EP46 Implementing a growth operating system with Isaiah Nolte

Summary

In this conversation, Mike and Isaiah Nolte discuss the common challenges businesses face that prevent them from reaching their full potential. He emphasises the importance of leadership in identifying and addressing these challenges to unlock growth.


Takeaways

The results are massive when addressing business challenges.
There are 15 commonalities that cause businesses to hit a ceiling.
Identifying these commonalities is crucial for growth.
Leadership teams play a vital role in solving these issues.
Pulling the right levers can unlock business potential.
Sales leadership is key to overcoming obstacles.
Understanding the root causes of stagnation is essential.
Entrepreneurs must be proactive in addressing challenges.
Collaboration within the leadership team enhances problem-solving.
Unlocking potential leads to significant business growth.

Keywords

business growth, leadership, sales strategy, entrepreneurship, potential unlocking, common challenges

Find out more about  working with me or about applying to join the ILN.  mike@smbmastery.com.au

 https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeadamscott/

https://theintentionalleaders.com/

Transcript

Mike Scott (00:01.24)
Hey guys and girls, good to be back. So today I've got a super impressive human on the show, Isaiah Nolte. Isaiah is the co-founder of Bloom Growth Operating System. He's also got five kids, lives in Nicaragua, which I can never pronounce properly, so he can say it properly, I'm sure. And he's an EO, YPO, just very, very interesting dude. Today we're gonna be talking about Bloom Growth OS, what it is, who it's for, who it's not for, and just...

get into it pretty deeply. Before we get into the nub of Bloom Growth, welcome Isaiah. Good to have you on the show,

Isaiah Nolte (00:39.96)
Yeah, Mike, thanks for having me. Really happy to be here.

Mike Scott (00:43.15)
Yeah, good. Thanks for making the time, man. We're on opposite sides of the world. I think it's early, early morning for me in Australia and it's probably late afternoon or evening for you on the other side of the world. So it's just a cool thing. I just love speaking to people, just doing cool things in other places. It's amazing. Before we get into Bloom, just tell the listeners a little bit about you. You've got five kids, you live in an interesting place, you've done a lot of stuff, you've built businesses, sold businesses, you invest a lot. Give me the sort of...

quick version of your history and a little bit about you, like the human side of you. What's some stuff that you maybe don't tell people all the time that's not on your LinkedIn profile?

Isaiah Nolte (01:20.996)
Yeah, you got it, Mike. So I think it's really interesting. We just did an exercise called personal purpose. And I've never done this before, even though I would say that I've lived a life of purpose. And as I just got clear and was thinking through the moments and phases of my life where I felt most alive or most empowered, started my first business when I was 18, you know, but

What a lot of people don't know is that I used a lot of the proceeds of that to fund nonprofit humanitarian aid work in Central America like this give back. And it's a consistent theme throughout my life of giving back. And I would say I'm on a rampage right now. I've got my five kids, my stepson's 22 and then 12, nine, eight and seven.

my little girl, four boys and a girl, and I'm on a rampage of just being intentional of creating these meaningful experiences with lasting memories. And the way that I've been doing that is through conducting mini planning sessions with my little kids where we spend four hours writing out on sticky notes our ideas, sticking them to the wall, and then ending up with annual goals and priorities for the quarter. And it has been just a blast.

Mike Scott (02:45.806)
Hold on a second, hold on a second. I have to jump in right there. You get your kids to spend four hours doing something like that? Four hours? Man.

Isaiah Nolte (02:45.817)
from

Isaiah Nolte (02:53.305)
Well, it's three years in the running, right? So I could share pictures with you of this. and then I would say the most beautiful part of this, though, is that there. So for the majority of my life as a dad, it's been me driving and pushing you guys. Let's learn how to ride a bike. Let's learn how to swim. Let's learn another language. Let's.

Mike Scott (03:03.32)
Man, that's impressive.

Isaiah Nolte (03:21.965)
Travel or whatever right? It's just me pushing and driving similar to most business owners and CEOs of business You're the one that's telling everybody what to do and dictating and mandating and everybody's just kind of getting drug along by you Well after a while that sucks like it's it's it's it's not fun to live that way so

the, you know, when we started doing this planning, essentially, Mike, what happened was, is my little kids got excited about designing their future of what they wanted to do for the, for the year, authoring the next phase of our lives together and envisioning that. believe me, in some of these four hour planning sessions, it was rough. My eight year old freaked out in one of them.

and just started yelling and said a few swear words and, Papa, this is so stupid. Why are we doing this? And then my 12 year old jumped in, Noah, and he says, Joseph, do you remember three years ago when we didn't do planning? And he's like, yeah. And you remember how we didn't really do a lot of fun stuff or have new experiences together?

Mike Scott (04:18.766)
you

Isaiah Nolte (04:36.299)
and my eight year old kind of calmed down and he's like, yeah. And he's like, well, don't you want to continue to do fun things and give new experiences? He's like, well, yeah. He's like, well, then can you continue doing this with us? And my 12 year old literally started coaching my eight year old, completely flipped his mindset of engaging with the exercise and we were back at it for another two hours.

Mike Scott (05:01.346)
Yeah, it's, I mean, I just love this. It's just so impressive firstly, cause I can't get my kids who are four and 10 to do anything for more than about three minutes. So I'm super impressed, but it's actually reminding me of, you know, chatting to my co-founder of the ILN recently, and he's a very high performance guy. He's built and sold businesses. He's a doctor. He's just come back from the world champs triathlon. He's got three kids. Like he's a very high performing guy and a very intentional critical thinker. And he was saying recently how.

You know, he sat there and he thought that goal setting and planning was like a bit of a load of shit. And so he stopped doing it. And he's, he kind of said, but then he kind of found that he was just sort of ambling through everything. So he was saying, I don't enjoy the process of planning. don't enjoy the process of setting goals, but in the absence of doing it, I can see that my life drops and I stopped leveling up and I stopped being performant and I stopped being intentional. And this is a good segue to start talking about, about

Isaiah Nolte (05:45.923)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Scott (06:01.11)
operating systems, growth systems, right? So.

Isaiah Nolte (06:03.703)
Yeah, and Mike, if I can just jump in there really quickly, this is true for our businesses. It's true with our families, and it's true in our personal lives. This goal setting and planning works. And really, what I like to liken it to is us just getting clear as to what our ideal future is. What do we want? What do we want most from our business? What do we want most from our family? What do we want most from our personal lives?

and then getting clear on that destination and then all we do is figure out the steps to get there. It's just, it's really simple but it's powerful and it works in these three areas.

Mike Scott (06:44.952)
You know, simple does not mean easy. In fact, in my experience, to get to simplicity usually requires a lot of hard work and a lot of creativity and lot of genius, right? I know we agree on this, right? It's like simple does not mean easy.

Isaiah Nolte (06:56.717)
Totally. Well, it's easy to make things complicated and complex, Mike. That's the...

Mike Scott (07:02.04)
Totally. Everything's attributed to Einstein, but apparently Einstein wrote a very long letter to somebody once, very long. And at the end of the long letter, he said, I'm sorry, this letter was so long. If I had more time, it would have been a lot shorter. And I just love that, right? Because it requires time and effort to get to simplicity and brevity. All right, cool. Isaiah, everyone listening to this podcast will be familiar with scaling up, will be familiar with EOS, and for good reason.

Right. mean, my experience just very quickly, we were in my main business. I've had a few businesses, but in my main business, Nona, we had that typical situation where we had grown pretty fast. were doing very well until we went. And all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, our culture was terrible. We were technically insolvent. We were a project based business and we had been paid everything we were going to get from clients, but we still owed them a lot of work. We were in a bad state and

I had just read Scaling Up and I remember sitting with my partners saying, guys, we should probably close the business now. That would be the sensible thing to do. Or we could implement this operating system thing in three months with no coach. It's supposed to take three years with a full-time coach. Which one are we going to do? Long story short, we became obsessed with the concept of a business operating system and it changed the way that I think about business. I've met Vern Harnesh. I was an EO for a long time. You know all about this. Most of my listeners will.

Then we went on to sort of, found traction and EOS and that was in my opinion, better and simpler. And now we've got Bloom Growth, right? So we're to be talking about what I believe is sort of like the next iteration of this full disclosure to the listeners. I'm a certified Bloom Growth coach, the first one in Australia. This was for good reason. And Isaiah is on here to sort of, you know, answer the hard questions. So where I want to start with is Isaiah, you started with EOS. I mean,

that's where you got into this business operating system stuff. The first question I wanna ask you is, you were at, as far as I understand it, just correct me if I'm wrong here, but you were one of the first EOS implementers. You were living that life, you were straight into that, all sorts of stuff. Give me a little bit of your history with EOS and then the critical question I really want you to start talking about is, why did you move away from EOS and begin what is effectively an alternative to EOS?

Isaiah Nolte (09:24.727)
Yeah. Can we do a clap clap here, Mike? Just for clarity. So Todd Smart, co-author of the book Flourish and the co-founder of Bloom Growth OS, he was one of the first EOS implementers. Todd actually introduced me to EOS about 10 years ago. That's how I got familiar with it.

Mike Scott (09:27.501)
Yes sir.

Isaiah Nolte (09:49.4)
But if you ask the question that you just asked, I can answer it with a great answer of our history and background with EOS. We were the first software provider for EOS and blah, blah, blah, blah, right? I can give you a great answer on it.

Mike Scott (10:01.804)
Okay. Let me re-Chad, just listen up. Let me just re-ask that question and just delete the first way that I asked it, please. Okay, cool. Let's get back into it. So Isaiah, you guys were the first software partner for EOS. Your co-founder Todd has got a illustrious history with EOS. You were introduced to it a decade ago. So this is not something you don't understand. You were deeply entrenched in that EOS world as was your co-founder. Talk to me about...

what the motivation was to move away from EOS and effectively create an alternative solution.

Isaiah Nolte (10:39.617)
I want to start by saying, Mike, and you referenced it with your experience, your business experience, having an operating system, whether it's scaling up EOS, whatever one you're using, is great. It's life changing. It's life changing for your business, for your team. So I just want to say we're deeply familiar with a lot of these operating systems. And if you're doing one right now, it's absolutely fantastic.

One of the reasons why we created the Bloom Growth OS though, and it stems back from our purpose or our why, and it's just to help, to make an impact, to give back to the entrepreneurial community. And as being the first licensed software provider for EOS, we basically pioneered software in the operating system space. It was called Traction Tools at the time, you know, a decade ago, and we've had

you know, over 10,000 companies on our software platform running on all of these different methodologies from a business operating system standpoint. And, you know, with 250,000 plus users and seeing the cycles of companies, of their performance on the software platform, we were able to basically see where there's gaps in the current systems. And

I love EOS. We ran on EOS with an EOS implementer from pre-revenue to YPO qualifying business in six years. EOS was life changing for me. I wish I would have known about an operating system when I was 18, when I started my first business. If we think back though, these growth systems or these operating systems haven't really evolved in the last few decades.

they're exactly the same as what's written in the books. And that's great for IP and brand consistency and all that, but how many of us know that things, our world is drastically changing?

Mike Scott (12:43.97)
So I want to jump in there because this is important to me, right? So the introduction that came to you is an interesting time for me because I've been doing this kind of facilitation and coaching for a while now. And then when I had our exit and went into this full time about four years ago, I found myself looking at the traction tools and the scaling up tools, which I'm very grateful for because they really change the way I think about business. But I found myself iterating on them.

So I would sort of take a thing from one of them and then I'd find myself in notion changing the accountability chart or changing the way that we do planning or changing how we do these things. And I didn't really want to, but I found myself sitting going, God, I've got to probably recreate all of this stuff. And then I was introduced to guys and I was like, this is amazing. I don't want to do that. I don't think I'm going to be good at doing that, but these guys have basically taken what exists and iterated on it because...

Isaiah Nolte (13:21.997)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Scott (13:36.921)
The world moves pretty quickly. I'm not gonna go down the AI rabbit hole today, but like that has changed the way that we've got to think about hiring, retention, all these things. You mentioned something that I wanna double click on. You were effectively the pioneers of software for these business operating systems through traction tools. That allowed you this very interesting data set of 250,000 users to see where the gaps were in these businesses. What were some of those gaps that you saw?

Isaiah Nolte (13:54.456)
Yes.

Isaiah Nolte (14:04.855)
Yeah, I'm happy to answer that, Mike. And you're not alone in folks that have iterated upon or created or modified the tools in each of these business operating systems as they're not fully complete. And the gaps that we saw are first and foremost one in sales and marketing.

having a sales and marketing engine for your business, getting clear on who your ideal client profile is and what are the activities that we're doing and the referral strategies and this go to market. this whole piece of sales and marketing is essential for every business. there's a missing there, a gap in the current business operating systems in the space right now. The other one is, yeah.

Mike Scott (14:50.914)
Yeah, 100%.

Isaiah Nolte (14:53.773)
The other one is around finance and data. This, my goodness, as an entrepreneur, if you're a business owner or CEO, I'd be willing to bet that you're struggling with, what data do I share with my team, with our employees? Do I share our revenue numbers and our profit numbers and how do I? And this is so common. They won't understand. They don't have the full picture.

Well, there's a financial literacy component that is so valuable for the small to medium sized businesses and having your leadership team and key members in the organization understanding the numbers and understanding what levers they can pull that make an impact in the business. Holy heck. Talk about being transformational for you and your team. You're not alone in this anymore. So finance and data is another key piece.

Mike Scott (15:44.982)
Yeah, I think.

Isaiah Nolte (15:48.609)
that's where they're missing.

Mike Scott (15:48.975)
You know, this is, actually did a LinkedIn post on this yesterday, which is going a bit bananas at the moment, literally saying like, being transparent with your numbers is a lot more than transparency. It's actually about empowerment, buy-in, accountability, selection of your team members, et cetera. And I remember how terrified I was when we started sharing our full numbers with our leadership team and then the whole business. Because when we did it, we were not at a time of strength, just to be clear. When we did it, we were actually in serious trouble.

And it was a gamble. Like I'll be honest, it was a gamble, right? But the most beautiful thing happened actually. I thought people were going to go, this is a sinking ship. We need to get off the ship. The opposite happened. People went, you guys have been amazing. What can I do to help? And we were like, I remember almost being in tears actually, the first time we did this being like, you know, one of our engineers actually came up to us when we did this. And I'm not saying that this is going to happen in every business, but he walked up to me and he said, Mike, cause we shared our numbers at a time that

Isaiah Nolte (16:16.888)
Yeah.

Mike Scott (16:45.23)
We were not in a good shape, right? And we felt we needed to be honest with our team and say, this is how we got here. This is where we are. And this is how we're to get out of this. And we did get out of it, but they didn't know we were going to get out of it. I remember a senior engineer coming up to me and saying, Hey, while you were talking, I just did some maths. I can go without a salary for six months. And I was just like, that will never happen, buddy. That will never happen. But I got teary. I was like, I mean, I'm getting teary now. Like I was like,

you will never have to do that. But my God, thank you. And we remain very good friends to this day. And he's probably listening to this and he knows who he is. And I just want to say thank you again, cause that, that, that made a big impact. So this finance and data thing, really what I'm saying here is this is not to the listeners. This is not bean counting that Isaiah is talking about. This is about buy-in. This is about psychological safety. This is about saying you are part of something bigger than yourself and you need to know.

Isaiah Nolte (17:20.195)
Yeah.

Isaiah Nolte (17:24.633)
you

Mike Scott (17:44.207)
how what you're doing on a Tuesday morning at 9.30 actually impacts this organization, whether we're five people, 10 people, or 5,000 people. So the other thing I want to double click on here is that, know, Greg McEwen wrote a book called Essentialism, which I absolutely love. And he talks about humans, like we contribute at our highest level when we are clear, when we have clarity. And to me, that's what Bloom Growth OS does as a general.

thing, but when we get into this finance and data component, you see people going, shit, now I know the five to 15 numbers that we need to be obsessed over, not the 87 numbers and not the zero numbers. So I just wanted to double click on that because like, I know you know this stuff, but it's like, you almost went over that really quickly to go like, it's really important. It's really good, but it's like, it's so important. And this is like game changing.

Isaiah Nolte (18:24.867)
Mm-hmm.

Isaiah Nolte (18:35.277)
Yeah. And you're not alone to our business owners, entrepreneurs who are listening to this. You're not alone in the internal struggle of what do I share? What don't I share? How transparent should I be? And Mike shared a really beautiful example here where employees, I would say that most of the time the folks within our organizations, care. They care. Like they want to help. They want to do a good job.

They want to succeed. They want to be a part of a winning team. It's almost innate in us as human beings to want to succeed and grow and thrive and excel and be an environment where that's going on. And I could share story after story after story of entrepreneurs that I've worked with implementing the Bloom Growth OS within their business where they had the same struggle. Well, the commercial property management company

Well, Isaiah, we've got this portfolio here of X number of properties that aren't profitable. There's no way I could share this information with the property management team. They're going to get scared. They're going to quit. They're going to, and all these stories that are going on in our heads, you know, telling us that we can't do this. Well, after six months, I was like, Dave, please, I promise you, if you share it, explain what they mean.

explain what these numbers mean, explain what we can do to make a difference, share where we're at right now. And you know what happened, Mike? Well, nobody offered to not take a salary for six months, but they did get engaged on how can we help? What can we do to turn these numbers around?

Mike Scott (20:03.894)
And turn the numbers around.

Mike Scott (20:08.482)
Take a salary cut. Yeah.

Mike Scott (20:18.838)
Well, now the game is winnable, right? Like we have to create winnable games. Like, and winnable games are done with scorecards. The reason sport is so popular around the world is because everybody knows what's going on. We're losing, they're winning. The scorecard is simple. That's why we have fanatic raving fans in every sport in the world. Yet weirdly in business, we don't default to creating winnable games. But like that example is great. It's like, hey guys, this part of the portfolio we're winning here,

but this part of the portfolio we're losing, how do we obsess over that problem? And every single day, what are you doing to turn that property from a liability into an asset? I love this. Okay, we could talk about this all day, but we won't. So we've got the gaps that you found from this data set was sales and marketing. And it's really about obsessing, not just about how do we get business, but how do we keep business and how do we increase total lifetime value? Then you found this gap in finance and data, but the emotional component about that is not just what are we measuring, but-

Isaiah Nolte (20:58.348)
Exactly.

Isaiah Nolte (21:09.591)
Yeah. Yes.

Mike Scott (21:17.58)
What are we sharing? How are we sharing it? And what's the meaning and the narrative around the share? What other gaps did you find?

Isaiah Nolte (21:24.365)
Yeah, the third one is obvious, I think, to most of us. It's technology. This is our internal tech. Every single company, no matter the size, we've got technology tools that we're utilizing for instant messaging, for managing client communication, for internal project management. And the list goes on and on and on of the software solutions that we use.

The other aspect of technology is our external tech. This is the client facing tech. you know, in your client facing tech, you want to make it simple and easy to do business with you. When you accomplish that, it can become a differentiator for you as well. So, and then of course the Bloom Growth OS is we're have our roots as a

know, tech company, a software company, this whole system, the coaching, the OS is supported through our software solution that makes it really simple and easy to execute the Bloom Growth OS at every level of your organization.

Mike Scott (22:31.042)
Yeah, I I look, I see this a lot, right? So like, again, we could talk about this for the whole episode, which we won't, but just a really practical example about this is whenever I'm working with a leadership team, right? Before the bloom days, now in the deep bloom days, inevitably we'll get to two metrics that we need to be tracking. One is net promoter score, which is, you know, a measurement of loyalty. How likely are you to recommend X to Y? And the other one is internal. So employee net promoter score. And then the inevitable conversation comes up. How do we measure that?

And then there's this weird handbrake that happens where people don't do it because do we use a Google form? Do we use a Teams form? Do we use X, know, retently or whichever office vibe, I mean, whichever platform. And that's just an example. And usually what happens is six months later, they're not measuring it because they haven't made a selection on the tech stack, which is just crazy because that's a three minute conversation. This is becoming more and more important as well from an external perspective. You know, again, you said it quickly, but there's a lot to that is.

It is getting harder and harder to answer the question, why should customers pick us over the other options? And a bigger part of that is the user experience from a tech perspective. How do they engage with us from a tech perspective that removes friction? And I guess the point is like, go through bit of an audit with that and a bit of a process in the Bloom Growth OS.

Isaiah Nolte (23:50.586)
And can I give you a couple of examples, Mike, just to clarify what we're talking about for external tech. We work with a commercial industrial rooking company in Nebraska in the U S. and you know, I don't know why, but the construction industry, a lot of times is very archaic. We're still doing quotes with three pieces of paper, the blue pink, yellow, ripping it off, hand the copy to the client or the customer and

Mike Scott (23:55.256)
Please. Yeah.

Isaiah Nolte (24:20.653)
You know, what are we doing? Right? So that's what these guys were doing. Well, through these conversations and implementing Bloom Growth in their business, they became clear that we can get iPads on the roofs. We can get a quote. We can do the roof walk right away, have the quote ready right there on the roof and say, here, you know, we can be here in two days. Sign right here. Okay. Well, you're not ready to sign right now. Well, then I'll just email this to you and click on it and away we go.

This dramatically impacted their conversion percentage because it made it easy and simple for somebody to do business with them. Right. And then the next phase of that is let's get either drones or satellite and imagery and we don't even have to do a roof walk. Right. That's the next phase of iteration on this. Another example that if I can share really quickly is in the Miami airport, I fly from Nicaragua to Miami often. You know, one of the pains that I have is short layover times.

So I need food quick. Well, there's one restaurant that I know of in the Miami airport where, everybody's got the QR code where you can scan and get the menu. But these guys have it built out where I can scan the QR code. Menu pops up. can order right there on my phone, close it out. Don't even have to talk to anybody. And my food is right there at my table. It's, it's they've solved my need in a very simple, easy, effective way using technology.

And I love it. And I go there every time when I have a short layover.

Mike Scott (25:49.027)
You know, and-

And again, with AI, we're on the forefront in another business that I'm invested in and involved with where we provide these solutions. you talk about the roofing company and especially companies that are listening to this that have got 10, 20, 30 years of experience. There is an absolute gold mine of information in the number of proposals that you've sent out because we can begin to overlay some AI onto that and going, hey, so of the roofing proposals that we send out, why are people accepting them and why are people not accepting them?

gold mine. So every single sales call that I have now for the ILN and some of the Bloom stuff, I transcribe it. Why do I transcribe it? Because I can say, okay, what am I missing? What are my blind spots? When people are saying yes, why are they saying yes? When they're saying no, what are they saying? What am I missing? And I'm learning so much about who is my ICP, ideal customer profile. Where am I shit? Where am I good? Where am I too loud? Where am I talking too much? I mean, this is like having the

Isaiah Nolte (26:43.501)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Scott (26:47.586)
best sales coach in the world for free working with your salespeople. Yet how many people are doing this? I'm guessing not one single person listening to this podcast, which is as decent amount is doing it, right? So again, I want to move on because the temptation is to talk about this all day. What are the gaps? We've got sales marketing, finance and data. got tech, internal and external. What are the other gaps that we found that you found?

Isaiah Nolte (27:12.793)
The next one is relationships. And man, that might sound so simple, right? Relationships. And it might be like, well Isaiah, what the heck do you even mean by relationships? As human beings and as teammates, a lot of times it requires a lot of energy to be in relationship.

with our peers, with the business owner, with your direct reports, with our employees. I alluded at it earlier with Dave and the property management company and the stories that he was telling himself about how his teammates would react to information about how profitable or not profitable some of their properties were. This intricacy of being human.

we obsess over this and we built a three year curriculum that leads a leadership team on building a deeper bond, destroying these assumptions where we validate them and don't allow space for the stories that we tell ourselves or the friction. It's so many times I invited into a business to coach a leadership team, lead them on a journey. want to grow the business double, you know, increased profit, et cetera.

And you know, we need help with our business, Isaiah. Well, most of the time, Mike, they need help with their people. There's, you know, no psychological safety. So people aren't contributing. There's just one person dictating there's friction between partners and the rest of the leadership team is walking on eggshells. Well, I can't say that, or I can't, I can't say this to Mike because he's going to freak out or all of these different scenarios suck and drain energy. And it translates into.

a lack of productivity. We're not as high performing as we could be when we have strong relationships within our entire organization. Can you imagine an organization of 50, 100, 250 people where we don't have this drama or it's very little, there's very little friction, we're aligned on our values.

Isaiah Nolte (29:26.871)
have the right mechanisms to communicate and execute on projects, and we have our whole company moving towards a common goal that they understand and are excited about, it's no wonder that companies grow so fast when they start running on Bloom or an operating system. It's powerful, Mike.

Mike Scott (29:45.699)
Yeah, a hundred percent. And this is not based on woo woo nonsense. know, Patrick Lencioni wrote a book, Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which if you haven't read it, guys and girls listening, just read that book. Read that book every year. You start overlaying that with work from Brene Brown and Liz Wiseman and multipliers. And you begin to see that if you want high performing teams, which you do because business is generally just people doing stuff with people, you have to start with trust. But that trust is not the trust.

that is I know what this person is gonna do or not do. This trust, Patrick Lencioni makes quite a distinct distinction. This is vulnerability-based trust. And what I've been pretty impressed by with the Bloom relationships modules is it's all coming from vulnerability-based trust. And what's interesting for me is I'm a super, super practical guy. I don't like theory, I don't like academics, I like practical shit. Like this is what you can do today. Whenever I'm running a Bloom day with my clients,

Every time most of the people when asked what was the most valuable part of today, the answer was this weird like, know, Mike, I know this sounds strange, but the most valuable part of today was the relationships piece. So we're in there solving quarterly priorities. We're in there solving what data are we like, like what data are we recording and sharing? We're in there. And yet the thing that they leave with is that relationship piece for the reasons that you've just outlined.

Isaiah Nolte (31:04.706)
Yeah.

Mike Scott (31:08.3)
My partners, you I started doing this kind of stuff with my partners a long time ago and intuitively it wasn't like, anyway, and they used to call it Mike's hippie bullshit. And at first they used to laugh at me going, here we go with Mike's hippie bullshit. Then it became Mike, we need more of your hippie bullshit. Then it became like, Hey, that hippie bullshit is actually not hippie bullshit. That hippie bullshit is actually like, this is how we are exceeding and punching above our weight group. So again, we could talk about this all day. Are there any other gaps that you guys found?

Isaiah Nolte (31:17.379)
Thank you.

Isaiah Nolte (31:34.039)
Yeah. I? Well, Mike, can I just share one more example here that I think most of our listeners will be able to identify with as I think through my own experience in running our business and setting the KPIs or the weekly metrics or the scorecard and having, you know, accountability or goals for each department.

Where I've seen this show up and be so detrimental for businesses is in this reviewing of the numbers state. When we do not have strong relationships or there's a missing or a gap in psychological safety or whatever you want to call it, the vulnerability based trust. What happens so many times, and as I say this, you're going to hear yourself in your meetings with your teams of when this is popping up.

When this isn't present and we go over the numbers and we're not hitting our goals, there is a triggering effect that happens for folks. I've seen it so many times. I could tell you example after example. It's like, and they move directly into defensiveness and they start to defend and justify and explain why we couldn't. It's out of our control and it just...

And what happens when that triggering happens, it completely shuts down the possibility of the conversation to move the needle in this metric. And as I'm sharing this, I'm sure you're thinking of examples with your team where this has happened. I've seen it over and over and over again. Well, client retention, well, it's because of this, this, and this that we lost so many customers last week. And it's really outside of our control. And we can't blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Mike Scott (33:10.51)
100 %

Isaiah Nolte (33:27.083)
and it just shuts down the possibility of us doing something about it.

Mike Scott (33:33.102)
So what happens when we've got psychological safety? What happens when we have the ability to be vulnerable? And what I mean by vulnerable here is the ability to say, I'm scared, I'm lost, I'm sorry, I don't know. What changes in that numbers conversation when we say, hey, why have we had so much churn?

Isaiah Nolte (33:54.04)
Yeah, I mean, it's as simple, Mike, as we missed our churn numbers. I don't know what to do to affect this. Can we work together or spend some time together problem solving on this? See how that is completely different than somebody getting defensive and aggressive and it just completely changes the way that we're obsessing over growing this business together as a team.

Mike Scott (34:06.648)
Yeah, it's open. Yeah.

Mike Scott (34:19.346)
There's a phrase that one of my clients uses, which I love, and he talks about falling in love with the problem. And that's what I'm hearing from you is it shifts from defending ego-driven fear to, we've got a problem, let's fall in love with this problem. Because my ex-co-founder in my last business, he's probably the highest performing, most capable, impressive person I've ever worked with. And he used to talk about like, when you can fall in love with the boring shit, that's when you become an amazing

operator. You obsess over the stuff that everyone finds boring because like 99 % of business is boring. Like it is like it is it's the mundane every day falling in love with the mundane stuff that makes you an incredible operator. So I love this. I love this. Okay, but we got to move on. We got to move on. All right, so you found a bunch of gaps. These gaps are significant. These gaps maybe weren't as needed then, but we evolve with the times and a big part of what I've noticed with Bloom is

Isaiah Nolte (35:02.989)
Mm-hmm.

Isaiah Nolte (35:06.478)
Yes.

Mike Scott (35:17.856)
even on the software, all the titles are editable, right? And to me, that's like a, it's a useful indicator of how it's sort of approach that everything is evolving and you can call it what you want, et cetera, et cetera. I want to ask you a pretty simple question that is maybe not a simple answer though. EOS exists. So who is Bloom for?

Isaiah Nolte (35:45.933)
Bloom is for...

Isaiah Nolte (35:57.846)
Mike, do you want me to go into the ideal client from a size standpoint or from the willing to be pro?

Mike Scott (36:04.62)
Yeah, so Chad, just take this out, we'll get back to it and I'll ask the question again. Yeah, so I want the simplest answer of the ICP, right? Like the ideal client profile, right? But like the simplest answer, right? Not the complex answer. All right, Chad, Isaiah's gonna answer again.

Isaiah Nolte (36:11.19)
you

Isaiah Nolte (36:16.973)
Yeah.

All right. Okay. got it. All right. So Mike, who is Bloom for? Bloom is for when you've got, you started a business, you're running and growing it, you're past the solopreneur stage, and you're beginning to build a team.

And what happens when you add teammates, you go from one to three to five to seven to 12. The complexity in your communication does not increase linearly as you add teammates. It increases exponentially. And in order to not get stuck or to continue to manage the growth, an operating system is the answer.

So who is Bloom for? It's for entrepreneurs, leadership teams of 10 plus employees that are willing to change, that are willing to be coached, that are willing to do things differently, to be open, to put their egos aside for the greater good of the organization. This is who Bloom is for. You want to grow this business? You want to have a lot of fun while you're doing it? This is what we're doing.

Mike Scott (37:34.083)
You know, on my personal coaching website, there's a thing that I say at the top, which is like, stop scaling chaos. And every time I say that to someone who wants to work with me, they just kind of like, see this light go off in their eyes and they're like, that's exactly what we're doing. We are just scaling the problems. Because I just want to repeat what Isaiah said there, because I see it all the time and there's lots of cool little sort of infographics of this online, but like when you're adding team members, the complexity doesn't scale linearly, it scales exponentially.

Especially beyond this, this weird number, I actually did a podcast episode on this recently saying, stop trying to protect your culture because there's this weird number of about 15 people where everything shifts and it goes from everyone knowing everything about each other and almost just communicating via osmosis to something very different where all of a sudden you need a different structure. You need a different set of communication rhythms. You need a different set of data and numbers and

That's what Bloom is for from what I'm seeing is that when you've grown past the ability to just do everything via some weird stream of consciousness because you're all sitting around each other and there's five people, et cetera. What impact do you see in this Isaiah? Like you've worked with now tangentially through the coaches or through yourself or through Todd, a lot of companies, thousands of employees, tens or hundreds of companies. What do you see?

in terms of results, because everything we've been speaking about up until now is me and you talking about these cool things, these cool tools, all of these great things. But every single person listening to this business is going to be like, what is this cost and what's the ROI? So I don't want to talk about ROI or talk about it, whatever you want, but like, what results do you see here? What's the evidence that this works?

Isaiah Nolte (39:19.671)
Yeah, the results are massive. The way that I like to liken this to Mike that, you know, our, we just, our book just came out flourish and it's really interesting when we start working with a leadership team with an entrepreneur in their team, it's there's every business has a certain area where they're stuck, whether it's in sales and marketing, their people, they don't have the right people, right seats on the leadership team or, know, there's like 15.

commonalities that we've noticed in businesses that has caused them to hit a ceiling, if you will. And through the process, these are uncovered and they become so clear. And when the leadership team and the entrepreneur begins to solve this one and pull this lever and pull this one and get the right sales leader in place, because the entrepreneur has been

the sales leader and the visionary and the integrator, the president running the team. And once they get that next level, all of sudden pulling these levers unlocks the pent up potential that the business has. And that's what we see, Mike. It's hands down. And if I can just rattle off things that our clients are saying, I'm working with 12 companies right now. Every single one of them, except for two.

This is the best year we've ever had highest profit we've ever had. A couple of them are working on getting the right people in their leadership team and results will come with a little, it's not a magic wand, right? This is not some magic voodoo sort of a thing. This is us compounding prioritization. It's us getting clear on what are the most important.

most valuable activities that we need to be focused on as a leadership team in each department. And we're striving and obsessing over these through the system and structure that we have. And what results in that is I have a client in Latin America that's doubled their business in two years, went from three to eight million in two years, quadrupled their net operating income from four percent to 19 percent in two years. And they've been in business for 10.

Isaiah Nolte (41:31.897)
Another one of our coaches in the Middle East mentioned that they've gotten more results in the first 60 days of running on Bloom than they had on scaling up in the last 18 months.

Mike Scott (41:34.03)
Yeah.

Mike Scott (41:46.425)
And I'm seeing similar things, right? But I want to double click on what you said. Like as Bloom Coaches, we don't do the work for the client. We create the tools, the space, the container for them to do the work, which is why when I asked Isaiah, like who's this for? This is not for people who want the work done for them. We don't come in as consultants and external, like you have to be willing to and want to do the work. But it's an amazing thing that happens that when you have a good facilitator standing in the front of the room with your leadership team,

doing what often seems like very simple work. I often get a set of comments, which is kind of like, you know, I've known this all the time, but I've never got this down onto paper. And it's not enough for the founder to be clear on what we should measure and where we should go. In fact, it's like, it's almost useless having the founder know that the leadership team's got to know that. And more importantly, the most junior newest person on the business needs to know that stuff. So a lot of the work that I'm doing with clients or the comments that I'm hearing is,

Hey, performance is going up. But also clients will often come to me saying, I'm totally overwhelmed as the founder. I'm working 20 hour days. My leadership team is crap. We can't grow, et cetera. Fast forward a little while and this person is going, I don't know what I'm doing anymore. I'm kind of not needed in the business. Like what do I do? And there's a bit of an existential crisis. These are people who think it's impossible to ever get there. Right now my experience is like, I've been doing this stuff for a long time.

These tools are not new, right? The only new stuff that I think Bloom has brought in really is the relationship stuff. That's kind of like proprietary. And I'm not saying this is a bad thing. I'm saying that like, this is not a knowledge problem that Bloom solves. Most of what's in there, most people listening to this will know. But like Derek Sivers says, if it were just a knowledge problem, we would all have six pack abs and be billionaires. It's an execution problem. It's an accountability problem. It's a relationship and communication problem.

Isaiah Nolte (43:35.768)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Scott (43:41.26)
And this is why I've become a bit of a fanboy of this is because that's what Bloom does exceptionally well. I'm conscious of time, Isaiah. We've only got a couple of minutes left. What I actually want to end on is, it looks like you want to say something, jump in.

Isaiah Nolte (43:47.522)
Yeah.

Isaiah Nolte (43:54.643)
I do. Mike, can I? So I know your previous question is, know, what are the results that, know, produces in a business and the, you know, doubling the business, increasing profit, these types of things are great, phenomenal, right? Most of us want that. But the thing that is the most meaningful and the most impactful that Bloom does, and Mike, you know, we have some clients that have been a couple of years on the journey with us now.

And the relationship curriculum is a three year journey where we're doing modules or exercises of building high performing teams. And really a lot of it boils down to self reflection and self awareness, emotional intelligence. It's really powerful, but what we've been hearing and non-solicited when we've asked leadership teams what, after two years of doing this, what's the best thing that you've gotten out of bloom so far, we're starting to get this as an answer. They're saying.

Well, you know, we really grew our business, we increased our profit, but the most valuable part of doing Bloom is I think I'm becoming a better human. I'm becoming a better human is what leadership team members and entrepreneurs are saying as they're on this journey. And it makes me get teary eyed thinking about it. And I could share story after story after story of once you get an epiphany of

self-awareness of how you're showing up and you become responsible for the way you're showing up. This not only benefits your team and the company that you work with, but it also trickles into your family. You become a better dad, a better mom, a better husband, a better wife. Like it's powerful, the impact that this has.

Mike Scott (45:41.559)
Yeah, I see the same thing. I see the same thing. And it's like, I'm beginning to get a bit of a reputation where I make people cry a lot. And, that sounds terrible, but it's becoming almost laughable because we go deep. It's a good kind of crying. It's a good kind of crying, but we just go there so quickly, right? Because I'm prepared to be vulnerable in these sessions as well. And this vulnerability is just, it's amazing, right? And then the business performance follows. That's what's so...

Isaiah Nolte (45:53.306)
A good kind of crying though, right, Mike? The good tears.

Mike Scott (46:10.4)
interesting to me about this coaching work that I do one-on-one in Bloom and the ILN just in my life. I've really been drawn to this for a long time now is that when you can be vulnerable, which is what this relationships module is actually all about, it's vulnerability, it's self-awareness, and it's the willingness to work on oneself. It's an internal locus of control rather than an external locus of control. The business miraculously almost just sorts itself out when you do this work. It's a miraculous thing.

It's not to say that you don't have to do the work. know, this is a gym. It's not a spa. Like this is work. Make no mistake, people. Like if you work with me or Isaiah, it's fun and it's cool, but we're going to make you work. Like make, make no mistake about this, man. right. Isaiah, I could talk all day about this, but I'm not going to, I want to wrap this up. I think we've covered a lot. I think the final question I want to ask you is if people are listening to this,

Isaiah Nolte (46:45.23)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Scott (47:07.016)
And they're wondering if it's right for them. If they've sort of, if you've piqued their interest and they're going, Hey, this sounds great, but I'm too small or I'm too big or I'm too broken or I'm too not profitable. I just want to know what message you would leave them with. I'm not saying like the sales pitch, but like, what do you want the listeners to take away from this conversation?

Isaiah Nolte (47:30.361)
Boy, that's a challenging question with, depending upon what size of organization that you are at. You know, there's been a lot of great nuggets here that I think can be applicable to all of our listeners, regardless of the size of your business. What I would encourage you to do though is contact us. Contact Mike.

Go to bloomgrowthcoach.com. All of our coaches in our community, we share the values of wanting to give back to the entrepreneurial community. So if you want to have a coach come and do a workshop or do a 90 minute no cost session for your leadership team where they'll uncover.

Is there areas of opportunity in your business and does it make sense to implement a growth OS, the Bloom Growth OS within your business? You'll get learnings and insights and takeaways. It begins the trust and the vulnerability even in that 90 minute session. I just encourage you to take action, reach out. We're happy to help. And if now is not the right time, that's totally fine. You'll get value and insight into areas that you can focus on.

even from spending 90 minutes with somebody like Mike or one of our coaches in our community.

Mike Scott (48:54.05)
Yeah, I love it. I mean, I can feel it from the minute I met you, there's just, you know, you're very passionate about not bloom, but what bloom represents, which is helping entrepreneurs because building a business is incredibly difficult. Even when it's going well, it's incredibly isolating. And a lot of people listening to this will be thinking, but the problems I've got are only my problems. Like they're just not, there is probably, I will be.

bold and say there is nothing that any of you are ever going to experience in your business that is truly unique to you. Unless you're Elon Musk trying to put people on Mars, even that, you Isaiah, thanks for the time, man. This has been awesome. I want it to be 30 minutes. We're at 49 minutes. I'm happy about that because man, just thought we could talk about this forever. To the listeners, you know, as always, if you've had any kind of insight listening to this,

I've got a saying that I like, which makes people, divides the room, but insight without action is just mental masturbation. Like it is not useful. So if you've had a, if you've had an Isaiah's awkwardly laughing now, in fact, I had a client reach out to me recently listening to an episode of mine. He's like, Mike, I need you to, I need you to explain to me what this mental masturbation thing is. And I'm like, no dude, use your imagination. But I'm serious about this. If you've had an, if you've had an insight and you do nothing with that insight, you're just wasting time.

Isaiah Nolte (49:58.585)
You've caught me off guard, Mike, with that one.

Mike Scott (50:17.72)
Do something, take action. Right. Isaiah, thanks for the time, buddy. It's been awesome. And I have a suspicion you'll be back on the show soon.

Isaiah Nolte (50:26.189)
Yeah, you got it, Mike. My pleasure.