John Smallmtn (00:01)

Welcome to another episode of The Founder’s Growth Show, where we look at people who come from performance roles and help other people with performance roles.

Today, we have someone who I am so excited to have on the show: Mike Simmons. Mike is the founder of Catalyst X, and he works with teams, organizations, and individuals to make sure that they have the clarity they need to keep making fearless decisions so they can hit their goals and keep moving forward.

Mike, welcome to the show, man. I’m so glad that you’re here.

Mike Simmons (00:30)

John, thank you. I’m pretty stoked to be here and to have a conversation, as always.

John Smallmtn (00:35)

Awesome. Okay, so I have a surprise for you. I knew that we were doing this interview today, and when I woke up this morning, I was just so excited. I needed to represent a little bit for my good friend, Mike Simmons. In the past handful of years that we’ve been connected, I’ve been able to come to you, ask questions, get help, and get the clarity that I need in a friend-to-friend, peer environment.

You’re one of my favorite people, and you do the things that you ask other people to do. You’re very consistent with pushing yourself, challenging yourself, and set a phenomenal example for anyone else in the leadership space. So, this is for you, my friend.

Mike Simmons (01:21)

Thank you very much. Now I have the “Be Like Mike” stuff playing in the background, and the color is on-brand—it’s black. That is absolutely awesome, and thank you.

It goes right back to you, too. I know that if I’ve got a question, I can ask in Slack or send a text message, and you’re going to respond. The key for everybody out there is to find your group of people who help you grow and know that you grow together. We are better together as a group because we feel confident asking questions. If you don’t have that group—if you feel like you’re alone—go out there, find it, or build it. It’s important to have folks you can lean on.

They’re out there. John and I are not unique. I believe there are many of us out there who don’t know that people are looking for help, so ask.

John Smallmtn (02:21)

Absolutely. While we’re here talking about this, can you talk a little bit about the Phoenix Club that you’re launching? That is one of these communities where people can go to get help and be surrounded by peers. We’d love for you to talk a little bit more about it for anyone who’s interested.

Mike Simmons (02:37)

Yeah, thanks for asking. The Phoenix Club is something that Jen and I have inherited leadership on. It was started originally by a former Disney executive, Dan Cockerell, as The Perch. It’s now going through its third stage; we’re shepherding the group through its third stage. In the second stage, Jodie Mayberry took over as the leader, and that’s where it became the Phoenix Club.

We’re carrying it forward because the mission still aligns from a naming perspective, which is about the mythical creature that rises from the ashes. The way that you rise from the ashes is by working together, leaning on others, putting yourself out there, and even more so, helping others. We rise together by helping others get better, and we know that we get better by helping others get better.

Jen and I have taken on leadership, and we’ve got just under 40 people inside the group right now. It is a paid community. We meet via Zoom on a weekly basis, and we meet in person—or have the option to meet in person—twice a year. We just had an event in Orlando a couple of weeks back. It was our first event, and we had a lot of lessons learned.

Really, what we’re looking for are people who are “-preneurs” out there—people who want to think differently so that they can do differently. Whether that’s an intrapreneur doing it inside your organization, an entrepreneur who wants to hire people, or a solopreneur who wants to do it on your own. If you’re a -preneur, someone who wants to think differently so that you can do differently, and you’re committed to helping people grow, we’d love to have you at the Phoenix Club. We’re just getting started.

John Smallmtn (04:22)

Awesome, man. Thanks for sharing. I’m really glad we got to talk about that. Community is one of those things that always helps us, right? But until you find the place where you can be walls-down to really get the help that you need, it’s largely just a waste of time.

That’s what Sherpa’s Lock is meant to be for, and that’s what your membership is meant to be for. Paid or free, find the one that fits your flavor and has people in there doing similar work, because no one gets to where they’re going alone on an island. You need other people.

When I was younger, I had an epic community inside of my Kung Fu community—people who would pour into me and help me with everything. But I wasn’t seeking out any kind of professional community, and it kept me really stuck for a very long time. Now, I try to provide space with the Sherpa community and everything else like that. Find your flavor, dig in deep, and don’t go in there expecting people to come help you when you’re holding all of your stuff off to the side. You have to pay to play by being walls-down.

Mike Simmons (05:28)

There are so many things to go deep on there, and I think it ties into the general conversation that we’re going to have today as you transition into different roles. You will feel lonely and alone anytime you make a shift or a change, whatever that shift or change is. Whether you’re entering into the Kung Fu community, moving from Phoenix to Dallas, or moving from one organization to another.

The reason why you’re going to feel alone is because you’re going to think that there’s a specific thing you want to get out of that community, or a thing the organization wants to get out of you. You’re going to expect that when you move into that role, the company or community expects you to have a certain level of understanding before you walk in the door. That preconceived notion is going to get in the way of your ability to ask a question. When you forget to ask that question, it’s going to get in the way of your development.

This is where the testing comes from. You can go into a new group the first time—just like you go into a new school—and ask a question. Sometimes you can ask the wrong question and get yourself isolated, excommunicated, or put in a different box. If you ask the right question with a level of curiosity and a genuine interest in understanding what others are doing, what they want to do, and where they want to go—taking an interest in them first—then you’ll be in a position where you’ll start to feel comfortable asking the questions that relate to their experience, which will help you move forward.

Community is critical, and it’s important to test it. There are multiple versions of it: versions that are very niche and specific, like a Kung Fu community, and ones that are going to help enable in the margins, pull those things together, and avoid echo chambers. That’s what I hope we’re building with the Phoenix Club.

There’s an African proverb: “If you want to go far, go together; if you want to go fast, go alone.” We can go really fast alone, but we might be going fast in the wrong direction, or find that we’re going fast while switching directions over and over again. When you have somebody else—and this is one of the big things for me—if you’re looking for leadership, start with a mirror. If you have somebody else who can either hold the mirror or look at the mirror with you, you can start to determine if you are actually moving in the right direction.

Anyhow, it all ties together. We’re human beings, and we all want to be like Mike. So again, thanks, John.

John Smallmtn (08:17)

It’s funny because I talk about the mirror thing. In my coaching, I talk a lot about martial arts, but really I talk about the importance of a feedback loop. The mirror inside of a martial arts school is a feedback loop. Having taught hundreds of different people a 300-year-old martial art, there’s always room for them to say, “You don’t understand where I’m coming from or why this is hard for me. I am doing it well.”

Okay, look in the mirror. Now how does it look? You can’t argue with that. But you have to be adult enough to know that you need to look in the mirror not to polish the things that you’re already good at, but to look for the things that need improvement.

Mike Simmons (09:00)

Why do we struggle looking in the mirror?

John Smallmtn (09:04)

I think it’s ego. I’m curious, because we’re both older guys now. We’re not these young studs or young gals that they’re pushing.

Mike Simmons (09:13)

I don’t know what you’re talking about, man! Actually, I feel super old. I have more gray hair now than I’ve had in years. But yeah, go ahead.

John Smallmtn (09:24)

As I get older, I find myself turning to “How am I screwing this up?” quicker and quicker, as opposed to casting around looking for how it’s not my fault and how it’s someone else’s fault. I don’t know if that’s an age thing, a developmental thing, or if it comes from doing this work and being very thoughtful and intentional. What do you think?

Mike Simmons (09:51)

Anybody could read Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s book, Extreme Ownership, and take out components that will help them realize that it all starts with self. If there’s a challenge happening right now, let me look first at the things that I can control.

We can control our attitude and our initiative. Those are two things that are always in our control: attitude and initiative. If we look back and say, “Am I bringing the right attitude to this discussion?” If no, then let’s fix your attitude. Get right there. “Am I actually working hard? Am I bringing the right initiative to this thing, or am I just half-assing it and going through the motions?”

If I go through those two things, then I can start to quickly determine: “Okay, if I’m bringing the right attitude and the right level of work, let’s figure out why I’m not making the progress that I’m working toward.” Maybe I’m bringing the right level of work to the wrong place. I’m working really hard on the wrong thing.

There’s a difference between watching someone run on a treadmill versus running in the street. On the treadmill, their body stays in the same place. On the street, the background should be moving with them as they go. As we look at it, let’s ask, “Am I working really hard on the wrong things in the wrong direction?”

The only way to really test that is by not only having your own set of data that you evaluate yourself against, but also asking others to look at that same data to help evaluate you. When you bring that to the conversation, the people on the other end who are coachable start to mirror those same behaviors. They start to ask those same questions: “Am I bringing my best self to this situation? Right attitude? Am I bringing the right work to this thing?” You’ll see that start to carry on and multiply to others.

This gets into leading self first, then leading another individual, then earning the right to lead teams, and then earning the right to lead teams of teams—which gets into the organization piece. It’s both teams and organizations, and it all starts with individuals, because those are the people who are actually doing the work.

John Smallmtn (12:36)

Absolutely. It’s hilarious we’re talking about this because I was writing about this this morning for my next book: trying to encapsulate this idea that no one follows a fraud. I’m trying to figure out how to write this conversation between two people so that the idea gets passed in a way that is helpful to others.

It’s like, “I have to be able to do the job of everyone on the team.” When it comes to individual skills, no. But when it comes to traits and mindset, absolutely. In Kung Fu, there’s the element of hard elements and soft elements. The soft elements are always mental stuff, and the hard elements are striking and punching.

Sales is the same way: calls, activities, follow-ups, and closing deals. But then there’s also the soft side: your tonality, whether you are consultative, or if you’re putting too much pressure on the prospect. When you’re trying to coach toward those soft sides—like EQ and personal development—you have to lead with intention. If you say, “Have a good mindset,” but you’re a tyrant, everyone knows you’re a tyrant and that you’re not leading with what you’re asking of others.

I don’t think every leader should be able to do every job of every person on the team, but you should be able to practice those mindsets and act in the ways that you want other people to act in those roles. Do the right thing, be supportive, and be thoughtful and intentional. You can be intentional as a leader and show that with your actions, which will lead to other people choosing to be more intentional when working with you. Or, you can go around telling everyone how intentional you are while they see a lack of intention in your actions. When you try to tell them to be intentional, it’s not going to land well because you’re not leading by example.

Mike Simmons (14:50)

You started with “nobody follows a fraud.” Is that real?

John Smallmtn (14:58)

We have to look at time duration. The thing that I’m hacking away at in this book is trying to make it a narrative—writing Mamet and Sorkin-level dialogue that is snappy and quick. But when you’re mentoring someone or being mentored by someone, the quality of those conversations is really hard to capture.

Mike Simmons (15:04)

Okay, yeah.

John Smallmtn (15:28)

Right? Because it’s fast, and there’s needling—not just for the sake of needling, but so that you can see the blind spot. It’s a unique challenge trying to write and capture this idea in dialogue. Having been on the receiving end of it and also being in a position as a mentor to help people, conversation becomes a flow state. Time slows down, and everything gets a little bit weird, so trying to write that is uniquely interesting.

The way this is playing out in my head right now is one guy says, “No one follows a fraud.”

The other guy asks, “What do you mean?”

He says, “You’re here as a new person. Do you think you could lead my team?”

The guy says, “Yeah.”

Then the response is, “Interesting. Do you think my team would follow you?”

It is a collaborative effort. One of the things I learned in the military is if you’re on a team with someone you wouldn’t follow into battle, you need to go find another team to be on.

When I was younger—and we’ll talk more about this in a little bit—I was always the guy with questions. Because my personality is that I need to know how things work, I would often get labeled the problem child. I would ask, “Why do we have to do this, guys?” I didn’t have the ability to frame questions in a way that made it clear I was looking for help rather than just trying to find a crack in the veneer, but that’s just how I communicate.

Talking to my daughter the other day, she said, “Here come the sales questions.”

I said, “Wait, hold on a minute. Where is this coming from?”

She said, “Well, you’re the sales guy. You’re going to ask me a bunch of questions.”

I said, “Hold on, I would like to pause for just a second.”

She said, “Okay.”

I said, “The curiosity has always been here 100% of the time. Sales training and sales coaching have given me the ability to ask questions and make sure they’re heard the right way, but I’m not asking you questions because I’m trying to sell Dad on you. I’m genuinely curious about these things.”

It was such a surreal moment because I go around and do my job now, and people appreciate how I communicate with them—clean, clear, direct, intentional. But then there are some people—my wife, for instance, hates whenever I say, “That’s a really good question.”

She says, “I know, asshole.”

I say, “Sorry,” because it’s reflexive at this point. We put in all this work so we can be great communicators, but then it becomes a part of you, and sometimes it’s weird to the people around you. Does that happen to you, or is that just me?

Mike Simmons (18:32)

Think about the different perspective the other person has when those questions come up. There’s one way to look at it and say, “John or Dad is asking me this question because he’s genuinely curious to gain perspective or help work through a situation.”

Now, there’s another world where that same perspective is, “He’s judging me. He’s going to judge my decision-making or my perspective.”

Am I asking the question because I’m genuinely curious and want to help, or am I asking the question because I’ve already got an expectation and now I’m judging the person against it? Sometimes we fall into the trap of asking questions from a judgmental perspective rather than a curious one.

The other piece is validating whether the other person is hearing those questions through the filter of, “Is this person curious and trying to help, or are they judging me, and am I going to feel less-than as a result?” Those are really hard things to assess in an initial interaction.

You look at nonverbals—John is nodding through the conversation, and we’re engaged in a discussion. This is a healthy discourse. It’s not about wanting to prove a point or ensuring our points are out there. It’s, “Let me actually have a conversation and see if we can gain perspective from each other.”

I challenge you when you’re engaged in community, with friends and family, or with whoever you’re talking to: How do you think they are perceiving the questions or the communication style? What position are they coming from, and what is your position?

When I get into problem-solving mode or crisis mode, I can move things through. If there’s an emergency, I feel very comfortable taking action to keep things moving forward instead of getting stalled in a “what are we going to do next?” mode. Some people get into a panic mode and don’t have the capability to keep things moving forward.

In high-stress situations where things are all over the place, I can move right into execution mode and start moving things along, but that’s not necessarily the situation all the time. We have to be aware that someone is not bleeding out in this conversation.

Just think about it: “How am I looking at this through their perspective and lens versus my lens?”

The tool that’s helped me a lot here is the fundamental attribution error. Are you familiar with that?

John Smallmtn (22:02)

What does that mean?

Mike Simmons (22:03)

The fundamental attribution error is something I learned back when I was at ASU. My degree is in psychology. I didn’t go to graduate school and I’ve never been paid as a psychologist; it was more to work through my own mental issues and figure out what was going on with my family and myself.

The whole idea is that if you and I are walking down the same street, and you trip over a stick in the middle of the street, my knee-jerk reaction is, “Wow, John is a klutz.” Now, if I’m walking down the same street and I trip over the stick, my reaction is, “Damn stick!” That is the fundamental attribution error—how we attribute what is happening. Those attributions happen immediately. You don’t put yourself in the other person’s shoes and think, “Man, that sucks that the stick got in John’s way.” It’s, “Why was John not paying attention?”

Think about the fundamental attribution error and the communication you have not only with your clients, friends, and family, but even worse, with yourself. That’s where some of the really dangerous stuff can happen.

John Smallmtn (23:20)

I love that. A handful of years ago, I was at a sales conference, and a guy on stage said, “We judge everyone else by their actions and ourselves by our intentions.”

Over the years of going to coaching sessions and seminars, you have moments where the cup is just full. I walked out of that session, and a friend of mine said, “Hey, maybe we should talk.”

I said, “Shut up. I cannot talk to you right now. I just need to sit and process this.”

Sometimes you hear something and it stings. To me, that’s an indication that it wouldn’t sting if I wasn’t feeling some version of it. If someone came up to me and said, “John, you’re a short, tiny guy,” I’m 6’4″, so I’d just think, “Okay, cool, that’s your opinion.” I wouldn’t carry it or think about it.

When someone says something, or when you’re scrolling on social media and see someone post, “Anyone who does this…”, and it stings, it’s probably because you’re doing a version of it without being aware of it at the time. I try to spend a lot of time thinking about why something landed rather than being in the realm of absurdity. It usually leads me to realize I need to go work on that and figure out the root of it.

It started from that line about judging everyone else’s actions and our own intentions. Then I finished reading Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb. He talks about how people say, “This worked because I did it,” but that’s just one potential outcome among hundreds of thousands. It doesn’t mean you’re the catalyst or the game-changer; you might have just gotten lucky.

Thinking about that book and all this other stuff, I try to be very aware of why something stings or why I feel called out. It’s choosing to build a mirror as opposed to waiting for someone to show it to your face.

Mike Simmons (26:01)

When I get into my darkest places—and it’s happened a couple of times historically—it happens because we’re all human beings. We all have our own issues, whether we’re open with them, whether we’re vulnerable, who we share them with, or what kind of face we present.

The path to burnout and a depressive state for me is when I’m not sleeping, I’m not working out, and I’m not eating well. If those three things are true, I’m at high risk for a situation where negative feedback without context will have a greater negative consequence on my side. It can be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

What can I do to fix that? First, I can be more reflective and ask, “What really changed? You got frustrated and are feeling burned out, but what’s changed in the last 24 hours? Look at the data.” That becomes a way to work through those pieces.

Second, I can use checklists, systems, and habits to stay on top of sleep, nutrition, and movement. If I stay on top of those, I create a protective buffer to help prevent negative reactions.

The biggest red flag for me is when a leader inside an organization asks, “Are we doing everything that we can?”

Are you kidding? No, we’re not doing everything. There’s always going to be something new we could add. But are we prioritizing the right things and doing them in the right order to be successful? Yes, and we need to have the confidence that we as a team are doing that.

If you don’t have the data to help you work through your own stuff, let’s get the systems together. I can take care of external issues, but I can’t control what’s going on in your mind. I can’t go into your brain as a leader and say, “Make sure you take care of yourself.” Sometimes saying something out loud creates so much damage because you’re the leader inside the organization. Asking “Are we doing everything we can?” is one of the more damaging things out there. No, we aren’t doing everything, but we are doing the right things.

John Smallmtn (29:19)

I don’t like “fake it till you make it” at all. It’s prevalent and some people push it, and I think there’s greatness in being able to show up and just be yourself. It’s harder in leadership than in other performance roles to show up and be vulnerable—to talk about the challenges and the things you’re working through—because of the pressure to go be the general. In that military environment, everyone under the general knows exactly what that general is capable of because that’s how it works.

You have to be real with people. They have to see you get challenged, fail, and figure it out if you want to help them through those same situations. If you come across as perfect, whether intentionally or unintentionally, you make it hard for the people under you to fail, struggle, communicate, and be vulnerable.

Changing gears wildly: You wrote a post the other day that I loved about all the roles you’ve had in your professional career. I was excited and stunned because I knew we were going to be talking on the show soon. I have gotten so much crap over the years for being a job hopper. I’ve waited tables and sold phones, investments, banking, and mortgages. You worked for UPS, worked for yourself as a fitness coach—which I have questions about—and done everything else.

When you think about your path—whether being an individual contributor, a leader, or a founder hanging your own shingle—where do you think the hardest gap is?

Mike Simmons (31:31)

Where you are.

John Smallmtn (31:33)

What do you mean?

Mike Simmons (31:34)

Where you are right now—that is the hardest gap. At the time and place when I was working through those things, it was always hardest right then. There was always something hard that I was working on. It wasn’t that anything was harder than another.

Dealing with some of the stuff that we’ve dealt with as our kids have grown up—those have been really hard things. We ran into some stuff that we had to deal with at Phoenix Children’s Hospital one year during Thanksgiving, and that was exhausting. That whole piece was exhausting.

What did it do to inform me in the future? When people are dealing with illnesses with their kids, give them some space. Let them know that you care and that you’re there, and that all of this other stuff can be taken care of in some way, shape, or form. Communicate with us around what needs to be taken care of so we can get it done.

It’s all hard. The thing that changes is that it’s different each time. The different thing is: Okay, in this scenario, am I the one doing the work, or am I inspiring people to do the work? If my hands are on it, that’s one thing. Maybe my hands need to be on it the first couple of times so that I can get an understanding and an appreciation for the kind of work that people do. But going forward, I need other people’s hands on it to be able to build scale. Then from there, it’s: How do I get feedback from those people so that I can determine if we are doing the right things in the right order to accomplish the mission, the objective, or the goal? Do we have alignment?

It’s all hard. What I realize over my career is that I probably could have left every place that I was at a little bit earlier. I was at UPS for seven years. At SmartForce/Skillsoft, I was there for seven years. At Safari/O’Reilly, I was there for eight years. I’m now pushing almost eight years here with Catalyst.

John Smallmtn (33:43)

Hmm, interesting. Wow.

Mike Simmons (34:03)

I look at this and say: Okay, there was a lot of stuff learned all the way through the process. The biggest thing for me in the O’Reilly/Safari days was realizing I could change roles inside that organization faster if I was more open with people about the type of role I wanted to have, what I wanted to test in, or by paying attention to all of the problems that exist.

I should have seen that in the Skillsoft/SmartForce days because there was a guy who worked there named Brian Whitchker. He would always go in and start working on new projects. He was kind of like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction—always going in and doing something else. The negative perspective was, “Hey, this guy always has his hands in everything.” The reality, though, is there should have been an appreciation for being the person who is always going to raise their hand and go do something different because there’s an opportunity to demonstrate leadership capability.

All the way through it, it’s always been hard. One thing isn’t harder than the other. The next thing that you’re doing—if you’re constantly working to get better—is always going to be hard. There’s a Special Ops saying: “Embrace the suck.” I didn’t serve—I did some volunteer stuff with ESGR, Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve. The military is extremely important to me, but it was not my path. But let’s embrace the suck. Embrace the hard part of it. If it isn’t hard, then the next question I would ask is: Are you challenging yourself enough?

If you’re not out there doing hard things, what are you doing? Some people will go through a season where you need a bit of a break, and the hard things are going to be more family-focused than business-focused, or more business-focused than family, or more on self. Those are the three categories I like to look at stuff through:

• Business: How do we make money?
• Family: Who are the people who are important to us?
• Self: How are we working on ourselves?

Your balance between those three is going to change based on how much hard stuff you can take on, because your seasons are going to be different.

John Smallmtn (36:15)

Man, first of all, for a long time, I thought that I could be a top-tier performer in all these various lanes of my life, and that was putting a crap ton of stress on myself.

There was this one period where I was still doing Affordable Web with my business partner and going through this coaching and training—learning how to be consultative and how to sell well. But there was so much mental stuff around it as well. That’s what really opened me up to being this constant learner and constant improver that I am now. During this time, I decided, “Well, I’m going to play trumpet,” which I hadn’t played since high school. “I’m going to learn German. I’m going to do these things. I’m still going to do Kung Fu. I’m trying to figure out how to sell Affordable Web to people.” The stack was so high of everything I was trying to develop myself on and improve on. When one of those things fell apart, they all fell apart—every single one of them. Then I felt bad because I thought, “Man, I’m supposed to be able to do hard things.” I was beating myself up, which made it harder to come back to it later.

The concept of seasons took me a long time to get to. I’ve had projects where after I left, I was like, “I just need some time after that. It got a little rough.” If I haven’t been tending those other gardens that are important to me—myself, my family, my own habits and hobbies—it takes a toll. It took me a long time to get to the place of being okay with seasons. I didn’t have a label for it, so it felt like if you’re not pushing, you’re complacent.

While I still hold the idea that you’re either pushing and looking for improvement or you’ve made the decision that you’re okay and going to continue to be okay, nothing is permanent. That focus does have to change, especially when you have responsibilities like a family.

I want to go back to something, because you said something in the intro and then we got sidetracked: Do you think it’s harder to be an intrapreneur or an entrepreneur? Which one do you think is the harder path to cultivate?

Mike Simmons (38:29)

Again, it’s the path that you’re in at that point in time that you’re really going to feel is hard. I know that sounds like a cop-out answer, so here’s the explanation: The problem with intrapreneurship is that certain aspects of it are outside of your control. You may be an intrapreneur inside an organization who is ready to push things forward, and it’s really going to help move things along, but the reality is the organization is not the right fit for you. They’re not ready for it, they don’t want to do that thing, and that is going to be outside of your control.

Now on the entrepreneur side, if you go that route, the hard thing is that there are other people inside your business—because an entrepreneur has other people inside their business, it’s not just them. Solopreneurs are on their own, and we can get into that too. But on the entrepreneur side, you’ve got people counting on you to feed their families. It’s very real.

John Smallmtn (39:32)

Yes! And they signed up for a job—they didn’t sign up for a rollercoaster.

Mike Simmons (39:37)

That’s it. Well, sometimes they signed up for the rollercoaster because they understood that was part of the job. That’s where transparency in leadership is really important.

They’re both hard. It’s a question of which “hard” you are interested in or drawn toward. I think there’s a lot of value in the intrapreneur role. The important thing is to make sure expectations are aligned across the organization around what you are working on. Maybe you can be the skunkworks version of what’s happening inside a specific group. That’s cool, but everybody has to understand what you’re looking for. Throw some food down there every once in a while, maybe check to make sure everybody’s still alive, but let them go about doing their work because they’re going to be different. They’re going to think differently so that they can do differently.

On the entrepreneur side, the stress of being accountable not only to your family, but to your team, organization, and customers can be super stressful—but it can also be super rewarding, too.

Solopreneurship is even a little more interesting because you’re bringing on others in the journey to help you through 1099s, partnerships, and people who are really specialized in certain areas, but who have their own business they’re working on too. Ideally, with those pieces coming together, we’re able to form a Voltron—we’re able to come together and form a giant super-robot ready to accomplish some amazing things.

There are a number of different ways to do it. The common denominator across all of this is “preneurship” as a concept: thinking differently so that you can do differently. You’re constantly going to be pushing outside of the margins because the status quo doesn’t work. It’s cool that the machine is going, but you want to figure out how to stress it in different ways to do something a bit differently. That doesn’t take away from the people who operate and manage the machine, because that’s really important too—you have to keep the machines moving along. But there are others who want to go out there and keep pushing limits.

What do you think is more difficult: intrapreneurship or entrepreneurship?

John Smallmtn (42:20)

I like what you said there. When I left corporate, I was burned out. I really hated the idea that my role was just a glorified touchscreen: “Do you want this thing? Yes or no.” I didn’t feel like I had the room to be discerning or to do what was actually right for people. I was just burned out.

Then I took a field sales role selling pedicle screws, and that was when I hit the wall. That was when I realized, “I do not have what it takes to do this job well.” That’s when I sought out coaching and found this path.

When I started my business, it was from a place of, “I’m not going back to that.” I couldn’t go back to corporate because it felt like a big step backward—environmentally speaking, I would still have those same struggles and concerns. Knowing what I know now, I probably would have conducted a better search looking for a role that allowed me room to figure things out, change things, and look for improvements.

Being labeled the problem child—”John, you just want to figure this out so you don’t have to go sell”—I felt like I couldn’t go back to that. I am a strategic person. I do need to think things through, and I want to be efficient and effective in the role. It seemed like I wasn’t going to be able to find that inside a job, so I decided to go out and do my own thing.

Here’s the really fascinating part: I’m a much better improver than I am a creator. Thinking back on it now, if I had just bought a franchise or something similar, I’d be so much further along. Would I be happier? Probably not, because of the rules and all that other stuff. But thinking about my lane of greatness, I’m really good at finding improvements and pushing myself through improvement. Being hyper-creative? Man… being out on your own, that’s what it really is.

When I started, it wasn’t to be a sales coach—it was just to help people with CRMs. I had really great coaches and thought, “There’s no way I’m at that level. I can’t do that. So I’m just going to build a feedback loop in the form of a CRM so people don’t lie to themselves.”

Then, when the pandemic hit, we started doing placements and recruiting. Someone asked, “Are they going to sell the way that you do?”

I said, “You don’t want me. I’m a farmer,” and all these other things.

The guy said, “Well, I really appreciated how you ran this call. I would like my person to do it very similarly. Can you do that?”

I said, “I’m going to have to build it.”

I’ve read all the books and gone to the seminars, drinking from every fountain I thought had pure value in it. I use what works, but I’m not dogmatic about any one situation. So I asked myself, “How do I actually sell?” Sitting down and working through it resulted in Sherpa as the framework that we now teach.

It’s funny when I talk to people now and say, “This is so great.”

They say, “I bet this was easy.”

No! Trying to figure out what I stand for, what I’m going to teach, what I’m not going to teach, and what I learned along the way that didn’t help me—things that made me jaded—and having to walk some of that back was so much harder for me. For a long time, I struggled with the idea that I was even a creative person because I’m not very artistic. But I can be creative in improving things. Proving that by running this business, writing the book, and doing everything else has been a big, challenging thing.

Going back, I probably would have done a much deeper search to find a team or organization I could work with that allowed me room to figure things out, but it just didn’t seem like an option at the time.

Mike Simmons (46:47)

The language you use that I think is really important for people to be careful about is “go back.” What does “go back” really mean? This is one of those areas where I get into knock-down, drag-out arguments with people.

Mike Simmons (47:08)

Specifically when it comes to sales process stuff, because everybody has a different definition of what a sales process is depending on their experience.

If you’re a high-performing sales rep, your view of the sales process is likely the approach that you use to go out and sell. To me, that is the sales rep approach. It looks like Monopoly: wash, rinse, repeat. It’s four steps, and we’ve got to work through this looping process. We repeat it—it’s not a closed loop, it continues to move things forward—but that’s the sales rep approach.

Another process that people will look at is process for the purpose of forecasting. For me—I like board games—that is Chutes and Ladders. We’re going to move forward, and they are absolutely going to go backward. A new person is going to come in, or someone is going to have to go back to the beginning for whatever reason or challenge happens. That’s Chutes and Ladders. Everything moves through stages, and as you move through each step, the probability of a sale increases.

The one that I think a lot of revenue professionals miss on, depending on their background, is the Game of Life piece: the customer journey. What is the actual journey that a customer is going through in their decision-making process?

Where people get into a knock-down, drag-out fight is when I look at this as the Game of Life. One of the cool things about the Game of Life is that you never really go backward. You meander. It’s like being on a path. It’s not like those experiences disappeared, so you didn’t go backward. You didn’t hit the reset button. Someone didn’t have a time stone and shift things backward in time. You actually are in that same place at a different time, in a different context, with different experience. What you might be able to do is add even more value to that part of the decision at that point in time.

With this backward piece, you’re constantly moving forward. You’ve just moved forward and are now going through another phase that was similar to the phase you did before, and you’ve brought so much else with you. So, give yourself some freedom. Give yourself a shift.

John Smallmtn (49:35)

Absolutely. Thank you for the clarity on that.

Jocko talks about this in his book: The person who can step off the line has a perspective that everyone on the line does not. Whenever I was moving up in Kung Fu, I was already an instructor, but I was about to hit a new level of instructorship where you get to learn the emergency techniques. Those are held off until the final stages of your path because you’re really going for damage.

I was so excited. I was like, “Finally, I’m here. I get to learn the cool stuff.”

My teacher sat down and talked to me one day. He said, “Why are you so excited?”

I said, “Man, this is the stuff I’ve been waiting for!”

He said, “Can I tell you something?”

I said, “Yes, sir. Yes, Sifu.”

He said, “You have your first form, your second form, and your third form. This is the fourth form.”

I said, “Yes, sir.”

He said, “Your first and second form will beat your first form. Your third form will beat your second form. Your fourth form will beat your third form. But a really good first form—top-tier first form—will beat the second form, third form, and fourth form.”

He said, “The reason these are called emergency techniques is because you only use them when you have been compromised. If you’re really on your game and you’re never in a spot where you’re compromised, you will never use any of these techniques.”

The wisdom of that only showed up years later because it wasn’t what I wanted to hear at the time. I just wanted to gouge people’s eyes out. But now, I think about that line all the time because I put a lot of practice and effort into fundamentals: tonality, cadence, and asking good questions—not “here is one trick that works in only one super specific situation and won’t apply anywhere else.” Really great fundamentals of managing a conversation will take you further than a bunch of BS techniques that you don’t know how to hold well.

My teacher also used to say that when you give someone a technique before they’re ready to use it, it becomes a crutch. It is a very interesting thing.

I know people who will stay in an entrepreneurial lane that doesn’t fulfill them because the idea of stepping out of that lane to take a role or work with a team feels like failing at being an entrepreneur. That’s more about how you’re holding your identity than anything else. But if you’re never allowed to take a step back and look around for a minute, you’re probably not doing yourself any favors.

Mike Simmons (52:28)

I love the focus on fundamentals, because if we get overly focused on the fundamentals, good things tend to happen. You can get really creative with how you apply those fundamentals.

Fundamentals for me are things like:

• Problem solving and decision making: Do we have a process? Do we have tools?
• Communication: Do we have a process? Do we have tools?
• Go-to-market: Do we have a process? Do we have tools?
• Achieving results (goal setting and execution): Do we have a process? Do we have tools?

If we do, and we’re aligned on those things, now we have integrity across our team and across the way we operate. This gets into some of the stuff you talked about earlier: If you’ve got a leader who says one thing but does something different, they no longer have integrity. There’s a lack of alignment, and that lack of alignment creates a lack of integrity. When that structure gets put under force, it will break down.

If it doesn’t break down, it might be because of something in the market that happened that nobody knew was going to happen. Think about being an up-and-coming sales leader at Zoom in March of 2020. Could you do anything wrong in the next six-month period? You’re just holding on and going.

That is not to take away from the leaders who learned a lot and drove business in that environment, but the success of the business in that time period was probably not driven by a strategic decision you made—unless you happened to be in a certain region in China at a certain period in time. It wasn’t the decisions you made, other than the decision to get out of the way and enable and empower your team to move forward.

John Smallmtn (54:38)

I love all these old mantras that I’m now old enough to see the value in, like “luck favors the prepared.”

That sales leader at Zoom—if he was completely in a reactive stance, just waiting for stuff to happen to him, they wouldn’t have capitalized on the market share and growth that they did. While right place, right time matters, being in the right mindset and mode for that time obviously matters.

When I played poker, my poker coach said, “Luck favors the prepared.” For a while, I would piss people off because I was trying to put them on tilt, so I’d play crazy hands. Sometimes you hit, and you always make a big deal when you hit so people know you’re a maniac.

I remember running down this guy on a pot and winning a big pot, and he was so mad. I had a 10-5—a complete garbage hand. But because I was the aggressor and kept putting pressure on people, I had control of the situation. Part of it is knowing my spots and knowing how to keep control of the situation, but also being in a good position with the lights on is a super important part. You can make speculative decisions and marginal decisions from a place of ego that don’t serve you, and that leads to everything else that it leads to.

Switching gears, because I know we’re coming up on time—and honestly, I think we could talk for four days and get super deep—what I would like to talk about for a moment is that you’re a revenue guy in my vision of you. You do lots of other things, but in my head, Mike is a revenue guy.

You’ve pivoted your business a little bit, which I really appreciate. I get frustrated when I talk to people and they say, “John, I’m a founder, I’m a CEO, you’re the salesperson—I don’t need your help.”

I ask, “Okay, cool. How clear are you on your goals and the activities that hit those goals?” Then it all falls apart and unravels.

The big flaw is that leaders don’t think they need the fundamentals of sales to run good conversations, practice good discovery, and really bring people into the conversation to get them excited about it. That’s the premise of my next book: Bad leaders can hide for a while; bad salespeople cannot. You’re either meeting expectations, or you’re on a PIP or on your way out the door.

Can you talk a little bit about this pivot and trying to get people to be more aware that they need the soft skills side of conversations and communication, no matter what they’re doing in the organization?

Mike Simmons (57:36)

I may absolutely be batshit crazy, and this may not work out—it may completely wreck my family’s finances and all of those things. All of this stuff could go horribly wrong, and there are ups and downs where it feels like it is going horribly wrong.

The thing that pisses me off is being known as a revenue guy. An organization will bring me in to evaluate their leadership team to help support firing a VP of Sales or firing people inside the organization. Then you go into the organization, evaluate things, and realize that the revenue challenge they’re experiencing is actually a culture challenge in disguise.

Culture starts with leadership, and leadership starts with self.

If we go all the way through there, we ask: How can we help people be better leaders of self? How can we build better culture inside our organizations? The way that I like to do it—or the thing that I think can be super helpful here—is improving problem solving and decision making, goal setting and execution, communication, and go-to-market. Those are the four pillars for me in business: leadership, culture, revenue, and execution.

Known as a revenue guy, that’s typically where I’ll be brought in, and then we’ll start to look at how we can enable and empower the organization to think differently and do differently. That becomes the culture piece.

The way we can do that is by helping people be better leaders of self, and helping people get better at problem solving, decision making, goal setting, execution, communication, and go-to-market.

Now, the beauty of all of this is that those are all revenue tools that I’ve rebranded. The problem-solving tool is an account plan. It is a hexagon—an account plan framework:

• What problem are we solving inside the business?
• Who has it?
• Who is impacted by it?
• Who cares about it?
• Why does the problem persist?
• Why is it important to solve?

That’s the top part of the hexagon. If you haven’t answered those questions, you haven’t earned the right to get into how, but too often we want to jump into how.

If everybody inside the organization understands, “This is how we solve problems,” we actually have a framework that we use to solve problems. When we come together as a leadership team or a team of teams inside the organization, we can ask the specific question for a specific line on that hexagon to determine if we are actually aligned as a team on that thing: the whys, the whats, the whos, the hows, the whens, and our timeline.

The problem that exists—and what frustrates me—is that we bring people into organizations and don’t enable and empower them to go out and do the work we ask them to do. We communicate based on our bias or preconceived notions, and we tell them how they should be doing things, or we look at activity metrics or whatever else.

If you give people tools to help them get better at problem solving and decision making, goal setting and execution, communication, and go-to-market, then you start to have better conversations with people inside the organization. Your thinking starts to change, then the doing starts to change, and then your evaluation starts to change. It becomes less about my bias and perspective and more about the team as a whole. We’re all doing things off the same playbook or the same sheet of music.

If you agree with the idea that there is a lack of leadership inside organizations—that we’ve promoted people into roles where we have not given them the tools and resources to be better leaders—then there’s an opportunity to go in and help solve for it. If you are promoting those people from within your business and not helping them be better leaders of self at the front line, you’re creating a bigger pipeline challenge inside your business, and you’re going to continue to struggle. You’re going to continue to hire people into those front-line roles.

Unfortunately, depending on where they are in their career, whether they competed in martial arts, golf, football, or band, if they haven’t done those things, they may not have the systems and tools to problem solve, make decisions, communicate effectively, and figure that kind of stuff out.

With the deprioritization of STEM/STEAM and the arts inside schools—focusing more on tests—we’ve reduced critical thinking across our students. Those students will one day become employees, and those employees will then not be in a position to lead.

Rather than keep screwing around at the top line doing executive retreats to improve ourselves as an executive team, my thesis is that your business will change if you start doing that at the front line. Why not enable and empower your team to have effective conversations, make effective decisions, and solve problems effectively as a group?

That evolution comes from the view that the revenue challenge that exists inside your business may actually be a culture challenge in disguise, and culture starts with leadership, and leadership starts with self.

John Smallmtn (01:03:03)

Absolutely.

I love that because I’ve been in the room on projects where they say, “Well, the culture sucks, so we just need to fire all these people, bring in new people, and that’s going to fix it.” I am waiting for someone else to raise their hand and say, “Hey, doesn’t this start with us?”

As the outside consultant—while I’m known for speaking truth to power and challenging things—it’s such a unique situation when people think it’s someone else’s fault. I spend a lot of time talking about how you can either be expectant or you can be enabling.

I talk to salespeople and others about the difference between being in a reactive stance—just waiting for things to happen—versus a proactive stance of at least falling forward, putting pressure on the situation, feeling when things are getting out of control, and staying on top of it. Being an expectant leader is similar to being in a reactive stance, versus asking, “How can I help? How can I support this person who is struggling?”

I want to flip this question a little bit. While I agree that organizations, companies, founders, and owners should be pouring into the development of their people, I also think it’s on the individual to take agency and start working on themselves.

It’s funny because when I do reach-outs for placements, I’ll say, “Hey, I have a role and would love to talk to you about it.”

People think, “God, here’s a recruiter.”

I tell them, “I’m not one of those recruiters, I promise. I’m not going to lie to you or juice you.”

Then I get pushback like, “Do I have to buy your program?”

I say, “No, absolutely not.”

If you aren’t making any effort to upskill yourself, you’re on the bottom of the pile. We just have to be honest about it.

If someone comes to you today and they are brand new going into one of these performance roles—whether in sales, marketing, leadership, or hanging their own shingle—how do you talk about the balance between doing the work and upskilling yourself? Later, if they decide to grow a team, how do they look for that quality in other people?

Mike Simmons (01:05:29)

The majority of the coaching I do today is inside client engagements with people within those organizations. It’s the same material I use at an individual level.

As far as the ownership piece goes, when working through that, look for leadership by starting with a mirror. A revenue challenge inside your organization may be a culture challenge, and culture starts with leadership, while leadership starts with self. All of this comes back to the individual.

If you are an individual waiting for people to hand things to you, you are not a leader of self. You’re not taking the initiative, and you’re not doing the work to continue to improve. You’re looking for a handout and for someone else to do it for you.

Depending on your role, where you are in your career, and your aspirations, that may be fine. If you want to be led by others, managed by others, and just go through a checklist to do the minimum, work inside organizations where that is the expectation and standard. But don’t raise your hand and tell people that you want to think differently and do differently. Don’t raise your hand and say you’re frustrated with the leadership inside your business. Don’t challenge everyone inside the business because you think they aren’t smart enough or don’t know how to do it.

Leadership is hard. I have wrinkles because I care and because I do hard things—not gray hair from stress. It’s hard stuff. Give your boss, leader, or others inside the organization flexibility, gratitude, and grace as they work through things. But know this—I think it comes from the fire department: No one is coming to save you.

No one is coming to save you. You have to take control of that situation. If you don’t take control, you leave it up to chance and to others. Take the time and invest in yourself, whether that means listening to a podcast like this or reading books.

Here is the other piece: You can invest in yourself all you want, check the box, talk about all the cool books you’ve read, and quote everything, but if you aren’t doing the work and putting it into practice, you suck. John can tell me all the level-four emergency techniques in Kung Fu, and I might know the words to say out loud, but in a situation where I get attacked, am I actually going to be able to do something? When I need to put it into practice, everything will fall apart.

Take ownership of self, get out there, and do the work. It’s worth it. When you invest in yourself, good things happen over time, over and over again. At a minimum, you figure out what kind of work you should be doing, what gives you energy, what makes an impact, and what you never want to do again. You learn as you go through it. You’re constantly learning.

John Smallmtn (01:09:00)

A lot of my friends are really into UFC, and they know the names of all the moves and fighters, but they’ll still say, “Man, I’m just going to see red.”

You are not on that level. You are going to get schooled by the first person who doesn’t see red and has real capability. That’s just how it works.

The same thing happens in poker. You can know all the math, but if you can’t think through that thought process in the heat of the moment during a big call or bluff, you aren’t going to do the math right. You’re going to have a problem.

You might have read every sales book, but if you’ve never been on a pipeline or had to carry a bag or a quota, you don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what it’s like to have the pressure of deciding whether to push for a deal or let it go. All those micro-decisions are the difference makers between someone who can do these jobs well and someone who can’t.

I really want to respect your time.

Mike Simmons (01:10:08)

Even if you’ve read the material, put it into practice, done all the training, and have all the reps, you’re still going to choke. It’s going to happen. Give yourself freedom to choke, because choking helps you get better for the next time.

John, thank you very much for having me on.

John Smallmtn (01:10:31)

Dude, we’re going to have to do a Part Two, because I have more stuff I want to talk about with you.

Can I ask two quick rapid-fire questions before I let you go?

First, what is your biggest pet peeve, mantra, or lesson touted as leadership advice that you think is taking us in the wrong direction? Is there anything super popular that you think is doing more harm than good?

Mike Simmons (01:11:09)

The one that drives me nuts is, “This is the way we’ve always done it.” We keep doing something over and over again because “that’s just the way we’ve always done it.” That is not a growth perspective.

Another one is, “It is what it is.” Those drive me absolutely nuts. It’s not “it is what it is”—it’s what you accept. Leif Babin talked about it in Extreme Ownership: It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate. We might say things out loud that we are frustrated with, but then we let them happen.

This gets into problem solving and asking why a problem persists. Sometimes something isn’t that important. If it isn’t that important, let’s be honest with each other and say, “Hey, it’s not that important.” Me carrying a couple of extra pounds right now must not be that important because I still go after the muffins when they’re in the kitchen. A decision is being made for that moment in time.

That first piece is a major frustration. The other frustration is all the people who claim to have a quick fix—a quick fix to building out your fractional practice, generating an audience on LinkedIn, or whatever it might be. I’ve never found many quick fixes or shortcuts. There is a process. It frustrates me when people try to share an “easy button.” The question I ask is: How do they make money?

John Smallmtn (01:13:00)

Looking at how they got there rather than just what they’re talking about is super important.

Last question, and then I’ll let you go, man. Once again, thank you so much for coming on the show. We will absolutely do a Part Two.

Other than Extreme Ownership, if someone is coming into leadership—since that’s where most of this conversation has been—what is one book they should read?

Mike Simmons (01:13:24)

I have a list. “There is nothing new except what has been forgotten”—Marie Antoinette, that’s my favorite quote. Newton also had a quote: “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Some of the giants whose shoulders I stand on include Peter Drucker. The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, with the foreword by Jim Collins, is something everybody should read or listen to. I listen to it every month. Jim Collins’ foreword to The Effective Executive covers ten lessons learned from Peter Drucker. You’ll hear a couple of those lessons in the tools and ideas I share, including: Stop what you would not start. If you are doing something that you wouldn’t start doing today, end it. It’s not serving its purpose, so let’s move forward.

Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, and Steven Pressfield—The War of Art is awesome. Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and Gary Keller’s The One Thing are all amazing resources.

Ultimately, what it comes down to—and what drives me—is simplifying our approach so we can identify the next logical steps and start taking them. If you lack a process, build one or adopt one. There are plenty of processes out there that you can adopt, or you can build your own.

Include reflection in that process so you can review how you are making progress and moving forward. When I get into game planning—goal setting and execution through clarity and focus—there are goals, actions, metrics, and execution. Those are the four parts. The metrics piece is all about holding yourself accountable to doing the work, and holding the work accountable to working.

We hit on The One Thing, Jim Collins, Peter Drucker, and Stephen Covey is also a big one for me.

Then there is the Margaret Mead quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Find your group of people. You will accomplish so much more when you work together with a group.

John, thank you very much for having me on board. I didn’t do my book list full justice, so I will send you some follow-ups above and beyond that. It’s all the material that has informed where I am, how I operate, and where I’m growing. Thank you.

John Smallmtn (01:16:15)

Awesome, man. If someone wants to learn more about what you’re doing, where should they go?

Mike Simmons (01:16:19)

Go to findmycatalyst.com. If you go to findmycatalyst.com, you’ll find links to everything. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, access the podcast, and see what we’re doing with the Phoenix Club and my speaking practice. Go to findmycatalyst.com and you will find everything.

John Smallmtn (01:16:41)

We had a little bit of lag there, but I think we’ll get it in the upload.

Anyway, Mike, thank you so much for coming on, man. This show hasn’t even launched yet, and you were nice enough to hop in here and volunteer some of your time. I really appreciate it. When this gets out, I can’t wait to show it to people, and we’ll figure out when to do Part Two. Thanks a lot, I appreciate it.

Mike Simmons (01:16:58)

Love it. Thank you very much.