Breaking The Patterns Of Our Thinking To Create Something Different With Bill Flynn

The longer you are in business, the less likely you are to stay in business. It’s time to break the patterns of thinking rooted in the past and start looking into the science and data available to propel businesses forward. Bill Flynn is the Chief Catalyst of Catalyst Growth Advisors, a coaching company that aims to help leaders advance how they perceive what should be done to run a successful business. He joins host Tony Martignetti to discuss the experiences that opened his eyes to his gifts and how he transitioned from being a startup entrepreneur to coaching CEOs in leading their business. Bill explains why businesses need to start making decisions based on data and turn a new leaf to their approach.

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Breaking The Patterns Of Our Thinking To Create Something Different With Bill Flynn

It is my honor to introduce you to my guest, Bill Flynn. Bill is a certified growth coach with more than 30 years of experience working for and advising with hundreds of companies, including startups where he had a long track record of success. After working for ten different high-tech startups in different markets segments, including speech recognition, eCommerce and affiliate marketing, he pivoted to becoming a business growth coach. He had 5 successful outcomes, 2 IPOs and 7 acquisitions, including a turnaround during the challenging 2008 financial crisis. Bill's also an author and international speaker. Bill's best-selling book is . Away from work, he is an avid reader, athlete and enjoys volunteering locally. When he's not off cheering on his collegiate champion daughter, Bill lives in Sudbury, Massachusetts with his wife, dog, cat and four chickens. We are going to have him on and talk a bit about his story. Welcome to the show, Bill.

Thanks for having me, Tony. I appreciate it.

As you might have heard what we do in the show is we usually talk about the key points in people's stories, what we call flashpoints and we highlight what has revealed your gifts to the world. In the process of doing that, we walk through your story and share what you are called to share. We want to know what has brought you to the world, all of the amazing successes that you have brought, how did you come to this place? Along the way, we will pause for reflections and see what shows up.

I came to high-tech by accident and through the family. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I worked at Papa Gino's when I was in college and I’ve got all the way up to shift manager. I was helping run the business as a 17, 18, 19, 20-year-old. I learned quickly I did not want to run a pizza place for the rest of my life. It was certainly out of fun but not my aspiration. I reached out to one of my family members who was an investment banker in the ‘80s, and then in the ‘90s became a VC. I said, “I don't know want I want to do.” He was great. He brought me over to his office and got on the whiteboard. He's like, “Let's plan out your next 30 years. What do you want to be when you are 25?” “I had no idea what I wanted to be.” It showed you the kind of person he was. He got me a bunch of informational interviews and one of them hired me. I started an inside sales guy making $15,000 a year or something in 1986 or 1987. I'm not a typical sales guy at all but I liked the work, and the people that I worked with were great. 

The company I was at was completely dysfunctional but I didn't know that at the time. I found out later that it was. I learned a lot of things about what I would never want to do in business, which are things that are important to learn. Unfortunately, I learned them when I'm at a very young age. I’ve got connected to some people in startups and I loved the startup thing. I love puzzles and figuring stuff out, the greenfields so that’s what put me on my way. I have had 2 sections or 2 aspects of my career. One is startups. I did ten of them, as you mentioned. I had a pretty good track record. I know I’ve got lucky. I’ve got in with a good bunch of people. I learned the team is a super important part of being successful. 3 or 4 of us did four of them together. I was 4 for 5 and 5 for 6, and when I was 5 for 10, my last few weren't so good.

A person can be great, and they probably already are, but they get in their own way sometimes.

Along the way, I was a coach but I didn't know I was. I wasn't smart enough to know that I was coaching, it’s just what I did. Looking back, I became a coach and I liked the process. I loved the results. It was great. The team, although they were uncomfortable with it at the beginning because I have learned a lot of folks were used to being told what to do. As coaches, they don't tell you what to do. They have you figure it out for yourself. They certainly can guide you and give you their experience but it's your job to figure out what's right for you and what works for you. As long as it fits in the context of where we are going and what we are trying to accomplish, I didn't care what they did.

That was great. I took that in the back of my mind and after startup number ten, the fourth failure in a row, I said, “Do I want to do another one?” I said, “Let me see if there's a way I can make this coaching thing more of a living.” That's what I did. I should have done it a lot earlier. I love what I'm doing. I now know what a calling is. That's what I did. My “gift” is I'm extremely curious so I ask a lot of questions. I have been called Socratic many times. I have learned that the more I have learned, the more I realized how little I know.

That created humility because when I was younger, it was all about being right. It was all about having the answer. That was important. We are taught that as children. You have to have the answer and all the good students have the answer and I wasn't a very good student, by the way. Those are the things I bring. As a coach. I'm sure you have a similar thing as well as you bring that innate curiosity and realize that the other person can be great and they already are but they get in their way sometimes and my job is to help them get out of their own way. That's my quick and dirty version of what I think I bring.

I like that you are talking about this element of humility too, which is the ability to say, “I could be wrong and I'm okay with being wrong.” In fact, being in startups, there's some element of digging into that for a moment but to say that there's always an element of being wrong in the things you are trying, it's all risky. Getting comfortable with that being wrong but still venturing forward is an important part of being in that world. Would you agree?

I have come to believe that you only fail if you didn't learn. We were wrong more often than we are right. You should be comfortable with that, especially if you are in a startup if you are trying to grow your business, you are going to be wrong a lot because you are trying to predict the future, which is hard. If you are uncomfortable with that, that can be very debilitating for you because you are going to do analysis paralysis. You are going to take forever. I'm a big fan of, “Get as much information as you need to make a cohesive decision, then give it a go and know that you can change it. As long as it's not existential, don't do that with an existential model. If you are going to sink the company or you are going to damage the company if you are wrong, then yes.

Spend a little more time or do things that are a little safer to fail, break it down into smaller bits. Many would say that I'm not as humble as I should be but I have acquired humility over time. I have also learned that there's not one way or another. There are many ways to get to some outcome and it all depends on some factors. You don't have to find the right way. You can find the way that works best for you. We, as human beings, have evolved through mistakes and errors. It's a trial-and-error process. It should be something we embrace, especially if you are looking to grow a company.

It's funny that you talk about that because it's about that trial and error that ultimately leads to that knowing when you are right and when you are wrong when to strike that balance, which is the next word that comes to mind, balancing, being a good leader in a startup is about knowing when to take risks and when to say, “This is not the right time to do that.” It's educated through all of the failures and the things that have happened in the past.

I have a very a unique view of a startup versus scale. A startup leader is very different. You have two things that you have to worry about, in my opinion, if you are a startup leader. One is, find a problem we are solving and solve it in a way that enough people will pay you enough money to make a real business out of it. That's one. The second is don't run out of money. Those are the only two things that you should worry about regularly. Most founders don't spend enough time on the first one, which often leads to the second one happening and you run out of money. Once you have done that, you've gotten through that knothole or over that hurdle, then it's a completely different model. Most startups are surviving and you are taking risks and doing the things to try to figure out how to keep going and how to meet payroll, etc.

Once you have done that, if you’ve got through the knothole, you have a business model. There's this guy, Steve Blank. He's considered the godfather of startups. I love his definition of a startup, which is, it is a temporary organization in search of a business model. If you don't find a business model, you won't survive. You can keep getting money. That's different. I always see there are some things on LinkedIn, “We’ve got another $20 million, $25 million.” I never see, “We just became profitable for the first time. We have done all these things that made our business healthy and thriving. It's celebrating mom and dad giving you more money so you don't have to sell the house or whatever. That's not success to me.

Once you do that, I always advise leaders, you need to go and revisit all the key decisions that you made as a startup and make sure that they are still the right decision because often they are not. Those decisions can come back to bite you years later. We have short-term memory problems as human beings. We don't always remember that. We were like, "It's because this happened.” No, it was because of the decision you made four years ago, which puts you on a path that that thing happened. That's how I view the world, which a lot of people don't see that way. Am I right? I don't know but it seems to work out that way more often than not, at least from my research and study in my experience.

It makes me think of these planting seeds. You start planting seeds early on that bear fruit many years later. I can imagine that that comes up even in your coaching, when you start to engage with people, sometimes you plant a seed and it becomes a client later on.

I definitely had that. I have had 2 or 3 of my clients were years before they decided to finally do something with me, which is fine because I say, “If you are not ready to do it, then I can't help you. I don't want to take your money then you will be dissatisfied.” Coaching is about reputation. Most of my new clients come from my own clients so I want to make sure that they are ready to go. I tell them, “Here's what you are getting yourself into. It's not easy. Here's what I'm going to ask of you. Are you okay with that?” People say, “What's your biggest challenge as a coach?” I say, “My biggest challenge typically gets the leader to shut up.” You hired all these good people, then you are telling them what to do.

You only fail if you didn’t learn.

Jim Collins calls it the genius with 1,000 helpers. I can't help you. That might work for you and that's great but eventually, you are going to run out of bandwidth. Some of these great people will leave because they want to think on their own. They want to use their own brains. You want to give them their brains back. It's a great way to think about it because that's what gets you better decisions, diversity of thought insight, which is two disparate thoughts that are loosely connected to come together. It's like, “Great.” You can do that on your own but if you could have 5 or 6 brains, that gives you more loosely connected thoughts. The insights could be better, deeper, and more profound.

Running into what I was going to go next. With the wealth of experience in the space of startups, and then you made the transition into coaching, tell me about the early days of getting your coaching practice off the ground. The trials and tribulations. You are like, “I try to forget about that.”

When I became a coach, my previous four were not good and that wasn't there for more than a year and a half. When you have success early on, you have developed a certain lifestyle. I live in Sudbury, which is a relatively wealthy town. My daughter went to private school, not on purpose. We would separate for the grade schools, and then we found the one bad school was in our district. They went through three principals in five years. My daughter was having a horrible situation. She was seven years old and she didn’t want to go to school. She didn’t want to go to first grade so we said, “We've got to do something about this.” We decided to try to find something else for her. Private school costs money and my last four startups didn't do well. I made a good amount of money but it wasn't anywhere near. I paid my bills and that was it.

When I started my business, I started with zero clients, no experience as a coach. I started from nothing. It was expensive. My bills didn't go down. I went through a lot of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars paying bills and things. I didn't have a client pay me until probably a year and a half, and it wasn't even much because I was still getting going. About two and a half years in, things started to happen. As a coach, you have generally hired for your experience but also the assets that you bring from your training. I bring a framework and I teach my clients a framework that they can use and they can build upon, which is a proven framework. It's 25 years old, it has been done tens of thousands of times and it works well. I make a good amount of money. I don't need a ton of clients. Generally, if I do a good job, they stay with me.

My first client is still with me. They are on pause now because of the pandemic and they are in the study abroad industry so they’ve got annihilated by this because no one is studying abroad but we still keep in touch. They are like, “We want to keep in touch. When things come back, hopefully someday we will be able to afford you again. We want to keep going,” which is great. They may be with me for 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 years. That's great, I don't need that many. It was rough.

There were times where I'm looking, “Maybe I should go get a job because it was burning money.” Until COVID, I was doubling my revenue every year. It started low number, to start but you double every year. That's a pretty good process. I was continuing. When things come back, I will begin that process again. It's a wonderful living. It's a great thing to do. You are helping people, you have an impact on thousands of lives. My BHAG is to touch 1 million lives before I'm done. I'm only at 26,000 now so I’ve got a long way to go.

It's amazing to hear it isn't an easy road but it's much like anything that you start and you have to be in it to win it and you have to be resilient to the downtimes and the uptimes.

The word is courage. There were times where it would have been easy to go back and get a six-figure sales job. I was good at it, I have been a VP of sales eight times so I've got a great reputation. It wasn't getting me up in the morning anymore. I could do it but this is fun. Time flies when I'm with clients or working on stuff like this. It’s just flying. It's so great.

Is it passion that drives you or is it more of a purpose that is the key or is it the same thing in your mind?

I say passion and purpose are two different things. There are a lot of science out there on passion. We are told when we are young, “Follow your passion.” We are like, “What the hell is that? I don't know what my passion is.” There's this guy Cal Newport and others who have done this work. He's like, "Your passion is something you are usually good at. Try lots of stuff. Things that you get good at and you gravitate towards, that's where your passion is. I give advice all the time. I give it to my daughter and adults as well. As a kid, I was giving, too. I said, “What is it when you are doing it, time flies? You lose yourself.” You want to investigate. That's probably what your passion is. That's the stuff you are good at or you love doing.

My example often is, I love to play the guitar and sing. I'm not a great singer, nor am I a great guitar player. I'm good at it. I'm not in any way great at it. I have a lot of musician friends. I am not nearly as good as they are but when I'm doing it, time flies. An hour and a half go by, I'm like, “I’ve got to go back to work.” I work in this room, and then I go in the family room where my guitar is, and I will play at lunchtime or whatever if I want to take a break and then like, “I’ve got to stop and get back to what I was doing.” That's passion. The purpose is what impacts you want to make in the world. What dance do you want to make in the universe?

That's the difference between the two. Hopefully, they converge. If you are going to have your passion and purpose be on the same page, that's a calling, in my opinion. A calling to me is what I do for free if I could. I would do this for free. To be honest with you, I do it for free all the time. I'm constantly coaching people and they are like, “I want to pay you.” I'm like, “Don't worry about it.” Either because I'm too expensive or I'm not doing it for that reason.

I get a kick out of helping people and having them help themselves. I don't get answers, I ask a lot of questions. To me, that's the difference between passion and purpose. They are key. There are 4 or 5 other things that you’ve got to do as well to be successful but they are foundational. That's part of your identity. Identity is important. They talk about a lot of them in sports but what's the Bruins' identity? The team is known as the Washington football team now. That’s super important.

I love that we are having this conversation because I'm thinking to myself, “There are so many people out there who I'm wondering how much they truly are connected to their passion and purpose.” I know there are a lot of talk about it but the reason why there's so much talk about it because it's so important when you connect to it and you come from such a different place and that's the power.

You see these numbers on employee engagement and they are horrible. Assuming they are right, I have heard arguments that they are not but I have seen two different studies done by pretty substantial organizations. Gallup, Mayflower Research Group, pretty good organization. They both say that employee engagement is 25%, 35%. That means 60%, more than half of your workforce. It’s just showing up to get a check. There are not a lot of passion purposes in that.

We are going to get back into your story. What has been the most challenging part of your journey to getting here? We may have already talked about it but maybe you could come back into a moment that was the hardest thing for you.

We talked a little bit but I will go a little personally. I wouldn't call it imposter syndrome but I have never been a CEO and I'm going in and I'm being leaned on by CEOs or heads of the company. Having that concern, then it's getting over it of, “Am I going to be used to these people because they are not going to take me seriously,” but you have never done this before so how would you know? I have been a GM, which is, to be honest with you, it's a mini-CEO. I was responsible for everything. I just didn't report to the board. My CEO did. I reported to him. I have a little bit of that but I never had the title. That was the biggest challenge I had was convincing myself that I could do it.

There’s a sizeable gap between what science knows and what business does.

One of the reasons why I didn't do this was I didn't find something I could teach that I felt confident in. That's how I picked my startups. In my startups I have picked on a gut feel. Partly it was because it's the team that I was with but I left the team because some of them went and did another one and I said, “I don't believe in that. I can't sell that.” I had to believe in it. I had to believe in the fact that I could do something that would be of use.

When I finally looked at a whole bunch of different business operating systems that I would want to teach, I found out there are 23 that I could find that are out there. Twenty-three different kinds of business operating systems. There's EOS or Scaling Up, E-Myth, there's a value builder. There are tons of them. I found the one that I thought made the most sense to me and so that I could believe it and that's what I did. Once I’ve got better at it, and that's why I lost money for so long is because I was practicing, finding what works for me and what didn't work for me. Now I have improved upon the system that I did because I found holes in it. It didn't make sense to me so I added things to it, etc. Now that confidence is there and you can see it.

A number of my clients say the word gravitas. They say, “We want your gravitas in the organization.” I'm squeamish about that word. There's some egotistical thing about that but it's a nice word. It means that I have confidence and I have been there. I have been through it. What I say means something. That's what I'm hoping to do. Not because I'm advising or telling you what to do. I don't tell my clients what to do but I ask them questions. Why do you do it that way? Do you have to? How would you do that? Would you rehire all the stakeholders in your business? Basic questions. What is strategy? What is your strategy? How would it work? How do you know what's working? They sit back and look. That was my biggest challenge, to be honest with you, getting over myself.

This is something that I love digging into because there's this inner journey that you have to go on to become the person you are and that's about earning that place. It's not about, “I have to get to the C level to be able to coach C level.” It's about earning your place and knowing what your worth is and understanding what you bring to the table by going inside and seeing who you are. When you come back out, you come in with this confidence of knowing, “My journey got me here. All the practice has gotten me here. Now, I'm able to deliver on that promise with the people I learned with.”

My dad used to tell a cool story that I still remember. My dad's not with us anymore. He was a pipe fitter. He fixed refrigerators and then onto grocery stores for Stop & Shop, Whole Foods, and all these grocery stores and he would be the construction guy. He would start from the beginning. He would tell this story where he said, “Your refrigerator is broken down.” The guy shows up and he asks a couple of questions and then he said, “Great.” He goes and looks in the back and takes out a screwdriver and he turns it one-quarter turn and the refrigerator works. He says, “That's $100.” The guy said, “A $100? You just turned one screw.” He said, “It's $95 to know which screw to turn. It's $5 to turn the screw.” That's what it is. You are not paying for my time with you. You are paying for the 30 years I put in that I'm bringing to you all at once and the hundreds of other people that I work with that I have access to as well. That's what you are paying for. You are not paying for me sitting in the room with you for eight hours at a time.

I wholeheartedly believe that. That's such an amazing part of bringing that together. It's all of that learning that you bring to the table.

I have made a ton of mistakes so I have a lot of learning to bring.

Speaking of mistakes and to translate that more to the lessons, what are the lessons that you feel that people need to hear from your journey above and beyond the ones we have already talked about? If you were somebody who is starting their entrepreneurial journey or there's somebody who is in this process of going through a transition, what would you want them to hear?

That's basically what my book is about. I have found that there's a sizeable gap between what science knows and what business does. We generally run our businesses on conventional wisdom, which is almost always wrong and intuition, which is often right but not always. There's a great phrase, which is a gut check. I'm a big fan of, “Go with your gut,” because there's something there but check it because sometimes it's wrong and it's a good practice to do it. That's one thing. The other is few things truly matter in business or life but those that do matter tremendously, have an outsized effect. Leaders need to spend much more time trying to figure out what those few things are.

That's what I do. I try to help them. What are the few things that drive your business? What do your customers really care about? What do your employees know and what are they bringing to the organization? You can build a better business by focusing on a few things. I have been researching business for 30 years. If you look at the best companies, meaning the ones that thrive and last, not just for years but for decades, generations and centuries, they do the same few things well, and they do them over again.

The example I like to give is Apple because everybody knows who they are. I don't think this is public but their strategy is simple. Their strategy is amazingly simple and simply amazing. Everything they do is about that, whether it's the Mac, iTunes, iPod, iPad, the TV, everything is the same thing. Make it simple but a joy to use. They apply that over again. They could do that with dishwashers or whatever their passion is. They can apply it to almost anything and that's what makes them successful. If you look at Herb Kelleher of Southwest, the best performing public company for many years, very simple. They do low fares, lots of flights and fun. That's what they do.

Their strategy is, “Wheels up, get the plane in the air. That's what we are doing. The only way we make money is when we get planes in the air. Everything we do is about how did we get the plane in the air a little bit faster,” but still have a decent experience. They put us through some crap, they make us stand in the cattle line, and we could only have salt and sweet on the thing and packages, and can't pick your seat and all the things. That's all to get the plane in the air.

Have you flown Southwest? You noticed when you get off the plane, the flight attendants are coming towards you and they are cleaning the plane as you get off. You can fly an American or Delta, you get off, everyone gets off, then they put the cleaning crew on to do the plane and they do a better job, the flight attendant but that's an extra 5 or 10 minutes. Southwest, 5 or 10 minutes, 1,000 times a day are a lot of time. That's fewer dollars we get to make. They are always trying to do that. There are a bunch of other stuff as well. You have to fire yourself from the day-to-day. We talked about that knothole. Once you get through that knothole, your job now is not running the company. Your job is to fire yourself from running the company because your job is to predict the future of the company. The only way to do that is not to operate regularly because you need your brain to relax. One thing I ask a lot and I will ask you this of you, Tony. When do you get your best ideas?

When I’m not working.

In the shower, on a run, on your bike, hanging out in the backyard, looking at nature and listening to birds. Growing businesses, especially these days, it's about insight and insight is slowing your brain down so you can bring these two things together. If you do those 2 or 3 things, those are the lessons I would bring, especially the first one. We ignore science at our peril. We have a 50% hiring success rate across the United States. That's a flip of a coin. You might as well bring in some people you think would do the job, pick the top two, flip a coin and you are as good as going through weeks and months of interviewing.

The longer you are in business, the less likely you will stay in business.

The worst way to hire someone is through an interview. Why? It's because we have 150 known cognitive biases and we bring them to the interview but they are outside of our conscious awareness, things like that. There is a 70% failure rate on change initiatives. Let's stop doing it the way we are doing it. Let's do it a different way. Let's do it the way science says. That's a big one. Close that gap. That's what I do. I put neuroscience in everything I do, teach people to look at the brain. You’ve got to lead with the brain and mind. Those are my key lessons.

I feel like we can go from days on.

Unfortunately, I could. I skew introvert but about this stuff, I'm not. I'm an extrovert. I love this stuff. I could talk about it forever.

The energy is palpable and I love it. This is exactly what jazzes me until the end of that. Speaking of books, what's one book that has had an impact on you?

As I said, I'm an avid reader because of the pandemic. I'm on pace to read 80 books in one year. I'm not trying to read a certain number at all. Sometimes I read the same book over again because it’s a great book and you pull other things out of it. One that I think was transformational and confirmational, for me, was a book by Marcus Buckingham called Nine Lies About Work. It ties back to science. He has been doing research since he was in his twenties when he was at Gallup, and then he left there, did his own, got acquired by ADP doing research for them. He's all about why. Why are some people successful? Why are teams better than other teams? Why are some companies better than other companies? He's like Jim Collins or other people who then research and try to figure out, is there a pattern here? Is there something that they do? Nine Lies About Work are those things.

We have come to believe that isn't true, yet we still do them, which is why I’ve got some data from the US Bureau of Labor. It was from a study done in 2011 or 2012. It basically says, “The longer you are in business, the less likely you will stay in business.” You have a 50% chance of making it five years, you have a 25% chance of making it fifteen years, you have a 23% chance of making eighteen years, then the study stopped. The curve was going down. Why didn't you see this as well? The Fortune 500, there are only 40 businesses left on the Fortune 500 that were there in the 1950s. Four hundred sixty turnovers. The likelihood of being on the S and P used to be 60 years, it's now 15. We are getting worse at this. We are not getting better at it. That's my message. Let's do this differently. It's not working. Let's figure out other ways to do it. I don't have all the answers but I have some ways of thinking that will help people.

Break the patterns of our thinking so we can create something different. Bill, this has been such a pleasure. I love all your insights, your story. We could have hours upon hours with you but I want to thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing what you have shared.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Where can people find more information about you? Where can they get in touch?

The best thing is my website. Everything is on there. I'm pretty much an open book. My book is on there. You know some of my stuff. I write twice a month. I write it short. Hopefully, it's a helpful piece. It's generally prescriptive. I give people stuff to do or things to ask themselves. My book is also a DIY book so you can look to resources on my site. You can read a chapter or two, and then go, try the exercise and do that stuff. My purpose is to help people. You can download my book for free on my site if you want. You can also pay for it, which is great too on Amazon or whatever. My phone number and my email's on there. You can book a 30 or 60-minute meeting with me. Everything is on my website, and that is www.CatalystGrowthAdvisors.com.

Get the book, everyone. It is fantastic. Subscribe because Bill is a wealth of information and so many great insights. I want to thank the readers for coming on the journey. I know you are leaving with lots of great insights and I hope that you reach out and talk to Bill and get some more information from him. Bill, thank you so much again for coming to the show.

It has been a pleasure. Thanks, Tony.

Thank you. We will see you next episode. 

Important Links:

• Further, Faster - The Vital Few Steps that Take the Guesswork out of Growth
• Nine Lies About Work

About Bill Flynn

Bill Flynn is a Chief Catalyst at Catalyst Growth Advisors, a coaching company that aims to help leaders advance the way they perceive what should be done to run a successful business. His program revolves around the idea of Simplified Servanthood, where he puts what matters most to their team and customers into perspective over distractions. Bill has over 30 years of experience advising hundreds of companies, especially startups.

He is also the author of the Amazon Bestseller FURTHER, FASTER, a self-help book centered on growth and mindset.   Bill joins me today to share how businesses should start making decisions based on science instead of what everybody else is doing. He shares the flashpoints that enabled him to realize his gifts in coaching and leading. He describes what it’s like to be a startup entrepreneur and what you should focus on if you want to become one. Bill also explains why many of today’s businesses are inefficient at what they do, especially when hiring new employees.