Fast Five for Friday: Hard Decisions, Real Connections, and Bigger Isn't Always Better

0:01 Welcome to The Coaching Equation, brought to you by Empire Partners and hosted by Ryan Lang and Brooke Bishop. Our mission is to help you build a profitable and impactful coaching business by cutting through the noise and all the expert advice to deliver tried and true actionable insights that you can deploy in your business today. Each week we bring on expert guests, unveil cutting edge tactics and strategies, and share the secrets and stories that we've gathered from working with the most successful coaching companies on earth. Welcome back to the Coaching Equation Podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Lang, CEO and co-founder of Empire Partners, alongside my co-founder and co-host, Brooke Bishop.

0:46 Bro, it's the final Fast Five for Friday of 2024. Are you ready to get it on? We need like the final countdown music for the intro for this one. The final countdown. That version, by the way, that Brooke just gave is royalty free, which is why we use that one instead of the official song. Was it on pitch though? That's the important part. Oh, maybe. Yeah. Not too bad. Not too bad. Okay. Kick us off here, buddy. All right. So the first one. So, dude, just in the spirit of the holidays and just also with our clients, there's 10 times more joy from giving versus receiving. And just this year, we got to just witness so much in terms of our clients.

1:27 That's the coolest thing for anyone who's a coach. You know, when you get to see your clients eyes light up because they took something that you recommended or there was a breakthrough that happened in your coaching and they applied that and then they got the result from it. Just, I don't know if you're, if you're a coach out there listening, you better be, because this would be a really weird thing to be listening to if you weren't. But that's why we do it, right? Like, yes, we want to make money. Yes, we want to grow a business. Yes, we want to have impact. Yes, we want to help humanity. But it's like, that's the piece of the puzzle when we get to actually see our efforts take root and bear fruit. Ooh, that rhymed. That was clever. You did, man. Dang, man. Look at you. It's on. End of year. What? But yeah, the beauty of this too is like with our kids, right?

2:11 Like the holidays, giving them a gift. Like we get so much more joy from seeing them open their presents and light up than we do opening our present for ourself, you know? So I just want to put emphasis, make 2025, like give more than you've ever given and have bigger impact and bigger effect. Anyways, yeah, I'll shut up. Yes, 1000% to that. And I just want to highlight one super quick thing, which is that when when Brooke started talking, he kicked it off by saying not just clients, but your team. Remember that show up as a servant leader and holy cow, your life is going to change their lives are going to change your business is going to change. It's crazy. All right. Number two, the value of the right partnerships.

2:52 We have looked around at a lot of other people that we know in our industry in one way, shape or form and other companies in our industry that have kind of chosen to go sort of the siloed route. I'm just going to double down on me and kind of do this my own way sort of thing, which is fine. But... One of the things that we were passionate about from the very beginning around here was leveraging the friendships and the partnerships and the incredible connections that we have. And we've done it from day one. And this year, especially, the power of that has been so palpable. The amount of difference that we have made in people's lives because we have not only been willing, but excited about.

3:34 about bringing in our friends and colleagues and partners and creating strategic alliances so that we can serve our clients at a higher level. It's been a massive game changer for us. It's been a massive game changer for our partners and for our clients. And quite frankly, it's just made the entire thing way more fun. So I would just give some encouragement that, you know, look around, look at the people that you can do things with. Find the right partners, find the right strategic alliances, find the right friends. Honestly, you will go farther together. And while you could drive the ship completely on your own, it's a lonely road. It's hard. And you may go fast, but you're not going to go too far.

4:17 I like the saying, you know, it's not that it's lonely at the top, but it is less crowded, you know? And so, with this year, just to echo the sentiments we just shared, like the right people, the right partnerships, holy cow, we can change the entire experience. So, no question. All right, number three. Number three, in-person events are back, baby. So for anyone who didn't know, when I left Robbins, when I left working with Tony Robbins, it was right when, right in the midst of COVID, right? So here I was 15 years in a... an executive seat for a company that hinged around in-person events. And then the world imploded and that went away. And that was my good, the universe's way of going, hey, Brooke, time to go do your own thing.

5:03 Hit the eject switch. Let's go. Obviously, everyone had to figure out virtual events and all that jazz. But what I think we've really... I shouldn't say think we learned what we learned, what we absolutely learned this year is in-person events are so freaking important and they are fully back. People are wanting to be in person. People want to do the work. They want to be in the room with the other people. And we got to experience that in our own events as well as participating and attending a number of other events this year. Yeah, it's just it's amazing. It really is. And I think that to your point, I think that the need for connection is at like an all-time high right now, which I think is wonderful because I loved in-person events before we got to COVID. And I think a lot of people who kind of like them are coming around to the true value.

5:47 They're really leaning into that. And so I think this is a really good one, dude, because I'd encourage everybody who's listening to think about how you can create true in-person time with your clients, with your community. It's incredibly valuable. And stay tuned because we're going to have information on our next upcoming event in Q1 of 2025 very, very soon. So, all right. Number four. Get in on this because we both could, but I want you to hit it. Yeah. Of course you want me to drop this one. Do you like that? I want you to hit that, Brooke. The sentiment's going to continue. We're ruined for the rest of this episode. Number four is make the hard decision.

6:28 Sorry. See the power of the pause. Can that be another one? How to lose your viewership in one fail swoop. Yeah. Who knew a 10-minute episode could go so fucking sideways? My God. My head just got so hot, red-faced. Okay. Bad. Okay. Okay. Number four. Make the hard decisions. This year, we made some really tough decisions. Honestly, this was true good leadership that you brought to the table. We had to take an honest look at where our company was, where we were headed, how we were structured, decisions we were making, our offerings. We, mid-year...

7:09 You brought it to the table. We had a really tough conversation. It wasn't a hard conversation for you and I to have in terms of our interaction. It was a hard decision because we had spent a year crafting and building something we thought was our good-looking baby. And we had a real honest dialogue around, is it? And we had to have an ugly baby conversation. We had to literally... peel back everything to the studs and go back to ground zero to the tune of literally changing the platforms and the technology we were on to our partnerships and who was involved to our compensation and who was paid what and how and where. Like literally we stripped our whole business down this year and it was not convenient timing. It was not convenient monetarily just because of the timing of it.

7:50 But due to your good leadership, brother, like we literally went, peel this onion back, let's start fresh. And we got to take all of our learnings and build quite frankly, revolutionary. So yeah, well, dude, and I would just say on that front, it's making the hard decision. And also knowing that when you have that intuitive hit that it's time, you got to move. Because you can't let so often those hard decisions sit for way too long, they eat away at you. And then before too long, they're even more difficult to make than they were in the first place. So yeah, that's a really good one. All right. So to round us out, this is a really good one, I feel like, for this year in general. Bigger is not necessarily better.

8:31 One of the things that we did this year because of a lot of the things that Brooke just talked about is instead of going wider and broader and going, oh my gosh, how do we get a bazillion people in here and that kind of thing, with our mastermind especially, and really even with our higher level consulting projects as well, Before we look to expand something, how do we do it better? How do we make the experiences more palpable for our clients? How do we help them create better results? What are the little things internally that we can look at and put a microscope on from our onboarding process to...

9:14 to your point, the platforms that we're using to the people that are involved in the company. And even with the people that are involved in the company, how do we better utilize those people? In a lot of cases, we looked around this year and thought, man, do we need another who to put on the bus? And in some cases, the answer was yes. But more often than not, we had the right who's. We just needed to shift what they were doing. We did that multiple times this year to create better results. So that was a big one for us this year is just the reminder that bigger is not necessarily better and we can grow exponentially without necessarily getting wider or broader by looking very clearly at what we already have and how we can refine it and make it better.

9:55 All right, my friend. Well, dude, first things first, thank you for listening to the Coaching Equation podcast all year long this year. This has been an unbelievable joy for us. We have so much more good stuff coming your way in 2025. Brooke, thank you for being my partner in all of this this year. This has been an amazing year. And man, I'm ready to rip the cover off and get into 2025 and get after it. Me too. No, it's been an amazing ride this year. And dude, sky's the limit. Opportunities are abundant. And yeah, let's bring on the new year. Let's go. Indeed it is. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Coaching Equation Podcast. And we will see you in the new year. Take care. Boom.

10:36 Thank you for listening to this episode of The Coaching Equation. Please hit subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. And if you got value out of this episode, we would be so grateful if you would share it out with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite platform. To learn more about Empire Partners or to inquire about working with Ryan and Brooke, please visit www.empirepartners.io forward slash go.