In the summer of 2009, Bill and his wife made good on a promise they'd made before kids and before the business got serious: they'd take the family to Italy for a month when the kids were old enough to remember it. The business was shaky. The timing was terrible. They went anyway. Episode nine of the Busy Is Broken series is the story of what happened to the company while Bill was gone — and the ten months of rewiring it took to make leaving possible.

The forcing function was simple and brutal: a real date on the calendar with plane tickets attached. Not an imaginary "someday." Bill had to confront an uncomfortable truth — he'd built and led the company in a way that guaranteed he could never truly step away. So he spent about ten months changing it.

What happened in Italy? The company moved forward. The team didn't crumble, because they were leaning on their own judgment instead of his. Here's the test for you: if you had to leave for a month starting tomorrow, what would break? Name it. Then spend the next quarter making your absence survivable.

Links:

• Busy Is Broken book and free diagnostic: busyisbroken.com
• Q20 Growth Diagnostic: scalingcoach.com/Q20

Mentioned in this episode:

Busy Is Broken

Have you ever had a week where you're completely slammed but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That’s not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter, over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. Also on amazon and other booksellers.

What happens when you start selling at six years old — not lemonade, but industrial machinery parts? Doug C. Brown figured out the math of leverage before he finished second grade: why work forty hours for ten dollars when you can sell one part in six minutes and make the same? That early wiring never left him. From military service to selling music equipment to Aerosmith and Paul McCartney, from nuclear medicine to telecom where he helped grow a company from $62 million to $368 million in two years as their number one rep, Doug's career is a masterclass in following the leverage.

Doug joins Bill to unpack his concept of Win-Win-Win Selling — the idea that every deal should produce three winners: you, your buyer, and someone else who benefits from the transaction. He shares the origin story behind this philosophy, born from watching too many reps stuff commissions by selling clients things they didn't need, simply because they didn't have enough prospects in the pipeline. Doug explains how he built an internal partner channel at his telecom company — connecting telephone hardware vendors with his cost-saving service so that clients saved money, vendors sold more phone systems, and Doug's phone rang sixty-two times a day with inbound leads.

The conversation digs into what actually separates top 1% performers from everybody else. Doug breaks it down to four things: always thinking in terms of leverage, systematizing everything, continuously building business skills, and continuously building personal skills. Bill and Doug trade war stories about the car dealership model of win-lose selling, the brutal economics of department store procurement, and the costly lesson Doug learned when he walked into a multi-million dollar meeting totally unprepared while six people on the other side had done their homework. They also explore the power of follow-up — Doug's two-year nurture that landed NASCAR, his mentor Chet Holmes' five-year pursuit of Jay Abraham and even longer play to land Tony Robbins, and why a simple quarterly "just thinking about you" message builds the kind of relationship capital that changes careers.

In This Episode

About the Guest

Doug C. Brown is the CEO of CEO Sales Strategies and author of Win-Win Selling: Unlocking Your Power for Profitability by Resolving Objections. A military veteran, former musician, and nuclear medicine professional turned sales leader, Doug has helped companies from startups to Fortune 500s build revenue growth systems. He was the #1 sales rep at a telecom company that grew from $62M to $368M, served as President of Training and Sales under Tony Robbins, and has worked with brands like Enterprise, Procter & Gamble, and NASCAR. His mission: helping business owners and sales professionals break into the top 1% of earners.

Links & Resources

Stuck? The Q20 Growth Diagnostic will give you a fresh perspective and it's free. ScalingCoach.com/Q20

Our new book, Busy is Broken, coming this September. Sign up for the release at busyisbroken.com

Mentioned in this episode:

Busy Is Broken

Have you ever had a week where you're completely slammed but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That’s not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter, over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. Also on amazon and other booksellers.

If the data on overwork is this loud, why do otherwise rational leaders keep flooring it? Episode eight of the Busy Is Broken series names what's running under the hood. After twenty years of coaching CEOs, Bill has found five engines that keep smart leaders stuck in patterns they know aren't working. They're not character flaws. They're operating systems. And most leaders run on at least two or three simultaneously.

Engine one — Identity: your sense of self is welded to the role. When "I am the business" becomes your operating identity, rest feels like death. Engine two — Fear: the quiet saboteur dressed as caution. Sounds like diligence. "I'm not micromanaging, I'm double-checking." Underneath: if this goes wrong, people will think I'm not good enough. Engine three — Habit: yesterday's survival reflex running tomorrow's company. The habits that built the company are the same ones trapping you inside it. Engine four — Culture: visible effort signals competence. Research shows people infer higher status from whoever appears busier. Being indispensable feels like winning. Engine five — Adrenaline: the dopamine of the save. That was Bill's. He loved being the one who got the call.

These compound. Fear drives micromanagement. Micromanagement feeds the identity of being needed. The adrenaline of firefighting masks the strategic neglect underneath. And the four sins they produce — poor delegation, micromanagement, perfectionism, strategic myopia — feed each other in a doom loop. This week's invitation: name your engine out loud. Don't pick the one that sounds least bad. Pick the one that's actually driving your behavior. Say it to someone you trust. Naming it is the first step to choosing something different. Next episode: the Italy Test — what happens when you put a real date on the calendar to step away.

Links:

Busy Is Broken book and free diagnostic: https://busyisbroken.com

Q20 Growth Diagnostic: https://scalingcoach.com/Q20

Mentioned in this episode:

Busy Is Broken

Have you ever had a week where you're completely slammed but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That’s not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter, over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. Also on amazon and other booksellers.