Building a Leading Digital Marketing Academy: Insights on AI, Leadership, and Entrepreneurship with Dan Grech

Struggling to keep up with the rapid changes in digital marketing and leadership? 

In this episode, I sit down with Dan Grech, founder of BizHack Academy, to explore how he transformed a high school journalism project into a leading digital marketing academy. Dan’s journey from investigative journalism to entrepreneurship is a masterclass in resilience and innovation.

Dan's story is a reminder that our past experiences shape our future. From uncovering a school theft ring to founding BizHack Academy after a career setback, he highlights the power of embracing AI and continuous learning. We discuss how AI can revolutionize your personal and professional life, offering more time for what truly matters.

Dan’s insights on personal growth, leadership, and the impact of storytelling provide actionable advice for any business leader looking to elevate their game and adapt to a fast-paced world. Tune in for a wealth of inspiration and practical strategies to drive your success.

Connect with Dan Grech and BizHack Academy: Pre-Order Dan Grech's Strategic Growth For Leaders to redefine success and find true fulfillment by discovering your own “Lo Suficiente.” Schedule a call with Dan today at this link and use code PODCAST20 at BizHack courses for 20% off.

Books Mentioned:

• Books and Books by Mitchell Kaplan
• Scaling Up by Vern Harnish
• Traction by Gino Wickman
• Shine by Gino Wickman and Rob Dubé

Ready to Finish 2024 Strong?
Don’t wait until December to address your challenges. There's a few months left in 2024, now is the time to plan for a strong finish! Book a free strategy call with Dr. William Attaway to create a plan for impactful results. 

Chapters

• 0:00 Leadership and Entrepreneurship in Digital Marketing
• 6:04 Dan's Journey: From Journalism to Entrepreneurship
• 9:38 Embracing AI for Business Growth
• 14:15 Understanding Oneself as a Leader
• 22:22 The Power of 'Enough' and Finding Purpose in Work
• 35:16 Resources for Leveling Up Leadership Skills
• 41:29 Reflecting on Personal Stories of Leadership

Transcript

Dr. William Attaway: 0:00

I'm honored today to have Dan Grech on the podcast. Dan's the founder and lead instructor of BizHack Academy, which provides digital marketing training to corporations and small businesses across South Florida. He was the news director at WLRN, miami's NPR station and was part of a Pulitzer Prize winning team at the Miami Herald. He co-hosted Miami's first podcast Under the Sun. He's worked at the Washington Post Marketplace and PBS's Nightly Business Report. He's also worked as the head of digital marketing at two software startups and the nation's largest Hispanic-owned energy company. He's taught at top universities, including Princeton energy company. He's taught at top universities, including Princeton Columbia and the University of Miami. Dan, it is so good to have you here. Thanks for being on the show.

Dan Grech: 0:51

Thank you so much, Dr William. It's great to be here.

Intro / Outro: 0:57

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:14

I would love to start with your story. Would you share a little bit about your story, particularly your journey and your development as a leader?

Dan Grech: 1:24

So the story begins for me. In junior year of high school I was assigned to take an elective class in journalism and one of the first stories that I wrote was based on a personal experience I'd had, which is I'd had some money of mine stolen out of my locker in gym class. But it was like a weird theft. The money they took the 20s and they left the fives and the ones and the tens, and I think the idea was that us rich kids in this suburban public school weren't going to notice the 20s missing. Well, I did not. I grew up you know, the poor kid on a rich block. My mom was a school teacher, my dad was a clothing salesman and I noticed when the 20s were missing and then I started asking around hey, have you also had money stolen out of your locked locker in gym class? And it turned out that almost half of the school had. So I published a story with a survey showing this and interviewed the head of campus security, the gym teachers, the principal, and a week after the article was published the head of campus security was quietly let go. It turns out he had been orchestrating this theft ring and it was sort of like the wet bandits. You know he used the signature technique of only taking twenties, so they knew it was him. So that was my taste of journalism and, um, I spent 20 years in that career.

Dan Grech: 2:54

Uh, the other thing that was very formative for me also happened in high school is, um, uh, I was a very active soccer player. In fact, my grandfather was a professional soccer player in Spain and he also was a soccer coach in La Liga, and so I have a lot of athletes on my father's side of the family and I played soccer growing up and we needed to raise money to go and play in Europe, and so we sold candy to do it, one blow pop at a time, and I was really, really good at selling candy, and so after we raised the money to go to Europe, I kept selling candy. I found out where the distributor for the candy was. I bought the blow chops for five cents and sold them for a quarter and was taking home one to two hundred dollars a day in quarters and dollar bills. It was like I was a drug dealer or something, and it became a problem. Not only was it extremely distracting, but I got like, you know, there were some folks on the other side of the railroad tracks in Belmont Hills who would steal my money, and it just started to feel really risky. So my mom insisted I stop, and so that was my entrepreneurial career.

Dan Grech: 4:15

So I had my entrepreneurial career and my journalism career, and the journalism one took off. I spent 20 years as part of a Pulitzer Prize, worked for NPR and PBS and then, like so many journalists, in 2013, lost my job and started unwittingly to find my way back to the blowpop business, basically as an entrepreneur. And so now my last 10 years has really been about building my business BizHack Academy and helping other businesses build theirs building my business, bizhack Academy and helping other businesses build theirs. Bizhack is dedicated to training businesses in marketing, particularly AI-powered marketing, and we're on a mission to train 1 million businesses over the next couple decades in AI and how to use it to grow faster. So that's sort of the story of how I came to be.

Dan Grech: 5:03

It was kind of a story of two loves the first love of journalism and then the enduring love of entrepreneurship. And you asked about the question of leadership. It's interesting. I think I'm a very gifted leader inspirational, articulate, not always the best manager and I think a good manager is consistent and available, and I often am busy and my priorities might shift. I might either be distracted by the bright, shiny object, or the seat that I'm sitting in as CEO requires me to shift focus. So I've come to learn that while I think I am a good leader, a visionary leader, an inspirational leader, an influencer, I'm not necessarily the best person to manage my team or even run the day-to-day, and so part of what I've loved about entrepreneurship is that it really forces you to ask really fundamental questions about who you are and why you do what you do in order to be able to be successful at it.

Dr. William Attaway: 6:13

That's so good. You've had quite an interesting journey through a lot of different things. Like most successful leaders that I've talked to, I dare say that at the beginning of that run you did not know where it was going to take you.

Dan Grech: 6:29

No. One of the number one core values in my company is learn by doing. Another way to say that that someone shared with me recently is that information comes from action. You only can figure it out if you try it. It's not always straight line, it's not always efficient, but you cannot think your way there.

Dan Grech: 6:55

And as a guy who's very heady, very fast moving and intelligent which isn't always actually an advantage, frankly I've learned that you can theorize and you can plan, but there's no replacement for just doing the work. And it also influences all of our teaching. Like there is nothing theoretical about anything that we teach in marketing. Like it is almost silly to teach entrepreneurs marketing theory. Let's, let's teach you how to do this and implement this and generate leads in real time. And and it's very satisfying too, because, you know, in a lot of our courses we're actually teaching people how to advertise, you know, on on meta and they're generating leads and sales in real time such that, like, the average participant is making $13 in revenue for every dollar they spend while in the course. And as a teacher, as an educator you know I joke my sons in kindergarten and his teacher is going to see the fruit of her labor in 20 years when she sees the boy, the man he grows up to be. I get to see it in real time. With marketing and sales, you're seeing lives changing almost week to week. So it's addictive, man, once I figured this out, I started teaching at a local community college.

Dan Grech: 8:26

Uh, business owners had a market, in part to learn marketing myself. But once I started to see the transformative effect we were having, it just I couldn't. I couldn't imagine doing anything else. And so, um, you know, I'm 47 years old, I have about 15 years left in the core of my career, and um, yeah, I'm just on fire. I'm going to train a million people. I know I am, and I can't do it by myself.

Dan Grech: 8:49

By definition, one person can't do that. And so, by defining that big, hairy, audacious goal and making it something that's a little scary, you bring people with you. You know you're talking about leadership, you know you, you, you plant that flag on the top of a big Hill and then you, you're, you're, you're running after it. And, um, I need, I need, I need to partner with people, uh, people like you, uh, to help spread the word, um, to help expose me to new audiences, to, um, and ultimately, I, I, I think, our, I think the company will need to be acquired or partner with a larger company that's got more scale in order for us to bring what we do to more people.

Dr. William Attaway: 9:34

I love the bold vision that you have and your commitment to really investing in the lives of other people to better them and what they're doing. I think that's very admirable and that's one of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation. So much of what you do is around AI in marketing, and this is a topic that's very hot right now. Everybody's talking about it, but from the conversations that I get to have, there's also a decent amount of fear about it, and I'm sure you encounter that when you talk with business owners who, hey, yeah, but what is this eventually going to mean? Is this going to end up taking jobs? Is this going to end up replacing people? As you hear things like that and so many other things, I'm sure, what would you say to business owners who are operating maybe from a place of fear around using AI in their marketing?

Dan Grech: 10:33

It's an important question because there is a real risk to society of general artificial intelligence run amok. You know, and a lot of popular fiction and movies about you know basically the robots taking over. You know, the robots pressing the nuclear button, and this is real. In fact, the top AI researchers, in March of 2023, a little over a year ago put out a one paragraph press release basically saying that the risk of annihilation by AI is as significant as nuclear war and pandemics, and and the signatories of that were people like sam altman, the ceo of open ai, and jeffrey hinton, the father of a modern ai. He used to work at google. So this is, this is not histrionics. This is a genuine warning shot across the bow. Okay, so that's above my pay grade, right? Like? That is a Congress level, presidential level, eu level, international agreement level set of guardrails that we need to put, not unlike what we've done with nuclear war.

Dan Grech: 11:55

I think that nuclear power, nuclear war, the possibilities to solve our energy problems and the possibilities to blow ourselves up to smithereens is very good as an analogy for AI. I don't see a lot of upside to pandemics, but I do see some upsides to nuclear power. What you've seen, though, is, the potential of nuclear power has been completely curtailed by the risk of nuclear war, and so what could have been an energy solution, sustainable and safe, just hasn't happened because of it. So that's what I think is. The other risk is that if we're incautious about, or if we regulate it poorly, the most powerful productivity tool in a generation could be curtailed, and so that's the flip side of that. We're not in danger of that right now, but that's certainly the possibility if we overregulate it. So for small businesses, which are these tools, I mean there's literally nothing in our lifetimes that has that level of productivity. That's 25% of your time. And then I asked him what are you using the time for? And about one out of every three say they're using it to grow faster. About 20% say they're using it to spend more time with their family. I mean, the risk of burnout for us entrepreneurs is so huge. Two hours a day is breathtaking.

Dan Grech: 13:28

I'll give you a concrete example of what AI has done for me. I blocked three days to write a major grant proposal, and I was able to load in some previous proposals. Have AI do the first draft? Anyway, I ended up doing it in two days, and on that Friday, I took my kids out of school early and we went to the beach, and I will forget about that grant proposal. I didn't end up getting it, but I will never forget that day on the beach with my kids, and that's what AI is starting to do.

Dan Grech: 13:59

For those of us who are forward with using it, that's the good news. The FOMO risk part is your competitors are using it. Your competitors are getting good with using this. New entrance are coming that are much more efficient than you. If you don't start applying this in your daily life, you will not like.

Dan Grech: 14:18

The train is leaving the station. It's going to either climb a border or run you over, and I feel like as a society, we have to contend with this fact, which is we all must become future ready and AI enabled, and we failed as a society with digital transformation. To this day, one out of every four businesses does not have a website. Businesses does not have a website, so we need to like it's like a man on the moon type mission. We need to all get ready for this future and it's important for us individually, as business owners and as entrepreneurs and as professionals, to be relevant, but it's also like really important for our country to be able to compete with China and India and others that are in many ways ahead of us when it comes to this.

Dr. William Attaway: 16:38

One of the things I love about you, Dan, is that you are so generous with what you're learning, not just through the BizHack Academy, but through your writing. You're a thought leader in a lot of different spaces, but recently you've had your contribution come out in a book. I'd love for you to share a little bit about that and why you chose to contribute to that particular book.

Dan Grech: 17:02

Yeah, so you know the book is called. It's part of the four leaders series and it's called strategic growth for leaders and it's an anthology of 10 success strategies from 10 different entrepreneurs. It's a wonderful read and it has a lot of different ideas and perspectives on what strategic growth looks like, and I decided to take I'm a little bit of a contrarian, but I decided to take a little bit of a contrarian perspective on it, which I'll share in one second. One thing I did want to just say about why writing and sharing is so important to me is, you know, first of all, like once a journalist, always a journalist, you know, I, I, I'm, I'm kind of built at this point to, to, to, to learn on your behalf and then present it to you in a way that's digestible and understandable, and it's just something I do really well and something I love to do. But it's also directly aligned with my mission to train a million business owners. I count you, if you read my book, as one of the business owners I've trained, and so if I can be lucky enough to have a bestseller, you know, sell a hundred thousand copies of a book.

Dan Grech: 18:16

I'm 10, a 10th of the way there, and then suddenly that million sounds a little less crazy, cause you know, whenever you're a visionary and you set out a big, hairy, audacious goal, you're fighting with yourself about whether this is insane, right, and and and and so like. We know that nothing. You know your reach should always exceed your grasp, or else what's a heaven for? You know you always have to reach a little further than what you think you can achieve. But if it's not achievable, then it's just fantasy. So, anyway, that's why I write and that's why I share, because I can't reach as many people. It's like each one of these books is going to reach people that I personally might not be able to personally meet and talk to. There's only so many hours in a day, so, okay, so what do I write about?

Dan Grech: 19:07

I write about the concept of enough, and I'm a dual citizen of Spain and I have I'm very lucky to have some cousins in Spain that I'm very close to who, um, kind of, one of whom is an entrepreneur as well. And, um, I went to her. She runs like one of the most successful, uh, rhythmic gymnastic studios for young girls in Spain and and wildly successful. Her parents started it. It's called Gimnasio Gretsch Gretsch Gymnasium the Gretsch name. My grandfather, sator Gretsch, was a very famous soccer coach, so the Gretsch name in Mallorca and across Spain is well known in sports circles.

Dan Grech: 19:55

So you know, for this gymnastics studio they started it and have a huge waitlist Like there's, there's no way to get in. And I went to my cousin who took over the business and runs it with her husband and I said why don't you like add an open, open, another location? Why don't you expand? You know they're in the basement of a building, you know low ceilings. I'm like, why don't you expand into a larger space? And she looks at me like confused and she says, danny, tenemos lo suficiente, which means Dan, we have enough, we have enough, wow, wow. And I, and it like it was like she could have taken a two by four and hit me across the head Like I. I thought to myself has an American ever said that to me? I've had enough and I can't. I literally can't think of a single one.

Dan Grech: 20:49

And then I'm part of a group called entrepreneurs organization and it's based on a book by Vern Harnish. He was the founder of it and the book that Vern wrote is called Scaling Up and the purpose of EO is to help each other scale up, and I asked for the first time, I said to what end? What are we climbing exactly? And what happens when we get to the top of it? Are we going to be fulfilled or be empty, filled with regret, or fulfilled? And I can't tell you how many people I've met from EO who are founders, who sold their business and are just lost Just lost.

Dan Grech: 21:29

And I feel like if you don't get started working on this before you sell your business, if you make your life about your business and then you sell it and then you achieve the summit and you break all the odds and you achieve the summit and you're just not prepared for what happens when you climb down. Or look, 96% of businesses don't break the million dollar mark and more than half fail within five years. The odds are terribly against us succeeding. So if you don't have a plan for failure and still having the journey be worth it, then you're also wasting your time. All these questions started to swirl. So the chapter is really asking those hard questions what is enough? What is the purpose that we're trying to do here? Why are we sacrificing so much? And how do we find meaning and purpose in the work? And it's just a different way to think about strategic growth.

Dr. William Attaway: 22:31

That's so good. You know, a lot of the people listening to this show are entrepreneurs, they're founders or they're business leaders in high-capacity organizations. From the perspective that you have you work with a lot of different companies, a lot of different businesses through your academy, through the teaching that you do you have a pretty interesting view across the landscape. If people are looking to make a big impact, if they're looking to make a big difference while not losing sight of that enough principle, is there advice that you would give to them, based on your own experiences and what you see?

Dan Grech: 23:12

Yeah, I think the first. There's two, two things I would say. One is kind of conceptual and then one's much more personal conceptually. Um, you know they, they talk about maslow's hierarchy of need and at the bottom of the hierarchy are things like shelter and food. And then you go up the hierarchy and it's things like wealth and status, even like companionship, and then at the very, very tippity top, uh, is what he called self-actualization. And and there's one really curious thing about the maslow's hierarchy of need of everything that's below self-actualization the more more you have, the less you want it. The more food you have, you're sated. The more money you have, it starts it incrementally, doesn't make a big difference in your happiness. You only need so much shelter. How many roofs do you need? But self-actualization the more you have, the more you want it. That's why it's a million and not 10,000.

Dan Grech: 24:21

The more people I help, the more people I want to help, and it's a little bit of an affliction, right, you know. Like then you ask well, how much is enough, and why does it have to be a million? And what ego are you serving to do it? And those are all legit questions, like I think a lot about. Like why does it have to be a million? And if it's 500,000, will it be satisfied? And why not just 10, but really deep? You know, consult and change the lives foundationally of 10 people. Isn't that good enough? And you know wrestling with those questions.

Dan Grech: 24:52

But what I've come to realize is I'm a very gifted communicator and I have a background in mass media, and so I think what I'm here to do, and the thread that ties what got me here and then what's to come, is the ability to communicate verbally and in a written way in a way that's compelling and entertaining and motivating, and that's my role in this big man-to-the-moon transition from not AI to AI, and I'm specifically focused on doing that for entrepreneurs, to help them grow faster, because small businesses are the heart and soul of our economy and they make everything worthwhile. They're the local flavor the our economy and they make everything worthwhile, like they're the local flavor. You know, the coffee shop and the restaurant that makes our lives wonderful, and I love Chipotle and I love Subway. But what a sad world if all our main streets were just chains and these small businesses that are so foundational to our economy. They represent half of our economic activity and about 80% of our employment are way less efficient and profitable than the big companies and they're often run at terrible costs to their owners. You know they are not happy people sometimes and they don't make a lot of money oftentimes, and so if I can help them with that and leveraging these efficiency tools to do that, oh man, it just gives me goosebumps Like what a great way to, you know, carry out this set of skills and privileges that I've been given and to be able to, I'd like to say I'm going to either die happy or die trying. We'll see, we'll see which it is.

Dan Grech: 26:36

But the other half of your question, which is like my next book and, frankly, like I'm the Pied Piper of this message, is you asked at the beginning of this interview for me to tell a story about leadership, a personal story about leadership, and I started very intentionally before I graduated from high school with the blow pop story and the journalism exposing the theft rating story. And the reason I started there is because all of us were seeded with what would come for the rest of our lives prior to our 18th birthday, and for many, if not most, of us, it's a trauma story. It's a story of something horrible or terrible happening to us that we don't want to ever have anyone have to live through. It could be like in my case, this story of foundational experiences, that where the thread runs from my junior year in high school all the way through my entire life, and what I have found and I've interviewed more than 1000 business owners is there is not a single business owner entrepreneur that I have found where the thing that their business does is an accident. Business owner or entrepreneur that I have found where the thing that their business does is an accident. There is always something in their past, usually before they graduated from high school, that seeded that interest that made them run that kind of business versus all the other kinds of businesses they could have run.

Dan Grech: 28:10

And one of my favorite examples of this is one of my best friends is Yoel, and he runs the Miami branch of Mosquito Joe, which is a pest control company specifically for mosquitoes, and mosquito pest control is kind of a newer field it's only the technology, for it is only maybe a decade or two old, and so it's been a really big growth field, uh, growth, and his business has been hyper successful. But you know he lives in South Florida, which is hot as anything and he's outdoors. You know he runs a company where they do outdoor spraying and for many years he was the sprayer. Now he has, you know, a whole team of people spraying. But I got to tell you, like of all the business you know all the businesses he could have chosen to be a franchise of why on God's green earth did he pick being outdoor pest control in South Florida? That sounds nuts, right and like I would like literally bottom of my list. The last thing I would ever do is do mosquito control as a business.

Dan Grech: 29:09

Yet he chose that and I asked him why Yoel like, why that's a weird thing to pick that. And I asked him why UL like, why that's a weird thing to pick. And he said, well, my father was from a Cuban immigrant and he had a construction, a home construction business, with two other partners and he would take me on the job sites and he has this really cute picture of him as like little UL and his dad and he would take me on the job sites and he taught me A how to be an entrepreneur and he told me that when he was ready to retire he was going to give me the business. And so I grew up and this was going to be the business, and then his dad died unexpectedly when Yoel was 16. And his two partners bought out the business and suddenly Yoel not only lost his dad but he lost his inheritance. He lost his profession, like the business was no longer his to inherit, and so then he went into it.

Dan Grech: 30:05

But he had this entrepreneurial bug and he decided he wanted to start a franchise and he picked pest control. And I said you know, Yoel, there's no accident there, man, you're doing the same work that your dad. Your dad made homes safe for families and that's what you do too. And he said you know, I'd never thought about it. And he's like, my dad's name was Jose, but everybody called him Joe, mosquito, Joe. So anyway, these are not accidents. I really don't believe these are accidents and I've had so many conversations with entrepreneurs.

Dan Grech: 30:39

What's remarkable is that we can spend 20 or 30 years running a business and not realize what we're doing. And my technique is really simple I interview them and I just listen, for the stuff that doesn't sound quite like, it doesn't hold together or it's like surprising. Um, I'll give you another like really quick example. Uh, there's byron kilbort runs the runner's shoe, uh, in pinecrest, florida, near miami and um, it's an elite running shoe store and he's a marathoner, so. So when I was talking to him I expected him to talk a lot about elite performance and like the just do it and Nike, that kind of whole thing, and no, he ended up talking about how most of his clientele are older and he really doesn't think of himself as an elite running shoe store. He really thinks of himself as a comfort shoe store. Right, curious, right, like I mean anybody with just a curious mind would be like that's weird.

Dan Grech: 31:39

So then I dug in. I said well, why, why is your clientele older and why do you think of yourself as a comfort shoe store? And he said well, you know now that you ask, my mother was a Mary Kay saleswoman and she had cerebral palsy and I used to load her wheelchair into the trunk of the car so she could do house calls and she was the number one saleswoman in South Florida and she never in her whole life had a comfortable pair of shoes. She was in pain every day of her life. And then he started to cry on this conversation. He's like she's been dead 27 years, but I know she's so proud of the work that I do. He had never made that connection, wow. So, anyway, dude, I'm just like on earth to do this for people.

Dan Grech: 32:23

And then what happens once you figure out why you do what you do? Well, it makes you more resilient, it makes your business more memorable. People understand why you're doing what you're doing and they want to do business with you to support you on that mission. It attracts the right staff, it attracts the right clients, and then it also aligns with the purpose of the company, right, and how does the company make the world a better place? And so it's just a very beautiful. It's really the foundation of your small business brand. So it's just a very beautiful, it's really the foundation of your small business brand.

Dan Grech: 32:57

And then you know, finally, like most small businesses, including, you know, this pest control company. There's 10 other pest control companies, including a shoe store. There's 10 other shoe stores. What makes your shoe store different? They're all me too businesses, same with restaurants. Pretty much every small business is a me too business. The only real differentiator they have is their story. And so if you get really good at telling that story and letting people know that story, it can profoundly change the trajectory of your business and there's a beautiful example of this in a small independent well, it's not that small, in an independent bookstore called Books and Books.

Dan Grech: 33:35

Books and Books was founded in 1982 by Mitchell Kaplan and he was so successful in his early days that Barnes Noble opened up one block away with the idea of killing his bookstore and taking his clientele.

Dan Grech: 33:53

And well, barnes noble is barely surviving amazon and mitchell kaplan has like five or six locations of his bookstore and he's one of them, considered one of the most successful independent booksellers in the country. There is like not a single person who reads in miami who doesn't know the mitchell kaplan story and story and Mitchell does not discount his books. So you can literally walk. You want to get the like, the latest release, you can go and get it for 40% off a block and a half half away, or you can get it at full price at Mitchell store and you pay full price. Everybody does. And it's almost like when you go to Mitchell store you're not buying a book, you're making a statement about who you are and what you value and you know and the importance of a local literary scene and they host 600 book readings a year and it's just an extraordinary business enterprise, and it all is at the foundation of Mitchell's story.

Dr. William Attaway: 34:54

It is so fascinating and I like the words you use extraordinary. It is so fascinating and I like the words you use extraordinary. It truly is. I was not familiar with that, but I'm blown away. There's two questions that I ask everybody as we move toward a close. You have to lead at a different level today than you did five years ago and if you continue, as I expect you will, on your trajectory to impact one million people with the message that you have, what are you doing to level up your leadership skills and stay on top of your game so that you can be the leader that your team is going to need you to be five years from now?

Dan Grech: 35:35

Yeah, the most important question any leader, any CEO, can ask is what am I doing to level up so I can show up as the best version of myself for my team? I'm going to give you a couple of answers. They all circle around the following, which is you need to make it your job to understand yourself, know thyself, and then you need to recognize that your worst qualities are going to manifest in your business what Jung would call your shadow or your id and then you need to protect the business against your worst parts. You also need to understand what you're uniquely gifted at doing and hire for the rest and put yourself in that quadrant of uniquely qualified as much as possible. That will not only allow you to live in your most energetic place, but it will give an opportunity for people who are better at things that even the things that you're good at to run and lead the company and so.

Dan Grech: 36:41

On that journey of self-discovery and self-understanding, there are a couple really important touch points for me. One of the most important is I found my people of purpose driven business owners. It's called the small giants community and they have a leadership academy, a one year long program that I went through. I also have been mentored by the amazing Paul Spiegelman, one of the co founders of the community, so that's one big recommendation there. They have an annual conference. Great place to start is to go to their conference and just the most important conversations I've ever had For more operational knowledge. Entrepreneurs Organization, which I had mentioned earlier, does a beautiful job, job and they have chapters around the world. Pretty much every major city has one. It's a great way to both.

Dan Grech: 37:53

Of books written by Gina Wickman, you know, and it's called. They're called Traction and there's a bunch of different books in the Traction Library. A little less well-known is he recently wrote a book that is I'm tryingrum, of entrepreneurs who reach the summit of a mountain and feel empty. You are, you know, attending to the, not to the, to the journalism, to the personal part of what you do, and it's. The book is called Shine and it was co-authored with the amazing Rob Dubé. So Gina Wickman and Rob Dubé, shine. The book is been transformational. It's 10 disciplines. Know Thyself is one of the 10 for maximizing your energy as a driven entrepreneur. In addition to having the book and a podcast of the same name, they also run a mastermind group and a training program. I can't tell you how impactful that has been on me and how highly I would recommend that. So good.

Dr. William Attaway: 39:34

Dan, I could talk to you for another hour, so fascinating.

Dan Grech: 39:38

Did you have a second?

Dr. William Attaway: 39:39

question, I'll take it. You answered it. I was going to say is there a book that you would recommend?

Dr. William Attaway: 39:44

to people who are listening, and you answered it right there as part of that, which is fantastic. I think one of the beautiful parts of a show like this is we get to learn there you go. Growth doesn't happen accidentally, and there's no such thing as a wasted experience like you've shared. I know people are going to want to stay connected to you, dan, and continue to learn from you. What is the best way for them to do that?

Dan Grech: 40:18

Yeah, thank you for that question and then, if there's time, I had a question for you, just kind of turn the tables on the interviewer. So the best resource for you is to go to my website, bizhackcom, um, and on that you'll find uh a newsletter about our upcoming masterclasses, many of which are free, uh an ebook, um and other uh great content that will help you kind of move forward in your entrepreneurial journey. We also are very active on social media at BizHack Academy and we have a large YouTube channel, also at BizHack Academy, with a lot of recordings and a lot of great content, and we would love for you to check it out and subscribe and join us in some of our live masterclasses. Okay so, dr William, my question for you is sometimes, when I tell these personal stories about why you do what you do, they trigger in the people listening their own little aha moment where they have a story from their childhood that comes to mind.

Dan Grech: 41:29

And I was just curious was there a story that from before you were, you know, graduated from high school? That came to mind as I was sharing mine 100%.

Dr. William Attaway: 41:41

When I was 15 years old, I was invited to attend my first leadership conference. It was a high school teacher who saw something in me that I didn't see in myself and I went. I got on a plane and went and listened and learned about the power of what leadership truly is and I was hooked. And for nearly four decades now I have been a student of leadership and for almost three decades I've been pouring into and investing in leaders as a coach, helping them to grow and develop intentionally. But all of that goes back to an invitation that somebody made to me when I was 15 years old.

Dan Grech: 42:25

Do you remember the name of that teacher?

Dr. William Attaway: 42:27

I do. J Don Moyer was his name, j Don.

Dan Grech: 42:30

Moyer, are you still in touch with Mr Don Moyer?

Dr. William Attaway: 42:34

I was until his death, maybe five, six years ago now.

Intro / Outro: 42:39

Wow.

Dan Grech: 42:40

And did you tell J that story?

Dr. William Attaway: 42:43

You know it's funny, I had not made that connection. Just like you said, I had not made that connection until about two years ago.

Dan Grech: 42:54

So after he passed.

Dr. William Attaway: 43:02

After he passed, I did not get. I thanked him for his investment doing for decades and the ability that I've had to pour into and invest in leaders across the world. I had not connected that with that invitation and, man, that's a conversation that I look forward to having when I see him again.

Dan Grech: 43:25

Yeah, that's beautiful.

Dan Grech: 43:26

I mean I'm getting goosebumps, I mean I like I have this experience a couple times a week.

Dan Grech: 43:32

And I just asked a simple question Tell me a story about your life and, like I now know everything I need to know about Dr William Attaway and why he does what he does, who he's honoring, who's looking over his shoulder from heaven making sure that he's staying on the right and narrow path, like I've no doubt that you have opportunities to make compromises that you don't make because you know, you know Mr Don Meyer is watching and and and, and I feel the same about my granddads, one a soccer coach, one a school teacher.

Dan Grech: 44:07

You know I'm I'm honoring their memory in the work that I do, and and and it really, it's really beautiful. You know it's, it's more important than money, uh, more important than fame. Uh, these seeds that were planted in us, um, in some ways, these holes that were, were these vacuums that were created that we spend the rest of our lives trying to fill, um really drive so much of what we do and why we do it, and yet so many of us, myself included, are unconscious about it, and then, when it becomes conscious, it's really powerful. You know, and and you know telling that story it says everything that they need to know about you and why you do what you do, and we understand that you're honoring your childhood teacher.

Dr. William Attaway: 45:05

You know, I believe there's no such thing as a wasted experience in your life. Everything that you have encountered, everything that has happened to you and for you, is something you can either try to hold in for yourself and try to be a reservoir and hold it all in just for you, or you can be a conduit and you can share that with people around you for their benefit. And the latter is what I try to model and what I teach, because I believe that is what it means to truly be catalytic in your leadership.

Dan Grech: 45:37

Well, thank you for the work that you do, Thank you for having me on and thank you for carrying forward that legacy. It's a beautiful thing you're up to and I appreciate being a part of it.

Dr. William Attaway: 45:48

And thank you for being here and for sharing so open-handedly today. You're welcome. Thanks for joining me for this episode today. As we wrap up, I'd love for you to do two things. First, subscribe to this podcast so you don't miss an episode, and if you find value here, I'd love it if you would rate it and review it. That really does make a difference in helping other people to discover this podcast. Second, if you don't have a copy of my newest book, catalytic Leadership, I'd love to put a copy in your hands. If you go to catalyticleadershipbookcom, you can get a copy for free. Just pay the shipping so I can get it to you and we'll get one right out.

Dr. William Attaway: 46:31

My goal is to put this into the hands of as many leaders as possible. This book captures principles that I've learned in 20 plus years of coaching leaders in the entrepreneurial space, in business, government, nonprofits, education and the local church. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn to keep up with what I'm currently learning and thinking about. And if you're ready to take a next step with a coach to help you intentionally grow and thrive as a leader, I'd be honored to help you. Just go to catalyticleadershipnet to book a call with me Stay tuned for our next episode next week. Until then, as always, leaders choose to be catalytic.

Intro / Outro: 47:15

Thanks for listening to Catalytic Leadership with Dr William Attaway. Be sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts so you don't miss the next episode. Want more? Go to catalyticleadershipnet.