on, but we won’t take action. And then when we do take action, we feel like we’re alone in the trenches, and then we’ve got this plate of hate. And it’s heavy, right? And how do we move on? And when you’re in it, you can’t see it.

0:04:27.9 WB: Well, Dave, welcome to the ET project. Fantastic that we have the opportunity to talk.

0:04:28.0 DG: Yeah. Thanks for reaching out. I’m excited to be here. I’m a geek, again, as an engineer, but I love talking business.

0:04:33.7 WB: There was something interesting I read in your bio somewhere about how you always had that passion for business. I was curious, you then went down the engineering path. So I just want to dig into why that was. Typically, if you go in engineering, it’s more of a science field, rather than being the entrepreneurial mindset. I’d love to uncover that a little bit.

0:04:55.2 DG: Yeah, let’s get into it. So my father was an onboard electrician for the C-130s during Vietnam. So when he came back from Vietnam, he had a toolbox in his hand and we were always tinkering. People cutting phone lines, we were always doing repairs. It was the cable TV generation, so I saw the cable guys always installing. And then through high school, I was doing car stereo installations, I was tearing cars apart. I figured out how to build systems. So I was always a tinkerer. But I also, again, that seed was planted with my grandfather on running a business. I loved numbers. I loved math. I loved accounting, and there’s just something about creating. And with my grandfather not there, my family was getting broken up. I wanted to be an architect. And my architecture teacher is like, dude, you suck at drawing. You’ve got the physical aptitude. You’re great at math.

0:05:44.4 DG: Can I throw you over with the electrical department and just let them have at you for a semester and see what you do? And I went over there and I aced the program, which transitioned me into a double E. So I got an electrical engineering degree. And again, like you said, I was never really fulfilled in my career. I spent 22 years in IT consulting and product management and this whole evolution of designing a product, installing a product, fixing the product, evolving the product. So I was kind of, even as an engineer, I wasn’t the pocket protector guy. We were like installing it. How does it really work? How was our client using it? Oh, you hit a bug. How do we get that fixed? Oh, you want this feature? And then it’s this constant integration. So in a way, I was an entrepreneur.

0:06:31.6 DG: I was leading of a product team into… I mean, I did oil and gas. I did healthcare. I did sales like in Walmarts and production and manufacturing. I work with Apple for all the iPhone chip productions. And it’s just, I just got obsessed with the idea of business around how a product can solve a problem, which can enable a business to make two, three, four X, the money they’re making just on a simple time saver. Right. And then when I was let go five years ago, six years ago now, it was just, I had always been obsessed and I would be taking courses and I got my, my certification in coaching because I wanted my ICF. It was all about credentials. Being an engineer, you had to get this and I got my engineering certification. I got this. And what I realized is I was chasing paper acknowledgement that I was smart. And when you jump out and start your own business, those pieces of paper don’t mean crap. It’s like, how can you apply it?

0:07:25.1 DG: And that’s when I started working with these business owners, with all the experience that I had on that constant recycle of evolution of making it better, systemizing it, getting the crappy stories out of your brain that, “I suck, I’m not good enough. There’s not enough time. I can’t do that.: It’s, that’s where I went. And then I got focused on the neuroscience side of why we do what we do and then how do we make it easier?

0:07:49.6 WB: Have you had the opportunity to do any work outside of the States with the business?

0:07:55.0 DG: Yeah. So in oil and gas, I was required to go over to Australia and over to Perth, oil and gas. I was out in California and Houston, Texas. Let me see, I’ve been over to Australia and then again, oil and gas. I was over in London, UK for BP Chevron. So most of my European or UK area was all oil and gas based. Australia was more, some oil and gas, but more of systemization operations for team development and that kind of stuff. So I’ve had the pleasure to travel over the pond to several different places and it’s been a lot of fun.

0:08:32.0 WB: You also mentioned on your website somewhere about the fact that you grew up with dyslexia. This is a big problem for many people and just interested how you leverage that.

0:08:45.0 DG: For me, I was never a good student. That was, as I was talking about, I really got obsessed with neuroscience because my oldest daughter is also autistic and my youngest daughter has dyslexia and dysgraphia as well. And I was like, man, this brain is a mysterious thing. And I just have that curiosity, right? And I was blessed my junior year in high school, my science teacher just happened to be my swim team coach. I was that ADHD kid that I was jumping BMX bikes. I was on swim team. I played soccer. I was climbing trees. So I swam swim team for probably six or seven years when I was a little kid, got up at 6:00 AM, rode my bike to the pool and my science teacher, I show up and I participate. I’m asking questions.

0:09:24.0 DG: I’m engaging. And first three tests I failed, like completely failed. And my teacher called my house and they’re like, look, something’s going on with Dave. He shows up, he participates, he can answer questions in class, but she’s like, I put a piece of paper in front of him and he can’t, he can’t get above a 40%. And they tested my reading level, my junior in high school. And I had a reading level of like a first grade, second grade, grade at that point.

0:09:48.4 DG: And they rushed to kind of get my reading levels up, but the damage was done. I was what, 16, 17 years old. And I had an internal self-talk. I’m an idiot. I can’t learn this stuff. And that just stuck with me through my thirties. And what I learned in that transition, it’s like, well, you know, I had to start gaining evidence and changing the narration of my story. I was like, well, an idiot can’t come out of high school with a 1.8 GPA and then go and get an electrical engineering degree and get a 2.8 to a 3.0 and then work in two of the top two companies in the world in IT, Cisco Systems and NetApp Storage and be an absolute idiot.

0:10:25.6 DG: Like it doesn’t work that way. So I had to start changing my story. And then when I started dissecting and learning about neuroscience and neuroplasticity, my dyslexia was actually a gift. My gift like… Again, how do I get to my junior year in high school? Not really knowing how to read, but knowing how to master the system and manipulate my way through for success. So what I learned is because of my dyslexia, I have a pattern recognition that a lot of the other people don’t see. It may take me a little longer to get to the front door. I tell it, people try to explain things to me. I’m like, slow it down. It takes me a little while to get to the front door, but once I get in the house, man, I’m ready to redecorate.

0:11:02.3 DG: Like, we got it. Right. And so the dyslexia for me, actually, when I look at it now is a gift. It can be a disturbance, but then I just I’ve learned how to navigate conversations with people to slow things down so I can translate to my visual imagery and then I can put it all together. So it’s a gift. That’s how I’ve changed my story.

0:11:23.9 WB: Yeah, which is fantastic. And kudos to you. I’m wondering, during the high school, during the college years, did you find a way to overcome it, that shortcoming with the ability to read, with the ability to see that initial picture? Did you find a secret that helped you get through?

0:11:44.6 DG: It was just pure pain. I just. I was that stubborn kid with ADD and I was just going to grind through it. We were talking pre call, that underdog story. I stay in touch with a lot of my clients because when they come to me, they’re in that transition. It could go either way. And I love to, once we disconnect, call them two to three years later, I’m like, so how did it go? Where did you go? And usually amazing things happen. But the point I’m trying to get across from me is I was the underdog. I was like, a lot of people doubted me, or at least in my mind, I thought they did.

0:12:19.3 DG: So I had the attitude of like, watch me. I want to prove you wrong. So that was a lot of my grit. And I learned later on in life, that’s not a way to be because it doesn’t attract growth and creativity. It’s kind of like walking around with your double middle fingers up. And although you can succeed, it doesn’t get you the grace and the flow and the creativity. So to answer your question, no, I never really figured it out until later. A lot of it now is… The tools weren’t available back then. Like I’ve got a natural reader, so I’ll write blog posts, I’ll write articles, and I’ll have to put it into a reader and have it read back to me just because then I can sit back and listen to it and create the pictures and make sure I’m trying to get across what I’m trying to get across.

0:13:00.6 DG: If there’s important articles that I need to read, and I know I need to be specific, or if my clients are sending me different specs or white papers, I’ll have to throw it into a reader and have it read to me. Because what happens to me is I get hyper focused on the word, and then I miss the translation. So there’s a disconnect, and I got to put it to pictures, and it just it can slow me down. So for me now, I’ve got tools that can read things aloud to me, which makes it 10 times easier.

0:13:26.6 WB: I’m sure there’s a lot of people out there that are struggling with something similar, and just listening to the insights you’ve shared now, they probably feel a little bit more comfortable in their own stories and in their journeys. So yeah, thanks for sharing that.

0:13:40.1 DG: Yeah, and then my youngest daughter has had more evidence of dyslexia, but now a lot. I’d say that 99% of the schoolbooks are in audio format nowadays. So there’s different programs that I pay a membership, like $100 a year, and all of their library books, everything’s in an audio format, and then she can have, and you can speed it up, slow it down. So just having that, even with my daughter, she’d bring home a library book, and I’d go in and check it out, and it would read it to her while she was reading it, and that speeds up comprehension too. So the tools weren’t there when I was growing up, but luckily they’re there today, and any student that’s dealing with dyslexia or struggles to comprehend, tools are there. Use them. Makes it easy.

0:14:24.1 WB: Yeah. Thanks for that.

0:14:26.7 DG: Yeah.

0:14:27.7 WB: The first time you mentioned that you’d worked with a couple of interesting people, we had some commonalities there. Tony Robbins and his associates, etcetera, how did you get to connect with this area?

0:14:41.6 DG: Yeah. So again, I went on that personal journey when I was like 30 years old, and I was fat and miserable and hating life and hating corporate America, and I was like, it’s got to be easier. So I went on this quest. Actually what happened is my dad sent me the DVD of The Secret, The Law of Attraction, and that just stimulated. I reflected on my childhood. If there was anything I wanted when I was a kid, I had this pie in the sky, this dream that I could create visual, and it would happen. I wanted to build a quarter pipe when I was a kid, and skateboarding was coming up, and I’m like, how am I going to do this? And I would just sit there. I didn’t realize… I realize it now, but then I was meditating. I would sit in silence and visualize. It’s like, oh, I want to build a skate ramp.

0:15:24.7 WB: Or I want to BMX bike, or I want to build a dirt park. I would sit and visualize or draw and sketch, and things were easy to create and put together. And then you’re 33 with a mortgage and two kids and a marriage, and life got real, and I realized that I had stopped dreaming. And I saw The Secret and The Law of Attraction, and then it just led me down the path of, I got exposed to Dr. Joe Dispenza and Dr. Bruce Lipton and Dr. Greg Braden. Greg Braden worked at Cisco when I was working at Cisco. And these guys that are just, they’re game changers.

0:15:57.2 DG: They want to give you a different perspective of what’s real, right? And then I ended up getting my coaching certification, and then I ended up networking with people, and I ended up meeting Chucky Acoby, who was the center for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He had a Super Bowl ring, and I had heard about NLP, neuro-linguistics programming, but I didn’t know a whole lot about it. And after getting to know Chucky, he’s like, hey, man, I’m working with Dr. Matt James. I’m like, that name sounds familiar. And he goes, well, Tad James. Tad James is Matt’s dad, and Tad was the right-hand man to Tony Robbins, who introduced NLP to Tony. And I’m like, oh, I got to meet this guy. Next thing I know, I’m in San Diego meeting Matt, and then I’m down in Tampa getting my masters in hypnosis and all this other stuff. So I was like, once you get obsessed with tools in your toolbox, you don’t stop, right?

0:16:38.2 WB: And have you found them useful in the business, in the business consulting?

0:16:42.5 DG: Oh, I use it all the time. It’s so funny. I use hypnosis all the time. And hypnosis is really just allowing a space for your client to feel safe and see another perspective. Right? And it’s funny. I’m like, I’m going to hypnotize you right now. And they’re like, oh, okay. I’m like, here’s what I’m going to do. Here’s what I’m going to say. And here’s what I’m going to ask. Then I’m going to make another statement, like you tell me, and then we’ll go through it. I’ll tell them exactly what I’m going to do. Like, okay, yeah, that’s just not going to work on me. And I’ll go right through it. And they’re like, I’m like, so now what are you going to do? Like, well, we’re going to do this, this, and this. And this is the action I’m going to take. And then we’re going to do this. And then we’ll come back next week with our marketing plan.

0:17:16.9 DG: I’m like, like, for whatever reason, they had a mental block that they couldn’t see that as possible for them. And the language patterns just allows you to trigger that emotional response to break through whatever barrier you’re having. And we all have them. I mean, I even come to my barriers and I’ll go to my friends, I’m like, I’m blocked here. Get it out of me. I can’t get to it because I’m attached to it, right? We’re emotionally attached to this BS.

0:17:38.2 WB: So that’s an interesting point, though. So when you find yourself stuck like this, you have a group of people around you, like mentors, coaches, advisors.

0:17:48.7 DG: Yeah.

0:17:49.7 WB: Yeah.

0:17:50.0 DG: Yeah. I have regular standing meetings with networks of people that sometimes we’ll do a cigar with a whiskey on the front porch. Some of them we do Thursday morning huddles. You know, what’s going on in your business? Where are you stuck? And a lot of it, too, is another network I try to engage in is we’re all tribal creatures. We need a tribe. So I try to surround myself with men similar age that are fathers, because being a father and a husband is very important to me.

0:18:16.4 DG: And then also managing growing my business and growing other people’s business is very important to me. So I want to surround myself with people that are going to call me out on my crap, right? When I’m thinking small, I want someone to be like, dude, I thought you were a dad, right? And just expose me for the negative language that I might be having, because that’s where it is. I mean men, I think we’re missing that today. That tribal instinct of men holding… It’s, iron sharpens iron. If you’re not in the trenches with the boys, holding yourself accountable, being vulnerable, we’re not growing.

0:18:50.0 WB: I wouldn’t limit it Dave, to just men, to be honest, I think it’s a societal requirement, right? And then we need to be connected with the other people.

0:19:00.2 DG: Yeah. And again, I’m not out for going and drinking a 12-pack of beer, but if we’ve got a pub, a brewery like 100 yards from my front door, like one or two beers once a week, just to be in that masculine circle of accountability of what’s working, what’s not, and again, I do a lot of… I break people’s language down into energy, into either a fight or flight or a creative, right? And I’ve got an assessment for this, but what I try to expose people is like this level one is victim, I can’t because of my circumstances. I have very low tolerance for level one conversation. If anyone comes into the group and they’re like, Oh, woe is me, I’m like, No, put your big boy pants on. [laughter] I don’t care, you’re gonna have to do some work. And level two in order to win, someone’s gotta lose, and I’m like, Yeah, that can get you motivated.

0:19:48.5 WB: Yeah.

0:19:48.9 DG: That was the attitude I was sharing with you, that’s how what’s got me through college. And then I was miserable through my 30s, once we transition to that creative energy, that level three is, I’m gonna own… My world exists and the crap and the goodness that’s around me is because of me and my best thinking. And then as we move up the ladder, level four is, I don’t win unless I help someone else win. Level five is, I’m not gonna delegate something, I’m not willing to do myself, we’ll roll up our sleeves, and then the last two are amazing at level six is, I’m solution-focused, so whatever problems in this world, we’re gonna solve it, but not just for me, it’s gonna benefit everybody.

0:20:24.6 WB: Okay.

0:20:25.3 DG: And then that level seven energy is when you can shut the heck up, surrender to God, to universe and be like, alright, my way’s not working, I know you got a greater plan for me, I’m gonna try and listen to you for a minute and have you point me in the direction. And what I’ve learned through that is a lot of people go to God, got to prayer, go to meditation to fix me now.

0:20:45.6 WB: Yeah.

0:20:45.7 DG: And it’s really what I’ve learned is the secret is surrendering to my way is not the right way can you please guide me where I need to go, cause every downfall we come in contact with is a learning opportunity, a lot of us think it’s being done to us and this pain [laughter] and it’s actually being done for us.

0:21:04.7 WB: For us. Yeah.

0:21:07.4 DG: And that’s, and again, that’s why I say I love the whole energy, ’cause the energy triggers an emotion, emotion triggers an action, an action gives you a result, and a lot of people look at the result, it’s like, well, I got a big bag of poop. It’s not on the cards for me. It’s like, No, you had to get here to know that this doesn’t work if you go back now you know what not to do, so now you know it was just rinse and repeat, and that’s kind of like the moral of the story of life, like life sucks at times, there’s always gonna be obstacles, but embrace the obstacles, plow through them and learn.

0:21:36.1 WB: Have you identified your ideal clients at this stage?

0:21:41.1 DG: Yeah, my program works for any small business owner. My goal is, is to track those business owners, they’re usually in the 35, 30 to 50. I’ve worked with some young ones, and they have been a hell of a lot easier to work with. ‘Cause they’re just like sponges. I have a 23-year-old kid that sold $5 million of websites in the last year and a half, right, so these young ones, man, they’re hungry, they got nothing going on and they’re just like, “feed me”, but the key is like that 30-35 to 50-55, their business is on that 2 million crux, right on the edge, they got a team of maybe three to five, and they’re wearing all the hats, they haven’t quite figured out the operations completely, they haven’t quite learned how to delegate, they haven’t quite learned how to systemize. So although they created a business, independent wealth, they’ve actually created themselves a job that, it’s starting to wear themselves out.

0:22:39.6 WB: Is that realization that…

0:22:41.2 DG: Yeah.

0:22:42.0 WB: We get into this entrepreneurial way of life for the freedom for the opportunity to be our own person. And then before we know it, we end up just working the grave shift like we were in the corporate world, and probably more miserable because it all rests on your shoulders.

0:23:03.1 DG: Yeah. Where’s the next client coming from? What’s the next invoice I can send? And I see that all the time. And I had a break down with a client this morning, and it basically comes down a marketing funnel, into a sales funnel, into a three-tier product, whatever you sell, to an onboarding, to a delivering and rinse and repeat. It’s not rocket science, but an owner usually is either good at creating the product, but doesn’t know how to market or is good at selling, but doesn’t know how to tier their products, can deliver, but doesn’t know how to do customer… Like an owner or a business owner is good at one to two things in their business and the others, they just need to know how it works so they can hire the right people to do it for them.

0:23:45.6 WB: Yeah, for sure. Before we dive too deep into the business, you have Not For Profit that you’re involved in or that you co-founded…

0:23:52.9 DG: Yeah. So my mom was diagnosed with brain cancer years ago, and my buddy Ron Hamner and I started a profit, a non-profit called Grab My Wheel. So I used to be a huge cyclist before children came along, I’ve done a couple of Iron Man, I used to race mountain bikes. And all that fun stuff. But it was back in the day when Livestrong was big. We used to, we put on a women’s event every year, a womens cycling event, and I think we’ve donated a half million dollars over 17 years, to different local charities and stuff for cancer research. So it’s kept me out of trouble, it’s, my daughters have been raised through that, so they know about the giving back and the volunteering and that kind of stuff, so…

0:24:35.1 WB: Purpose behind asking that question is add to your earlier point about time, you’re involved in a not-for-profit, you’ve got your coaching practice, you’ve got your consulting practice. Now, how do you manage your time on a day-to-day basis?

0:24:52.0 DG: That is a great question. We now have a 16-year-old going on 30, and we have a 19-year-old. Both girls, my oldest is a senior in high school, my youngest is a junior in high school, my oldest does cross country and used to race mountain bikes, my youngest is on a collegiate track to play fast pitch softball in college. So we’re usually on the weekends at a hotel, doing softball showcase tournaments, talking to college coaches. So we’ve got five game series this weekend, and I run all the live stream videos, we do YouTube and I do all the clips on that, but my daughters both work jobs they go to school and they’re running their sports, and we had a family huddle [laughter] six weeks ago, everybody has a Google calendar, everybody puts their time blocks in of when they’re working, when they need the car, and what it comes down to is just getting creative. My wife and I, I’m very blessed with an amazing wife, she still works in the tech industry, we share responsibilities, get the hate off your plate is a delegation process, knowing what I’m good at and what I suck at, and my wife, she sat down, I was like, I don’t wanna do this, this and this, I suck at it.

0:26:00.6 DG: And just learning how to delegate, I’m like, Well, that’s your responsibility, like, neither of us are too good to walk the trash to the street. Tomorrow’s Friday, I was just in the kitchen and my wife’s pulling up the trash cans I’m like, “What are you doing?” She’s like, “Tomorrow is Friday.” I’m like, “Oh yeah, let me help you with that.” So you’re letting the trash out, so to answer your question, it comes down to really, everyone in the house has a Google calendar, and we just time block when we wanna do things, like my daughter asked me this morning, “Hey, can you take me to softball field tonight?” And I look at my calendar, I got a podcast recording [laughter] and it’s like, if you wanna go after seven o’clock, then yeah, we can definitely go to the field, but it’s just getting creative with time and delegating and enrolling people to help and participate.

0:26:44.9 WB: Let’s jump into business side of things, I know you’re doing a lot of coaching, and you have the people you’ve spoken about. Do you overlay coaching with the consulting?

0:26:55.8 DG: I had a couple of my buddies that are running multi million dollar coaching companies, and they’re like, it’s gotta be a cookie cutter, it’s gotta be this, so this is how you market it. And I’m like, “Look, the foundation of the business is the same, like we talked about earlier, you gotta have a marketing plan to a product that people want.” I love Alex Hormozi. He’s like, Look, if you put… If you open up a hotdog stand on your front porch, you’re probably not gonna be successful, but a hotdog stand out front of a pub at 2:00 AM on a college campus, you’re probably gonna sell out. So really what I love to do is just help my clients see all the pillars of their business, and then I’m listened for the NLP, the Neuro-linguistics patterns, I’m listening to their language patterns, where they’re saying, I’m trying or I can’t or this isn’t working, I’m looking for their blocks, so it’s like I love to lead with mindset, but nobody wants to admit that their minds wrong, right? So if I can lead with, Hey, what in your business is f’ed up right now.

0:27:47.5 WB: Yeah.

0:27:48.7 DG: And then I can usually tier it back to, Well, that problems in between your ears. I still don’t tell them that. That’s when we use the language patterns in the systems and then let them go through. But yeah, we do MER, Mental Emotional Release. We’ll do different hypnosis techniques, we’ll do switch patterns, we’ll do whatever we need to do to overcome it, right. And usually by the time we roll our sleeves up and we get dirty in the trenches and we really see the passion behind their business, a business owner is willing to try anything.

0:28:13.9 WB: You talk about the six pillars, I wonder if we can just run through them, not in too much detail but, you’ve mentioned the game plan, which is where you start, you wanna go through…

0:28:26.1 DG: It’s funny because I was working with an electrical engineer the other day, and he does these radome systems, antennas with with satellites, and… And at the beginning too, my old thought came in, I’m like, this guy is an electric engineer. He built this amazing product. I’m like how am I gonna help him, and then I get in and he’s like, “Oh my God, I’m a quarter million dollars and I can’t get this part.” And I’m like, “Oh okay, I’m outside looking in, I could definitely help you.” So how we help, yeah, the six pillars is… Oh, sorry about that. And so we start with a game plan is most people, most business owners can come in and tell me what they don’t want, but they haven’t sat down to write out what they do. So really, I wanna sit you down is, what’s your game plan? Why did you get into your business? Why is it? Why are you passionate about it? What was your intention? Was it free time for the family? Is it generational wealth? What are you trying to do with your business? Right, and then part two. Most of the clients, I wanna deal with, pull out your PNL. What’s been your revenue? Where are you losing money? Where are you hemorrhaging? What are your expenses? What are your margins? Oh, I’ve got some clients that are…

0:29:27.4 DG: We’re settling for 6% and 8% margins, and I’m like, No. It’s like, that’s a job. That’s not a business, Target 18% to 28% margin. So we really look at the data analytics. And again, I’m not a CPA. A lot of times we’re gonna let you… I’m gonna look for why you’re not looking at your money. Usually there’s a mental block, there’s a psychological upbringing, money is evil. Whatever it is. So we look at the money, we help you get a CPA, we make sure you’re getting your monthly book closings your soft closes, your quarterly tax statements, etcetera, etcetera. This is kind of my sweet spot, but being in engineering for 22 years, I’m scrum mastered and certified an Agile. So Agile systems is creating standard operating procedures with a quality control check points in rinse and repeat. So this is where the “hate off your plate” comes into play.

0:30:13.1 DG: There are systems that are in your head, that you haven’t quite learned how to systemic them and delegate it to the team, and then that Agile and team dynamics comes in together. We do an analysis of all your team members, we wanna look at how you rate them on a scale of one to 10? Why, if they’re not an eight, why are they below an eight, is it you, is it training? Is it their… What is it? And believe it or not, it’s funny, when we do that with my business owners, usually about one-third of the company quits once the owner starts to recognize what they’re good at, what they suck at, trying to rearrange the talent to the skill set that matches them.

0:30:50.2 DG: And then a lot of these people are like, Oh man, I’ve been skating. Now, this guy is gonna make me work. Oh, I gotta go find a new job. [laughter] Which is great for the owner, ’cause now we get the virus out of the environment, now we know exactly who we need to hire, he goes and hires that person and all of a sudden. Yeah, it’s weird how it works. I think over the last five years, I’ve had a third quit and the rest of the people are like, Oh, you’re gonna give me operating procedures, you’re gonna tell me how I succeed. Oh and I can get bonus what I did… And all of a sudden these people are excited to kind of show up to work, because now they know how to win. And then that leads into communication, so teaching our leaders how to communicate to the team members, how to hold them accountable without being an A hole. You don’t have to yell and scream, these are success factors, this is how we succeed in the job, in these tasks, etcetera, etcetera. And then just helping them execute and then letting them come back to the table, it’s like, “well we did, we changed this and this and this is the outcome we’re seeing”, and then we look for cause and effect, we kinda dissect it and break it down, change up the process, and it’s just rinse and repeat until you kinda get this streamlined.

0:31:54.8 DG: And then what happens is over a year, year and a half, the owner starts to see this rinse and repeat, this rinse and repeat. So when we bring in a new product or we enhance a product, or we add different tiers, or we add a service, they’re like, “Oh, I’ve done this before. We just do this and this.” I got a client right now. It’s like, we’re almost on the third or fourth vertical in the company of six years from now. So he’s got this one vertical, he already sees a vertical that we can lay a foundation, we just found two more verticals that he’s like, Man, I gotta get a holdings company, I gotta get these s-corps so we could hold ’em. We can have these all. He’s already bought the domain names… And so it’s once you get the business owner in that mindset, they get excited and they see all these opportunities. Yeah, it’s really fun to watch them.

0:32:37.0 WB: So you really like a business doctor, you… You’re working on the individuals? And then you’re also looking at the systems processes and getting everything aligned and streamlined and operating as it should. Right.

0:32:51.2 DG: Yeah, and I created it just for me, sometimes with my dyslexia sometimes, like I said, it takes me a while to get to the front door, but once I get in, I can run. And I know sometimes these business owners are just, they’re on the corner trying to get to the front door and they just need someone to grab their hand and be like, come on, let’s go. And there’s been a lot of moments in my life where I needed someone to just grab my hand and say, c’mon, let’s get inside, it’s cold out here. And I just… A lot of my friends that run other coaching companies, they’ve got these Netflix back door video training series, which are amazing, I mean, FAQS are great, but I don’t have time to sit down and watch 30 hours, of freaking how to do videos, I’d rather hop on a phone, here’s my… Or a Zoom call, here’s my problem.

0:33:33.3 DG: And a lot of times it’s the problems here, but it actually, “Oh that problem there is because your marketing sucks. That problem there is because, Oh, your, tell me your sales script. Oh yeah, that you’re turning them off here.” This the problem. They think the problem is here, but it’s actually three to four steps before the problem even shows up that you gotta fix to get there.

0:33:52.1 WB: Which is an important point as you’re running through those pillars I was thinking there’s probably a lot of people out there and maybe listening that would be hearing, man, this sounds like a lot of work. I don’t have the time to do what I need to do today. If I bring in somebody like Dave, I’m just gonna be swamped, I’m gonna die in the process. How do you address that?

0:34:18.0 DG: It does take a commitment, but here’s one thing I’ve learned in the way our brain works, our ego is designed to protect the body, which means our ego is constantly looking for the next fight. So that mindset right there is level one. I can’t make any changes because if I did, I could actually get worse, and although this sucks, I’ll tolerate this suck, people will not change until the pain outweighs the fear of change, period. You can be listening to this, and be like, Yeah, I know what I need to change. You’re not in enough pain yet. When you’re in enough pain, like the two clients, potential clients I talked to this week, they picked up hopped on the Zoom, they’re hemorrhaging. I’m in a lot of pain right now. Cash reserve suck. I’m back ordered to October, I got a quarter million dollars in deals going out… Their pain, you can just see their pain, and then I’ve got others that came to me, they’re like, Hey, we hit the 2.8 million mark. I got a team of 11, I can be an asshole. I’m starting to piss people off, I know it’s me. Can you help me get my head right, because if I piss off five more people at my shop, I’m on my own and I can’t do this on my own. Help help me help me so that I could help everybody else.

0:35:31.3 DG: It’s a time commitment, it is. Usually, it can be anywhere for two to three hours a week in the beginning, for like the first month to six weeks, depending on how deep we need to dive. And then usually it’s an hour check-in weekly, and a lot of that is to, to continue that growth and implementation. And a lot of times we’ll bring other team members in. I’m like, You don’t have to do it on your own. Who is your operations guy? Like one company now I work with, they’ve got a team of 28, and I talk on a weekly, bi-weekly basis. So probably about 11 people in the organization. But they just have that… He just… I helped him so much that he’s like, You just need to be available to all my leaders, ’cause he wants them to feel supported, but now he’s gone from two to six million. He’s like, I just, there’s so much on my plate. I wanna give each person that individual attention because I just, I can’t be there and like I can pay you to be there in that way to get them through their personal crap and the stuff that’s going on in the shop.

0:36:32.0 WB: I’ve worked with a number of companies over my career, a little bit grayer than you, so probably a little bit longer career, but we’ve introduced, I think I was just thinking while you were talking there, I think I’ve probably introduced three, with three companies that the whole quality assurance process. And that is essentially a whole series of standard operating procedures and getting everything in check. One of my takeaways with that is the initial set up of that can be a lot of fun can be interesting to really refine the process, how do you keep people aligned to that SOP, 12 months down the track.

0:37:19.5 DG: That comes down to weekly check-ins. It’s so important to have the one-on-ones, and it’s weird, it’s the same in a household, you know. We have teenage daughters, and my wife and I’ll be talking about problems we’re having with the kids, when they’re doing so much, do they know how to succeed? So my wife’s a customer success manager in tech industry, so she’s always looking for, is the customer integrating the product, is the product working as designed, are they getting the bugs resolved in a timely manner, and then how does the client validate to us that our product is successful? So we have to identify those success factors. So if we’re doing a standard operating procedure, we know first… It’s funny, the one company I was talking about, they’re sign manufacturing, goes, “Dave we make a change today, we’re really not gonna see those effects for three to six months.” And I’m like, “No. It can happen faster.” And sure enough, it’s like, Well, I’ll look at the notes, I’m like, six months ago, we changed this, we’re just now seeing the effects of it, because like you just said, when we change the process, you’re reprogramming everybody in that process.

0:38:25.5 DG: And not everybody’s gonna get it right out of the gate, you’re gonna constantly rinse and repeat, and when you get the process double-checking if they’re not doing certain things, why? Do we need to do that? It’s just that… And this is the problem with business owners and well, humans in general. We can’t be wrong. This is the way I made it. Do it my way, because I said so. I’m like, but that part’s stupid. It doesn’t make sense. So if we’re not in conversation as we’re evolving systems and making it more efficient, and we’re not in conversation, you’re the owner, you don’t… If you’re making a widget in the shop like you, you’re not doing it. They are, right? It’s like the whole Toyota story, right? Where the Toyota engineers sat with the servicemen and the servicemen helped he engineers redesign their engineering because the service men are the ones that had to service them in the field. Like you don’t put stuff under the engine because every time I need to service it, which is on a six-month basis, I have to lift the engine out of the damn car. That’s stupid, right? So it’s having that conversation with the leaders and the doers to make sure that the doers are giving the feedback to the leaders, and we’re getting those systems dialed in properly.

0:39:35.2 WB: How do you deal with customers that really have that shiny object syndrome, where particularly in IT, right? Because you guys are faced with this every single day with another new product on the market, another way of thinking things, how do you deal with that and cope with…

0:39:54.6 DG: Well, it kinda goes to… I have a client that, he’s an amazing website developer, e-commerce, and then he’s got a service system, and then he did the SEO. So he was stuck on the shiny syndrome, he’s like, my SEO process is the best. And I’m like, Well dude, let’s map it up. Let’s sell it, but it took like eight months to get to market. And then now all of a sudden, he looked up and he was like, Why did I take so long? I’m like, I don’t know. That’s on you. I’m like, We’ve been having this conversation for eight months, and I said, You’re making $15000 a month of this new SEO process. But he has the shiny project, a shiny tool syndrome, shiny ball syndrome, and that kind of stuff. And again, that goes back to NLP, it’s like the Neuro-linguistics, it’s like they have a pattern or a habit of procrastination. The shiny ball syndrome is basically, this looks hard, I don’t know how much effort it’s gonna take. This makes it look easy. I’m gonna go diddle over here for the next three days and ignore what I know I should be doing, but there’s a dopamine hit of ignoring what you’re supposed to be doing, right.

0:41:02.1 DG: And that we just leverage conversations, hypnosis and, what do you gain? What do you lose, in that there’s all those questions that we can get right into the unconscious and figure out why you’re doing it, and if you wanna get rid of it, we just do a swish pattern or do a conversation about it.

0:41:17.3 WB: Listening to the conversation, it sounds like the majority of your clients are IT industry-based. Is that correct?

0:41:25.5 DG: No, actually, most of them are in a blue collar space, I’ve got a concrete manufacturer, HITECH. I’ve got a sign manufacturer HITECH. I’ve got an e-commerce. I’ve done Amazon store owners. We were talking about that. I just found out today, I had two Amazon store owners, both have sold from multi-million dollar sales, 18 months after working with me, they ended up having a big pay-off, they were able to sell the… A lot of it was helping them get their playbook together, the operations. So, now they’ve got a business, but it’s a gamut. I think a lot of them, it’s just more of a design, design build type company, someone that has a design process and estimating a build and deliver, some of them can flip it into a service-based contracts, ’cause I was in professional services for years. But yeah, it’s, excuse me, it can be all over the place, but most of them were in a blue collar-ish construction manufacturing of some sort.

0:42:15.8 WB: What would you say to budding entrepreneurs that are in that, let’s say that one million bracket at the moment that are really struggling, they’re committing more than 12 hours a day, what would you offer to them just as a parting gesture to help them move forward.

0:42:35.7 DG: I’m a visual guy, I love Miro Boards. For me, what I do with a lot of my clients is we map out the business, we just put… It starts here, and this is my marketing, it goes to my sales, do you have your marketing dialed in? Do you have your avatar? Do you know who your, the problem your product solves, and do you have the avatar of your client down? Do you have your sales script down? If you’re not marketing and selling, I don’t care what your product is. Like of course, marketing and sales has to be around a product that people need, goes right back to Alex Hormozi, if you’re selling hotdogs on your front porch, you’re gonna be out of business by the end of the week, put the same hot dogs in the front of a pub at two o’clock in the morning, when you got starving college kids, you’re gonna sell out probably every Friday and Saturday night. So just making sure that your product has a need, you’re marketing to the right people, you have your avatar and then you have a sales script, and then once you start developing, creating and selling your product, start putting your playbook together, a lot of the stuff is my clients will come in like, I had this pre-kick off meeting and it was awesome.

0:43:37.2 DG: I’m like, Great. Did you document it? What did you mean? I was like, I need you to go back while it’s still fresh in your head and document everything you covered, and now that’s the new pre, pre kick-off that needs to be documented when you put it in a notion board or somewhere where it can be stored. So, anybody when you replace yourself, there’s a process. If you’re… Like so there, it’s just the learning of if there’s a process you hate that’s repeatable, that someday you wanna hand it to someone, start documenting what it is and get it off your plate.

0:44:06.1 WB: Dave Goodall, great conversation.

0:44:09.8 DG: Love it.

0:44:10.9 WB: Thanks for being on the ET Project. I’m sure listeners will get a huge amount out of the insights you’ve shared. So, thank you.

0:44:18.0 DG: Thank you for having me. This… I, again, I’m a gig. I love these conversations.

0:44:23.0 Speaker: Thank you for joining us on the ET Project a show for executive talent development. Until next time, check out our site for free videos, e-books, webinars blogs at, coaching4companies.com.

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