The Escalation Process Of Leadership With Kelly Roach

True leadership can be best seen among leaders who inspire others to be the best of who they can become. In another enlightening episode, Nathan Hirsch talks to Kelly Roach, known as the Business Catalyst and the host of Unstoppable Success Radio. She explains to us some of her learnings from the business world and highlights on the escalation process of leadership. She also talks about the hiring process and how to troubleshoot a bad hire. Having learned from corporate America, Kelly offers some tips on how entrepreneurs can scale their business and avoid some mistakes along the way.

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My guest is Kelly Roach. Kelly, how are you doing?

I’m doing good. Thanks for having me.

I’m excited to talk to you. Thanks for being here. For those of you that don’t know, Kelly is known as The Business Catalyst, helping elite business owners become game-changers in their field and achieve $1 million-plus breakthroughs in their business. She’s a former Fortune 500 executive who built and led record-breaking teams in seventeen locations around the US. Her programs and consulting encompass billion-dollar corporate strategies combined with the speed and agility of the most powerful online strategies. We’re going to talk all about that, but first, let’s take a gigantic step back. What were you like as a kid growing up? Were you a straight-A student? Were you a rebel? Did you always know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

None of the above. I was definitely a BB+ student. Firstly, I always struggled in school. It was not my strong point. I did try hard though. I did not know I wanted to be an entrepreneur. When I joined Corporate America, I thought my dream was to be a corporate exec flying on jets and on boardrooms and all of that. I charged as hard as I could to the top of Corporate America and I was promoted seven times in eight years. I got all those things that were in my mind that I had dreamt up were going to be the dream. I got to the top of that mountain and I was like, “I think I climbed the wrong mountain.” I realized it wasn’t for me, that wasn’t my dream.

I wanted flexibility. I wanted freedom. I wanted to focus on my family. I wanted to travel the world. I had never dreamed of being an entrepreneur. I recognized once I had accomplished what I thought I wanted that the only way that I was going to experience those things was if I went out and I created that for myself. That’s how I decided to get into coaching and to consult small business owners because everything that I had done up until that point to allow me to get promoted seven times in eight years was teaching, coaching and training people in sales, marketing and how to build their business faster. I pivoted and started helping other companies with that instead of focusing on one internal corporation and team.

I’ve never had a real job. I started my first business when I was in college. I never got that corporate experience and I think a lot of entrepreneurs didn’t necessarily come from the corporate world. What’s the biggest thing that you learn in the corporate world that someone like me or other entrepreneurs that haven’t experienced that miss out on?

For me, the biggest advantage of my time in the corporate world was learning solid business principle, and strategy that helped me to grow my business so much faster. When I look at what’s happening in the entrepreneur space and I coach hundreds of entrepreneurs around the globe every single day. A lot of what you learn in Corporate America about the principles and the foundation of growing business did not translate over to what I like to call the entrepreneurial world. One of the main reasons why many entrepreneurs and small business owners struggle, for example, in the business that you’re in where you’re helping people to find support staff, a lot of entrepreneurs are hugely resistant to hiring. They’re hugely resistant to building their teams because they didn’t have that corporate experience of leading a team, building and understanding the power of exponential growth that comes from a team. For me, a lot of what’s helped me to build my two companies quickly and with a solid foundation where I don’t have to be working 24/7 comes back to that leadership experience that I was able to gain before I even became an entrepreneur.

What does leadership look like for you? Leadership gets thrown around a lot. Every entrepreneur wants to be a leader. What do you look for in a leader? How do you coach people to be a better leader?

There’s an escalation process of what leadership means. In the beginning, you start by delegating and then you move into management, which is where you’re holding people accountable and responsible for deliverables and outcomes. When you grow from the management into true leadership is when you inspire people to become more, to be their best selves, to find their why, to go all-in on whatever objective you are brought together to work towards. You have absolute loyalty, commitment, and 100% responsibility from that individual because you understand how to help them to achieve what matters most to them. In the process, you’re able to achieve what matters most to you. Most people never get to that level in their businesses. That’s why many entrepreneurs are stuck in this cycle of grinding it out and working hard. I wrote a whole book on it, that’s how passionate I am about it. My second book is called Bigger Than You: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Building an Unstoppable Team. Even if you master how to do sales and marketing and you learn how to build and grow your business, if it’s you and more you and the whole business depend on you, it’s difficult ever to scale hence the role that you play in helping entrepreneurs to do that.

What would someone’s first hire be? That’s a question that I get asked all the time. It’s a difficult question to answer. When someone asks you that or someone doesn’t know what to get started, you’re working with a solo entrepreneur, what do you advise them?

The first hire should always be the tactical VA or admin that is going to essentially help the business owner to align their time with revenue-producing objectives in the business. The first hire should be a person that’s going to be the tactical blocker that gets everything off of your plate, that someone can do better, faster, cheaper than you can. The second hire should always be a primary revenue producer who is someone that their entire existence is they are to create more income for the company so that you can continue to build and grow your team. That first one is absolutely your blocker. It’s their job to keep you, the business owner, focused on being in front of the camera, behind the microphone, on the stage, and having consults with prospects, running launches, closing clients and building the business.

What do you look for when you’re hiring someone?

I always hire to work ethic. I always focus primarily on character, integrity and drive. I teach everything else. What I always tell people when they’re assessing people that they’re going to consider hiring is I see a lot of business owners that hired a talent. Talent is great but talent doesn’t mean that this person is going to come to work for you every single day. Talent does not mean that this person is going to have the commitment, the passion, the drive, and the integrity, all of those things to keep going when things get tough. What I always say is you have to lock in on what your company and personal value system is and you have to get clear on what the personal characteristics of the people that you are going to surround yourself with must display. You have to use that as a part of your hiring process and stick to it every single time you make a hire.

What about running meetings? A big part of corporate is getting the most out of meetings, making sure people leave on the same page. Do you have any tips or tactics to share there?

That’s one of the most important things that I did learn in Corporate America and that I use now with my virtual team that’s all over the country. What we joke about all the time, my team says, “I’ve never been as close working in person with any team that I’ve ever worked with as I am with our team and we’re completely virtual.” That’s because we were on effective team meetings. The key to it number one is to keep them short. The biggest time-waster is getting people in the meetings, on phone calls where they’re not purpose-driven, where they go on longer than they should. Do people then get confused around what is the deliverable? What is the thing that we’re supposed to be walking away from this doing? Even my team sales meetings that I run every single morning, they last fifteen minutes, that’s it. Everyone is off to the races and they are focused on going out there and executing and generating results.

I would say number one, be purpose-driven, have an agenda, know exactly what you want to cover and most importantly be able to answer the question, “So what, now what?” The people sitting in the meeting need to know so what, meaning why does this matter? Why are we doing this? Why is this important to the overall big picture? They have to understand why and then now what? What am I supposed to do right now as a result of the conversation that we had? If you focus on that as a leader, and the third thing I would add to that is, what’s in it for me? What’s in it for them? If you give those three things, your meetings can be fifteen minutes or less and they can be power-packed. You can build a multimillion-dollar company around it, which is exactly what I had done with my own team.

How do you handle someone that you hire that’s going in the wrong direction? They’re not living up to expectations. Whatever they’re doing is not what you want them to do. Do you have a certain approach or strategy for handling that?

Super swift definitive action. Number one, someone cannot meet your standards if you do not clearly articulate them and communicate them. The number one reason why contractors don’t perform, the number one reason why people want to fire their admin or fire their VA or get rid of team members is not the team member’s fault. It is, in most instances, a leadership gap that relates back to your own clarity or lack thereof and your own accountability or lack thereof. The most important thing when you see that someone’s off track, the first thing that you need to do is hold up a mirror and say, “Am I consistently communicating a clear, concise message and holding this person accountable to the same set of deliverables day-in and day-out so that they can perform well and meet my expectations?”

In 99.99999% of the cases, the answer will be no. The reason why that person is not meeting your expectations is that you didn’t set them up successfully to do that. First things first, communication. The second thing, clarity and the third thing is accountability. If you then say, “Yes, I’m checking all those boxes. I’m clear. I’m communicating. I’m holding people accountable, coach.” Coach and move swiftly to a definitive end goal. Either you’re moving them up or you’re moving them out and give yourself a 30-day window to make that decision. Take it through the formal steps of the process, document it, make it clear, give the person every opportunity to succeed and then either exit or uplift.

What other tips and strategies can you give for scaling their business? You work with a lot of entrepreneurs. What other mistakes do you see them making?

The biggest mistakes are not investing in building your team and not investing in advertising. Those are the two biggest things that hold entrepreneurs back from growth. If you have the best product in the world, you have the best program, you deliver the best result but only five people know about you and you can only close one person at a time, how far are you going to go? That can’t be underestimated. It is understanding that investing in visibility and in a team is your responsibility as a CEO that wants to scale. It’s one of those things where I’m passionate about helping people understand this. My recommendation is if you’re saying, “I can’t afford it,” get a part-time job so you can afford it. My recommendation to entrepreneurs is it is that important. If you truly believe in your business and you truly believe that this is your calling and this is what you want to spend the rest of your life doing, then get a part-time job. Barter with someone, pick up an extra client, do something on the side to raise the funds that you need to get off the ground. If you don’t outsource or insource or hire, and if you don’t pay for visibility, you’ve already put up the walls of how far you can go in business and it’s not far.

That can be overwhelming to a lot of entrepreneurs because there are many different social media channels, there are many places you can run ads. How do you go about figuring out? What is the best way to advertise my business? What is the best way to get an ROI?

The best place to start with advertising if you’re online business is Facebook ads, hands down. It’s proven. You’re going to get a return on investment. You have to be patient and invest money in testing. You’re not going to set up ads now and be making bank tomorrow. It doesn’t work that way. I’ve been doing Facebook advertising since 2013. I’ve gone through all the cycles of the craziness and the algorithm changes. Everybody is like, “It’s impossible to make money. It’s too expensive.” All of that. Here we are still, in 2019, making at least a 10x return on investment for our ads. That’s even with all of the challenges, the market saturation, the deterioration, all of those things.

That’s not going to stop. That’s never going to stop because anything that’s worth anything is not going to come easy or everyone would be doing it. For the readers, you should be glad that it’s a little bit hard to get up and running with cracked advertising. You should be glad that it’s expensive to get up and running with advertising because if there’s no barrier to entry and there’s no filtering process, then it would be impossible for anyone to make money with those mechanisms. That’s something strategically that it’s important to have a bigger picture perspective on.

I know you’re into philanthropy. Can you talk a little bit about why that’s important to you and what you’re working on?

I don’t get to talk about it that much and I don’t bring it up, so I appreciate you asking. I came from a family that lived above the poverty line. We had a lot of help growing up. We had a lot of people that did a lot of caring and kind things for us, to help us during tough times. I’ve always seen the good of people. As I build and grow in my business and now my business is, I have the opportunity to make a difference. It’s always been my intention to use my platform for good. I feel that as entrepreneurs, we have a responsibility to give back in any way that we can. I don’t care if it’s $0.50, I don’t care if you don’t have any money, and it’s your time, whatever it is. For years now, we’ve been making consistent donations to Charity: Water and organizations to help vets get back on their feet and Save the Children and all different kinds of companies.

What I’m most proud of is we started our own foundation. We are raising the money to do an entire water project. We’re building a full well and for every company and customer that we close, we make a donation to this foundation so that we can begin to build wells around the world in partnership with Charity: Water. That’s been huge. There are still billions of people around the planet that don’t even have clean drinking water. For $30, you can bring clean drinking water to one person for the rest of their life which is unbelievable to me. When you think about human life and you think about the centerpiece of what’s at the center of the circle, it’s clean drinking water. You can’t survive without it. Having a lack of clean drinking water is a 100% solvable problem.

I love what you’re doing there. Kelly, this has been great. Where can people find out more about you? What are you most excited about for the rest of the year? 

I’m excited about everything. I’m excited about all the new things coming with online entrepreneurship. We’re having a lot of fun with micro-content, sound bite marketing, text message marketing, and doing our launches with live streaming. It’s a fun time to be an entrepreneur. I’m excited to continue on the journey and see where it takes us. In terms of connecting with me, my show is called Unstoppable Success Radio. We deliver a new episode every single week. It’s twenty minutes or less and focuses on giving strategies, mindset, and tools to grow your business faster online. Check out Unstoppable Success Radio. I teach the live launch method once every six weeks in my Facebook group. It’s free and it’s how you can do 6 and 7-figure launches using nothing more than the phone and the camera on it. If you’re interested in learning about that, you can search the Tribe of UNSTOPPABLES on Facebook.

Thanks for coming on, Kelly. 

Thank you for having me.

Important Links:

• Kelly Roach
• Bigger Than You: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Building an Unstoppable Team
• Charity: Water
• Save the Children
• Unstoppable Success Radio
• Tribe of UNSTOPPABLES – Facebook group

About Kelly Roach

Kelly Roach is known as THE BUSINESS CATALYST, helping elite business owners become game-changers in their field and achieve million dollar + breakthroughs in their business.

As a former Fortune 500 executive who built and led record-breaking teams in 17 locations around the US, Kelly’s programs and consulting encompass billion-dollar corporate strategies combined with the speed and agility of the most powerful online strategies of today.

Kelly is a featured expert on ABC, NBC, Fox, the CW and in some of the world’s leading publications such as Inc. and Forbes where she shares the principles of her best-selling books and host of top 100 Marketing and Management podcast, Unstoppable Success Radio.

Kelly is committed to ongoing philanthropic work to bring clean drinking water to those who do not have access and is the co-founder of Give Her Courage, a movement to instill courage and confidence in the girls of our future from the start.