[00:00:00] What is business coaching? On our website we talk about building systems, adding value to your business and creating a company that serves your life. But what does a coaching relationship actually look like for both coaches and clients?
[00:00:14] In this special edition of On It, a production by EMyth, I'll be talking with our director of coaching, Adam Traub and Emyth coach Amanda Sut, both former Clients Turned Coaches, about what business coaching really looks like from both sides of the relationship.
[00:00:30] Each month we tell the stories of owners and how they transformed their companies. You'll learn about their struggles, their successes, and the changes they made to create the business they always wanted. One that, in the end, serves the life they want to live.
[00:00:45] I'm Martin Khmensky, CEO of Emyth. Emyth is the original business coaching company, and over the last three decades we've worked with tens of thousands of business owners to help them systematize their business, improve their bottom lines, and find more meaning in their work.
[00:01:01] Schedule a free one-hour session with an Emyth coach at Emyth.com. That's E-M-Y-T-H.com. We'll personally match you with a coach based on your industry, location, and what help you're looking for. You'll have a real coaching experience and learn the steps necessary to produce
[00:01:19] both immediate results and long-term change. Learn more on our website, Emyth.com. So I have Adam and Amanda here with me. Welcome to both of you. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Martin.
[00:01:34] For starters, Adam, I'm wondering if you can tell our listeners a little bit about the business that you brought to Emyth as a client. Sure. It was many years ago, a manufacturing company in Southern California. They made rescue breathing apparatus for scuba divers and for the military.
[00:01:56] The position I held there was general manager, so I oversaw manufacturing, purchasing, shipping, and receiving. Then also, I became the finance manager at some point along the way. Can you tell us all a little bit about the issues that your business was facing that Emyth
[00:02:20] was primarily focused on working on? Yeah. So when we came to Emyth, the business was pretty much all about the founder. Everything went through him and he used to work 16 hours a day. It was very typical, six days a week, sometimes seven days a week.
[00:02:39] It was all about him and he felt like he had to do everything. The business was important to him and maybe not to anybody else. We had some big challenges with the company culture and actually turning his thinking
[00:02:55] around, but at that time it was pretty much him and no one else in the company was involved. There was no real vision. Everyone was just doing their own thing. It just seemed disjointed and disconnected. Things took a lot longer and people were frustrated.
[00:03:13] Now, it's pretty difficult when we first started. What kind of pain were you going through in your position as finance manager, let's say, or even before that as general manager that tipped you off that something might not be working right here?
[00:03:32] We would have company meetings and it was like a raw, raw session where the owner would talk about things he wanted to do and then employees would laugh or clap and cheer and be very excited.
[00:03:48] Then five minutes later, talking badly behind his back and actually talking badly about each other right in front of them and also behind their back. It was like putting on pretenses versus really getting the message and buying into it. Sure.
[00:04:05] How long was it before you approached EMIF to explore the possibility of becoming a coach? I was with that company for almost 10 years. I guess I always had this fantasy of actually working for EMIF or becoming a coach.
[00:04:27] I didn't know what it would look like, but I was so impressed and enthralled in the changes that were made and how our company culture shifted and how things just got easier. It just got so much easier. It was around that time.
[00:04:46] I felt like I accomplished pretty much everything I could and I was looking to see what was next. Then I started then I contacted EMIF. It was about 10 years. It took us a long time to go through the process, but we had a lot of issues.
[00:05:04] It just kept getting better and better. Even after I left the company, the company still continued to work with EMIF for a while. You approached EMIF about becoming a coach and how long ago was that? How long have you been with EMIF at this point? That was early 2002.
[00:05:26] You're working on 13 years now. That's a pretty impressive success. 13 up in April, it'll be 14 years. Amanda, I'm wondering if you could let us know a little about the company that you brought to EMIF as a client? Sure. I come from a family business.
[00:05:51] I am second generation and I worked with my parents. There was lots of chaos going on there. This was, we're based in Atlanta or a marketing firm. We went through some really tough times in the recession.
[00:06:10] A lot to deal with how much the housing industry was affected and that it was a big part of our business. After being in business for at that point about 20, 25 years or so, felt like we were starting over.
[00:06:26] I really distinctly one day remember sitting down at my mom's office and going, has it always been this hard? She just turned to me and said no. We really knew that we needed help. We felt like we were tripping over each other. We had really good product.
[00:06:42] We had some really good clients but just weren't making traction. We felt like we were working harder than anybody else in the business. I think I had read the book and then went to the website and signed up to get some of
[00:06:57] the worksheets to do some of the work myself. Probably about five years before we came on as a client and kind of out of the blue, I think it must have been not even a week after I had that conversation with my mom.
[00:07:10] I actually got a call from somebody at EMS. I think they were going through their list of contacts from that and they said, do you want to talk about coaching? I don't think I've ever so quickly said yes. Just unilaterally made that decision for us.
[00:07:27] We were to that point was like how much longer can we keep up this pace of just not being able to take two steps ahead, three steps back kind of feeling.
[00:07:39] We knew we knew what we were doing and wanted to be able to take it to that next level and just could not get out from under ourselves. That's kind of the chaos that we look like coming into the coaching experience.
[00:07:56] Definitely a company of duration but we're concerned about being able to make it to that next level. Sure. When you talk about that experience of getting that call, tell me more about that place you were at when you said yes.
[00:08:15] Was it just nothing could hurt or I've got nothing to lose at this point? I might as well or did you already have a sense that coaching might be something that's of value to you?
[00:08:29] I had no idea that coaching was even an option but one of the phrases that we used a lot trying to get ourselves out of our hole was you could do the same thing again and again that's the definition of insanity.
[00:08:43] We were looking for different ways to do things and how could we get the perspective we needed. Part of in the back of my head knew the whole idea behind EMIS and what it would do for a business.
[00:08:57] I looked at everything that I'd started and in like five years I'd started everything and not finished anything. When we sat down and looked at it, we could spend another five years and maybe finally finish it or we could commit to coaching and get it done.
[00:09:17] I want to talk to you about this some more later on in the conversation but if you had to sum it up what do you think is the difference between those worksheets and doing the work on your own versus working with a coach? What makes the difference there?
[00:09:34] It's a huge difference because being a leader in your business, you're trying to hold everybody else accountable and so you end up being that catch-all so much of the time and there's nobody holding you accountable and that's what that
[00:09:48] coach did is the stuff that we were doing with EMIS and that working on the business was the most important stuff to do but because of everything else it was so easy to keep putting it to the side, putting it to the
[00:09:59] side, putting it to the side whereas that coach held us to it. And then how long was it since you went into coaching with your business? How long was it until you decided that you might have some interest in joining the network?
[00:10:19] I had not even quite finished our first year of coaching and basically the email hit my inbox and actually my mom forwarded it to me. She's like, you might really like this because I've always joked that I would
[00:10:34] have gone into education because I love teaching and helping people find their own power but I don't like parents so I never wanted to do that whereas coaching allowed me to be able to actually fulfill that without that impediment. That's a funny one.
[00:10:55] We'll make sure not to share the audio clip with your mother and father. And so you joined up the network and had you had any experience prior to that coaching or consulting or advising businesses? From a marketing perspective, yes but just within a company's marketing world
[00:11:22] but not necessarily on the business finance side of it. Wonderful. So for some people listening who aren't as familiar with EMIF, they may not know that EMIF does business coaching and what that means relative to life coaching and other kinds of coaching that are out there.
[00:11:44] And I believe anyway that EMIF does have an impact on its business owners, not only in terms of changes that are made in their company but also real changes that impact those owners' lives. And I wonder if you could maybe explain a little bit
[00:12:03] about how we accomplish that? What does it mean to touch someone's life but through their business and how do we focus on that as opposed to maybe other kinds of coaching companies? I think it's the part of the process that we always like to start with
[00:12:21] is that you go into business for yourself because you're passionate about something and that's a part of who you are. And not necessarily, it starts with you and not necessarily the business. And that's the biggest part and I think
[00:12:38] for me is the most rewarding part when I can help somebody reconnect with that initial passion and desire to be able to do what they love doing and to make a living at it. But you can get burned out really easily. And so I find that
[00:12:55] in itself, and we talk about it a lot, is that your business needs to serve the life you want to live. And I love being able to, whenever we can get to that, whether it's the beginning
[00:13:07] of the process or a couple months in, having that real conversation with somebody and I feel like it always surprises them. But when I ask them, it's like what do you want your whole life
[00:13:17] to look like? Not just your 9-5 part but what else does this business need to be doing for you because it's a tool that generates a lot of money for you hopefully. And that it not only
[00:13:33] gives you the rest of your life outside of work but for you to actually enjoy the hours that you are working. So getting to be able to focus on that and having real conversations of not putting
[00:13:47] two separate boxes around your home life and your work life but looking at them together. Yeah, that's awesome. Even if you enjoy working, a lot of people do and they like working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. That's fine. We have no problem with that if it's giving you
[00:14:06] more life, if it's contributing to what really serves you. And so Amanda is right. First and foremost we have to look at what's always driven you in your life and we have various
[00:14:22] we go through. But if you don't know what truly drives you, then the business will drive you nuts and everyone around you will drive you nuts because you begin to live randomly like things are just happening to you. So where we start out in the coaching
[00:14:42] these processes is you begin to live your life more intentionally. That's every part of your life and that includes your business. So with that intention comes power. And I know for me and many
[00:14:55] coaches do this, that's ever present in my mind. I'm having that conversation with my clients continuously whether we're actually talking about that or not. We could be talking about budgets. We'll find a way to bring that up. You created a budget. Great. How's that impacting
[00:15:13] your life? It seems like a strange question almost. But it really isn't because it's all related. And our job is to hold it, the big picture how everything is connected and it comes back
[00:15:27] to that central point. I mean really if you were to say the biggest secret of EMF is that they've actually been working on their life the entire time. It's just easier to do it through your business. But many clients have expressed that their life has actually gotten better
[00:15:45] in this business course if you will. That aligns so well with how I not only see what we do with our clients but also with my experience as a business owner myself and I can remember as
[00:15:59] maybe some of the people listening can being on what felt like that hamster wheel where I had to make a certain amount of money next month. I knew I had to make it. And why did I have to
[00:16:12] make it? I had to make it because I had all these expenses that I had to pay in the next month. And why did I have to pay those? Because I needed to pay those people to make the money for
[00:16:22] the next month to do it. And there was this never-ending cycle, this hamster wheel without a purpose that I was on. And I honestly didn't know at the time. I couldn't really feel it that
[00:16:36] well at the time that that's what was happening. But now in retrospect having moved down from that company, I can see that and I can see especially now learning more about the EMF perspective
[00:16:50] and seeing it played out in the lives of our coaches and our clients as well. I can see how by going into somebody's business and helping them see how it can be designed and almost engineered in a way that serves their life goals.
[00:17:09] You are improving people's lives but it's always through the channel and through the lens of the business as opposed to just directly and specifically talking about their life goals. It's a part of it but it's always connected and always comes back to what they
[00:17:27] want their business to do to achieve those results. Yeah, very well said. And one of the first things we do with clients is we look at what's the core for their life and then we
[00:17:42] start to look at the vision for their business. And specifically how does that vision give them more life? And then those are really the two central points and everything else in coaching is
[00:17:55] we talk about the vision but it's related right back to giving them a better experience of their life. So for example, we talk about time management and the conversation really is okay, you're doing this thing, is that getting you closer to fulfilling your vision or taking
[00:18:12] you farther away? And if it's getting you closer, it's probably also giving you getting you closer to having this kind of life that you want. And so they begin to think about this as a routine
[00:18:29] and that's where the shift starts to come in. A lot of times it's really small and minute. The biggest changes in business happen from small decisions. Yeah. There are some common themes that I picked up on in hearing both of your stories and
[00:18:47] one of them is this feeling like no matter how hard we work or what we try, we're not seeing results. And I'm wondering if either as a client, in your experience being a client of Emiths
[00:19:04] or now maybe having the context of being a coach as well, if you have a sense of what was missing there when you're sitting, when you the business owner, some of our clients might be,
[00:19:17] if you're sitting there and thinking I'm hustling my butt off and I'm not seeing the results, what wires might not be connecting there for that owner? What comes up for me is just looking at my own experience as a client
[00:19:35] and obviously I've seen it as a coach too, is we solve a problem and we're happy about it but then it comes right back and sometimes even worse. And so I think what happens is we fail to
[00:19:53] get at the root cause. Like what is actually really causing this to be this way? And so I see it with my own clients and when I was a client, we just keep throwing things at it to make it better
[00:20:08] and make it better and make it better but we don't take the time to really go deep enough to get at the source. And that was one of the biggest values that I've seen in email that
[00:20:20] you know, beginning to change your thinking to be more strategic and really getting a sense of what that actually means. And seeing the results, we had a problem I remember it's kind of embarrassing
[00:20:35] actually. We had a problem with a machine for six years. It kept coming back, it kept coming back. We kept fixing it, it kept coming back to the point where we were ready to fire people
[00:20:47] on the machine or near it. And we use one of the processes, the transforming frustrations process that we have and I had one of the biggest epiphanies in my life because I thought okay,
[00:21:00] if I fire this employee, I'm probably going to have to have someone else run this machine. It's critical to the operation. And the thought came to me, if I have somebody else do it,
[00:21:13] are they going to have the same problem? And I realized that they would. And all our energy was focused on this employee, that he was the problem. All of us, I mean there was a whole
[00:21:25] group of us for years. As soon as we began to not look at him but look at the problem as a whole, it took about 30 hours. We handled that and never came back for years, never came back.
[00:21:44] That's the kind of thing that I see a lot. Adam, some of the people listening might be familiar with that transforming frustrations process but can you just give an overview for anybody that's not familiar about what does that look like? What are the steps involved in
[00:22:01] starting with your problem and coming to a conclusion like you did? Sure. So it's an eight-step process and what you do in the beginning is you're identifying a single frustration. Sometimes when we get frustrated, we'll write down a whole list. I did the first
[00:22:18] time. What's bothering me? Let me tell you and I wrote several pages but what we try to do is focus on one at a time. They're probably actually related but the mind can't handle all
[00:22:29] that so we got to look at one thing. You write down what's bothering you. Now what's interesting is what you write down initially may not be actually what's bothering you so you have to keep going deeper. We end up asking that question a few times.
[00:22:45] We start to really get a sense of what is really truly bothering us. Then we're looking at contributions like how did I contribute to this? How did others contribute to this? Is this really truly a systems problem? It's important to go through those steps to really see
[00:23:04] how you're relating to it and that's really what this process is about. Once you start to get underneath it, then we begin to quantify and measure. This is the most interesting part because it's one of the things that we learned through EMETH. That's part of
[00:23:19] our point of view as quantification. When you're measuring and looking at numbers and looking at how things perform, you get a lot of insight and you can make them better. So you begin to take this frustration and you start to quantify the impact of it.
[00:23:33] How many times does it happen? What does it cost you? How much time is lost? Does it occur every day? Does it occur once a week? What day of the week? You can go as deep as you want. You don't typically need to go that deep
[00:23:48] but through the quantification you start to get insights and through those insights you start to see what the solution could be. Then the rest of the process is about putting the pieces together. In a nutshell, that's the process. I think it's not about necessarily coming
[00:24:09] up with a solution although that's part of it but the idea is that you use this process over and over and over again until it starts using you because it's literally teaching you how to think strategically. We have found and Amanda, I'm sure you would agree with us,
[00:24:27] the missing piece in many cases that strategic thinking is what allows clients to get the results they came to us for. So that employee that would have been fired, the company would
[00:24:39] have told the story for years that it was all about him but what we failed to do is really look at ourselves and what is our contribution in hiring, in training? Are we actually creating
[00:24:51] a company culture where people cannot thrive? When we came to EMF I think that's exactly what was going on. What was interesting with this whole machine is something definitely shifted with that employee. He was there for several years and it's just a brutal job
[00:25:12] and he came up to me shortly after that and asked if he could switch jobs. I thought he was joking and then I really began to see how serious he was about that
[00:25:25] and that he wanted to expand his horizons because he's been doing the same job for years and years and years so he wanted to do assembly and it's very critical because the product we made
[00:25:37] was a life-saving device and if you build it wrong it could have very bad effects. We had pretty good quality control and we never had any issues but we didn't want to introduce something that wasn't needed into the equation. So I thought all right,
[00:25:53] we'll supervise him but we'll train him and that was amazing because this ended up being just a huge lesson for me. He ended up being probably the best assembler I've ever seen.
[00:26:06] That gave him so much confidence, he started to get clear about what he really wanted to do with his life and with our blessing he actually left the company and moved halfway across the country
[00:26:22] to pursue a job in the medical field. He attributed that to us and how we were being and how we gave him space to grow because he always wanted to do that and never felt
[00:26:34] like he could. It's just amazing that we have that kind of effect. You can have a pretty powerful effect either way, good or bad and so you start to really make some choices and see what's really going to have the impact that you want to have.
[00:26:53] Definitely. I think one of the things that I see the most with that is you see clients and I even saw this with myself is when you keep fixing that same problem it's like when you go
[00:27:03] people get lost in the woods and they go, hey I think I saw that tree before and they keep circling and circling. They have no direction, they don't have the map, they don't have the compass and the transforming frustrations helps you understand
[00:27:16] those tools that are missing in order for you to get beyond that challenge. Amanda, you would say that it's a were there similar kind of things going on that were causing your frustration that were causing you all to circle the same trees in the woods
[00:27:34] and overworking without getting the results you're looking for? Oh definitely. We used to be the epitome of a family business and most of those frustrations were because we were kept making the same mistakes over and over again of getting
[00:27:48] angry at each other and yelling at each other, well maybe not full on yelling, but there was a lot of tension because we couldn't figure out how to solve the problem like we'd run into it with billing every month. It would just be such a stressful
[00:28:01] experience and none of us looked forward to it and by doing things like the transforming frustrations, exercise and I've done it a couple times on these processes. I don't worry about it anymore. It's pretty easy, it's not a big deal,
[00:28:14] I don't stress about it and we don't have like three days of just you know everybody's not looking forward to coming to work. Nobody actually knows when billing happens anymore. And it almost seems obvious like well that's what you would do, but when you're in it
[00:28:31] it's hard to see the forest from the trees and so you see a tree and you think that's it, but when you start to get that helicopter view and you go up a little bit
[00:28:41] it does provide a totally different way of looking at it and that objectivity and I think that's really what not only that process does but a lot of our processes help provide that objectivity so
[00:28:54] you can begin to relate to your business in a totally different way and it makes it easier to get the results that you truly want. Absolutely, absolutely. I'm wondering Amanda if you maybe this is not a fair question to ask but I'll ask it anyway. I'm wondering if
[00:29:14] if you enjoyed more working through EMYTH as a client or working with EMYTH as a coach. The first time going through it with a coach it is life-changing, I mean that's the
[00:29:30] reality of it but that's also why you go into it to be able to have somebody hold up that mirror and really be able to show you where you're getting in the way of your own success
[00:29:41] and then on the flip side of it I did mine back to back you know it was within a year of coaching I was starting to train to be a coach so I almost got to go through it all twice back to back and
[00:29:54] it was a really different interesting way to kind of go back through the materials and see it from the other side that I almost transformed myself two times in a row just being
[00:30:07] able to see it from the other side so they were so different and so similar but both you know incredible experiences. Could you identify what is most meaningful to you about being a coach
[00:30:22] about having that role for other people? Yeah, the biggest part for me was wanting to pay it forward when all of a sudden I got my life back and not even that but being on top is lonely
[00:30:36] and that's I didn't realize how lonely I was as a leader and I had my family around me and as we went through the process and realized the things that we should be talking about
[00:30:48] and how we should be distinguishing our roles so that we're not stepping on toes and had one of us actually leading the troops as opposed to three of us trying to do it.
[00:30:58] It was such a life-changing experience to finally be able to understand that my team wasn't below me but they were next to me was huge and that part is the reason that I went into coaching. I was even
[00:31:12] talking to somebody this morning about this and you could just hear how alone they feel that they've never had a chance to talk this way to anybody else. I couldn't get her to stop
[00:31:26] talking because the floodgates opened up. I just asked two little questions and you could tell that it was so pent up and you need to be able to work through these things and that's where I feel like
[00:31:38] the coaching opened me up and it was something that I see other business leaders in that same idea of putting on a good face and leading the troops but really hearting underneath or
[00:31:49] really being by themselves and how to help them be re-inspired to do the job that they wanted to do from the beginning. Thank you for that Amanda. I can tell how meaningful it's been.
[00:32:04] Adam, are there similar things in mind for you? Is there anything else you would add to that? Yeah, it's really interesting listening to Amanda because it puts me back in my own experience.
[00:32:18] They're similar in a way but very different. I loved being able to make something work intentionally because we set out to do that and we did do that when I was a client and it was because of email
[00:32:35] and I wanted to continue that and I thought I've always wanted to make a difference with people. This seems like a natural fit. I don't know a ton about business except that business that I helped
[00:32:49] run but there was something about it that I knew I could probably be successful and I thought, okay, it doesn't hurt to have been a client for all these years and gone through all this material
[00:33:02] until the about the second hour of training on my first day where I realized that all that knowledge I had about the processes probably wasn't going to help me much in coaching somebody
[00:33:13] through it. I could tell them what to do but I really began to see what coaching was about and allowing clients to make this shift themselves and creating a space to do that.
[00:33:26] So I began to learn a whole new set of skills in doing that and it's phenomenal, I would say, to be able to touch somebody in that way similar to the experience I had because it was
[00:33:41] very incredibly powerful experience as a client and I always bring that with me when I talk to my clients and to be able to directly have an impact and have them experience a better life
[00:33:58] and have their business work better and knowing that I'm played maybe just a little role on that that's awesome. I wouldn't trade that for anything. If you're inspired at all by what you've heard today, maybe you'd like to become a coach. The first step is joining us this
[00:34:16] February in San Diego at Immersion. It's a three-and-a-half day workshop where you'll learn all about the coaching opportunity our training program and get to meet our team including Adam, Amanda and I. This will be the only immersion in 2016 so it's a great chance for us to
[00:34:34] get to know you and for you to get to know us all the info you need is at emith.com.com.com. Thanks for listening to On It by E-MIF. We'd love to hear what you think about the podcast
[00:34:46] leave us your comments on our blog at blog.emith.com or email any feedback to info at emith.com and if you like the show please leave us a review on iTunes or a like on SoundCloud
[00:34:58] we really appreciate it. You can also schedule a free one-hour session with an E-MIF coach and have your own coaching experience at emith.com. You can learn more about our clients and coaches by visiting our website.