Cut The Tie | Own Your Success
Define success on your terms, then, "Cut The Tie" to whatever is holding you back from achieving that success.
Inspiring stories from real entrepreneurs sharing their definition of success and how they cut ties to what is holding them back.
This is not your typical podcast. This is a deeper dive into the entrepreneurial spirit, the journey, and what it feels like to achieve success.
Each episode is inspirational, motivational, and most importantly - actionable. You'll gain real strategies and mindset shifts you can immediately apply to your own life and business.
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Own your success.
Cut The Tie
Thomas Helfrich
Host & Founder
Cut The Tie | Own Your Success
“Break Every Problem Into Small Pieces”—Steve Chiama’s Engineering Secret for Business
What happens when years in corporate America teach you how to make money—for someone else’s business—but leave you wondering if you could do it for yourself? In this episode of Cut The Tie, host Thomas Helfrich sits down with Steve Chiama, a business coach with ActionCOACH Western Fairfax, to talk about scaling companies, pricing correctly, and cutting the tie to the false security of corporate jobs.
Steve shares how he shifted from engineering and running profit centers in Fortune 500 companies to becoming a business coach who helps owners scale from six to seven figures—and beyond. With 15 years of coaching experience and more than 140 businesses transformed, Steve knows what it takes to build a profitable, sustainable company.
About Steve Chiama
Steve Chiama is a business coach with ActionCOACH, serving clients across the U.S. His background spans 38 years in corporate America, including leadership roles in engineering, customer service, and profit center management. Today, he brings that hard-won knowledge to entrepreneurs and small business owners, guiding them through proven systems to achieve the growth, profitability, and lifestyle they imagined when they first started their business. Whether it’s refining processes, pricing for profit, or building teams that can scale, Steve’s mission is to help owners step out of “doing everything” and into running a business that works for them.
In this episode, Thomas and Steve discuss:
- Cutting ties with corporate security
After nearly four decades in corporate roles, Steve realized the “security” of a paycheck wasn’t so secure after all. - Why most small businesses stay small
Steve explains why 96% of businesses never get past $1 million in revenue, and why only 0.4% ever hit $10 million. - Pricing, value, and paying yourself first
Steve breaks down why paying yourself first, building margin into pricing, and scaling through others is the only way to achieve lasting profitability.
Key Takeaways
- Corporate jobs aren’t secure—your skills are
Layoffs can erase “security” overnight. Real stability comes from knowing how to create results yourself. - Break problems into small pieces
Steve’s engineering mindset: solve challenges step by step, then reassemble into a working whole. - Most businesses fail by undervaluing themselves
Undercharging and overworking kill profitability. Pay yourself first and charge what you’re worth. - 10x growth requires systems, not hustle
Working harder won’t scale. Build processes and delegate to grow beyond your own time. - Coaches drive accountability
Knowledge without action fails. Coaching ensures consistency, follow-through, and momentum.
Connect with Steve Chiama
📎 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevechiamabusinesscoach/
🌐 Website: https://westernfairfax.actioncoach.com
Connect with Thomas Helfrich
🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/thelfrich
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/cutthetie
📎 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomashelfich
🌐 Website: https://www.cutthetie.com
📧 Email: t@instantlyrelevant.com
🚀 Instantly Relevant: https://instantlyrelevant.com
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Welcome to the Cut the Tide podcast. I'm your host, thomas Helfrich. I'm on a mission to help you cut the tide of whatever the hell holding you back from success. And also, you should be defining that success yourself, because if you didn't, someone else defined it for you and you're going to have a tough time reaching that and it's a big thing. So definitely define your own success. Today, I am joined by my friend, steve Chiama. How are you, steve?
Speaker 2:How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Very good, thomas. How are you Steve? How are you doing? Very good, tims. I'm doing well. We meet almost weekly and whenever I realize. I've known Steve a long time now and we've never met in person, but he finally decided to come on. He is an action coach, so I'm going to pre-sell him a little bit. Listen to what this guy says about building businesses. He's helped people go from like a few to a whole bunch of zeros. So, like, just preface that I love this, so introduce yourself and what it is you do really quick, and then I'm going to set something up for you.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, that sets the stage. Thank you, thomas. I am a business coach with Action Coach. I work with business owners, guide them through a process. It's actually a step-by-step systematic process. Guide them through a process it's actually a step-by-step systematic process. Help them grow their business to achieve the goals that they were imagining when they originally started the business. And it turns out that it's not always the way they see it when they begin it. There's a few things they need to learn along the way. That makes it easier to get there, and so I help them go through those uh processes and uh get the most out of what they're doing.
Speaker 1:So people can stalk you while they listen um to the show. They can work you out, cause that's a common thing to do because people's attention. You're about to go hit your phone and listen to something, so I want you to go hit this. Where where should they go check you out while you're talking for your your show here?
Speaker 2:Uh, they can look me up on linkedin. They can look me up on my website, which is action coach western fairfax uh, they can look them up. They can look me up by my name, which is steven kiyama, on the on the internet, and, uh, there's any number of ways they can find me I'd like to point out something.
Speaker 1:I've been mispronouncing your name now for 18, 19 months. I said she I have.
Speaker 2:I've. There's probably 10 people I've met in the world in my life.
Speaker 1:That got it right the first time my wife being Slovak, I would call it Chiama, and so that's actually probably the pronunciation. It's an.
Speaker 2:Italian name, and so if you think of words like Chianti, you can catch it Gabalucci, gabalone.
Speaker 1:You know of words like Chianti, you can catch it, I didn't know. Gabalucci, gabalone, you know, yeah, something like that. Yeah, it's like Italian. I just I just fix Sicilian, I think is what I go with there. All right, I know this, but you have to share why people typically will pick you as a coach and I would give the use case. You have a bunch of them, but you have a really good one.
Speaker 2:So tell people why they should work with you. Many business owners start with an idea that they have knowledge good knowledge of a craft and are really good at a particular skill, a particular service or a particular product. They can only get so far because there's only so many hours in the day, and then they get really, really, really busy and they can't keep up and all of a sudden they're not making the money they really thought they would make in the beginning and they're working an awful lot of hours to do it, and this is pretty typical. What we bring to the table the skills that I bring them is a way to learn how to convert that product to money, to learn how to be able to drive that business without them being the one that does all the work, but bringing in a team of people to do a bunch of it for them. Learn how to scale that money up so that they're making the money that they really want to make, and if their appetite grows as they grow, that's fine too.
Speaker 2:I've had businesses go from $700,000 to $3.2 million in three years Businesses in the five, six, seven million dollar bracket right now that are growing as they learn how to grow their teams to become a little bit more effective than they've been in the past. And that's the key Learning how to be more productive, learning how to focus on the right things, learning how to do the do the things that make money. And it isn't just selling the next project, it's how you're going to sell the next 10 projects and who's going to do them for you while you go get the next 10 after that.
Speaker 1:So it's kind of learning how to think so that you're in a money-making place instead of a doing place. There's a few things that came to mind. Just as a business owner, I thought the world was flat and that's what I was going to go after. And then I meet people like you and I'm like oh, it's actually round. Oh, this is way worse Round and bumpy, round and bumpy, if not smooth. Okay, so that's one. And then on the journey, and you know, the one thing I would say to people is you're going to start off with 10X is kind of easier than 2x, meaning you're probably an entrepreneur and you're too far spread and you're not really focused on the one or maybe one and a half things that make you money.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And that's the 700 to. You know, double comma, and after that it's who, not how, and that's the, and I think just to summarize that, like so, there's a journey you'll go through that you don't realize, and if you're doing who, not how, before you got the 10x is easier than 2x piece, you were definitely doing it wrong, because you're going to be, unless you got endless funds somehow. Anyway, my point is there is an order and a reason for it, what you do. Now that we got that defined, let's talk about how you define success, just for yourself. How do you define it?
Speaker 2:All right. So I'm going to define it two ways. One is this the satisfaction of helping people get a result over and over and over. That's a satisfaction, that's a step in satisfaction. Two, for myself is and I use this as much as a scorecard that I'm successful. Is that how much money am I making and how much of that goes to my pocket and stays with me? So you know, like any other business owner, the objective is to be here and be profitable. Otherwise you aren't going to be here for very long. You can't sustain that. So how much money am I making and what's my growth curve in that process? So those are the key ways I would take a look at it. You can't let go of the satisfaction of helping somebody, because that's what gets you up in the morning.
Speaker 1:I couldn't agree more, and one of your definition of success has actually influenced me. And you've been with me through this. But I had this idea that you start with paying yourself first and then you retain money for your company. And I'm like, hey, wait, that's not the way to build a pricing model. I need to make this and I need to have this much margin for error, and then I need to pay these people. This.
Speaker 2:So that means my price is.
Speaker 1:You can't be doing this for break even and you will go break even if you do it the way I described, the other way where you go the other way, yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's a side hustle, it's a hot one. A lot of people run along the lines. They think that being a small one, two, three person business is the inexpensive, cheap, I can go get more customers because I can have lower prices. And the fallacy to that is and there's a phrase for this economy of scale the big companies are cheaper. The reason small companies think they are cheaper is because they don't pay themselves, and I can think of business after business, after business after business that the owner is not really paying themselves, or if they are paying themselves, it's not even close to what they could be paying themselves with a different thinking process. Yeah, and pricing, you're right, pricing is a huge piece of this equation.
Speaker 1:The underlying of that is some we'll move on here but is the idea of what your value is. So if you've undervalued services because you don't think you're not a big company, but people sometimes buy from niche because they think they get better service and they get more fine things, so knowing your value takes a lot of that and don't be discouraged. I know a few times I've thrown and this has worked. I said, hey, listen, our services are $15,000 a month. And they took it and I'm like I think I'm going to do that more often Because I was just like I'm going to throw this turd on the table and see what happens. That was $100,000 of their budget and I was like God, 8,000 a month.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, this is where you're sitting down and thinking about what's the right niche, not what's the niche I know how to sell to. What's the niche I should be learning how to sell to?
Speaker 1:We'll pick that one offline in our weekly session. All right, you got your success defined for you. Tell me about your journey a little bit. And what's been the biggest metaphor, ty, you had to cut to get it.
Speaker 2:Oh gosh, biggest metaphor, ty, you had to cut to get it, oh gosh, the biggest. I started in corporate America and I did about 38 years in corporate America and in a variety of roles. I started my life as an engineer, so I kind of think of myself as a recovering engineer today. I went, evolved into the business side and I for a 20-year period I was running profit centers for different corporations, most of the time in customer service-related areas of the company, so carrying on services and parts sales and upgrade sales for manufactured equipment out there globally it's actually worldwide.
Speaker 2:I guess the biggest cut-to-time moment I had was when I made the decision that I'd been learning how to make money for other companies. Why am I doing it? Why am I doing it that way? And I've been thinking that companies are kind of a secure place to be and yet I've been through a handful of acquisitions on both sides of the table where the company I was in was bought or the company I was in bought something else, and I was involved in the process of dealing with the merger of these different activities and teams and technologies and what have you. It was very interesting and very challenging, but when you stop and think about that. How secure is that? What makes that different from going off on your own and figuring out who's the customer that I need to be reaching out to? And figuring out who's the customer that I need to be reaching out to, what's the services, what's the results that they need and the services I can provide that get them those results.
Speaker 1:So you get the tie was the belief that you needed to work for somebody else. Right Is that I can do it myself. Right, and you remember the actual moment, though the straw, so to speak, that you're like.
Speaker 2:I don't really remember the actual moment. I think it was more of a process than a moment. It happened over a period of time. I had some family changes going on that I was looking at. I'd been through a lot of moves For me. I've moved around the country a lot, lived in a lot of different places, and so I guess it just was one more evolution and sit there and say why am I doing it this way?
Speaker 1:Knowing you, it would be a process. I didn't think there was going to be like a big F you moment. I'm out. That's not Listen, he's actually selling their Corral de la Clely. I like to point this out on the side notes. Do you see how he did that? He said I'm going to take you through a process. No knee-jerk reactions, Whiskey, that's true.
Speaker 1:I like that you are not here, but I think that's what makes you effective as a coach is that you actually look at real data and I don't want to be unemotionally because you're considering the emotions of the data, but at the end of the day, you make a decision on real data because you may feel and do this, but the data is saying everything else. Your outcomes don't match and I think that's where a business owner struggles is they have a lens on the data that they need someone to look around and go that you're trapped inside that little fish eye right now.
Speaker 2:Angle that you're trapped inside that little fish eye right now. Yeah Well, I'm going to get on a rant here a little bit, because I think our education process, our education system, is terrible.
Speaker 1:All right, we're going to pause that rant, hold on a second here. We don't know that kind of thing. That's a story we're going to podcast on that one I do want to know, so I want to come back to that, maybe offline. But I want to know something. There's one thing to have your success defined, your journey. It takes you where you go, and then you're like, okay, I'm going to do this, but then there's the how.
Speaker 2:So give me maybe the top one or two things you had to do in the how part to make that move. The first thing I had to do was to decide, and the first thing I needed to do was build a vision for myself when did I need to be, find avenues, paths, opportunities, choices that would help me get there. And a lot of that process was looking at different business models, looking at different businesses that I thought were attractive to me for one reason or another, and part of that would be the product, part of that would be the model of the business itself. Part of that was who would I be serving? And I looked at quite a few different things.
Speaker 2:Then I started to work with a franchise broker, because one of the things I learned was that it's nice to want to buy a business, which is what I was thinking about. It's nice to want to buy a business, which is what I was thinking about, but it's hard to start a business cold. You don't have systems, you don't have processes, you don't have product. Really, you can make it up as you go along, but that's the hard way. Why make it up and go along when somebody else already has done that for you.
Speaker 2:I tripped across the Action Coach system going through that exercise and discovered that they had essentially packaged all the things I had learned the hard way over a 20-year period of time and I didn't have all those neat formulas and all those neat tools and all those neat templates to be able to figure out how to do this stuff. I was doing it from my gut, based on hard lessons rather than based on data, and I knew that wasn't going to cut it. So when I sat down and looked at what they brought to the table, I said huh it. So when I sat down and looked at what they brought to the table, I said huh, that looks like a much easier path to be able to help a customer get a result than sitting down and trying to make it up myself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you also didn't realize the competition was out there beating you up with all these assets you don't even have.
Speaker 2:Well, in that particular particular case, you know what the worst competitor is probably your what time people thinking they can do it themselves?
Speaker 1:oh well, sure to do it yourself, or I'm one of them. Who can I get? Who am I?
Speaker 2:it's amazing how many people in how many parts of the market think they can do this themselves.
Speaker 1:And if you've done it before, I'd say, if you've been through it, that you're probably speed to go build to a 5 to 10, like the jump between a 2 and a $10 million business right and you have some stats around that Very difficult. It's like a very low event of the percent to get there figured out and a lot of times there's a big luck piece to it.
Speaker 2:The numbers that I have seen tell me that 96% of business owners never make it past a million dollars of revenue. 0.4% 0.4% make it to 10 million. That's kind of a reflection on the do-it-yourself approach.
Speaker 1:You and I have had this conversation lots of times, and I'm a zero to hero one just because maybe if I'd taken ADHD medicine prior, I would have had a different thought on that. That's a tie we need to cut. That was a tie and we've cut that right off too. I'll tell you what we are hyper-focused, um, but. But the truth is it's it's a fun route and I love that. I've gotten to the point where I have. Also, I know at the time I couldn't. I looked at franchising and I knew at that time.
Speaker 1:So I'm going to tell people this specifically if you know you can't follow a system, don't be a franchise, do not even get in that rut, because you're going to pay a lot of money to do it and then really be screwed and you're firing yourself. So, for the same reasons, you probably aren't going to be successful in a corporate world. You're going to have those exact same challenges by yourself and you'll find every reason to blame anything. So you got to understand yourself. For me, zero to hero was the only path that was going to possibly work and it's been the path to discover. So just, I think people need to take that in a little bit. I want to keep the focus on you on this.
Speaker 2:So, since making that move about how long and what's been the impact, that's doing it well, okay, from a personal perspective, I've probably helped about 140 people over 15 years be 15 years this month. Um, I've enjoyed it. It's been a blast. It's always amazing to watch people get one more success and then one more success and then one more success. To me, that's the blast, right there. Learning how to make money really that's been a blast. All of those things have been part of the game and it's just a matter of you know learning how to. How do I position myself to be attractive to more business owners so that they're comfortable talking to me about their problems? Um, what would what? What's the obstacle that they want to overcome? To me, overcoming challenges has been kind of a lifetime game. Um, I enjoy it. To me, it's to me, it's fun, kind of a lifetime game.
Speaker 1:I enjoy it. To me it's fun and there's a satisfaction in knowing you're like. I could be wasting away in the back and I think of your 150 or so people you said you've helped in 15 years. Fair to say, more and more have come in the last four as you've gotten better at what you're doing and as you're escalating. If you refined your talents where you're like man, I am really got this.
Speaker 2:I is escalating. If you refined your talents, where you're like man, I am really got this. I know who I can help really really well now and I'm nailing it. I would not say that has been that simple. Covid had a real negative impact for a while. People got really really scared. They couldn't see a future, so they hid away. They did not take risks, they did not take chances. They hid away. They did not take risks, they did not take chances and that meant they did not look for outside input very well and it's kind of interesting, I actually opened up a mini mastermind that was free. How few people actually took advantage of that over those years when I did that Now, he's free.
Speaker 1:Steve, Now he's free. You got to charge like $10,000 on that.
Speaker 2:Evidently I'm quite happy to do that.
Speaker 1:Can I throw something in there just on that note, and I want people to think about this. And Steve, you come, jump in. You're like, no, don't ever do that, he's wrong. I love the idea of, once you've gotten some stable revenue in for 30 days, go do something crazy and say, hey, it's $10,000 to work with me and see if you can find one or two clients to do it. And you might be like, huh, now part of that might be. What I mean is maybe you're charging $2,000 for your ticket. Go and say go, look what other people charge our experts and just charge what they charge and be like and take that persona a little bit. I'm going to do exactly that. What do you think about that? From an idea, because there's a folks and solopreneur here that's getting going versus the business that's established. So what about that idea?
Speaker 2:All right. So what's kind of interesting here is I actually offer a ladder of products so people can enter in at almost any price point they want to come in that they feel that they can handle. I'll tell you, the ones that jump in a little bit aggressively are the ones that get stuff done because they have to, um, but I can bring people in for something for 360 bucks so I think that's the thing, is it so you and okay, I'm beating the question a little bit for 360 bucks.
Speaker 1:So I think that's the thing, is it so? Okay, I'm baiting the question a little bit here. So the thing is get customers in at the level of their comfort, as long as you can add value and make money at that price point, at 360, you're not every week with them.
Speaker 2:No, and now I'm going to play with what matters Somebody who's willing to put up $2,500 a month. That's the person who's going to make real progress.
Speaker 1:So I Do you think it's because you ordered $2,500 and or they are financially committed, so they're like, I'm not they are committed.
Speaker 2:They are going to do the work. They are going to step up and do the work, and this is what it's all about. It's about getting out of the comfort zone. It's about doing things they've never done before or they've never done consistently before. Doing them consistently, doing them regularly and doing them often, which specific things depend business to business, but it's always in that category. Many times it's going back to the beginning and setting processes up. I mean, we played around with the process word a little bit ago, but that's really a core piece of this. It's putting everything into a process, following the process. Make the process work for you, um, but it's gotta be the things in the process that work and produce results. And there's the key is learning how to measure results so that you can see what does work and what doesn't work.
Speaker 1:You know it blows me away is that people will spend minimum if they have a crappy salesperson five to 7K to bring a salesperson in without even thinking about it, but they'll blink at a coach expert that can help them transform their business for 2,500.
Speaker 1:So it's not about the money you spend, because you get more of your time. You get more which you're there doing, and I think this is the piece where I think, as you think, about how you're evolving your own success. When people think about what they need to do, the more often you're holding me accountable, the more shit I'm going to get done on a system proven to work. And that's what 2,500 gets you versus 362. That's you doing the work in the afterthought of time, when you thought about it and didn't really spend the rest of money somewhere to burn it. Right and I think that's the mindset you should have is, if I'm willing to hire a salesperson, but I still can't, I've done it five times. Now pause, save 5K and go hire somebody who can show you how to go repeat the model and get the processes in place so you can hire 10 salespeople that are all making 10X what you pay them.
Speaker 2:All right. So here what you pay them. All right, so here's a fun statistic. People go to workshops, People go to seminars. People buy books. 85% of the time they never do anything with it.
Speaker 1:I'd better be hiring that.
Speaker 2:Spend $5,000, go listen to Tony Robbins and then don't do anything.
Speaker 1:It blows me away. Friends of mine go do all that stuff and I'm like you own a cleaning business and nothing's changed in your business. You feel better about yourself. I don't get it. I don't go to those things because I just don't see the value in a conference. I just feel like I'm going to get sold the whole time. Go fill out one Grant Cardone form and you'll get called 700 times. Yes, right, I put your phone number last time I felt them about.
Speaker 2:What does it take to get?
Speaker 1:you doing what needs to be done Exactly that. I love it. All right, let's keep moving forward on our show, because I think I can do this with you. I'm trying to. I've got. This is an important show because I'm stealing free advice for people that don't really have to pay $2,500 a month for it for you. So here we go. What's actually been the best business advice someone's given you?
Speaker 2:Oh, there's an interesting question, hmm, hmm, I guess the best bit of information I've learned along the way, and it came while I was in college.
Speaker 2:But every time somebody comes back and talks to me about something, it goes back to that same lesson over and over and over and over. And that is when you have a problem or a challenge or an issue in front of you break it up into small pieces, understand each piece, work to solve the pieces one at a time and collectively put the results back together again for each of the pieces solved. And I hate to say this, but I learned that in engineering school, just literally trying to solve homework problems, work problems, and every time I turn around, the business problem in front of me has to be solved exactly the same way. Sit down, think about what is the problem, what are the pieces of the problem, what's the data I got to have for this piece, what's the data I got to have for that piece, what's the data I got to have for that other piece over there, and then start to work out what have I got to change to change the outcome of the data?
Speaker 1:There's, you do have to, but in that that you know, this goes back to kind of the central theme of the we've been talking about. You have to have good processes and understanding of those processes to be able to do that. If you don't, you get it. Yes, you have to have good processes and understanding of those processes to be able to do that. If you don't, you get nothing. If there was a question, I should have asked you today, though, and I didn't what was that question and how would you answer it?
Speaker 2:I think the universal question is how can I scale my business up 10 times, 20 times, 100 times?
Speaker 1:I think, though, they have to pay you for that answer. I don't know, but you can do it for free. I'm accepting that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the short approach to that answer is to sit down and understand what is the flow of money in the business. What is the flow of money in the business and that starts with marketing and ends with collecting on orders completed. What is the flow in detail and how do I systemize that? And then how do I put people into it? Piece by piece, by piece by piece, in a sensible sequence.
Speaker 1:In a short answer, that's the one that's worked the most. You're obviously spot on, that's what you do for a living. But it is so true, right? So, as I've really kind of dove into my business of what makes money, what's fun, what's an ideal or, and what's a future bet that I should or should make, I know by looking at where, like even now, like right, okay, cool, our podcasts are top of funnel for us. They're great conversations, there's a sales opportunity right after for people buying promotion, but there's no real revenue because that's all done, that's the future investment of the cut the tie. And so I'm like, all right, but how do I make revenue then? And so it's.
Speaker 1:It's making sure the guests that come on also probably need some help with lead generation, and if they, if they don't, that's fine, cause they might be people who know people, they might be something else, and it's not 100% fit. But realizing that was number one, and then saying how can I be in one shirt all day? It's all these little pieces of the process. Instead of doing the podcast all week, you and I talk and you're like, why don't you batch that shit? I'm like, all right, I'll batch it, and you start doing this stuff and I think how do you grow to a big company? It doesn't just happen and I think a lot of entrepreneurs, including myself, thought it just would like. All of a sudden, things are going great out of because they did and the truth is it doesn't it. You have to be very, very, very structured and approached and and systematic on how you're going to make it happen it, otherwise it will. You will go through these peaks and values of revenue for the rest of your life until you quit.
Speaker 2:Do you remember the old?
Speaker 1:story if you invent a better mousetrap, the world will beat itself to your door. I've heard that Not that long of a form Never works. Nope, Actually, China does it and sells it for 30% less than you can make it for.
Speaker 2:Well, there's another piece of the equation right there, but just start with the original point of view. If they don't know you exist, why should they come? That's right. If they don't know your product has a better track record of catching mice, why should they bother?
Speaker 1:Here's a realization I will painfully publicly admit. So a year ago, we started the podcast with the idea that I wanted to shift our things that way, and as we built part of our other company going out, what's become very clear to me? The road ahead on my company's pivot is long, and so I'm like, okay, we will continue that, because that is a much bigger, there's a real reason to do that and it's also some top of funnel. So I moved my brand back to lead generation, which is what we do for people, and as soon as I did, you know what's happened. I've written more proposals in six weeks than I did all last year.
Speaker 2:Isn't that interesting.
Speaker 1:We are. When you tell people what you do and you have a system and you're very, not area but confident about what you do because you've done it well and you know you do it better than probably 99% of other. The point is, yes, you have to let people know what you do and don't don't get sucked in this idea that you shouldn't promote yourself because you. No one else is going to do it for you.
Speaker 2:There's a, there's an auxiliary piece to this too. Uh, and I see this all the time People get to a place where they feel they've capped out but they're not making the money that they want to make. So, rather than do the work of marketing and scaling, they go out and look for another opportunity, and then another opportunity, and then another opportunity. And then all of a sudden they've got trying to do four or five or six or even 12 different things and they're not doing any of them effectively enough to scale up, because they just don't have the number of hours in the day, the number of hours in the week to make it all work. And they wonder why it's not all coming together. Well, if you're working on this opportunity over here, you're not working on this opportunity over there. So which is it? If you really want to do them? Get one going so well and get it so well scaled up that somebody else is doing the work. So then you've got the time and the cash to go over and do this one, pick one at a time.
Speaker 1:I think that goes back to what we said you have to go 10x on one thing. Now this is the value statement. I'll leave everyone with when a coach matters. They will help you figure out of the four things you're working on. It'll be painfully obvious and you'll be like I can't believe I spent money for that, but you'll need to hear it from somebody else of which is the one that's most likely to be 10 Xable in the shortest amount of time, or six Xable in a shorter time, which allows a really good what's the best one to focus on and giving you the confidence and tools to make it, because that's what entrepreneurs get scared of is lost opportunity. And then they see you know the rift, or I're like I need another revenue source and I need another one, and they get so thin that nothing works well.
Speaker 2:You just need to make this one work really well, scale it up and then come back to the other one later.
Speaker 1:Great, all right, I appreciate you coming on today, so I want you to it's shameless plug time part two who and where?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm not sure I understand exactly the question who and where but where do they do that? Any business owner, any business owner that wants significantly more than they've got, should get a hold of me. I've got a way to hold of me. I've got a way to help almost any size business. Where is they can find me on LinkedIn. They can find me on the website. They can just look my name up on the website. But Action Coach Western Fairfax is the name of the firm. Those are the places that they can check me out and connect with me. That's probably the easiest, most consistent way that they can find out what they want to find out.
Speaker 1:I'll narrow it for you too. Us businesses that want to go next level. Next comma, next zero Fair enough 10x 10x. I like that. I think that's a zero. Is that just one zero?
Speaker 2:It's got a zero in it, followed by a whole bunch more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I like that. I like zeros and commas.
Speaker 2:The more the better.
Speaker 1:My two theory characters on the thing are Zeros and Commons, not that European crap either. Like a real comma, yes, yeah.
Speaker 2:The US version of those US and.
Speaker 1:US. Who thought of that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I have no idea how that happened. I don't understand. I did a lot of business in Europe and there's still things I don't understand where they came from. I understand how to work with them, but I don't understand where they came from.
Speaker 1:I'll leave you with this idea, though we did come up with like a foot and some other weird measurements. It's probably us who did it, Since we're Americans. You know, it's Gulf of America now. So I'll leave it at that, all right, thank you, steve, for coming on today. Thank you, steve, for coming on today. I really appreciate you getting on here finally and spending some time with me.
Speaker 2:Awesome. Thank you very much, Thomas. Appreciate it.
Speaker 1:And everybody who listened and got to this point. Thank you. If this was your first time, hope it's the first of many and if you've been here before, I do hope you come back. Get out there, go cut a tie, go hire a coach If you've on LinkedIn C-H-I-A-M-A.
Speaker 2:Thanks, steve, for coming on, all right. Thank you, thomas.
