How To Master AI-Powered SEO Tools That Transform Business Growth With Manick Bhan

High-pressure environments often teach us the wrong lessons about leadership, but they also serve as a foundation for growth. In this episode, I sit down with Manick Bhan, a visionary in the SEO and digital marketing space, to discuss his journey from Wall Street to leading a mission-driven agency. Manick shares candid insights on transitioning from toxic leadership styles and overcoming setbacks while scaling an agency and staying laser-focused amidst industry challenges.

We dive deep into how his groundbreaking tools, Search Atlas and OTTO, are revolutionizing SEO with AI, achieving results that traditional methods claimed impossible. Manick also opens up about the importance of humility, mentorship, and learning from past mistakes to evolve as a leader. Whether you're curious about AI-powered SEO tools or seeking inspiration to lead with purpose, this episode is packed with actionable takeaways and fresh perspectives.


Connect with Manick Bhan:

Connect with Manick Bhan on YouTube or Instagram to learn more about his groundbreaking work in SEO and digital marketing. Dive deeper into his insights, tools, and strategies to scale your business with cutting-edge technology.

Books Mentioned:

• Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout 

Right now, you can get an extra 20% off your ticket for the Scale with Stability Summit with my exclusive code CATALYTIC20 at checkout.

Visit scalewithstability.com to grab your ticket—I hope to see you there!

Right now, you can get an extra 20% off your ticket for the Scale with Stability Summit with my exclusive code CATALYTIC20 at checkout.

Visit scalewithstability.com to grab your ticket—I hope to see you there!

Right now, you can get an extra 20% off your ticket for the Scale with Stability Summit with my exclusive code CATALYTIC20 at checkout.

Visit scalewithstability.com to grab your ticket—I hope to see you there!

Chapters

• 0:00 The Journey from Wall Street to Startups
• 7:07 Leadership Lessons Learned
• 13:22 Scaling an Agency: Challenges and Breakthroughs
• 21:45 Revolutionizing SEO with AI
• 32:00 The Power of Focus and Humility
• 39:45 Creating Ethical, Mission-Driven Businesses

Transcript

Dr. William Attaway: 0:37

It is such an honor today to have Monik Bhan on the podcast. Monik is the founder and CEO of LinkGraph, an award-winning mission-driven SEO and digital marketing agency, and the founder and CTO of the Search Atlas SEO Software Suite. As a growth hacker, data scientist and skilled programmer, seo is his greatest passion and life's work. With over 10 years of experience in search engine optimization from the in-house and agency side, and with two successful exits under his belt, he's taught both startups and Fortune 500 companies how to scale their brands with a data-driven SEO strategy that can break into any market with ease and create sustainable growth. Monique, I'm so glad you're here. Thanks for being on the show. Great to be here.

Intro/Outro: 1:28

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. And leadership and executive coach, Dr.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:43

William Attaway, I would love to start with you sharing a little bit of your story with our listeners, monique particularly, around your journey and your development as a leader.

Manick Bhan: 1:59

How did you get started? Well, I think I would say the real learning happened with my first startup, because that was really where the rubber met the road. This is now like over 10 years ago, building my first tech company, and I came out of an environment. I was on Wall Street, I worked at Goldman Sachs, and that's a very unique work environment, right, and I use the word unique, but you know what I mean.

Manick Bhan: 2:20

Probably I do, yeah, and it turns out that most people don't function their best in an environment of, like, high pressure and just negative reinforcement, and I think that I had to unlearn the environment that I was that I started in and move away from that to really understand how do you get the best out of people, how do you motivate people, especially when you're a super scrappy startup in the early days and you can't even afford to really pay people market wages and they're with you just because they're impassioned by your vision, your product, and so that's really where it began. For me was just learning through trial and error, and I wish I could say that I was a great leader in the beginning, but I can say honestly that every time I think I made mistakes and I made plenty of them, that I learned and I was able to take those lessons and just become better over time.

Dr. William Attaway: 3:13

I love that and I love the way you describe that. You know, coming out of Goldman Sachs. I think that so many of us, even when we move into the entrepreneurial space, all we do is replicate what we have experienced because it's what we know, and all we do is just take and do that without really being intentional and thinking that through. As you began to build what you were building. What are some of the things that you said hey, this is going to be something that I'm going to do differently.

Manick Bhan: 3:40

Some of the things that you said, hey, this is going to be something that I'm going to do differently, yeah, so one of the first things that I look back on is just when things aren't going well, like how do you handle that moment with the team? How do you communicate to the team? We're not where we need to be. At Goldman, it was a we pull everyone into a room and everyone gets a spanking right. It doesn't. It doesn't really go over too good anymore. We've grown past that era Nowadays.

Manick Bhan: 4:06

I think what I learned from that experience was, after doing it wrong the first couple of times, I realized we needed to actually share openly and honestly what's going on. Everyone needs to know, but we need to do it in a way that's constructive and encouraging and uplifting, because ultimately, we build teams. We build teams because we single-handedly can accomplish our vision without the help of others, right, and so if we're going to do a group lift, we have to coordinate. We have to collaborate. We have to all get under the same roof.

Manick Bhan: 4:38

And so I think, starting to see it outside of my perspective and look at it from this broader perspective, is what is this team? How is this team operating? It's just like kind of the first step, and then there are great mentors, there are great books, there are great lessons to be learned from being in environments with people who have scaled and built huge companies that share their mental models and frames for how they build teams and how they motivate people that share their mental models and frames for how they build teams. Now they motivate people. And then I just kind of like grabbed pieces from here and there and put them together and experimented with them within our own company and I think now, you know, fast forward 12 years. I think we're doing a lot more of it right than we did 12 years ago.

Dr. William Attaway: 5:17

Well, and hopefully we're all in that growth pattern right.

Manick Bhan: 5:32

We're better than we were five or 10 years ago. Who are some of the people that you have looked up to as part of that process? People that you've learned from and the stoicism I've been really inspired by that. I think that helps me become a better human being, not just at work, but with my family and then more like near-term now, in the modern day. People that I work with and I communicate with on a regular basis are other successful founders who are sharing their lessons from building their teams and figuring out what works for them.

Manick Bhan: 6:01

My personal coach is a guy named Andrew Horan, who is just an amazing human. He started this great company called Tribute. That's like the nicest gift you can get on your birthday. What it is is someone who really cares about. You will go to all your friends, send them a link and they'll record like a five, maybe 20 second video about you and then it stitches all of them together and it gives it to you. Right, oh, my goodness, it's an amazing birthday present, andrew. He created that and anyone back in New York when he was just struggling to get off the ground and was trying to build the technology and helping him a little bit here and there and now that's a thriving business. It's doing so well and also a big positive impact right on the world there no-transcript.

Dr. William Attaway: 7:07

I think that really differentiates what I call a catalytic leader from so many others. They're always in that learning posture. They're always maintaining and cultivating a teachable spirit. What are some of the habits that help you to do that?

Manick Bhan: 7:27

I mean I would just say humility. It doesn't matter how big you are. There's always someone who's bigger and there's always you can grow and do. I mean, last year we hit 20 million of revenue. Our team is 151 people, now maybe more. That was two weeks ago and so we've scaled tremendously. But the only way that you keep growing is you have to take the success and put it to the side and say, okay, ultimately, if I'm going to keep growing, I need to not think that I'm the best at everything. I got to be open to criticism, open to feedback and just keep learning, and so I've always a pretty humble guy. Most people, I think that me don't even really know about the company or the success that we've had. I try to keep that a little bit to the side and just focus on being able to connect with people on a regular basis.

Dr. William Attaway: 8:08

And Monica, I think that's exactly how I perceived you when we first met. I had no idea, and in learning more about you and what you are doing and have done or in the process of doing, it's just blown away To hear you speak and talk about this. You absolutely exhibit that humility and that is a gift and it is a choice, and that's something that I would love for our listeners to understand. You choose the mindset that you're going to have and that is a choice that you have made. 20 million in revenue is nothing to sneeze at 151 team members who are looking at you, learning from you, and I would imagine more than one of them, more than a few, are modeling after what they're seeing, and that's an incredible responsibility that you have as their leader. You know leading LinkGraph, founding and leading LinkGraph. You know this agency, linkgraph, founding and leading LinkGraph. You know this agency like. What are some things that you have learned in that journey? How long has that journey been and what are some of the big takeaways so far?

Manick Bhan: 9:10

Building agencies is hard work that's the first thing and knowing what it means to build and scale an agency to hit eight years of revenue. We crossed over 10 million two years ago, and building the team to get to that point was very challenging, because there were many moments along the way where we thought we can't, possibly this is not going to work out. We actually took a step back where our agency got smaller and we felt like our growth was petering out, and that was a really discouraging position to be in for me and for the team, because the more successful your business is, the more vision there is for everyone in the organization. Everyone gets to grow and become bigger. If your business gets smaller, then everyone else's vision shrinks too, and so in order for you to create the growth opportunity for everyone, you have to keep growing. Otherwise they'll go find another organization to work at where they can see that growth for themselves because their vision's inside the bigger vision. Right?

Manick Bhan: 10:36

Maybe any agency owner who's listening to this has had the thought more than once, if you're honest with yourself, that maybe I should just sell. I got it to this point. Maybe it's time to exit. It's gotten too hard, it's gotten too challenging. I feel like the market's becoming crazy. People have those thoughts.

Manick Bhan: 10:43

I'm not glad that I stuck with it because it was more for me, not just on the economic side, but there was more growth in it for me me personally, you see, I don't view business necessarily as a way to just make more money, although I think a lot of people think of it that way. I also view it as a vehicle for personal development and growth. Right, because as you build a bigger company, as the team gets bigger, as the vision gets larger, that means you have to grow. Right. The company will only grow to the level that you're at. So you have no idea how powerful or how amazing or how happy you could become. You just have to play the game out and keep building and see what comes of it. I'm still building and I'm really glad that I'm still with it and not just one business, not just your agency, but Search Atlas.

Dr. William Attaway: 11:31

I'd love for you to share, for the few people who are listening, who may not know what Search Atlas is. What is that all about?

Manick Bhan: 11:37

You know, Search Atlas is a passion of mine and it is something that we built originally for our agency. This is how we scaled our agency to such a big size is that we needed something proprietary, something special, our own secret sauce. And this is when we started to show that technology to our customers. These enterprise brands Procter and Gamble, the Olympic Committee, like these huge, huge brands that are well known they started to see what we were building and doing and they said, okay, I got to work with these guys. These guys are the nerdiest, techiest, smartest out there. Let's just work with them. And so it began as the SaaS technology that we had for our enterprise clients only. And then, at some point, the word started to get out and people were asking us hey, Monica, how do I use this? Can I use this in my agency? And then we realized, actually, you know what we could actually serve a greater purpose beyond just helping the enterprise guys. We could also help all businesses across the world. And as we sat down this is now last year, January we sat down with a great friend of mine named Lynn Askin, who's an EOS implementer. You know Lynn, right, I do, I've had him on the show. Yeah, yeah, an EOS implementer. You know Lynn, right, Do you? I've had him on the show. Yeah, yeah, Lynn's an amazing person. And we at that time this is before the rocket ship, Okay, Before the rocket ship we sat down and helped us discover our BHAG, which is an EOS big, big, hairy, audacious goal. Okay, yes, Our BHAG was to impact a million businesses. That's our number. We want to impact a million businesses because we believe that if we impact a million businesses, there are multiple tens, hundreds of millions of people behind that that we're impacting in a positive way, right, their families, the owners of the businesses, the communities around them. We could serve a much greater purpose and the way that I view it is like an ethical business. If you generate a billion dollars of value for the world, well then you can participate in like one to 10% of that. Like that's like fair people Like you just get that because you've created so much value. So for us it was about can we use the software to create way more value for the world? And we realized that we could. And that's really when Search Atlas became like a publicly accessible technology. Could, and that's really when Search Atlas became like a publicly accessible technology, and so that was like the end of 2023, like November, December. We then kind of launched it in January of 2024. And then over the summer we launched our first AI automated agent called Auto, and Auto it's been just gangbusters so it's been an incredible rocket ship and also just the technology of what it's doing. It is essentially automating.

Manick Bhan: 14:18

A fully holistic SEO system Can pretty much get any business, whether it's a local business on Google Maps or an e-commerce store on Google Search or a fortune 500 brand rank better on Google, and fast. Most people think SEO takes like like six months. Now we're seeing results. People are posting in our case studies in our community in seven days. We say 14 days because seven is kind of unbelievable, but we're, you know, we're seeing, we're seeing the reaction so fast, and so that's really where I think the crazy part of the story began was in June. But remember, we've been building this for seven years. This has been a journey to get here and now I'm excited. I'm really excited because the results from there actually presented a case study of 150 websites that we did an implementation for an agency 150 sites and in 60 seconds. It's like a video that shows all of their case studies in 60 seconds and TLDR just spike, spike, spike, spike, spike for everyone. So cool. Validation of the technology.

Dr. William Attaway: 15:27

Watching a demo of auto was mind-blowing for me, because so many of my clients and my experience in the agency world is exactly what you said. You know six to 12 months for SEO results, setting expectations, right-sizing your expectations. It's not going to be quick. This is going to take a while, and Otto just absolutely blew that out of the water. As you introduce this and show this to people, do you get a lot of pushback? Do you get a lot of people who are like this can't be real?

Manick Bhan: 15:53

You know it's funny, it depends. It depends the business owners and the agencies that see it. They're excited because they see the potential and they know that this type of AI is capable of doing this, and so they were looking for it. It's almost like they knew it was out there and they found it and now they're learning about it and they're understanding it. So on that side, it's been easy.

Manick Bhan: 16:16

The pushback has actually come from the SEO community. Really, I was one of the keynotes at Chiang Mai SEO this year, which is one of the industry's biggest conferences, and I asked in the beginning of my talk what percentage of you believe that SEO can be automated using AI? Very few, like maybe less than 15% of people put their hands up. Oh, my goodness, they didn't believe that it could be automated. By the end of my talk, when I showed them that we had automated it, the numbers in the room radically shifted. But really, the reticence on their part is that they don't like the fact that it's changed and they don't want to believe that maybe some of the work that they used to do is no longer needed to be done by hand.

Dr. William Attaway: 17:06

Oh my goodness, Change gets different responses. No-transcript and understanding that. What is today, what has been true in SEO? And this can be a whole new game. Where did that vision originate for you? Did you always have that kind of vision that is so much bigger than what is?

Manick Bhan: 19:02

I knew that SEO is a math problem. At the end of the day, it's a mathematical formula, right? There's no people or monkeys moving things up and down ranking the search results by hand, right? It doesn't happen that way. It's a math problem. And so when you know it's a math problem, you just have to understand like, what's the equation, how does it work? Once you break that equation down and you understand it's this and this and this and this, then what you just have to do is figure out how do you turn those knobs in the right direction.

Manick Bhan: 19:30

I knew that there was an answer out there to do this. That took me now it's been over seven years of figuring it out. It's really taken seven years of doing this every single day. Doing the data science. You know we have five billion keywords pulling the data for those, analyzing the search results, running the correlation studies. It's been a lot of really late, late nights and early mornings and you know a lot of like math to break it down.

Manick Bhan: 19:57

But I knew that there was a way that we could pretty much create a turnkey response and make businesses just more visible online yes, on Google, but also on other channels. And I think now one of the things that I feel very strongly is that, as we're seeing how AI is changing these digital marketing channels, I feel like we have a fiduciary responsibility to make sure that anyone who uses Search, atlas and Auto gets amazing outcomes for their clients. What that actually means is we have to be responsive to people who are searching not just on Google, but everywhere all over any kind of answer engine everywhere, and so now what we're thinking about is Omnichannel.

Manick Bhan: 20:42

It's not just about the search channel, although we care and we've cracked it, but now, actually in about a week, we're launching auto for Google Ads to automate creating Google Ads for businesses that are super high performance, and then we'll do meta ads. So our vision is we just want to create a AI that is business owner friendly, like, if you think about Facebook's AI and Google's AI, those AIs, what are they optimizing for? Google's AI is optimizing to get you to spend more per click. They want you to bid as much as possible, right? Because they track internally.

Manick Bhan: 21:18

They have, you know, google has economists on staff that track the economic engine of their search platform, where they're looking at the average cost per click over time equation that determines how much Will's going to spend on his click to rank for XYZ keyword on Google, and all they want is for that number to be as high as possible, which is not good for you and it's not good for the other advertisers, because everyone just spends more. So what we realize, especially entering the AI agent era, is that everyone's agent is going to be serving themselves. How do we create one that serves our customer, our business owner, our agency, right, how do we serve their needs? And because they're optimizing in the completely opposite direction Google, meta they're against us. We have to figure out how do we get access to those audiences, but paying less, not paying more.

Dr. William Attaway: 22:17

Does that make sense? How does this? It does completely. You know a lot of people that I know are starting to use tools like ChatGPT or Cloud as search engines, you know, and leveraging those and the queries that they're putting in to get data that you know. A year ago, three years ago, they would have gone to Google for or another search engine like that.

Manick Bhan: 22:50

How does this intersect with that technology? What they've done is they've said here we're going to allow you to find anything that you want. Right, we're going to create a free service for you to find the information that you want. In exchange, in exchange for something very important when you want to buy something, when there's a transactional intent, that you'll come back to our platform when you want to go buy a coffee table or buy a flight ticket or buy something of the other, right? So they created this information, this library that we would use, so that when we would come in and need to make our purchases, that we would do it on the same platform. So they monetize this information search with the transactional component and, over time, what we've seen is that, you know and this is this started like 10 years ago.

Manick Bhan: 23:40

Rand Fishkin started talking about the advent of zero-click search and how more and more keywords, people aren't clicking from the search page to the website. They're getting their answer on that landing page after they search and they don't need to click to go to the publisher site. And that trend has just gone higher and higher and higher, because it's actually better for the user. They don't need to go and navigate and read all these other pages to find the answer. They just need to know the answer. And so there's been a cannibalization of the informational search game, and ChatGPT is just an extension of that, where all the informational search things like comparisons like I was doing some comparisons this morning, I'm shopping for something like a very high-end product and I'm trying to understand all the different options and instead of doing that search on Google, I want to do it in the large language model, because they have all the data right. That's an informational search, and so those searches, while they're interesting and we would like to get the traffic if we could, over time those are always just getting squashed. And so, seeing where that trend is going, the trend line has been very clear Google is always.

Manick Bhan: 24:46

There's less and less informational search volume that we're going to be able to tap into, but the transactional search volume, the large language models they're not really meant for that. The large language models they're not really meant for that. And even the AI overview game that's where they make almost all their money, like by a lion's share, and so, if you remember that Google is a public corporation, it really helps us to understand what the future can look like, because they last thing they want to do is turn off those blue links and put them into an AI overview, because then their business model goes away. So you can expect that there's going to be very slow change to the core of the economic engine.

Manick Bhan: 25:42

They don't want fewer clicks going to those paid blue links. Anything they want more going to the paid blue links. So that's also something important to think about is how they monetize, and so that's also why I think it's important when we talk about SEO, we really should be talking about search, and how do we maximize our visibility in search overall? And the paid media side is just an important part of that. Now, it always has been, but I think it's just super important today to be able to perform in search in the entire channel, organic and paid.

Dr. William Attaway: 26:17

Absolutely fascinating. You are in an industry that is always changing. There's always something new, and you have to stay on top of that. Your company, both companies, need you to lead at a higher level today than they did three years ago, five years ago, and that same thing is going to be true three years from now, five years from now. How do you stay on top of your game and level up with the leadership skills that your company, your team, your clients are going to need you to have?

Manick Bhan: 26:51

Well, will? I like going to events and talks by people who know more than I do, people like yourself, who you know. You got a great frame the last time I saw you speak at a mastermind. You talked about this idea of mental speed and basically, you know, are you making a decision at a level 10 where you're just your mental speed is so high and rushing through it and you're making these really important business decisions, but not from a grounded place or a calm place. Maybe those important businesses need you to be at a one we are thinking slowly and clearly right.

Manick Bhan: 27:22

So I just I like I'm a sponge, so I like to surround myself with people that are better than I am in different walks of life, and that's how I keep leveling up my game. And I also I believe in coaching. So when I know that there's someone out there better than me, I'll pay 5K, 10k, 20k, whatever it costs to get that type of consulting. So, like Dan Martell, I think a session with him is like $10,000 for an hour. We're going to pay that just so we can talk to him and tap into that knowledge, and I've done that all the time. I think I probably spent over a hundred grand last year on coaching and more than that, actually 200,000 in coaching, not just for me but also for my leaders in the team, because they need coaching as well. So that's something that we very much believe in, because, you know, I'm not the magic man, I don't have all the answers, but I know that I can find guys like you, other folks as well, and bring them into the team and just help us all level up.

Dr. William Attaway: 28:21

Again we go back to that humility. Again we go back to that teachable posture, and I hope our listeners are paying attention to that, because that is a critical ingredient for success. If you were to go back 20 years ago and you were to be able to what would you love to go back and tell yourself?

Manick Bhan: 28:44

Don't diversify. My biggest mistake is that I diversified away from this. What?

Manick Bhan: 28:52

I should have done. So here's what I did as we built our agency. Our agency scaled and it grew and it grew and every time I was afraid I was like when is the shoe going to drop off? When are things not going to go right? I need to create all this passive income. And so we invested and we built up a significant real estate portfolio.

Manick Bhan: 29:12

If I could go back and do one thing differently, I can't get that time back that I wasted on that diversification. That time is so valuable. I would have undone that, I would have taken all of those resources and I would have put it all into this, because then we would be years and years ahead of where we are today. Obviously, I'm grateful. I'm glad for what we created. I mean, it's amazing the response, but I know that we could have just gotten, and so I'm not making that mistake anymore. Now. Everything that I'm doing is all fully concentrated. Some people they like to have multiple businesses or multiple things that they're working on. I'm not a big fan of that. I think better to just stay focused. This is my thing. This is what I'm going to focus on and I'm going to put all my energy into it. Put all my eggs in one basket because I'm confident and I believe that I know more about this particular business opportunity and this space than anyone else, and so I'm going to gain maximum leverage on this one opportunity.

Dr. William Attaway: 30:12

I was talking to a team member this morning and she asked me she said all the people that you've talked to, what makes the difference between the ones who are successful and the ones who aren't? What's the big thing? That is the differentiator. And we talked about a number of things and I said I think the thing that I see over and over again is clarity, focus and discipline. People who have clarity about what they want, where they want to go, focus they're not going to let anything distract them. They're going to stay focused on that one thing and the discipline that it takes to stick with it over time. Monique, your story is exactly that, and what you just shared is such an exemplification of it Not to get distracted, not to diversify, to stay laser focused on this one thing, and we are going to be world class at it. Yeah.

Manick Bhan: 30:59

And it's hard because you know, with my first tech company, if I had said I'm going to stay focused on it and I'm going to have discipline in it, I was the last man in the trenches. We raised five and a half million and at the end we didn't have a lot to show for it. The company was barely keeping the lights on. This is like 12 years ago, ancient history. But the clarity part comes in knowing is this it, is this the one, or is this not the one? Yes, and it's hard to know in the moment. Is it right or is it not right?

Manick Bhan: 31:29

But one thing I think is pretty clear is like look, is this business model? Is this a good business model? Is this a business model that's going to allow me to support the team, the people on the team, give them good salaries, give them good opportunities, or is it not? And sometimes things need a little bit of time to flourish and grow into what they can be. So that clarity part well, I don't know. For me that's the part I think is maybe the hardest, because you can have good discipline right and you can have good focus. But the knowing part, like is this the right decision or not? What do you do Like? How do you gain perspective?

Dr. William Attaway: 32:06

That's why I have coaches, that's why I have people who are outside of me, who ask me questions that nobody else is going to ask me, and help me see things that I can't see, because you can't see the whole picture when you're in the frame. You're in it, you're too close to it. You need somebody on the outside, and that's what they do for me. They help me have a perspective that is beyond what I am capable of doing on my own makes sense. That's that helps me gain clarity, the objective, because they are going to ask the questions like is this viable?

Dr. William Attaway: 32:36

is this a long-term strategy that's viable? Is this sustainable? Can you, can you actually build something here that's going to to go beyond you? Do you have to be at the center of the spider web where everything connects to you for this to go forward? Because that's not scalable. Questions like that are the ones that really force me out of the weeds, force me out of the moment to moment and the firefighting that is too often a part of leadership, and ask the bigger questions.

Manick Bhan: 33:04

So that's a good question which is like does this require me to be at the epicenter in order for it to be successful? That's a really powerful question. What are some of the other questions that come up that you think are really important, that we should all ask ourselves in those moments?

Dr. William Attaway: 33:20

You know, one that I use frequently is are you building what you want to live in? Because a whole lot of people, when they stop to think about that, the answer is no. Entrepreneurs will start a business for typically one or more of three reasons they want financial freedom, time freedom and location freedom. Maybe they want all three, but so often what they end up doing is trading a nine to five for a 7 am to 9 pm job. And if you have clarity and you're building something and you know this is for a season and not forever, that may be what it takes to get you through. That's great, that's focus.

Dr. William Attaway: 34:03

But if not, if that season never ends, ends, that's not a season, that's your life, and if that's not the life you want to live, then you're building something you don't want to live in, and I think that question really forces you to look in the mirror, and that's helpful. So, as a, as a perpetual learner, one who is constantly in that posture, is there a book that has made a really big difference in your journey that you would recommend to the leaders who are listening? Hey, if you haven't read this, check it out.

Manick Bhan: 34:39

Yeah.

Manick Bhan: 34:39

So one book, one book that I really like it was suggested one of the agency events that I was at is a book called Positioning, and so this is like it's more of like a business-y book, and it's this idea that, like companies only exist in the context of their competitors. Especially if you have like, if you're going against like a David versus Goliath type of thing, where everyone knows your competitor Like, oh like, so what makes you different than so-and-so? If people often ask you questions like that or there's a lot of people in your space, positioning is like key and if you can make your position, deposition them and acknowledge that depositioning from the very moment people interact with your ad or your brand, like that, you will see, and we've seen it for ourselves it is super, super bonus. So that book was like a massive unlock for me when I read that book, because it helped me tap into the greater understanding of what we're doing, which is we're trying to get our brand in the chrono, in the mind of our customers and implanted there in a good way. So right from the very beginning, we have to deposition them in some way, right. So that was an amazing book. The other one that I'm reading right now is the 15 Minutes of Conscious Leadership.

Manick Bhan: 35:53

Our team hit 151 people and I just felt like I needed to. You know, started to see our system start to break and the internal pressure pile up. As you know, people aren't reporting clearly in like neat lines and different people are becoming pressure points. You just those systems as you scale break. I think people say they happen at different points.

Manick Bhan: 36:17

Some people say it's like the rule of three, like 30 and then 90 and then 270. I don't. I don't know if it falls in line that way, but we definitely felt it when we hit 150. That was where it happened for us, right around there 130, 150, somewhere in that zone. And so now we're kind of going back to that book and some of these older books because I think those organizational principles are pretty timeless. Yes, we do live in a different era today with social media and with AI and some of this other stuff, but I do think that humans, as a fundamental law, we're still the same and so how we work together in teams, I think some of the older books might even be better than the newer books. What do you think?

Dr. William Attaway: 36:59

100% agree. Some of my favorite authors are people who, like you say, are no longer with us. You know, the wisdom is timeless and the wisdom is such that we can contextualize it and say, ok, that's what it was then. What does that look like? You know, with the tech, with the social media, with all the things that we have? I didn't exist when they wrote that or said that, but what does it look like to contextualize the wisdom and the insight and bring it forward? The wisdom and the insight and bring it forward.

Manick Bhan: 37:24

Yeah, you got a lot of books in your bookshelf.

Dr. William Attaway: 37:27

What are you reading right now? You know I'm reading a book for the second time, and it is one that is absolutely fascinating me. It's called the Business of Expertise by David C Baker. It is really helping me to think in a very different way about what we do as people who bring knowledge and share that with other people, whether it's through speaking, coaching, writing. Those are the three things that I primarily do, and what Baker does in this book is talk about how we translate insights into impact, and it's such a fascinating read. I'm reading it a second time because I enjoyed it so much. I was like there's more here. I want to go back through this again. Say the name one more time Sure, it's called the Business of Expertise by David C Baker.

Dr. William Attaway: 38:19

Sounds like a good one. Well, and the two? You mentioned it too. I wrote those down here so I can check those out. So thank you for that. Yeah, my pleasure, monic. This has been such a fascinating conversation and I could continue with you and have a conversation for another hour, because there's so much insight that you have gained so far in your journey. I want to thank you for being so generous with your time and with the wisdom that you've learned so far in your journey. With your time and with the wisdom that you've learned so far in your journey, I know our listeners are going to want to stay connected to you and continue to learn more from you and about what you're doing.

Manick Bhan: 38:52

What's the best way for them to do that Best way to keep up with me. Probably my links will be in the show notes. They will, but you can find me on YouTube. For you can Monic Bond on YouTube, and you can also find me on Instagram Monique Bond as well. It used to get old.

Intro/Outro: 39:09

We'll put all those links in the show notes. Thank you so grateful for your time and for your generosity today. My pleasure, william. Thank you. Thanks for joining me for this episode today.

Intro/Outro: 39:19

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.

Intro/Outro: 39:52

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 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: 40:36

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.