The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Scaling Up Your Business with Herb Cogliano: Expert Insights

Episode Date: January 11, 2025

Scaling Up Your Business with Herb Cogliano: Expert Insights AspireGrowthAdvisors.com About the Guest(s): Herb Cogliano is an experienced international executive business coach and CEO with expertise in scaling businesses. Leading his advisory practice, Herb utilizes the "Scaling Up" performance platform, derived from Verne Harnish's book "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits," to help business leaders achieve more freedom, develop accountability within their teams, and foster strong economic strategies. He is passionate about aiding growing companies to achieve industrial leadership by ensuring healthy cash flow and driving flawless execution. Herb formerly served as CEO of Sullivan and COO Designers, a distinguished technology staffing and workforce solutions firm. Episode Summary: In this episode of "The Chris Voss Show," host Chris Voss engages in an insightful discussion with Herb Cogliano, an international executive business coach and expert in scaling businesses. Herb shares vital strategies on how to elevate growth companies by instilling a sense of purpose through profit, fostering accountability, and driving flawless execution. Through his journey from an entrepreneurial family background to his current role, Herb explains how he supports business owners and leadership teams in achieving a higher valuation and reducing workplace drama. Herb offers detailed methodologies on overcoming the substantial barriers that business owners face while scaling up, particularly the challenges of leadership, sales and marketing, and innovating within rapidly changing market dynamics. Central to this discussion is the concept of building a high-value business with clear metrics for success, transparent accountability, and an active leadership role. Utilizing his experience and insights, he articulates how businesses can adapt to innovation, refine their market positions, and enhance cash flow to secure growth funding. Key Takeaways: Herb emphasizes the significance of building a company that aligns profits with purpose, thereby making substantial impacts on communities, clients, and employees. Identifying and nurturing next-level leadership within companies is crucial for effective scaling and achieving sustained growth. The episode outlines the necessity of creating clear, measurable KPIs to ensure employees understand their roles and performance expectations. Herb sheds light on the ongoing changes in remote work culture and its implications for company structures and employee satisfaction. Leadership accountability and consistent follow-up are paramount to ensuring robust decision-making and efficient business operations. Notable Quotes: "The more employees, the more locations, the more clients, the complexity to run the business increases and we get stuck." "You need a company that can show consistent growth — whether it's in sales, gross margin, profitability, or cash." "I think a company is a combination of our collective talents, and when we put those talents to good use, normally good outcomes happen." "Most entrepreneurs are very good in the beginning at delegating, but have a problem when they go to those people later." "We are a lifestyle company, some of us, and we enjoy keeping it small and focused. Nothing wrong with that."

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. There you go. When the Iron Lady sings, that makes it official. For over 22 years, we've been bringing you the Chris Voss Show,

over 2,200 episodes, 16 years. Evidently, I'm going dyslexic in my old age. We bring you the Chris Voss Show and the CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the Pulitzer Prize winners, all the great minds that have been on the show over these decades. We're doing coverage right now of CES 2025, so be sure to check that out as well go to goodreads.com for chest chris voss linkedin.com for chest chris voss chris voss

one on the tiktokity and chris voss facebook.com to see all the chris voss show facebook groups and all the crazy things that we do over there on the chris voss show today we have an amazing young man we're going to be talking to him about his business, what he does, how he does it, and all the work that he's put into it. Herb Cogliano, do I have that right? Perfect, yes. There we go. Herb Cogliano joins us on the show. He leads his advisory practice by leveraging the scaling up performance platform described in Vern Harnish's book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, Scaling Up. He's an international executive business coach, experienced CEO, scaling up practitioner,

and professor of the Scaling Up Master's Business course. He's passionate about working with leaders of growth companies to achieve more freedom by creating industrial leading strategies, fostering a culture of accountability, driving flawless execution, ensuring healthy cash flow within their organizations, which is good to have. He professionally was the CEO of Sullivan and Cogliano Designers, a 53-year privately held family-owned technology staffing and workforce solution firm. And in 1983, he founded the Sullivan and Cogliano Education Business. Welcome to the show. How are you, Herb?

I'm doing great. Happy New Year to you and your listening audience, and I look forward to a great conversation. There you go. So give us a 30,000 overview of what you guys do there at your company and your dot-coms as well. Let's get into that. Yeah. So what I simply do is work through how business owners in their leadership team can scale up their company for higher valuation, give the leader and owner time to work on the business versus in it, and then help you reduce drama with clients and employees. There you go. No one likes drama with, no one likes drama. I mean, maybe some people do.

Actually, I think some people thrive on it, but most people don't. Because you've got enough headaches, right, in your business when you're doing a business and stuff like that. Yeah. And you know what happens, Chris? We got into this because our business went through struggles and challenges. The more employees, the more locations, the more clients, the complexity to run the business increases and we get stuck. Most definitely. So tell us a little bit about your journey through life.

How did you become an entrepreneur? How did you get in some of these businesses in your words? And then, of course, that journey that you went through that you just cited. Yeah, grew up in an entrepreneurial family. My father was the founder of our staffing business, 1966. Always talked about work around the dinner table. Love the impact that he had in getting people jobs, gainful employment. I saw how other people reacted to that positive impact that he had on the people and the staff that we work with and knew immediately at a young age that I wanted to be in business and be an entrepreneur helping people. I'm very focused on delivering purpose with profits. The more profit we have that can keep our company financially stable,

that we can reinvest into doing more good things, the stronger our purpose is in the ability to make a difference in the world. Definitely, definitely. Why do you feel it's important to make a difference in the world? I think we were all given certain talents that make us unique and special. And I think a company is a combination of our collective talents. And when we put those talents to good use, normally good outcomes happen to our communities, our families, and the clients and people that work with us. And that's just something personally that means a lot to me. I can work, but why not work and do good work at the same time?

That's the great thing about being an entrepreneur. A lot of times we try and solve problems, sometimes just for ourselves. We look at a widget and we go, God, I could make that widget better. Why don't they make that widget better? Sometimes people contact, like Lamborghini, I think did the ferrari and say hey i think i know how to make something better and they're like yeah now blow it off and and you know people go and make their own thing and make it better so what what type of clients do you work for if people are out in the audience what what type of clients do you usually handle do they they need to have a minimum net worth, minimum spend, things like that? My clients are normally companies that are 15 to 200 employees that are trying to get from 5 to 100 million in revenue. I find two goals.

The first client under 10 million, how do I get to that 10 million dollar company revenue mark and a lot of only one half of one percent of the 38 million companies in this country ever make it to 10 million a year and that blew my mind that 99 and a half percent never make it. And why does that occur? There you go. Why doesn't it occur? Yeah, three things. Number one, we are a lifestyle company, some of us,

and we enjoy keeping it small and keeping it very focused and nothing wrong with that. But we have a group of other people that want to get bigger, but they don't know how to hire, develop, and retain next level leadership. They do not know how to deal with scalable infrastructure, more people, more clients, more locations, more complexity. And they don't know how to navigate changes in market dynamics, competition, commoditization, and because they

don't change, their business ultimately stays flat or dies. Wow. Yeah. You got to keep growing. So your focus is on the mantra of scaling up. What does that mean exactly to you in your words and what you're trying to do for your company? Yeah, it's normally a company that is not a startup. They have a company of at least a million or more in revenue. So they have at least a proven concept. But they don't know how to scale into different markets, different products, different territories. And they don't know how to develop the team to help them do that. Deal with the financing and cash needs that growth sucks cash and how to

execute properly, keep people accountable and do it in a way where clients and people are happy. Yeah, it's a challenge. Chris, think about it. Most entrepreneurs are very good in the beginning at delegating. They have a skill. They do it well. They want to bring it to the world. They hire a bunch of people around them that they can delegate, do A, do B, and the people do it well. You have a problem when you go to those people later and say, I now need you to make the decisions. I now need you to hire other people. And yet you didn't hire them for that in the beginning, you hired them because they took direction and got stuff done. And that creates a mismatch. And some people never make it over to the leadership that's needed to go from 15 to 50 to 100 people or more.

Yeah. A lot of people aren't qualified, too. No. To make that journey. So it's kind of a qualification thing as well. It's interesting how that whole thing will work. So you sit down, you help them scale up. Now, these are companies and or executives that work with you. You can do either or.

I normally work with business owners and their senior leadership team. They're typically three to five, five to seven people on a leadership team with the owner and the owner is engaged in the business. They're active owners, but I have quite a few owners that are struggling with succession planning. They don't want to run the day-to-day. They want to own the company still, but maybe they want to work in a different area, but they want somebody else to be CEO. I have several wonderful clients that we've done succession planning that's worked out really well for them keeping the business and yet keeping it in good hands with somebody that can actually run it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a big thing that people don't realize. I think is one of the issues with scaling up, people not delegating where they delegate stuff and all that good stuff. You know, they're holding too much of their own power and doing everything themselves. I think that can be a symptom for some of the owners. Some of the owners themselves don't know how to delegate. And some of the owners do know how to delegate, but they don't have the right people in the right seats to delegate to. So it normally can happen in one or both places. And we work with them using tools on how to hire the right people in the right position

and delegate the right things that they can be successful. Yeah. Delegation is so important in doing work because you just, you just, so many entrepreneurs, they try and do everything themselves and they can't, you can't do everything yourselves and scale. It just doesn't work. Yeah. I look at three simple things to help an owner delegate. Number one, are you clear about what needs to be delegated? Number two, is there a KPI or metric that if you delegated it successfully, that we could measure to know if it was successful or not? And number three, do you close the loop with regular follow

up meetings and reports for people to be accountable and report out on whether or not they are achieving what you wanted to delegate correctly? When you have all three in place, things are good. But have you ever heard when people abdicate, I told you what I wanted, I told you the number I needed, but there's no follow up. There's no closing the loop on a consistent basis, people will have trouble, they need additional support, additional resources. And I find it's not successful when we're missing one of the three items. And it's very easy to help the owner fix that once they realize it. Yeah. I mean, people, you know, they think that they can do all the best work and

they don't, you know, they don't delegate. They don't learn to trust their people. I mean, that's why you hire these people so that you can trust them. And so they can do their jobs and stuff. So that's really important as well. One thing you talk about is changing a growth path, taking a look at your cash flow, your profitability and your valuation. And imagine for valuation, you're talking about, you know, the resale potential for your company. Yes. Tell us a little bit about some of those things you work with companies on. If you think about an owner, they're taking 100% of the risk in starting a company and holding on to a company, hopefully for many, many years.

And at the end of that journey, whenever it is, you just hope that they're building a value in their company that is really worthy of the time and the risk they put into it. So in order to do that, you need a company that can show consistent growth, whether it's in sales, gross margin, profitability in cash. And when you can build a company with those type of outcomes, then you will steadily increase the valuation and worth of the company if you ever get to a point where you want to sell it. Now, some people don't want to sell. But in our situation, we went through a point where I was growing, and I needed more cash. And because the bank saw good numbers, good cash, good profit, I could go to them and get more money to fund the growth that I wanted to do. So it's not always a sale. Sometimes it's funding for additional growth as you continue. There you go. So you can get those maybe

potentially future rounds, et cetera, et cetera, all that good stuff. So what do you find a lot of entrepreneurs are struggling with these days? What is their biggest thing? AI? God, what else is there? I think AI is part of the equation, but I hear big things around leadership, identifying next level leaders, and people who can lead independently, autonomously, within these mid market companies that are not used to leading and then the second thing is sales and marketing a lot of markets are changing and people are not getting the same sales leads and sales closure rates that they used to and so sales and marketing

understanding is your company in the right position? Are you delivering? Do you have the right products or services people still need? Or are they commoditized and being replaced by AI or different types of competitors? So if you want to scale, you need markets that are growing and you need markets where your position in the market is distinctive and adds a lot of value and a lot of companies have lost their kind of positioning and that's why their sales are off and we need to help reposition or pivot the company into the next growing market to restart the growth they used to have. There you go. Get that growth going. A lot of people, do you find that they

fail to innovate? Is that one of the things that you find with them? I think what's happening, Chris, is that the rate of innovation is increasing. So what we used to think innovation was in a small mid-market company five years ago has accelerated so much quicker that we need to pick up our innovative pace inside of our companies. And some people are really just getting up to speed. We're behind. Wow. We're that far behind on stuff.

Some. Yeah, some. It's a thing where people have got to stay. If you don't innovate, everybody else will innovate with you. You help people instill accountability across their teams and passion. Give us some maybe tips and tricks to utilize there that you can tease out. The first simple thing I ask an owner, do all of your employees know whether or not they had a good day or a good week at work? You would be surprised, Chris, if you went to company to company, employee to employee and asked that question, how many do not have specific KPIs or metrics that they measure to tell them whether or not they had a good day of good work or a good week. Wow. And that's leadership's job in hiring a person in funding the person to give them clarity of what success is. If I'm in sales, is it 10 appointments a week and $20,000 worth of sales closed? If I'm in customer service, is it a 95%

same day response rate and an 85% customer satisfaction rating or better. If I'm in finance, is it receivables, average days outstanding, less than 30 days, and two months cash on hand? Oh, wow. Most people don't have them. Yeah. Most businesses are operating pretty freaking thin. Yes. It comes down to it.

And keeping those employees happy. I mean, it's kind of, it's kind of interesting where trying to keep everybody happy nowadays, including yourself is a hard balance to take and achieve. You know, you've got to attract the right people. You've got to create a different, a good strategy. You got to execute on everything. And then you've got to maintain profitability and cash flow. What do you see is happening with remote work right now? Remote works kind of interesting thing that it's impacted a lot of companies and kind of changed the way you have to lead your company.

Yeah, I think it was really, it drastically changed during COVID. It was an immediate pivot, as you know, and I think it's kind of pivoting back towards this hybrid. I haven't seen major shifts in the last year, I think it's kind of settling on companies have decided whether or not they're going to be an all in the office, or whether or not they're going to be all remote. And a lot of them have leaned into hybrid, come into the office two days a week, work from home three days a week. So I think it took a while for that to settle out for most companies. But I think most companies have made a decision on where they stand.

And then the employees are going to make a decision on where they stand. And then the employees are going to make a decision on what type of company do I want to work for on-site, hybrid, or fully virtual. And I think that's going to see itself play out in the next year or two for employers. There you go. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be a wild trip and seeing how that plays out and what's in it. So let's talk about some more of your services. I mean, it's going to be a wild trip in seeing how that plays out and what's in it. So let's talk about some more of your services. I noticed that there's a few different things in your website here. There's a complimentary growth assessment.

Yep. And there's a complimentary no-risk discovery meeting people can do with you. Tell us about those offers as well. So think about your business is not achieving what you'd like to achieve, Chris. And you're not sure why. You have some ideas, but you're not really sure because you've been working on it for a while, and yet the business numbers are not improving.

If I, as an individual, don't feel well, I go to a doctor, and a doctor, I tell them the symptoms, and they diagnose what's wrong with me and hopefully give me the right medication. Hopefully, yeah. As a coach and a CEO of companies, I don't want to just pretend I know what the challenge is with your company, I have to do an evaluation, a diagnosis to uncover really where the challenge is. That assessment helps me diagnose like a doctor where your company may not be doing well. And then based upon the proper diagnosis, I can prescribe the right tool, the right methodology to help you get well. And that's simply what I do. I diagnose, I educate you on the areas where your company needs to improve. I give you medicine or tools to help you get better. And then we keep repeating that cycle over and over until you get to the

desired level that you want your company to be. That's a good place to be. Yeah. Get better, do better, all that good stuff. There's another thing you have on your website, a complimentary growth kit.

It looks like it looks like maybe the, a kit or worksheet manual. Yeah, it's two really important things. Number one is the first chapter in scaling up is the barriers to scaling up. So it gives the owner a perspective of what are the barriers that could be stopping me? And now you've created awareness. Ah, that second one is really what I'm dealing with right now. And then the growth toolkit is complementary scaling up tools that I use with the client

that I give to anybody that would like to look at them or use them, whether you use me or not. It's a complimentary toolkit of things I work with to help companies get better and grow stronger. There you go. And it looks like you've got several services too on your website. There's the CEO Executive Coaching Program, there's the Mastermind Group Executive Coaching, and the leadership team, executive coaching. You want to tease out a little bit of those? Yes. Some companies haven't had the time to build out a leadership team. So maybe it's the owner

and a number two, and that person really could benefit from one-on-one CEO coaching. And my coaching will help them uncover where the company needs help, and then specifically how to build a leadership team bench. The second mastermind program is for smaller companies, typically under 10 million that really want a more affordable program to get scaling up training for leadership teams that are typically no bigger than three to five people. And the third program is a private program for just the company owner and the full leadership team to use scaling up to help get their company to the desired level that they want. There you go. This is the ways to go, and people can help their businesses by working with you.

As we go out, give people your dot coms, tell people they can onboard with you, and all that good stuff. So feel free to check me out at aspiregrowthadvisors.com. And there are complimentary assessments there. You can reach me for a complimentary discovery call. Just love to help and work with entrepreneurs that are having challenges. And even if there's nothing I can do directly, having a conversation to just confirm some things or just

get a referral, I'm happy to help in any way that I can. And just thank you, Chris. It's been a pleasure being here with you today. Thank you. And thanks to our artists for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Voss, Chris Voss, one of the TikTokany and all those crazy places on the internet. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that should have us.