Good Neighbor Podcast: TN-WNC-SWVA
Bringing together local businesses and neighbor of the TN-WNC-SWVA region. Good Neighbor Podcast hosted by Skip Mauney helps residents discover and connect with your local business owners in and around The TN-WNC-SWVA.
Is your business serving the residents of TN-WNC-SWVA? Then, we need to talk! Visit gnpTri-Cities.com to schedule your free interview.
Good Neighbor Podcast: TN-WNC-SWVA
EP# 289: Scaling Beyond Plateaus with Bill Gilliland of Action COACH Business Growth Partners
What makes Bill Gilliland with Action COACH Business Growth Partners a good neighbor?
Ever feel like your business has hit a ceiling? You're not alone. That nagging plateau where growth stalls is exactly where Bill Gilliland of Action Coach Business Growth Partners steps in to transform good businesses into great ones.
Bill shatters the common misconception that business coaching is solely for struggling companies. "It's not a business hospital," he explains with refreshing clarity. "It's a business gymnasium." This powerful distinction reveals the true nature of effective coaching—not rescuing failing enterprises but strengthening ambitious ones ready to level up. With 18 years of experience helping entrepreneurs scale, Bill has honed his expertise particularly with businesses in the trades, construction, and professional services sectors.
What makes Bill's approach particularly insightful is his understanding of the psychological barriers to growth. "We're all our biggest lid on our own business," he notes, highlighting how often entrepreneurs themselves become the ceiling that prevents scaling. The conversation takes fascinating turns as Bill draws parallels between business breakthroughs and outdoor activities like fly fishing—reminding us that our best ideas often emerge when we're not actively thinking about work at all. This holistic view of entrepreneurship acknowledges that mental space away from business paradoxically creates room for business innovation.
Looking for guidance to break through your business plateau? Connect with Bill through his website billgilliland.biz, attend the upcoming Asheville Business Summit on September 23rd, or simply reach out for that cup of coffee he mentions might spark your next breakthrough. Sometimes the difference between staying stuck and scaling successfully is just one conversation with someone who's helped others navigate the same journey.
To learn more about Action COACH Business Growht Partners go to:
Action COACH Business Growth Partners
(828) 348-1787
This is the Good Neighbor Podcast, the place where local businesses and neighbors come together. Here's your host, Skip Monty.
Speaker 2:Well, hello everyone and welcome to the Good Neighbor Podcast. So today we've got a very special guest with us live. We're live today as well as recording. I don't know if we would, but thrilled to have a special guest in our studio with us for the first time. And I'm sure you'll be just as excited because today I have the pleasure of introducing your good neighbor, mr Bill Gilliland, who is the owner operator of Action Coach Business Growth Partners. Bill, welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me. Well, we're thrilled to have you and, like I said, excited to learn all about your business. So if you don't mind, why don't you kick us off by telling us what you do?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're a professional services business. We work with mostly business owners. We do coaching and training, coaching and training. So you know it tends it tends to be business owners who are ambitious, who are looking to scale their businesses and their teams and, yeah, we help them be great at business. That's what we do All right.
Speaker 2:Helping business be better, that's awesome.
Speaker 3:We can all use that.
Speaker 2:Well, how, Bill, how'd you get into helping businesses years?
Speaker 3:ago reading an article in the wall street journal about I think it was about executive coaching, but it was about coaching and I'm like and I'd never heard of it and and I thought, well, this is, this seems like a pretty cool thing and and I didn't do anything with it. I was running another business and then we sold. Actually, the guy who owned the business sold it. I was running it with him and I don't really have anything to do. So I was out there looking for a business to buy or or a sales territory or just you know. Just I had resumes, I was talking to people and I got a call one day and I said have you ever thought about being in business for yourself, but not by yourself? And I said well, I did that once before. You know, tell me more. And the more I went down this path, it ended up being the whole action coach environment. And you know, here we are 18 years later. It's been a good run.
Speaker 2:So Wow, 18 years. That is an awesome run actually. Congratulations.
Speaker 3:Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so what are some?
Speaker 3:uh, excuse me, bill some myths or misconceptions in the coaching business well, it's gone from no one knowing what a coach is to everyone thinking they know what a coach is, and so I think the misconception is that you know everyone, that all coaches are created equal, and, and so the market is very muddy out there in my opinion, and so one of the things I've got on my YouTube channel I've got things like how do you pick a business coach? How do you pick a coach? What should you be looking for? And so I think the misconception is that one coach fits all the other misconception is that you know why do I need a coach in the first place?
Speaker 3:And probably the biggest misconception about business coaching is that it's for the people that are in trouble, that it's a business hospital. It's not really a business hospital. It's a business gymnasium, it's a business trainer. So a great Olympic potential athlete is going to have a trainer to get them from wherever they are to the Olympics or potentially, hopefully, to a gold medal. Same, if you just want to run a 5K, it doesn't really matter where you start. It all works more like a trainer than than a hospital. You know the coaching isn't going to help somebody who's um, it might I mean I, you know help someone who's who's sick or dying, but um it's it. That's probably the biggest misconception, so yeah, not a business hospital.
Speaker 2:right, right, yeah. So you're there to help good businesses become great.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I can't help. You know, if a plane's on a runway and they're running out of runway and it can't take off, you know, because it's got too much drag, there's not much that we can do about that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Gotcha Good analogy. Well, Bill, who are your target customers and how do you attract them?
Speaker 3:Yeah, our best customers, like you said, are people who are doing. They've usually plateaued, they've usually gotten to a place and get stuck. So they're Like I said, they're ambitious. They're either business owners or founders who are looking to scale. They've gotten to a point on their own and they usually are running into a ceiling. We do a lot of work with people in we call them vans and trucks and crews. So in the trades and the construction and building, building industries and home services, those tend to be a nice niche for us and we also do a lot of work in professional services. So and Jason, my partner, has an expertise in specialty retail. So we like working with people who are looking to scale and that's just kind of who's shown up over the years and along the way. How do we find them? Obviously, we'd love to find them all through referrals, but we, we market everywhere there is to market.
Speaker 3:We, you know, we do podcasts, we do Google AdWords, we do events, we do, in fact, we've got an event coming up called the Asheville Business Summit in September. The website for that is wncsummitcom. We had a guy from Ghana show up last year. Wow, I will say it was cool because when we first conceived of the event. We're like we want to make this international and then boom right off the bat. We had somebody come I just found it on, you know, found it on Google and or on the Internet and showed up in Asheville, north Carolina, with the event. But, yeah, the folks in the Tri-Cities definitely should make plans to come. It's going to be great. We had a lot of people come before.
Speaker 3:Our deal right now is that you know we're about a year by then. We'll be about a year out from the hurricane and you know that hit us all and you know we're celebrating. You know how we're going to move forward and so we've got a lot of good local talent coming this year and how we're dealing with it and how we're moving forward and how we're, you know, back in the game. So it's pretty exciting. Like I said, wncsummitcom all the information there. Early bird tickets are on sale right now. So we got a late start on it because, hey, we had a hurricane November and December, january. We would have been working on this stuff. Now we're working on it in June, july and August. So it's just the way. It's just what we do, yeah.
Speaker 2:Just what you do Business Summit. Definitely make a note about that. You ever thought about having your own podcast? I do have a podcast.
Speaker 3:You do have a podcast. Yeah, you can check it out on all the channels. It's called Epic Entrepreneurs. Yeah, we've got a lot of episodes out there. We've interviewed a lot of people. I do some just solo sort of. Some people call it ranting, but it's just my thoughts on subjects and we have done. We have had some people call it ranting, but it's uh, just my thoughts on on subjects and uh, we, we have done. We have had some people on who wanted some actual coaching on the spot, so we did that. So awesome uh, but generally it's a, it's an interview, just sort of like this one.
Speaker 2:So we will check. We will check that out for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, awesome. Yeah, well, outside of work, bill, what do you like to do for fun?
Speaker 3:I got all the you know the vices. I like to play golf and fly fish and I just like to get outdoors, you know, basically, with people it's a lot of fun and, yeah, it's, you know, you, I, I, you know people come to the, come to our area to do, you know they do biking and get a lot of its outdoor activities and I'm one of those people.
Speaker 2:So well, we, we live in a beautiful place to do yeah, we do all of that. I'm a fly fisherman as well. So, yeah, good, love it, love it. There's nothing else I'd rather be doing.
Speaker 3:Honestly, it's well, and I took. My grandfather told me years ago he used to hunt and fish and you know he said I don't care what you do, you got to have something you know you can't you can't work all the time bill you got to have.
Speaker 3:You need something, whatever it is. I mean, you're out there and you know it just takes your mind off of of everything and frankly, that's good. I mean a lot. A lot of what we do ends up being mental right, cause you know, a lot of times to grow a business we have to get the owner out of their own way.
Speaker 3:You know, that's, that's, we're all. We're all our biggest lid on our own business. And so we, you know. But a lot of the good ideas happen when you're not thinking about anything, you know, when you're trying to figure out how to get that fish. That's, you can see by you know, or when you whatever, when you've just taken your mind off of business. That's when the great, great inspirations come.
Speaker 2:Well, I used to work for a guy many many years ago, who was really good, great entrepreneur, and he told me that some of his best ideas came from a cocktail napkin you know from just you know, meeting with some folks having a drink, and then something pops in his mind and writes it down and becomes a great idea, a hundred percent, yep. So, bill, if you could think of one thing that you would like our listeners to remember about you and about Action Coach, business, growth Partners, what would that be?
Speaker 3:We're here to help and you know whether that's. You know if you just need to talk, people are sort of scared to. You know, to have a 15 minute coffee or to have a chat on Zoom, and you know we're here. It's what we do. We do it all day long. We, we dedicate time to helping people and you know, if sometimes that is just some of the best things, best testimonials I've ever gotten, then people didn't pay me a dime. You know, we just had a. We just sat down, had coffee for 20, 30 minutes and some good stuff came out of it and so you know, have have a cup of coffee, get to know. You know, get to know us and you know if there's something more there, then we can talk about that. But that's not. We just we're I love the name of your podcast good neighbor. We just want to be. We just want to be a good neighbor. Yeah awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, sounds like. Hopefully they at least buy your coffee.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, it can go either way. I mean I don't, I don't mind. I mean, coffee's not that expensive and I don't mind. Yeah, like I said a lot of times, I'll even buy the coffee. Awesome, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Good to know. Well, if any of our listeners own a small business, need help or are trying to, like you said, scale, grow their business and have sort of plateaued, how can they, how can they learn more?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so the easiest way is just to go to our website. It's it's Bill Gilliland dot biz. If you want to, if you really want to, you know, check out wncsummitcom, because they'll get a ton of information in a short period of time. That way you can email me directly. It's williamgilliland at actioncoachcom or you can call me, it's fine. My number is 828-348-1787. It's all out there. It's not a. We don't hide anything. You want to get a hold of us? Get a hold of us.
Speaker 2:There you go. The business summit is what was that date again?
Speaker 3:It is the Hang on. Let me get you the exact date. I think it's the 23rd of September. Let me just double check that that's a it's a tuesday. So yeah, yeah, it's, it's the 23rd. Uh, if you want to come hang out with some uh vips, there's a dinner the night before so you can get a vip ticket, um, and hang out with uh the speakers and some higher-level networking. That's out there too. So, yeah, check it out. Wncsummitcom. That's all the information is there wncsummitcom.
Speaker 2:Awesome, we will definitely check that out, guys. You heard it here. Guys and girls, if you're an entrepreneur and you are looking to grow or to expand, action Coach, business Growth Partners, that's what they do and look for. On September the 23rd, like you said, that's almost exactly a year from Halloween.
Speaker 3:It's almost exactly a year. We're celebrating the whole recovery and the whole. You know how we're expanding this whole area and you know it'll be great. It's going to be good. We've got a good lineup of speakers and it's going to be great. Awesome, awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, we'll look forward to that, and you sold me, so if I can possibly be there, I will be. So we appreciate that very much and, bill, appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to spend a few minutes with us and with our listeners and to tell us all about what you can do to help businesses. So, thank you so much, you're welcome and I love what you're doing. Well, thank you and love what you're doing, and maybe we can have you back again soon. Yeah love that. All right, thanks so much.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to the Good Neighbor Podcast. To nominate your favorite local businesses to be featured on the show, go to gnptry-citiescom. That's gnptry-citiescom, or call 423-719-5873.