Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Scott Ballard explains what he does as a confidence coach
• Why Scott believes that you should start with yourself if you want to lead
• Scott shares a story that shows how the process of winning together can create unforeseen momentum
• Measuring success differently: shifting from a traditional profit-driven model to using KPIs that focus on employees becoming better versions of themselves
• Why it’s sometimes necessary and beneficial to let good employees leave your company
• Scott describes how his struggles with dyslexia have influenced his life and his leadership style
• Scott offers up his book recommendations and how you can best get in touch

In this episode…

You hear a lot of talk about finding the perfect work-life balance, but how does one influence the other? Most people consider work and life separately, but what if they could come together in a way that would make you better at both? How would you like to work somewhere that takes your personal goals as seriously as the company’s goals? And what company wouldn’t want an employee who considers their employer’s goals as important as their own?

For many of the businesses that work with Confidence Coach Scott Ballard, this idea has become a reality through a program known as The Dream Employee—and it’s creating excellent results.

Join Carl J. Cox in this episode of the Measure Success Podcast as he sits down with Scott Ballard, Founder of Confidence Coach LLC. Listen in as Scott shares how he’s using his coaching practice to change the way that businesses think about leadership. He also explains why a higher turnover rate might be seen as healthy, what The Dream Employee process is all about, and how he’s turned his experiences with dyslexia into a superpower. Stay tuned!

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Scott Ballard on LinkedIn
• Confidence Coach LLC
• Schedule a free consultation at Confidence Coach LLC
• Tom Wright on LinkedIn
• Cascade Strategy
• The Dream Employee
• Coming to America
• The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by Gay Hendricks 
• The Vision Driven Leader: 10 Questions to Focus Your Efforts, Energize Your Team, and Scale Your Business by Michael Hyatt
• How to Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• 40 Strategy
• Contact 40 Strategy
• Carl J. Cox on LinkedIn

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is sponsored by 40 Strategy.

40 Strategy provides strategic planning and consulting to help organizations realize and achieve their dreams by creating and measuring KPIs for success.

Unfortunately, most organizations only spend 2% of their time—or about 40 hours per year—on building an effective strategy.

Increasing the success of those 40 hours is what 40 Strategy does because your success is their passion—and that’s why organizations look to them for guidance.

Not only does 40 Strategy help you craft and implement an effective strategy, but they’ll also work to facilitate teams with proven practices and help with your scenario planning.

Harvard research shows that you can triple your success when you use the right Key Performance Indicators. Who doesn’t want that?

If you have questions, you can reach out through their website or email them at catch@40strategy.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Measure Success Podcast where we feature top leaders on how they measure success in their business and life. Now, let’s learn from their experiences.

Carl J. Cox 0:18

Carl J. Cox here and on the host of the Measure Success Podcast, where I talk with top leaders about effective strategies that inspire success. And this episode is brought to you by 40 Strategy at 40 Strategy. We provide strategic planning, consulting, to help organize organizations realize and achieve their dreams. Got basically what we do is we help companies create the strategic plans and measure the right KPIs for success. You and I were talking about this early on, is it why we call it a 40 Strategy is only about 40 hours, team hours collectively spent together, or 2% of their time on strategic planning. And that’s pretty crazy. When you agree, Scott

Scott Ballard 0:57

100%, when you first brought that up, when we met, I was like, wow, that that is that’s alarming that that’s all that’s invested in time and energy and resources. So that’s pretty cool. It’s a great name.

Carl J. Cox 1:12

And, you know, it’s our, your, your success is our passion. That’s why our organizations call us to help. Not only do we come up with strategy, but we facilitate your teams with proven success. Harvard research shows that when you use the right key performance indicators, you can actually triple your success. And who wouldn’t want that? Don’t you agree, Scott?

Scott Ballard 1:33

Yeah, I think every business in the world is, is the potential customer of that and is a great need of it. I mean, the numbers bear out, don’t they?

Carl J. Cox 1:42

Absolutely, absolutely. So. So with that, for people of interest, you can go to 40strategy.com, or simply email us at catch@40strategy.com. And I’m really excited to have a little shout out here who brought us the introduction. And this introduction is to Tom Wright, who’s actually the CEO of cascade strategy. That’s how Scott and I actually met, we were looking for some ways of possibly partnering and who would have knew what ended up all of us being here today, just, you know, gosh, that’s about 18 months later, which is kind of amazing how time has flown by. And so anyways, Tom, we thank you for that. And he does an amazing job out of Sydney, Australia with his strategic planning software called Cascade Strategy. So with this, I now get to introduce you, Scott. So Scott is the founder of confidence coach, and author, speaker and coach for business owners, with employees, his he has 35 years of successful business ownership as his background, and the last 10 years, Scott has been coaching businesses or with employee engagement prompts, which is a significant challenge. He has worked with everything from small businesses to fortune 500. And he has developed The Dream Employee process to solve the rising employee disengagement problem, and Gallup has some crazy numbers and how bad this data is, of course, and so you are a true entrepreneur with simply $100, you started PBG from your kitchen countertop, and grew that to over 4000 agents in 42 states. And you were able to successfully sell that business and even testified before Congress before selling that business. And that’s a whole nother story that we probably won’t talk about today. You’ve after that you traveled the world and really gave back in a multiple number of different countries in Africa, you went to you told me some incredible, incredible things that you did. And then you decided, you know, as any high charging impressive person does is they want to give back. And so you have become a coach. But I think more importantly, in the that you’re a great friend, you’re a wonderful husband, you got a wonderful wife, Orlena, which helps run the company, your father, grandfather, and I sincerely missed our Starbucks chats. Because, of course COVID we haven’t been able to be in person, as much as we’ve had to, we’re able to, you know, if it wasn’t truly for your positive mentoring Scott, I may have never launched 40 Strategy for that I’ll always be definitely grateful to you. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for that. And with that now we can start on the questions which I’m excited to talk about. So first of all, you want to tell me a little bit more that we haven’t already described about what confidence coach does.

Scott Ballard 4:24

Yeah, we do two things comm First of all, I just want to say it is my pleasure to be with you. I mean, we’re friends, we we’ve we’ve actually gone through a lot in a few months, just getting to know each other and supporting one another and you know, you’re doing amazing work and I’m excited to see where you’re going to go with that. So you know, it’s my pleasure to be here. And also say this to the people listening, if you haven’t reached out to Carl to at least talk to him about what he’s doing and how he’s doing it and how he’s going about it and who he is as a Person integrity and his track record, do that do that today don’t put that off. So we do two things, Carl and you, you’ve experienced one of them. We work with high end leaders, entrepreneurs, CEOs, that want to work on themselves. And by doing that work on an idea, or a concept or strategy that they want to bring into the marketplace. And that’s a big passion of mine. And, and I love my people, I love my tribe, like entrepreneurs, business people, like these are my people. And so we work with them one on one. And then the other thing we do is The Dream Employee membership, which is really a very intuitive, counterintuitive way of doing employee engagement, by actually engaging the employee in their own personal goals first, and then in the company’s goals, as they become a better version of themselves. And then watch the engagement go up the teamwork, the collaboration, and everybody wins. That’s, that’s our, our real dream here. And, and so those are the two things we we bring to the marketplace. And, and, you know, Carl and I have had a lot of conversations about different pieces of this. But yeah, that’s that’s kind of what we what we do here.

Carl J. Cox 6:23

Yeah, Scott, I a big fan of The Dream Employee concept. One of my favorite books many years ago I wrote was, I think called Dream Employee, if I recall correctly, and and it was a massive revelation of that kind of that wow, aha moment, right. I think often, when we get into coaching, we were focused on the leaders, right, and what we don’t realize is we can help engage everyone else, what an incredible impact that they will have not only on the professional side, but maybe more importantly, the personal side, which leads me to one of the things that we talked to prepping for this call. And you told me, he said you cannot lead if you’re not leading yourself. What does that mean?

Scott Ballard 7:07

Well, well, that means that that if you’re if you’re going to lead people, then you have to lead yourself and what what that is about is you have to be clear about what are the goals and dreams or the mission or the vision you have for your life? And then and then to get to your point, Carl, what’s the strategy? What’s the plan, what’s the commitment and the discipline to do that, and, and people want to follow somebody that that is living that way, you know, and that’s, that’s your work. And that’s, that’s your whole life. And so, so leading yourself is about that. And one of the ways that we do that is, is we help people uncover the lies that they believe about themselves, or about their ability or about their, their talents, and we deal with those lies, we call them out. And then we replace them with what really The truth is, and then they have this new identity, and then they can lead themselves well, from a healthy, confident, good place. And then there’s that example and that person that people want to follow, you know, to, to to achieve that strategy and to get to that goal. And so we really start with that, that deep stuff of like, Okay, this is what my high school coach said about me. And it’s still impact man still replaying that I’m still living into that. And still, the truth is, you know, what, no, the truth is this. And so that’s how we lead ourselves. We start with being honest about where we’re at, and, and the lies that we’ve believed. And we do the work of identifying those, addressing those and then replacing them or reprogramming for like, debuggers, like, I’m not a stock or person, but I do bug people all day long. You know, I take that bad thought or that lie, and we exchange it for the truth. And when people are working from the truth in their identity, their ability flourishes, their competence flourishes, their courage, flourishes, their fall through is better, they have better thoughts about reaching goals, or completing tasks or whatever that may be. So we’re in the business of making people the best version of themselves every day. That’s from the janitor to the CEO. And, you know, everybody has this in them. And so that’s, that’s how we, that’s how you lead from that. That’s, that’s that’s what we do.

Carl J. Cox 9:29

I love this concept of what you’ve been doing and working on and tell me about this company, you’d mentioned a couple years ago is near the holidays and and something I’ve heard as well to have where they would be successful owners just had it and and they’re ready to kind of get rid of everything and everyone so to speak. Tell me about that story. And and how did you help change the heart of that particular owner

Scott Ballard 10:00

Yeah, so so Carl, I had been coaching this guy, one on one for a couple of years. He has two companies, they’ve been in business over 40 years. He’s the sole owner very successful in their niche, about 150 employees. And, you know, we’ve done really well has done really well. And so we were coaching, working on some transition stuff to a next generation of things. And we met a couple years ago, between Christmas and New Year’s just had coffee, which me and Carl live in this world of coffee and meet people. That’s all their story. But it was one of those mornings. So. So we’re sitting there, and I’m talking to Joe, and he says to me, he says, I’m done. Like, I’m done with these employees, I’m done with them not caring, I’m done with their disengagement, you know, it’s just so frustrated. And he’s like, I’m gonna, I’m done. I’m gonna get rid of this. It’s over. I just can’t do it anymore. And I said to him, I said, I said, well, we’ll Joe, let’s think about this for a minute. And I asked him a question. And I’m always asking people questions. I said, Well, how did you take this business? How did you become a business owner, and then you get over the hump, and, and, and really make it and make it big? And and, you know, in this business, he goes, Well, I have a goal. And he goes, I was going to turn myself inside out to achieve that goal. And that’s what I did. I did whatever it took to achieve that goal of starting this business making successful. And I said, Well, I said, Joe, don’t you think your people all have goals and dreams of their own, like dumping him? He goes, Well, I don’t think so. He was so negative. He’s just like, in this bad spot. And they go, really? And he goes, Yeah, he was you don’t know, my people that I don’t think they I don’t think they work like that. I don’t think they think about them. And I said, Well, you know, I kind of would challenge on that. And I think that everybody has some kind of dream or goal, you know, inside of them to, you know, to do something. And I said, Well, I have this idea. I go, you know, maybe we could we could find out what their dreams or goals are. And then our team can come in and we could help them achieve those dreams and goals. And they would, you know, achieve in their own personal life. And then they’d be better at work and they’d be a better version of themselves and get more confidence and, you know, more ability and he’s on would never work. Like he was just done like whatever. I said, Okay, well, I and I’ll be glad to do it for free just to see what would happen. And he goes, No, I’m not interested. Like he was. He’s never liked that. He’s just shut me down. Like, totally. And so, so Carl, so I left New Year’s happen. The day after New Year’s, I get a call from him. And he’s like, hey, and I’m like, Hey, what’s going on with me? Cuz I’m really sorry. And I’m like, Okay, what are you sorry about like, I’m, you know, cuz he’s, and, and he goes, Well, he goes, You know, I was really kind of rude and just real abrupt, and you don’t deserve that. You’re just trying to help me? And I like, yeah, and he goes, and he goes, Well, do you really think my people have dreams and goals, like passions, like things they want to go after in their life? And I go, Well, they’re live. Yeah. Like, if they’re breathing, you know, I think so. You know, and I’ve been all over the world. I’ve seen some people were in really desperate poverty, like terror. But you know what, when you sit and talk to them, you give them a glass of water, and they tell you that there’s something they want out of their life, they want something better. So anyway, long story short, he goes, Okay, you can try it on a few of my leaders. So we have a couple weeks later, we pull in there and he’s got 10 of his leaders in the company there and we’re in the lunchroom. And, and I get up there and and, and I’m going okay, here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re just going to ask you a simple question. And we’re going to see whether or not any of you You know, like this, this resonates with anybody does Do any of you have dreams and goals for your life, like outside of work here. And they’re all kind of like this done. Look on the face, like, like you see, like are like, what did he this thing? 

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