Growth Through Interaction: Adam Hartung’s Strategy for Winning in Changing Markets

In this episode of Career Coaching Secrets, host Rexhen Doda sits down with Adam Hartung, CEO and Managing Partner of Spark Partners, for a deep look into how real growth happens in careers, businesses, and leadership. Adam reveals why the key to long-term success isn’t grinding harder—but changing the way you approach challenges, experimenting with new strategies, and surrounding yourself with people who support your evolution.

Adam shares how he built his coaching business by maximizing meaningful interactions rather than chasing conversions, and why small and mid-sized businesses are where real transformation happens. He also breaks down his flat-rate coaching model, the challenges of building a true referral engine, and the mindset shifts leaders must embrace to break old habits and step into higher performance.

Rich with insights on experimentation, scenario planning, innovation, and personal reinvention, this conversation is a must-listen for leaders, aspiring leaders, and coaches who want to elevate their impact in a rapidly changing world.


Connect with

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamhartung/
Website: https://adamhartung.com/

Transcript

Adam Hartung: 0:00

I tend to set my goals in terms of how many interactions that I can have. The more interactions I will have, the more opportunities will develop. So I'm constantly trying to find business meetings, small groups, any organization where business people are collecting to talk about, you know, what's happening in the world, disruptions, trends, and what they can do to be more effective. Right. So that's where I'm going. And I'm trying to always say, can I get more interactions? What could I do this month, next month, the month after? How can I fill my calendar with opportunities to interact with people? The goal being that I can't give you a specific, you know, how many I need to, I need to meet 20 people to get one client. It doesn't work that way. But it does the more interactions I have, then the more opportunities come my way.

Davis Nguyen : 0:41

Welcome to Career Coaching Secrets, the podcast where we talk with successful career coaches on how they built their success and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is Davis Wynne, and I'm the founder of Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, and even $100,000 weeks. Before Purple Circle, I've grown several seven and eight-figure career coaching businesses myself and have been a consultant at two career coaching businesses that are doing over $100 million each. Whether you're an established coach or building your practice for the first time, you'll discover the secrets to elevating your coaching business.

Rexhen Doda: 1:32

As CEO and managing partner of Spark Partners, Adam guides executives and boards through scenario planning, trend analysis, and innovation management to create sustainable competitive advantage in the rapidly changing markets. It's a pleasure for me to have him on the podcast today. Welcome to the show, Adam. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to have you on, Adam. So I wanted to kind of understand when it comes to your beginnings with your coaching business, what inspired you initially to start this, to become a coach and start your own coaching business?

Adam Hartung: 2:05

Well, I had been a management consultant and I did it for a number of years. And one of the things I started realizing was that people were working very, very hard. They were doing everything that they were told to do. They were trying to do all the things they thought were the right things, but they were getting bad outcomes. And it struck me that perhaps we needed to change the approach, change how people were doing things so that we could quit having the bad outcomes and instead get better outcomes.

Rexhen Doda: 2:30

And so that was what was motivated me back when uh when thinking about the clients that you work with, uh, how would you describe the ideal client profile? In this podcast, we have two audiences. It's coaches, but it's also the audiences of the coaches who we've had on the show before. So we might be reaching out with this podcast to the ideal client profile that you typically would be serving. So how would you describe it for them who are listening? Is there a certain industry, certain demographic, psychographic, other commonalities that you see uh in your ideal client profile?

Adam Hartung: 3:01

I find that the people that I like to work with and get the best results are people who either are leaders of an organization today and they want to have better performance, or there's somebody who aspires to be a leader and would like, when they become a leader, to be able to provide better performance than the people that they worked for in the past. So it's a combination of a desire for leadership and a desire for human growth that they want to be better than they were in the past, they want to be better than some other people they've observed.

Rexhen Doda: 3:31

And how is the engagement that they have with you? We were mentioning also in the intro that they go through scenario planning, trend analysis, and innovation management. But when you think about the engagement they have with you, is there some sort of a program of a certain length? Is it one-on-one coaching or group coaching? How would you describe that?

Adam Hartung: 3:51

So I work with people any way that suits them. That's the way I try to approach it. So it's everything from I have a problem and I can't quite figure out how to answer this problem or solve this problem, and I just want one session to sit down and listen and you give me feedback at them. Like, am I in the right direction or do I need to change? That's simple, straightforward. And I have people that call me up and say, met me before, or how you know, heard of me, and can I help with that problem? Then there are people who say, look, I want to undertake a program where I would be able to get to a better solution or better outcomes. And to do that, I think I'm gonna need to work with you over time, and then we'll schedule up, you know, usually something in the order of three to six months, and I will say, okay, we're either gonna get together and talk weekly or bi-weekly. Some people want to work monthly because they have really hectic schedules, and I tell them, well, you're not gonna make a lot of headway, just do it once a month. Uh, but we can stretch that out over six to nine months and see how we do. So, and then the second thing though I would say is that whenever I work with somebody over a longer time period, I work on the notion that it's a flat monthly rate, and I don't charge by the hour. So what I the reason I do that is because I don't want to be in a session with somebody and they get the sense that I'm I'm like a lawyer, and the longer we talk, the more it costs them. Because then what happens is that over time, people just don't want to call and they don't want to have discussions. And in fact, you want it to go the opposite direction. You want the longer you know somebody, the more you build trust, the more you spend time talking. And so if we say, look, it's gonna be a certain flat rate per month, and it's not contingent upon you don't get shut off with a maximum amount of minutes or or hours, that's when I find that we have the best results.

Rexhen Doda: 5:24

It makes a lot of sense actually. Uh you bring a good point that you don't want to measure it by hour because then you would also, in a way, devo you'd be devaluing your time too at the same time. If they want more engagement, then it makes sense that that's potentially not going to be the case always. But if there's not a lot of engagement, then it means you would be devaluing your time by just like making it hourly. Is it worthwhile to just work hourly for and offer the coaching services? A lot of coaches actually that I've spoken to have seen the hourly not be scalable at any by any means because you can only have so many hours uh in a day as a coach. While with a flat, it seems like a better solution to me.

Adam Hartung: 6:05

Again, what I try to work with people is that it's not about how many hours I can bill or how much you pay me. The question here should be what are the outcomes that we can achieve? And I really want to focus on those outcomes. It's kind of like somebody else, am I going to be working on something for two months, three months, or a year? And I'm like, well, it all depends on how quickly you can get to the outcomes you want. And then also if the first level of outcomes satisfy you, or you achieve your first level of outcome improvement, do you want a second level or a third level? Do you want to keep going, right? And so that that that I don't really think about it in terms of a scaling question. What I'm thinking about is are my clients able to achieve the goals that they want? Now I've actually told clients, look, you know, we can set outcomes out there, and I'll actually take my compensation as something related to the outcomes. And that's always fascinating. People think that's a really interesting idea, but then they never want to do it because whenever I start saying, well, basically you're gonna get a piece of the action of the output, and I'm kind of well, yeah. I mean, once we achieve outcomes, you know, I'll I'll I'll be happy to take it to take my my compensation then. I I just find that people, as much as they like the idea in the initial stakes, they they don't ever nobody's ever said I agree to it.

Rexhen Doda: 7:14

Interesting. And so right now, where do you find your clients? Is there a marketing channel that you find is working really well for you?

Adam Hartung: 7:21

So I've I focus almost exclusively on small and and mid-sized businesses. I used to work with bigger companies, and uh in the last decade I pretty much tailored that way to way down. And the reason I do that is because people in big companies often get tied up with internal political machinations, and and they will draw me into trying to understand the political machinations of their organization. And that's not what I'm trying to do. What I'm trying to do is help them understand how they personally can grow, how they can help their organization to grow more effectively. And so small companies and medium-sized companies, people tend to have more capability to let their personal skill set achieve the growth goals that they want to get for not only themselves, but for the organization that they are in. And so I'm constantly looking for the small and mid-sized companies, and it's one of the reasons that uh I talk about like I don't really try to the idea of scale. What I have to be aware of is in a small and mid-sized company, people are often wear a lot of hats, and they can't commit to something over four or five months because the world is changing, and I tell them, you know, that's true, and that's what we're gonna work on. And they'll be like, I think I could really focus on improving for like two or three months, but then I'm probably gonna need to step back for a while. And so there's a need there to finding new clients all the time, uh, as opposed to saying, oh, here's a client and it's gonna be a client for two or three years. I don't really have those kinds of relationships.

Rexhen Doda: 8:43

That makes a lot of sense. And right now, with your coaching business, when looking into the future for the next one to three years, do you have any specific business goals that you're working towards?

Adam Hartung: 8:53

I tend to set my goals in terms of how many interactions that I can have. The more interactions I will have, the more opportunities will develop. So I'm constantly trying to find business meetings, small groups, any organization where business people are collecting to talk about what's happening in the world, disruptions, trends, and what they can do to be more effective, right? So that's where I'm going, and I'm trying to always say, can I get more interactions? What could I do this month, next month, the month after? How can I fill my calendar with opportunities to interact with people? And the goal being that I can't give you a specific, you know, how many I need to I need to meet 20 people to get one client. It doesn't work that way. But it does the more interactions I have, then the more opportunities come my way.

Rexhen Doda: 9:37

And it's it's all about basically building the connection first instead of like going after coaching relationships. You initially you connect with them on these events, and then later on they could become a client or the or they just could could be connections that you have for the future. It seems like what I found with coaches is generally that is kind of like a long game. So you go into these social events, it doesn't just like you said, it doesn't mean that you meet 20 people and one of them is gonna be a client. You're not thinking about conversion, you're mostly thinking about building connections as much as possible.

Adam Hartung: 10:07

And and I don't tend to do just general networking events because it's very difficult for me to understand a person and their needs, right? What I tried, you know, okay, let's all go to a chamber of commerce meeting, say hello to each other, exchange business cards, and that does absolutely nothing. I never found that to be successful. What I try to do is get into a situation where before I get there, people are going to know who I am, right? So I have some presentations that I give where I talk about how to get free focused on your future, how to focus on personal growth, those kinds of things. And I'll say, if I could come in and I can have uh, you know, X number of minutes on your calendar to talk to people about um what I think's important for them, how they are going to achieve better outcomes. That's what I want. And then as a result of talking to a group about how to achieve better outcomes, I then then go into some individuals. There's always some individuals that will say, I really liked what you had to say. Let me talk to you about something specific on my mind. Great, let's do that conversation. Then what I often do, in fact, I do it all the time, is I tell people, I've met you here, we've just barely met each other, I don't know a whole lot about your situation. Um you're asking me for your input right off the cuff. That's cool. But here's the deal. Why don't you call me on the phone? Get on, you send me an email, let's schedule a time, we'll get on the phone, we'll talk. And it doesn't cost you anything. I'll talk to anybody that I've met, I'll sit down and have a conversation with them over the phone, and I don't charge for that. And then I'll be like, okay, at the end of this, if you feel like there's uh we can define an outcome that you're looking for, and you feel like we can improve towards that outcome, then we can set up a relationship. Uh so you know, I do a lot of free phone calls, I'll be very honest with you. But again, how many interactions can I get into where I can tell people who I am and what I do? Then in those interactions, how many people are gonna stop and say hello? And then of those, how many people will call me on the phone for a free discussion? And then some of those will turn into clients.

Rexhen Doda: 11:56

When it comes to your coaching business right now, you mentioned that uh part of your goals is that you want to make as money uh interactions with people as well. Uh where do you see, in terms of challenges, where do you see the bottleneck for your coaching business right now?

Adam Hartung: 12:10

Well, what would be great for me is if they all these literally thousands of people I've met over the years, if there were more referrals, where instead of me having to kind of bridge the gap all the time, there'd be somebody who said, okay, you know, they're having a conversation and they say you should call Adam Harton. And then they would pass it along. That uh sort of I call people at a referral engine. That's one thing that I've really never been able to figure out quite how to crack. If I had that, where it was sort of like, okay, now I mean I'll be in a group and I'll run into somebody and they'll say, I remember you. You know, we met seven years ago, blah, blah. And or I'll meet somebody and say, hey, you know, can you your face rings a bell? And you know, well, yeah, well, we met three years and five years ago, and they'll remember me and they'll remember what I do. Then I'll say, Oh, great. I said, you know, how are things going? And how about your peers? And it's what always strikes me is how many people remember it, but again, that referral engine's something that I've I've really how do you build that? You know, I have about I want to say about 9,000 followers on LinkedIn, and uh I post regularly, there's a lot of comments. I do posting and and I do interactions on on uh Facebook as well. But you know, it honestly doesn't lead those haven't led to what I would call referral engine.

Rexhen Doda: 13:24

I when it comes to that referral engine, what I found from coaches that I've interviewed is that you have to kind of like actively ask for it. Do you ask your past clients or even current clients for anyone they might know that might benefit from your services, from your coaching?

Adam Hartung: 13:39

Well, yeah, of course, we obviously I always ask people if there's somebody that they think I could help. Could we have an introduction? I think part of this again gets back to the kind of the nature of a lot of what I do. You know, what I'm very serious about growth. I'm very serious about growth. Uh I don't have value for people that aren't interested in growing. And so oftentimes the kind of things that I talk with people about, they they find it a bit challenging. Let's put it that way, because I'll be sort of like, well, you're working really, really hard, but you're not getting the outcome you want. Maybe you need to do something different, significantly different, if you want to get a better outcome. That challenges people, right? Because most people want to do more, better, faster. That's really what they want to do. And what happens is, you know, they keep thinking if I just work at this a little harder, and I'll get small improvements, and the small improvements will lead to big improvements. And what I learned years ago is no, that doesn't actually work. That there's this this what we call declining marginal returns. The harder you work at something, you have to double the amount of effort to get the next micro improvement, and then you have to double it again to get the next micro improvement. So what actually happens is if you get to a certain level, you have to actually do something very different. You ever heard of something called the Fosberry?

Rexhen Doda: 14:52

I think I might have heard, but I'm not very familiar with it.

Adam Hartung: 14:54

That's okay. I mean, but in high jumping, right? You've seen people in the Olympics, they do high jumping, right? And it looks a little awkward. They run up to the bar and they sort of jump backwards over the bar. You don't want to go over the bar that way. That was invented by a guy named Dick Fosberry. And in high school, prior to Dick Fosbury, when people did the high jump, they would run up to the bar and they would kick their leg, their dominant leg up, up in the sky, and then they would roll over the bar. Their belly would be go over the bar, right? So they go over belly, right leg, their leg, then their belly, and they follow the other side. And so that's how all high jumping was done. Well, this guy, Dick Fosbury, he sat down, he looked at it, and he said, you know, what if I did it an entirely different way? And what he started to realize was that if he ran up to the bar and jumped as high as he could, but he jumped with his back, he didn't have to throw his whole body over the bar. All he had to do was get up to about his middle, and then what he could do is he could kick his legs up in the air and it was throwing backwards over the top of the bar. And so that he changed the way you do high jumping. And at first everybody thought he was insane, literally. And they called it the Fosbury flop because he was flopping onto the mat on his back when he fell down on the other side. He's falling back, not on his feet, not on his stomach, on his back. And so he was derided for it. Well, he started working on a technique in 1963 in high school, and in 1968 he he won the gold medal at the Olympics, and now everybody goes over the bar backwards. Now, why do I tell that ridiculous story? Because what I run into a lot of times are people that are rolling over the bar, and they keep doing the same thing over and again, and they keep talking to other people, and people, how do I get an improvement? And somebody will say, Well, wear better shoes, or do more push-ups, or work on your upper body strength, and they'll have all these ideas, but at the end of the day, they're still running up and jumping over the bar the way they always had. And what I'm trying to tell people is you probably got out of what you're doing, all you're gonna get. What we have to do is come at it a different way. You've got to come at this thinking about how am I going to do something very different? How do I get to the next level of performance? And that requires experimentation. And that requires that we give ourselves, that we give ourselves permission to experiment, but also the people around us. We have to go to them and say, I'm going to experiment. So this guy who did the high jumping, Dick Fosber, for example, when he first started doing it, his coach hated him. Because his coach said it was a stupid idea. What are you doing? And so his coach was telling them it would never work. So he had to defy his coaches, he had to defy all of his fellow high jumpers in order to experiment and develop this new technique. And that's the daunting part of growth, is because usually we want to grow. And even if we have an idea for a new way to do it, now what happens is we have to experiment. Do we have, well, we give ourselves the opportunity to experiment? We'll give ourselves the time to experiment. Now it means that if I'm going to spend an hour on something, I can't try to do more of what I always did. I can't go to the gym and try to do more of what I've done. I have to stop that so that I have the time and the resources to try the new thing. Will the new thing work? At first, you don't know because you're experimenting, right? Now, not only do you have to do it, but you've got to get those around you to agree. Dick Fosbery's coach could have thrown him off the team. And be like, you're not even going to be on the team if you keep trying to do this. Well, look at the people around you, your coworkers, your spouse, your children, your family. I mean, the resources that you have that try to help you have a good life. If you go to try to do something different, how are they going to react? Are they going to say, oh, that's great, that's cool, go do it. A lot of people say, sure, do anything you want, right up until the point at which it impacts me. And when you start to change and it's going to impact me, no, I don't want you to do that anymore. So we get shut down by the people around us who say, Oh, you got to be kidding, you're not really going to do that, right? I mean, like that, that one of how am I supposed to take care of my problem if you go do something different? So the biggest hurdle we run into are people have to get permission to actually grow. And the default was if you don't give permission to grow, you'll just fall back to doing what you always did, right? Now, that I hate, I'm going to sound political to this, but that's for the whole MAGA movement. The whole MAGA movement has largely been around. I don't want to grow. I want to figure out some way that I can just keep doing what I always did and I want wonderful outcomes. I see this guy who went to college and he got a better outcome. I didn't get to go to college. Or I see this person over here that, you know, there's always some reason why somebody gets better outcomes than I do. But I say, well, maybe it's time you do something different. You've got to do something so that you can grow. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to keep, I want to get rewarded. I want to get outcomes by doing more of what I've always done. And then it's kind of like, you know, well, the guy that was a great horseshoe that had a livery stable, is he supposed to somehow have a wonderful life and be able to have a nice house and everything else when all he knows how to do is shoe horses in a world where we don't have horses anymore? That doesn't work, right? So if you take, for example, the world of IT, information technology, you used to have people that loaded up reels of tape onto computers, and we had people that typed in like key pumps cards that were fed into computers. And then we had people that ran server farms inside of companies, and we had people that controlled PCs where we We bought PCs and they put a platform, you know, this is Soft Care One, and they sent it to a person and then they maintained all the PCs in the network. And these were all jobs that people had, right? The reality was all of those jobs went away. And in fact, now we're getting to the point that certain amounts of programming are going away because of our artificial intelligence engines that can do programming for us. So what happens is if you get stuck in one of those old jobs and you don't grow, it's just going to go away. And you're not going to have that job anymore, right? And that's the part that's hard to get people to recognize. Everybody comes like, I'm not sure that I really if I'm at this age or I have these children. Because we get committed to our history. I bought a house, I got married, I had children, I went to this college, I got a degree in X. I made an investment in that in the past, and I want to reap the benefits of the world. I was like, well, you made an investment, but if the world moved, you've got to invest in something new. Because you're not going to get anything out of doing what you always did unless you invest in something new. So this is the hard part, truly the hard part of trying to coach somebody and help somebody kind of move forward because it's it requires a lot of internal stamina where you can say, I'm ready to experiment. I'm ready to do less of what I did in the past so that I can have time to experiment. And I'm ready to tell people around me that I need them to support me when I experiment and I do something new. I need my boss to support me, my co-workers to support me. I need people to support me. So it's not nobody can grow on their own. You have to get your network or your organization around you to support your personal growth. And that's where it gets to be hard because now you have to ask for permission and you have to get them on board. And it becomes and then as you're doing that, they can get all judgy wudgy on you, right? Like, well, are you getting the outcomes? I'm not sure if you're getting the outcomes, so let's start judging what you're doing. And you gotta be ready to say, look, I'm still in the process of experimenting. I'm not sure if I've nailed down how this is gonna actually work out, right? How am I gonna improve?

Rexhen Doda: 21:59

So it it's a tough process. Absolutely. And how I like to think about it is as you said, more uh better, faster, instead of that, I feel like the better frame would be more better new. So if more and better isn't getting you where you want it, the next step has to be new, uh, not faster. Because when when you think about faster, it's actually just better. It's just better and faster is kind of like the same thing. So new would be the next move. And so for all the coaches out there that are thinking of scaling their impact in a similar way you're trying to do as well. What advice would you give to these coaches trying to scale their impact?

Adam Hartung: 22:38

Well, they the most important thing is you can actually look at the improved outcomes of the people you coach, you know, like what's happened? If you and athletics will often say that coach did better because they won more games, right? And they go from team to team and and the teams do better and they have a winning record because where they go, the teams did better. And that's what I always try to ask people. Okay, if you're gonna coach somebody in something, can you point to a history of better outcomes? Can you say I was working with somebody, they were at this level of performance. After we worked together, there was a better level of performance. They made better decisions, they were able to accomplish things that previously they struggled with, right? So those outcomes are the things that will drive the most success, right? And the one thing I can say is that whenever I work with clients and they start down this road, a lot of them will ask me if they can talk to somebody else that's worked with me in the past. And I always like, yeah, please do. And I hope you do, because if you can get then you're not going into it with blind faith. You're not just hoping that it's gonna work. You can talk to somebody and they say, Well, yeah, I mean, I I worked with Adam Harton, and yeah, this was the outcome. You can have faith in it. The person themselves didn't have to have faith. So I would always encourage people, are you tracking the outcomes? Are you keeping are you really able to say this is how you've helped somebody and it's measurable and impactful?

Rexhen Doda: 23:57

Thank you. Thank you so much, Adam. Thank you so much for the amazing advice, and thank you so much for coming to our podcast today. They'll be able to find your profile. They can also go into the website, adamhardzone.com, right? Thank you so much, Adam. Thank you for staying through the podcast with me, and thank you for coming.

Davis Nguyen : 24:15

Okay, thank you. That's it for this episode of Career Coaching Secrets. If you enjoyed this conversation, you can subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to this episode to catch future episodes. This podcast was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help career coaches scale their business to $100,000 years, $100,000 months, or even $100,000 weeks, all without burning out and making sure that you're making the impact and having the life that you want. To learn more about our community and how we can help you, visit join purplecircle.com,