[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to today's episode. I'm your host, Daniel Hill and we're here today with Andrew Pols. Andrew, welcome. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Thank you, Daniel. It's great to be here. [00:00:08] Speaker A: Andrew, for people who might not be familiar with you, can you tell us who you are and what it is that you do? [00:00:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I am an executive coach. My company is Andrew Pols Executive Coaching. And so executive coaching in the way that I do it, because it's not, it's, it's not like let's say being a surgeon where you're a cardiothoracic surgeon or you're a cardiac surgeon. People know what you do with executive coaching. You might do lots of different kinds of things with the people you coach. In my case, what I'm doing is I'm working with founders of companies to scale themselves as a key lever in being able to also scale their companies. I have found that founder growth and company growth are a flywheel effect. And if the founder's professional growth or personal growth stalls, it's almost always shortly thereafter when their business growth will also stall in some way. So my focus is really on assisting the founders and entrepreneurs to scale themselves and their companies side by side. [00:01:02] Speaker A: That's a very unique take. I like that a lot. One of the things that you had put in your bio, which I saw, is in addition to doing the executive coaching, you also run ultra marathons. Can you talk a little bit about that? [00:01:15] Speaker B: Yeah, just it's actually mountain biking, ultramarathon mountain biking races. So the races that I focus on are 100 miles or greater and they're almost always at 8 to 10,000ft of elevation at the base of where the race starts. So we're riding up, up and down mountainous trails for over a hundred miles, usually ten to twelve thousand feet of climbing involved in these races. So they're, they're intense to say. [00:01:42] Speaker A: That's incredible. Yeah. How did you even get started doing that? [00:01:45] Speaker B: So it was completely serendipitous, if you believe in serendipity, or it was divinely inspired, depending on your point of view. You know, I was, I was like languishing around with COVID at the end of December 2021 and I was reading this book called Born to run by Christopher McDougall. It's a great book, by the way. And he talks about in this book, which is all about running and being a human being, this incredible race that takes place in Leadville, Colorado called the Race across the sky. And it's 104 mile long foot race in the Colorado Rockies. And I'm reading this book, and I'm thinking to myself, I don't understand how these people are human beings. And doing this, like, this is ridiculous. And I'm telling my wife about this, and she tells me, oh, there's a NETFLIX documentary about this. And so we sit down one night to watch this. Now, here's the serendipitous part. Every year in December, I go through this ritual with myself of reviewing the last year of my life and looking at where did I grow? Where did I not grow? You know, where did I break through the whole year? And then I kind of put it on the shelf like a book. I just read a great book, set it aside, and then I look forward to the next year, and I come up with a theme for the year that I want to live from. I like themes over resolutions because themes are just. They're just robust and they're powerful and they're inspiring to me. And I come up with this theme for 2022 of accomplishing the seemingly impossible. Okay? [00:03:06] Speaker A: Just. [00:03:07] Speaker B: It just really called to me. Now, I hadn't thought about anything I wanted to do with it yet. Like, there was no specific whatever goals. So I sit down with my wife, we watch this documentary, and lo and behold, it's not about running. There's a race on the same course in Leadville. That's mountain biking. Okay? Now, I was a mountain biker, but I mountain bike for fun. I would go, like, 10 miles, and I would be dead. This is at sea level, okay? I'm watching this show. There are these people who are mountain biking a hundred miles at ten thousand feet of elevation. And I turn to my wife, and I'm like, honey, I could never do that. That's crazy. And she looks at me and she goes, oh, yeah, you could do that right now. She says that to me, and I just am like. I laughed at her. I laughed in her face. I'm just like, babe, you don't ride bikes. You don't know what you're talking about. I really appreciate how much you believe in me. I do. But you have no idea what you're talking about. I could never do that. And she, like, looks at me, Daniel, and she grabs my metaphysical shoulders, like, with her whole being, and she goes, no, you don't get it. If you wanted to do that, you could do it. And something in that moment, in the way she was being with me, it just, like, penetrated in my chest. My heart started to race. And I sat there kind of, like, boggled for a second, and I Started thinking, oh my God, what if she's actually right about this? You know, what if I'm wrong? She's right. And then I'm starting to think about, am I going to sign up for 100 mile? Wait, what? And I had no plans of doing anything like this. I. But it just drove up this sense that I had that I just can't do hard things. With everything I had accomplished in my life, I just had this sense, especially in the physical domain, like, I can't do hard things. And so then I remembered my theme and I'm like, so this is what it's going to be, huh? This is, I thought it was going to be like some business goal. Can I reach 8 fig? You know, whatever. No, it's going to be 100 mile mountain biking race in the Rockies. So that's how I got into it. And it took me a year and a half to finally be able to complete one. The first time I tried it that first year, I wasn't able to finish. But when I finished the race, almost two, you know, whatever, two years later, it just changed me as a human being to discover that I could do something that I really believe was impossible for me. And it was so impactful. I actually wrote a book about it that will be coming out sometime next year. [00:05:27] Speaker A: Wow, that is an incredible story. It's so impressive that you were even able to. A hundred miles. I don't even, I mean, for where I live, that's, you know, to Long island and back. That's. And that's flat ground. [00:05:40] Speaker B: Right. [00:05:40] Speaker A: So to imagine going up and down Mountains for 100 miles, my first thought is, how do you go to the bathroom, how do you eat, how do you, you know, all these things, the logistics of it. But I'm sure the training is very intense. But this kind of goes to, I think to say, here's who you are as a person. You, you recognize that people stagnate in their personal lives and then that affects their business life. And you took that on and said, okay, here's my goal, here's what I'm going to accomplish. It took you some time, but it sounds like it was worthwhile. And now not only do you have this experience, but I would very much like to read your book. I'm looking forward to that. [00:06:15] Speaker B: Well, thank you, I appreciate that. [00:06:17] Speaker A: So let's talk about the executive coaching that you do. Can you tell us about some of the clients that you've worked with in the past and how you've helped them? [00:06:25] Speaker B: Them? Yeah, there's there's just a really broad spectrum over the. I've been coaching for 20, 22 years now, so I've gotten to work with over 10,000 people and they just cover this spectrum. But in terms of the, the people who are likely listening when it comes to like entrepreneur small business owners, I mean, I have worked with people everywhere from pre revenue to the founders of a company that was acquired by Netflix and now, you know, coaching people at Netflix or Epic Games or NASA. So I really have gotten the opportunity to work with people kind of all parts of this journey and myself have started three companies. I've also run several multimillion dollar companies for others. So I have fortunately just lots of different kinds of experiences in the domain of business that I get to bring to bear on my coaching engagements to help my customers, my clients grow their businesses. [00:07:22] Speaker A: And how do you help these people? Let's say that they have a business, things are going pretty well, but they want to hit that next level, whatever it is. They want to go from being two or three employees to 10 employees or they, whatever it is. Let me just pick that one as an example. But how do you actually help people in that scenario? [00:07:40] Speaker B: Well, the, you know, the people often ask me if they've never done coaching before, like, well, what is coaching? Like what's the difference between coaching and say therapy or something like that? And I think this is relevant to what you're asking. Okay, because people who participate in therapy or who are therapists listening to this, please don't hate me for doing characterizing this way. This is just the best way I can think of to make a distinction here because you know, coaches are not mental health professionals. So we don't have that kind of training. But typically when people are going to therapy, part of what they're trying to do is understand how they work and how they got to be the way they are, why am I this way, what happened, et cetera. So a lot of it is backward looking. Coaching, by contrast, is about identifying where do you want to wind up and then finding a way to empower that person to bridge the gap between here and there. So coaching engagements, at least the way that I do them, they always start off with a series of objectives. And those objectives can be both professional, like revenue growth, headcount growth, as you were saying, but also personal in terms of people's leadership, their professional skills, their ability to learn, lead team meetings, their ability to pitch investors for things like that. So there are going to be a number of goals in different domains they want to accomplish that they can't see how to do from where they are on their own. And that's where the coaching becomes useful. My job is to equip them, to empower them, to find their way across that gap in the time of the engagement. Now, how do I go about that? It's a combination of coaching them in the domain of being, which is something that most people don't talk about. And it's weird because human beings operate in three domains, right? We are human beings. So we have ways of being. We can. We can go about what we're doing being loving or being irritated. We can go about what we're doing being open or being closed. So ways of being are fundamental for human beings. And that's an important area of life. You have being, then you have action, and you have results. The things that you have in life, okay? And there is a flow naturally in life from being to actions and from actions to results. So, you know, you go, I'm married. If I go have a conversation with my wife, if I'm being loving, no matter what we're talking about, I take one kind of actions. If I'm being righteous, I take a very different set of actions and I get a very different result if I'm being loving or I'm being righteous. So some of the coaching I do is in the domain of being and giving people access to new ways of being and new ways of seeing the world. The allow them to take actions they couldn't take before or couldn't take effectively, and that enables them to produce different results. So some of my coaching is about that. Some of my coaching is straight up about how do you think about business in a new way that allows you to take different actions? So we're working in both domains, you know, both that personal domain and in the business domain on filling in what would make the difference in them accomplishing their goals. [00:10:29] Speaker A: You explained that so well. One of the things that I think a lot of people are feeling is some uncertainty right now in terms of the economy. Is it a time to grow or is it a time to scale back? [00:10:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:40] Speaker A: What would you say you've seen in your experience of the impact that the recent changes in the economy causing uncertainty? How has that affected small businesses from your vantage point? And if we picked an example like commercial real estate agents, what would you say in that regard? [00:10:57] Speaker B: So I actually have a couple. It's interesting that you asked about that. I do have some clients who are commercial real estate agents. And so one of the things that you're seeing right now in commercial real estate, for example, is interest rates are a part of the current environment. And although interest rates did recently go down, I think 25, 25 bips, they're generally higher than they've been in some time. So if you're in commercial real estate, let's say, and you are a landlord, you're on the landlord side. So you own this property and your investment only really returns anything to you if you can keep the property occupied at least, etc. So if interest rates are high and you, let's say you bought the property 10 years ago and now it's time to refinance your loan and the interest rates are 2 points higher now, so they're 2 percentage points higher now than they were when you purchased. And you have to refinance, that completely changes the financial model of your business. So that's there, right. So there are a lot of commercial loans coming up. So this is a challenge for the landlord side of things. But then at the same time, if you're a tenant, so you're a retail business, you're a restaurant, whatever, you know, the cost of goods have gone up for you because right now pricing is high, there's a little inflation in the market. So now your business model is being stretched, your profitability is being stretched at the same time that commercial real estate prices are wanting to go up to cover this refinancing challenge. So in that particular industry, you can see how that's how this plays out if really you have to look at it sector by sector. But since you asked about that sector, just to give you some sense of it, that's some of what is going on out there right now. [00:12:33] Speaker A: I definitely agree with that. And the point you make about how people view it to interest rates versus inflation and so forth is incredibly valid. What would you say for a business that is geographically fixated in some way, like say a CPR class, for example, that's serving a specific demographic area, what type of needs, business needs, would a company like that have to consider? [00:13:00] Speaker B: Well, for one thing, you have to consider how the current market conditions we were just talking about affect your target demographic. And that could be anywhere on the spectrum from its advantageous to disadvantageous to it's somewhere in between. So, for example, you said a CPR class, right? So maybe, maybe I'm someone in a, in an industry, in a job. And I'm thinking, man, I think AI is going to gobble up my job in the next year or two. I need to find a different thing. To do that, AI is not going to gobble up, well, hey, maybe I could go learn how to be a paramedic, you know, and I don't think AI is going to gobble up paramedic skills. So maybe I need to go start getting myself trained in what that takes and I'm going to go right. So maybe now if I'm the business giving that class, I'm going to think about marketing to someone with a message that's hitting that note like, hey, concerned that, you know, changes in artificial intelligence might steal your job? Think about a career in da da da da. Right? So geographically located businesses could, could think about. Now it's interesting because a CPR class, I personally wouldn't think of that as necessarily a geographically located class if it can be done online. But if you have to be actually pumping dummy chests and things like that, then yeah, okay, I could get that. So then you're going to think about Google, maybe keyword searches in your geographical area, bidding on those kind of search terms, people who are searching for like oh, I need, I'm looking for a job that's not going to get gobbled up by AI. So things like that, that's one, one way you could think about it. [00:14:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I like that approach too and good point on the Google AdWords, because that is something that someone who wants to take that class, who's thinking about their future, who potentially would want to teach their own CPR class, I absolutely love that approach. One similar question, but in a slightly different vein. What would you say is the key to knowing when is the right time to scale up? If you have a home services business, like maybe a pool installation company and things are going smooth, how do you know when it's the right time to expand and to scale up? [00:15:11] Speaker B: I think that question needs to be answered maybe with just a little bit of nuance. So for example, I have two very different types of entrepreneur that I coach. I coach venture backed Silicon Valley style startup founders and I also coach because just because it's a love of mine and it's where I started my entrepreneurial journey. I coach small business owners. So if I'm a venture backed company, the word scale up means something very different than they do if I am a pool cleaning contractor or remodeling contractor. Those are two completely different connotations of the word to scale. So if you're looking at the venture backed startup and you're trying to grow into a unicorn, a billion dollar company, the time to scale up is when you've demonstrated what people call product market fit. When the market is screaming at you, you have something I really want. And now the challenge you have is you are not resourced appropriately to answer the demand for the size of market you have, you have found a fit in. So in that case, when you have demonstrated you have product market fit, and the market is clearly telling you, man, if you can, if you can get a million things of this out, you can sell a million of these things. Now it's time to just pour on the capital and put in a sale. A bunch of sales functions and a bunch of manufacturing functions. If it's. If it's a widget or whatever, okay. But for small business, it's completely different and the considerations are different. And what I would say is, and this is where I find many small business owners skip an important step is you always have to start with the ultimate end in mind. And I don't find very many entrepreneurs who do this. And what I mean by the ultimate end is, is what you want to do sell your business at some point, is what you want to do own a business that you don't have to work in that pays you sort of what they call mailbox money? Is it that you just love what you do? And what you want to do is extract yourself from all the administrative stuff, stuff you don't like, so you can just do the technical work you love. What do you want to do? What is the outcome you're shooting for? That has to inform your answer to the question, when is it time to scale up? Because bigger's not better. Intrinsically, it really isn't. And it's a mistake to think that it is. Because if what you really love is the freedom your business gives you and you decide you want to scale up because bigger is better, you may find that it cost you your freedom to scale up and you're not happy, right? And so you really need to know what is the ultimate outcome you're going for? And that answers your question. I know I'm not answering your question directly. That's only because I don't think you can. [00:17:51] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I think that's a fantastic answer. Because to your point, if you have a different goal from someone else, right, just because you want to scale up, and if it comes with more stress, more anxiety, more, you know, un. Unfun work that you now have to do, is it really worth it? Was the growth at all costs that you were willing to do really worth it? And I think a lot of times small business owners are just so focused on, you know, the next month or the next quarter or whatever. So thinking that far ahead gives a lot of perspective. Where are you trying to go? And that really makes sense from a executive coach, from a leadership perspective, what is that goal that you have in mind that's right for you? And then tailoring the plan to do that, that makes complete sense. And I really like that approach. [00:18:34] Speaker B: Great. Yeah. And you know, it's like if someone's answered the question is, and I want to make more money, you don't necessarily have to scale up to do that. I mean, it's like how much do you look at your margins? Are you leaving money on the table? What if you could make the same amount of take home money right now with half the top line revenue because your business is inefficient? Would you take 50% less headache with no equivalent pay cut to cut your revenue? Like, yeah, most entrepreneurs like, I'll take that all day long. So maybe what we ought to do is get really efficient before we start thinking about regrowing the revenue. Maybe we need to get rid of half our customers because they're not profitable, you know, whatever. So yeah, the end goal is really important to consider. And again, something I find many entrepreneurs skip mostly because they don't know that it's important to do or they don't know what their answer is and they find that embarrassing or frustrating. And so, you know, sometimes people just need to do that in a conversation because they think out loud better than they think in their head when it comes to those kinds of things. [00:19:37] Speaker A: That was an excellent explanation. Andrew. This has been fantastic getting to chat with you. Can you tell us where we can find you online and what we can look forward to you creating in the near future? [00:19:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Great. So I'm very active on LinkedIn and so you can certainly contact me there. Send me a connection request. I'll accept it, especially if you let me know that you heard about me on the unscripted small business podcast. Or you can connect with me through my website, andrew pols.com My LinkedIn is also my name. It's LinkedIn in Andrew Polls. So either one of those you can get to me. As I mentioned, I have a book coming out next year about that whole experience of taking on that race. It's called over the Gate. And so that'll be coming up soon. And I'm also beginning to do some work on products that I'm going to be putting on a learning hub online that will be a much lower cost option for entrepreneurs because I know many of them really need that right now. And you know, coaching is more expensive than self paced learning. So I'm going to be developing some products like that as well. So stay tuned. [00:20:40] Speaker A: That's a great idea. Then people can watch and listen at their own pace. Right. And digest it while still getting to access your expertise. I think that's a great approach. [00:20:49] Speaker B: Thanks. I appreciate it. It's been really, really fun talking to you, Andrew. [00:20:53] Speaker A: This has been great. Thank you so much for your time. [00:20:56] Speaker B: You're welcome, Daniel. Have a good luck with the podcast. It's a great podcast. I love the people you have on here. [00:21:01] Speaker A: Thanks.