EP 61: Bruce Eckfeldt on Leveraging Opportunities, Scaling Your Business, and Breaking Into a New Field with Maximum Impact

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07/08/21 • 51 min

Do you know what you really want from your business? It’s not enough to say “I want more money,” or “I want to scale.” What is your life going to look like when you get there?

What role do you want to play? What do you want to do every day? CEOs can bottleneck a company faster than anyone else when they’re not actually doing the right job.

There’s no one right answer but there is an answer for you. Knowing what that is will help you make strategic decisions about how, when, why or even whether to scale up your business.

Strategic thinking and planning is something most small businesses don’t do enough of, but getting that clarity can set you up for success. And really, you aren’t going to get where you want to go if you don’t know where you are going!

Dream big! Then make strategic decisions and actions to turn it into a concrete reality.

Like today’s guest, badass business owner Bruce Eckfeldt. Bruce has settled into a life and a business where he gets to play, and pick and choose projects of all different kinds, which is my total dream scenario.

After building, scaling and selling his own technology consulting firm in 2003, Bruce became a strategic coach and advisor to early-stage CEOs and their leadership teams. He hosts two podcasts, Scaling Up Services and Thinking Outside the Bud and writes weekly for Inc.com on leadership and strategic business growth.

I always get inspired talking with him so I’m excited to share his wisdom and decades of experience.

Tune into this episode to hear:

Why scale isn’t just about the number of people on your team and why a CEO needs to think like a coach
Why figuring out your role in your business drives strategy decisions
How to keep boredom out of the equation when focusing strategically for scale
How to level up your client base by leveraging your knowledge of your current clients’ needs

Learn more about Bruce:

Learn more about Pia:

Resources:

Dream Team Predictive Index Workshop

Do you know what you really want from your business? It’s not enough to say “I want more money,” or “I want to scale.” What is your life going to look like when you get there?

What role do you want to play? What do you want to do every day? CEOs can bottleneck a company faster than anyone else when they’re not actually doing the right job.

There’s no one right answer but there is an answer for you. Knowing what that is will help you make strategic decisions about how, when, why or even whether to scale up your business.

Dream big! Then make strategic decisions and actions to turn it into a concrete reality.

I always get inspired talking with him so I’m excited to share his wisdom and decades of experience.

Tune into this episode to hear:

Why scale isn’t just about the number of people on your team and why a CEO needs to think like a coach
Why figuring out your role in your business drives strategy decisions
How to keep boredom out of the equation when focusing strategically for scale
How to level up your client base by leveraging your knowledge of your current clients’ needs

Learn more about Bruce:

Learn more about Pia:

Resources:

Dream Team Predictive Index Workshop

Previous Episode

undefined - EP 60: Iman Khan Spills Selling Secrets During Online and In Person Events, the Danger of Under Pricing, and Working on His Abundance Mindset

EP 60: Iman Khan Spills Selling Secrets During Online and In Person Events, the Danger of Under Pricing, and Working on His Abundance Mindset

Pricing conveys value. If a potential client is wondering if they’re going to get bombarded with upgrade offers once they sign up, they won’t sign up. Being underpriced can and does hurt you.

When your price reflects the value of the service or package, your clients can trust that they’ll get what they’re paying for.

But how do you know when your price reflects your value?

On today’s episode I’m excited to have badass business owner and former business coach of mine, Iman Khan.

Iman and his wife Afrin own Red Elephant Inc, where they are on a mission to empower people to empower others to make real change in the world by finding their platform and voice.

I’ve known Iman and Afrin for nearly 10 years, from back when they still lived in New York and their events were one of the places I turned to most to find MY voice.

When they were building their business and honing their system, Iman and Afrin tweaked and tested and tweaked again until they found what works consistently, and that includes pricing.

And while their core system hasn’t changed, those adjustments, tweaks and pivots have been more key than ever for them in the last year as their business moved from live events to online with hundreds and hundreds of Zoom rooms.

They definitely succeeded, and today Iman is going to share some of the strategies they used to make online events engaging, entertaining and most importantly, impactful.

Tune into this episode to hear:

• How reviving and restructuring the delivery of older programs helped Red Elephant pivot quickly when the world shifted online

• How their network pushed their business to evolve from producing events to teaching entrepreneurs how to sell from the stage and run their own events

• How tweaking and testing led to a system that works, and why they don’t mess with it now that it does

• What makes in-person, multi-day events worth the investment of time, energy and the costs of hosting

Learn more about Iman:

Learn more about Pia:

Resources:

The Landmark Forum

Next Episode

EP 62: Jane Sagalovich on Creating Courses That Make a Difference and her Hybrid Approach to Online Courses

If effortless passive income were possible, you’d be on a beach somewhere with a margarita right now, or whatever your fantasy vacation looks like.

But passive income takes a lot of effort up front. You have to build an audience, the course, the funnels, the ads. And you have to keep selling the course once it’s out there.

Maybe you’re hitting your capacity for clients with the services you’re currently selling and you want to scale up. Maybe you want another revenue stream that’s less intensive than done-for-you services or one-on-one coaching. Creating an online course is a great solution.

But what if trading one time and energy-intensive service for the time and energy-intensive process of setting up and selling an automated online course doesn’t sound like a good trade?

On today’s episode I am excited to speak with badass business owner, and Founder of Scale Your Genius, Jane Sagalovich.

Jane is a business strategist and scaling mentor and she is on a mission to rid the world of crappy online courses–I think we can all second that! She has helped hundreds of experts create their high-quality online courses and programs with clarity, confidence, and ease.

She teaches a hybrid course model that allows service providers to leverage their time by combining the elements of a good self-paced course, a good group coaching program, and a one-on-one coaching experience to create an offer that gets clients great results, without needing to build the whole funnel system that is required to sell online courses.

Tune into this episode to hear:

Why building a hybrid online course can be easier and more profitable than a fully automated offering
Audience considerations when you’re going from done-for-you services to mostly-DIY online courses
Why you can’t recycle existing content unless it fits the client journey you’re building in the course
How to avoid info-dumping when you should be focusing on guiding

Learn more about Jane:

Learn more about Pia: